NOTES FROM THE PATH

“Seek out your own salvation with diligence,” the Buddha said.  “Try it, see for yourself.”

The Buddha said, “You can search throughout the entire universe for someone who is more deserving of salvation than you are yourself, and that person is not to be found anywhere.”  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.”

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.

Salvation begins with Right View, which means the way one looks at life, one’s perspective.  Without Right View, one is confused, resulting in frustration, depression, and anxiety.  The goal of Buddhism is quieting 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.  Memory, though, is selective, hence unreliable.  Historians, for example, balk at this because the past is everything to them.  They don’t want to hear about the shortcomings of language, for instance, 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 basic 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.  

Remembering the past and planning for the future are done now, in the present moment.  “All we have is now,” Marcus Aurelius reminds us, as does Eckhart Tolle who speaks of now as “Isness,” what actually "is.”  Alan Watts said, “There’s no place to be but here and now.  There is no way to be anywhere else.”  Watts added, “Interestingly, time is moving, yet there is only now.”

EXISTENCE IS IMPERMANENT.  When the 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 is time bound, transient.  When we try to grasp it, it just runs through our hands.  We are not happy with what we achieve, own, and know because too quickly we are tired of them, are bored with them.  Time kills them.

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 there is.

Hormones contribute to the illusion of the self, the lie of hormones.  It is not, for instance, until testosterone recedes in men in their fifties that they see the extent to which they have seen the world through a veil all these years.

There is as well the lie of mental states.  We are conditioned to view the world and ourselves in a certain light, which is false often times.  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 it using symbols that are approximations at best of what we mean.  Semantics scholar Alfred Korzybski notes, “Whatever you say something is, it isn’t,” with Alan Watts adding, “nothing is really describable.”  Meanwhile, 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 are false, too, often times.  When one is lonely, he misses his family and friends.  Loneliness, though, like all other feelings, comes, as Krishnamurti explained, from thoughts, and thoughts 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, to be enchanted, spellbound.  What we actually are is just consciousness.  We are a conscious body.  In Hinduism, this consciousness is also called atta, or atman, which is the immanent form of the Brahman.  But why so further define it?  Why make it like a soul?  The Second Dharma Seal 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.  All the individual is 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," Alan Watts said.  Liberation, nirvana in Buddhism, moksha in Hinduism, is the goal.  Everything other than the Path to it is irrelevant.  In this way, as the Dhammapada states, “It is not what others do, or do not do, that is my concern. It is what I do, and do not do. This is my concern.”

MEMENTO MORI:  The Dalai Lama’s hobby is fixing clocks, a reminder to him that he, like everyone else, is “on the clock.”  Memento mori, remember death.

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 a wrong-doer, he has had his head cut off.”  Life is not all suffering, 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.

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 to pleasures to where we need more and more of them to get the same effect.  Addiction is the result.

WHY ARE YOU UNHAPPY?  It is because you are filled with wanting, with desire, to the point that eventually the desire becomes a thirst that cannot be satisfied, even when you achieve what you desire.  So how can you be happy?  By ceasing to desire.  Just as a fire dies down when no fuel is added, so your 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, again, 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.

WEALTH, POWER, AND PRESTIGE:  Wealth, power, and prestige are what society teaches us are the desirable things to have in this life.  But Krishnamurti said, “Think it through.  Do you really want what you think you want?”  As the old adage goes, "Beware of what you want, you might get it."  Or again, "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 of Buddhism is to eliminate suffering.  The saying “less is more” is correct.  Have nothing and want nothing, and in this way you will take the greatest pleasure in the smallest things and be happy.  “He who knows he has enough is rich,” Lao Tzu said.

DO NOT COMPETE.  With competition there is a winner and a loser, with the biggest loser being the winner.  A hollow victory.  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 aim of Buddhism 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.  They are just shooting pool.

WHY AMBITION?  Ambition is one’s attempt to fill a void in his life, such as a need for love or respect.  Love and respect, however, are transient.  Wealth, power, prestige, love, and respect are empty victories.

AVOID ALL ATTACHMENTS, FETTERS, CHAINS THAT BIND.  Do not be attached to personal possessions, to location, to money, to other people, and least of all to yourself.  Attaching yourself to things is folly because soon enough you are tired of them, wish you never had them, yet cannot get rid of them.  You find you become attached to people but because you don’t like most of them all that much, it jeopardizes your happiness in the end.  Have feelings for people, the Buddha said, but don’t make them responsible for your happiness.  Meantime, why should you attach yourself to yourself, to your physical self especially, for your physical self is dying, has been dying from the day you were born?  And why should you attach yourself to your psychological self when your psychological self is an illusion?

NO DUALITY.  This is known as the principle of relativity.  There is only the appearance of opposites, when in fact they are one.  Opposites are two sides of the same coin.  You can’t have light without dark, substance without space, life without death, self without other.  They go together.  They arise mutually, called the coincidence of opposites.

REALITY.  The truth is that 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 that we will die one day, for instance.  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 fully grasp it.  When we look up at the stars at night we do not know what truly it is we are looking at, otherwise we would be screaming in terror in the streets.  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 outside it.

DIRECT EXPERIENCE IS SUPERIOR TO SECONDARY EXPERIENCE.  Direct experience is, for example, classical music, i.e. abstract sound, physical labor, and color.  It is the experience of the five senses.  Secondary experience is the symbolic world, thinking and language, life once removed.  While secondary experience is useful in ways, it generates a world unto itself and in this way is false, or 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.  It is like a clock where if one wheel turns, all the wheels turn.  Everything changes with one change, or not. The moral implication of this is, what are the consequences of one’s actions?  Will they lead to hurt of self, of others, or of both?  What will happen if one stops, or does nothing?

