I am convinced that those who take the time to try and figure out how we can improve life conditions for all sentient beings will get to the same point as Buddha--either spiritually or intellectually. While Buddha had to leave his wife and child to discover this, I have been fortunate to have the support of my wife in this quest. Most of my family and friends have been left behind, however. While regretful, this is a necessary part of any development process.
As a former Catholic nun, I believe that Karen Armstrong brings special insight to a figure like Buddha. Below are some excerpts that I found to be "enlightening."
(Please note that many alphabetic accents that are in the book text are missing from the following text. My apologies.)
Many aspects of the Buddha’s quest will appeal to the modern ethos. His scrupulous empiricism is especially congenial to the pragmatic tenor of our own Western culture, together with his demand for intellectual and personal independence. Those who find the idea of a supernatural God alien will also warm to the Buddha’s refusal to affirm a Supreme Being. He confined his researches to his own human nature and always insisted that his experiences-even the supreme Truth of Nibbana-were entirely natural to humanity. Those who have become weary of the intolerance of some forms of institutional religiosity will also welcome the Buddha’s emphasis on compassion and loving-kindness.
But the Buddha is also a challenge, because he is more radical than most of us. There is a creeping new orthodoxy in modern society that is sometimes called “positive thinking.” At its worst, this habit of optimism allows us to bury our heads in the sand, deny the ubiquity of pain in ourselves and others, and to immure ourselves in a state of deliberate heartlessness to ensure our emotional survival. The Buddha would have had little time for this. In his view, the spiritual life cannot begin until people allow themselves to be invaded by the reality of suffering, realize how fully it permeates our whole experience, and feel the pain of all other beings, even those whom we do not find congenial. It is also true that most of us are not prepared for the degree of the Buddha’s self-abandonment. We know that egotism is a bad thing; we know that all the great world traditions-not just Buddhism-urge us to transcend our selfishness. But when we seek liberation-in either a religious or secular guise-we really want to enhance our own sense of self. A good deal of what passes for religion is often designed to prop up and endorse the ego that the founders of the faith told us to abandon. We assume that a person like the Buddha, who has, apparently, and after a great struggle, vanquished all selfishness, will become inhuman, humorless and grim.
Yet that does not seem to have been true of the Buddha. He may have been impersonal, but the state he achieved inspired an extraordinary emotion in all who met him. The constant, even relentless degree of gentleness, fairness, equanimity, impartiality and serenity acquired by the Buddha touch a chord and resonate with some of our deepest yearnings…. [p. xxvi and xxvii]
The search for a place apart, separate from the world and yet marvelously within it, that is impartial, utterly fair, calm and which fills us with the faith that, against all odds, there is value in our lives, is what many seek in the reality we call “God.” In the person of the Buddha, who had gone beyond the limitations and partialities of selfhood, many people seemed to find it in a human being. The life of Buddha challenges some of our strongest convictions, but it can also be a beacon. We may not be able to practice the method he prescribed in its entirety, but his example illuminates some of the ways in which we can reach for an enhanced and more truly compassionate humanity. [page xxviii and xxix]
From the very earliest times, men and women devised religions to help them cultivate a sense that our existence has some ultimate meaning and value, despite the dispiriting evidence to the contrary. But sometimes the myths and practices of faith seem incredible. People then turn to other methods of transcending the sufferings and frustrations of daily life: to art, music, sex, drugs, sport or philosophy. We are beings who fall very easily into despair, and we have to work very hard to create within ourselves a conviction that life is good, even though all around us we see pain, cruelty, sickness and injustice. When he decided to leave home, Gotama, one might think, appeared to have lost this ability to live with the unpalatable facts of life and to have fallen prey to a profound depression.
