REFLECTIONS ON KING SOLOMON AND THE BUDDHA Chapt 5.

Reflections On King Solomon And The Buddha - Section 1

Chapter 5 - King Solomon and the Buddha

by Ira Rosenberg

Solomon's understanding of suffering and attachment, like the Buddha's, comes from deep meditation on the human situation, but he comes to it from a different direction, not as an ascetic or mendicant or renunciate, but as a man of the world, as one participating in life on every level, as a lover, as a doer of deeds, as a rich man, a ruler, a seeker of wisdom. He says:

I made me great works; I builded me houses; I planted me vineyards; I made me gardens and orchards, and I planted trees in them of all kind of fruits; I made me pools of water, to water therewith the wood that bringeth forth trees; I got me servants and maidens, and had servants born in my house; also I had great possessions of great and small cattle above all that were in Jerusalem before me; I gathered me also silver and gold, and the peculiar treasure of kings and of the provinces; I gat me men singers and women singers, and the delights of the sons of men, as musical instruments, and that of all sorts. So I was great, and increased more than all who were before me in Jerusalem; also my wisdom remained with me.

(Ecc. 2:4-9)

Unlike the Buddha, who was the princely son of a king and who renounced his kingdom and left his family and never ruled it, Solomon's heart and mind mature through kingship. He builds and judges and rules. The legend is told in 1 Kings that God came to Solomon in a dream and gave him one wish and he chose wisdom. But this wisdom was not to help him achieve enlightenment or to cut the knot of mortality, as in the Buddha's parallel journey, but to render judgment among men, to live the involved life, the life engaged with others. Solomon seeks to do many things. He becomes a full man of the world from a life of committed action, for which Solomon asked and God granted the gift of wisdom. And then Solomon tested the limits. Legend has it that Solomon many years later wrote the book of Ecclesiastes to more or less sum up and pass on what he learned with his gift of wisdom, namely, that it is flawed too, that there is no end of suffering. The craving and clutching and sense of loss, the frustration, the human suffering, the inherent imperfection that comes from having a self are all expressed in Ecclesiastes.

Then I looked on all the works that my hand had wrought, and on the labor that I had labored to do: and, behold, all was vanity and vexation of spirit, and there was no profit under the sun.

(Ecc. 2:11)

According to Rashi, what Solomon means by vanity is "that it passes," that nothing can be held, that ceaseless change undoes our accomplishments, that life is out of our control. And by vexation he means that there's no permanent peace of mind for the individuated self living in this irremediably unsatisfying world.

The broader sentiment is reflected in King Solomon's proverb "the fool's heart is in the house of mirth; the wise man's heart is in the house of mourning," where he presents the house of mourning, curiously, as a recommendation rather than a warning .

This same sensibility can be found in Buddhist thought from the very beginning. By "not craving anything" is meant this:

Men of the world, in eternal confusion, are attached everywhere to one thing or another, which is called craving. The wise however understand the truth and are not like the ignorant. Their minds abide serenely in the uncreated while the body moves about in accordance with the laws of causation... This triple world where we stay altogether too long is like a house on fire; all that has a body suffers, and nobody really knows what peace is

(Bodhidharma on the Twofold Entrance to the Tao. Quoted in Suzuki, Manual of Zen Buddhism)

Joseph Campbell describes this sensibility as basic to Oriental culture:

In the Indian tradition all has been perfectly arranged from all eternity. There can be nothing new, nothing to be learned but what the sages taught from of yore. And, finally, when the boredom of this nursery horizon of "I want" against "thou shalt" has become insufferable, the fourth and final aim is all that is offered -- of an extinction of the infantile ego altogether: disengagement or release (moksa) from both "I" and "thou.". In the European West, on the other hand, where the fundamental doctrine of the freedom of the will essentially dissociates each individual from every other, as well as from the will in nature and the will of God, there is placed upon each the responsibility of coming intelligently, out of his own experience and volition, to some sort of relationship with -- not identity with or extinction in -- the all, the void, the suchness, the absolute, or whatever the proper term may be for that which is beyond terms.

(Joseph Campbell, The Masks of God: Oriental Mythology. p.22)

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Last Updated 09/17/98 (rge)