In the past couple of weeks, I've gone to the local Zen Center three times, once to a sort of orientation and twice to practice mindfulness meditation for 35 minutes at a stretch. I've also made intermittent efforts at home to practice, ranging from five minutes to up to 20 minutes. It may be just placebo, but I do fancy it's having some beneficial results--notably, with my absent-mindedness. I don't think I've lost my glasses even once since the first session at the Zen Center. Also, the past couple of nights I've had some pretty vivid dreams in living color, assuming that's a benefit.
Buddhism generally has always had a certain appeal to me with its intrinsic gentleness and its ethics of compassion, especially taken in its context, the Great Vow to refrain from final enlightenment, or Nirvana, out of compassion for all sentient beings until all sentient beings have been brought to enlightenment, well, that is a great and strenuous ethic.
But I have difficulty understanding the metaphysics of why that should be so. I know the Buddha would likely say that metaphysics is just so much ego piffle, so perhaps that is not the best way to express what I mean. Presumably, if a person's compassion is sufficient that in itself would lead one to the brink of the Final Enlightenment. Yet, in order to develop that compassion, I (and henceforward I insert my own ego for the sake of clarification) have to practice a sort of getting rid of the self by means of sundry mental exercises and disciplines, beginning with and including mindfulness meditation. It would be a crude argument to state that I'm not being especially compassionate by sitting in a room somewhere and counting my breaths although I suppose you could say it may be a kindness to some that I'm not interacting with them during that time, but I prefer to think that would be a stretch. And, if after I do achieve some desired level of compassionate near-enlightenment, apparently the most compassionate goal I can have is to bring people to the same state by means of the Buddha's teachings.
Of course, I'm supposed to be compassionate along the way insofar as I encounter other sentient beings and have interactions with them so that I relieve their suffering as *they themselves perceive it.* Somebody is sick, I try and comfort them or provide medicine. Somebody needs water, I give them a drink, etc. But I'm not supposed to be "attached" to any of them, nor am I supposed to believe that, say, physical suffering is primary. I am supposed to address that form of suffering and most others as somehow superficial--the direct or indirect result of their being "attached" to their desires. To me, that stance denies the importance of history, of suffering, of the individual, and indeed the whole of reality as it is commonly understood.
Robert Thurman in his book *The Jewel in the Lotus* has a most eloquent description of the concept of "emptiness." It is not oblivion or nothingness, rather it is the recognition that everything is connected and that all beings have at one time or another have occupied the position of whatever the individual consciousness construes to be "other." He also describes this state as "oneness" although I don't think he is being rigorous. Other Buddhist and mystical writers, though, are insistent on the notion of non-duality and oneness & that is given as a "reason" for us to love the Other, to be compassionate towards the Other, etc. To me, that's not very satisfying to think that my love and compassion towards the Other, such as it might be, is merely a form of loving myself. Heaven knows, I got nothing against self-love, but the whole point of loving somebody, of being compassionate towards them is that "they," thank Heaven, are *not* me. "Interconnectedness," as Thurman, describes it, is one thing, actual oneness is another. Oneness as many mystics seem to promote it implies a kind of vacuous soup of things, where everything and everyone are all the same thing.
(BTW, Robert Thurman is a professor of Indian Studies and the father of Uma Thurman, known to be a not unattractive movie star.
Thurman goes on to indicate that the individual consciousness is *really* nothing more than a sliding nexis of interrelationships of all the other elements of the universe. I can't help thinking that this implies that the individual consciousness, whether one thinks of it as having achieved "emptiness" or not, has no power of agency and is merely a passive epiphenomenon, just as most scientists believe on the basis of their metaphysical materialism. Without some notion of a subject capable of enduring on some level or another, it also renders the notion of reincarnation...really implausible. Therefore, the whole idea of the bodhisattavas has to be...an error--not to mention the doctrine of karma.
(And, if I can't recall any of my past lives, how can karma provide me with a useful moral education? Or if karma is automatic and unconscious, what is the point of conscious striving of any sort? If I have no sense of continuity from one life to another, it may as well be the case that my real identity only subsists in my current incarnation)
Strictly speaking, I don't think the Buddhists are completely wrong, but it is as if the Buddha had a great ethical insight about the importance of compassion but was unable to ground his insight in concepts other than those that are analogous to the concepts in Hinduism--of which Buddha's thought is a reformation.
Here I think the advantage is with Christianity. Christianity affirms the importance of history and the human subject in a way that the Eastern religions do not. It also affirms the importance of compassion not as a means to a transcendental end, but as an end in itself. Actually, I think Buddhism does affirm the importance of compassion for its own sake as well--the notion of the Bodhisattvas is merely a kind of a workaround "justification" for that ideal compassion that seems rather clumsy to me. To elaborate a bit, Christianity holds out the hope that some day history, humanity and nature will all be redeemed and transfigured and include a redeemed and transfigured humanity. (I have negative stuff to say about a great deal of traditional Christianity, but I'll save it for another occasion.)
So there.
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