– Hap­pi­ness passes, and suf­fer­ing fol­lows. Suf­fer­ing passes too, and hap­pi­ness fol­lows. Well, which will you choose, hap­pi­ness or suf­fer­ing? – the mas­ter posed the enig­mat­ic ques­tion. His listen­ers laughed at first, then fell silent. Whatever you choose, you lose… in the cycle of life everything changes, trades places, and in the end moves towards decay.

Accord­ing to the philo­sophy of yoga, suf­fer­ing is the inev­it­able com­pan­ion of mater­i­al exist­ence, and by its source it is of three kinds.

Fated suf­fer­ing is a cos­mo­lo­gic­al factor, arising from a dis­rup­tion of the order of nature, such as a nat­ur­al dis­aster, or the usual hard­ships of the weath­er.

The second cat­egory of suf­fer­ing is the tor­ment caused by liv­ing beings. And this applies not only to the attack of a tiger or a mos­quito, but also to the web of human rela­tions, for it is through our fel­low humans that we come to exper­i­ence the greatest joys, and the greatest pains as well.

Finally, the third source of suf­fer­ing is ourselves, for our somat­ic and psy­cho­lo­gic­al ills spring from the body and the mind.

Although the East­ern world-view holds life to be, onto­lo­gic­ally, full of suf­fer­ing, the people there love to live all the same, and they even meet the hard­ships and ills of life hap­pily, or at least with equan­im­ity. The tsunami in Sri Lanka was an example of this too, when, in a true tragedy, the tidal wave swept away the live­li­hoods of whole fam­il­ies, and even their kin, and yet it was the psy­cho­lo­gists of the European med­ic­al team who were most at a loss – for the people needed no trauma treat­ment, no psy­cho­lo­gic­al care. Their faith and cul­ture, thou­sands of years old, car­ried them through those shat­ter­ing events. It is as if this, too, hin­ted that, unlike the West­ern out­look, ever more thor­ough in its details, the East still pos­sessed a view of the whole pic­ture, a con­scious­ness of the uni­verse, in which joy­ful and pain­ful turns alike have their neces­sary place.

The West­ern world, by con­trast, has com­fort as one of its chief main­springs, and we try in all man­ner of crafty ways to make our lives more com­fort­able. A civil­isa­tion of com­fort has aris­en, which, how­ever, often brings with it a ‘cul­ture’ of dis­con­tent.

Out­look, faith and wis­dom surely play their part in help­ing people in other regions of the world bear even wretched cir­cum­stances wisely, with dig­nity, and even hap­pily. And every human being stands in need of this wise out­look. Of course, it mat­ters wheth­er it is fool­ish resig­na­tion that guides us, or the recog­ni­tion of what fate has neces­sar­ily ordained. It is said that who­ever res­ists his fate is swept away by his des­tiny, while who­ever obeys is car­ried to his goal.

Just as we can­not see a pic­ture hanging on the wall clearly if we go too close to it, nor if we stand too far from it, so we must view the things of our life, suf­fer­ing among them, from the right dis­tance. A great deal depends on the view­point we choose. Accord­ing to the Tibetan teach­ings, one way to treat our pain, our suf­fer­ing, is to turn to med­it­a­tion. As we pic­ture the suf­fer­ings of our fel­low humans, or all the tor­ment there is in the uni­verse, we are not only struck by the relativ­ity of our feel­ings, of our exper­i­en­cing, but our stim­u­lus threshold rises too, and so we grow less sens­it­ive to our own pain. And this psy­cho­lo­gic­al medi­cine has no side effects, unless it be that we shall be bet­ter able to handle the things of our life.