The Taste of Dharma

Buddhism has long been fashionable here in the West and that’s a shame. Our voracious consumer society promotes and rewards whatever sells without considering its intrinsic value, and commercial success easily clouds the essence of things. It’s true that not everybody who approaches the Dharma is looking for its essence; still, it is important that it doesn’t remain buried under the avalanche of other catchier or more exotic elements, promoted for the edge they bring to sales.

Is it possible then to convey, with no intent to proselytize, an impression of what the Dharma is like from the inside? Seeing how popular Buddhism is proliferating this seems not only possible but advisable, because the prevailing image due to sectarian politics and merchandising techniques might be useful when it comes to peddling courses, books, and retreats, but is light-years away from its initial spirit –I’m thinking for example of the austere style of Zen turned into a cerebral and emotionally detached minimalist aesthetics or the folkloric pomp and circumstance of Tibetan rituals peppered with mystical elements on the one hand and surreptitiously assimilated to the Christian background of its new audiences on the other. Interesting, appealing, even enticing, sure; but... how much of the gist of the Dharma is to be found in all that?

In one of the early Buddhist texts, the Dharma is compared to the ocean because of eight qualities they both share, one of which is that:

“As the great ocean has only one taste, the taste of salt, so the teachings have only one flavor, the flavor of emancipation.”

This image, clear and concise as it is, perfectly evokes the true spirit of Buddhism in its fundamental unity: underlying its manifold outer appearances there always remains the same absolute priority, here called “emancipation”. Emancipation from what? From the tyranny of the conditioned and suffering mind. Buddha often called it “the heart’s unshakable release”, albeit in a different sense from what we understand in the West, where the heart is seen as the seat of emotions: what he meant was the definitive and irrevocable liberation of the pure mind each human being has within as part of their natural heritage –one’s own nature, in Buddhist terms– which in turn brings the elimination of suffering. That is where the Dharma is aimed with an invariable unity of purpose; anything not leading there is cast overboard –and this includes God, the soul, and (according to at least one of the ancient schools) any idea of a life after death. Yes, there are discrepancies between those who claim the Buddha flatly rejected their existence and those who’d rather think he merely denied their relevance to the Buddhist path, without taking a stand on whether they existed or not. Be that as it may, it doesn’t matter much: they have no place in the Dharma –a point those intent on considering Buddhism a religion would do well to take into account.

The single-minded, crisp, and sparing spirit of the Buddhist path is probably a reflection of the Buddha’s own temperament, certainly not prone to pussyfooting around issues, revelling in ornate rhetorical figures, or dithering too much when it came to teaching. A highly illustrative example of this approach occurs in a passage where he discusses his attack on suffering and its causes:

“Suppose, Ananda, there were a great tree and a man were to come with an axe and a basket and were to cut down that tree at the root. After cutting it at the root he were to dig a trench and were to pull out the roots even to the rootlets and fibers of them. Then he were to cut the tree into logs and were then to split the logs and were then to make the logs into chips. Then he were to dry the chips in wind and sun, then burn them with fire, collect them into a heap of ash, then winnow the ashes in a strong wind or let them be carried away by the swift stream of a river. Surely the great tree thus cut down at the roots would be made as a palmtree stump, become unproductive, become unable to sprout again in the future.”

There is something extraordinarily methodical and thorough in this approach, tenacious almost to the point of being relentless. At times, I’ll admit the Buddha almost sounds like a German engineer (though it’s also possible the repetitive tone of the sutras was a mnemonic device imposed later as an aid to preserve the teachings orally); his style may not appeal to everyone’s sensitivity, but it is eminently practical and reflects an unquestionable mastery of the subject at hand. Personally, if I were for example an astronaut about to board a rocket bound for outer space, the Buddha would not only be the kind of engineer I wish would have designed the spaceship but also the technician who had revised it to make sure all the joints were tight and all circuits were connected and working properly. And, come to think of it, why should it be any different for the journey of introspection, mindfulness and meditation that makes up such a large part of the Buddhist path?

So, if I had to choose a way to describe this path, I’d say it’s foremost frugal and lucid. This quality translates into a twofold approach: on the one hand it sets up experience as a criterion superior to any dogma while on the other it pares down conceptual baggage, whether theological or philosophical, to a minimum. It’s not exactly scientific, but it is analytical. The truth of Dharma is not something that can be proven in a laboratory but is a matter of personal experience; however, it can and ought to be measured against the experiences of others who have been down this path before us. In embracing this principle of parsimony (a.k.a. Ockham’s razor, widely applied in science) it compensates to a certain extent for the impossibility of verifying its claims as an outside observer, as if the Buddha were to say, “Look, I can’t give you sufficient proof that what I say is the truth; you have to check it out for yourself. But at least I won’t force you to believe any tall tales on your way to that experience.”

As on a mountaineering expedition, this journey imposes a great economy of means: everything is streamlined for the final goal and there is no room for anything superfluous or non-functional. It’s not an easy path; it pushes you out of your comfort zone, forces you to grow and mature and, in a certain sense, demands that you stop believing in fairy tales. Of course everybody has their own varying standards in these matters; but in the Dharma, progress often entails a strict diet to wean oneself from fantasies along with the old likes, dislikes and attachments we have turned into false needs.

