| |
Venerable
Ajahn Sumedho -
Is Buddhism A Religion?
This
is the first chapter in The Mind and The Way, a forthcoming book of
Ajahn Sumedho's talks to be published by Wisdom Publications in 1995. It
was edited from a talk given at Lancaster University in 1989.
It is tempting to think that we understand religion because it is so
ingrained in our cultural outlook. However, it's useful to contemplate
and reflect on the true aim, goal or purpose of religion.
Sometimes people regard religion as belief in God or gods, so religion
becomes identified with the theistic attitude of a particular religious
form or convention. Often Buddhism is regarded by theistic religions as
an atheistic form, or not even a religion at all. It's seen as a
philosophy or psychology, because Buddhism doesn't come from a theistic
position. It's not based on a metaphysical or doctrinal position, but on
an existential experience common to all humanity - the experience of
suffering. The Buddhist premise is that by reflecting, by contemplating,
and by understanding that common human experience, we can transcend all
mental delusions that create human suffering.
The word religion comes from the Latin word religion, which means a bond.
It suggests a binding to the divine, which engulfs one's whole being. To
be truly religious means you must bind yourself to the divine, or to the
ultimate reality, and engage your whole being in that bond, to the
point where an ultimate realisation is possible. All religions have
words like "liberation" and "salvation." Words of this nature convey
freedom from delusion, complete and utter freedom, and total
understanding of ultimate reality. In Buddhism we call this
enlightenment.
Understanding the Nature of Suffering
The Buddhist approach is to reflect on the experience of suffering,
because this is what all human beings share in common. Suffering doesn't
necessarily mean a great tragedy or a terrible misfortune. It just means
the type of discontentment, unhappiness, and disappointment that all
human beings experience at various times in their lives. Suffering is
common to men and women, common to rich and poor. Whatever our race or
nationality, it is the common bond.
So in Buddhism, suffering is called a noble truth. It is not an ultimate
truth. When the Buddha taught suffering as a noble truth, it was not his
intention for us to bind ourselves to suffering and believe in it
blindly, as an ultimate truth. Instead, h e taught us to use suffering
as a noble truth for reflection. We contemplate: what is suffering, what
is its nature, why do I suffer, what is suffering about? An
understanding of the nature of suffering is an important insight. Now
contemplate this in your experience of life. How much of your life is
spent trying to avoid or get away from anything that is unpleasant,
unwanted? How much of our society is dedicated to happiness and
pleasure, trying to get away from anything unpleasant and unwanted? We
can have instant happiness, instant absorption, something that we call
"non-suffering"; excitement, romance, adventure, sensual pleasures,
eating, listening to music, or whatever. But all this is an attempt to
get away from our own fears, discontentments, anxiety, and worry, things
that haunt the human mind until it is enlightened. Humanity will always
be haunted and frightened by life as long as human beings remain
ignorant and don't put forth effort to look at and understand the nature
of suffering.
To understand suffering means that we must accept suffering rather than
just try to get rid of it and deny it, or blame somebody else for it. We
can notice that suffering is caused, that it is dependent upon certain
conditions: the conditions of the mind that we've created or that have
been instilled into us through our culture and family. Our experience of
life, and that conditioning process, start from the day we are born. The
family, the group that we live with, our education, all instill into our
mind various prejudices, biases and opinions, some good, some not so
good.
Now, if we don't really look at these conditions of the mind and examine
them for what they truly are, then of course they cause us to interpret
our life's experience from certain biases. But if we look into the very
nature of suffering, then we begin to examine things like fear and
desire, and then we discover that our true nature is not desire, is not
fear. Our true nature is not conditioned by anything at all.
The Conditioned, The Unconditioned, and Consciousness
Religions always point to the relationship of the mortal, or the
conditioned, with the Unconditioned. That is, if you strip any religion
down to its very basic essence, you will find that it is pointing to
where the mortal, the conditioned and time-bound , ceases. In that
cessation is the realisation and the understanding of the Unconditioned.
In Buddhist terminology, it is said that "there is the Unconditioned;
and if there were not the Unconditioned, there could not be the
conditioned." The conditioned arises and ceases in the Unconditioned,
and therefore we can point to the relationship between the conditioned
and the Unconditioned. Having been born into a human body we have to
live a lifetime under the limitations and conditions of the sensory
world. Birth implies that we come forth out of the Unconditioned and
manifest in a separate, conditioned form. And this human from implies
consciousness.
