By what track can you reach him,
the Buddha, the awakened one,
free from all conditioning?
How can you describe him in human language
–the Buddha, the awakened one,
free from the net of desires and the pollution of passions,
free from all conditioning?
In Blade Runner, the futuristic dystopia that has now become a cult film, a posse of replicants (androids created through genetic engineering to take care of the dirty work for humans) returns to Earth on a desperate mission: to find out who designed them and force him to alter their program so they can live beyond the four miserable years that now inexorably mark the limit of their existence. Though peppered with the usual dashes of violence, romance, and special effects typical of Hollywood studio productions, the movie revolves around issues of great depth: life and death, free will and predestination… in a word, what it means to be human –something about which the last survivor in the rebel commando (Rutger Hauer, featured above) teaches an unexpected lesson to a battered and helpless Harrison Ford in the desolate, rain-swept rooftop where the replicant foray is finally resolved.
I bring up this modern cinematic myth because it almost seems as if Robert Wright had it in mind when fashioning his interpretation of the effect that the discovery of the survival of the fittest as the prime motor of evolution had on Darwin. To anyone who has seen it in action, it is obvious that Nature is the least sentimental thing there is; but this feeling must have been multiplied to horrific proportions for Darwin –who was, let us not forget, a man of grave moral concerns living in the heyday of Victorian England– once he saw that raw, unabashed, and blind natural selection was the mechanism that best explained the development of species. Indeed this theory, increasingly supported by available data, came to enthrone ruthless struggle for survival as the supreme criterion for life: an endless process, devoid of any apparent meaning, fed by the constant death, in fearful numbers and with sickening recurrence, of the weakest organisms across the biological scale, whose sacrifice seemed to have no sense beyond perpetuating a game whereby Nature, trapped in an endless cycle, devours itself so as to be reborn time and again.
It is no surprise that Darwin himself, dismayed like many of his contemporaries at the brutal threat the new view posed to the moral underpinnings of his society, felt undisguised scruples about the new ideological landscape he had ushered in and devoted part of his subsequent efforts to try and mitigate its more dramatic implications (in that sense, Darwin was perhaps the least “Darwinist”, as popularly understood, of all those who embraced his theories). Perhaps that’s why, like the android Roy Batty facing his designer Dr. Eldon Tyrell in Blade Runner, Robert Wright depicts Darwin virtually confronting his own creator in one of the climactic moments of his ambitious enquiry –except in the naturalist’s case, this creator is not a person but rather an impersonal and relentless process responsible for having created all living organisms on the planet:
It is remarkable that a creative process devoted to selfishness could produce organisms which, having finally discerned its creator, reflect on this central value and reject it. More remarkable still, this happened in record time; the very first organism ever to see its creator did precisely that. Darwin’s moral sentiments, designed ultimately to serve selfishness, renounced this criterion of design as soon as it became explicit.
It’s conceivable that Darwin’s values, ironically, drew a certain strength from his pondering of natural selection. Think of it: zillions and zillions of organisms running around, each under the hypnotic spell of a single truth, all these truths identical, and all logically incompatible with each other: “My hereditary material is the most important material on earth; its survival justifies your frustration, pain, even death.” And you are one of those organisms, living your life in the thrall of a logical absurdity. It’s enough to make you feel a little alienated –if not, indeed, out and out rebellious.
Darwin’s rebellion, as interpreted by Wright, basically meant trying to salvage from the shipwreck values with a long moral and religious tradition such as altruism, solidarity, and empathy toward one’s fellow men, shattered by the tidal wave of the recently discovered biological selfishness. Too bad Wright had not read or at least did not take into account the Dhammapada as he wrote these pages, which might have led him to a more qualified and accurate judgment on Darwin’s gesture. Lest this seem an unwarranted sectarian claim based on a glaring anachronism, let us return once again to the Buddha’s own words. In the light of what has been said before, how can we read this description of his own predicament without undermining Darwin’s claim to originality?:
I have gone through many rounds of birth and death,
Looking in vain for the builder of this body.
Heavy indeed is birth and death again and again!
But now I have seen you, housebuilder,
You shall not build this house again.
Its beams are broken; its dome is shattered:
Self-will is extinguished; nirvana is attained.
Here, at long last, we come to the heart of the Buddhist path. Instead of engaging in absurd polemics as to who spotted his creator first, from this vantage point it makes a lot more sense to draw together the new insights revealed by the striking parallels we have reviewed in order to fully understand what’s at stake in the path of Dharma and assess its significance.
Thanks to our previous discussion, we are now in a position to explain the path opened by the Buddha in a manner acceptable to those who tend to be put off by any religious overtone. Let us state it simply thus: Siddhartha Gautama’s great contribution was threefold. First, he discovered the “creator” of our human condition as apparent individuals separate from everything else (in Buddhist terms, the process of dependent origination: the twelve-linked chain responsible for generating the identities, which are a sham and yet constitute the greatest impediment to experimenting our own nature). Second, he confronted this process, probably by recourse among other methods to a self-devised meditation technique called vipassana. And third, he found out how to put an end to this “creation” by means of the systematic integral practice he called the Noble Eightfold Path. Having done all that, he awoke to the truth as it is here and now and became “the Buddha” –the awakened one.
The parallel with Darwin’s findings puts in perspective the full import of these steps –something that Buddhist literature, when not too concerned with making itself properly understood, tersely describes as the path that frees human beings from suffering and leads them to nirvana. The great advantage afforded by EP in this regard is that it exposes on the one hand the magnitude of diverging drives that beset human beings –that half-choking, half-sedating stranglehold of the three unwholesome roots and their grim companion, suffering (dukkha)– while at the same time reducing the grounds for interpreting the release of nirvana as a kind of stupendous cosmic orgasm whereby one gains access in this life to a Buddhist paradise –a fantasy we will do well to undermine.
The main virtue of one who has crossed the river and awakened is that he/she is free from all conditioning, that is, has cleaned his/her mind of obsolete commands that are out of joint with respect to the natural order Buddhists call Dharma and Daoists, Dao. After that, a residue of the old habits may still remain but, basically, as its name indicates, liberation has to do more with letting go than with gaining. What is then left is a natural system that is free to interact with its environment in accord with the real needs of the moment, and nothing more. It’s just that, by comparison, our previous state resembles a puppet subject to the wrenching pulls and spasms caused by what we could describe as psychologically and socially noxious capsules of evolutionary remains distorted in the course of our evolution as a species.
In concluding, let us allow the Buddha himself to answer with his customary sobriety the question posed at the beginning of this section, “How can you describe him in human language –the Buddha, the awakened one”?
He has reached the end of the way; he has crossed the river of life.
All that he had to do is done: he has become one with all life.
Or, to put it in the first person:
One who conquers himself is greater than another who conquers
a thousand times a thousand men on the battlefield.
Be victorious over yourself and not over others.
When you attain victory over yourself,
Not even the gods can turn it unto defeat.
I have conquered myself and live in purity
This ends the series of articles on Dharma and Evolutionary Psychology, written with the sincere desire to benefit all beings.
May all be filled with joy and peace.
May all beings everywhere,
The strong and the weak,
The great and the small,
The meek and the powerful,
The short and the long,
The subtle and the gross:
May all beings everywhere,
Both seen and unseen,
Dwelling far off or nearby,
Being, or waiting to become:
May all be filled with lasting joy.
Let no one deceive another,
Let no one anywhere despise another,
Let no one out of anger or resentment
Wish suffering to anyone at all.
Just as a mother with her own life
Protects her child, her only child, from hurt,
So within yourself let grow
A boundless love for all creatures.
No comments:
Post a Comment