Untangling Self by Andrew Olendzki

Author:Andrew Olendzki
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Wisdom Publications

The Buddha has demonstrated that greed, hatred, and delusion can be eliminated entirely from human experience. Understanding the conditions that conspire to feed these tempests goes a long way in helping us calm their raging forces whenever possible.

THE BUDDHA’S SMILE

The most difficult Buddhist idea to explain, I find, is not interdependent arising or nonself, challenging as these are, but equanimity. How is it that one can neither like nor dislike something without being emotionally detached or indifferent? Our sense of identity is so bound up with our desires that to many people the thought of being without preferences for one thing or another is tantamount to being stripped of the very quality that makes us human. Nonattachment is just so dry. Give me the pot-­bellied laughing Buddha any day (who of course is not a Buddha at all but a Chinese folk deity) over the austere figure presiding over our meditation halls with just the hint of a smile on his face.

The Buddha is not asking us to have no emotion but only to let go of our more primitive and unhealthy emotions. Desire, in both its positive mode as greed or attachment and its negative mode as hatred or aversion, is an unhealthy emotion and causes suffering. We don’t see this, but it’s true. We don’t want this to be the case, but it is. It is easy to see at the extreme ends of the spectrum, where craving manifests as an uncontrollable addiction or hatred results in a frenzy of brutal ethnic cleansing. But even at the near end of the spectrum these same emotional forces are at work gently pulling us toward the things we want and pushing us away from what we don’t want. And though the effects of this are more subtle, the heart of the Buddha’s insight was to recognize that they can be just as harmful.

What is the harm, you ask, if you like the color purple or if you are mildly annoyed by people who are rude, just to take a couple of random examples? Nothing much. The problem is that desire is a house builder, as the Buddha discovered on the night of his awakening:

Housebuilder, you have been seen! You will not build another house . . . my mind has reached the destruction of craving.29

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