Siddartha’s
departure
Aged about thirty, Gautama Siddartha
(Sanskrit: Siddartha meaning: ‘the Achiever’. Later
named the Buddha (or Knowledgeable One)), called the Sakyamuni
(meaning the Scythian (!!) recluse) was
as distressed as are most smart but pampered, sheltered and thoroughly bored
upper middle class 30 year olds who live at home with dad, mom, the wife, the
kid and the cat. So he quit his parent’s home to discover
the cause of his distress and the way to its elimination, in the process
becoming the prototype seeker of the happy, because true self (and which,
sadly, he discovered didn’t exist as an abiding essence). After about 7 years of fruitless
endeavour he eventually realised that his distress resulted from attaching to
(or craving for) what (i.e. a self that) is transient and relative, hence
beyond ownership and control. He universalised his personal (??) predicament and understood that since no
creature (to wit, ‘arisen thing’) could be permanently master (i.e. owner) of
his or her self, distress (Pali: dukkha ≈
sorrow), i.e. actually the biological signal for system’s failure, was
inevitable for all. The Buddha
spent the next 40 years of his life explaining the fundamental origin of
dependence (or relativity) and of changeability (i.e. impermanence) and of
the distress they cause. He also invented a vast number of physical and
psychological techniques, including verbal tranquillisers (see the mantra at
the end of the Heart Sutra)
that served to reduce and /or eliminate distress. Alas, he
never did ask the crucial question as to the Guide & Control function of
unpleasantness (i.e. distress, sorrow and so on, to wit: (Pali)
Just about
everyone experiences the distress not just of being wholly dependent and
without the power to shape one’s life but also of the awful changeability and
unpredictability of life. That experience is common to the bulk of humanity
being crushed by the realities of existence in a predatory world. The Lord
Shiva is the Hindu attempt to solve the
same problem Of course the
Scythian Recluse, i.e. latterly called the Buddha, got the cause of suffering
badly wrong. But it did become a popular sell. Clean observation and a shave
with Occam’s Razor suggests that happiness
signals success, i.e. at goal attainment,
irrespective of the goal and that unhappiness
signals failure to achieve the (i.e. any) goal. Simply stated, happiness (, i.e.
positive stress Pali: sukkha)
and unhappiness (i.e. distress. i.e. negative stress) (Pali:
dukkha) are biological success-failure signals. In
this regard, see my book ‘How to make and fake happiness’ |
