Dispatch from Samsara

Woe befalls the wayfarer (who enters the cycle of births and deaths). Therefore, be not a traveler (in samsara); fall not a victim to sorrow!--Buddha, The Dhammapada, Sutta 302

Over the past several months, many people have offered me insights and observations concerning my divorce, which my now ex-wife pursued with a singular, and quite puzzling zeal. Of all the wisdom I solicited, I was most keenly interested in that of women, who I thought could help me decipher my wife's bizarre behavior. There seemed to be a rough consensus among the women I spoke to concerning my wife's behavior. They would all tell me, "This divorce is not about you; it's about her. She's at a point in her life where she feels like she needs a change." They'd also tell me, "A woman changes a lot between twenty and twenty-four."

As much as I appreciated their kind consideration of my plight, these conclusions always seemed dissatisfactory, as if they were all too eager to justify my wife's unconscionable behavior. They seemed to me a contemporary twist on the "Nuremberg Defense": my wife was simply following the imperatives of biology; the thick ragout of blood and hormones coursing through her compelled her to her course of action.

I have to say that I categorically reject this justification, because it puts animalistic drive in a position of prëeminence. Instead of being extraordinarily wonderful and ennobling, distinctly human traits like reason, empathy and conscience become, in this behavioralist paradigm, simply vexatious anomalies, peculiarities of evolution that are undeniably present, but which should not distract us from the real explanation for human action--action that is fundamentally indistinguishable from our simian brethren.

Bottom line: my ex-wife systematically destroyed our marriage in order to pursue her own egostistical ends. Existence is, as the Buddha proclaimed, indeed suffering. Suffering in Pali (the Buddha's native tongue) is dukkha, which has no exact translation into English. The Buddha's take on dukkha is interesting, because, whereas one typically associates suffering with pain, the Buddha claims that pleasure is also a source of dukkha, because one knows the pleasure cannot last in this realm of causation, of conditioned conditions (samsara), and this also brings her suffering.

What does one attempt to achieve, then, in getting married? To carve out of samsara a little piece of nirvana? Nirvana, like dukkha, has no exact English equivalent, but is sometimes translated as "extinction." One's desire becomes extinct, or extinguished, freeing her from samsara. "Man proposes, but God disposes," I guess. It's funny, though, because many Buddhist sects around Asia have a concept of hell eerily similar to the Christian one. Consider, for instance, this display at a Thai Buddhist temple. Very Dantesque, wouldn't you agree?

I guess, all things considered, samsara ain't such a bad place to be.