Читать книгу The Heart of Buddhism: A Simple Introduction to Buddhist Practice - Guy Claxton - Страница 13

It is in fact seeing the fruits of Buddhism in another person that attracts people more than anything else. Sometimes, as I said, people are interested in the ideas or the forms of meditation that they come across in conversation or in a book. But what transmutes this interest into some sort of commitment is usually an encounter with a human being who seems actually to embody the teachings. There is a feeling of being drawn, not so much by what they say as by who they are – by a sense of their being at peace with themselves, or of their ability to cut through a difficult situation with an enviable mixture of clarity and tact. Now of course it is not only Buddhists who have this ease and grace; everybody, I am sure, has memories of ‘unforgettable characters’ – a teacher, perhaps, or an old person with whom you had a special relationship as a child, or maybe even just a friend of a friend whom you met at a party or in the pub – who had something of the air we are talking about. But what Buddhism offers, the promise it holds out, is the possibility that you, if you really want to, can become more like that. There are a set of things you can do that will reliably deliver more happiness, more peace and more love in your life.

Let me illustrate this process of attraction by quoting from some interviews that I taped with residents and visitors at a Buddhist community in Devon. Here is Kevin, a visitor for the weekend from his home in Southampton, 45 years old, a project quality manager for a big company making complicated communication systems. He was brought up an ‘unthinking Anglican’, left school at fifteen, took City and Guilds qualifications in electronics, and is married with two teenage daughters. How did this apparently ordinary man come to be involved with lamas, gurus and meditation?

About seven or eight years ago, in my late thirties, I started to realize that everything in life isn’t good, everything in the garden isn’t rosy, and that there is such a thing as suffering, and you start to question it ... I mean, things in my own garden and the garden globally. Before I ever met Buddhism I began to think that perhaps the unsatisfactoriness of life was something to do with me. That it wasn’t outside, but the only one who could do anything about my life was me. People could perhaps give me some advice, but the effort really had to come from within myself … My first encounter with Buddhism as such was when I was standing at the kitchen sink and my wife said, ‘Did you know Chas (a friend) is a Buddhist?’ and I thought, ‘That’s interesting. I wonder what that’s all about? I must talk to him about it.’ And when I did he talked about suffering in one’s life, and how to approach it, and he just reinforced what I had been thinking.

Then I read a book by Christmas Humphreys, and I got to hear about some Buddhist meetings in Portsmouth, and I thought I’ve got to investigate this. So I went along, not at all sure what I was going to find. The first thing I found was some very nice, warm, friendly people – that was my instant impression. They accepted me as if they already knew me, which I found very encouraging. And I’ve come to realize that this is the effect that Buddhism tends to have on people. People become warm, friendly, generous – with things and with themselves. It was that first meeting that clinched it. They still had problems in their lives that they were willing to talk about, but it seemed to me that they somehow coped with these problems in a way that involved far less effort than a lot of other people I knew – myself, for one! Now I can see that this attitude stemmed from their meditation practice. Ten minutes later the bhikkhu (monk) walked in in his robes, with his begging bowl – he was from the Isle of Wight! – and I was immediately impressed with his calmness. He seemed to be at peace with himself. I listened to him talk, and after the meeting I fixed to visit his place on the Isle of Wight … and I’ve been meditating pretty regularly since then.

My family are very sympathetic. They’ve seen a big change in me. I’m not so easily panicked or worked up as I used to be. I’m more calm. On a physical level my health has improved – I’ve got low blood pressure now and a very low pulse rate, and it used to be the other way round. Just a few months ago my youngest daughter – she’s thirteen – came with me to the monastery and spent the best part of a day there. She found it very interesting. She was quite impressed actually! She was very struck by the shaven heads and lack of hair. The first impression she got was one of peace. She said, ‘It’s funny, Dad. I don’t know why it is, but their shaven heads make them look peaceful!’

Then there was James. He was thirty and had been living in the community for about nine months at the time, teaching at the local technical college and looking after the vegetable garden. James had been brought up a strict Roman Catholic and had been to a Jesuit boarding school from the age of eight. He had a PhD in water pollution and was married to another Buddhist. He said:

I started to think about religion for myself when I was about fourteen. I think I was pretty confused, especially in my feelings. My family weren’t very emotional, and also at school feelings were pushed aside and you just had to cope. You didn’t cry, you didn’t show any ‘weakness’ because that was wrong. No touch; no cuddles. There wasn’t anybody I could talk to about this so it was all locked up inside, and I had to grapple with it on my own. Sex too was a big issue, especially coming from a very ‘male’ family and being at an all-male school. I was beginning to be fascinated by girls, but was also terrified! Generally I felt very split between my intellectual life and a deeper side of me that I could feel but not really understand. I tried to ask one of the priests about this and he said, ‘It’s just nature. You see it in the birds and trees. It is God.’ And that really confused me! So I left school with these big questions forming inside me. When I went to university I basically squashed it all down, and just had a bit of a wild time. But when I went on to do research I was spending a lot of time on my own in the lab doing experiments, sometimes through the night, and I started to think again.

