Buddha and his Minions

Buddha lived around 2500 BC but the first written record of his teachings aren’t until a few hundred years later. Given that gap you’d have to expect there was a bit of deviation from what the man actually said and what we think he said.

Apparently he was a wealthy man surrounded by abject poverty and for some reason he felt more than a little guilty and unhappy about this. Somewhere along the way he also decided that the causes of suffering in life were extremely hard to avoid.

So he did a little self development to relieve himself of his wealth, his guilt and unhealthy contact with other mentally polluted humans, and then, like all other prophets, he inexplicably decided to share his learnings so that others less capable had an easier path to follow.

Here is where it gets interesting. Buddhism teaches four ‘Nobel Truths’ but history shows that they were composed centuries after his death and that Buddha’s teachings may have been personal and adjusted to the needs of each person.

In any case the ‘thermodynamics’ of Buddhism as it is practised today are:

1. All conditional phenomena and experiences are not ultimately satisfying which oddly enough is taught as ‘suffering is universal’. I think Buddha must have got to the Nihilist position where asked himself ‘how do I know I even exist?’ and then backed off and thought ‘that Nihilist thought feels depressing’.

2. More explicitly, he decided that the craving for and clinging to what is pleasurable and aversion to what is not pleasurable leads to dissatisfaction (and a bit of mumbo jumbo also added about reincarnation for the loopies)

3. That putting an end to the craving and clinging also means that dissatisfaction can no longer arise (a bit superfluous this one, added for those dummies who couldn’t figure this out from the previous one)

4. The fourth one is the plug for the religion that follows. Literally, ‘but wait there’s more. With every donation we will teach you completely free of charge the Noble eight-fold path to happiness’.

What I like about the eightfold path is that it works on two levels.

The surface level; if you follow this ‘kinetic’ how-to-be-guide you will become a happy and content person (with the added promise of being reborn as a higher being for the not-so-bright amongst us) and this happiness will result from your own smug and detached actions of the eightfold path.

But in fact Buddha’s grand and cunning plan was for everyone to follow the eightfold path which would then collectively remove everyone’s causes of suffering, i.e. the nasty actions of other people.

In other words, Buddha’s cunning religion worked at two levels.

First, by asceticism and meditation one could physically and/or mentally remove oneself from a world full of suffering caused by the actions of other humans.

Secondly, if everyone did this then there would be no human causes of suffering and everyone could come out their ascetic-meditative state into Nirvana/Heaven, where everyone is just nice to each other.

It’s a lovely idea but it hasn’t worked out so well. But who knows, maybe at times throughout history there have been times when enough people bought into the eightfold path and as a result the suffering index was on ‘low’ for a while.

Just for completeness the eightfold path was eight actions one could practice to achieve all the things that Buddha had dreamt of achieving.

One must aim to have the ‘right’ view, intention, speech, action, livelihood, effort, mindfulness & concentration.

The eightfold actions all start with the word ‘right’ which denotes completion, togetherness, and coherence, and a sense of perfect, wise or ideal.

That is, ‘right’ is bloody subjective and these are definitely guidelines and not rules.