Buddhism is best seen as a view to the way of life; in fact it’s the path that one walks which enables one to see the light in all of its blinding hideous glory.
The Buddha based his entire teaching on the fact of human suffering and the ultimately dissatisfying character of human life. In this sense, he was in a sense the first existentialist.
Existence is painful. The conditions that make an individual are precisely those that also give rise to dissatisfaction and suffering. Individuality implies limitation; limitation gives rise to desire; and, inevitably, desire causes suffering, since what is desired is transitory. Here his philosophy sounds remarkably like Sartre’s. It appears that the Buddha was born too soon.
As the Buddha says, all of life is sadness. This is in fact a verifiable truth. But in fact at the very same time, life is the most joyous thing imaginable. In understanding that these two seemingly but not actually opposite processes are going at the same time, ones arrives, finally, via the long and winding road, at the truth of the Buddha.
