A talk given to friends of Baba ki Pathshaala during a Zoom webinar on 16th August
Friends, I am going to be speaking to you today in English, kyonki mera hindee aur maraathee keval ek do shabd hain.
I would like first of all to thank Narayani and my Baba ki Pathshaala friends for giving me the opportunity to speak to you all. I am very fond of Indian and Indians. I was resident in Pune for four years from 1982 and have visited India many, many times times since. I always enjoy meeting Indian people. I find them very open, friendly and full of goodwill.
I am also not unaware of the terrible difficulties caused by the caste system that has divided Indian society. It is not possible even to mention the word caste or jati without opening a window to pain in people’s minds.
There will be opportunities for you to ask for clarification and put questions to me after I have presented my paper, which will last about 30 minutes.
It was interesting listening to your two main speakers yesterday. It occurred to me that they were both specialists, both knowledgeable and practised in their own fields: one in psychiatry and counselling, the other in Music.
In Buddhism we take a rather different approach. We say that to be a true individual, you should develop not only your strengths but improve your weaker faculties, so that you become a well-rounded human being, and eventually one who realises samyak sambodhi or full and perfect Enlightenment.
A word or two about faculties. Here I follow Carl Gustav Jung, my favourite western psychologist and philosopher of the last century. He spoke of a healthy human being having four chief faculties: feeling, thinking, sensation and intuition. I think you all probably understand what the first three are. The fourth, intuition, is rather more difficult to describe and define. It is the ability to reach valid conclusions without conscious deliberation, conscious reasoning. One could say your unconscious provides the answer in a flash.
The really interesting thing about these four faculties of the healthy human being is that if we take up a spiritual path, commit ourselves to a spiritual path such as Buddhism or Buddha-dharma, each of them develops or emerges into a spiritual strength: feeling develops into shraddha or faith – not blind faith or andha shraddha, but faith that is informed and supported by reason, experience and intuition. Thinking develops, as a result of spiritual practice and study, into prajna, or wisdom; sensation develops into viriya or spiritual energy, energy in pursuit of the Good. Intuition develops into what has been called Holistic Guidance, or the guidance that comes from an integrated mind.
What do we mean by an integrated mind? Well, here we owe it to Sigmund Freud, the father of modern psychiatry, for making the idea of the subconscious scientifically respectable. You have all heard of the iceberg. The titanic hit one of them and sank. So the remarkable thing about icebergs is that only one tenth of them is visible above the water. The remaining nine-tenths is invisible, under the water. So it is with our minds. This is what Freud discovered. Most people are unaware of the depths of their own mind since most of it is unconscious, systematically repressed. We remain unaware of it until and unless we begin to meditate. So an integrated mind is your ordinary mind integrated with what was previously subconscious and also, we may say, integrated with the superconcious meditative states known as the dhyanas or jhanas.
But to return to Carl Gustav Jung and the faculties; these faculties, which everyone has to some extent, can be developed if only we get proper instruction, proper spiritual education, and set to work to develop our own minds.
Now of course you may say “But what if I do not have a healthy mind? What if I am suffering from envy, jealousy, anger, confusion and so on?” Well your first task is to find a spiritual friend, someone who has already made some progress the path of spiritual development. They will help you to overcome your negative mental states. To be human means to suffer from greed, hatred and delusion. These are known as the kleshas. Everyone has them. If you don’t have them, you are already Enlightened! So your spiritual friend, your Kalyana mitra or mentor, will show you the path by which they are developing themselves, and encourage you to take up that path.
Now as you probably know, there are some people whose mental condition is so severe that they are not capable of taking up a spiritual path. In that case they will have to seek professional help, and even take medication. Serotonin re-uptake inhibitors are often prescribed in cases of chronic depression. Other counsellors advocate mindfulness-based cognitive therapy, which is said to be more effective than the use of drugs in the treatment of mental health.
There is also the question of the stigma associated with mental health issues. But unless you are clinically depressed, or have some other really serious and heavy mental illness, you do not need to go to a therapist. You can take up the practice of meditation and start cultivating a healthy mind. No-one will blame you for that. They will even respect you for taking up a spiritual path of self-development, development of your own mind.
