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VII. Buddha and the Mythopoetic Tradition (1967)
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At the end of the day when he finishes his meditation he will
be able to rise and say that now all of the gods will see that he
has become a Buddha, that he has become an enlightened one, that
he can run through the palaces of the gods without fear and that
he can place himself above the gods in order to put them in their
place. Buddha smashed all of the Indian gods and he smashed them
in the most literal way in order to propose a way of life that was
based upon the ecognition of suffering and the power to overcome
suffering. Everything in life amounts to suffering and more suffering
and he puts this forward as an objective argument which is irrefutable
because it is something any human being can see with his own eyes.
The question then, is how is one to get rid of this suffering which
implies that first we must understand the reasons for suffering
in order to be able to obtain the methods of thought necessary to
rid ourselves of it. So Buddha now asks "what causes this ever
increasing suffering in the world", and he answers, "we
cause it". We cause it by our blind wishes and passions, and
by that he does not mean all passions for he himself is a
very passionate man, but he is passionate for the truth. Rather
most of our passions are blind. We are like blind animals running
through the world and by our running we increase our suffering more
and more. Thus the first step in the abolition of this suffering
is that we must get a hold of ourselves.(10)
How are we to do that? Buddha coins for us a logical term to describe
our predicament which he calls selfhood and he sets against
this another term which he calls Buddhahood.
Now when anyone tells us that we must abolish selfhood we Europeans
understand him to mean by that the abolition of all our joys and
our individuality. We do not like that thought because we love so
much to be selves. But Buddha is not speaking about our concept
of self. He has a very different concept in mind, a concept that
is expressed by the Indian word atman which, according to
the Hindus, is destined to be sucked back into Brahman because
Brahman is the soul of the world and the atman is
only the dream of that soul. And now we see something of
the revolutionist coming in, because it is with the atman that Buddha
identifies selfhood and it is selfhood with which he identifies
suffering and finally it is with Brahman that he identifies the
image of selfhood. That is, the whole of suffering is symbolized
in the image of Brahman (to the Hindus the ultimate God) and with
this he relegates the entire concept of a world soul to the
status of superstition. How fortunate for him that the Hindus were
more tolerant than the Christians turned out to be centuries later
when a similiar situation arose, because if he had been in Christian
surroundings he would have found himself at the stake for the views
he put forth. He analyzes the concept of self almost in the manner
of a modern psychologist and it took a very long time until finally,
in the eighteenth century, David Hume appeared, and to the question
"what is the self" he put forth the answer: "a series
of disconnected impressions".
That is exactly what Buddha said. The self is not a one (i.e., a
unit, or monism of sensory data) but rather a series
of discontinuous psychic states.(11)
This self which I claim to possess is not an I. It is rather like
a kind of spreading monster that spreads to everything, that
desires everything, that covers everything, and that
wants everything. And it is precisely this self which you
must diminish and ultimately smash if you are to become a Buddha,
if you are to become an enlightened one. I am stressing the words
enlightened one. They mean a man who has composed himself
in accord with a certain way of life until finally in the end everything
that he thinks and does is an expression of the thoughts that
he lives. They are put into existence by him and his
thoughts and deeds have become one. All of the men whom we mentioned
before were like that. Their thoughts and deeds were one and Buddha
expresses this in the form of a parable as the difference that exists
between a man who speculates about the behavior of others and writes
down his thoughts but does not live by them, and someone whose understanding
of the right path is reflected in his actions as well. The former
he likens to a herdsman who has absconded with another man's cow,
and he means by this that to rob another man of his thoughts, to
endlessly speculate about something that is not ones own, is to
engage in an activity that is irreal. There can be no reality
to it and he draws our attention to this because he has something
which he wishes to do for us, and what he wishes to do is to point
the way to something he calls nirvana. Now what is this nirvana,
really? Is it a hereafter? Is it eternal bliss? What is Buddha saying
to us?
There he sits -smiling- in all of his status as one who has reached
nirvana. It is an unforgettable smile, the greatest smile that I
have ever seen. It is the smile of achievement, nothing more.
He has achieved enlightenment. He has become a Buddha. He no longer
believes in rebirth. He is sure of only one thing, and that is that
he shall never come back, he shall no longer return into samsara,
into the circle of life, he shall be a Buddha forever and he offers
this to us as a possibility (to be achieved by each of us
in our own lives).
Does this then mean that it is right for us to die, forever?
It means something like that. Because nirvana, which is always
explained as nothingness or emptiness, is not really
any of those things. Nirvana is something else.
Nirvana, is mindfulness.
