The Second Arrow: The Buddha's Teaching on Pain

By Tim Yu · Updated 2026-06-08

The parable of the second arrow is one of the Buddha’s most useful teachings: when life hurts, that is the first arrow — often unavoidable. But the resistance, dread, and self-pity we heap on top is a second arrow we fire into ourselves. Pain may be given to us; much of our suffering, the Buddha taught, we manufacture — and can learn to put down.

The story

In the Sallatha Sutta, the Buddha asks a simple question: what is the difference between an ordinary, “untaught” person and a trained disciple when pain strikes? Both, he says, feel physical pain — the awakened are not made of stone. But the untaught person, touched by a painful feeling, “sorrows, grieves, and laments, beats his breast, becomes distraught.” And so, the Buddha says, that person “feels two pains, physical and mental” — as if “shot with an arrow and, right afterward, shot with a second arrow.”

The well-trained disciple, struck by the same painful feeling, does not add the second. They feel the first arrow — the bodily pain — clearly and fully, but they do not pile on resistance, panic, and despair. “They feel one pain: physical, but not mental.”

What the second arrow is

The first arrow is the raw event: the illness, the insult, the loss, the unpleasant sensation. We rarely control it. The second arrow is everything we do with it — and it is almost always worse than the first.

It is the spiral of this shouldn’t be happening to me. It is replaying the argument for the hundredth time, dreading a pain that hasn’t come yet, resenting the world for the wound, telling ourselves a story in which the hurt means we are a failure or that things will never be all right. None of that is the original pain. It is a second shaft, fired by our own hand, into the wound the first arrow made.

The liberating news is exactly there. We cannot always stop the first arrow — but the second is ours. And what is ours to fire is also ours to lay down.

Where it comes from

The teaching is from the Sallatha Sutta (“The Arrow”), SN 36.6, in the Pali Canon’s collection on feeling (vedanā). It is one of the clearest statements anywhere of a theme that runs through the whole of Buddhism: the Second Noble Truth, that suffering arises not from events alone but from our craving and resistance toward them. The second arrow is that truth made into a single unforgettable image.

How to stop firing the second arrow

The practice is not to feel less but to add less. A few ways the tradition and its teachers suggest:

• Catch the gap. Between the first arrow (the pain) and the second (the reaction) there is a moment. Mindfulness widens that moment, so that resistance becomes a choice rather than a reflex.
• Name the two arrows. When you are hurting, ask: what is the actual pain here, and what am I adding? Simply seeing the difference loosens the second arrow’s grip.
• Let the first arrow be. Resisting pain is itself a second arrow. Allowing the raw feeling to be present — without the story that it must not be — often takes most of the suffering out of it.
• Drop the future arrows. Much of the second arrow is anticipation — dreading pain that hasn’t arrived. Returning to the present disarms it.

This is why the second arrow is so beloved by people facing anxiety, chronic pain, and grief: it does not promise a life without hurt, which would be a lie. It offers something truer and more freeing — that most of what we suffer is the part we add, and that part can be released. (For the wider teaching, see the Four Noble Truths and the meaning of dukkha; for the practice, mindfulness and meeting anxiety. For the Buddha’s other arrow parable — on the questions not worth asking — see the poisoned arrow. For more stories like this, return to our guide to Buddhist parables; unfamiliar terms are in the glossary.)