An End to Suffering

by Pankaj Mishra

  There is a quality of mystical revelation about the Buddha’s truth. Like the crucial experiences of Jesus or the Prophet Mohammed, who founded world religions, it may be beyond verification through logic or intellectual concepts, but it doesn’t imply that his enlightenment consisted of a lightning flash of inspiration.

  The Buddha did not claim a divine origin for his insights. One of the legends about his life says that his four noble truths came to him over nine hours or so of meditation that night. It is more probable that they arose out of his six-year-long experiences as a meditator, ascetic and thinker, and that it took the Buddha more than one night to realize the full implications of what he had found, which he then refined over the next forty-five years of discussion with his disciples.

  The Buddha set himself off further from recipients of esoteric wisdom by claiming that the truth he reached in Bodh Gaya is available to anyone willing to follow his example. The key was meditation – not meditation as others had known it, not the kind of yogic practice the Buddha had encountered before, but one which he perfected, and which he offered as a means to both knowledge and salvation.

  During his time with the gurus Kalama and Ramaputra, the Buddha had encountered what were then the conventional Upanishadic-Brahminical theories of self-knowledge – the theories that remain at the spiritual and philosophical core of Hinduism. According to these, the microcosm (man) reflects the macrocosm (the universe). The essence or self of the individual is the same as the essence or self of the world; both partake of the same unchanging substance, the brahman. Meditation, in so far as it achieves a consciousness without an object, is the means to reach a profound knowledge that the self of the knower is identical with the self of the known; it helps one realize the truth of the Upanishadic formula ‘Thou art that’ and to realize this is to be liberated.

  The deeper states of yogic meditation that the Buddha came across promised human beings a grand vision of transcendence: that there was a Self, an eternal, seamless, and unborn whole which lay behind apparent multiplicity and change in the world, the unity that lay behind the obvious dualism of subject and object, individual and the world.

  However, the Buddha claimed originally that such knowledge of the eternal self was fixed in advance. The meditator had actually trained himself to locate it in the attainment of a deep meditative state; he began with a particular frame of mind or intention, which then predictably led him to a particular form of knowledge.

  As the Buddha saw it, the teachers preaching the so-called eternal, independent and unanalysable Self had not realized it from within; it was an abstraction, a product of speculation. He may have been thinking of his own experience with Kalama and Ramaputra. Both teachers, upon questioning by the Buddha, had admitted to having no direct knowledge of their doctrine. Rather, they assumed that it must be true.

  This was not unusual. Spiritual teachers before the Buddha had been content with positing an eternal essence and claiming that it could be experienced in certain meditative states. The Buddha thought that such experience was samskrta (conditioned) – a word he made his own through frequent use. It sprang from certain clear causes – frame of mind, will and intention, and so it could not be identical with an eternal and unborn self.

  In any case, the deep states created by such meditation did not last long. They arose out of certain causes and then disappeared. They could be analysed; they couldn’t but be different from an eternal, unanalysable self.

  The Buddha did not use such practical reasoning to discredit meditation. Rather, he showed that the yogic experience of meditation was limited to certain states achieved through concentration, and did not seek to go beyond them. His own meditative technique tried to combine concentration with mindfulness and self-possession. It led, he claimed, to a direct knowledge of the unstable and conditioned nature of the mind and the body.

  This may sound odd to most of us, who live with the triumphs and triumphalism of science, and are used to seeing knowledge as something arrived at objectively, through a process of verification by physical means. Meditation may not seem a convincing way to attain it. It doesn’t rely on logic, not even on the evidence of the senses. It is a purely subjective experience.

  But the Buddha’s own discoveries could not have been made in any other way. For they describe first and foremost the workings of the mind – the mind that determines the way we experience the world, the way in which we make it our world. The Buddha worked with the insight that the mind was the window onto reality for human beings, without which they could access nothing, nor even assume the existence of a world independent of their perception, consciousness and concepts:

  It is within this fathom-long carcass, with its mind and its notions, that I declare there is the world, the origin of the world, the cessation of the world, and the path leading to the cessation of the world.2

  This was not the absolute idealism of the kind found in western philosophy. The Buddha did not assert that everything was a projection of the mind, or that there was a thing-in-itself out there. He spoke rather of the phenomenal world arising out of interdependent causes and conditions.

  The world and its objects had no intrinsic characteristics or true nature – or at least none that could be perceived outside human mental processes. Their colours, sounds, smell and textures weren’t independent of the perceiving mind. They came into being through the process of sense organs perceiving and interpreting data through instants of consciousness.

  This is illustrated by a story in Buddhist scriptures about two blind men who wished to know what colours were. One of them, who was told that white was the colour of snow, assumed that white was ‘cold’ the other man, who was told that white was the colour of swans, thought that white went ‘swish-swish’.

