A BUDDHISM PRIMER BY JESSE DIAZ
When water vapor condenses on a windowpane, it starts out as a gas, invisible to the naked eye. Gradually, the process of condensation proceeds and we are able to see a foggy sheet appear over the surface of the glass. That which lay beyond the glass becomes concealed. slowly, sparkly bits begin to form as over the foggy layer tiny droplets of water begin to coagulate. Then, dramatically, when one of those droplets becomes heavy enough, it plunges down the glass leaving a clear streak across the fog, revealing a slice of whatever happens to lay behind it.
To an earthling, this familiar situation is easily explainable because of our familiarity with earthly phenomena. To an alien from a desert planet that has no knowledge of even the existence of liquid water, let alone condensation, however, the entire process would appear abstruse at best. It would be perceived as a mystery, labeled as such and tucked away into the alien’s memory, assuming it has one, as one of those unsolvable riddles of the universe. After all, in daily life, what use could a knowledge of the chemistry underlying this obscure process possibly bring?
The Buddha described the architecture and dynamics of the human mind as being too complex for an ordinary person to simply understand after only a light investigation. We are kind of like aliens to our own minds. He described the human mind as being like a bamboo thicket which was tangled at the bottom with its trunks, and then tangled at the top with its branches. The bottom tangle is like the confused mind that sees the world in terms of concepts, has feelings about what it perceives and then reacts to those perceptions. The upper tangle is the world that we seem to inhabit and naively take for granted. We live “in our heads”, and get tangled up there, then we live out “in the world” and get tangled up in that. This was what perplexed the Brahman, Jata Bharadvaja, when he approached the Buddha one day and asked:
A tangle within, a tangle without, people are entangled in a tangle. Gotama [The Buddha's name], I ask you this: who can untangle this tangle?
The Buddha then answered:
A man established in virtue, discerning, developing discernment & mind, a monk ardent, astute: he can untangle this tangle. Those whose passion, aversion, & ignorance [the 3 root effluents or defilements] have faded away, enlightened masters, their effluents ended: for them the tangle’s untangled.
Where the physical experience and the knowing of that experience, along with perception of contact happening at the senses & perception of physically experienced objects totally stop without trace: that’s where the tangle is cut.
—Jata Sutta
In English, this means that if you can meditate until all physical experience of the body, mental thinking about objects, and perception of anything at all completely vanish, you will have undone this tangle and glimpsed Nibbana. Our lives are like an endless struggle to gain whatever we think we happen to lack at the moment. And the Buddha says that if you are clever and follow these momentary struggles and frustrations back to their source, you will come to the realization that every aspect of our being is bound up with stress and pretty much sucks. That is to say that until what we usually think of as ourselves and our lives -body, mind, experiences and the world- are all completely gone and stop popping up we will never have peace. Was the Buddha on crack or was he onto something profound 2,500 years ago?
A young upstart may say that he or she happens to like having a sexy body, a cunning mind and the life of a G. But the Buddha would say “Uh uh, girlfriend! It’s our attachment to these things that keeps us tangled up in this seemingly endless cycle of thwarted satisfaction, where we fear loss, need more stuff, and wish become something other than we are.” Okay, so the girlfriend part is my own creative interpretation, but the rest is basically accurate.
In essence, the universe doesn’t revolve around whether or not a person likes certain things, and this thinking is specifically implicated as the very cause of our going around like dogs chasing our own tails, always trying to make things just the way we want them, only to have our elaborate plans suddenly collapse; the things we gain, disintegrate or disappear; and the things we avoid, return and annoy the ever living shit out of us. So not only is the Buddha saying that all of our favorite toys are dangerous, but he’s also implying that the reason we wanna play with them in the first place is because we’re all insane and stupid. Basically any thing that people might seek out and try to enjoy is targeted as being a hot potato. So you’re not gonna find the Buddha shaking his rum bum at the club. Let me just put it that way. He eschews all that worldly stuff. Big time.
