Chapter 7

Chapter VII

Suffering
VISIT IN VIRGINIA

In the fall of 1982 there came an invitation from Charles Haynes, then Director of Religious Life at Randolph-Macon College near Richmond, Virginia, to represent Hinduism at a symposium called “Perspectives on Suffering, An Interfaith Inquiry,” which would take place the following spring, at the College. It was a challenge, for which I felt I would have to prepare well. Below is the fruit of that.
Five world faiths would be on the platform, in a three-day format of presentations and responses, followed by audience questions. Very well planned, I thought, intelligently arranged; it should prove pleasing to a college community. As usual in such affairs, the organizers had several sponsors besides the Department of Religion of the college. Each was to present the view of his/her faith, whether scriptural, theological, historical or whatever, on the matter of suffering. It began, however, with a disappointment for me. I had looked forward to meeting the outstanding scholar of Islam, Syed Hossein Nasr. At almost the last hour he had called in ill, and was sending a substitute.

Chosen to represent Christianity was Dr. Dorothee Sölle, European theologian and activist; Rabbi Harold Kushner (author of Why Bad Things Happen to Good People and other books), who was the Jewish spokesman; for Islam, Dr. Aziz Said, professor of International Relations at American University, Washington D.C.; and Japanese Zen Buddhist Prof. Tokiwa. Convener Charles Haynes, a remarkable organizer, has now become nationally known for his advocacy of comparative religious studies in private schools.
We begin with the first paper on Hinduism given at the symposium.

SYMPOSIUM ON SUFFERING: An Interfaith Inquiry
Randolph-Macon College, February 1983

HINDUISM

Introduction

Teacher and writer Gerald Heard, with years of study and meditation behind him on the mystics of various religions, said to a group of us: “It seems you must either take pains or bear pains: which way will you have it?” “To be weak is miserable,” cries Milton in Paradise Lost, “doing or suffering.” I think the message of this entire paper may come down to that.
Mahatma Gandhi called his life's work My Experiment with Truth. I should like to borrow the phrase to refer back to another experiment with truth in the same land, some twenty-five centuries earlier, made by Gautama who became the Buddha. He called his conclusion “The Four Noble Truths”: suffering is a fact; suffering has a cause; it also has a cure; and there is a way, a path which effects the cure. It has taken a long time for the West to realize that this realism of the Buddha is not pessimism.
It is widely assumed that this formulation was original with him. Probably not. It is possible that the same formulation, made with respect to bodily disease, by an ancient physician, Susruta, in his surviving medical works, was well-known at the time of the birth of Gautama. We cannot now say which came first, nor does it much matter. Suffering is our lot, stretching as far back as we can see and also as far ahead, and every religious faith has its attitudes concerning suffering and ways to deal with it. Alas, to stand in the presence of real suffering and talk of its analysis sounds all too glib: an affront to the sufferer.
Therefore one of the first things we shall have to do, in presenting various Hindu perspectives, is to try to dispel the notion prevalent in the West that to be non-attached (asakta, udasina) means to be indifferent, and that a person of spiritual detachment does not feel, or is not concerned with, the world's misery.

Firstly, Buddha himself gives the lie to that supposition. This world has known no greater heart than his, as his sixty years' service to man richly testifies. Isn't it the mind and heart which is set apart from self-interest that can cleanly bear the burdens and absorb the sorrows of an afflicted world? I recall being fearful when first entering the monastic life, that the end of this road might be a soul aloof, self-satisfied, no longer feeling or caring what the world feels—in short, perhaps a misanthrope. Foolish doubt. At a public class one of our senior swamis was questioned on this very point. He said: “The illumined souls not only feel for and empathize with us in our grief, they feel it many times more intensely than we do. But they know how to handle it.” They are not, then, without emotion; they are in some way above emotion. On the other hand, a mother who came to visit Sri Ramakrishna just after losing her first baby son, describes the meeting thus: being told of the situation Ramakrishna broke into sobs which literally left pools of water on the floor beneath the cot on which he sat. The mother was dumbfounded but came away uplifted.

A common element?

In what is to follow we shall examine the several historical and current viewpoints on human suffering, commencing with that of the Yoga philosophy and concluding with views of the Ramakrishna-Vivekananda movement. I think I can predict that you will discern a common element in them all—an element which will perhaps be found in all the papers presented, namely, that we are to shift the center and focus of our life from the ego to the non-ego (in whatever various terms the two concepts may be expressed). Jesus and Buddha were worshiped, after all, not for their explanations of suffering but for their power to encompass it.

