Westerners have misconceptions
about Buddhism

Speaking of Religion
The Rev. Dr. Tim Griffin

Lately I have been reading Buddhist literature. Many westerners may have a misconception about Buddhism.
For example, because our religious traditions tend to be devotional, we may suppose that Buddhist worship the Buddha. For the most part, that is not true. While most Buddhist traditions revere the Buddha as the one who showed the way to transformation, they do not worship him.
On the contrary, they regard the Buddha as a human being, who was afflicted by the same conditions that afflict many of us. He was confused about life’s meaning. He was troubled by the impermanence of things, and more particularly, he was disturbed about the inevitable circumstances of human existence — sickness, old age and death.
In fact, his concern about these features of human existence became so acute that he left his wealth — he was a prince — and his family to find a solution to his pain. And according to the tradition, he found the solution to the problem of the human condition after six years of rigorous asceticism and meditation.
The short version of the story is that the Buddha discovered that there really is no "problem" to be solved. It is true that human beings, like every thing else in the universe, undergo change. We get sick, we grow old and we die. But this is not a problem, really. It is simply the way things are.
It only becomes a problem when we interject our judgments into the equation. When we decide that things should be other than they are, i.e., that we should not become ill, grow old or die, that we suffer. That is to say, suffering results because we decide there is a mismatch between how things are and how they ought to be.
So how did the Buddha propose that we rid ourselves of suffering? His answer is very simple, and yet immensely difficult to practice. He said that we should not attach to any state. All things are impermanent; that is just how it is.
The pain that accompanies being sick, for example, is only compounded by aversion to it. The sickness itself is painful, but it does not produce suffering. Suffering results when I tell myself a story about the sickness, such as, "this is so unfair" or "I have so much to do that I cannot be sick now," etc. The problem is that these stories that we add on to the condition do not improve it, they merely add another layer onto the illness itself.
Nonetheless, as the Buddha observed, we are always busy doing precisely this type of thing. For example, when we are happy, we become attached to the experience of happiness, and we begin to worry that it will go away. So we cling to the situation, and when it inevitably passes, we feel even worse. Similarly, our aversion to sadness or unhappiness leads us to attempt to push it away and in so doing we tell ourselves stories about how unfortunate we are to be experiencing this now.
We cannot avoid painful and unpleasant situations, and we cannot always experience happiness. However, if we are simply present to our experiences, whether good or bad, without adding a story to the experience or becoming attached to it, the Buddha maintained something miraculous occurs. We find that we can be with the experience just as it is, and we find that our experience of reality is heightened by our attitude of simple presence.
In other words, when we are happy we are just happy, and when we are sad we are just sad, and that is all. Surprisingly, when we begin to practice being mindfully present in the here and now, we begin to see how much we have been missing by replaying the past or anticipating the future.
Still, as I said, it sounds like a simple practice, but it can be very difficult, particularly when our tapes begin to play adding our story to the experience. When this happens, the Buddha’s advice for dealing with these tapes is the same as it had been for confronting our experience: simply observe the tapes without judging or commenting on them.
We have been playing these tapes for so long now that they play almost continuously, and we are largely unaware of them. But if we simply watch them, they lose their energy and power over us. ••
Father Tim Griffin is priest-in-charge at the St. Luke’s Episcopal Church, at 1946 Welsh Road in Bustleton.