I can imagine sitting down with a reader and being asked that question, which would lead to quite a few more.
How am I supposed to follow someone who constantly insisted that he was no longer a person and didn’t have a self?
Ideally, you follow him by losing your own self. Which seems impossible, since it’s your self that’s fascinated by him. It’s your self that’s suffering and wants to be rid of suffering. The primary message of Buddhism is that this self cannot accomplish anything real. It must find a way to disappear, just as Buddha did.
The self reaches its goal by not being the self? It sounds like a paradox.
Yes, but Buddhists found three ways to live the wisdom their teacher left behind. The first way was social, forming groups of disciples into a Sangha, like the group of monks and nuns that Buddha gathered in his lifetime. The Sangha exists to establish a spiritual lifestyle. People remind themselves of the teaching and keep the Buddhist vision alive. They meditate together and create an atmosphere of peace.
The second way to follow Buddha is ethical, centered on the value of compassion. Buddha was known as The Compassionate One, a being who loved all of humanity without judgment. Buddhist ethics bring the same attitude into everyday life. A Buddhist practices being kind and seeing others without judgment, but in addition displays love and reverence for life itself. Buddhist morality is peaceful, accepting, and joyous.
The third way to follow Buddha is mystical. You take to heart the message of non-self. You do everything possible to break the bonds of attachment that keep you trapped in the illusion that you are a separate self. Here your aim is to tiptoe out of the material world even as your body remains in it. Ordinary people are doing things all day, but in your heart you’ve turned your attention to non-doing, as the Buddhists call it. Non-doing isn’t passivity but a state of openness to all possibilities.
If I practice non-doing, what would I actually do? It still seems like a paradox.
The third way confronts Buddha’s most enigmatic side. How can you shed the separate self when it’s the only thing you’ve known? The process sounds frightening, for one thing, because there’s no guarantee. Once you accomplish “ego death,” as it’s often called, what will be left? You might wind up enlightened, but you also might wind up a blank, a passive non-self with no interests or desires. People find the Buddhist path rigorous because you are asked to re-examine everything you think will get you ahead in life—money, possessions, status, accomplishments—and see them as a source of suffering. For example, having money doesn’t directly cause suffering, but it ties you to the illusion by hiding from sight the fact that there’s another way to live that’s actually real. Money, like possessions and status, creates a treadmill that brings one desire after another.
So enlightenment is the same as having no desires?
You have to understand “no desires” in a positive sense, as fulfillment. At the moment a musician is performing, there’s a state of no-desire because he feels fulfilled. At the moment you’re eating a wonderful meal, hunger is fulfilled. Buddha taught that there is a state, known as Nirvana, where desire is irrelevant. Everything desire is trying to achieve exists in Nirvana already. You don’t have to pursue one desire after another in a futile quest to end suffering. Instead, you go right to the source of Being, which is neither full nor empty. It just is.
Do you still want to live after that?
Nirvana is no longer about life and death, which are opposites. Buddha wanted to free people from all opposites. If you are following his teachings the second way, through morality and ethics, then being good, truthful, nonviolent, and compassionate is important. You don’t want to practice the opposite behavior. But if you follow Buddha the third way, the mystical way of non-doing, duality is the very thing you try to dissolve. You go beyond good and evil, which is scary to many people.
What is the non-self?
It’s who you are when there are no personal attachments. This sounds mystical, but we shouldn’t be distracted by semantics. The non-self is natural; it’s rooted in everyday experience. When you wake up in the morning there’s a moment before your mind gets filled with all the things you have to do today. In that moment you exist without a self. You don’t think about your name or your bank account; you don’t even think about your spouse and children. You just are. Enlightenment extends that state and deepens it. You aren’t burdened by having to remember who you are, ever again.
When I wake up in the morning I remember who I am almost immediately. How does that change?
By gradually shifting your allegiance. Consider how you relate to your body. You mostly forget about it. Heartbeat, metabolism, body temperature, electrolyte balance—literally dozens of processes go on automatically, and your nervous system coordinates them perfectly without interference from the conscious mind. Buddha suggests that you can let go of many things that you’re certain you must control. Instead of devoting so much effort and struggle to thinking, planning, running after pleasure, and avoiding pain, you can surrender and put those functions on automatic, also. This is accomplished gradually by a practice called mindfulness.
You mean, I simply stop thinking?
You stop investing yourself in thinking, because Buddha teaches that you haven’t been in control of your mind anyway. The mind is a series of fleeting, impermanent events, and trying to ground yourself in impermanence is an illusion. Time is exactly the same, a sequence of fleeting events that has no solid basis. Once you hear this teaching, you put it into practice through mindfulness. Whenever you are tempted by the illusion, you remind yourself that it’s not real. In a way, a better term might be re-mindfulness.
The process of shifting your consciousness takes time. This is an evolution, not a revolution. We’re all pulled in by the temptation to choose between A and B. Duality makes us believe that making good decisions and avoiding bad ones is all-important. Buddha disagrees—he says that getting out of duality is all-important, and you’ll never escape as long as you keep burying yourself deeper into the game of “A-or-B?” Reality isn’t A or B. It’s both and it’s neither. Mindfulness keeps you aware of that fact.