The Yoga Perspective

The very definition of the word yoga is the termination of suffering.[1] Therefore the practicer of yoga goes through a process which is the therapy for our suffering. Probably the earliest summation of this perspective is found in a verse of the Katha Upanishad: “Smaller than the smallest and larger than the largest, that Self dwells in the heart of every creature. The desireless, free from all sorrow, see It's glory through the purity of their mind and senses.”[2] When desires are overcome and our mind and senses purified, says the yogi, that Inner Being is seen in all its glory: this formula is impersonal, non-theistic; it contains no external deity and the grace thereof, no historical savior. Yoga makes the assumption that mind and body are real; as material substances they will exist in some form, but when the purusha has disentangled itself as it were, all of prakriti will disappear for it, and it will shine in its own majesty.
If heart is the devotee's instrument, and intellect the philosopher's, the will and vital energy (prana) are what the yogi uses. At present our vitality is low and uncontrolled. It has to be raised by the appropriate disciplines to the level of our conscious intent. Every nerve, every muscle, virtually, can be brought under control. It is a philosophy, not of agreement with nature, but of resisting and mastering nature. As Swami Vivekananda tells us, “The whole body will have to be rearranged, as it were. New channels for thought will have to be made in the brain, nerves which have not acted in your whole life will begin to work, and so on.”[3] The capacity to concentrate, to make a laser, so to speak, of the light which is consciousness, is the destiny and innate glory of the human being.

Seer and seen

What is it that we suffer from, according to Patanjali?
“The pain-bearing obstructions are ignorance, egoism, attachment, aversion and clinging to life.”[4] Clear enough; we are familiar with these and their consequences. And ignorance is the root of all the others, he tells us, a concept found throughout the whole of Indian philosophy.
“They [the obstructions] bear fruit as pleasure and pain, caused by virtue or vice.”[5] Here is the law of karma by which the wheel of samsara, our life in the world, is turned; if we experience pleasure it is because of past virtuous action; if pain, because of past vicious or mistaken action. If all this does not appear to be true, if the wicked seem to thrive or the saintly seem to suffer, we are to understand, says Yoga, that the deeds in question will bear their fruit in the future, perhaps in our very next life.
“The cause of that which is to be avoided is the junction of the seer and the seen.”[6] Now who is the seer? The Purusha, the Self of man, pure Consciousness. And what is the seen? Everything else. Our suffering results from the junction of these two, the erroneous identification with nature, the Self's taking its reflection in mind and matter as itself.
   Patanjali's classical eight-runged Raja Yoga is offered as the ladder for raising our consciousness to kaivalya or spiritual independence. Frankly, for most of us it is too steep a climb. However, as it appeals to certain temperaments, and scientific and heroic personalities do aspire to it, let us see what the teaching is, in an approach to the problem of suffering.
   The first two steps are the “dont's” and the “do's” of moral character, without some degree of which spiritual aspiration itself does not arise, and without proficiency in which, it cannot be fulfilled.
The second two rungs of this ladder are body-centered disciplines of diet, posture and breathing (which also affect the mind); their purpose is to cleanse, lighten and strengthen our psycho-physical equipment. Without sound health and strong nerves, says the yogi, it will be difficult to achieve the transformation of consciousness required. Adaptability is the crux of yoga and so we would want to be sure that our nerves are strong and finely-tuned to bear the strain of concentration.
   The next stages, pratyahara, dharana, dhyana and samadhi all are degrees of mental concentration and absorption, commencing with the pulling back of the mind from sense-objects and culminating in the total separation of Purusha from prakriti, Consciousness from nature. In any case, the mind is to be kept high. “Plain living and high thinking” is for the yogi. The yogi will be particularly fond of those passages in the Gita which discriminate between Purusha and prakriti, and will dwell upon them to make their content a matter of direct perception, to see the play of prakriti, nature, everywhere: all is prana, only vibrating at different rates. The yogi's task is to raise up all the vibrations which come his way. Just as unholy company is to be avoided, so are low, mean thoughts. It is a fact often obscured in our skeptical, materialistic culture that one of the best ways to transcend suffering, to avoid injury and disease and to face death in stride, is to live a “clean” life.

Concern for the suffering of others

Admittedly the suffering of others has not been the primary concern of the Yoga approach. This does not mean that the perfected yogi is an unfeeling, uncaring person, as noted in our Introduction. If we ask the raja yogi how to relieve the miseries of the people of the world, the reply might be that non-injury is found in yama, the prohibitions in the very first step of yoga. The yogi, too, by demonstrating the attainment of “Independence” does set the best possible example to suffering humanity, and may also be persuaded to instruct others in the art of yoga. Further, the community as a whole is subtly purified and uplifted by the mere presence of such souls in the society. India has many accounts of instances where this principle is evidenced. One of my teachers, for example, told of a town where lived a recognized holy man, devoting all his prayer and meditation to the welfare of the community. After a few years there was a measurable difference in the level of crime in that town.

