Com­ing into being is suf­fer­ing – said Buddha, while a con­tem­por­ary Buddhist teach­er recast it: com­ing into being was suf­fer­ing.

Wheth­er we can con­sign the suf­fer­ing bound up with com­ing into being to the past tense, and strike it from the exper­i­ences of the present, is for every­one to decide for him­self; but the the­ory of suf­fer­ing is cer­tainly worth our atten­tion, pre­cisely so that we can face this pecu­li­ar dimen­sion of earthly exist­ence and frame effect­ive, rel­ev­ant answers. Neither the West nor the East denies the onto­lo­gic­al fact of suf­fer­ing.

Many accuse the East­ern world-view of pess­im­ism: etern­al return, dis­il­lu­sion­ment, lack of ambi­tion – the list of ste­reo­typed labels could go on, yet we may safely for­get them, since on the one hand the East too is fast becom­ing West­ern­ised, and on the other, spir­itu­al people are marked by striv­ing rather than indif­fer­ence. But there is a con­sid­er­able dif­fer­ence between spir­itu­al activ­ity and mater­i­al bustle. For the soul-see­ing sage the wak­ing of men is night, but when every­one sleeps, he is awake.

If we seek to know wheth­er life is more joy­ful or more full of suf­fer­ing, the answer depends on age too. The young gen­er­a­tion exper­i­ences the world as mostly joy­ful, the more mature as mostly full of suf­fer­ing. Hope­fully, were we to put the ques­tion to true sages, they would once again side with the joy­ful life – but now at a more mature level, thanks to the elev­ated vant­age point of spir­itu­al insights and ful­fil­ment.

In his youth Buddha, too, met with no suf­fer­ing of any kind. His fath­er desired to raise his son in sur­round­ings that would shel­ter him from every pos­sible suf­fer­ing, and even from the nat­ur­al real­it­ies of life. Accord­ing to the poem Buddhachar­ita, which comes to us from Dhar­marak­sha, this is why it so deeply shocked Buddha when he first ven­tured out of the palace with its para­dis­al com­forts and caught sight of an old man. His chari­oteer told him that the bent pos­ture, the fal­ter­ing gait, the grey­ing hair and the wrinkles were the symp­toms of old age, and that grow­ing old over­takes every­one one day. The sight of a sick man, and then of a funer­al pro­ces­sion, stirred a like aston­ish­ment in the young prince, and he spoke thus:

How shat­ter­ing the shape of man's fate.

How can one live here free of care,

when in the end our body turns to dust?

And yet, as if a stone lay where our heart should be,

we do not per­ceive how fleet­ing is this life.

This beau­ti­ful par­able lists the three fun­da­ment­al suf­fer­ings of life: sick­ness, old age and death, to which the East­ern out­look, tak­ing for gran­ted the etern­al life of the soul and there­fore rein­carn­a­tion, adds birth as a fourth. Although our West­ern cul­ture holds birth to be a joy­ful event, in the East it is seen as one link of the karma-chain, which neces­sar­ily takes its place in the train of inev­it­able con­sequences. And the cause of birth is the desire for com­ing into being, trishna, or the thirst for exist­ence. Buddha foun­ded his teach­ings on four noble truths, accord­ing to which: 1) the world is full of suf­fer­ing; 2) the thirst for exist­ence, desire, is the cause of worldly exist­ence; 3) worldly exist­ence can be brought to an end if desire ceases; 4) to that end one must know the right path.

In the East they know that life is suf­fer­ing, and yet people are serene. In the West we hope that life is joy – and yet we are not happy. Some­thing is not right here…