One of the difficulties with psychology is that it focuses on mental illness. Also, there is no general agreement amongst psychologists concerning the nature of the human mind. And without understanding the nature of the mind, it is not really possible to provide an adequate explanation of human experience and to point a way from dukkha to happiness, let alone to Enlightenment.
Western psychology, we can say, has done much good, but it has also created much confusion. Increasingly with many westerners, it is the encounter with Buddhism that brings real understanding and illumination. And Buddhism, of course, began with the greatest of the spiritual teachers of India, the sage of the Shakyas, the human, historical Buddha.
What many psychologists, psychiatrists and counsellors, to their credit, nowadays, is to point their clients to a spiritual path. Which spiritual path they point to will of course depend on their own shraddha, their own belief in a particular spiritual teacher or teaching, their faith in one particular dharma or another. And as you well know, in India there are a very large number of dharmas, some being invented almost on a daily basis.
Buddhism, the Buddha-dharma, cuts through this knot of confusion and conflicting views, conflicting drshtis, mithyadrstis, false views as directly as possible in the first two verses of the Dhammapada, a well-known collection of verses uttered by the Shakyamuni in the early stages of his teaching.
“Experiences are preceded by mind, led by mind, and produced by mind. If one speaks or acts with an impure mind, suffering follows
even as the cart-wheel follows the hoof of the ox.”
“Experiences are preceded by mind, led by mind, and produced by mind. If one speaks or acts with a pure mind, happiness follows
like a shadow that never departs”
Buddhism speaks therefore, generally speaking, not so much in terms of mental health, but rather in terms of mental states, states either unskilful or skilful, akusala or kusala. A mental state is kusala if it tends towards happiness, towards the relief of suffering, and akusala if it tends to produce unhappiness or dukkha, mental pain, mental suffering.
Of course, you may say, we may say, that a problem immediately arises: does Buddhism assert that all mental disease is the outcome of unskilful actions, akusala karmas? No, that is not so. Buddhism freely acknowledges that much mental illness has as its basis, as its origin, chemical and physiological factors. In which case, it might be wholly appropriate, for instance, to prescribe serotonin uptake inhibitors in cases of acute depression, bipolar or boundary personality disorders.
Such diagnoses and prescriptions do not however provide complete, long-term solutions to the human condition. They seek merely to return the patient to a supposed “normal”, or to a condition in which they are able to function relatively straightforwardly in ordinary society. But part of the problem is that society itself is sick. So for Buddhism there can be no question of trying to return someone to the condition of people in ordinary society. Buddhism speaks in terms of creating a community of like-minded people, a sangha, a spiritual community.
Therefore what Buddhism sees is needed for someone suffering from their mental states is a spiritual friend or kalyana mitra, who helps them to take up a path of personal, mental and spiritual development. Such a path may well include counselling, music therapy and art therapy, but it will take you much, much further. It will lead to a state of complete psycho-spiritual integration and ultimately to samyak sambodhi, a state of enlightenment that involves the realisation of profound wisdom and compassion for all that lives.
So everyone could be said to have mental health issues. To be merely human means that you suffer from your own mental states. No one but a fully and perfectly Enlightened person is entirely free from negative mental states at all times. What do I mean by negative mental states? The poisons of greed hatred and delusion. All human beings suffer from them to a greater or lesser extent, but there is a way out.
A few weeks ago, I posted this comment on my Facebook page:
“It is by not understanding, not realising, not admitting that one’s own mind is from time to time poisoned by greed, hatred and delusion that unskilful and false ideas such as racial hatred, caste, and all kinds of suffering continue to arise."
"So long as one does not recognise the mental poisons in one's own mind whenever they arise, they continue to be produced and to cause personal and interpersonal suffering, personal and interpersonal pain, strife and misunderstanding. It is in this sort of way that the whole mass of worldly suffering rolls on without perceptible beginning or end."
"It is by feeling, by seeing, by experiencing, realising and admitting to oneself that one’s own mind is indeed from time to time poisoned by false, deluded ideas, by repeating false ideas and mantras that the process of mental purification can begin, and the path to Enlightenment opens.”
To put it simply, even if one is not suffering from a clinically diagnosed mental illness, it is very likely that from time to time you will experience negative, harmful and poisonous mental states. If by honest introspection or by the practice of meditation you are able to see this, to admit this, the path of mental development is open. If you are so conceited as to think your mind is always completely pure, then it is unlikely that you will have recourse to Buddhist thought or practice.