Rabbi Kushner and I became friends and conversed between the sessions. There was a memorable dinner over which he and I took the topic of suffering down to a more personal level. He had, as his book explains, lost his teenage son to a rare disease. It had so deeply affected him that he felt he must solve this problem of “undeserved suffering.” The Rabbi was unable to accept the possibility of the doctrine of karma and reincarnation to solve his riddle; the Vedantic idea that there was no undeserved suffering he found intolerable. In the end I suggested that he had to acknowledge “compensation” in some form: here he was, experiencing fame and fortune from his book and his lectures, all as a result of this tragedy.
“I would give every scrap of that up, just to have my boy back!” was his rejoinder. And who would not? Kushner gave his own account of this exchange in his second book, “When All You’ve Ever Wanted isn’t Enough.”

The Perspective of Devotion

Many will feel, no doubt, that in the perspective of devotion we have a more “positive” approach to suffering than that of yoga. For here, suffering is eclipsed by our preoccupation with the Divine Being. For the Christian, love of Christ and Christ's love for us do, of course, can take the sting out of pain. A man once asked Sri Ramakrishna for his opinion about the yogic disciplines of austerity, self-restraint etc. and drew the following reply: “Yes, all those things are prescribed in the scriptures and by the teachers of spiritual tradition, but if one cultivates the love of God, the mind and senses will come under perfect control.” These words epitomize Divine Love via the path of bhakti. This is the perspective on suffering already familiar to spiritually minded persons in the West, and it will not be necessary for us to do much more than summarize it as found in the Indian tradition.

To Hindus the forms of God are theophanies, discovered by them and resorted to as objects of devotion and as saviors from sorrow, death and judgment. Some are heavenly, not born on earth (e.g., Siva, Durga, Surya, Muruga), while others are Incarnations of Vishnu, the all-pervading Supreme Being. In this summary of devotion we have selected the person, legend, devotees and scriptures of the most popular of these, Sri Krishna, as representative.
In the Mundaka Upanishad, soul and God are likened to two birds, inseparable companions, perched in the same tree (the body), the lower (the soul) hopping slowly upward through its pursuit of the sweet or sour fruits thereof, until one day it looks up at the higher bird sitting majestically at the top, merely observing it all. The soul then knows that it is not alone.[7] The next verse tells us that one day even identity with God will be its condition.

Surrendering to God

It is important for understanding Hindu bhakti to notice that God and the soul are of the same species and dwell together inseparably in the human body.
How, then, is the individual to ascend the tree and close the distance between himself and the Lord? First, by fulfilling the duties of life which lie close at hand, but guided by a new attitude. “Surrender all action to me,” Sri Krishna tells the warrior Arjuna, “and fixing the mind on the Self, devoid of egoistic hope and free from the fever of grief, fight the battle.”[8] This formula will prevent our labor from creating further bondage. Such surrender is the mental and emotional counterpart of external sacrifice, yajña, expressed in ways both crude and sophisticated. As beginners we quite humanly expect reward; our devotion is motivated, sakama; the miseries we seek to be spared are of the commonest sort, penury and death.
Even so, it is only the gracious Lord who hears and grants our petitions. When our worship, philanthropy and performance of duty are all offered to God, we become free from the bonds of both evil and good results and our hearts are united to him in the bond of love. Those who love him, he assures us, will never perish. Sri Krishna demonstrates this often, in both phases of his earthly life, the pastoral and the civic.

Quickly I come to those who offer me
Every action,
Worship me only,
Their dearest delight,
With devotion undaunted.

Because they love me
These are my bondsmen
And I shall save them
From mortal sorrow
And all the waves
Of life's deadly ocean.[9]

But the signal fact of all devotional perspective in this strand of Hinduism, as in Christian devotion, is the conviction that God is no invisible, intangible abstraction, abiding only in heaven. He has, through his amazing grace and infinite mercy, condescended to be born on earth in a human being. In the Indian format, Lord Vishnu, taking embodiment as the darling of the cowherd village, Gokula, later to be a brilliant philosopher and statesman, appeared among us to magnetize our lives, deflect our history and teach us what we are and what we can be. Some of these teachings are detailed in the long and comprehensive conversations with Uddhava, Sri Krishna's Brahmin disciple: “Keep my commandments,” he tells him: “practice the virtues—peace and same-sightedness, modesty, purity and patience.”
The Lord concludes his message to mankind, we may say, in the summary he discloses to Arjuna at the close of his majestic and inspiring sermon. If conceit dwells in our heart, we are lost; but bowed, and united with him, we will, by his grace, conquer all obstacles. For the Lord dwells in the heart of every being, turning them round on the wheel of maya. Returning to him, behind the wheel, we receive, through his grace, the state of supreme peace beyond all change.

