The ultimate goal of Buddhism is to achieve inner peace and then share your experience with other people. It is important for you to be a source of encouragement and support for others. This is as simple as giving someone a hug if he or she is feeling down. If someone is important to you or does something nice for you, let the person know how you feel. Let people know that you are grateful for them and appreciate them.
If someone is having a bad day, provide a listening ear. Treat people with compassion. Your happiness is directly related to the happiness of other people. You can practice compassion in many ways: [21] X Research source Turn off your cell phone when you are spending time with friends and family.
Make eye contact when someone is talking to you and listen without interrupting. Volunteer in your community. Open doors for other people. Be empathetic towards people. For example, if someone is upset, acknowledge and try to understand why they are upset. Ask them what you can do to help. Listen and show concern for their feelings.
Be mindful. When you practice mindfulness, you pay attention to how you think and feel in the present moment. Mindfulness is not only for meditation but for your every day life as well. For example, you can be mindful as you eat, shower, or get dressed in the morning. Go to source Start by choosing one activity and then focus on the sensations in your body and your breathing as you do it.
As you wash the dishes, pay attention to the temperature of the water, how your hands feel as you clean the dishes, and how the water feels as you rinse the dishes. Instead of listening to the music or the television as you get dressed in the morning, get ready in silence. Notice how you feel. Were you tired or well rested when you woke up?
How does your body feel as you put on clothes or shower? Part 3. Identify suffering. Buddha describes suffering differently than you may usually think of it. Suffering is inevitable and is a part of life. Dukkha is the truth that all is suffering. Yet, Buddha considers desires i. These two things are considered the roots of suffering because humans are rarely ever satisfied or content. Once one desire is met, another desire is created.
This is a vicious cycle. Dukkha means "that which is difficult to bear. Determine the cause of suffering. Desire and ignorance are the root of suffering. For example, if you are sick, you are suffering. While you are sick, you desire to be well. Your unmet desire to be well is a greater form of suffering than just being sick. Any time you desire a thing, opportunity, person, or achievement that you cannot have, you are suffering. The only guarantees in life aging, sickness, and death.
Once you achieve or get something that you want, you will begin to desire something else. Your constant cravings keep you from achieving true happiness. End suffering in your life. Each of the four truths is a stepping stone. If all is suffering and suffering comes from your desires, then the only way to end suffering is by no longer having desires. To end the suffering in your life, you must change your perception and learn to control your desires.
Controlling your desires and cravings will allow you to live with freedom and contentment. Attain the end of suffering in your life. The end of suffering can be attained by traveling the Noble Eightfold Path. First, you have to to have the right intentions and mindset. Secondly, you have to live out your right intentions in your everyday life.
Lastly, you have to understand true reality and have the correct beliefs about all things. The eightfold path can be divided into three categories: wisdom right view, right intention , ethical conduct right speech, right action, right livelihood , and mental cultivation right effort, right mindfulness, right concentration.
If desire is the causation of suffering, isn't all of life desire? When we are hungry we desire food. When tired we desire sleep. How do we banish these desires without dying or losing our minds? Yes, you are right, all of that is driven by desire. There are three bases of desire: lobha greed , dosa aversion , and moha delusion. Desire within these three bases is acknowledged as the causation of suffering.
When you are hungry, it is okay to eat in the motivation of fulfilling daily nutrition necessity for doing the right effort. Do not eat more than you need because it gains greed lobha. It's okay for you to desire to be free from these three bases, it's called right effort. It is also okay to read some Dhammapada verse. Not Helpful 9 Helpful If all Buddhists ultimately desire to attain Nirvana, then isn't that a contradiction if they can't attain it as long as they have desire?
I am confused. Don't be confused by the word "desire" used to explain the causes of suffering with the "desire" used to describe one's wish or will. An example of the former is our greed, some examples of the latter are birthday wishes and our ambition. Obsession about satisfying desire ultimately leads to all kinds of suffering, while fulfilling a wish keeps one's mind focused and directional.
