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"Suffering is generally divided into three types."

John Powers,
Introduction to Tibetan Buddhism,
Part 2

Suffering is generally divided into three types: (1) the suffering of misery, which includes physical and mental pain; (2) the suffering of change, which includes all contaminated feelings of happiness (called sufferings because they are subject to change at any time, which leads to dissatisfaction); and (3) compositional suffering--the unpleasantness endemic to cyclic existence, in which sentient beings are prone to distress due to being under the influence of contaminated actions and afflictions.

The first type is easily identifiable and includes ordinary pains, such as headaches, physical injuries, and emotional torment. All beings naturally wish to be free from this type of suffering and to experience its opposite, which is physical and emotional pleasure.

The second type is more difficult to identify, since it includes things that ordinary beings mistakenly regard as pleasurable, such as buying a new car. Looking at a desirable car for the first time, most people view it as something that will bring satisfaction and happiness, not even considering the fact that all cars break down, often in inconvenient places. Moreover, they cost money for the initial purchase, for taxes, insurance, maintenance, gas, and so on, and from the moment they are driven out of the dealer's lot they begin their inevitable progress toward the junkyard. What at first was a gleaming high-performance machine begins to rust, leak oil, and require repairs, until finally it becomes unusable and has to be discarded. As the Dalai Lama points out,

When you first get it, you are very happy, pleased, and satisfied but then as you use it, problems arise. If it were intrinsically pleasurable, no matter how much more you used this cause of satisfaction, your pleasure should increase correspondingly, but such does not happen. As you use it more and more, it begins to cause trouble. Therefore, such things are called sufferings of change; it is through change that their nature of suffering is displayed.

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Excerpted from Introduction to Tibetan Buddhism by John Powers. Copyright © 2007 by John Powers. Excerpted by permission of Snow Lion Publications. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher. HTML and web pages copyright © by SpiritSite.com.