Give me your whole heart,
Love and adore me,
Bow to me only
And you shall find me:
This is my promise who love you dearly,
Lay down all duties in me, your refuge,
Fear no longer
For I will save you
From sin and from bondage.[10]

Forming a relationship with the Lord

But for the devotee, God must become the most real of all entities. The Vaishnava and other devotional systems describe degrees of increasing relationship which we can form with the Lord, and prescribe the attitudes and methods of their cultivation: the peacefulness of goodwill toward all; the discipline and satisfaction of servanthood to the master; the loving care and intimacy of parenthood or childhood; the sharing and equality of friendship; the headlong ecstasy and passion of the sweetheart, of spiritual marriage. These and others, separately or combined, constitute both our program of practice and our venue of experience.
It is obvious that all of this requires a God who is at least Personal, if not possessing a form. Rescuing requires a Savior. “Giving up all (righteous and unrighteous) action, come unto Me alone for refuge. I shall free you from all sins: grieve not.”[11] And in the Hindu tradition this foray into the unknownness of the Divine Being brings about the revelation of that Being as the Soul of our soul, our very Self. All the above is preliminary and preparatory for this to take place, for the discipline which Love itself entails. The art is to love him “with our whole mind, heart, soul and strength.” It is a long road and one we can travel only if he takes us by the hand, so to speak.
In fact, it is exactly in its interface with suffering that our heart is tested and reveals its status. Three stages in the development of divine love have been demarcated in this Sufi poem about Rabbi'a quoted by Swami Vivekananda in his Inspired Talks:

Rabbi'a, sick upon her bed,
By two saints was visited
Holy Malik, Hassan wise
Men of mark in Muslim eyes.

Hassan said, “Whose prayer is pure
Will God's chastisements endure."
Malik from a deeper sense
Uttered his experience:

“He who loves his Master's choice
Will in God's chastisement rejoice.”
Rabbi'a saw some selfish will
In their maxims lingering still,

And replied, “O men of grace,
He who sees his Master's face
Does not in his prayers recall
That he is chastised at all.”

Not only in his prayers, but at any time. Rabbi'a, supreme mystic as she was, tells it rightly. It is God-absorption. Because the lover of God commonly supposes that she deserves her suffering as chastisement, we can equate the two, then the three positions of the poem are made clear: endure; rejoice, be oblivious: these are the stages. It reminds us of The Prophet, where Gibran takes it up: “And if you cannot but weep when your soul summons you to prayer, she should spur you again and yet again, though weeping, until you shall come laughing.”[12]

Concern for the suffering of others

In the perspective of devotion, the best examples of such concern are those of God himself, chief of which is the avatara, God's manifestation on earth in the human condition, and his saints. Chaitanya (15th century A.C.) like St. Francis, embraced the outcast. Ramanuja (11th century A.C.) accepted damnation to hell in order to proclaim to the public his secret and sacred mantra which would save them. Radha, intoxicated with love of Sri Krishna, constantly implores her companions to assuage their sorrows by falling in love with him. Mirabai, styling herself the bride of this Incarnation, tries to raise the well-being and consciousness of her entire community. The mystic singers and composers beseech us to end our worldly woe by worshiping the Lord or immersing ourselves in devotional practices. By preaching, spreading the word, bringing others into contact with Krishna (et. al.), the work of loving concern goes on.
Compassion by all these means, and by good works, is enjoined in almost every chapter of the Bhagavad Gita.
In recent times one of the best examples of a devotee (for surely we can call him that) engaged in loving concern for others is that of Mahatma Gandhi. His life of sacrifice and dedication in the path of shanta, diffused love for all beings, drew world-wide recognition; it typifies both Hindu and Jain religious attitudes.

The Perspective of Advaita Vedanta

The philosophy of Advaita (non-duality) is one of inquiry. It consists of pondering and asking the right metaphysical questions. Three of the most essential emerge from the Advaitic proposition: “Thou art That: this is to be realized.” The first question then is, Who or what am I?; the second, What is the nature of That?; and, How will it affect suffering if I realize this identity? We shall take up the third and examine it along guidelines given by Sankaracharya, the greatest exponent of Advaita, using his understanding of the “source”—the Upanishadic verses.

How will it affect our suffering if we can realize That? In a justly famous verse the Mundaka Upanishad says of the Self-realized, “All the knots of the heart are untied, all doubts dispelled and the effects of all actions are destroyed when He is seen who is the nearest of the near and the farthest of the far.”[13] So He is both the Intimate and the Ultimate. In another sruti passage this yardstick is laid out for all time: “The infinite alone is happiness; there is no happiness in the finite.[14] One of the outstanding Vedic sages, Yajñavalkya, describes the experience of Self-absorption in very human terms, comparing it to the full embrace of husband and wife, neither being aware of anything else within or without, and certainly not disturbed by fear or craving. In fact, he says, there ones desire is fulfilled because it is the Self alone which is desired in all things by everyone. And to be desireless is to be free from sorrow.

