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Buddhism Buddhism begins with a man. In his later years, when India was afire with his message,
people came to him asking what he was. Not “Who are you?” but “What are
you?” These are the words of Huston Smith, from his classic book The World’s Religions. And then Huston Smith goes on to tell us more: “His answer became his title, for this is what Buddha means. The Sanskrit root budh means to awake and to know. While the rest of humanity was dreaming the dream we call the waking human state, one of their number roused himself. Buddhism begins with a man who woke up.” [Smith. 1994. The Illustrated World’s Religions. p. 60]. We have heard, in the story that Anne Fiske told us this morning, some of the human details of the life of that man. Siddhartha Gautama was born around 563 BCE in what is now Nepal, near the Indian border. He lived to be eighty years old, and devoted forty-five years to his ministry, preaching publicly, counseling privately, founding and leading an order of monks, and challenging the entrenched social structures that valued caste and class over individual merit. Even from this distance, some 2500 years after his birth, he appears to have been a remarkable man. Turning again to Huston Smith, we are advised that: “It is impossible to read the accounts of [the Buddha’s] life without emerging with the impression that one has been in touch with one of the greatest personalities of all time. The obvious veneration felt by almost all who knew him is contagious, and the reader is soon caught up with his disciples in the sense of being in the presence of something close to wisdom incarnate.” [Smith. 1991. The World’s Religions. p. 88]. In a pattern that you may recognize, the facts of this man’s birth were soon elaborated into something much more, into a miracle birth story that rivals the more familiar one of Jesus. The legend begins with an annunciation of the impending birth. His mother, the Queen Maya, was visited in a dream by a pure white elephant carrying a snow-white lotus flower which it gently presented to her. Still in the dream, the room was immediately flooded with a heavenly light, and the world was shaken by an earthquake so terrible that even the deaf heard the roar, even the blind were able to see. The lame rose and walked; the silent gained the power of speech, the world was filled with beautiful music and flowers of many colors, and even the wild beasts became gentle. The King’s counselors interpreted the dream: the Queen would bear a son who would grow up to one of two destinies; either he would succeed his father as king and unite India, becoming a great conquerer and a Universal King, or he would become a great teacher and a world redeemer. When at last the child was born, four angels appeared, holding the four corners of a golden net into which the newborn baby was laid. “Be joyful, O Lady,” said the angels to Queen Maya, “A mighty son is born to you.” Four kings joined the four angels, kings who held the baby and laid him down on a soft mat. But the boy lifted himself up on his feet and walked, one step and then another until he had walked seven steps – or perhaps seven steps in each direction, as he surveyed the universe. Then, like any other baby, he lay back down on his soft mat and fell asleep, though this child was guarded by angels who sang above him in the sky. [”The Birth of Buddha” in Sophia Lyon Fahs. 1995. From Long Ago and Many Lands. pp. 92-97.] Though the man was revered – indeed, almost venerated – after his death, the Buddha made no supernatural claims, either for himself or for his teachings. He attributed all his wisdom, attainments, and achievements to human effort and human intelligence. The system of teachings and practices that he developed and taught is so spare and logical that some argue that Buddhism is not technically a religion at all, but more akin to a philosophy, or to pure psychology. At the very bottom of Buddhism is the human experience, and direct experience at that – the seeker of truth is advised “not to accept anything merely on the authority of another but to exercise their own reasoning and judge for themselves whether a thing is right or wrong.” [Narada. 1988. The Buddha and his Teachings. p. 283.] At the very bottom of the Buddha’s experience was the established Hindu practice of his day – a religion already two thousand years old. Hinduism had become rigid and stale, infused with secret knowledge available only to the initiate – the Brahmin. Rituals had become mechanical, tradition had become a dead weight [Smith. 1994. The Illustrated World’s Religions. p. 67]; extremes of superstition, asceticism or self-indulgence prevailed. The Siddartha Gautama, in his search for enlightenment, had tried and rejected these. He sought, and he found, a middle way. “Be ye lamps unto yourselves,” the Buddha taught, and our choir sang to us. “Be your own confidence; hold to the truth within yourselves as to the only lamp.” [words of hymn # 184 in Singing the Living Tradition.] Even the Buddha himself is to be seen as a teacher, one who showed the way and marked the path for others to follow in the universal human search for enlightenment – for having everything figured out, for seeing the unity of all being (to quote Anne Fiske in this morning’s story.) Each seeker – and we are all seekers – must follow the path for themselves. “Strive on with diligence,” are his last recorded words – or perhaps what he said was “work out your own salvation with diligence.” And what did he mean by salvation? “Emancipation” might be a better word – release from the interminable cycle of ignorance and suffering that seems to be the inevitable human lot. And each person’s emancipation depends, in the words of Buddhist monk and scholar Walpola Rahula, “on [their] own realization of Truth, and not on the benevolent grace of a god or any external power as a reward for [their] obedient good behaviour.” [Rahula. 