Sometimes we hear that the Buddha wanted to put a stop to all suffering caused by things inside or outside, but the real cause for the suffering is inside in your own craving and ignorance.

"The Buddha defines the world as your six sense media: the external sense media that make contact at your internal ones, plus the feelings and awareness that arise through that contact. That’s the world. And the Buddha adds that that’s your old kamma. Try to see it simply in those terms. He also says that it’s burning. So if we try to straighten out the world, we’re working at the wrong place. It burns us because our greed, aversion, and delusion try to hold on to the results of our past kamma. And, of course, those results are going to slip through our fingers. They often may not be what we want, but we can’t go back and change our past kamma.

So the problem is not with the world. The problem is with our greed, aversion, and delusion. Now, this doesn’t mean we don’t try to change the world when we can. Our kamma is such that it does allow for some things to be changed for the better. But the real cause of the suffering in the world is not the world itself. It’s the mind. This is why when the Buddha attacked the problem of suffering, he didn’t attack the world. He attacked his own mind — “attacked” in the sense of focusing his attention there — and really tried to straighten things out inside. Sometimes we hear that the Buddha wanted to put a stop to all suffering, regardless of whether it was caused by things inside or outside. But as he said, the real cause for the suffering is your own craving and ignorance. That’s not outside. It’s inside.

So if you want to put an end to suffering in the world, you have to start here. This is why we’re sitting here helping the world by focusing on our own bodies and minds right now because the suffering comes from within for everybody. You can’t go out and erase other people’s suffering. You can’t make them skillful, which is what’s required to put an end to suffering. It’s something that each person has to develop for him or herself alone.

So here you are with yourself. As for the things you see out in the world, the potentials for all the harm that people do, a lot of those are in us as well. This is why we have to look inside and straighten things out here. There are a lot of things in the world that we lay claim to. If they ever get threatened and we don’t have an alternative place to find our happiness, we’re going to really hold on and fight back, which means that if we want to stop the fighting in the world, at least make sure that we don’t go out and *start* fighting in the world."

~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "The Right Place to Look"