Life, and Other Alternatives

I find it difficult to accept that life, this life, my life, is an illusion.  Back in the est days, we used to say, "If you think this life is unreal, go stand in front of a speeding bus."  Last week a close friend revealed he has bladder cancer, and I learned that my college roommate has been diagnosed with lung cancer. My former brother-in-law is slowly dying from a degenerative brain disease.   Aging sucks!  But I hesitate to extend that to: Life sucks!  As a friend observed, "Consider the alternative." 

I doubt that anyone would want to read a blog simply entitled "LIFE."  The world is too much with us, all of us, for that to be of much interest.  A fish has no concept of water and air is invisible to us unless someone messes with it.  The Vedic sages in India and philosophers from Plato onward imagined that this "blooming, buzzing confusion" we all experience as life, our lives, is only an illusion, maya, the unreal dream of people in a cave, a view through a glass darkly.  There are lots of reasons for disparaging the information we receive from our senses about the world out there.  Prime among them is the search for certainty, for something, anything, that lasts and will not change.  Since it's not to be found out there in the world where everything changes and dies, then it must be the product of mental reasoning or mystical illumination, for logic and the divine are forever.

I'm wading in murky waters here.  My Christian friends are troubled by my rejection of the doctrines of bodily sin and resurrection, not to mention the very notion that Jesus is God, and my Buddhist acquaintances find questionable my rejection of karma and rebirth.  There is little encouragement here in Bangkok to pursue a Christian practice of ritual and prayer in the absence of a faith community and for some reason I find it more difficult to meditate in this Buddhist country than I did among the unbelievers back in the U.S.  What remains, however is this life I am living, with all its epiphanies and pains, joys and suffering.  Even if it hasn't lived up to my hopes and expectations, I don't want to run away from it into the arms of an imaginary savior.

These thoughts were stimulated by Pandit Bhikku's discussion of samsara on his Little Bang Sangha web site.  His Theravada Buddhist tradition usually says that samsara -- often defined as the endless cycle of birth, suffering, death and rebirth -- is the opposite of nirvana, or enlightenment.  If samsara is a place, then we must escape it to find relief from suffering.  In the Mahayana tradition, samsara and nirvana are sometimes seen as the same since every concept is void of existence.  To make the point that the two Buddhist traditions are compatible, Pandit Bhikku quotes from Theravadan monk Thanissaro Bhikku, abbot of a California monastery, who describes samsara is a process rather than a place.  He calls it "the tendency to keep creating worlds and then moving into them."  He says the literal definition of the Sanskrit term is "wandering on" (other sources say "keeping going," "cycle of continuity," and even "flux of life").  The problem, according to Ajahn Thanissaro, is that the worlds we and others create cause us great suffering, "keep caving in and killing us."  He says that "trying to stop samsara-ing" is like giving up an addiction or an abusive habit. The Buddha discovered the secret, and, "of those who have learned how to break the habit, no one has ever felt tempted to samsara again."

I have a problem with this.  For good reasons, early commentators accused Buddhism of nihilism and saw it as denying life rather than affirming it.  If you take the doctrine of rebirth out of the equation, samarsa can be a positive term to describe life in all of its phases, beautiful as well as ugly, horrifying and terrible as well as awesome and inspiring.  I take for my mentors in this rejection of reincarnation the atheist Buddhist Stephen Batchelor as well as Buddhadasa Bhikku, the Thai reformer who attempted to purge Theravada Buddhism of superstition (moving closer to Mahayana in the process).  In Buddhism as in Christianity, to renounce life in all of its physicality is to argue not that life is an illusion but that it is bad, the root of sin and defilement.  I think there is little question that this was the Buddha's insight, and he chose to turn his back on normal life as a renunciant and the founder of a monastic order of monks.   I have no problem with people choosing this option (some of my best friends are vegetarians, or football fans), but heartily disagree that the primary goal of life for all of us should be to end it or to live it in a radically restricted form.

According to the stories, the Buddha was extraordinarily sensitive to suffering.  He became aware not only of the normal pains associated with childbirth, sickness and death, but also of the psychological suffering we create with our minds as a result of our desires to hold on to pleasure and push away unpleasantness.  But his important realization that every created thing is impermanent led him not to embrace the messiness of life but to reject it.  Why?  The fallacy here is that human beings cannot live with an acceptance of suffering.  But there are many stories and accounts of the enobbling and even transformative power of suffering, for the patient as well as the caregivers. Yes, much can be changed and improved with an awareness of how the mind works.  But is the fact that love ends and people die a reason to reject the world and go into a cloister or monastery?  I think not.

So I reject the alternatives to life in favor of the process of samsara-ing, and I will attempt every day to live in this world as fully and aware as possible, looking for beauty and love as well as opportunities to express kindness and generosity.  This is what makes us human.  The alternatives to accepting our incarnation in these bodies are not satisfying.  To see life as an illusion and to search for Truth in hidden places is frustrating and pointless.  To see life as a snare and a pit from which we must escape leads only to the lonely wisdom of a survivor on a desert island.  I also find unhelpful the scientistic babble of the neo-atheists.  People are drawn to the unseen, just as they are attracted by beauty and love, and I'm learning from Thais to acknowledge the invisible forces and powers that surround us.  As this point I'm still in the kindergarten of a spirituality that draws on Buddhism, Brahmanism from India and the indigenous animism of Southeast Asia.  But I have good teachers and someday I may shed the ingrained skepticism and cynicism that a lifetime of living in the west has left as a legacy.