Sakyamuni Buddha ("The" Buddha)
Anuradha Sutta, Samyutta Nikaya 22.86.
Translation (phrasing this slightly differently)
by Thanissaro Bhikkhu here
or translation by Maurice O'Connell Walshe here (as "Anuraadho Sutta").
Quoted at The Four Noble Truths: BBC
You'll also frequently see this as
"I teach suffering, and the end of suffering."
"No single English word adequately captures the full depth, range, and subtlety of the crucial Pali term dukkha. Over the years, many translations of the word have been used ("stress," "unsatisfactoriness," "suffering," etc.)."Pain", in the broad sense. "Dissatisfaction". Alienation, anomie, angst are sub-categories of dukkha. "Existential imperfection".
"In the traditional version of the shaman, the magician, the one who walks between the worlds, one of the things that make it possible to walk between worlds is a wound. The perfected body, the perfected soul is in a higher place. In the unperfected wounded self, the wound is an ability which grants you the power to look outside the conventional, luxurious, hedonistic, the sensual things which preoccupy us in this world into some other place.
I think it's one of the reasons why very often artists are wounded, are psychically wounded in one way or the other. I think actually the truth is everybody is psychically wounded, the issue is whether you own up to it or not.
"I think what I'm trying to do constantly is when I have these kind of journeys into empowerment, is that there is always a price for a that empowerment. It's the yin and yang; without paying the price, you can't have the empowerment, but the empowerment to some extent may even cause you to pay the price. You have to grasp something very painful, you have to have to open yourself up to very painful experiences. The pain of the world if you will. And I think that one of the things that artists do, that magicians do, religious figures do is open up the place in us which we seal off very quickly as children, because we realize if we open up too much, it hurts too much.
The world is full of hurt. People die, people leave, the world changes radically, unpredictably; things that we love finish, things that we hate begin. The experience of the world from an early age is primarily, I think an experience of loss and pain and despair. In order to heal those feelings paradoxically you have to put yourself up to them.
My books are very often 'Look it's okay to be wounded, it's okay to be imperfect but be aware that the wound should not just be suffered, it should be used. It should be a way to become a richer, more loving, more constructive, more articulate human being."
Explorer From The Far Reaches Of Experience
by Kim August, Pharr Out! 1998
Quoted in Clive Barker on Magic
"Brave New World takes place in the 26th century. The planet is unified and at peace .... Marriage, childbirth, and family life have been abolished, along with all kinds of suffering -- even such minor kinds as disappointment and frustration."
"Looking back across the past few decades, it’s hard not to think that post-industrial modernism is headed all one way, everywhere it has taken a firm grip. Pleasure-giving gadgets and drugs are ever cheaper and more accessible. The distresses of life, especially physical sickness and pain, are gradually being pushed to the margins. ... And all this is headed… where?Emphasis and links are a mix of mine and original -- ed.
We all know the answer to that one. It is headed to Brave New World. ...
The issue posed by the novel, as every thoughtful commentator (Francis Fukuyama and Leon Kass, to name two) has pointed out, is: What exactly is objectionable about the world of Year 632 After Ford? As Kass says, the dehumanized people of that world don’t know they are dehumanized, and wouldn’t care if they knew. They are happy; and if they feel any momentary unhappiness, a pharmacological remedy is ready to hand. If being human means enduring sorrow, pain, grief envy, loss, accidie, loneliness, and humiliation, why on earth should anyone be expected to prefer a “fully human” life over a dehumanized one?
Most people won’t. So far as it makes any sense to predict the future, it seems to me highly probable that the world of fifty or a hundred years from now will bear a close resemblance to Huxley’s dystopia -- a world without pain, grief, sickness or war, but also without family, religion, sacrifice, or nobility of spirit. It’s not what I want, personally, and it’s not what Huxley wanted either (he was a religious man, though of a singular type). It’s what most people want, though; so if this darn democracy stuff keeps spreading, it’s what we shall get, for sure."
"Les Murray's Fredy Neptune, a novel about the life and adventures of a German-Australian seaman in the first half of the 20th century, is 255 pages of blank verse. ... The wonder is that this is an excellent book, one that revealed to me things I did not know about the narrative uses of poetry. (You can get an amazing amount of action into a very few lines, for one thing.)
... Fredy sees an appalling amount of unhappiness, so much that he describes all of Eurasia as a great execution trench. ... This brings us to Murray's own outline of a theodicy for the first half of the 20th century.
Fredy is an ordinary Catholic. ... What worries him is not the existence, but the sanity of God. Fredy knows from his own experience that the only way to survive a beating is to pretend he is being hurt, since even a very cruel human being will eventually recoil from inflicting pain. God, however, does not. Whatever His purposes may be in allowing suffering in the world, they override every other consideration. Fredy's numbness is a way of dealing, not with his own suffering, but with the suffering of the victims."
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