Now I want just to mention very briefly a few other important teachings of Buddha-dharma before inviting questions and offering answers.
First, the two arrows of suffering, or two kinds of pain, two kinds of dukkha. The first is ordinary physical pain such as burning your finger on a hot cooking utensil. The second is mental pain; the anxiety and worry about such things as status in society, worry about disease and death and so on.
This is the second arrow, and Buddha-dharma states very clearly that it can be removed. It can be removed by proper spiritual education and meditation.
Then there is the question of duality and non-duality. People are often puzzled by this. They ask: is the universe dualistic or monistic? Does it consist of two principles, mind and matter, good and evil, life and death, and so on. Buddhism’s answer to such questions is that the universe can be both dualistic and monistic, depending on your point of view. The ultimate answer to such a question can be arrived at only by gaining Enlightenment.
This brings us to the teaching of the Middle Way, the madhyama marga. It is said to be the very earliest teaching of the Buddha, the very earliest explanation he gave of how he gained Enlightenment. Before his enlightenment he practised the path of self-punishment, which was the popular idea of how to relieve the soul from suffering. His self-punishment, it’s said, became famous all over India like the sound of a great bell sounding in the blue sky. But it did not bring him enlightenment; it brought him near to death, so he gave it up as useless. He also stopped starving himself and started taking proper food again.
At this point his five companions, the parivrajakas, left him in disgust, thinking he had stopped leading the spiritual life. But Siddhartha – he was not yet the Buddha – remembered an experience he had when he was a boy. He was seated with his back against a tree watching his father, Rajah Suddhodana, ploughing a field. He began to feel very blissful, and time seemed to stand still. The stories say that the sun stood still over the tree, but this is not to be understood literally. It means that the boy went into a sort of trance state, a state that later came to be known as jhana or dhyana, a meditative state of deep absorption. So Siddhartha remembered this and thought to himself “Ah, perhaps that is the way to Enlightenment”
So to cut a long story very short, following this method he gained Enlightenment while sitting one full-moon night under the Bodhi tree in what is now known as Bodh Gaya.
After his Enlightenment he went in search of the five parivrajakas to tell them what he had discovered, but at first they refused to believe him. You have left the proper path, they said. but the Buddha replied that no, he had not left the proper path. He was now following, he said, a middle way, a way between the extremes on the one hand of self-punishment and on the other of self-indulgence. By following this Middle Way, he said, he had gained the highest spiritual realisation, samyak sambodhi.
His appearance and manner, serious and happy, even radiant, eventually persuaded the parivrajakas that he was indeed Enlightened, and his teaching of the Middle Way became famous. It was by no means the only teaching that he gave, but that is how he began.
So it is possible to answer a number of important questions by applying this teaching of the Middle Way: for instance, what is the Middle Way in psychology? Do human beings have a soul, an atman, or not? The answer can be given that yes, they have an atman, a personality or soul, but it is constantly changing, it is not fixed as is taught in the Hindu shastras, in the Bhagavad Gita and so on. Because selfhood is changeable, it means we can gain Enlightenment!
Then the middle way in ethics: is what is called karma, willed actions, like fate, unchangeable, or do our unskilful thoughts and actions have no effect on our future? The answer is that our actions do indeed have effects in the future, but those effects can be balanced or counteracted by skilful actions. With this in mind, it is possible to gain Nirvana, the transcendence of all mundane states of mind and being.
The Buddha’s famous Noble Eightfold Path is a detailed working out of that Middle Way, but we haven’t got time to go into that now.
Then the middle way in philosophy; the Buddha was not too concerned with philosophy, he was more concerned with the relief of suffering, but some of his followers were, and still are very concerned, very worried about what is ultimately real. Is the universe mind or matter? Is it completely real or totally unreal, just an illusion? Does it really exist?
The middle way here is that what we call existence is neither totally real nor totally unreal. Our understanding of what is real develops, unfolds, according to the depth of our spiritual realisation, deepens according to our emerging prajna. The Enlightened mind sees the world as neither completely real nor totally illusory. It sees the world with the eye of compassion, pointing out what is false and affirming what is true, what leads to the eradication of suffering, and to the attainment of happiness and ultimately, Nirvana.
