READING THIS, CAN anyone escape being shaken to the core? Buddha wasn’t just a kindly teacher who wanted people to find peace. He was a radical surgeon who examined them and said, “No wonder you feel sick. All this unreal stuff has filled you up, and now we have to get rid of it.” Naturally, a lot of listeners ran back to conventional religion, and just as many ran back into materialism, which promises that body, mind, and the physical world are absolutely real.
Why should we accept Buddha’s word that they aren’t? That, I think, is the crucial question. There’s not much challenge in accepting that one’s life contains suffering, and only a small challenge in accepting that flux and change create dissatisfaction. Both facts seem psychologically self-evident. But to accept that the entire world, and everyone in it, is an illusion? That’s an enormous challenge, and it requires a complete shift in consciousness to meet it.
The word illusion has a host of meanings, and some are very enticing. The illusion, for example, that when you fall in love it will last forever. The illusion that you will never die. The illusion that ignorance is bliss. Buddha saw the danger hidden in these enticements. He rarely spoke harshly, but I can imagine him bursting all these bubbles: love ends, everyone dies, ignorance is folly. But if he had stopped there, Buddha would have wound up a tiresome moralist.
His definition of illusion was so absolute it almost freezes the blood. Whatever can be seen, heard, or touched is unreal. Whatever you cling to as permanent is unreal. Whatever the mind can think of is unreal. Does that leave anything free from the withering grip of illusion?
No.
Yet once we get over our shock, Buddha declares that with a shift in consciousness, reality reveals itself. Not as a thing. Not as a sensation. Not even as a wisp of thought. Reality is purely itself. It is the ground of existence, the source from which everything else is projected. In the most basic terms, Buddhism exchanges a world of infinite projections for the single state of Being. A freedom so complete it doesn’t have to think of freedom or say its name.
Which brings me to the subversive reason I decided to write a novel on the life of Buddha. By telling his story from the inside (early on I intended to call the book I, Buddha), I could trace every step that led Siddhartha to stop believing in the world. His tale isn’t really that of a romantic prince, suffering monk, or triumphant saint. It’s a universal soul journey that begins asleep and ends awake. Siddhartha woke up to the truth, which sounds inspiring, but in this case the truth demolished his entire self. It overturned every belief, purified every sense, and brought total clarity to the mind’s confusion. In sum, this book has been a kind of seduction, coaxing the reader step by step toward a vision that none of us was brought up to see. Through the eyes of Buddha, the root of suffering is illusion, and the only way out of illusion is to stop believing in the separate self and the world that supports the separate self. No spiritual message has ever been so radical. None remains so terribly urgent.
The Art of Non-Doing
A Practical Guide to Buddhism
After being inspired by Buddha’s life, the most important thing is not to let him slip through your fingers. This can easily happen. First of all, because he didn’t want anyone to hold on to him. Buddha was like a supernova exploding in the sky, spreading light in all directions. Before the explosion you could locate him in time and space. He was a person like any other, however brilliant and charismatic. But after the explosion known as enlightenment, he turned into something else, something very impersonal. Call it pure spirit, essence, or transcendent wisdom. By any name, he was no longer a person, which makes for special difficulties. How do you follow a teacher who is everywhere at once?
I can imagine sitting down with a reader and being asked that question, which would lead to quite a few more.
How am I supposed to follow someone who constantly insisted that he was no longer a person and didn’t have a self?
Ideally, you follow him by losing your own self. Which seems impossible, since it’s your self that’s fascinated by him. It’s your self that’s suffering and wants to be rid of suffering. The primary message of Buddhism is that this self cannot accomplish anything real. It must find a way to disappear, just as Buddha did.
The self reaches its goal by not being the self? It sounds like a paradox.
Yes, but Buddhists found three ways to live the wisdom their teacher left behind. The first way was social, forming groups of disciples into a Sangha, like the group of monks and nuns that Buddha gathered in his lifetime. The Sangha exists to establish a spiritual lifestyle. People remind themselves of the teaching and keep the Buddhist vision alive. They meditate together and create an atmosphere of peace.
The second way to follow Buddha is ethical, centered on the value of compassion. Buddha was known as The Compassionate One, a being who loved all of humanity without judgment. Buddhist ethics bring the same attitude into everyday life. A Buddhist practices being kind and seeing others without judgment, but in addition displays love and reverence for life itself. Buddhist morality is peaceful, accepting, and joyous.
The third way to follow Buddha is mystical. You take to heart the message of non-self. You do everything possible to break the bonds of attachment that keep you trapped in the illusion that you are a separate self. Here your aim is to tiptoe out of the material world even as your body remains in it. Ordinary people are doing things all day, but in your heart you’ve turned your attention to non-doing, as the Buddhists call it. Non-doing isn’t passivity but a state of openness to all possibilities.
If I practice non-doing, what would I actually do? It still seems like a paradox.
The third way confronts Buddha’s most enigmatic side. How can you shed the separate self when it’s the only thing you’ve known? The process sounds frightening, for one thing, because there’s no guarantee. Once you accomplish “ego death,” as it’s often called, what will be left? You might wind up enlightened, but you also might wind up a blank, a passive non-self with no interests or desires. People find the Buddhist path rigorous because you are asked to re-examine everything you think will get you ahead in life-money, possessions, status, accomplishments-and see them as a source of suffering. For example, having money doesn’t directly cause suffering, but it ties you to the illusion by hiding from sight the fact that there’s another way to live that’s actually real. Money, like possessions and status, creates a treadmill that brings one desire after another.
So enlightenment is the same as having no desires?
You have to understand “no desires” in a positive sense, as fulfillment. At the moment a musician is performing, there’s a state of no-desire because he feels fulfilled. At the moment you’re eating a wonderful meal, hunger is fulfilled. Buddha taught that there is a state, known as Nirvana, where desire is irrelevant. Everything desire is trying to achieve exists in Nirvana already. You don’t have to pursue one desire after another in a futile quest to end suffering. Instead, you go right to the source of Being, which is neither full nor empty. It just is.
Do you still want to live after that?
Nirvana is no longer about life and death, which are opposites. Buddha wanted to free people from all opposites. If you are following his teachings the second way, through morality and ethics, then being good, truthful, nonviolent, and compassionate is important. You don’t want to practice the opposite behavior. But if you follow Buddha the third way, the mystical way of non-doing, duality is the very thing you try to dissolve. You go beyond good and evil, which is scary to many people.