A RAINBOW HIDING IN THE
CLOUDS : CULTIVATING THE MIND OF ENLIGHTENMENT.
A Rainbow Hiding in the Clouds: Cultivating the Mind
of Enlightenment
Cultivating the mind of enlightenment [bodhicitta] can in many ways be
regarded as the main aim of Buddhism. Yet few realise what it is and what
it entails. It means viewing yourself, life and the world with the best
mind you can muster, which is the mind of a Buddha. What are the qualities
of this mind? The best mind we have is one of tranquillity, happiness and
great joy; it is a kind, gentle and loving mind. This is the mind we most
often have as children and when in the best of moods and often when
waking. To a large extent this is also the world of meditation.
Meditation does resemble a world described by Auden:
Returning each morning from a timeless world,
The senses open upon a world of time [Auden, 282]
In a coma of waiting, just breathing
In a darkness of tribulation and death
While blizzards havoc the garden and the old
Folly becomes unsafe, the mill-wheels
Rust, and the weirs fall slowly to pieces [Auden, 283]
This verse is also suggestive of that awareness of impermanence and
decay process that meditation so often also brings with it.
The inner and outer worlds do contrast so sharply with each other:
Around them boomed the rhetoric of time
The smells and furniture of the known world [Auden, 305]
At one’s calmest, most contented and most joyous, we see people, self
and the world as blended boundlessly and indistinguishably with the glow
of compassion, love, empathy and peace. To this mind, self, world and
others are not seen as separated from each other, but as fused into one
selfless and egoless field of experience. This is quite specifically and
uniquely a Buddha mind.
The seamless continuum
Of supple and coherent stuff,
Whose form is truth, whose content love,
Its pluralist interstices
The homes of happiness and peace [Auden, 240]
By contrast, viewing self, others, life and the world as separate
things with a mundane mind often breeds disappointment, misery,
separateness, disillusionment, despondency, unhappiness and many other
nagtive and restrictive attributes. It is a view full of depressing
barriers.
Compelling all to the admission,
Aloneness is man’s real condition,
That each must travel forth alone
In search of the Essential Stone. [Auden, New Year Letter, 1940, 238]
Meditation also explores this sense of aloneness but deepens our
familiarity with it through engagement with the inner world of reflection
and by exploring our connectedness with all things.
* meditation forms the basis of Buddha’s enlightenment – the whole of
Buddhism can be traced back to the events and qualities of Buddha’s
enlightenment – it forms the primary perspective of the whole show. The
qualities of the mind of enlightenment are those higher qualities that
Buddhas possess, such as imperturbable tranquillity, unfading joy and
bliss, profound compassion and the deep wisdom that can perceive emptiness
continuously as well as special powers such as the ability to see the
karmic predispositions and past lives of others. Essentially, the mind of
a Buddha is the same as the qualities of the mind of Buddha’s
enlightenment, but for practical purposes it means joy, peace, bliss and
compassion combined with the deepest feeling for the suffering of others
and the insatiable desire to help suffering beings in every possible way.
“The true man, the authentic man, the inherent cultivated
aristocrat, who unites the greatest sensitivity in daily life to the
greatest richness of a greater life, is he who most desires the happiness
of the world, he who seeks his own happiness in the universal happiness,
he who succeeds by means of a clear concept of the whole life of the
world, in best occupying, using, and enjoying his space and time.”
[Juan Ramon Jimenez]
* meditation gives access to another mental realm different from the
world – this is the inner realm of the mind and peace, of tranquillity,
stillness, of joy and illumination…a realm of reflection – gaining
access to this realm is itself an illumination and an empowerment for many
people because it means – often for the first time – a realisation that
even in the midst of chaos, frenzy, suffering and the fleeting nature of
our lives, there is room to be made for peace, self-reflection and the
development of spirituality. It is through meditation and mindfulness that
one begins to grasp compassion, tranquillity and joy and so it is through
meditation that one approaches those qualities of a Buddha’s mind, that is
the qualities of enlightenment itself.
* a big problem of life is deciding what path to adhere most in on’e
thinking — the pessimistic or the optimistic; the materialistic or the
spiritual; the grim or the magical — does life embrace both, or is one
more primary and the other more fleeting?
