EXISTENTIAL OR TRANSCENDENT?

AC: A little further on in the same chapter, you state: "The Buddha was not a mystic. His awakening was not a shattering insight into a transcendent truth that revealed to him the mysteries of God. He did not claim to have had an experience that granted him privileged, esoteric knowledge of how the universe ticks." Then you say, "Only as Buddhism became more and more of a religion were such grandiose claims imputed to his awakening."

SB: That's right, yes.

AC: Given that the experiential recognition of the Four Noble Truths is, as you've just stated, the most important element of awakening in the Buddhist path, it would have to be more than a strictly intellectual revelation—right?

SB: Yes, of course.

AC: What would be the component, then, in the revelation of the Four Noble Truths that would make it more than merely an intellectual insight or recognition?

SB: The component that would make it more than a merely intellectual recognition would be the fact that the momentum or driving force that propelled the Buddha to this awakening was the question of life and death. In other words, the Buddha's quest was an existential quest, and as I see it, we can only understand awakening as something that is a resolution to the primary existential dilemma that every human being faces—the fact of having been born and the fact of death. In responding to such questions, the intellect can be helpful—it can give us useful ideas and so on—but fundamentally, this is a matter that grips our entire body/mind and is the basis upon which we then focus our attention through meditation or spiritual inquiry or whatever it is that we're doing. And it's the unrelenting honing in on that existential sense of questioning that triggers and awakens the mind to another response to birth, sickness, aging, and death, which historically, for the Buddha, was the revelation of these Four Truths.

AC: But in this, what we could call heroic or, even though I know I shouldn't say it, absolute confrontation with these existential questions—which obviously few human beings actually have the courage to engage in—would there not have to be a transcendent element of the sort you refer to in your book as "the Deathless" or "the Unconditioned," the discovery of which creates, shall we say, an experiential context that transcends a merely three-dimensional sense of what life is? Wouldn't it be the direct experience of this fourth dimension, which some have also referred to as "the supermundane," that would give the Four Noble Truths their liberating power? Is there not, in other words—and this is just a question—another element that empowers this profound existential inquiry?

SB: Well, of course, you start out with a question, and the reason it's a question, or a dilemma, is because you're unable to step out of it. You're unable to see a way out of a situation to which you have no response. And clearly, if you're going to find a response that addresses that question, you must somehow transcend the limitation that has stuck you with that question. To that extent, one could say, yes, of course, there must be some degree of self-transcendence. But transcendence, to me, is a relative term. In other words, one can say that one has a transcendent experience only in relation to that in which one was previously trapped. To then reify that notion of transcendence into some kind of state, I think, is a mistake.

AC: But just to pursue this a little further, there are several passages in the Nikayas [the earliest recorded recollections of the Buddha's teachings], which you're no doubt very familiar with, in which the Buddha describes what he himself calls "the Deathless": "Monks, there is that which is not born, not become, not made, not conditioned. Monks, if there were not that which is not born, not become, not made, not conditioned, there could be made known no escape from that which is born, become, made, conditioned here. But since, monks, there is that which is not born, not become, not made, not conditioned, therefore the escape from that which is born, become, made, conditioned is made known." Obviously, the Buddha is here very directly and clearly pointing to the profound significance of the experiential discovery of a mystery, which, at least in these formulations, alone makes liberation possible.

SB: I know what you're getting at, but that passage is quoted endlessly, and the interesting thing is that it only appears once, and in a relatively minor text found in a subsection of the Khuddaka Nikaya. I therefore take such passages to be primarily inspirational in nature rather than literal.

AC: What does that mean?

SB: It means that if you read through the Buddhist sutras, you'll find all manner of passages that appear, actually, to be at odds with many other passages. And I think it's particularly striking how Western interpreters of Buddhism have latched on to that last passage you've just quoted. It's endlessly reiterated, and yet, as I said, it only occurs once in all of the canon. It's a passage that I think is attractive precisely because it lends credence to a kind of mystical absolutist interpretation of Buddhist doctrine that is actually not so widely found elsewhere in the texts. I'm not saying that you can't find passages elsewhere that use that kind of language, but even leaving aside contemporary views on Buddhism, there have been commentators as far back as two thousand years ago who shed doubt on the legitimacy of such passages and saw them as inspirational rather than literal. For many people, that kind of language inspires them to reach beyond themselves. It inspires them to believe in the possibility of something quite other than the sort of experience they feel trapped and stuck in at the present. But the idea that those inspirational injunctions of the Buddha are meant to be taken literally, I personally find problematic.

AC: So you seriously question the notion that the Buddha put any emphasis on the significance of an absolute or transcendent dimension.

