An End to Suffering

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Author: Pankaj Mishra
Full Title: An End to Suffering
Category: #books

Highlights

‘I was only paying lip service and reciting a doctrine I had picked up from the older (pupils), and as others did also I maintained I had known and understood the teaching.’
Soon, the Buddha began to have doubts. He began to think that ‘Kalama only has faith in this teaching and does not proclaim: “I myself know, realize, and take upon myself this teaching, abiding in it”.’ He went up to Kalama and asked him: ‘How far have you yourself realized this teaching by direct knowledge?’
He learnt whatever there was to learn, and then grew restless. He began to consider that Ramaputra only had faith in his teaching and hadn’t realized it within himself.
For one, the states achieved by meditation, no matter how deep, were temporary, ‘comfortable abidings’, as he put it, ‘in the here and now’. One emerged from them, even after a long session, essentially unchanged. Concentration and endurance were important means, but without a corresponding moral and intellectual development, they by themselves did not end suffering.
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His experience had also taught him – a lesson he would later emphasize before his disciples – that mere faith in what the guru says isn’t enough and that you have to realize and verify it through your own experience.
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- Note: Perhaps being inclined this way is what kept us moving on from the various sources of “authority” we sought out.
he asked himself if he had been trying too hard as a seeker, and whether excessive desire, even for enlightenment, wasn’t the problem. Certainly, no desire had prompted the meditative bliss he had reached under the rose-apple tree: ‘Do I need to be afraid,’ he thought, ‘of that happiness which is apart from sensuous desires and evil?’
As the Buddha saw it, the teachers preaching the so-called eternal, independent and unanalysable Self had not realized it from within; it was an abstraction, a product of speculation. He may have been thinking of his own experience with Kalama and Ramaputra. Both teachers, upon questioning by the Buddha, had admitted to having no direct knowledge of their doctrine. Rather, they assumed that it must be true.
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But the Buddha’s own discoveries could not have been made in any other way. For they describe first and foremost the workings of the mind – the mind that determines the way we experience the world, the way in which we make it our world. The Buddha worked with the insight that the mind was the window onto reality for human beings, without which they could access nothing, nor even assume the existence of a world independent of their perception, consciousness and concepts:
With regular practice of meditation, you become aware of, and learn to ignore, the random impulses and sensations which previously would have resulted in some sort of reaction, physically or mentally, but which now arise and fade without leaving a trace.
This kind of meditation did not concern itself with finding essences outside or inside the human body. It analysed how we experience reality, rather than describe what reality is. It undermined the misperception of things and situations as unchangeable. It offered a different way of perceiving the phenomenal world, by seeing through to its true nature as something impermanent, unsatisfactory and essenceless.
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The word ‘meditation’ brings to mind a stereotypical image of a person seated cross-legged with eyes closed. But the original Buddhist word for meditation, bhavana, which means culture or development, conveys better what the Buddha wished to accomplish: the creation of a wholesome mental climate through constant awareness. Accordingly, he prescribed a posture for only one meditative exercise, which requires attentiveness to the rhythms of breathing. The rest of the exercises – which involved partly the study of desire, anger, hatred, torpor, anxiety, as they rose in one’s mind – were designed to accompany the meditator’s daily routine.
The ego seeks to gratify and protect itself through desires. But the desires create friction when they collide with the ever-changing larger environment. They lead only to more desires, and more dissatisfaction; and so the effort to protect and gratify the self is constantly destabilized and perpetuated.
For the Buddha, as much as for Hume, happiness was too closely bound together with suffering. Even the happiness caused by meditation was fleeting and so part of duhkha. Happiness could never be fully and permanently possessed as long as it arose from conditions external to us, conditions that changed all the time.
His vision of the self and the world as marked by diversity and perennial movement led Montaigne to declare that in his essays, I do not portray being. I portray the passing. Not the passing from one age to another, or, as the people say, from seven years to seven years, but from day to day, from minute to minute.7
This austere vision is not far from the one found among the greatest of modern novelists, Flaubert and Proust, who wrote about how human beings desiring happiness and stability were undermined slowly, over the course of their lives, by the inconstancy of their hearts and the intermittence of their emotions.
Personal experience and a habit of close analysis seem common to both the meditator and the artist in their discovery: they see that the human being is a process, a shifting web of relations among such changing aspects of his person as perceptions, desires and ideas, and that by presuming to possess a stable self he sinks deeper into ignorance and delusion.
Trishna literally drives human beings. It was different from desire – the Buddha does not seem to have disapproved of wanting per se, or felt he was contradicting himself when he set off each morning to look for alms. To want something out of one’s free will, and with the right intention, was not craving. Craving came into being ‘wherever that is which seems lovable and gratifying, there it comes into being and settles’. It made individuals seek ‘fresh pleasure now here and now there’, in this life as well as the next. There was a craving to escape pain as well as a craving for wealth, power and status; a craving for sensual pleasures as well as for right opinions.
