There is no place better to contemplate the transience of human life than a hospital. Surrounded by three of the four sights that are said to have spurred Siddhartha Gautama on his quest for the end of human suffering — sickness, old age and death — one is compelled to seek out the fourth. The promise of transcendence rooted in a realisation of truth.
According to popular accounts of the life of the prince who would be Buddha, his life-altering moment came when he stepped out of the confines of his sheltered life. He came face-to-face with four sights — a sick person, an old person, a corpse and an ascetic. The young prince, who had been kept away from anything unpleasant all his life, was shaken to the core to discover that these were inevitable consequences of being human. Never having encountered them before, their impact on him was cataclysmic. It was as if his eyes were blown open and he could not close them again to the truths revealed before them.
Siddhartha was deeply affected, but what was he to do with the knowledge revealed to him? In this, the fourth sight — that of an ascetic — proved to be crucial. He pointed towards a possibility, of excavating a path that might lead towards an understanding of and, perhaps, even an end to suffering.
It was so powerful an idea that it impelled Siddhartha to set out from his palace, leaving behind material comforts, his family, his career, in short everything that had made up his life until then. He embarked upon the groundbreaking journey that would culminate under the Bodhi tree, from where he would arise as the Buddha, the fully awakened one.
In his first sermon thereafter, he succinctly articulated both the reality of the human condition and the possibility of transcending it. Once we are born, we will grow old, fall sick and die. Buddha was not looking for a way to dodge these because that is impossible. What he uncovered was the knowledge that would liberate us, not from the human condition, but from the suffering that seems to be bound up with it. It need not be so, was what the Buddha discovered.
This knowledge is enshrined in the four noble truths that formed the crux of Siddhartha’s first sermon. He begins by acknowledging the truth of suffering, the fact that it is in-built in the human condition. And this suffering has an inner cause, which is desire, to have things go our way, to have the world moulded according to us. The third noble truth is that of cessation of the cause of suffering and therefore of suffering itself, and the fourth noble truth shows the path, the way, to do so.
In a hospital, surrounded by the inevitability of suffering, one cannot but wish the ubiquitous television be replaced with a remembrance of Siddhartha’s journey of discovery, that we are condemned to the human condition, but not to suffering!
