,,,The Buddha taught that the three poisons cause a great deal of suffering. They are: Greed, Anger and Ignorance. His goal was to get people to strive for a life of: Generosity, Compassion and Wisdom. If we could reach that goal, we could eliminate a lot of human suffering, including our own.
,,,First, greed comes from a desire to have more than we need. It’s a desire that cannot be satisfied with its object; for instance, money. When we give in to greed, the more we have, the more we want. Greed can never be satisfied. It can only be challenged with self awareness. We must determine how much we need and when we have enough, admit it. Greed is a distraction that always puts happiness out of our reach. It only produces suffering.
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Anger is the next poison. It’s not anger that causes suffering; it’s the actions that we take when we don’t know how to handle our anger. Anger is natural. Harming others is unnatural and causes suffering for the victim and the perpetrator.
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Ignorance is the third poison. The most vivid example today is the ignorance that prevails in certain countries that are struggling to keep modernity at bay with archaic forms of obsolete religious belief systems. I won’t argue that there certainly are some aspects of post modernity that I wish we didn’t have to tolerate. But institutionalized ignorance is not the answer. This kind of ignorance demands that terrible things happen to innocent victims.
The Three Poisons of Human Suffering | The Big Slice
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