BUDDHA'S STEPS
I frequently reflect on Gautama's life as we know it. His story is the stuff of modern films. However, his legacy has been overshadowed in media by the publicity sought by the exiled Tibetan Dalai Lama, who represents a failed theocratic Buddhism of ethnocentric religious and political ritual. That face of Buddhism has fallen into line with the current victim-obsessed culture of The West, which still favors religious melodrama over personal morality.
Gautama's path fascinates me in light of the words of Dhammapada, a wonderfully succinct summary of his thoughts on practical steps to personal transformation. If read as a letter from a friend, these words are very powerful, very human, very simple. My attempt here is to share my ideas on the Buddha's steps to wisdom as we know them.
Step 1: Liberation from Narcissism.
Gautama was born a prince. The top power tier of an ancient society, comparable to the international billionaires of today with the added aspect of divinely bestowed hereditary provenance in his cultural context. Imagine it. As an aristocratic male heir, this placed him just below the gods of his time. Wealth and privilege to the highest extent available. It is suggested that he had accepted his exceptional place in the scheme of human existence readily as a boy. That is, until he ventured outside his palace, where he had been surrounded by wealth, youth and beauty. In the destitute environment outside his palace, Guatama encountered the life of the masses. He saw sick people dying outside shabby dwellings. He saw starving old people begging. He saw young people, old before their time, doing back-breaking labor to subsist. It is said this exposure was his first step to enlightenment. His narcissist's vision of life as pleasure was shattered by his shocked comprehension of the common experiences of all humanity: suffering, aging and death.
Step 2: Liberation from Tribalism.
When I interpolate his transmitted words to the time of his liberation from narcissism, I see a young man, recently married and recently a father, who suddenly realizes he has been sleep-walking through a prescribed tribal life, not based in reality. He has fulfilled his part in the play, a starring role. Now he has realized that this has brought another life into this world of suffering, aging and death. Imagine his horror. This, more than any esoteric interpretation of Buddhism, moves me. This fork in the path of personal experience offered choices to the privileged prince: Cowardly conformity through denial of the reality, cynical self-indulgence to escape the pain of his comprehension, breaking free from the chains of his tribal role to explore reality, etc.. He chose to liberate himself from his tribal role in order to find some meaningful way to live with life's reality of suffering aging and death. There was a subculture in place outside his palace which he sought: The yogic subculture.
Step 3: Liberation from Possessions
Gautama renounced his hereditary legacy and chose to set off alone without personal property or income to explore the life of a yogi and beggar. I want to stress that this occurred around 500 yrs before the Christian Era in South Asia. It was a time of short life spans and destitute human poverty for those without the means or ability to scrape a living. It was a time of tribal violence and brutality. Being a voluntary lone traveler and beggar was in itself an act of naivete, courage or madness.
Step 4: Liberation from Tradition/Ritualism.
The yogis of Gautama's time, not very different from some yogis in India today, were also seekers of liberation from human suffering. Personal ritualistic denial of bodily suffering was a common factor in the practices of these yogis. Most had learned their rituals from masters who who had received them from their masters, and so on. The traditional yogi methodology entails mortification of the body in favor of living in the mind (mind over matter). Gradual increments of self-imposed pain and deprivation leading to a perceived immunity from physical suffering. Gautama wandered and experimented with yogi discipline, but he eventually concluded that imposing suffering on the body did not really liberate the mind, but simply distracted it.
Step 5: Liberation through Meditation
Gautama turned to deep meditation. He reportedly meditated for long periods without nutrition or hydration. A self-imposed coma, in today's parlance perhaps. From this deep meditation, he reported reaching a state of liberation from human suffering.
Step 6: Practice
Gautama developed a life practice, derived from his profound meditative experience. This entailed meditation and ethical living, devoid of attachment or violence. He lived in society but detached from it. His focus was control of his own mind and body to maintain his liberation from human suffering. His achievement must have spoken to others. He gathered a following from those who observed his practice, which he eventually spoke about with them. It was their attention and dedication to that practice which transmitted it through the ages from oral to written tradition.
Step 7: Enlightenment
Tradition tells us that the Buddha's enlightenment entailed his perception of existence outside the dimensions of space and time. In the context of the beliefs of his culture, which had conceptualized reincarnation, this meant his perception of his existence throughout time, liberated from material Earth-bound reality. In this way, he is said to have conquered suffering, aging and death. However, despite whatever emancipation he may have experienced from human suffering, Gautama did age and die, reportedly by some accounts poisoned intentionally or unintentionally by a benefactor at an advanced age.
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The evolution of Buddhism into culture-bound religions after Gautama's death was perhaps inevitable. After all, we see the same evolutionary development in Christianity and Islam, both religions based on the impact of an individual on others. Religions and their sects are the products of followers, not the profound individuals who inspire them. Francis of Assisi, for example, who renounced personal property, was not imitated by Franciscans who eventually owned friaries throughout Europe and had custody of The Holy Land during The Crusades. Buddhist monks who live in comfortable temple complexes in parts of the world, do not imitate Gautama.
So, a contemporary individual, such as I, must try to look over that religious perversion of actual history as much as possible to garner any of the kernel wisdom of Gautama. This entails learning about his cultural period. It entails wiggling out the basic messages transmitted through time from the overlays of rite, myth and politics. This led me to various translations of Dhammapada. My favorite digest of these fragments is Thomas Byron's rendering from 1993, the Shambhala Edition with foreword by Ram Dass, a man who once changed my experience of life with a few simple words to me spoken in a small nurses' station of an AIDS hospice. If Gautama's influence had contributed to this man's wisdom, I decided I'd better check it out more closely than I had.
The quest to apply Gautama's wisdom to my life continues twenty-five years later. I can see a similarity in the steps of my life's path. I passed through the early steps along that path with little knowledge or understanding of Gautama's contribution to human understanding. This serves to strengthen my belief that Gautama's path is an essentially human one, not the path of a demigod. I believe the explorers of the mind of the early 20th century, Freud and Jung, saw this as well. I have taken great delight in the thought that Gautama influenced great minds 2500 years after his death. I also subscribe to the speculation that Christ himself may have been influenced by Buddhist thought. My illustration above this piece may well be a hint to the influence of Buddhism in the Greco-Roman era.
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