Why Buddhists Must be Done with Buddhism

Why Buddhists Must be Done with Buddhism

In the second century C.E. the great Buddhist teacher Nagarjuna wrote Verses From the Center. Almost lost among twenty-seven chapters and 448 verses are four simple lines. They are among the most important four lines in the Buddhist literature.  

When buddhas don't appear

And their followers are gone,

The wisdom of awakening

Bursts forth by itself.

Stephen Batchelor, Verses From the Center - A Buddhist Vision of the Sublime

If Gautama Siddhartha's original message of liberation is anything more than an interesting development in the history of religious thought in Southeast Asia then it has to have a vitality that stands on its own, transcending incidentals of personality, time and place. And most certainly transcending the centuries of historical baggage that followed in its wake.

Nagarjuna clearly thought that it did.   

So let's put it to the test.

Let's be done with the Buddha and with buddhas. Let's be done with the followers and the teachers and the sages, the patriarchs, gurus, monks and nuns. Let's be done with all Buddhist scripture and commentary and the myriad Buddhist branches, schools and traditions, oral and written. Done with the cult of the cushion and the technologies of meditation, along with lineages and genealogies, titles, caps, robes, rituals, chants, mantras and koans, and all Buddhist beliefs. 

Let's dare to throw the baby out with the bathwater, the good out with the bad. Throw out what works along with what doesn't. Wash our hands of anything and everything that stinks of the word Buddhism and let the very word Buddha and all memory of it be long forgotten. Let it all go, Gate, gate, para gate, para sum gate. Done, finished, over. 

Now what?

What is this wisdom of awakening that will burst forth by itself?

First, what it is not. The wisdom of awakening is not a few rules of ethical behavior. It is not a prescription for a noble life or a strategy for living. People don't need religion or philosophy or some wisdom of awakening in order to lead a good life. About that there have always been reliable sources of sound advice including simple common sense and fundamental human decency.

The wisdom of awakening is also not about an abstract esoteric doctrine of emptiness, although that is getting closer to the chase. The Buddha's original message of liberation was not an otherworldly metaphysical vision of enlightenment designed to engage the attention of scholars, pundits, metaphysicians, priests, or the educated elites of the Indian subcontinent. The wisdom of awakening was an insight accessible by all regardless of their station in life, education or sophistication. The idea of emptiness was a way to unlock, to release the wisdom of awakening, not an end in itself.

So it must be with the new wisdom of awakening -- it must be a vision, a message, a simple insight available and accessible and understandable by ordinary human beings, living on the earth, concerned with earthly affairs, at all levels of society, regardless of sophistication. And it must be an insight of great power, not some easily dismissed nostrum.

This is what I think it will look like:

The wisdom of awakening that originally burst into the mind of Siddhartha Gautama and will burst forth again on its own in the mind of someone who looks, is simply this:  

There is no supernatural. 

There is no supernatural anything; there never has been; there never will be; ever. There are no gods or goddesses or deities or supernatural powers above you or below you or on either side; none are there to be found in the mountains, or the desert, the forest, the jungle, the grassland, the river, or the sea, or on the farm or in the village or city or in the schools or universities or temples or monasteries; none in statues or stone or in painting or on paper. Nothing supernatural can ever be found in any man or animal, vegetable or mineral, living or dead. None. There is no supernatural authority anywhere and no one wields any authority backed up by any supernatural anything. They never have had any such authority. There is none to be had.

In ancient India there were those who immediately understood the power of this profoundly liberating insight. India and the ancient world had soaked for tens of thousands of years in a suffocating supernaturalism that permeated every aspect of human life, from the cradle to the grave, a supernatural cultural current dominating the individual, the family, the village and all levels of political, economic and religious life.  

It was impossible then, and is impossible now, to be free in a world where you believe in any supernatural anything. The most ancient, the most powerful, and the ultimate in crippling authoritarian ideologies, is the belief in the supernatural.  

For the perceptive and receptive Indian mind steeped in the cultural background of the supernatural the revelation that the supernatural was simply an empty fantasy was a truth of overwhelming potency and liberating power.  

For those whose understanding was not so deep or immediate the wisdom of awakening was not just one more ideology to be taken on faith or simply believed. The invitation of the Buddha was simple: look and see for yourself. In fact, you have to look and see for yourself. Look at the world around you, the comings and goings, the natural processes, the forms contingent and interconnected and ever changing. And now look at the content of your own minds, reflecting those endless forms; now you see them, now you don’t; they come and go. 

So too, look at the sacred images within your mind, the gods and the goddesses, the devils and demons and all sorts of supernatural beings and forces and undercurrents that populate your conscious and subconscious thoughts. Simply look and see. They are not real. They are empty. There is nothing there to fear or worship or to respect or stand in awe of or to revere or to submit to. Look and see. The supernatural has no hold on you whatsoever. The supernatural does not exist. It never has. It never will. There is no supernatural power underlying your life or any aspect of your life.

For the ancient Indian mind the message was simple and direct: Simply stop believing in the supernatural and the direct and undeniable experience of the natural world is what is left. Live in that world, the only world there is.

The situation is not all that different for anyone today or for anyone living in a time when all memory of Buddhism will have been long lost. Belief in the supernatural is not a bug in the human mind, it is a feature. From infancy the human mind is overwhelmed by a natural world seemingly beyond understanding. Things happen and the how and why are at first a complete mystery and may remain so for all one's life. It is easy and natural to believe that supernatural forces are at work in the natural world. And societies are dominated by a bewildering variety of superstitious beliefs. Almost everyone, it appears, believes in some form of the supernatural. It is not so easy to break free of a suffocating culture. But it can be done.   

The wisdom of awakening that will burst forth on its own is freedom from the supernatural and all guises of the supernatural; freedom from all the promises of otherworldly understanding or insight or metaphysical enlightenment or special powers. And freedom from all those who claim authority based on the supernatural or their understanding or interpretation of the supernatural. All those people are simply human beings just like everyone else.

If Gautama the Buddha's insight liberated the ancient Indian mind mind from the stultifying supernaturalism of the ancient world, then Nagarjuna's insight liberates the modern buddhist from Buddhism, from the baggage and the mysticism, metaphysics, and supernaturalism that has steadily eroded and corroded the original message of liberation.  

Walk in freedom on the earth.  There are no gods above you and no demons below.  There are no spirits to the right or to the left, in the forests or mountains or deserts or in the sea. There is no supernatural power behind any secular or religious authority; nor is there any behind the priest or the guru or the saint or the sage or the metaphysical scholar.  

If it is true that the truth shall set you free, then the greatest truth is that there is no supernatural anything; there never has been; there never will be.

  

Now go about your business.

Dixi

LLP