Читать книгу 20 MINUTES TO MASTER … BUDDHISM - Kulananda - Страница 16

In his teaching, the Buddha distinguished between two different states – samsara and nirvana. Samsara pertains to the endless round of birth and death in which we find ourselves perpetually wandering. It is the state of un-Enlightened being. Nirvana, on the other hand, is that state of complete freedom and unending spontaneous creativity which follows from the complete eradication of craving.

The nature of samsara is that it is conditioned. How we are, what we think, what we feel, all arise in dependence upon conditions: our parents, schools, nation and race – all these have conditioned us in particular ways, and we continue to be conditioned by the news we read, the state of the weather, the food we eat and the company we keep. We have a reactive, coin-in-the slot kind of mentality. In goes an input, out comes an output. In goes sunshine, out comes happiness; in goes rain, out comes unhappiness.

Nirvana, on the other hand, which is synonymous with Enlightenment, is a state of complete, experiential insight into the conditioned nature of all phenomena. Seeing the conditioned nature of things, the Enlightened mind is not enslaved by them. The Enlightened mind is therefore completely creative – able to move in any direction at will, whatever it does will be free, fresh and spontaneous.

Conditioned existence has three marks or characteristics. It is unsatisfactory, impermanent, and insubstantial.

That conditioned existence is unsatisfactory was explained above under the heading of the First Noble Truth – the Truth of dukkha, unsatisfactoriness.

One of the main reasons why conditioned existence is unsatisfactory is because it is intrinsically impermanent. Nothing ever lasts. Whatever we want, whatever we get, slips in the end from our grasp. Everything, always, changes. How simple it is to say this, yet how difficult to truly realize it. We constantly treat conditioned phenomena as if they were permanent – our friends and family will always be around, our car will never break down, our favourite sweater will never wear out. Thus deluded, we experience dukkha.

Because conditioned things are intrinsically impermanent, they are also insubstantial. So far we’ve mainly concentrated on the psychological dimension of conditioned existence – nothing lasts and so we suffer. With the idea of insubstantiality we begin to enter the metaphysical dimension of conditionality.

Take, for example, the book you are now reading. It seems solid enough – just a normal book – but consider the conditions which went into making it. Think of the wood, which probably grew somewhere like Canada or Finland, which was chopped, pulped and turned into paper. Think of the sunshine that helped the trees grow, the woodsmen who tended them (and the food the woodsmen had to eat in order to function, the clothes they had to wear, the machinery they used). Think of the processes of transport involved at every stage. And then think of me, sitting here writing – my computer and printer – my food and clothing – my teacher, without whom I’d have nothing to say – my parents, without whom I would not exist – and all their parents, infinitely backwards in time.

Think of the publishers, the distributors, the booksellers. Think of the English language, all its vast history of development; and think also of Pali, Sanskrit, Tibetan, Chinese and Japanese. Think of the art of writing.

All of these are essential conditions which had to pre-exist in order for the book you’re now reading to be what it is. If any of them were different, this book would not be what it is. In fact it wouldn’t be here at all. For there is no essential ‘book’ which can somehow exist independently of all the myriad conditions which went into making it. All that it is is a temporary coming together of a vast range of conditions. And as conditions change, so it too changes – it wears out and grows grubby, or perhaps you’ll get bored and throw it away. But whatever happens to it next, it never stops changing. Eventually it will be landfill, kindling or pulp for cardboard. There is nothing in it which you can hang on to and say ‘This is it – this element here, that’s the book!’, because we could just throw it on a fire and it would vanish. There is no fixed, final, unchanging entity which is ‘the book’.

We take the label ‘the book’ and apply it to a small temporary pattern within the infinite flux of conditions. We can use it with great accuracy for a time, to describe the particular way in which some conditions have come together. But that is all it is – a label – and we must never make the mistake of thinking that because we can use labels to denote patterns that there are somehow fixed and substantial, unchanging ‘things’ behind each label.

Because things are impermanent and insubstantial in this way, because they are only conditioned, they are also – to use an important Mahayana Buddhist concept – ‘empty’ or ‘void’. All of phenomenal existence is shunya: empty. Things come together and pass away – there is no intrinsic reality behind them.

And yet, out of this changing flux of conditions, we construct for ourselves the delusion of solidity and intrinsic separation. We divide the world into subject and objects. There is ‘me’, a fixed, unchanging, solid ego-identity – and there is ‘not me’, the rest of life. And we then further divide the world into those things we like, which we seek to incorporate into our ego-identity to give us a sense of security; and those things which we dislike, which we try to keep apart from our ego-identity at all costs, because they make us insecure. This fundamental subject/object duality is the source of all our suffering.

Clinging to a changing world of flux, looking for security in the intrinsically insecure, we experience continual disappointment. The ultimate security we seek is not available in a dualized world founded in neurotic attachment. True security, rather, consists in learning to live without any neurotic attachments whatsoever. Such a state, however, is not one of sterile isolation from the rest of life. Rather, it is a state where we experience our deep interconnectedness with all of life, where we don’t try to shut some things or people out and grasp with clinging desperation to other things and people. We let things, people, ourselves, simply be what they really are – not what we want them to be. If we can just do that, then we will be free to respond to all living beings with kindness, warmth and compassion.

We must, however, beware of treating samsara and nirvana as entirely discrete opposites. For, as teachers like the great sage Nagarjuna have pointed out, they are in fact inseparable. It is not that nirvana is a place – as it were, a kind of Buddhist heaven, somewhere else – it is right here, right now.

To really see samsara as samsara is to experience nirvana. As Krishnamurti put it, ‘The unconditional acceptance of the conditioned is the unconditioned.’

But we tend not to accept the conditioned as conditioned. We always want to treat it as if it were unconditioned, as if it were really able to give us complete and final satisfaction; as if the things we like and the people we love will somehow be with us forever; as if samsara were somehow really substantial and secure. And so we don’t experience the identity of samsara and nirvana. We remain deluded. Misguidedly clinging to samsara, we suffer. We have a great deal of work to do before we ourselves can honestly say that we experience the identity of samsara and nirvana. For us samsara is here and nirvana is a state beyond the horizon of our current being, at the far end of a spiritual path which we can, if we chose, begin to tread.

To see the Three Marks of Conditioned Existence for ourselves – to realize their truth, not just intellectually but from the depths of our being, allowing our behaviour to be changed by that insight – is to have a meaningful glimpse of Perfect Vision and to take the first step along the Eightfold Path.