MEDITATIONS: THE DHAMMAPADA, CHAPTER TWENTY

The path

Human life is truly a short affair. It is better to live doing the things that you like. It is foolish to live within this dream of a world seeing unpleasantness and doing only things that you do not like. But it is important never to tell this to young people as it is something that would be harmful if incorrectly understood.

. . .

It is a great mistake for a young samurai to learn about Buddhism. The reason is that he will see things in two ways. A person who does not set himself in just one direction will be of no value at all. (Yamamoto)

While reading chapter twenty of the Dhammapada, I could not help but continually recall the above two quotes from Tsunetomo Yamamoto’s Hagakure. They are well warranted warnings for anyone initiating his journey in search of wisdom. When one sets sail in earnest pursuit of truth, he will very rapidly discover contradictions, first in others, then in himself, and then in the world. That is to say, he who digs deep enough inevitably discovers the bottomless pit which awaits him.

These are metaphors: Hell, the abyss, the dragon’s lair, the cyclopean city of R’lyeh sunk at the bottom of the ocean. They describe the unknown. More specifically, they describe our inability to answer certain questions—for they reveal the very questions to be in error. For instance, how does one extinguish evil or unnecessary suffering? How does one form a just government or make government unnecessary?

The answer: false presuppositions abound everywhere. There is no such thing as good without evil, nor meaningful suffering without the meaningless, nor a just government, nor a society of all masters bereft of a relative slave class—that is, there is no such thing unless one is willing to engage in dialectical synthesis. But what is this synthesis? It is the Alkahest, the alchemical substance which renders all back to their base elements. In short, it is the path toward nothingness, toward nihilism:

Destroy attachment to self
As you could an autumn lily in your fist.
Cultivate the path to peace,
The Nirvana taught by the Well-Gone-One. (Buddha 69)

There is not much ambiguity here. The path to peace, the Eightfold Path, is the dissolution of the sense of self as separate from the universe. By becoming one with it, one becomes indistinguishable from it. One becomes zero—nothing.

This message is extended to all human relationships:

Children, parents, and relative
Are not a protection;
For someone seized by Death,
Relatives are no protection.
Knowing this,
The wise person, restrained by virtue,
Should quickly clear the path
To Nirvana. (70)

The value of Yamamoto’s warning should be apparent from the above citations.

But why “of value”? For one who seeks enlightenment and relief from suffering, what trouble is there with learning young these lessons of worldly renunciation? Zen Buddhist monk Takuan Soho answers this better than I can.

Even though the Way cannot be seen except when you have no desire, people have eyes, so they see; they have ears, so they hear. Because such openings exist, there must always be desire. So the existence of desire in these openings is also a subtle function. Since the presence of desire is the wonder in the openings, to speak of having no desire does not mean abandoning desire. Why? You can’t cut off your ears and eyes and throw them away. As long as there are openings, there must be desires. (Lao-Tzu & Takuan 3)

Here, Takuan calls our attention to a contradiction behind a contradiction. To eliminate suffering, one must first eliminate desire, but to desire the elimination of desire is itself a desire—first contradiction. Worse yet, if we admit that desire is inescapable for human beings because our very constitutions, which facilitates experience, are what produces those desires, then to desire an end to suffering or to desire is in the first place out of accord with our natures and thereby the nature of the universe in which the Eightfold Path is meant to bring us into atonement (at-one-ment) with.

Unprepared, a young man is likely to be confused and torn in twain by the irreconcilable conflict between these realizations and his pursuit for truth, wisdom, or enlightenment.

It is with these dangers in mind that we meditate on the Eightfold Path as it is laid out by the Buddha himself:

The best of paths is the Eightfold Path;
The best of truths, the Four Noble Truths.
The best of qualities is dispassion;
And the best among gods and humans
Is the one with eyes to see.

