REFLECTIONS ON KING SOLOMON AND THE BUDDHA

by Ira Rosenberg

Cultural, economic and social relations have become so complex now, so large, so transient, the 
pace of change has so quickened, that all the old forms of association through which love and 
wisdom travel have been thrown into disarray. Since the mid-nineteenth century, the family, the 
tribe, all secondary institutions, religions and social establishments have been transformed by 
technology, media, mass marketing, capital and government. Indeed the case has often been 
made that the technological environment itself is almost fatally unbalancing to us, not only 
through economic hardship, relentless competition, alienation, environmental degradation, 
disease, etc., but directly by its unprecedented assault on our senses and through them on our 
brains and minds.

Our cities show the effects through overpopulation, overcrowding, blasting industrial rhythms, 
vast power grids with ceaseless sixty cycle hum, the drowning of seasonal and annual changes 
under heat and lights. Our intensely electronic, automated, digitized gadgetry, shows it, with 
cultural over-stimulation, media frenzy, noise, visual chaos, flashing lights, highway speeds, 
rapid changes of perspective, leaping time zones, instantaneous global communication. People 
change jobs, homes and mates faster than ever. Money moves at the speed of light. Ownerships 
change hands with brutal disregard for social needs. Travel and communication accelerate. It's 
seen in the fast cutting in TV and films, in sound bites, in media factoids. They’ll sell us 
anything. It's contemporary, it's desirable, it's fun! The quick turnaround time, fast hand-eye 
coordination, keep us too busy to think, too stressed out to relax into open awareness. We can’t  
get a take on the whole. The very seasons are prettified or Disneyfied with cutesy fashions for 
which artificial needs are created, so that markers for the movement of the planet around the sun 
become shopping seasons and the seven day week is a business artifact. 

Different parts of our personalities are called out at work, at home, in the social world, in the TV 
world of the imagination, in Disney World, during vacation time, in sports viewing time, at the 
casino, in the hospital. The sensory shifts, with their long trains of memory evoked, pull us to 
separate identity centers inside ourselves.  The confusion of shifting identities frightens us. It 
moves too fast. We suppress it. The commercial interests encourage us to cling instead to the 
corrupt sense that "I am what I buy, because it makes me look like who I think I should be. "

The sense of dislocation in a time of such rapid change could be shaped and tempered with 
meaningful rites of passage, but they are under assault too.  The old myths and rituals don't speak 
to our needs very well. We don't to derive meaning and direction from them. They've become 
twisted, aim-inhibited, commercialized and do not serve as powerful coordinators of turning 
points anymore.  They’ve been made into "buying opportunities."

We feel the moral vertigo and reach out to each other, which in practice means dialing the phone,  
but the dramatic speed with which we can reach each other, intended to make us closer, makes us 
distant and cool instead. We break up a love affair by telephone, for instance, and we don’t enter 
into the full sensory immediacy of the situation.  The phone conveys the information, it evokes 
the passions, but the very paucity of the sensory field generates a new kind of stress to which 
neither fight nor flight seem to be an adequate response. A genial surplus-serotonin high works 
much better. With it we can engage in life suffering less alienation. We can wander happily 
around the mall in our chirpy emptiness without being overwhelmed by the intense sensory fields 
and vacuous offerings. All things trivial we get in big doses, with bouncy jingles, and clowns 
trying to sell us things. 

Behind all this we experience the thrum of the quickening pulse endemic to life in technological 
culture. Acceleration itself may be addictive. It reliably creates an adrenaline high, and the 
physiological rushes with which the body responds to the increased tempo of life are experienced 
by many as pleasurable and necessary.  (Hans Selye's adaptation phase of the stress response 
playing itself out as an addictive high.) Either we add fuel to it with stimulants or try to damp it 
down with narcotics. One way or another -- or both ways if we're really skilled and know how to 
"work our drugs" -- we drive on through life chemically altered to an increasing extent, often 
pressing the brakes and accelerator simultaneously, plunging ahead in full career, less keeping up 
with the Joneses than with ourselves. And this adjustment to acceleration (part of Toffler's 
“future shock”) is reframed by the power structure and made to seem a desirable trait. Speed is 
the essence of things, the spice of life. That's why films "cut to the chase." We are hooked to 
acceleration even more than to greed of acquisition and power, because it enters lower down in 
the central nervous system. We have fewer neural routines to override or filter it out.

Living under the influence of a global entrepreneurial, for-profit technological culture, and in the 
absence of a core connection to love and wisdom, we have made success and failure the crucial 
measures of a modern life, and success is succinctly defined: make money, get a good mate, 
build a family, buy the right products, win the esteem of your neighbors, be a winner, not a loser 
-- get there fast! Except in the area of ambition or drive itself, success is not so much a sign of 
excellence, skillfulness, arete or goodness, as of raw aggressiveness and dedication to self, and 
this makes it a source of pain and discontent, a hidden spring of suffering.


PRIMORDIAL DISSATISFACTION

The effort to make life whole, to experience life meaningfully, and to live with a firm sense of 
self is deeply challenged. We feel extremely vulnerable. Love and wisdom are being twisted in a 
culturally specific ways, bent, inhibited and trivialized by the culture's own standards of success. 

Though we suffer from these new assaults on our nature, the experience of suffering itself and its 
characteristic demands on our energy and attention are not new. The painful aspects of life are 
always present -- in this epoch piqued by this, in that epoch piqued by that. Clinging, 
dissatisfaction, delusion, fear, pain, self-indulgence, unmet desires, emptiness, restlessness, 
loneliness, alienation, abandonment, aging, illness, bereavement, loss and lack of control are 
anything but new. They are not occurrences unique to a historical moment, but are evocations of 
human nature, a kind of misery we have always endured, familiar and persistent, crossing all 
social divides, suffusing all stages of life, surfacing in different ways and with different 
emphases in different cultural settings, though wearing different garb, always covering the same 
body.

In our day and age, successomania, addiction, consumerism and juvenilization are the culturally 
specific pathways the universal and inevitable suffering takes, the particular manifestations of 
vanity and vexation in our time, their local coloration.  All of them, as always, when closely 
studied, are dependent on cravings and delusions supported by a false understanding of the 
nature of the self . 


CONSOLATIONS OF PHILOSOPHY

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. 


SOLOMON'S DISCONTENT

The Proverbs of Solomon and the book of Ecclesiastes catch and focus this same awareness.  
They're the main scriptural sources for the Hebraic sense of dukkha.  Like the Buddha, Solomon 
starts with inherent dissatisfaction. Both of them recognize the persistence of suffering as 
something woven into the world as lived, not as extrinsic to it. Solomon says:

I saw all the deeds that were done under the sun, and behold, everything is vanity and 
frustration. what is crooked will not be able to be straightened and what is missing will 
not be able to be counted.

