Does Suffering Ennoble One's Character?

I recall reading Somerset Maugham’s The Summing Up many years ago, almost like a kind of “Bible” of wisdom and life experience. To this day, I still think it’s one of the sanest books, from an extremely interesting and wise writer who seemed to have observed human beings very closely. In one of the chapters, he relates how the idea of suffering ‘ennobling’ one’s character is something that is inherited from a Romantic tradition. In his own observation as a medical student and general ‘student of people’, Maughan reflects that suffering tends to do quite the opposite, namely to make a person more narrowly attached to comfort and their bodies, to the point where it can embitter a person, and make them depressed. I believe that in her book A Season in Hell, Marilyn French comes  to a similar disillusioned perspective on suffering.  Today, I reflected on the way home from a gathering, what view of suffering is correct?

First of all, I don’t think that I am referring to a specifically Buddhist notion of suffering, which tends to be equated with emotional attachment of some kind. I am talking more about the suffering of daily life, such as the stress of uncertainty or the reality of impermanence. And I think a classic Buddhist answer would be to say that events or situations never ‘make’ a person either happy or sad. Rather, it’s one’s attitude toward these states that is the real deciding factor to whether suffering can make a person stronger or simply unable to cope with the situations at hand.

I tend to think that there are times when physical suffering can encourage a person to cultivate joy with others, even though it is still a physical suffering. There is an interesting dynamic here, and I believe part of it is compensation while another part is about gratitude. If a person is too comfortable in themselves and in their bodies, there is a tendency to overstep oneself or even to feel a little disengaged or discomfort. It is almost as though they are so comfortable yet there is still a vague kind of dis-ease or anxiety floating somewhere, the sense of ‘what’s next’ or perhaps everyday ennui. For this reason, I don’t think that we ever want to not have any pain or suffering, since these latter are often what give life a sense of proportion and struggle. From Buddhist perspectives I have read, there is even a sense that having a human body which is subject to frustrations and struggles is actually an ideal condition to practice spiritually, since it provides just the right kind of edge for a person to investigate themselves and to go beyond comforts and seeking pleasures.

But that having been said, I think that suffering needs to contain some seed of hope; otherwise, it can be a kind of prison for someone, particularly if one is suffering a chronic pain in the body. As long as a person has a hope for care, their sights are not so narrowed at trying to find self-induced cures or solutions, and they then have the energy to be available to others.  I think one of the roles of health care  is not necessarily to provide direct cures, but to give people’s minds a wide enough space that they can find their own resilience in the midst  of pain. There is a great supportive element in coping with illness and suffering, and the art of this support is never to make a person feel isolated  or left to their own devices to try to ‘figure out’ what’s ‘wrong’ with them. In this way, suffering itself doesn’t need to be seen as something that a person needs to wrestle with like a kind of bear or evil adversary. Perhaps this itself is what lends suffering nobility rather than suffering automatically conferring nobility on a person.