Get Out of Yourself
December 28, 2021
There’s that famous line at the beginning of Anna Karenina where Tolstoy says that happy families are all alike, whereas every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. He then proceeds to write a novel of hundreds of pages about some very, very unhappy families, focused on the particulars of why they were unhappy. The implication seems to be that the things people have in common when they’re happy or unhappy are of no interest. What’s of interest is the particulars of our own suffering, or other people’s suffering. But from the Buddha’s point of view, Tolstoy’s got it backwards.