Post #190: Staying Sane in Samsara

21 Sept. 2025

“They had brought along a provision of hippo-meat that went rotten and made the mystery of the wilderness stink in my nostrils… The pilgrims, in the midst of a shocking hullabaloo, had thrown a considerable quantity of it overboard. It looked like a high-handed proceeding; but it was really a case of legitimate self-defense. You can’t breathe dead hippo waking, sleeping, and eating, and at the same time keep your precarious grip on existence.”

— Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness

     Who has not looked with sorrow, with dread, or at times even with fear and loathing, upon the rife confusions of the world? How rampant the fantasies and delusions, how bottomless the abyss of ignorance and presumption! How impenetrable the weave of ill-will in its infinite variations, how universal the dominion of craving and clinging and hankering after hollow things…

     Some basic morality and elementary decency cannot be too hard to find among us, or else human life would not be viable; some moments of love as well, here and there, though rarely untainted by grosser stuff; and also a fair amount of concentration, though all too readily distracted and, where it is more steady, directed all too often towards base and unworthy objects. But wisdom, not of the occasional practical kind, but of the sort that transcends self and silences contention with an unanswerable word or a smile: how much do we really see of that in our world? Or if we did encounter it unexpectedly, could we even be sure that we would recognize it?

     How frightful a mess it can all appear, how maddening a swirl—a veritable maelstrom of benighted misery! So far the company of dreaders are hardly wrong in their judgment, only blinkered in their perspective, since next they (we) tend to make a cardinal mistake: they exempt themselves, not altogether perhaps, but enough to make it appear as if they alone stood outside the welter they describe, rather than in the very midst of it, along with everyone else. Alas, how much easier it is to see the specks in the eyes of others, but not the beams in our own—this too a symptom of the all-encompassing nescience.

     We compound the mistake with another (or maybe they are twin aspects of the same error): because we imagine that we can keep ourselves aloof, the ignorance of others seems to us willful and blameworthy. As we rise above the fray, or so we imagine, we are usually filled not with compassion but with disdain, contempt, or even rage towards those who remain so obstinately blind to the truth. Not that our moments of clarity are to be slighted, of course: getting our heads occasionally above the madly swirling waters is as vital for keeping us going in the right direction as it is dangerous when mistaken for reliable clear-sightedness, or, worse still, for having reached the safety of the other shore, which in fact remains far off.

     The Buddhist corrective, both to the ignorance and to its concomitant sneering and lashing-out, is to remind us that ignorance, craving, and aversion are no mere aberrations in our human condition, but its constitutive elements. Without the fuel of these defilements, we would none of us have been born into this world in the first place. To be sure, our business here is to wear out our old skins and leave them behind in due course, if we are able to outgrow them and molt naturally, not try to tear them off with bloody results; but as starting points these very imperfections are inescapable. Where we see the unholy triad (ignorance, craving, and aversion) at work—nearly everywhere we look—we should not respond with revulsion, but by recognizing that such is our native element as worldlings, and any rising above the muck and mire something to be grateful for, not something to be used against others less fortunate or less meritorious.

     Instead of recoiling so much, then, we should reach out as much as we can. In this it helps, however, to know our limits. Saints and Buddhas may face no such constraints, but the rest of us had better heed the warning familiar from commercial aviation: put on your own oxygen mask first, before you try to help anyone else. Holding hands should not end with getting your shoulder dislocated, and reaching for someone from your life-raft not with capsizing. Perhaps the smell of spoilt hippo meat all around needs to be tolerated, as Conrad’s wretched “pilgrims” could not; but our precarious hold on sanity, even more than on existence, will often require that we hold our noses, or turn away, where a more saintly being would not.

      Self-defense may not be very saintly, but it too has its place on the Path, especially when we face circumstances that would overwhelm us if we let them. So long as we can remain equanimous, bring it on; but no further. Buddhas shrink from nothing, but the training is not for them; it is for the rest of us, who are not Dhamma heroes, and therefore it needs to be gradual (no. 9), adapted to our respective limitations, our specific feeblenesses and characteristic weak spots. Sufficient faith, with Buddhists as with the Christians who gave us the image, may indeed be able to move mountains, sometimes, in a manner of speaking. At other times, alas, mere molehills can be enough to trip up the weary. Falling face-first into an anthill is also a way to practice equanimity; but it is not recommended.

