i am confused..so whats the difference?
for me, i think there is a difference. personally, "life is
suffering" offers a pessimistic view on life. i believe buddha said
there is suffering in life, there is cause of suffering, there is
end to suffering and here are the ways. human life provides an
opportunity for us to cultivate our inner buddhahood. some say
half-filled glass, some say half-empty glass.
btw, i think below is a good read.
____________________________
Life Isn't Just Suffering
By Thanissaro Bhikkhu
http://www.accesstoinsight.org/lib/authors/thanissaro/lifeisnt.html
"He showed me the brightness
of the world."
That's how my teacher, Ajaan
Fuang, once characterized his debt to his teacher, Ajaan Lee. His
words took me by surprise. I had only recently come to study with
him, still fresh from a school where I had learned that serious
Buddhists took a negative, pessimistic view of the world. Yet here
was a man who had given his life to the practice of the Buddha's
teachings, speaking of the world's brightness. Of course, by
"brightness" he wasn't referring to the joys of the arts, food,
travel, sports, family life, or any of the other sections of the
Sunday newspaper. He was talking about a deeper happiness that
comes from within. As I came to know him, I gained a sense of how
deeply happy he was. He may have been skeptical about a lot of
human pretenses, but I would never describe him as negative or
pessimistic. "Realistic" would be closer to the truth. Yet for a
long time I couldn't shake the sense of paradox I felt over how the
pessimism of the Buddhist texts could find embodiment in such a
solidly happy person.
Only when I began to look
directly at the early texts did I realize that what I thought was a
paradox was actually an irony — the irony of how Buddhism, which
gives such a positive view of a human being's potential for finding
true happiness, could be branded in the West as negative and
pessimistic.
You've probably heard the
rumor that "Life is suffering" is Buddhism's first principle, the
Buddha's first noble truth. It's a rumor with good credentials,
spread by well-respected academics and Dharma teachers alike, but a
rumor nonetheless. The truth about the noble truths is far more
interesting. The Buddha taught four truths — not one — about life:
There is suffering, there is a cause for suffering, there is an end
of suffering, and there is a path of practice that puts an end to
suffering. These truths, taken as a whole, are far from
pessimistic. They're a practical, problem-solving approach — the
way a doctor approaches an illness, or a mechanic a faulty engine.
You identify a problem and look for its cause. You then put an end
to the problem by eliminating the cause.
What's special about the
Buddha's approach is that the problem he attacks is the whole of
human suffering, and the solution he offers is something human
beings can do for themselves. Just as a doctor with a surefire cure
for measles isn't afraid of measles, the Buddha isn't afraid of any
aspect of human suffering. And, having experienced a happiness
totally unconditional, he's not afraid to point out the suffering
and stress inherent in places where most of us would rather not see
it — in the conditioned pleasures we cling to. He teaches us not to
deny that suffering and stress or to run away from it, but to stand
still and face up to it, to examine it carefully. That way — by
understanding it — we can ferret out its cause and put an end to
it. Totally. How confident can you get?
A fair number of writers have pointed out the basic confidence
inherent in the four noble truths, and yet the rumor of Buddhism's
pessimism persists. I wonder why. One possible explanation is that,
in coming to Buddhism, we sub-consciously expect it to address
issues that have a long history in our own culture. By starting out
with suffering as his first truth, the Buddha seems to be offering
his position on a question with a long history in the West: is the
world basically good or bad?
According to Genesis, this was
the first question that occurred to God after he had finished his
creation: had he done a good job? He then looked at the world and
saw that it was good. Ever since then, people in the West have
sided with or against God on his answer, but in doing so they have
affirmed that the question was worth asking to begin with. When
Theravada — the only form of Buddhism to take on Christianity when
Europe colonized Asia — was looking for ways to head off what it
saw as the missionary menace, Buddhists who had received their
education from the missionaries assumed that the question was valid
and pressed the first noble truth into service as a refutation of
the Christian God: look at how miserable life is, they said, and
it's hard to accept God's verdict on his handiwork.
This debating strategy may
have scored a few points at the time, and it's easy to find
Buddhist apologists who — still living in the colonial past — keep
trying to score the same points. The real issue, though, is whether
the Buddha intended his first noble truth to answer God's question
in the first place and — more importantly — whether we're getting
the most out of the first noble truth if we see it in that
light.
It's hard to imagine what you
could accomplish by saying that life is suffering. You'd have to
spend your time arguing with people who see more than just
suffering in life. The Buddha himself says as much in one of his
discourses. A brahman named Long-nails (Dighanakha) comes to him
and announces that he doesn't approve of anything. This would have
been a perfect time for the Buddha, if he had wanted, to chime in
with the truth that life is suffering. Instead, he attacks the
whole notion of taking a stand on whether life is worthy of
approval. There are three possible answers to this question, he
says: (1) nothing is worthy of approval, (2) everything is, and (3)
some things are and some things aren't. If you take any of these
three positions, you end up arguing with the people who take either
of the other two positions. And where does that get you?
The Buddha then teaches Long-nails to look at his body and
feelings as instances of the first noble truth: they're stressful,
inconstant, and don't deserve to be clung to as self. Long-nails
follows the Buddha's instructions and, in letting go of his
attachment to body and feelings, gains his first glimpse of the
Deathless, of what it's like to be totally free from suffering.