Consciousness always defines a relationship between subject and object,
and in Buddhism consciousness is regarded as a discriminative function
of the mind. So contemplate this right now. You are sitting there paying
attention to these words. This is the experience of consciousness. You
can feel the heat in the room, you can see your surroundings, you can
hear the sounds. All this implies that you have been born in a human
body and for the rest of your life, as long as this body lives, it will
have feelings, and consciousness will be arising. This consciousness
always creates the impression of a subject and an object, so that when
we do not investigate, do not look into the true nature of things, then
we become bound to the dualistic view of "I am my body, I am my
feelings, I am my consciousness."
Thus, a dualistic attitude arises from consciousness. And then, from our
ability to conceive and remember and perceive with our minds, we create
a personality. Sometimes we enjoy this personality. Other times we have
irrational fears, wrong views, and anxieties about it.
Aspiration of the Human Mind
At the present time, for any society in the materialistic world, much of
the human anguish and despair arises from the fact that we don't usually
relate ourselves to anything higher than the planet we live on and to
our human body. So the aspiration of t he human mind towards an ultimate
realisation, towards enlightenment, is not really promoted or encouraged
in modern society. In fact it often seems to be discouraged.
Without this relationship with the higher Truth, our lives become
meaningless. We cannot relate to anything beyond the experiences of a
human body on a planet, in a mysterious universe, all our life really
amounts to is putting in time from birth to death. Then, of course,
what is the purpose, what is the meaning of it? And why do we care? Why
do we need a purpose? Why must there be a meaning to life? Why do we
want life to be meaningful? Why do we have words, concepts, and
religions? Why do we have that longing or that aspiration in our minds
if all there ever is, or all there ever can be, is this experience based
on the view of self? Can it be that this human body, with its
conditioning process, simply lands on us fortuitously in a universal
system that is beyond our control?
We live in a universe that is a mystery to us. We can only wonder about
it. We can intuit and gaze at the universe, but we cannot put it into a
little capsule. We cannot make it into something in our mind. Therefore,
materialistic tendencies in our minds encourage us not to even ask those
questions. Or else these tendencies make us interpret all life's
experience in the realm of logic or reason, based on the values of
materialism and empirical science.
The Awakening Experience
Buddhism points to the universal or common experience of all sentient
beings, that of suffering. It also makes a statement about the way out
of suffering. Suffering is the awakening experience. When we suffer we
begin to ask the questions. We tend to look, investigate, wonder, try to
find out.
In the story of Prince Siddhattha (the name of the Buddha before he was
enlightened) we hear of his life as a prince in an environment where
there was only pleasure, beauty, comfort, social advantages - all the
best life could offer. Then, as the legend goes, at the age of 29,
Siddhattha left the palace to look outside, and he became aware of the
messengers of old age, sickness and death.
Now one might say that he must have known about old age, sickness and
death before the age of 29. In our way of thinking, it is quite obvious
to us from an early age that everyone gets old, gets sick, and dies.
However, this was something that the prince was merely aware of as a
fact. It was something that did not awaken his mind until he reached the
age of 29.
Similarly, we can live our lives, here in England, and we can assume
that everything is all right, and even the unhappiness or the
disappointments that we might normally experience may not necessarily
awaken us. We may wonder about them a bit, but there are so many
opportunities to not look at it, to not notice. It's easy to blame our
unhappiness on others, isn't it? We can blame it on the government, on
our mother and father, on friends or enemies, on external forces. But
the awakening of the mind to old age, sickness and death happens when
we realise that it is going to happen to us. And that realisation comes
not just as an abstract idea but as a real gut feeling, a real insight
that this is what happens to all human beings. What is born gets old,
deg enerates, and dies.
The fourth messenger that the Buddha saw was a samana. A samana is a
monk, or a religious seeker, someone who is devoted solely to the
pursuit of the ultimate reality, the truth. The samana, as portrayed in
the legend, was a shaven-headed monk wearing a robe.
These are the four messengers in Buddhist symbolism: old age, sickness,
death, and the samana. They signify the awakening of the human mind to a
religious goal, to that aspiration of the human heart towards realising
the ultimate reality, which is freedom from all delusion and suffering.
Buddhist Practice
Sometimes modern attitudes towards Buddhist meditation tend to portray
it as leaving the world and developing a very concentrated state of mind
dependent upon carefully controlled conditions. So in the United States
and in other countries where Buddhist meditation is becoming
increasingly popular, people tend to develop strong views about it being
a concentrated state of mind in which technique and control are very
important.
This type of technique is all well and good, but if you begin to develop
the reflective capacities of your mind then it is not always necessary,
not even advisable to spend your time trying to refine your mind to
where anything coarse or unpleasant is suppressed. It's better to open
the mind to its full capacity, to full sensitivity, in order to know
that in this present moment the conditions that you are aware of, what
you are feeling, seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, touching, thinking,
are impermanent.
