Читать книгу The Heart of Buddhism: A Simple Introduction to Buddhist Practice - Guy Claxton - Страница 17

EVERYBODY wants to be happy. Everybody wants to be loved and accepted as they are. Everybody wants to feel clear and strong and loving in their turn. Everybody wants to live in a happy and peaceful world. Everybody wants enough food. Everybody wants to be free from pain. Understanding what we all want is not difficult. It is how to get there that is the problem. What steps can we take, what ‘game plan’ should we follow, to be as happy as we can in a world that is indelibly marked with old age, disability, sickness, physical pain, accident, bereavement and finally death? This is the 64,000 dollar question, for all of us now, just as it was for Siddharta Guatama, the Buddha, 2,500 years ago. But most of us do not go into it in quite as much depth as he did, and we therefore do not discover as profoundly satisfactory an answer. We sort of pick it up, and make it up, as we go along, and vaguely hope that we’ve got it about as right as we can. We equally vaguely assume that the anxiety and irritation and jealousy and guilt and restlessness we feel are all part of the package deal into which we were born, to be put up with, or avoided, or ignored as best we can.

Buddha’s shocking discovery is that our half-baked game plan, far from being a little wide of the mark, is just about as wrong as it could be. Not only does it fail to deal with the intrinsic pains and upsets that are bound to befall us all sooner or later, it actually generates an untold amount of extra suffering. Through our misguided efforts to generate happiness, peace and love, we are actually creating distress, anxiety and animosity. Now this is a hard idea to swallow. Can it really be that most of the population of the world, for most of history, has been so crass? That all our philosophers and saints and philanthropists, as well as the rest of us men, women and children in the street, have been earnestly and energetically barking up the wrong tree? That what millions of people experience as inevitable hardship is in fact optional and homegrown? We shall need some convincing. Apart from anything else it will be rather embarrassing, if Buddha does turn out, against all the odds, to be right, to admit to such monumental stupidity. The only recourse in that unlikely event would be to howl with laughter – which explains, perhaps, why for many people an experience of ‘enlightenment’ is indescribably funny.

In this chapter I want to turn the tables on ourselves, and to make Buddha’s proposal look less absurd and our own normal point of view more questionable. First let us make explicit what this ‘common sense’ is, so we can submit it to some scrutiny. Most of us have never articulated it clearly to ourselves, yet it underlies and controls what we do, and the choices we spontaneously make, just as the program in my word processor never appears on the screen itself, yet it determines absolutely the responses that my little machine makes to my key-strokes. We were not born with this so-called common sense, but picked it up intuitively from those around us. So easily and unwittingly did we do so that now, if we are aware of it at all, it seems to us as natural as the air we breathe. To follow the familiar game plan is second nature to us. Yet if this is second nature, we might pause to wonder about the first. Might there be an even deeper strategy for living that has been eclipsed by a ‘common sense’ which could turn out on inspection to be riddled with common nonsense? Might there not indeed be more in heaven and earth than is dreamt of in our philosophies?

This is the Buddhist starting point and the Buddhist programme of research, this enquiry into the premises on which we have, by default, been basing our lives. First this structure of habits and assumptions must be floated to the surface of our minds, and then it must be picked over in the light of experience. What have we been up to? And has it been working?