[无量香光 · 显密文库 · 手机站]
fowap.goodweb.net.cn
{返回首页}


The Quest for Meaning
 
{返回 Bodhi Bhikkhu 文集}
{返回网页版}
点击:1848

The Quest for Meaning
by
Bhikkhu Bodhi
© 1998

However much the modern world may pride itself on its triumphs over the follies and foibles of the past, it appears that the progress we credit ourselves with has been bought at a price so steep as to throw into question the worth of our achievements. This price has been nothing less than the shared conviction that our lives are endowed with ultimate meaning. Though in earlier ages men and women lived in a space populated largely by figments of the collective imagination, they could still claim a precious asset that we sorely lack: a firm and buoyant belief that their everyday lives were encompassed by a penumbra of enduring significance stemming from their relation to a transcendent goal.

Present-day attitudes, however, molded by scientific reductionism and technocratic audacity, have combined forces to sweep away from our minds even the faint suspicion that our lives may possess any deeper meaning than material prosperity and technological innovation. For an increasing number of people today the consequence of this militancy has been a pervasive sense of meaninglessness. Cut loose from our moorings in a living spiritual tradition, we find ourselves adrift on a sea of confusion where all values seem arbitrary and relative. We float aimlessly along the waves of caprice, without any supreme purpose to serve as the polestar for our ideals, as the wellspring for inspired thought and action.

But just as little as nature can tolerate a vacuum, so humankind can little tolerate a complete loss of meaning. Thence, to escape the plunge into the abyss of meaninglessness, we grasp after flotsam, attempting to immerse ourselves in distractions. We pursue pleasure and power, seek to augment our wealth and status, surround ourselves with contraptions, invest our hopes in personal relationships that only conceal our own inner poverty. At the same time, however, that our absorption in distractions helps us to cope with the psychological void, it also stifles in us a deeper and still more insistent need — the longing for a peace and freedom that does not depend upon external contingencies.

One of the great blessings of the Buddha's teaching is the remedy it can offer for the problem of meaninglessness so widespread in human life today. The Dhamma can serve as a source of meaning primarily because it provides us with the two requisites of a meaningful life: an ultimate goal for which to live, and a clearcut but flexible set of instructions by which we can advance toward that goal from whatever station in life we start from.

In the Buddha's teaching the quest for ultimate meaning does not begin, as in the theistic religions, with propositions about a supernatural scheme of salvation to be assented to in faith. It begins, rather, by focusing upon an experiential problem right at the crux of human existence. The problem, of course, is the problem of suffering, the boundaries of which are shown to extend beyond our immediate subjection to pain, misery and sorrow, and to encompass all that is conditioned precisely because of its impermanence, its vulnerability, its lack of abiding substance.

The goal of the teaching, the unconditioned element which is Nibbana, then comes to have a decisive bearing upon our vital concerns because it is apprehended as the cessation of suffering. Though in its own nature it defies all the limiting categories of conceptual thought, as the cessation of suffering Nibbana provides the final answer to our innermost yearnings for an imperishable peace, for complete freedom from sorrow, anxiety and distress. The way that the quest for this goal intersects with the course of our everyday life is made plain by the Buddha's analysis of the cause of suffering. The cause of suffering, the Buddha holds, lies within ourself, in our selfish craving conjoined with blinding ignorance, in the three evil roots that taint our normal engagement with the world: greed, hate and delusion. Thence the freedom from suffering that we seek lies in the eradication of these three roots.

To orient our life toward the goal of deliverance from suffering requires that we tread the path that leads to and merges with the goal. This path is the Noble Eightfold Path, which brings an end to suffering and bondage by enabling us to extricate the causes of suffering embedded in our hearts. We begin the path exactly where we are, in the midst of error and defilement, and by clarifying our views, transforming our attitudes, and purifying our minds, we advance by stages toward the direct realization of the ultimate good.

If the goal toward which the path points lies beyond the pale of conditioned existence, to walk the eightfold path is to discover within the confines of conditioned existence dimensions of meaning previously unknown. This richness of meaning stems from a twofold source. One is the recognition that the following of the path brings a diminishment of suffering for ourselves as well as others, and at the same time an enhancement of joy, mental equipoise and peace. The other source of meaning is the conviction that the values we are pursuing are not merely subjective and arbitrary, but are grounded in an absolutely objective order, in the very nature of things.

As we embark on the way to the end of suffering, the final goal no longer appears merely as a distant shore but becomes refracted in our experience as the challenge of overcoming the unwholesome roots, and of assisting our fellow beings to do the same. This challenge, the task of actualizing our own good and the good of others, becomes at the same time life's inner core of meaning: to transmute greed into generosity and relinquishment, to replace hate with love and compassion, and to dispel delusion with the light of liberative wisdom.


{返回 Bodhi Bhikkhu 文集}
{返回网页版}
{返回首页}

上一篇:The Search for Security
下一篇:The Problem of Conflict
 A New Undertaking
 Dhamma and Non-duality
 The Problem of Conflict
 The Discourse on Right View - The S..
 The Five Spiritual Faculties
 The Search for Security
 Nourishing The Roots - Essays on Bu..
 A Statement of Conscience
 An Auspicious Month
 From Views to Vision
全文 标题
 
【佛教文章随机阅读】
 模块三:做正确的事情为自己负责(3)[栏目:佛是一棵树 第四部分:佛法中的六度空间]
 佛教信仰简论[栏目:周贵华博士]
 现代人的宗教迷失[栏目:噶玛天津仁波切]
 对外道应该采取什么态度?应该如何做?[栏目:希阿荣博堪布问答]
 十六届:普茶 柏林夜话三[栏目:生活禅夏令营演讲集]
 五届:开营式上的讲话(扈本讯)[栏目:生活禅夏令营演讲集]
 佛教基本知识 第四章 菩萨行果 第一节 菩萨乘的发心和誓愿[栏目:佛教基本知识·正果法师]
 佛教宇宙观[栏目:传喜法师]
 The Lankavatara Sutra - Chapter I. Discrimination[栏目:A Buddhist Bible]
 漫说《杂阿含》(卷十五)~H 393经(善男子经):本经所阐述的是出家比丘(善男子)应懂得出家的真正..[栏目:界定法师]


{返回首页}

△TOP

- 手机版 -
[无量香光·显密文库·佛教文集]
教育、非赢利、公益性的佛教文化传播
白玛若拙佛教文化传播工作室制作
www.goodweb.net.cn Copyrights reserved
(2003-2015)
站长信箱:yjp990@163.com