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Suffering and Nirvana

1. The document discusses the concept of "nitya-tripti" or "eternally satisfied" from Hindu scripture as a solution to human suffering. 2. It explores how philosophers like Schopenhauer and Buddha view the world as filled with suffering and change. Schopenhauer argues that human suffering exceeds that of animals because humans can consider the past and future. 3. The key is for humans to detach from the ever-changing world and seek something eternal and unchanging - their own self or essence - to find liberation from suffering. This represents the Hindu and Samkhya idea of "Kaivalyam" or aloneness.

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Bharatwaj Iyer
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152 views

Suffering and Nirvana

1. The document discusses the concept of "nitya-tripti" or "eternally satisfied" from Hindu scripture as a solution to human suffering. 2. It explores how philosophers like Schopenhauer and Buddha view the world as filled with suffering and change. Schopenhauer argues that human suffering exceeds that of animals because humans can consider the past and future. 3. The key is for humans to detach from the ever-changing world and seek something eternal and unchanging - their own self or essence - to find liberation from suffering. This represents the Hindu and Samkhya idea of "Kaivalyam" or aloneness.

Uploaded by

Bharatwaj Iyer
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© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Download as PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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Suffering and Nirvana.

I once read in Dr.Radhakrishna’s translation of the Bhagavad Gita the word


“nitya-tripti”. If translated it would mean “Eternally Satisfied”. I am unaware as
to where else this word occurs in Hindu Scripture, but as far as I read it in
Radhakrishna and thought about it, I found the word to contain immense
metaphysical value. I found this word to contain the solution to the greatest
problem of Man, the enormity of human suffering.

The German philosopher Schopenhauer in his essay “on the sufferings of the
world” uses the example of the prey and the predator to show that in the
world misery far exceeds happiness. When a predator is devouring the prey,
one party is miserable and in pain for its being eaten and the other is in glee
for it is having good food. But any rational observer wouldn’t fail to notice that
the misery of the animal being eaten far exceeds the joy of the animal at its
dinner. I don’t know if Schopenhauer uses this example as a good piece of
rhetoric in the midst of a serious and long essay or he meant it, but we can bet
our shirts on the fact that this world is engulfed by enough suffering to make
Bertrand Russell say that it wouldn’t do sitting in an ivory tower, the world is
too bad. Tennyson says that nature is red in tooth and claw, yes, but the case
of man is even worse. Dostoevsky’s “Notes from the underground” stands as a
glaring example as to how man can suffer without any physical ailments at all,
completely ailed simply by his own “self”. Schopenhauer notes in the same
essay that human suffering far exceeds that of the animals for man thinks. Man
is considerate about the past and the future, he does not only live in the
present as trees and other animals do. A tree resembles to the German
wisdom greatly overshadowing that of man, for the tree is perpetually calm
and steady, never wavering and always at peace, this characteristic, greatly
mirrored in the person of Shakya Muni, is a rare characteristic indeed.

Man has a number of faculties which the animals fortunately lack, he is filled
with shame or hope, pride or jealousy and the rest, and all these go on to make
him seriously bound. Albert Camus’ Muersault is a man devoid of emotions
and although it has led him to monstrous acts, but nevertheless it was the
principle that made him absolutely free, absolute free to randomly commit an
act of murder and not have a pricking conscience after it- a complete opposite
of Dostoevsky’s Raskolnikov. Hope according to Schopenhauer is a principle
enemy. Man hopes for something and either gets it or he doesn’t. If he does he
is not as happy as he should have been for half the joy was already enjoyed in
the expectation, and if he doesn’t then you know... In any of the two cases
hope makes man live in the future ignoring the present, unlike the inanimate
that has no choice but to live and die in the present.

Buddha gives “dukha” the first place among his Arya-Satyas, the belief that
this world is an eternal wheel of suffering with no hope for assuage. There are
variants to this world-view but one thing is common in all of them: this world is
not correct, it is somehow bad. This tune is even resonant in the religion that
sprang from Jerusalem, denouncing the world being the greatest possible
escape from suffering and the best way to reach the Kingdom. The first error in
the world seen by the Indian version of renunciation is that the world is
changing. Change is something bad, because constancy is better. Then why not
just get rid of the world if change is wrong? Because the aim of change is to
reach a stage of constancy, stagnation in the most untoward sense. The tree,
too, only symbolised constancy to Schopenhauer. Swami Vivekananda believes
that liberation will come only if all work is abandoned and the self is able to
rest in itself. The whole aim of man is to recoil as far as he can from this world
which represents so much instability and evanescence, and he must fly to
something which on the contrast is stable and eternal: his self, and be alone
with himself, this is the Samkhya idea of “Kaivalyam” literally meaning
“Aloneness”.

But if you ask the question why is man taking so much trouble in quitting the
world and searching a realm unknown to our vision, the answer wouldn’t
actually be the search for impersonal knowledge, as the spiritualist would tell
you, but a search for a panacea, if not a panacea then at least a reprieve from
the wishful climate of the world, a climate of change and inessentiality, a
climate of temporariness and destruction, a climate of misery and happiness.
Actually the seers are being very pragmatic. He is hankering after an absolute
“param tatvam” which wouldn’t change and die, which would fail to give him
bliss, which wouldn’t sink down into the mesh and marsh of matter and
relativity which he hates so much. What he wants is the ETERNALLY PRESENT.
Nietzsche was right when he said that man loves everything that is eternal.
And that is how man has always wanted his destiny to be: permanent and
perpetual.

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