When I posted earlier today about Jack Kornfield, I hadn't realized that my last post was also about him. As I listened to the second disk about the four noble truths, I thought about the question of suffering. I remember that I had read several books about the problem of suffering from a Christian perspective during my exploration just out of college. I also remember when the book When Bad Things Happen to Good People by Rabbi Harold S. Kushner came out. A couple of years ago, I touched on suffering in this blog.
What struck me today is that the first noble truth does not try to explain why God allows suffering as is common in Christian teaching. One should not begin a discussion by being defensive, yet that seems to be the approach in Christianity. Buddha does seem to have looked clearly at the world and began with something that should be obvious. Jack's teaching is the first time I have really paid attention specifically to the four noble truths though I have begun to become familiar with the buddhist view of suffering from other causal reading (articles and the web rather than books).
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