Faith makes life better. That’s the proposition before us. On the face of it, the proposition seems shaky. Faith quite often doesn’t bring the rewards that have been promised over and over. Empty-handed faith may lead to disillusionment or a broken heart. A touching example comes to mind. The world was shocked when the letters of Mother Teresa, long withheld by the Church, came to light in 2007. The diminutive Albanian nun had died ten years before. Her work with the poor in Calcutta made her a model of Christian charity far beyond the boundaries of Catholicism. Psychological experiments done at Harvard used films of Mother Teresa holding sick, orphaned babies in her arms and showed them to groups of subjects. Merely viewing these images caused beneficial physiological changes, decreasing blood pressure and offsetting various measures of stress.
Suddenly her letters revealed that this saintly figure was wracked with doubts, which had tormented her at the beginning, middle, and end of her career. The former Agnes Bojaxhiu received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1979, but that same year she wrote a letter to a priest with a desolate message in it.
Jesus has a very special love for you. As for me, the silence and the emptiness is so great that I look and do not see, listen and do not hear.
Those who campaign to see Mother Teresa canonized claim that her doubts make her an even more heroic exemplar of faith. (So strenuous was her spiritual struggle that she used a cilice, the proverbial hair shirt or rough undergarment, the discomfort of which reminds the wearer of Christ’s suffering.) But if you take the letters literally, at face value, Mother Teresa had a knotty predicament. She tried to live according to a Christian ideal, only to be baffled when God didn’t listen or answer her. God never showed his presence to a great devotee, and therefore she had to confront deep disappointment and (as some atheists gleefully point out) unresolved skepticism about the truth of religion.
When belief is great, doubt is never far away. Too much is at stake. Even though she was an outsize personality and a model of immense compassion, the “saint of the gutters” wasn’t all that different from ordinary believers who feel that God has abandoned them. Mother Teresa’s story reinforces my core conviction: Faith has to make your life better in order to be valid. The legacy of religion can be viewed from afar, in terms of great historical epochs, but ultimately it comes down to how people of faith have fared, one person at a time. If living a saintly life at the service of others leaves you in a state bereft of God, your well-being hasn’t improved. If holding fast to religion creates the basis for intolerance—much less torture and war—then an evil has been hatched in the world. The proposition that faith brings a better life fails.
What saves faith from this grim analysis is a counterforce: wisdom. Wisdom supports faith, because both are about invisible things. Both must be tested one person at a time to see if they are valid. When you decide to live in good faith, what happens next? Life happens, between breakfast and dinner. What you think, say, and do has to be shaped into something valuable. The whole question of value is where wisdom applies. Every fork in the road, however small, requires a choice. The world’s wisdom traditions provide a guide, based on thousands of years of human experience, as to which choices enhance life the most. Let me give you a general sense of where wisdom points.
When you are afraid and anxious, don’t trust the voice of fear.
When you are in a chaotic situation, find a way to bring order and calm.
When faced with an angry conflict, make no decision until the anger has subsided. When you meet resistance to your cherished ideas, consider the viewpoint of those who resist you.
When you are tempted to condemn someone else, see if what you hate in them is hidden away in yourself.
When you are in trouble, decide if the situation is one you should put up with, try to fix, or walk away from. Having decided, act accordingly.
When you know the truth, speak up for it.
These are just some examples of wisdom in action; they apply to everyday situations rather than great spiritual issues. There is a story in the Vedic tradition about a young man who went in search of the secret of abundance. For many months he traveled through the countryside until one day, deep in a forest, he met a spiritual master and asked how to make his dreams come true.
“What do you really want?” the master asked.
“I want to have untold wealth, but not for selfish reasons,” the young man replied earnestly. “I want to use it to help the whole world. Can you please tell me the secret to creating such abundance?”