1974. What the Buddha Taught. p. 2]. The Buddha was a clear and logical thinker, and his teaching rests on four postulates, widely known as the Four Noble Truths. The first of these, the absolute starting point, is the truth that “all life is suffering.” Sickness, death, poverty – these are easy and obvious conditions of suffering. But even the things we love best have an edge of pain: when we are separated from the beloved, when we must defer pleasure or satisfying service, when hope and fear are intertwined in our caring for a child, or a friend. Realistically – and Buddhism is nothing if not realistic – life as we typically live it is “unfulfilling and filled with insecurity;” more often than not, we feel “dislocated,” off-center. We suffer. [Smith. 1991. The World’s Religions. p. 99]. And the cause of suffering is attachment, or perhaps a better word is “desire.” This is the Second Noble Truth. We create expectations for how life should be – will be – and when these expectations, these desires, these outcomes to which we have become attached – when they are not fulfilled, then we suffer. Having identified the fundamental condition of human life, and the cause for it, it follows logically that IF we could free ourselves from attachment, IF we could overcome our desires, then our suffering would end. If we could learn to “go with the flow,” then instead of being off-center, always pushing against the current of life as it bears down on us, instead we could relax into harmony with what is. The cure for attachment lies in freeing ourselves from attachment. This is the Third Noble Truth. There IS a cure. And the cure, the Fourth Noble Truth, is the path that the Buddha identified and marked for others to follow. The Eightfold Path, it is called. Eight practices, eight disciplines, eight steps along the way from a life of ignorance and suffering to a life of enlightenment and harmony with all that is. The eight steps are: Right Views, Right Intent, Right Speech, Right Conduct (including the Five Precepts for right conduct: do not kill, do not steal, do not lie, do not be unchaste, do not drink intoxicants), Right Livelihood, Right Effort, Right Mindfulness, and Right Concentration. In short, we are instructed to live in a way that is intentional, aware – awake. As much as possible, and more and more with practice and with progress along the path, we are to pay attention to what happens, to how it affects us, to all the little catches and traps that pull us back into attachment and suffering, to all the little choices we make that determine the direction of our life and growth. Gradually, we are to free ourselves from reactivity, from entanglement with transitory and mundane things. Gradually, our consciousness enlarges; we focus on, we participate in, we merge with the infinite. We strive on; we work out our own salvation with diligence. In the end – in this life, or in the next, or in the one after that – in the end we achieve nirvana – a state of being that some in the West have tried to liken to heaven, but which literally means “extinction” – a state of being in which all that bounds and restricts the individual has melted away, and we are boundless and we are everywhere and everything that is. These are the teachings in their simplest form. The practices that have been developed to implement the teachings are many and varied, and so there are many different Buddhisms in the world today: Mahayana and Theravada, Zen and Pure Land, Engaged and Vipassana and the Vajrayana or Diamond Way of Tibet. At the heart of each is the search for enlightenment for the individual – and in this sense, Buddhism is at its core a solitary practice. Nonetheless, some schools focus more on withdrawal from the world, with a practice centered on meditation and a dedicated corps of monks and nuns. Some schools focus more on a life in the world and a mindfulness practice grounded in the homely activities of the daily routine. Vietnamese Buddhist teacher Thich Nhat Hanh invites us to stop and breathe and smile whenever we see the taillights of a car stopping in front of us in traffic, remembering that it is only in the present moment – red lights and all – that we can live our lives. [Thich Nhat Hanh. 1991. Peace Is Every Step. p. 33]. And some schools, focusing on the impact of the societies in which we live on the direct experience that we bring to bear on our journey to enlightenment, follow a path of social engagement, working to bring about what Christopher S. Queen calls a “mundane awakening … which includes individuals, villages, nations, and ultimately all people … and which focuses on objectives that may be achieved and recognized in this lifetime, in this world.” [Christopher S. Queen. 1996. “Introduction” in Engaged Buddhism: Buddhist Liberation Movements in Asia. p. 9.] Here we find the activist Vietnamese monks who immolated themselves in protest against the war in their home country; here we find the social reform movements in Sri Lanka and Thailand; here we find the political insight of the Dalai Lama and the transformational poetry of Thich Nhat Hanh. And always the teachings take second place to the practice. Always the words pale before the experience of paths traveled, insights achieved, fleeting glimpses of unity and harmony. Buddhism begins with a man, but it leads to you. Always, to you. So let the speaking come to an end. Let the words fade
into silence. For two minutes, let each of us focus on our breathing,
and let us pay attention to what is happening to us, and to how we feel.
We will begin with a simple “In-Out” breathing exercise from Thich Nhat
Hanh’s little book Peace Is Every Step. Who knows where we will end? Thich
Nhat Hanh will lead us into silence, and the chanting of our choir will
lead us out. Repeat?
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