Post #70: Liberation

6 Oct. 2023

“The Path is very difficult and terrible. It would be better if you didn’t begin at all. So I suggest you get a refund at the door and go home. But if you do decide to make a start, you need to be ready to go all the way to the end.”

—Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche giving a talk in Berkeley*

Even by the exacting standards of his type, this rogue guru had a special gift for showmanship; but he was no fool, and the line between wisdom and bullshit can be a surprisingly fine one.

Let’s put it a little more soberly: once you’ve begun in earnest, it doesn’t much matter how bleak you consider your prospects of enlightenment or liberation to be, or how tempted you are to roll up the mat and be done with it. There is no turning back. As with the Hotel California, only even more so, you can check out any time you want, but you can never leave. Turn away from the Path as resolutely as you wish, it will always be there waiting for you, silently reminding you that you have not finished what you’ve begun.

Here’s the kicker, though, which the good Rinpoche left unmentioned, perhaps because it was so obviously implied: unwelcome as the relentless call to continued effort may be, you are likely to find, sooner or later, that there is something even more awful than the endless trekking on the Path— namely the prospect of having to suffer life’s miseries without your practice to deflect and soften the blows!

So I may know a thing or two, as a veteran stumbler, about the many pebbles and the occasional gems on the long, long Path; but what of going on to the end? What knowledge do I have of that? If you want to be strict, dear reader, let’s be blunt: none whatsoever. I’ve caught a few suggestive glimpses of what lies beyond the confines of our ordinary minds (see Post #56), and I’ve been granted a few passing intimations of the power of equanimity and love. That’s all, and it does not add up to knowing anything, so far as I am concerned.

Does that mean I am confirming the truth of Lao Tzu’s dictum, in chapter 56 of the Tao Te Ching, that “they who speak do not know”? Perhaps so, but not on the dismissive note that I hear in the line. I see nothing wrong with speaking, as part of one’s quest for answers, about things that one does not know or understand, especially if one realizes full well that one does not know or understand them. Plato 101.

What about the other side of the equation, “they who know do not speak”? Again, I’m not really convinced. For starters, the statement undermines itself logically, much like the ancient Greek paradox of the Cretan who declares all Cretans liars. (If the claim is true then its affirmation too falls under the verdict.) But even leaving that aside, as too narrow a reading perhaps, the clever-sounding endorsement of sagacious silence over sharing what one knows, or trying to do so anyway, makes little sense to me.

Yes, yes, I’m aware of the Flower Sermon and I can see the charm of the sage’s wordless smile; nor am I oblivious to the beauty of the cherry blossoms on the sublime tree of Zen at its best. But that’s not my game; I go along with Seneca’s sixth Letter, in which he observes how much of his pleasure in learning consists in discovering something new that he can share with others; however beneficial it might be, if any part of wisdom or insight were ever given to him on condition that he must not pass it along to anyone else, it would cease to please him and he would decline the offer.

Besides, the clever-sounding notion that those who know don’t speak looks plainly false to me in that very few of our human sages, if any, have ever in fact been keen on withholding what they knew, at least when they thought they could get a hearing. Of course the world abounds in those who speak all-too readily without knowing what they are talking about—either in the profoundest or in the most mundane sense—but there is no dearth of wise folk who have done their utmost to communicate what they knew to others, from the lofty heights of the Buddhas, prophets, and saviors of mankind, all the way down to our neighborhood saints and know-it-alls—among whose ranks there may be, I grant, quite a few babblers and charlatans, but also plenty of formidable and legitimate scholars, undoubtedly serious monks, hard-core lay meditators, and other eminently credible practitioners in our day, still very much alive and no doubt the genuine article, many of them.

There is much truth, of course, in how the Buddha gets depicted, immediately after his enlightenment, as hesitating over whether there was any point in trying to convey, with human language not made for the purpose, something as profound, as hard to see and understand, as subtle and unattainable by mere reasoning as his Teaching. “If I were to teach the Dhamma,” the Buddha concludes initially, “others would not understand me, and that would be wearying and troublesome for me: so enough with teaching the Dhamma…” (Majjhima Nikaya 26:19) Nor did his first encounter with a prospective student, after he had changed his mind, go particularly well. “May it be so, friend,” is all he can get out of the wanderer Ajivaka Upaka (26:25), who is not impressed by what sounds like mere boasting to him.

Yet the Buddha would not have been the Buddha if that had been the end of it, and so it has been with countless other discoverers of truth, high and humble. What truly wise or enlightened or liberated being would, or could, ever think it right to shut himself up in his hut or cave and refuse to let others partake of his liberating insights? He may be wary of casting his pearls before the swine, as another liberator put it so vividly, but in this human world, knowing smiles and silences are not enough, be as Zen as you like. The trouble lies not in speaking per se, but in finding the right language; and that is a tangled skein indeed…

But enough with such abstract reflections, and back to the personal and concrete. I have been prefacing my journey of reflections from the very start (Post #2) with the disclaimer that I am not practicing for Enlightenment or Liberation. Seventy posts later, have I changed my mind, or am I about to change my tune? Not quite. I’m as keen as ever to keep my practice in the lower case and not to let big words with capital letters encroach too much upon it. My practice remains, as it has been for several years (though it has not always been so), an everyday affair with no great expectations attached. And that’s not just pretending, thank you very much.