Just a few more points and we will conclude. Buddhism affirms that is is possible to remove oneself from a state of mind that sees the world as a problem. One does that by practising a middle way that leads to awakening from our fears and fantasies about life.
Attaining that dynamic state of being, one’s mind becomes calm and clear, in a state of equanimity or upekkha, a state which cannot be disturbed by anything happening in the world. It is attained not merely by reflecting on the real truth, but by practising deep meditation in accordance with the Buddha’s teachings.
Two more points. First, you might ask what are the consequences of not adopting, not taking up the spiritual path taught by the Buddha? Well, it is hardly possible to say what will happen, but is very unlikely, perhaps impossible, that you will attain spiritual Enlightenment. you may occasionally be happy, but unlikely to find complete fulfilment of your human potential.
Lastly, a simple question: how can I change my life for the better? The answer is simple but difficult to follow. The story is told of a great Buddhist master who went to China. The Chinese emperor wanted to have a good argument with him and invited him to the palace. He asks the Indian meditation master: now tell me the principles of Buddhism. “The principles of Buddhism?” says the master. “Let me see. Cease to do evil, learn to do good, purify the heart”. The Chinese emperor was very disappointed. He says “But even a child of seven can understand that!” “Yes” says the Master, looking directly at the Emperor, “A child of seven can understand that, but even an old man of seventy cannot practice it” Thus, it’s said, was Zen Buddhism introduced to China.
The path of Buddhism therefore requires deep and sincere commitment. It needs faith, faith supported by reason, by experience, and by intuition.
So there we are. I hope I have given you some idea of what it means to follow a spiritual path, in particular the path of Buddhism. I hope I have helped you to worry less about your mental states and to take up the best path of personal, of spiritual development, the path taught by Shakyamuni the Buddha.
I am going to conclude by reading a poem entitled Meditation, by my Buddhist teacher and kalyana mitra Urgyen Sangharakshita:
Here perpetual incense burns,
The heart to meditation turns,
And all delights and passions spurns.
A thousand brilliant hues arise,
More lovely than the evening skies,
And pictures paint before our eyes.
All the spirit's storm and stress
Is stilled into a nothingness,
And healing powers descend and bless.
Refreshed, we rise and turn again
To mingle with this world of pain,
As on roses falls the rain.
******************************
Friends, I am going to be speaking to you today in English, kyonki mera hindee aur maraathee keval ek do shabd hain.
I would like first of all to thank Narayani and my Baba ki Pathshaala friends for giving me the opportunity to speak to you all. I am very fond of Indian and Indians. I was resident in Pune for four years from 1982 and have visited India many, many times times since. I always enjoy meeting Indian people. I find them very open, friendly and full of goodwill.
I am also not unaware of the terrible difficulties caused by the caste system that has divided Indian society. It is not possible even to mention the word caste or jati without opening a window to pain in people’s minds.
There will be opportunities for you to ask for clarification and put questions to me after I have presented my paper, which will last about 30 minutes.
It was interesting listening to your two main speakers yesterday. It occurred to me that they were both specialists, both knowledgeable and practised in their own fields: one in psychiatry and counselling, the other in Music.
In Buddhism we take a rather different approach. We say that to be a true individual, you should develop not only your strengths but improve your weaker faculties, so that you become a well-rounded human being, and eventually one who realises samyak sambodhi or full and perfect Enlightenment.
A word or two about faculties. Here I follow Carl Gustav Jung, my favourite western psychologist and philosopher of the last century. He spoke of a healthy human being having four chief faculties: feeling, thinking, sensation and intuition. I think you all probably understand what the first three are. The fourth, intuition, is rather more difficult to describe and define. It is the ability to reach valid conclusions without conscious deliberation, conscious reasoning. One could say your unconscious provides the answer in a flash.
The really interesting thing about these four faculties of the healthy human being is that if we take up a spiritual path, commit ourselves to a spiritual path such as Buddhism or Buddha-dharma, each of them develops or emerges into a spiritual strength: feeling develops into shraddha or faith – not blind faith or andha shraddha, but faith that is informed and supported by reason, experience and intuition. Thinking develops, as a result of spiritual practice and study, into prajna, or wisdom; sensation develops into viriya or spiritual energy, energy in pursuit of the Good. Intuition develops into what has been called Holistic Guidance, or the guidance that comes from an integrated mind.
