The Buddha's Smile

The Buddha's Smile: Enlightenment and Happiness
Robert A. F. Thurman
Talk for B.U. Institute for Philosophy and Religion
December 8, 1993

PREAMBLE
Lately I have been reflecting more often about a salient fact of Buddhist history; or it could be myth - whichever it finally turns out to be, perhaps we’ll never know, the ramifications are the same. Siddhartha supposedly became a Buddha, a perfectly enlightened being, at the moment of greeting the morning star in the pre-dawn twilight under the Bodhi tree on a full moon May morning in some year round-about 528 BCE. To become perfectly enlightened is not just to slip into some disconnected euphoria, an oceanic feeling of mystic oneness apart from ordinary reality. It is not to be invested by some God with the final word, a message to believe in and to promulgate. It is not even to come up with a solution, a sort of formula that can control reality. Rather it is supposed to be an experience of release from all compulsions and sufferings, combined with a precise awareness of any relevant object of knowlege. A Buddha should know everything that matters and the precise nature of it all - that is how he or she is defined. Upon attaining this realization, the story is that Buddha smiled!

Fortunately for all concerned! The point is he could have frowned. Or he could have remained passive and inert. Or he could have beamed away like a Star Trek officer, turned into little sparkles - then to be no more. But the Buddha of our story smiled a cheerful smile. What a relief!

“Buddha” is the designation for a person who comes to the peak of sentient evolution, beyond the stages and states of humans and even gods. It is defined as “awakened” from the sleep of misknowledge, and as “blossomed” into the omniscience and competence of universal compassion. This stage of being has many other names: “Bhagavan” - “Glorious,” “Tathagata” - “Transcendingly Realized,” and most important in our context today, “Sugata” - “Blissful,” sukham - gata, “having become bliss.” Such a being is described as The Buddha’s Smile having three bodies, bodies of Truth, Beatitude, and Emanation. In any sort of Buddhism, it seems beyond question that “Buddhahood” is a synonym for supreme happiness. To state my thesis succinctly, from the Buddhist perspective enlightenment is happiness. So naturally a Buddha smiles.

In the Individual, Monastic, or “Early Buddhist” Vehicle, Buddha is called Sugata, Blissful One, he is said to have attained both Nirvana and Parinirvana, all suffering “blown out” and utterly blown out, to have reached the supreme happiness (paramasukha), to have gone beyond the Gods in joy, to have become the God of the Gods. In the Universal, Messianic, or Social Buddhist Vehicle, Buddhas are said to enjoy a Beatific Body (Sambhogakaya), to experience nonduality of Nirvana and the world, and are depicted as theistically capable of producing whole universes of bliss, buddhaverses (buddhakshetra) of Bliss (Sukhavati), Intense Delight (Abhirati) and so forth. And in the Lightning, Diamond, or Apocalyptic Vehicle, ultimate reality as expeiencedin enlightenment is described as bliss-void-indivisible (sukhashunya-avinirbhaga). So the overall Buddhist view must be that supreme enlightenment and true happiness are one and the same.

MISAPPREHENSIONS
If this is so, then why is Buddhism considered a pessimistic, nihilistic, even morbid religion or philosophy? And this not only by moderns in the West, but by some Brahmins at various times in India, some Mandarins at various times in China, and other authorities all over countries where Buddhism flourished for millennia? I think the essence of the answer lies in the corollary of the thesis “enlightenment is happiness;” namely, that “ignorance is misery.”Compared to the joyous bliss of freedom and released awareness, the Buddha saw the plight of beings in bondage and confusion as an unremitting condition of suffering. Hence in the diagnosis that he submitted to the world, the first noble truth (or “holy fact,” as I prefer) was that all misknowledge-driven living is constant misery. The Dhammacakka-pavattana Sutta records him as saying simply, “All this is misery,” the commentarial tradition informing us that the “this” refers to the “contaminated aggregates” (sasravaskandha) of the misknowing body-mi nd-complex.

So it must have easily seemed to people who felt happy now and then that the Buddha was profoundly pessimistic. They tended to fasten on the first Holy Fact of suffering as proof of a grim outlook indeed. It was not clear to them that he called this the first “holy fact” because he was aware that it was a fact only for a holy person - ordinary egocentric individuals consider this an error, not a fact or a truth. Ordinary egocentric life alternates between pain and pleasure, suffering and happiness. Buddha understood that alteration, and called ordinary happiness “suffering of change,” because of its instability. Well then who’s right and who wrong? Are people right or Buddha? Is it merely a matter of opinion? It would be a matter of opinion if the perceptions of the two types of beings, egocentric beings and Buddhas, were equal. But a Buddha is supposed to have a superior perception, to see through illusion and discern reality. So an egocentric person who would consider a Buddha to be another type of egocentric person would certainly argue it was his word against Buddha’s. But the Buddha argued that it is fact and not opinion. It is a fact that all this is suffering for an unenlightened person, and that this fact is only known by an enlightened person. The unenlightened are like Plato’s cave-dwellers.

Only the one who has escaped and seen the sun knows that they are trapped in the shadows. To think this through for ourselves, we have to understand how the Buddha analyzed the ordinary person’s misperception, to see if the analysis makes sense.

