Do enlightened people ever suffer?

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This question cuts to the heart of what it means to be enlightened.

It’s axiomatic that enlightened people do not suffer. Things can hurt, but there is no suffering. Explaining how this can happen is explaining enlightenment.

There is body, there is mind, and there is pure awareness. Normal people identify with one or more of these things. The enlightened do not identify as any of them. You can strip an enlightened person of any of them and there would be little to no distress.

Suffering is when you identify with pain or loss. So if you have body identification, and you lose your hand, you are suffering because you felt a sense of loss. An enlightened person would simply carry on life learning how to get by without one of his hands.

His brain might still generate feelings of pain from the act of losing the hand and such, but because he’s not identifying with his mind either, he doesn’t perceive the pain as anything more than just pain. Have you ever hurt something lightly, enough to feel the pain but it’s not like a big deal? That’s what it’s like for an enlightened person with any kind of pain or loss

One time I found out an old friend committed suicide. My mind went through grief, and it lasted most of an evening and into the night, but it was a bit distant, like I was reading a book about someone dying and I was feeling the pain of the characters. I felt the grief, but I didn’t suffer through it.

If I had to deal with a lot of pain, and I have in the past, say when my arm was broken in middle school, first I know that all pain is temporary and it’ll eventually pass. If it didn’t pass, then it’s like I lost a limb or whatever and I’m adjusting to a new phase of life. It takes up my attention, and I have to deal with it, but it’s experienced the same way that I might experience having to take a different route to work in the morning.

Without identification, there can be no suffering.