Matter Doesn't Matter

Okay. Just so we're on the same page -- these are not stories about people who wandered in the wilderness and found meaning there. I found such tales difficult to come by, although this probably means I was looking in the wrong places. The content I did find, however, comes from two very different men, both of whom explore the themes of Ecclesiastes and come to similar conclusions as that book's author did.

Both of my tags are TED videos - find them at http://www.delicious.com/alaskagrown34.

The first video is by David Hoffman, a successful filmmaker whose talk is about losing everything in a house fire. As he speaks, the background plays a slide show of the destroyed items from his home - collector records, photographs, awards, sentimental letters from family - in essence, the things one man collected over a lifetime to surround himself with. It is reasonable to assume that these things brought him pleasure, either for aesthetic, sentimental, or career-related reasons. This is what we do, isn't it? We collect things. We collect things that make us happy; or at least we think they will bring happiness. For David Hoffman, it's clear that he isn't thrilled about the disaster that devastated his stuff. But he's surprisingly unemotional about it. His attitude is, "Bah, it's just stuff", and he is willing to move on without it. In fact, he plans to turn the disaster into a new project.

This parallels nicely with what Ecclesiastes' author seems to be saying every time he repeats the mantra, "everything is meaningless". Both men are pointing out that everything we work for, everything we collect, everything that we think lends meaning to our lives - is meaningless.

The second talk is given by Ogyen Trinley Dorje, the Karmapa of Tibetan Buddhism. Although his talk is less about his life story than I expected it might be, it probes some of the same themes that Ecclesiastes does. Indeed, the Karmapa is interested in "how we live in the world", just as the author of Ecclesiastes is. At the beginning of his speech, the religious leader tells how he was selected as a child to become the next Karmapa. He says, when they asked him, he "thought it would be fun and there would be more things to play with." Wait. Doesn't that sound just like Ecclesiastes? When he became king, the biblical writer thought he would find satisfaction in material pleasures - wealth, wine, women, etc. You kind of know what he's going to say next, right? Whenever someone begins a story with the sentence, "I thought it would be like this....", you expect the "but...." to come soon. For the Karmapa, the "but" was that being a highly revered religious leader was a lot more work than he had expected. Not quite what our Ecclesiastical writer had to say about life, but true nonetheless.

Later in his talk, the Karmapa spoke of the incident in which some precious Buddha idols were destroyed in Afghanistan by a Muslim group. Such an act would seemingly incite anger in a man who holds the Buddha in high esteem, but his answer was generous. He pointed out that the only thing that was really destroyed in the Buddha smashing incident was matter. The phrase he used was "deterioration of matter". Basically, he's just saying, it's just stuff! In essence, one could say that he is reiterating Ecclesiastes' idea that things are meaningless. It's just matter, and matter doesn't matter.

One more thing from the Karmapa's talk. Listen to this: "Whatever you're doing right now, sink into that." Sink into it. Sounds a little bit like Ecclesiastes 9:10: "Whatever your hand finds to do, do it with all your might".

In the end, according to both David Hoffman and the Karmapa, what matters isn't stuff, it's people. To me, that sounds a lot like Ecclesiastes.