Personal Response to Buddhism Buddha's Essay

In the U.S., for example, even a very modest income provides a standard of living that is more comfortable, privileged, easier, and luxurious than the vast majority of human beings living on the planet. However, because human nature is to continually judge one's contentment in relation to what others may have, few people are truly content or satisfied with their respective situation in life. Middle class people envy upper middle class people, upper middle class people envy the comparatively wealthy, and even the very wealthy covet the homes, possessions, and status of the immensely wealthy. In that respect, the Buddha's analysis of the human condition would be tremendously useful in connection with the importance of realizing that seeking contentment through the accumulation of material possessions or achievement of social status is analogous to trying to fill a cup full of holes.

As a general principle, the application of Buddhism would enable many people to achieve contentment by recognizing that external gratification (especially through comparative or competitive measures) is fundamentally useless because it is never-ending. In a more practical sense, Buddhism may have only a more limited relevance to modern life because implementing it fully would also preclude the achievement of goals that enable us to satisfy our most basic needs within an industrialized society in which everyone must develop some skills that have value to others in a capitalist economic system. However, the Buddhist principles are extremely useful for learning to distinguish legitimate personal goals and reasonable needs from superficial or ego-driven goals and purely materialistic needs whose value is only a function of perception. Needless to say, Buddhist moral teachings provide rules that would be beneficial to human societies. In that regard, they merely express some of the most important moral rules formalized in modern laws designed to protect all individuals in society from the wrongful actions of others.