“Looking In On the View of Life: The First of Buddhism's Eight-Fold Path”

A Sermon for West Seattle Unitarian Universalist Fellowship
March 7, 2004
Rev. Peg Boyle Morgan

“THE LIGHT YOU SEEK IS IN YOUR OWN LANTERN”
“Life's a bitch and then you die!”
Who said this?
Maybe Jay Leno or Conan O'Brian??
No, it was someone older. Maybe Lenny Bruce or - - - ?
No, someone older than him.
It was the Buddha!
The first of his Four Noble Truths is “Life is Suffering.”
He then went on to say that everyone, no matter how rich or powerful, has only old-age, sickness and death to look forward to.
“Life's a bitch and then you die!” What a terrible and fatalistic view.
But after saying this the Buddha gave us an antidote to this dreary outlook.
He said: “There are reasons for this suffering.”
And there is a way to drastically diminish or eliminate suffering.”
And the way is the Noble eightfold path—a middle way that begins with viewing life rightly.”

At an early age the Buddha had his view of the world blocked by his father.

His father was a powerful ruler. When he was born, just 600 years before Jesus, the Buddha was named Siddhartha Gautama.  His father's prophets made a prediction made about him:  that he would either become a great ruler like his father, or he would become a great religious teacher.
His father wanted him to be a ruler, like himself. He thought that by only showing his son the perks of power he would influence Gautama’s path to that of becoming even a greater ruler than himself.

They lived in a huge palace, covering a great area of land. The boy Gautama was raised by warriors and military men. He was a natural. As he grew up he became great with the bow and lance. And he could ride horses like he was glued to them. He was strong so that in hand to hand combat he could soon beat the best.

His nights were spent in the camaraderie of men, drinking and joking, and mingling with the hundreds of dancing girls of the court. He eventually married one, and had a son.
But he was never allowed outside the confines of the palace.
He was never allowed to see what really went on in the world.
As the other members of the palace grew old they were whisked away, out of his sight.

If they grew ill they were hidden form his view.
And if they died, their bodies just disappeared.

You see, his father didn't want him to see normal suffering of mortals for fear that he would develop compassion and seek the path of the comforter.

Guatama could tell that he was being manipulated.
He snuck out of the palace to see what was going on.
and for the first time, he saw old-age, sickness and death.
He ultimately left the palace, even though it meant leaving his wife and son.

His father had blocked his view of things as they are, and when he saw the truth it set him on the path of becoming one of the world's great teachers.

In his elder years, when his reputation for wisdom and miracles preceded him wherever he went, people would ask him who he was.  Are you a God?  Buddha would answer “No”  An angel?  “No”.  A saint?  “No.”  Who are you?  Buddha answered “I am awake.”

Indeed, the name and word Buddha means “awakened one.”  His awakening did not come easily.  After many years of self-imposed privation, he decided that wisdom would not come from either extreme self-denial or from attachment to the wealth of his home palace.  He would begin living a middle way, and underwent a deep spiritual transformation or “awakening.” 

The Buddha would live until he was 80, spending his life traveling throughout India, teaching kings and beggars, farmers and criminals.   The people of Buddha’s time were very much like we are.  They had many questions about their lives.  Some of them were the big questions we find ourselves asking:  Is there a God?  Is there an after life?  Is the world eternal?  But to these questions Buddha was silent.  He had no use for speculative questions, posed by esoteric philosophers  He felt that debates about unanswerable questions were useless. 

Instead, Buddha addressed day to day problems, the places in our lives where we get stuck.  For again, like us, the people of his day struggled with figuring out their image and place in their families, they struggled with their body image, they found themselves at times overreacting to something someone said to them, losing their perspective and their tempers; they sometimes obsessed about unimportant things, feeling lonely, and feeling envy, and bruised ego—just to name a few of the feelings I have felt!  How about you?

Buddha offers us a way of looking at life that helps us understand these experiences, and at the same time giving us some answers as to how to live more freely and more peacefully. 

The Buddha said that the reason we suffer is our being too attached to our desires..  We are attached to our own opinions and to being correct; we are attached to our possessions, to our dreams, to our loved ones.  We are attached to our youthful bodies, our physical pleasures, we are attached to our accomplishments and the esteem we hope to earn.  We cling to our things, our plans, our desires, our relationships and –the big one, we are attached to our lives. 