Yet that was not the case. Gotama had indeed become disenchanted with domestic life in an ordinary Indian household, but he had not lost hope in life itself. Far from it. He was convinced that there was a solution to the puzzle of existence and that he could find it. Gotama subscribed to what has been called the “perennial philosophy,” because it was common to all peoples in all cultures in the premodern world. Earthly life was obviously fragile and overshadowed by death, but it did not constitute the whole of reality. Everything in the mundane world had, it was thought, its more powerful, positive replica in the divine realm. All that we experienced here below was modeled on an archetype in the celestial sphere; the world of the gods was the original pattern of which human realities were only a pale shadow. This perception informed the mythology, ritual and social organizations of most of the cultures of antiquity and continues to influence more traditional societies in our own day. It is a perspective that is difficult for us to appreciate in the modern world, because it cannot be proved empirically and lacks the rational underpinning which we regard as essential to truth. But the myth does express our inchoate sense that life is incomplete and that this cannot be all there is; there must be something better, fuller and more satisfying elsewhere. After an intense and eagerly awaited occasion, we often feel that we have missed something that remains just outside our grasp. Gotama shared this conviction, but with an important difference. He did not believe that this “something else” was confined to the divine world of gods; he was convinced that he could make it a demonstrable reality in this mortal world of suffering, grief and pain. [p. 4 and 5]
But the monks of Magadha, Kosala, and the republics to the east of the Gangetic plain were more interested in practicalities. Instead of regarding ignorance as the chief cause of dukkha, they saw desire (tanha) as the chief culprit. By desire they did not mean those noble yearnings that inspired human beings to such inspiring and elevating pursuits as the holy life, but the type of craving that makes us say “I want.” They were very worried by the greed and egotism of the new society. They were, as we have seen, men of their time and had imbibed the ethos of individualism and self-reliance that was emerging in the marketplace, but, like the other sages of the Axial Age, they knew that egotism could be dangerous. The monks of the eastern Ganges were convinced that it was this thirsty tanha that kept people bound to samsara. They reasoned that all our actions were, to an extent, inspired by desire. When we found that we wanted something, we took steps to get it; when a man lusted for a woman, he took the trouble to seduce her; when people fell in love, they wanted to possess the beloved and clung and yearned compulsively. Nobody would bother to do an arduous and frequently boring job in order to earn a living unless he or she wanted material comforts. So desire fueled people’s actions (kamma), but every single action had long-term consequences and conditioned the kind of existence the person would have in his or her next life.
It followed that kamma led to rebirth; if we could avoid performing any actions at all, we might have a chance of liberating ourselves from the cycle of new birth, suffering and redeath. But our desires impelled us to act, so, the monks concluded, if we could eliminate tanha from our hearts and minds, we would perform fewer kamma. But a householder had no chance of ridding himself of desire. His whole life consisted of one doomed activity after another. It was his duty as a married man to beget offspring, and without some degree of lust, he would not be able to sleep with his wife. Unless he felt a modicum of greed, he could not engage in trade or industry with any success or conviction…. [p.39 and 40]
Gotama did not join any of these sanghas. Instead he went to the neighborhood of Vesali, the capital of the Videha republic, to be initiated in the dhamma of Alara Kalama, who seems to have taught a form of Samkhya. Gotama may have already been familiar with this school, since the philosophy of Samkhya had first been taught by the seventh-century teacher Kapila, who had links with Kapilavatthu. This school believed that ignorance, rather than desire, lay at the root of our problems; our suffering derived from our lack of understanding of the true Self. We confused this Self with our ordinary psychomental life, but to gain liberation we had to become aware at a profound level that the Self had nothing to do with these transient, limited and unsatisfactory states of mind. The Self was eternal and identical with the Absolute Spirit (purusa) that is dormant in every thing and every body but concealed by the material world of nature (praktri). The goal of the holy life, according to Samkhya, was to learn to discriminate purusa from praktri. The aspirant had to learn to live above the confusion of the emotions and cultivate the intellect, the purest part of the human being, which had the power to reflect the eternal Spirit, in the same way that a flower is reflected in a mirror. [p. 44]
The texts make it clear that Gotama had come to this axis of the universe, the mythological center that holds the whole of the cosmos together. The “immovable spot” is that psychological state which enables us to see the world and ourselves in perfect balance. [p. 89]
But what was he going to teach? The Buddha had no time for doctrines or creeds; he had no theology to impart, no theory about the root cause of dukkha, no tales of an Original Sin, and no definition of the Ultimate Reality. He saw no point in such speculations. Buddhism is disconcerting to those who equate faith with belief in certain inspired religious opinions. A person’s theology was a matter of total indifference to the Buddha. To accept a doctrine on somebody else’s authority was, in his eyes, an “unskillful” state, which could not lead to enlightenment, because it was an abdication of personal responsibility. He saw no virtue in submitting to an official creed. “Faith” meant trust that Nibbana existed and a determination to prove it to oneself. The Buddha always insisted that his disciples test everything he taught them against their own experience and take nothing on hearsay. A religious idea could all too easily become a mental idol, one more thing to cling to, when the purpose of the dhamma was to help people to let go.
