I was just talking with my friend Lydia about meditation, the “point” of meditation, and related a couple metaphors I’ve found useful in my thinking, and thought, hey, they’d make a decent post.
My understanding of these is very much incomplete, and is a process, and these are just metaphors I’ve come up with on my own. They’re not scripture. If the Buddha’s teachings were just a finger pointing at the moon, these are kind of a finger pointing at the finger pointing at the moon. You’ve been warned.
No-Self, Codependent Arising, and Neurosis
There’s a lot of subtlety to the related Buddhist concepts of no-self and codependent arising. A lot of it has to do with the confusing limitations of language and our word, “exist.” (An aside: the brilliant Karen Armstrong’s books, The Great Transformation and A Case for God, do great justice to this complexity.) But a lot of it is just, well, deep subtlety.
From this subtlety, questions: If there’s no self, if all phenomena are impermanent and ephemeral, why must we meditate? What is there to do? For that matter, who is meditating? And if enlightenment and nirvana are about ceasing, why does it feel so hard? Why can’t I just… stop?
I think of meditation as sitting with a huge length of rope, tied into a knotted mass. As I sit, I steadily loosen and untangle the knots. It can’t be a struggle – everyone knows if you get impatient with knots, you only make matters worse. Instead, I sit with the knotted rope in my lap and, eyes defocused, just feeling with my hands, gently loosen whatever section I’m holding, trusting that over time this slow work will release them, and as the knots fall away, the rope is laid out, smoothly.
Over time, as I’m sitting there untying the rope, I think to myself, what is a knot, really? On the one hand I must admit that knots exist, because here I sit, untying them. And at the same time, a knot is only a name I give to the rope when it is twisted in one way rather than another. I cannot say, give me only a knot, but no rope.
And if ever I finish untying the rope, I will look at it and say, what have I really done? When I started, I had rope, and now, I have rope. And the end product of all that steady work, that steady release, is the realization that there was nothing really to do in the first place.
But I cannot have that realization while the rope is knotted.
Karma and Reincarnation
I was talking with my friend Tynan about reincarnation as we drove to his grandparents’ house in Massachusetts a few weeks ago. When I casually mentioned my belief in reincarnation he was startled. “You really believe in reincarnation?”
There’s a lot of subtlety, too, to the Buddhist notions of karma and reincarnation. The most pedestrian view, the way we often use “karma” in daily conversation, is this notion that the universe keeps records and hands out pleasure and pain to make sure it all adds up. Like if you’re mean to someone, a potted plant is guaranteed to fall on your head within a week.
Reincarnation, too, is often understood in a similarly mystical way. If I’ve been good, and I die, I’ll come back as a human again. If I’ve been bad, I’ll come back as a mushroom. And not a good mushroom, like a truffle. A bad mushroom.
These views obviously don’t stand up to scrutiny. With karma, who’s keeping tabs? The Buddha never discussed the existence of any gods, dismissing it as irrelevant to the pursuit of liberation. With reincarnation, what’s reincarnating? The Buddha was also quite explicit about no-self, rejecting the notion of the atman, or soul, as something with intrinsic existence. What would it even mean to say that I “came back” as a mushroom, if there’s nothing there to come back?
So, another metaphor: We are all wading around in a giant lake. Our walking is our karma; karma literally translates simply as action. As we walk, we create ripples: our karmic momentum. The ripples vary in size. Sometimes we stumble and struggle to remain upright, and splash, creating larger waves.
The waves and ripples move through the lake, and when they reach others, they move them. To the extent that we’ve perfected our balance, the ripples of others may affect us more or less, but all of us are moved. When very large waves crash against us, even the steadiest of us are moved. And as we struggle to retain our own balance, we splash around and create more waves. And on we go, splashing around, adding our own waves to the ones already there.
The motion of the water, this disturbance, is upset, what Buddhism calls dukkha, the unavoidable unsatisfactoriness of life, and at times it can become very turbulent, frothy whitewater threatening to drown us entirely. Our own frantic struggles to remain upright are our suffering.
It’s not so tit-for-tat as the simplistic view. When a wave hits us, we can’t always say exactly where it came from. It may be the combined results of many people’s struggles. And even if we see who caused it, we can look and say, he did that because another wave hit him. We’re all in the same lake, splashing around together. But when the water is very choppy, we know for sure it’s because of our struggling, because left alone, the water would be still.
And so, on reincarnation, a story I’ve always liked:
“Master,” the student asked, “If there is no self, no eternal soul, what is it that reincarnates?”
“Neurosis,” the master answered, without hesitation.
And so reincarnation, as I understand it, isn’t mysticism. All it’s saying is this: let’s say you’ve been splashing around in that lake, and you’ve created massive waves. Then you die, and fall to the floor of the lake, unmoving. What happens to those waves?
They keep going, obviously. When you die, your karmic momentum doesn’t stop. If you wronged someone, the fact that you’re dead doesn’t erase that from their mind. Your death doesn’t obliterate the residue of your life. To me, it’s not so much a “reincarnation” as it is a “continuation.” When my body dies, I live on through my karmic momentum. “I” continue to exist as the waves in the lake, and when those waves hit others and they react, I exist still in their reactions. Whether my physical body is still moving around is unimportant.
