These pleas are the foundation of an ethics that Buddhism describes as “natural” as opposed to “entailed.” Prior to the adoption of beliefs or commitments that entail moral obligations, the other naturally calls upon you not to harm her. While a vow might entail a commitment to celibacy or monogamy, such specific injunctions are not present in the call of the other. Others simply enjoin us not to hurt them. Only in responding to their command do additional religious, social, and legal conventions come into play.
On hearing the silent “do not hurt me,” we are called to risk responding to that plea. Even when someone threatens us in a voice shaking with rage, his mute cry can still be heard beneath the torrent of abuse. In spite of itself, violent emotion can render the plea more audible than when it is stifled behind a carefully honed façade of contentment. Instead of fueling a spiral of mutual hatred by returning the insult, we are free to respond to the other’s deeper injunction not to hurt him. In moments of intimacy, we find ourselves no longer in the grip of self-consciousness but in a free and open space whence we respond to the other in ways that astonish us. When such constraints are suspended, we recover an ease that allows us to spontaneously engage with the other’s dilemma.
To suffer with someone else, to imagine what it feels like for him inside the envelope of his skin, is not only a sign of our shared sentience. I find myself open to an otherness that is forever beyond my reach and control. I cannot know him in the way he knows himself, any more than he can know me in the way I know myself. The moment when mutual recognition dawns includes an awareness of what is unknowable: what it is like for him to see me with his eyes, hear me with his ears, think of me in his brain.
In encountering another, one is confronted not with an immutable fact but a pathway of possible intimacy. One speaks of someone being “closed” or “open,” of “getting through” to them, of finding the “chinks in his armor.” A person is like a path: a space whose trajectory we may or may not be invited to share. We long to trust others enough to dismantle the boundaries we initially want them to respect. To be intimate with another is to be allowed inside their life and to let them enter yours. As we embark on the seemingly endless quest of mutual understanding, we become a chapter in each other’s story, figures in each other’s dreams, creators of each other’s self. To know another intimately is not achieved by dissolving the differences between us but by allowing the space to draw them out. Such differentiation is realized through probing and being probed by the otherness of the other.
In letting someone else into your life, you open yourself to the risk of being astonished. For intimacy to remain alive, the other must remain a mystery for you. To know someone intimately is to honor them as embodying an unknown. However well you know and trust them, you cannot afford the complacency of taking them for granted. A beloved partner in a life-long relationship can be capricious and unpredictable. When caught in Mara’s snare you prefer not to see this. Over time, you tend to enclose the other within limits that define them according to your own needs and desires.
18
The Anguish of Others
“A MONK WAS SICK with dysentery,” records a passage in the Pali Canon, “and lay fouled in his own urine and excrement.” Buddha came to his lodging and asked why no one was taking care of him. “The other monks don’t care for me,” he replied, “because I do nothing for them.” Buddha and his attendant Ananda washed the monk, lifted him up, and laid him on a bed. Having questioned the community about its failure to care for the sick monk, Buddha said, “Monks, you have no mother or father who might tend to you. If you do not tend to one another, then who will tend to you? Whoever would tend to me, should tend to the sick.”
Through intimately identifying himself with the sick monk, Buddha affirms the link between the questions that prompted his quest and the awakening in which it culminated. Without birth, sickness, ageing, and death, there would be neither awakening (bodhi) nor an awakened one (buddha). Awakening is only intelligible as a response to the diabolic contingency of the human condition. Buddha can identify with the sick monk because he can see his own awakening prefigured in the other’s suffering. He shows his monks the contradiction in honoring him while ignoring their sick brother. Awakening, he implies, is rooted in the anguish of a man lying uncared for on the ground in a pool of his own piss and shit.
