(Authorized by Thich Chan Quang)
Suffering – Dukkham (2)
Buddhism never makes use of God to get out of suffering in the world. That means there is no goal for being born in heaven, even though Dharma often mentions a lot of heavens. The Buddha used to talk about noble people being born in heaven when they died, thanks to their diligent practice and coming deep into meditation. However, He never considered being born in heaven as the supreme aim. For Him, it is only a temporary blessing in the Law of Cause and Effect (Causality). The Buddha’s supreme aim to solve human beings’ suffering and happiness is to get free from the Circle of Rebirth (Samsara), and attain Enlightenment.
If we can come into Nirvana like our Buddha did, then we are to completely get free from the suffering of circle of rebirth.
Thus, what is Nirvana? Is our aim to get free from the Circle of Rebirth? Freedom and Nirvana are the terms that can be hardly understood. That is why Buddhism is not as attractive to people as other religions are. Buddhism is only attractive to high-minded people who can understand abstract theories. When Einstein’s theory of relativity was shown in the conference packed with many of the most intelligent scientists in the world, yet only thirteen scientists could understand. However, now, his theory is admitted, and he is supposed to be the one of the greatest scientists in the world. Why he is the greatest? Because his theory of relativity is too abstract to be understood. But it is the Truth. Today, everything related to space is depended on the Theory of Relativity.
Like that, Nirvana is the Truth that is really too difficult to be understood. That is why Nirvana is not attractive to people, but Nirvana is especially attractive to wise people who want to practice this to release from the Circle of Rebirth, and they choose this because this abstract concept is the Supreme Truth.
We are going to analyze more in detail how Nirvana is in the Extinction of Suffering.
The Buddha brought up the Supreme Goal, and Nirvana to solve the matter of Suffering. In addition, He also showed us the understandable basic level that is the Law of Cause and Effect.
There are many ways for people to get suffered. Suffering comes from situation. Suffering comes from feeling. These two ways of suffering are different from each other. People suffer from their poor situation. Others suffer from being scolded. Some people don’t feel suffered when they are scolded, or they don’t feel suffered though they are poor. Perhaps, those people’s minds are completely peaceful, thanks to their best practice.
When solving suffering of human beings, the Buddha did solve two sources of suffering: situation and feeling.
For the suffering caused by feeling, He taught us how to command our minds, how to purify our minds so that we can get completely peaceful. Then step by step we are going ito Nirvana. He also showed us the Law of Cause and Effect to solve the suffering caused by situation. He asked us to do good deeds more and more, in order that we would never be in poor condition or in misery.
Doing good deeds is very important. If believers are only to deal with feeling of suffering without recognizing situation of suffering, then they have only partially understood Buddhism.
If we don’t have blessing from doing good deeds, we can hardly get out of the situation of suffering. One more important factor we need to know: because we don’t accumulate merit of doing good deeds, we have lack of blessing, then we would be easy to lose our purified minds, due to being arisen from immoral thoughts. That is a reason why doing good deeds is the most important thing in our Buddhists’ practice.
In the Liberation from Suffering, we will see more detail of how important doing good deeds is, through our Buddha’s saying.
Now, we start to analyze the eight kinds of suffering according to the Buddha’s teachings: Being born, old age, illness, death, love but separated, hatred but having to meet, not getting what to desire, full-orbed activities of five cumulations.