The etymology of the word “buddha” is very delicious: budh implies the utter eradication of all delusions, all the neuroses, the painful emotions such as attachment, anger, low self-esteem and, of course, the root of them all, the primordial assumption of an intrinsic self; and dha implies the development to perfection of all the goodness, the positive, uplifting emotions such as love, compassion, self-confidence and the rest.
Someone who heard this for the first time at a recent class burst out laughing. And that’s understandable! Initially it is absurd, quite shocking in fact. Our various psychological models and our neuroscientific views give equal status to all these states of mind as the normal parts of a normal person, so normal that we’d be abnormal if we didn’t have some of them. Sure, we’d all like to have less of the neuroses, maybe, but get rid of them – no! That’s like cutting out half of your brain.
So where does this idea come from? The person called Buddha and anyone since him who has followed and accomplished the same methodology as him has found from their own direct experience that the delusions are adventitious; not intrinsic; they’re not at the core of our being; they’re not in our fundamental nature. Therefore – that’s the logic – they can be removed.
Clearly, Buddha is not talking about the brain; that’s not his expertise. Buddha’s expertise is, indeed, the mind, but that is referring to the subjective cognitive process itself: the thoughts, feelings, emotions, subconscious, unconscious, the entire spectrum of our inner being, which for the Buddha are not a function of the brain. Without insulting neuroscientists you could say that the brain is a physical indicator of what is going on in the mind – but only at the grosser levels. Buddha asserts far subtler levels of cognition, of consciousness, that do not depend upon the brain. To achieve the goal of buddhahood we need to understand this.
Maybe we wonder why we should get rid of the neuroses anyway? Well, for the Buddha, they’re the main source of our suffering. In other words, he’s telling us he’s found a method to stop suffering. That’s one way of framing the entire Buddhist path: it’s a method for stopping suffering – and flip that over and it means it’s a method for finding happiness, happiness that is stable, that doesn’t turn into suffering.
It’s a bit of a shock to hear that what goes on in our mind is the main source of our own suffering – and, by implication, our own happiness. Most of us, as Lama Zopa Rinpoche points out, have no idea that what goes on in our mind plays any role at all in our happiness and suffering, forget about being the main player!
It’s pretty clear that we all instinctively believe – humans, monkeys, ants, all of us – that the outside world is the main source of happiness and suffering: observe our behavior; it’s evident. So to turn this around, to make the paradigm shift and to recognize that it’s our thoughts and feelings is no easy task.
Learning to be our own therapists, as Lama Yeshe puts it, is actually the defining characteristic of being a Buddhist; that’s when we really start the work.
This is hard enough. But to have confidence in the logic of delusions not being at the core of our being, that takes some thinking about.
The essence of it is that our emotions, the positive ones as well, are expressions of conceptions held deeply in our mind. Our problem is we don’t even notice what is going on in our mind until they become emotional, which is when the body gets involved.
This is why employing Buddha’s marvelous psychological skill called concentration meditation is crucial: with even a little success we begin to go beyond the physical and get to hear the conceptual stories that underpin, that drive the emotions. Then we can begin to hear how they are literally misconceptions and we can start to use logic to argue with them, to deconstruct them, gradually to lessen their hold over us and to believe less and less in their stories.
This is the job to be done!