The Non-Violent Weapon of Suffering

Abstract

Indian metaphysical and religious thinking sees not so much evil, as suffering, as the chief problem. To go into why this is so would take us further afield than space allows. The theist of the Judaeo-Semitic tradition with his insight into God as the embodiment of goodness in His Divine Person grapples with the undoubted presence of evil in the world. A very different cosmology makes room for evil among the dramatis personae of the cosmic drama, seeing in this drama a whole hierarchy of beings ranging from demons to gods, a many-levelled stage, where man is an actor — sometimes a victim and sometimes a hero. The forces within and without involve him in this cosmic drama, and that suffering is part of his lot is accepted as a fact of his existence. It is no less a fact that he is capable of reaching peaks of joy, in human relationships and in the creative work of art and craft, and these give a foretaste of a bliss which is beyond imagining and yet which is mirrored in the mood of celebration which dominates most forms of Indian art. A cyclical view of time reconciles man to the repetitive phases of his destiny, bearing within it, if not an eschaton as conceived on a linear model, then, at least the promise of a chance to try again. The cycle of births and deaths strikes a man in a fearsome way if he sees it as the prospect of further chains of suffering. Even outside the Indian tradition, who has not at some time felt himself to be in a cosmic trap, a treadmill from which there seems no escape? Suffering then, in the Indian mind, has always posed itself, to the philosophers and sages, as something to be got rid of, that is, as a practical problem.KeywordsPurificatory RoleMoral EquivalentHuman MiseryDivine PersonDivine GraceThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.