Post #45: Balmy Buddhism (Pain Revisited)

8 July 2023

When the idea for this post first occurred to me, I was tempted to reach for a harsher adjective, also starting with a b, that would have brought a bit more torque to my introduction. But to give in to that urge would have been to invite misunderstanding of a kind that I don’t much care for. It’s not that I think edge is always out of place just because one is talking Buddhism; that is just the point of today’s reflections. But the other b-word might have sounded as if I were angry or annoyed with the balmy Buddhists, which I am not, or if I had scores to settle with them, which I do not. They are a nice, likable lot, well-intentioned and generally kind in their dealings with others, and I do not wish to disturb or offend them.

(I was extremely surprised, about a week after posting my text, to hear Thai conservatives described as “a balmy lot.” A balm is a soothing ointment that may be applied, figuratively, to one’s soul, and “balmy” has therefore meant, since at least Shakespeare’s time, something soft, mild, and pleasant. It is in this sense and in this sense only that I use the word. Where certain Americans get the bizarre idea that it has anything to do with being foolish, irrational, or eccentric, is beyond me.)

The issue of balminess came up because my social-media-savvy Bhutanese friend (Yangki) told me that she had described, and effectively retitled, my Post #17 as “Making Peace with Pain.” And yes, of course my text points in that direction all right, even if I would be reluctant to put things quite that way. Why reluctant? Because pain is one of life’s central challenges, a lifelong struggle over accepting the unacceptable, and I get aggressive (the Buddha help me!) when I hear it talked about as if it could be done between breakfast and lunch over a matcha latte, by “just letting go.”

Nobody ever just lets go in this manner, dammit, not if it is anything serious, and what could be more serious than pain? It racks us, torments us, drives us to the edge of insanity (or right over), and sometimes makes us prefer a self-inflicted death, whatever uncertainties it may bring, to the predictable pains of this life. Anyone who dares put “just” anywhere near the sheer horror of life with serious pain is either in denial, or else needs to look the first noble truth a bit more deeply into its cold, cruel eyes.

Mind you, there are balmy Buddhists of a very different stripe, who really have drunk the cup of misery to the dregs and come out the other side. A Vietnamese monk I once met in Ontario, for example, who as a young man served as a lieutenant in the South Vietnamese army and had several of his fingers cut off for it by the Communists. Such examples could be multiplied endlessly in our Dukkha-driven world, and we all have a tale to tell of stray-fire coming our way, even if not many of us have lived through the full-on bullet-hail and the steel-bursting storms of war, as Ernst Jünger once wrote, another lieutenant in yet another apocalypse. I do not wish to belabor the theme. Before those who have passed through the like and have emerged with their capacity for balminess intact or even enhanced by bitter struggle, I fall silent and bow deeply. Saints, sages, and heroes stand so far above my vantage point that I have nothing to add except expressions of awe; they can be as balmy as they wish, any way they want.

But let’s be realistic here: how many of the balmy Buddhists one meets at the café are cut from such cloth and have passed through such fires? How many of those to whom the phrase “make your peace” and “let go” come so easily speak as they do after having their skins scorched or burnt off, be it mentally or physically? It is not, heaven forbid, that I would diminish the more everyday miseries of the human condition, or brush off anyone’s real sufferings because the cause does not seem significant enough. Nothing could be further from my intention, which is to acknowledge Dukkha frankly in all the myriad ways it shows itself in the world. Viktor Frankl wrote, on the strength of his experience at several concentration camps, that human misery fills out the chamber of the human mind however seemingly small or big the occasion may be; it is not with the measuring stick that one can get at real suffering. The talk one sometimes hears of “First World problems” is obnoxious for this reason: yes, we should certainly be grateful for the material blessings that we, but not others, may get to enjoy, whether making comparisons within or across countries. But just as important is the recognition that there is no first, second, or third world of pain, only the universal truth of sentient suffering.

So just what am I saying, then, when I contrast the balminess of the Vietnamese monk with that of the brunching meditators with whom, except for the matcha, I feel a great deal of personal affinity? What I am trying to get at is that the Ontario monk knows every time he looks at his mutilated hands what it really takes to “make peace” and “let go.” It is not, for him, a superficial sentiment or a catchy slogan, but something he had to fight for every bit as hard as he did for staying alive when he was a soldier.

When letting go is easy, or making peace comes readily, it is either because we are not leveling with ourselves fully or because we are not (not yet anyway) dealing with the things to which we are truly attached—as we all are to something (or rather, to many things), though we may not give a proper accounting of them before ourselves or before others. To get serious about the practice is not, cannot be, happy-smiley and easy all the time, any more than serious psychotherapy can happen without tears, or open-heart surgery without blood. I am not saying that all is pain on the Path; but if along the way it is not hurting in some place, and badly sometimes, then I don’t think it is working.

Of course the inverse is also likely, and makes for a diagnosis that I have often had to face myself, both before the court of my own doubts and before others: if the element of Dukkha predominates too visibly, one may likewise be doing something wrong—though I would caution, as per my earlier post on the Unhappy Buddhist (#10), that this is a far more complicated and opaque matter than it may appear from the outside. Be that as it may, balmy Buddhists are variegated lot, and I am not out to diminish them; I am merely expressing a discomfort that assails me sometimes, and that may well be attributed, if anyone should see fit, to my own not being damned balmy enough...