Mastering the Core Teachings of Buddha - An Unusually Hardcore Dharma Book

I know of no examples where the necessary and sufficient causes for the arising of these benefits did not involve some kind of work. In short, I say to those who persist in promoting the Nothing To Do School and the You Are Already There School: STOP IT! You are spreading craziness, and this is craziness that many people will not be able to tell is craziness, and that appears to include those who promote these fallacies.

While I usually do not go so far as to tell people that there is something so deeply wrong with what they think and how they communicate it that they should stop it immediately and forever, this particular point is a great example of something I consider abhorrent and worthy of profound revision.

Regardless of any kind intentions, the teachings of these schools take a half-truth that seems so very nice and seductive to us neurotic practitioners who just can barely stand another achievement trip and 327

Models of the Stages of Enlightenment

have such a hard time with self-acceptance and turn that distortion into sugary poison. There is no need to tie the three useful concepts of 1) no-self, 2) self-acceptance in the ordinary sense, and 3) the notion that the sensations that lead to understanding if clearly perceived over and over again are manifesting right here, right now, to such a perversely twisted yet seemingly benign and similar concepts as the ones they unfortunately promote.

FINAL POINTS

Spirituality that ignores or covers up our inevitable dark or undesirable sides is doomed to be bitten and burned by them. Models of realization that involve high ideals of human perfection have caused so much dejection, despair and misguided effort throughout the ages that I have no qualms about doing my very best to try to smash them to pieces on the sharp rocks of reality. They are not completely useless, and there is some value in keeping the standards to which we aspire high as we will see in the next chapter, but most of the time are taken way too seriously to be helpful at all.

It is clear that those who adhere the most rigidly to the self-perfection models of enlightenment are also very often those who believe enlightenment is the least attainable and feel the most disempowered in their practice and spiritual life. Not surprisingly, those with the highest standards for what realization will entail often have the lowest standards for their own practice and what they hope to actually attain in this lifetime. They are the armchair quarterbacks of the spiritual path. Becoming grandiose about aspiring to a high ideal seems to be a common coping mechanism for dealing with a lack of

confidence and insight. As Christopher Titmuss, one of my best and most honest teachers, often says, “We do not come from a self-perfection lineage.” There are those who do explicitly come from self-perfection lineages. I wish them good luck. They’ll need it.

328

Mastering the Core Teachings of the Buddha

31.SO WHAT’S “FULL ENLIGHTENMENT”? *

This has been a source of considerable debate, confusion and division in Buddhism, particularly between the three main traditions of the Theravada, Tibetan, and Zen. I am going to jump into the fray, as is my typical style, but realize that it is going to be a messy business. These debates tend to boil down to arahats vs. buddhas, a distinction I hope to make clear shortly. Zen is largely on the side of buddhas, though their intriguing vagueness on the subject can at times make it somewhat uncertain what they mean by “buddha.” Most of the time the Zen kids actually seem to mean “arahat” when they say “buddha,” though I wouldn’t go around saying that if you want to be liked. In my more cynical moments, I think their models end at stream entry. On the other hand, the most mythological descriptions of arahats in the Theravada are often closer to the stylized descriptions of buddhas, so the problem is obviously widespread and goes both ways. All kinds of absurd tensions and divisions have arisen around this one point between the Theravada and the Mahayana when, at least in terms of actual dogma, there is really no conflict. How these ideals relate to non-Buddhist traditions is complex, and I offer the simple notion that these things all converge rather than diverge at this level.

The Theravada clearly acknowledges that an arahat is a stage below buddhahood, and nouveau Tibetans seem particularly gleeful at this.

(To digress again for just a moment, there is an apocryphal and absurd story in circulation that when the teachings on emptiness were first given, a large number of arahats dropped dead of heart attacks. This tends to cause conceited laughter and smiles on the faces of nouveau Tibetan Buddhists, which is about as sick a reaction as I can imagine.