What do we mean by an integrated mind? Well, here we owe it to Sigmund Freud, the father of modern psychiatry, for making the idea of the subconscious scientifically respectable. You have all heard of the iceberg. The titanic hit one of them and sank. So the remarkable thing about icebergs is that only one tenth of them is visible above the water. The remaining nine-tenths is invisible, under the water. So it is with our minds. This is what Freud discovered. Most people are unaware of the depths of their own mind since most of it is unconscious, systematically repressed. We remain unaware of it until and unless we begin to meditate. So an integrated mind is your ordinary mind integrated with what was previously subconscious and also, we may say, integrated with the superconcious meditative states known as the dhyanas or jhanas.
But to return to Carl Gustav Jung and the faculties; these faculties, which everyone has to some extent, can be developed if only we get proper instruction, proper spiritual education, and set to work to develop our own minds.
Now of course you may say “But what if I do not have a healthy mind? What if I am suffering from envy, jealousy, anger, confusion and so on?” Well your first task is to find a spiritual friend, someone who has already made some progress the path of spiritual development. They will help you to overcome your negative mental states. To be human means to suffer from greed, hatred and delusion. These are known as the kleshas. Everyone has them. If you don’t have them, you are already Enlightened! So your spiritual friend, your Kalyana mitra or mentor, will show you the path by which they are developing themselves, and encourage you to take up that path.
Now as you probably know, there are some people whose mental condition is so severe that they are not capable of taking up a spiritual path. In that case they will have to seek professional help, and even take medication. Serotonin re-uptake inhibitors are often prescribed in cases of chronic depression. Other counsellors advocate mindfulness-based cognitive therapy, which is said to be more effective than the use of drugs in the treatment of mental health.
There is also the question of the stigma associated with mental health issues. But unless you are clinically depressed, or have some other really serious and heavy mental illness, you do not need to go to a therapist. You can take up the practice of meditation and start cultivating a healthy mind. No-one will blame you for that. They will even respect you for taking up a spiritual path of self-development, development of your own mind.
One of the difficulties with psychology is that it focuses on mental illness. Also, there is no general agreement amongst psychologists concerning the nature of the human mind. And without understanding the nature of the mind, it is not really possible to provide an adequate explanation of human experience and to point a way from dukkha to happiness, let alone to Enlightenment.
Western psychology, we can say, has done much good, but it has also created much confusion. Increasingly with many westerners, it is the encounter with Buddhism that brings real understanding and illumination. And Buddhism, of course, began with the greatest of the spiritual teachers of India, the sage of the Shakyas, the human, historical Buddha.
What many psychologists, psychiatrists and counsellors, to their credit, nowadays, is to point their clients to a spiritual path. Which spiritual path they point to will of course depend on their own shraddha, their own belief in a particular spiritual teacher or teaching, their faith in one particular dharma or another. And as you well know, in India there are a very large number of dharmas, some being invented almost on a daily basis.
Buddhism, the Buddha-dharma, cuts through this knot of confusion and conflicting views, conflicting drshtis, mithyadrstis, false views as directly as possible in the first two verses of the Dhammapada, a well-known collection of verses uttered by the Shakyamuni in the early stages of his teaching.
“Experiences are preceded by mind, led by mind, and produced by mind. If one speaks or acts with an impure mind, suffering follows
even as the cart-wheel follows the hoof of the ox.”
“Experiences are preceded by mind, led by mind, and produced by mind. If one speaks or acts with a pure mind, happiness follows
like a shadow that never departs”
Buddhism speaks therefore, generally speaking, not so much in terms of mental health, but rather in terms of mental states, states either unskilful or skilful, akusala or kusala. A mental state is kusala if it tends towards happiness, towards the relief of suffering, and akusala if it tends to produce unhappiness or dukkha, mental pain, mental suffering.
Of course, you may say, we may say, that a problem immediately arises: does Buddhism assert that all mental disease is the outcome of unskilful actions, akusala karmas? No, that is not so. Buddhism freely acknowledges that much mental illness has as its basis, as its origin, chemical and physiological factors. In which case, it might be wholly appropriate, for instance, to prescribe serotonin uptake inhibitors in cases of acute depression, bipolar or boundary personality disorders.