Once we make a wish, we may not be as obsessive as satisfying our desire to fulfill the wish. The "desire" to attain Nirvana is an aspiration to all Buddhists who have to be mindful of all conditions that may obstruct them to attain it, including their own "obsessive desire" to attain it.
Not Helpful 4 Helpful One of the tips on this page says, "Find what you enjoy and do more of it," but isn't that just indulging one's desires and, therefore, increasing suffering? Finding what you enjoy more and doing more of it does not lead to nirvana. You need to free yourself from all defilements. The main cause for suffering is craving, which happens due to greed, ignorance and hatred.
The best way to attain nirvana is meditating. Not Helpful 14 Helpful Achieving Nirvana will probably not be easy. It may take a long time. Even if it feels impossible, keep trying. Helpful 0 Not Helpful 0. You can practice Buddhism on your own, but you may benefit from going to a temple and having a teacher.
Don't rush to decide on a group or teacher. Always trust your own instinct with this and take your time. There are great teachers out there and some very unpleasant ones.
I believe this is due to the Mahayana view that Nirvana is an all-encompassing domain that all beings reside within, and therefore, by being self-sufficient, yet selfless, as well as detached, yet altruistic, one is truly imitating the totality of all things that make up Nirvana, or following what is called the Middle Path.
Yet, this cannot be equated to the Theravada belief in the diligent practice of temperance. While the Theravada school supports the practice of temperance so that one can detach from the world, the Mahayana tradition believes that moderation imitates the impartial nature of the Buddha, or the preeminent one who has achieved Nirvana, which in turn can help others attain spiritual emancipation. To Mahayana Buddhists, Nirvana is not only a state of spiritual flawlessness, but also the reality that all sentient beings are a part of.
Furthermore, to Mahayana Buddhists, Nirvana is a state of spiritual perfection in which one realizes that there is nothing outside of Nirvana, and that it is the highest degree of reality one can enter into. Consequently, the Mahayana Buddhists believe that this can lead one to be disenchanted with Nirvana, which is problematic because feelings of dissatisfaction are contrary to that state of contentment.
Hence, this paradox leads the Mahayana, unlike their Theravada brethren, to recommend that those who are in Nirvana assist those who have not yet reached it. The Buddhist philosopher Nagarjuna believed that Nirvana was beyond logic. To him, the closest one can come to describing this level of reality is to understand that it derives from neither existence nor non-existence. Hence, by being an exception to the interactions between being and non-being, Nagarjuna is left to conclude that Nirvana is the all-encompassing totality of reality that all sentient beings reside within.
Furthermore, Nagarjuna states that because there is really no definition that is adequate to describe Nirvana, one should discard it from thought so that it does not become a source of vexation. One may infer, as a result, that to Theravada Buddhists one should try to escape the painful predicament of this life, through only self-denial, which I believe the Buddha, Nagarjuna, and the Mahayana Tradition would not identify with.
Ultimately, Nirvana facilitates desire, and since desire derives from Nirvana, there is something good in it, insofar as it can help one to learn valuable life lessons.
Nagarjuna, who claims that the universe is dynamic and not subject to the laws of origination or annihilation, may rightfully be understood as supporting a similar claim that was made by the Buddha in The Parable of the Mustard Seed. According to the Buddha, one must accept that Nirvana is at times a painful condition, which all people are a part of, and that by helping others from a place of genuine compassion can, in turn, help them to realize the preexisiting state of Nirvana.
Finally, this too diverges from the Theravada belief that one must achieve Nirvana instead of growing into it as a state of being.
Burtt, E. Astore, R. Astore, Rocco A. The newsletter highlights recent selections from the journal and useful tips from our blog. Inquiries Journal provides undergraduate and graduate students around the world a platform for the wide dissemination of academic work over a range of core disciplines.
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Forgot password? Reset your password ». By Rocco A. Astore , Vol. Cite References Print. In Theravada Buddhism, Nirvana is not only a state of liberation from wants, but also a freedom from the suffering that is associated with them.