SB: Yes. My own reading of the texts is that those are, in balance, fairly marginal comments that are actually at odds with the thrust of the Buddha's message that speaks to me. So while I see those passages, as I said, as having inspirational value, I personally can't take them literally because I feel that they would put Buddhism back into the context of religious experience that we find, for example, in the Upanishads [esoteric Hindu scriptures], which for all its beauty is not something that I think the Buddha was endorsing.

THE REVEALED PATH

AC: In your chapter entitled "Imagination," you write that awakening is "by its very nature . . . free from the constraints of preconceived ideas, images, and doctrines. It offers no answers, only the possibility of new beginnings." My question here would be: Doesn't genuine awakening clearly and unambiguously reveal that perfect middle place between all pairs of opposites, in other words, the revealed path? The reason I'm pursuing this is that when you say that it "offers no answers," again—and I might be misconstruing or misunderstanding it—the implication seems to be that there really isn't any Answer with a capital "A."

SB: That's right.

AC: Whereas what I would say is that what I'm calling this "perfect middle place between all pairs of opposites" would be the answer. In other words, one would never be able to know beforehand specifically what the appropriate response would be, but that place from which it is revealed at any given moment would be discovered to be always one and the same.

SB: Well, I don't know . . . maybe. When I say, for example, that awakening does not give answers, only the possibility of new beginnings, what I'm getting at is that any kind of genuine insight experience—whether you call it awakening or anything else—is something that will only ever find expression in response to the specific and unique demand of the situation in which one finds oneself. But I still think we're probably quibbling over words here.

AC: Well, no, because again, what I'm suggesting is that the insight itself—that depth of insight that is free from all fixed ideas—is the answer. But I get the sense from reading your book—and I think it's because you obviously, and for many very good reasons, feel strongly about staying away from anything that is absolute—that you believe there simply couldn't be an absolute perspective. Now that's fair enough, but it is my own experience that there is indeed an answer, and that answer is the discovery of that place—which, interestingly enough, I do agree you might be pointing to—where there are no fixed ideas. My point, though, is that when we are able to discover that place, it becomes possible for us to always know, or to always find out, what the right response actually is.

SB: I can accept that as long as we don't literalize that place as something that we can fix, as it were. In other words, I see Buddhism and Buddhist practice as operating within a very dynamic context, one that is not concerned with, and in fact is highly suspicious of, the rhetoric and language of place, of ultimates, of absolutes, of positions of any kind.

AC: Well, as you say, when we're using language, we can sometimes get into a little bit of difficulty. But when I say that the place I'm referring to is between all pairs of opposites, it ought to be pretty clear that from the point of view of the rational mind, it's not really a place that can be imagined because it's inherently free from all the constrictions of any view. And yet, it is precisely the discovery of that "no-place" that makes a truly enlightened response to life possible.

SB: Yes, okay. In that way I can go along with it, I suppose. But to me, the point is really about freeing myself from fixations that trap one in a fixed set of images, ideas, views, patterns, and so on. And once that way of being is realized, it's not as if you've discovered a place to rest, but rather an openness to responding to the world in a way that is not cluttered and tied down by fixations and places.

WHAT DEFINES A "CULTURE OF AWAKENING?"

SB: I'd like to bring into our conversation at this point the idea of the "culture of awakening." I think there's a tendency in the West to give too much importance to the centrality of the individual embarking on a heroic quest rather than seeing that the possibility for that heroic quest rests on there being a place in the culture that values and supports it. I see the role of Buddhism in society not as some kind of personal strategy for individuals but rather as the foundation for a culture in which such behavior is legitimized, valued, clearly articulated. And that, I think, is in many respects a far more important challenge for those of us who are engaging with these ideas today than the heroic individual quest. Now some people will, of course, feel that to be the prime motive for their response to their own existential or spiritual concerns, and I have no problem with that. But it does somehow exclude or put in second place those who are more concerned with creating structures that will give rise to a culture of awakening that will hopefully, over a much longer term, provide us with a means to transform this highly materialistic and very narcissistic culture that we live in into one that supports different kinds of values.

AC: One would think that they would go hand in hand. But unless at least a few are willing to be so heroic as to go beyond the known completely, the vision of what exactly those new structures would be couldn't become very clear—could it?

SB: Yes and no. Of course that element is crucial. But I think it also perhaps underestimates the innate intuitive capacities of creative people who may not be drawn to that kind of intense spiritual practice but are nevertheless somehow intuitively in touch with other possibilities and forms. This awakening thing does not necessarily correspond to the model you seem to have of the heroic individual striving to let go of all their stuff and embrace the unknown and so on as a solitary quest. The heroic quest is very much one that values transcendence over immanence. It's important to recognize that awakening is also something immanent, something that is, in a sense, already present in the ordinary mind. I think that awakening percolates through, and is percolating through, in our time in history, in forms of culture, music, literature, and art that are not even necessarily self-consciously engaged in that kind of heroic quest but are simply trying to express an intuitive kind of gut feeling of something else, something other. So I would say that a culture of awakening embraces and values both.

