Auld Lang Syne (for old times’ sake) is generally sang in appreciation of friendships at the time of an outgoing year on the eve of an incoming New Year. One could even think of it as an ‘old’ anxiety song, as it can also be sung to symbolize other life endings, or new chapters, including funerals, farewells, and graduations.
A thoughtful Buddhist might recognize this popular tune as a salve—or drinkers’ bandaid—for the suffering of transiency and impermanence, the first mark of suffering in conditioned existence. Either way the real nature of friendships—indeed, all social relationships—is called into question by the mere mention of Auld Lang Syne.
Singing this song, and drinking its Kool Aide, is just one way socialization makes everyone artificially dependent upon each other. In reality, we’re already dependent upon each other, within or without a social context, as determined in Buddha’s doctrine of interdependent origination. So, while having social dependencies is ultimately a personal choice, our existential dependency upon each other is not. This is a truth that must be studied, reflected, and meditated upon in order for one to become both a genuinely mature, self-reliant, and loving person. Unexamined social relationships are often fruitless, confusing, and emotionally painful.
It’s necessary to realize all social relationships echo or resemble familial ones. Also good to know is that all relationships not based on a selfless, unconditional, loving kindness are to some or great extent, ‘transactual.’ This means one thing is traded for another. Even, at times, one’s self esteem. Emotionally destructive this is to be avoided, while other relationships, based on loving kindness, promoted. This is why in Mahayana Buddhism the teachings on Loving Kindness and the practice of ‘sending and receiving,’ a reflective, foundational meditation, is so important.
According to the Bodhisattva vehicle, all sentient beings are established, through the doctrine of reincarnation (a doctrine common to Indic religion), to have been, at one time or another, one’s very own mother. This also means every other member of one’s present lifetime family has also been one’s mother, father, brother, sister, and so forth. All relationships then are seen to conditionally ‘exist’ within a continuum of an infinite mash-up of karmic encounters, positive, negative, and indifferent.
In the reflective meditation called, ‘sending and receiving,’ one sends all one’s love to another after having received all their suffering—an exchange of a positive self for a negative one—starting with one’s mother and graduating to one’s worst enemy. The goal is to uproot the negative conditioning of socialization, defeat any competitive selfishness, and to instill instead a genuinely compassionate—proactive and resourceful—loving kindness toward all beings, no matter what your relationship is, or how repugnant you find them.
This significant readjustment to everyone’s acknowledged self-centered conditioning is made easier through ‘The Four Immeasurable’ teaching, instilling Buddhist virtues and practices that help people cultivate loving-kindness, compassion, empathetic joy, and equanimity toward others, ‘both near and far.’
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To be a limbed entity in either of the two realms, desire and form, is to be passionate toward one another. This is the root of compassion driving all acts of kindness, random and otherwise.
But what about states of subtler mind and the appearance of a formless realm and the primordial state of the Dharmadhatu?
Objectless compassion is practiced to achieve these action-less meditative states, the profound emptiness of which benefits countless sentient beings. How is this so? It’s an immeasurable, boundless love turning the fathomless, jewel ornamented wheel of the fully enlightened Buddhas, establishing in a conceptually unestablishable way, what only Buddhas know: an ultimate truth within the relative, conventional one we have falsely imagined.
So, instead of an endless cycle of ‘out with the old and in with the new,’ let’s just change our minds at least “for the sake of Auld Lang Syne.”
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