Eastern thought about suffering.

According to Hinduism, physical, mental and emotional suffering arises from the duality and modifications of the mind and body. These modifications manifest in human life as pain and suffering, attraction and aversion, union and separation, desire, passion, emotion, aging, sickness, death and rebirth etc.

Accordingly, suffering is an inescapable and integral part of life. The purpose of religious practice is to resolve human suffering that arises from samsara, which means the cycle of birth and death. As long as man is caught up in the phenomenal world of transient objects and appearances and becomes attached to them, he has no escape from suffering.

The history of spiritual Hinduism is the history of man’s yearning for a lasting solution to the problem of human suffering.

The Upanishadic seers approached the problem by focusing on the hidden causes of suffering and tried to resolve it internally by cultivating purity, fortitude, sameness, equanimity, stability, balance, detachment and indifference through austerity, restraint and renunciation.

Aging, sickness and death are reminders of the nature of Samsara and our existence in it. Liberation then means freedom from suffering.

According to the Upanishads, when organs are put to selfish use, a person becomes impure. For this desires are the root cause. When engaged in selfish actions, they become vulnerable to suffering. Pleasure is not a solution to avoid pain. Pleasure and pain are caused by the same duality or pairs of opposites. Our objective should be to rise above both.

Desire comes from our attachment to sense objects. Liberation means freedom from all kinds of desires and attachment so that one is not motivated by self-interests in performing necessary actions, but rather by the pure intention to serve God and His creation. This transformation is accomplished through various spiritual practices and the path of yoga.

The battle has to be fought in the mind and body. The mind is the seat of desires and intentions and hence for a human being it is the battlefield, the Kurukshetra.

The Bhagavad Gita identifies the instability of the mind as the main cause of suffering. The root of the mental instability is desire, which arises out of the repeated contact of the senses with their sense objects. It is because of our outward going nature and our dependence upon things and objects that we suffer in this plane of duality.

Our experience suggests that enjoyment comes from having things. The scripture suggest that true enjoyment comes from not having the desire to own things and enjoy them, or at least not being attached to things and circumstances. The ideal goal should be Self realization.

The causes of suffering

Impermanence which makes life insecure,

Desires and attachment which leads to karma and bondage,

Delusion and ignorance caused by Maya,

Repeated birth and death,

Attraction and aversion to pairs of opposites,

Contact and separation from the objects of desires,

Attachment to sense objects,

The triple qualities of sattva, rajas and tamas,

The evil characteristics of lust, anger, greed and envy,

Lack of discrimination between of what is real and unreal

Hinduism acknowledges that while we may know the causes of suffering, suffering cannot be fully resolved as long as we are subject to the modification of nature (gunas). No matter what one may do, some suffering is inevitable in life. The purpose of spiritual practice is not to end suffering, which is humanly impossible, but to learn to deal with it by re-conditioning the mind and body. This is the purpose of yoga.

While working for liberation we must learn to endure suffering with detachment and acceptance, keeping faith in God and performing our actions as an offering to God.

Belief in karma is not to make us despondent, but it should make us more responsible toward self and our spiritual welfare. We need to accept suffering with a sense of detachment and the awareness that our suffering is of our own creation for which we have to take responsibility.

Suffering can be seen as the teacher as well as the solution in which our liberation is hidden.