Liberation does still come into it, however, even for me. The Buddha was quite clear that “the holy life is grounded upon Nibbana, culminates in Nibbana, ends in Nibbana” (Majjhima Nikaya 44.29). The orientation towards it is clearly not an optional extra, but integral to the practice. The question is what to make of it: what exactly does Nibbana mean? The usual idea, capitalized as it were, is of a grand and dramatic unveiling of cosmic truth, a sublime epiphany and along with it, admission to a highly exclusive club of the spiritually elect, so to speak. For the tradition does insist that witnessing Nibbana marks the point of stream-entry, which is supposed to make one’s course on the Path irreversible, oneself an entry-level saint, and eventual liberation a foregone conclusion. Only then, it is said, does one become a member of the Sangha proper.

But perhaps this crucial turning point can nonetheless be understood a little less dramatically. At its most basic, Nibbana means simply a moment of cessation (or literally extinction, as of a fire) when suffering, or more precisely, the taint of the unsatisfactory in sentient existence (Dukkha), comes, for once, to a full stop. The false sense of self falls away, identification ceases completely and along with it all craving and aversion—no more, but also no less.** It may last for only a second or it may be of much longer duration, but even in the absence of any of the cosmic fireworks we may associate with it, a radical change of perspective is inevitable, since by the Buddhist analysis such complete freedom from dissatisfaction has never occurred before in the entire karmic life-stream of someone who has not already witnessed Nibbana. Such a moment would be tremendously potent, laden with the greatest significance, and a pivot around which the whole program of life will naturally get reframed and rearranged. At the same time, however, it has often been said to feel quite ordinary beside what one might have expected such a revelation to be like. (At this point, I am entirely out of my depth and I can only refer the reader to Jack Kornfield’s After the Ecstasy, the Laundry, a wonderful resource for illustrating how the ordinary and the extraordinary come together during and after such episodes.)

As Ajahn Chah has put it (and not only he), “If you let go a little, you will have a little peace. If you let go a lot, you will have a lot of peace.” The more you can get away from the deep habit of forever identifying yourself completely with your experience-stream, the freer you will be; and if you are able to realize, experientially and not just in the abstract, that the self is little more than the product of such unnecessary identification, then you will be free altogether. Not all the remaining bad tracks on your mind will disappear at once, but with no-self guiding the defragmenting laser beam of attention from now on, it is only a matter of time. Alas, the formula alone means little; it has to be lived.

On one level, I feel ridiculous speaking here of things of which I know so little, if anything at all. But there is another level on which I don’t feel quite so bad about saying my bit, because it serves a different kind of purpose. If you are looking for someone who can speak to you from a higher plane, as it were, with all the authority that goes with so lofty a position, then all the best to you! But there is a limitation, too, that comes with such communications, namely that the gulf will be, of necessity, a lot wider than it is here between us.

What the awakened or enlightened or liberated have to say presupposes things to which you have no access—not incidentals, but the most central insights around which they have arranged everything else. These rearrangements may make intellectual, moral, spiritual sense to you, and appeal to you greatly, but they cannot be yours until you have confirmed them for yourself by personal experience. Until then, they can only speak to you from the other bank of the river that you have not crossed yet. If such a chat across the water is what you are looking for, great; if not, then here I am—the beggar at the great banquet, the jester at court, the stray dog on the Path.

If you look at me, make no mistake, you won’t see anything special. If you look to me, you will be disappointed and, possibly, misled, though not intentionally. But if you look through me, towards what I am pointing at because I can see some shadowy outlines, though not much more, then you might be able to discover something for yourself that is important and that might make a real difference in your life. Or else, go ahead and take your troubles to the big guys, get their big answers, and struggle with how you can fit them to your questions and to the place from where you are asking them.

But enough already. For what it’s worth, I really do believe the promises of the Path—though preferably in small doses and at low altitudes—even if much remains hearsay to me, with a few occasional noises carried from afar on the wind. How much my own confidence in the message owes to leaps of faith, how much to conjecture, how much to extrapolation from what I’ve seen, and how much to robust personal experience, I cannot tell for sure. It all flows together so much that I am unable to distinguish clearly where the lines and boundaries run, or what is causing what.

My degree of conviction and commitment waxes and wanes, admittedly; sometimes the flame burns more brightly, other times it is dimmed, occasionally it flickers in the breeze, very rarely it gasps in the gusts of life as if it might be extinguished; but it has never gone out again after being first lit. And so I can say, with no pretention to be being right, but also no hesitation or apology:

The Dhamma works even if it is not always apparent.

The Path leads somewhere even if progress is slow.

Liberation is possible even if I don’t think I will make it.

*There are different accounts circulating of his exact words, but I am giving the gist of it, based on how Jack Kornfield tells the story, though he was not there either and is going by how others told it to him (“Obstacles and Vicissitudes in Spiritual Practice,” in Spiritual Emergency, edited by Stanislaf and Christina Grof (New York: Penguin Putnam, 1989), p. 140).

**I don’t know how much Stephen Batchelor would approve of my characterization, but the way he speaks of stream-entry in his Confession of a Buddhist Atheist (esp. pp. 129–31 and 158–60) resonates especially with my own experience, such as it is, and I feel indebted to the account, though I cannot tell how much so.