The elderly only wish for a few grandchildren. While alive, they propagate their families and look after the grandchildren. For life after death, they look forward to the worship of the descendants. With this view of life, they are able to withstand all the suffering, and lead contented lives. According to this concept, there is a saying in Chinese,.
Thus, there is a another saying in Chinese,. A family of accumulated evil deeds shall suffer misfortune. Life is for the country - Some people focus their attentions on their nation and country. The significance of life is to contribute to the enhancement of national pride or development. This concept stems from the same origin as the concept of the family.
In the past, there were tribes who treated the whole tribe as one unit. If an individual in the tribe came under duress, it was perceived as a risk to the whole tribe, and hence the whole tribe responded to the threat. Under this concept, those who sacrificed themselves for the sake of the whole tribe were elevated to the level of a God. Thus the significance of life based on the prosperity and strength of a nation is quite different to the Confucian ideal emphasizing nurturing and survival activities for only close relatives.
Life is for all Mankind - Some people prefer to consider humanity as a whole. The significance of life is on the progress of human society. Only with the progress and civilization of the human race is there a meaning to life.
With this aspiration for all human beings, one should strive for the development of all humanity, and work hard for the benefit of the majority. However, to place the significance of life on the family, or nation, or the human race is not one that people like to do willingly.
We try to hang on to something because of the fear that our body and mind will degenerate one day. But can we assure that these are the real meanings of life? If the significance of life is on the family, for those who do not have any offspring, does it mean that it is meaningless to live? If the significance of life is on the country, from the perspective of history, there were so many highly prosperous countries and civilizations, but where are they now?
They have long vanished and are only regarded as anthropological evidences now! Then, what about living for the advancement of mankind? Human activities rely on the existence of the earth. Although it may still be a very long time to go, it is inevitable that the earth will degenerate one day.
What is significance of life when the earth ceases to support the human activities? It seems these three significances of life adopted by most people will eventually become void. Their ideas cannot get away from the ideology mentioned in the Awareness Song. The concept of "a future in the heaven" has been used by most worldly religions, especially religion with God in the Western countries to explain the significance of life. In these religions, the world where we humans now live, is just a illusion.
Human beings that live in this world, believe in the God, love the God, and abide by His instructions in order to go to the Heaven in the future. Some religions say, the end of the world is coming, and those who have no faith in the God will be trapped in the hell of eternal suffering; whereas those who believe in the God will get into the heaven and enjoy the eternal bliss.
So it would seem, all the faith, morality and good actions people do is motivated by their desire to prepare for their entry into the heaven. But this heaven is something for the future. It is impossible to go to heaven while still living as a human being. Therefore, the concept of a heaven is only a belief. In reality, heaven cannot be proven to exist. As mentioned earlier, Buddhism denies that there is any permanent and absolute significance of life, and described life as unsatisfactory s.
However, Buddha acknowledged that there is a relative significance of life, and it is through this relative and conditioned nature of life that we can achieve and realize the universal truth. According to the discourses of the Buddha, our lives, and the world, are nothing but phenomena that rise and fall.
It is a process of forming and degenerating. There is nothing that is not subject to change or impermanence. Impermanence indicates that there is no eternal bliss, because even a joyous state will eventually cease and become suffering.
Because there is suffering, there will be no ultimate and complete freedom. Through right mindfulness, one can free oneself from passions and cravings, which so often make us prisoners of past regrets or future preoccupations. A monk who with tranquil mind has chosen to live in a bare cell knows an unearthly delight in gaining a clearer and clearer perception of the true law.
Right Concentration is a mental discipline that aims to transform your mind. The first stage of concentration is one in which mental hindrances and impure intentions disappear and a sense of bliss is achieved. In the second stage, activities of the mind come to an end and only bliss remains.
In the final stage, all sensations including bliss disappear and are replaced by a total peace of mind, which Buddha described as a deeper sense of happiness. The disciples of Gautama are always well awake, and their minds day and night always delight in compassion. He taught truth and he also taught compassion because he saw personal happiness as related to the happiness of others, humans and otherwise. Such a lesson is reflected in both the way he lived and the way he died.
In life, it was said that the Buddha forewent Nirvana in order to teach others the keys to transcendence. In death, the story goes that a follower accidentally poisoned Buddha. As he was dying, he comforted this follower by assuring him that the meal he had just eaten was one of his two most blessed meals: the first meal was the one he had to break his fast under the bodhi tree, and this second meal of rotten mushrooms was the meal that would bring him to Nirvana. The journey to attain a deeper form of happiness requires an unflinching look into the face of a reality where all life is seen as dukkha or mental dysfunction.
