I agree. When i once read such passages in the sutta’s the thought arose: ‘pain is impermanent’, how can this impermanence be suffering? We may be glad pain it is of the nature of impermanence, that’s a big relief. It would be really awful if pain would be permanent. This is also true for craving and for avajji. Just because they are impermanent there is a possible ending. So it is not logical to conclude that what is impermanent is suffering.
But i have always seen that these contemplations on impermanance, suffering and not-self, also when translated that way in the sutta’s, are meant to cause a kind of disillusion with form, with feeling, with perceptions, with mental formations and with consciousness, i.e. the conditioned.
How this works is, for example, mentioned in the three sutta’s SN22.12 -14 (from the translation of Bodhi)
I summon the three sutta’s:
Seeing thus (the khandha’s as impermanent, suffering and not-self) bhikkhus, the instructed noble disciple experiences revulsion towards form, revulsion towards feeling, revulsion towards perception, revulsion towards volitional formations, revulsion towards consciousness. Experiencing revulsion, he becomes dispassionate. Through dispassion [his mind] is liberated. When it is liberated there comes the knowledge: ‘It’s liberated.’ He understands: ‘Destroyed is birth, the holy life has been lived, what had to be done has been done, there is no more for this state of being.”‘
I do not know the word ‘revulsion’ is correct translation. I think the goal is disillusion, seeing that all this obsession with the conditioned is of no help at all. Whatever conditioned state, it cannot be a refuge.
This is why the Budddha was not satisfied with the high jhana’s his teacher felt as liberation. It was quit clear the Budddha would never be satisfied with some conditionally arising state. He was looking for the unconditioned.
His goal is that we do that too. So any kind of longing for the conditioned is in the core a distraction to the real Path of the Unconditioned.
Anyway it is quit clear that those three contemplations have to lead to a more dispassionate mind. We have to see the unfruitfullness, the helplessness of investing in the conditioned.
I feel the emphasis in the training with those three contemplations is, especially to apply them to our own experiences of a body, feelings, perceptions, mental formations and consciousnesses.
Our attitude towards experiences has to change, beginning by the ending of full identification and mine-making.
This mechanism is explained in SN22.1
…”He lives obsessed by the notions: ‘I am form, form is mine. As he lives obsessed by these notions, that form of his changes and alters. With the change and alteration of form, there arise in him sorrow, lamentation, pain, displeasure, and despair”…this also for the other khandha’s.
I belief this is true. We will never be freed from this mental suffering
when our attitude towards what we experience does not change. How? I belief, it has to become less personal. The first major step in a decreasing personal involvement with what we experience is the elimination of sakkaya ditthi, i.e. viewing experiences as mine or who i am. But this goes on and on in the training and at the end we loose this personal coloured involvement with experiences totally because even the sense of I am ends. Then, in the seen there is only the seen, so no sense of an I-who-sees. In the felt, there is only the felt, so no an I-who-feels, etc.
This is how i think it is described in the sutta’s.
Siebe