How does Buddhism explain the source of suffering?

karasti

Today at my Sangha meeting, one of our members posed a question none of us knew the answer to. She got really frustrated to the point of interrupting people and repeating her question over and over again. People would add their thoughts and she'd stop them and say "I KNOW that but that doesn't explain where suffering comes from."

She talked about the story of Adam and Eve taking the fruit from the tree of knowledge and how that is the source of pain and suffering. If you ask a Christian leader why humans suffer, that is generally something that is brought up. That we suffer because Adam and Eve ate from the tree when they were told not to.

The lady wanted to know if there is a comparable explanation, myth, story or whatever in Buddhism. She wants to know how Buddhism explains why we suffer. She seems to believe that primitive cultures were more pure, closer to the earth, they didn't have the addictions and delusions we have now, and she wants to know how we lost that to become so deep in Samsara doo-doo. It seemed to me that renunciation is what she was going for, but she seems to feel it's not possible in our world. It kind of seems to me like she is asking a question that doesn't have an answer, and she got really frustrated with that as an answer. We discussed it for an hour, and every response from her was "no, I know that, that is not what I'm asking." Finally our group leader said he would pose the question to our teacher, and to the lama who is visiting next weekend and see what they say.

It got to be a rather confusing go around, but I thought I'd ask if anyone here has insight. How does Buddhism explain, if it does, where suffering initially arose and how we got torn away from our purer ways (in her opinion) to live in the world we do now with as much suffering and delusion? Does Buddhism have anything in it's texts that explains whether people had some sort of downfall as Christianity does?

Glow

Out of curiosity, what are the explanations that the other people in your sangha gave that this woman rejected?

genkaku

Buddhism can't explain suffering.

People who practice Buddhism know this.

Sabre

In Buddhism there is no such story, because everybody is responsible for their own happiness. Everybody creates their own suffering. Whether you would have lived 6000 years ago in the time of said Adam and Eve, 2500 years ago in the time of the Buddha or now, suffering is there and it is mind-created. The source of suffering is the mind, mostly the ignorant mind.

In more detail, it is not understanding suffering and how craving leads to suffering, that creates more suffering for ourselves. If we are too greedy for a hot soup, we burn our mouth. Some people burn their mouth every time they eat, others quickly learn. Four noble truths right there. The second one explains the source of suffering: craving caused by ignorance.

I'm sure somebody must have said something along those lines. If that's not the answer she wants to hear, so be it. What can you do? Not much. Some people don't like to hear they are the source of their own problems and want to blame some outside thing. Just like in an argument, people always blame the other. Or they blame the soup for being hot. That's the way people are.

Metta!
Sabre

Invincible_summer

I don't know about any sutta/sutra passages that may explain it, but to me, it's always come down to ego-centeredness that humans have always had since the beginning of time.

We can use the story of Adam & Eve too - the snake's ability to seduce them into eating the fruit with the promise of god-like wisdom shows that they desired to be more than what they were. Not only that, but the appearance of the fruit was "pleasureable to the eye" and that contributed to "the Fall" as well.

It'd be very difficult for me to believe that there were no such things as jealously, selfishness, unchecked desire, etc in our ancestors' societies. I guess it can be argued that all the problems started when our ancestors began to create divisions of labour and hierarchies where some members of the community had more than others due to their position or whatever. If you're alone or even in a small group that's focused simply on surviving, there's not much drama to be had I wouldn't think.

But this is all speculation.

Sabre

Invincible_summer said:

I don't know about any sutta/sutra passages that may explain it,

I do The Buddha's first discourse:

"The Noble Truth of the Origin (cause) of Suffering is this: It is this craving (thirst) which produces re-becoming (rebirth) accompanied by passionate greed, and finding fresh delight now here, and now there, namely craving for sense pleasure, craving for existence and craving for non-existence (self-annihilation).
http://www.accesstoinsight.org/tipitaka/sn/sn56/sn56.011.piya.html

karasti

It was a long discussion, lol, so it's hard to remember them all. We talked about pure hard-wiring of biology and the frontal cortex as to how we respond to fear and other emotions, and why we have those emotions (protect us from a wooly mammoth attack in our past and so on). We talked about how there is a balance, that there is no light without knowing dark and so on, and that that is the natural way of the world. That we cannot have no suffering without knowing suffering. She was told multiple times that no one knew if there was some sort of mythology that explained the fall of man as Christianity does, and I suspect that Buddhism probably doesn't have that type of mythology but I don't know for sure. She seems to feel that the answer Christianity gives for why people suffer is valid but that Buddhism didn't offer the same type of answer or explanation. I'm not sure why she was so adamant that it matters where it started.