AC: I appreciate the model that you've presented. I would say, however, that any genuine "culture of awakening" is obviously going to be defined by the realization and the deepest insights of the individuals involved, and that those insights that make it a "culture of awakening"—if it really is one—are most likely to come from the individuals who've gone the farthest. But what you've said helps me to make a little more sense of the fact that despite your apparent dislike for the notion of the "solitary quest," you consider it a positive development that contemporary dharma practice, as you write in your book, "is becoming individuated," and that "in valuing imagination and diversity, such an individuated vision would ultimately empower each practitioner to create his or her own distinctive track within the field of dharma practice."

SB: That's right.

AC: What you describe there is a view that seems to be very popular these days, particularly in Buddhist circles. My question is: How could a dharma practitioner who is sincerely seeking enlightenment truly be able to create his or her own distinctive path? In the relationship with a spiritual mentor—assuming, of course, that the mentor is enlightened—isn't it essential that the student be willing to submit to the mentor's guidance in order to find his or her way to the unknown—in other words, to liberation? Otherwise what we're left with is something on the order of, "Master, my inner Buddha is telling me that what suits my awakening today is to sleep in."

SB: I would cite, in this instance, the famous passage from the end of the Buddha's life, in which he refuses to appoint a successor and gives expression to this whole idea of being "a lamp unto yourself," of taking the dharma as your guide—which is what speaks to my heart, as it were. But actually, the whole Buddhist tradition has always been caught in precisely this tension between, on the one hand, the valuing of individual responsibility and self-reliance and, on the other, the recognition of the value of discipline—of giving yourself over to monastic orders, or giving yourself to the uncritical following of a teacher or a guru or a guide. So while I personally find myself to be more in harmony, and more comfortable, with the path of self-reliance, I certainly wouldn't suggest that this alone is sufficient. And I value very highly the importance of giving oneself to the guidance of those who are wiser and more awake and enlightened than oneself. That, I think, is an unavoidable component, and if you take it away, then the whole thing does just become whatever you want to make of it.

AC: Exactly. And that's the question I have about the thrust of much of what you've written in your book. I feel that when push comes to shove, it could too easily boil down to exactly that because, as you know, many people think they want to be free, but when they start finding out what it really entails, they often start backpedaling. It is at those times that are most critical that one often needs to be willing to take great risks in order to make that unimaginable leap into a completely different relationship to life.

SB: I think it's also a temperamental thing. I mean, some people do seem to have such a capacity for isolation and self-reliance that they have relatively little to do with communities and teachers and so on, and others have the very opposite temperament and require that sort of support as a precondition for any kind of progress along the path. We need to acknowledge and recognize the shortcomings and advantages of both. And just as you can follow a very wise teacher and fall into dependency and a kind of disempowerment and unhealthy reliance, following purely your own intuition and impulses can lead you to a kind of narcissistic absorption in your own fantasies.

AC: That's for sure.

SB: So it's a question, really, of finding a balance. I still feel, nonetheless, that the aim of the practice is freedom, and that includes freedom from being in the throes, as it were, of an authority figure to whom one endlessly defers.

AC: Even the Buddha, you mean?

SB: Yes, even the Buddha, sure.

AC: But if the Buddha was really the Buddha, would it be possible to be in a relationship of unwholesome dependence and disempowerment with him? If he was who he is supposed to have been, would such a thing have been possible?

SB: Well, yes, actually, I do think that's possible, and again, I don't want to elevate the Buddha into too much of a sort of superhuman person. He certainly was a very good organizer and probably ran a very tight ship, but what has always been telling for me are those injunctions he gave at the end of his life, when he actually said, in a sense, "Well, I've done my job. You get on with it."

I see Buddhism as a 2,500-year ongoing experiment in awakening that is continuously trying out new things. It's continuously adjusting and changing, modifying, questioning what it's doing, and that to me is precisely where the richness of the tradition lies: that you can have Zen Buddhism and Tibetan Buddhism and Theravada Buddhism, all of which are amazingly different, and yet nonetheless retain the core, the primary threads, of that which was set in motion by the historical Buddha.

The Buddha unleashed into history, as it were, a whole series of cultures of awakening, all of which would have been completely unpredictable in the Buddha's own time, each one reflecting the needs and specificities of the different situations in which the dharma found itself. So the kind of dharma that is going to emerge in our culture is not going to be like anything else that's happened before. And that, I think, is the great opportunity that we have in the West because we can see that bigger picture perhaps better than it's ever been seen before; we can see Buddhism as an historical movement, as a series of contingent cultures.