The Good Axle-Hole: How the Rigveda Wrote Comfort Before Anyone Wrote Suffering

A Word That Only Ever Rides

Take the most important word in the history of Indian thought about suffering, and go looking for it in the oldest Indian book. The word is duḥkha (दुःख), the first of the Buddha’s Four Noble Truths, the thing the whole path is meant to end. Search the Rigveda for it, all 1,028 hymns and roughly ten thousand verses. In the Sanskrit text I searched for this article, it does not occur once.

Now search for its opposite, sukha (सुख), and the picture gets odder. The word is there, fourteen times over, and each time it describes the same object. In one verse it is a poet’s request to Agni, who is to come “on the most sukha chariot.” In another the river Sindhu herself harnesses a sukha chariot and goes off to win a race. The Maruts ride sukha chariots through the sky. The Aśvins get one built for them by craftsmen. A horse in a riddle-poem longs for one.

There is no sukha mind, no sukha life, no sukha afterlife. In the earliest Sanskrit, sukha is a fitting that belongs to a vehicle.

That small fact opens a larger one. When the Rigveda wants to say that things are going well, it reaches for the language of travel: a road, a ford, a wheel that turns true. When it wants to say that things are going badly, it does the same, and with a precision that is easy to miss in translation. This is a piece about those words, about the hole in a wheel where an axle sits, and about what happens to a vocabulary of comfort when the people who made it did not yet have a vocabulary for suffering as a general condition. We will follow sukha from the hub of a Bronze Age cartwheel to the opening of a yoga manual, and see where the story breaks down.

Fourteen Chariots

The count is easy to make and hard to ignore. Here are the verses in which the stem sukha- shows up as a word in its own right (leaving aside look-alikes such as sukhādaya, which comes from the verb “to chew” and belongs to the Maruts’ ornaments).

Two things stand out. The first is the sheer consistency: not one of these is about a person’s feelings, and no verse speaks of anyone being sukha. The second is who rides. These are gods, plus one river and one racehorse. The ease belongs to the vehicle, and the vehicle’s passengers benefit from it, in the way that a person who owns a well-made cart benefits from it without needing to say so.

Which brings us to the word’s anatomy. Sanskrit has a common word kha (ख), which in later Sanskrit also means “space” or “sky,” but whose older, humbler sense is “hole” or “aperture.” In the Rigveda one of the things it most clearly means is the hole in the nave of a wheel through which the axle passes. Su-kha, “good-holed,” is a chariot whose axle sits cleanly in its bore and turns without shuddering.

That is the traditional etymology, recorded in Monier-Williams, who writes that sukha is “said to be” su plus kha and to mean originally “having a good axle-hole,” and who notes that in the Rigveda the word means “running swiftly or easily,” as of chariots.[1] I should be plain about its status. It is an old proposal, widely repeated, and entirely consistent with every Rigvedic occurrence. It is not a demonstrated fact, and Mayrhofer’s etymological dictionary of Old Indo-Aryan is the place to see how cautiously specialists handle it.[2] But the data fit so neatly that you would need a reason to prefer a different story.

Aside. A competing guess exists for the other word. Some have suggested duḥkha is not “bad hole” at all but a form of duḥ-stha, “standing badly,” that is, unsteady.[1] Notice that this alternative would produce the opposite problem: it explains duḥkha well and makes sukha awkward. The axle-hole theory, in contrast, is tight for sukha and looser for its opposite. One of the pair may have been bent to match the other by speakers long before Buddhism, a common thing in word pairs.[16]

What the Hole Looks Like in a Verse

To believe that a word means “axle-hole” it helps to see the hole on its own, and the Rigveda does show it, rarely and vividly. The plainest case is in the story of Apālā, the girl with the skin condition who found soma on the road and pressed it with her teeth (RV 8.91; see Women in the Rig Veda). Indra, we are told, cured her by drawing her through three openings in turn:

khe rathasya khe anasaḥ khe yugasya śatakrato | apālām indra triṣ pūtvy akṛṇoḥ sūryatvacam

“Through the hole of the chariot, through the hole of the cart, through the hole of the yoke, O Śatakratu: having cleansed Apālā three times, Indra, you made her sun-skinned.”

