The Buddhist agenda is a change of heart for the world. The slogan that goes with this is "Inner peace, outer peace," or, we could say, inner transformation, outer transformation. Buddhism is looking to bring people to a transformation of consciousness - an arising of wisdom and compassion that knows no boundaries. This is a way of liberation, but not the kind of liberation that is commonly thought of.

The idea of liberation comes from pre-Buddhist India. The pre-Buddhist idea was to release the soul from the confines of this benighted world. Liberation meant that the soul might be free and so be able to return to god, leaving the world behind. The Buddha stood these ideas on their head. There is no soul of that kind, he said - no soul that could flee the world and make a refuge in a metaphysical realm. The real refuge for our lives is here, embodied in wise people, skilful practice and harmonious communities. These are what we need. He called them three jewels.

After he died, people tried to deify him and return to their old ways, but the message is still there for those who have ears to hear. He did not want to be a god. The liberation that the Buddha speaks of is not the liberation of the soul from the world, but the act of liberating the world from our own greed, hate and delusion - the three poisons. When we can do that we will find that the paradise we yearn for is not far away.

The key to this is transformation: the transformation of three poisons into three jewels. We sometimes say inner transformation, but this makes Buddhism seem more inward looking than it actually is. People are not basically inward looking. People are engaged in a world. This is a real world. Reality is constantly knocking on our door. Just turning inward is not the answer. We will not bring about wise people, skilful action and harmonious communities by ignoring the knock on the door or saying "Nobody at home."

Transformation - the liberation of the world from graspingness, oppression and folly - means being willing to open the door in a hospitable and generous way. An inward transformation actually means a re-visioning of the outside world. When we look at the stranger on our doorstep, do we see a friend-to-be or an alien presence? Do we make this world our friend or our enemy? If we make it our enemy, then we will surely be in the business of trying to find an individual salvation for our individual soul. That would certainly not be the Buddha's way.

The Buddha's way was simply to give his life to the service of the world. That service was the overcoming of the poisons of the mind by transforming them into love, compassion and wisdom.

This transformation both comes about by and is expressed in action. The Buddha walked. Wherever he went he made the minimum possible demand for his personal needs and gave the maximum he was capable of to help the local people to grow in wisdom, in skilful means and in compassionate community. He tended the sick, he taught, he mediated in disputes, he advocated for peace, he protected animals, he cultivated kindness, he helped people achieve wisdom, and he encouraged others to adopt a similar approach to life.

A Symbol of Transformation
Consider the lotus flower. This is a symbol of the kind of transformation the Buddha was interested in. The lotus is one of the most beautiful flowers in the world. It is stunningly lovely. It stands above the water with its magnificent petals wide open to the sun. Beads of water may splash onto the petals and seem only to enhance the beauty, sitting like little jewels sparkling in the light.

The lotus also bears fruit. Uncommonly among plants the fruit and flower are there simultaneously. The flowers do not fall until well after the fruit has formed.

Where does this wondrous plant draw its nourishment from? Whence comes its strength and beauty? We know, of course. It comes from the mud and slime down in the dark depths of the pond. This is the secret of the lotus, to transform what seems to us loathsome into what seems to us the epitome of fineness. This is the symbol of transformation.

The Buddhist approach, therefore, is like the lotus. We can imagine ourselves as a lotus plant. We have roots. Each of us has a history. Each of us was once a little person surrounded by powerful adults. The adults did not always do what we wanted them to do. They did not even always act as they should. Each of us has wounds. We have had struggles. We have had disasters and triumphs - things we feel smug about and things that make us cringe with shame. All of us have been oppressed in some degree at some time. Some more, some less, perhaps. We all have mud in which to grow our lotus.

The stem of the lotus symbolises spiritual training. If you are a Buddhist, this term has a particular connotation. But you might be a Christian or a Jew or a Moslem, or you might be of no particular named faith. Whatever, you are bound to have done some spiritual training of some sort. You have learnt some discipline. You have had some education. You have been drawn out and shaped, strengthened and skilled. You have acquired ways of understanding the things you have experienced in life and some of these ways have made you into a more wise and compassionate person. This training, whether systematic or just a product of circumstance, is the stem of the lotus.

Training starts at home with our parents, continues at school, goes on through higher education and career and adult relationships. All these are training of one sort or another. We are learning all the time. We learn skills and knowledge. We learn to cope with challenges and crises. We learn to be useful and to help others. Everybody has had some spiritual training. From the Buddhist perspective, the most important training is whatever enables us to let go of self-seeking ways and find a way of being that is constructive and creatively engaged. So of the training we have participated in in life may have been counter-training. We may have learnt bad habits - cynicism, aggression, greed and addictions. There is pollution too in the lotus pond.

When we talk about spiritual training we are not talking about spirits, plural, as in ghosts. We are talking about spirit, as when we say that a person has a lot of spirit - a quality not an entity. It means courage, fortitude and flexibility. The stem of the lotus is strong and it bends. If it were stiff and brittle it would break. It can go with the flow, but not too far. It can bow with what is good and hold against what is not. It can sway with an impact, and come back again. Buddhism has a lot to say about spiritual training.

