One moment we are “pathing,” only in the next to find ourselves “stuck” and “blocked.” We may not have lost our sense of purpose and direction, but feel incapable of making any headway. It is as though a barrier has been placed across our path and we can find no way to surmount it. We feel hindered, trapped, frustrated. The more we struggle to be free of the obstacle, the more we seem to bang our head against a wall. It is as though Mara deliberately puts immovable objects in our way to frustrate our aspirations. We find ourselves paralyzed by an obsession or fear, we meet with accidents and calamities, we are debilitated by diseases and the ravages of ageing.
Progress along the Buddhist path to awakening is said to be “obstructed” by the devil of compulsions. A compulsion is any mental or emotional state that, on breaking into consciousness, disturbs and captivates us. Whether inflamed by anger or inflated by pride, we feel ill at ease and hemmed in. A compulsion encloses us within its boundaries. When overwhelmed by depression, not only are we inwardly sunk in despair but whatever we see, hear, and touch is abhorrent.
Shantideva compares compulsions to “bands of thieves” who lie in wait for an opportunity to invade us and “steal the treasures” of our minds. As soon as there is a lapse in self-awareness, a compulsive thought or image is liable to erupt, triggering a torrent of longing or despair that leaves us rattled and bewildered. As creatures of Mara, compulsions act as if they were autonomous forces. We suffer anxiety or panic “attacks” and feel overwhelmed by unwelcome thoughts. We are seized by feelings and images that we cannot seem to shake off.
The depiction of Mara as an autonomous being who argues with Buddha illustrates how such drives feel as though they happen to one. I do not choose to be lustful, lethargic, conceited, or deluded; I find myself feeling that way. I do not decide in advance to think a thought; it comes to me as a ready-made phrase. I talk of “my” desires, “my” fears, and “my” doubts as though I somehow owned and controlled them. But when I try to let go of them, I find that it is not so much I who have them, but they who have me.
Compulsions obstruct the path by monopolizing consciousness. The hypnotic fascination they exert prevents us from attending to anything else. We behave like a rabbit dazzled by the headlights of a car. Not only do compulsions make us lose sight of our goal, they inwardly paralyze us. To escape their grip does not entail suppressing them but creating a space in which we are freed to let them go and they are freed to disappear. “As soon as I know the mind is distorted,” says Shantideva, “I should remain as steady as a log.” Without condoning or condemning what is breaking into consciousness, calmly note that an emotionally charged complex of phrases and images has erupted. You do not have to think of it as “me” or “mine.” Having arisen of its own accord, it will pass away of its own accord. Given the space to do so, a compulsion frees itself.
Compulsions not only disturb and enclose, they distort. The emotion of hatred is not possible without a perception of the other as hateful. Everything about the person is repellent: the slant of his mouth, the shrug of his shoulders, the tone of his voice, the cut of his suit. Although he has a wife, children, and friends, it is inconceivable that they could love such a man. A compulsive feeling about someone encloses him or her inside a frozen image.
Such compelling perceptions are rooted in the innate conviction that reality is composed of discrete, fixed units designed to attract, repel, or bore us, while the self who is attracted, repelled, or bored is a separate entity standing aloof and independent. This conviction is so embedded in human consciousness that it is hard to imagine how it could ever be completely uprooted. It is where Mara holds us most tightly in his grip. By paying careful, sustained attention to the fluid and contingent nature of things, we can begin to ease ourselves free of his mesmerizing gaze. The emptiness in which Buddha abides is the space wherein that conviction has lost its potency and thereby its ability to obstruct us.
Once revealed for what it is, the world is opened up as tentative and contingent, impossible to pin down as “this” or “that,” “me” or “mine.” A thing is what it is not because of an irreducible essence that marks it off from other things but because of the complex and singular relationships that enable it to emerge with its own unique character from the matrices of a contingent world. To emerge contingently like this is what it means for a thing or a person to be “empty.”
