Behind The Mask ~ SARNATH ENCOUNTER
On the 1st of January,
1994, I was in Sarnath, where the Buddha preached
His first discourse, known as The Turning of the Wheel
of the Law. I had arrived there from Kathmandu the
previous evening, and was looking forward to spending
time in this generally peaceful place. But upon entering
the grounds of the sacred site after returning from
an excursion in nearby Varanasi, I found it very unpeaceful,
as—being a public holiday—it was crowded
with holiday makers. They were everywhere, sprawled
on the grass around the central stupa* and among the
ruins, picnicking, playing football and cricket—some
young people were even dancing to music from their
cassette players!— although there were signs
around the place forbidding such activities. Rules
like this are seldom respected or enforced in India.
At one side of the main stupa a Tibetan
lama was giving a Dharma talk to quite a large group
of people, most of whom were Westerners, many of them
monks and nuns. I didn’t want to join them,
however; I only wanted to be quiet. But how to be
quiet with so many noisy people around, and harsh
music blaring from the ubiquitous loud-speakers outside
the grounds? I felt sad at the irreverence of the
local people, although I had seen so much of it before
in other places that it should have caused me no surprise
and I should even have expected it. Contrary to what
many people think about Indians, they are, in general—though
we must always be wary of generalizations—not
highly spiritual, but, in reality, among the most
materialistic in the world; the fact that they might
not have the opportunities or financial means to indulge
their materialistic desires does not disprove this,
and the frequent occurrence of so-called ‘dowry-murders’
overwhelmingly supports it.
I passed through the crowds and went over
to the Burmese monastery on the far side of the park,
hoping to find some quiet there. Well, it was quieter,
to be sure, but none of the monks I met or saw showed
much friendliness, and I was either ignored or met
with quizzical looks, probably because of my dress,
which is different from theirs. It has been my experience,
over the years, that Theravada monks, in particular,
find it very hard to deal with monks who do not ‘belong’
or subscribe to their type of Buddhism (once, at the
Great Stupa at Bodnath, Kathmandu, I saw a Nepalese
Theravada monk, and greeted him in the customary way
with joined palms and the word "Namaste".
Getting no response from him, I then said: "No
Namaste?", at which he hurriedly mumbled "Namaste".
Sometimes, I wonder why I even bother). Sadly, sectarianism
is widespread among Buddhists, although it has never
given rise to violence, as it has among the followers
of other religions.
Preferring the noise of the crowds to the
non-friendliness of the Burmese monastery, I went
back to the Deer Park, to look for a place to sit;
I had a feeling that something was about to happen,
although I had no idea what. So I sat down cross-legged
beneath a tree, on an ancient wall of a ruined monastery,
with my eyes half-closed and downcast, and my mind
soon became focused and calm. Although curious people
kept coming by to look at me and make fun and silly
remarks, I ignored them and didn’t allow it
to disturb me. After a few minutes, someone came and
stood at one side of me, looking intently at me; I
could feel his gaze; but I didn’t move or acknowledge
him in any way. After some more minutes, he sat down
nearby, and I thought: "He wants something. Well,
let him wait; I’ll test him to see how much
he wants it". So I continued to sit there, unmoving,
for maybe another twenty minutes, and then I stirred,
at which he stood up and came over to me with his
hands joined in anjali (the Indian form of greeting).
Politely and respectfully, he said: "I noticed
you sitting there and was impressed, so asked my friends
to leave me here for a while and come back later.
I am interested in meditation", he said, "and
wonder if you would explain something about this for
me".
I asked him if he knew the significance
of the place we were in, but he said, "Not really".
I found this a bit hard to believe, as he had already
told me that he was studying philosophy in the nearby
Varanasi University, so how could he know nothing
about this Buddhist holy place? Maybe he just said
this to see how much I would tell him.
