Expected Life In Dhammapada, And The Examined Life

The Human Condition has many components which become apparent in everyone’s daily aspect of their lives. Throughout life, people will experience different events that will trigger a new aspect of the Human Condition. Birth, growth, emotionality, aspiration, conflict, and mortality contribute to this. There cannot be one without the other. Throughout the texts used, “Dhammapada”, “The Examined Life”, and “The Case for Tragic Optimism”, all the traits are equally important, but those in the texts had a choice of their attitudes, and with growth, conflict, and mortality, each of the texts explained the Human Condition with these aspects. A person constantly grows in their everyday lives. Growth continues to be important because of how a person

In “Dhammapada”, the conflict in the text happens to the man who cannot overcome his own wants. The man’s thoughtlessness lead him to only care about trying to gain his own form of satisfaction, and from this, he caused himself daily pain. His conflict lead him to learn that a man’s search for pleasure will only lead to self-hatred. This text uses the analogy of a field going through damages from man’s everyday sins such as vanity, passion, hatred, and lust. “The thirst of man grows like a creeper; he runs from life to life, like a monkey seeking fruit in the forest.” (Thirst, p. 8) The conflict that man goes through with himself opens him up to new opportunities that may change the way he lives. In “The Case for Tragic Optimism”, man’s search for meaning causes him conflict. When man finally does find his purpose in life, only then will the conflict in his life end. Until then, man’s search for meaning causes him his daily strife. “Let one attempt to expose a number of the most diverse people uniformly to hunger. With the increase of the imperative urge of hunger all individual differences will blur, and in their stead will appear the uniformed expression of one uniform expression of the one unstilled urge.” (Frankl, p. 5) Conflict will always be something that one must go through in their life to become truly successful. Conflict

With no way to avoid it, everyone will experience it. Death can exist in a person’s spirit, to where the being feels like they have no will to live, or those who have death in attitude or motivation, to where they have no future that they want to look forward to. In “The Examined Life”, Cornel West states that we can only find truth when we accept death. He states that a person needs to learn how to die and how to prepare for death. There cannot be talk about truth without talking about how to die. “Because there is no rebirth, there’s no change, there’s not transformation without death. And therefore, the question becomes how do you learn how to die.” (West, p.13) By seeking death, the understanding of having limited time on earth prompts people to use as much of the life that they have to discover the true meaning of the truth. Death goes hand in hand with truth, which leads to the conclusion of the Human Condition. Death continues to be the end of life. In “The Case of Tragic Optimism”, it states that optimism should remain even in the worst of times, the “tragic triad”. The tragic triad contain pain, guilt, and death. In human existence, these three instances will happen. But through these times, those who stay positive and persist even through the torture of the tragic triad will ultimately defeat the death of their spirit. “And this in turn presupposes the human capacity to creatively turn life’s negative aspects into