The Deeper Purpose of Buddhist Meditation

  

                When we do a basic breathing or hearing meditation, we often become calmer.  And yes, being calmer feels better than being agitated or anxious.  But is that all the meditation does for us—provide us with some symptom relief so we feel a little better for a little while? [Many people are satisfied with this.] If we think this, we are missing the real power and central purpose of meditation. 

                The Buddha said he only taught two things:  understanding the nature of suffering, and freedom from suffering.  The entire program of Buddhist teachings has the aim of fundamentally changing the way we engage life so that we cause less suffering for ourselves and others.

                Our agitation and racing mind blinds us to what is going on in our lives.  Becoming calm is important because it prepares the foundation for being able to see clearly our thoughts, emotions, and behavior.  When this happens, we can then see clearly the ways in which we are unknowingly creating suffering.  Once we see this we can change our responses and finally put a stop to it.

                The following story helps to explain why we often continue engaging in behaviors that harm ourselves, and also makes clear what is needed to stop engaging in those behaviors.  Imagine that you are walking down a street near where you live, and a man comes up to you in a very agitated condition.  He says to you “Please, please help me!  I have this terrible, searing pain in my right hand.  I don’t know how I can endure this for another moment.  Please help me! Tell me what to do.”  This man is obviously suffering greatly, and you are moved by his plight.  You glance down, and you notice that the man is gripping a red hot coal very tightly in his right hand.  What do you say to him?

                I think anyone would tell the man to simply release the coal from his hand.  The only reason the man has not already released the coal is that he has not yet seen the connection between what he is doing and his own suffering.  Once he sees clearly that gripping the hot coal is the cause of his suffering, he no longer wants to grip the hot coal.  Releasing the coal does not require thirty years of prior meditation practice, or some special technique, or a superhuman amount of will power.  When the connection between the behavior and the suffering is seen clearly, the desire to continue with the behavior evaporates and the gripping of the coal stops. 

                This is our situation precisely in regard to our own behaviors that we continue to engage in even though we are suffering greatly because of them.   We simply have not seen the connection yet.  Once we see clearly that our choices are causing us to suffer, we no longer want to make those choices anymore.    Seeing clearly totally transforms our situation. 

                I knew a friend and sangha member who, for many years, got enraged and upset about other people’s bad driving. After he learned to calm his mind and then become more mindful of his emotions, bodily sensations, and thoughts he saw very clearly one day that it was his own mind state, and not the behavior of others, that was the real cause of his suffering.  The real cause was his gripping the “hot coal” of his insistence that others drive the way he thought they should, and at the same time also seeing that he had absolutely no control over their behavior.  They weren’t the cause of his suffering, he was the cause.  When he saw the futility of what he was doing, he released his expectation, and ended his suffering.  In describing later what happened, he said “I really saw what I was doing and I just didn’t want go there anymore.”  Simple!

                To cite a personal example…  As first a philosophy student and then a teacher, I was encouraged to look only for the flaws and defects in everything I read or heard.  Critiquing everything became a pervasive habit, and if you look only for flaws you will surely find them in great numbers everywhere.  When I began to see clearly what I was doing I could see how my mental habit was the real cause of my unhappy, pessimistic feeling that the world was full of badness.  This not only made me unhappy but my negativity also tended to drive people away from me.  And yet I clung to the behavior because it was part of my image of self as having a “perceptive and intelligent mind.”  As a result of my meditation practice, one day I saw the real source of my unhappiness was inside of me and I released the hot coal of constantly looking only for defects.  What a relief!  The world wasn’t as bad as I had thought!

                This connection between behavior and suffering must be seen at a very deep level.  It cannot just be an intellectual or verbal understanding. This means that there must be total clarity—it cannot just be something that others have said, or something we have read, or something we are “supposed to think” is true.  We need to know it “in every cell of our body.”

                When this level of clear seeing is achieved, will power simply becomes irrelevant.  A simple example can serve to make this clear.  Imagine that you are standing on the curb of a busy street in a large city.  You want to cross the street but there is a bus approaching at a high rate of speed in the lane nearest the curb.  Do you step off the curb in front of the bus?  No, of course not.  Is it necessary to debate this question in your mind:  “Should I step in front of the bus or not? This is tough, there are good reasons on both sides of this issue.  Sometimes I think it’s a good idea and other times…”  No.  It’s not like that at all.  Debating the issue never even occurs to you.  Do you need strong will power in order not to step in front of the bus?  No.   This is a very easy decision.  And why is this?  It is because you see very clearly the connection between the behavior being considered—stepping in front of the bus—and the great suffering that will come as a result. There is no desire to step in front of the bus to cross the street, therefore no will power is required at all.  All that is needed is seeing clearly the connection between what you are about to do and the suffering that will be experienced as a result.

                So yes, meditation can calm us down, but that is just the beginning.  Meditation provides the foundation.  What comes next is the actual house itself that rests on the foundation.  The house itself is a deeply changed person who now engages life in a fundamentally different way that causes much less suffering for self and for others.  Many people never build the house or even suspect that there is anything else beyond what is actually only the foundation. 

 

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