ABSTRACT
There is a general consensus among scholars and Buddhist teachers that the Buddha’s intention in “returning to the world,” after his awakening experience, was not to offer an ontology, a metaphysics, or a cosmology to his listeners. Rather, his concern seems to have been with our misunderstanding of the existential reality. As mentioned repeatedly in various suttas (discourses) of the Pali Canon, this concern is expressed as the problem of dukkha – how it originates and how it is brought to cessation. The Pali term dukkha is a multivalent term whose nuanced understanding might help us discover how the issues of mental health and therapy are embedded in the basic intention of the Buddha.
