Let's not keep dancing

It took a lot of courage for Siddhartha to renounce his world for a higher vision of reality.  How many in today’s materialist world with its money chasing denizens would be up to the challenge of going from riches, or its possibility, to rags?  Not many I suspect.  

The real challenge meets us when we finally get all the material things we always wanted, including security, then settle back and ask ourselves are we really, really happy?  Chances are, like the song, Is That All There Is, made famous by Peggy Lee, with one of its more memorable lines, “then let's keep dancing,” we will eventually try to “keep dancing” or come to the realization that there is much more to life than satisfying our desire for material things and security.  

When we get to this place, if we ever do, we come to a fork in the road.  One road is “keep on dancing” which, at best, turns into spiritual materialism.  The other road is much different.  It opens up to a world that is outside and beyond nature; including the physical body.  It is transcendent.  This is where Buddhism actually begins.  This is the road Siddhartha chose rather than to keep on dancing.

Comments

[Instance]

Dooyen: Are you saying Shakyamuni was a "welfare leech"? Ha, ha that's one I've never heard before. Haha!

Asceticism is spiritual greed. Only when we abandon both things, and abandon abandoning, can we start genuine practice.

First prince, then ascetic, and finally buddha.

[The Zennist]

Dooyen:

Have you read the Lalitavistarasutra lately? It has a heavy allegorical ring to it like the Ramayana. Maybe that is the way we should look at the matter.

[David Ashton]

Bows to you for tirelessly pointing to it.

[dooyen]

Did Siddharta really renounce the world? He initially was a rich guy and continued to live on the means of others, now called donations or dana, had a whole park bestowed upon him and implemented a monkhood that was told that (the most honest) work on the rice field to feed oneself is prohibited. I do not consider that "renouncing". It is just another dependence on s.th. we call social welfare today, with a perhaps sophisticated derivation.