mental factors and dependent origination: the mind is an engine of stress
Analogous to the earthling who is able to divine the mysterious process of the water cycle that accounts for fog and dew drops on a windowpane, a Buddhist practitioner peers into his or her own mind and watches the arcane, complex processes unfolding there. The technical language used to describe this process is refined and employs a technical vocabulary, each word carries an extremely specific meaning: words like support condition, necessary condition, co-emergent condition, requisite condition, etc. (In all, there are 24 such “conditions”). But just as the strange notation of mathematics becomes second nature to the mathematician, the various conditions and the complex phenomena that they describe -eye, object of sight, seeing, feeling, perception of the object, etc.- become familiar friends to the meditator. What’s more, after becoming familiar with the constituent conditions and the relations that they have to the elements of experience, a beautiful thing happens: the mind suddenly becomes able to apprehend not only its own parts and their individual functions, but the overall shape and actvity of the larger edifice that they comprise. The mind becomes fluent, in a sense, in the language of its own programming, the language of conditioning known as “dependent origination” or Paticca Samupadda.
To put it another way, a meditator is like an auto mechanic in training, reverse engineering a car in the dark using only a tiny flash light to see by. After years of hard work and investigation, there is this sort of Aha! moment when in a flash of insight, the would be mechanic comes to understand that all of the bolts, valves, belts, gears and grease are part of a complex machine that has a higher function. In the case of the car, the higher function is to drive a person somewhere, which is pretty bad ass, especially if you are a high school boy who wants to get laid; in the case of the mind, however, this higher function is to generate dukkha, or to make stress and suffering. In contrast to getting laid, this really sucks… a lot.
On the other hand, the meditator also gets his or her own “Aha!” moment, but the Aha! moment for the meditator is an insight into the inner-workings of conditioned mental phenomena. Figuring this out won’t get you laid, but it will empower you to put an end to stress and suffering, which, believe it or not, is way more awesome. The Buddha referred to this insight as a “breakthrough in discernment”. Not long after discerning this for himself, he reached the end of his long search for truth and attain supreme enlightenment. And he did say that it’s better than sex. Now you know why monks are celibate.
Nibbana, tranquility, mindfulness and the 4 protections
Gaining insight into how this process works is like suddenly becoming fluent in a language because it is a matter of becoming able to sense something instantaneously, with precision. No deliberation or 2nd order reasoning is necessary. With enough exposure as an infant, when a person speaks in his or her native language, it is with the marriage of feeling and a mastery over the means of expressing it. Unless you are a politician, you do not need to spend long hours putting words together to express what you want to say. The rules of the system are so internalized in you that they are obeyed instinctively. In this same way, the meditator intuitively knows what will lead to stress and what will lead to its “non-arising”, one of the many synonyms for Nibbana.
When one masters any skill, the obeying of its rudimentary principles becomes automatic and consideration of these principles occupies little to no real estate in that person’s conscious awareness. This fluency is achieved through a long-term, sustained entrainment of one’s own mind, using the Buddhist methods. These methods include discipline in virtue, tranquility and concentration techniques, perfecting the 4 foundations of mindfulness, and mastering the 4 protective meditations (loving kindness, compassion, sympathetic joy, and tranquility). The 4 protections can temporarily ward off negative, self-defeating mind-states and ensure that nothing will knock you off course as you pursue the 4 foundations practice that leads to wisdom and insight.
When a course in Buddhist theory is strategically combined with a practical fieldwork unit -an expedition into the forests of your own mind, let’s say- insight into the superstructure of the overall ecosystem is a gimme. The process of learning the teaching, training in its methods and realizing its ultimate goal are every bit as thrilling and alluring as any search for a fabled city of gold on a newly discovered continent. But just as our cuddly, desert planet, alien friend might not be able to appreciate the physical mechanisms behind the sudden and beautiful streak of a water droplet squiggling out a clear path across a foggy windowpane, those of us who are too afraid, or are satisfied to be ignorant of the inner-workings behind the vague and shapeless building blocks of our own experience will never know the thrill of discovery that awaits a simple, albeit life changing look inward.
the 8 fold path, the 3 root defilements and karma
But studying, training, and realizing this process is only the beginning. Once you see the path that leads peace and the end of stress and suffering, the arduous task of walking it still lies ahead. Though difficult, walking this “8 fold” path may rightly be called the hard task of living. For pain is actually felt, not denied; egoism, spotted out, not indulged.
