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European history was deeply changed when
Protestantism arose in 1517 in rebellion against the Catholicism of its day. In
a similar way, Buddhism arose on the northern border of India around 500 B.C. in
response to the Vedantic Hinduism of its day. Like medieval Catholicism, ancient
Hinduism was a religion of rituals, with an elite priesthood who administered a
complex theology. It supported a society in which people were rigidly divided
into a system of caste, role, and power.
Like Martin Luther, Buddha
proposed radical alternatives to the religion of his day--some of which resemble
the ideas of the Protestant reformation. Buddha advocated individual effort,
plain language and simple means. His approach emphasized direct experience
rather than relying on priests or theology. In his vision, all people (including
women and the poor) were equal and equally capable of spiritual development.
Although some sects later considered him divine, Buddha spoke of himself
only as "one who is awake." Original Buddhism was less like a religion than like
a set of psychological practices--exercises to do with your mind until you no
longer need them--a raft to be discarded after you have crossed the stream.
The core of Buddhism spread to India, China, Korea, Japan, Southeast
Asia, and Tibet--where it combined with the native traditions of each place to
produce results as different as Zen --with its Japanese starkness and piercing
beauty--and the colorful cheerfulness of Tibetan monks. Thailand and Burma claim
to be the most direct descendants of Buddha's vision, though, naturally, others
claim to be the true religion as well.
Buddhism seems to have arrived in
America sometime in the 19th Century. Emerson and Thoreau were touched by it.
According to Peter Matthiessen, the first Zen master known in America arrived in
the 1890s, and shortly afterward, D. T. Suzuki began a long career of
translating texts and writing about Buddhism, influencing such influential
thinkers as Jung, Heidigger, and Toynbee in Europe and, in America, Aldous
Huxley and Eric Fromm. Zen attracted the interest of several prominent American
artists of the Beat Generation, including Allen Ginsberg and John Cage. Buddhism
arrived in this country a second time after a wave of Tibetan lamas (driven out
by the Chinese invasion of 1956) arrived in America the 1970s, established
centers like the Naropa and Nyingma Institutes, set up schools and publishing
houses, and began teaching on a wide scale.
Buddhism has attracted a
large following among American intellectuals, perhaps because Buddhism contains
so much insight on how to use the mind to tame the mind's excesses. Though many
seem to have been puzzled by Bertolucci's 1994 film, "Little Buddha" (with its
sudden shifts among realism, fable, and Indian operatic styles), it spoke to a
growing interest in this country in the spiritual teachings of other
cultures.
Buddha described his message in simple terms (the Four Noble Truths) that are somewhat difficult to discuss, because they do not refer to ideas so much as to experience.
To live is to suffer. Life is accompanied by inevitable pain, sickness, disappointment, disillusion, decay and death. This place we live on, the earth plane, is characterized by inevitable and unavoidable dissatisfaction, disappointment, rejection, failure, pain, yearning, decrepitude, and loss. "Suffering" in Buddhism refers not only to physical pain, aging, sickness, and death, and to emotional pain like fear, loss, jealousy, disappointment, and unrequited love, but also to the existential sense that, somehow, deep down, life is permanently out of joint. Everything is touched by the shadow of dissatisfaction, imperfection, disappointment. Suffering, in the Buddhist sense, is a pervasive condition. No one escapes it. Even enlightened teachers grow old, suffer the pains of decay, and die.
Suffering arises because everything changes, everything is impermanent.
Everything is in process, all the time. Whenever we hope to find any lasting
happiness by means of something that is changing, suffering results. This means
that nothing in the realm of ordinary human experience can provide lasting
happiness, and trying to force things to stand still and make us happy is itself
the main source of misery.
"Attachment" in Buddhism extends far beyond
the sense of "greed" or "clinging" to something closer to what the Christian
tradition would call "pride"--a self-centered isolation, the separate selfhood,
"ego" in the worst sense.
This selfhood acts upon others and the world
as if they were forever separate from oneself, generating what author Charlene
Spretnak described as "the continuous chain reaction of craving, jealousy, ill
will, indifference, fear, and anxiety that fills the mind." This is a deep,
pervasive, but normal kind of alienation--one seemingly built into the nature of
the human nervous system.
The most pervasive form of self-centered
suffering takes place as we project upon everyday experience a huge burden of
extraneous interpretations, associations, fantasies, emotions, painful memories,
and diversions. We act then with the Buddhist big three problems: greed,
aversion, and delusion. Greed sucks things in to our purposes, violating their
natures as necessary. Aversion shoves things away, denies, distorts, destroys
them--again violating their natures. In the state of delusion, we float,
confused, not seeing, not knowing, insulated from the pain and salvation of deep
experience.
