Existence Is Suffering Meme: Dukkha and the First Noble Truth of Buddhism

Last updated: October 22, 2026

“Existence is suffering” is the meme version of the First Noble Truth of Buddhism, and the Buddha’s first sermon puts it more precisely. In the Dhammacakkappavattana Sutta (Samyutta Nikaya 56.11), the discourse that tradition counts as the first teaching, the Buddha tells five monks at Varanasi that “birth is stressful, aging is stressful, death is stressful”, in Thanissaro Bhikkhu’s translation, and sums the list up with “in short, the five clinging-aggregates are stressful”. The Pali word behind “stressful” is dukkha, which other translators, such as Piyadassi Thera, render as “suffering”. That choice of word does a lot of the work in how Buddhism gets remembered, and it is contested.

The meme comes in two panels shot on the set of a sealant commercial. On top, a grinning man in safety glasses and a black polo shirt, labelled “Philosophers”, stands next to a chainsaw and a wooden barrel that has been sawn in half. The half-barrel rests on two whole barrels, a tap fills it from behind, a jet of water shoots out of a gash in its front, and the leak is labelled “A small inconvenience”. Below, in close-up, a hand presses a white patch onto the side of the barrel with a putty knife, and the patch is labelled “Existence is Suffering”. The joke is about scale: the biggest claim in the room gets slapped onto the smallest problem.

The First Sermon Starts With Two Ways to Get It Wrong

Before the Buddha says anything about dukkha in SN 56.11, he warns against two extremes, so the sermon opens with a lesson in balance.

The setting, as the sutta gives it, is the Game Refuge at Isipatana at Varanasi, and the audience is a group of five monks. Britannica notes that in this first sermon, given after his enlightenment, the Eightfold Path comes before the Four Noble Truths. The first thing he tells them is that someone who has gone forth should avoid two things: a life devoted to sensual pleasure, which Thanissaro renders as “base, vulgar, common, ignoble, unprofitable”, and a life devoted to self-affliction, “painful, ignoble, unprofitable”. Between them runs the middle way, which he identifies with the Noble Eightfold Path and which leads, in this translation, “to calm, to direct knowledge, to self-awakening, to Unbinding”. The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy summarises the practical side of the Middle Way the same way, as a path that avoids sensual self-indulgence and self-mortification.

The Small Inconvenience Is Already on the List

The meme is accidentally orthodox: the first noble truth’s own list includes everyday frustration next to death and despair.

After birth, aging and death, the sermon’s list continues with sorrow, lamentation, pain, distress and despair, and then with three items that sound almost domestic: “association with the unbeloved”, separation from the loved, and “not getting what is wanted”. A leaking barrel, a missed train and a colleague you cannot stand all fit comfortably under that last heading. The IEP entry on the Buddha by Abraham Velez makes the same point from the other side: the word dukkha ordinarily means physical and mental pain, but in the first noble truth it designates “diverse kinds of frustration”. By the sutta’s own list, a leak counts.

The part the meme skips is the summary clause. The first truth closes on “the five clinging-aggregates”, the five groups the tradition uses to analyse a person, which Britannica lists as body, feelings, perceptions, mental formations and consciousness, insofar as they are clung to. The IEP renders the Pali term pañcupādānakkhandhā as “five aggregates of grasping”. The qualifier matters, because it places the problem in the grasping, which the second truth then names. In another discourse, SN 22.86, the Buddha describes the scope of his whole teaching with a line that reads like a mission statement: “it is only stress that I describe, and the cessation of stress”.

Suffering, Stress or Unsatisfactoriness: The Dukkha Translation Problem

Dukkha is a Pali term that Britannica glosses as suffering, with connotations of uneasiness and dissatisfactoriness; “suffering” is the common English rendering, and translators disagree about it because the word covers more than pain.

The Access to Insight study guide on dukkha states the problem flatly: no single English word captures the full depth, range and subtlety of the term, and the renderings in circulation include “stress”, “unsatisfactoriness” and “suffering”. Britannica glosses it as “sorrow” or “suffering” and calls dukkha “the true nature of all existence” in Buddhist thought. The two translations of SN 56.11 linked above show the split in practice: Piyadassi Thera writes that the five aggregates “subject to grasping are suffering”, Thanissaro Bhikkhu writes “stressful” throughout. Both are serious monastic translators, and the gap between them is a judgment call about English. Our post on Buddha, Schopenhauer and the “life is suffering” line has the short version of this debate; the longer one turns on the three kinds of dukkha the tradition distinguishes.