Things were beginning to boil up again, and then one day I saw a poster for a public talk on Buddhism, and on impulse I decided to go. In walked this big monk and he sat down and talked for about an hour, and I felt his whole presence just fill the room. Something inside me responded to his strength and his peace, and my whole being just said, ‘Yes’. I wanted the strength that he showed. He seemed to know what it was all about. But afterwards I couldn’t remember what he said at all! I started going to a small meditation group that was meeting and then joined a Zen group in London.

Mary, another resident in the community, had had a rather different upbringing, yet in some ways her path to Buddhism was similar to James’s. Her father had been interested in the Eastern religions and had been a somewhat unconventional figure in their south of England commuter-belt town. Mary had been used to thinking about spiritual matters as a teenager:

I had been looking forward to going to university to discuss ‘the meaning of life’ with people, but as it turned out university wasn’t about that at all. It was about getting plastered. All the people I seemed to bump into were just into drink and sex and their careers! I missed the serious side of things dreadfully. After I left I worked for a couple of years and then planned an overland trip to China. Six months before I was due to go my father died. And during the week after he died I experienced, in the middle of all the feelings, a great presence of mind. I was thinking and writing about him, and remembering all the times I had felt critical of him. And I thought, ‘When death is possible, what is the most important thing?’ And I knew the answer was Love. This was a sort of turning point, and I gained some insights that I later realized were important in Buddhism, though I didn’t know it at the time. When I came back from my trip, which I eventually made, I went to a thing called a Western Zen Retreat – very nervously, I might say. I didn’t know what to expect. I was set this question to meditate on which was ‘Who am I?’, and I found an answer to it, a real one, that put me in touch with a level of being that I had not experienced before: infinite love, infinite peace, a different sense of who I am entirely. And that experience of course made me very interested in Buddhism. At this point I wasn’t quite sure what I was after, but I was jolly well after something!

Then I met a Japanese Zen Master called Hogen-san who came to England for a few weeks every year, giving talks and workshops, and he attracted me very much. I used to follow him around the country. He was very down-to-earth, not ‘holy’ at all. I remember one interview I had with him where we had Guinness for breakfast! I learnt to see that Buddhism was in everyday life, not in some special rituals or only on Sundays. Hogen-san’s quality was there in the pub as well as in the meditation room.

The last extract I want to give here is from my talk with Theresa, a 41-year-old American woman who was also living in the community and teaching meditation. She had grown up in an orthodox Jewish family, enjoying some of the rituals, but without thinking about what it meant at all. ‘It didn’t mean anything to me. I wasn’t specially resistant, but ... well, everybody has to have a religion, don’t they, and you might as well be Jewish,’ is how she remembers it. She impressed me as much as anyone I have ever met, with her unpretentious, light, warm manner which I came to see as the outward show of a great inner strength and peacefulness. The story of how she came to Buddhism illustrates another of the common threads – the discovery that what you thought was going to make you happy doesn’t. The piece that I want to quote here demonstrates not so much the powerful attraction of example, though that is there, but rather the way in which such qualities as she clearly had can grow from rather unpromising beginnings. If Theresa can make it, I thought, there really is hope for us all!

I wasn’t thinking about any of the big questions as an adolescent, but I had a really rough time of it socially when I was thirteen. I spent a lot of time in my bedroom. After school I’d come home and lie on my bed and listen to the Top 40 on the radio, and the words of the songs spoke to me about where I was at. They were sad and asking why you didn’t have a boyfriend and saying how wonderful it would be to be in love. The songs were very melaneholy and I was very sorry for myself. Life seemed so wrong. I didn’t feel that people liked me. I was lonely. I had been successful in school up to thirteen, and then my grades just plummeted. I lost all my self-confidence. There seemed to be such an emphasis on how people looked, and I wasn’t pretty. I didn’t fit the image of the ‘popular girl’ so the boys didn’t go for me. I just shrivelled up even more. And the songs were like my only friends. They understood me a bit.

When I went to college looks stopped being the all-important thing, and I started to feel more comfortable about myself. It seemed like I had a personality that was worthwhile. And I even got some boyfriends, so things really began to look up! I started to have a good time – but not thinking about what I was up to. It was cool to be an atheist, so I was an athiest. I was going to parties and drinking beer like I was making up for lost time. Four years! After I left college I went to Kansas City and worked for Hallmark Cards as a graphic artist. I was doing well in most people’s terms – I had a good job, I was making good money, I had a nice apartment and a car and nice clothes. I was going out on dates. I’d become ‘attractive’. I’d got all the things that as a girl I’d thought were important. I got to travel a lot in the States and Europe, and finally wound up married at 27 – because it was the next thing to do, and it kept my Mum quiet! So finally I had a chance to find out what it was all about. I began to question what it was that I’d got, vaguely at first, and then more seriously as my relationship with my husband began to go downhill. It was like I’d finally done it – all the things that are supposed to make you happy, even getting a husband. And I wasn’t. It hadn’t worked. I was in a bad way. I used to just lie down on the sofa and curl up and things would get very dark. I just didn’t want to deal with it at all. I couldn’t. I didn’t know how. I would get very angry and scream and throw plates. I was very difficult! We were living with my husband’s parents in North Carolina, and they didn’t like me at all.