“Letting go” is one of the keynotes of the Buddha’s teaching. The enlightened person did not grab or hold on to even the most authoritative instructions. Everything was transient and nothing lasted. Until his disciples recognized this in every fiber of their being, they would never reach Nibbana. Even his own teachings must be jettisoned, once they had done their job. He once compared them to a raft, telling the story of a traveler who had come to a great expanse of water and desperately needed to get across. There was no bridge, no ferry, so he built a raft and rowed himself across the river. But then, the Buddha would ask his audience, what should the traveler do with the raft? Should he decide that because it had been so helpful to him, he should load it onto his back and lug it around with him wherever he went? Or should he simply moor it and continue his journey? The answer was obvious. “In just the same way, bhikkhus, my teachings are like a raft, to be used to cross the river and not to be held on to,” the Buddha concluded, “If you understand their raft-like nature correctly, you will even give up good teachings (dhamma), not to mention bad ones!” His Dhamma was wholly pragmatic. Its task was not to issue infallible definitions or to satisfy a disciple’s intellectual curiosity about metaphysical questions. Its sole purpose was to enable people to get across the river of pain to the “further shore.” His job was to relieve suffering and help his disciples attain the peace of Nibbana. Anything that did not serve that end was of no importance whatsoever.
Hence there were no abstruse theories about the creation of the universe or the existence of a Supreme Being. These matters might be interesting but they would not give a discipline enlightenment or release from dukkha. One day, while living in a grove of simsapa trees in Kosambi, the Buddha plucked a few leaves and pointed out to his disciples that there were many more still growing in the wood. So too he had only given them a few teachings and withheld many others. Why? “Because, my disciples, they will not help you, they are not useful in the quest for holiness, they do not lead to peace and to the direct knowledge of Nibbana. He told one monk, who kept pestering him about philosophy, that he was like a wounded man who refused to have treatment until he learned the name of the person who had shot him and what village he came from; he would die before he got this useless information. In just the same way, those who refused to live according to the Buddhist method until they knew about the creation of the world or the nature of the Absolute would die in misery before they got an answer to these unknowable questions. What difference did it make if the world was eternal or created in time? Grief, suffering and misery would still exist. The Buddha was concerned simply with the cessation of pain. “I am preaching a cure for these unhappy conditions here and now,” the Buddha told the philosophically inclined bhikkhu, “so always remember what I have not explained to you and the reason why I have refused to explain it.” [p.101-103]
But mindfulness (sati) led the Buddha to a still more radical conclusion. Three days after the five bhikkhus had become “stream-enterers,” the Buddha delivered a second sermon in the Deer Park, in which he expounded his unique doctrine of anatta (no-self). He divided the human personality into five “heaps” or “constituents” (khandhas): the body, feeling, perceptions, volitions (conscious and unconscious) and consciousness, and asked the bhikkhus to consider each khandha in turn. The body or our feelings, for example, constantly changed from one moment to the next. They caused us pain, let us down and frustrated us. The same had to be said of our perceptions and volitions. Thus each khandha, subject as it was to dukkha, flawed and transitory, could not constitute or include the Self sought by so many of the ascetics and yogins. Was it not true, the Buddha asked his disciples, that after examining each khandha, an honest person found that he could not wholly identify with it, because it was so unsatisfactory? He was bound to say, “This is not mine; this is not what I really am; this is not my self.” But the Buddha did not simply deny the existence of the eternal, absolute Self. He now claimed that there was no stable, lower-case self either. The terms “self” and “myself” were simply conventions. The personality had no fixed or changeless core. As the Chain showed, every sentient being was in a state of constant flux; he or she was merely a succession of temporary, mutable states of existence.
