[Buddha-l] Purpose of life

[Ngawang Dorje]

Hi,
 
I think life is meaningless. Bhikkhu Thanassaro wrote:
 
“Think back for a moment on the story of the young Prince Siddhartha and his first encounters with aging, illness, death, and a wandering contemplative……….”
 
“This is hardly a life-affirming story in the ordinary sense of the term, but it does affirm something more important than life: the truth of the heart when it aspires to happiness absolutely pure. The power of this aspiration depends on two emotions, called in Pali samvega and pasada…………”
 
“Samvega was what the young Prince Siddhartha felt on his first exposure to aging, illness, and death. It's a hard word to translate because it covers such a complex range — at least three clusters of feelings at once: the oppressive sense of shock, dismay, and alienation that come with realizing the futility and meaninglessness of life as it's normally lived; a chastening sense of our own complacency and foolishness in having let ourselves live so blindly; and an anxious sense of urgency in trying to find a way out of the meaningless cycle. This is a cluster of feelings we've all experienced at one time or another in the process of growing up, but I don't know of a single English term that adequately covers all three. It would be useful to have such a term, and maybe that's reason enough for simply adopting the word samvega into our language………”
 
“………[the] solution is symbolized in the Siddhartha story by the prince's reaction to the fourth person he saw on his travels outside of the palace: the wandering forest contemplative. The emotion he felt at this point is termed pasada, another complex set of feelings usually translated as "clarity and serene confidence." It's what keeps samvega from turning into despair. In the prince's case, he gained a clear sense of his predicament and of the way out of it, leading to something beyond aging, illness, and death, at the same time feeling confident that the way would work.”
 
“As the early Buddhist teachings freely admit, the predicament is that the cycle of birth, aging, and death is meaningless. They don't try to deny this fact and so don't ask us to be dishonest with ourselves or to close our eyes to reality. As one teacher has put it, the Buddhist recognition of the reality of suffering — so important that suffering is honored as the first noble truth — is a gift, in that it confirms our most sensitive and direct experience of things, an experience that many other traditions try to deny.”
 
“So the Buddhist attitude toward life cultivates samvega — a clear acceptance of the meaninglessness of the cycle of birth, aging, and death — and develops it into pasada: a confident path to the Deathless.” [1]
 
 
The Dalai Lama once said, “I believe that the very purpose of life is to be happy, to seek happiness. From the moment of birth, every human being wants happiness and does not want suffering.” [2] [3] . Nibbana, the ultimate goal of Buddhism [4], is described as, “the highest happiness” [5].
 
1.    Bhikkhu Thanissaro (1997) Affirming the Truths of the Heart - The Buddhist Teachings on Samvega & Pasada
http://www.accesstoinsight.org/lib/authors/thanissaro/affirming.html
 
2.     Dalai Lama and Howard Cutler. The Art of Happiness: A Handbook for Living (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1998), 3
 
3.     Dalai Lama.The Compassionate Life (Massachusetts: Wisdom Publications, 2003), 7.
 
4.   ““For the holy life, friend Visakha, is grounded upon Nibbana, culminates in nibbana, ends in Nibbana.” (Bhikkhu Nanamoli and Bhikkhu Bodhi, trans. The Middle Length Discourses of the Buddha – A Translation of the Majjhima Nikaya (Massachusetts: Wisdom Publications, 1995), 403 (MN 44 , Culavedalla Sutta – The Shorter Series of Questions and Answers.))
 
5.   Dhammapada 202-204