Suffering is not always the way of Life
Once the Buddha was confronted by a monster called Suciloma, whose name translates as ‘Needle-hair’. He was a prototype punk with needles for hair! He wanted to find out if the Buddha was really enlightened. So, he sat next to the Buddha and leaned towards him to prick him, but the Buddha leaned away.
‘Aha!’ said Needle-hair. ‘You don’t like pain. You’re not really enlightened. An enlightened person would maintain equanimity no matter what. He wouldn’t have any likes or dislikes.’
The Buddha said, ‘Don’t be stupid. There are things that are going to cause problems for my body. It’s going to hurt it and make it unhealthy’
This is just common sense. You don’t step on snakes, you don’t run into fires, and you don’t allow needles to poke you. You move away. It’s common sense, not attachment.
That’s loving-kindness toward your body: keeping it healthy, keeping it safe
Often blinded by our experiences, conditioning, and set in our ways, though, that’s exactly what we do: we step on snakes, run into fire and allow needles to poke us. Snakes of attachments, fire of desires, and needles of jealousy and covetousness. They bite, burn and hurt.
We call it suffering and we think that this is the way of life. We mistake our pain for our suffering. We have little control over the former, but the latter is almost entirely in our hands. We can take things in our stride or be tossed into the tide. This choice, we must remember, is in our hands. At all times.
Ref: Taken from Book “The Big Questions of Life”
