Expert: Joe McSorley - 10/1/2008

Question
QUESTION: I have three questions:
What similarities do you see between Buddhism and other religions and philosophies?
Do you think more people consider the Buddha to be a spiritual teacher or someone to be worshipped? (Also, is it true that the Buddha told people that he was simply a teacher?)
Do you find that many people misinterpret Buddhism? Why or why not?

ANSWER: Hi Rachel,
 Here are your questions:
What similarities do you see between Buddhism and other religions and philosophies?

   There are a lot of religions and philosophies in the world so I surely can’t compare them all.  There are also different schools of Buddhism that have differences between them.  There are strong similarities between Taoism and Buddhism at their core along with some of the Indian traditions in the Upanisads and Vedas.  That the self as we know it is not the true self would be central to these philosophies and that we must overcome the ego self, or the self that separates itself from the world, nature and itself, is the goal of these philosophies.  This concept does not exist in the Abrahamic religions.

Do you think more people consider the Buddha to be a spiritual teacher or someone to be worshipped? (Also, is it true that the Buddha told people that he was simply a teacher?)

The word ‘Buddha’ means awakened one and there have been many Buddhas over the centuries.  The historical Buddha, Gotama Siddharta, is the one most people refer to as the Buddha and he was an ordinary man who awakened to his true nature and tried to teach that way to awaken to others.  He was not a god to be worshipped or prayed to.


Do you find that many people misinterpret Buddhism? Why or why not?

 I find that most people do misinterpret Buddhism, Zen Buddhism that is, some of the worst of them being American Buddhists that seem to see Zen as a form a Dadaism.  We all bring a sense of self and history to whatever we are doing be it philosophy, music, sport or art.  It limits our ability to see something new when we hold on to old concepts be they about self or what we are learning.  There are few people who will ever truly master music.  There are many people who play music and have a rudimentary understanding of it but few who really master it.  There are some who naturally get it and others who get it through perseverance and practice.  There are many who get really good at the practice of it but never breakthrough to the essence of it and somehow cling to the practice for their entire lives.  I don’t know why things work this way but it is how it happens.


Take care,
        joe


---------- FOLLOW-UP ----------

QUESTION: Thank you for your response. These questions are helping me with an assignment for an elective philosophy course.

But now that I understand more, I just have to ask:
Don't some people incorrectly interpret Siddhartha's enlightenment as a reason to worship him?

Also, does the ego prevent us from finding our true selves? Can we hold them both? And does nirvana begin at the end of the life when we find our true selves? Or can we live with the people we love and still experience nirvana?
Thanks again!

