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| "And he says to me, "YOLO!" ["You only live once"? We know better than to believe that.] |
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| If "I" don't live all these lives, who does? |
"My forbears accumulated much wealth yet passed away taking nothing of their wealth with them. Nor did they return to enjoy their treasure. Alas, they have come to destruction. They have missed the good fortune of getting the best out of a good rebirth" (Jataka I, 2).
In this way great beings in search of liberation from suffering (disappointment, dukkha) look upon life. And they, having made a gift of their possessions to the world, go forth to endeavor for self-mastery that leads to supreme enlightenment.
Seeing into the centuries, millennia, and aeons with unclouded knowledge, the Teacher saw by means of clear insight to the limits of the knowable and declared:
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| Samsara represented as the Wheel of Life and Death |
"How can one reckon all one's sorrows, life after life, through separation from loved ones, through union with the unloved, through the death of dear ones, and through the loss of one's health and wealth, limbs and life?
"In this sweeping on of life's stream, it is hard to find another who has not been one's own father, mother, brother, sister, son, and daughter. Truly, every living being might well have been associated closely with every other in this long trail of woe" (SN 11.180).
"Where in the whole wide earth could be found a spot unpolluted by the dead? Sometime in the endless flux a living being has died wherever life manifested itself" (Jataka II, 5-6).
To a Brahmin who was searching for unpolluted ground where no corpse had ever been cremated, the Teacher said 14,000 corpses of that Brahmin's clan had been burned on the very spot on which he stood and further said that there is no place on earth that is not a cemetery.
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| Bhutanese thangka of Jataka Tales, 18th cent. (Phajoding Gompa) |
Every kind of suffering does one undergo through rebirth in diverse planes of becoming. And there is nothing in the world that arises that is fully pleasant. Everything is mixed with disappointment in such a way that for the thoughtful all pleasure appears as menaced with suffering (unsatisfactoriness, lack of fulfillment) or moving on to it because of impermanence.
Therefore, the foremost, the greatest teacher of the world, the Buddha, taught that all that is felt is flooded, sunk, immersed in unsatisfactoriness, touched by disappointment, pain, grief, misery, and is never ultimately fulfilling.
In view of the pain-laden character of rebirth the Teacher set forth the wisdom of renunciation, relinquishing, and detachment in this way:
"Unknowable is the beginning of beings clouded in ignorance and fettered by craving, running on, hurrying on, through interminable births and deaths. Nor can it be said of the running on and hurrying on of beings, ignorant and full of craving, that they are tending to an end.
"In this interminable process for so long have you all experienced grief, bitter and sharp, and made graveyards bigger and bigger.
"For that reason you should turn away from formations (sankharas), cmut them off, and become free of them."
During this long process of wayfaring in samsara very rarely does one gain the state of a human being. "It is," says the Buddha, "as if a person were to cast into the wide ocean a ring with a single opening in it, and that ring were to be carried this way and that on the water by the wind — westward, eastward, northward, and southward.
"And suppose a turtle blind in one eye were to come to the surface of the sea once every century.
"What do you think, meditators? Will that one-eyed turtle put its head through that ring with the single hole every time it surfaced once every one hundred years?"
— "Venerable sir, how may it be known that it will succeed even after a long time?"
— "Well, meditators, a one-eyed turtle surfacing only once every hundred years would put its head through that ring with the single hole before a person who has fallen into a state of regress (apaya) returns to the human plane."
It is hard to accumulate merit when experiencing great suffering in those states of loss and regression, which is to say, in the state of
- an animal trembling with fear of death at the time of seizure by a net, snare, or the like, as
- a draught animal painfully driven to work through various kinds of cruel punishment, as
- a ghost with tearful face full of insatiable hunger and unquenchable thirst, with skin and bone body, exclaiming from time to time, "Alas, what woe!"
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| There are countless worlds in 31 Planes. |
But in the human state through the combination of a fair measure of pleasant living and fellowship with the virtuous, the door of merit is open.
If one suffers as a human there is every chance of that very suffering becoming a supportive condition for growth in right understanding and for gaining confidence in the Dharma.
In the fashioning of a sword of spirituality to destroy ignorance and the passions, the alternation of suffering and pleasure may be compared to the action of the smith who plunges the blade being alternately in fire and water to temper it by heating and cooling in turn.
Human life with its tolerableness becomes a suitable ground for producing skill (kusala karma, merit).
Yet, if human beings have the nature of the denizens of the states of regress, that is, of those denizens tormented in hell worlds, the ghost plane, or the animal plane, then such human beings though in human guise do not accumulate merit.
There are three kinds of unfortunate beings in human guise who may be known thus:
- the first kind by their readiness to take life and commit all kinds of violence, theft, lying, and lustful actions;
- the second by their laziness and consequent depression and misery;
- the third by their extreme proneness to self-indulgence, their lack of independence of character, and their transgression of all codes of decency.
Only the kind that has become established firmly in humanness. What is that?
It is the current good fortune, this human state of being endowed with modesty and dread to do wrong (hiri and otappa). It is settled reliance on the fact of karmic results (karma-vipaka) -- deeds and the results of deeds -- stretch beyond this human life to future lives after this, until craving is undone through enlightenment and the liberation of nirvana (arhatship).
Enlightenment is knowing what is and is not conducive to one's own well-being and that of society, compassion, mental quickening (samvega, a spiritual "sense of urgency") to realize the good and true according to reality, the rejection of wrong courses of action, and the practice of the meritorious courses of action.
One established in this way enters the place of merit. For such a person the way to the acquisition of worth is open. One grows in good. One becomes pure and a true servant of the world and thereby one who honors the Supremely-Enlightened One, the Teacher of the Path to the Deathless.
But all this can, according to the Buddha's path of purification and perfection, become accessible only through the way of friendliness (metta), amity, called loving-kindness, which is the precursor of all good.
Only through the way of friendliness (mettayana magga), the vehicle of friendliness, does one approach perfection. No Buddhist can consider any one an enemy. A Buddhist follows the Enlightened One and so put the idea of enmity far from oneself. One has to eliminate hate in one's heart before one does anything else.
And when one gets rid of hate one has also canceled, removed, obliterated, expunged all thought of another as his enemy.
Really the ill-mannered, the harmful ones, the undisciplined ones may be as vast as space. If a person regards all the bad people in the world as enemies, how many of them will one be able to destroy?
But when the thought of hate in the heart itself is destroyed then all "enemies" are instantly vanquished. They instantly become non-existent for one, and in that sense they are "destroyed" through one's becoming full of friendliness toward them.
So the poet Bodhicariyavatara of Santideva says:
How many of the harmful folk,
who are as measureless as space,
am I able to slay?
But when the thought of hate itself is slain,
all my foes will have gone away.
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