The end of all sorrow

This sage continues in the boldest words: “There the gods become no gods, the Vedas no Vedas...the outcaste no outcaste...the monk no monk...,” for in the embrace of the Self one is not conscious of good nor of evil, having gone beyond all sorrows of the heart.”[15] Another teacher, Prajapati, characterizes the Self as freedom: it is free from evil, old age, death, grief, hunger and thirst.”[16] All the ills that beset us, according to the Advaita perspective, derive from our thinking that we experience duality —otherness— and that again is our misinterpretation, our ignorance. “When the Self has become all beings, what delusion, what sorrow can there be for one who has beheld that Oneness?”[17]
Sankara, in his treatise Atmabodha (Self-Knowledge) waxes ecstatic in a poem to his own Self-realization: “I am free from sorrow, attachment, malice and fear; for I am other than the mind. I am free from changes such as birth, loss of weight, senility... I fill all things, inside and out, like space. Changeless and the same in all, I am pure, unattached, stainless and immutable.”[18] Writing in the eighth century A.C., he prescribed strict qualifications before one even begins the path of Advaita. In our time it is difficult to find candidates with such preparedness; the qualifications themselves would become the agenda. His four specifications are discrimination, renunciation, “the six treasures” and yearning for freedom. These deserve a closer look.

The “six treasures”

Discrimination. The non-dualist's tool is the reasoning intellect, one limb of it asking questions, another deciding what answers to accept. “What are we here for? Why do we die? Who am I, where did I come from, where am I going? Where/what is God, if any? How am I related to him and to the universe? Is there something by knowing which, one can know everything?” These are the principal questions. Especially as regards suffering, one is to discriminate between that of the body and that of the mind. Instead of compounding our ills by means of dread, worry, anxiety or self-pity, we learn to say with Sri Ramakrishna, “O my mind, know that the body follows its own laws, which include suffering. But why should not you, O mind, remain immersed in bliss?”
Now, if we rightly discriminate, dispassion and renunciation naturally follow because if you have discovered what is real, you let go of what is not; or it lets go of you. Sankara mentions “the enjoyment, either now or after death, of the fruits of our actions,” as if it were something quite trivial. No problem! But seeing how anxious we are to reap the results of our work, we can well understand what such renunciation means to our life.
The “six treasures” are the external and internal control of senses and mind; introspection; forbearance; Self-settledness (samadhana) and sraddha, a term with no exact English equivalent. It can best be defined as an affirmative attitude of faith, toward self, scripture and teacher. For the purposes of this survey there is sufficient similarity between these and the yogi's disciplines that we need not give them further discussion. They are preparatory to the meditation of this jñani, the knower of Truth. The meditation is either upon Atman, the truth behind the individual, or on Brahman, the truth behind the universe, and on their identity. Removing obstacles by means of our reason, we then go beyond it, needing it no longer. Thus we see once again the paramount role of meditation in each perspective, in whatever way it may be prescribed.

Yearning for freedom: mumukshutva is the Sanskrit term for the thirst of the soul, so to speak, to be truly free, which Vedanta says we all share, conscious of it or not. Where is that exit for us, returners to life after life and death after death? Where is that escape from the wheel-in-the-squirrel-cage of this samsara, life in the world? Whether our lives be rich or impoverished, hellish or heavenly, a time must come when we see the series as the result of ignorance and bondage and strive to transcend it. Moksha or final freedom is as generic and vital a demand in us as are the other three traditional aims of Hindu life: conscience, emotional expression and security. Evidence of this is cited in the texts. The fact that in sleep we pull away from this so-called reality, in order to create another world of dream and to experience the no-world of dreamless sleep, all of this shows that this waking world, despite our protestations of interest in it and belonging to it, does not have a continuous claim upon our consciousness. We are already free — we have a Freedom we do not suspect.
If you are a non-dualist, then, you are expected to study and meditate upon the play of consciousness throughout the day and night; how the three states of waking, dream and sleep-without-dream succeed each other, superimposed, as it were, upon turiya, the pure consciousness underlying them. Then yearning comes — to be Alice at the end of her Wonderland— to be your Self, and awake from all the fairy tales which have surrounded you.

The Advaitin's concern for others

The Advaitin, in denying “otherness” and regarding the Self as all-sufficient, seeing all being in It and It in all beings, is not thereby denying what we call altruism: quite the contrary. That would be a gross misunderstanding. It sometimes happens that those whose minds are not yet tuned to the nature of the Self make the mistake of applying its description to the smaller self, or ego, and imagine Advaita as a kind of exotic megalomania or solipsism. But it is just because one sees the Self everywhere that one feels the misery of the suffering of every being as one's own.

