What is the Purpose of Our Life?
There’s already love and compassion in each of us. We often feel love towards others with our friends or family members. In the same way we may periodically feel compassion towards the suffering of humanity. At the same time our love and compassion can be very conditional.
Letter for Sojong 08/15 from Anam Thubten
Dear dharma friends,
There are many seemingly profound ideas on what the purpose of human life is. We can of course choose one of them that makes sense to us, and yet when we adopt any kind of existing belief system it can be sometimes just conceptual without having any kind of vibrancy or aliveness. For this very reason we might like to ask ourselves again and again what the purpose of life is until there is a deep answer that comes from our own heart.
This seems to be what Buddha did. He didn’t let himself be fooled by the worldly riches like fame, wealth and reputation. He wasn’t satisfied easily by the religious doctrines of his time. He was always in a fire of live inquiry which eventually led him to a profound inner awakening. The answer to such a question is also an expression of our deepest impulse, which turned out to be the bodhicitta or enlightened heart. Bodhicitta is our authentic longing to become bigger inside by expanding our circle of love and compassion.
There’s already love and compassion in each of us. We often feel love towards others with our friends or family members. In the same way we may periodically feel compassion towards the suffering of humanity. At the same time our love and compassion can be very conditional. Sometimes we don’t embody them everyday in the face of difficult issues. So we can continue to expand our circle of love and compassion by embracing more and more people as well as living beings in our heart. That keeps us becoming bigger and bigger inside. And that’s how we are designed to become happy, from being less selfish and less self-centered.
As a human we all want to discover happiness and we always also are looking for the secret of happiness. But there are no magic pills we can take, no one doctrine that will make us unconditionally happy if we believe it. The secret of happiness is this spiritual practice that makes us become bigger from the inside.
This is really what our heart wants after all. You can regard this as the longing of our own Buddha nature to realize itself. There is this idea in the wisdom traditions that there is a journey of going from the finite to the infinite. But this is not so much that some day we’re going to arrive at the infinite, but instead it’s that we walk this path, take this journey of moving from the finite to the infinite for the rest of our lives. And such journey is all about becoming bigger inside by allowing the circle or our compassion and love to grow continuously.
Let me remind all of you that we are going to observe Sojong on the 15th of this month. You might like to reflect and engage this kind of inquiry that will help us to invoke authentic bodhicitta. We can look at the areas in our lives where we can develop more love or compassion. We can also ask ‘What is the purpose of our life?’
With palms joined, Anam Thubten