  Happiness and suffering, fulfilment and frustration – the mind was indispensable in all of these processes, even when they emerged out of conditions seemingly external to us. To control the mind, then, was to change radically one’s relations with the world. As the eighth-century Indian monk Santideva wrote:

  By the mind the world is led…The mind swings like a firebrand, the mind rears up like a wave, the mind burns like a forest fire, like a great flood the mind bears all away. The bodhisattva, thoroughly examining the nature of things, dwells in ever-present mindfulness of the activity of the mind, and so he does not fall into the mind’s power, but the mind comes under his control. And with the mind under his control all phenomena are under his control.3

  The enquiry into the nature of the mind which the Buddha tried to conduct is a task not easily performed even today by modern science, which charts the central nervous system, reducing consciousness to chemical and electrical reactions within the network of neurones. Psychologists still tend to focus on outward behaviour to study the workings of the mind.4

  The Buddha, however, began with the assumption, now often shared by neuroscientists, that the mind alone can know and analyse the mind, and alone can observe the movement and nature of thoughts passing through it. Accordingly, the first tool, or prerequisite, in his contemplative science was a still mind.

  This is not achieved easily for the mind is more or less identical with ceaseless activity. Thoughts and feelings flow in and out of one another – so fast that they can barely be separated from each other and the actions they give rise to. The Buddha used an unflatteringly Darwinian simile to describe this process:

  What is called ‘mentality’ and ‘mind’ and ‘consciousness’ arises and ceases, in one way and another, through day and night; just as a monkey ranging through a forest seizes a branch and, letting go, seizes another.5

  William James, the father of modern psychology, asserted that it was impossible to stop the flow of thoughts. His failure, as well as that of many early psychologists attempting to study the mind through introspection, may have kept psychology from its inevitable encounter with Buddhism. Modern-day psychotherapists who recommend meditation to their clients are more aware that thoughts can
be identified and isolated in a calm mind.

  At the same time, it takes patient and sustained effort to sit still and grow aware of thoughts passing through. The first effort usually produces greater agitation. Thoughts seem more oppressively numerous than usual, bubbling up one after another, although their quantity may not be more than usual. The tormented narrator of Fyodor Dostoevsky’s insightful psychological fiction Notes from the Underground describes the slippery quality of such self-consciousness:

  How am I to set my mind at rest? Where are the primary causes on which I am to build? Where are my foundations? Where am I to get them from? I exercise myself in reflection, and consequently with me every primary cause at once draws after itself another still more primary, and so on to infinity. That is just the essence of every sort of consciousness and reflection.6

  As in the narrator’s case, negative thoughts – resentment, envy and malice – tend to multiply faster, making the world seem dark and unyielding. But to be aware of these thoughts is also to feel one’s ability to control them. This is what frustrates Dostoevsky’s underground man, who can’t even get himself into a state of anger because of what he calls ‘those accursed laws of consciousness’:

  You look into it, the object flies off into air, your reasons evaporate, the criminal is not to be found, the wrong becomes not a wrong but a phantom, something like the toothache, for which no one is to blame, and consequently there is only the same outlet left again – that is to beat the wall as hard as you can.7

  Devoted to activity, however mindless, Dostoevsky’s narrator is determined to repel consciousness, to ‘hate or love’, do anything, ‘if only not to sit with your hands folded’. But those who make it a habit to sit with their hands folded discover that when discouraged, thoughts simply cross the mind and fade. Gradually, with increasing concentration, you see your mind slowing down. A slight pain in the knees during meditation, which ordinarily makes you change your position without thinking, or a pleasurable daydream which spins out scenarios without stopping, can be examined in isolation and resisted before they result in action: a change of position, more daydreams.

  With regular practice of meditation, you become aware of, and learn to ignore, the random impulses and sensations which previously would have resulted in some sort of reaction, physically or mentally, but which now arise and fade without leaving a trace.

  The thoughts then cease altogether until you are aware of being perfectly still in the present moment. This state is reached relatively quickly by disciplined meditation – the state where Buddhists begin to examine the nature of discursive thoughts and their influence over the human body.

  This kind of energetic meditation, which the Buddha called Vipasyana, went beyond the regular states of concentration and equanimity achieved by the yogis with consistent focus. It called for a detailed objective observation of one’s mind, which could strip thoughts of their usual solidity, the power with which they held sway over human beings, the power they transmitted to the world, making it seem something fixed and unyielding, desirable or undesirable, when it had no innate quality or essence, and was only a continuous process of transformation.

  This kind of meditation did not concern itself with finding essences outside or inside the human body. It analysed how we experience reality, rather than describe what reality is. It undermined the misperception of things and situations as unchangeable. It offered a different way of perceiving the phenomenal world, by seeing through to its true nature as something impermanent, unsatisfactory and essenceless. In his exposition of Buddhist teaching, Vishuddhimagga (Path of Purification), the fifth-century Indian philosopher Buddhaghosa came up with several images to describe the transience and elusiveness of the world as experienced by the meditator: dew drops at sunrise, a bubble on water, a line drawn on water, a flash of lightning, etc.

