Eastern Wisdom, Modern Life

nirvana, and that means “release.”

And so, in this way, through our failure to see that everything is alive because it flows, we try to possess it, and this is trishna, or grasping. In other words we try to hold on as tight as we can to what we love: to hold on to our own lives, to hold on to the lives of people we cherish. In exactly the same way a mother, who’s very fond of a child who’s growing up and still wants to keep that baby, and smothers with love that

And so, if we think of the world as being made up of separate things rather than related things, we start trying to deal with things as if they were separate. That is to say, take for example pleasure and pain. We say pleasure is distinctly separate from pain. I want pleasure, but I don’t want pain. I wo

ve up without down. Supposing we try to arrange everything around here so that everything was up and there was nothing down, or so that we had all fronts but no backs. We would simply cease to exist. And so, in the same way, to try to wrest or separate pleasure from pain would bring about a state of mind in which we cease to know what pleasure was. There would be no contrast to pleasure and it would become simply boring. And so, in this way, we orient our lives towards impossible ideals and as a result run into frustration

avidya, literally “not knowing,”

marga. Marga means “path”

word trishna, which is related to our word thirst, means clutching or grasping, and it is often translated “desire.”

duhkha, which means something approximately like anguish, or suffering in a special sense. The cause of the disease he called trishna, and the