For Hindus, eradication of suffering is only by right knowledge

 “As men learned more about the world, they found themselves everless capable of expressing to their educated fellowman what it was that they have learned. The gap between life and knowledge grew wider and wider. Those who governed could not understand those who thought and those who wanted to know could not understand them, those who knew” Will Durant in the preface of the story of philosophy.

But this could not be the case of Hindu thinkers, they have the strongest forward view of life. Scholars never had the hesitation and complexity to found any of it in Hindu thought. Hindu philosophy had a problem in front of them and they pondered on this problem to solve it by their own means. The end is generalized, to ride of a suffering of life. They advocate the life and explain the way of living. They dedicated to the human psychology and they worked to encourage the prefect society.

It drawn, that the philosophers had started with the life, full of misery and charged that life at the end is no more real in any sense to life. The soul, for Hindus, as the centre of philosophical bliss and the world, unreal, unrequired and unworthy in all aspect.

But the picture painted above for the Hindu philosophy seems to be untrue, a because suffering and life for Hindus are the two faces of a coin, regathered again and again in the rebirth or recycle of life. It is taken that Hindu philosophers were only concerned with the miseries of life, whether it is an orthodox or unorthodox system of Hindu philosophies, they seem to draw a sketch of life and it was taken that for Hindus, life is not worth living and such view was so largely accepted that it prevailed for centuries and therefore there was no discoveries and invention in Hindu’s land for centuries.

But in reality, Hindu philosophers never said that life is not worth of living or they never professed the suicidal concept for all or even for any problem, For Hindu thinkers, life was not the problem in any way but the problem was miseries and sufferings in life. They accepted the truth that life is full of troubles and man therefore dwells in the ocean of suffering (Bhavsagar). Hindu thinkers had no theme that this life is useless but life is real and so the miseries in life.

Max Muller said that, “They simply state that they received the first impulse to philosophical reflection from the fact, that there is suffering in the world, they evidently thought that in the perfect world, suffering has no place, pain certainly seems to an imperfection and, as such, may well have cause, the question, why it existed and how could be annihilated.”

To some extend those Hindu philosophies on this soil had realized the sense of suffering, but they never had any outcry for this against the Nature injustice. Otherwise, suicide expedient becomes the main problem for Hindus. Running away from the life is not the main teaching of any Hindu philosophy.  They admitted first the pressure of sufferings and then developed the method to overcome that suffering.

 Schopenhauer in Man is a wolf to Man, page 419 said, “If we should bring clearly to a man’s sight the terrible suffering and miseries to which his life is constantly exposed, he would be seized with horror and if we were to conduct the confirmed optimist through the hospital and surgical operating room, through the prisons, torture chamber etc. If we were open to him all the dark abodes of miseries, where it hies it self from the glance of cold curiosity and finally allow to him look into the starving dungeons of UGOLINO. For where did Dante took the materials of his hell but from our actual world? And yet he made a very proper hell out of it, but when on the other hand had he came to describe heaven and its delights, he had an insurmountable difficulty before him for our world affords no materials at all for this.”

Badarayana started the Vedantic thought and took suffering as real and the reason of suffering is avidhya (wrong knowledge) and it was the object of philosophy to remove this wrong knowledge by means of right knowledge and to bring out the true knowledge of Brahman ( the absolute reality) the highest bliss (Thatgat Upnishad II). They found that the cause of suffering in this world is only because of wrong knowledge and this wrong knowledge is something which took the place of right knowledge a wrongly concept.

Samkhya begins at once to accept that the existence of the three kind of sufferings and announces as its highest object, is to complete cessation of this painful life. They also realized the difference between the kind of pain and their causes. For them too, the suffering is the main problem but the aim was not only for them to eradicate the pain but to get the right knowledge, this right knowledge alone is capable of removing all physical and mental pain. And after that the Yoga philosophy followed the theoretical part of Symakhya and goes to the extreme of ceasing the pain by the method of Samaddhi through cessation of modification in heart (Cittvrati Nirodha).