Desire [also] Leads To [...] Suffering

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I bought my second Buddha on a whim. I was in the Black Market with Minako looking for something entirely different and saw the army of wooden Buddhas assembled behind the counter. Most were fat and laughing. Enlightenment is happy, after all. But those Buddha’s never appealed to me. There was one on the end, a skinny one with what looked like a blank expression at first, but the more I looked at it, the expression seemed more peaceful than blank. That's the one I picked.

Now, if you ask Buddhists, they might argue that there is no difference between blank and peaceful.

I have a limited understanding of Buddhism, and what I do know is mostly the bastardized North American version of Zen Buddhism. The long and the short of it seems to be that the reason we are unhappy is that we desire things. Not necessarily material things. They can be circumstances, or situations we want to be in. Those who are motivated among us set goals and try to achieve these goals in order to get whatever it is we want. We think these things will make us happy.

Of course, they don't really.

Either you don't get what you want, or when you get it, it doesn't actually make you happy.

The NAZB (North American Zen Buddhist's) solution to this is to eliminate desire. Take away the want in the first place, and accept the situation you are in, and then you will be happy. Accept that things change, and that circumstances can be different, but nothing is really better or worse. Just different.

(Ironically, many Buddhists get hung up on the way to enlightenment and the elimination of desire by wanting enlightenment too much. You can only achieve enlightenment if you don't want it...)

I like a lot of things about this world view, but there is one piece I can't and won't accept: that a person is capable of eliminating all desire, and that this person will then better off than before. I agree that desire is one of the foundations of suffering and major block to happiness, but I think it's one that people everywhere have to struggle with. I don't think anyone achieves enlightenment. I think people can recognize that their desires are nothing more that a bizarre combination of hormones and chemicals and upbringing and cultural influence (etc.) But that recognition does not allow people to live their lives free of desire. A person's desire is part of what makes them unique as an individual (Buddhists wouldn't argue this, they just don't value individuality in the same way I do). The challenge, I think, is to navigate life without being driven solely by your desires (for love, sex, money, stability, the complete set of 1969 O-Pee-Chee baseball cards, etc.) but without ignoring them either, giving into them once in a while. Not at all easy.

I bought my second Buddha to remind me that no matter how much I want to write my novel, and no matter how much I finally want my apartment to be clean, and no matter how much I want to be the guy with all the cool sports stuff people want to buy, none of it really has any lasting significance. All of those things are valuable to me, and I will keep working at them, but none of them sum up my value or essence as a human being. Nothing really can.

And if I sit on my balcony from time to time, thinking about how my ass feels on the chair, and noticing how the wind moves in the trees, and how the old ladies hobble along in their walkers and how the garbage in the bushes is disintegrating, I can remember that, and feel like I am not completely ruled by my desires.