  In a discourse called The Setting Up of Mindfulness, the Buddha described the various forms of meditation he preferred. The word ‘meditation’ brings to mind a stereotypical image of a person seated cross-legged with eyes closed. But the original Buddhist word for meditation, bhavana, which means culture or development, conveys better what the Buddha wished to accomplish: the creation of a wholesome mental climate through constant awareness. Accordingly, he prescribed a posture for only one meditative exercise, which requires attentiveness to the rhythms of breathing. The rest of the exercises – which involved partly the study of desire, anger, hatred, torpor, anxiety, as they rose in one’s mind – were designed to accompany the meditator’s daily routine.

  For the Buddha, to observe the processes that occur inside the mind, to be aware of the tiniest perception or thought, was to move towards a radical truth: that consciousness was not an independent or self-contained entity, that it was a perpetual flow of interdependent thoughts.

  The contemplative who analyses the nature of the mind in this way also understands the nature of the self. For although both mind and body change over time, human beings nevertheless have the sense of something constant within them – what characterizes them as persons until their death, what gives them their sense of individuality, which is strong or weak depending on the culture or society they live in. From this feeling of an innate ‘I’ arises the sense of an autonomous ego, and the tendency to gratify and protect it – the tendency that dictates virtually all human activity.

  Perceiving itself as separate, the ego turns the world and other people into means for its gratification, giving rise to desire, pride, revulsions, anger and other emotions. The ego seeks to gratify and protect itself through desires. But the desires create friction when they collide with the ever-changing larger environment. They lead only to more desires, and more dissatisfaction; and so the effort to protect and gratify the self is constantly destabilized and perpetuated.

  Meditation thus revealed to the Buddha the conditioned and unsatisfactory nature of the self. It produced the theory that supported his view of phenomena as processes rather than fixed essences. But theory meant little to the Buddha if it couldn’t be verified and turned into a way to overcoming suffering. Meditation was, most importantly, a practice indispensable to attaining nirvana, which was none other than a full realization within one’s own being of the insubstantiality of self, and liberation from its primary emotions, greed, hatred and delusion.

  Buddhist philosophers, such as Asanga and Vasubhandhu, who belonged to the Yogachara school that flourished in north-west India in the fourth and fifth centuries AD, were to take the Buddha’s view further.8 They saw consciousness as a stream without beginning or end, which could be born only from a preceding instant of consciousness and result in the following instant of consciousness, and which continued after death. Just as modern physicists see mass energy, so they saw consciousness: something that can neither be created nor destroyed, but only transformed. It was able to interact with the human body, but, as modern Buddhists have asserted, it could not be reduced to chemical reactions in the brain, and did not disappear along with the material body itself, but went on to manifest itself in another body. The proof of this lay in reincarnation – people who remembered their past lives, such as the present Dalai Lama, who as a child identified the rosary and walking stick he had used in his incarnation as the previous Dalai Lama.

  Later philosophers also refined the Buddha’s view of phenomena as things that appear but have no fixed or autonomous entity. Unlike the mainstream of western philosophers, they did not attempt to find or assume a stable and permanent entity behind phenomena – something that could be the basis of knowledge about the natural world. They accepted that the laws of cause and effect worked in the everyday conventional world, but rejected the notion that there could be an independently existing reality behind appearances. The chariot on which the Greek king Menander had travelled to see the Buddhist monk Nagasena was real enough. It belonged to what the Buddhists called the realm of relative or conventional truth (samvrti). But the chariot was only the sum of its constituent parts which when sep
arated, reduced to grains of sawdust and eventually into molecules and atoms, revealed their ultimate reality – what the Buddhists call parmartha.

  For Buddhist philosophers, the particles that make up matter are not more real than their constituent parts; they are not solid and indivisible entities with intrinsic existence. Nagarjuna, the second-century philosopher, went on to assert that the ultimate nature of phenomena was emptiness, which explained their ability to manifest themselves infinitely. This is close to what the physicist Werner Heisenberg believed: that atoms or the sub-atomic particles ‘form a world of potentialities or possibilities rather than one of things or facts’.9

  But Buddhist philosophical analyses of the phenomenal world never broadened into a scientific explanation. This was because Buddhist philosophers had different, more pragmatic, goals. They aimed not so much to transform the external world through science and politics, or to build nuclear bombs, as to help human beings understand the nature of mind and rid themselves of the negative emotions – anger, hatred, malice, jealousy – caused by their attachment to such solid-seeming entities as self and world.

  Turning the Wheel

  THE BUDDHA SPENT A few days after his enlightenment in Uruvela. At first he doubted that he could share with others his ideas – which he thought were ‘against the current’, ‘difficult to see, difficult to understand’, and which he claimed ‘men who are overpowered by passions and surrounded by a mass of darkness cannot see’.1