"Wisdom from Buddhism"

            Buddhism’s great wisdom, the most important thing it has to teach us, is about a topic we often avoid. Buddhism offers us unique insight to the question of suffering, because Buddhism is a religion born out of suffering.

            It is said, in the story of the Buddha, that Prince Siddhartha Gautama was born into a royal family in India in the 6th century. The Prince’s father, the King, wanted to train him for political leadership and to master the martial arts. In order to keep him on this path, he sought to protect him from any questioning of life or struggles. The Prince’s life was spent confined to his father’s palace where he had all the comforts of his time, and all signs of suffering were removed from the kingdom. If anyone became sick or old, they were removed from the kingdom so Siddhartha never knew of suffering.

            One day, when Siddhartha was twenty-nine, he told his father he wanted to see the world outside of the palace. The King carefully orchestrated a servant to take Siddhartha on tours of the outside world. On the first three tours, the servant was able to create an environment where all of the sick, old, dying and weary townspeople were cleared from the streets. The servant only took the Prince to places full of beauty and peace. On the fourth trip though, Siddhartha was finally confronted with sickness, old age, and death. He was so horrified by what he saw that he went back to his palace with only one thing on his mind. He wanted to figure out how to solve the suffering in the world. He wanted to end sickness, old age, and death.

            Siddhartha immediately left his palace, his family, and gave up all his worldly goods and became a wandering monk. He wandered for six years, at times giving up all food and water, sometimes eating just a grain of rice. Finally one day he sat down under a tree and upon seeing the morning star he realized enlightenment. He exclaimed “Isn’t it incredible! All sentient beings have the Buddha nature. At the very same moment, I and all sentient beings together enter the Way.”

            What he was saying is that all beings are perfect as they are, lacking nothing. The happiness we are searching for has been here all the time. It just needs to be realized.

            And that is how Siddhartha Gautama became the Buddha. A religion and way of life was created out of the struggle to end suffering.

            Suffering is also called dukkha in Buddhism and it has a very specific meaning as we heard earlier in our reading. Dukkha not only refers to unpleasant sensations such a pain, but it encompasses everything. Physical, mental, material. Everything that is subject to change is suffering. And as the common phrase goes, the only thing constant is change. Which means that everything causes suffering.             

            Everything, even things that are pleasant cause suffering because even good things do not last forever. The reason change creates suffering is because of our desires or our attachments. We are attached to people, ideas, events, things. We do not like things to change or end.

            After his enlightenment, Buddha lived for fourty-seven years teaching. Fourty-seven years worth of wisdom and thousands more years of interpretation can be a lot of knowledge to take in at one time. Today I would like to focus on just three aspects of this wisdom which I think can help us make our lives better. The first is the realization that suffering exists, second is that the way to stop suffering is to end our attachments, and third, there are ways in which we can help ourselves and others in times of suffering.

            The first Noble Truth of Buddhism tells us that all of existence is suffering. This is an important wisdom to gain because just realizing there is suffering can help us in our lives. I know to some of us that might sound counterintuitive, that the way to increase our happiness is to realize the main fact of existence is that there is suffering. However, one of the main reasons people are unhappy is because we, especially in our American culture, are trained to act as if suffering does not exist. When we can not accept that suffering is a part of life, we are unhappy.

            In Buddhism, that are many amazing short tales which give us some of the most important teachings in our life, in a very simple way. One of those tales about suffering is called “The Mustard Seed.”

            There once was a woman who all her life wanted a child. After many years, she finally got the child she always dreamed about. She loved her child and it made her happy to be a mother. One day her young son became ill and while they tried everything they could to cure him, he did not get better and he died. The woman wrapped her son in a blanket and hugged him and kept asking people to cure him. Someone told her to go to the Buddha because the Buddha was wise and could find the medicine that would cure her child.

            The mother took her boy to see Buddha and he knew right away the boy was dead. She asked for medicine to cure her son and the Buddha told her he knew of the medicine which she was looking for. Buddha told the mother to find a mustard seed and bring it back to him, for the mustard seed was just the medicine her son needed. She was thrilled to hear this because mustard seeds are used often in Indian cooking and she knew she could find one quickly. As she was leaving, the Buddha said there was one more thing he needed. The mustard seed had to be given to her by a family who had not experienced death in the last year.

