What does it mean to live well and be virtuous in a world of suffering, chaos, and deterioration?
What does it mean to go on living in a consciousness that is inevitably bound to
the struggle of it only becoming more confused and tormented as it becomes more capable and aware?
Generally speaking, most religious and philosophical concepts are spurred out of these
sorts of challenges and questions. They represent humanity’s attempt to overcome or deal with the
deficiencies and difficulties bestowed into each pair of unrequested human hands. One perhaps
especially unique example of such an attempt is the philosophy and religion of Buddhism.
Somewhere between 6th and 4th century BC, in what is now Southern Nepal,
a boy named Siddhartha Gautama was born. He was born to an aristocratic family, his father,
Śuddhodana, being the ing of a growing state in the Indian subcontinent. When Siddhartha was born,
a holy messenger prophesized that he would become one of two things: either a great king or a great
religious leader. When receiving this prophecy, being the conservative king that his father was,
he determined that he would ensure that Siddhartha would become the former. He would ensure this by
completely sheltering Siddhartha, confining him within a massive palace he had configured away and
walled off from the rest of the world, rigidly filtering what was allowed in by a standard of
perfect health, beauty, and luxury, constantly cleansing the palace of any signs of imperfection,
discomfort, misery, ugliness, illness, and death, preventing Siddhartha from ever knowing they
existed. All of this, in Śuddhodana’s mind, was to create a world that would be easy for Siddhartha
to fall in love with and desire kingship of, removing any need to consider, question, or become
interested in religious and spiritual domains. Throughout his childhood and into early adulthood,
however, Siddhartha would, for this very reason, become increasingly curious and begin probing into
life. At 29 years old, his existential curiosity finally boiled over the walls of the palace and
into the unknown and prohibited kingdom of beyond. At this point, Siddhartha would make the decision
to take his first journey out of the palace and into the world.
In anticipation of this, in an effort to maintain the masquerade of a perfect, redeemable world,
his father ordered the streets to be removed of all signs of pain, suffering, sickness, old age,
and death. Despite this, however, while on his journey, Siddhartha would still happen by an
extremely sick man, his body obviously blemished and written on by the conditions of his ailment.
When Siddhartha saw this, he asked the chariot driver whom he was being escorted by, what was
wrong with the man. The chariot driver informed Siddhartha that the man was sick and explained to
him what this meant. After returning to palace for a little while, on a second journey out,
at some point, Siddhartha would next be exposed to an elderly man who looked extremely feeble, frail,
and wrinkled. Again, when he saw this, having never seen an elderly person of such age, he asked
the driver what was wrong. The driver informed him of the phenomenon of aging and how, like that man,
all human bodies grow old with time, decaying, growing unattractive, and becoming weak.
Again, after returning to the palace for a little while, on a third journey out,
this time, Siddhartha would encounter a funeral procession occurring through the streets,
exposing him to, for the first time, a dead body. Again, Siddhartha asked what was wrong
and was informed by the driver about death and the impending finite limit of all living things.
Now, completely and utterly devastated by his collection of newfound insights
into the fragility of the physical body, the temporal horizon of age,
and the finite, terminating nature of existence, of which all living things,
including himself, would inevitably face, he felt the final straw break, destroying his comfortable,
sheltered, youthful image of the world, and replacing it with its true, horrifying one.
Realizing this truth of the world, now, Siddhartha could no longer return and stay in the palace.
Rather, he found himself compelled by a new quest to overcome and deal with this image of life.
On a fourth journey, Siddhartha, now seeking answers, noticed a meditating holy man in the
city who seemed to be at complete peace amidst the horrors that surrounded him.
Curious about the man’s apparent ability to attain such a state, after inquiring into him, Siddhartha
would become inspired and spend the following many months on a sort of spiritual quest,
seeking holy practices, ideas, and answers. However, being a very pragmatic and inquisitive
man by this point, refusing to mindlessly agree with the conventions, orthodoxies, and
blind faiths required for many of the religious ideas and practices of the time, Siddhartha found
himself at the very brink of available ideologies and methods, still completely unsatisfied.
At some point, along with a group of several other men, Siddhartha would engage in the extreme,
radical spiritual practice known as asceticism, which involves a complete renunciation of earthly
indulgences and pleasures in an attempt to deprive the body and free the self.
After many months of starving himself into an unrecognizably weak,
malnourished skin draped collection of bones, Siddhartha still had found nothing in the form of
answers or resolutions to life. He could not think straight, and the extreme physical deprivation
only created more futile suffering. And so, he began to eat food again, returning back
somewhere into the middle of the two extremes. Now, ostracized by the ascetic men for what they
felt was giving up, Siddhartha would continue on his own, meditating alone in the forest away from
the rest of the entire world. He would continue to both eat and meditate, not depriving his body
nor pursuing much beyond what his body needed for basic comfort. Throughout this period,
Siddhartha would experience a collection of introspective realizations. And it was here
that Siddhartha would begin to formulate his fundamental philosophical tenants, and it was
here that Siddhartha’s story would become the story of the Buddha, or, the enlightened one.
In this moment, Buddhism would begin its journey in human history,
challenging and changing the course of religious, social, and philosophical orthodoxy forever.
In truth, it isn’t clear how much of the Buddha’s story is real or fable, if not entirely fable.
