By: Andrew Olendzki
(Condensed and abbreviated, from Lion’s Roar, September 29, 2020)
…the Buddha had an unusual ability not only to apply himself to anything he undertook, but, more importantly, to turn away from it and find a new way forward when he realized it was not effective--even when he was under duress to conform. This is first demonstrated when he walked away from a privileged upbringing to join a counterculture of forest dwelling ascetics. The world he was raised in was quite content with pursuing a life of sensual pleasure, as long as one also worked to gain wealth and did one's duty as a member of the elite ruling class. As a prince named Siddhartha he was groomed for this world, but turned away from it to search for something more meaningful…Gratification of the senses and the enjoyments of worldly success seem to him shallow and pointless if human life inevitably ends in old age, sickness, and death.
…He learned the ancient arts of meditation from a series of teachers, and here demonstrated for a second time the same ability to follow his own path in the face of great pressure to do otherwise. As the wanderer now known as Gautama, he quickly mastered the concentration skills used to attain subtle and exalted mental states, and was invited by his teachers to join them as a leader of their community. While this would have entailed honor and prestige among his fellow wanderers, he turned down the offer and set off again to follow his own path. Meditation was a valuable practice but only a temporary refuge. He was in search of a deeper wisdom, a solution that penetrated into the very nature of human suffering and showed how to end it once and for all.
In the next phase of his life the man who would become the Buddha took up the practice of extreme asceticism, following the guidance of peers who were convinced that by turning away from all pleasure and embracing pain one could root out the desire that holds a person in bondage to rebirth. Starving himself to within an inch of his life, he eventually realized that this too was not leading to any extraordinary insights, and decided to start eating normally. This incensed his companions, who accused him of being weak and giving up too easily. Yet once again he was able to measure the value of a practice using his own experience rather than by accepting the opinion of others, and once again he set out alone to find another way.
Before long the wanderer Gautama, seated under a tree on a single particular night, had the transformative experience after which he became known as Buddha, “one who is awake.” What was the nature of this experience, and how did it change him so profoundly? What happened to him under that tree? However else it came to be understood over the centuries, we can be sure it involved a deep psychological transformation.
The Buddha's inner explorations had revealed suffering to be caused by three toxic emotional traits buried deep in the human psyche. When triggered by the pleasure/pain reflex, they emerge again and again as unhealthy mental states that cause unskillful and harmful behavior. Among these are greed--the craving to pursue, acquire, and hold on to anything that feels good--and its opposite, hatred, the craving to resist, destroy, or push away anything that feels bad. Together, greed and hatred serve to keep us discontented, always wanting our experience to be different than it is, either pleasant or less painful.
The third and most important toxin, he realized, was delusion--a basic ignorance pervading all our perceptions and views, leading us to presume the world is more stable than it is, to assume gratification is more sustainable than it is, and to think of ourselves as more substantial than we actually are.
With meditation the Buddha was able to see the world as the unfolding of a process rather than as a collection of things. He saw that every moment is different, every event is unique, and each transient phenomenon arises and passes away in deep interrelationship with other phenomena. Human experience consists of episodes of consciousness in which information gathered by the senses is felt as pleasant or painful, interpreted to fit a narrative, and responded to in skillful or unskillful ways. When greed, hatred, or delusion are present, blazing like fires that scorched the mind and body, suffering is born; when these are absent, suffering goes to rest.
That night under the tree of awakening, the Buddha extinguished the fires of greed, hatred, and delusion, becoming a person within whom they were “fully quenched” (nirvana). As he described himself soon after his awakening: “All attachments have been severed, the heart’s been led away from pain; tranquil, one rests with utmost ease, the mind has found its way to peace.” This is a description not of cosmological transcendence but of deep psychological healing.