Post #10: The Unhappy Buddhist

12 May 2023

I’ve been thinking for years about one day writing something—a little tongue-in-cheek but fundamentally serious—about those of us whose trials and tribulations on the Path do not give us the happy-smiley look and vibe that is expected of the Buddha’s bona fide students. Someone who still carries his taints so openly, someone who does not appear, on the surface at least, to be made especially happy by his practice, must surely be doing something wrong... Or must he?

The popular imagination has made up its mind: Buddhism and happiness go together, and the Buddha stressed unequivocally that his Middle Way was to be practiced and the Eightfold Path travelled on joyfully (Majjhima Nikaya 19.26)—a far cry from the self-tormenting austerities and severities that he had himself practiced almost to the point of killing himself. (At one point, it is said, the astonished gods were quite sure that he really had starved and tortured himself to death.) But he revived, reflected that he had acted with more sense as a five-year-old watching his father from the shade at a ploughing ceremony, began eating again (a bowl of rice pudding, no less, handed to him by a pretty village girl), and thus fortified, sat down for his final showdown with Mara. The rest is history.

But there is another, equally orthodox but less widely reported aspect of the practice about which the Scriptures are no less explicit. For they mention the peculiar case of those who, perhaps because they are by nature possessed of strong lusts, or because they struggle with a particular propensity towards ill-will or particularly tenacious kinds of ignorance, may find themselves leading a spiritual life that, for all the purity and perfection of their efforts, involves them in “pain and grief, and weeping with a fearful face” and that feels about as delightful as “drinking fermented urine mixed with various medicines.” (I am not making this stuff up, see Majjhima Nikaya 45.6, 46.19.)

What happiness one will find on the Path, in other words, depends not only on the quality and intensity of one’s practice, but is determined more fundamentally by one’s personal, read karmic, conditions and circumstances, whatever they may be in any particular case. Of course it is to be hoped that the urinal-scented side to one’s journey will be the exception rather than the rule, and that like everything else it will prove merely a temporary station. At the same time, there are no guarantees that one’s progress might not be, and remain for a long time, very hard-won indeed, and perhaps remain altogether elusive, or at least invisible to the jaundiced eyes of others.

We tend to think of the Dhamma and like spiritual practices in terms of the victory they ultimately promise, but they are always calls, in the first place, to fight the good fight, whether the battle (with oneself more than anything) will ultimately be won or not, to say nothing of the war. Hence the kind of knife’s edge account of the Path that I have in mind today would see a lot more Dhamma heroes who are fighting it out with their demons in the last row of the meditation hall, their backs literally up against the wall in many cases, than in the front rows where the living statues of Buddha are seated. For my part, I would take credit for nothing so much as my willingness to tough out my first retreat, which was incomparably harder than anything that came after, and for then finding the resolve to go back for a rematch when that was still a truly terrifying prospect.

I’ve often thought that the nicest rooms at a meditation center, which in practice tend to be given to the most seasoned meditators on the logic that they should enjoy congenial conditions commensurate with the depths of their practice, should go to the first-timers instead, albeit with the caveat that I am not volunteering mine—because I am not a triumphant practitioner, but a struggling one still who continues to need all the help he can get. I make no secret of my shame: I am able to make myself go back again and again for treatment, but I would not be able to do so if the environment were not reasonably commodious.

On one bleak occasion many years into my practice already, when center accommodation meant a military-style common room that was locked during meditation hours, I walked out as soon as I realized just how brutal the regimen was going to be. It earned me a pretty severe scolding by the center manager who made sure, before he handed my passport back to me, that I was clear about what a lousy Dhamma citizen I was. Quite an unnecessary exercise, as I was never under any illusions on that particular point; but I seized the occasion to practice noble listening, reinforced by the more worldly-wise consideration that he did still hold my passport ransom. Lo and behold, noble listening really worked, and having said his bit, my stern interlocutor calmed right down and became quite friendly, concluding perhaps that in my humbled state I was a fitter object of pity than righteous indignation.

Mind you, it is not that I have given up hope of finding on my path the elusive serenity and palpable joy that is so widely associated with Buddhism. If it made me no more equanimous and kind to others at all, I would be quite ready to concede that I should stop wasting my time and direct my energies elsewhere. Note, however, how much depends here on one’s starting point. Measuring equanimity on a rough scale from 0 to 10, I can state for the record and with perfect assurance that I began at zero. If I have worked myself up to no more than an unremarkable 3 or 4 (still below the 5 that would mark a rough average among the run of mankind!) it would still be quite a stupendous accomplishment for me, even if I cannot expect anyone to break into applause. Such changes do not come easy to anyone, and where someone else is on the scale has little bearing on my situation. (On the loving-kindness side I don’t think I was ever quite so challenged—thank goodness—but there too it is a long way to Tipperary and anyway not for anyone to be his own judge.)

Perhaps it is for us, the strugglers and stragglers on the Path, to remind our more impressive Dhamma brothers and sisters, and all the world along with them, that there is something to be said, especially when it comes to essentials, for working precisely on one’s weakest side and not, as the logic of specialization usually prompts us in worldlier contexts, to keep getting more and more expert at something that comes easily, or at least readily. I cannot tell how good or bad a meditator I am, if that distinction means anything in the first place; but I can look in the mirror during yoga classes, which I have been doing for about as long and with similar determination born of desperation. And what I see, frankly, does not look give a very pretty or polished impression, even if I have little doubt about being a genuine yogi in the gymnastic sense at least, albeit an altogether unaccomplished one.

To speak a little more precisely, yogi-bhogi may be the more fitting term for my type, oxymoron though it is, strictly speaking: for it refers to someone who manages to combine, or perhaps alternates between, the urge to enter into some kind of communion with higher things (the literal meaning of yogi) and the all-too familiar fellow who remains beholden to the comforts, indulgences, and pleasures that govern the everyday world (the bhogi). Some might say that one needs to make a choice, but I would not know how, having a foot in both camps and no inclination whatsoever to move full time into either one of them. The classic commentaries speak of the incorrigible pleasure-seeker’s way as a life of “trying to lick honey off a razor blade” (Visuddhimagga XVII.63). If that is right then it is also no wonder that the idea of a knife’s-edge Dhamma feels so intuitive to me…

(This one goes out to P.)

Reading: Majjhima Nikaya 36.31–32 (the Buddha remembers his happiness as a child and recognizes the senselessness of fearing innocent and wholesome pleasures)