For the second-century-CE Indian philosopher Nagarjuna, such contingency is emptiness. And that emptiness is the middle way. Thus emptiness is a path. It is that open and unfettered space that frees us to respond from a liberating perspective rather than react from a fixed position. It is the absence of resistance in the heart of life itself that allows the boundless diversity of phenomena to pour forth in creative profusion and abundance.
10
From Home to Homelessness
WHEN I LOSE my way in a strange land, I lose not only my bearings and freedom to move, but also my connection with others. As soon as I realize I am lost, I feel isolated and alone. The path may have been my sole link to humankind. I might not have seen another person for days, but only when the path disappears am I overcome by loneliness. As a gap between things wide enough for people to pass, a path humanizes the landscape. Lights on a distant hill reveal more than a destination; they connect me with those who lit them.
A path is nothing in itself. It is the impression left by the tread of feet of those who went before. The relief of recovering a path is that of being reconnected with others like myself. Not only can I resume an unimpeded journey to its goal, but I have returned to the fold of my kin. A freshly discarded bottle is as reassuring as a signpost or a bridge. For a path is an inter-subjective space. Its free and purposive trajectory is created and maintained by those who use it. Leave it for a year or two, and grasses and weeds will reclaim it. As you walk along a path, you are indebted to every man, woman, child, and dog who preceded you. And each time you place a foot on the ground, you maintain the path for those who will follow. In pushing aside a fallen branch, you take responsibility for those who will come later.
The path evokes an early memory of humankind. For we are nomads, refugees, immigrants, wanderers across the surface of this earth. We come from elsewhere. As creatures in constant motion, we are restless, rarely at ease when standing still. We reject one place in favor of another and move on. We flee catastrophes, tyrannies, and wars. Whether in search of food, work, safety, or meaning, we set out on trails left by others or blaze trails of our own. Wherever we leave our mark—be it on a physical or cultural landscape—we allow the possibility of a path to emerge.
Buddha described commitment to the path as “going forth” from home to homelessness. “In a home,” he said, “life is stifled in an atmosphere of dust. But life gone forth is open wide.” “Going forth” traditionally refers to the renunciation of household life by a monk or nun, but to an unsettled generation, it is simply a reminder of the human condition. “The foxes have holes,” said Jesus, “and the birds of the air have nests; but the Son of man hath not where to lay his head.” A sentient being on a ball of rock and mud hurtling through space, who is skeptical about the promises of religion, need not aspire to homelessness.
Homelessness strikes us each time we see through the diabolic illusion of the world as a home that provides security and well-being. Every place that offers itself as a final abode will fail to live up to its promise. Either we will find ourselves frustrated and ensnared by it or will be evicted from it at death. To commit oneself to a path is to abandon the consolations of settling down. One accepts a nomadic destiny in the company of those with whom one is bound by this common fate.
“Narrow is the way,” says Jesus, “which leadeth unto life, and few there be that find it.” But having found the path is no guarantee that I will not lose it. You might once have stumbled across it by chance, only to spend the rest of your life trying to find it again. You were convinced you had discovered a path only to find y
ourself tracing another circle. Buddha recognized that it was not enough to find the path. One had to cultivate it.
The Pali and Sanskrit word for “cultivation” is bhavana. The root of bhavana is bhu, which means “to be.” Bhavana means “bringing into being” or “allowing into being.” To cultivate a path is to bring its free, purposive, and shared space into being. It is a creative task. As in growing a plant, one creates the conditions that allow it to unfold. By preparing the ground, planting seed, providing sunlight and water, we create a golden field of wheat. Something that previously was not there is now abundantly present.
A path is created by clarifying one’s aims and removing what gets in the way of their realization. It is carved from commitment and opened up by letting go. It entails both doing something and allowing something to happen. A path is both a task and a gift. In exerting too much control, one inhibits its spontaneous unfolding, whereas just by letting everything be, one loses sight of a guiding vision. The art of creating a path is to do neither too much nor too little.
