The Easy Path to Buddhahood: Part 2 - Acknowledge Your Inability

To aspire to become a True Buddha – a being who is totally free of suffering – totally enlightened – may seem like an absurdly impossible goal, especially if you have never heard Buddha’s teaching before.

You can lay aside your worries here, if you have them. To take the path of the Pure Land, the Easy Path to Buddhahood, the first “step” is to awaken your aspiration to Buddhahood. You can read more about that here.

That’s why it’s so important to proclaim Buddha’s perspective concerning each and all of us: our fundamental nature truly IS Buddha – only it is covered up by our blind passion – our cravings and aversions - our delusional thinking about life, ourselves and others.

That dual truth - of our fundamental nature as Buddha - and our common matrix of delusions and obscurations - is true of the best of us, and the rest of us as well.

When we listen deeply, and hear that our fundamental nature is Buddha, we naturally begin to yearn for deliverance from all our suffering into the freedom that Buddhahood – and only Buddhahood – offers us all.

That yearning – that aspiration – is truly a precious seed, lying dormant in each and every being – the best of us, and the rest of us as well.

Many times we don’t even have a name for this seed when it first begins to sprout deep within. All of a sudden, without any warning, we are turned on the axis of our own awareness: The humdrum, mundane, “me versus them” world we live in reveals itself to be shimmering, pristine, numinous and alive. All of a sudden, we are not just alive – we are life itself.

This “oceanic experience” as William James called it in The Varieties of Religious Experience, is nothing less than our common seed of Buddhahood sprouting inside us. It is an early spring - a short-lived sign of a life we have not yet experienced in fullness – the end of suffering at last.

But it fades. Because of our blind passion which fuel our endless delusions and obscurations, as Buddha called them, our primal shimmering experience recedes, and we are thrown back into our humdrum, mundane, “me versus them” experience of existence once again.

But that one taste of Buddha life awakens our thirst for more. It leads us to take our first steps on the path. And so the journey – in this life – begins. Our aspiration to Buddhahood is the carrot – and our suffering as non-buddhas is the stick – that leads us (and sometimes drives us) along the path – however we name it.

What many of us encounter, once on the path, is the encouragement to enter one or more paths within the Path – sometimes called “dharma gates” within Buddhist teaching – which involve taking on a particular set of teachings and practices to move us closer to the goal of Buddhahood.

Over the course of thousands of years, many methods have been developed to cut through our delusions and obscurations, to uncloud the mind, to reduce our cravings and aversions, and thus unveil fuller and deeper glimpses of our fundamental Buddha nature.

There are dharma gates that use various types of meditation - dharma gates that use various types of chanting - dharma gates that use various types of visualizations – dharma gates that involve selfless service – dharma gates that involve vows of one sort or another – dharma gates that involve deep study - dharma gates that involve renunciations, calling for celibacy, or voluntary poverty – dharma gates that involve surrender to a teacher who becomes a “cut out”, a stand in for the still unseen Buddha within.

And there are dharma gates that include combinations of any and all of the above.

Historically, people have been encouraged to find a “fit” – what kind of dharma gate will work for me, to complete my journey to Buddhahood, based on my own personal nature, my own strengths and weaknesses, my own way of experiencing life?

But the underlying assumption, always, behind all of these many and varied dharma gates – these paths within the Path – is that it was possible to arrive at the goal – the endpoint of Buddhahood – Nirvana – the cessation of suffering at last – by doing SOMETHING, with some kind of instruction and/or direction from a spiritual teacher.

That assumption – that dedicated and sincere effort could indeed lead to Buddhahood – was valid and true when Shakyamuni Buddha lived among men, some 2500 years ago.

That assumption remained true and valid for 500 years after Shakyamuni departed. Because Shakyamuni’s energetic field – called a “buddhafield” in the Larger Pure Land Sutra - was present and potent, many beings understood the teaching deeply – both as intellectual content and lived experience.

Many came to the precipice – the edge of Buddhahood in this life – and left this world, totally free beings at last. Many were plain people – even people who we would label (in modern language) intellectually retarded, or emotionally disturbed. That’s how potent the power of Shakyamuni’s buddhafield was during his lifetime, and in the early years after he left this world.

For the next 1000 years, Shakyamuni’s buddhafield - though still present in some strength – was not as potent. As a result many beings still understood the teaching as intellectual content – but not deeply as lived experience. Few were able to master their blind passion, their egotism, their cravings and aversions by their best efforts in whatever practices they chose. Few came to the precipice of Buddhahood – or even close to that edge.

We who are alive right now live in a “third age” – called the Age of Dharma Decline. It is an age characterized, more than anything else, by a weak and ineffectual Buddhafield. Why? Because Shakyamuni, the last Buddha of this world, is long gone, and Maitreya, the future Buddha in this world, won’t arrive until many years in the future.

As a result, very few people in this age understand the Buddha’s teaching as intellectual content, and fewer still as lived experience - in an ongoing way, though a lot of Buddhists like to THINK that they do.

Even among those who DO understand – and DO have some experience – the lack of energy from Buddha’s buddhafield means that mastery of blind passion, of cravings and aversions, of egotism is pretty much impossible for most people, most of the time.

In fact, the because Shakyamuni’s buddhafield is so weak, the plain fact is that we don’t even know what we don’t even know. Most of us are just not aware of our blind passion and our great negative karma, most of the time.

