/lit/ - Literature

https://www.accesstoinsight.org/lib/authors/thanissaro/affirming.html

>Samvega was what the young Prince Siddhartha felt on his first exposure to aging, illness, and death. It's a hard word to translate because it covers such a complex range — at least three clusters of feelings at once: the oppressive sense of shock, dismay, and alienation that come with realizing the futility and meaninglessness of life as it's normally lived; a chastening sense of our own complacency and foolishness in having let ourselves live so blindly; and an anxious sense of urgency in trying to find a way out of the meaningless cycle. This is a cluster of feelings we've all experienced at one time or another in the process of growing up, but I don't know of a single English term that adequately covers all three. It would be useful to have such a term, and maybe that's reason enough for simply adopting the word samvega into our language.

>[]

>As the early Buddhist teachings freely admit, the predicament is that the cycle of birth, aging, and death is meaningless. They don't try to deny this fact and so don't ask us to be dishonest with ourselves or to close our eyes to reality. As one teacher has put it, the Buddhist recognition of the reality of suffering — so important that suffering is honored as the first noble truth — is a gift, in that it confirms our most sensitive and direct experience of things, an experience that many other traditions try to deny.

The Dharma is a gift.

Suffering is unavoidable guys. You could have the perfect job, an awesome house, a wonderful family, and then all of a sudden your wife has a brain aneurysm and dies.

Modern people have sort of forgotten this, since so many of us assume that we can somehow "invent" our way out of suffering. Ignoring the obvious problem of whether or not such a thing is even possible, such an outlook also ignores the reality of the deeper, more subtle psychological sufferings that pervade us, often without knowing it. You might think you're "happy" when you complete a world domination victory in Civ 5, but odds are you've got a lot of anxieties / worries / stressors etc. all under the surface buzzing away, which playing video games can only temporarily mask.

If you really study all the religious traditions you'll see that literally all of them elaborate on this in much detail. That's why things such as patience, grace, restraint, humility, honesty, etc. are all universally praised by them. I truly feel like when modernity decided to throw away religion due to their superficial inconsistencies, we more or less threw the baby out with the bathwater because we got rid of our main source of collective wisdom teaching us these matters.

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https://www.accesstoinsight.org/tipitaka/an/an03/an03.061.than.html

>"Having approached the brahmans & contemplatives who hold that... 'Whatever a person experiences... is all caused by what was done in the past,' I said to them: 'Is it true that you hold that... "Whatever a person experiences... is all caused by what was done in the past?"' Thus asked by me, they admitted, 'Yes.' Then I said to them, 'Then in that case, a person is a killer of living beings because of what was done in the past. A person is a thief... unchaste... a liar... a divisive speaker... a harsh speaker... an idle chatterer... greedy... malicious... a holder of wrong views because of what was done in the past.' When one falls back on what was done in the past as being essential, monks, there is no desire, no effort [at the thought], 'This should be done. This shouldn't be done.' When one can't pin down as a truth or reality what should & shouldn't be done, one dwells bewildered & unprotected. One cannot righteously refer to oneself as a contemplative. This was my first righteous refutation of those brahmans & contemplatives who hold to such teachings, such views.