When you say that something is dukkha does it simply mean that it is conditional experience, full stop, or is there something more to the meaning of dukkha?
BTW, I just realized I can’t PM you as your profile is hidden from me. Can you PM me and then we can chat or carry on our conversation? Otherwise you can open a new thread and I guess I can respond there? Thanks. 
That’s what the Buddha said, as in the above sutta citations.
So kama-vipaka does manifest in the same life and not just in subsequent ones?
You keep giving me these made-up binaries to choose from that seem totally unrelated to anything I have written. I’m not playing this silly little game with you.
I believe peace of heart is different from mental peace and equanimity. For example, with strong samadhi as condition one can force mental peace but not peace of heart. The heart can be very burdened while the 6th sense base is stilled and senses ‘there is nothing’. But thisis not the same as dispassion and real ease of heart.
My conclusion: Whatever happens in the head, and is experienced in the head,is not the peace of Nibbana.
I totally agree with this and several of your other contributions. Which is rare for me to say.
It’s not that some experiences are duḥkha and some are not. Duḥkha is simply another word for “experience.” It’s part of a complex of unlikely synonyms first identified, to my knowledge, by Rupert Gethin (current president of the PTS) in 1986. Gethin points out that in these [Pāli] sources:
upādānakkhandhā = dukkha = loka = satta = ajjhattika-āyatana = sakkāya
“All these expressions apparently represent different ways of characterising the given data of experience or conditioned existence, and are also seen as drawing attention to the structure and the sustaining forces behind it all” (1986: 42).
- Gethin, Rupert. 1986. “The Five Khandhas: Their Treatment In The Nikāyas And Early Abhidhamma.” Journal Of Indian Philosophy 14(1): 35-53.
As Sue Hamilton put it a few years later:
…dukkha is not descriptive of the world in which we have our experience: it is not descriptive of everything we perceive out there and then react to. Rather dukkha is our experience. (2000, 82. Emphasis in the source)
- Hamilton, Sue. 2000. Early Buddhism: A New Approach. London: Routledge.
As the seldom quoted final lines from the Vajira Sutta say:
But it’s only suffering that comes to be,
lasts a while, then disappears.
Naught but suffering comes to be,
naught but suffering ceases.”
[Sujato’s translation]
Everything that arises from a condition, that is to say “all dharmas with a condition” (asaṃskṛta-dharma)—which again is simply all sensory experiences: that is what duḥkha is; that’s what duḥkha refers to. Only that one dharma without a condition (saṃskṛta-dharma) is not duḥkha.
In other words, the relevant contrast here is not between good experiences and bad experiences. No. The relevant contrast is between the presence of experience and the absence of it.
Compared to the absence of experience, any sensory experience you can have lacks something. As I say, I think some Buddhists began to believe that the absence of sensory experience was reality.
And in my view the very same rationale applies to and makes sense of Prajñāpāramitā Buddhism. Which I have argued for in a scholarly article:
- Attwood, J. 2022. “The Cessation of Sensory Experience and Prajñāpāramitā Philosophy” International Journal of Buddhist Thought and Culture 32(1): 111-148. (PDF) The Cessation of Sensory Experience and Prajñāpāramitā Philosophy | Jayarava Attwood - Academia.edu.
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Yes, this is because of sense contact. Sense contact, any touch, comes with a sensation and represents an element of burden to the mind, like a pressure. If i touch the skin that comes with an element of pressure. The same is present in any experience. An element of touch/contact, sensation (vedana).
@yeshe.tenley This is a good example of a Buddhist hypostatizing an abstraction and coming up with “reality is the absence of sensory experience”.
In this case, its somewhat oblique because @Green only claims to know the “nature of mind”, which can be stated as a four word phrase - not even a whole sentence.
This is not a small claim however, since it first entails having the belief that mind is an entity and that it has a “nature”. Although it is not entirely clear what they mean by “mind” or “nature”. Or what the supporting epistemology might be for this metaphysical superstructure. Like, how does @green substantiate this claim to know the nature of mind? It’s also not clear.
@Green defines “the nature of mind” as the absence of sensory experience (unless “empty of sense contacts” means something else, it is quite hard to tell sometimes). And they subsequently argue that it is sensory experience itself that causes both suffering and rebirth. So sensory experience has now also become an entity with causal potential.
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Thanks very much for sharing and for the quotes.
Also – respect and many thanks for your posts on the forum.
Your citation of the Vajirā Sutta reminded me of SN12.15:
"…you’ll have no doubt or uncertainty that what arises is just suffering arising, and what ceases is just suffering ceasing. Your knowledge about this is independent of others.
‘Dukkhameva uppajjamānaṁ uppajjati, dukkhaṁ nirujjhamānaṁ nirujjhatī’ti na kaṅkhati na vicikicchati aparapaccayā ñāṇamevassa ettha hoti.
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Yes, and I think something similar is happening when we insist the five aggregates ARE dukkha, but again I promised not to hijack this thread with my own idiosyncratic views so let’s leave it at that. Feel free to PM me if you want to discuss further. 