Anyway, I told him that this was the place
where the Buddha gave His first sermon to the five
ascetics who had formerly been his companions, and
I related to him the reason they had left Him. Before
his Enlightenment, they had followed him in his austere
and extreme practices, waiting for him to make the
breakthrough, and feeling that he would then show
them the way. But when Siddhartha failed to achieve
his goal by fasting so much that he was reduced to
just skin and bones and almost died as a result, he
realized that this was the wrong way and that, just
as a life of luxury and pleasure, as he had lived
in the palace, was ignoble and unprofitable, just
so was a life of self-mortification and deprivation,
which he had recently followed; both ways make the
mind dull and incapable of seeing things clearly.
He felt that there had to be a middle way which avoided
these two extremes, and that it would be the way of
meditation such as he had experienced in his boyhood
when he had been taken out to the countryside and
left in the shade of a tree while his father and courtiers
went off to lead the Spring Ploughing Festival. Gradually,
the young prince became aware of the suffering all
around him: of how the oxen that pulled the ploughs
were beaten and goaded to make them pull harder, how
the ploughmen sweated and strained under the hot sun,
how worms and insects were exposed and died as the
plough-shares cut through the earth, and how birds
came down to devour them, how big birds attacked small
birds; he noted how life lived on life, from the smallest
of its forms to the largest, and how man was also
a predator. His observations moved him so profoundly
that he seated himself cross-legged, with back erect,
and his mind automatically became calm and clear.
It was the memory of this incident so many years before
that now showed him the way to go: not by torturing
and starving the body shall I find liberation, he
thought, but by observing how things are.
But when he began to eat again, the five
yogis who had attended him thought he had abandoned
his search and returned to a life of sense-pleasures,
so left him in disgust; alone again, he nevertheless
determined to continue his quest. Slowly, his strength
returned, and after some weeks, recovered and refreshed,
while seated beneath a tree respected by Buddhists
ever since as the ‘Bodhi tree’ or ‘Tree
of Awakening’, he became Enlightened, became
a Buddha, an Awakened One. He had achieved His goal,
had clearly understood Suffering, the cause of Suffering,
that Suffering can Cease, and the way that leads to
the Cessation of Suffering.
After His Enlightenment, He was at first
inclined to remain alone in the forest, thinking that
what He had discovered was very hard to comprehend,
and that if He tried to share it with others, no-one
would understand, and it would only be needlessly
troublesome for Him. But we know that He eventually
decided to go forth and teach, and when He had so
decided, He considered who He should teach. He turned
His thoughts to his five former companions. "They
were intelligent and good, even if a little misguided",
He thought; "They will understand".
And so He set off to join them in the place
where, by His psychic vision, he saw them to be staying.
This was in a park just outside Varanasi, about 200
kms from where He had become Enlightened. It took
Him maybe two weeks or more to walk there as He was
in no hurry. When He arrived there, the five saw Him
coming in the distance, and said to each other: "See
who is coming: it’s Siddhartha! Ignore him;
we don’t respect him anymore; he abandoned his
search for truth". But as He came nearer, so
impressive was His appearance and bearing that they
forgot their resolve to ignore Him, and spontaneously
rose to receive Him respectfully. One took His alms-bowl,
one took His upper robe, another brought water for
Him to wash His face and feet, another gave Him water
to drink, and the other prepared a place for Him to
sit. Then, refreshed and seated, He addressed them
thus: "Open is the Gate to the Deathless. I have
found that which I sought! Listen, and I will reveal
it to you", and He explained about the Middle
Way He had discovered, which avoided the extremes
of a life of pleasure and luxury on the one hand,
and a life of self-mortification and deprivation on
the other, and which leads to Enlightenment. He explained
the Four Noble Truths: how all living things Suffer,
how Suffering arises, how Suffering ceases, and the
Way that leads to the Cessation of Suffering. As He
spoke about these things, one of the five—Kondanya,
by name—became enlightened, and the Buddha saw
it on his face, because when a person understands
something very deeply and clearly, it does show on
his face, like a light radiating outwards through
the skin. The Buddha exclaimed: "Kondanya has
understood! Kondanya has understood!"