     At the end of his life, summarizing the Teaching one last time to dispel any lingering misunderstandings, the Buddha stressed particularly the need to take refuge in the Dhamma and make islands of ourselves, that is to say, become spiritually self-reliant, our own masters (who else?). (Digha Nikaya 16.2:25–26 and Dhammapada 12.4 (160), see my nos. 18, 80, 133, among others.) Doing so does not mean turning inward exclusively, becoming unsociable, or taking no more interest in the concerns of others. Love thy neighbor is as much a Buddhist exhortation as a Christian one.

     At the same time, there is much, in our times of desperate information overload especially, from which we are well-advised to pull back (no. 188). The myriad diversions of social life, from gossip (social media) to politics (no. 122) to public entertainments of all sorts (seventh precept), are best avoided or at least strictly limited, not only by monks but by other serious practitioners of the Dhamma too, not because they are by themselves so very pernicious, but because their combined onslaught distracts the mind too much from the essentials. The guidelines for householders are much less stringent, granted, but the principle is clear: the mind, like the body, needs to be put on a sensible diet and guarded from unwholesome, noxious, or even merely useless inputs (see especially my no. 26 on monkey mind and mental hygiene in the digital age). This should not be done in a spirit of disgust—a committed meditator can practice on anything, even pollution—but of taking care that by protecting ourselves, as outlined above, we may better take care of others.

     Time on the mat, which might be considered the most important safeguard of all, along with the basic moral precepts, will sometimes be treated in rather cavalier a fashion, especially by an age in a hurry, as if it were only for beginners, the spiritually feeble-minded, or other unmindful folk. This or that is my meditation, one often hears, or even “All my day is a meditation.” Such easy talk may have an appealingly undogmatic and relaxed ring, but discipline is no less important than appropriate relaxation (see especially no. 2 on Sona the former lute-player). Even the most expert musicians continue to tune their instruments and practice their scales. Our minds too need calibrating not once and for all, but every day anew, morning and night, just as our teeth require continual cleaning.

     Whether the same remains true of Buddhas is surely a moot point: what can we really know of their ways? You will understand what to do when you have truly crossed to the other shore; those who suspend their efforts mid-stream, however, or when they have barely dipped their toes in the water, are deluding themselves more dangerously, perhaps, than those who harbor no spiritual pretensions. Against all the clamor for quick results, we must remind ourselves again and again that the Path is long, very long indeed, and the most important thing therefore not speed in bursts, but steadfastness and continuity of practice all along the way.

     So we stand like trees, our roots more or less firmly grounded in the soil, our branches agitated by the unrelenting winds of the eight vicissitudes (no. 16). At times lightning strikes or the storm becomes so violent that the tree falls; otherwise decay sets in with the same result, sooner or later. We do not merely imagine this living being we call a tree, with which we identify ourselves (and our selves) so persistently. The rings we add, season by season, year by year, are neither arbitrary nor insubstantial, but layers shaped by what came before, and by surrounding conditions. The various strength of the trunks too is a fact to be reckoned with, and we are mistaken mostly in one respect: we imagine that at the heart of these trees, there is, individual in the truest sense, an abiding core, some ultimate and essential self. (Or to put it in more human terms, the houses we build are real enough, and much older than we remember from day to day; they have owners of sorts, but there is nobody home.)

     In this most instinctive of beliefs, so the Buddhists warn us with a compassionate smile, lies our most consequential error, as natural as it is bound to trap us in misery. Strip away the layers one by one, look beneath, and at the core (as with plantain trees, the Buddha explained), we will find no heartwood at all (Samyutta Nikaya 22:95 (3), 140-42), only emptiness. The discovery ought not to disappoint but liberate us, but whether we are ready for it is another question. So we stumble on, unable to bring things into proper focus, or see what is going on at all, even after the argument has convinced us intellectually, and the last traces of self-belief will accompany us, it is said, all the way to the end of the Path (Samyutta Nikaya 22:89).

Hard it is to be born,

Hard to live,

Harder still to hear of the way,

And hard to rise, follow, and awake.

Yet the Teaching is simple:

Do what is right.

Be pure.

At the end of the way is freedom.

Until then, patience.

(Thomas Byrom: Dhammapada 14.182-84)