She talked about how when we are born we are so pure and we pick up all those cultural sufferings as we grow up. She seemed to have some hangups on a "it sucks that we lost our purity and I wish we could go back." She doesn't want to have to plod through the suffering to get back to what we should be from the beginning. She seems to believe at one point in our history, we lived these really pure lives. And that somewhere along the way we lost it (Adam and Eve) and she wants to know how Buddhism explains that we lost it to begin with. I'm not convinced we ever had it as an entire race.

I think she believes things about primitive cultures that aren't really true. They suffer, too. True they don't have the same problems we do, but we also can largely start to investigate these things because we don't have to worry about the things they do. She thinks they live fully in the present with no worries about tomorrow, and I think that's wrong. Pretty sure they worry how they will survive day to day and get food for their kids for the next week and survive monsoon seasons, and so on. When you have to worry about how you are going to eat and move your shelter, you don't get the time to consider the deeper questions.

Sabre

Quickly, get your sangha a copy of the four noble truths . Joking of course, but as I've stated before, that's where the Buddha explained the origin of suffering. And it's not mammoth-fighting-responses or something like that.

On a side note: Even before Eve ate the forbidden fruit, surely Adam must have suffered when God took a rib out of his body?... Must have hurt quite a bit.

Invincible_summer

@Sabre - But it seems the woman in karasti's sangha is looking for a specific incident in human history (or at least some mythology) that tells us when humans first stepped in the "samsara doo-doo." As fundamental as the 4NTs are, it wouldn't really suffice it seems.

karasti

LOL @Sabre well, our group is pretty loose. Several of us have taken refuge vows (though I'm almost 100% sure this lady was one of them!) but we have people who are other traditions as well and just enjoy learning. So our experience runs the gamut from our leader who has been practicing for 30 years, a handful of unsure Christians, one Zen guy and a few random others.

I think personally she's looking for an answer that doesn't exist. I think she is looking to compare to vastly different things: Buddhism and Christian bible stories.

But yes, Invincible_Summer is right. She wants to know at what point we went from pure people to deep in the doo-doo people. I don't think that point in time exists, like someone else mentioned I think we've always been there, just in different ways based on our lives and cultures of the time. It's just not so simple as "well, the Buddha told his monks that once upon a time Man X had been born pure and did something to become unpure, sending the human race spiraling into samsara."

Sabre

@Invincible_summer
Could be. But I do not know what was said. If nobody said anything about the noble truths, and she didn't know about them, perhaps she was just looking in the wrong direction because of thait.

But yeah, it seems like what you said - to find some sort of beginning point. But even the Buddha could not see the beginning of samsara. It doesn't matter anyway, because the question shouldn't be "what was the beginning of suffering?", but it should be "what sustains suffering?".

@karasti
Let's for argument sake say it began with Adam and Eve.. than even Buddhist's wouldn't really care because you can't change the past. So it started there, great.. but it is still here now. What can we do now? If my house is on fire, the first thing I do is trying to get it out, instead of finding out where the fire started.

Jeffrey

Samsara has no beginning but it has an end.
Nirvana has no end but it has a beginning.

Sabre

"It's just as if a man were wounded with an arrow thickly smeared with poison. His friends & companions, kinsmen & relatives would provide him with a surgeon, and the man would say, 'I won't have this arrow removed until I know whether the man who wounded me was a noble warrior, a brahman, a merchant, or a worker.' He would say, 'I won't have this arrow removed until I know the given name & clan name of the man who wounded me... until I know whether he was tall, medium, or short... until I know whether he was dark, ruddy-brown, or golden-colored... until I know his home village, town, or city... until I know whether the bow with which I was wounded was a long bow or a crossbow... until I know whether the bowstring with which I was wounded was fiber, bamboo threads, sinew, hemp, or bark... until I know whether the shaft with which I was wounded was wild or cultivated... until I know whether the feathers of the shaft with which I was wounded were those of a vulture, a stork, a hawk, a peacock, or another bird... until I know whether the shaft with which I was wounded was bound with the sinew of an ox, a water buffalo, a langur, or a monkey.' He would say, 'I won't have this arrow removed until I know whether the shaft with which I was wounded was that of a common arrow, a curved arrow, a barbed, a calf-toothed, or an oleander arrow.' The man would die and those things would still remain unknown to him.
http://www.accesstoinsight.org/tipitaka/mn/mn.063.than.html

