I remember reading Herman Hesse’s Siddhartha when I was 17 or 18. I was irritated with it because, it was never clear to me that Siddhartha was Buddha—even though that is one of the individual’s names that is said to have become the Buddha. I didn’t understand then and have only come to understand better now the profound nature of the Buddha’s story. There was someone, a man, who became the Buddha, but, similar to trying to piece together the reality of Jesus’ life or any sacred figure from long ago, the story of the Buddha also has elements in it that suggest it may be the story of at least two lives combined. But unlike our western finger pointing and ah, hah’s against the stories of the Bible that supposedly tell us the life of someone called Jesus, these western notions of historical accuracy mean nothing in the world of Buddhism. The historical story of the Buddha is irrelevant, so irrelevant that there is almost nothing demonstrably real about the story of the life of the real Buddha in the Buddhist sacred texts.

In part, this is because it doesn’t matter in a deep way. Once Buddha had become enlightened, traditionally dated to the spring of 528 B.C.E., Before the Common Era, he actually was no longer one person, or one personality, he was Buddha nature, with one foot in humanity and one foot in the divine realm of sacred presence, the place he found called Nirvana. He supposedly lived to be 80; he was enlightened at about the age of 35, and he spent the next 45 years of his life teaching his path to enlightenment. He had thousands of followers and disciples but very little is known about him, what he liked, what he looked like, nothing much more than his movements and his teachings. And some of that seems embellished by those who came after, and again, that doesn’t matter much in the world of Buddhism. Part of Gautama’s teachings was that he didn’t matter as a distinct person, that he was no longer a distinct person, that Self and personality were ever changing and that they were illusions. And once he was enlightened, he didn’t want people to worship him, he didn’t want a personality cult, what he had to teach had nothing to do, he insisted, with him as an individual.

In her biography of Buddha, Karen Armstrong explains that Buddha came to exactly the opposite conclusion of that of Descartes’ famous "I think therefore I am." The more the Buddha thought, the more he found that the Self, the I, was an illusion. There are strong teachings against idolatrous religious ideas in Buddhism, ideas that come from individuals. Buddha considered it very unskillful to simply take on faith anyone else’s ideas or beliefs—that would be idolatry. Everything had to be learned and experienced for one’s self, or it wasn’t real. This is where he uses his raft metaphor for those who want to cling to him as if to a god. He asks if you were at a big river and you needed to cross over what would you do? You would put together a raft, log by log, bind it, hop on board and cross the river. When you got to the other side, would you then lift the raft, which had been of such service, up on your shoulders and haul it with you wherever you went next? No. You would leave the raft behind. So, you should leave Buddha behind once you reach the other side.

My concrete 18-year-old mind, and even now my concrete, western 43-year-old mind, wants to know, though, who the Buddha was, and I am still mystified by Siddhartha. But without apologies, the story of the Buddha is an archetypal myth—it is a story of the way; it is a story of journey; it is not meant for the literal mind set. It’s underlying message, like the underlying message of most religions, too, is that you do not seek enlightenment simply for yourself—although that seems to be the way Buddhism sometimes gets acculturated by many in our society.. Enlightenment is about letting go of yourself, leaving yourself, and, if you truly followed the path of Buddha, you would then give yourself back to humanity, with the sole aim of bringing compassion to all living things, and even non-living things, such as the stone in the meditation.

Last month, a Buddhist priest visited our group of ministers from the Mountain Desert District at our fall retreat near Salt Lake City. He led us in an exercise he called, The Big Mind. He assured us that even a group of lawyers had been able to experience the big mind. Of course, among ministers, there can be some who are just as cynical or just as skeptical or just as stubborn, so some didn’t experience it. We didn’t have to go into a meditative state, the priest used the power of suggestion. We would slightly move our chairs each time he asked us to go to a different place in our minds.

This movement of the chairs would symbolize an internal changing of perspective. It would work, if we would let it work. I now know that I wanted to do this, in part, because I wanted to believe and still want to believe that my way of thinking and doing religion is just as legitimate as Buddhism, that I can be just as spiritual, that I can move in my mind to different places. So I did. I really did.

I spoke from the place of the big mind, which was like describing the perspective of god or Nirvana, from the place of wisdom, and from some other place that I literally couldn’t remember once we stopped the exercise. I had control over what I chose to say but what I said I wasn’t consciously aware of putting together before I said it, although I did a few times lose this inner welling up of ideas. Any time we wanted to speak from the place of the ego or the I, we would simply shift our chairs to represent that we had gone back. I am relating this experience to you because for me it was a tangible experience of some of what Buddha tried to teach. He insisted that his way did not require supernatural intervention, that the experience is not supernatural, that every single person has the capacity to reach enlightenment, that it is an individual path or journey that doesn’t truly require a priest, a director or a monastery—although some of this might be helpful. The Big Mind exercise was not reaching enlightenment—what it did was show us psychologically that we could find different states within our mind, that the meditation practices of Buddhism might work for some of us, that meditation was real, that most of us hold a key within us to experience different states of mind. I’m explaining this because Buddha said the only way to reach Nirvana, at least as long as we are human, is through meditation.