(RV 8.91.7, my translation from the Sanskrit; compare Jamison and Brereton)

The ritual logic is obscure and the verse is one of those unwelcome ones that scholars read in more than one way. What is not obscure is the vocabulary. A chariot has a kha. So does a cart (anas). So does a yoke. The word sits at three points in the vehicle where a shaft or a peg or a body can pass through.

Other uses show the same noun reaching beyond wheelwrights. When Indra breaks open the mountain, the rivers’ khāni, their channels or outlets, are cleared (RV 4.28.1, RV 5.32.1, RV 7.82.3). The poet of RV 6.36.4 asks Indra to open “the kha of wealth.” And in RV 8.77.3 a simile compares the crushing of enemies to spokes (arā) set in a kha, the hub-hole, though the instrumental khedayā in that line is itself an obscure form, and I would not lean on it.

The semantic range is already visible: kha is wherever something passes through and therefore the place where things work or fail. A river that cannot get through its kha floods or stagnates. A chariot whose kha is off shakes itself to pieces. Good and bad are, at this level, engineering terms.

The Road Is the Metaphor

Once you start looking, the Rigveda’s whole vocabulary of fortune turns out to be a vocabulary of passage. Take the pairs that begin with su- (“good”) and duḥ- (“bad”):

The two foundational words, suvita and durita, are built on the root i, “to go.” A durita is a bad going, a place where the way fails. By my count, forms of durita occur in some fifty verses; suvita in about forty-five; the dative suvitāya, “for good going,” accounts for most of those, usually in a request that the god lead the worshippers there.

Here is how that sounds in practice. In RV 1.99.1 the poet asks Agni to carry us across all hard places:

sa naḥ parṣad ati durgāṇi viśvā nāveva sindhuṃ duritāty agniḥ

“May he carry us across all the hard places, as in a boat across the Sindhu, beyond the bad goings: Agni.”

(RV 1.99.1, my translation; compare Jamison and Brereton)

The poet’s idea of rescue is not the removal of pain. It is a crossing. And in RV 1.41.4, a verse to the Ādityas, the road comes back as an image of rightness itself:

sugaḥ panthā anṛkṣara ādityāsa ṛtaṃ yate

“Easy to travel is the road, free of thorns, O Ādityas, for him who goes by the truth.”

(RV 1.41.4, my translation; the sense of anṛkṣara is “without thorns or obstacles,” compare Jamison and Brereton)

The Ādityas’ road is sugá when you travel it in ṛta. Failing at ṛta is, in this idiom, not guilt in the abstract but a bad stretch of road. That is the same intuition the Varuṇa piece traced from the other direction, and it has a very particular consequence for how we read the moral vocabulary. The Rigveda’s verb for wrongdoing and its word for difficult terrain are cousins. When a hymn asks for relief from duritá, it often cannot be made out whether the worshipper fears a sin or a stumble.

Then there is the poem that commits itself openly to both readings. In RV 1.23.22 a man bathing in the waters says:

idam āpaḥ pra vahata yat kiṃ ca duritaṃ mayi | yad vāham abhidudroha yad vā śepa utānṛtam

“Waters, carry this away: whatever bad going there is in me, whatever I have done in malice, whatever curse I have uttered, and whatever untruth.”

(RV 1.23.22, my translation; compare Griffith 1896)

Duritá sits first in a list that runs through malice, cursing, and lying. The poet does not choose between a physical and a moral meaning. For him there is one flaw, and it is a flaw of the way.

Methods note. The counts here are mine, from a plain-text search of a romanized Rigveda, and they will move slightly with edition, spelling and what you count as the same stem. Treat the figures for durita (~54 verses), suvita (~46) and the fourteen sukha verses as reliable to within a handful. A printed concordance, such as the one Grassmann’s dictionary makes possible, will adjust them at the margin without touching the shape of the argument.[3]

Where Do Bad Things Live?

If duḥkha is missing, you might expect some other general word for pain to fill the gap. There is nothing very close. What the poets have instead is a set of terms for narrow places and obstructions: aṃhas, the tight spot, taken up at length in Narrow Places and Wide Spaces; durgá, the hard road; duritá, the bad going; duṣvapnya, the bad dream, handed off to Trita in the piece on dreams. Each is a situation, not a state. You are in one, you can be led out of it, and the god who leads you out is quite often the god of roads.