Even at first sight, the Buddha’s teachings show a constant effort to reduce the multiple to the simple, to bring the far-off near, and to make the spiritual tangible and practical so as to redirect the mind to what’s at hand, to the great task we have before ourselves. That is why it’s ironic to often see the Dharma explained on the basis of such an otherworldly doctrine as reincarnation –which is really a vestige of the old Brahmanic religion from which Buddhism splintered off and arguably plays a marginal role in the teachings. The distortion is just as serious if we depict Buddhism as an escape to an ivory tower, achieved at the expense of numbing down our vital functions. In either case we generate an impression that is terribly at odds with the Buddha’s personality and mission as they emerge from even the most cursory reading of the original texts.

The Buddha did not preach an escape, a compromise, or a system of earthly investments and deferred compensations in a future state beyond our ken. What he did was to grab the monstrous bull of suffering by the horns and find a way to put an end to it; not exactly a triviality, but a moment of enormous consequence which brought him the certainty that there is a solution to the human condition we call suffering. That’s why, just like any other method, the Buddhist path must stand or fall according to its relevance to this life, here and now. That and none other is the question we must ask time and again when presented with the teachings or practices of any Buddhist school, be they meditations, prayers, initiations or retreats: What does this taste like? Is it contributing to the heart’s unshakable release or am I being taken for a ride? If your experiences don’t support the first impression, you know what you should do with these tools –for that’s all they are, no matter how venerable they may seem.

Don’t make the journey with excess baggage, lugging around heavy equipment that pulls you down without knowing what good it is. The path to the summit has much more to do with learning to let go than with grasping and hoarding.

Buddhism? No, thanks!

The Buddha never was a Buddhist. That’s the way it is, surprising as it may sound. Over the forty-five years of his teaching there were no images or statues of the Buddha, no great temples, rituals, or ceremonies, nor almost any of the highly picturesque paraphernalia people associate with Buddhism nowadays. All there was, instead, was a true tribe of people bonded by camaraderie and solidarity under his guidance and committed against many odds to a common search for the same truth he claimed to have found. It is quite possible that even in the master’s lifetime the original core of disciples expanded so much that its initial spirit was diluted and weakened; at any rate, shortly after the master’s death, this double-edged sword appeared as a compensatory mechanism: Buddhism. It is not the only or even the first time in history when, perceiving they have stranded from the essence of things, men generate idols to worship so as to mitigate the painful or even guilty conscience of their loss. But that is no good, as ancient wisdom warns us: “The Dao (Tao) gives rise to all forms, yet it has no form of its own. If you attempt to fix a picture of it in your mind, you will lose it. This is like pinning a butterfly: the husk is captured, but the flying is lost. Why not be content with simply experiencing it?”

Buddha called his teachings “the Dharma”. What exactly is that? Dharma is a Sanskrit word meaning “law” or “way”. It stems from the Indo-European root *dher- (related to the Latin firmus), whose basic sense is “to support” or “to hold”; hence the noun dharma, meaning “that which keeps everything as it is”, or “that which makes it all the way it is”; in plain English, the truth of things. In ancient India, from that basic sense of “principle or law regulating the universe” a secondary meaning was derived of individual conduct in accordance with this principle. Thus, the Dharma represented each individual’s obligation, according to the Hindu caste system, with regard to social mores and civil and religious law: one modelled his/her personal life following the pattern of the universal law expounded in the ancient sacred texts of the Vedas as interpreted by the priests. Almost by osmosis, that same distinction was passed on to early Indian Buddhism: the Dharma was thus not only the teachings of the Buddha but also the duty to adopt the conduct advocated by him as a path to awakening.

But what is the problem if we understand it that way? That the Dharma becomes a closed and finished personal product, like the work of a dead artist which can be possessed and administered as if it was private property –the very attitude the Buddha objected to in the Brahmins who kept the Vedas in their charge. The truth of Dharma is not the exclusive asset of any one person or group. The Buddha himself understood his discovery as part of a collective enterprise: “I saw the ancient path, the ancient road traveled by the Perfectly Enlightened Ones of the past. Like a path overgrown by vegetation and long lost is what I found again”. After his awakening, he spoke and debated on several occasions with other masters who expounded different ideas from his own; often he would ask them to explain their dharmas first, only to show them that his was superior –not because it was a truth revealed by a god, but because it was the most effective and straightforward method to experience the truth of the human predicament firsthand. In that sense, the Dharma belongs to all humanity, free of anyone’s ownership; it has much more to do with truth as understood by science –something empirical, subject to debate and confirmation, and pertinent to all, regardless of beliefs– than with any religious dogma held by tradition, no matter how venerable it may seem.

Why is it preferable to use that odd word, “Dharma”, instead of “Buddhism”? Because the truth neither admits nor requires any “-isms”; it is what it is. The Buddha said he taught the Dharma and we hold that the Dharma represents the truth of the natural law governing all beings; it has no need to seek out converts or to pit itself against other “-isms”. If we insist on using the term “Buddhism” –which, of course, is most practical if we want to avoid long-winded explanations– we should be fully aware of the paradoxes it entails: for example, that Buddhism predates the Buddha, and that the innumerable natural beings peopling our planet who live and die according to natural law are also Buddhists. In that case, any snail or elephant, any lichen or cypress is as Buddhist –or more, indeed– as the thousands of people who have embraced the formalities of the Buddhist path without really understanding what it is about or where it leads.

So, let others visit the great temples decorated with Buddhist statues, dress up in colored robes, and recite litanies mechanically. If you are able to grasp the mystery of a butterfly on the wing, you are closer to the Dharma than all of them together.