Three Seasons of Samsara

“…And on the fourth, we will be free.”

You know it strikes me rather funny, that so many people, especially here in the West, cling to the idea of reincarnation because it brings them safety. The idea being that the human being is a pilgrim, or rather their soul is, which gradually develops through myriads of lives on a quest to find out what’s it all about. When the objective in the East is the exact opposite. To get out of the wheel of Samsara. So that you are free from the round of birth and death.

This clinging is also true of Nirvana. The whole point of realizing it, is the cessation of suffering. But to me the notion that Nirvana would be this peculiar state of mind in which all your troubles are absent, is to put it crudely, stupid. Because we already know that once you have a state in which you are happy, that state is temporary and will wear off sooner or later.

So you cannot actually sustain this magical existence, where you either are in a perpetual state of security, or of bliss. Both points are moot. So the only way to counter this is to let go of the whole thing. Let go of security, and the pursuit of lasting bliss. And when you do, you might actually discover something even better. Where you won’t need a religion to carry you anymore, which by the way is in my opinion the real purpose of them.

As an analogy taking the raft and the river. When you cross a river in a raft, you don’t pick up the raft and start carrying it with you. You leave it behind. So the objective of Buddhism or any other tradition of this kind, is to ultimately make you shed the scaffolding so to speak, and let the building stand on its own.

A lot of people will have problems with this notion. They think that once you commit to a sect or a church, you’re in it for life. Well fuck that. Says who? It’s like Buddha said in one of the smaller sutras: take what you need, and throw the rest into the ocean. Meaning that one should only use the relevant things to their own situation, and discard the excess. I think this is also the appeal in secular spirituality. Because it gets rid of “surface decorations” of religion.

But the whole idea of Samsara or the Wheel of Becoming is that you are chained into it by iron chains, so long as you are attached. And a Buddha is one who instead of becoming attached to it even by golden chains, gets rid of the chains altogether. And there is an interpretation given by a Japanese scholar, who discussed enlightenment with Alan Watts that I feel is important so I will share it here.

He said to him that the reason Buddha countered the teachings of Hinduism by lecturing on Anatman or the concept of Non-Self, in which nothing in this universe contains any trace of an essence or some soul which endures even after death, was because it was meant to act as a shift in balance into the Middle Way. So the concept of Self or Atman found in Hinduism was balanced with Anatman or Non-Self, and the concept of life being pure pleasure was countered with him saying life is suffering and so on.

Everything in Buddhism is always balanced with its opposite to arrive at the middle. Why? To get people out of their extremes. In other words, if you were stuck at a particular point of view, let’s say, clinging to God, they would demolish your belief in the Madyamika or The Middle Way School of Nagarjuna, and take every kind of “fixed point of view” away until there was nothing left for the student to hold unto. Because they believed that one doesn’t need any extremes, because they have a tendency to make one myopic. If you get stuck in a point of view, there is less chance to see the whole picture. So Buddhism is always trying to get people out of their ruts of not seeing the whole picture.

And this is in my opinion the reason why Buddhism was developed, not because it brings people safety, but because its goal was to get you into a place, where you don’t need safety anymore. That you won’t need a religion to carry you anywhere. That you are in fact, a Buddha where you sit right as you are. And this is more or less what Bankei Yotaku was trying to say with his teaching of the “unborn mind”, a Zen master living in Japan in the 1600s. You are a Buddha, even before you take up the path. Because if you weren’t, then Buddhism would be wrong in saying that there is no path. In the Diamond Sutra of the Sixth Patriarch, it is said that when Buddha attained complete and unsurpassed enlightenment, he didn’t attain anything. And that means, that there is nobody to attain it. Because you’re it, and always were.

That very same sutra says, in Huineng’s own words: “The difference between the gradual school and my Sudden school, is that where as they both share the same destination, the gradual school is for slow witted people, and the other is for fast witted people.” In other words, not everyone needs to sit on their legs for 30 years to get the point. Because there’s a saying, all roads lead home. And that is I think, one of the hidden truths of Buddhism.

There is another sense altogether in which the Samsara can be thought of as projecting continuation on one’s actions, so that what appears as the person, as they move from the past, through the present moment, into the future, is a hallucination. That you are “being reincarnated”, that the links in the chain, are nothing other than your projection of the past and the future. And so you are keeping yourself in the Wheel, so long as you think in time. So the only way to be free, is to step out of time completely.

That doesn’t mean that you become dead, or just passive. But that you don’t act in a way that drags the past behind you, or equally worry about the future. This is as hard as it sounds. Almost nobody that I’ve ever met, has been able to do this. But it is possible to live with the attitude where they won’t let time affect them negatively. It also means that you can still make plans, provided you’re not attached to some coming date.

What I mean by attachment in this context is not grabbing things at too hard. It doesn’t mean that you give up desire completely. Because we need desire simply to breathe or to sleep. So that is another misunderstanding in my view, that people who take up these practices ought to give up desiring completely. As the dialogue in Buddhism shows, trying to give up desire is just the opening step in a series, and its objective is to get you further than might initially appear.

Now, I’m not an expert on Buddhism or any other tradition for that matter. But what I’ve learned over the years is that people go to great lengths in fooling themselves regarding various things in the “spiritual scene”, and forget that there has to be a human element and some rationality involved. Otherwise we become too spiritual, and that is a very real phenomenon. Where the person reeks of excessive spirituality.

And there enters into what I call “anti-worldliness”, where we think that entering into the spiritual requires the disappearance of the physical world, and that we should refrain from sex, among other things. Because of the notion that we get too attached to the physical pleasures of the profane. And so to get rid of them altogether is preferred. But this is false in my thinking. Because asking the simple question: if the objective of life was to get rid of physicality, why a physical universe at all in that case?

But Samsara also can be thought of as not simply a trap that we should get away from or escape, but a game in which we can have fun and participate in everything life has to offer. So one has to live on two levels simultaneously. One where they won’t grab too hard, and also enjoy while it lasts. And this is the fourth or the “final” season I started this article with. We are free as soon as we change our whole outlook and approach to the Wheel. So that the three seasons that went before weren’t all for nothing. Satchitananda.

T.F.