Buddhism does a good analysis of Pain as experienced by humans. It is so very interesting to discover that this in accordance to what the science of psychology has also investigated –
Going deep into the nature of Pain – Buddha found following are 4 dimensions of it has. I name these dimensions as -
1. The Reference Frame –
Whatever humans experience is out of this world – this life – Our Reference frame. By design life entails a great deal of sufferings. This ranges from commonplace feelings (grouchiness, fear, anger, boredom, depression, heartaches and pains, loneliness, etc) to acute forms (produced by wars, famines, disease, natural calamities, etc).
Buddha characterizes a world in which there is a great deal of unhappiness, ranging from abject pain, loneliness, anxiety, hunger, being with hateful people, lots of those we love, to unpleasant states of feelings as described above.
Having said this I am not propagating the idea that world is a hopeless land of limitless suffering. On contrary, I am by temperament immensely optimist. The idea is just to bring to ones attention that pain is inevitable in this world – by design.
2. Transitoriness of pain –
Pain includes an idea of change, perpetual flux, what Buddha refers to as “transitoriness”. It implies that misery is always potential – in coming. For example if a person says, “All these suffering does not apply to me. I have a well paying, interesting job, a happy marriage, and good health.” The Buddhist thesis would be : All good the person sited is subject to change. For example, the man’s wife may one day stop loving him. Or he may wake up one morning realizing that he no longer loves her. And the loss of job, health, or stability is notoriously common. The conditions of our happiness are all subject to change. The idea is that there is nothing like – “live happily ever after”.
If one is happy – she is fortunate indeed. She should obviously savor and relish it. But she should have the awareness that pain in some form is always potentiona – either in the form of commonplace feelings or acute forms as described in the point 1 above.
Again the idea is play life fully. Cherish happiness as if this is the last day of one’s life. But when pain comes, accept it as natural and normal – by design.
3. The Causal Matrix –
This idea being adopted as-is from Hinduism, Buddha establishes another dimension of pain. The idea is that we live in a world which is highly interdependent. The events in life are related to a matrix of numerous other factors and coincidences. This has been explained in the Karma Theory of the ancient Vedantic philosophy.
This dimension has been poetically articulated by the famous Buddhist monk – Thich Nhat Hanh. He describes one of Siddhartha’s insights as he was coming to enlightenment -
“He looked up at a pippala leaf imprinted against the blue sky, its tail blowing back and forth as if calling him. Looking deeply at the leaf, he saw clearly the presence of the sun and the stars – without the sun, without light and warmth, the leaf could not exist. He also saw in the leaf the presence of clouds – without clouds, there could be no rain, and without rain, the leaf could not be. He saw the earth, time, space and mind – all were present in the leaf. In fact, at that very moment the entire universe existed in that leaf.”
This interdependence applies, of course, to all life, including each human life.
This causal nature of suffering brings the Buddhist conception closer to the western scientific world outlook. All of science has its foundation “this is like this because that was like that”. For example, the cause of the annoying behavior of a tyrannical and abusive boss might be the ill grooming of his during his childhood by an alcoholic father. The idea is that all forms of pain might have its seed in a remote an seemingly un-related event. Life is thus a mosaic of such varied interdependences.
4. The last link within –
The Buddha places the ultimate cause of suffering squarely within the individual. This can be explained with the following example –
We may think that a person who cheats us is the cause of our suffering. In the Buddhist view, it is our anger at being cheated, our craving to retrieve our money, our brooding over the event that is immediate cause of our suffering. The fact of being cheated is an important event in the causal sequence, but is one step removed from the final cause of suffering. This view, then, focuses not on the external, more instant causes of our suffering, but on the immediate inner link of the causal chain, on our motivational and emotional makeup.
This emotional makeup – the final link to push us into distress – is dependent solely on the human being’s inner state of heart and mind. This is ofcourse an outcome of the social conditioning of the individual.
For example the 1930s middle class American culture, in which it was made to believe that promiscuous girls were bad, homosexuals were bad, and it was important that a girl should marry being virgin – were social conditionings – which cause vulnerabilities in a lady, causing not only pain in her internal psyche but also pain in others.
So, life can offer us as many touch situations as possible – as a result of many other interdependent happenings, on which we might not have least of control. But the best part of life is that the quality of our life – our inner state of bliss or un-rest is solely dependent on that critical and last link in the causal chain – how we take it. If we re-design our inner self such that it is not affected by these un-controllable outer causal happenings, we might have a way out of the suffering.