            So the woman set out on her search for a mustard seed. At the first house she came to, there was a young girl and three kids in the home. The mother asked the young girl for a mustard seed and the girl found one right away. As the mother turned to leave, she remembered the Buddhas request about the seed and asked the young girl if anyone had died in the house in the last year. The young girl said yes, that just six months ago her mother had died. She said she was filled with sadness and pain but decided to continue on as her mother would have wanted her to help her father raise her young brothers.

            The mother thanked the girl for the seed but said she could not take it. She came to another house and asked for a seed but in this house she found out the man’s brother had died two months ago.

            The woman visited many homes looking for a mustard seed, but each family had encountered death in the last year.

            The mother returned to the Buddha and he asked if she had found the cure she was seeking. She said yes, she did find the medicine she needed. She said she now knew that everyone experiences death and suffering and no one can stop it. She said it hurt a little less knowing she was not alone. She was now ready to bury her son. The story says this woman went on to stay with the Buddha and counseled may people who had experienced loss. Her advice brought relief to many people over the years.

            This centuries old tale tells us that suffering is a part of life and sometimes it is not fixable.

            However, our American culture teaches us that everything is fixable, especially if you have enough money and knowledge. We can see how we deny suffering in our culture today by looking at the way we talk about death. When people mention the death of another person, they almost never use the word dead. They say things like “My brother has passed on,” or “Mary is no longer with us.”

            In my first week as a Chaplain intern I went to the training for the labor and delivery floor. I remember clearly one of the first things they taught us. They said never, ever, say, at a baby’s death, that the baby has “passed on” or is “no longer here.” You must always say the baby died. The death of a child is horrific and people need to start the grieving process right away. When you do not name death, people deny it, just like the mother from the mustard seed story. They still think there is some small possibility that the baby is not dead- that it’s heart can be restarted, or there is medicine we can give the baby to bring it back. The way a chaplain could most hurt a parent who’s baby has died, is to take away the reality of the situation.

            It is essential to our physical, mental and emotional well being that we understand suffering is part of life. When we deny suffering, for instance, denying that we have an incurable illness, we then have no way to handle and accept that illness.

            Understanding that suffering exists is the first part of the wisdom of Buddhism. The second step is to realize that in order to cease suffering, we need to end our desires, or end our attachments. 

            This has been the hardest Buddhist concept for me to understand and follow in my own life. Anyone who knows me well knows that I might be one of the most attached people around. In particular, I have a very strong attachment to my family and friends.
            I can understand the concept of ending our attachments to material things such as cars and even my home, but I still have a hard time with the idea that we should not be attached to other people. How can we not be attached to our parents, our children, our brothers, sisters, friends, and partners?

            We are often told we have to be attached to people. For many of us, if we tell our partner, “I am not attached to you, I don’t need you”, we might end up with big problems in our relationship. In the dictionary, attachment means “a means of securing or fastening.” Some weddings and unions have a hand fasting ceremony because we are in a way celebrating the attachment of two people, for life.

            But Buddhism defines attachment in a very specific way. When Buddhism speaks of attachment, they are speaking of the act of relying on someone or something else for our happiness. For example, that would be like saying we need our partner or child in order to be happy. Most love songs we hear on the radio speak of one person needing another. Without this person they will fall into disappear. We promote this kind of attachment, the kind that Buddhism says we must get rid of.

            To truly love someone: partner, parent, child, sibling, or friend, we have to realize that we do not need them. Saying we need someone else to be happy puts a huge burden on them, which makes them unhappy. It also makes us unhappy because of our immense fear of losing them. Loving someone means we have a relationship where we support each other but we are not dependent upon one another. That is what non-attachment is.

            Ceasing attachment means we enjoy something for what it is, we take the good with the bad, and we are not dependent on something else to make us happy.

            The main spiritual practice of Buddhism is meditation, most often meditation that asks us to stop our attachments. As you meditate, thoughts and feelings come into your mind and heart, and you are just supposed to let them pass by. You do not stop and think about them or focus on them. It is like watching a train go by. You recognize it but let it pass on.

            This is essential because being attached to something implies that the person, event, or stage in your life will always be there or will never change. The reality is that nothing stays the same. No one will live forever, the abilities we have when we are younger we may not have when we are older. The job we used to have may be gone, natural disaster strikes and we lose our homes.

