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Why is there suffering?
Jeffrey
Veteran
Is that one of the questions that is imponderable?
0
Comments
Second Noble Truth; hardly imponderable.
That's such a cornerstone of Buddhism that I wonder if you didn't mean something else?
I was thinking more from a question of why the universe has suffering. From the nuts and bolts of the mind the answer is craving. But why is it here? If you take craving and suffering as pieces of the puzzle then my asking why there is suffering includes the question 'why is there craving'?
Why is there anything instead of nothing? Some things are just "this is".
Tanha or Thirst/Craving is preceded by and dependent upon Ignorance, or not having Clarity of things as they really are. There's really no better or fuller explanation for these truths that I can think of... we're imperfect, flawed, creating problems.
"Why is there craving?" seems to belie the question "Why is there life at all? Why does it persist and replicate itself?". These are questions of purpose, but I can't see a way to divine that purpose, can you? When someone comes up with a way to answer why we're here, without simply making claims that can't be justified, I'll be listening with baited breath!
The "why" questions seem much less pertinent and answerable than the "how" questions.
I don't know, that's all I got.
it's kind of a weird question because it is kind of asking if the world is cold and cruel and we are sort of Bhuddist super heroes
. who are trying to not only make the best of it, but also make it all the way to enlightenment. So my question is definitely a kind of basic "Why" but I want to give the flavor of my question. The flavor is asking why the world is this way. It is akin to asking "why were there dinosaurs?" Maybe it's a waste of time to think about it! But I had the question as a wonderment.
Well, if the world were perfect I suppose "change" would... change that.
The system or laws might be perfect and unchanging, but the stuff is murky most of the time! The emptiness can be all sorts of ways, but it's still empty like a dream.
I think we can pretty much say nothing "is" necessarily one way or another, unless we are talking about unchanging laws (unchanging for all we know). If we ask why there's suffering, we'd have to ask why there wouldn't be suffering! Causality becomes everything.
Every question becomes the same damn question, missing emptiness. MU MU MU.
As they say the only thing that's sure is death and taxes.
Don't you dare post a pic of you in tights and a cape!
I think science does a good job of explaining it, and it's very in accordance with the 2nd Noble Truth too.
If we had to design a brain that's built to survive and pass on it's genes, we'd build a brain just like ours. One that's restless, irritable and discontented; a brain that produces a mind that wants and craves and does not understand Reality.
I might think that that blonde woman, with the large breasts, will make me happy, but to get her I've got to get a lot of money, status, a big house and a flash car; wear the right clothes and be a certain way.
Evolution by natural selection does not favour animals who just sit around all day, not really bothering to eat, survive, or have sex (Gawd knows how those Chinese pandas have lasted so long?). George Carlin summed it up when he said "Mother Nature doesn't give a shit about our happiness, all she's worried about is getting more grandkids!"
I think that's why I find the spiritual path so difficult; it really does go against (my) nature.
Evolution by natural selection does not favour animals who just sit around all day, not really bothering to eat, survive, or have sex.
Cats seem to do OK.
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I'm an ex soldier and we reckoned nurses were in the same category as death and taxes too. Nurses - particularly nurses in training - always seemed to like soldiers.
(Apologies to any nurses who feel I've insulted their moral standards).
That's a good question. Just because the Noble Truths intend to address this question doesn't mean you shouldn't ask it for yourself. You really need to ask this over and over, if you're going to come to an understanding and not just dismiss it by pointing to the Buddha's lectures.
To begin with, try to imagine a world without suffering. What would be different in it? What would have to change, and since everything is interconnected, what else would change along with it?
In my own case, after many, many hours of meditation and pondering the question and yes, finding the teaching of the Masters lacking to some extent, I found my own answer. It's MY answer, though. It's not THE answer. I make no pretensions of Buddha-hood. I refer you to the Noble Truths for that.
My answer?
Take away suffering, and you take away what it means to be human.
For life to exist, we must have death.
For joy to exist, we must have grief.
For laughter to exist, we must have tears.
And as true as this answer is, it's never going to be good enough, because we're human.
And in the end, that is what the Noble Truths mean to me.
So I'd like to ask people here the same question that @Jeffrey asked, but on a less intellectual level. A woman comes to you, carrying her dead baby in her arms, and says, "You Buddhists are supposed to know all about suffering. Why did my baby have to die?"
What do you tell that mother?
Tell her what the Buddha told another woman that asked the same question, "go find another family that has never experienced death and when you find them, come back and I will give you the answer".
It seems that being self aware has some nasty side effects that we're still trying to work through.
That's one of my favorites. Her answer was found through her compassion for others and in the sharing of experience. Buddha was asked to perform a miracle and so he taught her to see.
