REFLECTIONS ON KING SOLOMON AND THE BUDDHA Chapt 16.

Reflections On King Solomon And The Buddha - Section 2

Chapter 16 - Selfless Intentions

by Ira Rosenberg

Perhaps there is another path toward selflessness, one that actually celebrates rather than dilutes the signal events. Jewish life seems to offer a way that has these characteristics. Kavannah (intention) is central. The signal events are affirmed, even accentuated, but are shaped by holy commandment (mitzvot.)

Notice the central role of action in the saying of the Hassidic Rebbe Abraham of Slonim:

Finally, you must bring this love and fear [of God] into the different ways you actually relate to the world, and this is done through the way you do mitzvot that require action. Because the body is physical, if you do not put love and fear of God into something physical, into something involving action, you are in danger of losing everything you have already attained on the levels of your mind and of your heart.

(Torat Avot p. 68 quoted in Buxbaum. Jewish Spiritual Practices, p. 280)

The performance of mitzvot with proper intentions elevates and intensifies the action of both daily and signal events from their mundane framework. Abraham Kook, the chief rabbi of Palestine during the British Mandate period, describes kavannah this way:

Prayer with intention, the affirmation of God's unity with intention, the commandment and the duty performed with intention -- and intention when incarnated in holy corporate beings, pure idealistic people, for whom equity and good, in practical affairs and in morals, is the whole joy of life; the living, creative intention -- what a luminous phenomenon this is in the world.

(Abraham Isaac Kook, The Lights of Holiness, in the Classics of Western. Spirituality, p,211.)

Odysseus' tears of longing on the seashore, by Cabalistic reasoning, could influence the whole of creation to some greater or lesser extent if in the moment of his agony his tears were wholehearted and his intention properly focused on the homeward journey. On such a journey, he would be performing redemptive action not only for himself but for all those he encounters on his way, and not only human persons but all life and even inanimate objects. In Jewish mysticism this redemptive action based on heightened intention is often referred to as the lifting of the sparks.

Martin Buber represents the Hasidic view of intention this way:

All men are the abode of wandering souls. These dwell in many creatures and strive from form to form toward perfection. But those which are not able to purify themselves are caught in "the world of confusion" and make their homes in lakes of water, in stones, in plants, in animals, awaiting the redeeming hour. It is not only souls that are imprisoned but also sparks of souls. No thing is without them. They live in all that is. Each form is their prison. And this is the meaning and mission of kavana: that it is given to men to lift up the fallen and to free the imprisoned. Not only to wait, not only to watch for the Coming One: man can work toward the redemption of the world.

(Martin Buber, Hasidism and Modern Man, Book III, p.93)

Through kavannah and mitzvot, traditional Judaism moves in the direction of selfless intention, promoting a high state of individuated consciousness, intense, focused, sometimes ecstatic, sometimes joyful, sometimes tragic, but where all deeds are done for a higher purpose, for the "sake of heaven," for God, for consecrating the Holy Name.

But the liberation does not take place through formulae of exorcism or through any kind of prescribed and special action. All this grows out of the ground of otherness which is not the ground of kavana. No leap from the everyday into the miraculous is required. "With his every act man can work on the figure of the glory of God that it may step forth out of its concealment." It is not the matter of the action, but only its dedication that is decisive.

(Buber, ibid. p. 96)

Does this kind of lively, heated and yet unselfish intention solve the problem of pallid love and wisdom of the Bodhisattvas? Not quite -- because we slipped God into the picture. Remember that Buddhism is a non-theistic system and the Buddha called God a mental projection. If we accept the Buddhist logic, action for the sake of heaven couldn't be selfless, because deeds undertaken for a mental projection are deeds undertaken for oneself. We are constrained to accept this limitation to strengthen the argument for human heartedness, because even by Judaic logic nobody knows what "God's unity" really means anyway. Even if there is a "God's unity" it is likely that our conception of it is colored by our own needs and imagery. And even if we say "God's unity" is beyond human comprehension, unknown, the "en sof," our sense of its incomprehensibility, unknowability and hiddenness inevitably comes from our human heartedness and so must enter the world as a projection of our own self-limitation.

This shows us that all intentions are dualistic by definition, because they must posit an us and them -- a self and a world, a separation, division, Maya -- even the "I and Thou" as distinguished from the "I and It" rests on this same separation. So even loving and charitable intentions have self-will in them and from the Eastern perspective generate the karmic forces that sustain dukkha. In the Buddhist canon this karma can only be worked off by selfless activity over many lifetimes -- which presents us with another obstacle, since we decided earlier that the evidence for rebirth, an afterlife or an eventual resurrection of the dead came from wishful thinking in the face of our mortality. Given the onceness of our lives, what do we propose to do with the karmic system?

This is a problem that contemporary western Buddhists have puzzled over with no great sense of conviction or resolution. A recent article in Tricycle, the American Buddhist quarterly has a go at it this way:

Theologically, or "Buddhologically," it is indeed problematic to do away with the doctrine of rebirth, for numerous other basic ideas would then have to be rethought. But if liberation is the "taste" of the dharma, as the Buddha said, then for its sake one should at least be prepared to put up with the unappetizing flavor of doctrinal inconsistency.

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Last Updated 09/19/98 (rge)