Evolving India

Was this the Enlightened One?

Modern Misconceptions about Buddha

The other day I came across an article on Buddha by an Indian writer. I took it up with keen interest, wondering how it would expound Buddha's Nirvana in lucid journalese. It made a good story, but to my disappointment I found that the author got over the Gordian knot of Nirvana by pretending there was no knot at all.

To be a countryman of the great Gautama and yet to quote H.G.Wells on Buddhism—this was beyond belief. How could H.G.Wells probe into the soul of a man who would have regarded the seer of the outer shape of things-to-come as totally ignorant of the inner shape of things as they are? No, sir, our Buddha is much larger than scientific and socialistic Utopianism. He is not a philanthropist or altruist of the Western model. As such he would never have shaken the Indian world in the past nor would the earthquake of his ecstasy be felt even at this day by every spiritual seismograph from Khatmandu to Colombo!

It is necessary to point this out, for the true Indian -view of life is so often watered down to

Page 29

suit the Western or the Westernised mind. If a merely humanitarian impulse had been at work in the secret places of Buddha's heart, he would have done nothing more in those famous scenes with an old man, a sick man and a dead man than get down from his chariot and take the old man to an infirmary and the sick man to a hospital and the dead man to the dissolving mercy of the burning ghat. And, surely, he would never have forsaken, as he did, his young wife with a newly born babe when they needed him most—a queer kind of philanthropic "selflessness", I must say! Instead of wandering away at night, becoming a beggar and an ascetic and spending six years aloof from suffering humanity, he would have set himself to introduce social reforms and build up charitable institutions and preach Wellsian Utopias.

But Buddha wanted to heal the very heart of life's misery and not solely to patch up its external wounds. He wanted to achieve for himself and make others achieve a liberation from the cosmic round of rebirths: that liberation was at least his avowed aim and it is impossible to imagine this aim being fulfilled by just the construction of an altruistic philosophy and the humanitarian practice of a Utopianism à la Wells.

I am surprised at an Indian writing: "All night he sat under the Bo Tree in profound thought and then he rose up to impart his vision to the world." Buddha did not sit in thought: he was, according

Page 30

to scientific standards, totally unconscious for a night and a day, while, according to spiritual standards, he was in deep trance, one of the chief characteristics of which is an utter suspension of all thought! Intellectual formulation came later; what Buddha sat in was a state of absolute Samadhi in which the human mind is transcended and a vast egoless desireless sorrowless superhuman Ineffable is realised. This Ineffable is Nirvana: Nirvana means literally "No Blowing"—in it the wind of desire, the rushing after this and that, the attachment to earthly things, the whole hungering psychology of bounded personal nature are lost and replaced by a sort of nothingness so far as the sense of limited personality is concerned and even so far as all divided forms and separate entities in the universe are concerned. It is an infinite oneness without feature or distinction—a mystical and spiritual state. It is not a philosophical thinking out of world problems on a unitary basis, not even a high seeing of the possibilities of harmony by the poetic mind, with a philanthropic emotion as the active outcome, as the resultant starting-point for work among one's fellows. It is utterly free from the subtle egoism of the philanthropic worker, with his stormy (and therefore non-Nirvanic) urge to help people and his attachment to some reformist fad or other, not to mention his private little amours and affaires in the interludes of public life and even a secret hunger for fame and reward and

Page 31

appreciation for public labours.

Humanitarian service, the moral practice of so-called unselfishness, is undoubtedly a help towards spiritual attainment, as it weakens the bonds of a too narrowly personal life, but it is not the goal of Buddhism. It is one of the steps to the goal which is Nirvana. And it is a step which could very well lead nowhere near Nirvana if the various other steps which have little connection with service to humanity as such did not go with it. Further, it is not an equivalent of what Buddha names compassion. Only after the realisation of Nirvana in a mystical and spiritual sense there is born the luminous Buddhist compassion, the experience and not merely the idea that there is no separation between things, the realisation of an absolute unity between self and non-self, the flowing out of all one's being towards the universe in a spontaneous impartial desireless unattached service. This experience, this realisation, this flowing out are the true Indian way of perfect living.

It is not easy, but nothing short of it can bring what artists and sculptors have tried to depict on Buddha's face—the godlike peace which is beyond all sorrow yet goes out to all sorrow as a heavenly healing power, both inward and outward. Would any one try to catch that expression on the face of H. G. Wells?...