(Ecc. 1:14-15)

For in much wisdom is much vexation, and he who increases knowledge, increases pain

(Ecc. 1:18)

It is better to go to a house of mourning than to go to a house of  feasting, for that is the 
end of every man, and the living shall lay it to heart.

(Ecc. 7:2)

The heart of the wise is in a house of mourning, whereas the heart of the fools is in a 
house of joy.

(Ecc. 7:4)

And moreover I saw under the sun the place of judgment, that wickedness was there; and 
the place of righteousness, that iniquity was there. 

(Ecc. 3:16 )

All things are wearisome; no one can utter it; the eye shall not be sated from seeing, nor 
shall the ear be filled from hearing.

(Ecc. 1:8)


The weariness that Solomon speaks about is part of the dukkha, an endlessly recurring hunger for 
sensation  that can never be sated. As Mesudath David comments to this verse: “the weariness 
comes from not ever achieving your goal, therefore toiling endlessly.”


KING SOLOMON AND THE BUDDHA

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)


DUKKHA 1A

To briefly restate the common ground, East and West: we experience incompletion and 
dissatisfaction because we live in a universe of change and crave to hold on to what passes away,  
and this is what makes us suffer. For both the Buddha and Solomon, dukkha comes from the loss 
of the good as well as from its absence, from surfeit as well as deficiency. It comes through 
change itself, which is inevitable. It comes through wanting, desiring. And it comes in the gap 
between the intention and the act. Dullness and predictability, meaninglessness and 
purposelessness bring dukkha -- but even in a life full of success and ostensible meaning, the gap 
between our hopes for ourselves and our deficient skills and inevitable decline would also bring 
dukkha. In the most intimate moments is dukkha, because they end, and because in our freedom 
we have chosen them. In the brightest insights is dukkha, because in our volition we sought and 
held them, and to hold to is dukkha. 

To take it one level deeper: dukkha and vanity depend on a self. Our resident suffering is 
generated by the illusion of a permanent self that wants to hold and collect and aggrandize, to 
seize pleasures and run from pain, that purports to know and understand, that struts and 
commands or cringes and hides. According to the Buddha, this self is what creates attachment, 
clinging, craving and duality, setting the self against the other, when really there is no self or 
other.


'Illuminating the rivers of his body, feelings, perceptions, mental formations and 
consciousness, Siddhartha now understood that impermanence and emptiness of self are 
the very conditions necessary for life. Without impermanence and emptiness of self, 
nothing could grow or develop. If a grain of rice did not have the nature of 
impermanence and emptiness of self, it could not grow into a rice plant. If clouds were 
not empty of self and impermanent, they could not transform into rain. Without an 
impermanent, non-self nature, a child could never grow into an adult. "Thus," he 
thought, "to accept life means to accept impermanence and emptiness of self. The source 
of suffering is a false belief in permanence and the existence of separate selves. Seeing 
this, one understands that there is neither birth nor death, production nor destruction, 
one nor many, inner nor outer, large nor small, impure nor pure. All such concepts are 
false distinctions created by the intellect. If one penetrates into the empty nature of all 
things, one will transcend all mental barriers, and be liberated from the cycle of suffering 
(dukkha)."

(Thich Nhat Hanh. Old Path white clouds p.116)


In affirming the self, the Buddha maintains that we are mistaking the aggregate of sensations, 
perceptions, reactions, etc., for an independent entity, as if behind our sensations, thoughts, 
perceptions, feelings, each changing from one moment to the next, there is something else, a 
permanent self apart from the changes, an unchangeable locus of awareness experiencing the 
passing show, directing it, choosing, acting. The Buddha insists there is no self apart from the 
flow of  experience. The aggregates that combine to generate our experience are all there is. We 
are the universe. The self is an illusion we create. Perhaps we create it to assuage our insecurity 
by projecting our faults and limitations outside us. Yet the sense of separateness it engenders is 
the root cause of our suffering. And this defensive projection rides upon a yet deeper one -- that 
the doer and the deed are separable in the moment the deed is being done -- which supports the 
estrangement between ourselves and the things we do by placing the things we do “out there,” 
while who we are is “in here.”  And this depends on an even deeper projection, which is perhaps 
basic and inevitable in the development of the human mind, that there is a self and an other. This 
basic split, according to Buddhist thought, is the source of all dual thinking, all craving, all lack, 
all suffering.

Fundamental to Buddhist psychology, then, is the notion that the potential for dukkha manifests 
only when self-will and the sense of  separate identity set the I  against everything other -- to 
either crave after or fear it. From this perspective, suffering depends on a person. It is always an I 
that suffers, and only an I can suffer. 

Mere suffering exists, but no sufferer is found;
The deeds are, but no doer is found.

(Buddhaghosa )

The Buddha's third Noble Truth is that detachment frees us from dukkha.  Detachment leads to 
the permanent cessation of all illusion by exposing once and for all the illusion upon which all 
other illusion must ride -- the illusion of a self. 

The man who is not credulous, who knows the "uncreated', who has severed all ties, who 
has put an end to the occasion (of good and evil), who has vomited all desires, verily he 
is supreme among men.

(Dhammapaddha 97)


Solomon shares the Buddha’s recommendation for detachment:

He that loveth silver shall not be satisfied with silver; nor he that loveth abundance with 
increase: this also is vanity. When goods increase, they are increased that eat them: and 
what good is there to the owners thereof, saving the beholding of them with their 
eyes?The sleep of a laboring man is sweet, whether he eat little or much: but the 
abundance of the rich will not suffer him to sleep.

(Ecc. 6:10-12)

Better is the sight of the eyes than the wandering of the desire: this also is vanity and 
vexation of spirit.

Ecc. 6:9)


But there’s a difference, because Solomon recommends pleasure in the 
moment:

Is it not good for a man that he eat and drink and show himself enjoyment in his toil? 
This too have I seen that it is from the hand of God. For who will eat and hasten except 
me?

(Ecc. 2:24-25)

Pleasure in the moment, when considered along with the unforeseen consequences of all action, 
suggests that Solomon places value in process over product, in absorption, in connectedness, as a 
passing, but not as a permanent state.

Then I commended mirth, because a man hath no better thing than to eat, and to drink, 
and to be merry: for that shall abide with him of  his labour the days of his life, which 
God giveth him under the sun.

