THE WAY TO THE END OF SUFFERING
The search for a spiritual path is born out of suffering. It does not start with lights and ecstasy, but with the hard tacks of pain, disappointment, and confusion. However, for suffering to give birth to a genuine spiritual search, it must amount to more than something passively received from without. It has to trigger an inner realization, a perception which pierces through the facile complacency of our usual encounter with the world to glimpse the insecurity perpetually gaping underfoot. When this insight dawns, even if only momentarily, it can precipitate a profound personal crisis. IT OVERTURNS ACCUSTOMED GOALS AND VALUES, MOCKS OUR ROUTINE PREOCCUPATIONS, LEAVES OLD ENJOYMENTS STUBBORNLY UNSATISFYING.
At first such changes generally are not welcome. We try to deny our vision and to smother our doubts; we struggle to drive away the discontent with new pursuits. But the flame of inquiry, once lit, continues to burn, and if we do not let ourselves be swept away by superficial readjustments or slouch back into a patched up version of our natural optimism, eventually the original glimmering of insight will again flare up, again confront us with our essential plight. It is precisely at that point, with all escape routes blocked, that we are ready to seek a way to bring our disquietude to an end. NO LONGER CAN WE CONTINUE TO DRIFT COMPLACENTLY THROUGH LIFE, DRIVEN BLINDLY BY OUR HUNGER FOR SENSE PLEASURES AND BY THE PRESSURE OF PREVAILING SOCIAL NORMS. A DEEPER REALITY BECKONS US; WE HAVE HEARD THE CALL OF A MORE STABLE, MORE AUTHENTIC HAPPINESS, AND UNTIL WE ARRIVE AT OUR DESTINATION WE CANNOT REST CONTENT. But it is just then that we find ourselves facing a new difficulty. Once we come to recognize the need for a spiritual path we discover that SPIRITUAL TEACHINGS ARE BY NO MEANS HOMOGENOUS AND MUTUALLY COMPATIBLE. When we browse through the shelves of humanity's spiritual heritage, both ancient and contemporary, we do not find a single tidy volume but a veritable bazaar of spiritual systems and disciplines each offering themselves to us as the highest, the fastest, the most powerful, or the most profound solution to our quest for the ultimate. Confronted with this melange, we fall into confusion trying to size them up, to decide which is truly liberating, a real solution to our needs, and which is a sidetrack beset with hidden flaws.
One approach to resolving this problem that is popular today is the eclectic one: to pick and chose from the various traditions whatever seems amenable to our needs, welding together different practices and techniques into a synthetic whole that is personally satisfying. Thus one might combine Buddhist mindfulness meditation with sessions of hindu mantra recitation, Christian prayer with Sufi dancing, Jewish Kabbalah with tibetan visualization exercises. Eclecticism, however, though sometimes helpful in making a transition from a predominantly worldly and materialistic way of life to one that takes on a spiritual hue, eventually wears thin. While it makes a comfortable halfway house, it is not comfortable as a final vehicle.
THERE ARE TWO INTERRELATED FLAWS IN ECLECTICISM THAT ACCOUNT FOR ITS ULTIMATE INADEQUACY. One is that eclecticism compromises the very traditions it draws upon. The great spiritual traditions themselves do not propose their disciplines as independent techniques that may be excised from the setting and freely recombined to enhance the felt quality of our lives. They present them, rather, as parts of an integral whole, of a coherent vision regarding the fundamental nature of reality and the final goal of the spiritual quest. A spiritual tradition is not a shallow stream in which one can wet one's feet and then beat a quick retreat to the shore. It is a mighty tumultuous river which would rush through the entire landscape of one's life, and if only one truly wishes to travel on it, one must be courages enough launch one's boat and head out for the depths.
The second defect in eclecticism follows from the first. As spiritual practices are built upon visions regarding the nature of reality and the final good, these visions are not mutually compatible. When we honestly examine the teachings of these traditions, we will find that major differences in perspective reveal themselves to our sight, differences which cannot easily be dismissed as alternative ways of saying the same thing. Rather, they point to very different experiences constituting the supreme goal and the path that must be trodden to reach that goal.
Hence, because of the differences in perspectives and practices that the different spiritual traditions propose, once we decide that we have outgrown eclecticism and feel that we are ready to make a serious commitment to one particular path, we find ourselves confronted with the challenge of choosing a path that will lead us to true enlightenment and liberation. One cue to resolving this dilemma is to clarify to ourselves our fundamental aim, to determine what we seek in a genuinely liberative path. If we reflect carefully, it will become clear that the prime requirement is a way to the end of suffering. All problems ultimately can be reduced to the problem of suffering; thus what we need is a way that will end this problem finally and completely. Both these qualifying words are important. THE PATH HAS TO LEAD TO A COMPLETE END OF SUFFERING, TO AN END OF SUFFERING IN ALL ITS FORMS, AND TO A FINAL END OF SUFFERING! TO BRING SUFFERING TO AN IRREVERSIBLE STOP.