How am I to understand “both and neither”?
You can’t, not with the mind. The mind is basically a machine that processes the world only in terms of “I want this” and “I don’t want that.” Buddha taught that you can step outside the machinery and simply watch it working. You witness the whole fantastic jumble of desires, fears, wishes, and memories that is the mind. When you gain practice doing that in meditation, things change. You begin to be aware of yourself in a simpler way, without so much mental jumble. In time your allegiance shifts, and the space between thoughts—the silent gap—dominates instead of thoughts.
Is that Nirvana?
No, it’s just a sign that you are successfully practicing mindfulness. The silent gap between thoughts goes by too fast for anyone to live there. You have to give the gap a chance to expand, and at the same time silence deepens. It may sound strange, but your mind can be silent the whole time it’s also thinking. Ordinarily, silence and thought are considered opposites, but when you go beyond opposites, they merge. You identify with the timeless source of thought rather than the thoughts emerging from it.
What advantage does this bring? Assuming I take the time and effort to achieve such a state.
One can speak of the advantages in glowing terms that sound very alluring. You gain peace; you no longer suffer. Death no longer holds any fear. You stand unshakably on your own Being. In reality the gains are highly individual and proceed at their own pace. Everyone is in a different state of unreality that’s highly personal. I may be obsessive, while the person next to me may be anxious and the person next to him depressed. In meditation these knots of discord and conflict begin to unravel of their own accord. Yet there’s always an evolutionary unfolding. In your own way you walk the path to peace, non-suffering, fearlessness, and everything else Buddha exemplified.
From the outside this third way of following Buddha looks mystical, but over time it becomes as natural as breathing. Buddhism survives today and thrives all around the world because it is so open-ended. You don’t have to obey a set of rules or worship God or the gods. You don’t even have to be spiritual. All you have to do is look into yourself and yearn to become clear, to wake up and be complete. Buddhism counts on the fact that everyone possesses at least a bit of these motivations. Mindfulness and meditation form the basis of Buddhist practice—although every sect and teacher has a particular slant on them. Za-zen, the style of Buddhist meditation practiced in Japan, isn’t the same as Vipasana meditation in South Asia. In the end, however, Buddhism is a do-it-yourself project, and that’s the secret of its appeal in the modern world. Don’t we all ultimately concentrate on personal suffering and what our individual fate will be? Buddha asked for nothing else as a starting point, and yet he promised that the end point would be eternity.
Acknowledgments
First and foremost I must thank a friend whose imagination sparked this project, film director Shekhar Kapur. We spent long, fascinating sessions together trying to imagine Buddha’s life. Without his contributions, the best parts of this book would never have appeared.
Thanks to Gideon Weil, my editor, who made invaluable suggestions every step of the way and intervened at just the right moments.
As always, my family and everyone at the Chopra Center provided their support and love. I am deeply grateful and hope that this book makes you proud.
About the Author
DEEPAK CHOPRA, the founder of The Chopra Center for Wellbeing, is the preeminent teacher of Eastern philosophy to the Western World. He has been a bestselling author for decades, and his writings have sold millions of copies. Visit the author online at www.chopra.com.
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Credits
Jacket design: LeVan Fisher Design
Jacket image: Shutter Stock/Andy Lim
Sneak Preview of
MUHAMMAD: A Story of the Last Prophet
A Sneak Preview of
DEEPAK CHOPRA’S
MUHAMMAD
A Story of the Last Prophet
Author’s Note
A great surprise awaited me when I began writing the story of Muhammad, the last prophet to emerge from the Middle Eastern desert—the endless, bleak, arid land that produced Moses and Jesus. Muhammad has suffered under centuries of disapproval outside the Muslim world. Ours is not the first age to react suspiciously when told by adherents that “Islam” means “peace.” That suspicion only turns darker when extremist jihadis become terrorists in Muhammad’s name.
In his own lifetime, the Prophet fought strenuously against his opponents and led armies into battle for the new faith. I grew up in India among Muslim friends, but even there, where mingled cultures and religions are an ancient way of life, the partition of Pakistan in 1945 led to riots and mass murder on both sides. In the name of truth, believers can easily trample love and peace.
None of that came as a surprise, however. I was determined to be fair to Muhammad and see him as he saw himself in seventh-century Arabia—we can locate his birth in 570 CE, in the middle of Europe’s Dark Ages, two centuries before Charlemagne was crowned emperor by the pope in 800, almost six hundred years before the spires of Chartres cathedral first pointed heavenward in the twelfth century. That’s where the surprise occurred, because among all the founders of the great world religions, Muhammad is the most like us.