Answer
Dear Rachel,  
Yes, many, if not most, take Gotama’s awakening to have made him somehow supernatural and godlike.   Before I have written how a large percentage of everyday Buddhists in the East worship him as a god and I received some emails criticizing me for this.  Even though it is not something overt in their teachings I still find that everyday Buddhists do worship him as a god.  I spent a lot of my time with Eastern communities particularly Chinese and Vietnamese and on a regular basis I see them praying to the Buddha and asking him for help and guidance.  As much as educated Buddhists might not want this to be true, it is, much like the bulk of Christianity doesn’t really follow what the Christ taught.   
  You ask questions that are good and thoughtful but they go off a premise and that is that ‘I’ exist and have an ego and that ‘I’ can become awakened.  This is fully understandable given the way most people understand Buddhism but to fully explain this to you is going to take a lot of writing so please be patient.
    Who we think we are is not who we really are.  This self is an illusion or construct of our mind but it is the only way we know ourselves to be.  In the Western traditions we try to change this self and add to it, fill it and fulfill it but in the East this very idea of self is the problem.  It means that the self that you perceive as you is not in fact you, but an image you have of yourself.  We know that we are, that we exist, but we don’t know who it is that exists.  Think of it this way, you see your shadow and that’s all you know who you are, the shadow, but you want to know who casts the shadow.  If you move forward, it moves forward and back, it moves back. This is called the ever-regressing self in Buddhism; you can’t approach it without it moving away.  The shadow is a self we perceive.  Now to perceive something means that you are not that which you perceive.  You have to separate from something to know it, to objectify it, but this separating to know causes a schism so that you can’t actually know it.  Think about it, if it is an object of your perception then it must be outside of you.  This is the problem of the human consciousness according to Buddhism.  We are split from ourselves and don’t know who we are.  This is called dualistic consciousness or ego-consciousness.  The ego is the split between what we perceive and who it is that perceives.  Since we don’t know who we are we confuse our thoughts for who we are.  In other words we know who we are by what we like and dislike, our history, culture, race and a million other things.   We also know who we are by knowing who or what we are not.  We are not that other group, race, religion, object, etc.  so we only can define ourselves by what we are not.  If you were to be in total darkness with no way to perceive anything else with your mind in the moment with no thought of past, future, like or dislikes aren’t you still completely you?  By the same token, if you wake up in a hospital bed and are only conscious, that is, you can’t see yourself, aren’t you fully you?  You might have had most of your body amputated but since you don’t perceive it you don’t have a changed idea of who you are.  Once you perceive it you then make all the judgments about your state of being and happiness.  So there is a self that separates itself from the world to know that it is.  This is dualistic consciousness; to only know in dichotomy or by splitting.  This is what the ego is, the act of splitting away from the world to know that you are.  This splitting creates a sense of self as separate.  We don’t have an ego, we are the ego, we are the act of splitting.
  To just obliterate this dualistic consciousness is to be dead to yourself.  The question is; what is the source of this consciousness, what is the root of this that creates the split?  When we don’t know this we perceive our self as that which was born and that which will die and this causes a base anxiety.  This is the idea behind “Life is Suffering (dukkha) in Buddhism.  We are living knowing we will die so there is an underlying angst to our existence.  Without the thought of self, body, history and everything else there is still something that calls itself a self.  To understand this better let me give you an analogy.     D.T. Suzuki has the analogy of a wave on the ocean as symbolic of man’s sense of self.  A wave arises on the ocean and looks down and sees the ocean all around.  It says, “ I am know that I am because I am not the ocean nor am I all the other individual waves, I exist separate from them”.  It has separated itself from the ocean to know itself as an individual wave.  This separation actually creates the ‘self’; it is both an act and a fact of this separation.  Now it makes all its judgments as a separated self.  In this act it is also separated from itself, it knows that it is but not who it really is.  It has a perception of a self but does not know who that self is. Now it tries to go outward to find itself but it cannot.  When it goes inward it is also problematic, why? Because the act of going inward or outward is still the act of separating from the ocean to be able to go inward or outward.  So this wave is alienated from itself, it’s surroundings and the ocean.  But the fact of the matter is, who is the wave fundamentally?  Is it the individual wave existing independently?  No, there’s really no such thing.  So who is looking for this awakening?  The fact is that the wave is really just a manifestation of the ocean; it never was separated in reality but only knew itself when it created the separation.  It has to stop the ego process, the act of separating, in the hope that the wave/ocean can see itself as both the wave and the ocean.  It is one hundred percent wave and one hundred percent ocean, not at any point ever separated.  The wave seeking the ocean/enlightenment/nirvana is the ocean seeking the wave.  When the breakthrough occurs it is not new or just starting but a realization of what always really was.  This is a non-dual duality, it is both itself as wave and ocean.  Pure non-dualism would have just been the ocean with a wave never arising.  We rise out of nature and now ourselves as separate from it but in fact we are nature in search of itself.
  Once awakened to itself as really the manifestation of the ocean the wave is free from the anxiety of life and death, it has broken the cycle and has no fear. It was not born and will not die, its birth was the illusion of separation like our birth is also. Now it has the power and depth of the ocean behind it to be fully expressed.  In our lives it is to see true reality, to be free from mental illusions and constructs and to live life fully.  We are nature actualized in the moment.  This is not a mindless empty nirvana but one that is full and vital.  
   Were you there at your birth?  When did you, yourself, come into being?  It happened at the separation of you from the world but this was not the body’s birth, it was your birth.
 So to answer your question the ego does keep us from awakening but more accurately, to be me is to keep myself from awakening, to be attached to this form as something separate and a self is to not be awakened but, initially, it is the only way that I am created.  To break through this separation and to see self as truly other and other as truly self we are now an egoless ego, we are a living paradox, split and not split simultaneously.  We don’t find our true self but become awakened to what already was.  Here we can love freely without discrimination, without a self that stands in between that judges the other and favors self and self’s desires over another.  We see our friends as they are and not as what we want or expect them to be.  We don’t experience nirvana, we are nirvana, we are nature as expressed in the form of Rachel though not confined by the form.  We are the artist, the brush and the painting, the dancer and the dance, free from the constraints of self-reflection.  We see what is clearly with nothing in between.
  I hope this helps you.  Take care,
     Joe