Editor’s note: This is the second in a three-part review of “Buddha.” The first installment can be found here.
In Part I, we followed the young spiritual seeker Siddhatta Gotama, practicing disciplined meditation and extreme self-denial in order to achieve happiness. Disappointed with the results of his efforts and the message of his teachers, he believed that there had to be a better way, a more healthy and joyful way, to be content.
His next step was simple. He ate a meal of solid food, the first in months. His fellow ascetics were disgusted, thinking he had abandoned the quest for inner peace.
The Buddhist scriptures imply that with one meal, Gotama was set for his final step towards enlightenment, the end of his quest of six years, “the final struggle with himself,” as author Armstrong phrases it in her book “Buddha.” It cannot have happened so quickly, she reasons.
Extreme self-denial had taken an immense toll on Gotama’s body. He was emaciated and needed time to heal. He also needed time to clarify and practice his new ideas, which centered on mindfulness and compassion. Later, he would tell disciples that to find the natural, joyful self was a slow process and could take years. The scriptures have him saying this: “Just as the ocean slopes gradually, falls away gradually, and shelves gradually with no sudden incline, so in this method, training, discipline and practice take effect by slow degrees, with no sudden perception of the ultimate truth.”
Gotama did not reject all he’d been taught. He changed some things and he added some things. Meditation was still important, as was ethical behavior like treating everyone with respect.
Mindfulness, the same practice that is steadily gaining credence in today’s therapeutic world, was a key addition to his new way. He sought to be aware, in every moment, of the nature of his thoughts and feelings. As Armstrong puts it, “He noticed the way ideas coursed through his mind and the constant stream of desires and irritations that could plague him in a brief half-hour.” He did not fight his thoughts or feelings, or try to change them. He just noticed them and observed how transient they were, how one craving would give way to another. Besides noticing the transience of feelings, he also became aware of the pervasiveness of suffering. This suffering was not only the result of the major traumas of sickness and death, but also, as Armstrong says, “in all the little disappointments, rejections, frustrations and failures that befall us in the course of a single day.”
Alongside his attempts “to see things as they really are,” which is how Gotama described mindfulness, he practiced the same meditation he had been practicing for six years, but now with an infusion of loving-kindness. No longer would the aim be a cold detachment from the world.
In every meditation he would invoke love. He called love “that huge, expansive and immeasurable feeling that knows no hatred,” and, as Armstrong describes, would “direct it to each of the four corners of the world. He did not omit a single living thing — plant, animal, demon, friend or foe — from this radius of benevolence.”
He found, and later taught, that mindfulness and compassionate meditation changed him into a less reactive person.
When he was ready, Gotama sat under a bodhi tree, beside “a sparkling river with delightful and smooth banks,” and vowed he would stay seated until he reached “Nibbana.” Armstrong uses the Pali spelling of the word most of us know in the Sanskrit spelling as Nirvana. She defines this as “the extinction of self which brings enlightenment and liberation from pain.”
The Buddhist scriptures tell us that Gotama stayed the night under the tree, letting his mind move into higher states of meditation until he received the final insight that would free him from suffering. In the mythological telling of Gotama’s night under the tree, he was visited by his shadow self, Mara, who sat on an enormous elephant in front of a huge army. Mara hurled storms, and the gods, who had gathered to watch, ran away.
Mara insisted that he, himself, deserved the sacred place under the tree.
“‘No,’ answered Gotama. ‘You have never made a spiritual effort. You have given no alms. Who are your witnesses?’”
I am his witness! shouted his army as one.
Who is your witness? Mara answered back to Gotama.
The gods had fled. Gotama was alone.
He asked for help. With his right hand he touched the earth, “he begged the earth to testify to his past acts of compassion,” as Armstrong relates. “With a shattering roar, the earth replied: ‘I bear you witness!’”
The elephant fell, the army ran, and Mara was defeated.
In the more literal version, Gotama received the wisdom he sought. He never claimed that this came from his own self. He said that he received an ancient wisdom. This wisdom he later taught as the Four Noble Truths, the centerpiece of Buddhism. Suffering is part of human life. Desire is the cause of suffering. Nibbana is a way out. And, finally, his own “Dhamma,” or teaching, is the path that leads from suffering to release.
Armstrong notes that there is nothing original in these four truths: “Most of the monks and ascetics of North India would have agreed with the first three, and Gotama himself had been convinced of them since the very beginning of his quest.” If there was anything new, it was the proclamation that he had found a way to reach Nibbana. The enlightenment that the scriptures say came to him under the bodhi tree may have come in the form of certainty.
Regardless, he had found the source of inner peace, he believed, and he became that night a Buddha, an enlightened person.
Part lll will look at the years he spent teaching, and his death.
(Anne Bevilacqua is lifelong book lover and a resident of Haywood County.)