These four sights bring on the most momentous midlife crisis in world history. Looking at his life though the prism of the suffering of sickness, old age, and death, Siddhartha decides that there must be more to human existence than profit, power, pleasure, and prestige. So at the age of twenty-nine he vows to “go forth from home to homelessness.”1 The next day, in an event now celebrated as the “Great Departure” (and reenacted in ordination ceremonies the world over), Siddhartha allows his spiritual desires to override the duties of filial piety. He says good-bye to his father and wife and son, walks out of his palace one last time, rides to the border of what would have been his vast inheritance, shaves his head, takes off his fine clothes, and puts on the life of a wandering holy man.
In the Western religions, wandering typically arrives as punishment. It is the spanking you get after you eat the apple or kill your brother. But for Siddhartha wandering arrived as opportunity. For years he meandered around North India, studying with various yogis, experimenting with various body austerities, and otherwise searching for a solution to the problem of human suffering. As he whittled his body down to skin and bones—the opposite of the big fat plastic “Buddhas” of Chinatown fame—his renown as an ascetic grew, but his ability to focus on his spiritual goal diminished. The more he disciplined his body, the more often and more desperately it cried out for food and sleep. So he left his teachers and fellow students and decided to strike out on his own. Forging a “Middle Path” between hedonism and asceticism, he vowed to eat and sleep just enough to solve the problem of suffering.
At the age of thirty-five, after six years as a renunciant, he sat cross-legged under a tree in Bodhgaya in North India and vowed not to get up until he had stolen the secret of our everlasting wandering from rebirth to rebirth. Sensing trouble, Mara, the demon of sense pleasures, sent a Bangkok of distractions his way, but the Buddha-to-be would not be stirred by such trivialities. After forty-nine days, awakening came upon him. In one of the great moments in world history, he saw that all things are impermanent and ever changing. He saw how we suffer because we wish the world were otherwise. And through these insights he saw his suffering itself wander away. From that point forward he was the Buddha, which, like the term Christ, is a title rather than a proper name. In this case the title means not messiah but “Awakened One.”
After his Great Awakening, the Buddha had a crisis of conscience. He knew that what he had achieved he had achieved alone, by his own effort, on his own merit, and through his own experience. He knew that words fail. So how could he possibly teach what he had learned to others? Wouldn’t any instruction he might offer be misunderstood? How could he speak without disturbing the silence out of which his awakening had come? So this newly minted Buddha considered withdrawing entirely from the world of speech and society. He returned to his itinerant life, wandering in silence for days. He finally decided, however, to try to help others see what he had seen, experience what he had experienced, so that they, too, might escape from “this sorrow-piled mountain-wall of old age, birth, disease, and death.”2
In a deer park in Sarnath, outside of Varanasi in North India, he found five fellow travelers who had turned their backs on him after he had decided to embark on the Middle Path. “Turning the wheel of dharma,” he delivered to them his first sermon: Buddhism 101. At the heart of this sermon were the Four Noble Truths, which compress the problem, solution, and techniques of Buddhism into this quick-and-easy formula: life is marked by suffering; but suffering has an origin; so it can be eliminated; and the path to the elimination of suffering is the Noble Eightfold Path. Whether these five holy men were converted by his person or by his words is not known. But after the Buddha gave this pathbreaking sermon, each of them decided to join his sangha, or community, and the Buddhist mission was on.
For the next forty-five years, the Buddha wandered around the Indian subcontinent, turning the wheel of dharma and gathering monks and nuns into a motley crew of wandering beggars. Together they bore witness to what has been described as “history’s most dangerous idea”—that human beings can solve the human problem on our own, without recourse to God or divine revelation.3 In this way, Buddhism, the most psychological of the great religions, joined Platonism, Jainism, Confucianism, and Daoism as one of the great innovations of the Axial Age.
