[Buddha-l] Re: Greetings from Oviedo

[Joy Vriens]

Benito Carral wrote:

>>>I  think  this  is  really interesting, it has to do
>>>with  the  "hapiness  myth."  Why  do most of people
>>>think  that the goal of life is to be happy? I don't
>>>agree.
> 
> 
>>Because you are a realist ;-)
> 
> 
>    Hahaha.  People  usually  tend  to  say  that  I'm a
> pessimist,  although  I don't tend to agree with such a
> view. :-)

I call it lucidity.

>    Today  I was talking with a friend for some hours. I
> explained  him  my  view on Western society and why I'm
> leaving  Oviedo  in  some  months  to live a completely
> different   life  that  he  doesn't  understand.

You are referring to your Conversion project, you mentioned a while ago?

>  As  a
> concluding  remark, he said, "I suppose we are still in
> the game because we don't have guts to shot ourselves."
> Well,  it sounds as pessimistic, but I also offered him
> an alternative.

That does sound pessimistic. I am an optimist like you in that I will 
try to find alternatives.

>    Chan  Fu said in other post that he doesn't know how
> to  teach  perseverance.  I have learnt something about
> that.  When  my  students  lost  interest in Dharma, it
> usually is because they have forgotten why they started
> to  practice  in  the  first  place.  They forget about
> dukkha  because  they don't feel so bad as before. So I
> think  that  they  key  to persevere in Dharma is to be
> aware of both individual and collective dukkha.

Yes, while trying to avoid making it into a self fulfilling prophecy. We 
are what we think, remember.

>    So  I  think  that not losing oneself in impermanent
> amusements  is not to be a pessimist but a realist guy.

If I could lose myself in impermanent amusements, I would be amusing 
myself all the time. But I am too much of a natural Jansenist, to be 
able to do that. We Buddhists are second category humans, we shouldn't 
forget that. It is those who can amuse themselves that are superior 
human beings, not us.

> But  I  don't  worry too much about labels, because who
> decides  what  a  pessimist  or  realist  is.  And most
> important, does it matter?

No, it's only something that becomes evident through comparisons, and 
who needs comparisons to be?

>>>As  far  as I know, the Buddha taugh how to end with
>>>dukkha.  And  that  has  little  to  do with most of
>>>people understand by happiness.
> 
> 
>>Well,  he  did go on a bit sometimes about describing
>>the end of dukkha as peace, bliss and what not more.
> 
> 
>    But  you know that such comments in early suttas are
> very  scanty  and  they  don't  seem  to  represent his
> general message.

Frankly, I don't know what *his* general message is. But end of dukkha 
is an excellent lowest common denominator of Buddhism in general.

>    Today I have asked to two different individuals what
> they   understand   by  happiness.  One  told  me  that
> happiness  is  feeling  good  and  that  he  feels good
> following  G-d's way. The other one said that happiness
> is  not  feeling  bad and feeling good sometimes, and a
> good way to achieve it, she said, is to be entertained.

I agree with her, if by being entertained she doesn't necessarily mean 
superficial amusement. I am rereading "Le sentiment d'exister" by 
François Flahault (I mentioned it earlier on this list), who says that 
our lives are constructed on nothingness (néant). BTW There is an 
excellent quote by Pierre Nicole that I will post here if I find it 
back. Anyway, the construction of our life, the weaving of all the 
threads that constitutes our life is nothing else than entertainment, a 
sort of escape from the nothingness.

Check out anguttara IV, 414 (reference by LVP) if you are interested in 
happiness. I found it in another sutta on Access too, but forgot which 
one. It's a teaching by Sariputta.

  >>>I  would  say  that, from the point of view of Early
>>>Buddhism, the goal was to have peace of mind.

>>I  disagree,  immortality  was there goal. Becoming a
>>god amongst gods.

>    I  have to disagree here. :-) If we talk about Early
> Buddhism,  it's  clear  that  the goal is a "definitive
> suicide" as I like to call it.

Sariputta and Moggallana were looking for immortality. That is why they 
joined the Buddha. See 
http://www.accesstoinsight.org/canon/vinaya/mv1-23-5.html. Also 
somewhere in the Mahavagga the Buddha declared he has attained 
immortality and that he has opened the gates of immortality. If you talk 
about *early* Buddhism, immortality is the goal.

* The Indian Buddha didn't
> want  to be reborn again.

They wanted to escape temporal existence, not atemporal.

> That was the goal, one shared
> by  many  fellows  then. So it was just the opposite of
> inmortality.   In  addition,  inmortality  of  what  if
> everything is impermanent?

You probably know the famous quote

"There is, O monks, an unborn, an unbecome, an unmade, an unconditioned; 
if, O monks, there were not here this unborn, unbecome, unmade, 
unconditioned, there would not here be an escape from the born, the 
become, the made, the conditioned. But because there is an 
unborn,...therefore there is an escape from the born...."
UDANA viii, 3

Joy