“Seek out your own salvation with diligence,” the Buddha said. “Try it, see for yourself.”
“You can search throughout the entire universe for someone who is more deserving of salvation than you are yourself, but that person is not to be found anywhere,” added the Buddha.
This is to say, when we are suffering, we are as much in need of our compassion as is any other being, and we are equally deserving of it.
In the end, only the individual can attain his own salvation. The Buddhas can merely teach that there is a Way. It is the individual’s responsibility to follow it. “Abide with oneself as an island, with oneself as a refuge. Seek no external refuge,” the Buddha advised.
Of whatever teachings you can assure yourself that they conduce to dispassion and not to passions, to detachment and not to bondage, to decrease of worldly gains and not to their increase, to frugality and not to covetousness, to content and not to discontent, to solitude and not to company, to energy and not to sluggishness, to delight in good and not to delight in evil, of such teachings you may with certainty affirm that this is the Norm, this is the discipline, this is the Master’s message. (Digha Nikaya II.156)
Salvation begins with Right View, which mean the way one looks at life, one’s perspective. Without Right View, one is confused, resulting in frustration, depression, and anxiety. The aim of Buddhism is to quiet the conflicted mind. The following is Right View:
THERE IS NO PAST. “Bring out the past here and show it to me,” the Buddha said. All there is is memory, but memory is selective, hence unreliable. No historian, for example, wants to hear this, because The Past is everything to them. They don’t want to hear about how peoples’ recollection of themselves, others and events can be faulty, how the interpretation of facts can be suspect, and indeed how the very accuracy of facts can be in doubt. Whole lives and major events are guided by this often shaky information, the blind leading the blind.
THERE IS NO FUTURE. “Bring out the future here and show it to me,” the Buddha said. All there is is anticipation, planning, expectation, which like the past is unreliable. This is to say, how can one know what his circumstances, much less he himself, will be like at a given point in the future, will be like even one hour from now. He may be dead by then. Only the present exists, one breath, one heart beat at a time.
"NOW" IS ALL THERE IS. Remembering the past and planning for the future are done now, in the present, after all. “All we have is now,” Marcus Aurelius reminds us, as does Eckhart Tolle who speaks of now as “isness,” what actually "is.” Alan Watts says, “There’s no place to be but here and now. There’s no way to be anywhere else.” Watts adds, “Interestingly, time is moving, yet there is only now.”
EXISTENCE IS IMPERMANENT. When a prince asked his jeweler to make him something that would carry him through times of triumph as well as times of defeat, the jeweler made him a ring inscribed with the words, “It will pass.” Impermanence, “annica,” is the First Dharma Seal. Existence is in a state of constant flux. Every day is different. Every moment is different. All is transient, hence unreliable, hence the cause of all suffering. We seek fulfillment in life but we never really feel fulfilled because what we seek fulfillment in is time bound, transient. When we try to grasp it, it simply runs through our hands. We are not happy with what we achieve, own, and know because too quickly we are tired of it, are bored with it. Time kills it. We then go on to achieve, own, and know more, which again because of time is only satisfying briefly.
THERE IS NO SELF. Present consciousness, anticipation, and memory create the illusion of a self. Krishnamurti said, “Could it be that you identify yourself with a merely abstract ego based on nothing but memories?” There is this physical body, this happening, sure enough, but it is all that there is. There is, furthermore, no self separate from the rest of existence as our egos would have us believe. There is no little person sitting at a console in our head, "driving" our bodies. It is the difference between having a body and being a body. Hormones contribute to the illusion of a self. This is the lie of hormones. It is not until testosterone recedes in men in their fifties, to give an example, that they realize the extent to which they have seen the world through a veil. There is as well the lie of mental states. We are conditioned to view the world and ourselves in a certain light, which may be false. This includes the lie of symbolic thinking (e.g. thinking about thinking and the problems that thinking creates), and the lie of language (e.g. words about words and problems that words create). We don’t know what we are looking at half the time and then we go on to communicate about it using symbols which are merely approximations of what we mean. Alfred Korzybski notes, “Whatever you say something is, it isn’t,” with Alan Watts adding, “nothing is really describable.” Compounding this, we identify ourselves with our thoughts. We think we are our thoughts. Also there is the lie of feeling states. We are conditioned emotionally to react to the world and ourselves in certain ways, which may be false. When one is lonely, he misses his family, friends, and God. Loneliness, though, like all other feelings, comes, as Krishnamurti explains, from thoughts, and thoughts are impermanent, transient, and unreliable. So, feelings likewise then are impermanent, transient, and unreliable. Yet we identify ourselves with our feelings. We feel we are our feelings. We feel we are our moods. Our lives are just these smoke and mirrors, called “maya” in Buddhism, meaning to be enchanted, spellbound. What we actually are is just consciousness, the watcher, so-called. We are a conscious body. In Hinduism, the watcher, or consciousness, is also called Atta, or Atman, which is the immanent form of the Brahman. But why so further define it? Why make it a soul? The Second Dharma Seal in Buddhism states that there is no individual permanent soul that, for example, migrates after death to another body. This is to discourage clinging, i.e. using soul as a life preserver, so to speak. All the individual is, according to Buddhism, is a temporary collection of momentary events that are constantly in flux in their causal relationship to each other, with a consciousness that expires when the individual expires.
