Life Values: What Do You Do Anything For?

People sometimes ask: why follow the Dhamma at all? What's the point?

Good question. But it helps to answer it with another one: why do anything at all?

Why get up to an alarm, commute to the office, save for a vacation, argue about politics in group chats? Dig a little and behind every «why» sit a person's life values: what they live for. And what they'd be willing to die for. If they have anything like that at all.

The trouble is that most of the time a person doesn't know what they live for.

Ask your friends what they live for. The answers will go something like this: money, career, pleasure. Maybe family. Traditional values. The national interest. The interests of the state.

That list has two problems.

First, nearly all of these words are vague. What are «traditional values»? Which traditions, and whose? Why do they matter? The person who defends them most loudly often can't answer a single one of those questions.

Second, you can't take any of it with you into death. Not the salary, not the job title, not the passport.

A third problem follows from those two. People aren't actually ready to follow such values to the end. They wouldn't die for them, and if we're honest, not always even for family.

«A real life value is one you can take with you into death.»

Take national pride. You can ask yourself straight out: will I take this with me into death? Will I die with the name of my people on my lips? If the honest answer is yes, fine: that's your value. But then Buddhism probably isn't for you. It's about something else. Why would someone need the Dhamma if the main thing in life is being a proper member of their nation?

So the place to start isn't Buddhism. It's figuring out your own life values. And if you don't have any, building them.

Because nobody taught them to reflect on their life. To watch it. To notice what they actually feel when they do this or that.

So they feel what they were told to feel.

They were told the car has to be at least as nice as the neighbor's, so they sign a five-year loan. They were told «at your age it's about time», so they rush to marry whoever's around. Maybe nobody said it outright. But they got the message: ads, relatives, the social media feed.

It's like a GPS with a route someone else typed in. You drive confidently, turn on time, never late. You just end up somewhere you never meant to go. And it goes on for years: a whole life spent on someone else's route.

Working out what truly matters to you is a separate and important job. No one can do it for you.

Once someone takes this seriously, the answers can be very different from person to person. And that's fine.

For some, the main thing is knowledge. Moving into the unknown.

In Norse mythology, Odin hung for nine nights on the branches of the world tree Yggdrasil, pierced by his own spear, to win the knowledge of the runes. He didn't know whether he'd survive. He was ready to die for knowledge.

For a person like that, even death is one more thing to learn about. Socrates, as his students describe him, was sentenced to die by drinking hemlock. He calmly drank the cup and kept talking with his students to the end. His body went numb, starting from the feet, and he went on observing and reasoning. It seems knowledge stayed his highest value to the very last.

For someone else the main thing is love. Compassion, mercy. Love for the Highest, whatever that means to you.

You can see it in the figure of Jesus Christ, who to the end, already on the cross, said: «Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.» No resentment, no «you'll pay for this».

This is something fundamental, even strategic. If a person knows what their life value is, their whole life is built around it. And that's a completely different life from the aimless drifting of someone who has never put their values into words.

So to the question «why do I need Buddhism?» — or more broadly, «why look for any kind of salvation?» — the most honest answer is another question: what do you do anything for? Settle that first. Then see how well the Dhamma fits your value.

And then dogmatism disappears. There's no point clinging to the Dhamma as something sacred in itself.

The Buddha spoke about this when he compared the Dhamma to a raft. A raft is for crossing a river. But nobody, once across, hoists the raft onto their back and carries it around for the rest of their life out of gratitude.

The Dhamma is a tool. A tool for living in tune with your deepest, personal, existential value. What is essential in the Dhamma once everything extra is stripped away is the topic of a separate article.

It seems modern society suffers from exactly this: a lack of values. Each particular person has no answer to the question of what they live for.

Why go to the office? Why buy new things? To what end? To get a few experiences?

Born, paid taxes, died. And on top of that, died fighting it with all their strength, because they never understood what any of it was for.

The Dhamma is worth exploring not because it's «good» in itself. People come to it for different reasons.

That last one isn't a joke but a story from the Canon. Nanda, the Buddha's half-brother, became a monk but pined for his fiancée and planned to return to lay life. So the Buddha showed him heavenly nymphs of unmatched beauty and promised: practise, and you'll have ones like these. Nanda threw himself into practice. The other monks teased him: «Hired hand! Working for wages.» He felt ashamed, began practising for real and eventually reached liberation. And he himself released the Buddha from the promise about the nymphs: he no longer needed it.

Nanda's goal wasn't much to speak of. But it was alive: it touched something real in him. And a living goal works.

«If a goal touches something real in you, it's a real goal. Even if it isn't mature yet.»

At the start, even a goal like that is good. As we move toward it and get to know it better, it will change. That's normal. How practice changes once you sit down to it seriously is easy to see with vipassana.

If you reflect and find some goal for yourself, it won't necessarily match the one that takes shape in the end. It will slowly grow and slowly come into view.

Values show not in what people say about themselves but in what they choose.

A promotion that means moving

More money, but the kids will see their dad once a month. Whatever choice is made, that's the value, even if something else is said out loud.

A free Saturday

A TV series, friends, a book, volunteering, sleeping till noon. Where your free time goes is more honest than any questionnaire.

A profitable but dishonest deal

No one will ever know. The decision made when no one is watching shows the real value.

Your bank statement

Open last month's spending. It's a fairly accurate portrait of what you actually live for right now.

Who you admire

A millionaire from your feed or a doctor who drives around rural towns? Your heroes usually show what you want for yourself.

And this isn't a value

Working without days off «for the family» so the family only ever sees you asleep. The word stays, but the value has been swapped.

The main thing is to begin.

The main thing is to see that there is something more to life than taxes and a car loan for something bigger than the neighbor's.