The cause of the symptom of universal suffering, according to Buddha, is ignorance (avidya). This ignorance is not merely a passive failure to know some things, it is an active mis-knowing of everything. It is a knowing of things to be what they are not in reality (a-sad-vidya). I prefer to call it a misknowledge. Most basically, the ordinary being knows that she is herself, she is there. Her presence is an irreducible reality, fixed , unique, constant, and independent. Each of us feels that way. In fact if we for a moment lost track of who or what we were, if we could not recognize ourselves, we would consider that a sign of sickness and seek medical help. Similarly, we each see things as having fixed essences that correspond to our notions of them, serving as the referents of the names we give them. We know we have a fixed identity and things have a fixed identity, and these identities are intrinsic, objective, identifiable, and irreducible. There are certain problems deriving from this knowledge w e have. The first is that while we are sure of self, “other” becomes problematic. Cognitively it is problematic, because, like Descartes, we may always doubt that the other, the rest of the universe, is actually there or is only an elaborate illusion. We can only be sure of ourselves, our constant being, the point of our perceptions and the source of our thoughts. Emotionally it is problematic because the other is so much greater than the self, it is infinite, eternal, it goes beyond our limits of space and time. Our perception gets lost in it. We die in it. And other beings, we dimly realize have a perception opposite to ours, they think they are the absolute center of the universe, even though we know we are. So we are pitted against them, they against us. So we feel insecure, anxious, we desire things in order to expand our sphere of security. We hate others for expanding their spheres of security. We fear they will do to us what we want to do to them. We are proud when we feel momentarily on top. We are envious when they seem above us for the moment.

Thus our basic knowledge of our presence, reality, and identity reveals tous a predicament that is naturally unpleasant. It is Hobbes’ “war of all against all.” We live in constant dissatisfaction. We live in fear and trembling, feeling essentially unique and alone, isolated and alienated from all others and the cosmos itself. This knowledge seems to place our very heart in a kind of vice, in a perpetual state of being squeezed by the awareness of the untenability of our situation. Naturally, as with any chronic pain, we get used to it, we get so we hardly notice it, and we measure our days by our little escapes and successes, by the momentary pleasures we experience from any slight relief or distraction from our basic condition, one being pitted against an unrelenting, consuming, and infinite alien universe. And in a world of other beings suffering under the same core constriction of innermost being, we develop a mutual agreement not to draw attention to our shared chronic stress of alienation, but t o reinforce each other in making do.

What the Buddha discovered was that our knowledge of our distinct, individual, irreducible identity was actually a misknowledge. The crushing vice gripping our heart was simply the result of an error. If the seemingly absolute self was mobilized to focus all its powers on the verification of its own existence, it could only come up with an eventually definitive failure to discover itself. No atomic self, no individual could be found to resist analysis by the ultimatereality- seeking analytic cognition. When the Buddha experienced this definitive failure to discover an intrinsic identity in the self, any real thing to correspond to the habitual sense of the absolute self, he experienced a total melt-down of his own personal heart-vice. The vice squeezed itself to the limit, as it were, and found itself squeezing against itself, with nothing sensitive in the middle, with nothing to hold on to. Like a pair of pliers with nothing in the grippers, infinite pressure could do no good, do no damage. When he e xperienced this space-like equipoised samadhi, the direct experience of selflessness or voidness, he felt an overwhelming relief. He felt free of fear from any other, totally free on the absolute level, on the level of his accustomed absolute intrinsic identity. And yet he was also free of any reified state of isolated freedom, and so relatively totally interconnected with the whole world. He felt no more loneliness and alienation, no more pitted against the world but a part of the world, a part of other beings and they a part of him. There was no more any opponent for him, he no longer lacked anything. What a monumental relief. As if an iron vice-grip that had been squeezing on his heart were suddenly removed. This is the happiness of enlightenment. No wonder every ordinary happiness, pleasure of senseexperience or mental pleasure, seemed paltry and insignificant next to the basic condition of the misknowing, a condition of being squeezed internally by the steel trap of the identity-habit.

HAPPINESSES
In the Individiual Vehicle, there is the happiness of Nirvana, spiritual release The Third Holy Fact (Noble Truth) is the one that Buddha staked his life’s work on, the Holy Fact of Cessation of, Freedom from, Suffering. This was his good news, his discovery that he found worth sharing with other beings. Upon realizing his own freedom, he is reported to have said, “Deep, peaceful, fabrication-free, translucent, uncreated - I have discovered a Reality like elixir of immortality. Whoever I might teach about it, they won’t understand; better to stay in silence in the forest!.” Later, when he had become more optimistic about peoples’ ability to respond to his instructions, he sent out his mendicants to spread the word, telling them to announce that “The gates of Nirvana have been opened!”

In the Pali Suttas, Nirvana is variously described as ... In the Abhidharma, it is considered to have four aspects; . In the Universal Vehicle, there is the happiness of Buddhahood, social and cosmic, the perfecting and adorning of the buddhaverse, and the liberating of all beings. In the Apocalyptic Vehicle, there is the happiness of Vajradharahood, spiritual, social, cosmic, and aesthetic, sensuous, and even sexual, the blissvoid indivisibility of cosmic orgasm, Vajradhara as orgasmic bliss-wisdom (sahajananda-jnana) in union with the Universal Mother Void-form (Vishvamatashunyarupa), the Universal Consort (Mahamudra), the Great Perfection (Mahasandhi) of consummate union with the All-good Mother Goddess Transcendent Wisdom, and so forth. THE BUDDHA’S SMILE From the Ashokavadana, there is a standard, page-long, stock description of the Buddha’s smile.

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