The master nodded yes. “In the heart of every human being there are two goddesses. Lakshmi, the goddess of wealth, is generous and beautiful. If you worship her, she may bestow you with treasures and riches, but she is capricious and may also withdraw her favors without warning. The other goddess is Saraswati, the goddess of wisdom. If you venerate Saraswati and dedicate yourself to wisdom, Lakshmi will become jealous and pay more attention to you. The more you seek wisdom, the more fervently Lakshmi will chase you, showering you with wealth and abundance.”
This advice goes beyond common pieces of wisdom that one might hear today, such as “Do what you love, and the money will come” or even “Follow your bliss.” The lessons of wisdom aren’t always blissful, and what you love can change. At a deep level, devoting yourself to Saraswati or wisdom is about connecting to who you really are, discovering and then using what is unique about you. In yourself is the path to fulfillment. Take an external path instead, and all the rewards of money, status, and possessions can end up being worthless, because you haven’t really tapped into what would truly fulfill you. But telling someone that money doesn’t buy happiness is futile—what it does buy feels good enough. The real problem is mental programming. If you have no other imprinting except materialism, the road less traveled doesn’t even exist. They tore it up to build a superhighway to the shopping mall.
As with God, wisdom is valid only if it’s practical from day to day. But wisdom also has long-range goals, and these too are the result of decisions. Every spiritual tradition values the goal of peace over conflict, love over fear, understanding over judgment, good over evil. The reason we fail to achieve these long-range goals isn’t a lack of vision. Libraries are stuffed with volumes of wise teachings. Rather, the failure is due to the short-range decisions we make between breakfast and dinner. They shape our behavior, attitudes, beliefs, and even our brains.
The brain is predisposed, in a remarkable way, toward making decisions that favor goodness, and from an impossibly young age. Solid evidence has been gathered by the Infant Cognition Center at Yale University, where babies are tested to see if they have an innate moral sense. In one experiment a baby is shown a scene enacted by three dolls. One doll is trying to open a box, but the lid is too heavy for him to handle alone. The doll on the right helps him, and together they get the box open. The doll on the left slams the lid down instead, refusing to help.
After the baby has seen this little drama, he or she is offered a choice. Would it like to play with the “good” doll or the “bad” doll? Over 80 percent of the time, babies will reach for the good doll. This is for babies as young as three months old. Similarly, if an infant who has barely gotten beyond the crawling stage sees his mother drop something on the floor, he will voluntarily pick it up and offer it to her. We can speculate on where this predisposition for good behavior comes from, but it constitutes the seed of wisdom. Not that the situation is so simple that babies are always good. The Yale baby lab also conducts an experiment in which a “bad” doll is punished, and babies show a tendency to favor the punishment rather than to forgive the bad doll. From infancy we have a predisposition not to forgive. This may be the seed of us-versus-them thinking, which some researchers believe is also innate.
The seed of goodness, if it is going to grow, takes years of teaching and experience. Nurturing the good takes place invisibly, and you must have faith to keep moving forward. Viewing our times from the outside—like the proverbial Martian landing in his spaceship to examine the human species—we see that highly visible things like war, crime, and violence trump wisdom. The great new savior is technology, and if 80 percent of college graduates in China are engineers, that shows what a forward-looking society China must be. Ask anyone what they think the solution to global warming, overpopulation, or the worldwide AIDS pandemic will be (pick your own crippling dilemma), and almost certainly they will say that their hopes are pinned on a future scientific breakthrough. The number of people who expect us to be saved by wisdom will be very tiny indeed.
That is shortsighted, however. Despite the treachery of history, wisdom has thrived in the struggle against human folly. The nature of wisdom is that it gathers from the inside, creating a shift in the direction of higher consciousness. We are visionary creatures. Our instinct is to move toward the light. What does the poet William Blake mean when he says, “And throughout all eternity, I forgive you and you forgive me”? The statement is nonsense if you focus on the war and strife that litter bloody history. But if you are convinced that goodness prevails, it’s wisdom. When the Frank family were hiding out from the Nazis who occupied Amsterdam and hunted down their Jewish population, Anne Frank wrote in her diary, “Despite everything, I believe that people are really good at heart.” Is that credible once we know that the Gestapo eventually found the Franks and sent them to die in Auschwitz—and on the very last train that departed from Holland? In the concentration camps, prisoners died from the horrendous medical experiments performed by sadists like Josef Mengele, Auschwitz’s “angel of death,” yet with their last breath rare individuals blessed their tormentors. Such extraordinary behavior prevails over pain and suffering, even in the face of certain death.
