Last week I went to the Apple Store in
George St with the friend I mentioned in my last post (the one who thinks that
Buddhism makes you want to kill yourself). She gave me the low-down on the
cheapest way to get yourself an iPhone, and showed me some of the cool
features of the iPad. We discussed the ethics of remaining loyal to Apple, or
going over to a competitor who has “reverse-engineered” (ie ripped-off) the
iPhone, but made its operating system open-source, so there can be free
exchange of new applications.
In amongst all this, I mentioned my last blog-post
about suicide and rebirth. My friend immediately reiterated her view that the
teachings of the Buddha encourage a wholesale rejection of the life of the
world. I mentioned the story of Prince Siddhartha abandoning his life in the
palace and she leapt on the example, insisting that as a young prince,
Siddhartha had everything the world could offer, and he rejected it. I
questioned whether a prince’s life is really so ideal; has Prince Charles’ life
been that easy? What about all the expectations laid upon someone in this
position? My friend dismissed these doubts: Prince Siddhartha wasn’t Prince
Charles; he was a prince in ancient India, endowed with every luxury, every
pleasure that life can offer a young man. But he saw all this as suffering, and
the religion he started encourages us to see it the same way. No i-phone for a
true disciple of the Buddha.
I had to admit that I had become suspicious
of my own desire to believe that Siddhartha might have left the palace, not out
of a sense that all worldly pleasure is suffering, but simply out of an
expansive desire to live more fully. When he rode away on his white horse, his
wife had just given birth to a son. Surely the decision to abandon them, without
even letting himself see his new-born child, must have been made in a state of
anguish. The idea that he was just calmly choosing an open-source life over a
more protected one based on family loyalty doesn’t seem plausible. So why did
he leave his wife and son? This is an aspect of the Buddha’s life that has
troubled many people.
In the middle of the Apple Store, I put
forward a half-serious hypothesis: maybe Prince Siddhartha was gay. He felt
that his life was a sham, that he was playing a role he couldn’t sustain, and
the birth of a son made this painfully apparent. How could he be a father, a
model for his child, when he was living a lie? He couldn’t enjoy the luxuries
laid daily at his feet, or the even greater pleasures of fatherhood, because he
felt he didn’t deserve them. Tormented by his own lack of integrity, he turned
away from the people he most loved and went into voluntary exile. This was only
the first step in his punishing treatment of himself. He then took up the most
extreme possible ascetic practices, expressing his self-hatred in visceral form.
He went on like this until he had almost
killed himself. His life would have ended in suicide if not for a simple act of
kindness from a woman called Sujata. Finding him on the verge of starvation,
she offered him some milk-rice, and he ate it. This was the second major
turning-point in Siddhartha’s life-story, one that is too often overlooked,
especially in Theravadan Buddhist circles: the turn back toward life, and
self-acceptance. At last he began to take care of himself, and appreciate the
good things that were offered to him. He saw that life is not just suffering
and causes of suffering: there is also the ending of suffering, and the way to
the ending of suffering. The noble truth is not two-fold, but four-fold. This
is the insight that prevented Siddhartha from killing himself, allowed him to find
the middle way that leads to enlightenment, and enabled him to found a
spiritual community that would come to include his wife and son.
Of course, it’s possible to tell the story
this way without supposing that Prince Siddhartha was gay – there could have
been some other trigger for the crisis that led him to abandon his young family
and walk away from the life of plenty he was born to. But to my mind, there
is a certain restrained gay sensibility in the teachings of the Buddha. Maybe
it’s just that his perspective comes from outside mainstream, heterosexual
society, and that a lot of the teachings are concerned with men who spend most of
their lives in the company of other men, and develop their deepest friendships
in this context. There’s also a certain archly humourous take on the foibles of
human nature, and the occasional outburst when the Buddha excoriates some poor monk
who’s asked the wrong question by telling him and everyone listening what an
idiot he is. When reading the suttas, there are times when I feel I could
almost be reading Patrick White - which is a compliment to the great Australian
novelist as well as a testament to how entertaining, as well as enlightening,
the suttas can be.
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| Patrick White - looking startled at being compared to the Buddha |
3 comments:
"(the one who thinks that Buddhism makes you want to kill yourself)"
As I am the one I would like to point out that I said exactly the opposite!
Buddhism sees suicide as an avoidance of the problem which leaves you with it (as all traditional buddhist accept rebirth) just as avoiding any problem in this life will not make it go away.
The point that I was trying to make was that if you take Buddhism out of context, using very straight forward logic will lead to very bizarre conclusions.
And just to make it very clear neither I nor Buddhism advocate suicide.
As for my view of life as suffering - it is not mine, it is the Buddha's. The suttas make it very clear, giving quite detailed definitions of what the Buddha meant when he talked about dukkha . These are not my definitions nor my personal interpretation of them. I doubt that anyone who read them can understand them in any other way.
Hi Ayya Citta, I thought that this post might ruffle a few feathers, but I didn't expect that they would be yours. I'm really sorry I misrepresented what you said - thanks for this clarification.
I can see now that the main point you were making was not about dukkha or how to respond to it, but about the danger of misunderstanding elements of the Buddha's teaching if you don't appreciate the context in which they were developed. I know that for you, this means the whole system of the Buddha's teaching, as well as the cultural, historical and philosophical context in which he taught. I appreciate that this kind of understanding is very important and can greatly deepen one's understanding of the Buddha's message.
However, I still doubt that there is only one way to understand his teachings, in particular the teaching on dukkha. THe context - or rather, contexts - that give this teaching life are multiple: they include not just the historical Buddha's context but also our contemporary struggles. In 'dancing' with the Buddha's teachings I am seeking a living dhamma, not just a scholarly or historically accurate version.
But of course, that's no excuse for stepping on my dance partners toes, or dragging them onto the floor against their will - poor form in any kind of tango. I hope you will let me make amends in the form of a little offering of liquid chocolate. I think at this stage, it would be good to introduce a practical dimension into our exploration of whether all worldly pleasure amounts to suffering...
This book is a great book to relate readers¿ personal lives. Hesse does an excellent job with explaining the life of Siddhartha, which makes it easy to understand what he is going through and what he is thinking. Every lesson that is learned by Siddhartha makes him stronger and more understanding of people. Issues are faced everyday by Siddhartha, showing how he struggles through the lessons he is being taught. These lessons give the reader a special outlook on the situation. This book stresses the importance of everything on earth, how nothing should be overlooked.
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