As Ch’an (Zen) Buddhism evolved in China, the notion of the path became divided along these lines. Those who saw the path primarily as a task described it as a gradual series of steps leading to a goal. Those who saw it primarily as a gift envisioned it as a sudden and unpredictable eruption of freedom and insight. The “gradual” path is a trajectory that develops over time; the “sudden” path is an open space in which we are freed to act as the spirit moves us. The gradual path is accomplished by commitment and discipline; the sudden path is beyond the reach of training and seems to burst forth without effort. Creating a path is like learning to play a piano. It may require years of discipline to achieve technical mastery of the instrument, but for the music to come alive requires a sensibility and inspiration that cannot be learned.
As we learn to play this complex instrument of bones, flesh, nerves, impulses, thoughts, and feelings, we trace a path that weaves its way like a channel through the landscape of our experience. It is guided by an intuitive yearning for what we value most deeply; its space is the openness we are able to tolerate within our hearts and minds; it is sustained by the networks of friendship that inspire us to keep going. The path follows the contours of our life as one day turns into the next. It is found amidst the most mundane of circumstances as well as the most sublime. Then we lose it as the story we tell ourselves about ourselves veers off onto another track. Then we find it again. And lose it again.
The path is more than just a task and a gift. In linking one with others, it is also a bond. The path unfolds not only within the depths of the soul but also through words and deeds in the world. It extends beyond us through the relationships that connect us to others. Our life is our passage through the world we share. Long after we are gone, that path may still be discerned in the traces we left in those we knew and in the things we created and transformed.
The Tibetans translated bhavana as sgom, which means to “become familiar” with something. To create a path is to become intimate with the space opening up within, around, and before us. This intimacy comes from mindful awareness of what is unfolding in our body, feelings, minds, and worlds from moment to moment. We get used to the taste, the feel, the texture of the path. It ceases to be something to which we self-consciously aspire. When we stray from it, we feel its loss as an act of self-betrayal.
The Buddhist path extends back two and a half thousand years to Gotama, in whose footsteps numerous generations have followed. It has survived only because people have accomplished its tasks, enjoyed its gifts, and forged its bonds within their lives. If it is to continue into the future, the responsibility lies with those who practice it now. As a shared space, it is contingent on those who tread it. If one generation fails, its fragile openness may be lost.
Yet the well-intentioned urge to preserve a religion runs the risk of mummifying it. Although you might succeed in preserving its institutions and dogmas for a while, you cannot preserve a path any more than you can preserve the current of a river or the whistling of a wind. Insidiously, Mara attempts to secure what by nature is open and fluid. The survival of a path is achieved not by preserving it but by walking it—even when you have no clear idea of where it will lead.
As religions grow from humble beginnings into churches and orthodoxies, the narrow path turns into a brightly lit highway. The risk of embarking on a journey into the unknown is replaced by the confidence of setting off on a well-planned excursion. Homelessness starts to feel like home again. The freedom of the open road is replaced by the drudgery of repeating a cycle of routines. As we proceed along the well-trodden paths of Buddhism, Christianity, Judaism, or Islam, we may begin to weary of their certainties. Perilous trails that branch off the main track and peter out in the anarchy of wilderness catch our attention. We realize that the path we are taking might disappear into a pathless land.
11
What Is This Thing?
AS AN UNIMPEDED SPACE that allows you to go beyond compulsive fixations, a path takes you into unfamiliar territory, where questions begin to outnumber answers, and uncertainty prevails over certainty. The conviction of being a necessary and isolated self is replaced by the perplexity of being a contingent and relational self moving inexorably toward its own end. The path’s empty space is animated by a growing awareness of how mysterious and inexplicable it is to be here at all.
Around the turn of the eighth century in China, a young monk called Huai-jang left his monastery on Mount Sung and headed south for Mount Ts’ao-ch’i, a journey of several hundred miles. When he reached Ts’ao-ch’i, he went to Nan-hua Monastery and was introduced to Hui-neng, the sixth patriarch of the Ch’an (Zen) school.
“Where did you come from?” asked Hui-neng.
