Post #71: Giving Up

12 Oct. 2023

“Doo doo doo

Down dooby doo down down

Comma, comma, down dooby doo down down

Comma, comma, down dooby doo down down

Giving up is hard to do!”

— To the tune of “Breaking Up Is Hard To Do” by Neil Sedaka

We often talk as if giving up and quitting were the same; but they look quite distinct to me. You might give up on looking good but still take regular showers, wear decent clothes, and get your hair cut occasionally—maybe even keep applying your conditioner and magic ointments to defend a receding hairline that you consider a lost cause.

You might also give up on your job and still keep going to work, perhaps even go from the outset, as Bukowski’s alter ego professes in Factotum, with a sense that you will soon quit or be fired anyway (“it gave me a relaxed manner that was mistaken for intelligence or some secret power”). You might give up on friends and family, frail and foible-ridden creatures that we all are, but keep seeing them anyway; give up on your country but hold on to your passport; give up on your meditation but still do your sittings; and even give up on a blog, or on the prospects for respectable levels of literacy in our world, but keep on writing and posting as if nothing had happened.

Indeed we may have to give up in this way eventually, all of us, even on life itself—and maybe that is not such a bad thing. Which is not to say that it’s easily done. Far from it. I would contend that despite all appearances to the contrary, it’s in fact very hard to do properly, because doing it right requires a lightheartedness that leaves no room for resentment. (Hold on tightly, let go lightly, as I put it in Post #19.) Throwing everything down and going on a sulk doesn’t qualify as giving up in this sense; it’s just venting your inner rage. Real giving up should come with a sense of relief, I would guess—though I can’t be sure because, while I have quit things in a huff often enough, I’m no good at all when it comes to giving up. Perhaps one may expect it to become easier with time, as the years close in on us and force our hand; but I’m not so sure. Resentment can follow us all the way to the grave, sad to say, and often does; so I wouldn’t look to wretched ageing (“shameful maker of ugliness,” as the Buddha called it) to fix anything even in this limited respect.

I wouldn’t say that I’ve given up on my meditation yet, but perhaps I am getting there. I know that my 10,000 hours are nothing more than a mental construct, but I keep feeding the chimera anyway because it may help me, somewhat paradoxically, with giving up eventually. Cross the line, see that it changes nothing (as expected), give up. Maybe. So far I haven’t been able to give up on the blog either, but let’s see how I feel after a hundred posts that get a visitor or two a day between them. Giving up on the last remains of youthful vigor and vitality, such as it is, will be harder; giving up on life itself may prove hardest of all, but then again, who knows.

But wait, why do I feel such a nagging sense of having left out something vital? Oh dear, I forgot the most important part: giving up on yourself without lapsing into self-loathing or developing an unhealthy interest in ropes, bridges, and sailor’s knots. Begone, great expectations, grand ideas about what you are or could or should be, heroic visions and desperate projections of specialness—which must invariably come with a fatal Achilles heel, a Siegfried spot unprotected by the dragon’s blood, because they cannot but make you feel worthless by comparison. Am I thereby consigning all self-improvement to the dumpster—per aspera ad astra nevermore—and proclaiming the end of every effort and aspiration, the sanctification of the inner slob, the triumph of the eternal couch potato over any higher, better, nobler you? No more vexatious thoughts of what you might become, just a love-fest of self-indulgent repulsiveness, pig-out time at last, no questions asked, no account of yourself required, warts and farts and all, hallelujah? Hardly. Acceptance of the realities of the moment, including self-acceptance, does not mean license to gaze with delight at your own navel forever after, as if it were the center of the universe and the measure of all things. What needs to be accepted, on the contrary, is your very inadequacy and insufficiency! You give up on getting nearer all the glitter in the sky—just fire in the heavens and so very, very far away—so that you might, freed of expectations you can never meet, be able to keep walking more steadily and gladly, with less of a burden to drag along. A weird dynamic, I would be the first to admit; don’t ask me to justify it to you, since I am as taken aback by it as anyone. But it makes its own kind of sense.

