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The Conquest Of Suffering Life Is For Peace And Not Pain: By: R.S. Mooshahary

Life is full of care and suffering with but fleeting interludes of peace and happiness. The anxieties and worries constantly buffet sentient beings to no end giving them no respite from sorrow and pain. Saints and savants, kings and commoners alike live life of suffering for which there is no set remedy. True, medical science has produced analgesics for the physical state of man but there is no anodyne for the pain of life.

Of “the weariness, the fever and the fret” in this world, John Keats bemoans to the Nightingale:
“Here, where men sit and hear each other groan;
Where palsy shakes a few, sad, last grey hairs,
Where youth grows pale, spectre-thin and dies;
Where but to think is to be full of sorrow
And leaden-eyed despairs;
Where beauty cannot keep her lustrous eyes,
Or new love pine at them beyond tomorrow.”

All religions preach peace and aim to enrich life by sublimating the human emotions. The sages and yogis seek to control temporal turbulence and relieve suffering through rigid self-discipline and practice of yoga. In one of his Yoga Sutras Patanjali says, “Heyam dukham anagatam”- that pains that are yet to come can be avoided. The yogic discipline set forth by him aim to bury the past pain, reduce the present suffering and prevent the future misery. It teaches the disciple to “endure what cannot be cured and cure what need not be endured.” Nevertheless, there is no escape from suffering; people continue to ‘fall upon the thorns of life’ and bleed.

Suffering visits us on regularity as determined by karma; past and present. Karma in turn is the result body’s endless desire – the memory of past pleasure we want to repeat and past pain we want to forget. It is the delusion of ego and the storm of fear and anger, which entangle us in the webs of illusion, torment us with the conflict between the lived reality and the construct held in our minds and lead us to a confused view of life. We need to shift our consciousness to clear the addled air; actualize freedom to transcend the karmic impurities, and in so doing be able to cease the cycle of birth and death.

Once a wailing distraught woman went to Buddha with her child clutched to her bosom and told him that her only child was dead and she wanted him to bring it back to life. She was inconsolable in her grief and the Compassionate One asked her to bring a handful of grains from a house in the village where no death had taken place and with that, he would revive the dead child. The woman went from house to house in search of the fistful of grains but failed to find any house where no death had taken place. Ultimately, she came back to Buddha with a lighter heart realizing the inevitability of death.

Buddhism has redefined the human predicament with one key issue: suffering. If suffering is a constant in life, then until there is an end to it, it is pointless to talk of gods, heaven and hell, sin, pleasure, redemption, the soul, and all the rest. Siddhartha the handsome prince became Gautama the wandering monk in quest of peace and transformed himself to Buddha. He encouraged each individual to look inside, find liberation through a personal journey through physical world, and experience Nirvana - a state of pure, eternal consciousness, peace and happiness.

Buddha persistently denied any form of personal divinity. He never spoke on the subject whether gods even existed. He refused to abide by rituals and ceremonies and taught every one to find Nirvana through righteousness. The Sakyamuni preached The Middle Way, which derived its name because it was neither too harsh nor too easy and being free from turgid anthropomorphism, it proved popular with the people. It avoids the extremes of permanence of self or phenomena; neither attaches itself to this world or other world but lives fully and consciously in the world as it is. It accepts suffering, decay and death as experiential condition of being born but rejects the concept of hell or heaven.

Buddhism believes that every sentient being possesses the potential to enjoy peace by adhering to the noble ways over a series of lifetimes and learning to comprehend the causes and circumstances of the afflictive emotions and thoughts, which are the roots of suffering. However, this journey can be solitary, austere and harsh with but little in the way of entertaining scenery. The entire teaching of Buddha grows logically from the First Noble Truth: Life contains suffering. The next three teachings are more in the nature of modern psychotherapy than conventional religious precepts.

Second Noble Truth: Suffering has a cause, and the cause can be traced and known
Third Noble Truth: Suffering can be removed; it can be brought to an end
Fourth Noble Truth: The path to end suffering has eight parts; the eight-fold practice of righteousness.

These eight parts are refreshingly free from religious dogma, prayers, rites and rituals and they will open the path to peace instead of pain. They ask each person to change how the mind works eschewing what is wrong, putrid and superstitious, then exchanging those outworn habits for enhancing clarity and purity. In other words they are the waking-up process, which Buddha experienced overnight under the bodhi tree. They are laid out as a lifelong program of righteous practice:

* Right view or perspective, * Right intention, * Right speech, * Right action, * Right livelihood, *Right effort, * Right mindfulness and * Right concentration. Some of these steps are natural as we all tend to believe that our words and actions are virtuous. We also do not want to go wrong in our efforts and intentions. However, other parts require special guidance. What is Right mindfulness or Right concentration? These aspects have their roots in the meditation practice of yoga, which Buddha reformed to enable ordinary people to absorb them. In consonance with these eight-fold paths, Patanjali describes eight-fold path of yoga – the astanga yoga – that can lead to ultimate emancipation of the human being from affliction.

One need not become an ascetic to be free from agony nor is it important that one subscribe to any religious tenets, chant prayers and perform rituals to follow the eight parts path to peace. Buddha was a man of earth like we are and the cause of his death at the age of eighty was extraordinarily humble and mundane – eating a bad piece of pork. As in him, the Buddhahood is in all of us but we have to wake up to see things free from illusion and shift our consciousness to total clarity from mind’s confusion.

(The writer, a former Director General of Police in Kerala and Director General of the National Security Guard and the Border Security Force, is currently the State Chief Information Commissioner, Assam )