Instead of seeing each moment as it is, we react to each
moment from our past pain and frustration; then we react to the pain and
frustration; then we react to that reaction; and so on and on. In this way a
special form of mental torment is created that consists of seemingly endless
layers of pain, negative emotion, self-doubt and self-justification--known in
Buddhism as "samsara," the illusory world we think of as real. It is what, in
honest moments, many people might call "normality."
I think of it this
way: Instead of experiencing life directly, we create a worldview and experience
it. That worldview serves to protect us through a system of explanations; but it
also makes each of us into an isolated self, separated from nature, from real
experience, from spirituality, and from one another--causing all experience to
be distorted and "out of joint," and ourselves to suffer from living at one
remove from life. We are nearly always, in some degree, outsiders to the world
and even to our own experience. .gif)
Buddhists have given deep attention to the ways human
beings are at once empowered and entrapped by the categories we create for
thought and language. Racial prejudice is a straightforward example of what
Buddhists mean by suffering that is created by the mind; it is based on mental
categories that distort perception and project our expectations onto others. The
fundamental Buddhist act is to accept responsibility for one's projections, and
to learn to know, first hand, how the mind creates illusion and amplifies
suffering.
If we could be released from attachment, we would be released from suffering.
And our primary attachment is to the concept of a separate, isolated self--from
which we derive all other attachments and experience all other sufferings.
This I understand to be the central belief of Buddhism: When we fully
face, accept, and lighten the self-amplified sufferings of our lives; when we
begin to experience life beyond our delusions and confusions, beyond self,
beyond culture, beyond knowledge--what we find is not a meaningless universe of
alien forces, but our true home.
Life is real. Reality is good.
Goodness, gratitude, love and joy are the natural state of the awakened heart.
When people begin to feel released from their self-sustained sufferings,
they experience life more fully, they become more cheerful and compassionate.
Most people have heard of the ultimate release--"nirvana"--a state of mystical
unity with the cosmos. Fewer people know the moving story of how the Buddha and
his major followers throughout history have approached nirvana, only to turn
back from that mystical escape and devote themselves to a life of helping others
in this imperfect world.
Enlightened people do not cease to experience
the pain of existence. They only stop creating illusions that amplify that pain
and cause new suffering.
Buddha taught a method to lead away from self-sustained suffering toward a
more enlightened and compassionate life--through the pursuit of morality,
meditation, and wisdom, described as eight pursuits: right speech, right action,
right livelihood, right concentration, right mindfulness, right effort, right
understanding and right thought.
Because it avoids the extremes of
asceticism and indulgence in favor of a life of moderation, nonviolence and
compassion, Buddhism is known as the "Middle Way."
Meditation is but one part of the Buddhist path, but it is a part that is
accessible to anyone, anywhere. Though Buddhist meditation cannot be learned in
any depth without a teacher, the basic practice is simple. In meditation,
Buddhists do not remove themselves from the world as some other schools of
meditation do; rather, Buddhists practice a kind of awareness that enables them
to be more fully present in the world.
Original
Buddhist practices (known today as "vipassana" or "insight meditation") are
sometimes austere. They may require years of daily sitting in silent meditation.
In several cultures, such as Tibet, Buddhism developed into a multifaceted
religion ("Mahayana"
and "Vajrayana" Buddhism) which adds singing, movement, temples, ceremony,
priests, scriptures, art, and other "religious" activities, so that it appeals
to a greater variety of people. Still, vipassana meditation remains the
underlying mental technology upon which Buddhism rests.
In a
characteristic Buddhist meditation, you sit quietly and, in a non-directive way,
allow attention to gently settle upon the ever-changing process of your
breathing. When you become aware that your attention has shifted to something
else, notice this fact, label that moment simply as "thinking," and guide your
attention back to the breathing.
Another instruction attributed to the
Buddha directs you toward feeling love, kindness, and compassion progressively
for yourself, those close to you, other people, those who have wronged you, and
ultimately for all beings.
To the Western mind, it seems absurd that
millions of people, sitting in silence, can change the world, end wars, improve
humanity, feed the poor, care for the sick, etc. But it not so different from
the Christian belief that prayer prepares one to be more loving and more just.
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Meditation is an attempt to address the most fundamental
causes of human misery. The Buddhist attempt to end war begins with cultivating
inner peace, developing an unwavering ability to see things as they are, and
treating all beings with compassion and respect.
A few Buddhists concepts seem strange to the modern mind. Buddha inherited
the Indian belief in reincarnation: Each person has lived before, and past lives
influence how you experience this one.
More strange, Buddha said that,
although people reincarnate, they have no souls. In part, this seems to be a
reaction to the ancient Hindu belief in an immutable, eternal soul (atman) that
migrates through many lifetimes.
In part, though, Buddha arrived at this
conclusion by his radical method of awareness. Buddhism invites you to look
unwaveringly at every experience and ask, "Is it solid, unchanging, whole?"
The answer, Buddhists say, is always, "No"--even when asked of the soul.