The portrait of Buddha in the Wellsian manner cast my mind back to another which I had considered

Page 32

disappointing too. The author responsible for it had shown a penchant for Western vitalism, the combative adventurous élan of modern Europe and declared Buddhism a warped and unhealthy thing in comparison despite certain features which he could not help eulogising. He viewed the Master somewhat peculiarly. He gave him a lot of compliments with one hand, garlanding him as Saint and Sage, "a man of giant intellect and penetrating vision", "the greatest thinker the world has ever known", but with the other he hung on him the label of "Obsessional Neurotic", saying that Buddha dwelt overmuch and morbidly on life's miseries and evinced an extreme unbalanced recoil of the nerves from them. I do not argue that a great intellect or a keen moral sensibility is incompatible with neurosis. Yet to put Buddha in the same category as a man like Nietzsche is to shoot wide of the mark. The author did not actually lump Buddha and Nietzsche together, but his contrasting descriptions of Buddha cannot help evoking in my mind the picture of Nietzsche. Here was a dynamic intellect, both logical and poetic, acute and inspired, an enemy of the sham, the botched, the pusillanimous, the devitalised—but alas! himself a nervous wreck and finally a dithering lunatic. The Freudian test of Obsessional Neurosis can apply to the German gospeller of anti-Christ Superman because in the long run the single dominant motif broke his health and left him a hysterical chaos.

Page 33

Obsession in the psychopathic sense is not the word for any and every kind of master-passion or life-ideal carried to the extreme. Wilberforce fighting throughout his life the one evil Slavery was not an obsessional neurotic, General Booth devoting his entire energy to the Salvation Army was not an obsessional neurotic, Spahlinger concentrating for decades on a vaccine for tuberculosis was not an obsessional neurotic—and they were not obsessional neurotics because their minds and nerves were strong enough to bear the burden of the idée fixe, did not sink into hysteria and exaggerative mania, temporary or permanent, and were untinged by morbid egocentrism.

The charge of "Obsessional Neurotic" against Buddha becomes strikingly false when we see him passing through the severe tension of his youth, the ascetic intensity of year on single-aimed year, to a most serene manhood, a most calm and cool yet humane and generous maturity, a head of the clearest, a heart of the noblest, a physical body of the healthiest and free alike from self-torture and self-indulgence—an all-round sanity, sublimity, sweetness. Such strong nerves, such an equipoised sensorium, such a tranquillity mated with activity, such a subdual of all conflicts cannot be a case for Herr Freud's clinic. Let us remember what our author himself writes in one chapter of his book: "It was said of Buddha that his mere presence brought peace to souls in anguish and that those

Page 34

who touched his hands or garments momentarily forgot their pain; evil passions fled at his approach and men whose dull unimaginative lives had been a mode of death arose, as it were, from their living graves when he passed by." Is this the picture of a hypochondriac and a victim to psychopathic?

Is it even true that Buddha shut his eyes to the presence of pleasure in earth-life and saw only pain? He did say that all life is dukkha or unhappiness, but must we turn on him a look of superior pity and marvel how he could be so short-sighted when it is plain that unhappiness is relative and exists merely because happiness or sukha exists, as silence because of sound and darkness because of light? Is not life composed of opposites generated from opposites and must not the seeing of dukkha mean automatically the seeing of sukha} Very good logic, this. But is our interpretation of the term dukkha the same as Buddha's? What was he after? He felt that what he was after was something the whole world was after in its heart of hearts. Everywhere and always the cry is for utter cessation of dukkha, the perpetual end of unhappiness and the perpetual continuation of joy. No matter what hard facts may hedge us in, we cannot deny that urge. Life with its constant sense of incompleteness and imperfection is ever seeking a state of Being immune to time's ravages, a Knowledge that is basic and gives the key to the world-mystery, a Bliss that shall not fade. Our search for lasting

Page 35

happiness and conquest of all pain is an agelong one, and perhaps the most dominant strain in our general hunger for Perfection and Permanence. But nowhere in the world do we find a perpetual end of unhappiness, for nowhere is there any Permanence and Perfection. All our sukha, our so-called happiness, arises from brief satisfactions, from small attainments and soon it is succeeded by dukkha. It cannot fill the heart of man and is therefore a gilded form of unhappiness itself. Not this but another experience that is ceaselessly radiant and does not hang for its radiancy on passing occasions or objects can alone be the magnet to our quest, The lack of it is what Buddha calls dukkha, a term which denotes not only the series of sorrows we endure but the whole of life and the whole chain of rebirths, because the play of impermanent pleasure must always leave unappeased the heart's cry for an endless cessation of sorrow. It is because sorrow cannot come to an everlasting stop, it is because sorrow comes recurring and never permits joy to last without end that Buddha looks on all living as a frustration of what life aims at, openly or in secret. That frustration is dukkha. Buddha is not a feverish fool irrationally refusing to acknowledge temporary joy and taking a jaundiced view of earth-existence. His philosophy is not a species of melancholic depression,

A Freudian conception of Buddha will satisfy just as little as a Wellsian. Nor will that satisfy

Page 36

which draws him as a man "doped" with Nirvana. Not only is Buddha miles off from neurosis; he also emerges from all accounts as no pale and passive wraith but a store-house of stupendous radiancy. We must not let it slip our memory that he resurrected "living graves". Indeed his was not a brutal obstreperous vitality: he was no Attila or Hitler or even an American hustler and go-getter. Strength and activeness of that type are in various and differing measures the mark of the Titan: the God comes with another face and another step, a dynamis no less effective but rooted in a supreme calm, a force of action that is based on an immense impersonal freedom from the fevers of the limited ego. To leave so profound a stamp on his own age and on thousands of years that followed could not be possible to one who brought merely a negative message, a cessation of all impulses of ordinary life with no grander impulse and more abundant reality to make up for that cessation.