When Jesus describes the final reckoning on the day of the Last Judgment, he identifies himself with every suffering person. In summoning the righteous to eternal life, he depicts himself as saying to them:
For I was hungry, and ye gave me meat: I was thirsty, and ye gave me drink: I was a stranger, and ye took me in: Naked, and ye clothed me: I was sick, and ye visited me: I was in prison, and ye came unto me.
His listeners are baffled; they have no recollection of treating him in this way. “Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren,” explains Jesus, “ye have done it unto me.” Both Buddha and Christ insist that the path they advocate leads not away from the singular anguish of others but into its heart.
Mara’s obsession with limits is driven in part by the intuitive terror of having to face the limitless suffering of others. In conquering Mara, Buddha’s awakening exposed him to the raw, unfiltered anguish of the other. In freeing himself from compulsive, self-centered reactivity, he exposed himself to the unpredictable demands of his world. His achievement was not merely one of dwelling in this unbounded emptiness but having the capacity to tolerate it. Such tolerance occurs, explains Robert Thurman, when “the mind reaches a stage where it can bear its lack of bearings, . . . can endure this kind of extreme openness.”
In freeing oneself from the limiting and ensnaring effects of “me” and “mine,” such emptiness confronts one with the turbulent and intimidating needs of others against which one seeks to immunize oneself with the reassuring conviction of being a static, isolated self. In meeting another’s gaze, you come to recognize a trembling concentration of contingencies as inconceivably complex and singular as your own. The experience of emptiness affords more than insight into the nature of contingency; it opens the way to an empathetic connection with others beyond the narrow orbit of family, friends, and lovers.
To illustrate how a selfless, contingent reality is also one of empathetic interconnectivity, Shantideva imagines the whole of life to be like a single body in which each creature is a distinct but integral part. He aspires to respond to the plight of others with the same sympathetic empathy that connects different parts of the body. “Why does the hand protect the foot,” he asks, “when the pain of the foot is not that of the hand?” As though in reply, Meister Eckhart says, “If the foot could speak, it would say that the eye, though located in the head, is as much its own as if it were located in the foot, and the eye in turn would say the same thing.” Each part instinctively identifies with other parts of the same whole. “When someone steps on another’s foot,” says Eckhart, “it is the tongue that says, ‘You stepped on me.’”
So why when I see a stranger in evident distress do I hesitate to reach out and comfort him? Why do I avoid looking him in the eye? This reluctance is an acutely disquieting compound of sympathy, guilt, and shyness accompanied by a flustered litany of good reasons for not getting involved. In the moment of turning away from the other, I feel the sting of intimacy betrayed. For Buddhists, this discomfort may be compounded by the failure to have tended to the other as Buddha. As a Christian, one may be aware of failing to have treated the other as Christ.
We enclose ourselves in a circle of self-interest, like a hand unaware of the rest of the body to which it belongs. “This separated member,” explains Pascal,
believes itself to be a whole and, seeing no body on which it depends, believes itself to be dependent only on itself and tries to make itself its own center and body. But, not having in itself any principle of life, it only wanders about and is shocked by the uncertainty of its existence.
The plight of both
Mara and Satan is to be banished from life itself. My sense of alienation is likewise rooted in this numbness to interconnectivity. I feel as though I haunt the world rather than participate in it. Even as I chatter in the midst of company, I feel eerily disengaged.
Then in the next moment I find myself startled by the suffering of another as though it were my own. In this glimpse of intimacy, we experience the astonishment of belonging again to a body of life that infinitely exceeds our own. The numbness of alienation gives way to the astonishment of participation. The closure of Mara is replaced by the openness of Buddha. Intimacy is realized in wholly giving oneself while wholly receiving the gift of the other.
The experience of sympathetic empathy dissolves not only one’s sense of isolation but any need to justify one’s feelings and actions in terms of an ideology. One does not care for the sick because Buddha said that “whoever would tend to me, should tend to the sick” or because it will propel one along the path toward awakening. One takes care of them because they are ill. For Shantideva, such behavior “is just like feeding oneself; one hopes for nothing in return.”