The Buddha pressed this message home throughout his life. Where the seventeenth-century French philosopher René Descartes would declare “I think, therefore I am,” the Buddha came to the opposite conclusion. The more he thought, in the mindful, yogic way he had developed, the clearer it seemed that what we call the “self” is a delusion. In his view, the more closely we examine ourselves, the harder it becomes to find anything that we can pinpoint as a fixed entity. The human personality was not a static being to which things happened. Put under the microscope of yogic analysis, each person was a process. The Buddha liked to use such metaphors as a blazing fire or a rushing stream to describe the personality; it had some kind of identity, but was never the same from one moment to another. At each second, a fire was different; it had consumed and re-created itself, just as people did. In a particularly vivid simile, the Buddha compared the human mind to a monkey ranging through the forest: “it grabs one branch, and then, letting that go, seizes another.” What we experience as the “self” is really just a convenience-term, because we are constantly changing. In the same way, milk can become, successively, curds, butter, ghee, and fine-extract of ghee. There is no point in calling any one of these transformations “milk” even though there is a sense in which it is correct to do so.
The eighteenth-century Scottish empiricist David Hume came to a similar conclusion, but with an important difference: he did not expect his insight to affect the moral conduct of his readers. But in Axial Age India, knowledge had no significance unless it was found to be transformative. A dhamma was an imperative to action, and the doctrine of anatta was not an abstract philosophical proposition but required Buddhists to behave as though the ego did not exist. The ethical effects of this are far-reaching. Not only does the idea of “self” lead to unskillful thoughts about “me and mine” and inspire our selfish cravings; egotism can arguably be described as the source of all evil: an excessive attachment to the self can lead to envy or hatred of rivals, conceit, megalomania, pride, cruelty, and, when the self feels threatened, to violence and the destruction of others. Western people often regard the Buddha’s doctrine of anatta as nihilistic and depressing, but at their best all the great world religions formed during the Axial Age seek to curb the voracious, frightened ego that does so much harm. The Buddha, however, was more radical. His teaching of anatta did not seek to annihilate the self. He simply denied that the self had ever existed. It was a mistake to think of it as a constant reality. Any such misconception was a symptom of that ignorance that kept us bound to the cycle of suffering. [p.110-113]
The Buddha believed that a selfless life would introduce men and women to Nibbana. Monotheist would say that it would bring them into the presence of God. But the Buddha found the notion of a personalized deity too limiting, because it suggested that the supreme Truth was only another being. Nibbana was neither a personality nor a place like heaven. The Buddha always denied the existence of any absolute principle or Supreme Being, since this could be another thing to cling to, another fetter and impediment to enlightenment. Like the doctrine of the Self, the notion of God can also be used to prop up and inflate the ego. The most sensitive monotheists in Judaism, Christianity and Islam would all be aware of this danger and would speak of God in ways that are reminiscent of the Buddha’s reticence about Nibbana. They would also insist that God was not another being, that our notion of “existence” was so limited that it was more accurate to say that God did not exist and that “he” was Nothing. But on a more popular level, it is certainly true that “God” is often reduced to an idol created in the image and likeness of “his” worshippers. If we imagine God to be a being like ourselves writ large, with likes and dislikes similar to our own, it is all too easy to make “him” endorse some of our most uncharitable, selfish and even lethal hopes, fears and prejudices. This limited God has thus contributed to some of the worst religious atrocities in history. The Buddha would have described belief in a deity who gives a seal of sacred approval to our own selves as “unskillful”: it could only embed the believer in the damaging and dangerous egotism that he or she was supposed to transcend. Enlightenment demands that we reject any such false prop. It seems that a “direct” yogic understanding of anatta was one of the chief ways in which the early Buddhists experienced Nibbana. And, indeed, the Axial Age faiths all insist in one way or another that we will only fulfil ourselves if we practice total self-abandonment. To go into religion to “get” something, such as a comfortable retirement in the afterlife, is to miss the point. [p. 115 and 116]
The “seclusion” of his monks was to be a psychological one, not a total physical segregation from the world. The Order existed for the people, not simply for the monks’ personal sanctification. The bhikkhus would need a degree of quiet for meditation, where they could develop the dispassion and internal solitude that led to Nibbana, but if they were to live entirely for others, as the Dhamma demanded, lay folk must be able to visit them and learn how to assuage their own suffering. [p. 129]
Source: Buddha (Penguin Lives)
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