sufferingto attempts to reduce it, raises questions about its fairness, especially in
light of a God who is supposed to be merciful, good, and just, and calls
into the question the purpose and meaning of life. Religious traditions
have come to grips with suffering by attempting to place it into a com-
prehensive context of universal understanding, and have endeavored to
find ways to alleviate or to escape suffering. Often, these two fundamen-
tal responses overlap.
In Judaism, suffering arises from the finite human condition, which is
more directly caused by sin, a willful disobedience of God’s command-
ments, or ignorance of the right religious path. Suffering can be construed
as negative because it is a punishment for transgressions but in a more
positive way it helps to educate a person. According to ancient Jewish
texts (Deut. 4.20; Isa. 48.10; Jer. 11.4), suffering is also a means of refine-
ment and purification. Moreover, suffering can help a person gain insight
into human existence and help that person gain a sense of empathy toward
others. It is also possible that a person can suffer by behaving virtuously,
as evident with Job as the primary paradigm in the Jewish tradition.
Disobedient or virtuous persons are not the only sufferers in the Jewish
tradition because God is also said to suffer due to His concern for the
afflictions of His people (Gen. 6.5–6; Isa. 63.9).
Similar to the Jewish position, the Christian apostle Paul teaches that
suffering is punishment for sin (Gal. 6.7), which makes it inevitable
because of sinful human nature. At the same time, suffering is welcomed
because it directly assists in building a person’s character, endurance, and
hope (Rom. 5.3–4) with the model being the suffering servant, Jesus, who
himself suffered for the sins of humankind in an act of vicarious atone-
ment. In fact, the early Christian community is historically nurtured in
suffering for their faith from their Roman persecutors. Those Christian
sufferers who pay the ultimate, violent price for their faith become heroic
martyrs who immediately gain entry into heaven.
Suffering plays a definitive role in Buddhism because it represents the
First Noble Truth of the Buddha’s teachings: All life is suffering (duk-
kha). This fundamental truth is based on the Buddha’s empirical observa-
tions about life with its sickness, old age, and death, but it needs to be
grasped in a wider context that includes the cycle of causation, which
necessarily means that everything within the world is causally condi-
tioned or produced. The notion of suffering includes the notions of imper-
fection, impermanence, emptiness, and insubstantiality. If the root
meaning of dukkha (suffering) is examined, it suggests that life is dislo-
cated in its present condition because of ordinary suffering, suffering
produced by change, and suffering inherent in conditioned states. If ordi-
nary suffering is obvious, the second type refers to the fact that within the