The sights of suffering which upset the mind of young Siddhartha were of disease, old age and death. But to the enlightened mind of Buddha not simply these, but the very essential conditions of life, human and sub-human, appeared, without exception, to be fraught with misery.
Birth, old age, disease, death, sorrow, grief, wish, despair, in short, all that is born of attachment, is misery.
We have mentioned in the General Introduction that pessimism of this type is common to all the Indian schools; and in emphasizing the first noble truth, Buddha has the support of all important Indian thinkers.
The Carvaka materialists would, of course, take exception to Buddha’s wholesale condemnation of life in the world, and point out the different sources of pleasure that exist jn life along with those of pain.
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But Buddha and many other Indian thinkers would reply that worldly pleasures appear as such only to short-sighted people.
Their transitoriness, the pains felt on their loss and the fears felt lest they should be lost, and other evil consequences, make pleasures lose their charm and turn them into positive sources of feat and anxiety.