> > You know in late high school /early college I remember thinking it is
> > hard to really show that life has meaning. I thought I had
> > existential ennui. Periodically, with the ups and downs of life, I
> > have revisited that falling into a kind of desirelessness.
> Not at all what Buddhism is about, but it's probably useless to clarify
> this point on this list. Brian and I have tried to do it several times,
> with no result. So I won't repeat that effort now.
I'm a newcomer, so I missed these efforts; and I'm a little foolhardy, so I'm going to make one attempt myself. But before I do, a little preface: I'm coming at this from a Soto Zen perspective, and also a Western Catholic perspective. You should preface all the comments below with "As I understand it ...", because "Buddhism" itself is hardly dogmatically unified. It's about as doctrinally diverse as modern Christianity is.
Think of being in a situation which is unpleasant to you. I'm going to use a very trivial example: I don't like washing dishes, so I've avoided the chore, and now I have a huge pile of dishes which have to be washed, and that's what I'm in the middle of doing. I hate it. I'd rather be doing something else -- aikido, cooking dinner, watching Buffy, having sex, whatever.
I'm suffering. Why? Fundamentally, because I'm not *just* washing dishes. I'm washing dishes and at the same time comparing it in my mind with all these other wonderful things I could be doing but am not. [As I understand it...] That's "desire". If I weren't *obsessed* with those (wholly internal) comparisons, I would be able to wash the dishes without the suffering.
It takes, for me, a lot of mental effort to wash dishes without suffering because my ingrained habit is to mentally wander off somewhere else which I imagine would be so much nicer; but I try to practice washing dishes without that mental distraction. When the illusion of the aikido class, or the sex, or whatever tries to intrude, I try to dismiss it and get back to the task I'm doing, which is washing the dishes. That, right there, is the essence of meditation. It's my washing-dishes-meditation.
I suffer less, and actually, I do a better job of cleaning the dishes.
This doesn't mean I approach my life resigned to the fact that I'm going to have to wash a bunch of dishes. It doesn't mean I act with complete disregard for whether or not I'm going to accumulate dishes in the sink that I'll then have to wash, because of ennui or whatever.
I know that I dislike the chore and like other activities better; I do try to get dishes done as they pile up so I'm not stuck with mounds of dishes. But sometimes I don't succeed, whether on account of bad decisions on my part (ignoring the task), or factors outside of my control (one of my housemates cooks me a meal that uses every pan in the cupboard on my night to clean); and when that happens, well ...
This is a kind of cheap example, because washing dishes doesn't involve pain, or hunger, or exhaustion, or thirst, or death. And Buddhism is *not* nihilistic in the sense that it says one oughtn't bother trying to do anything about being in those situations in the future; in fact we *ought* to take action to avoid that suffering -- on the part of ourselves, and on the part of other beings. But when we're unavoidably in that moment -- as always happens in one way or another -- Buddhism counsels the same dishes-washing attitude as an antidote to the suffering inherent in those situations as well.
That's "enlightenment". It's not easy, but it is a tenet of Buddhism that it is possible; and the Buddha even gave a prescription for getting there. But that's another discourse entirely.
...
I suppose you could go back to the whole dishes-washing example and substitute "accumulation of karma" for "accumulation of dishes" and then shoehorn in some metaphor for reincarnation and the carrying of karma from lifetime to lifetime. But I'm not going to try, because I don't believe in reincarnation (except for, perhaps, in a very abstruse sense); and I don't think you have to believe in it to be a Buddhist.
-- John S Costello joxn.costello at gmail.com "Every other vice hath some pleasure annexed to it, or will admit of some excuse, but envy wants both." -- Robert Burton