Take nothing on blind faith, even my words - The Buddha
I hope you all have been trying some of the little things I have taught you, like smiling when you are feeling down. Maybe a few of you have even able to intervene occasionally when you are about to act without thinking. As I keep telling you, this class is not going to make you into a completely new person, but if you look for small positive changes in the way you live and your outlook on life, you will find them. These in turn can serve to help motivate you to continue your practice and improve even further.
So far, I haven't said much that's explicitly Buddhist, although I have been sneaking in Buddhist ideas without calling them that. Today we will begin our exploration of Buddhism with the story of the life of the Buddha. Then I will introduce you to your first really new meditation technique.
The Buddha was born about 500 B.C., probably in Nepal or perhaps Northern India. His father was a minor king, so he himself was a prince. He was raised a Hindu, so one fact to walk away with is this: the relationship between Hinduism and Buddhism is like the relationship between Judaism and Christianity. The Buddha was a Hindu who founded a new religion that retained many elements of Hinduism just like Jesus was a Jew who founded a new religion that retained many elements of Judaism. Meditation itself was a very old practice in Hindu circles by the time the Buddha was born and many metaphysical doctrines like the idea of reincarnation are classic Hindu ideas.
On the night the Buddha was conceived, his mother supposedly dreamed that a white elephant with six tusks entered her side, which was considered an omen that the child would be a very important person. 9 months later, she went into the garden and gave painless birth to a son, who she named Siddhartha Gautama. Painless or not, the birth did not go perfectly, because the queen died 7 days later. Siddhartha was then raised by his mother's sister and his father.
It is said that after his birth, many religious leaders came to the baby Siddhartha and made predictions that he would be a major religious leader. Now, the first responsibility of a king is to provide a male heir, so Siddhartha's dad was not at all pleased to have people telling him that his first born son was going to be a religious leader. So he decided to isolate the boy from the world, essentially locking him up in the palace. It was a big palace with fine grounds and the king made sure that Siddhartha had every pleasure he could wish for, so this was not so bad. For example, it is said that Siddhartha had his pick of the most beautiful women in the land for his entertainment. The king also decreed that Siddhartha should never be exposed to even the idea of pain and suffering. So no one could speak of illness or death in the prince's presence, and all those he encountered were young and healthy, etc. The idea, apparently, was to make sure that nothing awakened the kind of sympathetic need to help others that marks religious leaders.
Apparently this all worked just fine until the Prince was 29 years old and decided he wanted to get out of the palace and visit his people. The king tried to prevent this, but the prince was determined. So Siddhartha went forth in a chariot with his charioteer, Channa. Legend has it that they encountered an old man and, never having seen someone old, Siddhartha asked Channa what the deal was. Channa replied that this was an old person who was once young like him. "Will I become old?" asked Siddhartha. "Yes," said Channa, "All men grow old." Having lived such a sheltered life, Siddhartha no doubt found this idea unsettling, but he was determined to see more. On subsequent visits to the outside world he encountered a sick person and a corpse, both times being told that all men get sick and that all men die. Finally, he encountered a religious ascetic. When he asks about this person, Channa tells him that this is a man who has dedicated his life to escaping the suffering that is the lot of those who live in this world.
Siddhartha resolves that he too will become a religious ascetic and figure out the riddle of why people suffer and how they can escape it. One night, he takes one last look at his sleeping wife and child and then escapes from the palace. At this time in India (and even today, to some extent), there were lot of these religious ascetics. These were men who had dedicated their lives to a religious quest to free themselves of the sufferings of the world. They owned nothing except a yellow robe and an eating bowl. They would spend their days off by themselves or in small groups, studying religion and philosophy as well as practicing various techniques designed to help them escape suffering such as meditation and yoga. They eschewed worldly pleasures, eating only what people freely offered to place in their bowl, sleeping in the open on the ground, etc. It seems Siddhartha spent several years living with various of these religious men and he learned a host of meditation techniques. At one point, he gets frustrated that he still hasn't figured things out and so he starves himself until he almost dies. You will sometimes see statues of the Buddha as an emaciated man and these are designed to show him in this stage or pre-enlightenment. Incidentally, the fat laughing Buddha you see in Chinese restaurants is not THE Buddha, but Hotei, a 10th century Buddhist monk. He is often referred to as "the laughing Buddha" because he was always in a such good humor. The confusion probably arises from the fact that Hotei was A Buddha, but not THE Buddha. Anyone who attains enlightenment is A Buddha and since Siddhartha there have been many of these (like Hotei), but Siddhartha was the first and showed all the others the path, so he is the only one known as THE Buddha.
In any event, the attempt at starvation finally convinced Siddhartha of one thing: turning away from the world as the ascetics do is not the path to enlightenment. So after he recovers his strength, he resolves to find a middle way between the life of pleasure he led at the palace and the life of asceticism he has lived the last few years. He sits down under a Bodhi tree and promises himself he will meditate until he attains enlightenment. He is supposed to have meditated for 49 days until finally he attains enlightenment and earns the title of the Buddha. He is 35 years old. It is said that he considers not even trying to teach others, since the world is so full of suffering, hatred and ignorance and the way he has discovered to free ourselves from these things is difficult and subtle. But he decides to try to help his fellow man and thus spends the next 45 years traveling throughout the region and teaching anyone who will listen to him how to attain freedom from suffering, true happiness and the morally exemplary life. We will talk later about what he taught.