Now he is not saying that we should avoid all pleasures and hopes and dreams.  Thank goodness.  I’m not going to suggest you or I begin an ascetic life.   But neither should we become so obsessed by our pleasures that we cannot let them go.  So how do we enjoy the pleasures of our life journey, but not make our happiness depend on any one of them?

RIGHT VIEW
The first step on this path is Right View.  All of Buddhism begins and ends with Right View, which means that ALL that we do and feel and think in life will be affected by how we view life.  Right View doesn’t mean “correct” view in any scientific, or moral or political sense.  This is not about dogma.  It doesn’t mean a snap shot, like a fixed picture taken with a camera.  It is more like an adverb, from the Sanskrit word “samyak” meaning in the right way.  It is a way of seeing life. 

Simone Weil offers us a passionate opinion about seeing life.  She was a Jewish woman who lived in France when the Germans invaded, and a profound spiritual thinker and writer.  She said  there is much we can’t control in our lives, the place and time of our birth, the culture and events of our lives—but what we do have control over, and the imperative of our freedom, is that we are truly “… free to choose which way we look.”  We do decide where to fix our gaze.  Where we gaze provides us our view of life, and influences ALL that we think and do. 

For the Buddha, seeing life in the right way starts with seeing life as it is, --continually changing. 

Life is characterized by constant becoming.  This is not always so obvious to us.  While asparagus may grow inches right before our eyes, and the evening primrose may put on a show for us, as it opens in a brief few moments--our own becoming and the becoming of people we care about is often more subtle.  Our growth and change hibernates for a while.  Things gestate out of view.  Changes can be very slow, but they can add up over time, like when after two years of dating my husband Wayne, living it up and eating out frequently, we both finally got on the scale—yikes! or like when you arrive at your high school reunion and see how much all your classmates have aged! 

The hard part of change is the loss, parents grow older, and we lose them to illness and Alzheimer’s; as our pets age, we face loss of their companionship; a passionate and romantic relationship loses its intensity.  Our workplace transforms itself and we find ourselves challenged to keep our position, having to learn new skills or look for other work. 

But would we have it any other way?  While change and the very real loss that we experience with change is painful, change can also be a blessing.  How often have you been relieved when a phase of your life was over, a relationship finally terminated, chemotherapy done, childbirth finished, school finished!  More recently in my life, as I have been being more conscious of impermanence, I have been consoled—in the midst of a struggle or disagreement—that this too will pass.  Change can be such a blessing! 

What would life be like if nothing changed?  What if there would be nothing to anticipate around the corner, no new friends, no plans, nothing to learn or explore? The possibility of change energizes us, gives us hope, gets us up in the morning.   No change, for me, would be depressing.  For we would have nothing to work towards, personally and as a people—there would be no hope for humanity’s struggles.  Instead—right before our eyes, the subtle, gestating change in attitudes about sexual preference is giving birth in a revolution before our eyes, with the growing approval of same sex marriage.  If impermanence was not the law of life, we would not be experiencing this largest of civil rights movements since the movement for racial equality.  For young people who were not alive in the 60’s and 70’s, this is their first view of humanity’s movement towards greater justice. 

Impermanence is the big Truth of life—a source of grief and a source of joy.    

One of the Buddhist sutras, or records of his teachings, teaches impermanence.  In it the Buddha sees our lives and everything in it—
            …
Like stars fading and vanishing at dawn,
Like bubbles on a fast moving stream,
Like morning dewdrops evaporating on blades of grass,
Like a candle flickering in a strong wind,
Echos, mirages, and phantoms, hallucinations,
And like a dream. 
                        (from The Eight Similes of Illusion, The Prajna Paramita Sutras)

This truth of impermanence calls us to learn the art of both sensitive engagement to nudge and influence change, in the direction of our values--while maintaining a healthy detachment.   And it would have us learn the art of gentle holding to what we love, and with the art of timely letting go.  We are called to live our lives with a caring, but light touch. 

This reminds me of this poem by Mary Oliver:

            To live in this world
            You must be able
            To do three things:

            To love what is mortal;
            To hold it against your bones
            As if your life depended upon it
            And when the time comes
            To let it go….to let it go. 

And so to not be able to let go is going to cause suffering.  Of course the big element of impermanence is the fact of death itself.  As I have said in memorial services, we learn to possess our griefs as a measure of our loves—and grieve we must, when we lose something or someone precious--but even our grief would best eventually give way to re-engaging in life.  And with the consciousness of our own death being a very real reality, (and believe me, as I approach 60 this is becoming clearer to me!) every day that we wake up becomes all the more blessed and meaningful. 

