Understanding the nature of suffering in the world

Humans suffer, at every moment and throughout the world. Some die when they’ve just been born; some when they’ve just given birth. Every second, people are murdered, tortured, beaten, maimed, separated from their loved ones. Others are abandoned, betrayed, expelled, rejected. Some are killed out of hatred, greed, ignorance, ambition, pride, or envy. Mothers lose their children, children lose their parents. The ill pass in never-ending procession through the hospitals. Some suffer with no hope of being treated, others are treated with no hope of being cured. The dying endure their pain, and the survivors their mourning. Some die of hunger, cold, exhaustion; others are charred by fire, crushed by rocks, or swept away by the waters.

This is true not only for human beings. Animals devour each other in the forests, the savannahs, the oceans, and the skies. At any given moment tens of thousands of them are being killed by humans, torn to pieces, and canned. Others suffer endless torments at the hands of their owners, bearing heavy burdens, in chains their entire lives; still others are hunted, fished, trapped between teeth of steel, strangled in snares, smothered under nets, tortured for their flesh, their musk, their ivory, their bones, their fur, their skin, thrown into boiling water or flayed alive.

These are not mere words but a reality that is an intrinsic part of our daily lives: death, the transitory nature of all things, and suffering. Though we may feel overwhelmed by it all, powerless before so much pain, turning away from it is only indifference or cowardice. We must be intimately concerned with it, and do everything we possibly can to relieve the suffering.

These correspond to three modes of suffering: visible suffering, hidden suffering, and invisible suffering. Visible suffering is evident everywhere. Hidden suffering is concealed beneath the appearance of pleasure, freedom from care, fun. A gourmet eats a fine dish and moments later is gripped by the spasms of food poisoning. A family is happily gathered for a picnic in the country when a child is suddenly bitten by a snake. Partygoers are merrily dancing at the county fair when the tent abruptly catches fire. This type of suffering may potentially arise at any moment in life, but it remains hidden to those who are taken in by the illusion of appearances and cling to the belief that people and things last, untouched by the change that affects everything.

There is also the suffering that underlies the most ordinary activities. It is not easy to identify or so readily localized as a toothache. It sends out no signal and does not prevent us from functioning in the world, since, on the contrary, it is an integral part of the daily routine. What could be more innocuous than a boiled egg? Farm-raised hens may not have it so bad, but let’s take a brief look into the world of battery farming. Male chicks are separated at birth from the females and sent straight to the grinder. The hens are fed day and night under artificial lighting to make them grow faster and lay more eggs. Overcrowding makes them aggressive, and they continually tear at each other’s feathers. None of this history is apparent in your breakfast egg.

Invisible suffering is the hardest to distinguish because it stems from the blindness of our own minds, where it remains so long as we are in the grip of ignorance and selfishness. Our confusion, born of a lack of judgment and wisdom, blinds us to what we must do and avoid doing to ensure that our thoughts, our words, and our actions engender happiness and not suffering. This confusion and the tendencies associated with it drive us to reenact again and again the behavior that lies at the source of our pain. If we want to counteract this harmful misjudgment, we have to awaken from the dream of ignorance and learn to identify the very subtle ways in which happiness and suffering are generated.

Are we capable of identifying ego-clinging as the cause of that suffering? Generally speaking, no. That is why we call this third type of suffering invisible. Selfishness, or rather the feeling that one is the center of the world — hence “self-centeredness” — is the source of most of our disruptive thoughts. From obsessive desire to hatred, not to mention jealousy, it attracts pain the way a magnet attracts iron filings.

So it would seem that there is no way to escape the suffering that prevails everywhere. Prophets have followed upon wise men and saints upon potentates, and still the rivers of suffering flow. Mother Teresa toiled for fifty years on behalf of the dying of Calcutta, but if the hospices she founded were to disappear, those patients would be back on the streets as if they’d never existed. In adjacent neighborhoods, they’re still dying on the sidewalks. We gauge our impotence by the omnipresence, magnitude, and perpetuity of suffering. Buddhist texts say that in the cycle of death and rebirth, no place, not even one the size of a needle’s point, is exempt from suffering.

Can we allow such a view to drive us to despair, discouragement, or worse yet, indifference? Unable to bear its intensity, must we be destroyed by it?

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