One of the distinguishing marks of the Buddhist tradition is its emphasis on experience over belief. Buddhism never had a creed or a catechism until the American convert Henry Steel Olcott decided in the late nineteenth century that any self-respecting religion needed both. This relative indifference toward religion’s doctrinal dimension is rooted in the Buddha’s celebrated refusal to speculate. Like his contemporary Confucius, who also inspired a new religion without relying on God or the supernatural, the Buddha was a practical man. He likened his teaching to a raft—“it is for crossing over,” he said—and was forever passing his carefully chosen words through a colander of the useful.4
One of the most famous stories of the Buddha’s life concerns a man who keeps peppering him with all manner of metaphysical puzzlers. Is the world eternal? Are body and soul one and the same? The Buddha responds to these questions with questions of his own. If you were shot with a poisoned arrow, would you waste time and breath by asking who shot the arrow, how tall he was, and of what complexion? Wouldn’t you just pull the arrow out? Buddhism, he says, is about removing the arrow of suffering. Speculation only plugs more pain and poison into skin.
At the age of eighty this prince who had awakened ate a bad piece of meat placed in his begging bowl. He died of food poisoning in Kushinagar, India, not far from his boyhood home on the Nepalese border. Just before passing into what Buddhists refer to as parinirvana (“final nirvana”), he asked his followers not to grieve for him. Everything is characterized by transiency (anicca), he said. Everything that is born must decay and die. His reputed last words were, “Be lamps unto yourselves; work out your own liberation with diligence.” His followers then cremated his body and distributed the remains as relics.
Since that time Buddhist pilgrims have been making the circuit of the four sacred places of the Buddha’s life: Lumbini, where he was born; Bodhgaya, where he was enlightened; Sarnath, where he gave his first sermon; and Kushinagar, where he died. Along the way they pray to the Buddha not only for nirvana but also for help with the struggles of ordinary life, and they regale one another with miraculous legends of his past lives. These pilgrims used to go on foot, sleeping under the stars or on monastery floors (or both), but now it is possible to go on first-class trains and air-conditioned buses, enjoying the amenities of luxury hotels.
When I was young, I did a budget version of this circuit myself and was particularly taken with Sarnath. One of the glories of India is that it is a land of hyperstimulation. If, as the Hebrew Bible puts it, “Wisdom crieth aloud in the streets” (Proverbs 1:20), you wouldn’t know it in Mumbai or Calcutta, since a clamorous combination of cars, motorbikes, motorized rickshaws, buses, and bicycle bells push decibels in many Indian cities to jet runway levels. But the stimulation does not hyperactivate only the ear. India’s images of the divine are riots of color. And its city streets are crowded almost to the point of impassibility. When I visited, Sarnath was a welcome respite from this blooming, buzzing confusion. While many of the world’s sacred spaces have been overtaken by the jealous god of consumerism, Sarnath had yet to go over to the tourist side. The architecture of the stupas there was blessedly spare, reminiscent of the Native American funeral mounds scattered around the American South and Midwest. And the place was eerily, blessedly quiet, a fitting tribute to this way of awakening.
From Asia to America
Upon the death of the Buddha, who is often said to have lived between 563 and 483 B.C.E. but may have lived as much as a century later, much of Buddhism was literally a movement—a meandering collection of monks and nuns who imitated the Buddha’s “no abiding place” lifestyle, supported only by the benevolence of lay followers
willing to give them food in hopes of acquiring good karma and a better rebirth. But eventually more and more of these renunciants settled down into a vast network of wealthy and powerful patrons. In this way Buddhism became the first of the great religions to develop the institution of monasticism.
