Life is Suffering
To live is to suffer. Life is accompanied by inevitable pain,
sickness, disappointment, disillusion, decay and death. This place
we live on, the earth plane, is characterized by inevitable and
unavoidable dissatisfaction, disappointment, rejection, failure,
pain, yearning, decrepitude, and loss. "Suffering" in Buddhism
refers not only to physical pain, aging, sickness, and death, and
to emotional pain like fear, loss, jealousy, disappointment, and
unrequited love, but also to the existential sense that, somehow,
deep down, life is permanently out of joint. Everything is touched
by the shadow of dissatisfaction, imperfection, disappointment.
Suffering, in the Buddhist sense, is a pervasive condition. No one
escapes it. Even enlightened teachers grow old, suffer the pains of
decay, and die.
Suffering is Caused by Attachment
Suffering arises because everything changes, everything is
impermanent. Everything is in process, all the time. Whenever we
hope to find any lasting happiness by means of something that is
changing, suffering results. This means that nothing in the realm
of ordinary human experience can provide lasting happiness, and
trying to force things to stand still and make us happy is itself
the main source of misery.
"Attachment" in Buddhism extends far beyond the sense of "greed" or
"clinging" to something closer to what the Christian tradition
would call "pride"--a self-centered isolation, the separate
selfhood, "ego" in the worst sense.
This selfhood acts upon others and the world as if they were
forever separate from oneself, generating what author Charlene
Spretnak described as "the continuous chain reaction of craving,
jealousy, ill will, indifference, fear, and anxiety that fills the
mind." This is a deep, pervasive, but normal kind of
alienation--one seemingly built into the nature of the human
nervous system.
In Buddhism, three concepts are said to characterize all
things:
* Anicca -- Nothing is permanent. Everything changes.
* Anatta (or anatman) -- There is no separate self. What appears
separate and enduring turns out to be changeable and "composite."
What we experience as identity turns out to be a changing
constellation of varying influences.
* Dukkha -- to believe otherwise, to cling to any thing or anyone
(including yourself), expecting it to be enduring, whole, and a
self, is to create and amplify suffering. And we all do it -- at
least until we become, we hope, enlightened.
Naturally, these concepts have been interpreted in many ways by
many thoughtful people, including the Mayahana interpretation that
our ordinary self is a non-self, but that we have a deep, true
Buddha-nature that can be awakened.
The most pervasive form of self-centered suffering takes place as
we project upon everyday experience a huge burden of extraneous
interpretations, associations, fantasies, emotions, painful
memories, and diversions. We act then with the Buddhist big three
problems: greed, aversion, and delusion. Greed sucks things in to
our purposes, violating their natures as necessary. Aversion shoves
things away, denies, distorts, destroys them--again violating their
natures. In the state of delusion, we float, confused, not seeing,
not knowing, insulated from the pain and salvation of deep
experience.
Instead of seeing each moment as it is, we react to each moment
from our past pain and frustration; then we react to the pain and
frustration; then we react to that reaction; and so on and on. In
this way a special form of mental torment is created that consists
of seemingly endless layers of pain, negative emotion, self-doubt
and self-justification--known in Buddhism as "samsara," the
illusory world we think of as real. It is what, in honest moments,
many people might call "normality."
I think of it this way: Instead of experiencing life directly, we
create a worldview and experience it. That worldview serves to
protect us through a system of explanations; but it also makes each
of us into an isolated self, separated from nature, from real
experience, from spirituality, and from one another--causing all
experience to be distorted and "out of joint," and ourselves to
suffer from living at one remove from life. We are nearly
always,
in some degree, outsiders to the world and even to our own
experience.
Buddhists have given deep attention to the ways human beings are at
once empowered and entrapped by the categories we create for
thought and language. Racial prejudice is a straightforward example
of what Buddhists mean by suffering that is created by the mind; it
is based on mental categories that distort perception and project
our expectations onto others. The fundamental Buddhist act is to
accept responsibility for one's projections, and to learn to know,
first hand, how the mind creates illusion and amplifies
suffering.