



          BPS Newsletter Cover Essay #14 (Winter 1989)
                                  
                                  
                      THE QUEST FOR MEANING
                                  
                        by Bhikkhu Bodhi
                                  
                                  


   However much the modern world may pride itself on its triumphs over
   the follies and foibles of the past, it appears that the progress we
   credit ourselves with has been bought at a price so steep as to throw
   into question the worth of our achievements. This price has been
   nothing less than the shared conviction that our lives are endowed
   with ultimate meaning. Though in earlier ages men and women lived in
   a space populated largely by figments of the collective imagination,
   they could still claim a precious asset that we sorely lack: a firm
   and buoyant belief that their everyday lives were encompassed by a
   penumbra of enduring significance stemming from their relation to a
   transcendent goal.

   Present-day attitudes, however, molded by scientific reductionism and
   technocratic audacity, have combined forces to sweep away from our
   minds even the faint suspicion that our lives may possess any deeper
   meaning than material prosperity and technological innovation. For an
   increasing number of people today the consequence of this militancy
   has been a pervasive sense of meaninglessness. Cut loose from our
   moorings in a living spiritual tradition, we find ourselves adrift on
   a sea of confusion where all values seem arbitrary and relative. We
   float aimlessly along the waves of caprice, without any supreme
   purpose to serve as the polestar for our ideals, as the wellspring
   for inspired thought and action.

   But just as little as nature can tolerate a vacuum, so humankind can
   little tolerate a complete loss of meaning. Thence, to escape the
   plunge into the abyss of meaninglessness, we grasp after flotsam,
   attempting to immerse ourselves in distractions. We pursue pleasure
   and power, seek to augment our wealth and status, surround ourselves
   with contraptions, invest our hopes in personal relationships that
   only conceal our own inner poverty. At the same time, however, that
   our absorption in distractions helps us to cope with the
   psychological void, it also stifles in us a deeper and still more
   insistent need -- the longing for a peace and freedom that does not
   depend upon external contingencies.

   One of the great blessings of the Buddha's teaching is the remedy it
   can offer for the problem of meaninglessness so widespread in human
   life today. The Dhamma can serve as a source of meaning primarily
   because it provides us with the two requisites of a meaningful life:
   an ultimate goal for which to live, and a clearcut but flexible set
   of instructions by which we can advance towards that goal from
   whatever station in life we start from.

   In the Buddha's teaching the quest for ultimate meaning does not
   begin, as in the theistic religions, with propositions about a
   supernatural scheme of salvation to be assented to in faith. It
   begins, rather, by focusing upon an experiential problem right at the
   crux of human existence. The problem, of course, is the problem of
   suffering, the boundaries of which are shown to extend beyond our
   immediate subjection to pain, misery and sorrow, and to encompass all
   that is conditioned precisely because of its impermanence, its
   vulnerability, its lack of abiding substance.

   The goal of the teaching, the unconditioned element which is Nibbana,
   then comes to have a decisive bearing upon our vital concerns because
   it is apprehended as the cessation of suffering. Though in its own
   nature it defies all the limiting categories of conceptual thought,
   as the cessation of suffering Nibbana provides the final answer to
   our innermost yearnings for an imperishable peace, for complete
   freedom from sorrow, anxiety and distress. The way that the quest for
   this goal intersects with the course of our everyday life is made
   plain by the Buddha's analysis of the cause of suffering. The cause
   of suffering, the Buddha holds, lies within ourself, in our selfish
   craving conjoined with blinding ignorance, in the three evil roots
   that taint our normal engagement with the world: greed, hate and
   delusion. Thence the freedom from suffering that we seek lies in the
   eradication of these three roots.

   To orient our life towards the goal of deliverance from suffering
   requires that we tread the path that leads to and merges with the
   goal. This path is the Noble Eightfold Path, which brings an end to
   suffering and bondage by enabling us to extricate the causes of
   suffering embedded in our hearts. We begin the path exactly where we
   are, in the midst of error and defilement, and by clarifying our
   views, transforming our attitudes, and purifying our minds, we
   advance by stages towards the direct realization of the ultimate
   good.

   If the goal towards which the path points lies beyond the pale of
   conditioned existence, to walk the eightfold path is to discover
   within the confines of conditioned existence dimensions of meaning
   previously unknown. This richness of meaning stems from a twofold
   source. One is the recognition that the following of the path brings
   a diminishment of suffering for ourselves as well as others, and at
   the same time an enhancement of joy, mental equipoise and peace. The
   other source of meaning is the conviction that the values we are
   pursuing are not merely subjective and arbitrary, but are grounded in
   an absolutely objective order, in the very nature of things.

   As we embark on the way to the end of suffering, the final goal no
   longer appears merely as a distant shore but becomes refracted in our
   experience as the challenge of overcoming the unwholesome roots, and
   of assisting our fellow beings to do the same. This challenge, the
   task of actualizing our own good and the good of others, becomes at
   the same time life's inner core of meaning: to transmute greed into
   generosity and relinquishment, to replace hate with love and
   compassion, and to dispel delusion with the light of liberative
   wisdom.

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