Sankara says, for example, that it is only after fulfilling normal social obligations that one can be fit to take up in earnest the pursuit of Advaita. All the dharmas of the earlier stages of our evolution must be observed and completed. This includes the social duties everyone has, to family, society and mankind (and, be it observed, Indian thought never did put society's needs or values above the demands of ultimate truth.) Sankara goes on to say that only the person who has had samadhi can freely and spontaneously move to the benefit of others. “In the absence of the egoistic feeling of embodied existence the sannyasins renounce all avidya-generated actions.”[19] “The world is not bound by action done for the sake of the Lord.”[20] He also tells us that the Self-realized should work for the welfare of others, even if they need do nothing more for themselves.
“First kill yourself” (i.e., the little self), says Swami Vivekananda, “then take the whole world as your Self.”[21]

The Perspective of Ramakrishna and Vivekananda

The time has come to represent my own particular tradition. My initial impulse is to ask why we, here in affluent uninvaded America, should be standing around discussing suffering? If it is others' suffering, we ought to be busy doing something about it; if it is our own, we must turn and look within for its cause and possible cure. We who follow the lives and teachings of Sri Ramakrishna and Swami Vivekananda like to be practical people first, theorists afterwards. If one insists upon discussion, then of course we have our point of view. These “prophets of new India” did not encourage uniformity or doctrinal conformity or “political statements,” and clearly what is said here can make no claim to be official or definitive; it arises from my own experience with the teachings of my several teachers and what I have seen in their lives.
Firstly, is there any contradiction in calling suffering a means of learning yet suggesting ways of avoiding it? No, there is not, because each applies at a different stage of spiritual development. Learning to avoid pain is a self-educating process; we teach the laws of karma to the child: “If you climb too high in the tree, a fall would hurt you very badly;” to the youth, “treat others as you would like to be treated.” It is only later, when we discover the maturing role in our lives, of distress—the fact that through stress and distress maturity may appear, that we can join the ranks of Rabi'a's friends and advise ourselves to endure, even to embrace, suffering. Swami Vivekananda said that we learn more through our suffering than through our happiness; does this glorify suffering, persecution etc. and consign us to martyrdom? Not at all. This is no morbid masochism for it is the cheerful mind, according to the Swami, that is persevering and can overcome.
Consider the feelings of the affectionate mother of a lad about to undergo football training. Fully aware of the risks he is taking and the injuries he is likely to sustain, she is nonetheless compelled to endorse it, knowing that to satisfy his eagerness means to aid in his maturity.

A merciful God?

How do we reconcile the mercifulness of God with the suffering in the world? Here it is necessary to consider what picture of “God” one entertains. It may be that we all worship one God, yet about the nature of that Being, there are many views. In ours, the transcendent Brahman or immanent Atman of the Advaitins, the one without a second, is recognized as the ultimate reality. That Consciousness is totally unaffected by anything in us or in the world: the Upanishads are adamant about this. However, that same Being also functions as the All-powerful, All-knowing and All merciful Personal God of the devotee. Both the Personal and the Impersonal aspects of the divine are true. “Whether you follow the ideal of the Personal God,” says Sri Ramakrishna, “or that of the Impersonal Truth, you will realize God alone.”
Furthermore, this Personal aspect of God is considered the Mother of us all. We like to call God Mother, and to look upon the whole cosmos as Her manifestation, her playground, as it were. Patiently She waits while her children play with the play-toys of this life.
While we are busy climbing in the tree of the world, sampling its sweet and sour fruits, she, like the upper bird of the Upanishads indulgently smiles, awaiting her children’s return to her lap. Yes, hers is the saving power, the grace which descends to succor, love and transform the wanderer, the sinner, but it is also more than that: it is the power of self-effort within each of us, the energy and intelligence given us to remake ourselves in our true image. She is both: the savior from above and the potency in us to struggle for ourselves. Looked at in this way, it is God who discovers Selfhood through us, so to speak. Faulkner may have had inkling of the purificatory power of grief when he said, “Between grief and nothing, give me grief.”
We see, then, in the Ramakrishna-Vivekananda perspective a combination of motherly tenderness and manly strength. “Hard as adamant, but soft as a flower,” Vivekananda put it, and he and brother disciples of the Master typified this. Strength he called “the medicine for the world's disease.” Strength is the cure for suffering, whether it is our own or others’, whether we are yogis, jnanis or devotees. Think of the strength it requires to say, “Thy will be done!” One who says it twice is a hypocrite, according to Swamiji.
This “strength” the Swami invokes is not stoicism, or mind over matter. Stoicism can be mere defiance of pain, not victory over it. And as for the Advaitin, the implication is just as clear: “Thou art That” means “you are the Infinite, the Eternal—no more sin, no more bondage, no more limitations, pettiness, ignorance or partiality.” To act upon this takes the greatest strength imaginable. To a mosquito a drop of sea-spray is a disaster: not to you or me. What are our disasters? Everything from the loss of employment to nuclear bombardment. Yet we are promised that through strength we can come to that transcendence of disaster which an ancient king displayed when told his city was on fire: “If Mithila burns to the ground, nothing of me is burnt.”