Yes, it's the story of Kisa Gotami, the parable of the mustard seed. When her young child had died, she refused to believe it was dead. After asking many people — in vain — for medicine that would revive the child, she was finally directed to the Buddha. When she told him her story, he offered to provide medicine for the child, but he would need some mustard seed — the cheapest Indian spice — obtained from a family in which no one had died. She went from house to house asking for mustard seed, and no one refused to give it to her. But when she asked if anyone had died in the family, the universal response was always, "Oh, yes, of course." After a while, the message sunk in: Death is universal. On abandoning the child's body to a charnel ground, she returned to the Buddha and asked to be ordained as a nun, and afterwards became an arahant.
I heard the same story but the version I heard she was looking for a miracle and thought Buddha could perform them. @SpinyNorman
@Jeffrey
Another possibility...
Why is there suffering...(beyond the 2nd NT) could be answered without bothering science or the Buddha or psychology or even entropy.
Meditatively observe where the source of your suffering originates and you will find ever diminishing returns. Take this far enough and preceding your skandhas, the inertia of the same delusive belief that we all suffer from today can be found expressing itself, life after life.....until that delusion finds some resolution. It is the innate delusion that we are in someway separate from the rest of existence. What manifests over eons is just as real as what manifests in every micro second.
While our Ego's view states that it's expression of life is a momentous occurrence, each life, from the meditative prospective, like every inhalation and exhalation, is just the continuing expression of that same delusive thread, until resolved.
It is imponderable because neither it's start nor it's finish, can be held by an Ego bound perspective and its real answer leaves no one to experience the question.
To Grieve.
To Grieve.
Wonderful answer!
I have heard of the story where the mother comes to Buddha with her dead baby, of course. In the version I heard, after the Buddha tells her to go to each house in the village and find one untouched by death, she comes back to him, followed by all the people who's door she'd knocked on, and he tells the people of the village to help her bury the child. It is as much about reminding the village that one of their own is in need of attention as it is about the mother.
I don't have an answer for the mother. All I could do is grieve along with her. I think all any of us can do is care.
Yeah, when they've been spayed and neutered! Hey, what about . . . nah.
I 'have' an intact tom cat, who this winter I plan to shut him in the house, dose him with kitty downers, and take him to be neutered. But in the meantime, he is a lean, mean man of action. He comes by to eat and meow and then back outside to be his restless, suffering, never to be satisfied life evolution intended for him.
It's not a weird question at all, in fact, it's a cornerstone. It's a question any compassionate person would ask, and ask seriously... including Gotama upon realizing the reality of death, illness, and old age. If there is an underlying order as is suggested by the concepts of karma and many lives then this question becomes more obvious and clear.
I think it's too bad that people don't know that buddhism does in fact answer hard questions like this.. in fact it gently points you in a direction that allows you to come to your own conclusions and supports you with the utmost care IF you are willing to really contemplate truthfully, independently and with strong intent. There are no easy answers or simple diversion tricks that can address this. Buddhism sometimes seems like it prefers to dodge questions like these, but actually it is designed to give a person genuine and non-dogmatic knowledge and insight on such matters... which means that it does a lot of indirect pointing to truths that truly defy the weight and walls of words.
A student, filled with emotion and crying, implored, "Why is there so much suffering?"
Shunryu Suzuki Roshi replied, "No reason.”
@zenguitar No reason, only reasons!
As has been suggested it is the cornerstone of practice. Why do we suffer? Existence without arising, into existence and decline or ageing into death and dissolution is part of existence.
See how we run from the First Nobel Truth?
What are we going to do about it? Practice perhaps . . . rather than pondering a perfect stagnant non existent perfect expansion without contraction . . .
:wave: .
Um, perhaps it is because we live in a temporary realm and have not passed beyond it yet? To an eternal realm? In other words, in somewhat of Buddhist concepts, we have not learned that this realm we alive ones are now in is a suffering realm, accepted it, and become enlightened?
@Straight_Man No eternal realm, only yearnings and delusions of permanent existence.
Well, would you hold that enlightenment is temporary?
The question makes no sense unless you assert a permanent independent "self", because there's no such entity to whom/which enlightenment occurs.
If you want "permanent", if you want to have always existed and to always exist, you have to give yourself up entirely and recognize that what you are made of has been countless things in the past and will continue on as new things in the future. "You" are temporary and permanent simultaneously, depending on whether you're talking about mundane reality or supramundane reality (emptiness)! It's hard to really grasp that. We want to be one or the other, and so we tend toward annihilationist or eternalist views, instead of the Middle Way.
. :coffee: .. Why is there suffering? . :om: .. "Ignorance" (not knowing) . :om: ..
When we search for answers but can't find them, is this not a form of 'suffering' ?
I guess in a sense, how would life know what "not suffering" is, if there was no suffering to compare it with...The universe works in mysterious ways . :scratch: ..
Why is there suffering? It is because of the mind arising.
When we profoundly explore into the mind, we could discover the respective elements of information, knowledge, representation, memory, compulsion, ignorance, blindness, disorientation, confusion, irrationality, impulse, volition, awareness, and consciousness. The inter-depending and inter-weaving of these elements are the necessary prerequisite for suffering to exist; without it, the suffering would be impossible.