(Ecc. 9:15)


As you might expect, Midrash Aggadah comments that "all mention of eating and drinking in 
Ecclesiastes refers only to the study of Torah, as it is stated (Isa 55:1)" but this interpretation 
almost certainly comes from the closed world of the rabbinical study hall, where the highest 
points of life are seen as occurring in a Yeshiva. (It bears some passing notice that Solomon 
never mentions Torah study in Ecclesiastes.) 

The pleasure of the moment, for Solomon, is not the meaning of life, but a compensation for its 
abiding pains, which always return to bend the mind and remind us of our weakness and 
mortality.

For there is a happening for the children of men, and there is a happening for the beasts 
-- and they have one happening -- like the death of this one is the death of that one, and 
all have one spirit, and the superiority of man over beast is nought, for all is vanity. All 
go to one place; all came from the dust, and all return to the dust. Who knows that the 
spirit of the children of men is that which ascends on high and the spirit of the beast is 
that which descends below to the earth?

(Ecc. 3:19 -22)

Neither is permanent detachment possible. Solomon's spirituality does not lead to the cessation 
of the illusion of the self, because no man has the will or power to command even his own spirit.

No man controls the will to retain the spirit, and there  is no ruling on the day of death; neither is their 
discharge in war, nor will wickedness save the one who practices it.

(Ecc. 8:8)

In Buddhism, by contrast, the fourth Noble Truth tells us that we can achieve liberation from 
suffering and from the illusion of a self by following a system of life: the 8-Fold Noble Path, 
through which attachment is ended and the self dissolved.

O bhikkshus, what is the Absolute?  It is, O bhikksus, the extinction of desire, the extinction of hatred, the 
extinction of  illusion. This, O bhikkshus, is called the Absolute.

(Surangama Sutra, IV) 

Further,

These two entanglements -- belief in an ego-personality and the conception of personal 
attainment -- must be utterly destroyed and never again permitted to rise to define the 
true Essential Mind.

(Surangama Sutra)

Solomon never prescribes a path for the cessation of vanity and vexation. Instead he himself 
struggles with it, he sees us all struggling with it. He explores pathways leading to release and 
relief but they all take strange turns or reach dead ends.

I have seen everything in the days of my vanity; there is a righteous man who perishes in 
his righteousness, and there is a wicked man who lives long in his wickedness.  be not 
overly righteous, and be not overly wise; why should you bring desolation upon yourself?

(Ecc. 7:15-16)

Even his own words, the words of Koheleth, the preacher, could be vain and vexatious. 

Beyond these, my son, beware: the making of many books is without limit, and much 
study is weariness of the flesh.

(Ecc. 12:12)

The suggestion that his own words are suspect comes from Solomon’s realization of the limited 
range of access of the human spirit to wisdom, that the spirit itself is somewhat unsteady and 
recalcitrant and cannot be trained to steadiness. 


THE APPEAL OF BUDDHISM

On the face of it, Buddhism's radical solution to dukkha seems so much more appealing. First it 
offers a thoroughgoing, no-compromise analysis of the problems on life, then it offers a direct, 
distinct method to break through the illusion of a self by working on the illusion of the self 
directly. Meditation, concentration and absorption train the mind. Precepts of behavior, right 
speech, right action, right livelihood, keep the person from adding more occasions for desire or 
aversion, gradually taming and then diminishing attachment to the sources of suffering. 
Moreover, Buddhism provides empirical signposts of progress based on direct experience, and 
on its deepest levels Buddhism is not dependent on a priesthood, a community, holy writ, divine 
providence or any other belief system. It makes no appeal to mystery or authority. One takes 
charge of oneself and works out one's own salvation with diligence.

Over time, following the Buddhist path, one reaches an open hearted detachment, and this leads 
to a life free of delusion, happy, stable and peaceful, allowing for a flowing participation in 
reality based on selflessness. When there's no you to seek attachments to the world of things or 
ideas, illusion lifts, the veil of Maya is pulled back, but when subjective experience is withdrawn 
there is still a world out there. Maya is the world conceived under the concept of measure. Maya 
and measure have a common etymology according to Allen Watts, and to be in Maya is to see 
the world divided up and measured into independent entities, mine and thine being only two of 
the possibilities. Beneath this is another reality -- the real reality -- the world which appears to 
the very same senses, perception and consciousness when attachment is lifted and openness 
reigns.

Then the senses and perceptions clear, life is received in its wholeness, and simple pleasures and 
pains of the body are responsive to the stimulation from the world. They rise and fall, they aren't 
held, nothing is possessed, no more than a mirror possesses its passing images. What ensues is a 
kind of pure action in which things get done, but there's no attribution of cause to a self outside 
the flow.  Everything is connected to everything -- dependent arising -- all existence inextricably 
interwoven. Remove the self-nature and the oneness of creation, through non dual awareness, 
becomes immediately apparent and peace and understanding prevail. 


WHAT'S WRONG WITH SOLOMON?

A self that was not a self,  a self not sundered from the world, a self cleansed of its samskaras, of 
the accumulation of wounds in love and wisdom, of its karma, free of all attachments, free of 
illusions -- how wonderfully appealing that seems, because to detach from all craving and 
clinging is to become the universe itself.  Let's not be petty. Let's get rid of the self and live in the 
moment. Renounce and enjoy, as Gandhi said. 

Did it simply not occur to Solomon that this strategy was possible? Was he too busy? Too 
worried about the succession of the kingdom to his incompetent son Reheboam? Too depressed 
about the split kingdom that he foresaw?  He says:

and I hated all my toil that I toil under the sun, that I should leave it to the man who will 
be after me. And who knows whether he will be wise or foolish. And he will rule over all 
my toil that I have toiled and that I have gained wisdom under the sun; this too is vanity.

(Ecc. 2:18-19)

Was it left to the east alone to plumb this depth, to see life this way and to take this course? Or 
did others see life from the Buddha's perspective, raw and open, only to choose another response, 
against renunciation and for individuation, even though it involved suffering, perhaps choosing 
to move from one to a different set of flaws for different emphases in what would be permitted 
and prohibited, depending on the purpose of life as one understood it? 

We can reframe the question. It's not why didn't Solomon see the Buddha's Noble Truths (though 
this may be the question many young Jewish born Buddhists ask,) but why did Solomon chose a 
different way?


SOLOMON ON THE SELF

Solomon also has a view of the self. In some ways it is similar to the Buddha's, in others even 
more radical -- and not as comforting. Central to the vanities and vexations Solomon saw, almost 
as a fundament on which the others sat, is the illusion that we can fully control the mind, that its 
stains can be fully cleansed and cleared. Solomon sees the mind as inherently vagrant with 
internally generated energies of its own, creative energies, sustaining turbulence and freedom. It 
can never be fully plumbed or subdued once and for all. 