Such diagnoses and prescriptions do not however provide complete, long-term solutions to the human condition. They seek merely to return the patient to a supposed “normal”, or to a condition in which they are able to function relatively straightforwardly in ordinary society. But part of the problem is that society itself is sick. So for Buddhism there can be no question of trying to return someone to the condition of people in ordinary society. Buddhism speaks in terms of creating a community of like-minded people, a sangha, a spiritual community.
Therefore what Buddhism sees is needed for someone suffering from their mental states is a spiritual friend or kalyana mitra, who helps them to take up a path of personal, mental and spiritual development. Such a path may well include counselling, music therapy and art therapy, but it will take you much, much further. It will lead to a state of complete psycho-spiritual integration and ultimately to samyak sambodhi, a state of enlightenment that involves the realisation of profound wisdom and compassion for all that lives.
So everyone could be said to have mental health issues. To be merely human means that you suffer from your own mental states. No one but a fully and perfectly Enlightened person is entirely free from negative mental states at all times. What do I mean by negative mental states? The poisons of greed hatred and delusion. All human beings suffer from them to a greater or lesser extent, but there is a way out.
A few weeks ago, I posted this comment on my Facebook page:
“It is by not understanding, not realising, not admitting that one’s own mind is from time to time poisoned by greed, hatred and delusion that unskilful and false ideas such as racial hatred, caste, and all kinds of suffering continue to arise."
"So long as one does not recognise the mental poisons in one's own mind whenever they arise, they continue to be produced and to cause personal and interpersonal suffering, personal and interpersonal pain, strife and misunderstanding. It is in this sort of way that the whole mass of worldly suffering rolls on without perceptible beginning or end."
"It is by feeling, by seeing, by experiencing, realising and admitting to oneself that one’s own mind is indeed from time to time poisoned by false, deluded ideas, by repeating false ideas and mantras that the process of mental purification can begin, and the path to Enlightenment opens.”
To put it simply, even if one is not suffering from a clinically diagnosed mental illness, it is very likely that from time to time you will experience negative, harmful and poisonous mental states. If by honest introspection or by the practice of meditation you are able to see this, to admit this, the path of mental development is open. If you are so conceited as to think your mind is always completely pure, then it is unlikely that you will have recourse to Buddhist thought or practice.
Now I want just to mention very briefly a few other important teachings of Buddha-dharma before inviting questions and offering answers.
First, the two arrows of suffering, or two kinds of pain, two kinds of dukkha. The first is ordinary physical pain such as burning your finger on a hot cooking utensil. The second is mental pain; the anxiety and worry about such things as status in society, worry about disease and death and so on.
This is the second arrow, and Buddha-dharma states very clearly that it can be removed. It can be removed by proper spiritual education and meditation.
Then there is the question of duality and non-duality. People are often puzzled by this. They ask: is the universe dualistic or monistic? Does it consist of two principles, mind and matter, good and evil, life and death, and so on. Buddhism’s answer to such questions is that the universe can be both dualistic and monistic, depending on your point of view. The ultimate answer to such a question can be arrived at only by gaining Enlightenment.
This brings us to the teaching of the Middle Way, the madhyama marga. It is said to be the very earliest teaching of the Buddha, the very earliest explanation he gave of how he gained Enlightenment. Before his enlightenment he practised the path of self-punishment, which was the popular idea of how to relieve the soul from suffering. His self-punishment, it’s said, became famous all over India like the sound of a great bell sounding in the blue sky. But it did not bring him enlightenment; it brought him near to death, so he gave it up as useless. He also stopped starving himself and started taking proper food again.
At this point his five companions, the parivrajakas, left him in disgust, thinking he had stopped leading the spiritual life. But Siddhartha – he was not yet the Buddha – remembered an experience he had when he was a boy. He was seated with his back against a tree watching his father, Rajah Suddhodana, ploughing a field. He began to feel very blissful, and time seemed to stand still. The stories say that the sun stood still over the tree, but this is not to be understood literally. It means that the boy went into a sort of trance state, a state that later came to be known as jhana or dhyana, a meditative state of deep absorption. So Siddhartha remembered this and thought to himself “Ah, perhaps that is the way to Enlightenment”
So to cut a long story very short, following this method he gained Enlightenment while sitting one full-moon night under the Bodhi tree in what is now known as Bodh Gaya.