Everything changes. Everything is impermanent. It is our attempt to attach
ourselves to impermanent things, and gain happiness thereby, that guarantees and
perpetuates suffering.
In some important ways, the Buddhist view of the
universe resembles the view developed by 20th-century physics. Except for the
mental categories we impose upon experience, we find nothing in experience that
is immutable. There is no constant but our own misconceptions and our own doomed
instinct to deny change. Every "thing" is actually a process--it arises,
develops, flourishes, declines, and dissipates. All nouns are still-photos from
the movie of life--which is made up of verbs. All that we see around and inside
us is the result of trillions of simultaneous processes, arising and declining
in a symphony of different overlapping rhythms at once. All that appears solid
in this cosmos is in reality a shimmering, substanceless dance of energy in
flux.
This shimmering immensity of inexhaustible becoming, out of which all things arise and to which they return, is lightly labled by such terms as emptiness, the void, the one reality, and Buddha-mind.
But where the shimmering reality of physics leaves us adrift like
meaningless specks in an incomprehensible universe, Buddhism envisions a reality
beyond meaning and meaninglessness, beyond knowing, beyond self, beyond duality,
beyond suffering--a dance of all things, in which we can become enlightened,
interconnected, and compassionate dancers.
The crucial distinction, I
believe, is this: Many people have looked deeply into the human condition and
come back cynical, ironic, bitter, or insane. Buddhists would say that such
people did not look deeply enough into suffering to detect their own
contribution to it, and hence the direction out.
Buddhists teach this:
True insight leads to compassion. Insight is compassion. Seeing your own
condition, your own imperfections, your own joys and thoughts, pains and
disappointments, illusions and delights, shows you, not "your" separate and
individual mind, but "mind" itself--the universal shared experience of all
people.
Pain is not just "your" separate and individual pain. It is
"the" pain that others, everywhere, feel.
Joy is not "your" separate and
individual joy. It is "the" joy that others, everywhere, feel.
When you
dig deep enough, all the wells run together in a place where every wave
celebrates that it is the ocean moving through form after form.
People
ask, "Is there a God?" "Do we live after death?" "Does life have meaning?"--To
all such questions, the Buddha replied with directions to attend to the
immediate problems caused by the way we use our minds to distort life and
amplify suffering. He taught that we must first remove the poisoned arrow from
our consciousness. Afterwards, we can have intricate discussions about where the
arrow was shot from, who made it, what wood it is made from, how the point was
sharpened, what kind of bow was used, and whether there is a God or an
afterlife. Meanwhile, act now to counteract the habits that poison the mind. Act
now to remember the clarity, compassion, and joyfulness of your true nature.
Nothing else is as urgent.
According to Buddhism as I understand it (and
I am not a Buddhist, only a grateful student of human spirituality) the dance of
process, continuous change, and boundless creative vitality is what is
ultimately real; and we are born with the potential for knowing it directly --
and most directly in the most ordinary moments of our daily lives. As some Zen
practitioners put it, everything is interconnected; therefore, if one thing is
real, everything is real. So attend wholly to the one thing before you, and it
will make all the rest of the universe stop reeling and become real again. And
the radiance of the entire universe will dwell in that one small thing.
Where Christianity envisions Heaven and Hell, Buddhism directs our
attention to the several tastes in the tea, to how the changing light shines
through each particular leaf, to the way this person is speaking to us now --
and to the eternal moment inside ordinary things.
No matter what our
abstracting mind and categorical language tell us, there is no dance separate
from the dancers. The dancers and the dance are one. And one with us.
The one book I most recommend to start with is: Buddhism, A Way of Life
and Thought, by Nancy Wilson Ross. Vintage Press.
Peter Matthiessen,
Nine-Headed Dragon River (Boston, Shambhala, 1987) (A moving, poetic
account of Matthiessen's spiritual experiences as a student of Zen.)
Huston Smith, The World's Religions (San Francisco:
HarperCollins, 1991).
Charlene Spretnak, States of Grace: The Recovery
of Meaning in the Postmodern Age (San Francisco: HarperCollins, 1991). (Her
Buddhist critique of deconstruction is well worth looking at.)
Joseph
Goldstein and Jack Kornfield, Seeking the Heart of Wisdom: The Path of
Insight Meditation (Boston: Shambhala, 1987).
Sogyal Rinpoche,
The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying. HarperSanFrancisco, 1993.
Chogyam Trungpa, Shambhala: The Sacred Path of the Warrior
(Boston: Shambhala, 1984).
For a more technical, scholarly account, see
Rahula, Walpola, What the Buddha Taught
The author's mind-clearing
exercise, a Westernized version of a basic Buddhist meditation.
An inspirational poem, "Just to See."
"We are literally made from stars." -- a brief inspirational essay on interconnectedness.
Another
introduction to Buddhism
Buddhism resources
Meditation
Gerald Grow's home
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Gerald Grow
is a professor of journalism at Florida A&M University in Tallahassee.