All this have I proved by wisdom: I said, I will be wise; but it was far from me. That 
which is far off and exceeding deep, who can find it out?

(Ecc. 7:23-4)

Where Buddha believed that with right efforts the mental anguish could be overcome, the stains 
washed away, the mind made into a clear and adequate instrument for attaining reality, Solomon 
saw this as a piece of delusory thinking in itself, a face-saving magnification of the powers of the 
mind in the face of an intractable reality. 

For there is no righteous man on earth who does good and sins not.

(Ecc. 7:20)

And I saw all the deed of God, for a person will not be able to fathom the deed that is 
done under the sun, because though a man toils to seek, he will not fathom, and even if 
the wise man claims to know, he will be unable to fathom.

(Ecc. 8:17)

For Solomon dukkha is woven even into meditative and spiritual practices, even into the highest 
illuminations and insights, so there is no perfect path, no absolutely prescribed way, and so there 
is no need for a Sangha, an order of initiates, to follow it, no need for a totally tight rein on the 
senses, emotions and thoughts. This points to another significant difference from the Buddhist 
view. There is no late stage exemption from engagement, no wandering phase, no arahant-ship, 
no renunciation of community action. Seniority does not diminish social responsibility. The 
deeper values cannot reliably be passed through the generations. Only the artifacts pass, the 
empty forms, the verbiage. How they are seen, used, read, understood varies uncontrollably. A 
person's values cannot even be transmitted to a grandchild. You have to learn always for 
yourself. The Buddha echoed the same sentiment when he said:

Be not led by the authority of religious texts, nor by mere logic or inference, nor by considering 
appearances, nor by the delight in speculative positions, nor by seeming possibilities, nor by the 
idea: 'this is our teacher.' But, O Kalamas, when you know for yourselves that certain things are 
unwholesome, and wrong, and bad, then give them up... And when you know for yourselves that 
certain things are wholesome and good, then accept them and follow them.

Buddhism, however, presumes that when we attain true understanding our understandings will 
coincide. 

When we learn to calm our minds in order to look deeply at the true nature of things, we 
can arrive at full understanding which dissolves every sorrow and anxiety and gives rise 
to acceptance and love.

(Thich Nat Hanh. Old Path White Clouds. p.120)

This "full understanding" is exactly what Solomon disputes. What about a disciplined meditation 
practice? a lifelong training to maintain detachment, and through detachment to find equanimity 
in the midst of change? This option, which is missing or at least very inaccessible in the Jewish 
tradition, is central in the East. Did Solomon overlook it? Followed with diligence and devotion, 
wouldn't meditation practice keep us in anatta (the non-self state) permanently? Solomon might 
respond by saying: possibly you can experience it reliably in the midst of meditation, and 
possibly you can learn to carry the meditative center with you and sustain the experience during 
the day, but only by virtue of living a simplified "chop and carry" life, a monastic life, or the life 
of a disciplined householder, and even here self-will, desire and aversion would break through 
frequently, just as it did in the Sangha even during the Buddha's lifetime. 

Therefore, Ananda, if any of my disciples who are trying to practice dhyana, do not 
abstain from stealing and covetousness, their efforts will be like trying to fill a leaking 
pot with water; no matter how long they try, they will never succeed.

(The Surangama Sutra quoted p. 267. A Buddhist Bible)

From Solomon's point of view, the simplified lifestyle may give partial relief from dukkha, but 
only because the chop and carry life intentionally depletes the energy of the signal events that 
form the major movements of life. How consistent is the search for moksha (release from 
suffering) with active engagement in love and wisdom in their manifold expressions? with 
raising a family, developing a profession, politics, travel, passion, sex, adventure? with turning 
points built on intensity and reversal, with the tumultuous shifting self states that rise and fall in 
the heart of change?  

In the traditional east where programs for the cessation of dukkha were developed early on in 
Vedanta and the Upanishads, and may have originated even earlier in the indigenous Dravidian 
culture, the impact of the signal events was softened by being merged into social roles based on 
class, caste, gender and life stage, or were transcended altogether in the lives of mendicants or 
forest dwellers. In the west, by contrast, the signal events have been validated as defining 
moments for individuals at least from the time of the Hebrews. We want to become our 
uniqueness; we want to feel like somebody special. In the contemporary world, unfortunately, 
the signal events are being drained of meaning by being commercialized, mediafied and 
redefined as buying opportunities. The natural rhythms of our lives are obscured and this keeps 
us from taking responsibility for ourselves, not only harming our own and other human lives, but 
undermining the planetary ecology. 

We can reject the prevailing cultural values to some extent, and we can try to bring the chop and 
carry lifestyle into our turning points, but it won't work. The attempt at Eastern equanimity 
conflicts with a greater real need -- to recover the intensity and reversal of our own individual 
turning points, which is the defining virtue of Western culture, but is now threatened by the 
culture itself. Even if our awareness of pervasive suffering makes us renounce life, what then? 
Short of suicide our renunciation is itself a way of life that involves sleep and waking, feeding, 
language, thought and action. We will still have to interact with others one way or another, deal 
with out thoughts and passions, get what understandings we can, make our mistakes, live with 
our failings. That's why Solomon says:

Go thy way, eat thy bread with joy, and drink thy wine with a merry heart; for God now 
accepteth thy works. 

(Ecc. 9: 7)

Solomon suggests that in dealing with dukkha and vanity we still must make life choices -- and 
in doing so we want to end up with a life that honors rather than dishonors our opportunities. So 
he continues:

Let thy garments be always white; and let thy head lack no ointment. Live joyfully with 
the wife whom thou lovest all the days of the life of thy vanity, which he has given thee 
under the sun, all the days of thy vanity: for that is thy portion, and in thy labor which 
thou takest under the sun

(Ecc. 9: 8-9)

This means that we have to accomplish our coming to terms with dukkha and vanity in such a 
way as to leave us with energy and enthusiasm for action. It's a creative approach, but full of 
hazard and uncertainty in the onceness of life.


Whatsoever thy hand find to do, do it with thy might; for there is no work, nor device, nor 
knowledge, nor wisdom, in the grave, whither thou goest.

(Ecc. 9: 10) 

A strange complex causality is implied in the Solmonic vision, not unlike the Buddhist 
dependent arising.
 
