my buddhist blog

Hi Everybody,
I'm back, back from the mountains, all that glistening snow and the air so clear that it shimmers somehow, and the sheer pleasure that comes from concentrating on nothing other than the next turn or the next mogul to slide round. There is undoubtedly a kind of rejuvenation that comes simply from being away from the urban environment and being close to nature again, the darkness of the pine forests or the harshness of the rock faces that loom against the sky. It lifts the spirit. In one of my books, I think it's in The Reluctant Buddhist I wrote about something that has actually been identified as the ' biophilia effect.' Basically it has been shown that the love of the natural world is so deeply embedded within our nature that when we walk in green fields or deep and shady woods, or for that matter ski in the high mountains, the pleasure we feel in our spirit, has a manifest effect upon our physiology, in terms of reducing our blood pressure for example and relaxing our facial muscles. The anxieties of life that we all experience drop away from us for a while. We feel a deeper relaxation.

Buddhism of course would say ' Of course!' and would speak to us eloquently about the oneness of mind and body, with the beautiful clarity of the phrase, ' two but not two.' That is to say the mind and body may appear to be different entities. Indeed in the west we are very much conditioned by the overwhelming cultural and medical tradition to view them in that way. But Buddhism argues that that is an incomplete view of the reality. The deeper reality, Buddhism teaches, is that they are simply two different aspects of each individual life, as inseparable, as distinct and yet as intimately related as two sides of a sheet of paper, or as your body and its image in the mirror. If you move one you inevitably move the other.

Both my spirit and my body were undoubtedly moved by being in the mountains last week.

But let me move on to where we were in Chapter 3, which is about Buddhism and belief, and discusses this central issue of what we mean by words like ' faith' and ' prayer' in Buddhism when we have no God or gods to have faith in, or to pray to. So we talked about Buddhism's profound humanism, and the implications of that. So we pick up the story on page 41.

' One key implication that is absolutely fundamental to anyone approaching Buddhism for the first time, is that the wisdom and the understanding that has been generated by this process of evolution down the centuries, on the nature of human life, and motivation, and relationships, is passed on to all men and women on the basis of equality. Complete equality. That is such an important point, but it's one that is extraordinarily difficult to grasp fully, even for those who have been practising for many  years. Because we are so accustomed in the West, we might even say conditioned, to believing that there is a vast unbridgeable gulf that normally exists between the teacher, the bearer of the wisdom, the Jesus or the Mohammed figure, and the rest of humanity, us ordinary human beings. That gulf simply does not exist in Buddhism.

Shakyamuni, the seed from which this great tree of Buddhism has grown remember, tells us repeatedly so that there should be absolutely no doubt, that he is simply one of us. Indeed for him to be deified in any way by his followers would run completely counter to the central thrust of his teaching. It would deny if you like the central idea that the life state he achieved, filled with hope and optimism and courage and resilience, despite the toughness of his life, is available to all of us. We can all learn that is, how to achieve it, in this lifetime.

That learning indeed, is what the practice is all about.

So if we strip away all the stories and the legends and the mythologies that have inevitably accumulated around so great a life, lived so long ago, Shakyamuni, an dindeed all the historical Buddhas down the years, have been ordinary human beings. They were undoubtedly extraordinary in terms of their wisdom, and the clarity of their vision, and their profound grasp of the reality of human life. And no doubt extraordinary too in their charisma, and their ability to convey that understanding to others. But apart from that, they manifested many of the ordinary human frailties. And they too struggled, as we all do, to bear the trials and tribulation sof ordinary men and women.

And the clear message that we should take from this, is that the fundamental quality at the centre of their lives, which happens to be described as their Buddhahood, or Buddha nature, was part of their ordinary humanity, it was not a thing apart.

Conversely, Buddhism teaches, that all the rest of us ordinary human beings, have within us the potential to attain this same life state. The importance of that understanding becomes evident when we get to talking in more detail about what this word Buddhahood means. But the key point is tha tit has nothing to do with an aspiration towards perfection, or elevation of any kind. Not at all. It's not a religious quality in any way, that is perhaps the biggest misconception. It is simply a human quality. An inner resource that, Buddhism teaches, we can all learn how to harness and make use of in dealing with all the stuff of our ordinary daily lives. '

Enough for one day do you think? I think so. My plan is to take the year to cover the whole book, so we've got plenty of time. It's great to see that the number of readers is climbing steadily. And I'm  deeply grateful for everyone whose found it, in the vast mass of material that's out there, and whose prepared to stick with it. See you next time, blog...or as Vittoria would have it...blogism...numero 12.

See you, William.