Wisdom, instead of calculating good versus evil, considers the deeper value of life. We are applying wisdom, for example, when we raise children. A baby has an absolute status; in a good family it is an object of unquestioned love. As the baby grows, the parents teach right from wrong. But they never say to their child, “The fact that you exist is wrong” or “You have brought more wrong into the world than good.” This isn’t blind love; it’s just how love is supposed to be. Wisdom tells us so.
Wisdom is the ability to look beyond the surface of things. No ability is more valuable. On the surface, a two-year-old throwing a tantrum is exasperating. As she screams bloody murder in the supermarket, the child’s mother looks embarrassed. People are staring with frowns on their faces. The mother sees in their eyes that they think she’s a bad mother or can’t control her child. This is a moment for wisdom, which says that young children must be tolerated, guided, and loved for who they are, not judged for how they behave. Beyond the appearance of the situation, the mother understands that “the terrible twos” are just a phase.
Some mothers cannot base their reactions on wisdom. They grow angry at the child. They blame him for causing a scene. They resort to scolding or physical punishment. Their first thoughts are about their own embarrassment and how bad they look in other people’s eyes. In other words, such mothers are trapped in the superficial appearance of the situation. They are unable to see beyond it.
We consult wisdom in all kinds of situations where gathering evidence isn’t applicable. Wisdom sees what can’t be seen with the naked eye. God is a lofty example, but there are many situations that only wisdom can resolve. For most people, the first person in the Old Testament who comes to mind as wise is King Solomon. In the most famous tale about him, two prostitutes appear before him in a bitter dispute. As one tells the story, she gave birth to a son in the house where both women lived. Three days later the other gave birth, too, but in the night she rolled over and crushed her baby to death. Getting out of bed, she exchanged her dead baby for the living one. No one else was in the house except the two of them. The second prostitute says that this is all a lie. So who was the real mother of the living son?
No doubt it was expected, since the king stood in for God, that Solomon would divine who was telling the truth. Instead, he set up a test.
Then the king said, “Bring me a sword.” So they brought a sword for the king. He then gave an order: “Cut the living child in two and give half to one and half to the other.”
The woman whose son was alive was deeply moved out of love for him and said to the king, “Please, my lord, give her the baby! Don’t kill him!”
But the other said, “Neither I nor you shall have him. Cut him in two!”
Then the king gave his ruling: “Give the living baby to the first woman. Do not kill him; she is his mother.” (1 Kings 3:24–27)
The Bible doesn’t explain what made the judgment of Solomon so wise, only that it was greeted with astonishment. “When all Israel heard the verdict the king had given, they held the king in awe, because they saw that he had wisdom from God to administer justice.” Today we might say that Solomon understood human nature. He knew that the real mother would rather give up her baby than see it die. Yet there is something else. Wisdom is a surprise; it defies expectation; it leads to an unpredictable place.
I’d venture that it is a mark of wisdom to believe in God. What makes it wise is our simple proposition that faith makes life better. Everyone wants to be happy. In the Indian tradition, you can choose two paths to happiness. One is the path of pleasure; the other, the path of wisdom. The path of pleasure is based upon maximizing all the experiences that feel good and minimizing those that feel bad. Instinctively children follow this path, not by choosing it but by preferring pleasure over pain. The same instincts persist when we grow up. Our brains are wired to react to painful stimuli by storing them in memory as something to avoid in the future. In the most primitive region of the brain, the reptilian brain, basic sensations of pain and pleasure create a strong physical response, which is why we gravitate toward sex, food, and creature comfort.
