Dan: Oh no I certainly didn't mean to imply that! I'm pretty sure Siddhartha discovered for himself that living a life void of desire was not the middle way. It was in fact extreme.
[Krimel] Excuse my intrusion but I think this point is central to Buddhist. The Four Nobel Truths are: 1. Life means suffering. 2. The origin of suffering is attachment. 3. The cessation of suffering is attainable. 4. The path to the cessation of suffering. As I understand this the path to enlightenment involved the elimination of attachment or desire of any form. The middle way through this is not that some desire is good and other desire is bad. All desire leads to suffering. If you love someone it is your love that causes suffering when they die. [Dan] Rather, what I was getting at is that there are positive desires and negative desires. I think the Buddha might agree: it's not a feeling of satisfaction, it's the positive or negative consequences that arise from desire that provide a demarcation point. [Krimel] I think the Buddha enjoins us to renounce ALL desire. The middle way is a kind of cop out that says, well it's ok to have lots of stuff and friends and family as long as we are not "attached" to them; as long as we can get along just find with out them. In that case whether you have these things don't matter. It is your attitude toward them that counts. This seems to me to be much the same as the Christian cop out that "The love of money is the root of all evil." It provides the same end run around this issue and keeps the rich folks in the pews and pagodas. I think what the Buddha is getting at is more like what Victor Frankl found in the concentration camps, a way of living and finding joy in the absence of everything we previously thought was important and dear. Moq_Discuss mailing list Listinfo, Unsubscribing etc. http://lists.moqtalk.org/listinfo.cgi/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org Archives: http://lists.moqtalk.org/pipermail/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org/ http://moq.org.uk/pipermail/moq_discuss_archive/