Impermanence is a characteristic common to all phenomena, whether it is
a belief in God or a memory of the past; whether it's an angry thought,
or a loving thought; whether it's high, low, coarse, refined, good, bad,
pleasurable or painful. Whatever its quality might be, you are looking
at it as an object. All that arises, ceases. It is impermanent.
Now what this opening of the mind does, as a way of practice and
reflection on life, is allow you to have some perspective on your
emotions and ideas, on the nature of your own body, as well as the
objects of the senses.
Getting back to consciousness itself: modern science, empirical science,
considers the real world to be the material world that we see and hear
and feel, as an object to our senses. So the objective world is called
reality. We can see the material world, agree to what it is, hear it,
smell it, taste it, touch it or even agree on a perception or a name for
it. But that perception is still an object, isn't it? Because
consciousness creates the impression of a subject and an object, we
believe that we are observing something that is separate from us.
The Buddha, by his teaching, took the subject-object relationship to the
ultimate point. He taught that all perceptions, all conditions that go
through our minds, all emotions, all feelings, all material-world
objects that we see and hear, are impermanent. About all of it, he
said, "What arises, ceases." And this the Buddha kept pointing out over
and over again in his teachings: this is a very important insight that
frees us from all kinds of delusions. What arises, ceases.
Consciousness can also be defined as our ability to know, the experience
of knowing. The subject knowing the object. When we look at objects and
name them, we think we know them. We think we know this person or that
person because we have a name or a memory of them. We think we know all
kinds of things because we remember them. Our ability to know,
sometimes, is of the conditioned sort, knowing about, rather than
knowing directly.
The Buddhist practice is to abide in a pure mindfulness in which there
is what we call insight knowing, or direct knowledge. It is a knowledge
that isn't based on perception, an idea, a position, or a doctrine: and
this knowledge can only be possible through mindfulness. What we mean by
mindfulness is the ability to not attach to any object, either in the
material realm or mental realm. When there is no attachment, then the
mind is in its pure state of awareness, intelligence, and clarity. That
is mindfulness. The mind is pure and receptive, sensitive to the
existing conditions. It is no longer a conditioned mind that just reacts
to pleasure and pain, praise and blame, happiness and suffering.
For example, if you get angry, right now, you can follow the anger. You
can believe it, and go on and on creating that particular emotion, or
you can suppress the anger and try to stop it out of fear or aversion.
However, instead of doing any of these, you can reflect on the anger,
because it is something that we can observe. Now if anger were our true
self, we wouldn't be able to observe it, this is what I mean by
reflection. What is it that can observe and reflect on the feeling of
anger? What is it that can watch and investigate the feeling, the heat
in the body, or the mental state. That which observes and investigates
is what we call a reflective mind. The human mind is a reflective mind.
The Revelation of Truth Common to All Religions
We can ask questions: Who am I? Why was I born? What is life about? What
happens when I die? Is there meaning to life or purpose? But because we
tend to think other people know and we don't, we often seek the answers
from others rather than opening the mind and watching through patient
alertness for truth to be revealed. Through mindfulness and through
awareness, revelation is possible. This revelation of truth, or ultimate
reality is what the religious experience really amounts to. When we bind
ourselves to the divine, and engage our whole being in that bond, we
allow this revelation of truth, which we call insight, profound and true
insight, into the nature of things. And revelation is ineffable too.
Words are not quite capable of expressing it. That is why revelations
can be very different. How they are stated, how they are produced
through speech, can be infinitely variable.
So Buddhists' revelations sound very Buddhist and Christians'
revelations sound very Christian, and that's fair enough. There's
nothing wrong with that. But we need to recognise the limitation of the
convention of language. We need to understand that language is not
ultimately true or ultimately real; it is the attempt to communicate the
ineffable reality to someone else. It's interesting to see the number of
people who now seek a religious goal. A country like England is
predominantly Christian but now has many religions. There are many
inter-faith meetings and attempts within this country to try and
understand each others' religions. We can stay at a simple level and
just know that the Muslims believe in Allah and the Christians believe
in Christ and the Buddhists believe in Buddha. But what I'm interested
in is getting beyond the conventions to a true understanding, to that
profound understanding of Truth. This is a Buddhist way of speaking.
We have now, in a country like England, an opportunity to work toward a
common truth among all religions, because we can all begin to help each
other. It's no longer a time when converting people or trying to compete
with each other seems to be of any us e or value. Rather than the
attempt to convert others, religion is the opportunity to awaken to our
true nature, to true freedom, to love and compassion. It's a way of
living in full sensitivity, with full receptivity, so we can take
delight and open ours elves to the mystery and wonder of the universe.
Forest Sangha Newsletter: July 1994, Number 29
back |