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Why Is There Suffering?
The first noble truth realised by the Buddha was that life is a suffering.
One may view this truth with incomplete knowledge and agree to it from the point of view of the general sufferings of body pain and emotional pain that one has to go through during the ups and downs of life.
One may even comprehend this from a psychological perspective that the instances of pain overpower our minds as compared to pleasure, and therefore, Buddha has given more weightage to suffering.
But with this statement, he is trying to make us aware of a far deeper truth about life, which our minds can’t grasp fully unless the conditioning is cleared.
He says that our life itself is suffering. There are no distinct accounts of pain and pleasure; rather, every experience of the world is suffering. In other words, suffering is the very nature of life.
This seems counterintuitive, as we can experience the pleasure of eating a delicious ice cream, attending a beautiful concert and so on.
Yes, these are the experiences of momentary pleasure. But ultimately, everything leads to suffering. The taste of delicious ice cream and the symphony of the concert get registered in our memory and cause us to crave them. Missing them from time to time, not being able to enjoy anything else to that same extent in…