Jesus places his followers in a similar double bind. He describes the righteous who will attain eternal life as those who feed the hungry and clothe the naked without being aware that they are feeding or clothing Christ. One feeds the hungry and clothes the naked simply because they are hungry and naked, not because by doing so one will be rewarded with eternal life. Religious belief may encourage one to become more compassionate, but it can compromise the heartfelt spontaneity of compassion. To realize Buddhist compassion or Christian love may entail suspending one’s identity as a Buddhist or a Christian.
No matter how carefully we attend to the call of the other, it is incapable of telling us how to respond. While unequivocably called upon to act, we are uncertain what to do. It is not just a question of obeying the explicit command that reaches our ears—the plea of an alcoholic to buy him a drink contradicts the mute plea not to harm him. So we meditate in the hope of hearing the wisdom of a quiet inner voice or pray for divine guidance, only to be greeted by silence. Even if we “hear” something, how do we know it is not the prompting of the devil? If we trust it, we still must decide whether, when, and how to act on it. In the end we, rather than our buddhanature or god, will be held responsible for what we do. The dilemma of choice is inescapable.
Whether it be the Jewish Talmud or Buddhist Vinaya, no system of rules and prohibitions, however elaborate, can provide exact instructions on how to deal with an unprecedented moral dilemma. We may be enjoined not to kill, but when the life of a mother is at risk, is it acceptable to terminate the life of her unborn child in order to save hers? Or do we let nature follow its course and allow the woman to die? Whose silent “do not hurt me” takes precedence? The mother’s? Or the child’s? At best, ethical precepts provide a coherent framework for guiding one’s actions; at worst, they encourage a self-righteous legalism that pays no heed to the call of the other.
To act is to risk. The contingency and complexity of life is such that we cannot foresee what will happen next. What seems a misfortune today (being crippled) turns out to be a blessing tomorrow (when all able-bodied men are rounded up and killed). We act with the noblest intentions, having carefully weighed our options, only to make matters worse. Finding your kind smile and wise words patronizing and hollow, your friend perversely chooses to do the opposite of what you suggest.
19
Incarnation
MILAN KUNDERA’S NOVEL Immortality opens with the narrator (who may or may not be the author—we later discover that he is a writer who has published a book with the same title as one of Kundera’s) sitting in a deck chair by the pool at his health club, observing an old woman having a swimming lesson. When the lesson is over, she walks toward the exit, then turns her head, smiles, and waves goodbye to her young instructor. “At that instant,” recalls the narrator, “I felt a pang in my heart. That smile and that gesture belonged to a twenty-year-old girl! Her hand reached out with a ravishing lightness.” The smile and wave had “the charm of a gesture drowning in the charmlessness of the body.” Then this charm crystallizes into the name “Agnes,” and the central character of the novel, whose life and sudden death are described in intimate detail over the next four hundred pages, is incarnated in the narrator’s mind.
Agnes was born from the imagination of a storyteller. Each new piece of information we acquire about her is like a brush-stroke that highlights another feature of her character. We swiftly and effortlessly build up a portrait of Agnes until we feel that we know what it would be like to be her. On learning that she has died in a car crash, we feel shocked and saddened.
Intuitively, we think of Agnes as a disembodied essence incarnated (“enfleshed”) in a body. The more we learn about her, the closer we come to penetrating the mysterious heart of who she is. She comes into focus through a steady accumulation of detail that configures an increasingly unique blend of different traits. This configuration is not the medium through which Agnes makes herself known. For there is no Agnes apart from the configuration of these traits. Agnes is the incarnation of the contingencies of her life: the accidents of her birth, the chances she takes, the choices she makes, the things that happen to her.