One could go on to talk of giving up on the world, especially in view of the reports from Israel or Ukraine, one suggesting despair because a resolution seems all-but impossible, the other because the armistice lines on which it will almost certainly be ended, years and hundreds of thousands of deaths from now, look so obvious. (See my recent article on Christmas 1914 for some suggestive parallels.) One could also turn to something more seemingly innocuous: the contemptible stickman gracing the cover of last week’s Economist—The Economist!—with feet occupying easily twenty times the diminutive space left for any speck of a brain. And this in an issue about the prospects for living to 120! No thank you. This too suggests despair to me, not because it is so bloodily hellish, but because of how wretched a picture it paints of what we do with peace and prosperity. Let be the world at large with its never-ending troubles, big and small; our little corners of it give us altogether enough lost causes to grapple with.* Give up hope all ye who enter here—and then get back to work.

And back to more heartening angles. One of the most charming stories about Ananda tells of how he was initially excluded from the council of senior monks who gathered a few months after the Buddha’s death to recollect what they had heard and find ways to preserve it for future generations. Ananda had stipulated, as a condition of becoming the Buddha’s personal attendant twenty-five years earlier, that he must be allowed to hear every discourse, or if he ever had to miss one for some unavoidable reason, that it would get repeated to him in private. He was also said to possess such a prodigious memory that he could recite this dauting corpus at will (a feat somewhat less incredible in a pre-literate setting than it would be in our post-literate times). Yet he was not considered an advanced enough meditator to be invited to the assembly (or that is how Goenka tells the story in his Satipatthana Discourses, see also Cullavaga 11.1.6).

So poor Ananda set to work, hoping to catch up with his peers in time for the great gathering. He worked tirelessly, pushing and pushing, day after day and night after night, but no matter how much he exerted himself, he was unable to close the gap. Finally, on the last night before the council, having done all he could and gotten nowhere, he realized that it was not to be. He simply was not a liberated being and therefore would not get to attend. So he gave up, turned over to his night lamp, put it out, and hit the pillow. And at that very moment, the inner gates with which he had struggled so relentlessly suddenly gave way and he attained what had eluded him so painfully before. (This does not mean that you are likely to find enlightenment on your pillow, but it is a revealing anecdote, embellished though it no doubt is.)

Thus the more uplifting version of the story. But there is a darker take on it, perhaps equally valid and instructive, which speaks to the difficulties of the newly leaderless Sangha at this time of crisis and confusion. The Buddha had preached resolute self-reliance, exhorting his students to make islands and refuges of themselves and the Dhamma, no one else and nothing more (Digha Nikaya 16.2.26). But the inveterate human habit of always looking to others for guidance and validation being what it is, the nascent Buddhist community felt rudderless now that their Awakened One had departed. Kassapa, a stern old former Brahmin who claimed a special relationship with the Buddha, stepped into the leadership void, and the other monks promptly entrusted him with selecting the members of what later became known as the First Council.

In other words, there was a power struggle going on, as Stephen Batchelor puts it more bluntly than I would dare,** and Kassapa had his reasons for not being keen on including Ananda, though he had to relent at the last minute, presumably on account of pressure from the other monks. Apart from more strategic considerations, Kassapa seems not to have had much faith in Ananda’s ability to keep himself together (and the young monks under his care in line) during such a critical time. And perhaps his concerns were not altogether unfounded, given that we do have it on record how the Buddha himself on several occasions half-chided and half-consoled Ananda over how unduly distraught he was wont to get at the deaths of senior monks, and at the prospect of losing the Buddha himself, spells of bitter weeping and all (see Samyutta Nikaya 47:9&13, Digha Nikaya 16.5.13).