Master Kassapa, all things depend on all other things for their existence. Take, for 
example, this leaf in my hand. Earth, water, heat, seed, tree, clouds, sun, time, space -- 
all these elements have enabled this leaf to come into existence. If just one of these 
elements was missing, the leaf could not exist. All beings, organic and inorganic, rely on 
the law of dependent co-arising."

(Thich Nhat Hanh. Old Path White Clouds. p. 169)

It is Solomonic to accept dependent co-arising but to give special emphasis to its sequential 
nature, to time's unfolding -- the "to all things there is a season" element -- and this is generally 
under emphasized in the Orient due to the cyclical view of time as an eternal round. The 
knowledge of timing, of interacting space-time, the true understanding of temporality, as we 
shall see, allows for a special kind of engagement with life missing in Buddhism.

The Solomonic world, I would like to say, half facetiously, is closer to the contemporary physics 
of the observer effect, closer to the chaos theory of causality than to the billiard ball universe that 
seems to rest behind Buddhist karma and even drives it through the veil of death from one 
lifetime to the next. With no clear linear relation between cause and effect, between observer and 
the observed, between behavior and its moral consequences, a more complex interconnection 
emerges. 

I returned, and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the 
strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet 
favor to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all.

(Ecc. 9:11)

In the Solomonic view, the world is more terrible and wonderful than that proposed by any 
philosophy or religion, east or west. He tells us this about the world: if it was better it would be 
less. Solomon's is a Blakean solution. The greatest evil is deadness, absence. The passions 
themselves are energies that can be shaped by understanding.

Men are admitted into Heaven not because they have curbed & govern’d their Passions 
or have no Passions, but because they have Cultivated their Understandings. The 
Treasures of Heaven are not Negations of Passion, but Realities of Intellect, from which 
all the Passions Emanate Uncurbed in the Eternal Glory.

(William Blake. A Vision of the Last Judgment. 87)

Only the darkness of nonentity is to be avoided. All the rest are workable forms of energy, and 
we are like smithies with our hammers, we're in both worlds, the world of fire and the world of 
iron.


REBIRTH

Practicing Buddhist detachment on the 8-fold Noble Path doesn't mean guarantee that you end 
the dukkha in this lifetime. The great enterprise may take longer than one lifetime. Even devoted 
practice may be insufficient to overcome the momentum of the self from its past lifetimes. 
Because the "stains" of craving, aversion and delusion are so deeply embedded, taking many 
incarnations to dig their way in, the illusions sustaining the self take many lifetimes to 
extinguish. Even the great meditation masters had to do continuous battle over myriad lifetimes 
to maintain selflessness The Buddha himself had been reincarnated many times before. 

Besides, Subhuti, I recall that during my five hundred previous lives, I had used life after 
life to practice patience and to look upon my life humbly as though it was some saintly 
being called upon to suffer humility. Even then my mind was free from any such arbitrary 
conceptions of phenomena as my own self, other selves, living beings, and a universal 
self.

(Diamond Sutra 4 b)

So much seems to depend on rebirth. How do the Buddhists sustain this odd belief? They 
maintain that the illusion of a constant self itself makes us think that it all ends at death, whereas 
the self never has had permanence and is constantly being annihilated and renewed every second 
in life, and death is just an extension of that. What we consider the end of life is just another part 
of the oscillation of arising/subsiding. Even in life we exist and cease to exist and exist again 
many times a second. Death is just another such momentary hiatus. What appears to us who 
observe the deaths of others to be a total ending to the Buddhists is just a rearrangement of 
energies, a throwing off of the material component of the five aggregates that define sentient life.

When the Aggregates arise, decay and die, O bhikkhu, every moment you are born, decay and 
die.

Here we hit the Achilles heel of the East. What assurance do we have that we have innumerable 
lifetimes before us? What if we only have this one? What does this do to our chances for 
redemption? That's the essential contradiction: eliminate multiple lifetimes and the Eastern 
approach falls into turmoil. The whole karmic system is shaken to its foundations. We have to 
face up to despair. This takes us right back to Ecclesiastes. King Solomon specifically rejects an 
afterlife in likening man to a beast and placing him in the animal kingdom.

For that which befalleth the sons of men befalleth beasts; even one thing befalleth them: 
as the one dieth, so dieth the other; yea, they have all one breath; so that a man hath no 
preeminence above a beast: for all is vanity. All go unto one place; all are of the dust, 
and all turn to dust again.

(Ecc. 3:19-20)

There's no karmic system here, there may be complex causal consequences playing out over 
time, but they're not strictly sequential or knowable and they do not lead to release from 
suffering. 

The radical onceness of life makes a crucial difference in our understanding of suffering and our 
response to it. Where the Buddha proposes a total elimination of dukkha through a deep 
understanding (and practice) of the impermanence and non-self  nature of reality over many 
lifetimes, Solomon, starting with the same dukkha, but stuck with one lifetime, accepts the pain 
in life, mitigates it where possible, and maintains an active sense of  involvement guided by 
ethical principles of choice. The prescription is for less renunciation and for more courage, more 
for accommodation than for inner spiritual revolution. For Solomon the task is not so much to 
eliminate attachment as to hone it to an acceptable, irreducible minimum consistent with full 
engagement in life -- family, sexuality, livelihood, community, love, wisdom  -- at every stage of 
life.


REBIRTH AS A COMFORTING ILLUSION

It seems clear that the Eastern world needs reincarnation for one simple and compelling reason: 
to validate personal suffering, so that it will not be in vain, but will be part of a path leading to 
the eventual cessation of our misery. We don't want to believe that our suffering is meaningless. 
We don't want to believe that the path to its complete cessation is never attained, or only rarely 
by very special people. It must be their human heartedness that takes them to this position, not 
their philosophical rigor. Looked at as just another effort of human beings to come to terms with 
their mortality, you'd have to say that the Buddhists need rebirth, they need consolation that flies 
in the face of common sense, they need the comforting illusion that it doesn't all end here in this 
frightening onceness of experience, but that something goes on and on until it achieves 
completion. It's the infantile part of ourselves that cannot countenance its own end. To comfort it 
we run from oblivion. 


THE "ONCE ONLY" PLAN

But an afterlife seems to me to be a timorous and unwarranted assumption, even by the values of 
the 8-Fold Noble Path or the Ten Commandments, which are just as good or even better on the 
"once only" plan that I strongly recommend. Without rebirth, without sure knowledge of results, 
altruism, generosity, service, the prospect of work without concern for reward, really become 
something tremendous, because now there is no reward in future incarnations  (or in serving 
others to improve their future incarnations.) There's no getting off the wheel for any of us. 
There's this lifetime only, without the karmic working off, without a final release. We’re in it 
together.