karasti

@Sabre, I forgot to say that yes, we talked about the 4NT and that was one of the parts she talked over and said she knows all that and understands it but that it still doesn't explain where it (suffering) CAME from. Why we experience it at all. I think she's looking for an answer akin to who was the first person to suffer, but like I said I don't think it was like the way she thinks it was. That we lived in an Eden, basically, and tripped up along the way.

She's a really knowledgeable lady and I think there was a lot of frustration on her part when we didn't seem to fully understand what she was asking. But in the end it came down to her wanting a comparable answer to the Adam and Eve story. I wanted to ask her why it mattered, since we are supposed to focus on the present anyhow, but I was getting a little irritated with her tone of voice and I didn't want to get snarky so I just sat quietly, lol.

Sabre

Dressed in bearskin, living in straw huts, being chased around by dinosaurs, having no toilets, no medical care and no Coca Cola either.. doesn't really sound like a suffer-less paradise to me..

But anyway, very often the wisest response is to remain silent and I think you did well. Maybe you can show her this thread or something.

Metta!
Sabre

riverflow

karasti said:

I think she believes things about primitive cultures that aren't really true. They suffer, too.

It sounds to me like her vexation with vexation starts with this assumption. There is no Eden, and there never was one. And even if there was, what good would it do to possess such information? (The arrow parable that @Sabre mentions above was what first came to my mind too)

This ties directly into the Kalama Sutta too--because the possession of information in and of itself is inadequate to deal with suffering. You have to start where you are, right here, rather than pining away for some imagined paradise to escape to. That pining away for ________ IS vexation itself.

person

It does sound like she is looking for some kind of fall from grace story. There isn't a very large focus on cosmological things generally in Buddhism but some stuff does exist. I think the usual explanation is that there never was a fall from grace and that our round of births and ignorance has no beginning. Logically in Buddhism we say everything has a cause, so running that backwards we'd have to come to some first causeless cause, some reason for that first moment of ignorance. Bertrand Russell said "There is no reason to suppose the world had a beginning at all. The idea that things have a beginning is due to the poverty of our imaginations."

riverflow

Also, at least as far as Catholic and Eastern Orthodox tradition goes, the Fall is not necessarily understood as a literal event occurring in history. Augustine, for example, understood it as something more like a parable expressing human nature.

Just like reading Aesop's Fables, the point of the story is not that foxes, rabbits, tortoises and lions talk--they illustrate something about human nature here and now.

So, at least from some Christian traditions, Eden is not really an empirically causal explanation either.

Jeffrey

If everything has a cause then there is no causeless cause. Definitively.

Cinorjer

There is no answer to her question the way she asks it, because there never was a Garden of Eden or a time when humanity lacked the capacity to suffer.

With the dawning of consciousness came the desire for the world to be something other than what it is, and suffering was born. There was never a golden age of enlightenment, we never fell from grace, never lost our innocence because we were never in a state of grace or innocent. Suffering exists because we exist. This is what makes Buddhism different from religions that claim suffering is punishment for our sins.

It's not up to you, to find an answer she will accept. It's up to her, to accept the answer Buddhism provides, or not. This is the foundation of the Noble Truths.

Zero

karasti said:

It got to be a rather confusing go around, but I thought I'd ask if anyone here has insight. How does Buddhism explain, if it does, where suffering initially arose and how we got torn away from our purer ways (in her opinion) to live in the world we do now with as much suffering and delusion? Does Buddhism have anything in it's texts that explains whether people had some sort of downfall as Christianity does?

Adam and Eve as recounted by the St James Bible is an amalgamated abridgment of Sumerian accounts which do not attribute suffering to the pursuit of knowledge.

A downfall carries an assumption of grandeur.

The first thing a baby does is cry.

