Trusting the Mind | Dave's Place

The Buddha’s Ultimate Message

Some years ago, a publisher asked me to write a Young Adult biography of the Buddha. It was an obvious assignment in a way; two of my novels had been published as YA’s (though I hadn’t written them that way), and I’d written a fair amount about Buddhism as well. I could envision the book they wanted: a kind of adventure story which took the legendary aspects of the Buddha’s life seriously, his extraordinarily sheltered and luxurious youth, his sudden flight from the castle at night, his apprenticeship in meditation and long period of ascetic practice, the final night under the Bodhi tree when he faced the machinations of Mara. Even I could see that might make a good YA. It sounded like a classic.

I just couldn’t write it. I pictured the person I was as a “young adult”—full of countless questions about religion, which no one seemed willing to listen to, much less answer—and every time there was an event in the Buddha’s life, I went deeply into what I thought his motivations were, what the whole thing meant, answered all the questions that would have fascinated me as a young man (and which fascinate me still). I would have enjoyed that book as a young adult, but perhaps no one else. I sent the publisher a couple of chapters and they’d seen enough. They were sorry they’d brought it up, I’m sure.

Soon after that I got a job at Duke University, which meant that I’d have to confine my writing to the summers, but that I’d be able to write whatever I wanted, with no concern about money. I didn’t know if I could handle this situation; I’d always been a deliberate writer, multiple drafts of every chapter, and didn’t see how I could get anything done in even a four-month summer. But I was inspired by one of my writing heroes, Anthony Burgess, who set 2,000 words per day as his goal, no going back and futzing around, and figured I could revise on weekends and in spare moments during the school year, if I could just get drafts done over the summer. I’d been practicing writing for over thirty years and had to assume I could make an abrupt change in my methods. I had to trust, as I’d read in a Buddhist book[1], that “consciousness is shapely” and that, if I let my mind work freely, the result would make sense. It would at least give me something to work with.

The first thing I did, with my first free summer, was to write that biography of the Buddha.

I knew no one would publish it. I had no credentials as a Buddhist scholar, and had only been practicing for eight years (the year was 2001). But I hated to leave a project unfinished, and wanted to see what I made of the Buddha’s life. Even if no one else was interested.

I saw the his life as both exceptional and exemplary. He was an extraordinary human being; even before he went off on his spiritual quest, people spoke of him as intelligent and able, and he eventually became a deeply realized human being.[2] At the same time, he encountered the same difficulties all of us do. We can read his extraordinary life as a blueprint for our own. It was as if he were showing us how to live.

One of the things that struck me was the way that, time after time, he trusted his mind in the face of what anyone else might have told him. That seemed to be a lifelong habit for him.

There are places where he taught us to do that, most notably at the end of his life, when his mournful followers, including his cousin Ananda, asked how they could get along when he was gone, when they no longer had their teacher. “Be a light unto yourselves,” he famously said (or perhaps “Be an island unto yourselves.” There’s some dispute about the translation, but the message seems the same in either case). He was telling his students to trust what they already knew, deep in themselves. They all had Buddha Nature. They just had to settle into it, and trust it.

He had given the same essential message in the Kalama Sutta. Believe something when you know it by your own experience. Don’t believe it because you hear someone else say it—even me—or because it’s some revered scripture. Believe it because you know that it’s true.

He wasn’t talking about the rational discursive part of the mind, which can be full of nonsense, and is the source of all our delusions. He was talking about a deeper part of the mind, which has more to do with intuition and creativity. It isn’t knowing something the way you know you’ll fall to the ground if you jump out the window. It’s a much deeper place, the way you walk into a room and know something is wrong. That part of our mind isn’t infallible. But it’s the best guide we have.

The Buddha had that trust all his life. And there are occasions when he relied on it in the face of everything his rational mind would have told him.

The first was what I consider to be the most remarkable moment in his life, though he was not yet enlightened and had never engaged in spiritual practice. It was when he left home. From the point of view of a rational human being, that was the act of a madman.

I don’t believe the legendary story of the Buddha’s early life, that there was a prediction that he would either be a great spiritual leader or a great secular leader, and that his father—hoping he’d be a warrior—shielded him from ever seeing sickness, aging, and death, the conditions that lead to a spiritual life. (How could a father protect any son from those things until his late twenties? That’s the kind of idea my “young adult” self would have torn to shreds.) I do believe that, like all wealthy men—he apparently was wealthy, though not actually a King—the Buddha’s father protected his son from things as much as he could, and gave him an extremely luxurious life. He definitely hoped his child would take the secular, rather than the spiritual path. What sane parent wants his child to go out and become a homeless beggar?

