Month: May 2010

I came across my friend’s entry Follow or Not to Follow this afternoon and that draws me to share this entry on the all time favorite topic – anger. On this note, I am reminded by a paragraph which I just read this morning from the book What Makes You not a Buddhist, given to me by a dear friend –

“All emotions are pain. …If you cannot accept that all emotions are pain, if you believe that actually some emotions are purely pleasurable, then you are not a Buddhist.”

Indeed a tall order! I like the writing by this author, Dzongsar Jamyang Khyentse, who coincidentally is also the script writer and director of the films The Cup and Travellers and Magicians. And that brings me back to the question on the subject of anger – if pain is what we are experiencing all the time – since we are not deprived from any emotion at any one moment, be it pleasant, unpleasant or neutral – then is it true to say that underneath our conscious state is the running river of anger, all the time? Probably anger is too strong a word to imply. What about aversion, upset, irritation or annoyance? But what the heck, aren’t they all relatives of this thingy called anger? I am relating pain to anger as whenever the word “pain” arises as an experience, it is always followed up by some form of resistance, which has aversion on it.

I just had my fair share of anger this afternoon when I could not come to an agreement with Lai Fun on what we needed to plan for our trip back to Penang. The storyline is irrelevant here though anyone who read this will surely be expecting or interested in the plot and drama that took place – the I am right and you are wrong ancient stories – but frankly, isn’t that what makes our life more juicy and “meaningful” since we are in pain all the time J?

But what interested me in the enfoldment of this drama is this anger per se. It is not simply just an object that pops out from the mind where I can put a finger on and say hey! here comes anger again. It is a complex mixture of victimized rescuer and persecutor mentality that plays out in the mind. In truth at that moment, anger was really not my given attention relatively to the conspired damned storylines of what I needed to attack and defend when it comes to the other party. The storylines were more real and true than the emotion of anger itself. But the irony was that the more stories which were being brought up in the mind, the more the anger were generated, as thoughts and feeling work hand in hand.

There was a wise story told about this person who ate a bunch of hot chilies, which made him perspire and caused burning in his mouth and throat; yet it was not in his thought to stop eating these chilies as he was blindly expecting to find one that was sweet to quench his suffering. Isn’t that who I am when I am angry?

My storyline is my chilly – so long as I do not see this truth, I will be guaranteed of suffering. Delusion is the cause – what I am expecting in my doing, which in this case, my thoughts, will eventually lead me to the end of the anger. Never. My righteous view is my gift and in that gift lays the venomous snake waiting to be unleashed upon myself.

And so I was fortunate this round – in applying one of my wise teacher’s advise – there is no reality to the thoughts or even the feelings – all are merely a misperception, merely impermanent nature in process. And of course, I couldn’t apply this without wisdom as my base, as I would be merely trying to fix up the pain I was already in, making the anger more resilient. Amazingly when wisdom comes up, the force of anger dances itself out and what is needed from me is just patience and attention – not on the thought or the feeling but of the understanding that impermanent nature is taking its course. Wonderful! We live happily ever after…. at least for this momentJ.

So, is our mind, a minefield of dosa (Pali) – anger, aversion, irritation, jealousy, judgments, restlessness and many more unimaginable relatives of dosa? That will be your journey of realization!

So paradoxical, but then again here is another from my dear inner master J:

The followers said to J, “Tell us how our end will be.”
He said, “Have you discovered the beginning, then, so that you are seeking the end?
For where the beginning is, the end will be. Fortunate is the one who stands at the beginning:
That one will know the end and will not taste death.”
– Pursah’s Gospel of Thomas –

It is not a special day, nor is it another usual day. Neither is it religious nor mystical.  It is an ordinarily simple day for commemoration of what a human endeavor can potentially arrive at – the state of awakening from the illusion of life, in short, enlightenment. It is so ordinary that nothing can compete its simplicity. Yet in this ordinary simplicity everything is finally understood and realized, fully.

In understanding one thing, everything is understood.
In understanding everything, nothing is understood.

Enlightenment is not what you can experience in life itself. No. Nor can you try any or every means; including any unthinkable strength and grit; to secure its price. None of that sort. It is simply getting out of the dream – sounds simple yet it is never as simple as we think it can be. It is like an invisible prison that is found in each of us, yet we are not able to put a finger on it.

It is a day to remember that somewhere in the past there was a pathway laid, albeit a pathless one, which points to the doorway of liberation, of getting out of the dream. The word Buddha, is not about someone or something, or even with any religious connotation attached to it, but rather enlightenment itself – which  potentially is the “birthplace” of one, an end of the journey of sort. The state of the unconditioned. It is a very personalized journey – ironically, a journey that undoes the personality itself – the undoing of the ego, the disentanglement of falseness.

I am not playing down the man who finally made the exit; not at all.  As Jed McKenna aptly said it, there is no such a thing as an enlightened being. In enlightenment there is no being. In Being, there is no enlightenment. Both are exclusive – they don’t come together – either you are awake, or in a dream. Period.

Gotama (Sanskrit: Gautama), the man who showed the possibility of enlightenment is historical; an important figure to cherish; but the work did not stop and end there. Idolization greatly missed the point he was trying to convey throughout his 45 years of ministry. It is again, like the finger pointing to the moon. You can’t fix yourself to the finger and yet find the moon. It is either or. Both are, again, exclusive. He showed the way and our choice is either to adore him or to follow the direction of his pointing finger, dropping the image of the finger entirely. It is the direction that needs to be accomplished.

Between the finger and the moon, anything is possible, yet vague. The path itself is pathless, not something you can see or feel. And in that pathless path, is found the prison of our own making that we have to relinquish – all by ourselves. That there is a certain skill needed to unlock the prison to make an escape to freedom – very much like the key-maker in the movie sequel, The Matrix Reloaded. But there is a hitch here – it is not just one prison door, nor is there even a space of a breath between each door.

Where is the prison except in the mind? It is a prison-less prison, not something that can be seen or felt tangibly. Not of stones of high walls or steel bars of tiny cells but views that seemed harmless in the beginning of time that ultimately built-up the massive complexity of entanglement which overwhelmingly by now seems an impossible task to see any end to it.

The clue is found in the now, the never-ending now – that each now offers the hope of opening the door to another door, and yet another door to another, and another… until one finds the end of it – the gift of enlightenment which awaits us there. What then is in the now that we need to comprehend? The views that bind us to be back again and again – the cyclic process of birth and death. The dream that is so real that fooled us to exist further.

And when we finally arrived at the end of the doors, we meet the Buddha there. Not someone, somebody or any religious figure we had in our mind. None of that sort. Not even the one we are now imagining in our perception or the image on the altar – they are all merely views which we are invited to give up, to surrender.

*Wesak or Vesak

He who sees the Truth, sees me. – The Buddha