Hello again, folks,
Retro, you said, "Speaking of complements, nibbana is asankhata, which means unformed. "
I actually knew that, thanks to this thread,
and it was one of the sources of my complement. But I kept on thinking about it ...
Complementing my complement, I just got:
All compounded things are associated with suffering, or, if you prefer, 'All formations are associated with suffering.'
I could get to like that as a translation of 'Sabbe sankhara dukkha'.
I still can't accept, 'All formations are suffering.' The verb is wrong if you take the most obvious meaning of the sentence (because formations are
a source of suffering if/when we cling to them, not suffering per se), so the sentence is, at best, misleading. (One could, at a stretch, grant the statement some kind of metaphorical truth, e.g. 'formations are suffering' in the same way 'ice-cream is bliss,' but a sentence which is going to be misinterpreted by 99.97% of its readers is a terrible teaching tool.)
And it's worth noting that there is no verb, as far as I can see, in the Pali statement. The connection between sankhara and dukkha is therefore unstated, as far as I can see.
Kim