Finding our place

 

A little time today, once again sitting in McDonalds clasping a white coffee, quite amazed that it has now been two months or so since the last price rise. Anyway, one good place to start with Buddhism (the Dharma) is with the Theravada texts/scriptures. If absorbed they can provide a hook on which to hang some of the more speculative ideas and teachings of the Mahayana, which can become a bit of a quagmire to the unwary

One fundamental text is from the Majjhima Nikaya, or "The Middle Length Discourses of the Buddha" Chapter 63. The Buddha is speaking to a guy called Malunkyaputta, but could be speaking to anyone who wants to know far far too much before committing themselves to any "path" or "belief system". As Dogen has said elsewhere:-

If there are fish that would swim or birds that would fly only after investigating the entire ocean or sky, they would find neither path nor place. When we make this very place our own, our practice becomes the actualization of reality. When we make this path our own, our activity naturally becomes actualized reality.

Anyway, here is the Buddha speaking:-

Suppose, Malunkyaputta, a man were wounded by an arrow thickly smeared with poison, and his friends and companions brought a surgeon to treat him. The man would say: "I will not let the surgeon pull out the arrow until I know the name and clan of the man who wounded me; whether the bow that wounded me was a long bow or a crossbow; whether the arrow that wounded me was hoof-tipped or curved or barbed.

All this would not be known to that man and meanwhile he would die. So too, Malunkyaputta, if anyone should say: "I will not lead the noble life under the Buddha until the Buddha declares to me whether the world is eternal or not eternal, finite or infinite; whether or not an awakened one continues or ceases to exist after death," that would still remain undeclared by the Buddha and meanwhile that person would die.

One very modern Dharma writer that I like is Stephen Batchelor, a man who comes in for a lot of stick from more doctrinare Buddhists who insist upon certain beliefs. Referring to the above passage from the Majjhima Nikaya, Stephen Batchelor writes:-

Dharma practice requires the courage to confront what it means to be human. All the pictures we entertain of heaven and hell or cycles of rebirth serve to replace the unknown with an image of what is already known. To cling to the idea of rebirth can deaden questioning.

Failure to summon forth the courage to risk a nondogmatic and nonevasive stance on such crucial existential matters can blur our ethical vision. If our actions in the world are to stem from an encounter with what is central in life, they must be unclouded by either dogma or prevarication. Agnosticism is no excuse for indecision. If anything, it is a catalyst for action; for in shifting concern away from a future life and back to the present, it demands an ethics of empathy rather than a metaphysics of hope and fear.

Well, I really like that.........an ethics of empathy rather than a metaphysics of hope and fear. It holds such profound promise, not to mention an implied criticism and rejection of much that passes for Religion in our world.