Hello, I’m Cheng Qing. Welcome to Relief for Life: Forty Introductions to Buddhism.

Before introducing Buddhist thought, let me ask:Why do humans feel compelled to seek life’s meaning?

German philosopherKarl Jaspers(1883–1969) argued that only in boundary situations such asdeath, chance, guilt, and the unreliability of the worlddo people deeply investigate existence. Put simply,only pain and anxiety awaken the urge to understand life’s inner value and meaning.

In The Origin and Goal of History, Jaspers observed that around 500 BCE, the Axial Age, several civilizations developed a shared feature:people suddenly perceived the boundary between themselves and cosmic order, the world’s terror, and their own powerlessness.Greek philosophers, China’s pre-Qin thinkers, Indian śramaṇas, and Israelite prophets each used spiritual practice to explore existence and the universe’s ultimate meaning.

For Jaspers, Socrates’s questioning opened minds, exposed error, and sought truth about the soul. Western philosophy grew from Greece, but its mainstream increasingly became systematic, logical knowledge, weakening concern for mind and soul.Because mind is subjective and hard to systematize, it is classified either as religious mysticism or merely emotional psychology.

We all suffer. Modern neuroscience, psychology, and philosophy can analyze its mechanisms, thenmake us imagine that knowing about suffering means we can solve it.Butabstract reasoning separates direct pain from lived experience.Reflection occurs afterward and loses pain’s immediacy. Conceptual theories persuade us retrospectively while suffering remains unresolved.

Modern mainstream thought leads us totreat intellectual history as continuous progress in knowledge.Science reinforces the belief that modern people are wiser and happier. Yet unprecedented control of nature and material abundance coexist with deep spiritual crisis: more knowledge has not settled the mind. In other words,despite unprecedented material security, we may be no happier than people in the age of Socrates and Confucius.

Why?