Dharma World Buddhist magazine

The Buddha's Path: Between Otherworldliness and Presence

by Notto R. Thelle

As we hear the voices of life's suffering and pain, the vision of unity and interconnectedness expands to become a solidarity that breaks through all barriers to embrace all that suffers.

Buddhism seems to begin in a gloomy pessimism and otherworldliness, but it is nourished by a hope that ultimately leads back to the world.

"Everything is connected with suffering," we are told in one of the Buddha's classic discourses. Birth is suffering, old age is suffering, sickness is suffering. Everything that makes us cling to life is suffering. We do not need a particularly vivid imagination to envision the poverty and distress in an Indian village 2,500 years ago. The Buddha saw the face of pain. He saw through the camouflage and made his pessimistic diagnosis. But he also believed that he had the solution to the puzzle of suffering. This is why his words, for all their heaviness, are colored by hope and expectancy.

The cause of suffering is the blinded passion that sets everything ablaze. "Everything is on fire," says the Buddha in his celebrated Fire Sermon. "The eye is ablaze, things visible are ablaze. All that the eye discerns is ablaze, all it sees is ablaze. . . . The ear is ablaze, the tongue is ablaze, the body is ablaze. It is set alight by the fire of desire, of hatred and of delusion, by birth, old age and death, by cares, laments, pains, troubles, and despair."

We are tied by desire to an existence in pain--not only in this life, but in an unending cycle of births and deaths. A person's destiny is formed by karma, the inflexible law governing human deeds: every deed entails a necessary consequence that forms that person's destiny. We reap the life we sow every day, and desire is the driving force that ties us to a life of pain. The only way out is to break the bonds that bind us, to extinguish desire, and thus to be set free from the cycle of births and deaths.

Hence, it is not surprising that a central element in Buddhism is withdrawal. The legend relates that Siddhartha Gautama, an over-protected prince, was deeply shocked by his encounter with the dark realities of life--sickness, old age, and death--and decided to leave the world and find an escape route from pain. After six years of hard discipline among the holy men who lived in the woods, he gave up this extreme asceticism and continued his search by means of silent meditation. He abandoned both sensuous pleasure and self-torture, desire and disgust, love and hate. Withdrawn and without attachments, he waited for insight.

The great breakthrough came after a long night of affliction, when the morning star shone at daybreak. His eye had been purified, and was no longer darkened by blindness. The world was still the same, but he came to see things in a new way, just as things take on a new shape and outline in the light of morning. His withdrawal was necessary. It is only when one is set free from the world that one can see what the world truly looks like. The Buddha's statues have a peaceful face, an almost invisible smile, with eyes half open and half closed, that speaks more eloquently than any multitude of words about his withdrawn presence. The passion has gone, leaving only an infinite gentleness that does not tie anyone down.

The Buddha returned to human society in order to share his insight with others; but all the time, the harmony of his life clearly preserves an element of distance. If it is true that the origin of suffering is blinded desire, then it is clear that one must avoid everything that might stimulate desire. Monasticism became the ideal way of life, with rules and regulations intended to protect the monk against temptations and to make provisions for silence. The classic subjects for meditation were also meant to help the monk see through the emptiness of things in the world and to avoid the ties produced by the senses.

Accordingly, the highest ideal in early Buddhism was the monk who acquires the liberating insight in his withdrawn harmony, breaks out of the cycle of transmigration, and enters the peace of nirvana, where desire is completely extinguished. It is not for nothing that Buddhism has been accused of preaching flight from the world and an insulated spirituality.

The Buddha's path is unthinkable without withdrawal. But it does not stop there: it leads on into landscapes with new perspectives and vistas, as we see most clearly in Mahayana Buddhism--the Buddhism of the Great Vehicle--which particularly spread in Eastern Asia. Here, we still hear about suffering and desire. The Buddhist sees through the transitoriness and emptiness, but discovers at the same time that the world takes on a new meaning for the one who sees its true form. Escape from the world is not the end; after being liberated, one can return to the world and live a new life.

What perspective opened up the world and shed new light on life? It was no new insight, but a deepening of the central point in the Buddhist interpretation of life, namely the doctrine of karma, the law of causality. Karma offers an explanation of human destiny by locating the person in an unbreakable chain of cause and effect, thereby also providing the key to change and redemption. This can end up in a self-centered endeavor to break out of the cycle in order to enter the freedom of nirvana; but this path can also open out onto further dimensions.

If we look beyond the isolated individual and his self-centered striving, the doctrine of karma can reveal an interconnectedness in human existence that shatters all boundaries. The teaching of causality is developed in the basic principle called pratitya samutpada in Sanskrit, often translated as "interdependence" or "dependent origination." Everything is understood as the result of an endless process of cause and effect. Human beings and animals, things, situations, and phenomena come into being, are transformed, and pass away as the result of an endless network of causes and effects; in their turn, these become the cause of effects in new contexts. Everything is part of this process, from an amoeba to a god, from the tiniest speck of dust to the galaxies in the heavens, from the atom to the atomic bomb. This means that nothing exists in itself, independently of the network of cause and effect. One cannot take one eddy out of a river and look for its innermost substance! Nor can one cut one mesh out of a net and draw up a description of its characteristics in isolation! In precisely the same way, one cannot understand the true nature of things by looking for some isolated "substance" in them. The only way to understand all that exists is to see the entire texture into which it is woven. To borrow the language of the Bible: it is not in God, but in relationships that "we live and move and have our being" (cf. Acts 17:28).

