Can human suffering ever end?

Is there any way to put an end to suffering? According to Buddhism, suffering will always exist as a universal phenomenon, but every individual has the potential for liberation from it.

As it happens, wherever life exists in the universe, so does suffering: disease, old age, death, separation from loved ones, forced coexistence with our oppressors, denial of basic necessities, confrontations with what we fear, and so on.

Despite all that, this vision does not lead Buddhism to the view held by certain Western philosophers for whom suffering is inevitable and happiness out of reach. The reason for that is simple: unhappiness has causes that can be identified and acted upon. It is only when we misidentify the nature of those causes that we come to doubt the possibility of healing.

The first mistake is believing that unhappiness is inevitable because it is the result of divine will or some other immutable principle and that it will therefore be forever out of our control. The second is the gratuitous idea that unhappiness has no identifiable cause, that it descends upon us randomly and has no relation to us personally. The third mistake draws on a confused fatalism that boils down to the idea that whatever the cause, the effect will always be the same.

If unhappiness had immutable causes, we would never be able to escape it. The laws of causality would have no meaning — anything could come from anything else, flowers could grow in the sky and light create darkness and, as the Dalai Lama says, it would be easier “not to go to all the trouble of constantly ruminating over our suffering. It would be better just to think about something else, go to the beach, and have a nice cold beer!” Because if there were no cure for suffering, it would be pointless to make it worse by stressing over it. It would be better to accept it fully and to distract oneself so as to feel it less harshly.

But everything that occurs does have a cause. What inferno does not start with a spark, what war without thoughts of hatred, fear, or greed? What inner pain has not grown from the fertile soil of envy, animosity, vanity, or, even more basically, ignorance? Any active cause must itself be a changing one; nothing can exist autonomously and unchanging. Arising from impermanent causes, unhappiness is itself subject to change and can be transformed. There is neither primordial nor eternal suffering.

We all have the ability to study the causes of suffering and gradually to free ourselves from them. We all have the potential to sweep away the veils of ignorance, to free ourselves of the selfishness and misplaced desires that trigger unhappiness, to work for the good of others and extract the essence from our human condition. It’s not the magnitude of the task that matters, it’s the magnitude of our courage.

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