Siddhārtha Gautama and the Journey to Enlightenment

Siddhārtha Gautama, who became known as the Buddha, began his life as a prince, pampered and surrounded by luxury. The journey what would change his life and the lives of millions who came after him began when he left the gates of his palace and saw the suffering around him for the first time. It was a devastating realization that such suffering is universal and unavoidable that spurred him on to a years-long quest for "the answer" to the challenge posed by the suffering of all humanity.

In the long run, he came up with a few insights that have been welcomed in the "West". He saw that much, if not all, suffering resulted from attachment to the things of this world - even attachment to the "self" and life itself. He recommended meditation as a way to let go of attachment. These days, Westernized Buddhists recommend meditation as a way of dealing with the stresses of "modern life". This is a a very long way from the problem that Buddha was up against.

I believe that, to appreciate Buddha's solution, one must appreciate Buddha's problem and, to whatever extent possible, tread in his footsteps.

All religions born in the Indian continent take reincarnation for granted, just as religions born in the Middle East take the existence of God for granted. For Buddha, the problem was not just to escape suffering, but to escape the endless wheel of suffering. If one believes that he will be endlessly reincarnated into a horrible world of suffering, it's easy to see how the basic problem would be amplified. Even if you are a prince in this life, you would inevitably be re-born as a cockroach in another. How to escape this fate? It is important to understand that this was the ultimate "problem" that Buddha tackled. The modern seeker must come to terms with the fact that Buddha's "problem" was created to a large part by a false belief in the nature of reality. A modern, skeptical seeker (such as a follower of Zen) must ask if Buddha's "solution" really is valid for today.

Since Buddha was wrong in his fundamental assumptions, we need to go back and join him in his original journey and experience what he experienced. We need to truly feel the tragedy of human existence and seek to come to personal terms with it. We need to wrap our minds around a few unpleasant aspects of reality:

• Each of us will suffer
• Each of us will die
• Everything around us is impermanent

Armchair Buddhists claim to "accept" such inconvenient truth, but were perhaps never bothered by it in the first place. Buddhism is not about feeling good or about feeling nothing. It is about feeling compassion. We are all in this together and somehow this helps. A bit.

The problem is not so different with Christians. Jesus, like everyone around him, took the existence of God for granted. He felt the call to compassion as a divine imperative. Where else would such a call come from? For the modern skeptic, the question is: does the call remain if you doubt or reject the source of the call?

Zen presents the problem in the starkest of terms. In Zen, the "self" is a fiction. All ideas are delusions. What is left? The simple answer is: Whatever "this" is, we are all in it together. That is the response of compassion. It is a free-floating human response, requiring no justification, proof or pre-condition. Your options are to accept it or to wrap yourself in delusion and try to convince yourself that somehow, in spite of all evidence to the contrary, things will be OK.