[Buddha-l] Re: What are the "joys of living"?

[Tim Bovee/Datni LLC]

On 6/26/06, Benito Carral <bcarral at kungzhi.org> wrote:
>  First   of   all,   old   age  is  not  a  proof  of
> wisdom--nowadays  I tend to think that it it's just the
> contrary,  just a question of samsaric habituation. You
> know,  Buddhism  is  interested  in a different kind of
> happiness.  If you could see lust effects in the global
> and long term, maybe you will be not so happy.
I don't say that age embodies wisdom, Benito. I only speak from my own
experience and wouldn't presume to make a statement of lust/non-lust or
wisdom/non-wisdom that would apply to all people. There would be no way I
could factually support it.

All I can say is that when I was 16, nearly everything was an occasion of
lust for me. And now that I'm 60, not even "Debbie Does Dallas" is an
occasion for lust. I'm more likely to say, "Look at the happy young people,
bouncing around without any clothes. Isn't that cute!"

>  There   is   something   that   you  don't  seem  to
> understand,  we are not buddhas (well, maybe you're one
> of  the  prayeka  class,  but not most of people). When
> someone  who  has not unrooted the unwholesome roots is
> exposed  to  sensual  dance,  porn  films and so on, he
> experiences  something  quite  different than when he's
> exposed  to Dharma teachings, that is why porn websites
> are far more visited than Dharmic ones.

I don't claim to be a buddha of any class. I claim only to have an interest
in what the Buddha taught, or what we think he taught, at least. In my
experience, salsa is no more or less sensual than hunger, thirst, belching,
sleeping, back-scratching or drinking an ice-cold beer on a hot summer
afternoon in northern Virginia. Sensual means "of the senses", and I don't
know how to distinguish between more sensual and less sensusal in any
context. I don't know how to turn off the senses, and therefore, for me,
everything is sensual.

In my experience, salsa is not always associated with lust in my brain, and
therefore I conclude that salsa is not inherently lustful. Lust is not
invariably the result of salsa. It is not a built-in property. If you argue
that it is a built-in property, then you have to account for my experience
as an exception.

Given my experience, the best you can do is to conclude that lust is a
property of salsa under some conditions. You must then define those
conditions. And if you argue that it's under the majority of conditions,
then I want to see your polling data.

Tim Bovee
Herndon, Va.
tbovee at gmail.com/www.daypoems.net
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://mailman.swcp.com/mailman/private/buddha-l/attachments/20060626/fc434c22/attachment.htm