The path of wisdom must override this basic setup, and we do that all the time. A marathon runner endures pain for the sake of reaching the end of the race. A prudent eater denies herself rich, fatty desserts for the sake of staying healthy. Human beings do not operate on the pleasure principle; we are too complex to be ruled by any simple brain mechanism. But prudent living isn’t the same as living wisely. Nor is wisdom found in adages like “Things have a way of working themselves out” or “Time heals all wounds.” Wise saws are based on collective experience, which can be helpful. It’s mostly true that time heals all wounds and that bad situations, if left alone, tend to work themselves out. But Socrates, the wisest man in Athens, opposed another school of philosophers, the Sophists, because they packaged wisdom and doled it out to their students in neat packages. Socrates held that wisdom could not be taught; in fact, that is its predominant characteristic.
Wisdom is discovered inside a situation; it is elusive and changeable. You cannot confine it to rules and adages. Most of the time wisdom startles us because it is so contrary to reason and common sense. A Buddhist parable makes this point. In ancient India, a disciple hears of a great teacher residing in a cave in remotest Tibet. He sells his worldly goods and makes the arduous journey across the Himalayas to find the cave. After many trials, the disciple arrives at the cave and prostrates himself before the teacher.
“I’m told that you are the wisest of men,” the disciple entreats. “Impart your wisdom to me. Show me how to become enlightened.”
The teacher is a grumpy old man who resents being disturbed by this intruder. Shaking his head, he replies, “Do you think wisdom is handed out for free? Bring me a bag of gold dust, and if you have brought enough, I will make you enlightened.”
Hearing this, the disciple almost loses heart, but he gathers himself up and returns to India, where he toils to fill a bag with gold dust. A long time passes. Then the disciple retraces the arduous journey across the Himalayas and prostrates himself before the teacher.
“I’ve done as you asked, master. I’ve filled a bag with gold dust so that you might teach me the way to enlightenment.”
The teacher holds out his hand. “Show me.”
Trembling, the disciple takes the bag out from under his cloak, the payment for years of slavery. The teacher grabs it and with a toss throws the gold into the air. Within seconds the wind has carried it away.
“What? What?” the disciple cries in dismay.
“I have no use for gold,” the teacher says. “I’m old and live in a cave. Don’t you know that money cannot buy wisdom?”
The disciple’s jaw falls; his head is swimming. Suddenly the teacher takes off his shoe and slaps the disciple hard against the ear. At that instant, the disciple is filled with total clarity. The truth dawns. He has awakened.
Wisdom stories are often like this—they lead to a surprising conclusion because the mind, stuck in its conventional thinking, must be shocked into seeing the light. The Christian version, which is much less dramatic, is condensed into Jesus’s teaching in Matthew 19:24, “Again I tell you, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God.” Both are about a mind that goes beyond worldly concerns. (I’ve told the Buddhist tale as I heard it, although later I discovered that it’s an amalgam of stories told about two illustrious Tibetan masters, Naropa and Milarepa.)
The path of wisdom has been called “the pathless path” just because it has no fixed guidelines. There’s no curriculum, and most frustrating of all, a teacher isn’t of much help. Mostly the teacher says, “I’ve been where you are now. Keep going.” The rest is taken on faith. If there were another way, frankly, most people would take it. The path of pleasure had to fail before the path of wisdom had a chance. In Buddhism, the seeker cannot take the first step until he or she has given up on pleasure. This bald fact was encapsulated in a doctrine known as the Four Noble Truths, which begins with “Life is suffering.” If you unpack this brutal statement, it comes down to the unreliability of pleasure. There isn’t enough pleasure in the world to stave off suffering. Some kinds of pain (such as the death of a child or killing someone by accident) cannot be healed with extra doses of pleasure. Guilt and shame make deep, often permanent impressions. The past leaves scars. As if all of that weren’t enough, aging and death are inevitable.