The suffering of others

The Ramakrishna-Vivekananda movement differs somewhat from orthodox Hindu monasticism in its activism, and is a restoration of the karma yoga doctrine of the Gita. One could suppose that if a person practices non-resistance to evil done to oneself, one might, when evil is done to others, behave in the same way. Sri Ramakrishna said one should not hold one's tongue at the sight of injustice and untruth; when Swamiji was asked what to do in the presence of a person who is molesting another, quick as a flash he retorted, “Why, thrash the perpetrator, of course!” Retrospectively, one may say that India as a whole drew from the teachings of Sankara (but not from his life!) the erroneous conclusion that activity is incompatible with non-dualism. Those familiar with the work of the Ramakrishna Mission in India and beyond, know how thoroughly we reject this misunderstanding and how firmly we pursue the yoga of action—not as charity but as service to the immanent God. The motto of the Order is, in fact, that we work “for the liberation of our own spirit and for the welfare of the world”, and among us there are those convinced that no “and” is required: the two are identical.

The raising of consciousness

In the above, the emphasis has been on strength. But strength is of different kinds and must be suited to the type of distress to be alleviated. Our workers struggle to fill the empty stomach, clothe the naked back and rebuild the wind-ripped roof; still, as missionaries of the practical, we know that man's physical distress is not his most corrosive, and its removal is all-too-often replaced by an increase in psychological suffering. Compare, for example, the effects on a mother, of “natural” childbirth versus the drugged one, and the heightened mental and social ills of a society whose every physical discomfort is attended to without delay. Does anyone doubt that the increase in mental disease, in crime and social upheaval is a price we are paying? “What the mind cannot tolerate it passes on to the body,” one of my abbots used to say. The psychological/emotional bases of illness and disease are recognized today.
Look too at our varying capacities to suffer—the difference in what we can endure, between young and old, the woman and the man, the “civilized” and the aboriginal. In the same person, we find different thresholds for pain in different moods or states of consciousness. In the case of Sri Ramakrishna we see the striking contrast on two successive days. Present at the death of his young nephew, he later reported: “It did not affect me in the least. I stood by and watched a man die. It was like a sword being drawn from its scabbard. I enjoyed the scene, and laughed and danced and sang over it. They removed the body and cremated it. But the next day I felt a racking pain for the loss of Akshay, as if somebody were squeezing my heart like a wet towel. I wondered at it and thought that the Mother was teaching me a lesson. I was not much concerned even with my own body—much less with that of a relative. But if such was my pain at the loss of a nephew, how much more must be the grief of the householders at the loss of their near and dear ones!”
As for the pains of the mind, wide variations are seen in the manner of their handling by different societies. I offer in illustration the case a young woman of Bengal of the circle of Ramakrishna's devotees, Yogin-Ma by name, whose family situation paralleled that of Mrs. Alving in Ibsen's Ghosts . Virtually deserted by her dissolute and uncaring husband, she found a solution vastly unlike Ibsen's; not a tragedy, because it resolves in Yogin-Ma's being absorbed into the circle of women surrounding Sri Ramakrishna's widow, the Holy Mother, internalizing her crisis, seeking the company of the holy and becoming virtually a saint. Not a popular solution in the West! Though the time-period is the same, one can scarcely imagine this happening in Mrs. Alving's Norway. Indeed, one wonders if the tragedies of The Doll's House and Ghosts could even be appreciated in the Indian environment and mental climate. For the latter always tells the soul who sorrows, “go in and up.” To parents who blame their suffering on their children it would say, “Remember that you knew well the gamble you both took in bringing them into this world.” To children blaming their miseries on the parents, “Do you not know that you came here choosing them? Why did you do so? So that you might exercise your developmental powers in just that situation.”
This is the Vedantic point of view and, I venture to suggest, the mature one. We always get misery in return for our love and care—not from the fact that we love or care, but rather because we want these in return.

