Three

Life is suffering

The ship which took me to Japan carried very few passengers. There was sufficient second class accommodation for a hundred people but there were only three of us, and my two fellow passengers turned out to be moody Danish soldiers who spoke nothing but Danish. They were travelling to the Far East at their own expense to catch up with their ship, which they had missed in Durban because they got drunk. They hardly talked to each other, and spent most of their time hanging dejectedly over the railing. Sometimes they drank beer and sang sad songs with a lot of “ø”s and “flø”s.

I didn’t mind having to spend five weeks at sea. It meant another five weeks’s holiday in the shadow of the monastery, and I had time to read. I thought that a little theoretical knowledge in the Buddhist field might come in useful, and I read dutifully and made schemes on large sheets of paper, with neat arrows and connecting lines. In this way I learned something about the teaching of Buddha. The first truth of Buddhism is that life means suffering. Life = suffering.

According to the myth Buddha was guided to awareness of the first truth by highly placed heavenly personages who wanted him to show the way to a better pattern of life. Buddha had once been a spoiled prince who lived in a luxurious palace. At his birth a peculiar and mysterious light had been observed in the sky and some courtiers said that they heard heavenly music. His father, ruler over a small kingdom, called in astrologists who predicted that the child had an exceptional personality and would become either a world ruler or an enlightened spirit who would solve the questions of the universe and who would be able to show the way to the mysteries to others as well. The father decided to take his son along a purely worldly path. The son should be given the impression that material things, wealth, success, power, are ideals which have a permanent as well as an essential value. Old people, sick people, poor people, depressed people, anyone miserable in any way, were kept outside the palace fence and the prince saw nothing but seducible young women and happy young men instead. He took part in sports and made music, and the courtiers arranged parties. One day the prince, curious to know what happened outside the fence, asked permission to go out. The king made sure that the prince wouldn’t see anything unpleasant: he arranged a conducted tour, briefed the carriage driver, told the people around the palace what to do and what to say, and had the miserable removed. But the heavenly personages materialised and took the forms of a beggar, a sick man, a very old man leaning on a stick, thin as a rake and almost blind, a corpse at the side of the road, and a wandering monk in a yellow robe. The driver of the carriage was questioned by the prince. He had to admit that the world knows a lot of misery, a lot of suffering.

The prince asked about the wandering monk in the yellow robe.

“He is a man, your highness, who has given up the superficial life and who tries to approach reality through discipline and meditation.”

“So you think there is a reality which is more real than what I see, and hear, and smell, and feel, and taste, and can imagine?”

“Yes, your highness.”

“And do you know that reality?”

The coachman didn’t know what to say. He did believe there was a higher reality, but he couldn’t say he knew that reality. The driver was a devout Hindu who believed that the apparent injustice of earthly suffering is an illusion and that behind, or in front of, or next to that illusion, or perhaps somewhere in the illusion itself, would exist a reality which could explain everything.

“Life is suffering,” Buddha concluded. He wasn’t a Buddha then, but Gautama Siddarta, an Indian prince. Even happiness, enjoyment, gaiety are forms of suffering, because these feelings are limited in time, and will stop. The essence of happiness is suffering because we always know that there will be an end to it because the subject, or the person, or the thought which causes happiness is temporary. The energetic businessman who is successful has a heart attack, the happy couple suddenly apply for a divorce, the promising child falls out with his parents and runs away from home, the fertile pastures are flooded, the ship sinks or is broken up, the loved pet is run over by a car. Everything is temporary, will die, will cease to exist. The baby which is now gurgling and burbling in its cot will die, now or later, but it will die.

What the Indian prince surmised then, has been surmised by everybody. Every human being who reflects, who observes, suspects that life is suffering. Perhaps he doesn’t like talking about it and prefers to push the thought away, but he knows that life is a difficult road, a way of the Cross which will continue till it is ended by death. The thought is suppressed by drinking, by work, by spending time on hobbies, but the thought will always return. It is possible to find temporary relief in books, or in conversations with friends, but books begin to bore after a while and friends don’t really have an answer either. So doubt returns. If life is suffering, and if death approaches a little more every day, then why live? If Buddhism hadn’t gone any further than this first truth, that life and suffering are synonyms, then Buddhism could be called a negative religion, without anyone arguing the point. But there are another three truths, stated by Buddha:

suffering is caused by desire, the desire to have and the desire to be;

the desire, the desire to have and the desire to be, can be broken;

the desire can be broken by applying the eightfold path.

It was a monotonous, rather cheerless trip. Nothing happened. Three meals a day, a cup of coffee in the morning, tea in the afternoon. A blue, almost flat sea, tidily enclosed by the horizon on all sides. I began to long for a gale or a collision, but the only adventures offered to me were to be found in the Buddhist books neatly arranged on the shelf in my cabin, one of which I took to my deckchair every time I set out for the sundeck.

I thought I could understand the Buddhist theory. Life is suffering. Of course. There is pure suffering, the physical suffering I remembered from the war years. There is also boredom; I had experienced it at school.

