Buddhist Philosophy in India and Ceylon c8.s2.7

c8.s2.7

It will be seen that the whole discussion of the issue of misery is based either on the preconception regarding the possibility of happiness for the absolute only, or on empiric observation of the actual misery of existence. There is nothing in the Canon to show a full appreciation of the fundamental issue whether in itself desire is pleasurable or painful; the idea that the normal exercise of activity is actually pleasurable, so that in any individual case the ordinary life of man is made up in the main of pleasure, not pain, is one which seems not to have occurred, doubtless because the psychological analysis of the Buddhists contented itself in the general run with verbal investigations. We have no guarantee from the Buddhist attitude that the normal judgement of the average Indian of the time, in the region where Buddhism arose, found life on the whole unpleasant, and the empirical basis of the Buddhist view may well be denied serious validity. The philosophical preconception, however, would as often be sufficient to meet any questions which might have been raised on this score, and doubtless to him who was predisposed on logical grounds to take a pessimistic view of the world, there was much to justify the conclusion that the life and aims of the ordinary unenlightened man were rather a pitiful thing.