But here we run up against another question. How are we to find such a path - a path which has the capacity to lead us to the full and final end of suffering? Until we actually follow a path to its goal we cannot know with certainty where it leads, and in order to follow a path we must place complete trust in the efficacy of the path. The pursuit of a spiritual path is not like selecting a suit of clothes. To select a new suit one need only try on a number of suits, inspect oneself in a mirror, and select the suit in which one appears most attractive. The choice of a spiritual path is closer to marriage: one wants a partner for life, one whose companionship will prove as trustworthy and durable as the pole star in the night sky.
Faced with this new dilemma, we may think that we have reached a dead end and conclude that we have nothing to guide us but personal inclination, if not a flip of a coin. However, our selection need not be as blind and uninformed as we imagine, for we do have a guideline to help us. Since spiritual paths are generally presented in the framework of a total teaching, WE CAN EVALUATE THE EFFECTIVENESS OF ANY PARTICULAR PATH BY INVESTIGATING THE TEACHING WHICH EXPOUNDS IT.
In making this investigation we can look to three criteria as standards for evaluation:
(1) First, the teaching has to give a full and accurate picture of the range of suffering. If the picture of suffering it gives is incomplete or defective, then the path it sets forth will most likely be flawed, unable to yield a satisfactory solution. Just as an ailing patient needs a doctor who can make a full and correct diagnosis of his illness, so in seeking release from suffering we need a teaching that presents a reliable account of our condition.
(2) The second criterion calls for a correct analysis of the causes giving rise to suffering. The teaching cannot stop with a survey of the outward symptoms. It has to penetrate beneath the symptoms to the level of causes, and to describe those causes accurately. If a teaching makes a faulty causal analysis, there is little likelihood that its treatment will succeed.
(3) The third criterion pertains directly to the path itself. It stipulates that the path which the teaching offers has to remove suffering at its source. This means it must provide a method to cut off suffering by eradicating its causes. If it fails to bring about this root-level solution, its value is ultimately nil. The path is prescribes might help to remove symptoms and make us feel that all is well; but one afflicted with a fatal disease cannot afford to settle for cosmetic surgery when below the surface the cause of his malady continues to thrive.
To sum up, we find three requirements for a teaching proposing to offer a true path to the end of suffering; first, it has to set forth a full and accurate picture of the range of suffering; second, it must present a correct analysis of the causes of suffering; and third, it must give us the means to eradicate the causes of suffering.
This is not the place to evaluate the various spiritual disciplines in terms of these criteria. My concern is only with the Dhamma, the teachings of the buddha, and with the solution this teaching offers to the problem of suffering. That the teaching should be relevant to this problem is evident from its very nature; FOR IT IS FORMULATED, NOT AS A SET OF DOCTRINES ABOUT THE ORIGIN AND END OF THINGS COMMANDING BELIEF, BUT AS A MESSAGE OF DELIVERANCE FROM SUFFERING CLAIMING TO BE VERIFIABLE IN OUR OWN EXPERIENCE. Along with that message there comes a method of practice, a way leading to the end of suffering. This way is the NOBLE EIGHTFOLD PATH ( ariya attangika magga). The Eightfold path stands at the very heart of the Buddha's teachings. It was the discovery of the path that gave the buddha's own enlightenment a universal significance and elevated him from the status of a wise and benevolent sage to that of a world teacher and he himself invited the seeker with the promise and challenge: " You yourselves must strive. The buddhas are ONLY teachers".
To see the Noble Eightfold Path as a viable vehicle to liberation, we have to check it out against our three criteria: to look at the buddha's account of the range of suffering, his analysis of its causes, and the programme he offers as a remedy.