One final thing I wanted to talk about a bit is the question of whether or not Buddhism is a religion. The answer depends on what sort of Buddhism we are talking about and what you consider a religion to be. You can think of the Buddha as beginning basically a self help program that he pitched in different ways to different audiences. When he was talking to sophisticated philosophers, he couched his ideas in philosophical and psychological terms they could appreciate, and when he talked to illiterate peasants, he couched things in more metaphysical terms, talking about Gods and and reincarnation. I tend to sympathize with the Theravada tradition, which is ostensibly the oldest school of Buddhism and tries to stay as close as possible to the Buddha's original teachings. Thus I would argue that much of modern Buddhism, especially Tibetan Buddhism, has taken the original ideas and garnished them with many of the more metaphysical trappings of a traditional religion (the ideas of reincarnation, gods and goddesses, miracles attributed to the Buddha, etc.)
Of course, that's just where I personally come from. No matter how you slice it, though, Buddhism is clearly an outlier among the five major world religions. Different sects of Buddhism believe in different specifics, but it is certainly possible to be a devout Buddhist and not believe in God or heaven or indeed any particular metaphysical doctrine at all. Buddhists also take a dim view of the idea of faith as a justification for belief. They are very big on using your own reason to guide you in life - the Buddha himself famously exhorted his students to, "Take nothing on blind faith, even my words." In other religions you are often told to believe first in order to realize the benefits of belief, but in Buddhism it's much more typical to be told to try the techniques yourself and think through the philosophy using your own reason. If it these things help you and make sense, then use them - otherwise, drop them and move on. When it comes to particular metaphysical beliefs like reincarnation, you find the same pragmatism - if believing in doctrines like reincarnation helps you to become a better, happier person, that's fine. However, it is not necessary to do so. As you might imagine, Buddhists are also extremely tolerant of other ideas - for example, it is not uncommon for them to celebrate the holidays of other religions as a sign of respect. After all, just because they believe their techniques are effective does not mean other religions don't also help their adherents live better lives.
One lesson to take from this is that you can make Buddhism into a religion if you wish, and many people do, but you can also practice it as a way of life separate from religion. Certainly in Buddhist countries like Japan, people don't really think of Buddhism as a religion. When I was in Korea, people would ask me what my religion was and when I said, "I am a Buddhist," they would say something like, "Oh, well me too - but what is your religion?" Thus one can easily be a devout Christian and a Buddhist as well - and if you are, I think you will find the teachings of the two traditions complement each other in many ways. As a final historical aside, meditation used to be a very common practice with Christian monks, but for some reason it never became popular with the lay public in Christian communities. I wouldn't be surprised if you see this changing over the next 20 years or so as more and more people in the West learn about Buddhism...
Now, for today's meditation we are going to try something different. Today we will do Vipassana, which is a different kind of concentrative meditation. Here's what you do: you fill your mind, not with breathing and counting, but with the sensations coming from different parts of your body. You scan your body in a systematic fashion, "listening" to each part in turn and trying to gather as much sensation as possible from that part before moving on. The exact sequence you follow is not that important, but you want to cover your body in small segments and you don't want to linger too long on any one part. Here is the sequence I use:
top of the head
forehead
nose
mouth
left cheek
right cheek
neck
left upper arm
left lower arm
back of L hand
palm of L hand
each finger on L hand
each finger on R hand
back of R hand
palm of R hand
R forearm
R upper arm
upper chest
upper back
stomach
lower back
left buttock
left thigh
left lower leg
top of L foot
Bottom of L foot
each toe on L foot
each toe on R foot
bottom of R foot
top of R foot
R lower leg
R thigh
R buttock
spine
back to top of head
You want to pause one full breath on each part and then move on. It may take a few minutes before you can "hear" much, but after a while you will find yourself picking up on pretty subtle signals - you will be able to feel the pulse in your toes or very slight movements in a joint. You can even "hear" the way a body part feels when it is just there and nothing much is happening (for a challenge, try "listening" to the way your ears feel).
This is ultimately just a different type of concentrative meditation, but it has a very different flavor. This is actually one of my favorite methods and I often find myself losing track of time when I do this, so I am surprised when the timer tells me I have been there 20 minutes. This is a sign that you are really "in the zone". This kind of meditation is also a really good way to get in touch with your body. After doing this a while, it is much easier to listen to your body as you are doing everyday things. This is interesting in it's own right - trying really paying attention to the way your knee feels as you walk across campus and you have a kind of walking meditation. It also helps you appreciate the way your body works. Typically, we don't really pay attention to our body unless is it malfunctioning, but if you learn this technique, you can appreciate your knee when it is working fine and not just when it hurts. Appreciating the everyday things in life is an important practice for Buddhists.