It All Depends on Your Perspective

One problem with understanding the Buddhist path, especially at the beginning, is that a lot of the concepts make much more sense from the perspective of a fully awakened person than from any other angle, but no one is fully awakened at the beginning, almost by definition.

It is usually the case that, when a teacher you trust tells you something that makes zero sense to you, the best approach is just to keep meditating on it and expect that it will come to make sense eventually.

For example, in Buddhism, especially Tibetan Buddhism, renunciation is a key concept. That sounds like a real buzzkill to an ordinary person in the United States. We’re supposed to want more always. The one who dies with the most toys wins, as one popular saying has it. Renunciation suggests giving up everything.

But according to one authoritative explanation, the Buddhist version of renunciation is less about giving up on things as it is changing our attitude towards those things. Grasping is the problem, not what you are grasping at. Greed and aversion, which are two sides of the same coin, are what we should strive to avoid.

Our expositor from above uses the example of the Dalai Lama, who apparently rides around in his hometown in India in a Mercedes Benz a lot. Some people really, really want a Mercedes Benz because it is a status mobile. It supposedly marks the driver as a person of means and sophisticated taste.