REFLECTIONS ON KING SOLOMON AND THE BUDDHA Chapt 3.

Reflections On King Solomon And The Buddha - Section 1

Chapter 3 - Consolations of Philosophy

by Ira Rosenberg

Certainly, awareness of the pervasive incompletion and dissatisfaction with life is a central concern in many philosophical, psychological and spiritual systems: the Buddha called it dukkha:

The Noble Truth of Dukkha is this:
birth is suffering;
aging is suffering;
sickness is suffering;
death is suffering;
sorrow and lamentation, pain, grief and despair are suffering;
association with the unpleasant is suffering;
dissociation from the pleasant is suffering;
not to get what one wants is suffering
-- in brief, the five aggregates of attachment are suffering.

(Dhammacakkappavattana-sutta)

This sensibility is not unique to the East. It crops up as a major trend in religions and philosophies of life worldwide. Lucretius, Marcus Aurelius, the Greek epicurians and stoics focused on it in the West. In recent times existential philosophers touched the same vein, all recognizing the same problem, but seeing different causes and prescribing different responses to it.

Some ancient thinkers saw the flaw in the compromises with imperfection that the Creator God had to make in order to produce a manifold, complex and free world in the first place. In the Jewish tradition, this realization is central to the Cabalistic notion of Tzimsum, the self-contraction of the effulgence of God in order to make room for a universe. But this conception of an original contraction, breakdown, splitting, duality, or sundering is shared in many traditions, and according to Joseph Campbell, originated and was spread from the Mesopotamian creation myths. The sensibility is still with us. Many contemporary scientific thinkers see reality as metaphysically flawed from the beginning, some from the Big Bang, perhaps by the Big Bang itself in our current rendering of it, because that's when the original symmetry that was born in the early moment's of the universe's expansion broke down and the single binding energy of wholeness broke into four separate forces: the weak nuclear force, the strong nuclear force, electromagnetism and gravitation.

The more personal sense of it, and the scientific and religious visions both may share these resonances, is that life is eternally flawed by impermanence, by change itself, that nothing can last, that no permanent meaning or purpose can be given irretrievably by the creatures to the creation, but that each creature must either struggle to find it anew from the beginning -- which is the hard way, or to join to it by affiliating with a community, a belief system, a tribal, national or universal religion. Joining makes life a lot easier than discovering, because above all things we yearn to belong.

Even evolution has the preconditions of dukkha in it. Random collisions between cosmic rays and DNA base pairs may be an expression of imperfection, accident, disaster. Perhaps it is the dukkha nature of reality that causes evolution, since mutation which moves us forward, and underlies speciation and species evolution, is itself an error of dependent causality, genetic error, random slippage, fall, the vulnerability of the germ plasm.

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Last Updated 09/05/98 (rge)