Buddhist "Ideas"

I hope this won't be a rant, but I just saw a program on PBS that got everything possible wrong about enlightenment.  The commentator was personable and obviously interested in Buddhism, but she didn't have a clue.

Should this be a cause for distress?  I don't know. Maybe it's to be expected.  How can you know you don't know the real thing until you experience it?  This is, after all, why there is such a thing as lineage (which I so much appreciate despite my dislike of hierarchy):  people who have been given permission to teach can be trusted to speak from the Truth they have realized. But when people who don't know speak as though they do, then others who listen also get confused.

What did she say wrong?  Pretty much everything. First of all, she kept talking about "Buddha's ideas."  Yes, in a way, anything that is put into words can be called an "idea."  But what Buddha realized is not about thoughts in the head.  In fact, it's about what is not thought.

The commentator at one point says that Buddhism leads us to seek escape from the real world of suffering -- I'm paraphrasing but that was the essence.  This is the whole problem:  when you experience the world you see as the "real" one, then everything you say after that has to be wrong.  

The commentator kept saying that Buddhists believe that you have to do this and that in order to find tranquility or nirvana -- she pretty much equates the two.  And maybe I'll stop here, because really the fundamental problem is that not once did the essential truth come up:  we don't exist.  Until that is known, everything will be seen upside down and backward.

But I remember myself how confused I was when people used to say this to me.  Sometimes I'd even get angry. What do you mean, I don't exist?  Who is this person who is dialoging with you right now if I don't exist??  And it is, actually, very difficult to explain what that means when this psychological self has always seemed so solid, so it's no wonder that the subject wasn't even broached on this show.  But at the same time, this is the raison d'etre for the Teachings.  It's not about following some path in order to get psychological satisfaction of some kind.  It's to realize that we are transparent -- empty -- and it is because we are empty that all of existence finds its home in us. 

Seeing the perfection of persona through Buddha's eyes

"This that we are honors the persona equally with the eternal."  

Pamela Wilson.

There are a lot of helpers in the world.  Most of those helpers have some wisdom; some have a lot.  But there is something about the roles of helper/ helpee that has always bothered me: the assumption that someone needs "help."  

From one point of view, of course, we all need help at different times.  Some of us seem to need more than others.  But from the point of view of the eternal, no one needs any help:  we are all perfect as we are.  And somehow, when we meet someone who knows that, we are radically changed, even if the person says nothing at all about it. 

Many years ago, I saw a Kurosawa movie called, DO DES'KA DEN.  It was a commercial flop and not very many people saw it, but I've seen it three or four times.  I kept trying to figure out what it held for me, because when I saw it, it appeared that a transcendent wisdom was being transmitted, although I wasn't sure if it was in the film, or if I had just projected it.  In this film, a ragtag group of society's dregs lives in a rubbish pile on the edge of Tokyo Bay.  Their quirkiness is all in the service of survival.  And it was something about Life's pushing through, Life's just keeping on making it happen that moved me to tears.  Pamela today called it the "resilience of consciousness," and suddenly I saw why I had watched this movie so many times.

I saw for the first time how every form, everyone, not in spite of how they are but in the very being of who and what they are, is manifesting divine perfection.  Adyashanti used to call it "the Eternal in drag."  It just shines if you have eyes to see it.  And today, I have eyes to see it.

Of course, this doesn't negate that there will be people who push my buttons, people whom I don't like or who don't like me for a myriad of reasons.  All that psychological stuff is still there, but it doesn't obscure what is underneath anymore.

The Bodhi Tree Myth

I don't know how much of the story of the historical Buddha's enlightenment is apocryphal.  But even if it's true, I know it was misleading in its attractiveness to me -- especially when I was young.  This guy wanders in the forest for years with no realization of his True Nature whatsoever, and then sits under this tree, vows to stay there until he realizes Truth, and finally does.  In one fell swoop -- complete.  Nothing left to do. 

OK, so maybe it happens.  But how many of you know of people who woke up that way?  I have met some people who claimed this is how it was for them, but if I talk to them for a few minutes, I see that they still have plenty of ego left.  Nothing wrong with that (except, maybe, the self-deceit part), but the way they function doesn't really look to others the way it appears to them.  And I sometimes wonder whether they, like myself when I was younger, have been deceived by the Bodhi Tree myth into thinking that this instantaneous, complete and total awakening is the way it always is, and so have superimposed that belief onto their own experience.

For most people, including myself, it's not about one moment of transcendence which becomes the final  realization of ultimate Truth but a series of awakenings and a gradual shift in the way life is experienced and seen.  It is true that that first awakening is very marvelous -- there is, in fact, nothing so wonderful.  But those realizations that follow take you deeper into a more complete understanding of your True Nature.  Ego keeps functioning and all -- but now there is an understanding of its more limited role -- to keep the creature safe and functioning well.  What we really are, though, encompasses not only our ego and all that we as form are, but all that everyone and everything else is as well -- that's what it is important to know.  We don't transcend our lives in a moment, but rather we come to see more and more how the Eternal is always present in everything.

A KOAN

Q:     Why does the Buddha above have no head?

A:      Think about it.