The "once only" position is by far the more easily sustained. The rigor of the argument is 
certainly on our side since there is no evidence for an afterlife, and the logic on which an afterlife 
is based seems so tenuous, so clearly intended to comfort rather than inform us. Perhaps the 
Buddha and Solomon would both approve of our rigorous rejection in the light of the last 2500 
years worth of physical and biological research. 

Because of his stand of full engagement, Solomon accepts the suffering that goes with 
attachment. He affirms attachment as an inescapable part of human nature, part of every life. 
"You're a horse, so pull" is the essence of it.  The existential lack, the gnawing emptiness, the 
fear is always ready to emerge. It can be shaped and moderated. For brief joyful periods it lifts, 
but it can never be eliminated, excised, or extirpated without wounding and diminishing the 
person. So Solomon looks for relative detachment, detachment from the folly and frippery of 
life, of maturing out of self-indulgence into service perhaps, but not fanatically.

Better is the end of a thing than the beginning thereof: and the patient in spirit is better 
than the proud in spirit.

(Ecc. 7:8)

With this relative detachment you can set and hold priorities, and this gives you great patience, 
and great patience helps you to be firmer in your detachment. To deal with our lives we have to 
grasp both horns of an intractable dilemma. We have to accommodate ourselves to our intrinsic 
suffering by dealing with incompletion and meaninglessness, but we also have to frame 
intentions, make choices, do things with enthusiasm, experience love, pursue wisdom  -- and 
nowadays in a wider ambit than ever before. 

The meaningful life, as we have been developing it here, really has to do with how to love and 
grow wise in a dukkha-filled universe, playing out both the power of the West to individuate, and 
the power of the East to find peace through detachment. But can it be done? Renouncing social 
and political engagement would not be an option, because the wider ambit draws us in, and the 
political world will not renounce its engagement with us even if we would leave it behind. Nor 
can we be of service or even have much leisure to make our choices. The shortness of life and 
the precariousness of our own and the planetary situation urge us to move quickly.

Earlier spiritual systems could and did disregard the interconnectedness of all species, and their 
mutual well-being, ignoring, or even opposing environmental needs. The Christian denigration of 
nature is said to have had that effect. And Jews have put themselves in an exclusive spiritual 
category, sometimes to a great remove from shared human concerns. Shneur Zalman, the founder 
of Chabad, the progenitor of the Lubovitcher dynasty even claimed, in his Tanya, that gentiles 
weren't endowed by nature with full souls. Clearly the foundation for a valid spiritual life must 
now embrace a planetary, ecological and environmental ethic at its heart -- an ethic of action to 
save, renew, repair. But how can we deal with the planetary problems before liberating ourselves 
from successomania, addiction, consumerism and juvenilization? Driven by the vanity and 
vexation in the craving for more, we heedlessly devour our resources. But successomania is 
sustained by the deep inward cauterization of love and wisdom, which has come to pass in a 
technologically driven and culturally specific form in the West and is now moving worldwide. 
But love and wisdom, as we shall see, are the source springs of our sense of the meaningfulness 
of life.

So the experiment we are living becomes: how can we live in the world and keep our enthusiasm 
for action despite everything we see and all the hurts we suffer? How can we do it without 
dividing ourselves into fragments, but from our wholeness choose life in the radical onceness of 
this lifetime, without its compensating myths of final redemption, without bending our minds to 
mystery and authority? We will now consider the way.


LIVING IN THE DUKKHA WORLD

Though our worldly dealings call on us to take action, the intrinsic dukkha nature of life distorts 
our actions. Peculiar cravings and fears, selfish intentions and unconscious motivations get in our 
way. They pull us off the path. They bog us down in a self. But the Buddha said that selflessness 
ends dukkha. So the question is: can we really find a way to be active, to choose, to decide -- to 
take one path while foregoing another -- without falling into a self?


THE BODDHISATVA IDEAL

The Boddhisattva purports to function selflessly, living entirely for the sake of others, motivated 
so fully by compassion as to be bound up in the fate of the whole creation -- and being bound up 
with the world, the distinction between self and other melts into a kind of redeeming selfless 
action. 

Just as a mother would protect her only child even at the risk of her own life, even so let 
one cultivate a boundless heart toward all beings. Let one's thoughts of boundless love 
pervade the whole world -- above, below and across -- without any obstruction, without 
any hatred, without any enmity

(Suttanipata i. 8)

A Bodhisattva should always think this way: I always practice diligence because I do not 
wish to cause suffering to any beings, because I wish to know all beings and the way they 
are born and pass away. I practice diligence because I want to know the Buddha's true 
law, have wisdom, and know how to use skillful means in order to procure the happiness 
of Nirvana for all beings. I practice diligence because I wish to suffer the sufferings of 
hell for the sake of all beings, so as to make them come to the realization of 
Enlightenment.

(Avatamsaka-sutra)


The Bodhisattva must have some real freedom to be "happy in hell." This is because he or she 
lives in the real world experiencing the turmoil of life without losing spiritual momentum. The 
boddhisattva has a supervening purpose, living as a lover of sorts, experiencing compassion for 
all those still bound up in the lower forms of attachment, knowing the pain to which they lead. 
The boddhisattva is a also wisdom figure, espousing a kind of wisdom that gazes unperturbed at 
essentials, that ceases to speculate on the wide ranging cosmos and, as "panna," restricts itself to 
the single purpose of exposing the illusion of the self from which all suffering arises.

Referring to broader issues of the origin of the universe, its infinitude and eternity, the Buddha 
comments:
 
Why, Malunkyaputta, have I not explained them? Because it is not useful , it is not  
fundamentally connected with the spiritual holy life, is not conducive to aversion, 
detachment, cessation, tranquillity, deep penetration, full realization, Nirvana. That is 
why I have not told you about them.

(Cula-malunkyatta-sutta)


The problem is that this restriction of love and wisdom sacrifices the diverse interchangeable 
fourfoldness of love as sex, eros, philia and agape to one kind of general compassion; and 
narrows wisdom in its interpenetrating fourfoldness of healing, creativity, individuation and 
spiritual release to the single issue of quietude.  This narrowing doesn’t do them justice.

Considered as dynamic processes, not end states, love and wisdom share so many characteristics 
as to suggest a common origin: Each pattern consists of two legs connected by two turning 
points: love as approach and separation from another (a-s,) wisdom as withdrawal into the self  
and return (w-r.) As each leg reaches an extreme in each process, it undergoes a reversal, marked 
by movement through a turning point. Approach becomes separation, separation becomes 
approach. Withdrawal becomes return, return becomes withdrawal. The turning points at each 
end of the dynamic are the poles of the process.  The two patterns are like mirror images of each 
other, w-r achieves its goal in solitude, a-s in intimacy. Together they form the warp and woof of 
life.