My lifeline was a man I was working for at the university who I could talk to a bit, and he started talking about the possibility of feeling some inner strength and not just being pushed around by other people’s expectations and disapproval. And someone else told me about Transcendental Meditation, which was at that time all the rage in the States. So I thought, ‘Oh well. I’ll try it.’ I did the weekend initiation and learnt the technique. And I remember looking in the mirror the day afterwards, and I really felt different. I felt a real calmness. I liked myself. I felt warmly towards myself for the first time for a long time, maybe for the first time ever. I felt still, and accepting of myself And that experience made me want to practise the meditation hard, which I did. I faithfully did my 20 minutes in the morning and 20 minutes in the evening for two and a half years without fail. Then I started to feel it had lost its value in some way, like, whatever it was good for, I had got it. And I had a sense there was more than the calmness and relaxation I was getting from TM. I started asking people about other kinds of meditation to see what there was.

I went to a weekend retreat in vipassana (insight) meditation, where we just sat watching the rise and fall of our breathing, and walking very slowly. And I found it the hardest thing of my life. By Sunday I was ready to explode. It was so simple, what the teacher was asking us to do ... and I couldn’t do it. And that really showed me something, the fact that it was such a challenge. I hated it, but the challenge absolutely intrigued me. I was hooked. He talked about the importance in everyday life of awareness, of waking up to life and living fully. Many of the things he said felt so inspiring and so right. And I wanted the kinds of things he was talking about. I just dived in and started doing lots of retreats and sitting every day. I started having some of the experiences Buddhism talks about – really seeing into the reality of who I am, and beginning to understand why things had been so difficult. Simply that a thought is just a thought, and I don’t have to get all caught up in it. There is a way out of all the suffering, as Buddhism says, and I was experiencing it – in glimpses. It was mind-blowing. Right here, in this day and age, it is possible. Not 2,500 years ago when the Buddha taught but here and now it is possible to see the end of suffering.

Several of these quotations, as well as showing the power of person-to-person contact and example, also suggest that people may be predisposed, perhaps only unconsciously, to Buddhism as a result of encountering real unhappiness in their lives that the conventional solutions and distractions don’t provide satisfying answers to. Sooner or later they are touched by an experience of distress that seems to open their eyes to the great weight of ‘suffering’, as the Buddhists call it, that the world contains. The author of No Boundary, Ken Wilber, suggests that unhappiness and dissatisfaction with life are not signs of inadequacy or mental illness, but of a growing intelligence,

a special intelligence usually buried under the immense weight of social shams. A person who is beginning to sense the suffering of life is, at the same time, beginning to awaken to deeper realities, truer realities. For suffering smashes to pieces the complacency of our normal fictions about reality, and forces us to become alive in a special sense – to see carefully, to feel deeply, to touch ourselves and our worlds in ways we have heretofore avoided … It is only through all manner of numbing compensations, distractions and enchantments that we agree not to question the root cause of our [troubles] ... But sooner or later, if we are not rendered totally insensitive, our defensive compensations begin to fail in their soothing and concealing purpose and, as a consequence, we begin to suffer.

For James the process started while he was still at school; for Mary it was her father’s death; for Theresa the unhappiness and depression of her marriage. For some people it is not until they themselves are ill, or old, or close to death, that the questioning begins to start. For many it is some kind of personal brush with distress that cannot, this time, be shrugged off.

It is interesting that it is precisely this dual impetus – waking up to suffering, and encountering someone who seems to deal with it better than we do – that got the Buddha himself started on the intense six or seven years of enquiry that ended with his ‘enlightenment’ under the bodhi tree at Bodhgaya in Northern India, and his discovery of the insights that now form the heart of all Buddhist teaching. According to the myth of Buddha’s life, he was born into a rich family to a father who was determined to shield him from any possible problems or unhappiness. He grew up with every conceivable luxury, and it seemed that his father’s plans were working out well until, one day when Buddha was out in the town, he saw a sick person, lying uncared for in the street, an old person, and a dead body, and these suddenly brought home to him the existence and the inevitability of suffering. But on one of his jaunts he also met a wandering monk, whose inner peace in the face of all this unhappiness impressed him greatly, and inspired him to set out on his quest to find the deepest, most lasting solution he could to the problem of suffering. It is partly the fact that there are people around today, Western as well as Eastern and female as well as male, who appear in some subtle way to have ‘cracked it’, just as Buddha did, that accounts for Buddhism’s growing appeal.