United
States - Walking out of a Buddhist bookstore
in San Francisco early this month, I heard
from the radio of a passing car the voice of
U.S. President George W. Bush giving his
annual State of the Union speech.
For a second, the word compassion seemed to
hang in the clear air. This ideal, greatly
cherished by Buddhists, is "one of the
deepest values" of America, according to the
President.
Immersed in Buddhist literature for the past
few years, I have come to know well how
words suddenly lose their familiar meanings
when encountered in a different society or
culture.
I was not surprised when reading Bush's full
speech to encounter his own special meaning
of such resonant words as "compassion" and
"freedom." For instance, his compassion was
aimed at "any citizen who feels isolated
from the opportunities of America."
He didn't specify what those opportunities
are. But they can be summed up in four
words: the pursuit of happiness. These words
describe much more than an individual or
collective aspiration. They describe an
ideology, a distinctively American attempt
to give meaning to life. But people from
older, traditional societies cannot be
blamed for finding it a bit strange. For
happiness seems something very private in
the U.S., best pursued by what Bush
prescribed as a patriotic duty immediately
after 9/11: shopping.
This view of the good life assumes that we
have a birthright to happiness, and that
suffering is an unfortunate and avoidable
aberration, likely to be removed by
political and economic change. Nothing could
be further from the Buddhist view of
compassion and happiness. In a famous
Buddhist story, a young woman wanders the
streets of a town with her dead infant in
her arms, asking everyone she meets to bring
him back to life. Someone directs her to the
Buddha, who listens patiently and then
promises to help if she brings him a mustard
seed from a household that has never
witnessed a death. The young woman knocks on
many doors. By the time she returns
empty-handed to the Buddha, she has begun to
grasp his lesson: all things in the world
are impermanent, and to be ignorant of this
fact is to be trapped in an endless cycle of
craving, frustration and suffering.
The Buddha brought consolation to many
people as he traveled around North India in
the 6th century B.C. This was a time when
the old tribal societies were cracking up, a
new urban civilization was emerging, along
with fast-expanding human desires, and
rulers dreaming of empire were waging
destructive wars. The Buddha was one of the
many new agnostic thinkers in North India
who responded to the suffering of people
uprooted from their tradition-bound worlds.
But he didn't diagnose this suffering in
sociological abstractions, as a consequence
of social and economic injustice, widening
racial or class gaps, or poverty.
He witnessed the emergence of the new
rootless, ego-driven individual as it broke
free from old close-knit societies and
became afflicted with craving, pride,
jealousy and hatred while acting upon its
newly expanded world. But unlike such modern
thinkers as Hobbes and Marx, the Buddha
didn't assume that a model of society was
needed that could contain the rampaging egos
of human beings. He proposed none of the
massive restructurings of society familiar
to us in our own times: revolution,
socialism, democracy, capitalism or regime
change. He insisted that suffering is a
mental experience, born from desire,
attachment, hatred, pride and envy. These
were the "negative emotions" that distort
and confuse the mind and lead it into a
pursuit of such goals as power, possessions
and sensuous pleasures. When thwarted, they
lead to frustration and suffering; and even
when fulfilled, they can only turn into
another source of unhappiness, for the
happiness they bring is always fleeting.
Buddhists claim that to realize fully the
impermanence of ordinary happiness is to
make the first step toward real, enduring
happiness. The first step is meditation. To
sit still and observe that one is neither
identical with one's thoughts and impulses
as they arise continuously and discursively
in one's mind, generating desire, anxiety,
fear and guilt, nor indeed limited by them,
is to be aware of the possibility of
controlling one's thoughts and of moving
toward a new kind of spiritual freedom.
For Buddhists, the highest form of happiness
lies in this inner freedom rather than the
freedom to acquire and consume. Happiness is
determined by one's state of mind rather
than by external events. It is not subject
to time and decay, or dependent on the
acquisition of things and people. Today, it
is what recommends Buddhism to so many
people living in societies built around the
endless stimulation and satisfaction of
individual desires, but which seem to
bewilder and oppress people as much as or
more than the simpler world to which the
Buddha offered his unique therapy.
