Within the Kegon tradition, suffering is understood through the vision of a cosmos in which all phenomena are mutually interpenetrating and interdependent. What is ordinarily experienced as pain, frustration, or loss is not an isolated event, but an expression of the total field of causation that Kegon calls the dharmadhātu, the realm of reality. Suffering appears when this vast web is misperceived, when reality is seen as a collection of separate, self-sufficient entities rather than as a seamless network of relations. From this standpoint, suffering is not something that stands apart from the whole, but is woven into the very fabric of interdependent arising.

The root of this condition is ignorance: a failure to recognize the fundamental interconnectedness and emptiness of all things. This ignorance manifests as dualistic thinking, the habitual tendency to divide experience into self and other, subject and object, mine and not-mine. On the basis of this imagined separation, attachment to an individual, enduring self arises, along with the desires and aversions that protect and reinforce that self-image. Such clinging generates karmic patterns that perpetuate dissatisfaction and distress, all the while obscuring the deeper reality of mutual interpenetration.

From the Kegon perspective, the world of suffering is not ultimately outside or opposed to enlightenment, but occurs within the very same network that, when rightly seen, is harmonious and complete. Each moment of suffering both conditions and is conditioned by the entirety of existence, reflecting the whole universe in its arising. Liberation, therefore, is not the annihilation of phenomena, but the transformation of vision: to see that what was taken as a hard boundary between self and world is a provisional construction. As this vision clarifies, the causes of suffering—ignorance, dualistic thinking, and attachment to a separate identity—lose their compelling force within the luminous field of interdependence that Kegon so carefully articulates.