This is the bitter pill that most Buddhists – and indeed most people of all religious paths – find so difficult to swallow. This bald statement of our limitations in the age of Dharma Decline is at the very heart of SHIN UGLY – Shinran’s plain teaching for plain people about the truth of why we find it so hard to end our suffering at last – even when we want to. It explains why even sincere Buddhists – even Buddhist teachers of all sects - remain so prone to what Buddha calls “the three poisons” of greed, anger and stupidity.

It’s a bitter pill indeed. It’s one that Shinran was able to swallow, as a Buddhist burnout - having put in 20 years of solid 24/7/365 practice with utmost dedication, only after he met his teacher Honen. Honen had put in decades of 24/7/365 practice as well - and had come to the same conclusion - and swallowed his own bitter pill.

These men recognized that despite their yearnings, they simple didn’t have the right stuff to yank out the roots of attachment in their lives as Shakyamuni had done. They couldn’t help but recognize that they remained plagued with what Honen called the ten evils, and what Shinran called the snakes and scorpions of his own mind.

They remained, in other words, people in great need of greater compassion - because they just couldn’t cross the ocean of birth and death in their own rafts - by their own power - to get to the far shore of full enlightenment - or even anywhere close.

They didn’t come to this conclusion easily. They experienced innate resistance, the resistance of their own ineradicable egotism, just as many of us do. And finally, they met this egotistic resistance in the only way any of us can meet it.

The innate resistance to this bald truth – the truth of our limitations in this age of Dharma Decline – can only be met in one way: by opening our hearts, and our minds to listen deeply.

Only by listening deeply – with great sincerity and sort of ruthless honesty – will we come to grips with the fact of our common existential predicament – our essential inability to rise above our blind passions.

Only by listening deeply will we understand at last why we cannot live in the view that we have tasted on our mediation cushions – or during a walk in the beauty of nature – as we go about the business of our daily lives.

Though we drag ourselves back to our many and varied practices over and over again, nothing settles us in, once and for all. All it takes – life shows – is a certain level of trouble – of discomfort – of discombobulation – and the cycle of suffering begins again, and again, and again.

This cycle of suffering plagues not just the “newbies” – but even the great Buddhist teachers of this age. The only difference is how much trauma it takes to break the person down – and bring him or her to the point where the mindstream is polluted by angst, anger, fear, sorrow, pride and confusion of one sort or another.

Under duress, our blind passion remains our master – regardless of our efforts at mastery.

Clarity of vision and mastery of blind passion – the kind of clarity and mastery that characterizes beings who stand on the precipice of Buddhahood - is rarely found in this day and age.

Many spiritual aspirants – Buddhist and otherwise – who have great love, respect and (indeed) attachment to their teachers and their teaching lineages – find such statements offensive and disrespectful. But neither offense nor disrespect is intended – by Shinran or his teachers or by me – when sharing the SHIN UGLY truth that all our efforts to complete our journey in this life are simply not effective today.

On the other side of the coin, many spiritual aspirants – Buddhist and otherwise - who have great love, respect and (indeed) attachment to their teachers and their teaching lineages, figure that if they themselves have such trouble mastering their blind passion, it must be because they are poor students – unworthy of their teachers’ time and attention. There is, sad to say, a lot of such secret self-contempt among serious spiritual aspirants who are failing at their “program” of mastery of their blind passions by whatever means they employ.

Possibly the largest category of spiritual aspirants are those who use their path as a kind of security blanket – a way to shield themselves from a raw and honest look at how much their mindstreams really are dominated by blind passion, ineradicable egotism, endless cravings and aversions - that arise over and over again.

This common-as-mud misuse of religion is one of the most fundamental expressions of our ego defense mechanisms. In Buddhism – and in other paths - it expresses itself as a subtle, secret self-satisfaction about WIITWD – “what it is that we do” - to get our ticket punched in whatever dharma gate we’ve embraced.

The SHIN UGLY proclamation of our common spiritual bankruptcy in this age of dharma decline - is what makes the Easy Path to Buddhahood the hardest path of all, for so many of us, when we first encounter Shinran – the foolish bald-headed man, as he calls himself – when he shares the final teaching of Shakyamuni for an age of Dharma Decline.

Why? Because this SHIN UGLY talk cuts right to the very heart of our egotism – our attachment to our own delusions about our sufficiency in an age of insufficiency.

It cuts right to the heart of our egotism to recognize the truth of our inability to come to the precipice of Buddhahood – or even anywhere in the neighborhood.

It HURTS to sit with awareness of our inability. It creates a profound TENSION – the tension of a true dialectic – between the thesis of our awakened aspiration to Buddhahood, and the anti-thesis of our utter inability to attain what we aspire for in our deepest being.

For con artists and crack whores, for junkies and gangstas, there’s little tension right here. Such people have few delusions about life’s suffering, or about themselves – except for the delusion that they DON’T have fundamental Buddha nature.

It’s those already on the path, already making some progress in some way or another, who find this teaching – Buddha’s final teaching for an age of dharma decline – so tough to listen to – especially when there’s nothing that can be done to resolve the tension that really is there - on the edge of consciousness - always.

Listening – deep listening - is what is required – to get a true sense of that tension – and Buddha’s resolution for it - once that awareness of our limitation finally dawns.

More than that, on the Easy Path to Buddhahood deep listening is the ONLY thing that is required – for both the junkie who doesn’t know his fundamental nature is Buddha – and for the Buddhist who doesn’t know – and doesn’t want to know - just how profound his limitation really is.

Once deep listening has brought us, at last, to that state of tension where we yearn, and yet are unable to satisfy our yearning – we are ready for the finale – the final step – part three of the Easy Path to Buddhahood. Click this link:


http://www.shinuglyblog.com/blog/index.php?p=55

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