It is said that when you realize enlightenment, you dwell in nirvana and will no longer reincarnate. What does that mean?
Enlightenment is said to be the state where we see so clearly that we can avoid creating any more karmic momentum. We have stopped, ceased. This often sounds pessimistic to people – nihilistic, even – but is actually deeply optimistic. In this metaphor, enlightenment is the ability to walk around the lake without creating any ripples at all. The process is gradual: As I develop the brahmaviharas, Buddhism’s “divine abodes” of loving kindness, compassion, sympathetic joy, and equanimity, I gain steadiness, over time, my ripples become smaller and fewer.
Loving kindness, compassion, and sympathetic joy are my motivation. They create in me the desire to stop the waves. Equanimity is a bit different: it’s the actual skill of not creating the waves, the ability. Equanimity is the physical balance I need to sway in time with even the largest waves and stay upright without flailing, without splashing.
This state of ceasing, of nirvana, is then the perfection of these, and far from nihilism, is deepest joy. Freed from the stress of always watching the water, worrying about the next wave, I can enjoy the cool, refreshing lake, the company of everyone else wading around with me, and I can turn my face up towards the sky and enjoy the sunlight.
And at the moment I die, I leave the lake undisturbed, and so I truly cease to be.
In your last metaphor you speak about the waves being your karmic momentum, but if you’re loving, compassionate and a joyful person, won’t you touch someones life, thereby affecting their karmic momentum. In other words, your trying not to have a karmic momentum will have touched someone, and you would still live on through theirs. Think about that means, no matter how hard you try not to make the water move, you would still affect the way it did.
Anonymous
That starts to get into *really* subtle territory. The Buddha himself is a great example. After his enlightenment, it’s said he generated no more karma, by definition. But he stayed around and taught for decades. It does seem that he affected those he interacted with – how is that not generating karma?
Honestly, I don’t have the answer to that. If I were to hazard a guess, I’d say, well, karma is either negative or positive, and the Buddha in staying around was able only to generate positive karma? My lake metaphor doesn’t really extend well to describe positive and negative karma, I admit.
To follow that up, there is a story that goes like this: The Buddha was out begging, one day, for food, but found that every door in the village was shut and locked. He knocked on one door and a man hurried him in and warned him: “The notorious murderer Angulimala is here!”
Angulimala had killed nearly a hundred men and was said to have special powers – once forty guards attacked him at once and he slew them all. He wore a necklace of the severed fingers of his victims. Everyone was terrified of him. The Buddha thanked the man for the warning and, against his urgings, walked outside and down the street.
A while later, he heard behind him the sound of Angulimala approaching. The Buddha continued calmly walking forward, and Angulimala found to his increasing frustration that even as he ran, he could not catch up to the Buddha.
Finally he shouted out, “Stop!”
The Buddha turned to him and said “I stopped a long time ago, Angulimala. Now you stop.”
The story goes on – Angulimala doesn’t understand, and the Buddha explains, and Angulimala went on to renounce his murderous ways, suffer the karmic consequences, and eventually become enlightened.
The notion of the Buddha saying “I have stopped,” as I’ve always read it, was saying, “I am no longer creating karma, I am no longer causing turbulence, and you with your murdering are generating great misery.”
But, like I said, I don’t pretend to understand how the Buddha was able not to generate karma and stick around to teach for so long. My understanding, though, is that he claimed that was the case.
It may not describe positive and negative karma, but it does make you think more deeply about how to make your karma be neither negative nor positive. Make you think weather it’s even possible or not.
Trying to cease to exist, is like trying to make the sun go down right as it’s risen, it won’t happen. Once you’ve lived, someone will remember you, change how they live based on what you’ve done, in either a positive or negative way. Only think to do is make it positive.
Not all metaphors make people think further than they want. Yours keep you thinking, they’re good.
Anonymous
I’ve never heard that story before. If only we could understand much more than we do. In time we will. But once we have, I’m curious as to how many people will make use of their new found knowledge, in a good way at least.
Hey Brian, thanks, that was a very nice post. Good metaphors too.
Have you read Alan Watts’ Way of Zen? I found it quite, um, enlightening. Much more so than D. T. Suzuki’s An Introduction to Zen Buddhism.
Hey! Yeah, you recommended it to me once, and I got it… and I have to admit I found it very slow going. Heavily academic, and I wasn’t very moved by it, so I put it down. He has such a reputation, though, I should go back and give it another shot.
Well, it’s more academic than some I guess. I like how he (eventually) gives explanations for some of the more paradoxical elements of Zen / buddhism, even if I’ve always suspected his explanations are not consistent throughout the book. I think the academicness makes the book a bit more digestible for me, as he explains a lot of context and not just ‘the message’.
There’s a Zen place in Vienna I’ve considered going to for their Zen ‘course’ – any tips on picking a place to go to for meditation?