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quite different. You do not take the five precepts in
obedience to a royal edict. You take them upon yourself,
and there is a very special reason for doing so. How can
you fulfill the precept not to take life? Every day you eat.
Even if you're a vegetarian, you must take life. This is
absolutely fundamental to an understanding of Buddhism.
Buddhism is a method  it is not a doctrine. Buddhism is
a dialogue, and what it states at the beginning is not
necessarily what it would state at the end. The method of
Buddhism is, first of all, a relationship between a teacher
and a student. The student creates the teacher by raising a
problem and going to someone about it.
Now, if he chooses wisely, he will find out if there
is a buddha around to use as the teacher, and then he says
to the buddha, "My problem is that I suffer, and I want to
escape from suffering." So, the buddha replies, "Suffering
is caused by desire, by trishna, by craving. If you can stop
desiring then you will solve your problem. Go away and
try to stop desiring." He then gives him some methods of
how to practice meditation and to make his mind calm in
order to see if he can stop desiring. The student goes
away and practices this. Then he comes back to the
teacher and says, "But I can't stop desiring not to desire.
What am I to do about that?" So the teacher says, "Try,
then, to stop desiring not to desire."
Now, you can see where this is going to end up. He
might put it in this way: "All right, if you can't completely
stop desiring, do a middle way. That is to say, stop
desiring as much as you can stop desiring, and don't desire
to stop any more desire than you can stop." Do you see
where that's going to go? He keeps coming back because
what the teacher has done in saying "Stop desiring" is he
has given his student what in Zen Buddhism is called a
koan. This is a Japanese word that means "a meditation
problem," or more strictly, the same thing that case means
in law, because koans are usually based on anecdotes and
incidents of the old masters  cases and precedents. But
the function of a koan is a challenge for meditation. Who
is it that desires not to desire? Who is it that wants to
escape from suffering?
Here we get into a methodological difference
between Hinduism and Buddhism on the question of
"Who are you?" The Hindu says, "Your self is called the
atman, the self. Now, strive to know the self. Realize I
am not my body, because I can be aware of my body. I
am not my thoughts, because I can be aware of my
thoughts. I am not my feelings for the same reason. I am
not my mind, because I can be aware of it. Therefore, I
really am other than and above, transcending all these
finite aspects of me."
Now, the Buddhist has a critique of that. He says,
"Why do you try to escape from yourself as a body?" The
reason is your body falls apart and you want to escape
from it. "Why do you want to disidentify yourself from
your emotions?" The reason is that your emotions are
uncomfortable and you want to escape from them. You
don't want to have to be afraid. You don't want to have to
be in grief or anger, and even love is too much  it
involves you in suffering, because if you love someone
you are a hostage to fortune. So, the Buddha says the
reason why you believe you are the atman, the eternal self,
which in turn is the brahman, the self of the whole
universe, is that you don't want to lose your damn ego. If
you can fix your ego and put it in the safe-deposit box of
the Lord, you think you've still got yourself, but you
haven't really let go. So, the Buddha said there isn't any
atman: he taught the doctrine of anatman, or non-self.
Your ego is unreal, and as a matter of fact, there is nothing
you can cling to  no refuge, really. just let go. There is
no salvation, no safety, nothing anywhere, and you see
how clever that was. What he was really saying is that
any atman you could cling to or think about or believe in
wouldn't be the real one.
This is the accurate sense of the original documents
of the Buddha's teaching. If you carefully go through it,
that is what he is saying. He is not saying that there isn't
the atman or the brahman, he's saying anyone you could
conceive wouldn't be it. Anyone you believed in would be
the wrong one, because believing is still clinging. There is
no salvation through believing, there is only salvation
through knowledge, and even then the highest knowledge
is non-knowledge.
Here he agrees with the Hindus, who say in the
Kena Upanishad, "If you think that you know Brahman,
you do not know him. But if you know that you do not
know the Brahman, you truly know." Why? It is very
simple. If you really are it, you don't need to believe in it,
and you don't need to know it, just as your eyes don't need
to look at themselves. That is the difference of method in
Buddhism. Now, understand "method" here. The method
is a dialogue, and the so-called teachings of Buddhism are
the first opening gambits in the dialogue. When they say
you cannot understand Buddhism out of books, the reason
is that the books only give you the opening gambits.
Then, having read the book, you have to go on with the
method. Now, you can go on with the method without a
formal teacher. That is to say, you can conduct the
dialogue with yourself or with life. You have to explore
and experiment on such things as "Could one possibly not
desire?" "Could one possibly concentrate the mind
perfectly?" "Could one possibly do this, that, and the
other?" And you have to work with it so that you
understand the later things that come after trying these
experiments. These later things are the heart of
Buddhism.
So then, shortly after the Buddha's time, the practice
of Buddhism continued as a tremendous ongoing dialogue
among the various followers, and eventually they
established great universities, such as there was at Nalanda
in northern India. A discourse was going on there, and if
you looked at it superficially, you might think it was
nothing but an extremely intellectual bull session where
philosophers were outwitting each other. Actually, the [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]