Читать книгу Bringing Wisdom to Life - Anita Carter - Страница 5

The Dalai Lama has said many times that what all beings want fundamentally is to be well and happy. We did a survey of the students at a course we conducted on Buddhism to find out what they hoped to get out of the course. Most of their answers were to do with developing inner peace and happiness.

Buddhism says you can certainly achieve long-lasting happiness. Ajarn Brahm, a famous Buddhist Monk who lives in Perth Western Australia, for example, says he has found deeper and deeper levels of happiness through practicing Buddhism. In his words he says he experiences "happiness stacked on happiness stacked on happiness".

From the Buddhist perspective the key to achieving happiness is to understand the real causes of happiness. According to Buddhism it is not a mystery at all. The process of how and why our mind experiences happiness and suffering is what the Buddha found out.

In Buddhism it is taught that there are two levels of reality. The first level is named conventional reality. This is the part every one of us already has understanding about.

We operate successfully in the world by understanding conventional reality and building the skills and attitudes from childhood to relate to our life that way. However, Buddhist teachings sometimes refer to conventional reality as a deceptive reality because it leads us to believe that it is the only reality that exists.

Buddhism says there is another level of reality called absolute or ultimate reality. This is the fundamental reality which is not so much to do with what appears to us to be happening from moment to moment, but more to do with why things happen, and how they happen.

Let us explain this by using the example of the Buddha when he was young, before he set out on his path to enlightenment. His name was Siddhartha. You may know that he was a Prince who lived a wonderful life in a royal palace in Northern India. Whilst his living conditions were fabulous there was still discontent in his mind.

He wondered about his life and the life of others. He was deeply affected by the things most people tend to accept as being just part of life; such things as sickness and old age, sadness and sorrow and finally, death. He saw these things as immense burdens and difficulties which we all must meet.

His wife, father, children, in fact everyone he knew would have to face old age and death, and yet, at the same time, everybody he knew lived their lives seemingly unconcerned about these things. They were unconcerned because they believed there was nothing that could be done about it.

Siddhartha, however, could not be unconcerned. He wanted to find out why the world was like that. He wanted to know what was the truth about life? What was really going on? What caused these different sufferings to happen in unequal measures to everybody? Was there any way that could be found which would stop suffering?

This is where we get back to the difference between conventional and ultimate reality. Siddhartha was asking questions which could not be answered by understanding conventional truth. He had reached the ceiling, the limit of what conventional truth could say about the world.

Even though some siddhas or yogis did perceive deeper levels of understanding than conventional reality, they could still not provide the answers to Siddhartha’s questions.

You can read about the journey Siddhartha went on for six years as a wandering aesthetic, in search of what he had vowed to find out about life and, in particular, to know the answers to his profound questions. He wanted to understand why there is suffering in life.

The culmination of this extraordinary quest finally came when his mind penetrated to the level of reality which creates our conventional reality. It is referred to as being an ultimate reality, meaning there is nothing further, nothing higher, nothing more than this.

Not only did Buddha access the existence of an ultimate reality, he chose to spend the rest of his forty-five years of life Teaching others the method by which they could experience what he had discovered for themselves.

From his perfect knowledge of both types of reality, conventional and ultimate reality, the Buddha described the engine that powers every individual’s experiences of suffering and happiness.

Buddha saw that just as there are laws of nature which operate in the physical world - the many laws we recognise through science, there are also universal laws of nature which operate in the mental world.

They are the natural laws of the mind.

We are so used to understanding that the physical world operates on natural laws yet what about the mental world? Mind is also part of nature.

The Buddha saw that together physical laws and the mind laws govern the processes of life and living. From this deep wisdom the Buddha saw how individual suffering arises.

So now we come back to our own situation. The problem that arises for us and the reason we have not already developed sustained happiness in our lives is that we only have knowledge of the conventional type of reality. Our knowledge is missing fundamental parts of the process through which our happiness and unhappiness come to us.

In our times we have learned through science the horizons of what we can see are ever expanding. Through quantum physics we can see into the infinitesimally small dimensions of reality's building blocks, through astronomical research we can see back through millions of light years in time, yet all these astounding visions are in the world outside of ourselves.

Our inside world really, we don't see much at all. We see further and further outwardly, not far at all inwardly. Why do you think that is?

Our mind is all we have got to deal with the events and processes in our life. Buddhism says it is possible to understand our own mind and it is the most important thing we need to understand and develop. The quality of our moment by moment experience of life is most determined by the quality of our own mind.

There are approximately forty volumes of Buddhist texts explaining what the Buddha found out, and the methods Buddha taught his students so they could develop their own minds to see ultimate reality directly, for themselves. How do we get a vantage point that can help us use this knowledge to move forward in our own lives?

One natural law that is used in Buddhist philosophy is the law of kamma. If we understand it correctly, it is a key to learning what Buddhist practice is all about and setting out on the Path to our own true wellbeing and happiness. This is the Law of Kamma or the law of cause and effect.