Muhammad saw himself as an ordinary man. His relatives and neighbors didn’t part and make way when he walked down the parched dirt streets of Mecca. He was orphaned by the age of six, but otherwise nothing exceptional stands out other than his ability to survive. Because he existed in a fiercely tribal society, Muhammad had numerous cousins and other males of the Hashim clan surrounding him as his extended family. There was no mark of divinity on him (except those invented by later chroniclers as Islam prospered and spread). He grew up to be a merchant who happened to marry well, taking a rich widow, Khadijah, as his wife, even though she was fifteen years his senior. He traveled in caravans to Syria one season and Yemen the next. Mecca owed its prosperity to the caravan trade. Even though these sojourns were beset with danger—Muhammad’s handsome, favored father, Abdullah, had died on his way home from one trip—merchants of Muhammad’s class routinely made journeys across the desert that lasted several months at a time.
What is extraordinary is that there are so many marks of common humanity in Muhammad’s transformation. Jesus is being exalted when he is called the Son of Man; Muhammad deliberately blends in when he calls himself “a man among men.” He could neither read nor write, but that was common enough, even among the well-to-do. He had four daughters who survived birth and two sons who died in infancy. Doing without an heir was unthinkable, and so he took the unusual step of adopting a freed slave boy, Zayd, as his son. Otherwise, it is inexplicable that God should reach down into a settled husband and father’s life to speak through him. The most remarkable fact about Muhammad is that he was so much like us, until destiny provided one of the greatest shocks in history.
In the year 610 CE, Muhammad, a forty-year-old businessman known as Al-Amin, “the trustworthy,” marched down from the mountains—or in this case a cave in the semi-verdant hills surrounding Mecca—looking shattered and frightened. After literally hiding under the covers to regain his wits, he gathered the few people he could trust and announced something unbelievable. An angel had visited him in the cave, where Muhammad regularly went to escape the corruption and distress of Mecca. He sought peace and solitude, but both were destroyed when Gabriel, the same archangel who visited Mary and guarded Eden with a flaming sword after God banished Adam and Eve, abruptly ordered Muhammad to “recite.”
The precise word is important, because “to recite” is the root word of Koran (or Qur’an). Muhammad was thunder-struck at this angelic command. He wasn’t someone who joined in the practice of public recitation, for which the Bedouin were famous. As a boy he had been sent to live with nomadic tribes in the desert, a common practice among prosperous Meccans. It was felt that the purity and hardship of desert life was good for a child. At the very least it took him away from the foul air and depraved city ways of Mecca. Among the Arabs the Bedouin were considered to speak the purest Arabic, but for the rest of his life Muhammad would betray his sojourn among the nomads, which lasted from his birth to the age of five, by having a rustic accent. The Bedouin were also famous as storytellers. They recited long legendary tales in praise of tribal heroes who conducted daring raids to seize camels and women from their warring neighbors. But Muhammad sat on the periphery as a listener rather than a participant, and he remained mute, so far as history is concerned, up to the moment when Gabriel found him.
The angel couldn’t persuade Muhammad easily. He had to lock him in a tight embrace three times—a mythical, mystical number—before he agreed to recite. What came out of the Prophet’s mouth were not his own words. To him and to those who began to believe his message, the fact that Muhammad had never recited in public proved that his words came from Allah. To this day, the Arabic in which the Koran is couched is singular, creating its own style and expressive world. Outside Islam, the only suitable comparison is probably the King James Bible, whose language resonates with English speakers as if spoken by either God or a chosen one who had been gifted with a divine level of utterance.
Because Muhammad never expected to be divinely inspired, the more tragic our suspicion and fear of Islam today. The pre-Islamic world feels much farther away than even the world of the Old Testament. Slaves were kept and cruelly abused. So were women, and unwanted baby girls were routinely left to die on a mountainside after they were born. Arabs used knives to settle even petty arguments, and they thought it honorable to murder men from neighboring tribes. Revenge was something to be proud of.
None of these ways, barbaric as they are, belong to Arabs alone. All can be found in various other early cultures. But Islam has been branded with barbarity in a unique way, in part because, in its zeal to maintain the Prophet’s world as well as his word, the customs of antiquity have been preserved into modern times. I portray Mecca as it really was, which means in all its harshness and brutality. To lessen the impact of our modern-day judgments, I use multiple narrators to share in telling the story. My storytellers are women and men of every caste, slaves and rich merchants, believers and skeptics, idol worshipers and eager followers of Muhammad’s message alike. The first people to hear the Koran had as many reactions to it as you or I would if our best friend collared us with a tale about a midnight visit from an archangel.
I didn’t write this book to make Muhammad more holy. I wrote it to show that holiness was just as confusing, terrifying, and exalting in the seventh century as it would be today.
After that, the other issues were fairly minor. Ornate Arab names can be difficult for outsiders to remember, so I have minimized the number of characters in the book, keeping it down to the most important. Spelling is doubly confusing, since the same words and names are transcribed several ways. I haven’t been consistent here. At the risk of irritating scholars, I’ve used the old, common spelling of “Koran.” I’ve reduced long tribal names to easily remembered ones like Abu Talib and Waraqah. And since the hamza (’) and ‘ayn (‘), for example, in a word like “Ka‘aba,” have no significance in English, I’ve done away with most of them, again in keeping with old, common usage. If sophisticated Arabic speakers are offended, I apologize in advance.
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