Ornoth

If you know anything about Asian religion, you probably know that Buddhism has an awful lot of symbology associated with it. From depictions of a seeming multitude of deities to elaborate mandalas to lots of ritual adornments, and a plenitude of mythical stories passed down from generation to generation.

We are generally told that this symbology does not reflect belief in the literal images, but that they are primarily metaphoric in nature. Manjushri is depicted with a sword, which represents how penetrating wisdom cuts through ignorance and delusion. Avalokitesvara, the embodiment of compassion, has eleven heads with which to hear the cries of the suffering, and a thousand arms with which to aid them.

This kind of symbolic representation extends deeply into the Buddhist canon, but it’s rarely discussed amongst western practitioners, who often struggle to accept it, viewing the mythic elements as extraneous and decorative and not a central part of the core teachings.

But there are some topics which Asians (and the canon writings) are quite emphatic about. Asians assert the literal reality of things like rebirth and the ability to recollect one’s past and future lives, which westerners usually are reluctant to accept at face value. To a westerner like myself, those concepts seem like they might be yet another instance of densely-piled Asian symbolism, but no one ever seems to come out and admit it.

Well, here’s where it gets personal…

My commutes to and from work this fall have included reading “The Collected Teachings of Ajahn Chah”, a book that I snapped up while visiting Abhayagiri Monastery, the final destination of the California Buddhist Bicycle Pilgrimage I took back in September. For those of you who don’t know, Ajahn Chah was essentially the root teacher of modern Theravada Buddhism. And because he welcomed foreigners to his monasteries, he’s like the grandaddy of one of the most successful branches of Buddhism in the west.

So in the middle of this book, I read the following passage. I cite it here almost entirely because I think the context and the sequence of points is important. Emphasis is mine.

Anger is hot. Pleasure, the extreme of indulgence, is too cool. The extreme of self-torment is hot. We want neither hot nor cold. Know hot and cold. Know all things that appear. Do they cause us to suffer? Do we form attachment to them? The teaching that birth is suffering doesn’t only mean dying from this life and taking rebirth in the next life. That’s so far away. The suffering of birth happens right now.

It’s said that becoming is the cause of birth. What is this ‘becoming’? Anything that we attach to and put meaning on is becoming. Whenever we see anything as self or other or belonging to ourselves, without wise discernment to know it as only a convention, that is all becoming. Whenever we hold on to something as ‘us’ or ‘ours’, and then it undergoes change, the mind is shaken by that. It is shaken with a positive or negative reaction. That sense of self experiencing happiness or unhappiness is birth. When there is birth, it brings suffering along with it. Aging is suffering, illness is suffering, death is suffering.

Right now, do we have becoming? Are we aware of this becoming? For example, take the trees in the monastery. The abbot of the monastery can take birth as a worm in every tree in the monastery if he isn’t aware of himself, if he feels that it is really ‘his’ monastery. This grasping at ‘my’ monastery with ‘my’ orchard and ‘my’ trees is the worm that latches on there. If there are thousands of trees, he will become a worm thousands of times. This is becoming. When the trees are cut or meet with any harm, the worms are affected; the mind is shaken and takes birth with all this anxiety. Then there is the suffering of birth, the suffering of aging, and so forth. Are you aware of the way this happens?

[…] You don’t need to look far away to understand this. When you focus your attention here, you can know whether or not there is becoming. Then, when it is happening, are you aware of it? Are you aware of convention and supposition? Do you understand them? It’s the grasping attachment that is the vital point, whether or not we are really believing in the designations of me and mine. This grasping is the worm, and it is what causes birth.

Where is this attachment? Grasping onto form, feeling, perception, thoughts, and consciousness, we attach to happiness and unhappiness, and we become obscured and take birth. It happens when we have contact through the senses. The eyes see forms, and it happens in the present. This is what the Buddha wanted us to look at, to recognize becoming and birth as they occur through our senses. If we know the inner senses and the external objects, we can let go, internally and externally. This can be seen in the present. It’s not something that happens when we die from this life. It’s the eye seeing forms right now, the ear hearing sounds right now, the nose smelling aromas right now, the tongue tasting flavors right now. Are you taking birth with them? Be aware and recognize birth right as it happens. This way is better.

What’s being said here—and the flash of insight that came to me on my way to work—is that the concept of rebirth is a metaphor for attachment. When something becomes so important to you that you have to have it, you are setting yourself up to suffer when it inevitably changes. When you can’t stand something so much that you have to push it away, you’re setting yourself up to suffer because you cannot control it. That is what Luang Por Chah is referring to when he talks about the abbot taking birth with each tree: if he is attached to the trees, he (metaphorically) lives, suffers, and dies with them.