WHAT IS WORTHWHILE DOING? Survival is not the issue because you’re not going to survive. Liberation is it. Everything other than the Buddhist Path is irrelevant. “It is not what others do, or do not do, that is my concern. It is what I do, and do not do. That is my concern.” (The Dhammapada). Meanwhile, you can always just kill time. Kill time before it kills you. There is an art of properly killing time. The Dalai Lama’s hobby is fixing clocks, a reminder to him that we are all “on the clock,” memento mori, he says. It is also diversion, much like chanting, to keep the mind from itself. Everything other than this Path is irrelevant. Make liberation your occupation. There is but one thing. Your day is for this one thing only. All anyone wants is to feel happy. We are naturally happy. The reason we are not happy is because we are bound up with the irrelevant.
SUFFERING. Termed “dukkha” in Buddhism, this is the Third Dharma Seal. “Greater than the waters in the four oceans is the flood of tears each being has shed, or the amount of blood he has lost when, as an animal or wrong-doer, he has had his head cut off,” the saying goes. Life is not all suffering, of course, but largely it is suffering. According to Buddhist psychology, every moment of life when happiness and inner peace are absent is a moment of suffering. When you are rushing, impatient, irritated, frustrated, anxious, angry, fearful, bored, sad, or jealous, when you are filled with desire for something you want that you don’t have, or feel aversion for something you do have that you don’t want, you are suffering. When you are reliving a painful experience from your past or imagining a future one, you are suffering. Nothing on this planet is free of it. Even long-time Buddhists who endeavor to not suffer still do so. This is to say, not all sources of suffering are easily eliminated.
PLEASURE TRAIL. To ease our pain we seek out what pleasures we can find here and there, food, sex, adventure, like chickens on the trail of corn. The trouble is, we adapt quickly to pleasures to where we need more and more to get the same effect. The same effect, however, is not the same effect, we find out, resulting in frustration, suffering.
WHY ARE WE UNHAPPY? It is because we are filled with wanting, with desire, to the point that eventually the desire becomes a thirst which cannot be satisfied, even when we achieve what we desire. So how can we be happy? By ceasing to desire. Just as a fire dies down when no fuel is added, so our unhappiness will end when the fuel of desire is removed. We must not strive, grasp, cling, clutch, wanting to do this or to be that, for even when we attain what we want, it is not enough. The more we have the more we want. Attaining what we want is suffering just as much as not attaining it is, with “suffering” defined as chronic frustration. What is gained by striving but wealth, power, and prestige, what society has taught us are the desirable things to have in this life. But Krishnamurti says, “Think it through. Do you really want what you think you want?” Beware of what you want, you might get it, the old saying goes. Similarly, Hell is getting what you want. The reality of wealth, power, and prestige is that they are transient and therefore will end soon enough in suffering. The aim is to eliminate suffering. The adage “less is more” is correct. Have nothing and want nothing, and in this way you take the greatest pleasure in the smallest things and are happy. “He who knows he has enough is rich,” Lao Tzu said.
THE FOLLY OF COMPETITION. With competition there is a winner and a loser, with the biggest loser being the winner. A hollow victory, his. This is because the one who wins must equal or better himself the next time out, feeling guilt at the same time for the suffering he has caused the loser. As for the person who has just lost, he feels resentful toward the winner, wishing him ill, looking forward vengefully to when they can compete again, perpetuating the cycle. The goal is to end such suffering. There is a popular picture of Buddhist monks shooting pool, a seeming contradiction to this tenet. The monks, though, are not competing. All they are doing is killing time.
THE TROUBLE WITH AMBITION. Ambition is a person's attempt to fill a void in his or her life, such as a need for love or respect. Love and respect, however, are transient. Wealth, power, prestige, love, and respect are hollow victories.
ATTACHMENTS, FETTERS, CHAINS THAT BIND. Becoming attached to personal possessions, to a location, to money, to other people, and worst of all to ourselves brings us pain. Attaching ourselves to things is folly because soon enough we are tired of them, wish we never had them, yet cannot get rid of them. We become attached to people but because eventually we don’t like most of them all that much, it makes us miserable. Have feelings for people, the Buddha taught, but don’t make them responsible for your happiness. And why should we attach ourselves to ourselves, to our physical selves especially, for our physical selves are dying, have been dying from the day we were born? And why should we attach ourselves to our psychological selves when our psychological selves are an illusion?