That god, in the Rigveda, is Savitṛ, the Impeller. One of his best-known prayers asks him to do two things at once:

viśvāni deva savitar duritāni parā suva | yad bhadraṃ tan na ā suva

“O god Savitṛ, drive away all bad goings; send us what is good.”

(RV 5.82.5, my translation; compare Jamison and Brereton)

This is the Rigveda’s clearest statement of what we would call the problem of evil, and notice that it is a work order. Evil is a thing that has to be pushed out of the road, parā suva, and good is what comes back in. Read it beside the Gāyatrī piece, which treats Savitṛ’s name as just this verb, “to impel.”

Aside. The Rigveda’s near-silence on tears fits the pattern. In the text I searched, the word for a tear, aśru, appears once, in Pururavas’s exchange with Urvaśī (RV 10.95.13, in a line whose grammar is hard). It reappears, negated, in the funeral hymn: the widows who step to the fire are anaśravaḥ, “tearless” (RV 10.18.7). The word is cognate with Greek dákru, Latin lacrima and English tear, so the Indo-European inheritance included it, and the poets simply seldom used it. I would not infer from this that these people did not weep. The corpus is a ritual repertory, and grief in it is delegated to the Atharvaveda’s charms and the funeral verses. But it does mean that anyone looking in the Rigveda for a theory of suffering is looking in the wrong building.

The Chariot Under the Word

Why a chariot? The answer lies in the economics of the poets’ world, and it is a subject on which the evidence is both rich and argued over.

The Rigvedic chariot, with its two spoked wheels, is the most carefully described machine in the text. The Ṛbhus’ craft is the template for the poet’s own, and the wood that the car is made from has its own vocabulary (Trees and wood). Spoked wheels were a new technology on the Eurasian steppe in the early second millennium BCE: the burials of the Sintashta culture, in the southern Urals, preserve what look like the impressions of spoked wheels in the soil, and these are among the oldest known.[4] Scholars disagree about what those vehicles were. Littauer and Crouwel argued for decades that early steppe vehicles were too clumsy for war, while Raulwing, among others, treated the evidence with comparable caution.[5][6] The Rigveda does not settle that dispute, and I will not pretend it does. But the verse in which the Aśvins’ three-wheeled car is praised, or the riddle in RV 1.34.9 asking “where are the three wheels of your three-fold car?” show a poetry that knows, down to the number of wheels, what makes a car go.[14]

A culture that has just learned how a bore, an axle and a wheel interact, and that depends on getting them right for speed, would hardly invent a word for comfort without looking at its own machinery. In that light sukha is not a metaphor for ease. It is the first, literal, technical sense of ease, which the language then spent a thousand years stretching.

graph TD
    A["kha: hole, esp. in a wheel"] --> B["su-kha: well-bored, smooth"]
    A --> C["duḥ-kha: badly bored?"]
    B --> D["RV: sukha ratha only"]
    D --> E["Later: ease, pleasure"]
    C --> F["Later: pain, suffering"]
    A --> G["Later: space, sky"]
    H["duḥ-stha: badly standing?"] -.-> F
    F --> I["Buddhism: duḥkha as first truth"]

The diagram makes one thing clear: the later history of the word is a series of widenings, from a part of a vehicle to a quality of a vehicle to a quality of experience. The dotted line is the rival etymology for duḥkha, which, if it is right, means the word never had a wheel in it.

From the Chariot Seat to the Yoga Seat

So far the claim is modest: in the Rigveda sukha is a chariot’s property. But one verse from the list above deserves a second look. It is Indra’s, in the Viśvāmitra hymn RV 3.35:

brahmaṇā te brahmayujā yunajmi harī sakhāyā sadhamāda āśū | sthiraṃ rathaṃ sukham indra adhitiṣṭhan prajānan vidvān upa yāhi somam

“With a formulation I yoke your two bay horses, yoked by the formulation, comrades at the shared drinking, swift. Mounting the steady, smooth chariot, Indra, come to the soma, knowing, understanding.”