My pleasure. I enjoyed seeing someone else promoting this approach for a change!
Yes. The Kaccānagotta Sutta is central to this strain of thinking about Buddhism. There are a few more important sources in my published article about cessation. e.g.
- The Sabba Sutta (SN 35.23)
- Discourse on the Cords of Pleasure (SN 35.117).
- Lokāyatika Sutta (AN 9.38),
- Discourse on Going to the World’s End (SN 35:116).
- Rohitassa Sutta (SN 2.26)
And in this unpublished essay: (PDF) Is Paṭicca-Samuppāda a Theory of Everything | Jayarava Attwood - Academia.edu
I have a parallel translation and study of the three versions of Kaccāna (Chinese, Sanskrit, Pāli) in a folder somewhere. I once imagined I might publish it. I should probably just upload it to academia.edu.
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Pfff…i cannot deal with all this @Jayarava. I most of the time like your contributions but i can also notice that you bring al lot of sentiment, often also bitterness, judgements into the discussion. I cannot and do not want to deal with that.
I just agreed with your description that any experience contains an element of dukkha. I did not say that reality is the absence of sense -experience. I do never speak about reality. I do not really know what this words means.
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As far as I am aware, I made a series of factually accurate and neutral statements about your brand of metaphysics, which is a popular brand. It was simply a convenient reference point in another discussion. I was emotionally neutral the whole time. I still am.
And I did not say that you said that.
I did say that I think you believe it or something that is equivalent to it. And on the evidence you presented this was a fair comment. I set out my reasoning for believing that. And you have chosen an ad hominem attack and moral judgement in preference to a refutation.
Since you have complained so vociferously, I would point out that you seem to have absolutely no reserve in telling me when you think I’m wrong. You’ve been doing it all day, so I can understand that you might assume I’m annoyed with you. But I’m not. Not today. Today you have not gotten under my skin. None of you did. A small victory for me.
Also, here we are in a potentially very interesting thread titled “Latest Scientific Knowledge & Sarvastivadins” and I don’t think you have used the words “Latest Scientific Knowledge” or “Sarvastivadin” at all; or made any on topic comments. Personally, I would have liked a chance to discuss the Sarvastivāda and/or scientific knowledge. Yes? But you wanted to talk about your views instead. And apparently you don’t like it when your views become the object of analysis. And yet, if you hadn’t interrupted me, I might still be talking about Sarvastivada or science with other people who were interested in that topic. Yes?
And I’ve gone from feeling neutral to feeling a little hungry. So I’m going to make dinner.
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Personally I would love to take this opportunity to learn more about their doctrines and differences compared to Theravāda et al.
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Wikipedia has it that the Sarvastivāda held:
“all [dharmas] exists” in the three times (past, present, future), a form of temporal eternalism.
And that this was debated in the Kathāvatthu. Possibly in chapters 6, 7, and 8? The translation is quite old though, but if I remember correctly another translation of the commentary to the Kathāvatthu was published recently?
Anyway, here is a quote from Chapter 6:
Again, taking all in terms of time, you affirm that the past exists, the future exists, the present exists. But is not the past something that has ceased—that is, departed, changed, gone away, gone utterly away? How then can you say “the past exists”? Again, is not the future something that is not yet born, not yet come to be, not yet come to pass, has not happened, not befallen, is not manifested? How then can you say “the future exists”?
The present, you say, exists; and the present is something that has as yet not ceased, not departed, not changed, not gone away, not utterly gone away. And the past, you say, “exists”; then you should say of the past also that it has not ceased, not departed, and so on.
Again, the present, you say, exists—that is, it is born, has become, has come to pass, happened, befallen, is manifested. And the future, you say, “exists”; then you should say of the future also that it is born, has become, and so on.
Again, the past, you say, exists, and yet that it has ceased, departed, and so on. And the present, you say, exists; then you should say of the present also that it has ceased, departed, and so on.
Once more, the future, you say, exists, and yet that it is not born, not become, and so on. And the present, you say, exists; then you should say of the present also that it is not born, not become, and so on.
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This reminds me, I wrote about the end of time in my physics and buddhism blog post many years ago. Wow a decade ago. Oh it compares Julian Barbour’s interpretation of a quantum gravity equation to Buddhism and includes a bit of sarvastivada.
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when there is sukha there is no dukkha. This can be checked in an empirical way without necessity of any book. Sukha is not dukkha because both cannot happen at the same time. This is available for the observation of any person.
If you are a beginner maybe you could try to check these simple facts of the experience to clarify that little mess.
You still think of dukkha as only mental suffering.
See the 3 types of dukkha. Sukha is impermanent, therefore it is dukkha of change. Sukha is conditioned, therefore it is dukkha due to conditioning. Sukha is only freed from dukkha dukkha, unpleasant feeling suffering.
Only the happiness of parinibbāna is changeless and unconditioned. Therefore entirely freed from dukkha.