DUALITY. There is only the
appearance of opposites, when in fact they are one thing, called the unity of opposites. Opposites are two sides of the same coin. You cannot have light without dark, substance without space, life without death, self without other. They go together. They arise mutually, called the coincidence of opposites, and since nature hates a vacuum, they continually create each other.
REALITY. We are on a rock hurtling blindly through space, a rock containing, by a fluke, life forms. The biggest fluke is that at least one of these life forms, we humans, is aware of itself. We are aware, among other things, that we will die one day. Life on this rock has no purpose beyond perpetuating itself. We are in denial about our life on this rock. We understand it intellectually but cannot grasp it fully. When, for instance, we look at the stars at night we do not know what truly it is that we are looking at, it's so vast. We look at a glacier, or the open sea, and our minds simply cannot penetrate it. We have at the same time a false sense of security about it, much as we have when we climb into a jet plane, believing that we are as safe in it as we are walking down the street.
DIRECT EXPERIENCE IS SUPERIOR TO SECONDARY EXPERIENCE. Direct experience is classical music, physical labor, and color, to name three. It is the experience of the senses. Secondary experience is the symbolic, the world of thinking and language, life once removed. While secondary experience is useful in ways, it generates a world unto itself. This world is false, or, more often than not, is only partly true.
DEPENDENT ORIGINATION. This states that what is, is dependent upon something else, the law of cause and effect. If this is, that comes to be; from the arising of this, that arises; if this is not, that does not come to be; from the stopping of this, that stops. The skillful man asks, “What are the consequences of my actions? Will it lead to hurt of self, of others, or of both? What will happen if I stop, or do nothing?” It is like a clock where if one wheel turns, all the wheels turn. Everything changes with one change, or not.
JI-JI-MUGE. This refers to the interdependence, the mutual interpenetration of all things and events. It is likened to a spider’s web where every dew drop on it reflects every other dew drop. A net of jewels, "Indra's net," is another way it is described.
MINDFULNESS. To be aware of Dependent Origination, and Ji-ji muge, is called mindfulness. Persons not aware of them are either ignorant, called “avidya,” which means uninformed, or they are ignore-ant, that is, they have chosen to pay no attention to them. “The cause of human misery and evil is ignorance," it is said. "Man in general is so darkly ignorant about his own nature that all of his actions have the wrong orientation. Not moral transgression then, but mental error is the root of human misery and evil.” “The result of ignorance is an endless chain of false illusions in which each succeeding illusion is due to its preceding illusion,” it is likewise said.
AHIMSA. Non-injury. “All things breathing, all things existing, all things living, all beings whatever, should not be slain or treated with violence, or insulted or tortured or driven away,” according to the Acaranga Sutra of Jainism, the view of Buddhism and Hinduism as well. A good illustration of this is Jain monks. While walking in the forest they carry long staffs which they tap on the ground in front of them to drive off insects lest they innocently trample them.
NO VIOLENCE. Physical violence goes without saying, but mental violence must also be avoided. Anger and ill will are mental violence and are among the destructive emotions, mental afflictions, so called, which also include hatred, jealousy, confusion, desire, and hubris.
COMPASSION. We must have compassion for our neighbors just as we hope our neighbors have compassion for us. This is because we are all in the same boat. Everyone suffers. Indeed, every living thing on this planet suffers, the common denominator. We must have compassion for all living things this way, even the tiniest creatures, for they live here too. Compassion is the cornerstone of Buddhism since it not only benefits the recipient but aids the one bestowing it as well, which is to say, the one bestowing it is diverted from his own troubles when he can lend a hand or heart to someone else. An alternative to the word compassion, in that it implies superiority on the part of the one bestowing it, is sympathy. Empathy is another word. We can all sympathize or empathize with others.
FORGIVENESS. Forgiving someone is the greatest gift we can give them, and that we can give ourselves. This includes not trying to change someone who does not want to change, or who cannot change.
NO REHEARSAL, NO REPLAY. Our thinking is dominated by rehearsing what we will say to someone in the future, or by replaying what we have said to them in the past. But there is no future, there is no past, so rehearsal and replay are merely “spinning in our tracks.” We must live in the present, treat each heartbeat, each breath, each meal, each laugh, as if it were the last, because one day it will be.
