One is a Buddhist if
he or she accepts the following four truths: All compounded things are
impermanent; all emotions are pain; all things have no inherent existence;
Nirvana is beyond concepts.
Hardly anything we
do in the course of a day -- neither in our thoughts nor in our actions --
indicates that we are aware of how fragile life is.
Subconsciously we
are lured by the expectation that we will reach a stage where we don't have to
fix anything ever again. One day we will
reach "happily ever after".
All form, including
our flesh and bones, and all our emotions and all our perceptions, are
assembled -- they are the product of two or more things coming together. When
any two components or more come together, a new phenomenon emerges…. This end
product doesn't have an existence independent of its parts.
Every change
contains within it an element of death.
Today is the death of yesterday.
We are afraid of the
unknown. The mind's craving for
confirmation is rooted in our fear of impermanence. Fearlessness is generated when you can
appreciate uncertainty.
Hopelessness -- just
like its opposite, blind hope -- is the result of a belief in permanence.
True liberation
comes from appreciating the whole cycle and not grasping onto those things that
we find agreeable.
Wealth, health,
peace, and fame are just as temporary as their opposites.
Buddhists don't
believe that there is an almighty creator, and they don't have this concept
that the purpose of life has been, or needs to be, decided and defined.
On both personal and
cultural levels, we adopt foreign or external methods to achieve happiness and
overcome suffering, seldom realizing that these methods often bring about the
opposite of the intended result. Our failure
to adapt creates a new set of miseries because not only are we still suffering,
but we also feel alienated from our own lives, unable to fit into the system.
At the moment that
Siddhartha found no self, he also found no inherently existing evil -- only
ignorance.
Ignorance is simply
not knowing the facts, having the facts wrong, or having incomplete
knowledge. All of these forms of
ignorance lead to misunderstanding and misinterpretation, overestimation and
underestimation.
When we act with no
understanding or incomplete understanding, there is no ground for
confidence. Our basic insecurity arises
and creates all these emotions, named and unnamed, recognized and unrecognized.
Habit makes us weak
against the self.
The self loathes
suffering and loves the causes of suffering.
There is always this
constant nagging feeling that there is more to life, and this discontent leads
to suffering.
Everything we see,
hear, feel, imagine, and know to exist is simply emptiness onto which we have
imputed or labeled a certain "trueness".
Happiness is a
flimsy premise upon which to base one's life.
People are more
inclined to sit straight in a quiet place on a meditation cushion than to
contemplate which will come first, tomorrow or the next life.