Approach-separation is an Eros centered process, through which we get to know and love others, 
withdrawal-return is a Logos centered process, through which we transform our relationship to 
ourselves, our ideas, our inner depths. A-s is a journey to love, which always begin with a 
greeting, w-r is a journey to wisdom, which always begins with a leave-taking. Each dynamic 
makes its appearance in the first moments of life, or even in earlier intrauterine development. 
The birth trauma itself, which is followed by reunion with the mother at the breast, is the first a-
s. The inwardness/outwardness movement first seen in the sleep/waking cycle, very likely tied to 
planetary movements of day and night through the biological clocks that have evolved to keep us 
functioning expresses w-r. In later development, the patterns rarely appear in isolation. They 
depart from each other and return to each other. They interweave. They influence and shape each 
other. They are mutually arising. A W-R turning, with its boon of wisdom, may only truly be 
incorporated into personal growth when it is validated in an interpersonal encounter, validated in 
a significant way in a significant interchange with another. Otherwise it remains a private 
symbol, a secret. Only what is given to another is truly acquired for oneself. And without love, 
without an a-s pattern playing out in one of the four kinds of love, withdrawal would lack 
consequence, lack material. 

Are they one or two? Just as in the early universe conditions were too fiery hot for life to emerge 
-- though the constituents of life were there -- and the heat of expansion prevented them from 
forming organic molecules for many ages, so too the oscillations behind love and wisdom may 
have differentiated only late in the course of cosmic evolution, which suggests that the cosmos is 
one in that a single act of creation brought it into being, but dual in that its sources of meaning, 
love and wisdom, emerged and differentiated later, so to speak in the cooling process.


PALLID LOVE AND TIMOROUS WISDOM

The Homeric heroes would scoff at the boddhisattva's empty existence. Contrast Odysseus with 
Arjuna, the Hindu prince, who Krishna admonishes to stop crying, saying: 

This despair and self-pity in a time of crisis is mean and unworthy of you, Arjuna. How 
can you have fallen into a state so far from the path to liberation?

(Baghavad Ghita  I.2, Easwaren translation, p. 49 vol. 1 The End of Sorrow) 

While Odysseus, captive on Calypso's isle, missing his home and wife is ennobled because he

"sat weeping on the shore even as aforetime, straining his soul with tears and groans and 
griefs, and as he wept he looked wistfully over the unharvested deep."

(Odyssey, Bk. V, Butcher and Lang trans. )

The boddhisattva’s pallid love and timorous wisdom don't honor the full savor of earthly 
existence. By restricting the expression of love and wisdom, the spiritual aspirant ends up living 
in a world where cultural advancement is fenced off from personal spiritual growth. A separation 
comes that drives a wedge between the spiritual and historical world that itself generates duality. 
The boddhisattvas may hold their equanimity, but only by disengaging from the signal events of 
their own lives -- from birth, leaving home, marriage, divorce, sexuality, child birth, child 
rearing, travel, planting, harvesting, eating, success, failure, labor, retirement, illness, death.

The restriction of love and wisdom to compassion and quietude drains them of their crucial 
vitality which is individuated and diverse and unique, and only by the full use of which can we  
master the special instrument which is ourselves in all its modes and rhythms. Our human 
heartedness fails us when we don’t join ourselves to the signal events.


SELFLESS INTENTIONS

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.

(Stephen Batchelor. Rebirth: a case for Buddhist agnosticism. Tricycle, Fall, 1992)


LET’S STICK WITH ONCENESS

Given the onceness of our lifetimes, perhaps the best we can do is posit a graded series of 
intentions running along a spectrum from "extremely selfish" to "extremely altruistic." Prayer and 
other meditational intentions would come closest to selflessness, approaching a kind of 
unbridgeable limit. But this approach to the limit may be less than it seems.  Because prayer and 
meditation accomplish the least tangible of worldly changes they naturally generate less karma, 
so they can be considered the least volitional of intentions. But if God is viewed as a mental 
projection, prayerful intentions would also be the most innocuous and some say utterly 
purposeless intentions unless followed up with human action. It then would hold that among the 
intentions leading to action, including plans, reflections, meditations, prayers, etc. some would 
be less self-involved than others. At the higher end of this series we might even encounter certain 
kinds of purified volitional energies that would enter into the world of events relatively free of a 
false belief in a self, in effect dropping clear of the doer. These kinds of actions are referred to in 
the Baghavad Ghita:

The seer says truly
That he is wise
Who acts without lust or scheming
For the fruit of the act:
His act falls from him,
Its chain is broken,
Melted in the flame of my knowledge.
Turning his face from the fruit,
He needs nothing:
The Atman is enough.
He acts, and is beyond action.

(Ghita Chap IV, p26. translated by Swami Pravananda and Christopher Isherwood)

Without a self , it is as if volition moves from the world to the world through the world,  shaped, 
focused, intensified through the lens of the aggregates of sensation, thought etc. -- the aggregates 
we only call a self  out of convenience. These actions would be creative because they form part 
of the world's own emergence, the world's unfolding, its evolution, the world’s art or dance. This 
makes the really interesting actions the ones that approach but do not reach the limiting  case of 
selflessness. We can think of them as Aikido-like actions, because they are actions, like the 
defensive martial art, that come from clear intentions, intentions that adapt the energy and 
momentum of the other for our own use. These actions are so much in concert with the other, 
that the follow-up deed of the person framing the intention requires very little more for its 
performance than the framing of the intention itself. But the effect of the slight action following 
the intention can be great.

These "deeds of intention," however, require what Don Juan called “impeccability,” great finesse 
and precision of timing (again using the Aikido analogy,) since the assertion of the intention in 
the moment of turning must be delicate and yet strong enough to meet and join the world's 
onflowing or converging energies. Only when we have this strong delicacy, do we have poise in 
the heart of time. We're at the fulcrum then -- we enter the action then -- we operate in the world 
of deeds from within the crucial turning points from which small actions generate great effects.


TIMING IS EVERYTHING

This impeccability in action is part of the Solomonic wisdom too. With timing and intention as 
our allies, we can build action strategies on the knowledge that love and wisdom are dynamic 
turning point processes. This lets us develop skills for engagement with life that make us 
suprisingly (even magically) effective in the world. 