ThailandTom

Making every nice and simple, the 4NTs..

fivebells

Suffering is an evolutionary process. Stable systems establish themselves, and struggle to preserve their own integrity. The perceptual distortions which naturally result from this struggle are the root of suffering.

Takuan

This story reminds me of a situation at my meditation center a while back. We were all discussing Buddhanature, and one individual kept bringing up Hitler. Every time someone tried to answer him, he responded with "but what about Hitler? How could he have the potential for enlightenment!?" We all came to the conclusion that he really didn't want an answer to his question. He had already decided upon his conclusion and nothing we could say was going to satisfy him.

Anyways, I think we each develop our own ideas when it comes to things like the origins of suffering. Personally, I believe it is because of our clinging to dualistic conceptualizations of reality, however I may be wrong. lol That doesn't change the first noble truth, "there is suffering". Whether we can pin point the origin of it or not, it's still there. It still needs to be dealt with. Our minds still need to change.

person

I found a good webpage concerning the beginning of things from a Buddhist point of view.

http://www.lorenwebster.net/In_a_Dark_Time/2011/01/18/the-buddhist-beginningless-universe/

karasti

Thanks for that, @person. I think that will be helpful for her.
I guess I don't really look to find an answer for her, but more so out of the feelings that developed within the group (which we could all feel) because of the misunderstanding that was going on and her interrupting. It was just unsettling because we don't usually experience those vast chasms within our group and my thoughts were swirling about it. I appreciate all of your responses, it helped for sure.

Silouan

The theory of an accelerating universe rather than a re-occurring bang is becoming the consensus in the scientific community, as in 2011 a Noble Prize in Physics was awarded for it. I'm not saying that Buddhist cosmology isn't in contrast as much remains to be discovered, but one can see there are issues to be resolved at present.

Silouan

@karasti

Why does beginningless mind, which is ultimately pure and unchanging in essence, give rise to a state of ignorance in contrast to its essence? I think that is the question your friend might ultimately be seeking an answer to.

I'm not a Buddhist, but perhaps one could say that both the physical and mental aspects of the universe both have a beginningless continuum, and are naturally occurring. The continuum of the mind we are referring to is the activity of experience. As an aside, the Anthropic Principle suggests a theory that the universe is meant to be observed or experienced.

The coming into existence of beings are the results of the general law of causality. Karma is an instance of the general law of causality, and requires an agent and intention. It becomes significant when it affects experience therefore the origin of suffering lies in both karma and ignorance. Is karma a contributing factor for all beings coming into existence it appears the answer would be no. Is it for human beings then the answer would appear to be yes as it affects their experiences.

In a nut shell there comes a point in the existence of beings where karma and ignorance and resulting suffering occurs and has an influence. According to Carl Jung human consciousness has developed over time as an aspect of what he calls the primordial unconscious, not to be confused with states of loss of consciousness though.

music

In Buddhism, suffering is without beginning. It is not like there was a perfect state first, and then suddenly we fell from it.

zenff

Maybe a part of the answer (from a Mahayana perspective) is in the two truths. In relative truth there is beginningless suffering which is an inherent part of samsara. In absolute truth there is no beginning and no end of anything at all. So there is no beginning of suffering and no end to suffering.

Read the Heart Sutra.
Enlightenment (according to the Heart Sutra) is waking up to the emptiness of suffering and of the four noble truths alike.

riverflow

The origin of suffering is ontological, not empirical. It cannot be located temporally, but rather it is the nature of consciousness itself. In order to desire to cling to something, to desire to chase something, or to desire to avoid something, we first must buy into the illusion that "I" and everything else exist as beings with unchanging essences that exist independently of one another. Suffering has its roots in that ontological fragmentation:

"We are actually very resistant to this reality. We hate it because it is too simple and we persistently think we need more. This is not a detail or quirk of our minds; it is not even a habit really; it is the deep nature of our minds. The Sanskrit word for consciousness is vijnana, which means to divide, or to cut. In order for us to have what we call experience we have to divide or cut reality. Genuine or all-rightness is wholeness, indivisibility, so it can’t be an experience." ~Zoketsu Norman Fisher, ‘A Coin Lost in the River is Found in the River,’ from The Art of Just Sitting: The Essential Writings on the Zen Practice of Shikantaza (edited by John Daido Loori)

seeker242

karasti said:

She talked about the story of Adam and Eve taking the fruit from the tree of knowledge and how that is the source of pain and suffering. If you ask a Christian leader why humans suffer, that is generally something that is brought up. That we suffer because Adam and Eve ate from the tree when they were told not to.

