Buddhism, I repeat, is a hundred times colder, more truthful, more objective. It is no longer confronted with the need to make suffering and the susceptibility to pain respectable by interpreting them in terms of sin—it simply says what it thinks: “I suffer.” To the barbarian, however, suffering as such is not respectable: he requires an exegesis before he will admit to himself that he is suffering (his instinct would sooner direct him to deny his suffering and bear it in silence). Here the word “devil” was a blessing: man had an overpowering and terrible enemy—man need not be ashamed of
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