As the fairy tale of the Buddha yielded to the exigencies of history, Buddhism spread across much of the Indian subcontinent, thanks in part to its revolutionary rejection of the caste system and its indifference to the scriptures, ceremonies, and status of high-caste Brahmins. It moved north and east into Central Asia, along the Silk Road into China, and from there into Korea and Japan. It sailed south to Sri Lanka and Myanmar, and from there into the Southeast Asian archipelagos. It even hiked its way over the mountains to the sky-high plateau of Tibet. Buddhism spread not because it had a new holy book, like Islam, or a new god, like Christianity. In fact, early Buddhists refused to see the Buddha as divine and did not view his words as revelation. Buddhism spread because it had a story, a powerful new story about someone who, by waking up, had solved the problem of human suffering and found peace amidst the swirl.
Back in its homeland of India, Buddhism had its Constantine moment when the great emperor Ashoka (304–232 B.C.E.), shaken by a horrific battle that gave him a great victory in exchange for thousands upon thousands of deaths, converted to Buddhism and began to construct all over the subcontinent monuments to compassion, nonviolence, and religious tolerance. But India was a god-besotted place and not one to forsake divinity. So by the thirteenth century, Buddhism had all but died out in the land of its birth, a victim of the popularity of bhakti-style Hinduism and the powerful arrival of Islam.
Buddhism went West in the nineteenth century via books, artifacts, and people—through translations of Buddhist scriptures into European languages; through art collected by Buddhist sympathizers and deposited in places such as the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston; through converts, such as the Russian founder of the Theosophical Society, Helena Blavatsky; and through immigrants, particularly from China and Japan, to Europe and North America.
Today roughly 445 million people, or 7 percent of the world’s population, are Buddhists, making Buddhism the world’s fourth largest religion after Christianity, Islam, and Hinduism. The world’s Buddhists are concentrated in South and East Asia and are only minimally represented in Africa and Latin America. There are, at a minimum, 175 million Buddhists in China, and Buddhists form majorities in Thailand, Cambodia, Myanmar, Sri Lanka, Bhutan, Japan, and Laos. When it comes to monasticism, numbers are hard to come by. There may have been as many as one million renouncers in Tibet when China invaded in 1950, but monks are probably most numerous today in Thailand and Taiwan.
Buddhism’s trend line, however, is down. At its peak, this tradition might have accounted for close to one-third of the world’s population, but the twentieth century hit Buddhism hard. The rise of communism in China and North Korea, and of evangelical and Pentecostal Christianity in South Korea, were particularly devastating. Still, Buddhism is growing rapidly in Australia, New Zealand, and the United States, thanks to ongoing immigration from Asian countries, the enticement of a spirituality that doesn’t hinge on the God proposition, and Buddhism’s apparent compatibility with science, especially modern psychology and quantum mechanics. Buddhism has also benefited from the belovability of the Tibetan Buddhist leader and Nobel Peace Prize winner, the Dalai Lama, and from a series of 1990s films on Tibetan themes, including Seven Years in Tibet starring Brad Pitt, and Little Buddha starring Keanu Reeves.5
Of all the Asian religions, Buddhism has had the largest influence on European and American popular culture. Its beliefs and practices have made their way onto the television show The Simpsons, the movie The Matrix, a bestselling book by NBA coach Phil Jackson called Sacred Hoops (1996), and lyrics by the hip-hop group the Beastie Boys (“Bodhisattva Vow”). Buddhism has also long attracted the attention of Western intellectuals. The German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche called Buddhism “a hundred times more realistic than Christianity,” and the American Beat Generation hero Jack Kerouac devoted his novel Dharma Bums (1958) to Buddhist themes and in the process helped to set off the “rucksack revolution” of the 1960s.6
The largest of the three main Buddhist branches is the Mahayana (“Great Vehicle”), which predominates in Vietnam and in East Asian countries such as China, Japan, and Korea. The oldest is the Theravada (“Way of the Elders”), which is popular in South and Southeast Asia—in Thailand, Myanmar, Sri Lanka, and Cambodia. Tibet is home to the high-altitude Vajrayana “Diamond Vehicle,” which also has a presence in Mongolia, Bhutan, Nepal, Russia, parts of China and Japan, and India, where the Dalai Lama has resided in exile since fleeing his homeland in 1959.
