To be Free from Suffering: Individual Consciousness, Societal Revolutions and the Power of Buddhism

Abstract

<p>This dissertation proposes to clear the path for an activism aimed at alleviating suffering in the world by addressing and overcoming certain debilitating philosophical confusions that cloud our understanding of suffering, its causes and remedies, and that get in the way of developing a genuinely practical deliberative agency aimed at suffering alleviation. It centres on the question and challenges of non-theistic individualistic solutions to sufferings, with a focus on early Buddhism of the Pāli Canon, the earliest source for the Buddha’s teaching, and elaborations and elucidation of Buddhism by contemporary scholars. It argues that a fundamentally non-individualist, societal/structural, approach to alleviating suffering - as, paradigmatically, proposed in the Marxist tradition - is, by itself and removed from individualistic approaches, doomed to failure, though, in conjunction with a properly individualist understanding of suffering, it offers much to genuinely practical deliberation concerned with suffering alleviation.</p>