Suffering and Self-refinement: Moral Perspectives from a Hindu,Indian Worldview

Abstract

Recent decades have seen an increasing awareness of the need for emic explorations where psychological models and epistemologies originate from worldviews of indigenous worlds and inform mainstream psychology. The aim of the present study was to address this lacuna in moral psychology by examining the concept of suffering in the Hindu, Indian moral worldview. In a qualitative study, in-depth interviews were conducted with 30 urban adults (M = 43.53 years) of Vadodara, India. The sample represented the high socio-economic class and was divided evenly between men and women. Participants responded to three major open-ended questions about ideas of suffering and related probes: (a) All people suffer at some point in life. Why do you think there is suffering? (b) Does suffering serve any purpose? Does it have any meaning? and (c) Can suffering be eliminated? In-person interviews were tape recorded, transcribed verbatim and used for thematic analysis. Select verbatim responses representing various themes were used to explain how adults spoke about suffering. Thematic analysis revealed four major themes: (a) forms of suffering, (b) the karmic nature of suffering, and (c) alleviating suffering through self-refinement. Findings contrast notably with the corpus of current literature on suffering, dominated by WEIRD cultures and often restricted to biomedical conditions. Importantly, the study highlights the centrality of one’s swadharma, interpreting moral actions in a karmic framework and cultivating equanimity (samatvam) through self-refinement as a means of alleviating suffering. The study contributes to the conceptualisation of psychological well-being in contemporary times from the Hindu, Indian perspective.