Buddhism and Pessimism

 by Harold Stewart

That 'Buddhism holds a pessimistic view of life' has, ever since Schopenhauer, been indelibly imprinted in the minds of Westerners as a standardized error. What this condemnation as 'Oriental fatalism' really means is that Buddhism does not share modern Western man's restless and aggressive attitude of self-assertion, an extraverted optimism scarcely supported by the actual conditions of worldly existence.

The truth is quite otherwise: Buddhism adopts neither of the sentimental attitudes of pessimism or optimism, which appertain to European and American cultures. Instead the Buddha regards universal existence with detached Wisdom and impartial Compassion. The aim of his teaching and method is Liberation from all such partial and illusory viewpoints, coloured by desire and aversion, into a state of peace and well-being. The Buddhist doctrine is not optimistic, because 'seeing things as they really are' includes 'a full look at the Worst', which reveals them as relative, limited, and finite and entails the realization that pain and suffering are endemic and incurable so long as one is identified with Samsara.

There is not one shred of historical evidence to substantiate the millenarian fiction that any society staffed by men is perfectible. All that we know of the past goes to prove the world's chronic corruptibility, at least so long as it is under human management. Its defects seem inbuilt by design, to prevent our permanent attachment to any of its forms of impermanence and to ensure its continued function as what Keats called 'a vale of soul-making'. The Buddha's ultimate affirmation after confronting all exigencies is thus at the opposite pole to the naive optimism of 'God's in his Heaven, all's right with the world' or 'All is for the best in this best of all possible worlds' or 'One truth is clear, whatever is, is right'. As Dickens pointedly remarked of Pope's line, it 'would be as final as it is lazy, did it not include the troublesome consequence that nothing that ever was, was wrong'.

But neither is the Buddha's teaching pessimistic, since in his analysis of human experience into its constituent elements, or dharmas, the pleasant far outnumber the painful. Yet for all that, they still prove to be a source of suffering, for even a life of unalloyed pleasure and comfort soon palls and passes away, leaving behind only regrets for lost happiness and the prospect of sickness, old age, and death. The Western misconception that Buddhist doctrine is pessimistic probably arose from the translation of the term duhkha as pain or suffering in the aphorism 'All existence is duhkha', when it carries the wider meaning of the finite limitations to which all existents are subject.

Its opposite is sukha, which signifies the smooth movement of the World-Axle in the nave of the Wheel of Existence. That empty hole in the hub, without which Samsara could not revolve, is known as kha, or zero, as A. K. Coomaraswamy explains, and aptly exemplifies the practical usefulness of the Void. From sukha is derived Sukhavati, the Western Paradise of Amida Buddha. Finally, the Middle Way taught by the Buddha transcends both extremes of pessimism and optimism and opens up an expedient path by which we can escape from our existential impasse.

The bare mention of escape is bound to call forth the stock criticism of those modern descendants of the Confucians, whose outlook is restricted to human society and its political and economic institutions as the sole reality. Despite its inspiring and formative influence on most of the Traditional civilizations of the Far East, Buddhism has long been accused of failure to face up to its social problems and responsibilities or, as it is called in the jargon, escapism. The twentieth century attaches a moral stigma to this term of opprobrium that suffices to disqualify and debar any subject to which it is applied. So Buddhism, the first Tradition to found many of those beneficent social institutions later adopted by secular states, is convicted of seeking to escape from the pain and suffering of this world - as if that were not the aim of all the healing arts !

Yet in some predicaments to escape may become a moral obligation, such as for the prisoner of war, whose military duty it is to try to regain his freedom. Buddhism likewise offers Liberation from Samsara to those unfortunates imprisoned by delusion, hatred, and greed. When social moralists inveigh against escapism, it is as well to recall C. S. Lewis's penetrating observation that 'Those most interested in preventing escape are gaolers'.

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