The Topic: Buddhism and the Human Condition

Opening Forum of the Buddhist Summer School in January 1997in Melbourne, where a number of teachers on the program open discussion on a particular topic. This is a regular feature at the beginning and end of each Summer School. Tapes from the Buddhist Summer School are available from E-Vam Institute.

Venerable Dr Diana Taylor: There are two aspects of the human condition which, are important: one is the state that we are in at the moment, and the other is the state that we are in. And there is usually quite a discrepancy between the two. The state that we are in at the moment is called suffering, according to the Buddhist tradition.

That suffering has got three aspects: there is the suffering that comes from physical pain; there is the suffering that comes from our emotional turmoil - I think all of us can relate to both of those sufferings very easily; and there is, what is called the pervasive suffering, which is the suffering that comes from not understanding the true nature of reality. One of the key aspects of Buddhism is that it addresses this pervasive suffering and gives a path to understanding haw, to step away from it.

From the Western psychological point of view - and I am mostly taking the Jungian approach - suffering is the suffering of pain, on the one hand, and the suffering of emotion, on the other. Western psychology tries to transform that emotional suffering into some state of happiness. There are many methods by which we are able to do that.

Through Buddhist psychology, we can go to the third step and look at the suffering that arises due to the illusions that are there in our minds. This is where meditation comes in as something that is of critical importance, because if we are to understand the illusions in our minds, we need to understand our minds. Meditation is the way in which we begin to understand the mind.

By looking at our minds and seeing how our minds work, we can go back and work on the suffering of pain. We can also look at our attitude towards pain. Through studying the mind we can look at the suffering of our emotions and how we react to the people and things in our environment. By looking at our minds, we can begin to question those sorts of attitudes and thereby begin to change them. Meditation covers all of these things. Finally, by looking at the mind, we can also begin to understand how very deeply imprinted our attitudes towards material reality is. We begin to understand how incredibly pervasive the sense of permanence is, particularly permanence of the `I', within our minds.

It is through these processes that we come to realise some sort of clarity. That clarity is clarity within our own minds, but it also enables us to have clarity within our relationships with others. This means that our relationships become much more comfortable, both for ourselves and for other people. It allows us to have clarity towards our environment, which, given the state of our environment these days, is something also that is very important.

Dr John Powers: As somebody who studies Buddhism professionally and also as somebody who comes from a Western background without any need to commit to Buddhism, I find myself doing a lot of questioning of conventional Buddhist wisdom. I do not really think that there is such a thing as `Buddhism.' I think there are many different types of 'Buddhisms' but there is nothing that you could legitimately call `Buddhism.'

What I am going to talk about is whether there is such a thing as the `human condition.' Now, I do not think there is any such thing as the human condition, either. There are many different human conditions and each human has his or her own condition. The question of whether or not Buddhism can deal with the problems of a particular person's human condition, really depends on that person and the particular types of Buddhism that he or she is interested in.

One of the reasons it is difficult to talk about this is that there are many types of Buddhisms and many types of people. For some people a type of Buddhism will work and for another person it will not - it really depends on the type of Buddhism you are looking at and the type of person you are. One of the problems associated with going into Buddhism at all is the fact that Buddhism comes to the West with a lot of cultural baggage that simply does not work in a Western environment, for some people.

One of the problems that some Westerners have, when they think about Buddhism, is that they interpret it through very Western religious terms; that is, as a set of truth claims. The question is whether Buddhism is true or not, and if it is true, then Christianity cannot be true. If Judaism is true then Buddhism cannot be true, or whatever. The problem is that this is really a mistaken way of looking at religions, because religion is more like language. That is, it functions more like a language than a set of truth claims.

Just as you learn to think in a particular way, by speaking English or by speaking French, which brings a whole set of cosmological assumptions about the individual and the world, growing up in a Buddhist environment teaches you to speak as a Buddhist. When you study a foreign language you learn that there are ways of thinking in Sanskrit or Tibetan that you simply would not think of as an English speaker. If you tried to think this way as a child, your teachers would prevent you from

It is exactly the same way with Buddhism. In becoming a Buddhist, you are adopting a new vocabulary and a new perspective on the world, but it is not a more true or better one. It may work well for some people; it may, for them, feel more right or more conducive to their own happiness. However, to think about it in terms of truth claims, in terms of whether one is right or wrong, is really a very mistaken idea. This comes from a number of people in religious studies, most prominently George Linbeck, who has a wonderful book called, The Nature o f Doctrine, in which he writes about religions as being like languages.

As time goes on, I think you're going to have more and more of an emerging Western Buddhism that is going to relate to Western ways of thinking. To some extent it is probably going to become better and better at .dealing with the Western human condition.