When the dreaded day came, Ananda was badly shaken up—not at all the model monk, imperturbable by the transient events of the world, that Kassapa took himself to be. What was even more irritating, Ananda remained a great favorite with the nuns, not only on account of his much greater charm, but also because they had not forgotten his championing of their cause—still a sore point with many of the senior monks. Hence the testy exchange in which the elderly Kassapa called Ananda a “boy” (who needed to get his act together), and Ananda (then already in his fifties) replied by pointing to his gray hair and grumbling whether they could not please be done with such condescending talk (see Samyutta Nikaya 16:10–11).

I have trouble following Stephen Batchelor when he attributes a “sense of failure” to the Buddha at the end of his life, but I think he is quite right to pause over just how bleak circumstances looked at the time.* When the Buddha was denounced, by a former personal attendant no less, before the parliament of the Vajjians, he bore it with good humor, retorting that he felt more praised than condemned by what had been said against him; but such betrayals, especially the machinations of his devious cousin Devadetta, and several assassination attempts to boot, would hardly have lightened his days, even if his enemies’ worst designs kept coming to naught.

The Buddha’s two great kingly patrons on the respective sides of the Ganges were both deposed by scheming sons towards the end of the Buddha’s life: Bimbisara of Magadha getting locked away and being left to starve in his cell, Pasenadi of Kosala dying on the run outside the gates of Rajagaha, where his beloved daughter had been queen ever since he, Pasendi, had been reduced to giving her, by way of conciliation after an inconclusive war, to Ajatasattu, Bimbisara’s parricidal son (who did, saving grace, repent before long). Nor were the Buddha’s own people spared, quite the contrary: around the time of his death, the Sakyans were extirpated, down to the last infant it was said, in a punitive expedition by Pasenadi’s enraged son, Prince Vidudabba, the other usurper of his father’s throne, over a cruel and catastrophically haughty deception the Sakyans had perpetrated on their Kosalan neighbors and overlords.

The Buddha’s two most trusted and capable senior disciples—Sariputta and Moggallana—had also died recently, the one of illness, the other at the hands of brigands, leaving the Buddha as deprived as it is perhaps possible for a liberated being to feel: he sighed that the assembly of monks looked empty to him now without them (Samyutta Nikaya 47:14).*** He was saddened, too, at taking his leave of the beautiful city of Vesali for what he expected to be the last time. Soon after, he fell violently ill from a dish of bad pork or mushrooms, served to him by the smith Cunda, probably with the tragic intention of offering something especially fine to his honored guest. So violent were the pains from his virulent diarrhea that the Buddha admitted to feeling wearied, saintly equanimity or not (Samyutta Nikaya 16.4.1&21). Would it be untoward to detect the slightest note of exasperation creeping in, as his end was nearing, when he was urged by the monks to give them yet another discourse about what he had already said to them so many, many times before: “What more, Ananda, do the monks expect of me, old and worn out as I now am, when for forty-five years I have never withheld anything from them?” (Digha Nikaya 16.2.25)

Does any of this mean that the Buddha might, like another putative savior of mankind, have felt forsaken at the last minute? I am uncomfortable with the idea, much as I empathize with Batchelor’s struggles around being considered (and perhaps at times even considering himself) “a Buddhist failure” (see chapters 1 and 7). We need to be wary, I think, of projecting the terms of our own lives on those of liberated beings, or at least of doing so in full; but I agree, at the same time, that our own frustration with so often lacking the wherewithal to make things come out right, for ourselves or for others, can leave us too ready to do the opposite—namely treat the great human models we most admire as if they had all the powers we lack so painfully, hence imagining that the Buddha (or any other savior of one’s preference) could have done no wrong, and that he could not possibly have gotten disheartened since he must have been able to foresee how, despite all the difficulties at the time, his teachings would prevail and still serve to inspire and sustain countless millions of human beings thousands of years later.

