Who was the Buddha?
The person we know as the Buddha, Siddhartha Gautama, summed up his teaching in a simple sentence: "I teach only suffering and the end of suffering". I doubt there is anyone to whom that doesn't sound good. No one wants to suffer and the Buddha maintained that there was a way out of it, a way out of Samsara, the unending cycle of suffering that humans endure. This is what he taught, and this only.
The way to do that, he said, was to undo our humanity completely, to dismantle all the pieces that make us discrete human beings, to define all the parts of our actions, thoughts, and personality that comprise our Self and to jettison them into the aether, leaving spirit unencumbered and absorbed into the stream that is life itself. There are no desires, no evils, no joys, no sorrows. We are completely and perfectly free forever. Nirvana.
He said this was possible for anyone and his followers say he achieved such a state, but returned to teach others how to do it. He became bodhisattva, an enlightened being who delays entering nirvana out of compassion and helps all willing sentient beings to achieve awakening as well. He became a teacher and is said to have passed down (verbally - Gautama never wrote anything down) the way to do what he did and many have followed him.
Sounds Pretty Good to Me
I can't blame them. Who doesn't want to leave suffering by the wayside and live in perfect happiness? Pretty much everything we do in life is geared toward making either ourselves (primarily ourselves, if we're honest) or someone else happy. It rarely works the way we think it does, of course, because generally what we think will make us happy is more life, not less. More love, more money, more health, more ease...more, more, more...and what it usually gets us is more complications and often more trouble.
It's possible that the Buddha was on to something by telling us we are better off with less of ourselves rather than more. Desire is thrilling and can make us feel ecstatic and alive but it is not always our friend, often leading to bad decisions, waste, and misery. I wonder, however, whether he took his idea of achieving happiness a few steps too far and for those who think their humanity is not a misshapen impediment, it might be worth looking at an alternative.
Die to Self
The Buddha wasn't the only one who thought we needed to rid ourselves of too much Self, but it's a matter of degree. Jesus did it, too. But Jesus' dying always carried with it a resurrection. In other words, Buddha undressed us and escorted us into a different kind of existence stripped of flesh, bone, blood, and intellect, but Jesus did something different. Jesus changed the clothes of humanity. He taught a way to remove the cloak of pride and selfishness and destructive desire and put on a new one, removing a forbidding, fortified heart of stone and replacing it with a vulnerable heart of flesh, open to hurt and death but somehow enlarged by them.
In short, Jesus taught us how to remain human, suffer constructively, and still find happiness.
How to Be Human and Happy
There are some Christian sects that treat our bodies like a red-headed stepchild, of course, who say that we are unavoidably and irredeemably corrupt by physical nature, and in that, they have philosophical agreement with the Buddha. But Jesus was a man. A man who never apologized for being a man or tried to undo his humanity. A man who lived fully and died fully, too. A man who knew that complete divorce from suffering was not the way we were meant to live and demonstrated it by suffering with intent right before our eyes.
Rather than undoing his humanity, He detached his humanity and his suffering from their catastrophic nonessentials, the desires and decisions that augment our sense of self but lead to nothing but the loss of the love, peace, and happiness we think we're working toward. He did leave a couple of pretty plain roadmaps for how to do this: his own life and the Sermon on the Mount. The sermon gives practical examples of which desires we should keep and which we should work to abandon. It tells us what we will look like while this is being accomplished - we will look like Jesus.
I admit I'm tempted to say Duh here because that is his aim all along - to make us like him. He said to "follow me" more than 20 recorded times and in that, please note, that He did not live any nirvana. He suffered and in that, I deduce that, even when we are following and doing as much of the right thing as we can muster, we will suffer too. It's part of the deal. It's part of life. It forms us. It confirms our humanity, and in case you haven't noticed, we are, at least for now, all human.
The Alternatives
It turns out that we can have our cake and eat it, too. Sort of. We have a Self and do not need to kick it to the curb to know joy and peace. With that Self and the desires that it brings, however, we will also suffer. That's the deal. It's either that or the way of the Buddha: immolation of the Self and absorption into a blessedly sense-free Nirvana.
There is a kind of happiness in either path.
I came so that you might have life, and have it more abundantly.-John 10:10
image: owlcation
No comments:
Post a Comment