“Real Buddhism is not really an “ism.” It’s a process, an awareness, an openness, a
spirit of inquiry… It is more accurate to call it ‘the teaching of the
awakened,’ or the buddha-dharma. – Roshi Steve Hagan, author of Buddhism:
Plain and Simple
Here we are.
Though there is a religion that carries the name, Buddhism
also can be understood as a philosophy, an approach to life, and here it can be
helpful to realize that the Sanskrit root word “budh” means to awaken or
gain consciousness. So, from this
perspective, Buddhism can readily be seen as a personal and collective
psychology handed down over the centuries, its purpose being the liberation, or
awakening, of human beings out of the unnecessary pain and suffering we cause
ourselves, each other, and the Natural World.
Another term that is used for
this philosophy is “buddha-dharma” which translates as awakened-path, dharma
being a word that means the way of Nature or the Universe. It is also the path or teachings that awaken
us into the Way or the secrets of the Universe, into what really is, not what we
have been told, imagine, or believe.
Unlike the Western religions, it is not made up of laws and dogma
revealed by God through a prophet, but rather of teachings about the nature of
life arrived upon through deep exploration of the human condition.
Before there was a religion called Buddhism, there was
simply a brilliant analyst and teacher, Siddhartha Gotama, who became known as
the Buddha, the “Awakened One,” who understood fully that the path to a sane
and satisfying life is in breaking free of all dogma, whether it is religious,
political, cultural, social, or personal.
Unique among religions, Buddhism makes a particular emphasis on the
teachings not being accepted or believed without bringing personal experience
to bear as confirmation. In this way,
what is often called a spiritual teaching is not what we conventionally
understand as spiritual, or other worldly, but rather practical advice for
living in a manner that brings us peace, wisdom, and a sense of belonging and
connection within our day-to-day lives and within the infinite miracle that is
the Universe.
Buddhism points us to experiencing our everyday lives with
ever-deepening subtlety, clarity, and insight as unfolding within the unity,
the connectedness and numinousness of all things in the truth of the
here-and-now. In this way, these
teachings are remarkably similar to what is attributed to Jesus when it is
written in the Gospel of Thomas that “The Kingdom of Heaven is spread across
the land,” and that “The Kingdom is inside you, and outside you. When
you come to know yourselves, then you will be known, and you will realize it is
you.” Buddhism recognizes, however,
as did Jesus, that this is true only for those “with the eyes to see.” Buddhism then is about awakening our
sleepy eyes so that they can see the creative, mystical, unifying dimension
beneath our everyday lives. It points us
to the realm of the Spiritual Universe, that dimension of infinitely wise and
compassionate consciousness that underpins, pervades, connects, and gives rise
to all things of the material universe.
Buddhism is, in fact then, about recognizing the realm of
that which is not of the world of matter and form, of our bodies, our minds, our
possessions, accomplishments, and circumstances, yet gives rise to and supports
this world of matter and form. It is
about recognizing the truth of who we are that transcends all stories we carry in
our minds concerning our personal history or circumstance, our traumas,
delights, failures, and victories, and resolves all contradictions into
paradoxical unity. It is pointing us to
the spiritual realm within and all around us, the mysterious unifying
consciousness that beats our hearts, causes the miracle that is our bodies to
function harmoniously just as the galaxies exist in perfect harmony.
This realm of pure consciousness is the true source of
creativity and compassion, beneath the noisy mind, bringing us into harmonious
flow with Life. It allows us to know love,
the truth of connection. It allows us to
know a loved one is in difficulty before we are told. It opens us to insights that we have no idea how
we arrive upon, and whispers to us of the creative intelligent source of this
Universe, and that somehow, we know Eternity as our true home. It is sometimes referred to as the realm of
non-duality, or oneness, while duality is our ever-challenging experience of
separateness in a difficult world made up of objects all regarded as useful, challenging,
or irrelevant. Buddhism points us to the resolution of
duality and opens the gate into non-duality or what can be called
enlightenment, which is just a way of saying peaceful, insightful,
compassionate existence within what is. But
because our culture steeps us in duality-only consciousness, understanding
non-duality, or enlightenment, can be a great challenge, a gate we cannot
figure out how to open. To this
quandary, Buddhism calls us to recognize that there is no gate, that we ARE the
mystery embodied, that opening the gate is a matter of relaxing into basic
truths.
As the mystery embodied, one way for us to understand
non-duality is to give deep and subtle consideration to this human organism
that we know to be ourselves. While we can recognize that we are a person, an
organism, with a body and mind and social circumstances, with subtler
consideration we can also recognize that we happen within larger collective
human organisms known as families and affiliations, communities, societies,
races, nations, and the human species. And
so, too, we happen within still larger and larger communities of organisms and of
the ecology of this planet Earth, an organism in itself, and beyond, on into
the vastness of the Universe, all a unity of organization and balance. If we begin to think within the
interconnections of biology rather than the material separateness of physics,
we can begin approaching a subtler truth of who we are.
