Second Arrow

Pain often arrives uninvited. A toothache, a bereavement, a wave of nausea, an afternoon of dreary tedium: they all come unasked, and many of them could not have been prevented. But the bigger problem arrives next: having been struck once, we tend to strike ourselves again, and this second blow, delivered by the mind, is what does much of the damage.

Buddhist teaching offers a felicitous example. In the Sallatha Sutta, the Buddha describes a person struck by one arrow and then a second. The first is the pain itself; the second is the sorrow, resentment and alarm that follow. The wise person, he says, feels only the first. They separate the suffering from their commentary upon it. Such an inner commentary, which multiplies suffering manifold, has an almost universal lexicon. 'Why me?' This is not how things ought to be. What if it never ends?

Research on chronic pain shows that catastrophising predicts greater pain and disability, independent of the physical condition. Epictetus observed that people are disturbed not by things but by their judgements about things. The Stoics never called pain an illusion; they held that assenting to a thought such as 'This is terrible!' is a separate act, one that can be withheld and forsworn.


None of this prescribes indifference; severe pain calls for treatment. The remedy is not suppression, which tends to backfire, but a change of inner posture: noticing the urge to protest and refusing to follow it. Each time the second arrow stays in the quiver, pain is allowed to be what it is, and nothing more than that.