Burden of care

We are all dogged by troubles because we care. If we don’t care, our troubles will disappear and we would see reason to say that life is beautiful and enjoyable.

We are all dogged by troubles because we care. If we don’t care, our troubles will disappear and we would see reason to say that life is beautiful and enjoyable.

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But the word care does not mean the care to love, respect and protect others. Here, it means ‘care to not care’ for the problems that cause our miseries. And so why care for such a care?

This is a key teaching of all religions; and particularly in Buddhism, it has a vital role to enunciate the Buddha’s philosophy.

For instance, why care and kill our happiness when we are not going to get a particular thing? It is in this sense that one has to be careless about care that is no good.

The Buddha says the destruction of care and troubles is possible only if one knows and cares to see and reflect wisely at suffering and its causes as well as its cessation.

Restraint involves complete control over mind and sense organs.

One who can have such restraint so that it keeps one’s self pure and does not lead to others’ woes is following the right path.

By ‘use’, we mean the use of things like clothes, food and shelter that do not add to our ostentatious living but keeps us in perfect and good sense.

The next is endurance which helps one put up with all kinds of troubles like cold and heat, hunger and thirst or any other body or mental pain. One who has this quality, pain is no pain and distress and pleasure is one and the same thing.

Similarly, avoidance as a way of life of things that are not noble and useful keeps one away from going astray.

The dispersal method involves rejection of harmful action and thought.

And, lastly, the most interesting one is the culture method. One has to cultivate mindfulness, energy, joy, calmness, concentration and equanimity — all factors of enlightenment.

Only then one can hope to be in bliss.