Buddhism is often described as pessimistic, but is the epithet just?  What does it mean?  The dictionary defines pessimism as the doctrine which teaches that the world is as bad as it can be and that everything naturally tends towards evil.  That is emphatically not Buddhist teaching.  The higher forms of religion have their basis and origin in the existence of evil, but their justification and value depend on their power to remove it.  A religion, therefore, can never be pessimistic, just as a doctor who should simply pronounce diseases to be incurable would never be successful as a practitioner.  The Buddha states with the utmost frankness that religion is dependent on the existence of evil.  “If three things did not exist, the Buddha would not appear in the world and his law and doctrine would not shine.  What are the three?  Birth, old age and death.”  This is true.  If there were people leading perfectly happy, untroubled lives, it is not likely that any thought of religion would enter their minds, and their irreligious attitude would be reasonable, for the most that any deity is asked to give is perfect happiness, and that these imaginary folk are supposed to have already.  But according to Buddhism no form of existence can be perfectly happy or permanent.  Gods and angels may be happier than men but they are not free from the tyranny of desire and ultimately they must fall from their high estate and pass away.

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The second Truth declares the origin of suffering.  “It is,” says the Buddha, “the thirst which causes rebirth, which is accompanied by pleasure and lust and takes delight now here, now there; namely, the thirst for pleasure, the thirst for another life, the thirst for success.”  This Thirst (Tanha) is the craving for life in the widest sense:  the craving for pleasure which propagates life, the craving for existence in the dying man which brings about another birth, the craving for wealth, for power, for pre-eminence within the limits of the present life.  What is the nature of this craving and of its action?  Before attempting to answer we must consider what is known as the chain of causation[442], one of the oldest, most celebrated, and most obscure formulae of Buddhism.  It is stated that the Buddha knew it before attaining enlightenment[443], but it is second in importance only to the four truths, and in the opening sections of the Mahavagga, he is represented as meditating on it under the Bo-tree, both in its positive and negative form.  It runs as follows:  “From ignorance come the sankharas, from the sankharas comes consciousness, from consciousness come name-and-form, from name-and-form come the six provinces (of the senses), from the six provinces comes contact, from contact comes sensation, from sensation comes craving, from craving comes clinging, from clinging comes existence, from existence comes birth, from birth come old age and death, pain and lamentation, suffering, sorrow, and despair.  This is the origin of this whole mass of suffering.  But by the destruction of ignorance, effected by the complete absence of lust, the sankharas are destroyed, by the destruction of the sankharas, consciousness is destroyed” and so on through the whole chain backwards.