We Make Our Own Suffering

From time to time, I have asked all of you, “When a glass is half full of water, how do you view it? How do you perceive it?” The author Seikan Kobayashi says that there are three ways you can view it. First, with displeasure and dissatisfaction that it is only half full. Second, with joy, feeling glad that it is half full. And third, with gratitude, being thankful for the kindness of whoever left half for you. However you view or interpret a situation like this, you yourself are the one who is assigning it some sort of meaning, and the only fact is that the glass is half full of water. Whether you accept this fact with displeasure and dissatisfaction, or with joy, or with gratitude, stems entirely from your own mind—from you.

I think that for us as lay practitioners, it is essential that the Buddha’s teachings are put in easily understood terms that are readily applicable to our daily lives. In this regard, Mr. Kobayashi’s writings—grounded in the teaching expounded in the Heart of Wisdom Sutra that “all forms are, namely, emptiness”—show us that whether things are pleasant or unpleasant, we ourselves arbitrarily assign meaning to all phenomena, which causes vacillations between our emotional highs of elation and lows of despair. In particular, the phenomena we think of as the root causes of our suffering and anxiety are oftentimes the seeds of suffering that we ourselves have sown, through our arbitrary decisions, prejudices, preconceived notions, desires, doubts, attachments, and so on. One example of the Buddhist way of seeing things, grounded in everyday life, is this glass-of-water analogy, which shows you that by changing how you view and interpret things, you can live with much greater ease.

Suffering Also Provides Some of Life’s Meaningful Moments

“Birth, aging, illness, and death are called ‘the four sufferings,’ but for me, they are not the four sufferings, they are the four joys.” These are the words of Dr. Ko Hirasawa (former president of Kyoto University). He suggests that by changing your perspective, your life will be a continuous succession of joy and ease (Ikiyo kyo mo yorokonde [Let’s live every day joyfully], Chichi Publishing, 1995). Although illness is generally seen as a source of suffering, the poet Shinmin Sakamura wrote this poem, imbued with a rather gentle sense of gratitude: “Illness / Has opened up / Another world for me— / The peaches / Are blooming” (Sakamura Shinmin zen shishu [Collected Poems by Shinmin Sakamura], Daito Publishing, 1985). The novelist Kojin Shimomura wrote: “The world I want to inhabit is one in which suffering is not the cause for despair, but rather the stimulus for courage” (Seinen no shisaku no tameni [For the wonder of youth], PHP, 2016). The aforementioned Kobayashi says of the teaching of emptiness that he illustrated with his glass-of-water analogy: “Perhaps what the Buddha wishes to tell you is that when you can find joy and pleasure in the same phenomenon, you are spiritually refining yourself” (Uchu ga mikata no mikatado [A perspective that makes the universe your ally], Koensha, 2003). Indeed, even those phenomena we think of as painful can be viewed and interpreted in various ways that ultimately lead us to find the courage to live and to find a new way of life. If you only view something as one-dimensional—seeing it solely as full of suffering or pain—you are more likely to become perpetually obsessed with that “suffering” and lose an excellent opportunity to grow and mature.

That said, I am not suggesting that you should force yourself to cheerfully accept painful phenomena. Rather, try to view things from multiple perspectives, and then recognize that any kind of suffering, when seen in the light of the truth of impermanence and the teaching of dependent origination, is itself an integral part of the unfolding circumstances and inevitabilities of life. Moreover, such experiences are linked to a creative future, just like those of a young child growing into an adult. Even if it takes some time, we possess the power to transform our suffering into provisions for life and joy.

Suffering and sorrow form meaningful moments in your life—they are also your precious life experiences. To quote the words of theoretical physicist Haruo Saji, “Since the present moment is formed by the accumulation of the past, by looking ahead to the distant future and carefully designing our actions from this moment forward, we have the ability to change both the future and the past” (Chichi [Attaining wisdom], Chichi Publishing, October 2021). In a similar sense, it is essential—for the sake of our future selves, the adults of tomorrow, and the future of our planet—that we live fully in the present moment by accepting as our life companions the suffering as well as the joy we have accumulated in the past.