Sukha is not Happiness Nor Duhkha is Unhappiness

Sanskrit, indeed, generates clarity and joy. And what is responsible for this is the way it has been designed, the way, here the words have been created. I have given a few examples in the earlier issues to illustrate this point. And, in this article, I aim to explain the words sukha and duhkha, to further illustrate the idea of Sanskrit – a consciously designed language.

The word sukha refers to happiness and the word duhkha refers to unhappiness. What is striking here is that both the words have a common sound kha and what makes the two different is the two separate prefixes su and dus attached to this sound. This indicates that both sukha and duhkha have something common in them. The prefix su is added in the sense of good, excellent, right, virtuous, beautiful, easy, well, rightly, much, greatly, easily, willingly and quickly. The prefix dus is opposite to the senses of su. So when dus is added to a word it brings the senses of evil, bad, difficult, hard, slight and inferior. Now we need to understand the meaning of kha. Phonetically kha is the second consonantal sound of the Sanskrit Alphabet and is articulated by throwing maximum air. It is a sound of relaxation, expansion and meditation, opposite to ka which is articulated by releasing minimum air and is a sound of contraction and concentration.

The original idea behind the sound kha is to expand, march forward, create space, feel it, move in it and occupy it, so it also means attack and invasion. From this original sense of expansion kha has the sense of ether, sky, air, hollow, hole, aperture or any opening. A bird is called khaga because it moves in the sky or space (khe gacchati). The word kha-dyota refers to the glow-worm that shines (dyota) in the sky (kha). The knowledge of Astronomy or the celestial sphere is known as kha-gola-vidyaa. It is from this sense of expansion that kha also has the meaning of happiness. This idea of happiness coming from the sense of expansion is very well expressed in the Chandogya Upanishad in which it is said, yo vai bhuumaa tat sukham, naalpe sukham asti, ‘that which is vast is happiness, there is no happiness in all that is narrow’. This explains that as long as one remains in the narrowness of consciousness s/he is unhappy, and one feels happy when s/he grows into the vastness of consciousness. Taking this sense of expansion, vastness, space of the sound kha and the various senses of the two prefixes su and dus we can very well say that sukha is moving from the relative narrowness to the vastness and feeling easy; and duhkha is remaining in that narrowness and finding it difficult to move towards the vastness and feeling uneasy. In other words, when someone is in a state of vastness, the experience of the ever-existing Ananda (kha) is easy (su). And when someone is in a state of narrowness finds it difficult to experience the ever-existing Ananda and complains of suffering and miseries. The truth, however, is that everything in this creation comes from Ananda, lives in Ananda, and merges in Ananda. There is nothing but Ananda alone. What we call suffering, miseries or unhappiness is our incapacity to experience the Ananda. This is duhkha – difficult (dus) to experience the kha or ananda. The message is: let’s raise ourselves, grow in consciousness and live in the vastness of consciousness; the true happiness lies in the vastness and the root cause of all sufferings, miseries and problems of humanity is nothing but the narrowness of consciousness that man lives in. In the language of the Gita this is Karpanydosha: the shrinking nature of a miser who does not want to open, to give, but remains confined in his small world.