He wants to teach us a life that is mindful and he means by that
not only learning or the possession of understanding, but also the
capacity to be able to mind good things. You are minding,
not only your own life, but the life of your children, the life
of your ancestors, the life of everything alive. We have lost the
meaning of this word in our language, because we have confused it
with an object (from which we obtain the inference that where there
can be no object only a void remains.(12)
So Buddha preaches only mindfulness as a state to be achieved by
all who truly want it and who wish to proceed along the path that
he shows.
In this sense he is like a guide for us, someone who has scaled
the mountain path before us and who assures us as to where we may
place our feet, because he has passed this way allready and knows
that indeed this is the way to go. It is the same way he proceeded
and the way he taught all of his disciples to proceed, to achieve
more and more mindfulness, because in a way the mind is everything
to him. What does that mean, the mind is everything? The mind for
him is composed of two powers; the power of understanding, or intellectual
power, and the power of minding in the sense of a purified will.
In order to make your will free, to be able to exercise it freely,
you must first purify it and free it from the commands of the self.
You must put your will to the task of something which is reachable
only under the conditions of a permanent effort and you must learn
to master your wants, which are in fact infinite.
So we are left then with nirvana, mindfulness, a state which he
tells us may last only for a moment, and which is the cause of the
smile we see upon his face. And we ourselves can reach that, we
can become a Buddha, and so the question then presents itself as
to what it means to become a Buddha. He starts with the self, which
is described as a kind of monster, and he ends with Buddhahood
which he describes as something we would almost call today a person,
and I would almost replace the term Budahahood with manhood
although in a sense much different from the way in which we usually
speak of a man. Manhood, in the sense Buddha came to understand
it, means the transformation of an indvidual (a prince who left
his family and broke with all of the past) from a self that acts
blindly to an enlightened one, to a man. So I propose to replace
the word Buddha with the word man, and say that Buddha became a
man in the sense that any human being can become a man because one
isn't born a man and neither is one born human. One can become human
and only through a tremendous effort. Yet it is here that we see
the birth of what later came to be mistakingly called humanism,
(which does not mean what the later so called humanists took
it to mean) but rather is a permanent effort with many means to
transform oneself from an animal into a man. There are other men
besides Buddha who live in this time period and who are humanists
in this sense. They all suppose that man is not born a human being,
that he is too much of an animal, or better yet, that he isn't really
much of an animal either. Rather he is more like a monster, not
an animal, and so Buddha as well as Lao Tze and Zarathrustra, all
show the way for the developement of man from an isolated self into
a human being.
Buddhahood then, is the overcoming of the self that possesses us
and keeps us bound to the fetters of samsara. Much later the half
Buddhistic Zen Buddhists will once again ask the question
"what is Buddhahood"? It should have been clear to them
if they studied Buddha's teachings carefully but they mixed him
up with Lao Tze and turned his beliefs into mystic beliefs. Buddha
was not a mystic and does not present us with a mystic performance.
We do not enter into eternal bliss, there is no such promise. If
anyone ever suggested this to him Buddha always answered that he
could know nothing of such an eternal bliss, because he is a man
and he knows that a man can never know about anything eternal, and
that anyone who claims to know such a thing is allready on his way
to becoming a charlatan.
This explains the strange fact that what is called sin in
Christianity is called ignorance in Buddhism. The only sin
Buddha recognized was ignorance and by ignorance he means much more
than not knowing enough. This anyone can repair by studying books,
however for the kind of ignorance Buddha has in mind there are no
books that can help you no matter how much you learn. To be in ignorance
means to have lived in an erroneous way and that means being ignorant
of what man can do. He asks us to look at this phenomenon called
suffering and then see for ourselves whether or not he was right
when he said that all of life was suffering. He wishes to persuade
and convince us through reason, to sharpen and clear the mind not
only the logical part but also the part Pascal called the heart,
to learn to use that instrument in loving care for everything that
is suffering. He is almost a rationalist in that sense, and
when he tells us that he wishes us to become mindful it is this
conception of mind that he is speaking of. There is no mysticism
here, this is not the nothingness or the emptiness that crept into
Buddhism later. Perhaps it crept in from the influence of other
asiatic religions and philosophies, from a misunderstanding of Lao
Tze, because Lao Tze speaks about emptying one's mind, but
he means by this only that we should make our minds more perceptive.
He means by emptiness receptiveness. We could of course speculate
about emptiness forever. Even God has been called emptiness, but
Buddha would have dismissed such speculations as being unanswerable.(13)
Unanswerable questions are good only when they sharpen your mind
to enable you to put forth answerable questions.
