Buddha Mind

Just since yesterday, after writing my last post, I've received many comments and mostly questions about how we stay sane on the road. These are really good questions and I wanted to address everyone's thoughts.

If you have been following my blog at all, you probably think I am somewhat jaded by my education in psychology. While it is true that I haven't so much as mentioned a word about spirituality or religion in 44 posts or so, please don't think I rely solely on psychology or science to "keep myself sane". In fact, stringent atheists bug the hell out of me. How can you live in this infinitely wondrous world and not acknowledge a force we cannot perceive? Music has shown me that this force exists and while I also have my parents to thank for being a spiritual person, I no longer follow the Episcopalian path they had probably intended for me.

Rather, I follow a worldview and outlook that more closely resembles Buddhism than any other organized sect. At a young age I read the Tao Te Ching. While the book is part of Taoist (not Buddhist) doctrine, it pointed my spiritual interest firmly East where it has stayed until this day.

It should be noted that Buddhism is not a religion, only a set of ideas and philosophies. Although I have no way to participate in the Sangha (the Buddhist community), and find it difficult to meditate on tour, I can still label myself a Buddhist by following several key principles which have been laid out to me by my experience with teachers and my readings. Most importantly, I try and maintain a calm, meditative state while carrying out a frenetic daily life. When asked while walking down the road whether he was God, Spirit or Man, the Buddha himself simply replied "I am awake".

It is that type of simplicity and pragmatism which makes Buddhism an attractive way to carry out my existence. Below I will list some key tenets of Buddhism that help "keep me sane on the road", and try to leave the psychology out of it.

-Compassion should be the fundamental, outward characteristic of the Buddha-mind. Buddha himself was not a god or prophet, he was simply a man who understood the condition of human suffering and came up with a comprehensive way of dealing with it inter-personally. Compassion does not mean dropping what you are doing and moving to Africa to help solve world hunger. Buddhism recognizes most people cannot and will not uproot their own lives, which involve suffering, to help others who suffer. However it makes the pragmatic suggestion to be aware of this suffering, while doing all you can to radiate peace to others.

-The Middle Way. As I said, Buddhism is very practical. It is true that the Buddha spent many week and months meditating, near starvation in the wilderness. After he came to his conclusions about human suffering however, he advocated against this type of harsh asceticism. This is known as the Middle Way or Middle Path. Starvation or excess don't help anyone, but taking what you need in life helps place your existence in the flow of natural order in the world. I find this point particularly potent in this time of American obesity, greed (leading to the current economic downfall), and as I try to maintain some semblance of a healthy lifestyle on the road.

-Radiate Mental Peace. Most times, we cannot directly change another person's attitude or outlook. Only the greatest teachers in the world can do this. For the rest of us, we can only radiate an air of inner peace, calm confidence which hopefully can help others find their way. This is part of silent compassion.

-Pratitya Samutpada. Also known as the Wheel of Becoming, this part of the Dharma (teaching) is the metaphsycial account of how us human animals perceive the world and thus, why we suffer. Laid out in a wheel shape with 10-12 points, depending on who you ask, the process describes how we are born into free will, develop ego and ignorance from this free will, develop attachments to the physical world because of our senses, suffer for these attachments, and later die and are reborn back into the circular process. I don't know about the whole rebirth thing yet, but this is a surprisingly accurate account of human perception when taking psychology into account. I know I said I'd leave psyc out of this, but the idea that the world is not objectively perceived, but is totally subject to our senses, which in turn leads to behaviors (attachements), is spot-on with current thinking in sensory psychology. A blue flower is only a blue flower because your mind interprets it as such (start the philosophical comments now...)

-Avoid Attachments. If there is one thing Buddhist are not down with, it's attachment to our physical world. This is where the word Karma is greatly misunderstood in the West. Karma is typically thought of as negative energy. For Buddhists, Karma is a positive or negative force which comes about through attaching oneself to the physical world. For example, you might think you are being compassionate to another by giving him or her a gift. If the person truly needed the gift, they will feel little responsibilty to pay you back. However, if you have now created a situation where a less fortunate person feels the need to return the favor, you have increased your attachment to this world and your Karma has actually been increased.

-Zen/Meditation. Recently someone close to me attacked my Buddhist ideals and asked me "if I even knew one Buddhist text...!?". After citing the Pratitya Samutpada above, I realized that this harsh inquisition reflects something basic people in the West think about knowledge: that it has to come from a book. Those of us brought up in Western academia have an addiction to the knowledge that those who lived before us have obtained. This is natural, as it is of course easier to believe Einstein than discover E=MC2 yourself... But this dependence on outside texts also leads to a lack of inter-personal knowledge, knowledge that only oneself can discover. This is when meditation and Zen come into play. Zen Buddhism is a sect of Japanese Mahayana Buddhism, and focuses on meditation and self-knowledge over the study of the Dharma. One who can meditate and discover truths from within will be infinitely happy and can free themselves from the burdening attachments of our modern world.

-Four Noble Truths/Eightfold Path. Simply the Buddhist account of human suffering (Four Truths) and how one should live to avoid attachments and sufferings (Eightfold Path). Without listing these, any Buddhist scholar would have immediatly retorted this post and put me in my place.

Please remember this represents my conception of Buddhism and mine alone. Ardent scholars will certainly take offense to such a limited description, where the Japanese Zen school would applaud me for internalizing the philosophy and making it my own.

These are tenets of Buddhism I strive to carry out. I fail constantly. I do know, however, that if I can remain compassionate, meditative, avoid attachments and follow the Middle Path, I will not only lead a happy tour life, but a happy life in general while plodding through his physical world of ours.

Tonight a gig in Madison, WI, and on to Minneapolis, Milwaukee, and Green Bay during the course of the week.