..续本文上一页l expedience. It leads to a revaluation of all values and a new scale of worth indifferent to the claims of self-concern. And it opens us to confidence in an unseen order of relations and inter-connections, an order in which the values that emerge, so often in forceful opposition to the old, will find their proper justification and reward.

　　Yet for suffering to become an effective spur to spiritual awakening it is not enough merely to encounter it. For the religious consciousness to be aroused suffering must be not only met as a constant liability of our existence, but confronted and grappled with in the arena of thematic reflection. As long as we engage suffering simply in its superficial modes, as felt pain and sorrow, we will react to it in one of two ways, both of which operate at a purely psychological level. In the first case we will react to suffering in an unhealthy manner, as when we arouse resentment against the source of our displeasure and seek relief by annihilating it, ignoring it, or running away in pursuit of some easy escape. In the second case we will react to suffering in a mentally healthy way, as when we fortify our minds with patience and courage, strengthen our capacities for endurance, and seek to resolve the problem in a realistic manner. But though the second approach is definitely to be preferred to the first, in neither case does that inward revolution take place which awakens us to our extreme need for deliverance and compels us to set off in a new direction previously unknown and unexplored. The urge for liberation can only set in when pain and sorrow have been confronted with reflective awareness and recognized as symptoms of a deeper ailment demanding a radical therapy. The quest for a conclusive solution to the problem of suffering begins with an act of understanding, not with mere tribulation. It starts from the realization that suffering is more than a chance encroachment upon a state of affairs otherwise felicitous, that it is a malady which infects our being upwards from its very root. We must come to see that the breeding ground of suffering lies not so much in the outside world as at the base of our own being, and that any cure that is to be permanently effective must uproot it at this inward source.

　　The arising of such a realization depends upon the adoption of a new perspective from which the fact of suffering can be faced in its full range and universality. Though single in its essence, suffering or dukkha yet pides into three stages or tiers in accordance with the level of understanding from which it is viewed. [10] At the most elementary level suffering appears as physical pain and oppression, manifest most clearly in the events of birth, sickness, aging and death, as well as in hunger, thirst, privation, and bodily discomfort. At a higher level it comes to be seen as a psychological fact -- as the sorrow and frustration springing from our separation from what is desired, our meeting with what is disliked, and the disappointment of our expectations. And at the third and highest level suffering becomes manifest in its essential form, as the inherent un-satisfactoriness of the samsaric round in which we turn without purpose on account of our ignorance and attachments. These three tiers are not mutually exclusive. In each case the lower level serves as basis for the higher, by which it is absorbed and comprehended. Thus, though the penetration of the highest stage, the essential suffering comprised in the "five clinging aggregates" (pañcupadanakkhandha), represents the climax of understanding, this realization comes as the fruit of a long period of preparation grounded upon the first flash of insight into the basic inadequacy of the human condition. Such an insight usually dawns thr…

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