It is this network of cause and effect that explains the transitoriness, emptiness, and pain of things. But it also makes possible a vision of reality that is life-affirming, for if it is true that all things come into being in a continuous process of cause and effect, this means that they are bound together in an unbreakable unity. The various branches of Mahayana Buddhism offer almost ecstatic visions of the unity and interconnectedness of all things, employing both philosophical speculations and the symbolic language of poetry to show us the universe as an organic whole where all things, from the smallest particle to the infinite galaxies, are woven together in a living network. We discover true life when we find our own place in the larger context and play our part in life's great symphony.

This symphony does not consist exclusively of harmonious and optimistic melodic themes high in the descant. There are also deeper notes in the bass, a de profundis ("out of the depths") which echoes life's crazy discords. As we hear the voices of life's suffering and pain, the vision of unity and interconnectedness expands to become a solidarity that breaks through all barriers to embrace all that suffers. If there is indeed a unity that binds together all sentient beings, we cannot be isolated from those who live in pain. The condemned of the earth are bound by a thousand ties to the blessed of the earth, and one cannot separate the lives of the unsuccessful from the lives of the successful. In the last analysis, this means that there is no salvation for the individual, for the simple reason that nothing and no one exists in isolation from the totality. The wish to break out and acquire salvation on one's own is an impossibly egotistic dream; the real path to salvation does not lead us out of the world, but back to the world. The world is not denied; on the contrary, we rediscover the world as the place where one can give one's own life to lead all life to salvation.

This is why the ideal of piety in Mahayana Buddhism is not the monk who has attained enlightenment and left the world behind him, but the enlightened person who returns to the world to share his insight with others there. The highest expression of this ideal is the idea of the bodhisattva who, although he has reached the stage where he can leave the cycle of births and deaths and enter the peace of nirvana, swears by his own enlightenment and salvation that he is willing to renounce this highest good, unless all life reaches redemption along with him.

This, then, is how Buddhism understands the true nature of things. The world is transitory and is in pain. Withdrawal sets one free from ties; but once one's eye has been purified, flight from the world is transformed into a new vision of universal unity, and withdrawal is replaced by a merciful presence.

A classic series of ten pictures, known and loved throughout Eastern Asia, offers an eloquent expression of this movement back to the world. They portray a man's search for his true self as a relationship between a cowherd and an ox. The first pictures show how he seeks its tracks, finds the ox, tames it, and leads it home. He has found what he was looking for.

But the series continues. First, the ox disappears from the picture, then the man too. The identity for which he had longed, and the ego that carried out the search, cease to be interesting. This is indicated by a large empty circle: the world is open. The man finds the way back to the origin and source of life, symbolized by running brooks and blossoming trees. It is only in the last picture that the man is seen again, now in the midst of a throng of people in a village square. The protagonist is back where he began his search. Daily life is the same, the people and situations are the same, but the perspective has changed. The man who sought himself has now forgotten himself, and he discovers his true place in the selfless service of others.

"Buddhism has taught me to forget myself," said one of my Buddhist friends. He was nearly one hundred years old, and was trying to sum up the wisdom acquired during a long lifetime. I had discovered long ago that he certainly did not live up to his own words; but then, what Christian believer could ever point to his own self (unless he was blessed with a good sense of self-ironic humor) as an example of the transforming power of faith and insight? After many years in the East, I have never seen more than glimpses and hints of what the realization of the Buddhist visions would mean. To a large extent, oriental Buddhism is shaped by forces that are much more worldly and commercial than contemplative withdrawal and merciful presence! But no one should doubt that the ideals are still alive.

The Buddha's path has lost nothing of its challenge. The Buddhism of the Great Vehicle is so demanding that few follow it seriously; even fewer take this path to its conclusion. But Jesus too did not expect that many would follow him on his path.

The Buddha's path and Christ's path--the two are described in words so different that one sometimes believes they are located in separate worlds. The strange thing is that they often intersect, and that those who attempt to take these paths are surprised to see how much they have in common when they talk about their experiences and share their longings and dreams with one another.

Notto R. Thelle, D.Th., is a professor in the Faculty of Theology, the University of Oslo, Norway. Having studied Buddhism at Otani University in Kyoto, he acted as associate director of the NCC (National Christian Council) Center for the Study of Japanese Religions in Kyoto from 1974 to 1985, where he was a visiting scholar in 1999 and 2000.

This essay is a translation from the author's 1991 book in Norwegian whose title translates as "Who Can Stop the Wind? Travels in the Borderland between East and West." This article was originally published in the January-March 2007 issue of Dharma World.

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