This is another dhamma talk from Yuttadhammo Bhikkhu that I would suggest anyone who are seriously pursuing happiness should refer to. Especially, if you’re Buddhist, this short talk addressing the question of ‘how to live one’s life?’ would give you a great view on the map to get there.
I’d like to express my deep thanks to Yuttadhammo Bhikkhu for the teaching. And I wish you all the best.
You can find more about Yuttadhammo Bhikkhu and his teaching at: https://www.sirimangalo.org/
Please find below the Youtube video and the transcribed script is followed.
Good evening, everyone. Today’s talk is in response to a question about living one’s life. So the question had its own specifics, but the important point of it was about asking how to live one’s life, which is a difficult question to answer on the face of it. Because you often involves some assumptions about what’s important, just assumptions about life in general. When we talk about how to live our lives, it’s often in context. It’s in the context of what we see as essential or important, in the context of how we understand reality. It’s caught up in what we’re told about life, about the world. So it involves concepts like family, society, economy. Even the concept of life itself, which is really just a concept, like a life from birth to death. Because the birth of a being, of a human being, it’s a concept that’s in our mind. Something that we conceive of, based on observations. It’s quite different experientially from other experiences. And so we give it a name and we see it as a thing, as an entity. We do the same with death. One death’s is some event that is quite different from other events. But it’s mostly external, right? You look at someone else, you spend time with them and you experience them in a specific way. But when they die, when you’re experiencing them quite a different way and it appears that they have ceased to exist. Or an important part of them, the mental part and the physical life has ceased to exist. And so this gives rise to all sorts of ideas.
But important for this question is the idea of life. So when we talk about life, we have to understand that it’s in context. It’s in the context of our understanding of things. And so I can’t tell you how to live your life in that context. Because it’s not essential. It’s not something that has an answer. The questions that we ask about life, in other words, are not fundamentally real. Should I go to university? Should I get a job? Should I get this job or that job? We ask questions that are based on concepts and so the answers are elusive, are complicated and are unanswerable in an ultimate level. And so we develop theories and philosophies and ideas based around this, the work ethic idea, the family, filial piety idea, our religions play into this, our culture’s plays into this, even our partiality plays into this. I want to be a lawyer. Right. How many concepts are caught up in that and how how subjective is that? I want to become a lawyer. But does that mean becoming a lawyer is the right thing for some people? That’s not, for many people nowadays. I want to bang on a drum all day. For some people, that’s enough. This is a puzzle for us to solve, and it’s a puzzle that is deeply a part of Buddhist theory and practice.
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