And to fully comprehend ourselves we must also turn our view
from the macroscopic to the microscopic, realizing that we exist as a system of
organs – of lungs, heart, stomach, brain, circulatory system, etc., all that
have their individual form and function, yet exist codependently upon each
other in supporting the larger entity.
We also coexist and codepend with microbes, with bacteria, fungi,
archaea, and viruses, and we are made up of trillions of cells, and deeper
still, of molecules and atoms, and deeper still down into the sub-atomic realm,
where we find ourselves in the undifferentiated unity of the quantum
mystery. Beneath, above, and all around
the seeming separateness of physical forms and the ideas of separateness we
create in our minds about who we are, if we look keenly enough, we find the
scientific truth that we are a system of interconnections and interdependence,
Life and intelligence happening through all time and space, perfectly balanced
and harmonious, unities within unities. This can well be understood as the
meaning of dharma, the great what-is, the union, the non-duality within which
duality happens. This is the realm that Buddhism,
as well as mystical traditions within every culture and religion, including
Christianity, Judaism, and Islam, along with aboriginal cultures, all
understood. We are never separate,
rather, we exist in connection, all as one.
In contemporary life, our culture ignores this larger perspective
to existence and fails to give validation to it when experienced, as it is in
circumstances sometimes referred to as “flow” or “zone,” “high,” “tuned in,” or
“spiritual.” It happens through sports,
the arts, our professional and recreational skills, relationships, and
sometimes, spiritual experience – moments where the sense of separate self
dissolves into a unity with the action, elements, and environment of the moment.
Yet despite our culture’s denial, there is a growing pull to this perspective
because it resonates within us as true, giving rise to another Buddhist
principle, that of karma – conscious attention to the effects, harmonious and
deleterious, to the natural unfolding, of actions and causes in our lives and in
the world around us. Likewise, while
more and more there is the experience that our society, culture and religions
are failing because they feel shallow, conflicted, divisive, and false, there is
a growing attraction to the ideas and experience that Buddhism and other
non-Western spiritual traditions offer. There
is growing understanding of the importance of ecology and cutting-edge physics
that points to a world of unity manifesting as diversity, all underpinned with
a brilliant intelligence, and laws that must be observed. We are beginning to awaken to the need for attending
to our responsibility as agents of karma.
Buddhism gives us these teachings and then tells us we must take
whatever intellectual understanding we have concerning them and always push
further into actual experience. We are instructed
that we must push through our lazy minds with meditation and mindfulness practices
that train and refine our mental capacities for concentration, stability, and practical
– as well as what gets called mystical or spiritual – insight. We are
led to open the intuitive sense of “knowing,” generally neglected, if not
scorned, in this culture that leads to understanding that which the limited
dimension of thought can only barely represent.
This opening requires breaking free of what Buddhism refers
to as egoic-delusion, the fictions we carry in our minds, conditioned into us
by our social, cultural, and personal psychological influences that cause us to
believe we are our neurotic stories in a chaotic world of competing separate
entities that must struggle with each other to safeguard our psychological,
social, and physical existence. This keeps
our attention on the challenge of finding security outside ourselves by making
more of “me,” and we fail to be in direct experience of Life as it unfolds
moment to moment, where our life really happens. The term egoic-delusion brilliantly points us
to the insight that living inside our sense of self as a completely separate
physical and psychological entity in competitive and consuming relationship
with a world of likewise separate entities is a psychologically destabilizing
and unsatisfactory perspective. This
small invention of a self fails to grasp the inherent dharmic and karmic realities
of harmonious interconnection and interdependence, and that Buddhism uses the
psychological term of “delusion,” meaning being caught in a false view that is
akin to mental illness, points us to the basic psychological purpose of
Buddhist teaching.
Buddhism then offers as prescription for this mental illness,
teachings and practices aimed at establishing a healthy and stable mind and
sense of self free of delusion and insecurity, attuned to reality, to what-is,
to dharma and karma. No, this is not the
usual kind of “ism” that instructs us in a set of beliefs to which we are to religiously
dedicate ourselves. It is a call to
awakening and sanity, unfolding one moment at a time. It is a call to living in that most elusive
of Buddhist teaching tools, the koan – elusive because the koan is a call to
enter into the heart of Life with all our senses and faculties to reveal our
true nature and the nature of existence as it unfolds moment to moment. A most unusual kind of “ism.” Yes, Here we are. The Gate is swinging open.