Pain as our salvation

Thus it is that misery may eventually help to liberate us: “Let us feel pain,” says Vivekananda in his outright manner, “that we have not reached the Highest, that we have not yet reached God, and that pain will be our salvation.” It will also make us bring forth our maximum strength, we might add. Ramakrishna never tired of telling his listeners, “Endure, endure, endure.”
If these solutions to the question of suffering sound rather like cutting off our head to cure the headache, we may fall back on the devotional approach: it never was our head, so not to worry. All heads are Her heads, all faces are Her faces, all hands Her hands, to paraphrase the Upanishad. The Divine Mother is Creatrix, Preserver and Dissolver of this creation. Hinduism admits no Satan in the western sense, no final cleavage in the heart of reality, for all is one Power, one Source. She, the Mother, is playing with Herself: in this drama of life it is She, who is taking all the parts—wearing all these masks of mountains, molecules, molluscs, stars, men and women. “The Divine Mother,” Ramakrishna's account goes, “revealed to me in the Kali temple that it was She who had become everything. She showed me that everything was full of Consciousness. The image was Consciousness, the altar was Consciousness, the water-vessels were Consciousness, the door sill was Consciousness, the marble floor was Consciousness—all was Consciousness. I found everything in the room soaked, as it were, in Bliss—the Bliss of satchidananda. I saw a wicked man in front of the Kali temple; but in him also I saw the Power of the Divine Mother vibrating. That was why I fed a cat with the food that was to be offered to the Mother. I clearly perceived that the Divine Mother had herself become everything—even the cat.”
On another day when he was expounding this truth the following conversation took place:
Sri Ramakrishna: “In other words, after the practice of hard spiritual discipline, one or two have the vision of God, through Her grace, and are liberated. Then the Divine Mother claps her hands in joy and exclaims, 'Bravo! There they go!’“
A devotee objects: “But this play of God is our death.”
Ramakrishna smiles. “Please tell me who you are,” he replies. “God alone has become all this…. It is God herself who has become both knowledge and ignorance.” No doctrine with him! This was his experience, often repeated. “I saw,” he reports near the end of his life, “houses, gardens, roads, men, cattle—all made of one substance; it was as if they were all made of wax.”
Another time: “I see that it is God himself who has become the block, the executioner and the victim for the sacrifice.” Thou art That.

“Vijñana”: the highest realization

This he used to call vijñana , this double process, negation followed by affirmation: we have first to realize, with our whole being—not just intellectually—the nitya, the transcendental Absolute; then, having reached the roof, we descend a stair or two to discover that it is that very Being who has put on the garment of this universe. And She wears it very lightly.
Is this not what Meister Eckhart also is telling us in his own framework? His “Book of Divine Comfort” collects in one place more consolations for the suffering than I have seen anywhere else. “Folks tell us,” he says, “of the holy life, how they have suffered. To tell the tale of what our Lord's friends suffered, time would be all too short. I say: they did not suffer. The least suspicion of God-consciousness and sufferings would be all forgot. This may well happen while the soul is in the body. I say more: while yet in the body a soul may reach oblivion of its travail; not to remember it again.” It is the same message and experience as that of Rabbi'a and Ramakrishna.
Without at least a glimpse of the truth of this vision we shall never understand the Crucifixion, nor suffering, nor the “problem of evil.” That is the message coming from this prophet of the new India: human suffering and worry spring only from our persisting thought that we are the doer. Suffering is the de-hypnotizing of ourselves. “All troubles come to an end when the ego dies.”
Let us close with a line from Gibran: “Your pain should not seem more wondrous than your joy;” and a stanza from the poet of Indian freedom, Sarojini Naidu:

Thou shalt drink deep of joy and fame,
And love shall burn thee like a fire,
And pain shall cleanse thee like a flame
To purge the dross from thy desire.

The questions posed by the audience were sharp and well-informed and a very good feeling was engendered all around. The panel received many compliments.
The symposium members parted, leaving the beautiful campus and the comfortable hospitality of Randolph-Macon College in Virginia, savoring a conclave of real excellence.

Bhagavad Gita, VI. 23.
I. 2.20.
Raja Yoga, Introduction.
Yoga Sutras of Patanjali , I. 32.
Ibid, I. 33.
Ibid. I. 36.
III. 1-3.
Bhagavad Gita III. 29.
Ibid. XII. 6-7.
Ibid. XVIII. 65-66.
Ibid. XVIII. 66.
On Prayer Alfred A. Knopf p.12
Katha Upaniṣad II. 2 .9.
Chhāndogya Upaniṣad VII. 23 1.
Bṛhadaraṇyaka Upaniṣad IV.3.21.
Chhāndogya Upaniṣad VIII.7.1.
Iśa Upaniṣad 7
vs. 5
Bhagavad Gita with Sankara's commentary, trs. by A.M. Sastry. Samata Books, Madras, p. 459.
Bhagavad Gita, III. 9.
Vol. I p. 88

Chapter VII Suffering VISIT IN VIRGINIA

Chapter VII

Suffering
VISIT IN VIRGINIA