Although Buddhism is highly intellectual, very rational, the experience of going beyond or going forth is not intellectual, it is not within our minds to control, we cannot rationally reach enlightenment. Understanding the concepts, in other words, is not the same thing as experiencing them. The Big Mind exercise, like any meditative exercise, is about learning to let go of thinking through, allowing your mind to rest, so that you can go beyond rational thought. If I hadn’t had that experience, I might not believe that this is possible, so I would have approached today’s sermon simply rationally, didactically telling you the story of Buddha’s life and about the concepts of Buddhism. Even though I’m not Buddhist and have little desire to become Buddhist, I at least now appreciate that it is real, and that it is not just an intellectual, religious exercise.

Buddha lived during what Karen Armstrong calls the Axial Age—from about 800 to 200 B.C.E. It was the time of the most powerful Hebrew prophets — Ezekial may have been a contemporary of Buddha’s, in a different part of the world, of course. This was the time of Confucius and Lao Tzu, Zoroaster, Socrates and Plato. Human beings acknowledged during the Axial Age that whatever God looked like, God wasn’t to be found on earth any more, as had apparently been the case for the predecessors of most of these cultures. Sages and prophets and holy men and women were concerned with the limitations of the human species, they were concerned with defining human nature, everything was thought about and considered from an ethical and moral perspective. The great religious traditions emerged, Taoism and Confucianism in China, Hinduism and Buddhism in India, monotheism in Iran and the Middle East, Greek rationalism in Europe. Buddha, because he was a product of his times, could not have imagined simple, psychological or spiritual enlightenment without attaching an ethical or moral dimension to his program. Scottish philosopher David Hume wrote about experience in a similar way to Buddha (Hume gave us much of our modern philosophical idea of empiricism—that we know only what we can experience, and experience is ever changing). But this kind of knowledge for Buddha, as was true for all Axial Age religious figures, would have been meaningless if it wasn’t transformative for humankind, if it didn’t change the way we behave.

So the Buddhist concept of annata, of no self, is not just an abstract, philosophical position, but one that requires the learner to behave as if he or she doesn’t exist. This concept is carried deeply with the practitioner into his or her meditative exercises. And Buddha asked that, in addition to the personal experience of meditation, that the learner also use the practice to give back to the world what he called the immeasurables—the emotion of love, the immeasurable feeling that knows no hatred. So, there is an actual meditative discipline of compassion.

There are four Yoga meditation states. At the simplest level, the discipline of compassion in yoga asks us to extend friendship to all living things; at the second level we are to cultivate compassion for all who suffer and empathize with their pain; at the third level, we experience sympathetic joy and learn to rejoice in the happiness of others; and at the fourth level, the highest and deepest level, when we are submerged in a state that is beyond knowing joy or pain. The discipline of compassion asks us to extend an attitude of total equanimity towards others, without any preferences, radiating a wholly disinterested benevolence. It’s hard with our western minds to imagine this Buddhist world of no personality without thinking of it as sounding bleak and inhuman, almost indifferent. But the kindness and gentleness of the Buddha belied that kind of interpretation. He inspired others to follow him and they wanted to be like him. Buddha reached enlightenment after following a harsh regime of asceticism, nearly starving himself to death, literally depriving the body in a hope to find the ultimate holy place, but it didn’t work. Buddha considers his path the "middle way”—a path that takes the practitioner between deprivation and hedonism. And he found this middle way, the way to enlightenment, according to at least one story, remembering an incident from childhood. His father had taken him to the ceremonial ploughing of the fields. A small child, his nurses left him under the shade of a rose-apple tree, and he sat up to look at the freshly ploughed soil. He noticed that the young grass had been torn up and that insects and the eggs they had laid in the tender new shoots had been destroyed. As the little boy looked at the carnage in the soil, he was filled with a strange sorrow, as if his own relatives had been killed. But it was a beautiful day, and suddenly a feeling of pure joy rose up unbidden in his heart. As the day wore on, the rose-apple tree shade remained over the young boy, shielding him from the sun, no matter its angle, a site that stunned his nurses when they returned and found the tree’s shadow on the wrong side of the tree. Years later, Gautama says he remembered the sensation of sorrow and joy as he sat beneath the Bodhi tree and found the center of enlightenment. He wrote: “The child had been taken out of himself by a moment of spontaneous compassion, when he had allowed the pain of creatures that had nothing to do with him personally to pierce him to the heart. This surge of selfless empathy had brought him a moment of spiritual release.” One of the only failings of the Buddha—a true product of his time — was his near misogyny, which at its best can be described as indifference toward women and at its worst complete disregard.