The roots and the stem support the flower. What are the petals on our lotus flower? They are all the good actions we perform in the world. I write books, I see clients for psychotherapy, I teach, I build friendships. How do I do these things? Behind them lies much learning, just as the flower depends upon the stem. It was hard work learning to write. It was a long training to become a psychotherapist - and more than that, it required a lot of life experience. It took the overcoming of many previous mistakes and mess-ups to make a good marriage. Flowers do not appear in the sky, they appear on strong stems that grow out of the earth.

It is very important to see our flowers. If we do not realise that we each are a flower, then we will not understand why we are here nor why anything matters. It is important to see our mud, but if mud is all we see, then we will just remain a dirty pool and no lotuses will grow. It is important to see the whole picture. There are those who want flowers without mud and there are those who see only mud and never produce flowers. This is, in both cases, because the stem is being over-looked. It is the stem that transforms mud into flowers and it is the stem that nourishes flowers from mud.

Layers of Mud
We have all encountered suffering, both that of ourselves and that of others. We have all evolved strategies for coming to terms with, overcoming or avoiding that suffering. We can pause a moment and notice the suffering that is in us still. Is it close at hand or does it seem distant today? Everybody has internalised sufferings and oppressions. These things can build in the mind.

When we become conscious of the suffering we carry we may also start becoming conscious of the strategies that we use to keep that suffering within bounds. Perhaps we avoid some people. Perhaps we seek security in a variety of ways. Perhaps we have become a bit cynical. Perhaps we have become addicted to things we regard as comforts - tobacco, alcohol, television, sex, or whatever.

As we do so we may begin to feel uncomfortable. We do not like to think of ourselves as addicted, cynical, grasping or defensive, but, if we are honest, probably we are all of these things. Buddhism is not interested in sin, but it is interested in honesty. If we are going to effect a transformation in life, we need to begin with a recognition of the state we are in. Honesty is a first step. The roots of the lotus need to be deep in the mud. So, first, find your mud.

When we look at our mud, we see that we do harm. There are strategies that we have evolved in order to cope with the sufferings that we have internalised and learnt to fear. These strategies do harm to others. In our effort to combat the oppressions we have experienced, we ourselves become oppressors. This is the normal situation. It is a hard thing to face. Buddhist psychology begins, therefore, with an attempt to face suffering, to face what it brings up, and to have a square look at what we do with it.

Even those who are actively involved in combating oppressions in the world, may not have done this initial self examination, or, if they have, may not have taken any action to do something about what they discovered. On the other hand there are an even greater number of people who, having become aware in some degree of their own suffering, have concluded that they have nothing much to offer.

The Stem of the Lotus
The message of hope that is the core of Buddhism is the idea that the mud itself can be transformed into lotus flowers. The implication is, on the one hand, that no matter what may lie in our history or what degree of mess we may have got our life into, there is always still the possibility of transforming that very mess into a resource - into nourishment for a lotus flower. On the other hand, there is also an implication that if we do not give attention to the stem of the lotus, the mud will stay mud and the flower will die.

The stem of the lotus is made by what, in Buddhism, is called cultivation. There is cultivation of body, speech and mind: that is, of behaviour; of words, thoughts and imagery; and of attitudes, intentions and mentality.

Asked to describe what this training is like, the Buddha said, suppose that a person decides to leave the conventional life behind and dedicate themselves completely to spiritual training, what will they do? Well, first he (or she) will attend to his own behaviour. He will attempt to clean up his act. He will make sure that he is not living in a way that is a direct cause of death and suffering to other living beings. He will liberate himself from the slavery of living for money. He will avoid getting caught in the complications and restrictions that new sexual involvement brings. He will pay particular attention to what he thinks and says, will avoid words that lead to conflict, disparagement of others, or the trivialising of life, and learn to speak words that make for peace, inspiration, compassion, and love, words that are wise and that touch the heart. Finally, he will work to eliminate compulsiveness. In particular, he will stop using alcohol and drugs, under the influence of which he is likely to lose his resolve and become involved in precisely the opposite behaviours from those listed here.

These will be her (or his) first concerns. If she tries to do this, she will encounter two difficulties. These are the habits of the senses and the habits of the mind. To overcome the first, it will be necessary to develop mindfulness. Mindfulness means keeping in mind the purpose of one's life. What we are talking about here is the way to make one's life meaningful. Many, perhaps most, people do not seriously undertake the task of making their life meaningful in anything more than a rather scattered and piecemeal fashion. Meaning is not given to life by the gods, it is created by the way we live. It is up to us to make it so.

A person following the Buddha's directions has confidence that she is creating a meaningful life - a life that they will be able to look back upon and think, "I did what I had to do - I made a meaningful life - my life was well lived." This was the Buddha's basic criterion. When we look back, are we going to be able to say that, or will we say, "I don't know where it all went," or "What was that all about then?" or, worse, "I wasted my time," or "The older I got the more bitter I became." When we are dying, the fortune we made will look trivial, the affairs we had will look inconsequential or harmful, the revenge we sought will be seen to have harmed ourselves certainly, and even if it succeeded in harming our enemy, the satisfaction in that will have paled.

