The Gift of Adversity

There is a book out there with the excellent title, "What Makes You not a Buddhist." It's a short, simple book, aimed towards a Western audience, that serves as a sort of response to the Western notion of Buddhism. It provides many excellent points, but its essential purpose is to draw the reader away from the allure of chants, beads, schools, and mysticism and back to the essential teaching of the historical Buddha. To be a Buddhist, the book claims, you need only believe in the Four Noble Truths. All is suffering. Suffering is borne from desire. To stop suffering, one must also end desire. The eightfold path is the process by which one can end desire and escape the endless cycle of suffering. All Buddhist practice - prayer, meditation, devotion, visualization, and so on - is simply a set of tools that the individual takes up to better align their mind to the truth.

Even if one does not know much else about Buddhism, these simple set of truths can have a powerful influence on us if we embrace them. We think so much about suffering and how to end it, but rarely are we willing to trace that suffering back to its source and adjust our mindsets to deal with the root cause. In a similar sense, the absence of suffering does not necessarily mean that someone is closer too buddhahood than someone who is overcome by it. The historical Buddha began his life as a prince who wanted for nothing and was protected from all evidence of suffering, but this didn't result in him spontaneously achieving enlightenment. It was exposure to suffering that forced him to examine his own understanding of how the world works, and his struggle with the problem of worldly suffering that ultimately led to his enlightenment. How can one find the answer if the problem never manifests itself?

In our lives we are beset by problems that seem out of our control. We get into car crashes, we lose our jobs, are passed over for scholarships, contract illness, get into fights with people we love, and on and on. Most of the time it feels like these problems are external, and they are, in some sense, but the emotions that come in reaction to them, the anger, frustration, disappointment, and despair, comes from nowhere but inside of us.

In the US we all live with certain expectations. For the most part, Americans expect things to be on time. We expect that when we flip a switch the light will turn on. We expect that when we pay with a ten dollar bill the person we are paying will be able to make change. We expect that when we go to a business on a business day, it will be open, and when it is open, it will provide us what it advertises. We even expect that when we visit a bathroom there will be a roll of toilet paper waiting for us there.

Moving to a new place, where daily life often comes into conflict of our expectations, provides us with a neverending supply of disappointment and frustration, if we let it. My day on Saturday was a good example.

The day started with an adjustment. While we usually have our weekends free, a speaker had to reschedule and so we had a lecture in the morning. Most of the time the lectures go for one hour, since soon after that we have to be at our placements, so I arranged for a car to pick me up at 12:30 so I could go to the library and do some research for my project. It turned out that this lecture ended up going long, and although it was my favorite of the set I was antsy the whole time, knowing that I was keeping my driver waiting.

At about 1 we got out and I rushed up to the car to get to the library. I had forgotten that the entire Tibetan Central Authority shuts down from 1 to 2 for lunch, so when I arrived around 1:30 I couldn't actually get into the building. I had some lunch of my own to pass the time, and when 2 came around was ready to get to work. Except, the library was out of power, and the electronic catalog was inaccessible. They still maintain a card catalog, so this wasn't as much of a problem as it could have been. I got yelled at by the attendant for taking a card out of the box, and then was told that I had to wait for the power to turn on before they could retrieve any of the books I had selected for me. I spent the rest of the hour browsing through a few of the books in the reading room, but by the time I had to leave the power had still not turned on and I never managed to use the books I had come for.

There was a lot that did not go right that day. Our program is set up such that we only have a certain amount of time to take care of things, so the fact that we only had a few hours out of the whole trip to make attempts at going to the library made the problems that day even more pronounced. But at every point I had a choice in how to deal with what was happening. It would be easy to get angry at the library for only being open at times when I couldn't visit, or to yell at the assistant for not helping me get what I needed. But in the grand scheme of things, what would that have gotten me?

If you make concessions in life but harbor anger over it you invite suffering. It's only when you release the emotions that come from problems that you really overcome them. But this doesn't mean the answer to every problem is to shrug and let it overcome you. Living like that will just make you passive and nihilistic. So how does one marry the idea that desire leads to suffering with he understanding that as people of flesh and blood we have needs and sometimes we must fight for our causes. No one would suggest that the Tibetans simply accept what is happening to them and look inward for the solution, for example. For this problem we might look to the example of the Bodhisattva to provide some illumination on Buddhism's approach to social action and aid.

The Bodhisattva are a group of beings who have attained enlightenment but have decided to remain on the physical plane to provide aid to all people until every last one has attained Nirvana. They represent the compassion of Buddhism, and the proof that while Buddhism stresses the internal journey to enlightenment it does not encourage self-absorption at the cost of the suffering of others. Buddhism is also called a practical religion, in the sense that whatever helps one attain enlightenment is a step in the right direction. In "Buddhism and Social Action: An Exploration" by Ken Jones, he explains that "Buddhist social action is justified ultimately and above all by the existence of social as well as individual karma. Immediately it is simply concerned with relieving suffering; ultimately, in creating social conditions which will favor the ending of suffering through the individual achievement of transcendent wisdom." Combine compassion towards all beings with a desire to create the environment that can provide for their enlightenment, and you can see why we may have to fight for things, even if we believe that it's all transient anyway.

There is some paradox in the desire to free the world of desire, and the resolution of that paradox is far beyond the scope of this little meditation. The world is complicated, and the solution to our problems is not simple. But we can take steps towards a better life, and eventually enlightenment, by being mindful of our own emotional obstructions and by working towards creating a world where others can focus on the Buddha's teachings without being distracted by hardship.