Hi Everybody,
Really joyful day today. I learned a moment ago that The Case for Buddhism is now up on Kindle as an e-book, so all the books and all the language versions, Spanish and Portuguese and Italian are now available to a much wider audience, at much lower costs. I have to say when I started out to write about my experience as a Nichiren Buddhist in The Reluctant Buddhist I could never have conceived how far they have travelled. It was my wife Sarah who said to me, ' Don't worry about them. They have their own mystic journey to travel.' I didn't really understand what she was saying at the time, but how right she was. This year for example, El Budista Reacio, the Spanish version of The Reluctant Buddhist has been in high demand in...where? in of all places the SGI community in the Dominican Republic. I can scarcely express the immense sense of gratitude that news brings to me. It's just extraordinary.
Anyway, the book we're dealing with in this blog, The Case for Buddhism, is now up on Kindle.
Ok, so this episode follows on directly from 25. We're talking about how Buddhism helps us directly to deal with the tough stuff that inevitably comes into all our lives.
' Buddhism tells us that we need to to use the daily discipline of the practice, and it is a discipline, to train ourselves. We want to learn to see the problems and difficulties simply as facts of life. Nothing more nor nothing less than that. Once again that is not a particularly earth-shattering idea is it? But again it is remarkable how often we choose to ignore it. For as long as we take everyday problems and difficulties personally, Buddhism argues, as a direct challenge to our personal equanimity and happiness, then absolutely by definition, as the night follows the day, as water always flows downhill, our equanimity and happiness will continue to be challenged.
How couldit be otherwise? In a sense by adopting that response, we are locking ourselves into a conditioning process from which we can't escape. Round and round we go, like a hamster on a wheel. The problems inevitably continue to occur, we choose to see them as a disruption to our personal happiness an dpeace of mind, so inevitably, we respond to them with powerful negativity.
So over the years we carefully forge this more or less unbreakable link in our minds between the occurence of problems and the negative response, the anxiety and the stress with which we have always associated them. It become so much the way of the world that we never challenge it. It simply doesn't occur to us that there can be a totally different response.
You might almost say that Buddhism was created to persuade us that there is.
A change of perception changes everything. I think it actually worth writing that phrase down because it's so central to our argument. Buddhism teaches that that the way we look at any situation or environment is of the very greatest importance. That is to say, it is not so much the external circumstance that governs how it affects us, but how we choose to see it. It's not so much the problem that occurs that causes us to suffer, so much as how we respond to that problem. That in itself is a huge Buddhist lesson.
And it takes us directly to a paradox that lies really at the very heart of Shakyamuni's teachings. You could say that it is the essential perception we need to grasp in order to break out of that cycle of self-conditioning. So Buddhism teaches that happiness or well-being, and suffering, are not, as we so often regard them, entirely different and separate experiences, that lie at the opposite ends of the wide spectrum of human experience. That is simply the effect of our partial and incomplete view of our reality. On the contrary Buddhism tells us, they are closely and intimately inteconnected, almost like the two sides of a piece of paper.
That's pretty counter-intuitive isn't it? What can it possibly mean? We intensely dislike suffering and we run away from it whenever we can. And we run towards happiness because we love it so much. They must therefore lie in quite different directions.
Stop running for a moment Buddhism argues, and look a bit harder at your reality. If we continue to hang onto the view that our happiness in this life is directly dependent on our achieving a smooth, untroubled, sunlit existence, free from anxieties and pains and problems, then it doesn't take all that hard a look to see that it is a strategy doomed to failure, since there is no such place.
None of us knows anybody who lives such a life. Not a single person.
So all Buddhism is saying essentially is ' get real!' Just as today's positive psychologists advise us. If we genuinely seek to establish a strong and resilient sense of well-being at the core of our lives, then that can only be found Buddhism argues, in the very midst of the problems and the suffering that life throws at us, since that is the only place there is. That is the only reality.
They lie therefore, our happiness and our suffering cheek by jowl, in precisely the same direction. As one Buddhist teacher puts it so simply,
' Our suffering is us, and we need to treat it with kindness and non-violence. We need to embrace our fear, hatred, anguish and anger.'
Our suffering is us...we can all perceive immediately the deep truth of that statement. Moreover Buddhism goes on, the greater and more challenging the problems we embrace in this way, the greater then potential happiness they can release, sinc ethey demand so much mor eof us. They force us to demonstrate so much more courage and resilience to overcome them. They make us grow you might say. to become our most capable selves. And personal capability we learn in the course of our Buddhist practice, is a very important ingredient indeed in the makingn of the stuff we call well-being. We all dearly want to be...and we want to be seen to be... capable human beings. '
Enough for today I think. As I write that it takes me back to my own battle against cancer, and the fear and the pain it brought, and the deep understanding that came to me that if I really embraced it with my whole being then I could beat it. And I have!! I'm sure we can all look back on major challenges we have faced, and actually see the growth and the strength that has come from overcoming them. And the growth and the strength are the stuff of our well-being.
Thanks for reading this far. See you nest time.
William
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