His own aunt begged him to allow her to become a nun and he twice refused, even after she and a group of women had taken a long pilgrimage and arrived to implore him haggard, hungry and with swollen feet. One of his companions finally forced him to see the contradiction of allowing only men to seek enlightenment, when he said the path was for everyone, even for the lowest members in India’s caste system. Buddha felt that women joining his orders would set back the age of his religious way by at least 500 years. Buddha, also, if it is actually the story of his life, abandoned his wife and young son when he left to seek the holy life. Unlike Christian ascetics, however, Buddha did not feel that sex was evil and that because it was evil, it would keep you from being holy, he found, more, that sex was good and that the life of a householder—a husband and father—would distract you from seeking a holy path because of its positive and distracting pull.

Buddha’s theory, also, was that if you reached enlightenment in the fourth stage of yoga (or beyond), that you would have to join a monastic order to continue living, otherwise you would die and stay in Nirvana. It is said that his father died the next day after reaching enlightenment, in part, because he was not prepared to give up his householder lifestyle. The foundation of Buddhism is that life is suffering. That is the first so-called Nobel Truth.

The cause of our suffering is our desire to hold onto things that cannot last, this attachment to things and desire to hold onto things can even be said to be the root of all evil. Nirvana—a sacred place of pure joy, where there is no suffering, where there is everything and nothing at the same time—exists as our way out, and we get to Nirvana by following Buddha’s eight-fold path, which includes moral living, meditation and finally, a reaching of wisdom.

My main criticism of Buddhism is its primary tenant that all life is suffering—not that I completely disagree—I certainly see the suffering and evil, along with the fact that we must all die and that death causes pain. But I also believe that life contains all good, as well, and that we don’t need to escape life to find happiness, that it’s possible to live through the pain of life and still find joy, that this is the meaning of life. Our ability to appreciate beauty, beauty in nature, music, art or poetry, our ability to feel love, are all part of being human, and these experiences can be even more profound as we live, learn to live, and experience sorrows, too.

Somewhere in this reasoning or logic, there’s a circle, and as we move along the circle, we grow closer to and then further away from Buddhism or Christianity, eastern and western thinking, assuming that these represent a dichotomy. But I don’t believe they’re really all that far apart. Buddha did not believe he was the first Buddha; he believed there had been many Buddha’s before and that his knowledge was inherent in the human condition—it was discovered and re-discovered every 32,000 years, whenever it was forgotten. Buddha took the five required practices of the monastic life, which were in place before his time, and turned the five abstentions or prohibitions, which included no violence, lying, stealing, intoxication or sex, into positive ways of being.

It wasn’t enough to simply avoid bad behaviors, it was necessary to cultivate the positive side of what these five prohibitions stood for—so that Buddha came up with his doctrine of no harm, which meant being helpful, wholesome, skillful, careful, reasoned and clear. To develop within yourself his concepts of right speech, right action, right livelihood and right effort requires the practice of mindfulness. Mindfulness means to be aware of every thought, observation and feeling we have as we go through even the most mundane tasks. If we feel anger or hatred or sadness or joy, we are supposed to note that feeling, not run away from it, accept it, realize it, understand its cause and stay with it until it leaves. Why? Because we are on the path of enlightenment, which brings us release from bodily sorrows. And when we get there, we will, more than likely, choose the compassionate path and return to our fellow creatures to help them find this release as well.
There are many appealing levels to Buddhism. Particularly, I think its insistence upon individual experience and knowing—that’s certainly appealing to most of us Unitarian Universalists, who insist upon approaching our western ideas of religion as individuals. The concept of mindfulness, awareness, is appealing, especially if we understand it deeply and realize it’s not just talking about self-centered navel gazing. The doctrine of compassion is compelling, extending love and friendship and joy to all creatures, holding their suffering within our hearts and minds. This is very close to the deepest meaning in Christianity and Judaism which instructs us to love our neighbor as ourselves, and to turn the other cheek in an argument or conflict, which includes the deeper idea, seldom followed, that we win by losing by letting go of our desire to win.

This is the essence of true liberation or freedom in the Buddhist tradition, the letting go of all things, especially our selfish, greedy, needy selves. The last words of the Buddha before he slipped into a coma and died and presumably returned to Nirvana, were: “All individual things pass away. Seek your liberation with diligence.” AMEN