The point of this story is that trying to answer God's question,
passing judgment on the world, is a waste of time. And it offers a
better use for the first noble truth: looking at things, not in
terms of "world" or "life," but simply identifying suffering so
that you can comprehend it, let it go, and attain release. Rather
than asking us to make a blanket judgment — which, in effect, would
be asking us to be blind partisans — the first noble truth asks us
to look and see precisely where the problem of suffering lies.
Other discourses show that the
problem isn't with body and feelings in and of themselves. They
themselves aren't suffering. The suffering lies in clinging to
them. In his definition of the first noble truth, the Buddha
summarizes all types of suffering under the phrase, "the five
aggregates of clinging": clinging to physical form (including the
body), feelings, perceptions, thought constructs, and
consciousness. However, when the five aggregates are free from
clinging, he tells us, they lead to long-term benefit and
happiness.
So the first noble truth, simply put, is that clinging is
suffering. It's because of clinging that physical pain becomes
mental pain. It's because of clinging that aging, illness, and
death cause mental distress. The paradox here is that, in clinging
to things, we don't trap them or get them under our control.
Instead, we trap ourselves. When we realize our captivity, we
naturally search for a way out. And this is where it's so important
that the first noble truth not say that "Life is suffering." If
life were suffering, where would we look for an end to suffering?
We'd be left with nothing but death and annihilation. But when the
actual truth is that clinging is suffering, we simply have to look
for the clinging and eliminate its causes.
This process takes time, though, because we can't simply tell
the mind not to cling. It's like a disobedient child: if you force
it to let go while you're looking, it'll search for a blind spot
where you can't see it, and will start to cling there. In fact, the
mind's major blind spot — ignorance — is the prime cause that gives
rise to clinging's proximate cause: craving. So, as the fourth
noble truth, the Buddha recommends a path of practice to get rid of
the blind spot. The path has eight factors: right view, right
resolve, right speech, right action, right livelihood, right
effort, right mindfulness, and right concentration. In a more
abbreviated form, the Buddha's term for the practice is "abandoning
and developing": abandoning activities that hinder awareness, and
developing qualities that expand its clarity and range.
The abandoning — in which you
refrain from unskillful thoughts, words, and deeds inspired by
craving — is obviously an antidote to clinging. The developing,
though, plays a more paradoxical role, for you have to hold to the
skillful qualities of mindfulness, concentration, and discernment
that foster awareness until they're fully mature. Only then can you
let them go. It's like climbing a ladder to get on a roof: you grab
hold of a higher rung so that you can let go of a lower rung, and
then grab onto a rung still higher. As the rungs get further off
the ground, your view gets more expansive and you can see precisely
where the mind's clingings are. You get a sharper sense of which
parts of experience belong to which noble truth and what should be
done with them: the parts that are suffering should be
comprehended; the parts that cause suffering should be abandoned;
the parts that form the path to the end of suffering should be
further developed; and the parts that belong to the end of
suffering should be verified. This helps you get higher and higher
on the ladder until you find yourself securely on the roof. That's
when you can finally let go of the ladder and be totally
free.
So the real question we face
is not God's question, passing judgment on how skillfully he
created life or the world. It's our question: how skillfully are we
handling the raw stuff of life? Are we clinging in ways that serve
only to continue the round of suffering, or are we learning to hold
to the ladder-like qualities that will eliminate craving and
ignorance so that we can grow up and not have to cling. If we
negotiate life armed with all four noble truths, realizing that
life contains both suffering and an end to suffering, there's hope:
hope that we'll be able to sort out which parts of life belong to
which truth; hope that someday, in this life, we'll discover the
brightness at the point where we can agree with the Buddha, "Oh.
Yes. This is the end of suffering and stress."
__________________________
Just like karma, not everything is due to Karma.
"Although Buddhism attributes this variation to Karma, as being
the chief cause among a variety, it does not, however, assert that
everything is due to Karma. The law of Karma, important as it is,
is only one of the twenty-four conditions described in Buddhist
Philosophy.
Refuting the erroneous view that "whatsoever fortune or
misfortune experienced is all due to some previous action", the
Buddha said:
"So, then, according to this view, owing to previous action men
will become murderers, thieves, unchaste, liars, slanderers,
covetous, malicious and perverts. Thus, for those who fall back on
the former deeds as the essential reason, there is neither the
desire to do, nor effort to do, nor necessity to do this deed, or
abstain from this deed."
It was this important text, which states the belief that all
physical circumstances and mental attitudes spring solely from past
Karma that Buddha contradicted. If the present life is totally
conditioned or wholly controlled by our past actions, then
certainly Karma is tantamount to fatalism or determinism or
predestination. If this were true, free will would be an absurdity.
Life would be purely mechanistic, not much different from a
machine. Being created by an Almighty God who controls our
destinies and predetermines our future, or being produced by an
irresistible Karma that completely determines our fate and controls
our life’s course, independent of any free action on our part, is
essentially the same. The only difference lies in the two words God
and Karma. One could easily be substituted for the other, because
the ultimate operation of both forces would be identical.
Such a fatalistic doctrine is not the Buddhist law of
Karma." http://www.buddhanet.net/e-learning/karma.htm
buddhism offers hope and optimism :)