Sukha (Buddhism)

This may refer to physical health, material well-being or spiritual beatitude. It covers pleasure, pleasurable feeling and happiness. Happiness is the ultimate to which every human aspiration reduces. The mission of Buddha was not only the revealing of how suffering (dukkha) could be overcome but also the attainment of the good and happiness of all beings. Happiness is the aim of the religious life. The crown of happiness, paramasukha, is Nibbana or Nirvana.

The happiness of worldly desire is kamasukha; sweeter and loftier than this are the four stages of the rupajhana and the five of the arupajhana, each sweeter and loftier than the one before. However, Buddha also said that happiness is wherever and whenever it is found. Nevertheless, the pleasantness associated with kamasukha, with feeling or ideas about feeling, is to be considered pain or ill; painful feeling is considered like a javelin; neutral feeling impermanent. If sense experience were totally happy, there would be no spur to the spiritual. If it were totally unhappy, no-one would be engrossed by it. It is the mixture of pleasure and pain that is both the hindrance to and the guarantee of spiritual progress.

In happy feeling, the static element is happy, change is unhappy. In unhappy feeling, the static element is unhappy, change is happy. In neutral feeling, knowledge is happy feeling, want of knowledge is unhappy feeling. All three may include passion, aversion or resentment, and ignorance. However, by practice of jhana or dhyana: in the first stage are banished sensual desires and immoral or wrong ideas, the intellect is engaged in happy zest about the object selected: in the second and third stages, resentment and opposed feeling melt away in yearning for attainment of blissful serenity of the saint; in the fourth stage, all positive feeling fades into indifference, clarity of mind is obtained and ignorance banished.

Sukha predominates celestial existence, at least as far as the six realms of the devas in the kamaloka. But although practice of the four-fold jhana brings rebirth as a deva in conditions which are entirely pleasurable, these are not comparable with the self-mastery and intuitive vision of the arahant. Happiness is thus best secured when what is aimed for is its cause rather than happiness itself.

One of the five constituent factors of jhana. The pleasurable feelings consequent upon diffused piti (zest) expel distraction and agitation and lead the mind to concentration.