Today's Daily Dharma:
The essence of the Buddha's message
The essence of the Buddha’s message is contained in the Four Noble Truths. The first of these is the truth of suffering…The Buddha declared that all our experiences of joy, indifference, and pain are unsatisfactory. Are not even our greatest mundane pleasures tainted with dissatisfaction? When these pleasures pass away are we not left with unfulfilled longing and discontent? But in spite of this, we tend to cling to the pleasures of life, ignoring their transient nature…
The suffering we must recognize includes not only the kind we experience at the loss of a loved one, or when we lose our job, for example, but also includes the more fundamental conditions of our human existence, namely, aging, sickness, and death.
- B. Alan Wallace, Tibetan Buddhism from the Ground Up, from Everyday Mind, edited by Jean Smith, a Tricycle book.
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