Furthermore, when they see the majesty and abundant pleasures of gods
with greater merit, the ones with less merit become depressed and
intimidated. For the weaker gods, there is the distress of being driven out of
their homes by the stronger ones. The gods in the realm of the Four Great
Kings and the Heaven of the Thirty-Three, in particular, quarrel and fight
with the demigods, and they suffer horribly when they are cut and torn, or
killed, by their weapons.
b. REFLECTING ON THE SUFFERINGS OF THE TWO HIGHER WORLDS
In the form and formless worlds there is no manifest suffering of suffering,
but the gods there are never exempt from the suffering of everything
composite.j Because the ordinary beings k in these realms become, as it
were, intoxicated with concentration, they do not make any progress in
increasing their good qualities. Once they have tasted the flavor of
concentration, they dare not be parted from concentration as an
experience,72 and as a result, their concentration fades and they die. In
particular, when the propelling action l they performed in a previous life is
exhausted, the ordinary beings in these realms again take birth in the world
of desire. Although they have had an apparently blissful experience in their
earlier meditation of worldly concentration and now in the concentrations of
the form and formless realms, when the propelling force for this tainted
bliss is spent, they will again fall into the lower realms without any idea
where they are going, like an arrow being shot into the sky. Letter to a
Friend says:
A Kamaloka god, one gains such bliss,
As Brahma, bliss that’s free from all desire;
But know that after that comes constant pain:
As firewood one feeds Avici’s flames.73
So, wherever we are born in the three worlds of cyclic existence, there is
suffering. Whatever the place, it is a place of suffering. Whoever
accompanies us is a companion in suffering. Whatever we experience, it
does not go beyond the experience of suffering. As is stated in the Sublime
Continuum,
Just as in excrement there are no good smells, for the five kinds of
beings there is no happiness;
Their sufferings are like the ever-continuing sensation of fire,
weapons, caustic salts, and so forth.74
That is what we have to understand.
III. REFLECTING PARTICULARLY ON THE NATURE OF THE THREE KINDS OF SUFFERING
Generally speaking, there are two aspects to the sufferings of cyclic existence: cause and effect. The cause concerns gods and humans who,