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Is life suffering?
- Thread starter agorman
- Start date
Unveiled Artist
Veteran Member
Unless we live forever as a result, life will always go in a cycle between life and death. To beat it is to accept life on life's terms and not try to "play God" by developing ways to cheat death by living forever. Causes imbalance.
Banjankri
Active Member
First, people will get scared that something bad may happen to them, they will pray for it later.
Life is suffering.
YmirGF
Bodhisattva in Recovery
Suffering is so incredibly over-rated, though it can be a good teacher, then again, if you were paying attention to begin with you wouldn't be suffering, so.... oh, never mind... 
(C'mon, what do you expect a bliss-monkey to say?)
For the record, "I" will never die, though I will toss this body aside, like a cherished old sweater, in about 60 years. I have no interest in trotting about with this body much longer than 120.
(C'mon, what do you expect a bliss-monkey to say?)
For the record, "I" will never die, though I will toss this body aside, like a cherished old sweater, in about 60 years. I have no interest in trotting about with this body much longer than 120.
wintersolstice
Member
There will still be plenty of other human problems to address.
Don't forget birth. If you're not born, you don't suffer. Birth is prerequesit for suffering.
I wish this were a more open question instead of a question in the Buddhism dir. Is there a general Buddhist teaching about this or is this something that is just a question being bandied about?
NathanShepard8888
Member
You should watch the movie named The Fountain.
metis
aged ecumenical anthropologist
This is from Buddhanet.net:
The Four Noble Truths
The first sermon that the Buddha preached after his enlightenment was about the four noble truths. The first noble truth is that life is frustrating and painful. In fact, if we are honest with ourselves, there are times when it is downright miserable. Things may be fine with us, at the moment, but, if we look around, we see other people in the most appalling condition, children starving, terrorism, hatred, wars, intolerance, people being tortured and we get a sort of queasy feeling whenever we think about the world situation in even the most casual way. We, ourselves, will some day grow old, get sick and eventually die. No matter how we try to avoid it, some day we are going to die. Even though we try to avoid thinking about it, there are constant reminders that it is true.
The second noble truth is that suffering has a cause. We suffer because we are constantly struggling to survive. We are constantly trying to prove our existence. We may be extremely humble and self-deprecating, but even that is an attempt to define ourselves. We are defined by our humility. The harder we struggle to establish ourselves and our relationships, the more painful our experience becomes.
The third noble truth is that the cause of suffering can be ended. Our struggle to survive, our effort to prove ourselves and solidify our relationships is unnecessary. We, and the world, can get along quite comfortably without all our unnecessary posturing. We could just be a simple, direct and straight-forward person. We could form a simple relationship with our world, our coffee, spouse and friend. We do this by abandoning our expectations about how we think things should be.
This is the fourth noble truth: the way, or path to end the cause of suffering. The central theme of this way is meditation. Meditation, here, means the practice of mindfulness/awareness, shamata/vipashyana in Sanskrit. We practice being mindful of all the things that we use to torture ourselves with. We become mindful by abandoning our expectations about the way we think things should be and, out of our mindfulness, we begin to develop awareness about the way things really are. We begin to develop the insight that things are really quite simple, that we can handle ourselves, and our relationships, very well as soon as we stop being so manipulative and complex. -- http://www.buddhanet.net/e-learning/intro_bud.htm
Banjankri
Active Member
I think that everyone should, but there is no real solution presented in that movie. Materialistic reincarnation is hardly satisfying.
I saw that, too. I think there was meaning in the end that was not materialist. He spent his 'Lives' searching for immortality as a materialist, but end the end he had to give life to himself and others by accepting his death or his cycle of suffering etc. He became the tree at the beginning of time, so while logically it didn't compute for him to go back in time, he was accepting his situation by doing so, thus making life possible in the first place. It was about acceptance and also very weird. I'd give it a 7 out of 10 on the weirdness scale.
You could always intrduce the subject elsewhere, I suppose.
There is specific Buddhist teaching on Suffering, it's cause, it's cessation and the path to cessation, as you've seen.
The OP asks what does this mean if science manages to find it's own solutions, such as ending old age sickness and death. That's different, but Buddhism doesn't offer any specific teaching on that. The Dalai Lama has said that should science find something contracticory to howw he dharma is taught, the science should get the nod, but His Holiness is one man and does not speak for all of Buddhism.
In a forum such as this, finding consensus is pretty much impossible for a topic like this, even though the anwer to the question is pretty simple.
My conclusion is, if Science would solve those 3 problems (and "birth", with contraception, although a World without kids would probably be too sad), life would be "less suffering" and we'd only have the disadvantages of living in the physical plane, which is of limited possibilities of enjoyment compared to higher planes.
But I wondered what a Buddhist would answer, since the main problems of life; birth, old-age, sickness and death, were seen as unsolvable in the days of Siddharta, 2500 years ago, but not now. I even dare to say that neither are unsolvable in other planets with more technologically advanced people.
But the little detail is: Is the mind of most humans today prepared for such blessings as immortality, lack of old age and disease? There's even people that gets sick on purpose, just to be taken care of!
So maybe the problem is not lack of technological advancements, but lack of illumination. So I think that "life is suffering" maxim only applies to people who don't do their spiritual homework.
But I wondered what a Buddhist would answer, since the main problems of life; birth, old-age, sickness and death, were seen as unsolvable in the days of Siddharta, 2500 years ago, but not now. I even dare to say that neither are unsolvable in other planets with more technologically advanced people.
But the little detail is: Is the mind of most humans today prepared for such blessings as immortality, lack of old age and disease? There's even people that gets sick on purpose, just to be taken care of!
So maybe the problem is not lack of technological advancements, but lack of illumination. So I think that "life is suffering" maxim only applies to people who don't do their spiritual homework.
Twilight Hue
Twilight, not bright nor dark, good nor bad.
Maybe. Maybe not.
Well said!
I'm not so sure that suffering is a question of available technology. People are living longer, but suffering continues. It continues because people continue clinging to impermanent phenomena. I don't know that there's a tech solution to that.
Oh and there's also the detail that without solving poverty, tech is not available to all!
Medicine and technology have already resulted in a population exceeding the planet's carrying capacity. The biological systems sustaining life on Earth are crashing. The sixth extinction is already underway.
Without instituting some way to curb population growth, wouldn't any medical advancement merely exacerbate this catastrophe?
Without instituting some way to curb population growth, wouldn't any medical advancement merely exacerbate this catastrophe?
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Well I talked about contraceptives already... and seems next year a new male contraceptive will be released. Which will mean the end of Mankind (because us men don't usually like to have kids, LOL!).
dyanaprajna2011
Dharmapala
There would still be suffering, but there would be more time in this life to attain enlightenment.