And there is enjoyment, which is spoiled by the knowledge that it can stop any minute. And happiness, which is so airy that it is gone before it has touched the spirit. Suffering is perhaps a big word for someone who has grown up in the heavy porridge-with-sugar-and-butter atmosphere of Holland, but in a Dutch streetcar it can easily be spotted, disguised and nicely dressed to be sure—but it is there.

And this suffering had bothered me, and it had driven me on to this ship. I had suspected, I still suspected, that suffering could be explained, and once explained, accepted. But Buddhism went further than that, it didn’t talk about “explaining” but about “doing away with.” I wanted to get rid of suffering altogether. I had tried to find a solution by going to church, by reading about Christianity, but the dogmas of the Christian faith seemed unacceptable to me—believing something because you had to.

Only when I read the dialogues of Socrates had I begun to see a little light. The description which Plato gives of the death of Socrates really cheered me up. The imperturbability with which he, even at the forced end of his life, remained pleasant, indifferent, quite detached, fascinated me. But how did he get that way? Plato doesn’t say. I wanted to know what I should do to find true equanimity. It is possible to ascertain that life is suffering, a thesis which is easy to defend. But to get stuck in a thesis is frustrating, irritating. All right, so we suffer. Then what? How do you stop it? If you continue to think in this direction the result is a circle, and you just go round and round.

Ouspensky and Gurdjieff seemed to point a way but they were both dead when I came across their writings. I found a lot of useful information in a book written by a Hindu master.1 But I was looking for something which I could do, here and now. Not a spiritual door I could knock on, but a real door, made of wood, with a live man behind it who would say something I could hear. In Japan there are Buddhist monasteries. Japan is a country easily accessible to westerners. Japan possesses living masters of wisdom, masters who accept disciples. I could have gone to India or Ceylon, but the stories I had heard about youthful idealists who had aimlessly wandered about, to die, in the end, of dysentery, didn’t appeal to me. If I got sick in Japan I would be able to find a doctor. There would be Japanese who could speak English. I wouldn’t be altogether lost should anything go wrong.

On the ship I re-read Ouspensky’s The Fourth Way.2 He says there are four ways to find the ultimate truth, complete freedom. The way of the fakir is to conquer the physical body, a long, difficult and uncertain way, tried and rejected by Buddha. The way of the monk, a shorter and more certain way, is based on faith; one has to believe strongly before anything can be seen or experienced. The way of the yogi is an intellectual way, the way of thought and consciousness, evoked by certain exercises. And the last is the way of the “sly” man, the man who doesn’t believe in anything but who wants to experience, who looks for proof.

Ouspensky then gives the method applied by the sly man. He always appears to be an ordinary fellow, he doesn’t wear a robe or a monk’s habit, but he is a member of a group and engages in exercises, at fixed times, regularly, supervised by a teacher.

If I had lived in Japan I might have become a disciple of a teacher without moving into a monastery. Zen masters accept lay disciples who come to see him once a day, always early in the morning, and continue living in the world although they often meditate with the monks and take part in the monasteries’ activities. But now that I had a chance, because of an inheritance and lack of responsibilities, to give myself completely to something, I wanted to try and do as much as possible. At least I thought so on the ship, when I was still under the impression that I had a free choice. Now, as I write this, I believe I had no choice at all, and was doing no more than work out the results of causes which were buried somewhere in the past. A man’s “liberty” is quite small. Even when he thinks he is making a choice the result is already fixed. A man can only make tiny decisions. He can decide to get up early and it may be that he will succeed if he keeps trying. He can decide to obey traffic rules and he may succeed again, if he repeats the decision ten times a day. Every change in the daily routine is very difficult, but, fortunately, not impossible. There is freedom in the small things of daily life, and the mystical training is possible when we make use of this freedom. But a big choice, to go or not to go to Japan, is not free.

The ship touched Bombay. I went ashore and couldn’t move for beggars. A hungry city. I couldn’t budge without being bothered by crowds of small children asking for money or food. The hunger we knew in Holland during the winter of 1944/5 seemed to be a normal and permanent phenomenon here. A sailor told me that he had been in a brothel where women were locked away in iron cages; for a few florins a client could spend five minutes or so in the cage, while his successors waited their turn impatiently behind a curtain of jute bags. The sailor hadn’t entered the cage, but had thrown in some money through the bars. According to him it was better in China: everybody dressed in a blue overall and a cap, walking in processions and waving flags and small books, but there was no hunger and no women in cages. I wondered if the women in the cages, and the beggars with their maimed and rotting limbs, would be in a better position if I found enlightenment in Japan. Misery stays. Another clever person is produced, hiding non-transferable wisdom behind a mysterious smile, but hunger and disease and exploitation continue. Misery is perhaps not, most probably not, bound to this planet, but is a cosmic phenomenon, set up in such a big way that actual destruction of suffering is a hopeless task.

