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Hello Lal,
We’ve touched on this in another thread, but I think it’s worth bringing up here too — it feels too important to leave buried.
The Māgandiya Sutta: The Leprosy Simile (MN 75)
MN 75 contains the same two-strong-men sub-simile, but embedded inside the leper analogy, and the Buddha uses it to make a very precise point about perception.
The cured leper is dragged toward the embers. He twists away. Then the Buddha asks:
“But what do you think, Māgaṇḍiya? Is the fire painful to the touch, very hot & scorching, only now, or was it also that way before?”
“Both now & before is it painful to the touch, very hot & scorching. It’s just that when the man was a leper… his faculties were impaired, which was why, even though the fire was actually painful to the touch, he had the skewed perception of ‘pleasant.'”
That exchange is the pivot of the whole sutta. The fire didn’t change. The embers were always glowing embers. What changed was the accuracy of perception — diseased faculties perceived fire as pleasant; restored faculties perceived it correctly as scorching.
Then the Buddha applies it directly:
“In the same way, Māgaṇḍiya, sensualities in the past were painful to the touch, very hot & scorching; sensualities in the future will be painful to the touch, very hot & scorching; sensualities at present are painful to the touch, very hot & scorching.”
The lesson of MN 75: Kāma was never anything other than what it is — painful, burning, scorching. The “pleasure” we experienced wasn’t something real; it was a symptom of the disease of Kāma-rāga distorting our faculties. The embers simile answers exactly why we don’t naturally see Kāma as glowing embers — because we’re still the leper, still sick, faculties still impaired.
What strikes me most is this: the realization that pleasure is not an independent, positive thing — but merely a temporary reduction of a deficit, a brief modulation of suffering — is precisely the shift in perception required to genuinely understand the First Noble Truth.
Western culture, and modern consumerism especially, treats pleasure as something additive — something you pile onto a neutral baseline to enrich your life. But the baseline was never neutral. It’s a state of deficit. It’s a burning fire (gini).
Once you see that pleasure cannot exist in a vacuum — that it is structurally and biologically tethered to a preceding discomfort — the illusion collapses. You cannot extract the “good” and discard the “bad.” They are two ends of the exact same stick.
If pleasure is literally made of the temporary suppression of a disease, then our entire motivational structure is inverted. We think we are seeking the good. Structurally, we are managing a chronic infection.
The implications are stark:
Because pleasure cannot exist without prior vexation, the desire for pleasure is secretly the desire to be wounded.
- To want the pleasure of a heavy meal is to require the discomfort of hunger.
- To want the relief of rest is to require the punishment of exhaustion.
- To want the thrill of reunion is to require the agony of separation.
People spend their entire lives trying to maximize the scratching without realizing that doing so requires keeping the wound open. You cannot optimize the scratch. You can only perpetuate the disease.
Most psychological frameworks assume a neutral baseline — distress pulls you below zero, pleasure pushes you above it. The reality of Dukkha Dukkha is that the baseline of an unawakened being is already profoundly negative. The six sense bases are not neutral receivers waiting for input; they are open sores radiating a constant, low-grade demand for friction. When a specific object applies exactly the right pressure to that sore, the alarm temporarily halts. The sudden silence of that particular alarm is what the mind labels “pleasure.”
When you fully internalize that the itch is the wound, the goal of existence shifts completely. If you believe pleasure is an independent good, you spend your life trying to build a better life — better food, better relationships, better vacations. You try to build a life made entirely of scratching.
1 user thanked author for this post.
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Thanks, Jaro, for bringing up the Māgandiya Sutta. As you correctly pointed out, it discusses the same two-strong-men analogy as in the Dukkhadhamma Sutta, but embedded within the ‘leper analogy.’
1. The following link points to the verse Jaro referred to: Māgaṇḍiya Sutta (MN 75): ‘Seyyathāpi, māgaṇḍiya, kuṭṭhī puriso arugatto pakkagatto kimīhi khajjamāno nakhehi vaṇamukhāni vippatacchamāno aṅgārakāsuyā kāyaṁ paritāpeyya.’
- The English translation there is, “Suppose there was a person affected by leprosy, with sores and blisters on their limbs. Being devoured by worms, scratching with their nails at the opening of their wounds, they’d cauterize their body over a pit of glowing coals.”
- Thus, ‘kuṭṭhī puriso‘ is translated as ‘a person affected by leprosy.’
- However, I think the word ‘kuṭṭhī‘ refers to something like eczema rash, but much worse; there could be tiny worms inside those sores. That disease kuṭṭhī may no longer exist, and the closest match today could be an ‘eczema rash,‘ where the person would get relief by scratching it. A person with ‘kuṭṭhī‘ would also feel relief by getting the wounds close to a fire/heat.
- I spent some time searching for symptoms of the disease ‘leprosy,‘ and that seems different.
2. The relevant point, as emphasized by Jaro, can be better understood by examining the sutta starting with that verse @marker 13.1.
- A better translation of the above verse is: “Suppose there was a person affected by kuṭṭhī, with sores and blisters on their limbs. Being devoured by worms, they would seek relief by scratching with their nails at the opening of their wounds, and by getting close to a pit of glowing coals.” (In other words, scratching with their nails and getting close to a pit of glowing coals is a ‘pleasure’ for him.)
3. Now, let me provide a better translation for the subsequent verses starting @marker 13.2:
“Their friends and relatives would get a physician to treat the patient. The physician would cure the patient, and the patient would be healthy and happy again.
Then the cured person (X) would see another person (Y) affected by ‘kuṭṭhī, with sores and blisters on their limbs. Being devoured by worms, Y would also seek relief by scratching with their nails at the opening of their wounds, and by getting close to a pit of glowing coals (Y also gets ‘pleasure’ doing those things).
What do you think, Māgaṇḍiya? Would that person X envy that other person Y getting ‘pleasure’ that way?”
“No, worthy Gotama.
Why is that?
Because while X experienced that ‘temporary relief’ only when he had the disease. When there’s no disease, there’s no need to seek relief.”
- The point is that X or Y would have the urge to scratch their sores and seek the heat of a fire only when they are affected by that disease. With the pain they constantly feel, the scratching and heat seem to provide a ‘pleasure.’
4. Then @marker 14.1, the Buddha explained to Māgaṇḍiya: “In the same way, Māgaṇḍiya, when I was still a layperson, I used to entertain myself with sights … sounds …”
- Thus, the Buddha was saying that he had also sought ‘sensual pleasures’ while living the ‘householder life’ before attaining Buddhahood.
5. Thus, the Māgandiya Sutta provides an analogy to illustrate the ‘true nature’ of sensual pleasures.
- When the mind of a puthujjana is burdened with raga, dosa, and moha (i.e., panca nivarana), it is under constant stress (even though a puthujjana does not feel it that way).
- That is why a puthujjana‘s mind is always seeking remedies (sensual pleasures) to ‘calm down’ the stressed mind.
- In other words, a puthujjana is like person Y and the Buddha is like person X (after being cured). There is no need for the Buddha to seek sensual pleasures!
6. I think that is, in essence, what Jaro also tried to explain. I wanted to provide a better translation of the Māgandiya Sutta than the one in the link in #1 above.
- I am glad to see Jaro getting the point!
- P.S. Related post: “Kāma Is a Pit of Glowing Coals – Dukkhadhamma Sutta“
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