Impermanence—the first way to view life rightly.

Then the Buddha says, the only unchanging part of our lives is our being.  And what a mystery our being is.  Buddha says that the second way of viewing life is to see that we are all connected and affect each other.  Interbeing, he called it.  This is his way of explaining KARMA.  Not the KARMA that says I’ll come back as a worm if I throw dirt on other people.  But a sense of more immediate cause and effect--Everything that happens to us is the result of causes and conditions arising in the midst of our lives, and our decisions and actions become causes and conditions that affect other people.  This is very much like our seventh principle:  “the interdependent web of all existence.”  This perspective calls us to be sensitive to the affects we have on others.  And, it allows us a sense of connection with each other, and ultimately to the finest measure of our lives:  compassion.  Buddha would suggest that we ought to look not to thoughts of individual salvation, but rather to a universal interconnectedness—that we are all in this living and dying together.  We are all in the same boat, and we ought to coordinate our rowing. 

Impermanence and Interbeing—two ways of viewing life rightly.

If the Buddha were here today, he would tell us that we should not follow his advice just because he says so. He said:  “Do not accept what you hear by report, do not accept tradition, do not accept a statement because it is found in our books, nor because it is the saying of your teacher.  Be ye lamps unto yourselves.” 

The third way of viewing rightly is to view from your inside.  The Buddha believed that wisdom could not be taught.  You can hear ideas, thoughts, and advice; but you need to take those ideas, values and advice and live them to test them out.  That’s what wisdom is—experienced values.  Wisdom is known only through one’s lived experience. 

“Be ye lamps unto yourselves” came from Buddha, a human being who was not taught to think for himself as a child.  Many of us in this room have been through the struggle Buddha had of deciding to live his life in a way not in accordance with his parents wishes.  For some of us, our parents were kind and inclusive of our decisions.  For others, you struggled for a long time with their disapproval, subtle or not. 

So when the Buddha says, test out ideas in your own lived experience, he is sharing his own conclusions from living life in many settings, extremes of wealth, poverty and the middle way.   He isn’t saying that we come to wisdom easily or that our decisions will be greeted with hurrahs from all around us.  He does not suggest that there is a supernatural authority figure we should follow, nor does he suggest that we should follow a long religious tradition just because it has longevity; He does not suggest that if we do not believe a certain way, we then need fear death and the terrors of a hell.  He wasn’t trying to establish a new religion, and he didn’t see himself as a God; “don’t pray to me when I’m gone.”  He said.  “When I’m gone, I’m gone.”  

He was only sharing his lived experience with us, in hopes of giving us a little jumpstart on becoming awake, on getting in touch with our own Buddha light.  Being awake is seeing life as it is, viewing life rightly.    He is saying that the light we seek we already have—we are illumined inside with it, and we know it as love and compassion, though we forget sometimes, while our society tosses us this way and that, telling us what to think—we forget to look inside.

The light you seek is in your own lantern.

Sometimes we find inside a wisdom that goes counter to that all around us.  There was a news story recently about a local man whose wife and darling little daughter were killed in a head on collision, caused by a high school aged teen who was car racing.  The man was in the courtroom, surrounded by many supportive friends.  There was a feeling of the importance of holding the teen accountable for this terrible vehicular homicide.  A packed courtroom would put pressure on the judge. 

And then the moment happened.  The judge asked the boy if he had anything to say.  The boy looked at the man, paused, and then said –full of emotion—“I’m sorry.”  The man said he was transformed in that moment, for looking inside himself, he felt compassion arising in his heart.  He later would ask the court to be lenient on the boy, as lenient as possible; and now he and the teen have formed a close bond, and travel around speaking to teenagers about safety and accident prevention, but in the process they also speak about following your inner light—where love and compassion lives.  It is an amazing and moving story. 

And with that light we can see rightly--viewing the impermanence of life, knowing the interbeing or interconnectedness of life, and remembering the importance of fixing our gaze within ourselves for the wisdom that flows from our life experiences.

Spring is a lovely time to be gazing at life.  The days are brighter.  The daffodils cry out with joy.  The birds are gathering in the trees.  Mt. Rainier is putting on her show.  And this spring, much is in flux in our world. 

As we seek greater light and love and compassion in our lives, may we first seek it in our own lantern, and then may we let our light shine out into the world, let it shine, let it shine, let it shine! 

Amen

BENEDICTION: 

TAKE THE LOVE AND COMPASSION YOU FIND INSIDE YOU, AND BLESS THE WORLD WITH IT!