Ways
People can be, and with plenty of scriptural authority, wary of Buddhism on account of it’s apparently damning view of life and the world. First Noble Truth; life is suffering. No room there for manoeuvre. It starts with that. Life isn’t, and never will be painless. Ancient western religion and philosophy wasn’t and isn’t without this acknowledgement either - if properly looked at. Even universal optimist theologies such as Thomism, which is in effect a sort of Aristotelianism with Judeo-Christian characteristics (and, importantly though unfortunately seldom acknowledged, inspired by the great Islamic philosophical tradition) understand the human condition to be one of relative weakness, imperfection, and suffering. Without going into details, it’s pretty clear that no major world religion is built on the premise that human beings are perfect, life is a breeze, and everything is just rosy as is without some sort of effort at acknowledging and understanding suffering (in other words, the human condition).
No less than any other spiritual teaching and worldview, the historical Buddha’s was thoroughly permeated by the social conditions and the intellectual horizons of it’s circumstance. And no less than other teachings, religious, philosophical etc it flashes within that crucible of particularity a flame of universal wisdom. Whatever the causes – identifiable or ineffable – may be, I landed on Buddhism as the framework of my spiritual life. That’s just an empirical fact. And it certainly doesn’t mean I have, nor could I have, any special authority to ever presume to make judgements against the spiritual choices of others. There can be no insistence or imposition which allows for authentic spiritual life- other than the very basic, but unfortunately becoming rather untrendy, position that respect for religious beliefs or lack thereof must be mutual, and acceptance of difference on such a personal and conscience-based aspect of life must be universally acknowledged or not at all; basically the affirmation of the hard won emergence of religious pluralism.
When Buddhists claim that life is suffering and that the world is illusion, it should be understood within it’s wider conceptual framework. If someone is coming from a theistic viewpoint which states that God made the world and the world is good, then at first glance Buddhism would seem to be extremely unpalatable. However, as before mentioned, even theistic religions don’t say that the human condition is without suffering or without need of some sort of refinement. The religious tradition of my childhood background, Roman Catholicism, is replete with references to pain and suffering. By the time I was born, in the circumstance into which I was born, it had become a lot less narrowly focused on this aspect of suffering. Even then though, going into a Catholic church as a young kid and seeing statues and images of the wounded, tortured Christ, bleeding saints, and armed angels spearing demons was fairly shocking. Although I can now see the great power of it’s aesthetic and acknowledge the profundity of it’s teaching, it is still not so easy to reconcile at first glance (without proper understanding, or outside of a basic acceptance of the path it presents) with the idea that God is good and creation is good!
The root of suffering which Buddhism identifies is ignorance. Ignorance means that what appears to the senses and the mind is at best, partial and provisional. In other words, not the ultimate reality. In other words – illusion. This ignorance is not a moral defect, but simply the characteristic of being a particular form of being – ie, human. We have as conditioned beings with our particular needs our particular conditioned senses through which appears a particular aspect of reality. We have limits. That is what is meant by basic ignorance. It could just as well be stated as ‘conditioned knowledge’. That much is fairly uncontroversial, and it isn’t the main thrust of the Buddhist focus on ignorance. That focus is on an ignorance beyond that basic one. It is the ignorance that leads to the belief that reality- ultimately- can ever be other than it is. The misleading belief that things outside of human competence can be changed by human beings.
A similar paradox to that involved in the Buddhist teaching is something that Socrates acknowledged; the wisdom of knowing that we are ignorant. The focus of the Buddhist teaching after this realisation however is rather different. Whereas Socrates and Greek philosophy after him (and before of course) set off with huge effort and great skill to further intellectualise off basic experience in an effort to reach the ultimate through intellectual means, Buddhism takes that realised limitation as calling for a different sort of wisdom and effort. While the Greeks and later the medieval scholastic philosophers/theologians sought to either or both define/understand absolute truth objectively, Buddhism seeks to deal with it existentially and subjectively (or at least, begin subjectively). While the western philosophical tradition in general (at least up until the 19th century) viewed unknowing as something that could eventually be overcome through the intellect alone, Buddhism takes unknowing as a proper limit to intellectual effort and as a sign for shifting gears and taking up different tools. ‘Ignorance’ or natural human intellectual limitation cannot be vaulted across with the limited intellect alone- any more than a photograph captures sound.
If Buddhism was merely philosophy, much of it’s subsequent teaching, including the developments of the various schools of it’s teaching, could be rendered as acceptable analogue to ‘western’ (that problematic but for communication purposes, useful, term) ontology and epistemology;
-That the world of beings is of constant activity and change,
-That it presents as a patterned fabric of interrelationships, of causes and conditions, where things appear, transform and disappear,
-That human beings, though interwoven in this fabric, see and understand of it what is apparent through the human senses including the human mind,
-And , that human beings can manipulate it through the human intellect as far as that goes- and no further.
That’s a fairly general and reasonably universal understanding of the ‘world’. Science, even a basic understanding of science, can indicate to what extent humans can manipulate the environment of which they are a part and on which they depend. It isn’t for instance at all hard to see how filling Earth’s atmosphere with ever-increasing amounts of heat-trapping greenhouse gases through the burning of fossil fuels, and the interrelated practice of deforestation, will put and is putting the possibility of continued life – and certainly life as we know it – on Earth in extreme jeopardy. Leaving aside the ravages of uncontrolled greed, self-destructive ambition, and desire for power that are tributaries to basic human ignorance (of limitation), the world and life as they are naturally are also replete with pain and suffering. This is also pretty self-evident.
The direction in which Buddhism takes this basic understanding is where Buddhism as a spiritual path begins. While with the basic understanding as described above, one could still be optimistic, or nihilistic, or hedonistic, or ascetic, or elitist, or conservative, or libertarian, or progressive, could still choose to fill one's head with proper scientific knowledge or full of contrarian woo, could still choose to be benevolent and beneficent or malicious and malignant, or etc etc…. Buddhism fairly emphatically says that ultimately we have to accept limited ability to affect the world or our condition. This is because ultimate reality, though immanent, transcends the human form as one of it’s limited aspects, and not visa versa.
Even if we leave out dishonesty, wilful deception, self-serving delusion, and unrestrained hatred, anger, lies, and misuse of others (which presents it’s own problems given the ubiquitous of embrace such vices in humanity in the world as is now)- if we go solely by the power of our instrumental intellect, we will hit a wall and we will simply suffer more from frustration and from the ungovernable consequences of our efforts.
The beginning of Buddhist wisdom is a paradox; life is suffering. It cannot be but suffering. Accepting/dealing with – not fixing or thinking to make perfect – the human condition and inherent suffering as a point of departure, is the path to transcending suffering. Suffering is not evil. It is a vector of reality. Without suffering, there is no bliss. The two are never separate.