Buddhism is a philosophy and practice that is extremely concerned with the mind and its various delusions, misunderstandings and cravings but, happily for us, sees a way out through higher consciousness and mindful practice. Equanimity, a deep sense of well-being and happiness, is attainable through proper knowledge and practice in everyday life. Bodhi, B. Somerville, MA: Wisdom Publications.
Skip to content If you want others to be happy, practice compassion. Dalai Lama. Buddha - An Introduction.
Buddha: A Little Background. Buddha taught his followers the Four Noble Truths as follows:. Dukkha arises from craving. Our mistaken belief that things can last is a chief cause of suffering. The history of Buddhism is the story of one man's spiritual journey to enlightenment, and of the teachings and ways of living that developed from it.
Siddhartha Gautama, the Buddha, was born into a royal family in present-day Nepal over years ago. He lived a life of privilege and luxury until one day he left the royal enclosure and encountered for the first time, an old man, a sick man, and a corpse. Disturbed by this he became a monk before adopting the harsh poverty of Indian asceticism.
Buddhists believe that one day, seated beneath the Bodhi tree the tree of awakening , Siddhartha became deeply absorbed in meditation and reflected on his experience of life until he became enlightened. By finding the path to enlightenment, Siddhartha was led from the pain of suffering and rebirth towards the path of enlightenment and became known as the Buddha or 'awakened one'.
There are numerous different schools or sects of Buddhism. By meditation and mind culture one can acquire the power to see one's rebirth as a link, or a succession of links, in a chain of births; one can also acquire the power of looking back into one's previous lives. Not only this, but Buddhism also teaches that with the attainment of Nirvana in this life itself, through enlightenment and true wisdom, one can reach the end of this chain of rebirths.
Nirvana, the state to which all Buddhists aspire, is the cessation of desire and hence the end of suffering. Nirvana in Sanskrit means "the blowing out. Among Westerners Nirvana is often thought of as a negative state, a kind of "nothingness. Nirvana is freedom, but not freedom from circumstance; it is freedom from the bonds with which we have bound ourselves to circumstance.
That man is free who is strong enough to say, "Whatever comes I accept as best. Nirvana is the dying of the kammic force. The Buddhist ascends to Nirvana through many stages of the Middle Way, the path of wisdom, morality, and control. There is not space enough here even to mention these phases or the various aspects of the regimen recommended by the Buddha in his vast scriptures; but it may be taken for granted that the life of the conscientious Buddhist is full and rich.
Through the cycle of rebirths he ascends, he perfects himself, he conquers his cravings through wisdom and love. Slowly the kammic force ebbs away, the flame dies down. At the root of man's trouble is his primal state of ignorance.
From ignorance comes desire, which sets the kammic force in motion. Hence the way to Nirvana lies through knowledge, and we come again full circle to Dhamma, the Buddha's teachings.
For in Dhamma, as truth, lies release from ignorance and desire and perpetual change, and the Buddha has shown us the way to truth. What, then, is the meaning of Buddhism? Ultimately Buddhism, although not strictly speaking a religion, is a systematic exercise in spirituality, certainly one of the greatest ever conceived. It offers the individual a means by which he may fulfill himself through understanding, reaching eventually the plane of the supraperson on which both the self and self-knowledge are no longer useful.
Meister Eckhart, the great Christian mystic, said: "The kingdom of God is for none but the thoroughly dead. Nirvana in life, the peace which "passeth all understanding," is the conquest of life, the discovery of the permanent in its flux of psychophysical accidents and circumstances.
The Buddhist believes that through meditation and good hard thought he can follow the Buddha through the successive stages of enlightenment and achieve at last the perfect wisdom which surmounts all need. But by no means all Buddhists are monks or adepts. What does Buddhism mean for the ordinary person going about his work in the world?
All through the Buddha's teaching, repeated stress is laid on self-reliance and resolution. Buddhism makes man stand on his own feet, it arouses his self-confidence and energy. The Buddha again and again reminded his followers that there is no one, either in heaven or on earth, who can help them or free them from the results of their past evil deeds. The Buddhist knows that the powers of his own mind and spirit are enough to guide him in the present and shape his future and bring him eventually to the truth.
He knows that he possesses a strength which is ultimately unsurpassable. Moreover, Buddhism points unequivocally to the moral aspect of everyday life. Though Nirvana is amoral, in the sense that final peace transcends the conflict of good and evil, the path to wisdom is definitely a moral path. This follows logically from the doctrine of kamma. Every action must produce an effect, and one's own actions produce an effect in one's own life. Thus the kammic force which carries us inevitably onward can only be a force for good, that is, for our ultimate wisdom, if each action is a good action.
This doctrine finds its highest expression in metta , the Buddhist goal of universal and all-embracing love. Metta means much more than brotherly feeling or kindheartedness, though these are part of it. It is active benevolence, a love which is expressed and fulfilled in active ministry for the uplifting of fellow beings.
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