The Buddha’s lesson begins from the recognition that everything contingently arises, meaning there are earlier relative causes for every aspect of reality. Never has reality been found to arise spontaneously out of nothing. Second, all arisings are impermanent. Nothing has been found to last forever.
This becomes a personal issue when we consider our own existence. We are not found to have spontaneously arisen but rather result from previous contingencies which gave rise to our creation and birth. We are not found to live forever as permanent beings but rather are subject to decay and death. These give rise to the existential questions – who am I? Why am I? Where am I going?
Life and death are powerful forces which we, as humans, can consciously recognize and commonly abhor. The perceived truth about our existence is very disturbing, in fact, painful. If we deny or resist the contingent and impermanent nature of our existence, we will move from pain to suffering as the years accumulate.
It is this core suffering over the existential problem of our existence that the Buddha sought to address.
He awakened to the idea that it was our clinging hopefully to an alternative to our reality of life and death, and all its smaller pains of illness, loss, and misfortunes, which moved us from pain to suffering. In recognizing that by our very resistance we were adding suffering to what was already a painful truth, he admonished us to relinquish our hold on the falsehoods. As we became more skilled at seeing and releasing our clinging, we could even release the sense of suffering we felt over the truths of existence. This is the awakening.
He instructed followers to improve their capacity to understand and relinquish the painful attachment to a continuing self by following a life style conducive to staying awake. With a correct view of the circumstances, a strong intention to face life on life’s terms and a daily effort to practice wakefulness, the follower became a ‘stream enterer’, embarking on a path to a shore far from the early ignorance and suffering. The Buddha encouraged the development of concentration through regular meditation, and maintenance of awareness through contemplation of various aspects of personal reality.
Recognizing that few individuals could or would choose to live outside of society, he instructed followers to govern their speech, actions and source of livelihood to minimize the impact of daily life on wakefullness. From this eight branched path of correct view, intention, effort, concentration, contemplation, speech, action and livelihood, the Buddha established a system of ethics which, by supporting wakefulness, ensured the elimination of existential suffering. In this way, the buddha dharma proved to be an effective model for ethics, outside of the traditional systems of supernatural beings, punishments and rewards. This path of wakefulness and self supporting ethics continues 2500 years later in the spriritual communities we see around us today.
The individual moves from the personal to the global…