Most of what is known about the Buddha and his teachings are based on oral accounts that were
written down centuries after his death, leaving plenty of room for various interpretations and
supplementary details to be added and twisted. Furthermore, there are numerous versions of his
story that are accepted as accurate, each with at least slightly different details, tones, spiritual
references, and overarching implications. However, regardless of literal accuracy and variation,
the general story of the Buddha arguably always remains the same at its core:
it is a story of us all. The story of growing up, becoming curious and tempted, seeking to
move out and beyond the borders of the sheltered reality maintained by our parents, society, and
our underdeveloped psyche, beginning to discover life’s contaminated horrors for the first time,
and the extreme lengths we often go to in order to try to understand, overcome, and escape them.
In terms of Buddha’s specific philosophical ideas, his core principles are contained in what
he termed The Four Noble Truths. The First Noble Truth being that life is fundamentally suffering.
No matter who or what, all living things are bound and connected by this intrinsic existential
quality of suffering, in its broadest sense. The Second Noble Truth proposes that this suffering is
a consequence of our desires and attachments. The third truth, in a revolutionary way of
thinking for its time, goes on to argue that since suffering is a product of attachment and desire,
one can personally overcome and end suffering by eliminating or recalibrating their desires
and attachments. The fourth and final Noble Truth contains the steps Buddha believed
were necessary to do so. This collection of steps would be named the Noble Eightfold Path,
also often referred to as the Middle Way. These eight steps include right view,
right intention, right speech, right action, right livelihood, right effort,
right mindfulness, and right concentration. These concepts are not so much steps to be achieved or
discovered in a linear order, but rather, a wheel of actively circulating behaviors and wisdoms that
one must constantly be turning. In broad summary, it essentially calls for the practice of wisdom,
humanistic morality through universal compassion, moderation, self-knowledge,
and reaching enlightenment, or Nirvana, through non-attachment and the elimination of desire.
Essential to the success of the Buddha’s teachings is this final idea of non-attachment
and no desire. Admittedly, this concept can sound rather convoluted or, at the very least, counter
intuitive at first, but it starts by recognizing the true nature of the self, which is, in at least
one interpretation of the Buddha’s teachings, non-self (or emptiness). Buddha argued that
fundamentally, our external world is in perpetual, unattainable flux, and consequently, so too are
we. We are but collections of constantly changing qualitative interactions between the world
and our thoughts, and thus, the idea of a fixed, independent, identifiable self is a delusion. This
is essential to understand, because it suggests that the self that we are trying to satisfy,
escape, or eternalize never even really exists in the first place. Rather, the capital I that we
describe is merely a state of emptiness constantly being filled and emptied by the succession of each
moment. This concept can perhaps be experienced distinctly when one considers how there is no real
central point of sensation and experience when one experiences something like smell, mental vision,
memory, or emotion. Of course, they can be pointed to the mind, but where in the mind? After the
nose, who or what is smelling? Or, let’s say, if you imagined a purple cat right now and visualized
it in your head, where is the purple cat? How is the purple cat? Where are you seeing it from?
There is a just a blank emptiness filled up by the interacting thoughts and sensations of the moment,
all becoming one constantly changing hybrid of self and material world.
Buddha’s teachings are about reorienting our view of our self so that we see this–that there
is no self–so we can then reorient our view of the world. According to the Buddha, we suffer, not as
a result of not having enough things like money, status, success, or ideal external circumstances,
but because the desire for such things is attached to the impossible delusion
of a permanent self capable of being satisfied by desire. And the only way out of this is ending,
or at least attempting to reduce, one’s dependence on such desires and attachments,
living with some form of restrained moderation, and conquering the prodding delusion of self.
“Though one may conquer a thousand times a thousand men in battle, yet he indeed is the
noblest victor who conquers himself. Self-conquest is far better than the conquest of others. Not
even a god, an angel, Mara or Brahma can turn into defeat the victory of a person who is self-subdued
and ever restrained in conduct.” Said the Buddha. Of course, Buddhism is not without its
shortcomings and outdated artifacts. For secular types, its religious association can likely pose
its fair share of problems. And outside of this, just in terms of its general, core principle,
can one truly desire no desire? Does this work as a final desire,
ceasing the very thing required to enact it, or does it create a mirage effect that holds us in
further submission to it? Moreover, to what extent do we really have any control over our desires,
the information we encounter, and how it all works together to affect us? And as the world and
humanity continues to develop further and further, and temptations and indulgences and distractions
seep into every corner of modern societal life, we are likely left with, at the very least,
an extremely difficult uphill climb into even the secular form of his teachings.
However, regardless of this and any other difficulties or pitfalls, Buddhism still remains
a highly unique and compelling system of thinking. Over millennia, it has seen many different
iterations, interpretations, updates, and effects, not only in the east, but also in the west, even
influencing many significant western philosophers by the likes of Arthur Schopenhauer, Friedrich
Nietzsche, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Emil Cioran, Alan Watts, likely David Hume, and many others.
Currently, it is the world’s 4th largest religion, with over half a billion followers worldwide,
primarily divided into two main overarching categories: Theravada and Mahayana. At its core,
Buddhism still remains one of the most unique and dynamic schools of religious thought,
grounding its ideas in empirical experience and practical methodologies,
making its wisdom accessible without necessarily depending on any gods or faith in the unknowable
and untouchable, bringing the spiritual down into the hands of the pragmatic, everyday person.
And perhaps most significantly, it confronts the suffering and darkness of life directly
and does not keep us in the palace of ignorance. It does not try to lie to us. It does not shelter
or coddle. It makes its best efforts to find the minimums and maximums of life and lead
us down a path towards some semblance of hope in living well in spite of what’s really out there.