What is the purpose of life?

[triesa]

I often ending discussion with my friends in this question....what is the purpose of life?

I often hear these comments from my friends........that becasue life is too short, so the purpose of life is to :

1) Do things that make your self happy
2) Enjoy life as much as you can
2) Leave a legacy so people will remember you
3) Spend every moment as if it is your last
4) Always do something which you enjoy
5) Make lots of money and be rich so you can try everything and anything in life

You see, all these statements I heard are all about how to make oneself happy, not much about others. I guess I was once like my friends, and that was before I know the dharma.

Now my perpsective has changed, I dare not say I have flipped over 100% to be the goody two shoes, I still do things to make myself happy, but art the same time, I think more of others now, whether they are happy or not, can I do something to help them out?

I feel more useful when I can do something for others or the societythan just for my own self, and all I hope is to continue to lessen this self cherishing mind. It does make sense that when you help others, you are actually helping your own self.....

[biggyboy]

This question has crossed my mind many times in my life for what is the purpose of our present life if we continue to live our life day in day out till we reach our death bed doing daily mundane activities, chasing dreams after dreams, climbing the corporate ladder, having kids and see them through with grand kids into our old age.  Yet filled with boring daily activities of wake up, work, cook, eat, watch TV/movies, shopping, dining, sleep without much contentment and purpose in life.  All of these are now history yet still I indulge in it but much lesser now. Practically, main part of my life now is on spiritual journey which has helped me so much to see the light of our life and what it entails and how we should live our life for.  It is not about ourselves anymore but for others.  And in the course of this journey, I see myself to be much much lighter and happier for what I am doing now daily with purpose.  In fact, much contended in what I have now.  And life is worth living now although there may have ups and downs.

[ilikeshugden]

The question is very hard to answer but my view on the purpose of life is that we are supposed to use our lives to benefit others. The mainstream view on the purpose of life would be very different compared to what I would think. When I casually asked some of my friends about the meaning of life, they replied to me a few things. Those few things are as follows, Money, Women,  Food, Sleep, Degrees, Work etc. People really need to look into helping others in order to find happiness within.

[Positive Change]

In a nutshell, for me, the purpose of life is to help "oneself". Sounds self serving and selfish... yes however, in order for us to help ourselves, the method is interestingly non selfish because it has everything to do with focusing out.

The common misconception of helping oneself I find is a "me, me, me" attitude when it really should be the opposite. Why is it that if we have a buffet table full of food, more than enough for us alone, and we gorge ourselves silly thinking we will be happy stuffing our faces. When in the end we end up having major discomfort from eating too much, and all the extra food goes to waste. Whereas if we we to share our food, we get far more satisfaction in seeing other hungry people eat and have a smile on their faces. Would that not make you happy?

How, if we went a step further and actually go the extra mile for another whether or not we have a buffet full of table is the real acid test! To recap, most of us think in helping ourselves will make us happy but the beauty of it is, it really has nothing to do with us per se.... its about us helping others which in turn makes us HAPPY!

[hope rainbow]

The common misconception of helping oneself I find is a "me, me, me" attitude when it really should be the opposite. Why is it that if we have a buffet table full of food, more than enough for us alone, and we gorge ourselves silly thinking we will be happy stuffing our faces.

With wisdom, we know that if we really want to gorge ourselves, we let the others do, we make sure they all can access the buffet, as many as possible and have a BALL!
Then karma will give us all buffets in the world, in the universe.

Yes indeed, but there is another result to that: we may lessen our attachment to food, because we basically broke the habit of gorging ourselves and also we may have gotten a taste for giving away to others and make others happy FIRST. And with some more practice, we find that to be more fulfilling than any buffet!

Be wise about how karma can help MY SELF can lead to wiser mind-sets...
A wiser mindset = a purpose of life.

Hehehe...

[Carpenter]

Life is just like a piece of paper, it is blank, it is empty, it depends on how we write on that piece of paper, and that’s the purpose that we chose.

Many people actually started to write on that paper with an actual topic, a clear and direct topic to write about, but unfortunately, due to many things going on, many distractions, they tend to add in more details, or going a bit side track from time to time, and due to too much details, too many things to write about, as time goes by, they already forgotten what is their main topic, and now when want to lead back to their own topic, it is already very difficult. Hence, they have lost their direction, they forgotten who they suppose to be, they lost their purpose in life and yet, they are trying to find it again. Therefore, they will keep asking “what is their purpose in life?”

[Tenzin Malgyur]

To me, I think this life is part of a journey. And what we do along the way will decide the future. If we live on this belief, we will try our very best to do whatever we can to avoid harming ourselves and others. Also we should always remember that this human form we have now is very precious and very difficult to get. If we believe in karma, we would want to collect as much merits as possible so that we can benefit many others.

[brian]

Purpose of life, i believe it is all about benefiting others and be kind to others. be harmonious to others even so. we talk from the lowest level being not relating to Dharma, we be kind to others, our neighbor, to the people who love and care about us. 

with kindness, it only brings meaning to us in life. i always think what meaning do we have if we live in this life without benefiting anyone or even ourselves. its like making you worth living in this world and not just being a parasite on the tree reaping the benefits from other's hard work.

[pgdharma]

For a non dharma practitioner, I would say the purpose of life is to get a good education, a good job, buy big houses and cars, finding a good/perfect spouse and keep chasing after one's dreams and desires.

For a dharma practitioner, I would say the purpose of life is to take this golden opportunity to be born as a human to study and practice the dharma, transformed and cut away the self cherishing mind and work for the benefit of others.

[vajraD]

Personally this question arises quite often especially when something is heading up in my head. I have a shallow mind. Hence my ultimate answer to the question is happiness, harmony and in service for others when ever I can. Don’t make promises when I cant fulfil them because it hurts the person as well as hurting myself.

[rossoneri]

What is the purpose of life? I guessed to all of us the answer is to be successful be it in career, love and almost everything we are aiming out of desire. This is not bad or wrong, we all have been brought up this way at this degenerate time.

But if we are successful and with Dharma, i believed we can be more useful in terms of not just looking and taking care of ourselves only but we can also contribute much more towards the Dharma and society by helping others and finding ways to spread/ serve the Dharma. With this focus planted in our minds, i believed this can be one of the purpose in our life.

[buddhalovely]

What is the purpose of life? And virtually all religions propose a way of life that will lead to salvation, liberation, satisfaction, or happiness. Buddhism is no exception.

In Buddhism, the primary purpose of life is to end suffering. The Buddha taught that humans suffer because we continually strive after things that do not give lasting happiness. We desperately try to hold on to things - friends, health, material things - that do not last, and this causes sorrow.
The Buddha did not deny that there are things in life that give joy, but pointed out that none of them last and our attachment to them only causes more suffering.This is done by recognizing the impermanence of all things and freeing oneself from attachment to these things. This will lessen suffering and eventually end the cycle of rebirth.

[ratanasutra]

Each one of us are having different purposes in our life. For some to have successful in life in term of career, material gain and family welfare. Some of us use their life to serve other ie people work in charity organization and they are happy with their giving actions. And for some not even have purpose in life, just stay day by day till last day, that all.

Out of ignorant we all say that our life have purpose, without realise that we just wasting our time to chasing for things that meaningless to our life.

In order to have meaningful purpose, we must treasure our life as we might not have a chance to born as a human again, by think about it then we will gain more realisation for us to be involve with more virtue actions and activities so we don't waste our treasure life.