Each instance of craving involved an escape from the here and now, a desire for becoming or being something or someplace other than what the present moment offered. But to seek ceaselessly some new state of being while at the same time striving for permanence was to expose oneself to frustration:
For as Oscar Wilde had put it, ‘In this world there are only two tragedies, one of not getting what one wants, and the other of getting it.’
As he saw it, impulses that arise in the mind, however automatic or habitual, also present the individual with choices. The individual can choose to act on them or not. Whatever decision he takes defines him for better or worse. Thus, for the Buddha, choice and intention shape the human being. They create his emotional and psychological world; and they add up to what the Brahmins called karma – the karma that for the Buddha resided in intention, expressed or not, as much as in action.
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‘It is,’ he said, ‘choice or intention that I call karma – mental work – for having chosen, a man acts by body, speech and mind.’12 With these apparently innocuous words the Buddha introduced an idea in India no less radical than the one the thinkers of the European Renaissance came up with when they stated that the good was defined by human will and not by God or nature.
The first of these, Right View, means that action, speech and thought should flow out of an awareness of things as they really are, impermanent and unsatisfactory.
His emphasis was on self-control, best summed up by these lines from Milton: ‘He who reigns within himself and rules passions, desires, and fears, is more than a king.’
For Socrates, to be rational and excellent was to know about moral choice, about choosing the good, and about knowing how to live. Knowledge lay not in concepts, but in virtue; and it was available to everyone since the capacity and desire for the good existed within all human beings. The philosopher merely alerted individuals to these inner possibilities, which they had to excavate on their own. For, as Socrates famously put it, ‘an unexamined life is not worth living for man’.
But, although the sramanas carried on much dialogue among themselves and before large audiences, they dealt primarily in assertion. Reality consisted of this and that; and there was no basis for morality. They lived in what the Buddha, commenting on the intellectual ferment of his time, later called the ‘jungle of opinions’.
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Unlike them, he was concerned to examine the nature of human experience rather than speculate about its supposed object – the world, its many components, their essence, etc. To this end, he proposed a description of the experiencing mind and body – the primary human means of grasping reality.
Sitting under an asoka tree, he took a few fallen leaves in his hand, and asked the bhikshus, or monks,
whether the leaves in his hand or the leaves on the tree were more numerous. When the bhikshus stated the obvious, he told them that in the same way he knew more than he had revealed to them, because they were of no use in the pursuit of wisdom.
Thus he ignored the question, which obsesses Christian theologians, of how suffering arose in a world created and supervised by an eternally loving God. He denied that there could be a powerful divine creator God of a world where everything was causally connected and nothing came from nowhere. For him, neither God nor anything else had created the world; rather, the world was continually created by the actions, good or bad, of human beings. He didn’t dwell on large abstract questions, preferring to goad the individual into facing up to his immediate situation.
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- Note: James, pragmatism, radical empiricism?
It is not the case that one would live eternally by holding the view that the world is eternal. Nor is it the case that one would live the spiritual life by holding the view that the world is not eternal. Whether one holds that the world is eternal, or whether one holds that the world is not eternal, there is still birth, ageing, death, grief, despair, pain, and unhappiness.21
suffering results when we seek to assert our autonomy in a radically interdependent world, when a groundless self seeks endlessly and futilely to ground itself through actions driven by ignorance, greed and delusion, which when frustrated lead to even further attempts at self-affirmation, making suffering appear inevitable and delusion indestructible.
He put it to good use in formulating rules for the sangha. His model for the internal structure of the sangha was the small republic in which communal deliberation and face-to-face negotiation were possible. A full assembly of monks took important decisions, reaching them by debate and consensus rather than vote. Any monk or novice was entitled to express his view of the matter under discussion. The debate went on until agreement was reached.
He saw consensus as of the utmost importance to the life of the sangha. The Buddha also stressed the need for each local sangha to remain united. He allowed for differences of opinion, but he did not wish them to undermine the structural unity of a sangha and vitiate the experience of everyday life. Controversy, whenever it arose, could be settled by the method of the dissenting individuals removing themselves and forming a new group.
The Buddha’s early effort to accommodate dissent, and acknowledge the plurality of human discourse and practice, later saved Buddhism from the sectarian wars that characterize the history of Christianity and Islam; and the Buddha’s emphasis on practice rather than theory kept his teachings relatively free of the taint of dogma and fundamentalism.
The picture of the common man that emerges from Buddhist texts is not a flattering one. He is a slave of his senses and addicted to pleasure; he craves and welcomes fame and praise, but resents obscurity and blame. He is greedy and lustful, easily provoked to morally unwholesome deeds. Pain overwhelms and bewilders him; he dislikes the sight of disease, old age and death. Old age crushes him, and his death is a sorry affair. All this happens because he fails to see things as they really are.
