When it is about vanity

The Buddhist philosophy of “it’s not about vanity” applies to certain aspects of the human condition. Whether or not an individual subscribes to it completely is up to them. I’m not Buddhist and the practices and harsh asceticism of the monastic life is not something that I’ve been drawn to ever. It doesn’t seem very healthy and it seems kind of snobbish, to be honest. 

There are instances when life or a profession is about vanity. The visual arts, for instance, is about visual aesthetics and seemingly goes against the principles of Buddhism as applied to human beings in the case of, say, acting or modeling, which places the emphasis on appearance. 

Yet, I’m not striving to be an actor or a model, I’m striving to be an architect. What is architecture? I don’t really know. My uncle is an architecture professor in China in a landscape architecture heavy university in Nanjing. I’m not really sure what that means, to be honest, because I don’t have experience with it. I just know that I’ve always been drawn to the arts. I think about moments in my life when I’m the happiest, and it’s usually in creating art or something beautiful. In many ways, art is about vanity: it is a fantasy that lifts us above the everyday mundane.