The Three Basic Facts of Existence II: Suffering (Dukkha) - Buddhist ...

VII. The pursuit of Happiness and the Fact of SufferingIn his Religions of man, Prof. Huston-Smith defines man as “the animal that wonders.” This veryapt description automatically implies that within every individual of the genus homo sapiens isa built-in mechanism which impels him to seek knowledge. He wants to know. This urge beginsto assert itself at a very early age, in very young children, who begin to ask questions abouteverything they see and touch and sense. Kipling has expressed this in the lines:I keep six honest serving men,they taught me all I knew.Their names are What, and Why, and When,and How, and Where, and Who.This in turn means that man is the only member of the animal kingdom who is capable ofasking questions and of reasoning. The salient point in this process is to ask the right questions,and even more important is the order in which the questions are asked. The question that hasintrigued man the most (probably before the dawn of history), and that still intrigues him, is,how did everything begin? Various answers to this question are to be found within the religionsand philosophies of the world. Greek philosophy—commenced with the question of trying tofind out whether there was any kind of primordial substance of which the world was made. TheGreeks made surprising progress working on this line of thought, culminating in the school ofthe atomists, Leucippus and Democritus, who anticipated the discoveries of modern times bymore than two thousand years.The various religions approached the subject in an entirely different manner. The Greeks, inthe beginning, at least, were concerned solely with the physical universe.The idea of a first cause was not introduced until the advent of the Socratic school (Socrates,Plato and Aristotle) and was seized upon with eagerness by the early fathers of the Christianchurch because it dovetailed so neatly with their own concept of a divine originator, God thefather, Jehovah, whom the Christians took over from the ancient Hebrews. However, Brahma ofthe Indian systems and Ahura Mazda of the Zoroastrians are very similar concepts into whichwas breathed the wishful thinking of their adherents. This First Cause, this Supreme Being, thisGod the Creator, was endowed with omnipotence and omniscience, with being all-merciful, allwise,all-just and absolute in every sense. He is, in fact, often referred to as The Absolute. And,as we read in the first chapter of Genesis, having created everything, the Lord God was verypleased:“And God saw everything that He had made, and, behold, it was very good.”This appraisal was made somewhat prematurely, and turned out to be not entirely correct. Theauthors of Genesis found to their dismay that they had struck more than they had bargained for.If everything were so good, how to account for all the suffering in the world? Surely all theterrible things that the flesh was heir to, and all the multifarious evils that befell living creatures,could not be attributed to a Just All Good, All Merciful, and All Wise Being! So, to overcome thecontradiction, the Devil had to be invented, Lucifer, “son of the morning,” who has exercised afascination, not only over some of our finest writers and poets, to wit, Milton, Goethe, Dante,and more recently, D. H. Lawrence, but also on by no means an insignificant number ofotherwise quite ordinary people whom one would not have expected to have been given toflights of fancy. D. H. Lawrence was inspired by his satanic majesty to write the poem,“Lucifer”:25