From a zen point of view, the explanation is the same! They just call it different names like opposite thinking, duality, I making, etc. Good lecture on it here. The Garden of Eden comments start at 1 minute mark. The tree in the garden is Tree of the knowledge of good and evil. So if you discard the false notions of good and evil (AKA attachment and aversion), you are back in the garden.

Little story from the platform sutra of the 6th patriarch.

Hui Neng then came out and sat cross-legged on a
rock. Hui Ming made obeisance and said, “I hope that the
Cultivator will teach the Dharma for my sake.”
Hui Neng said, “Since you have come for the Dharma,
you may put aside all conditions. Do not give rise to a
single thought and I will teach it to you clearly.” After a
time, Hui Neng said, “With no thoughts of good and with
no thoughts of evil, at just this moment, what is Superior
One Hui Ming’s original face?” At these words, Hui Ming
was greatly enlightened

lobster

She wants to know how Buddhism explains why we suffer

She suffers because she has nothing better to do.

It should be understood that the Buddha did not preach all that he knew. On one occasion while the Buddha was passing through a forest he took a handful of leaves and said: "O bhikkhus, what I have taught is comparable to the leaves in my hand. What I have not taught is comparable to the amount of leaves in the forest."

He taught what he deemed was absolutely essential for one's purification making no distinction between an esoteric and exoteric doctrine. He was characteristically silent on questions irrelevant to his noble mission.
http://www.buddhanet.net/nutshell02.htm

If you want stories, go to story tellers.
:coffee:

riverflow

@karasti - thinking a bit more on the matter... perhaps the best approach to answering the question is to not to answer it at all, but to redirect the question back to herself and her own personal suffering.

My question is (and I mean this in a genuinely compassionate way): Why is this answer so important to her? Where is this insistence coming from within her life? It sounds to me like the resolution she wants comes from something eating away at her inside. This isn't mere curiosity--this is a cry.

There is nothing wrong with that--that is just what dukkha is. If she could somehow be directed toward the source of her question (which is a kind of cry for help) she might see that she has to begin with herself rather than looking 'out there' for a solution to her own suffering.

The good thing is that she is aware of dukkha. She just needs to look within rather than externally to find the solution to her pain.

maarten

Isn't the buddhist explaination from dependent origination?

John_Spencer

Good Question - the tree from which Adam and Eve eat is called the 'Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil'.

After eating of that tree God returns and seeing that Adam and Eve have clothed themselves He asks "who taught you to be ashamed?".

Clearly Adam have become 'self-aware' (hence shame of their nakedness.)

This story of humanity's burgeoning self-awareness (and the trials and suffering that ensue as a result) is a very Buddhist story.

Unless we had eaten of that Tree we wouldn't be what we are today - beings capable of promoting Good and demoting Evil through our own Free Will.

Which is all Shakyamuni ever asked of us.

John_Spencer

...or Jesus Christ for that matter.

fivebells

riverflow said:

My question is (and I mean this in a genuinely compassionate way): Why is this answer so important to her? Where is this insistence coming from within her life? It sounds to me like the resolution she wants comes from something eating away at her inside. This isn't mere curiosity--this is a cry.

But there is an answer to her question, and the answer does have practical value. The answer is that a system (which can be a personality trait; a person/animal; a social institution like a family, religion or nation state; or many other things) is more stable and influential if it has mechanisms which seek to preserve and enhance the system's integrity. Therefore, the systems we tend to observe in our lives tend to include some kind of drive to include some kind of drive to self-preservation and self-enhancement. Systems which don't include this drive tend to get swallowed up or rendered irrelevant to us by systems which do. And it is this drive which is at the root of suffering.

karasti

I think she understands the root of her suffering, at least as well as anyone can. But the answer she was hoping for was more on a humanity basis that a personal basis. I'm interested too in why she is so adamant at receiving an answer and she did come across as desperate for it. She is a doctor, and studies science for a hobby and sometimes I think she has a hard time in letting go of the things in life that she feels are hard facts and accepting that not all things in life have them. Or, that we do not yet have the ability to apply fact to them I suppose.

fivebells

Tell her what I just said, then.