Good behaviour was ensured by attentiveness, by a constant awareness of what one did and thought. Virtue lay in acting in a way that helped not only oneself but others. The Buddha deemed generosity and compassion essential for the layman, particularly in respect to the bhikshus. Giving alms to the bhikshus put one in a charitable frame of mind, but it also helped the bhikshus appease their hunger. On the whole, to be kind and gentle and honest to others was not only to cultivate moral wholeness but also to encourage the cultivation of similar attitudes in others.
For bhikshus a mind so cleansed of negative attitudes was an essential prerequisite for meditation. But for the lay people it was an end in itself, much as it was for the Stoics, for whom there was no higher form of spirituality than an active self-awareness. In the unexamined life that the common man lived, the Buddha introduced not the hard-to-achieve goal of nirvana, but the task of achieving self-knowledge through spiritual vigilance.
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As Marcus Aurelius put it: Everywhere and at all times, it is up to you to rejoice piously at what is occurring at the present moment, to conduct yourself with justice towards the people who are present here and now.4
Higher insight involved the bhikshu deeper in the life of society rather than placing him above it as ruler or recluse.
For the Buddha as much as for Plato, life in society was the inescapable obligation faced by human beings. There was no private salvation waiting for them. In fact, as the Buddha defined it, liberation for a human being consists of entering a non-egotistical state, where he felt the conditional and interdependent nature of all beings.
He hoped to bring about a fundamental change in the attitudes of men savouring their individuality: to prove to them that everything in the world is part of a causal process and cannot exist in or by itself; that things are interdependent, and that this is true as much for human beings as for physical phenomena.
Even Adam Smith feared that the market society driven by desire and the multiplication of needs would degenerate into chaos and violence if its citizens did not exercise self-control. He hoped that the individual living in it would be able to distinguish between what he wants and what he needs. But this was more an expression of optimism than a practical method to unravel altogether what Smith himself recognized as the deception of desire.
It is partly why he did not try to envision the moral and political order that could accommodate such autonomous individuals and their desires. He wished to establish what Rousseau called ‘the reign of virtue’. But he did not see it coming about through an abstract political organization. Although he stressed that the ruler be righteous, he balked at making a faceless entity such as the state the supposed arbiter between allegedly solitary and fearful individuals, who preyed upon each other and so were in need of a remote master. The same delusion that made men suppose themselves to be solid and independent individual selves could also make them see such changing, insubstantial entities as state and society as real and enduring, and subordinate themselves to them.
The Buddha’s compassion presupposed no gulf of class or caste between persons; it sprang from his concern with the mind and body of the active, suffering individual. It sought to redirect individuals from the pursuit of political utopias to attentiveness and acts of compassion in everyday life.
without the belief in a self with an identity, a person will no longer be obsessed with regrets about the past and plans for the future. Ceasing to live in the limbo of what ought to be but is not here yet, he will be fully alive in the present.
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Gandhi practised what Václav Havel, living under a totalitarian regime, once described as ‘anti-political politics’, that is, ‘politics not as the technology of power and manipulation, of cybernetic rule over humans or as the art of the useful, but politics as one of the ways of seeking and achieving meaningful lives, of protecting them and serving them’.
Regardless of the regimes they lived under – British or Indian, capitalist or socialist – individuals always possessed a freedom of conscience: the freedom to make choices in everyday life. To exercise this choice correctly – to work with what the Buddha called right view and intention – was to live a moral as well as a political life. It was also to take upon one’s own conscience the burden of political responsibility and action rather than placing it upon a political party or a government.
Reason could emerge only out of a moral regimen. The individual had to reflect thoroughly on the consequences for both himself and others of his deeds and the intentions behind them. Here, the Buddha’s favourite notion of kusala, or skilfulness, was crucial; it applied to both skill in meditation and to moral discipline. To be morally skilful was to know that what was good and bad was good and bad for both oneself and for others. Only then could the choices confronting the individual be narrowed down:
But the Buddha realized that since moral rules could no longer derive their sanction from tradition and custom they had to be inferred from actual individual experience. In the larger world, which increasingly absorbed small groups like the Kalamans and where tradition and custom had lost force, the individual had to rely upon his newly discovered rational faculty. Normally deployed in the pursuit of self-interest, it could also be used to cultivate the mental skills and attitudes necessary to a moral life in society.
It was what I began to see more clearly that autumn in Mashobra: what the Buddha had stressed to the helpless people caught in the chaos of his own time: how the mind, where desire, hatred and delusion run rampant, creating the glories and defeats of the past as well as the hopes for the future, and the possibility for endless suffering, is also the place – the only one – where human beings can have full control over their lives.
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The mind is where the frenzy of history arises, the confusion of concepts and of actions with unpredictable consequences. It is also where these concepts are revealed as fragile and arbitrary constructions, as essentially empty. What seems like necessity weakens in the mind’s self-knowledge, and real freedom becomes tangible. This freedom lies nowhere other than in the present moment – the concrete present, the here and now, that the Buddha had affirmed over the claims of an abstract past and an illusory future.