The only difference between Agnes and a nonfictional person like yourself is that you incarnate contingencies that can be traced to a body and its impact on others. Agnes has no fingerprints that could link her to the scene of a crime. Agnes has no dental record or DNA profile that could identify her remains in a burnt-out car. Were her character further fleshed out, she could be movingly portrayed in a play or film. But Agnes cannot be photographed. For a photograph presents material evidence that something took place in the world we share. The unrepeatable way in which light reflected off that face or building or landscape fifty years ago is still fixed in the emulsion of the negative. A photograph, writes Susan Sontag, “is a material vestige of its subject in a way that no painting can be.” Even a poorly exposed and blurred snapshot is “a trace, something directly stenciled off the real, like a footprint or a deathmask.” A photograph is a “drawing” (graphos) in “light” (phos > photo-).
“All novels,” writes Kundera, “are concerned with the enigma of self.” Each character is an opportunity for the novelist to undertake a “meditative interrogation” of this self. Yet “the more powerful the lens of the microscope observing the self, the more the self and its uniqueness elude us.” This elusive self possesses an unbearable lightness, both playful and tragic at once, that can slip away or be destroyed at any moment. Tereza, another Kunderan character, looks into a mirror and wonders how long it would take for her to vanish if her nose were to grow by a millimeter a day. “If her face no longer looked like Tereza,” the author asks, “would Tereza still be Tereza? Where does the self begin and end?” Kundera’s sense of wonder is not about “the immeasurable infinity of the soul” but “the uncertain nature of the self and its identity.”
Our incarnation in this world unfolds from an eerie collision between unprecedented physical contingencies and those stories we endlessly tell about ourselves and others. We identify and empathize with Agnes and Tereza because we share their storylike nature. People get to know us through our stories much in the same way they come to empathize with a character in a play or novel. As anyone can attest who has been emotionally transported by a film, profound moments of intimacy can occur in the company of fictional beings. At the same time, we are irreducibly different from them because, like Milan Kundera, we pose and grin and have photographs to prove it.
Buddha (who is neither quite the same as nor entirely different from Gotama) became incarnate only when he began to tell the story of his awakening to others. His initial impulse was not even to try communicating what he had discovered. “This dharma I have attained,” he reflected,
is profound, hard to see and understand, peaceful and sublime, unattainable by mere reasoning, subtle, to
be experienced by the wise. . . . If I were to teach the dharma, others would not understand me, and that would be wearying and troublesome for me.
But the god Brahma (the creator of the world in traditional Indian cosmology) was reading his mind and immediately vanished from the heavens and appeared before Buddha to persuade him to teach those “with little dust in their eyes who are wasting through not hearing the dharma.” And so “out of compassion for beings,” Buddha began to translate the ineffable depths of contingency and emptiness into the slippery ambiguities of language and forms of life.
Unless we are prepared to regard Brahma as a celestial apparition who descends from the sky in order to plead with Buddha on behalf of humanity, we need to consider him as another metaphor of Buddha’s inner life. If Mara represents Buddha’s shadow, then Brahma represents his charisma. While Mara appears to Buddha on his deathbed as a reminder of his inescapable mortality, so Brahma appears at the beginning of his career as the inspiration to engage with the world. In both cases Buddha is confronted with his destiny. As an embodied creature he can neither avoid death nor ignore the injunction to heed the call of others who suffer.
Although they frame the parameters of his incarnation, Brahma and Mara are unable to sway Buddha from his nirvanic release. Their appearance as mythic figures interacting with Buddha throughout his life suggests how the divine and demonic are dimensions of the human condition. They are not deleted by awakening but understood for what they are. Buddha acknowledges their presence by granting Brahma and Mara roles in his moral universe, but refuses to take them as seriously as they would like to be taken.
Buddha tells of how he once miraculously vanished from earth and appeared in the realm of Brahma to dissuade the god from believing that the divine condition was eternal. This mythic episode points to Buddha’s own struggle with the numinous fascination exerted by the divine. The discourse relates how “Mara took possession of a member of the god’s assembly,” who said to Buddha:
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