The temptation is great, no doubt, but succumbing to it would mean depriving our model human beings of much of their humanity, which is precisely about sometimes having every reason to give up, and no way of knowing what triumphs or compensations may still lie ahead—and then going on with unbroken determination (if not always undiminished enthusiasm), not because the situation inspires hope, but because the boulder remains to be pushed, the right thing remains to be done, and love does not ask for a return on its labors.

PS: An urgent word of warning to anyone under thirty (at least). You may be tempted to conclude, even in your teens and twenties, that the show is not worth the price of admission, and the game not worth the exertion it requires—hence to walk away in disgust. It won’t do. Whether your assessment is correct or not, you are expected to get up your pluck, exert yourself on that damn boulder, and earn some bruises as the visible marks of your effort. Hiding from life’s challenges or giving up before you have properly begun won’t do you any good; all it will accomplish is to draw upon yourself the scathing contempt of the world. In the young, even the sagest counsels—unearned by bruising experience—only sound callow, and although life is bound to prove too much for anyone’s strength before the end, you still need to give it all you can while you can. As Saul Bellow writes so very truly in Herzog, “You have to fight for your life. That’s the chief condition on which you hold it.” Yes, defeat awaits you, as it does all of us, eventually; then you are allowed to give up. But not before.

*”Evil at large is none of your business,” as William James put it in a lecture at Harvard on whether life is worth living (15 April 1895), “until your business with your private particular evils is liquidated and settled up.”

**See his Confession of a Buddhist Atheist (Spiegel & Grau 2011), p. 231. Although Batchelor goes further than I am comfortable going (see also the reference to “Gotama’s sense of failure” on p. 216), his chapters 17 and 18 offer a very thought-provoking perspective on the situation of the Sangha at the time of the Buddha’s death, and my passing reflections here are much-indebted to Batchelor’s more thorough discussion.

***The Scriptures do not mention any sigh, of course—and I have it too, the little voice in my head dismissing with indignation the very idea that a liberated being would ever make such undignified noises. What next: a liberated being crying? Ridiculous!

All right, all right, I have trouble imagining it too; but what do I know of liberated beings? All I do know is that human beings do such things, and that someone completely unmoved by natural impulses would fill me with more suspicion than reverence. I pass no judgment on the little voice: it may well be right. But it could also be the echo, not of profound insight, but of how we unenlightened ones imagine those who have gone beyond our range of comprehension.

In our ignorance of their condition, we are bound to see them incompletely, or distortedly, and I wonder whether the real mark of the liberated might not be something far more interesting than the imperturbable, ever-serene smiles that we invariably paint on their faces: namely their ability to sigh (perhaps even to weep, who knows) without heartbreak—that is, to do more or less what we do, subject to all the ordinary human impulses of nature, but to remain at every moment so deeply immersed in the awareness of impermanence, and so suffused with loving kindness, that these familiar human things acquire quite a different meaning.

I don’t know, nor do I pretend to, as I’ve been at pains to stress throughout (especially in the last post, #70). I am merely reflecting, thinking out loud about matters that are of great interest, surely, though beyond the limits of my experience and understanding. Perhaps that should make me shut up; but last I heard there were not enough fully liberated beings around to do all the talking. And even if there were more of them (and they were more easily found and certified) we would still be liable to misunderstanding them unless we were at their level, in which case there wouldn’t be much to say.

It’s unfortunate, I agree, but even if there really were a way to ascend, step by step, towards the light of Truth (as Plato imagined), we could still only get there by using our dim cave-conceptions and refining them bit by bit. (How terribly frustrating this can be catches up with me every time I must endure another round of scathing academic reviews—but perhaps, behind the wretchedness of the endless paper cuts, they serve a well-disguised higher purpose too, teaching the recipient to finally let go the fruits of his actions, in the words of the Bhagavad Gita that I have invoked repeatedly, though still unable to live by them.) And thus back to the mantra of mantras: it’s a long, long way to Tipperary…