Geshe la’s teaching today on suffering was a profound and traditional one. In many ways, it forms the cornerstone for the fundamental meditation on compassion, and it provides much of the groundwork for the philosophy that leads us to compassion, so its importance is difficult to overestimate. Geshe la gave us this extensive teaching on suffering because the paragraph that we read from Stages of Meditation had ended by reminding us that compassion was the root of the Buddha’s doctrine, and so Geshe la logically proceeded to teach us how to generate compassion: by meditating on suffering.
He spoke of three kinds of suffering, and it’s important to know them and understand them clearly:
1) The suffering of suffering—Having taken this body, we are subject to various ills—mental and physical—as well as to the disappointments, sadnesses, and miseries that we commonly recognize as suffering in the day-to-day world. This is called the suffering of suffering.
2) The suffering of change—This refers to the fact that all pleasure in the world of samsara eventually transforms into pain. Gain results in loss; happiness becomes sadness; joy cannot be sustained. Everything comes and goes. Everything changes, hence, the suffering of change.
3) Pervasive suffering—This is the most subtle of the three kinds of suffering. Anything and everything that is born and conditioned by karma has the nature of conditionality; it is the very nature of our reality that all things, all emotions, all feelings, and all of us are momentarily disintegrating. As Geshe la said, even at the highest realms of spiritual accomplishment, suffering of this sort is occurring. As Geshe Lhundub Sopa has written, “In the end you must realize this most subtle level of pervasive suffering—that the whole of cyclic existence is conditioned by karma and afflictions and is therefore in the nature of suffering. It is seeing this deep, inescapable suffering nature of everything within cyclic existence that inspires the thought of renunciation.” And, I would add, of compassion.
It is only by becoming gradually more and more familiar with these levels of suffering that we will generate the correct motivation to a) renounce this suffering, and b) to generate the compassion needed to free all sentient beings from this suffering.
Sidney Burris
