role for understanding, even for remembering, what the great teachers have said, but this is always an adjunct to the development of your own, first-hand understanding of human nature based on unshakable self-knowledge. Close to the end of his life, Buddha is reputed to have said, ‘Do not believe anything just because some authority, even me, has said it. Be a light unto yourself.’ What the teachers have to offer are maps and guide-books for the journey to self-realization, not edicts that are to be taken as ‘gospel’. Even the doctrine of reincarnation, which some people find hard to swallow, is not an essential part of the Buddhist prescription, and can be interpreted in a way that does not clash with a scientific way of thinking.
Perhaps there is just one leap of faith that is required, and that is the belief that it is possible for one’s personality, one’s way of looking at the world, to change. For people who are wedded to the idea that the way they see things is the only possible way, that their point of view is the only point of view (or the only right point of view), for such people the suggestion that things could look different, or that other people who don’t share their opinions might be at least as ‘right’ as they are, is going to be hard to take.
Yet it is this egocentric attitude that begins to look irrational when we examine it, not the possibility of change. We know that our own perspective alters depending on whether we are in a good mood or a bad one. A problem that had seemed insurmountable becomes much more manageable after a heart-to-heart with a friend, or a good night’s sleep. When we are ‘on good form’ the fact that it is raining on the day of the picnic can seem funny, and an opportunity to do something silly like go anyway and get wet, or to sit on the living-room floor eating with your fingers. When we are ‘off-colour’ the whole thing is a disaster, and the rest of the day is spent sulking or picking a fight with the children. All that Buddhism is asking of us, as the price of admission, is an openness to the possibility that we can acquire the knack of being on good form more powerfully, and more of the time, and that there are other people from whom we may have something to learn. We do not have to accept these people as authorities because somebody tells us to. All we have to do is to be on the look-out for people who seem to us to have mastered the art of living more comprehensively than we have ourselves. The odds seem to me to be overwhelmingly in favour of the existence of such people. (Of course there are also charlatans, and we have also to trust our intuition in steering clear of those candidate ‘gurus’ who do not feel right. We shall have more to say about ‘shopping’ in the last chapter.)
Buddhism, whatever else it does, provides a good antidote to the compulsive business of the present age. Stress is on the increase, not only because of the demands and uncertainties of modern life, but because we are in danger of forgetting how to relax. People are coming to feel guilty when they are not doing anything, as if gentle sources of refreshment, reflection and recreation were of no real value. Traditional forms of meditation in our culture, such as knitting, walking the dog, gardening, fishing and watching county cricket after a good lunch, encourage a peaceful, reflective state of mind, yet they are often given up for activities that favour instead emotional excitement (football matches) or which merely swap one form of mental activity (worrying) for another (watching soap operas and quiz shows on TV). Buddhism at the very least provides a framework and a rationale for being quiet.
The final reason why Buddhism is exercising such appeal in the West is the failure of our own religions to deliver the kind of guidance that people are after. To many people, eager for help in clarifying their own cloudy misgivings about the selfish, narrow, materialistic life they have come to live by default, Christianity is a dead loss. It seems like a husk, a precious relic which is no longer useful for anything, and which instead is guarded and interpreted by an army of curators who are, in their own lives, as much at sea as the rest of us. Of course there are exceptions, Christians whose faith makes them glow with health, and priests who seem to have a better than average grasp of human nature and a love of people with all their faults and foibles. But when people look at the Church as a whole, many of them see something that resembles a trade union or a multinational corporation more than a source of spiritual inspiration and guidance, and they find it unprepossessing and dessicated. Even in the vastness of the Royal Albert Hall in London there are few people who do not feel the difference in quality between the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Dalai Lama. Instead of warmth and wisdom we seem to be offered instead a fairy-tale world of Holy Ghosts and angels, of water that turns to wine and wine that turns to blood, of incantations and rituals that may be good theatre but which do not help me with my drink problem, my furtive infidelities or my gnawing sense of emptiness inside.
The problem with Christianity especially is that its living message has become incarcerated within a prison of metaphor taken as fact, symbol mistaken for reality and ritual for its own sake, a prison with bars of coral, slowly built up from the skeletons of once-useful images that no longer point to anything beyond themselves. God the Heavenly Father (who used to be accompanied by God the Earthly Mother before she was edited out of the Gospels) was an originally helpful but ultimately expendable way of pointing at the reality of a world from which we all emerge, and on which we all depend. But the experience of kinship and at-home-ness that Jesus was trying to convey gets disregarded when we start thinking in terms of God as an entity – or perhaps a team of entities – real and separate from us, whose creatures we are and in whose charge we remain. God becomes a vaguely person-like projection: external, controlling, creating, and usually male. Having missed the point, we are left with a fuzzy surrogate in which all we can do is believe, and which all too often comes to symbolize not the potential for liberation but the necessity for obedience and the inevitability of guilt.
The story gets even more tangled when we are taught to accept that the instrument by which we are to increase our love for each other is Will – a gift from God which, however, like a cheap Christmas toy, is inherently faulty, and which is occasionally (when we are ‘good’) serviced by the manufacturer with a lubricating dollop of Grace. By the time people had done their literal-minded worst with analogies like ‘the Kingdom of God’ and ‘heaven’, and he had found himself involved in such ludicrous conversations as the famous ‘render unto Caesar’ one, Jesus must have had serious doubts about the wisdom of opening his mouth in the first place.
So for many people Christianity will not do. Its officers seem lost, its language archaic, and, because Jesus is presented as definitely a one-off, the best it can offer them is the possibility of falling just a little less short. They are looking for an alternative that is more inspiring, more comprehensive and more optimistic – and Buddhism is a good candidate.
Despite the inherent appeal of Buddhism, it is sometimes presented in a technical way, which emphasises the difficulties of translation and obscures the heart. Or the differences between the different schools are stressed, so that one becomes either entranced or bemused by the distinctive styles – the deities and mandalas of Tibetan Buddhism, the complicated philosophizing of the Mahayana or the bizarre behaviour of Zen Masters. When these are put first it is easy to mistake the skin for the banana. Conversely, when the heart of the matter is understood, only then do the vast range of practices and doctrines make sense. This book is first of all an attempt to convey the spirit of Buddhism, in its most rational, practical and mundane form; and then, from time to time, to look at some of the ways in which the great Buddhist teachers, using language and examples where were intelligible within the context of their time and culture, have tried to communicate the essence of their own transformation to others.
First I want to explain the Buddhist point of view. In the course of this I shall explore what it has to say about several aspects of people’s lives, especially our thoughts and feelings, our relationships, and our attitudes to death, bereavement and loss generally, as well as its implications on the social, political and global levels. Then I shall say something about the Buddhist ‘cure’, and particularly about meditation – what it is and why it works. In the process I shall try to introduce, without losing the flow, some of the more traditional language, teachings and practices of the different Buddhist schools in order to illustrate the simplicity that underlies the welter of diversity.