Although Buddhism is widely associated in the West with meditation, most Buddhists do not meditate. Their piety consists largely of bhakti-style devotion to various Buddhas and other supramundane figures. They worship these Buddhas in temples, pray to them at home, and go on pilgrimage to sacred sites associated with their exploits. Buddhism also plays the leading role in funerary rites in almost every society where it has a major presence. Because this tradition is associated with rebirth, families look to Buddhist monks when it comes to dying, funerals, and memorials.
Among the great religions, Buddhism runs in the middle of the pack in terms of contemporary influence, just behind Hinduism, which boasts more adherents, and just ahead of Judaism, which claims only about one practitioner for every thirty Buddhists worldwide.
From Suffering to Nirvana
Like Hindus, Buddhists trace the human problem to the karma-fueled cycle of life, death, and rebirth known as samsara. But Buddhists are more explicit about precisely why it is undesirable to wander from rebirth to rebirth. Rebirth is undesirable, they say, because life is marked by suffering. So the problem Buddhism seeks to overcome is suffering, which Buddhists refer to as dukkha. Its goal is nirvana, which literally means “blowing out” (as in the candles on a birthday cake) but in this case refers to extinguishing suffering.7
Buddhists use a variety of techniques to achieve this goal. Some chant. Some just sit. Some visualize their way into mandalas, or sacred maps of the cosmos. Some puzzle over mind benders called koans in an effort to frustrate the either/or mind and shock what remains into nondual awakening. But Buddhists are best known for the practice of meditation, even though it is not a common activity among laypeople. A Burmese friend who has been meditating for decades once described his practice as nothing more than “a chance to be idle.” In our purpose-driven culture, however, doing nothing can be hard work.
Of all the styles of Buddhist meditation, the simplest is following your breath. I do this with my students in my introduction to religion courses, and it’s something anyone can try at home. You find a comfortable place to sit and then just follow your breath—its going out, its coming in, and the subtle rests between its ebbing and flowing. In the process you might realize that this breath is forever changing, the end of the out giving rise to the start of the in, and the end of the in giving rise to the start of the out. You might also feel how the body breaths on its own—that you are not in control.8
Another popular Buddhist practice is vipassana, which is variously translated as “insight” and “mindfulness” meditation. Here, instead of your breath, you follow your feelings or thoughts or sensations. If you are bored, observe that you are bored. If your back aches, observe that your back aches. The aim of vipassana meditation is simply to be mindful of things as they are, to watch how all conditions arise and pass away, and so to observe, as German poet Rainer Maria Rilke put it, that “no feeling is final,” and no thought or sensation either.9
Metta is another form of Buddhist meditation. Metta is often translated as “loving kindness,” but it also means unconditional love—love without attachment or expectation of return. In this technique you begin by feeling metta for yourself. You move on to cultivating unconditional love for a friend. Then you fe
el metta for someone you neither like nor dislike, and then for someone you dislike or even hate. In the next stage you feel unconditional love for yourself, your friend, the person to whom you are indifferent, and your enemy, treating them all as equally needful and deserving of loving kindness. Finally, you extend this feeling of metta to all beings everywhere in the world and beyond: “May all creatures be of a blissful heart.”10
Though their techniques differ, Buddhists share certain core convictions. Whereas some Buddhists are deeply engaged in questions of rebirth and the afterlife, most follow their Confucian and Jewish counterparts in focusing on the here and now. They see suffering as the problem and nirvana as the solution. They trace suffering to “ignorant craving”—our tendency to mistake things that are changing as unchanging and then to cling desperately to their supposedly unchanging forms.11 Or, as one Zen teacher puts it, “Suffering arises from wanting something other than what is.”12 This is a shocking departure from the teachings of Plato and the Upanishads, which promise happiness to those who discover and hold fast to what is unchanging and eternal.
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