(This entry touches upon some themes discussed with greater rigor, thoroughness, and scholarliness in my "No Self? A Look at a Buddhist Argument," International Philosophical Quarterly, vol. 42, no. 4 (December 2002), pp. 453-466.)
For Buddhism, all is dukkha, suffering. All is unsatisfactory. This, the First Noble Truth, runs contrary to ordinary modes of thinking: doesn't life routinely offer us, besides pain and misery and disappointment, intense pleasures and deep satisfactions? How then can it be true that all is unsatisfactory? For the Buddhist, however, what is ordinarily taken by the unenlightened worldling to be sukha (pleasure) is at bottom dukkha. Why?
Because no pleasure, mental or physical, gives permanent and plenary satisfaction. Each satisfaction leaves us in the lurch, wanting more. A desire satisfied is a desire entrenched. Masturbate once, and you will do it a thousand times, with the need for repetition testifying to the unsatisfactoriness of the initial satisfaction. If it were fully satisfactory, why would you be inclined to repeat the pleasure? Each pleasure promises more that it can possibly deliver, and so refers you to the next and the next and the next, none of them finally satisfactory. It's a sort of Hegelian schlechte Unendlichkeit, bad infinity. Desire satisfied becomes craving, and craving is an instance of dukkha. One becomes attached to the paltry and impermanent and one suffers when it cannot be had. One also suffers when the satisfaction sought is achieved but revealed to be less than what one expected.
There is more to it than this, but this is the essence of it. The thing to note is that the claim in the First Noble Truth is not the triviality that there is a lot of suffering in this life, but that life itself, as insatiable desiring and craving for what is unattainable to it, is ill, pain-inducing, profoundly unsatisfactory, and something to be escaped from if possible. It is a radical diagnosis of the human predicament, and the proposed cure is equally radical: extirpation of desire. The problem for the Buddhist is not that some of our desires are misdirected and inordinate; the problem is desire itself. The solution, then, is not rightly-ordered desire, as in Christianity, but the eradication of desire. The root (radix) of suffering is desire and that root must be uprooted (e-radi-cated). It is a radical solution.
Although Buddhism appears in some ways to be a sort of 'empirical religion' — to hazard an oxymoron — the claim that all is suffering involves an interpretation of our experience that goes well beyond the empirically given. Buddhism, as a development from Hinduism, judges the given by the standard of the permanent. It brings the meta-physical or super-sensible to bear in the evaluation of the physical or sensible. Permanence is the standard against which the ordinary satisfactions of life are judged deficient. Absolute permanence sets the ontological and axiological standard. The operative presupposition is that only that which is permanent is truly real, truly important, and truly satisfactory. But if, as Buddhism also maintains, all is impermanent, then one wonders whence the standard of permanence derives its validity. If all is impermanent, and nothing has self-nature, then the standard is illusory. If so, then we have no good reason to reject all ordinary satisfactions.
For Buddhism, the fundamental problem is suffering in the radical sense above explained, and the solution is entry into nibbana by the extirpation of desire, all desire (including even the desire for nibbana), as opposed to the moderation of desire and its redirection to worthy objects. I question both the diagnosis and the cure. The diagnosis is arguably faulty because arguably incoherent: it presupposes while denying the existence of an absolute ontological and axiological standard. The cure is faulty because it issues in nihilism, as if the goal of life could be its own self-extinction.
I am talking about primitive Buddhism, that of the Pali canon. Attention to the Mahayana would require some qualifications.
So one reason I am not a Buddhist is that I reject the doctrine of suffering. But I also reject the doctrines of impermanence and 'no self.' That gives me two more reasons. These other doctrines are inseparable from the doctrine of suffering, and they, like it, have a radical meaning. It is not just that things change, but that they are in Heraclitean flux. It is an observable fact that things change, but the nature of change cannot be 'read off' from the fact of change. Is change Heraclitean or Aristotelian? If the former, then everything is continuously changing; if the latter, then there are enduring substrata of change which, for a time at least, do not change: one and the same avocado is first unripe and then ripe. Neither of these views of change is empirically obvious in the way that it is empirically obvious that there is change.
Now it is radical impermanence that underpins radical unsatisfactoriness and that also implies the doctrine of anatta, which, in Western terms, is the denial of the existence of substances. This denial, too, is radical since it is not merely the denial that substances are permanent, but a denial that there are any substances at all.
But I should say that I take Buddhism very seriously indeed. It is deep and sophisticated with a rich tradition of philosophical commentary. Apart from its mystical branch, Sufism, I cannot take Islam seriously –except as a grave threat to other religions and indeed to civilization itself. But perhaps I have been too much influenced by Schopenhauer on this point.