* in any religion, it seems that the primary view taken is the
spiritual and magical one, and suffering and hardship are seen as
secondary, temporary and fleeting phenomena…that make life hard. The
backdrop chosen is one of joy, happiness and spiritual illumination and
this takes precedence over the grim relaities of life, which are borne as
a burden but which are never allowed to extinguish the deeper joy.
* in politics and science, by contrast, the primary view seems to be
the reverse…that life is a bum deal, is grim and hard – and the primary
perspective taken is grim with pleasure only an occasional, secondary and
thus fleeting interruption of otherwise grim life facts. It is up to each
of us to choose which of these scenarios we use to base our lives upon.
* meditation [cultivation of mental stillness and inner reflection]
clearly reinforces the primacy of the spiritual and magical view of human
life and thus necessarily downgrades into second place all material and
unhappy aspects of existence. Meditation is thus not only the basis of
Buddha’s enlightenment, but the basis of the benign and optimistic view
all religions take about the deeper nature of life.
* to ‘keep ourselves going’ in the sphere of meditation and
spiritulaity, we must have some faith in what we do; and we do this in the
daily light of terrible events that happen and about which we become aware
through the news media. Our attitude towards these events is important
because it helps us to make sense of life itself. No religion can avoid
these difficult questions and they all formulate their own views on causes
and cures and what we should make of sad events in the world around us.
Housman was perfectly right
Our world rapidly worsens:
Nothing now is so horrid
Or silly it can’t occur [Auden, 865]
It is from getting excessively bogged down in these doom-laden events
that one can so easily become very pessimistic about life and humanity and
the seeming utter worthlessness of life. As Auden says, then the mind can
become:
…the mind
A quagmire of disquiet [Auden, 866]
* Thinking and reflecting on recent tragic events — such as the 9/11
attacks, the Bali bombing, the Madrid bomb attacks and the tragic Beslan
school siege — one is forced to reflect upon and examine the nature of
one’s own life and to really consider whether there is a God or any
spiritual principle we should live by to guide our lives and how we can
give ourselves comfort and solace in such a wicked world.
Dismayed by a wilderness
Of hostile thoughts [Auden, 800]
Thoughts of his own death,
Like the distant roll
Of thunder at a picnic [Auden, 800]
Death and misery become the predominant thoughts when we are oppressed
by worldliness, when we lack the spirit of truly enlightened thinking.
* these are the essential, the core problems that any decent human
being must address…or run away from. Suffering and tragedy can happen to
any one of us and will come one day forsure. Our problem then is what to
do about this? How should we view it and how can we best prepare ourselves
for that sad day when it is our turn to die or suffer tragic loss?
…the heart
As Zola said, must always start
The day by swallowing its toad
Of failure and disgust. Our road
Gets worse… [Auden, 241]
Each day we must confront or run away from the myriad frustrations and
disappointments that our lives inevitably contain. All lives contain them.
This is our ‘toad of failure and disgust.’ In a sense, meditation, like
therapy, places us face to face with them all.
The subatomic gulfs confront our lives
With the cold stare of their eternal silence [Auden, 309]
* in our own muddled way we avoid these issues…preferring not to
think of them or to pray that they don’t come soon and to lend our own
tears to those of the close relatives of tragic events. We feel this
somehow protects us and contributes something towards their healing. Maybe
we kid ourselves…
What Auden calls “the broken ladder of our lives,” [Auden,
309] is a ladder leading where? Probably nowhere but to the grave. That is
a chilling thought.
And we must pray for
A good death, whatever
World we are destined
To look on last. [Auden, 762]
* the Buddhist view is that all comes from karma and so if we purify
ourselves, our hearts, our words and our actions, then we can be confident
of future happy lives.
If we are honest with ourselves, then we can see that our lives are
littered and filled with unacknowledged frustrations and disappointments
about unattained targets and unachieved ambitions, about self, about
certain other people and even about the world at large. This is the nature
of samsara and although from a Buddhist view they are all trivial, to us
at times they seem overwhelmingly important.