On the ship I also read about the theories of karma and reincarnation. Karma is the law of cause and effect, reincarnation the law of rebirth. If I do something wrong in this life I shall be an invalid in my next life, not as a fine, but as an exercise, an extra exercise (as if life as a healthy person isn’t difficult enough already) to bring me finally to pure consciousness. The soul has to be chastened, and chastening goes with suffering. In one life the soul cannot be sufficiently purified, so more lives have to be lived, 500 or 600—then enlightenment comes and further lives are lived in other spheres where there is less suffering and more enjoyment. Also, there is an in between period, a pause between every death and every rebirth, a sort of holiday for those who have done well and a hell for those who have done badly. When I read about these theories and thought about them they seemed acceptable, but they did not provide a solution.

It could be that the women in the cages of Bombay and the beggars were digesting karma; that would explain suffering, but not the cause of suffering. Why are beings created who have the chance to live in a wrong way and, as a consequence, have to do difficult exercises (like having to live as an invalid) later? I am not even talking now of such harsh ideas as crime and punishment and eternal hell. The Hindu theory is kind and tolerant compared with Christian teaching as it was formulated by the Christian churches a little while ago. The method of Buddha seemed to me in the end, for myself anyway, the best: no questions about the why of everything, but a disregard of doubt, an attempt to do away with being involved with the pain of the world, and a conscious start along a path which has been tried by one man who managed to reach its goal, a path which has been followed by many others who used the original explorer as their guide. A possible path, not a vague theory. A path which still has living guides today, the Buddhist masters. I knew that I would have to content myself with the idea that I could not expect any certainty, not even a firm faith in the masters. It would be a way of trial and error, a hesitating effort, a touch and go affair with, perhaps, a little success sometimes, maybe a glimmering of insight, a slightly deepening understanding.

*   *   *

The ship took me to Singapore and Hong Kong and stayed a few days in each port to load and unload. In every port I went ashore and looked around. In the slums I saw people sleeping in the streets; I had to look where I was going so as not to step on them. There were beggars again, and pathetic children and whores, although there was no comparison with the raw suffering of Bombay. To suffer, and why? Caused by the eternal desire which we carry about with us. We want to have and to increase our possessions continually. We want to be, and to be more, and to continue to be, even after death, through our children or through the name of the firm we founded. We want to have a name, a personality, which has to grow in importance all the time. The desire is mainly subconscious; it keeps us going. We work, we boast, we advertise ourselves, and on every photograph our first concern is to see if our image has come out well. We do not suspect that our body is nothing but an empty shell which will go to the wastepaper basket of the cemetery or crematorium. The ego, the false I, which we carry about with so much trouble and feed continuously, is a little cloud, which changes its shape all the time and consists of snapshots ranging from baby to old man. What concerned us last year is of no importance now, and what concerns us now will be forgotten and senseless next year. But even if we realise this the desire will continue and we shall muddle about in the dark.

Buddhism is not gloomy; only the first truth has a sombre sound. The thirst for life, which pushes us around and keeps us away from ultimate reality, can be broken. The situation isn’t hopeless. The destruction of self, as advised by Buddha, is not suicide.

The last stretch of the ship’s journey, from Hong Kong to Kobe, was the most difficult, as I had expected. I was alone now, the Danes finally having found their ship in Hong Kong. The daily discipline of reading and writing interrupted by meals couldn’t be kept up any longer. I began to wander all over the ship and visit the bar regularly. The monastery was getting very close. It had been a vague shape on the horizon for a long time but now it began to have a very definite outline.

I foresaw a lot of real and imaginary difficulties. I wasn’t quite so sure if I wanted to break my ego and give up everything which up till then had had some value for me.

A story told by Ouspensky, which he must have heard from his mysterious teacher, Gurdjieff, an Armenian who graduated from an esoteric school in Tibet, cheered me up considerably. Gurdjieff compares the man who has no answer, who knows of no solution, to a prisoner who spends his time aimlessly in jail.

Now there are prisoners who claim that jail is the only possible place to be in and that there is nothing outside jail. That type of prisoner, Gurdjieff says, should be left alone. They are stupefied, and they don’t want to do anything, and as long as they remain in that state of mind they can’t be helped.

But there are prisoners who want to escape, who are not content with their surroundings and who suspect that there is a much more attractive area outside their jail. They can’t really know this, because they are born in jail, or else the memory which they might have retained of free life has been artificially removed. But they do believe in the possibility of getting out and away, and they believe there is a lot of sense in trying.

But the jail is well guarded, there are towers with searchlights, and trained, ever alert warders armed with the latest make of machine gun; and there is a deep moat around the building, filled with sharks and hungry crocodiles. The walls are high, strong and smooth. It is almost hopeless even to think of escape. But it can be done. Prisoners have escaped, in groups, well prepared and brilliantly led by masters. The masters know the area outside the jail and can live within as well as outside the jail. But they can’t carry anyone outside; all they can do is point the way and they know all the tricks.

The ship approached Kobe in the early morning. I had got up at dawn so as not to miss anything. There was nobody on deck and the sea around me was empty. All I could see was one small fishing boat. An old Japanese was busy pulling up his nets. He saw me and I waved. He waved back. It seemed a good omen: at least I was welcomed cordially.