Occasional paper

BUDDHAS ARE MADE OF CLAY

This piece is written in response to a short correspondence with Stuart Lachs who has written two interesting articles about the mistakes that have been made in some Buddhist communities through misunderstanding the role of the spiritual teacher and creating conditions for abuse. He relies particularly upon an analysis of the case of Baker Roshi who was disgraced by scandal and other similar cases.

Lachs quotes Baker Roshi thus:
“A roshi is a person who has actualized that perfect freedom which is the potentiality for all human beings. He exists freely in the fullness of his whole being. The flow of his consciousness is not the fixed repetitive patterns of our usual self–centered consciousness, but rather arises spontaneously and naturally from the actual circumstances of the present.” This was Baker before his fall.

Our sense here at Amida is rather that the teacher has three roles: 1. spiritual guide; 2. whatever functional responsibility he/she carries for the community; 3. foolish being. In a Buddhist community we are all firstly foolish beings. One is not spiritual guide by dint of special virtue, but only by having particular insight into the fact of being a foolish being. Realising that one is subject to “fathomless blind passion” that rises incessantly, one may be of service to others in helping them to realise that they are likewise. One may also have regular practical responsibilities that range through from the ordering of the community to chopping carrots or cleaning drains as occasion demands. One is not necessarily expert at any of these practical duties, but one does one's best with, hopefully, some grace.

My views are no doubt mistaken and probably heretical, but I do not believe that the Buddha was perfect. I believe he was enlightened. It is not the same. To be enlightened is to know your nature to be beginningless passion and ignorance, and yet, even in the midst of this reality, to be ever doing one's best to help others live as nobly as may be – in other words, to love. My belief is that that is what Buddhas and Arhats do.

Enlightenment is, in this perspective, more or less the opposite of what many people seem to think. The common view is that enlightenment is an actualisation of perfection. I believe it is a realisation about imperfection. Of course, everybody is willing to say “Nobody's perfect”, but, deeply, they don't believe it in their own case. This is the core of the Buddhist philosophy. Deep down people believe in their own perfection and this is the core of delusion that distorts their encounters with the real world.

Buddhism has become popular on the promise of offering a way for people to confirm their own delusion about themselves. In this it is not unique: it is inevitable in a consumerist culture. But that promise wears thin, and the excuse that “It takes a long time” has to yield eventually. Even at the level of day to day practice, people believe, for instance, that mindfulness – the magic quality that is supposed to yield this perfection – is a glorification of the here and now momentary sensual experience of life, whereas, in fact, how the “Setting Up of Mindfulness” actually works is quite different. Mindfulness (smriti) is reliance upon keeping in mind the facts of beginningless greed, hate and delusion on the one hand and Buddha's compassionate example in the midst of samsara on the other. It is a matter of remembering, not of here and now awareness. The word smriti means “remember”. This remembering is “set up”, however, by making a thorough experiential study of the body (kaya), reactions (vedana), mental attention (chitta) and things of the world (dharma) and finding them all unreliable. It is precisely in finding that the “here and now” is NOT a refuge, that one is forced to turn to the eternal wisdom of the Buddhas, which is the apodictic knowledge of the sad reality of our condition and the shining possibility of enlightenment IN ITS MIDST.

This “in its midst” is crucial to the whole understanding that we call enlightenment. We do not become enlightened by escaping, nor by some kind of miraculous transformation that turns people into god–gurus, but by facing the reality of our condition and doing so in a much more real way than most people are ordinarily capable of. The capacity only comes through something that shocks our system to the core. This is why it is very difficult for ordinary people living average lives to get enlightened. Their condition is too comfortable for the sort of crisis that precipitates real insight to be likely – except, perhaps, with the onset of fatal illness. There are many death–bed satoris, but the purpose of Buddhism is to precipitate a spiritual death at an earlier stage. It may well be that Baker was more enlightened by his fall than he was before it.

The spiritual life is a matter of tension between samsara and nirvana. With the ideal there always comes the actual. In this sense the Dharma life is dualistic – and in many other senses too. This is because it is rooted in the real world. We are earth, wind, fire, water and space. We are not etherial spirits. Our lot is one of existential limitation, impermanence and affliction. It also carries the potentiality of great nobility, altruism and joy. These do not come through the abolition of ill, frailty and vulnerability, but through becoming fully awakened to their reality.

A Buddhist teacher is not somebody who always gets things right and never has any inconvenient emotions. He or she is one who knows their own ordinariness, yet still swims in the ocean of Buddha's inconceivable love, and, for that, feels gratitude so immense it can be hard to contain.

The articles by Lachs can be read at Terebess Asia Online

D.D. Brazier
2001