Buddhism teaches that suffering comes from our mental attitude and past karmic residue. We create further suffering to lie ahead for ourselves as we make wrongful actions, thoughts, and speech. Although not covering every possible affliction, the main mental attitudes that present us with the cause for suffering are attachment, anger and ignorance.
Attachment can be to many things; it can be to people, concrete items, places, foods, or life itself.
Attachment to people, leads us to want to remain close with them, so that their illness, death, moving away, or alteration in relationship may bring us great pain. Attachment to items and foods can lead us to distress or sorrow when we do not have them, an overwhelming desire to attain them, and a dependence upon ensuring their supply. Attachment to a location can lead us to experience misery and distress if we have to leave that place, whether in this lifetime or at death. Attachment to life can lead us into a fear of death, a continual dissatisfaction with the way our life is going and consequent attempts to attain and maintain a perfection of conditions - such as a perfect home, a perfect job, a perfect family, all seen as our 'right' and therefore demanded and expected by us. The Buddha explained that attachment to life maintains our position in Samsara, otherwise known as cyclic existence.
Anger has many factors, the majority of which are harmful. When feeling angry about a situation or person's treatment of us, the anger not only fills our mind and body with a harmful rage, but generally spills out into angry words and deeds as well as angry thought that harms mostly ourselves. These angry words and deeds interact with other people, causing the harm and misery to spread, and generally for the situation to get worse rather than to improve. Anger therefore creates suffering within our own lives as well as in those of other beings, enlarging and spreading the suffering. Additionally, thoughts deeds and speech stemming from anger will lead to further negative karmic residue needing to be resolved in our future, therefore creating miserable situations lying ahead.
Ignorance leads to suffering in that our lack of understanding, our distorted or delusive view of a situation, often leads us into taking the wrong actions. We may not comprehend why something is as it is, and therefore mistakenly place the blame on another rather than our own self. We do not understand why bad things happen to us, if we have good intentions, if we are ignorant of karma. People that seem to be opposed to us may not even realize that we have a problem with their speech or deeds, which we wrongfully assume to be their fault rather than recognize as our own incorrect attitude. Using thought rather than the wisdom that stems from omniscience, we often fail to sight things as they truly are, therefore leading ourselves into further turmoil from the misunderstanding of a situation.
"I teach about suffering and the way to end it" ~ Shakyamuni Buddha
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