THERE IS SUCH A THING AS BAD LUCK. Baby birds in a nest get killed when the tree trimmers come through. The birds were in the wrong place at the wrong time. Bad luck. We will all be in the wrong place at the wrong time one day. The famous Catholic writer and Trappist monk Thomas Merton attended an interfaith conference between Catholic and non-Christian monks in 1968. While stepping out of his bath, he reached out to adjust an electric fan and apparently touched an exposed wire and was electrocuted. Bad luck. We will all reach out for something some day and it will do us in. Some Buddhists argue that bad luck is not bad luck so much as bad karma. This may be the case with an individual here and an individual there, but where large populations suffer, for example, genocide, it would not apply. They don't all have bad karma.
DYING. As soon as we realize that we are alive, we know that we will be dead one day. Every last person in the world will die eventually, just as every speck of living anything will die. This is why Buddhists seek to be nothing, as it were, for if you are nothing, you have nothing to lose. “When Death came, there was no one there,” the saying goes. Some say that Buddhists have a death wish, but not wanting to live is hardly the case. It's that they don't need to live. Besides, they argue, the older they get, the more they have to deal with degenerative diseases, to name one.
OBJECTS. Buddhists conceive of an object as an event, not as a thing or substance. A rock is an event.
THE WORLD. Buddhists accept the world as they find it, as it is. Above all, they do not place blame. They believe that the individual determines what happens to him or her. The individual, not something “out there,” is responsible for his or her fate. The external world only reacts to what the individual does.
SUCHNESS. Also termed "thusness" or "tathata," it means reality as it is, without superimposing any ideas upon it. This is seeing things as they truly are.
GOD. Because it is in the realm of speculative philosophy, the issue of God is avoided in Buddhism. The point, Buddhists say, is liberation, in real terms, today.
ICONOGRAPHY. Even Zen Buddhists can be found in elaborate temples bowing to statues of the Buddha, but this is merely what Buddhism comes in, Alan Watts said, the packaging.
THE MIDDLE WAY. Buddhism is called the Middle Way. The Middle Way is what is common between opposites. The Middle Way, in practice, is so the cure is not worse than the ailment.
CONTAGION. Our behavior, for the most part, is that of people around us. We do what other people are doing, called “contagion” in psychology. The result is conformity, even when it is bad for us, like war.
ON THE BRIGHT SIDE. Rather than dwell on how our lives might have been better had we done this or done that, we should think of the ways in which our lives might have been worse.
BURDENS. Intellect, talent, celebrity, duty, and victory cease to be burdens when we no longer seek them.
LONE RHINO ON THE PLAIN. Pratyeka-buddha. Seek out your own salvation with diligence.
SAMADHI. A remarkable place in the brain. Samadhi is absorption to the point of ecstasy. It can occur spontaneously during deep meditation or be the result of such “technical means” as repeating a mantra at length. Frustration over not attaining samadhi at will, however, can make it a fetter.
ZEN TEST. The four propositions in Buddhism are as follows: something is; something isn’t; something both is and isn’t; something neither is nor isn’t. Zen asks what is beyond the four propositions?
THE TAO. Zen, as a combination of Buddhism and Taoism, shares Taoism's view that the Tao that can be named is not the Tao. He who says he knows the Tao does not. It cannot be said what the Tao is exactly, only what it is like. The Tao is like gravity. Wu wei in Taoism means non-interference, which is to say, one should flow with life, not get in the way of it. As Alan Watts put it, “You are going along with the Tao whether you want to or not. You can swim against it, but you’ll still be moved along by it. If you swim against it, all you’ll do is wear yourself out. But if you swim with it, the whole strength of it is yours. The difficulty, though, is determining which way it is going.”
WHAT YOU ARE, AT LAST. Your will has nothing to do with it. You are happening of yourself. There is nothing for you to figure out. This realization is where mysticism begins. This is what the Buddha called Wisdom. It comes from the emptying or purging of the ego-identity and accepting what remains, which is pure consciousness. One becomes like a newborn child. One is now on the surface, no longer buried under layers of self, thinking and memory. Now there is only feeling, feeling not of the emotional kind, but of the intuitive kind. Just feel it. Don’t interpret it. Don’t expect anything from it. There is nothing to be done about it. It is here that we feel that we are all of existence. Tat tvam asi, that art thou. What follows is mystical union, but not of self with other, but of self with self, in the way that the Atman is Brahman in Vedanta. And with this comes a fundamental shift in consciousness.
RIGHT DIRECTION. You are facing in the right direction. All you have to do is keep walking, the adage goes.
THE BLOSSOMING. A plant is more surprised than anyone when suddenly it sprouts a flower. It is now, it sees, what it was meant to be, the only thing it could ever be. No less so a human being, blossoming into who he truly is, sometimes equally unexpectedly.
FINAL REALIZATION. Consciousness discovers that it is a broader consciousness, not that it is a
part of a broader consciousness but that it
is a broader consciousness.
