Lecture notes Week Three
[This will not by any means be complete, but I wanted to supplement what your
book text says, and what the two Power Point presentations convey with the following: ]
It is vital to understand Buddhism by way of Hinduism.
In other words, do not try to come directly to Guatama Buddha’s experiences and
teaching from your occidental (Western) perspective and understand it as if he had
“hatched these ideas” in Nebraska or London. Siddhartha was Indian; he was brought
up in the classic Sanatana Dharma (what we call Hinduism now) and his understanding of
the universe started there. As your Fisher text notes (p. 105), Siddartha tried to fulfill his
religious destiny by following the paths of Hindu spiritual teachers; he led the life of a
typical Indian sannyasin, fasting and denying himself physical pleasure, seeking to
purify and liberate his soul from the endless wheel of karma by traditional religious
means.
When he pursued something, he pursued it doggedly. He eventually became,
literally, skin and bones. The images of the Buddha that you see wherein he looks like
the Scarecrow in the Wizard of Oz, as light as a feather and almost no flesh, stem from
this period in his life. When he eventually despaired of coming to enlightenment , and
stopped fasting and sat down in a restaurant and had a nice meal, his fellow disciples
were aghast; horrified at his apparent indifference to “religious” solemnity.
Guatama,
it appeared, was not taking this religion business seriously. But he was. He just had lost
faith in “religious” means to attain enlightenment and decided to live a more natural,
balanced life of health instead of abstinence.
In that renewed healthy state he sat down under a tree to re-commence the pursuit
of enlightenment, much more comfortable, now that he had a bellyful. He reviewed his
former lives and the cycle of existence on which he and other Hindus were dizzily
whirling around. He saw his fellow Indians’ deeply religious (or, as he would say it:
“superstitious”) affectations. He noted their multiple religious processes, elaborate rituals
that kept them constantly thinking about the other world after death, and kept them
seeking “help” from supposed spiritual beings or gods. He saw his community as
addicted to religion, to the pantheon of deities and consorts of deities that we looked into
briefly last week as we were introduced to the ancient Indian religion now called
“Hinduism.”
To Guatama it seemed futile and foolish to waste so much energy expressing
extreme devotion to all of this, when, as he saw it, the existence of gods is even more
illusory than our own existence – which is itself problematic. What he basically realized
when he finally attained “enlightenment” is that his misery (one supposes: particularly his
misery of recent years stemming from his fanatical religious excesses) and that of
everyone derives from our mistakenly thinking we can find solutions to the problem of
life in metaphysical (religious) exercises.
We want and we do not have, so we suffer.
We turn to religion to find solace from that suffering, but in doing so we cause ourselves
MORE suffering, because we foster an illusion that help will be forthcoming from some
heavenly being.
Instead of nurturing and cultivating “religious consciousness,” as a Yoga master
would urge us to do in order to become more “spiritual” and eventually attain moksha,
that is, liberation from the karma-driven wheel of death and rebirth and existence, and
unity with Brahman-consciousness, the Buddha says we should seek to rid ourselves of
THAT desire, as well as all the other (less pure) desires. He too, like the Hindu culture
of which he was a part, saw the problem as escaping the endless cycles of earthly
existence. But to Buddha’s mind, trying to do so via devotion to illusory, non-existent
deities was just a means to furthering one’s attachment to this samsara world.
The goal, then, is to snuff out the desires that keep pulling us back into this cycle.
The goal is to clear the mind of all chattering, both material and religious, that keep us
focusing on our supposed “place in this world.” As long as we are striving to achieve any
goal (even the goal of escaping samsara) we continue to foster the illusion that there is an
individuated self who is thus striving. And as long as we perpetuate that false illusion
we’ll never be free, for self-love (or flesh love) will continue to draw us back to this
plane of existence, even after death.
To a westerner, for whom existence is usually perceived as meaningful, and for
whom, let’s face it: life is pretty comfortable, Buddha’s proposed “salvation” does not
sound particularly inviting. But you have to put yourself in their (his contemporaries’)
shoes and try to understand how bone-wearying and mind-numbingly miserable existence
was.
That one would want to escape the normal “daily life” would not have seemed
odd there, then. Especially if one adds in the incredibly long eons of time that Hindu
cosmology propounds, and imagines what a poor, dusty, disease-ridden denizen of a premodern society must have experienced life as, with nothing to look forward to except
repeating this miserable dirty cycle again and again and again and again across millennia
of millennia . . . If you’ve ever been really sick out in public – like, let’s say at a county
fair, and someone keeps urging you to go on one whirling ride after another, and you’ve
already got a splitting headache, and all you can think of is how much you’d like to find a
cool dark place and just pass out from consciousness . . . . then maybe you can begin to
relate to what Buddha was proposing.
He was suggesting that if we could rid ourselves of concern with life, especially
with ultimate concerns of life, we might have hope of eventually slipping into that cool
dark oblivion in which there is no further consciousness of the wearying samsara, no
further consciousness, in fact, of our own existence.
To paraphrase Shakespeare’s Hamlet:
“. . . or not to be. Ahh, to rest, perchance
to sleep . . .” Bottom line: we need to understand Buddha first as an Indian; as a lapsed
Hindu. As a thinker who renounced the entire religious superstructure that we glanced at
last week under our study of Hinduism and said all that superstition (religion) hampers,
rather than helps, our quest for nirvana, or non-consciousness.
It should not surprise us, then, that Buddhism did not take hold in India. Instead,
it flourished in China, in Thailand, in Burma, Tibet, Japan, Korea, Laos . . . cultures
whose pantheons of deities were not developed so complexedly as that of the followers of
Sanatana Dharma in the Indus valley and its neighboring subcontinent.