Removing suffering

Easter is approaching, and the Christian Easter is in remembrance of Jesus Christ dying on the cross and later returning to life. The death of Jesus Christ is seen as a sacrificial offering for atoning for the sins of humanity.

The idea that the sins of one person can be taken away by another person seems to exist in most religions. But there are different opinions about the problem to be solved. Is it sin, suffering or the wrath of the Gods?

Shantideva, who was a scholar in the Buddhist tradition, is analysing the matter in Bodhicaryavatara. (Chapter 8, Meditation 101 - 108.) In Buddhism there is no sin, but suffering.

First he claims that suffering has no proper owner. Suffering belongs to no one.

This is different from the Christian tradition where sin always has an owner. By doing a sinful action, the individual becomes the owner of sin. But the suffering caused by the sinner hits another individual. This person might be without sin (in this case) but will nevertheless suffer the consequences.

Does this mean that the death of Jesus atones for the bad guy, but leaves the victim alone in the distress? The sins of the victim are also atoned for, but what about the suffering?

In the Buddhist tradition, the problem is suffering and not sin. Even if suffering has no owner it exists. It should be prevented and removed.

"If the suffering of one ends the suffering of many, then one who has compassion for others and himself must cause that suffering to arise." (8-105)

Those who have understood that the suffering of others is as important as the things they themselves hold dear "plunge down into the Avici hell as geese into a cluster of lotus blossoms" (107), Shantideva claims.

Maybe you could add that in order to plunge down voluntarily into the hell you should trust in having a remedy against the suffering of others. Which is the mechanism making it possible for one to take away the suffering of others?

The answer could be in the question of ownership. Removing suffering is the same as releasing the voluntary ownership of suffering adopted by those who suffer. The moment they realise they do not have to carry this burden, the suffering is gone.

Merit

The Buddhist tradition is very intellectual, and the written material is much bigger than any individual can read during a life. So, from a position of having read just a fraction, trying to boil down the ideas into just two words, these words would be emptiness and merit.

Emptiness is the Buddhist description of reality. The full understanding of this is very sophisticated.

One very important aspect of emptiness is absence of self nature. Everything is created by causes and conditions.

This means that if we want a good life we have to get the right causes and conditions.

And good causes and conditions are made by merit.

We get merit by having a positive attitude towards others in everything we do.

Doing typically good things as help to heal and to be of service for those who need service gives merit if we mean what we do. We can also get merit by having a positive attitude in situations which are not typically good.

Self made

As we have no self, we can be self made...
If we had a given self we could not change. As we have no given self we can change. When we have changed we can call this new situation self made - we made it ourselves.
The argument is something like this:
The personality we have now is decided by our body and mind. Mind is most important. It contains our experiences, our knowledge and our hopes for the future.
According to Buddhism there is nothing more. This is different from our spontaneous feeling and from most religions, which claim there is a self or soul which is the supervisor of all we do.
If our personality is nothing more than the effect of our present knowledge we might as well improve our knowledge and thus get a better self.
To change personality is not easy. It is not a superficial thing. But it can be done.