But something deeper is at work. The same thing that roots life in suffering also leads to the way out of suffering: self-awareness. We are the only creatures who have awareness that pain is inevitable. We can foresee future pain, and that is enough to remove the savor of present pleasure. Without self-awareness, you can’t feel guilty about the bad things you’ve done or past wounds that remind you of your failings. (As one mordant wit remarked, “I don’t want to come back after I die if it means going through junior high school again.”)
Self-awareness plunges us into the sad knowledge that we were born to suffer. But at the same time it offers a solution: the path of wisdom. Why was the disciple suddenly enlightened when his teacher hit him on the head with his shoe? The act itself wasn’t the reason. Rather, he had a stroke of self-awareness, in which he realized that being in the world—working, raising a family, learning how to do all the right things—takes place at a different level from the truth. Of course the parable is simplistic. In real life, learning how to obey Christ’s injunction to “be in the world but not of it” takes years. Wisdom is a process of inner growth; it doesn’t come about instantly.
Once you accept that life is suffering, the other three Noble Truths follow:
Suffering is caused by attachment.
There’s a way to bring suffering to an end.
The path for ending suffering has eight necessary parts to it.
The eight necessary parts (formally known as the Eightfold Path) are joined together by the word right: right view, right intention, right speech, right action, right livelihood, right effort, right mindfulness, and right concentration. Leaving aside some terminology that is specifically Buddhist, such as mindfulness, the core issue comes down to a single question: What does right mean? Unfortunately, no simple answer emerges. Buddha didn’t provide a playbook for the game of life. His version of wisdom, like every other, cannot be reduced to a formula with fixed rules.
I realize that for many Buddhists, as for many Christians, the teaching of wisdom winds up in some impossible contradictions. (You can work so hard at being good to others, for example, that you stop being good to yourself.) This is a major problem. When you look closely at Jesus’s teaching about turning the other cheek, it’s no wonder that very few Christians manage to follow it.
“But I tell you, do not resist an evil person. If someone strikes you on the right cheek, turn to him the other also. And if someone wants to sue you and take your tunic, let him have your cloak as well. If someone forces you to go one mile, go with him two miles.” (Matthew 5:39–41)
This passage from the New Testament falls under the Buddhist category of doing and thinking what is “right,” but we continue to ignore “resist not evil,” just as Buddhists and Hindus sometimes turn their backs on the doctrine of Ahimsa, which tells them to do no harm to any living creature. The path of wisdom very often defies common sense, human nature, and social practicalities. As a matter of course, we resist evil, punish wrongdoers, and refuse to go the extra mile. It is so counterintuitive to follow wisdom that there are only two choices: Either pay lip service to the great spiritual teachers while living your own life, or reduce their teachings to simple rules of morality and conduct.
Neither alternative comes close to the intention of a Christ or a Buddha. They were not moralists. They were radicals who showed the way to inner transformation. I’m not condemning practicing Christians as failures when they resist evil instead of turning the other cheek. It isn’t a failing, either, that Buddhists reduce the Eightfold Path to an admirable cut-and-dried set of ethics. Human beings can always use reminders to be peaceful, treat other people decently, and act out of love instead of anger. By comparison, a teaching that would completely overturn everyday behavior seems more threatening than healing. So let me take a moment to defend the path of wisdom in all its radicalism. Since the Christian message is so well known (and has been temporarily discredited by right-wing fundamentalists), I’ll use Buddha and his solution for suffering instead.
Looking around at the state of the world, we feel overwhelmed by its chaos, which seems to be teetering between madness and catastrophe. Yet when people came to Buddha more than two thousand years ago, they brought the same complaints as ours. They felt helpless in the face of natural disasters, war, and poverty. They couldn’t comprehend a world on the edge of madness.