Deluding yourself will seem an attractive alternative to meditation at times and you will be tempted to use pride and anger to cover up your inner-weaknesses, but you won’t, because you will know where those things lead. Like the skillful hunter parked out in a tree-hide, you will watch the water hole of your still mind and observe the strange and wondrous creatures that come there to drink, disturbing it from time to time. These creatures are the ugly products of your negative karma, which constantly arise due to the aforementioned effluents of passion, aversion and ignorance, that remain as fixtures in our own personalities. We can think of these effluents as deeply engrained habits that lead us to make ourselves suffer. We used to run scared from or fight against the various feelings, perceptions and thoughts that arose in us due to these malodorous aspects of our own inner-beings, but now, at the waterhole of the mind, we are determined to meet them with love, compassion and equanimity until they live out their lifespans and naturally pass away. Why? Because with our expanded wisdom we know that both the flight and the fight will lead to further suffering, to a further disturbance of the mind.
At some point along the way, these beasts will stop coming to the pond. Large stretches of peacefulness will become the norm and only occasionally will a slight wind blow ripples across it to blur the usually perfect reflection of the surrounding forest. The effects will manifest in your daily life, interactions will be performed mindfully, and as the effluents weaken, the experience of life will asymptotically approach a quality that can only be described as “pure” or “meaningful”.
the 5 aggregates, 3 marks of existence, 4 noble truths and the 8 fold path again
With the non-arising of fear, clinging, anger, desire, the moments will all appear like stars to you, dazzling and distant, beyond your reach, but satisfyingly so. For only to be able to see them with your eyes is part of their beauty. And to see them fade away into morning and disappear into a sunlit sky, bedazzled by clouds against a surface-less blue, will seem altogether so miraculous that it will never occur to you that something better has been lost. This is the pleasant abiding that comes from letting go and concentrating on the present, because chewing on old memories is like eating stale food and fantasizing about the future is like eating junk food, both the past and the future are out of our control and to be attached to things which are uncontrollable will lead to suffering. And what cannot be controlled? Our physical experience, our perceptions, our feelings, our mental formulations, sensory consciousness. These 5 things are out of our control, they are subject to decay, and clinging to them leads to stress. That is to say, the “5 aggregates” bear the “3 marks of arisen phenomena”, which are non-self, impermanence and suffering.
The non-arising of these 5 aggregates is equivalent to the realization of Nibbana, or that to which the 3 marks do not apply. Nibbana alone does not decay and it alone is not bound up with suffering. When asked if Nibbana was a “self”, however -a word which in Pali implies a controllable nature as well as an abiding essence- the Buddha would respond with silence, careful not to answer in a way that might confuse his nuanced teaching with either the belief in an eternal soul or the belief in the annihilation of all conscious experience upon the death of the body. The nuanced view that he did hold, which is the cornerstone of his teaching, is laid out in what he called the “4 noble truths”. These four Truths are:
1. the truth of suffering: all aspects of living experience are stressful and end in death2. the truth of the cause of suffering: craving for worldly things, to become, and to destroy
3. the truth of the cessation of suffering: abandon craving and end suffering
4. the truth of the path: the 8 fold path that leads to the abandonment of craving
And what is this path? In the Buddha’s own words:
I saw an ancient path, an ancient road, traveled by the Rightly Self-awakened Ones of former times… just this noble eightfold path: right view, right aspiration, right speech, right action, right livelihood, right effort, right mindfulness, right concentration…I followed that path. Following it, I came to direct knowledge of suffering, direct knowledge of the origination of suffering, direct knowledge of the cessation of suffering, direct knowledge of the path leading to the cessation of suffering…Knowing that directly, I have revealed it to monks, nuns, male lay followers & female lay followers…
—Nagara Sutta