So in the end this tough man became a symbol of mildness and he
created what became a religion of mildness, almost too mild, when
we look at the Buddhists today. They have not gone on crusades,
they have not tortured people, and we may ask ourselves what kind
of religion is that? It is the most humanistic religion that
has ever been created and in that sense Buddha has been called the
light of Asia. He wants us to achieve enlightenment, he truly
wants us to judge the ideas he proposes, we can accept them or reject
them, but he never forces them on us. In this sense he is a humanist
philosopher. This men, who has such a toughness about him, gives
us only one mild teaching after another, because he wants us to
get a hold of life so deeply that in a way he shall always remain
a riddle for us.
Buddhism has become a world religion. But it has become a religion
in a very funny way, namely, they have made Buddha into a God; or
more correctly, they have made thousands of Buddhas' into gods,
and they have created a heaven of which Buddha never spoke.(14)
These are the embellishments, the things that have overgrown it,
and with them have grown back the myths as if a clearing, once made
by human hands, is suddenly overgrown by the surrounding jungle.
Such are the left overs, the weak possessions of contemporary Buddhism.
We can clear them out again, but on the other hand there is
a religion, a real religion contained in the teachings of
Buddha. I don't know if it has ever been put forward in quite this
way, but once we have made a clear distinction between nature and
man, that is once we have gained our freedom, we must still
distinguish nature and man from divinity or God. This is done in
a very philosophic way, but although Buhdda tells us that he knows
nothing about God, or gods, as transcendent entities, he
still indicates their possibility.(15)
There must be some kind of ultimate reality as a background to what
he is doing and he knows this, because otherwise what he is doing
would be impossible. Now this notion of an ultimate reality
is something that theologians are always talking about, and the
more logical they become the less religious they are. Buddha does
not deny the possibility of this ultimate reality; he only says
that it is unreachable for man. He denys us any understanding of
it, because he knows that we cannot conceive of an absolute, of
something that is not compound, that has no beginning and has no
end. Yet we can at least get some idea of what that reality might
be like by conceiving of its absolute negative. It is still
not reachable for us, not experienceable, yet we can still get something
of an abstract notion of what it may be, and he seems to think that
this might be very useful to us. In Lao Tze this is the function
of the Tao. It, too, is a transcendent principle, something
that transcends reality but still might possibly be an ultimate
reality.You can believe in it, or not believe in it, but the possibility
cannot be denied. And this means that in so far as man is concerned
there does exist a relationship between himself, and an unknown
God. It is only the slightest possible relationship,
a very human relationship, and yet it exists, not only in
our relation to God but in our relation to nature as well.
II
We have seen in this first era of enlightenment the existence
Of several men: Buddha in India, Lao Tze in China, Zarathrustra
in Persia, the prophets in Israel, and finally the first philosophers
in Greece. They all do something to enrich our possible knowledge
of man and the world, and they give us an orientation, because at
this time everything seems to be lost. For so long the mind of man
had been contained in the ethical world, and then, suddenly, he
is forced to provide his own direction. So we see created in this
age two kinds of speculative metaphysics, and by metaphysics I mean
a very simple thing. I mean the recognition of human freedom and
the decisions and plans that are put forth upon its basis; the recognition
that the world Cannot do this for us and that it is our obligation
to be free.
There will be many philosophers who believe that they can take care
of this for us. They will build whole systems which are supposed
to explain it to us which is the very thing the Buddha did not do.
Yet the very moment anyone conceives of a transcendent principle
we see the beginning of a new type of religion which we call transcendent
religion. The notion of transcendence appears and then we see systems
which originally started as philosophies ending up as religions.
This is what happened to Buddha's philosophy. He had not intended
tc create a religious metaphysics, but since there existed in his
system a possible transcendent principle, that allready made it
religious in the sense of the higher world religions. On the other
hand, we have an entirely different phenomenon in Zarathrustra.
Zaratbrustra is a philosophic speculator as well as a religious
speculator. He seemed to want to believe that it was possible to
somehow be both. He has a single principle of freedom and one prayer
which he says to his God, Ahura-Mazda, who is a God but who is placed
so far into transcendence that no one, not even Zarathrustra himself,
can really reach him. He only revealed himself once, when he talked
to Zarathrustra, and Zarathrustra claims that be has been taught
by him. There is a strange absence of rituals and it is a kind of
philosonhic religion that is beimc preached. In one of his Prayers
Zarathrustra thanks Ahura-Mazda for having brought forth free will
in man and the discriminating mind.(16)
He has given us everything we need and we shouldn't ask for more.
[tape ends here]
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