At this point in my narrative—and
I must confess that I have fleshed it out a bit in
writing here for the sake of further clarification
for my readers—I asked the young man—as
I will now ask my readers—to visualize the scene
of the Buddha speaking to the five yogis; it is most
important to do so. What the Buddha looked like, we
really don’t know, but He certainly would not
have looked like the images we have made to represent
Him. If He had not yet shaved His head at that time,
as an example of what He later asked His monks to
do, He probably looked like a yogi Himself, with long,
matted hair and beard. And if He didn’t look
like that, the five almost certainly would have done,
and not as most Buddhist art since then has shown
them, as Buddhist monks, with shaven heads and faces,
clad in typical Buddhist robes; we must keep it in
mind that, at this point, there were no Buddhist monks;
they were about to become the first; and it was some
time after this that the uniform of the monks was
decided upon. They—and the Buddha Himself—would
have looked weather-beaten and not overly clean, living
the life they did.
We have idealized the Buddha so much that
it is now hard to imagine Him as a normal-looking
human being, yet such He was, behind all the deification
of Him that has gone on since. Indeed, there are still
Buddhists who believe that He was about five meters
tall! And in Thailand, there is a beautiful temple
built around a depression in the rock that is believed
to be a footprint of the Buddha, but it is so big
that a person could get into it and lie down! This
is not realistic and merely increases superstition
and ignorance instead of diminishing them! Buddhists
are often guilty of idolatry—as we are sometimes
accused of being—but we are by no means the
only ones; it is really quite common, and comes about
through mistaking the form for the essence. (Besides,
the Buddha never went to Thailand, and probably never
even went beyond the Ganges river-valley, or saw the
sea).
Continuing, I asked the young man if he
imagined the five yogis to all be sitting in the same
position—the posture we associate with meditation:
cross-legged, straight-backed, hands in lap and eyes
downcast—like statues, or photo copies of each
other, as they appear in Thai or Indian pictures of
this scene? Would they not probably—I went on—have
been sitting in various postures—maybe with
chin in hand, and so on—relaxed, yet perfectly
attentive? We can be attentive without sitting cross-legged,
can we not? And in that attentive state, they would
not have been thinking about the past, the future,
or even the present; nor would they have been thinking
about or practicing meditation, as do so many ‘meditators’;
they would have been rapt, paying complete attention;
they were in the present, in meditation. Have we not
all known this kind of meditation at times? Of course
we have, but we probably didn’t realize what
it was, and so we ask around about meditation, thinking
that it must be something exotic and special instead
of something we have known—in one way—for
most of our lives. But it is because we have not understood
what we have known that we continue to jump around,
seeking teachers, doing meditation courses and retreats,
and so on, looking, but not seeing, and in the end
we have to come back to ourselves, having gone a long,
circuitous way around, when a little intelligent thought
would have saved us so much time and trouble. It is
rather like rubbing two sticks together—and
wet sticks, at that!—in order to produce fire,
when there are matches and other means of ignition
at hand. Why do we insist on doing things the hard
way? What are we aiming for with our pious and strenuous
practices? What kind of race do we think we are running—a
marathon or something? If the aim of our meditation
practice is insight—insight into how things
are—do we think that insight can only be ‘attained’
by doing things like sitting cross-legged for hours
and hours? Obviously, we think that insight can be
made to arise, and that it is within our capacity
to do it—to ‘storm the gates of heaven’,
as it were. The corollary of this is to conclude that
people who don’t practice such things are incapable
of experiencing insight, which is a great misconception
and reveals our greed and desire to get something
in return for our efforts, instead of seeing things
as they are and what we’ve already got. Thus,
our religious practices become materialistic—what
the late Chogyam Trungpa Rimpoche—a well-known
Tibetan lama—referred to as ‘spiritual
materialism’: the craving for and attachment
to results.
Still with my young inquirer: I asked him
if he had seen the Tibetan monk over near the main
stupa, speaking to a large group of mostly Westerners.