Venerable Tejadhammo: I think Buddhism is part of the human condition. In other words, Buddhism is a problem within the human condition, precisely because it's an 'ism,' because it is a religion. Many Westerners like to argue about whether Buddhism is a religion or a philosophy. The popular position at the moment is, 'Buddhism is a way of life.' The trouble is, no one seems to be actually living it.

The basic problem is one of clinging and being fixated on something. Each one of us decides this is Buddhism. What does that do? That just generates more and more suffering - more suffering for those around us because we become real pains in the neck to be around, and more suffering for ourselves because those around us disagree with us. The people at the Zen Centre or the Kagyu Centre have a whole different way of looking at things and we each know that the other is wrong.

At a personal level, Buddhism is something that I do not really have much time for. The teachings of the Buddha are something different again. I think they are very valuable, rich and deep, and take a lifetime to explore. Buddhism can be put between the pages of a book, but the teachings of the Buddha cannot, despite the fact that people are furiously translating texts and saying, `these are the teachings of the Buddha.' It is the difference between thinking that we know about something and having the experience of that thing.

Dr Barry Clark: I thought I would start with the human condition, since I know a lot more about that. When you hear Buddhist teachings you hear the term 'suffering' again and again. A lot of people who first hear Buddhist teachings tend to shrug and say, `Well, I'm not suffering. What is this suffering trip?' Maybe it is better to talk about `problems' because, probably, everybody acknowledges that they have problems of some kind.

From the Buddhist perspective, this would be an integral part of the human condition. When we look at the human condition, we isolate very fundamental factors, such as birth, ,sickness, old age and death. Now, for some people, these experiences might not necessarily seem to be suffering, but just talking from the Buddhist perspective for a moment, when a child is born it usually cries and there is a reason for that. The descriptions of the birth experience - as recalled by great masters who could maintain a certain state of 'consciousness throughout this event - suggests the birth experience is something like being crushed between two mountains. According to the classical Tibetan medical Tantras, on the thirty-seventh week after conception, an urge develops in the foetus along the lines of, 'Man, I've just got to get the hell out of here.' When he or she does, they find themselves emerging into a pandemonium of light and sound and sheer bedlam and confusion.

You can hardly find anybody anywhere about whom one can say, 'They have never been sick in their life.' That would also seem to be an integral part of the human condition. People tend to think of the process of ageing as something exclusively associated with old age, whereas the Buddhist concept is that it is something that starts at birth. Be that as it may, I have met many people who - as they grow old or especially if they are alone or finding it hard to cope express suffering and despair about the ageing process, saying, 'Well, death can't come too soon.'

If you have read the Tibetan Book of the Dead and related works, you will know that the experience of death can also be quite traumatic, confusing and disorientating. This can be very difficult to cope with for somebody who has not prepared him- or herself through tantric practice. Perhaps you will develop your own conclusions as to whether suffering has anything to do with the human condition. If you accept that there is some inevitability about problems through being human, you may ask what Buddhism has to do with that.

The more that I have looked into this path and the various ramifications and practices actually taught by the Buddha, it seems that he covered all bases. He seems to have given us a method for overcoming every form of suffering - a means, a practice, a technique for eliminating every kind of obscuration and defilement in the mind-stream. He has provided a vast array of techniques for attaining every kind of realisation, every kind of spiritual attainment, every kind of siddhi or psychic power. He has set out a path for the liberation from suffering states, the liberation from cyclic existence itself; the whole round of birth, death and rebirth.

This is the kind of thing that the Buddha wanted us to put to the test, to check out. You have probably all heard the analogy of testing gold by rubbing it, scraping it, burning it and so forth, to ascertain whether it is completely pure. This is the same kind of approach that the Buddha exhorted us to employ with regard to his own teachings. I have always respected this particular attitude of the Lord Buddha.

Geoff Dawson: A Zen student once asked my teacher, Charlotte Beck, 'What is it to be enlightened, what would it be like to be enlightened?' Her response was, 'When life can no longer humiliate you.' This is a rather interesting answer. It is part of the human condition to have a sense of suffering or be humiliated by life - by experiencing sickness, old age, death, rejection, criticism and so on. All of these things are things that life can throw at us that are rather unpleasant.