            Intellectually it is often easy for us to understand that things change and we should not be attached to outcomes or people in an unhealthy way. But emotionally that is very hard to follow in our lives. I want to acknowledge the reality that the likelihood any one of us will attain complete detachment is very unlikely.

            Buddhism is a religion which knows we will probably never master the spiritual path. Buddhism is fully aware of the complications of life, and especially the complications of human emotion. It is compassionate about the fact that no matter how hard we practice, how much we try not to be attached, we will not always succeed. And yet it calls us to practice anyway because any small improvement we can make brings some relief to our suffering.

            Buddhism gives us many tools, called skillful means, to help us practice this path.  While there are many skillful means, the one I find most compelling is what is called the Bodhisattva ideal, which is the third wisdom of Buddhism I would like to talk about today.

            A bodhisattva is an enlightened being who refuses to enter into nirvana until everyone else is saved. They stay behind to help others become enlightened. In some ways you could say a bodhisattva is similar to Christian saints or a god or goddess. Some of the bodhisattva figures you might recognize are Kwan Yin, Maitreya, and Manjushri. People call on them and pray to them in times of need. Each one has particular attributes and are said to help with different things. However, the bodhisattva ideal is a teaching which asks us to follow the bodhisattva path. It asks us to help alleviate the suffering in the world, often by helping other people.

            One of the important parts of recognizing that there is suffering is in recognizing the reality of it, you can then know what you can do to help alleviate it. And you are not attached to the outcome of your helping. So if one thing you try does not work, you can try something else. Sometimes a skillful means we use is medicine, transportation, rebuilding efforts in an area devastated by disaster.  There are some things we can fix or improve.

            However, there are other kinds of suffering we can not fix and the skillful means of the bodhisattva we use in that instance is our presence. We can just be there. Just sitting with someone as they go through something terrible can be the biggest gift we can give. And for ourselves, knowing there may be nothing to do to fix our own illness or pain, is a gift we give ourselves.

            The bodhisattva I think can be a good guide for us to follow is Kwan Yin. She is the bodhisattva who hears the cries of the world. In some images of her, she has a thousand hands each one holding a different item which she could give to someone in need depending on their situation. She may have eleven heads, each conveying a different expression of emotion. Sometimes she just appears, with no items in hand, with the understanding that often the only thing to do, is nothing.

            The key to living out the bodhisattva ideal is compassion. Compassion for all beings including ourselves. Compassion can help alleviate suffering in that it allows us to be free to help ourselves and others. Compassion does not ask us to be attached to a certain person or outcome, it only asks us to walk with a situation.

            I think of all of the chaplains who sit at the bedside of a dying person who are following this bodhisattva idea. Often when people have been ill for a long time, their family and friends have already said goodbye, the person slips into a state of unconsciousness and there is nothing to be done to save them. Many chaplains, even many nurses have sat at the bedside of someone who is dying alone because that is all we can do. Or I think of the many family and friends who care for for their aging loved ones. Knowing you can not cure them but willing to care for them on a daily basis anyway.

            Those are all bodhisattvas in our world. And I am sure every one of you has brought the gift of compassion either through your presence or a skill you can offer to someone else who was suffering. Each one of us are bodhisattva’s when we chose to be guided by compassion.

            Suffering is one of the realities of our existence. It is the thing that brings us the most unhappiness and is the one thing we can never get rid of. The only thing we can do is deal with it as it is. That may mean simply listening or it may mean organizing a social action movement.

            The wisdom that Buddhism brings to us for this most basic religious question, the question of suffering, is that we need to recognize it, try to be as unattached as possible, and use the skills we have in order to help alleviate the suffering of ourselves and others.

            It is a hard path to follow, but we can start small. Even if it is just trying to figure out how to not be attached to the clothes that we have or the sport we wanted our child to play.

            Each time we decide to contemplate the wisdom of this Buddhist teaching, we gain a little more insight and a little less suffering. It is a hard practice, but a worthwhile one.

            In the midst of the reality of suffering, may we live with the bodhisattva ideal of compassion so that we can bring a bit more comfort to the afflictions in our own lives and the lives of others.

            Amen and Blessed Be.