their main stumbling block—and catalyst—for theodicy (see 1.6 and Eckardt, 1.4). With the readings in Chapter 2, we move to the Buddhist tradition for an alternative perspective on suffering and a different analysis of the ways to cope with and explain it (for background information, see 2.8, Some explanatory notes on Buddhism). Early Buddhism is concerned primarily with the practical task of overcoming the universal fact of the suffering, misery or ‘unsatisfactoriness’ of existence, which is understood