I wrote my new book, Buddha: A Story of Enlightenment, as a sacred journey, fictionalized in many of its externals but psychologically true, I hope, to what the seeker's path feels like. In all three phases of his life – Siddhartha the prince, Gautama the monk, and Buddha the Compassionate One – he was as mortal as you and I, yet he attained enlightenment and was raised to the rank of an immortal. The miracle is that he got there following a heart as human as yours and mine, and just as vulnerable.
Someone who is awake
The Buddha story, as it gathered momentum for two millennia, became chock-full of miracles and gods that got stuck onto its surface. Speaking about himself, Buddha never mentioned miracles or gods. He held a doubtful view of both. He showed no interest in being revered as a personality; none of his many sermons mentions his family life or gives much personal information at all. He certainly didn't see himself as divine.
Instead, he saw himself as ‘someone who is awake,' which is what the word Buddha means. Here in all his mystery is the principal human being who ever gained enlightenment, who spent his long life trying to wake up the rest of us. Everything he knew, he knew from arduous, sometimes bitter experience. He went through extreme suffering – almost to the death – and emerged with something incredibly precious. Buddha literally became the truth. ‘Whoever sees me sees the teaching,' he said, ‘and whoever sees the teaching sees me.'
A spiritual earthquake
Buddhism caused an earthquake in the spiritual life of India, crushing the privileges of the Brahmin caste and raising even the despised untouchables to spiritual dignity. Buddha blew through the temples like a strong wind and with the simplicity of genius reduced the human predicament to one key issue: suffering. If suffering is a constant in every life, he said, then until there's an end to suffering, enlightenment is pointless. Equally pointless is talk of God or the gods, heaven and hell, sin, redemption, the soul, and all the rest. This was reform of the severest kind, and a lot didn't stick. People wanted God. Buddha refused to speak on the subject of whether God even existed. He adamantly denied that he himself was divine. People wanted the comfort of rituals and ceremonies. Buddha shunned ceremony. He wanted each individual to look inside and find liberation through a personal journey that began in the physical world and ended in Nirvana, a state of pure, eternal consciousness. Nirvana is present in everyone, he taught, but Nirvana is like pure water lying deep beneath the earth. Reaching it requires concentration, devotion, and diligent work.
What can this teaching do for me?
As a storyteller, I didn't feel it was my place to spread Buddhism. That's best left to the modern equivalents of the wandering missionaries who first preached Buddhism. It would be unseemly for me to step on their toes. But I'd like to speak to you, the reader, who might be coming to Buddha from the cold. I came to Buddha that way, and I asked the obvious question: What can this teaching do for me? Is there something that will open my eyes and make me more awake, right this minute?
Personally, I found three things. They are known as the three Dharma seals, or to put it in plain English, three basic facts about Being. They spoke to me far more than the Middle Way because of their universality, which extends far beyond the boundaries of religion.
1. Dukkha Life is unsatisfactory. Pleasure in the physical world is transient. Pain inevitably follows. Therefore, nothing we experience can be deeply satisfying. There is no resting place in change.
2. Anicca Nothing is permanent. All experience is swept away in flux. Cause and effect is endless and confusing. Therefore one can never find clarity or permanence.
3. Anatta The separate self is unreliable and ultimately unreal. Our attempts to make the self real never end but also never succeed. Therefore, we cling for reassurance to an illusion.
Radical realism
Reading this, can anyone escape being shaken to the core? Buddha wasn't just a kindly teacher who wanted people to find peace. He was a radical surgeon who examined them and said, ‘No wonder you feel sick. All this unreal stuff has filled you up, and now we have to get rid of it.' Naturally, a lot of listeners ran back to conventional religion, and just as many ran back into materialism, which promises that body, mind and the physical world are absolutely real.
Why should we accept Buddha's word that they aren't? That, I think, is the crucial question. There's not much challenge in accepting that one's life contains suffering, and only a small challenge in accepting that flux and change create dissatisfaction. Both facts seem psychologically self-evident. But to accept that the entire world, and everyone in it, is an illusion? That's an enormous challenge, and it requires a complete shift in consciousness to meet it.
Yet once we get over our shock, Buddha declares that with a shift in consciousness, reality reveals itself. Not as a thing. Not as a sensation. Not even as a wisp of thought. Reality is purely itself. It is the ground of existence, the source from which everything else is projected. In the most basic terms, Buddhism exchanges a world of infinite projections for the single state of Being. A freedom so complete it doesn't have to think of freedom or say its name.
Which brings me to the subversive reason I decided to write a novel on the life of Buddha. By telling his story from the inside, I could trace every step that led Siddhartha to stop believing in the world. His tale isn't really that of a romantic prince, suffering monk, or triumphant saint. It's a universal soul journey that begins asleep and ends awake. Siddhartha woke up to the truth, which sounds inspiring, but in this case the truth demolished his entire self. It overturned every belief, purified every sense, and brought total clarity to the mind's confusion. Through the eyes of Buddha, the root of suffering is illusion, and the only way out of illusion is to stop believing in the separate self and the world that supports the separate self. No spiritual message has ever been so radical. None remains so terribly urgent.
From Buddha: A Story of Enlightenment, © 2007 by Deepak Chopra, published in the UK by Hodder and Stoughton.
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