When I was young, a few seminal ideas guided my life. One of them (now well known in the West) was expressed by Mahatma Gandhi: “Be the change that you want to see in the world.” Because the world is so huge, it came as a revelation to me—and also a mystery—that by changing myself I could affect the world. The idea wasn’t original with Gandhi. It’s an offshoot of a much older idea, traceable to ancient Vedic India, which says, “As you are, so is the world.” This is the same as saying that the world begins in consciousness. Buddha was famously practical. He told people to stop analyzing the world and its troubles and to stop relying on religious rituals and sacrifices.
By refusing to accept a religious culture that had become rigid and divorced from individual lives, Buddha was the avatar of the situation we find ourselves in today, where God seems disconnected from the individual. Buddha didn’t justify the social safety net of the priestly caste with its automatic connection to the invisible world of spirit. Above all, he accepted the inescapable fact that each person is ultimately alone in the world. This aloneness is the very disease Buddha set out to cure.
His cure was a waking-up process, in which suffering came to be seen as rooted in false consciousness, specifically in the dulled awareness that causes us to accept illusion for reality. The steps of waking up have trickled down into the everyday life of practicing Buddhists:
• Meditate on the core of silence within the mind.
• Observe the shifting contents of the mind carefully, separating out anything that sustains suffering and illusion.
• Unravel the ego’s version of reality and pierce through the ego’s claim that it knows how to live properly.
• Face the truth that everything in nature is impermanent.
• Let go of materialism in both its crude and subtle forms.
• Become detached from the self and realize that the individual self is an illusion.
• Be mindful of one’s being; overcome the distraction of thoughts and sensations.
• Abide by a set of higher ethics whose basis is compassion for other people and reverence for life.
Some or all of these things stand for Buddha’s path of wisdom, by which the disease of suffering can be cured. So how is the cure proceeding? Let’s say that an outsider is coming in from the cold. He or she wants to be free of pain and suffering and wants to feel that life at its core is meaningful. An outsider could think that the Buddhist cure has become difficult, complicated, and confusing. Every aspect has its drawbacks:
• Sitting and trying to find a core of silence is beyond the average person’s short attention span and doesn’t fit into the hectic pace of modern life.
• Watching and examining the shifting contents of the mind is time-consuming and exhausting.
• Confronting the ego is nearly impossible, because it has a hundred heads for every one you cut off.
• Facing the truth that everything is impermanent frightens people.
• Seeking detachment makes people think they will be giving up worldly success and comfort.
• Abiding by a set of higher ethics makes people anxious that they will be prey to anyone who is stronger, less moral, and capable of using violence without any sense of guilt or remorse.
Even if you believe that these objections are unfair to Buddhism, bringing wisdom to a world built on illusion and suffering is difficult. Solving violence through pacifism is unworkable. Detaching from materialism has little appeal when people everywhere are rabid consumers of material goods. Yet the genius of Buddha’s teaching lies in its universality, and whatever is universal is also simple enough for everyone to understand.
Right now Buddha’s cure isn’t simple, because we fear being alone. By asking people to go inside, Buddhism seems to be asking them to be more alone. We are also asked to strip ourselves of labels. Labels fit things you already see before you, things you already know. They work for Jell-O and Chryslers but not for invisible things. Soul and God are therefore false labels. So is the self, which is tagged with misleading labels of all kinds. I can label myself an Indian male, a husband and father, a breadwinner, a citizen, and so on. All these are things I see and know already.
Can I label my inner self the same way? No. To Buddha, God and the soul were question marks, because the seeker after God doesn’t even know who “I” am. Nothing is closer to each of us than our sense of self, but if it remains a mystery, what good does it do us to pursue higher mysteries? Someone who seeks solace from God and communion with the soul has turned them into spiritual security blankets. There is no comfort in the unknown, and it is pure wish fulfillment to think of God as anything but unknown—so Buddha taught.
He was a master diagnostician of spiritual afflictions; he understood that when people prayed to the Hindu gods, they were praying to creations of the mind, and that what the mind creates has no lasting truth. Maybe a person can be clever enough to disguise his ego while projecting it as an all-powerful, all-knowing, all-present deity. But whenever the known is projected into the unknown, something false is happening, and the truth moves further away. Wisdom is a great respecter of the unknown. It isn’t distracted by the mind’s incessant need to create pleasing illusions.