Buddha was a spiritual figure and not just a philosopher or a moralist. A philosophy of life as dukkha or unhappiness, a morality insisting on rejection of tanha or egoistic thirst may sickly earth-existence over with their pale cast of pessimism and ascetic inertia; and in fact earth-existence did get sicklied over when Buddhism survived as a philosophy and a morality, with the true spiritual inwardness gone. Even something worse than pessimism and ascetic inertia may result without that

Page 37

inwardness. Tanha which keeps us attached to finite transient objects is a tremendous force in our ordinary psychology and a suppression of it might twist and pervert our nature and issue in various maladies and manias. What is called "sublimation" is no easy matter and may, when achieved, bring some release, but it is a very imperfect tackling of the problem and does not eradicate the roots of egoistic desire: it only prevents, at least for a time, the apparently dangerous deformations. Tanha can neither be suppressed nor sublimated out of existence by any common means, and any effort to keep away from it altogether will cause, at best, a dejection and dullness impairing the founts of activity. When, however, a changeless and beatific Poise outside our human constitution, psychological and physical, is reached, initially in a state of trance but finally as an infinite background to every waking moment—when the spiritual light of Nirvana is there and a divine reality that transcends all limited and temporary objects pervades the consciousness and gives the tone to our life—the effect on a healthy and "rounded" nature is intensely strengthening and intensely creative.

Buddha did not remain in forest seclusion, absorbed in saving his own soul, lost in his own immensity of inner realisation. He was driven by that very immensity out of the limits of personal salvation to embrace the world and uplift it. By his enlightenment a vast monkhood was set aglow

Page 38

and mystics went forth everywhere. Whatever served as a hint, a glimmer, a symbolic suggestion of the Nirvanic bliss was taken hold of and creatively used, dynamically manipulated. Beauty, wisdom, service rushed out like a life-giving river.

A civilisation packed with a splendid abundance of noble vitality took birth and sent its emissaries across the Himalayas and the Indian Ocean. Was that the work of "doped" cowards and weaklings and sluggards? Can we brand Asoka as such— Asoka with his imperial energy, his endless zeal to harmonise his far-flung kingdom and send the light of Asia to all the continents? Can we stigmatism as anemic and impotent the enthusiastic souls who carved massively in stone or who painted the caves of Ajanta after winning incredible victories of excavation in the basalt cliffs? Buddhist art was created by men on whom the spiritual light had laid its hand, even if it had not in all instances gripped them wholly. The colorful enthusiasm and beautiful optimism which Gladstone Solomon saw in the Ajanta frescoes and considered the ne plus ultra of art-expression are not, as a psychoanalyst might explain, long-repressed life-instincts exploding into artistic ecstasy by a kind of natural revulsion from the Buddhist negation of the world. They are the natural outflow of the ecstasy which was the core of Buddha's life—they catch in rainbow hues and symbolic shapes the richness and the rapture dwelling in true Buddhism, they are a

Page 39

prismatic representation of the sunlight that lay for ever, according to all testimonies, on Buddha's face, a visionary loosening forth of the unquenchable beatitude that everyone felt in the presence of Buddha's body. He who stirred and illumined "the dull unimaginative" routine of his contemporaries—surely it was he who through the imagination of artist-monks kindled up and animated the caves of Ajanta!

Nirvana is not a barren nullity. To the Buddhist mystic the world might have been a home of sorrow, but Nirvana brought into it an imperishable smile: life was transfigured and bliss sat like a rose on a stem of thorns and made roses break out in all places, frustrating the thorns' tyranny. Buddhist mysticism did not create world-values for the sake of the world's own importance, it created them to open the world's eyes to the glory of the Beyond; and there it showed a certain over-emphasis on one aspect of being, as all past religious practice has tended to do. But world-values it did create and could not help creating, because the reflection of so grand a reality as Nirvana in the waking consciousness must unseal in a healthy and "rounded" constitution the divine spring of creative power that waits above the purely personal tanha-ridden mind. Though only one aspect and not the integral truth of the spiritual Mystery, Nirvana is still a superb more-than-human height and by that fact it is far above even the finest in Western vitalism

Page 40

and makes Buddha a more truly evolutive and creative figure than the heroes of sturdy robust enterprising "realistic" disposition whom we are often asked to admire.

Page 41