Post #1: On the Path, Off the Path?

29 April 2023

So am I a Buddhist? The question sounds straightforward enough, and living in Buddhist lands as I do, it would be nice to have a handy answer ready. But I don’t.

In the local, devotional sense of “making merit” at the temple with incense sticks, prostrations at the feet of brightly robed monks, or intricate calculations around the karmic costs of this or that offense or expiation, no, I’d better not call myself a Buddhist. Only it’s not quite so simple, because I have spent more than a decade and half now following a path that certainly owes much to the teachings of the Buddha as I understand them—if I understand them. (We’ll get to clocking my hours on the mat: that will be the next installment, I think.)

Aye, there’s the rub: if I understand them. For there’s a curious twist to the whole construction of the Noble Eightfold Path, which is said both to begin and to end with right view. What does that mean in practice? Well, for starters it means that even proper knowledge of what is and is not the Path is supposed to come, according to the orthodoxy itself, only at the final completion of the journey. Until then we stumble along, with some sense of direction, let us hope, but still groping our way forward amidst much confusion and uncertainty.

2500 years of traditional guidance may be helpful, to be sure, but as the Buddha himself supposedly told the “fittingly perplexed” and sceptical Kalamas in an especially famous talk, reliance on a tradition (or on a trusted teacher, or venerated scriptures, or plausibility and common sense, or careful reasoning, the list goes on and on) cannot solve the problem of where to turn for truth. Only sustained personal experience, not anyone else’s pointers, can give us the direction we lack—in bits and pieces, forward steps and setbacks, moments of temporary assurance and profound insight as much as waves of recurrent doubt.

What about following the precepts? I keep them in mind, certainly, but they are hardly distinctive enough to mark one out particularly: what tradition has ever encouraged anyone to lie, to steal, to kill, to cultivate intoxication, or to engage in sexual misconduct? The devil, as they say, is in the detail here, and while the precepts look like pretty sound and sensible rules of thumb to me, they are not divine commandments of the more familiar kind, nor categorical imperatives issued sui generis by the rational faculty, but training rules that need to be interpreted and applied pragmatically—no more and no less.

Taking refuge, then—with the Buddha, his Teaching (the Dhamma), and the community of serious and seasoned walkers on the Path (the Sangha). Fair enough, but surely too vague for issuing membership cards.

Thinking in terms of karma and rebirth? Oh dear, not that one, please. Very central to the architecture of Buddhist belief, no doubt about that, but what do I know of such high cosmic truths? One life at a time, as Thoreau insisted even on his death bed.

Perhaps the Four Noble Truths with their recognition of suffering—or better, dissatisfaction—as a feature of existence woven into the very texture of sentience, not an avoidable flaw or bug in the program, but the very program itself. Sure, that makes a lot of sense to me, as does the diagnosis that goes with it of what can be done about it. But once again, to understand the full implications of the Noble Truths is to have walked the Path to the end—to the point where the greatest delusion of all falls away at last, the unshakable belief, seemingly borne out so unanswerably by our everyday experience, that behind the welter of confused sensations and perceptions, there is something holding it all together, some identity beyond the momentary constellation of this or that ever-changing causal condition and relationship. I’m not sure I even understand on paper all that is implied here; but even if I could form some adequate idea of it, which is doubtful enough, it wouldn’t get me to the liberating experience that alone can bring such ultimate things properly to light.

What about impermanence itself, then, Anicca in the traditional Pali vocabulary, perhaps the most pervasive feature of all in the world of Samsara, the endless wandering of sentient beings from birth to aging, sickness, and death? To become fully aware of this all-pervading transience, the Buddha taught, even if were just for the snap of a finger, would be more fruitful than the greatest alms-giving, than feeding a hundred liberated beings or a Buddha, than going for refuge or taking the five precepts, even than developing a mind of loving-kindness. So there, in the most fleeting thing of all, the sand of life that is running forever through our fingers, perhaps I do have something, not to hold on to, but to look at for guidance and orientation. “All things are impermanent: work out your liberation with diligence!” the Buddha exhorted his followers with his last words (variously translated). And yes, in that sense, though on-and-off perhaps, there cannot really be any doubt that I am one of his followers too…

Readings: Anguttara Nikaya 9:20 (the unique fruitfulness of contemplating impermanence) and 3:65 (the Buddha reassures the Kalamas)