Buddha was a radical surgeon, cutting out all labels that put a name on the unknown. Naturally, people who came to him for comfort and solace were shocked that he proposed major surgery. They saw themselves as humble seekers after truth, which they would hear from his lips. Buddha knew better than to satisfy them—instead, he overturned their expectations about how truth works.
Truth isn’t found in words but through insight and self-discovery.
Truth isn’t taught or learned. It is wrapped inside consciousness itself.
Your consciousness must deepen until what is false has been left behind. Then truth will exist by itself, strong and self-sufficient.
These are universal statements applicable to everyone’s life. Yet Buddha’s teaching became easy prey for the ego-personality. Let’s say that you are being true to your higher self—or God or the soul—by practicing Ahimsa, the doctrine of nonviolence and reverence for life that one finds in every Eastern tradition. And not just there. The Hippocratic Oath taken by physicians, which begins “First, do no harm,” is an expression of Ahimsa. But Ahimsa can easily turn out to be part of the human disease rather than the cure. Following where nonviolence leads, I may become a pacifist who finds himself hated by his country for refusing to protect it from enemies. This hatred may lead to persecution, and so I become a martyr to the truth. I get thrown in jail—or in extremis I become a monk setting himself on fire in Vietnam to stir the conscience of the world—and in the end I suffer more than if I hadn’t learned this truth called Ahimsa.
The web of the ego is complicated, and the negative possibilities I’ve mentioned have marred the good intent of Ahimsa when it was put into practice. I could pick another spiritual value instead, like love. People have killed in the name of love and suffered terribly in countless ways. The positive is always woven in with the negative. Truth can cause suffering; it can deepen the illusions of the separate self. Does the good of nonviolence outweigh the bad? After all, peaceful disobedience freed India under Gandhi and led to civil rights reform in the racist South under Martin Luther King, Jr., an avowed follower of Gandhi’s principles. Buddha didn’t measure truth that way. If it were enough to tell people to go and cause no harm, the human disease wouldn’t need a drastic cure.
Buddha wanted to pluck out the seed of illusion, not to feed the mind with new ideals that would succumb to corruption. He aimed for nothing less than an inner revolution. I think inner revolution is the purest form and the highest purpose of wisdom, as stated in the original Buddhist teachings, the Theravada, whose aim was to make people not into Buddhists but into Buddhas.
Coming in from the cold, modern people yearn for some kind of inner transformation because there is a hole inside them where God used to be. Buddha’s radical cure is necessary when nothing less will do. Filling the hole with a new image of God merely replaces one illusion with another. Some people would disagree. In Mahayana, the “greater way” of Buddhism, personal enlightenment came to be seen as selfish. For me to try to become enlightened in a suffering world isn’t morally right. A different goal—compassion for all living things—arose as a substitute ideal. Mahayana Buddhism stands for healing the suffering we see all around us. One lifetime after another, each Bodhisattva (awakened person) is offered the choice between personal enlightenment (i.e., saving himself) and service to humanity (i.e., postponing personal salvation). Always, they choose the latter. This is altruism that never ends—realistically, the world cannot be saved by a handful of enlightened beings, though it can be strongly influenced.
My mind comes back to practicalities. I can’t settle centuries-old disputes among deep religious thinkers. The value of inner transformation doesn’t depend on Buddhism and right doctrine. The same promise was held out by the Vedic sages who lived long before Buddha; by Socrates, who was born soon after Buddha died; and by Jesus five hundred years later. Each opened up the pathless path using different words. When you reach higher consciousness by any means, you no longer separate what is good for you from what is good for everyone. Humanity contains Buddha nature (the source of compassion); the world contains Buddha nature; the cosmos is nothing but Buddha nature.
