This quote is from Master Hsuan Hua‘s commentary on the Medicine Master Sūtra.

Life is filled with suffering. There are the Three Sufferings, the Eight Sufferings, and the limitless sufferings. Mentally and physically oppressed by all these sufferings, living beings never find any peace, happiness, or comfort. These oppressive sufferings dominate their lives.

The Three Sufferings:

1. The suffering due to contact with unpleasant conditions.
2. The suffering due to the loss of pleasurable conditions.
3. The suffering due to inexorable change.

The “suffering due to contact with unpleasant conditions” means that in the midst of suffering, there is still more suffering. One has neither food, clothes, nor shelter. That’s suffering piled on top of suffering, suffering that never comes to an end.

If one does not undergo the “suffering due to contact with unpleasant conditions” that comes with poverty, one may undergo the “suffering due to the loss of pleasurable conditions” experienced by rich people when they lose all their wealth in a sudden and unexpected disaster, such as robbery, fire, or flood.

“I’m neither poor nor rich, so these two sufferings don’t apply to me,” you say.

However, you cannot escape the “suffering due to inexorable change.” From youth until the prime of life, and then on into old age and death, your thoughts flow in an unending succession. That’s known as the suffering due to inexorable change. The life process itself entails suffering.

There are also the Eight Sufferings:

1. The suffering of birth
2. The suffering of old age
3. The suffering of sickness
4. The suffering of death
5. The suffering of being apart from those you love
6. The suffering of being together with those you hate
7. The suffering of not obtaining what you seek
8. The suffering of the raging blaze of the five skandhas

Birth is a very uncomfortable experience. You feel as if you were being squeezed between two mountains. You feel as much pain as a live turtle whose shell is ripped off. After a painful birth, you gradually get old. Old age is also suffering. One by one, your organs start failing, and even simple tasks become very difficult. The pain of sickness is even harder to bear. You may moan and cry, but no one can suffer in your stead.

Such suffering is very democratic: everyone from the king down to the lowliest beggar must bear it. Even the emperor, who owns the empire and is worshipped by all-even after his death-suffers just like anyone else when he gets sick. Of course, if you don’t get sick, then it’s not a problem. If you do, then sickness treats you the same as anyone else; it’s not polite at all.

Ordinary people have deep emotional attachments. They hope their loved ones will live and their enemies will die. When two people fall in love, they forget about everything else. Like besotted fools, they are always stuck to each other, as if with Crazy Glue, and nothing can pull them apart. …

There is also the suffering of being together with those one hates. “I really detest that person,” you think. “The mere sight of him upsets me.” You wish to get away from him, but strangely enough, he follows you wherever you go and always makes a point of greeting you and working with you. You detest him, but he always hangs around you. You can’t escape him. That’s the suffering of being with those whom one hates.

Then there’s the suffering of not obtaining what you seek. When you fail to obtain what you seek, you may become so afflicted that you can’t sleep at night and you lose your appetite. You feel restless and ill at ease. That’s the suffering of not obtaining what you seek.

The worst suffering Is that of the raging blaze of the five skandhas. The five skandhas are form, feeling, thinking, formations, and consciousness. No one can leave them behind. They are so powerful that they have suffocated us and smothered our Buddha-nature. However, once we understand them, we’ll see that there’s no real substance to them. They are just like clouds drifting by. Once we “illuminate the five skandhas and see that they are all empty,” as the line from the Heart Sūtra says, then we know that “originally there was not a single thing; where can the dust alight?” (a verse from the Sixth Patriarch’s Sūtra)