THE RANGE OF SUFFERING
The Buddha does not merely touch the problem of suffering tangentially; he makes it, rather, the very cornerstone of his teaching. He starts the Four. Noble Truths that sum up his message with the announcement that life is inseparably tied to something he calls DUKKHA. The. Pali word is often translated as suffering, but it means something deeper than pain and misery. It refers to a basic unsatisfactoriness running through our lives, the lives of ALL but the enlightened. Sometimes this unsatisfactoriness errupts into the open as sorrow, grief, disappointment, or despair; but usually it hovers at the edge of our awareness as a vague unlocalized sense that things are never quite perfect, never fully adequate to our expectations of what they should be. This fact of dukkha, the Buddha says, is the only real spiritual problem. THE OTHER PROBLEMS, THE THEOLOGICAL AND METAPHYSICAL QUESTIONS THAT HAVE TAUNTED RELIGIOUS THINKERS THROUGH THE CENTURIES, HE GENTLY WAVES ASIDE AS "MATTERS NOT TENDING TO LIBERATION". What he teaches, he says, is just suffering and the ending of suffering, dukkha and its cessation.
The Buddha does not stop with generalities. He goes on to expose the different forms that dukkha takes, both the evident and the subtle. He starts with what is close at hand with the suffering inherent in the physical process of life itself. Here dukkha shows up in the events of birth, aging and death, in our susceptibility to sickness, accidents and injuries, even in hunger and thirst. It appears again in our inner reactions to disagreeable situations and events; in the sorrow, anger, frustration, and fear aroused by painful separations, by unpleasant encounters, by the failure to get what we want. EVEN OUR PLEASURES, THE BUDDHA SAID, ARE NOT IMMUNE FROM DUKKHA. THEY GIVE US HAPPINESS WHILE THEY LAST, BUT THEY DO NOT LAST FOREVER; EVENTUALLY THEY MUST PASS AWAY, AND WHEN THEY GO, THE LOSS LEAVES US FEELING DEPRIVED. OUR LIVES FOR THE MOST PART ARE STRUNG OUT BETWEEN THE THIRST FOR PLEASURE AND THE FEAR PAIN. WE PASS OUR DAYS RUNNING AFTER THE ONE AND RUNNING AWAY FROM THE OTHER, SELDOM ENJOYING THE PECE OF CONTENTMENT; REAL SATISFACTION SEEMS SOMEHOW ALWAYS OUT OF REACH; JUST BEYOND THE NEXT HORIZON. THEN IN THE END WE HAVE TO DIE; TO GIVE UP THE IDENTITY WE SPENT OUR WHOLE LIFE BUILDING, TO LEVE BEHIND EVERYTHING AND EVERYONE WE LOVE. Life is impermanent and thus marked with that insecurity which is the deepest meaning of dukkha. For this reason, one aspiring to the complete end of dukkha cannot rest content with any mundane achievement, with any status, but must win emancipation from the entire, increasingly unstable world.
THE CAUSES OF SUFFERING
A teaching proposing to lead to the end of suffering must, as we said, give a reliable account of its causal origination. For if we want to put a stop to suffering, we have to stop it where it begins, with its causes. TO STOp THE CAUSES REQUIRES A THOROUGH KNOWLEDGE OF WHAT THEY ARE AND HOW THEY WORK; THUS THE BUDDHA DEVOTES A SIZEABLE SECTION OF HlS TEACHING TO LAYING BARE "THE TRUTH OF THE ORIGIN OF DUKKHA". The origin he locates within ourselves, in a fundamental malady that permeates our being, causing disorder in our own minds and vitiating our relationships with others and with the world. The sign of this malady can be seen in our proclivity to certain unwholesome mental states, (Kilesas). The most basic of these are greed, aversion and delusion. GREED (lobha) is a self-centered desire: the desire dor pleasure and possessions, the drive for survival, the urge to bolster the sense of ego with power, status and prestige. AVERSION (dosa) signifies the response of negation, expressed as rejection, irritation, condemnation, hatred, enmity, anger, and violence. DELUSION (moha) means mental darkness: the thick coat of insensitivity which blocks out clear understanding.
From these three routes emerge the various other defilement's: conceit, jealousy, ambition, lethargy, arrogance, and the rest, and from all these defilements together, the roots and the branches, comes dukkha in its diverse dorms as pain and sorrow, fear and discontent, as the aimless drifting through birth and death.
THE BUDDHA TEACHES THAT THERE IS ONE DEFILEMENT WHICH GIVES ALL THE OTHERS, ONE ROOT WHICH HOLDS THEM ALL IN PLACE. THIS ROOT IS IGNORANCE ((avijja). Ignorance is not the mear absence of knowledge, a lack of knowing particular pieces of information. IGNORANCE CAN CO-EXIST WITH A VAST ACCUMULATION OF ITEMIZED KNOWLEDGE. As the basic root of dukkha, ignorance is a fundamental darkness shrouding the mind. Sometimes this ignorance operates in a passive manner, merely obscuring correct understanding. At other times it takes on an active role; it becomes the great deceiver, conjuring up a mass of distorted perceptions and conceptions which the mind grasps as attributes of the world, unaware that they are its own deluded constructs.
