which we all depend. But the experience of kinship and at-home-ness that Jesus was trying to convey gets disregarded when we start thinking in terms of God as an entity – or perhaps a team of entities – real and separate from us, whose creatures we are and in whose charge we remain. God becomes a vaguely person-like projection: external, controlling, creating, and usually male. Having missed the point, we are left with a fuzzy surrogate in which all we can do is believe, and which all too often comes to symbolize not the potential for liberation but the necessity for obedience and the inevitability of guilt.
The story gets even more tangled when we are taught to accept that the instrument by which we are to increase our love for each other is Will – a gift from God which, however, like a cheap Christmas toy, is inherently faulty, and which is occasionally (when we are ‘good’) serviced by the manufacturer with a lubricating dollop of Grace. By the time people had done their literal-minded worst with analogies like ‘the Kingdom of God’ and ‘heaven’, and he had found himself involved in such ludicrous conversations as the famous ‘render unto Caesar’ one, Jesus must have had serious doubts about the wisdom of opening his mouth in the first place.
So for many people Christianity will not do. Its officers seem lost, its language archaic, and, because Jesus is presented as definitely a one-off, the best it can offer them is the possibility of falling just a little less short. They are looking for an alternative that is more inspiring, more comprehensive and more optimistic – and Buddhism is a good candidate.
Despite the inherent appeal of Buddhism, it is sometimes presented in a technical way, which emphasises the difficulties of translation and obscures the heart. Or the differences between the different schools are stressed, so that one becomes either entranced or bemused by the distinctive styles – the deities and mandalas of Tibetan Buddhism, the complicated philosophizing of the Mahayana or the bizarre behaviour of Zen Masters. When these are put first it is easy to mistake the skin for the banana. Conversely, when the heart of the matter is understood, only then do the vast range of practices and doctrines make sense. This book is first of all an attempt to convey the spirit of Buddhism, in its most rational, practical and mundane form; and then, from time to time, to look at some of the ways in which the great Buddhist teachers, using language and examples where were intelligible within the context of their time and culture, have tried to communicate the essence of their own transformation to others.
First I want to explain the Buddhist point of view. In the course of this I shall explore what it has to say about several aspects of people’s lives, especially our thoughts and feelings, our relationships, and our attitudes to death, bereavement and loss generally, as well as its implications on the social, political and global levels. Then I shall say something about the Buddhist ‘cure’, and particularly about meditation – what it is and why it works. In the process I shall try to introduce, without losing the flow, some of the more traditional language, teachings and practices of the different Buddhist schools in order to illustrate the simplicity that underlies the welter of diversity.
2 A PEACE MISSING
Calamity, n. A more than commonly plain and unmistakeable reminder that the affairs of this life are not of our own ordering.
Afraid, adj. Civilly willing that things should be other than they seem.
– Ambrose Bierce
EVERYBODY wants to be happy. Everybody wants to be loved and accepted as they are. Everybody wants to feel clear and strong and loving in their turn. Everybody wants to live in a happy and peaceful world. Everybody wants enough food. Everybody wants to be free from pain. Understanding what we all want is not difficult. It is how to get there that is the problem. What steps can we take, what ‘game plan’ should we follow, to be as happy as we can in a world that is indelibly marked with old age, disability, sickness, physical pain, accident, bereavement and finally death? This is the 64,000 dollar question, for all of us now, just as it was for Siddharta Guatama, the Buddha, 2,500 years ago. But most of us do not go into it in quite as much depth as he did, and we therefore do not discover as profoundly satisfactory an answer. We sort of pick it up, and make it up, as we go along, and vaguely hope that we’ve got it about as right as we can. We equally vaguely assume that the anxiety and irritation and jealousy and guilt and restlessness we feel are all part of the package deal into which we were born, to be put up with, or avoided, or ignored as best we can.
Buddha’s shocking discovery is that our half-baked game plan, far from being a little wide of the mark, is just about as wrong as it could be. Not only does it fail to deal with the intrinsic pains and upsets that are bound to befall us all sooner or later, it actually generates an untold amount of extra suffering. Through our misguided efforts to generate happiness, peace and love, we are actually creating distress, anxiety and animosity. Now this is a hard idea to swallow. Can it really be that most of the population of the world, for most of history, has been so crass? That all our philosophers and saints and philanthropists, as well as the rest of us men, women and children in the street, have been earnestly and energetically barking up the wrong tree? That what millions of people experience as inevitable hardship is in fact optional and homegrown? We shall need some convincing. Apart from anything else it will be rather embarrassing, if Buddha does turn out, against all the odds, to be right, to admit to such monumental stupidity. The only recourse in that unlikely event would be to howl with laughter – which explains, perhaps, why for many people an experience of ‘enlightenment’ is indescribably funny.
In this chapter I want to turn the tables on ourselves, and to make Buddha’s proposal look less absurd and our own normal point of view more questionable. First let us make explicit what this ‘common sense’ is, so we can submit it to some scrutiny. Most of us have never articulated it clearly to ourselves, yet it underlies and controls what we do, and the choices we spontaneously make, just as the program in my word processor never appears on the screen itself, yet it determines absolutely the responses that my little machine makes to my key-strokes. We were not born with this so-called common sense, but picked it up intuitively from those around us. So easily and unwittingly did we do so that now, if we are aware of it at all, it seems to us as natural as the air we breathe. To follow the familiar game plan is second nature to us. Yet if this is second nature, we might pause to wonder about the first. Might there be an even deeper strategy for living that has been eclipsed by a ‘common sense’ which could turn out on inspection to be riddled with common nonsense? Might there not indeed be more in heaven and earth than is dreamt of in our philosophies?
This is the Buddhist starting point and the Buddhist programme of research, this enquiry into the premises on which we have, by default, been basing our lives. First this structure of habits and assumptions must be floated to the surface of our minds, and then it must be picked over in the light of experience. What have we been up to? And has it been working?
I am going to make a few educated guesses about what this second nature consists of, but as I do so, please remember that these are not Great Truths to be believed, but suggestions to be tested. Although Buddhism often seems to present us with ideas that are strange or outrageous to our normal way of thinking, all we are required to do is to suspend our initial reaction and try the ideas on for
