IT IS WHAT IT IS

Suffering is what it is.  This is a central issue in Vedanta, but even more so in Buddhism.  The Buddha built his entire career around it, you could say. 

Vedanta says that suffering results from attachment to the empirical, egoic self, including the body, and that this blocks the way to God.  Buddhism's position is simply that suffering is painful, and if something can be done to end it, then it must be done.

The Buddha comes down hard here, though.  He included in his sources of suffering, aged parents, wives, children, and friends.  He said that if one loves his wife, children, aged parents, and friends, then death, that is separation from them, is painful.  Moreover, the very intensity of love itself is painful, he said. 

"Let, therefore, no man love anything; loss of the beloved is evil.  Those who have a hundred dear ones have a hundred woes; those who have ninety dear ones have ninety woes; . . . those who have one dear one have one woe; those who hold nothing dear have no woe.  Those who love nothing and hate nothing have no fetters."

Like Vedanta, the Buddha argued that all attachment to the empirical self must be overcome entirely, not because, as in Vedanta, the empirical self is not the true self, the Atman, but because it leads, inevitably, to misery.