(RV 3.35.4, my translation; compare Jamison and Brereton)

Sthiram rathaṃ sukham: the steady chariot, the smooth one. And Indra is to adhitiṣṭhan, “stand upon” it. Now recall the single Yoga Sūtra most people can quote, the one on posture: sthira-sukham āsanam, “the seat should be steady and comfortable” (YS 2.46).[7] The adjective pair in the Sūtra is the pair in the Rigveda, in the same order, for a rider’s seat rather than a sitter’s. A companion article on yuj argued that the Rigveda’s “yoking” was a technology before it was a discipline, and this is further evidence in the same direction.

I would put a fence around that observation. Patañjali wrote many centuries after the Rigveda, and the two words are the obvious ones for any vehicle or seat, so a direct line of influence is not demonstrated and need not be. What is demonstrated is that the vocabulary of a good posture was, in its first recorded life, a vocabulary of a good ride. The pair’s meaning had to migrate from a chariot to a human body, and later to a mind, and the migration is observable in the language.

The Riddle of the Wishing Horse

The most unexpected appearance of the word is the funniest. RV 9.112 is a short, refrain-driven hymn to Soma in which a series of speakers each say what they want. The poet says that people’s thoughts and callings are all different: the carpenter wants something broken, the doctor wants an injured man, the priest wants a patron pressing soma.[8] Then, in the fourth verse, the horse enters:

aśvo voḍhā sukhaṃ rathaṃ … maṇḍūka ichati

“The horse wants the smooth-running car … the frog wants water.”

(RV 9.112.4, abridged; my translation, compare Jamison and Brereton)

The verse’s middle, which I have cut, is bawdy and doesn’t need a gloss here. The point is the grammar of wanting. In this catalogue of ordinary appetite, in a poem that is gently making fun of everyone including itself, a horse wants what a horse wants, and that is a sukha chariot. It is the nearest thing in the Rigveda to a statement about wanting comfort, and it is given to an animal.[15]

What Happened Next

Between the Rigveda and the Buddha, the word sukha was freed from its car and began to describe states of mind. The transition is invisible in the evidence we have, because the intervening texts are a different register, ritual prose and speculative dialogue. By the time sukha is rendered into Pali, the kha is long forgotten as a hole. The Pali dukkha, standing at the opening of the Buddha’s first sermon, carries the weight of the whole analysis, and translators have argued about it ever since. Walpola Rahula, in What the Buddha Taught, famously insisted that “suffering” is too narrow a translation and that the word covers imperfection, impermanence and emptiness along with pain.[9] The Pali Text Society’s dictionary lays out the same range.[10]

A tale is often told in modern Buddhist teaching that the Buddha’s dukkha is a wheel whose axle does not sit right in its hole, so that the ride jolts and nothing runs smooth. It is a good picture. It is also, as the two competing etymologies above indicate, an unproven one, and it has the further difficulty that the Buddhist texts themselves do not tell it. I like the picture anyway. Whether it was ever in anyone’s mind when the word was coined, the Rigveda shows that the image was available: a culture that rode chariots had every reason to hear a faulty bore as a fault in the order of things.

What I think the evidence does show, with no help from the etymology, is something about the Rigveda itself. Its writers had a rich practical vocabulary for the quality of passage through life, and almost no abstraction above it. The great Buddhist move, which took the particular troubles of the road and made them a single condition of existence, was available only after someone decided to build the general word. The Rigveda did not build it.

The Poem Under the Philosophy

I think the useful lesson is not that Buddhism was somehow predicted by a wheel. The lesson is that when an old text appears not to contain an idea, the absence is itself information. The Rigveda has no duḥkha, and it also has no word for the self apart from the body, and no illusion in the later sense. In each case the later abstraction has a Rigvedic ancestor that is concrete, physical, and a little surprising: the body, a craft-power, a hole in a wheel. The abstractions were made by stretching these.

For a modern reader that is less disappointing than it sounds. We tend to think of philosophy as a ladder out of the material world. The Rigveda suggests a different picture, in which the most abstract words a civilisation owns begin as parts of machines and farm tools, and keep, if you listen, a faint rattle of the original.

Try this, if you want to test it. Open RV 10.75, the hymn to the rivers, to its ninth verse, and read it as someone who has just been told that sukha means “well-bored.” The Sindhu, a river that the poet has just spent eight verses describing as a flow of wealth and sound and horses, harnesses her own smooth chariot and goes to win a prize. It is a very odd thing to say of a river, and a very beautiful one, and a good way to hear an old word for comfort before it learned to be a state of mind.