Mindfulness means to know, in each moment of life, that this moment matters. If one can learn to live like that one will have a full and satisfying life. One will be alive. In so far as we do not do so, although we look as though we are living, we will really be dead spiritually. Death is busy living most people's lives for them. The Buddha was not willing to let Death have his life while he was still in it. So mindfulness is the antidote to the habits of the senses - the habits that inveigle us into taking the extra cake or avoiding the task we feel squeamish about. If we just live "looking after myself", then one day we will look back on a trivial and superficial existence. So much for the pitfalls of the habits of our senses.

The habits of the mind lie deeper. The mind is full of constructions that we have been building since infancy and perhaps before. These constructions can cause us trouble because generally we have our mind organised in a self-serving way. Most of what we have learnt in life and virtually all of what we have made up, has been created to support our beliefs about who and what we are, how we think we should be treated and so on. In other words, all our constructs revolve around self.

The Buddha, therefore, said that the person who wishes to create a meaningful life, will have to do something about the way his (or her) mind is. It is not so much that he will need to clean everything out of it as that he will need to start using whatever is there in a new way. He will need to take stock. To do so it will be necessary to study the mind. To study the mind he will need to learn stillness and silence and also skills in inward inquiry. The two main branches of Buddhist meditation method are called "stopping" and "looking".

He will learn to keep his attention in the here and now and to observe what arises spontaneously. He will also learn to make searching inquiries into his own mentality and motives. Sometimes this will be unpleasant. Some of what he finds there will be painful and some will be ugly. He is likely to feel contrition and even revulsion sometimes. He will come face to face with the emptiness of much of what he had previously devoted time and energy to.

This is what the Buddha said about growing the stem of the lotus. He also said that the person who does these things will, in the process, discover bliss. She (or he) will find that the mind is not a monster and that the world is not evil. She will find that the constructions she had previously filled her mind with, change. They are impermanent. She will realise that the things she used to put such store by are becoming burdensome to her and other things that she had previously feared or avoided are becoming more friendly. She will begin to feel deeply that the world that matters is this world, not a set of fantasies. She will no longer be in pursuit of the perfection of self, but will feel drawn to the needs of the "not-self", the real world. In this transformation she will experience a great liberation and exhilaration that seems to well up spontaneously from the roots of her being. She will be energised as never before.

The Lotus Flower
The stem does not really exist for its own sake. It exists in order to effect the transformation. It grows up through the dark toward the sunshine. Then it breaks the surface into a new bright world and unfolds into a beautiful flower. Having become a flower, it does not stop growing. It goes on to produce many fruit. The Buddha, after his enlightenment, kept on developing. Ever new ways of presenting the teachings flowed from him. He learnt things as the number of followers increased. The sangha took shape and new precedents were set for how they should live and what they should do. This process was continuous. Eventually the Buddha died. By then the seeds were scattered all over India and soon they spread further afield. Very few individuals have had such an extensive effect upon the people of this planet.

One person can make a lot of difference. This depends, however, upon the lotus flowering. Some seeds just stick in the mud. Some grow but do not break the surface and so remain in the dark. Some continue upward. This depends upon a kind of faith. It is not faith in something super-natural. It is faith in life. Death will come eventually, of course. But while alive, live. There are encounters like this between the Buddha and Death in the Buddhist texts. Death comes and tempts him. Death says, why not just opt for an easy life - you are famous now - why not cash in on your reputation? Or, on another occasion - why not just come to me now - wouldn't it be easier? The Buddha replies to this last - you will have your time but for now I have important things to do. There is a story that after the Buddha's enlightenment, Death stalked him for seven years trying to find a chink to get in by. At the end of seven years, the text paints a picture of Death sitting down looking totally disconsolate. He say, "For seven years I have pursued the Buddha at every step; but he was always alert and I did not have a chance. I have been like a crow that comes down thinking to have found a tender delicacy that turns out to be a stone. The crow flies away again. I too have given up."

The lotus flower rises above the water - above the darkness of death-in-life. Buddhist training brings us to this point and enables us to give this life to others. In the same text as the story of Death as a disappointed crow, there is the Buddha full of enthusiasm still, saying, "From land to land, I shall go, training disciples far and wide." All this is in the Sutta Nipata.

So the flower is the deathless state but the purpose of the flower is the fruit and the fruit is service to others. A Buddha has much to do when there is a whole pond to be filled with lotus flowers. When we look around, there is much suffering in the world. Some suffering is of the unavoidable kind. There are earthquakes and storms. There are the challenges in life that help to bring us to maturity. There is another kind, however. This is the death-in-life variety that we could call defeat of the spirit. It is this latter that Buddhism exists to combat.

Whether we call Buddhism a religion or not is simply a matter of definition. Religions as we know them had hardly been invented when the Buddha lived. It was really King Ashoka who made Buddhism into what we recognise as a religion. Primitive Buddhism was a call to a life of deathlessness (the flower) and service (the fruit).

Dh.D.J. Brazier
1999