In these erroneous perceptions and ideas we find the soil that nurtures the defilements. The mind catches sight of some possibility of pleasure, accepts it at face value, and the result is greed. Our hunger for gratification is thwarted, obstacles appear, and up spring anger and aversions. Or we struggle over ambiguities, our sight clouds and we become lost in delusion. We might still find pleasure and enjoyment, sense pleasures, social pleasures, pleasures of the mind and heart. But no matter how much pleasure we may experience, no matter how successful we might be at dodging pain, the basic problem remains at the core of our being and we continue to move within the bounds of dukkha.
CUTTING OFF THE CAUSES OF SUFFERING
TO FREE OURSELVES FROM SUFFERING FULLY AND FINALLY WE HAVE TO ELIMINATE IT BY THE ROOT, AND THAT MEANS TO ELIMINATE IGNORANCE. But how does one go about eliminating ignorance? The answer follows clearly from the nature of the adversary. SINCE IGNORANCE IS A STATE OF NOT KNOWING THINGS AS THEY REALLY ARE, WHAT IS NEEDED IS KNOWLEDGE OF THINGS AS THEY REALLY ARE? NOT MERELY CONCEPTUAL KNOWLEDGE, KNOWLEDGE AD IDEA, BUT PERCEPTUAL KNOWLEDGE, A KNOWING WHICH IS ALSO A SEEING. THIS KIND OF SEEING IS CALLED WISDOM. Wisdom helps to correct the distorting work of ignorance. It enables us to grasp things as they are in actuality, directly and immediately,, free from the screen of ideas, views and assumptions our minds ordinarily set up between ourselves and the real.
To eliminate ignorance we need wisdom, but how is wisdom to be acquired? As indubitable knowledge of the ultimate nature of things, wisdom cannot be gained by mere learning, by gathering and accumulating a battery of facts. However, the Buddha says, wisdom can be cultivated. It comes into being through a set of conditions which we have the power to develop. The conditions are actually mental factors, components of consciousness which fit together into a systematic structure that can be called a path in the word's essential meaning: a course-way for movement leading to a goal. Our goal is the end of suffering, and the path leading to it is the Noble Eightfold Path with its eight factors: right view, right intention, right speech, right action, right livelihood, right effort, right mindfulness and right concentration.
The Buddha calls this path the middle way . It is the middle way because it steers clear of two extremes, two misguided attempts to gain release from suffering. One is the extreme of indulgence in sense pleasures, the attempt to extinguish dissatisfaction by gratifying desire. This approach gives pleasure, but the enjoyment won is gross, transitory and devoid of deep contentment. The Buddha recognized that SENSUAL DESIRE CAN EXERCISE A TIGHT GRIP OVER THE MINDS OF HUMAN BEINGS, AND HE WAS KEENLY AWARE OF HOW ARDENTLY ATTACHED PEOPLE BECOME TO THE PLEASURES OF THE SENSES. But he also knew that this pleasure is far inferior to the happiness that arises from renunciation, and therefor he repeatedly taught that the way the to Ultimate, eventually requires the relinquishment of of sensual desire.
The other extreme is the practice of self mortification, the attempt to gain liberation by afflicting the body. THE ERROR IS TAKING THE BODY TO BE THE CAUSE Of BONDAGE, WHEN THE REAL Source OF TROUBLE LIES IN THE MIND; THE MIND OBSESSED BY GREED, AVERSION AND DELUSION.
Aloof from these two extremes is the noble Eightfold path, called the middle way, not in the sense that it effects a compromise between the extremes, but in the sense that it transcends them both by avoiding the errors that each involves. The path avoids the extreme of sense indulgence by its recognition of the futility of desire and its stress on renunciation. DESIRE AND SENSUALITY, FAR FROM BEING MEANS TO HAPPINESS, ARE SPRINGS OF SUFFERING TO BE ABANDONED AS THE REQUISITE OF DELIVERANCE. But the practice of renunciation does not entail the tormenting of the body. It consists in mental training, and for this the body must be fit, a sturdy support for the inward work. Thus the body is to be looked after well, kept in good health, while the mental faculties are trained to generate the liberating wisdom. Thats the middle way, the Noble eightfold Path, which " gives rise to vision, gives rise to knowledge, and leads to peace, to direct knowledge, to enlightenment, to Nibbana".
To see the noble Eightfold Path
Thuk Je Che Tibet
No hay comentarios:
Publicar un comentario