Buddha

I don’t want to get old. I don’t want to have trouble walking. I don’t want to ache all the time. I don’t want to watch my friends die one after another. I don’t want to lose my good looks. I don’t want to lose my charm. I’m afraid to not be hip. I’m afraid to break my hip. I’m afraid of being worthless. I have so much fear.

Old age, along with sickness and death, were perceived as inevitable by the Buddha, or so the tale goes. Following this perception he left behind his life of sensual and material wealth in search of deeper, more permanent answers to the “problem” of life. The problem, of course, is that we are here, so what to do? Where do you want to go today?

After attaining an extraordinary degree of discipline and self-control, and resolving himself to realize the answer to the fundamental question of existence come hell or high water (“though mountains may break themselves apart on my head I will pursue this….”), he turned inward to the examination of mind itself. Finding that impermanence was the nature not only of the physical body but of sensory and perceptual phenomena, emotional states, and even the very ideas and concepts that are the fundamental bases of our understanding of the universe, it dawned upon him that….

This is where I disconnect. This is where I no longer see the path. Did the Buddha recognize that his identity, having no permanent essence, was therefore insubstantial and irrelevant, and lose himself into the vastness of the universe? Did he recognize that perceiver and perceived are co-creative, and that the nature of self is intimately tied to the nature of other, with the boundary in between ultimately being illusory? Did he sink into a dark pit of nihilism and drift through the rest of his days, or was he filled with ecstatic joy by the cosmic reality of his own being and dance through the remainder of his life with the passion and curiosity of an intoxicated lover?

Of course the essence of his teachings point to the necessity of a dispassionate non-attachment. But the other side of this coin is non-aversion, so viewing the universe around him with a curious joy seems far likelier than the stoic distaste for our material world that is so often attributed to him. But did he dance? Did he engage the world around him with delight at his current moment? Did he aspire to be a still-point at the center of movement? How can an individual remain a still-point at the center of a moving reality after attaining the realization that the individual and the rest of reality are not separate at all, but in a constant dramatic interplay as all things in a world of duality must be? Did the Buddha transcend suffering or simply come to understand it?

The questions are endless. But in response I can find only useless, insipid words, and the piercing indefinable silence of the present moment.