In other words, the mind is dependent arising and the dependent nature per se is an inherent existence with emptiness becoming its central influence. In other words, the dependent nature can never be eliminated by whatsoever means because what is becoming is due to emptiness and what is unbecoming is also due to emptiness.
Goes to show how important it is to ask the 'right' (8fold Path 'right') question in the first place.
Poor student probably wasn't asking for REASONS for suffering anyway.
Personally, I favor this question: "How can I cease to suffer?" That would back the old Zen master into a corner and force a more targeted response out of the old fart.
>
By following what The Buddha Taught.
That's what he said he had come to do.
And did.
Follow the Yellow Brick Road - There's no place like 'Home'....
. . . the damn Yellow Brick Road is UPHILL . . . both ways.
It's a good question actually and should be pondered more often. It's when we don't ponder it enough that suffering finds its way towards us.
"Sorrow not, lament not! Have I not said to you ere now, Ananda, 'In all things dear and delightful there is the element of change, of separation, of otherness.'
How then can it be possible, Ananda, that what is born, what has come to be, what is put together, what is of nature to crumble away, should fail to crumble away!
It cannot be."
(D.N. ii 143 - F. L. Woodward translation)
Subject to decay are all compounded things.
For whatever reason, objective fact of one of the marks of existence.
Suffering? Subjective personal judgement passed on by us human who, for whatever reason, are wired up not to accept willingly objective fact of existence mentioned above.
There is the fact that existence is entropy, impermanence, decay.
Suffering is our personal opinion about it.
We don't want to get ill, we don't want to age, we don't want to die, we don't want to lose our beloved beings, we would like happiness to last forever.
"No way," says life. Why? We don't know. We never will.
Why is heat hot? Why is salt salty? Why is water wet?
Let's make the most of the good moments while they last.
Let's accept dukkha when it happens.
Whole aim of our Buddhist practice.
Yes, I think that sums it up quite nicely.
There’s a well known joke about a tourist in Ireland who asks one of the locals for directions to Dublin. The Irishman replies: ‘Well sir, if I were you, I wouldn’t start from here’.
In many ways we have to be where 'all roads lead to Rome'/Oz in order to find the ups and downs are level. Time for a musical interlude . . . .
:wave: .
The world is a reflection of your own mental state. If you see it as full of suffering only you can change that view.
I've posted this before but it sums it up quite nicely.
There are some parts of change we like. Some that we don't like.
No schytt Sherlock.....
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Yes, he would have hit you over the head with his stick and said, "How? By getting out of my face, that's how."
Actually I doubt that Suzuki Roshi would have done that, but I can imagine some legendary Zen masters who would.
From whence does suffering come? For the human mind much suffering is generated by our thoughts, our (mis)perceptions and the (mis)understanding of our condition and reality. To this add (not only for us but all creatures) that birth, age, sickness and death are inherently part of our existence.
Maybe asking why is there suffering is the wrong question to ask.
Maybe we should ask, what would a world be without change?
Stilted, stagnant, and static are words that come to my mind.
To have the world we have, requires change: the change in our minds, in our relationships and in our bodies. Sometimes these changes are painful but without them life wife would not move on, it would not progress, indeed it would die.
The dukkha of impermanence I can understand but some of the pain some people have to endure is crazy.
I knew it! :clap: .
Thanks for that. The world is a reflection of our mental state
Well reminded. Once we assimilate and act accordingly . . . everything changes . . . for us and surprisingly the world we reside in . . .
I consider this realisation so important, gonna repeat it again: The world is a reflection of our mental state :clap: .
As every dogchien knows, Samsara is Nirvana . . . sure I read that in a Buddhist fortune cookie somewhere . . .
The world or our world?
OK, before I begin, I need some kind fellow member to promise to kick me soundly on the behind, when they get the chance.
Now, this is the kind of thing which enables me to inflict 'suffering' upon myself:
It's not 'From whence'....'whence' means 'from where'... so basically, you're asking,
"From from where does suffering come?"
It's just 'Whence.'
"Whence does suffering come?"
(Sorry.)
I'm about to get mine....
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Suffering arises when we care more about what happens 'out there' than what happens 'in here'.
We need to reverse the perspective or perception.
Just to bring it back to a 'serious' level.....
. 
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Do you want a sign that you’re asleep? Here it is: you’re suffering. Suffering is a sign that you’re out of touch with the truth. Suffering is given to you that you might open your eyes to the truth, that you might understand that there’s falsehood somewhere, just as physical pain is given to you so you will understand that there is disease or illness somewhere. Suffering occurs when you clash with reality. When your illusions clash with reality, when your falsehoods clash with truth, then you have suffering. Otherwise there is no suffering.
Anthony de Mello
Because of not seeing things as they really are.