The Human Condition
January 10, 2005
Human life, when you think about it, can be pretty miserable. Think of how few people actually get what they want out of life, and yet how much they’re driven by their desires. Sometimes their inability to get what they want can be blamed on laziness, but often it’s because of factors totally beyond their control. A wave comes up out of the ocean, washing thousands of people away, and all their plans, their hopes, their desires get washed away as well. What we’re left with is thousands of corpses, wrecked buildings — and that’s just one day’s events. The days add up to years, and the years to centuries: centuries of frustrated desires. So what we need is a way of dealing with frustrated desire, and that’s one of the gifts the Buddha offers us.