[This article is my synthesis of the initial chapters of the book - The Positive Psychology of Buddhism and Yoga by Dr. Marvin Levine]
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Copy Right © All rights reserved - Samrat Kar
Going deep into the nature of Pain – Buddha found following are 4 dimensions of it has. I name these dimensions as -
1. The Reference Frame –
Whatever humans experience is out of this world – this life – Our Reference frame. By design life entails a great deal of sufferings. This ranges from commonplace feelings (grouchiness, fear, anger, boredom, depression, heartaches and pains, loneliness, etc) to acute forms (produced by wars, famines, disease, natural calamities, etc).
Buddha characterizes a world in which there is a great deal of unhappiness, ranging from abject pain, loneliness, anxiety, hunger, being with hateful people, lots of those we love, to unpleasant states of feelings as described above.
Having said this I am not propagating the idea that world is a hopeless land of limitless suffering. On contrary, I am by temperament immensely optimist. The idea is just to bring to ones attention that pain is inevitable in this world – by design.
2. Transitoriness of pain –
Pain includes an idea of change, perpetual flux, what Buddha refers to as “transitoriness”. It implies that misery is always potential – in coming. For example if a person says, “All these suffering does not apply to me. I have a well paying, interesting job, a happy marriage, and good health.” The Buddhist thesis would be : All good the person sited is subject to change. For example, the man’s wife may one day stop loving him. Or he may wake up one morning realizing that he no longer loves her. And the loss of job, health, or stability is notoriously common. The conditions of our happiness are all subject to change. The idea is that there is nothing like – “live happily ever after”.
If one is happy – she is fortunate indeed. She should obviously savor and relish it. But she should have the awareness that pain in some form is always potentiona – either in the form of commonplace feelings or acute forms as described in the point 1 above.
Again the idea is play life fully. Cherish happiness as if this is the last day of one’s life. But when pain comes, accept it as natural and normal – by design.
3. The Causal Matrix –
This idea being adopted as-is from Hinduism, Buddha establishes another dimension of pain. The idea is that we live in a world which is highly interdependent. The events in life are related to a matrix of numerous other factors and coincidences. This has been explained in the Karma Theory of the ancient Vedantic philosophy.
This dimension has been poetically articulated by the famous Buddhist monk – Thich Nhat Hanh. He describes one of Siddhartha’s insights as he was coming to enlightenment -
“He looked up at a pippala leaf imprinted against the blue sky, its tail blowing back and forth as if calling him. Looking deeply at the leaf, he saw clearly the presence of the sun and the stars – without the sun, without light and warmth, the leaf could not exist. He also saw in the leaf the presence of clouds – without clouds, there could be no rain, and without rain, the leaf could not be. He saw the earth, time, space and mind – all were present in the leaf. In fact, at that very moment the entire universe existed in that leaf.”
This interdependence applies, of course, to all life, including each human life.
This causal nature of suffering brings the Buddhist conception closer to the western scientific world outlook. All of science has its foundation “this is like this because that was like that”. For example, the cause of the annoying behavior of a tyrannical and abusive boss might be the ill grooming of his during his childhood by an alcoholic father. The idea is that all forms of pain might have its seed in a remote an seemingly un-related event. Life is thus a mosaic of such varied interdependences.
4. The last link within –
The Buddha places the ultimate cause of suffering squarely within the individual. This can be explained with the following example –
We may think that a person who cheats us is the cause of our suffering. In the Buddhist view, it is our anger at being cheated, our craving to retrieve our money, our brooding over the event that is immediate cause of our suffering. The fact of being cheated is an important event in the causal sequence, but is one step removed from the final cause of suffering. This view, then, focuses not on the external, more instant causes of our suffering, but on the immediate inner link of the causal chain, on our motivational and emotional makeup.
This emotional makeup – the final link to push us into distress – is dependent solely on the human being’s inner state of heart and mind. This is ofcourse an outcome of the social conditioning of the individual.
For example the 1930s middle class American culture, in which it was made to believe that promiscuous girls were bad, homosexuals were bad, and it was important that a girl should marry being virgin – were social conditionings – which cause vulnerabilities in a lady, causing not only pain in her internal psyche but also pain in others.
So, life can offer us as many touch situations as possible – as a result of many other interdependent happenings, on which we might not have least of control. But the best part of life is that the quality of our life – our inner state of bliss or un-rest is solely dependent on that critical and last link in the causal chain – how we take it. If we re-design our inner self such that it is not affected by these un-controllable outer causal happenings, we might have a way out of the suffering.
[This article is my synthesis of the initial chapters of the book - The Positive Psychology of Buddhism and Yoga by Dr. Marvin Levine]
______________________________________________
Copy Right © All rights reserved - Samrat Kar
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