After his Enlightenment he went in search of the five parivrajakas to tell them what he had discovered, but at first they refused to believe him. You have left the proper path, they said. but the Buddha replied that no, he had not left the proper path. He was now following, he said, a middle way, a way between the extremes on the one hand of self-punishment and on the other of self-indulgence. By following this Middle Way, he said, he had gained the highest spiritual realisation, samyak sambodhi.
His appearance and manner, serious and happy, even radiant, eventually persuaded the parivrajakas that he was indeed Enlightened, and his teaching of the Middle Way became famous. It was by no means the only teaching that he gave, but that is how he began.
So it is possible to answer a number of important questions by applying this teaching of the Middle Way: for instance, what is the Middle Way in psychology? Do human beings have a soul, an atman, or not? The answer can be given that yes, they have an atman, a personality or soul, but it is constantly changing, it is not fixed as is taught in the Hindu shastras, in the Bhagavad Gita and so on. Because selfhood is changeable, it means we can gain Enlightenment!
Then the middle way in ethics: is what is called karma, willed actions, like fate, unchangeable, or do our unskilful thoughts and actions have no effect on our future? The answer is that our actions do indeed have effects in the future, but those effects can be balanced or counteracted by skilful actions. With this in mind, it is possible to gain Nirvana, the transcendence of all mundane states of mind and being.
The Buddha’s famous Noble Eightfold Path is a detailed working out of that Middle Way, but we haven’t got time to go into that now.
Then the middle way in philosophy; the Buddha was not too concerned with philosophy, he was more concerned with the relief of suffering, but some of his followers were, and still are very concerned, very worried about what is ultimately real. Is the universe mind or matter? Is it completely real or totally unreal, just an illusion? Does it really exist?
The middle way here is that what we call existence is neither totally real nor totally unreal. Our understanding of what is real develops, unfolds, according to the depth of our spiritual realisation, deepens according to our emerging prajna. The Enlightened mind sees the world as neither completely real nor totally illusory. It sees the world with the eye of compassion, pointing out what is false and affirming what is true, what leads to the eradication of suffering, and to the attainment of happiness and ultimately, Nirvana.
Just a few more points and we will conclude. Buddhism affirms that is is possible to remove oneself from a state of mind that sees the world as a problem. One does that by practising a middle way that leads to awakening from our fears and fantasies about life.
Attaining that dynamic state of being, one’s mind becomes calm and clear, in a state of equanimity or upekkha, a state which cannot be disturbed by anything happening in the world. It is attained not merely by reflecting on the real truth, but by practising deep meditation in accordance with the Buddha’s teachings.
Two more points. First, you might ask what are the consequences of not adopting, not taking up the spiritual path taught by the Buddha? Well, it is hardly possible to say what will happen, but is very unlikely, perhaps impossible, that you will attain spiritual Enlightenment. you may occasionally be happy, but unlikely to find complete fulfilment of your human potential.
Lastly, a simple question: how can I change my life for the better? The answer is simple but difficult to follow. The story is told of a great Buddhist master who went to China. The Chinese emperor wanted to have a good argument with him and invited him to the palace. He asks the Indian meditation master: now tell me the principles of Buddhism. “The principles of Buddhism?” says the master. “Let me see. Cease to do evil, learn to do good, purify the heart”. The Chinese emperor was very disappointed. He says “But even a child of seven can understand that!” “Yes” says the Master, looking directly at the Emperor, “A child of seven can understand that, but even an old man of seventy cannot practice it” Thus, it’s said, was Zen Buddhism introduced to China.
The path of Buddhism therefore requires deep and sincere commitment. It needs faith, faith supported by reason, by experience, and by intuition.
So there we are. I hope I have given you some idea of what it means to follow a spiritual path, in particular the path of Buddhism. I hope I have helped you to worry less about your mental states and to take up the best path of personal, of spiritual development, the path taught by Shakyamuni the Buddha.
I am going to conclude by reading a poem entitled Meditation, by my Buddhist teacher and kalyana mitra Urgyen Sangharakshita:
Here perpetual incense burns,
The heart to meditation turns,
And all delights and passions spurns.
A thousand brilliant hues arise,
More lovely than the evening skies,
And pictures paint before our eyes.
All the spirit's storm and stress
Is stilled into a nothingness,
And healing powers descend and bless.
Refreshed, we rise and turn again
To mingle with this world of pain,
As on roses falls the rain.
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