Jeffrey

@fivebells, that sounds like what my teacher calls 'mandala principle'. There are messengers who share the values, there are guardians who protect the manadala, and there are some who try to take over the mandala to different values.

We can't avoid mandalas. They are everywhere. But we can put the nature of mind as the center rather than republican or democrat or Buddhist or whatever. Being in tune with the mandala means you will not stumble. You have a form of balance like balancing on a rocking boat. Sometimes the mandalas are at odds like the ego mandala and practice mandala. That produces strong feeling; for example in the clash of ego and practice we might have feelings of worry that something bad would happen if we just let go and whole heartedly practiced so we change and the boat is more rocking for awhile.

Jeffrey

For humanity answer we need to practice dharma. We can't fix the samsaric world.

BeeHurst

Sabre said:

But even the Buddha could not see the beginning of samsara. It doesn't matter anyway, because the question shouldn't be "what was the beginning of suffering?", but it should be "what sustains suffering?".

The suffering making to the mind with the attachment self thinking. The suffering beginning with the ignorance (avicca). The ignorance including the anusaya tendency for the self becoming (bhava). The animal, the plant, the physical that not have the self thinking cannot have the suffering. The animal, the plant, the physical can have the ignorance but if not have the self thinking cannot have the suffering. The Buddha teaching is the samudhaya. Samudhaya this word mean the many factors of arising coming together. The many factors of arising coming together is the ignorance sankara crave attachment become self (jati) that is making the suffering. If have the ignorance but not having the becoming self then not the suffering. In Siam Thailand, the Buddhathat Bhikku he explain the paticasumupada of the suffering.

BeeHurst

karasti said:

She talked about the story of Adam and Eve taking the fruit from the tree of knowledge and how that is the source of pain and suffering. That we suffer because Adam and Eve ate from the tree when they were told not to.

The Adam and the Eve is not making the suffering because it eating the apple. Eating the apple making the digesting and toileting. The Adam and the Eve making the suffering because have the conceptual thinking of the good and the evil. Buddha teaching the same idea in Second Noble Truth of the craving to be craving not to be liking this liking that disliking this disliking that. If you is believing Buddhism is the good you can have the suffering if the Christian people telling you the Buddhism is the bad. If you believing your money is the good and the bad people stealing your money this making you the suffering because you thinking the money is the good. You make the suffering if get angry believing the stealing robber is the evil. Knowledge of the good and the evil making the suffering. Hindu and Chinese teaching the non-duality of not good not evil. Suffering is coming from the knowledge of the good and the evil and not coming from the God or the apple. God not tell the people the suffering is coming from Him. God tell the people the suffering coming from the knowledge of the good and knowledge of the evil. God telling the Adam and the Eve the suffering coming from the good evil mental conceptual thinking. Suffering is create by the mind not by the God. The God not create the suffering.

lamaramadingdong

Suffering is inherent in anything impermanent.

BeeHurst

lamaramadingdong said:

Suffering is inherent in anything impermanent.

Mountain of rock is impermanence. You believe the mountain made of the rock have suffering?

riverflow

lamaramadingdong said:

Suffering is inherent in anything impermanent.

I don't think this expresses the matter clearly. I would say that it isn't the impermanence itself that brings about our suffering but rather the delusion that we take impermanent reality to be permanent. We mis-take impermanence for permanence.

riverflow

A gloss:

'A man will be imprisoned in a room with a door that’s unlocked and opens inwards; as long as it does not occur to him to pull rather than push it.'

~Ludwig Wittgenstein

ordinarybeing

From evil karma from beginingless time. From the dying universe in which ours is from?
When awareness started, the thoughts start.

Even though she seems a little angry from you not being able to give her an answer. I think just from being around a lama and the dharma and the diamond perfection of wisdom sutra somewhere in your center, she got some good karma seeds from it and I don't think she knows it yet.

I think she wants definitions and form over emptiness and formlessness.

So giving her answer will be hard, heck even I can't fully understand emptiness yet.

lamaramadingdong

I'll rephrase- Suffering is inherent in anything impermanent that thinks it isn't.

Vastmind

^^^
*raises right hand*
Now, that was some serious truth, right there!