I do think that Gautama[3] had some profound experience of impermanence in his late twenties. He’d known for most of his life that he was going to die, but he realized it in some deeper way. I’ve always thought that realization had something to do with the birth of his son.[4] I’ve known a number of men (including me) who had a sudden realization of mortality—complete with panic attacks—when their first child was born. Simultaneous with the experience of seeing a life come into being is the realization that someday, in the same way, that life will come to an end. And there’s nothing a father can do to prevent that. We simultaneously have an overwhelming wish to protect our child and a realization that, ultimately, there’s no way we can. You feel that small slight body as you hold it, the soft vulnerable head, and you shudder.

Gautama asked of his servant, in the most poignant moment in the story, “If all of life ends in death, what is the point of living?” What, indeed? He had asked one of the most basic questions of human existence.

The thing about the Buddha was that, unlike the rest of us, he couldn’t rest until he’d found the answer. He couldn’t suppress his feelings. He had to know.

And in some way, what he found on his spiritual quest apparently answered that question for him. His teaching doesn’t address it directly. But it must at least address it obliquely. He seems to have answered it to his own satisfaction.

In any case, in order to find an answer to that question, Gautama left home. He left a luxurious life where he had everything he could want for one where he essentially owned nothing, he would live by begging, he would—as Jesus did—give himself over to the beneficence of the universe. There’s no more radical act than that.

He had to find the answer to his question.

Like many people who are good at everything they turn to, he was even good at spiritual practice! He found a teacher who claimed he could take meditators as deeply as meditators could go, and eventually affirmed that Gautama had made that journey, and acknowledged that he was ready to teach. Another teacher came along and said that no, he could take his students even deeper than that (does this sound familiar to those in the modern spiritual marketplace?) and Gautama studied with him for a while, with the same result. He went as far as the method could take him. He was ready to teach.

Gautama was a success. He had left a secular life for a spiritual life, and his teachers said he had accomplished his goal. But he knew, at a deep level, that he hadn’t found what he was looking for. He hadn’t answered his question.[5] He trusted his mind, and moved on from those teachers.

He famously undertook extreme ascetic practices. He and some of his compatriots believed that desire was the problem—it was human desire that presented them from seeing the truth—and that the way to kill desire was not to give in to it at all. They were already celibate, but they practically gave up eating and drinking as well. The legendary stories of how little they ate are not believable, but Gautama apparently grew emaciated (accounts of that may be exaggerated too). He proceeded to a point where he saw that, to completely eliminate desire, he would eliminate life. Desire was an inescapable part of life. In a charming moment in the legendary story, a farm girl sees the ailing man and gives him what sounds like rice pudding[6]. She was saying, in effect, C’mon, man. Ya gotta eat! But the people he’d been practicing with, his only spiritual companions, thought he’d given up his quest, and they deserted him.

Gautama was left alone. In a certain way, at every one of these junctures, he was always alone, perhaps most dramatically on the night when he left home, but certainly when he abandoned his first two spiritual teachers, and now when he was abandoned by his dharma brothers. This was the moment when Gautama’s trust in mind was most remarkable. He had come to a complete dead end. The depths of meditation hadn’t saved him. Extreme ascetic practice hadn’t either. And in this moment of despair, from the depths of his mind, he had a vague memory, a twilight image, of a moment from his childhood when he was sitting under a tree observing things around him—this was like the most basic stage of meditation—not drawn to them or averse to them, just experiencing them. And though that sounds like one of the all time dumb practices (a website calls it The Stupid Way) he thought there was something to it. He had a hunch, having done all he’d done, that this might be the way to wisdom.

So he sat down and had a look at things. And thereby discovered the practice that would change his life, and has changed countless lives since.

[1] The Diane Di Prima chapter in Beneath a Single Moon.

[2] My teacher Larry Rosenberg once told me that he didn’t think the Buddha was necessarily the most realized person who ever lived, but that, of the realized people, he was the best teacher. I would say the same thing about Larry himself (not to put him in intimidating company). Of all the people I’ve known, he was one of the most realized. But he was first and foremost a marvelous teacher.

[3] The name most biographers give him before he was enlightened.

[4] That explains the other huge puzzle about his leaving home. After people say, How could he leave his young wife? they then say, And how could he leave his son? The child had just been born! But it was because of his child’s birth that he had to go. That was the compelling fact.

[5] Specifically, the deep states he had accessed in meditation were brought about by causes and conditions, by things he had learned to do. They were helpful, but they weren’t permanent. He was looking for something that was not impermanent.

[6] Larry Rosenberg’s favorite dish.