In that way, you are “reborn” as many times as there are things that you become attached to.

That also elucidates the nihilistic-sounding descriptions of nibbana as freeing oneself from the endless cycle of birth, suffering, and death, never to be reborn again in this world. It’s not about some crazy kind of metaphysical suicide; it’s about never placing ourselves in the position of experiencing the suffering that comes from seeking lasting happiness from something that itself is impermanent and subject to suffering.

And so I can say with no trace of irony that I do recall my past lives, and that I have in the past been my parents, my lovers, my friends, and many of the places and plants and animals in nature. Because in some way I have grasped after them deeply enough to become attached, causing myself some degree of suffering when they eventually changed.

Have you never felt the pain of visiting the neighborhood where you grew up and seeing how it has changed? Or lost a dear pet? Or found that you had grown estranged from your best friend? That’s the kind of rebirth that ajahn is talking about.

Similarly, in that metaphorical sense I can foresee my own future “lives” by looking at the things that I am drawn toward. My cat? Of course I’ll suffer when he dies. Cycling? Yeah, that’ll be hard to give up. Nature? My affinity for nature will someday cause me a great deal of suffering when I’m no longer able to get out and enjoy it. In a sense, I am “becoming” these things, because my sense of self has become firmly attached to them.

Even if it’s obscured by a somewhat opaque veil of metaphor about rebirth and past lives, this remains one of Buddhism’s core teachings: eventually, all our attachments come back to bite us, unless and until we learn how to let go of them gracefully.

I always feel some degree of trepidation relating my philosophical revelations. Either they sound like trite, self-evident aphorisms, or they take so much abstract language to relate that they come across completely flat on paper.

Last night I had another interesting revelation. Like the others, it’s going to take some background.

Many Buddhist sects express some form of belief in reincarnation. Throughout his multiple lives, a man must attempt to perform meritorious acts in order to accumulate positive karma and promote one’s future wisdom.

In addition, nearly all schools of Buddhism promote a belief in the unity of all life, some dialect of the concept that we are all truly one in essence.

The point of these tenets is to help adherents overcome the problem of ego. Buddhism stresses compassion above all other values, and modeling compassion requires a certain suppression of the ego’s belief that it is more important than anyone else. It is difficult to express true loving compassion while we’re busy defending our ego’s self-conception of us as somehow special, better, and more important than everyone else.

However, I’ve always had an innate aversion to both of these concepts. I couldn’t explain why, other than indicating a stubborn belief that we are nothing more than bio-mechanical organisms that live briefly and die, and our consciousness, in whatever high esteem we hold it, dies with the meat that houses it. And although we have self-evident dependencies, we are not “one”.

Okay, that’s the background. Now let’s set the scene for the revelation.

I am presently reading “The History of Surrealism”, a horribly dry but authoritative account of the movement, originally written in French by Maurice Nadeau back in 1940. Here is a particular passage where Nadeau speaks about the movement’s primary leader, André Breton.

Life and the dream, he had shown, were two communicating vessels, in which events were homologous, it being impossible for the individual to assert that the latter was more real than the former. This time he went further: he abolished any frontier between the objective and the subjective. There exists, according to Breton, between man and the world, a perpetual and continuous correspondence. There exists, above all, a continuity of events which can be antecedently perceived and whose correspondences remain invisible. Yet self-analysis permits their observation.

Upon reading this, a couple things struck me.

First, the last two lines are a fairly concise statement of a Buddhist approach to life: there is something to life that is beyond its appearance to our mundane senses, and contemplative meditation allows us to access that. Now, the surrealists had a general familiarity with Buddhism, so this isn’t necessarily an independent observation, but it did put me in the mindset of interpreting this passage from a Buddhist perspective. Which led to the following.

It seems to me that Breton, as depicted in this passage, is a bit strident in his insistence upon some existence beyond objective reality. I felt this was an expression of a powerful fear of death, of the very impermanence that Buddhism teaches us to accept.

Or does it?

Breton’s unchecked ego brought him to this conceptual argument in order to bolster the idea that he would somehow live beyond his meat. But in reincarnation and the mystical oneness of all life, Buddhism also seems to provide psychological crutches that allow the overpowering ego to avoid facing death!

In a word, Buddhism’s concepts of karma, reincarnation, and the oneness of all life, while helpful in allowing the individual to suppress ego in order to cultivate a healthy sense of compassion, can also be viewed as the sheerest vanity, providing the ego with ample ways of rationalizing away the blunt, absolutely immutable fact of our impermanence and death.

I find this particularly ironic, because Buddhism is all about mastering one’s ego and accepting the fact that we die. To realize that such an obvious, ego-driven aversion to death can be found within Buddhism’s core tenets was a real revelation.