He said he hadn’t, but I told him they were
there anyway. These people, I went on, had left the
comfort and luxury of their homes on the other side
of the world, to come to dirty and smelly India where
one must undergo so many hassles as a matter of routine
(anyone who has been to India will surely know what
I mean here), in search of Dharma. And all around
them are native people oblivious to this, just enjoying
themselves with picnics and games. Why should this
be? And why are you different? Why do you want to
know about these things? Why aren’t you enjoying
yourself instead, like your people here? Don’t
even try to answer, I told him, because you don’t
know, which is how it should be, as the roots of the
present—and of any situation and thing—are
hidden in the past, and very few of them can be perceived.
There are no accidents in life, but neither is everything
pre-ordained; everything arises from causes, and there
are so many contributory causes to each effect that
it is simply impossible to imagine or perceive them
all. You must accept the fact that you are different,
even though it is often difficult to be different
and ‘odd’. And try to keep the flame of
your inquiry burning steadily—not high one minute
and low the next. Ask questions, yes—ask questions
of anyone and leave no stone unturned—but do
not accept their answers unthinkingly, as their answers
will not be your answers, and in such matters, second-hand
answers will never completely satisfy us; at most,
they can reassure us somewhat and help us to check
and confirm our experiences; we must find our own
answers; there is no substitute for this.
The young man seemed satisfied with my explanation
and went away with a light step; and as for me, I
knew that this was the reason why I had felt the need
to sit down; my feeling had been vindicated.
Our desire and search for results from our
efforts often blinds us to what is here. The Buddhist
scriptures tell of many people becoming enlightened
by listening to the Buddha speak, and often, these
were people who had no conscious knowledge of meditation
and had never ‘practiced’ it. So, to maintain
that "meditation is the only way"—as
a well-known Buddhist figure in Malaysia has said—is
incorrect, unless we consider meditation in a much
broader way than most ‘meditators’ consider
it: that there is nothing outside of it, that it is
all inclusive. Enlightenment arises as a result of
seeing things clearly—not with our physical
eyes, but with the ‘third eye’ or ‘eye
of understanding’. Understanding plays such
a big part in our lives—from very basic things
like how to tie our shoelaces or make tea, to perception
of reality. So, we might say meditation concerns understanding,
and understanding is not something we do, but is rather
something that happens to or in us, something, in
fact, that does us! In this way, who doesn’t
meditate? Who has not known meditation? Away with
these foolish and elitist questions of "Do you
meditate?", "What kind of meditation do
you practice?", "Who is your meditation
teacher?", and so on. Come on; wake up!
The Pali word ‘bhavana’ is usually
translated ‘mental development’, and includes
what we generally mean by words like concentration,
meditation, contemplation and mindfulness. As ‘mental
development’, therefore, what is it but bhavana
when we learn how to read and write in school? This
is also mental development, no? Moreover, being a
healthy kind of mental development, it is in line
with the Buddha’s Teachings.
If you wish to ‘practice’ meditation,
by all means do so; do whatever you wish, as long
as it’s not harmful to anyone or anything, and
as long as you are prepared to accept the consequences
of your actions without complaining or blaming others
for them. Whatever you do, however, whether it be
chanting, praying, ‘practicing’ meditation,
keeping moral precepts, giving, abstaining from eating
meat, etc., be careful not to become proud of it,
as that would only defeat the purpose, and you would
become like a dog running round and round in circles,
chasing its own tail. It is not rare to come across
people who are proud of their practices, thinking
they are better than those who don’t do such
things; but they should be regarded as our teachers,
too, in that they show us, by their example, what
not to do or how not to do it. Thus, everything becomes
positive.
Care should be taken about one’s motives
for ‘practicing’ meditation, and what
one expects to get from doing so. We should know why
we are doing what we are doing. Some people, overly
concerned with results from their efforts, not only
become blind to what is often right in front of them,
but sometimes become mentally unhinged or disturbed.
If one is not careful, and in a great hurry for results,
meditation may easily become maditation! There are
many cases of it.
Approach life with Dharma and everything
becomes meditation; anytime, anywhere, insight might
arise.
- - - - - - -
* (A ‘stupa’ is a reliquary monument,
usually with a hemispherical base surmounted by a
spire; they are objects of devotion and pilgrimage.
Some stupas, as found in India, Nepal, Sri Lanka,
Burma and Thailand, are huge and can be seen from
far away). |