Buddhism 101: Pain is Our Birthright…

Pain is our connection to the realm of sentient being. We are all equal in this regard. But we have a path, thankfully. This refers to the First Noble Truth, of course, something like ‘There is suffering.’ Period. Full stop. That’s the foundational thesis of Buddhism, which all further dissertations struggle to assimilate, what with its apparent pessimism, which only gets worse (before it gets better). ‘Birth is suffering, aging is suffering, sickness is suffering, dissociation from the loved is suffering, not to get what one wants is suffering.’ Yeow. Yes, life’s a real sh*t-show at times. What to do?

Oh, sure, the PhD’s try to explain it all away by saying that ‘suffering’ can mean ‘dissatisfaction’, ‘stress’, or maybe even ‘bummer’, but the result is the same: it’s not a good look, not when everybody else is bragging about their seven flavors of bliss and their multiple stairways to heaven. But that’s what the Buddha said, and that’s what he meant. But I think that he also meant that’s our connection to the world and each other. Otherwise, how would we even really know that we’re really alive? Pleasure is fleeting.

But pain is real. And a large part of it is caused by the simple fact of our oh-so-human cravings. Bingo. There’s a path for that, and it will keep us humble in its universality. Because isn’t the underlying cause of all craving, desire, lust, and greed, our selfish assertion that we are something special and deserving of whatever we can get? Haha. Gotcha. Because we are but a bundle of causes and conditions that predictably lead to the defilements which define us: hatred, greed, anger, and those oh-so-pesky cravings. The path outta there is as simple as the decade-old Franz Ferdinand song which seconded that emotion: “Right Thoughts, Right Words, Right Action.” Simple, no? It works. Try it.