JI-JI-MUGE.  Similar to dependent origination is 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 on it.  A net of jewels 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, avidya, or they are ignore-ant, that is, have chosen to pay no attention to them.  The result of ignorance is an endless chain of false illusions in which each succeeding illusion is due to its preceding illusion.  Ignorance, therefore, is at the heart of all human misery and evil.  Humans are so darkly ignorant about their own nature that all of their actions have the wrong orientation.  Not moral transgression then, but mental error is the root of human misery and pain.

AHIMSA.  Non-injury to other living beings.  “All things breathing, all things existing, all things living, all beings whatsoever, 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.  Thus, Jain monks, while walking in the forest, carry long staffs that they tap on the ground in front of them.  This is to drive off any insects lest the insects get innocently trampled.

NO VIOLENCE.  Physical violence goes without saying, but mental violence must also be avoided.  Anger and ill will are mental violence.

COMPASSION.  We must have compassion toward our neighbors as we hope our neighbors have compassion toward us.  We are all in the same boat.  Everyone suffers.  Indeed, every living thing on this planet suffers, the common denominator.  We must, therefore, have compassion for all living things, even for the bacteria that may one day kill us, for they live here too.  Compassion is the cornerstone of Buddhism because it not only benefits the recipient, but it aids the one bestowing it as well.  An alternative to the word compassion, since it implies superiority on the part of the one bestowing it, is sympathy.  We can sympathize with our neighbors because we all suffer, and if we have not yet lived all that much life to be able to sympathize, or have not yet lived a particular aspect of life, we can at least empathize with others.

FORGIVENESS.  Forgiving someone of something is the greatest gift a person can give another, and himself.  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 our rehearsing what, for example, we will say to someone in the future, or our replaying what we have already said to someone in the past.  But there is no future, there is no past.  Only the present exists.  We must treat each heartbeat, each breath, each meal, each laugh, as if it were our last, because one day it will be.

ZEN'S VIEW.  The four propositions are that something is; that something isn’t; that something both is and isn’t; and that something neither is nor isn’t.  Zen asks in a koan what is beyond the four propositions?

BAD LUCK.  If there is good luck, there is also 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.  We will all be in the wrong place at the wrong time one day.

DYING.  As soon as you realize that you are alive, you know that you will be dead one day.  Every person in the world will die, just as every speck of living anything will die.  The Buddhist response to this is to live a simple life, to be nothing, especially to be no ego.  If you are nothing, you have nothing to lose.  “When Death came, there was no one there,” Alan Watts put it.  There are those who say that Buddhists have a death wish.  It is not that they don’t want to live, but that they don’t need to.  The reason?  The older one gets, the more he has to worry about.  The longer one lives, the more years he has to live with anxiety.  The longer one lives, the longer he has to suffer with degenerative diseases.

OBJECTS. Buddhists conceive of an object, a rock for instance, as an event and not as a thing or substance.

THE WORLD.  Buddhists accept the world as they find it, as it is.  They do not place blame.  They believe that the individual determines what happens to him. The individual, not something “out there,” is responsible for his 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.

GOD.  The issue of God is avoided in Buddhism because it is not the point.  What matters is liberation, in real terms, today.

ICONOGRAPHY.  Even Zen Buddhists can be found bowing to statues of the Buddha in elaborate temples, but this, as Alan Watts said, is merely what Buddhism comes in, the packaging.

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.  We do what other people around us are doing, called, in psychology, contagion.  The result of contagion is conformity, even when, like with war, it is bad for us.

ON THE BRIGHT SIDE.  Rather than dwell on how your life might have been better had you done this or done that, you should think of the ways in which it might have gotten worse.

BURDENS.  Talent, celebrity, intelligence, duty, and victory cease to be burdens when they are no longer sought.

LONE RHINO ON THE PLAIN.  Pratyeka-buddha.  Seek out your own salvation with diligence.

SAMADHI.  A remarkable place in the brain.  Samadhi is not self-hypnosis.  It is mental absorption to the point of ecstasy.  Samadhi can occur spontaneously during deep meditation or be the result of such “technical means” as repeating a mantra at length.  Frustration over not attaining it, though, can make it a fetter.

TAO.  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, only what it is like.  The Tao is like gravity.

WU WEI.  Wu wei in Taoism means non-interference.  We should flow with our lives, not get in the way of them.  Alan Watts said, “You are going along with the Tao whether you want to or not.  You can swim against it but you will still be moved along by it.  If you swim against it, all you will do is wear yourself out.  But if you swim with it, the whole strength of it is yours.  Yet the difficulty for us is determining which way it is going.”

WHAT YOU ARE, FINALLY.  Your will has nothing to do with it.  You are happening of yourself.  There is nothing for you to figure out.

OUT OF NOTHING COMES SOMETHING.  This is where mysticism begins.  The Buddha termed this Wisdom.  It comes from the emptying or purging of the ego-identity.  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, however, 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 one realizes that he is 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, in Vedanta, the Atman is Brahman.  And with this comes a fundamental shift in consciousness.

RIGHT DIRECTION.  Alan Watts said that you are facing in the right direction.  All you have to do is keep walking.

FLOWER.  A plant at the end of its life suddenly sprouts a flower.  The plant is more surprised by this than anyone else.  It is now what it was meant to be, it sees, the only thing it could ever have been.

REALIZATION.  Our consciousness finds that it is a broader consciousness, not that it is a part of a broader consciousness but that it IS a broader consciousness. 

AWAKENING IN ZEN.  It is likened to your hands resting on your thighs, where your hands feel your thighs at the same time that your thighs feel your hands.