The Religion of the Veda: The Ancient Religion of India (from Rig-Veda to Upanishads) c11.41

c11.41

And yet the deep-seated instinct of life which makes men all over the earth, India included, wail their dead, goes hand in hand in all higher forms of Hindu religion with the apparently sincere expression of a desire to be released from life. Pessimism, at first negative, in the end positive and profound, becomes the ruling theory of Hindu life. With all the attractions, fascinations, and beauties of life, life is felt to be a fetter, or a knot which ties the heart to the world of sense; and release (*moksha*) from the everlasting round of lives (*samsāra*) is the Hindu salvation (*nirvāṇa*). Buddhism later on expresses the urgent need of salvation from existence in its well-known fourfold doctrine of suffering. Its first clause establishes the truth of suffering: Birth is suffering; age is suffering; disease is suffering; union with what is not loved is suffering; separation from what is loved is suffering. The conviction that all life is futile is expressed hardly less distinctly in the Great Forest Upanishad (3. 5. 2), where hunger and thirst, woe and delusion, age and death, desire for children, and desire for possessions are lumped alike as the evils and vanities of life, before the highest knowledge has been attained.¹ Anyhow, all the principal Hindu systems of religion and philosophy start out with the assurance that the world is full of suffering, and that is their particular business to account for it and to remove it.