Why we suffer: Buddhism, Taoism, and karma in Laércio Fonseca's reading

Almost every spiritual tradition tries to answer the same question: why do we suffer? Some say it's punishment, others say it's error, others say it's illusion. For physicist and spiritualist Laércio Fonseca, suffering isn't a flaw in life, but part of it: no one who incarnates escapes pain, and pain serves a purpose. In material that stitches together Buddhism, Taoism, and the idea of karma, he argues that suffering is a way of learning.

This piece walks through his arguments alongside what each tradition actually teaches. Fonseca's ideas are his own, and several belong to the realm of belief, with no possible verification.

The first truth and the three planes of pain

The Four Noble Truths are the essence of Buddhist teaching. The first says that suffering (dukkha, in Pali) exists and includes sadness, dissatisfaction, affliction, and even boredom or the diffuse sense that nothing matches what was expected. The tradition relates it to attachment to impermanent phenomena, incapable of offering lasting satisfaction. The next three deal with the cause, the end, and the path leading to it. Fonseca adds ignorance, forgetting the true nature of the self, and notes that once the cause is understood, suffering can cease through the Eightfold Path, the middle way.

He distinguishes three planes. The physical covers pain, illness, aging, and the body's limits. The psychic covers loss, anguish, loneliness, and depression. The spiritual covers disconnection from the divine and lack of purpose. For him, the last two run deeper, because they act at the root and affect the body as a consequence. A sick consciousness would weaken the body, and a soul at peace could radiate healing even down to the cells. The relationship between emotional state and physical health is a subject of research, but the claim that spiritual peace heals cells goes beyond what has been shown.

Pain as school

Drawing on Taoism and on Shaolin temple training, Fonseca says masters use suffering to shape the disciple, breaking pride, ego, and attachment. Without it, he claims, there is no room for light. The image is that of the chisel: every spirit that incarnates would be a rough stone, every life a blow, and the end a work of art. Suffering thus appears as initiatory technique, not punishment.

Individual and collective karma

Much suffering, according to Fonseca, is rooted in past actions, from this life or others. The word karma means, in Sanskrit, action and its consequences, and in Indian religions, especially Buddhism, it designates a principle of cause and effect. Fonseca goes further and attributes specific conditions to causes in past lives. He tells of a woman with Parkinson's whose illness would be the result of an incarnation in which she unjustly ordered a servant's hand cut off. He also speaks of collective karma, that of entire peoples, and cites the sculptor Aleijadinho, who, according to spiritual accounts, would be a reincarnation of Michelangelo suffering for a past life as an overseer of enslaved people.

These are accounts of belief, with no way to verify them, and explaining illnesses or historical tragedies through past lives runs into resistance for ethical reasons and for lack of support in history or science: it risks turning the victim into the guilty party.

Animals

One of Fonseca's most emphatic points concerns the suffering imposed on animals, especially through meat consumption. If everyone had to kill with their own hands the ox, the pig, or the chicken they eat, he says, they might never eat it again. Part of collective karma would come from this cruelty, and intestinal diseases, cancers, and excruciating pain at the end of life would be “vibrational atonements.”

The Tao's view

Drawing on the Tao Te Ching, Fonseca says there is no pleasure without pain, nor light without shadow. The book, written between 350 and 250 BCE and traditionally attributed to Lao Tzu, is one of the best-known works of Chinese literature. In Fonseca's reading, by defining “good” we create “bad,” and by wanting only joy we deny the sacred role of sadness. The Taoist sage neither rejects pain nor joy, seeing them as parts of a single flow: accepting what life brings with serenity would be the true middle way.

Forgiveness and ethics

In this karmic logic, only forgiveness breaks a cycle of suffering: forgiving whoever caused harm and being forgiven by whoever was harmed, even unintentionally. When this truly happens, Fonseca says, even incurable illnesses could dissolve. It is a statement of faith, which does not replace medical treatment.

He closes by saying it's pointless to dress as a spiritualist while still inflicting suffering on anyone, whether man, woman, animal, or spirit. True spirituality, for him, is ethics lived out, with love and compassion for all beings, and only then would the cycle of pain close.

The question that remains is the one all these traditions dispute: whether pain is a teaching or merely a fact. Fonseca's answer is that it can be a door to despair or a bridge to enlightenment, and that the difference lies in how each person chooses to cross it.