“Mount Sung,” said Huai-jang.
“But what is this thing?” said Hui-neng. “How did it get here?”
Huai-jang was speechless. The exchange of social niceties had turned into something unsettling. Huai-jang remained on Mount Ts’ao-ch’i with this question for the next eight years.
Five hundred years later, in thirteenth century Japan, Zen master Dogen declared Hui-neng’s “What is this thing?” to be the nature of Buddha. Since the process of awakening begins with questioning one’s existence, one’s buddhanature is most adequately expressed as an interrogative. The path opens up as soon as one’s life is exposed as a question rather than a bundle of more or less interesting facts. This questioning is not intellectual curiosity. Zen speaks of it being asked through one’s skin and bones. It seizes the body and emotions as urgently as it grips the mind. You cannot reflect on it from a comfortable distance. It is inseparable from everything you are.
To question like this is to let go of opinions and remain suspended between all possible answers. Certainties, beliefs, and assumptions are put on hold. One can question only what one does not know. To ask “Where is Mount Ts’ao-ch’i?” is to admit that one knows not where it is. While waiting for the answer, one hovers in the space between all conceivable directions. To ask “What is it that observes the devil at play?” one rests in the strange space of a self-aware creature subject to forces that disturb and enclose it. All possibilities lie open. There are no foregone conclusions. You are momentarily freed from the tyranny of opinion. Mara is deprived of a foothold.
An astonishing thing about life is that it astonishes us. Astonishment quivers at the heart of human consciousness. Can we imagine a future where all questions have been resolved and nothing perplexes us? A time when “what?” and “why?” have lost their meaning? No matter how much knowledge we accrue, at the end of each line of enquiry will there not always be another question awaiting us? One that we cannot foresee until we have answered those that precede it?
To rest in such perplexed astonishment was described by John Keats as “negative capability”:
that is, when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries and doubts without any irritable reaching after fact or
reason.
While Keats understood this quality as the defining trait of the creative artist, it succinctly captures the frame of mind of one who contemplates the question “What is this thing?” When we learn that “irritable” was used in the nineteenth century as a medical term to describe the reflexive nature of a limb to react when subjected to stimulation, its accuracy in describing Zen meditation is heightened. To cultivate astonishment triggers one’s habitual craving for the certainties that seem to reside in concrete facts and reasoned conclusions.
Certainties are more consoling than an infinity of questions. To know you are a monk who has just walked all the way from Mount Sung in sandals made of reeds gives you an identity. You feel secure inside the boundaries of that description of yourself. You have no doubts as to who you are. But probe a little deeper—“What are you really? How did you get here?”—and the boundaries crumble to reveal a mass of unbounded perplexity.
According to legend, when the young man who was to become Buddha left the security of his home to explore the world beyond its walls, he chanced upon a person crippled with age, another ridden with disease, and a corpse. These sights perplexed him. For the first time, his existence became a question for him. The boundaries of his identity collapsed. The certainty of being Siddhattha Gotama—Suddhodana’s heir, Yasodhara’s husband, and Rahula’s father—was an inadequate answer to the question posed by being born and having to die. On returning home he felt trapped. Late one night he slipped away to pursue a path that might lead to a resolution. But Mara was observing this and said to himself, “From now on, as soon as a hint of desire, malice, or cruelty stirs in his mind, I will know it.” And so Mara “attached himself to him like a shadow follows the body, waiting for an opportunity.”
A path is animated by perplexity and obstructed by fixed ideas. Confusion reigns in its free, purposive, and shared space. We do not know where our questions will lead, but they compel us to seek a response. Yet with each insight we risk being halted in our tracks by the devil. As the imposer of limits and ends, Mara cannot tolerate the limitless and endless nature of astonishment. He is that part of us that is prone to regard any provisional answer as though it were the final word on the matter. When crystallized into an ideology, even the most lucid understanding will trap us rather than free us. “If you meet Buddha,” advises the Zen patriarch Lin-chi, “kill him.”
Living with the Devil Page 6