“Serious,” in the sense of meaningfulness, and “trivial” are important terms that we face in the long, subtle process of awakening to our true nature. Suffering from too much youthful arrogance, in which we imagine we are smarter and wiser than we actually are, we tend to confuse serious and trivial. Philosophy or the many discourses of the Buddha are still for the beginner “mere words” which means they are, basically, useless and unimportant, that is, trivial. At best the discourses of the Buddha are a kind of intellectual amusement; much like reading a novel which is often a pleasurable diversion from the real seriousness of the world!
Serious, in this context, means what is important for me right now, for example, my problems with this person I have been seeing for the last two years or, at this time, I am out of work and I need to find a job quickly. Serious could even mean getting too drunk and banging up my car. It could also mean getting low grades in which case my parents are going to kill me! It all these examples one is looking for a quick fix. They are serious. These are the kind of people that one often sees at a Dharma center or in a chat room. Their lives and their problems are in some serious shit they believe.
For the sage, however, all the shit such people are going through is trivial. To use a big Buddhist Sanskrit term, these kinds of people are in a state of viparyāsa or cognitive inversion. For Buddhism, ‘serious’ is about overcoming the finitude of one's life and one's eventual death, including rebirth into more of the same from which there is no apparent escape. The serious Buddhist seeks to realize the imperishable state which is transcendent which is free from rebirth and re-death. But all this is trivial, I hasten to add, for a person who is having a serious fight with their spouse who could not care less about the subject of rebirth. They heard that the doing zazen is helpful. This is what they want to learn at the Zen center. Hopefully, doing zazen for a couple of weeks will help. Then they can go back to their normal lives which has nothing to do with what Buddhism is actually about. Such people are lost in the world of the trivial and don't even know it.
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