One way, briefly, of understanding the human condition is to look at the Buddhist Wheel of Life, which has six segments to it. These are not geographical places, these are the conditions of our own mind as human beings. There are the hell realms, which are experiences of great fear, anxiety, paranoia and so on; the animal realm, which Freud describes as the instinctual behaviour of aggression, sexuality and so on; the hungry ghost realm, which is that sense of longing for something and never being satisfied; and the human realm, which is characterised by the experience of emotion. I think that what is particular to the human condition is the capacity to experience great suffering and great joy. We have a wide emotional range and intensity of emotions, because of which, there is a capacity for great joy, of great intimacy and love as well as great suffering. The other realms are the realm of the jealous gods; which is a realm of competitiveness, mastery and clashes of wills such as are seen in the political sphere; and the realm of the gods, which is a realm of joy and bliss.

In Buddhism, the idea is not to get from the hell realm into heaven. We have to see through this whole wheel of existence, because if we try to hang onto the joyful, blissful states of mind, they will fade away like everything else and something else will replace them. Trying to hold on is also suffering, because it will humiliate us if we try to hold onto it.

There are a number of books coming out on Buddhism and psychotherapy, particularly contemporary psychoanalytic theory, where there is a lot of merging between the Buddhist worldview and the psychoanalytic worldview. This looks at the central issue of human nature as narcissism. This comes from the Greek myth of Narcissus. The story briefly is that Narcissus goes in search of himself (which is symbolic of the human being in search of their own identity) and sees his own reflection in the river. He gets fixated on it, falls in the river and drowns. That is the nature of human beings, too. We are searching for our true nature, our Buddha-nature or true self. That is the central question of being a human being: 'Who am I?' We are searching for something all the time, yet we get fixated on our self-image. That is the dilemma that is the paradox of the human realm.

The teachings of the Buddha are basically saying that there is a way out of this, in a metaphorical sense. There is a way of getting off this wheel of going round and round in suffering. However, it is not in the sense of getting off it and going to some other realm where you never suffer any mote. The way of practice is coming to accept all of those different aspects of ourselves; all of those different realms make up bur experience.

We have to start with this human condition and go into it, experience it and know what it is like. The path of Buddhist practice is about coming to a deep acceptance of who we are as human beings, and there is a change of perception that comes about in that. It is not about getting off the wheel, but through a change in perception we are released, from a lot of that unnecessary suffering because there is no longer resistance to life as it is. When we start to cultivate an experience of non-attachment to life and we see into the impermanence of things, we see into the emptiness of life and we recognise that while we are searching for our true nature, there is really nothing there. There is no fixed self, there are no fixed objects out there that are going to make us happy. When we really know this in our bones, there is liberation from that. It is through that sense of insight that life can no longer humiliate us any more.

It is essential to really understand that this is the way of meditation. There is a certain understanding that you can develop about Buddhist practice, or any religion or psychotherapy for that matter. That is intellectual and it is important. A lot o fpeople think tha Zen Buddhism challenges intellectualism. It is not quite as simple as that,
however. Zen Buddhism is just saying that the intellect can only take you so far. It is important, but to really know your true self, in your bones, requires a process that does not involve the rational mind. It is non-rational. It is a way of experiencing in your bones, in your marrow. We take up meditation practice so that this becomes something experiential, not just an intellectual understanding of life.

Question from the audience: John, I enjoyed the way you presented your material, so would you like to comment on meditation as part of the way?

John Powers: As somebody who actually practises meditation and also as somebody who questions conventional wisdom, I often do ask myself what it is I am doing. I do find that practising meditation helps me to diminish some of the things that cause anxiety and suffering, because a lot of the things that do that are false ideas. By doing meditation in a Buddhist context, you can examine ' these false ideas to see which ones hold up under analysis. Having said that, I also often think that when Buddhists go on about suffering, they are often overstating the case.

Question: The human condition is as much about community and the environment. What does Buddhism have to say about living with others and with our environment, in terms of right thought or right action?

Geoff Dawson: If we think of enlightenment as something that is going to happen to `me' and then 'my life is going to be happier,' that is really a misconception of what enlightenment is about. It is through the experience of doing any kind of meditation practice, whether it is Buddhist or otherwise, that one begins to understand one's connectedness with other people and life in general. As this experience goes on, it is not a matter of `me' becoming enlightened; it is a matter of that connectedness with all things becoming clearer and clearer. As that insight becomes clearer,we recognise that helping others, working for the environment, working for a sense of community, is what practice is about.

Barry Clark: In Buddhism, there is a very useful practice of exchanging oneself with others. We give our own happiness, blessings, virtues and positive energy to others. By empathising with others, by shifting our daily perception I towards what we have in common rather than what separates us, we can easily recognise that everybody wants to have a greater level of happiness. This is a certain fundamental attitude that we all share, but we tend to forget this fundamental aspiration that unites us. I think Buddhism offers a really excellent opportunity