Robina’s Blog
26 November, 2020
Basically, the law of karma, as His Holiness says, is like self-creation. It’s a wonderful way to put it because Buddha would assert we are not the handiwork of a creator. Nor are we the handiwork of Mummy and Daddy – that’s a surprise to us because even if we’re Buddhist we still think that Mummy and Daddy gave us love and compassion and hate and the tendency to be good at music or football. No, Buddha says. We bring our own stuff with us. This is something fundamental in the Buddhist view of the world.
Where did Buddha get this information from? Not from on high; he is not a creator; it was not revealed to him. He observed it with his own mind. This is the point. In this sense, the Buddha is exactly the same as a scientist, exactly the same as Einstein. This is not a joke, it is true. We have such assumptions about what can be proved and what can’t – we have an assumption in the materialistic world that we cannot prove that the mind is not physical, that we cannot prove reincarnation. Buddha did prove these things. He’s not just making it up, it’s not revelation, he’s not speculating. He observed these to be true; this is exactly the Buddhist approach.
We mightn’t like what he says and we might not have any interest in getting to prove what he says, but this is what he says; it’s there in the literature. Basically, Buddha is saying: “This is what I have found to be so – the entire Buddhist path – and you can all accomplish it. I have done the work, here is my methodology – now it’s over to you.” That’s it. This is the Buddhist approach.
A few years ago, a scientist in New Zealand asked me this question – and it’s the first time I’ve ever had this question: “Who revealed the teachings to the Buddha?” This is a perfect question if you think of religion as being creator-based – and that’s our default assumption, isn’t it? He was very shocked when I said: “Would you ask Einstein who revealed relativity to him?” We think it is a joke, but it is not: it is exactly the same. What Buddhism is – like Einstein’s findings – is Buddha’s findings. For Einstein it did not come from revelation, he did not have a dream or a vision, he did not make it up – we’d be very insulted if he had; he was not speculating: he had done his homework and he presented his findings. And he did not ask us to believe him: “It’s over to you if you want to prove it for yourself.” Buddha is exactly the same.
The difference is obviously in the content. This is the Buddha’s view, this is what he has found to be true: consciousness is not physical, it goes back and back, and it will continue, continue; suffering and its causes can be removed from the mind utterly – and that’s a pretty revolutionary concept, philosophically and psychologically – and that every being has this got this potential. And it’s got far more subtle levels of cognition than we posit in modern psychology and neuroscience. The Hindus discovered this before the Buddha: with śamatha, they accessed these subtler levels of their own mind. And still today there are people like you and me, up in the mountains, metaphorically or actually, accomplishing this single-pointed concentration. It is not a dead technique. It’s a living technique, and it was around well before the Buddha; he happily took it with him when he diverged in his own direction.
It is right there. It’s a psychological skill; don’t forget that. We have all these lovely words called mindfulness and about twenty-nine varieties of it – it’s practically its own religion now. And for the Buddha, in order to do the job of achieving our own potential, ridding the mind of all the rubbish, ridding the mind of suffering and its causes, we need to access this subtle level, we need to have single-pointed concentration, in this life or at some point, in order to do the work of unpacking and unravelling all the nonsense in our mind, which, the Buddha says, is the source of our suffering.
“Here’s what I did to achieve this, and if you want to get rid of suffering and get happiness, over to you, baby.” That is the Buddha’s approach. We have to remember that. We don’t have to like him. We don’t have to believe him – in fact, he insists we don’t believe him; that’s just intellectual laziness.
But we’re so addicted to believing that we can’t prove past and future lives, because that’s the view of philosophical materialism. We have to understand that the Buddha’s view of what the mind is, what its function is, is radically different.
We’re also addicted to the view that you can’t prove Christianity or Islam because it’s from God, from on high. And in fact, if you said you could prove it, that would be beyond arrogant; that’s like saying you can become God; you must never do that. But this is not the Buddhist view. In the Buddhist view, to prove that what the Buddha said is true means to experience the truth of it, not just to know it intellectually. So, this approach demands engagement. That scientist, he would never say, “Oh, I believe in mathematics, I believe in botany.” We would never say that – we’d be laughed at! But we all like to say, “I believe in karma, I believe in reincarnation.” This is intellectual laziness. It’s either true or it’s not. The Buddha has given us the methods for experiencing the truth of it.
Often, His Holiness says to us in the West, that if you are practicing Buddhism sincerely, you’d go one step at a time, proving things as you go. If at some point you can actually prove that Buddha is wrong, then, of course, you must reject him.
But you start with belief. When you first learn that one plus one is two, you have to believe your teacher; you’d be in trouble otherwise. But then you have got to prove it. You don’t just leave it at the level of belief. You can believe in mathematics very comfortably because there are enough people who know it, you can get away with it. Butn if your mother ask you to buy her five oranges, you can’t do it, because you don’t know mathematics.
That is why I never say “I believe” in all this stuff; I say it’s my working hypothesis. This is what a decent scientist would do. Working with this information, not just believing it. It is crucial. You make it your own experience. That is the Buddhist approach.