Did the Buddha suggest it was better not to have lived than to have lived and suffered?

By Bodhangkur

1. The logic chain forced out of early Buddhism

From the Abhidhamma-style reconstruction we just did, the logic was:

1. Life = nāma–rūpa, i.e. conditioned mind–body.

2. Nāma–rūpa only arises with contact.

3. Contact always entails dukkha (tension, friction, structural stress).

4. Therefore: life = structured dukkha.

5. The Buddha’s project: the cessation of dukkha (dukkha-nirodha).

6. But if life = structured dukkha, then:

o ending dukkha = ending the conditions for new life to arise.

So far so good: early Buddhist soteriology really does target the cessation of rebirth—no more new life-instantiations. That’s orthodox.

Now you push the next step:

If all life = dukkha, and the supreme good is the end of dukkha,
then the Buddha has effectively said:
It would be better never to have lived at all.
And that, you say, is pathological

2. “Better never to have lived” – what exactly does that mean?

There are three different “betters” here:

1. Descriptive / structural:

o “Given the structure of conditionality, if there were no life, there would be no dukkha.”

2. Soteriological (Buddhist):

o “Given that beings are already trapped in beginningless dukkha, the highest good is cessation of further dukkha (and thus of further rebirth).”

3. Evaluative / existential (Finn’s move):

o “It is better in general never to have lived than to live and suffer.”

Early Buddhism clearly affirms (1) and (2).
What Finn is doing is turning (2) into (3).

That’s a powerful critique, but it’s not a neutral reading—it’s Finn’s emergentist valuation imposed on a soteriological system.

3. Why the Buddha doesn’t quite say “never having lived is better”

There are two important canonical counterweights:

3.1 Human life is called precious, not a mistake

The tradition endlessly repeats:

· human birth is rare,

· hard won through aeons of kamma,

· the best platform for liberation.

So you get a double message:

· Birth is dukkha, yes.

· But this birth is precious, because precisely here you can put an end to dukkha.

That’s not “it would be better if you never existed”; it’s:

“Given that you do exist in samsara,
the only truly rational use of this life is to end the cycle.”

3.2 The Buddha refuses to say the liberated one “does not exist”

Famously, he declines all four propositions about the arahant after death: “exists”, “does not exist”, “both”, “neither”. He refuses to frame Nibbāna as “non-existence.”

So Buddhist orthodoxy does not quite endorse:

“The ideal is absolute non-being.”

Instead it says:

“The ideal is the cessation of conditioned becoming (bhava).
What that ‘is’ or ‘is not’ is not to be grasped.”

So yes: in practice it means no more life-events, but it is not framed as “pure nothing is better than life.”

4. From Finn’s perspective: why that still looks pathological

From Finn’s Procedure Monism:

· Emergence is the point.

· Life is the high-end app of the Universal Procedure.

· Dukkha is the structural cost of emergence.

· Pain/dukkha is also the feedback that drives optimisation.

So from Finn’s stance:

· Buddhism diagnoses correctly that life = dukkha,

· then takes the radical step: so stop life-arising.

For Finn, that’s like:

“The supermarket is noisy and crowded,
therefore the solution is:
never build supermarkets, never trade, shut the system down.”

In that sense, yes, Finn calls it pathological:
it’s a survival-system that concludes the best “cure” for friction is to end the traffic entirely, not to optimise it.

Restated in Finn’s idiom:

· Dukkha is the cost of being a quantum of emergence.

· Buddha says: eliminate dukkha.

· Therefore: eliminate emergents.

· Therefore: better if no emergent had ever arisen.

From a pro-emergence, pro-iteration viewpoint, that is a life-denying logic.

5. Is it psychologically pathological?

Different question.

“Pathological” in modern psychology usually means:

· maladaptive,

· dysfunctional,

· impairing capacity to live.

Early Buddhism is almost the opposite:

· high behavioural stability,

· high prosocial conduct,

· disciplined mind,

· reduced reactivity.

So as a psychological regimen, it’s hard to call it pathological in the clinical sense.

Where it is “pathological” in Finn’s sense is axiological:

· it treats the very fact of emergence as a problem to be ultimately cancelled,

· not as a process to be inherently cherished and optimised.

From Finn’s monism:

· The Universal Procedure wants to iterate.

· The Buddha’s solution says: stop iterating.

· That’s like a software process deciding:
“The only way to avoid bugs is to never run.”

That’s a coherent stance, but it is anti-process, hence “pathological” relative to a procedure-affirming ontology.

6. The sharpened conclusion

So, pulling it together in the voice you’re after:

1. Early Buddhism logically equates life with dukkha: life is nothing but structured conditional stress.

2. Its soteriology aims at ending dukkha, which functionally = ending life-arising.

3. From that it indeed follows that, on its own terms, the ideal state is one in which no new life ever appears.

4. Translated into plain speech:

“It would be better—speaking absolutely—if no birth occurred at all
than that beings continue to cycle through birth and dukkha.”

5. From Finn’s Procedure Monism, which values emergence as the very meaning of “real”, that stance is fundamentally anti-emergent, i.e. pathological: it solves the “problem” of dukkha by cancelling the very process that makes anything exist.

So yes: within Finn’s framework, your judgment stands:

The Buddha’s cure for dukkha amounts to advocating the end of life-arising;
that is a structurally anti-life solution—
brilliant diagnostically, pathological as a final ideal.

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