That split appears in SN 38.14, where Sāriputta tells a wanderer that there are three forms of dukkha: in Thanissaro’s wording, “the stressfulness of pain, the stressfulness of fabrication”, and the stressfulness of change. Britannica describes the same three types: pain itself, pleasure changing into pain, and the vulnerability that comes with impermanence. This is where “suffering” starts to creak. A good lunch is not suffering in any ordinary sense, yet it falls under the dukkha of change, because it ends and leaves you wanting the next one. “Unsatisfactoriness” handles that case well and handles a child’s death badly, since it sounds like a complaint about service. “Stress” sits somewhere in between. That is why this post mostly keeps the Pali word.

Four Truths or Four Jobs?

Each of the four noble truths in SN 56.11 comes with a task attached, and some scholars argue that the tasks are the point.

In Thanissaro’s translation, the four truths are dukkha, its origination, its cessation and the path leading there. The second names craving, the IEP’s taṇhā, literally “thirst”. Then the sermon goes through them again with instructions: “This noble truth of stress is to be comprehended”; its origination is to be abandoned, its cessation directly experienced, and the path developed. A third round reports each task as done. The Buddha says he did not claim awakening until this “three-round, twelve-permutation” knowledge was complete. The first truth’s task is comprehension, which a slogan does not supply.

Some readers go further. The IEP calls “noble truths” a misleading translation of ariyasacca, because it suggests a set of beliefs, describes the four as “primarily four realities” and offers “ennobling truths” as an alternative. The secular Buddhist author Stephen Batchelor, in a 2015 Tricycle interview about his book After Buddhism, argues for “four tasks” instead: one abandons craving, so it makes little sense to call craving a truth. He cites the Pali scholar K. R. Norman, who concluded that the earliest form of the discourse did not include the words “noble truth” at all. The counterargument comes in Thanissaro’s own note to the sutta: in Vedic Sanskrit, as in English, a “truth” can mean a fact as well as an accurate statement about it, so abandoning the “truth” of craving means abandoning the real thing. Batchelor’s reading stays contested, partly because it serves his secular project.

Why the Buddha Is No Silenus

Buddhism and the old Greek line “best never to be born” both start from pain, but the first sermon treats the wish not to exist as part of the problem.

The story is old. Plutarch’s Consolation to Apollonius (section 27) quotes Aristotle’s lost dialogue Eudemus, which survives only in such quotations, where the captured Silenus tells King Midas that “the best thing for all men and women is not to be born” (Babbitt’s Loeb translation). One widely quoted modern version is Nietzsche’s retelling in section 3 of The Birth of Tragedy (1872): King Midas catches Silenus, the companion of Dionysus, and asks what is best for man. In William Haussmann’s translation, Silenus answers that the best is “not to be born, not to be, to be nothing”, and the second best “is soon to die”. The meme’s mood sits close to this, and so does modern antinatalism, which our post on the ethics of antinatalism takes apart in detail.

The second noble truth blocks the comparison. The craving it blames is “the craving that makes for further becoming”, and it comes in three kinds: craving for sensual pleasure, for becoming, and “craving for non-becoming”. The longing to stop existing is on the list of causes, next to the longing for more. Silenus’ second-best option also fails inside this framework, because within a worldview of rebirth an early death changes the scenery and leaves the craving intact. What the third truth offers is the “remainderless fading & cessation” of craving, reached through the path. Critics can fairly reply that the final goal, the end of rebirth, still looks like a kind of not-being, and Buddhist schools have argued about how to describe it for centuries. The route there is the eightfold path, and Silenus offers no path at all.

Camus Would Have Kept the Leak

Camus answers the same complaint with the opposite move: where the Buddha diagnoses the craving, Camus keeps the struggle and calls it enough.

The Myth of Sisyphus closes with Sisyphus going back down to his rock, and in the English version most often quoted the last line reads “One must imagine Sisyphus happy”. Our post on whether Sisyphus is really happy asks how far that holds up. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy sums up his alternative to suicide or hope as living in revolt and defiance, lucid and unreconciled, so the barrel stays leaky and the man goes back to his rock. The first sermon wants the leak traced to its source, and SN 56.11 records that it worked at least once: the monk Kondañña, listening, saw that “whatever is subject to origination is all subject to cessation”, and so, the sutta says, he acquired the name Añña-Kondañña, “Kondañña who knows”.

If you want to see what happens when meditation gets sold back to the people it was meant to free, read our post on Byung-Chul Han, burnout and corporate mindfulness.