The mundane mind is a mind of such ordinariness and not a special or
supramundane mind at all. Therefore, as is clearly apparent, viewing the
world and our attitude towards self, others and life, and what qualities
of the mind we use to look at it with very much determines how we see
it…how we see ourselves and others. “Life is beautiful, if you look
at it in a beautiful way.” [Shahrdar] A positive, calm and joyous
mind primarily sees, the beauty and joy in others as primary and the
world’s suffering so fleeting and evanescent [ephemeral]. A mind heavy
with aversion and desire and negative attributes cannot view things so
because it is so weighed down with suffering and misery. In the case of
someone focused in politics, then again they tend to see a world awash
with misery and very little joy is seen in the world. A mind of desire and
aversion tends to swing wildly between pleasure and pain, neither of which
lead to much peace or lasting joy.
The world therefore is both mundane and horrible as well as magical,
fantastic and wonderful. Both are true–but which do we want to follow,
believe or adhere to as a primary ‘map and compass’ for our own lives? The
choice is for each one of us to make. “Life is beautiful, if you
look at it in a beautiful way.” [Shahrdar] and such a sentiment shows
that we see mostly what we choose and wish to see. By choosing to see it
ugly, so it becomes ugly. The choice is ours.
Focus on the beauty and the wonderful and allow for the horrible too,
but focus primarily upon love and beauty and the inherent niceness in
people as primary and the badness as a necessary and secondary
intermittent
defilement, but an adventitious and curable defilement nevertheless…a
transient feature upon a firmer bedrock of niceness. This may sound trite,
but surely is a preferable view to its vile opposite? It gives us hope. We
want to live on the basis of one, in the hope of the other, or on the
basis of one, while looking out for the other as an occasional invasive
possibility.
The darkness blotting out hope, the gale
Prophesying your downfall [Auden, 617]
Meditation on the Buddha mind [bodhicitta] gives us the chance to come
to know for real what prayer and purification are: prayer based on
non-self and true healing of others’ woes. It also offers us the chance to
realise the meditation experience as the core of Buddha’s enlightenment.
Meditation on the bodhicitta therefore aims to enable us to dissociate
ourselves from the myriad, trivial and mundane frustrations of our lives
and to cultivate the higher view of ourselves as represented by universal
compassion, love and a focus upon the positive aspects of life that can
improve it both for ourselves and for all living beings. This is the true
bodhisattva motivation that lies behind the bodhicitta concept. Meditation
on bodhicitta enables us to transcend the fleeting and transient–the
ephemeral–and the badness and to focus on the great and good, the bedrock
of ‘permanent things,’ which are things of a sacred and compassionate
nature: “Life is beautiful, if you look at it in a beautiful
way.” [Shahrdar]
Meditation means “one must be passive to conceive the truth.”
[Auden, 308] It also means we strive to seek the truth in a form of
stillness that sees “the shadows cast by language upon truth.”
[Auden, 308] It sees beyond the duality of language. As Auden rightly
says:
What we have not named
Or beheld as a symbol
Escapes our notice [Auden, 840]
Language and giving names to things conspire to dull our bright senses
and lead us away from the simple facts of our existence that meditation
always attempts to refresh and revitalise.
…a world
Antecedent to our knowing, where flowers think
Theirs concretely in scent-colours and beasts… [Auden, 801]
“The apple tree that cannot measure time,” [Auden, 306] like
a dog that cannot speak, loves us dearly but cannot tell us this; it is a
mystery and an enigma but arguably is infinitely preferable to the fools
whose lives are embedded in wrong views.
For as the poet says,
All real perception it would seem,
Has shifting contours like a dream,
[Auden, New Year Letter, 1940, 210]
Obviously in the case of Zen, the ‘mind of enlightenment’ is an empty
mind that takes all things at face value, questions nothing, judges
nothing and detaches itself by enjoying every moment living in the now and
thus finding a rainbow hidden among the clouds…the finding of nirvana
within the sad wreckage that samsara is.
Sources :
W H Auden, Collected Poems, Edited by
Edward Mendelson, London: Faber, 1994
Dr Ardavan Shahrdar, MD, DIHom,
President of Iranian Homeopathic Association