The reason that the average person cannot live the pure teachings of Jesus or Buddha is that these teachings depend upon higher consciousness. Otherwise, turning the other cheek will get you beaten up twice as badly. Burning yourself up to protest the Vietnam War will be an act of futile pain. Even devoting yourself to sick, orphaned babies in Calcutta might bring painful disillusionment. Most of the time, in fact, the teaching of wisdom can’t be applied effectively to the surface of life. An inner revolution must occur along the way. By finding a new level of awareness, one solves the negatives of Buddha’s radical cure—isolation, fear of detachment, anxiety about becoming weak and passive, the apprehension that nirvana will be cosmic loneliness.
To me, the Eightfold Path represents a way to find out who you really are by inviting your awareness to show what it really is. Many practicing Buddhists strive for right action, right speech, or right thought because they are virtues spouted by an enlightened person. I think there’s a better reason. These values are innate. They are part of every person’s makeup once we drop our disguises. I mentioned Ahimsa to show that it has hidden pitfalls. Those pitfalls exist if you struggle to be nonviolent, if you suppress your anger and resentment, disciplining yourself with gritted teeth to meet evil with good. At bottom you are still judging against yourself for harboring the seed of violence, and self-judgment is the root of guilt and shame. How can reminding yourself to be kind ever turn into spontaneous kindness? The mystery of Buddha’s cure is this: What you seek you already are.
If people could see that the human disease is temporary, a station on the way to enlightenment, I think wisdom would speak to the world’s problems in very real ways. Wisdom could guide trends that are already moving ahead. We are already becoming more peaceful, for example. In the past forty years more than eighty dictators have fallen. Deaths from large-scale conflicts, including civil wars, have drastically decreased. Even broader trends are moving in the right direction. In America, the past decade has seen declines in abortion, teenage pregnancy, drug use among the young, and overall violent crime. Wisdom tells us to nurture and guide these trends if we can.
If you need somewhere to put your faith, look to the agenda of wisdom, which is based on rising consciousness. The blueprint of the future is invisible, but something important is working its way through the global mind.
Meditation will become mainstream.
Natural ways of healing, both physical and psychological, will become commonplace.
Prayer will be seen as real and efficacious.
Manifestation of desires will be talked about as a real phenomenon.
People will regain a connection to spirit. Individuals will find answers inwardly to their deepest spiritual questions. They will believe in their private answers and live accordingly.
Communities of belief will arise.
Spiritual authorities will wane in influence.
A wisdom tradition will grow to embrace the great spiritual teachings at the heart of every religion.
Faith will no longer be seen as an irrational departure from reason and science.
Wars will decline as peace becomes a social reality.
Nature will regain its sacred value.
These may seem like baby steps compared to Buddha’s deep teaching of enlightenment or Jesus’s universal love. I feel just the opposite. Every step forward contains a hint of Buddha nature. If you notice these hints and give them value, they will expand, and in time they will fill the hole of lonely isolation and the threat of meaninglessness. The path of wisdom is natural and open to everyone. Einstein said as much when he considered how God relates to everyday life: “Whatever there is of God in the universe, it must work itself out and express itself through us.” In a sentence Einstein outlined the agenda of wisdom. Wisdom is the divine working itself out and expressing itself through us.
Wisdom tells us secrets before we have a right to know them. That’s the beauty of it. You don’t have to pray for wisdom or make yourself worthy of it. As with the concept of grace in the New Testament, which falls like rain on the just and the unjust alike, the ultimate truth simply is. When we catch a glimpse of it, we become more real in ourselves. It is undeniable that the outward appearance of life contains suffering and distress. Wisdom reveals that suffering comes and goes while a deeper reality never changes. That reality is founded on truth and love.
Faith makes life better because in the midst of pain and suffering, we need to trust that something else is more powerful. Your present self, in its unawakened state, isn’t your enemy or a cripple or a failure. It is Buddha waiting to realize itself. It’s the seed of wisdom needing to be nurtured.