The Best Buddhist Writing 2010 - Melvin McLeod [1]
The great divide between Buddhism and the world’s other major religions is the idea of God, a creator deity. Buddhism is a nontheistic religion: it is the religion with no God. The Buddha was a human being who practiced and achieved enlightenment, and if we follow his example and practice as he did, we can wake up too. If a religion has no God, everything changes.
In Buddhism, the starting place is a very human problem: suffering. Some people have accused Buddhism of being negative and obsessed with suffering. Buddhists call it realism. Life has its obvious sufferings, such as illness, loss, and death, and beyond that, all lives, even the most pleasant and privileged, are marked by an underlying sense of fear and unease.
Some of the most powerful and moving stories in this book are about coming to grips—bravely, openly, and realistically—with life’s difficulties. I think Stan Goldberg’s memoir of hospice work (and his own cancer diagnosis) that opens this book is a perfect example of the Buddhist approach to suffering, one of love and gentleness. In that context, a true meeting of human hearts can happen.
Elsewhere in this volume, Sylvia Boorstein tells us how we can connect with the universal truths of the human condition by sharing with each other our worries and concerns for those we love. Elizabeth Brownrigg struggles with a difficult caregiving situation, and the Zen teacher Norman Fischer suffers the death of his best friend. Daniel Asa Rose is having a tough time with his teenage son, but they are brought together by a century-old reminder of tragic loss.
If working with such suffering is the challenge, then the bad news, as we’ve already noted, is that Buddhism doesn’t offer us an outside refuge or savior. It would be great if there were one—who wouldn’t want that?—but the truth, at least according to Buddhism, is that we’re on our own. The good news is that we can do it. We have the inherent resources—the intelligence, courage, wisdom, and love—to handle our problems.
Many schools of Buddhism call this our buddhanature. It is the opposite of original sin. You could call it original virtue. Our true nature is awake, open, and compassionate, and the ignorance and neuroses that obscure it are only temporary. This positive, hopeful view shines through many stories and teachings in this volume. The titles alone tell the story: “Joyful Wisdom”; “Natural Wakefulness”; and “You Are Here,” in which the great teacher Thich Nhat Hanh explains that everything we need is right here, right now (and indeed where else could it be?).
None of this means it’s going to be easy. We have only to look at the state of our world to know that our obscurations, if ultimately temporary, are still powerful and deep-seated. In Buddhism, it’s all about mind. Our enlightenment and happiness, as well as our ignorance and suffering, are all a product of the mind.
Buddhism traces our problems back to ignorance. We fundamentally misunderstand what we experience—both our own nature and the nature of the world—and so we suffer. The path is working with the mind to remove the obscurations and reveal its original purity and goodness. In turn, the world’s basic goodness is also revealed. This we do through the wealth of skillful means for which Buddhism is renowned, what we generally call meditation. Meditation taps into our inborn awareness and intelligence to wake up from our deep-seated belief in the solid reality of self and other and experience life as fundamentally open, interdependent, and joyful.
The best way to learn how to meditate is directly from a qualified teacher. Short of that, there is some very good meditation instruction in this year’s edition of The Best Buddhist Writing. The Tibetan teacher Dzongsar Jamyang Khyentse Rinpoche offers a guided meditation instruction that focuses on the key point of Buddhist