MEDITATIONS: THE DHAMMAPADA, CHAPTER FOUR

Flowers

It is easy to mistake the meaning of many core concepts of the contemplative life. This is true whether one is studying Greek stoicism or virtue ethics just as it is true when learning about Taoism or Buddhism. For instance, the common man’s interpretation of the Taoist wuwei—action through non-action, or action without intention—amounts to something like “doing nothing,” when in reality, what is implied is quite the opposite. In the example case of wuwei, the mistake is assuming that all action is conscious, intentional, and ego-driven. It is the error of the primitive man who projects all his unconscious forces onto external factors, evil spirits in the past and random chance in the present. Both miss the mark in regard to wuwei which requires the acknowledgement that our attitude toward the world partly determines how we experience said world—meaning that an internal, psychological change can transform the significance of objective reality to each of us subjective beings. Thus can one solve a problem without lifting a finger by changing one’s heart instead. Thus can one transform the nature of his same set of actions by orienting his desires to be in accord with the outcome and not the other way around.

But that is Taoism.

In Buddhism, one encounters a parallel set of concerns. One must learn to “keep by letting go” and to enact change by accepting a lack of control over the outcomes:

As a bee gathers nectar
And moves on without harming
The flower, its color, or it’s fragrance,
Just so should a sage walk through a village. (Buddha 15)

The bee does not change the nature of the flower, but acts in consort with its nature in a mutually beneficial exchange. Moreover, the bee is not even aware that it serves the flower in this way. Conscious intention is not necessary. It may even, in fact, inhibit the natural virtue which arises out of two beings acting in accordance with their duty or Dharma, their individual ways as part of the great Way. A sage is just the same as this. The enlightened man is not concerned with helping others as a consequence of his conduct. The helping of others is a secondary product of his deep acceptance of the nature of the universe.

This begs the question: what does it mean to “accept the universe’s nature?” Is it being suggested that the meditative monk will magically bring about harmony and abundance by means of karmic justice? No, not in the slightest.

What is meant by acceptance is belief in its most honest, objective form, and that is belief verified through actions in the world. What one does is what one truly believes, whether his ego-consciousness is willing and able to admit it. Hence the ever present warnings against hypocrites and hypocrisy itself across all philosophy, just as here the Buddha warns:

Like a beautiful flower,
Brightly colored but lacking scent,
so are well-spoken words
Fruitless when not carried out.

Like a beautiful flower,
Brightly colored but with scent,
so are well-spoken words
Fruitless when carried out. (15)

By acting as though life were joyous and precious, one comes to believe it is so. “Life” in this context is the source from which every experience is derived. Life is the world; it is existence in-and-of-itself. And when one actualizes an affirmative attitude toward life, he sees his plight as things to be settled inside, as objects of his own responsibility:

Do not consider the fault of others
Or what they have of haven’t done.
Consider rather
What you yourself have or haven’t done.…

Just as from a heap of flowers
Many garlands can be made,
So, you, with your mortal life,
Should do many skillful things. (15)

Note, here, that plight is not the consequence but the psychologically painful experience know as suffering. The cultivation and employment of skill are in service to one’s potential self; that is, they are done not to acquire but to become an acquisition of the universe—it is to find one’s potential place and fit in accordingly, to atone, to become-at-one with being itself.

Thus:

As a sweet-smelling lotus
Pleasing to the heart
May grow in a heap of rubbish
Discarded along the highway,
So a disciple of the Fully Awakened One
Shines with wisdom
Amid the rubbish heap
Of blind, common people. (16)

Buddha Siddhartha Gautama. The Dhammapada; Teachings of the Buddha, translated by Gil Fronsdal, Shambala Publications Inc, 2008.