The Road To Enlightenment

It's seven a.m., the 20th of April. We've spent the last three days on trains, only just having gotten our first good night's sleep in a hotel. We're bumping down a dirt road alongside a wide, dried up river; six people plus one driver in an autorickshaw. We're all relieved and excited to finally be headed to Bodh Gaya, the first actual destination on our All India Tour.

During the approximately hour long ride from the town of Gaya to Bodh Gaya, we passed through the crowded, dirty streets of a small town; thriving, verdant fields; arid, dusty, dead farms; we saw forests, plains, and hills, lives of opulent ease and luxury and of destitute poverty. I wonder how much of this scene is the same as when the Buddha walked this same road along the river 2500 years ago. Probably more than I expect.


I think about the stories I know of the Buddha's life. Born into the Ksatriya caste of warriors and heads of state, the Buddha (then Prince Siddhartha) was, throughout his early life, preened to be the ruler of the Sakya kingdom. Upon Siddhartha's birth, a sage proclaimed that he would go on to become a great leader, but would not say whether this would be in a spiritual or secular role. Determined that no son of his would ever become some crazy mystic, Siddhartha's father went to great lengths to keep his young son insulated from the "real world" by keeping him safe in the coccoon of palace life and surrounding him with only beauty and all the good things of life. Eventually, however, Siddhartha began to have the feeling that there must be more to life than just the limited exposure he was granted. He wanted to see what was outside the palace, and so convinced his servant and companion to take him out. During the course of three separate trips outside the palace, Siddhartha saw people afflicted by the three unavoidable types of suffering we all face-- sickness, old age, and death. He also, almost certainly, saw poverty and the way that most people have to struggle simply to survive. He became aware of the injustices of the caste system and began to doubt the religion he was taught to believe from birth that imposed these arbitrary and cruel strictures on those he recognized as fellow humans. His eyes opened to what life really was for the majority of people, Siddhartha knew that he could not continue to lead his insular palatial life, and set out to find out What It's All About. He went from teacher to teacher, tradition to tradition. He was an apt pupil and quickly outstripped every teacher he had, but he never got a satisfying answer to his questions. For several years, he practiced the strictest austerities, sure that mortification of the body was the only way to attain enlightenment. Eventually, however, he decided that asceticism just makes you physically weak and does nothing to foster realization and he wandered, dejected and disillusioned, down from the mountains and walked along a river until he came to a forest outside the village of Uruvella-- today, Bodh Gaya. There he sat down under a tree. And just sat. Local children would come and give him rice and ricemilk each day to keep his body strong and able to support his concentration and practice of meditation. And as he sat, Siddhartha saw into the true nature of all things-- nothing exists independently, in and of itself. Each thing depends on all other things for its existence. We suffer because we cling to the idea of a separate, independent self which does not exist. And he formulated an Eightfold Path that could guide one to realize his selflessness and interdependence with all the rest of creation.

In the Soto Zen tradition, we are told that we are all already Buddhas. Our fundamental nature is Buddha Nature and thus there is nothing to attain; there is no special state of mind we need to realize; we do not have to "try to create a Buddha." Everything we do, whatever we do, is an expression of our Buddhanature.

Maybe I'm too cynical to be a good Buddhist, I don't know. I feel like most of us are a much more similar to Prince Siddhartha than we are to the Buddha, the Awakened One. Or maybe a more apt analogy is that we're like Siddhartha's father, and our minds, our consciences, our consciousnesses are like Siddhartha-- who eventually grows up to become the Buddha. We do everything we can to avoid pain and suffering. We're obsessed with safety and security and insulate ourselves so that the Real World doesn't intrude upon our peace of mind and sense of wellbeing. We keep ourselves constantly busy and distracted so that we never have to acknowledge or confront the suffering in ourselves or in the world. But try as we might, I think we all experience some feeling of dissonance. A feeling that Something Isn't Quite Right Here. Despite our best efforts, our feeling of peace, wellbeing and security isn't quite complete. What gives??

And at this point we have a choice. We can ignore the feeling, insulate and anaesthetize ourselves further, go deeper into our snuggly, happy castle and forget that there is a whole world outside. Or we, like Siddhartha, can choose to investigate what's out there; become aware of what is happening outside of our safe, warm fortress and risk finding out unpleasant things and having to deal with our complicity in them. This awareness, I think, is our first step on the journey if we are honestly going to walk with the Buddha, Christ, and all the other great teachers who have trodden it before and continue to tread it with us. Like Siddhartha, once we are aware of the suffering that exists outside (and indside, even though we notice that even less) our palace walls, we really have no choice but to change the way we are living and devote our lives-- often, it seems, with a lot of trial and error-- to finding another way.