this question what is purpose of life I think this is a wrong question to ask to a Buddhist rather the question should be what is life a zen master a great zen master once said to study Buddhism is to study oneself and to to study oneself is to realize there is no one self and this is a very I think beautifully uh put into a nutshell so as you I hope through my small introduction you will have a glimpse of what is life from the Buddhist perspective it's like a what do you call it mysterious
absolutely not it's something so straightforward yeah it can be like this like um like when you shake hands you say like I want to shake hand with you and then you you shake hand you don't think in terms of I want to touch your sweat I want to touch your skin and burn you know we don't think in terms of paths we think in terms of our whole unit this is an ignorance also we think when we when we think about our hand we will always think this is the same hand that I had yesterday
right everybody will think like that this is the same hand as the same hand that I had yesterday and this will be the same hand as I will be the same hand in the future like tomorrow or the next minute but that is not the case the hand is always always changing remember because we are you are precious hand is also under the clutches of the Lord Yama the time and this makes sense because if your hand is not under the subject of time you will not need moisturizer because your hand needs moisturized moisturizer it
proves that is changing and then not worse it decays it gets old it has it will have wrinkles then finally it will disintegrate and it will fall apart but all along there is a hidden assumption that this is the same hand that I had it 20 years ago so we when we talk about ignorance we are talking about nothing exceptional nothing mysterious nothing sort of mythical we are talking about this fundamental ignorance of not knowing the truth of our existence it doesn't matter the hand is just the example but every situation our emotion our feeling
our relationship our values things that we value today we will not value tomorrow um if I modify a little bit of what great Indian Bengali um said you know our value changes all the time when we were children we valued our dolls our toys now we if someone breaks your toys those days we we go crazy now it doesn't matter so much now we actually have renounced them we have actually automatically become a Sanya sin with a toy I mean most of us now we now we have a new toy we have a new get
you know like it doesn't matter what whatever fast cars um I don't know uh smartphone whatever by the time you reach to maybe 80 or 90 those things doesn't matter then maybe it will be like a tablecloths maybe it will be a salt shaker I don't know walking sticks I don't know what something like this so this is how our value changes so everything changes but all along we never realize this and this is what is represented by the pig and pig so pig is a really important icon in this whole thing and pig is
also the source of time and the space because of ignorance because of your assumption therefore there is time and space this is how the Buddhists would interpret and now once you have the pig the ignorance you will always have two other emotions broadly speaking hope and fear hope gets uh hope gets uh what you call it um ah when the Hope becomes more strong and constructive and when the Hope becomes more assertive then hope is what becomes greed desire attachment which is usually represented by bird rooster insatiable supposedly I don't know why but this is
how the 2500 years ago the Buddhists have decided that the roosters are insatiable and then the fear when the fear becomes uh what you call it um uncontrollable when the fear becomes very big the fear becomes aggression so that aggression is represented by snake paranoid always panicky quick in asserting things so these three the ignorance desire and the anger are sort of the Almighty creator of all this perception called life
