The Buddhist doctrine does not mean that life is something trifling and unimportant, to be lived anyhow.  On the contrary, birth as a human being is an opportunity of inestimable value.  He who is so born has at least a chance of hearing the truth and acquiring merit.  “Hard is it to be born as a man, hard to come to hear the true law” and when the chance comes, the good fortune of the being who has attained to human form and the critical issues which depend on his using it rightly are dwelt on with an earnestness not surpassed in Christian homiletics.  He who acts ill as a man may fall back into the dreary cycles of inferior births, among beasts and blind aimless beings who cannot understand the truth, even if they hear it.  From this point of view human life is happiness, only like every form of existence it is not satisfying or permanent.

Dukkha is commonly rendered in English by pain or suffering, but an adequate literary equivalent which can be used consistently in translating is not forthcoming.  The opposite state, sukha, is fairly rendered by well-being, satisfaction and happiness.  Dukkha is the contrary of this:  uneasiness, discomfort, difficulty.  Pain or suffering are too strong as renderings, but no better are to hand.  When the Buddha enlarges on the evils of the world it will be found that the point most emphasized as vitiating life is its transitoriness.

“Is that which is impermanent sorrow or joy?” he asks of his disciples.  “Sorrow, Lord,” is the answer, and this oft-repeated proposition is always accepted as self-evident.  The evils most frequently mentioned are the great incurable weaknesses of humanity, old age, sickness and death, and also the weariness of being tied to what we hate, the sadness of parting from what we love.  Another obvious evil is that we cannot get what we want or achieve our ambitions.  Thus the temper which prompts the Buddha’s utterances is not that of Ecclesiastes—­the melancholy of satiety which, having enjoyed all, finds that all is vanity—­but rather the regretful verdict of one who while sympathizing with the nobler passions—­love, ambition, the quest of knowledge—­is forced to pronounce them unsatisfactory.  The human mind craves after something which is permanent, something of which it can say This is mine.  It longs to be something or to produce something which is not transitory and which has an absolute value in and for itself.  But neither in this world nor in any other world are such states and actions possible.  Only in Nirvana do we find a state which rises above the transitory because it rises above desire.  Not merely human life but all possible existences in all imaginable heavens must be unsatisfactory, for such existences are merely human life under favourable conditions.  Some great evils, such as sickness, may be absent but life in heaven must come to an end:  it is not eternal, it is not even permanent, it does not, any more than this life, contain anything that god or man can call his own.  And it may be observed that when Christian writers attempt to describe the joys of a heaven which is eternally satisfying, they have mostly to fall back on negative phrases such as “Eye hath not seen nor ear heard.”