This is the path
For purifying one’s vision; there is no other.
Follow it,
You’ll bewilder Mara.
Follow it,
You’ll put an end to suffering.
This is the path I have proclaimed,
Having pulled out the arrows. (Buddha 67)

What Buddha is promising here is a glimpse of Truth “behind her veil,” or “beneath the facade of her pretty clothes and make up,” as Nietzsche might say. This is not what it sounds like; if you don’t understand, then read for yourself what happens across religions and mythologies to those who look directly on the face of a god. It is not pleasant, to make an understatement, which is why dispassion is the highest quality in Buddhism. It is the necessary quality for the path of the renunciant who seeks to willingly embrace his own self-destruction.

That is what it means to purify one’s vision. That is what it means to bewilder Mara—the illusion, which is all experience. The third eye which opens as a consequence of such enlightenment is the Eye of Shiva that disintegrates everything it comes to see. That is what it means to bewilder experience itself.

“All created things are impermanent.”
Seeing this with insight,
One becomes disenchanted with suffering.
This is the path to purity

“All created things are suffering.”
Seeing this with insight,
One becomes disenchanted with suffering.
This is the path to purity.

“All things are not-self.”
Seeing this with insight,
One becomes disenchanted with suffering.
This becomes the path to purity. (67-8)

“What good is this acidic philosophy?” you might be asking.

Answer: “There will be times when one is stuck, entangled, his life-blood and energies clogged, his mind bogged down with poisonous refuse. During these times, it is useful to have some solvent on hand.”

We have looked on the Eightfold Path from one side of the dialectic, now let us examine it from another:

Inactive when one should be active,
Lazy though young and strong,
Disheartened in one’s resolves,
Such an indolent, lethargic person
Doesn’t find the path of insight.

Watchful in speech and well-restrained in mind,
Do nothing unskillful with your body.
Purify these three courses of action;
Fulfill the path taught by the sages.

Wisdom arises from spiritual practice;
Without practice it decays.
Knowing the two-way path for gain and loss,
Conduct yourself so that wisdom grows. (68)

In seemingly stark conflict with the earlier passages, the Buddha sudden gives prescriptions to one’s conduct. What? “What for?” the young person might ask. “If the ultimate truth is undifferentiated oblivion, then what value is there in efforts in this material world? Isn’t it all illusion? All Mara?”

These are fair questions from the nihilist perspective of the universe. But like Takuan explained, you are not the universe. We are human beings; and though it is true that all that we experience is in a constant state of transience, that all desire produces suffering, and that our individual existences are but flashes and specks when compared to the vastness of virtually infinite time and space; our perspectives matter to us.

It is true that one can destroy himself by applying too much solvent, but he likewise can’t free himself from his own mental prison if he isn’t willing to dissolve the bars. And to handle said solvent, he must be strong and skilled enough—strong enough to bear the vessel which contains our Buddhistic Alkahest, and skilled enough to pour only as much as is necessary for the circumstance.

This is why Buddha advocates for the almost Confucian cultivation of character. One must put in effort, he must learn self-discipline, and he must understand that this act of cultivation is a continual practice. In order to be strong enough when the time calls, one must have had a continual pattern of strength training. In order to be brave enough to face tragedy and death when it visits one’s doorstep, once must have voluntarily confronted it many times before. If one breaks his habit, just like with exercise and the body, his moral fortitude and courage will atrophy.

That is all to say that the dispassion described earlier is the capacity for stoicism in the face of unavoidable suffering. It is through this dispassion that one transmutes said suffering into meaning, which is to say that one escapes his own, psychological, self-imposed limitations by training his insight to shift to the perspective of the universe—and back. It is, after all, a habit that must be practiced life-long. One does not renounce the world just to be done with it. One lets the world go so that he can move onward, in it and through it.

But all this is difficult to understand. Yamamoto is probably right. It ought not be taught to young people.

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

Lao-tzu and Takuan Soho. Tao Te Ching; Zen Teachings on the Taoist Classic, translated by Thomas Cleary, Shambala Publications Inc., 2010

Yamamoto, Tsunetomo. Hagakure.