In contrast to the Theravada concept of spiritual liberation, the Mahayana school believes that Nirvana cannot really exists until all have reached it. Burtt ed. Ibid Ibid. Rocco A. As soon as you are liberated in the here and now, you enter a nirvana you can enjoy for the rest of your life. If you observe your feelings mindfully rather than just reacting to them, you can escape the control.
Mindfulness involves, among other things, cultivating an awareness of your feelings that fundamentally changes your relationship to them. So, regardless of how exotic or how practical your aspirations — whether you believe in a cycle of rebirth and want to escape it, or just want to attain complete liberation in the here and now, or for that matter just hope to find partial liberation in the here and now — a key tool in the quest for liberation, mindfulness, remains the same.
And, accordingly, some of the basic terminology remains the same. The things in your environment — the sights, the sounds, the smells, the people, the news, the videos — are pushing your buttons, activating feelings that, however subtly, set in motion trains of thought and reaction that govern your behaviour, sometimes in ways that are unfortunate. All of this points to the sense in which the ancient Buddhist appraisal of the human condition is very modern in spirit.
The human brain is a machine designed by natural selection to respond in pretty reflexive fashion to the sensory input impinging on it. It is designed, in a certain sense, to be controlled by that input. And a key cog in the machinery of control are the feelings that arise in response to the input.
A donut smells good, so we approach it; a restless hunger feels bad so we try to escape it — by, say, eating a donut; social status feels good and ridicule feels bad, so we pursue and avoid, respectively.
If you interact with such feelings via tanha — via the natural, reflexive thirst for the pleasant feelings and the natural, reflexive aversion to the unpleasant feelings — you will continue to be controlled by the world around you. But if you observe those feelings mindfully rather than just reacting to them, you can in some measure escape the control; the causes that ordinarily shape your behaviour can be defied, and you can get closer to the unconditioned.
T here are debates within Buddhism about how dramatically to conceive of nirvana and the unconditioned. Or is it a bit more mundane, just freedom from the mindless reactivity to causes, to conditions, that would otherwise control you?
Thinking of complete liberation in the here and now as a kind of zone — a metaphorical if not a metaphysical zone — might be useful. And it might be useful regardless of whether you think the zone is realistically reachable or just something you can get closer and closer to.
When I phoned my wife after my first weeklong silent meditation retreat, she said I sounded like a completely different person — before I had even said anything about the retreat, or said anything of substance at all. The very tenor of my voice sounded different, she said. And she liked the new tenor a lot. Now, I grant you that this might have been more of a comment on the old tenor than on the new one.
Anyway, the point is that there had been a real change of tenor. Certainly, the world as I saw it had a new tenor. I had shed so much of my usual self-absorption that I could take a new kind of delight in the people and things around me.
I was more open, suddenly inclined to strike up conversations with strangers. The world seemed newly vibrant and resonant. It is the fate of all conditioned things to change when conditions change.
And conditions change all the time. And you would think that a meditative discipline devoted, in some sense, to tamping down the influence of feelings on perception, to fostering a view of sober clarity, would only abet that tendency. After that first retreat, I felt like I was living in a zone of enchantment, a place of wonder and preternatural beauty. I was still reacting at least somewhat reflexively to the causes impinging on me. Still, one source of the enchantment, I think, was that I was spending less time reacting, less time having my buttons pushed, and more time observing — which, as a bonus, allowed for more thoughtful responses to things.
I assume that living in the unconditioned would be great, but living in the less conditioned can be pretty great, too. You could take many ideas that are fundamental to Buddhism and recast them in terms of the conditioned, the caused. Indeed, you could say that Buddhist philosophy consists largely of taking the idea of causality really, really seriously.
In that discourse, the Buddha also emphasises the impermanence of the things we think of as parts of the self. And this too — the perennial arising and passing away of thoughts, emotions, attitudes — is a consequence of the ever-changing forces that act on us, forces that set off chain reactions inside us.
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