This also have I seen as wisdom under the sun, and it seemed great to me. There was a 
small city, with few people in it, and a great king came upon it and surrounded it and 
built over it great 
bulwarks. And there was found therein a poor wise man, and he extricated the city 
through his wisdom, but no man remembered that poor man.

(Ecc. 9:13-15)

But we can only do certain things at certain times and not at others. 

The sensibility that "there is a time for every purpose" is a core Solomonic concept. When we 
have the capacity to “surf” the swells of the temporal world in all their variety we are 
empowered. 

Everything has an appointed season, and there is a time for every matter under heaven. A 
time to give birth and a time to die: a time to plant and a time to uproot that which is 
planted.  A time to kill and a time to heal; a time to break and a time to build.  A time to 
weep and a time to laugh; a time of wailing and a time of dancing. A time to cast stones 
and a tie to gather stones; a time to embrace and a time to refrain from embracing.  A 
time to seek  and a time to lose; a time to keep and a time to cast away.  A time to rend 
and a time to sew; a time to be silent and a time to speak.  A time to love and a time to 
hate; a time for war and a time for peace.

(Ecc. 3:1-8)


By living and loving with attention to the basic mystery of timing, we are coming to understand 
meaningful coincidence, synchronicity, in a Jungian fashion, but with navigable nodes and nexus 
points in time that can be invoked, induced consciously, manifested with properly timed 
intentions seeded into crucial turning points at the right moments. But not always, not reliably so, 
because dukkha is here too. By seeking to penetrate the mysteries of timing by close attention to 
the flow -- by bearing witness to synchronicity -- we learn to live in such a way as to pare 
ourselves down to an ego that doesn't make hard claims or seek entitlements or dominate the 
action with quirks of personality. We attain a “least operable self,” but a self nonetheless, still 
effective, capable of choice, skillful in means, but not bound to false illusions. 

The Baal Shem Tov, the eighteenth century founder of Hasidism, was also deeply involved with 
this approach. Subtle timing enters into almost every tale told about him -- and the timing, when 
taken up with proper intention, created great and seemingly magical effects from small and even 
trivial actions. A typical tale follows:

I heard that there was an arrendator (Jewish tax farmer) who lived near the holy 
community of Medzhibozh. Another man came and paid more for the arrendeh and the 
first arrendator was dismissed from the village. He was in debt to the Master (The Polish 
overlord) of  that village, but he did not have sufficient money to pay the debt. But the 
master and the new arrendator forbade the people to let the man leave the village to go 
anywhere. In spite of that, the former arrendator traveled to see the Besht (acronym for 
Baal Shem Tov.) When the new arrendator learned about it he reported it to the master, 
saying "the former arrendator went to a sorcerer to enchant you."  The master was angry 
with him and placed his son in prison. The arendator did not find the Besht at home 
because he was in the holy community of Kamenka. He followed him to that town, but did 
not find him there because the Besht had gone home. He followed after him and caught 
up with him on the road.  The Besht said to him: "What can I possibly do for you while I 
am traveling? Follow me to my home."    On their way the Besht perceived that the 
master had placed the arrendator's son in prison. He said "We do not have time to 
waste."They came to a river, and the Besht immersed himself in it. Coming out from the 
river he said to him: "Return home and immediately upon your arrival in the village go to 
the manor house."  And so he did. When the master saw him through the window he was 
frightened lest he be hurt by his magic, and he chased the son away from the prison. He 
sent his son to chase the arrendator and his family away from the village. And so it was. 
Then the master sent a letter to the governor of the holy community of Medzihbozh 
containing a serious complaint about the Besht in these words: "There is a sorcerer in 
your town."  The governor answered him: "See to it that you make the utmost effort to 
appease the Besht because he is not a sorcerer. If you do not appease him, heaven will 
punish you."  The master immediately sent a wagon with chickens and all sorts 
of flour to appease the Besht.

(In Praise of the Baal Shem Tov)

Time is of the essence in this story. From the moment the arrendator's son is placed in jail and he 
seeks out the Besht, days and hours are passing. He finally catches up with the Besht at a 
specific moment in a specific place. This is what the Besht has to deal with. Why not earlier or 
later? Why not somewhere else? The Besht’s schedule, already dominated by synchronistic 
occurrences, made it so. The Besht says follow me home and we’ll do something, but before he 
gets home he learns or surmises that the son is in prison and recognizes that the crucial turning is 
near. Despite his own request, he doesn’t wait until he gets home. He immerses himself in the 
river.  He clears his head, changes his consciousness, allows him to focus his intention. He tells 
the man to go to the master's house. This involves returning to the village from which he fled  
and showing up in front of the master's window. The master sees him and is thrown into a fright. 
Why frightened?  Because he thinks, would he have come back unless he had some magic with 
which to threaten him?  So the son is released, the debt canceled. The Besht gets wagon load of 
chickens and flour into the bargain. What exactly did the Besht do? Nothing much. He listened to 
a story. He took a dip in the river. He said go to the master's house right now. No instructions as 
to what to say when he got there were needed. The timing of the surprise was the effective 
element. The Besht surmised the master's frame of mind and did the least he needed to do to 
secure the result he intended.

The Besht's character is drawn in angular fashion in these tales; he is brief, laconic, he doesn't 
waste words, he doesn’t explain himself. He's not grandiloquent or mysterious. He stays out of 
the limelight. By not being full of himself he flows with the time. The wonders he seems to 
accomplish, properly interpreted, are not outside the pale of plausibility -- they come from his 
human heartedness.

To know and then do what the time demands requires a self-effacing attitude -- an illusionless 
stance -- it requires getting out of one’s own way. And a yet it is a stance in which a sharpened, 
reduced self is brightly present. It has to choose among alternatives, to choose quickly, almost 
spontaneously, flowing with the needs, intensely involved with those needs, involved with 
community, involved with the signal events, involved but always  "waiting for ripeness," (as 
Valentine Smith the wisdom figure in Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land repeatedly declares.)

But the limiting case of pure selflessness can never be reached. If you reached it, if you more or 
less served as a channel that passed intentions from the world to the world, you would be selfless 
in those moments, but in being so you would have lost your freedom, your creative spark. You 
would pass on what came to you along the causal chain, to which you would be attuned and 
ready to respond. But in such a world there could be no human freedom, because if it is possible 
to frame intentions at all, they couldn’t be selfless. If you could frame selfless intentions there 
would be no freedom -- and without freedom it makes no sense to talk about intention. 

FLYING CLOSER TO EARTH

Let's look for relatively selfless intentions closer to daily life. Let’s not be Luftmenschen. What 
about love? Certainly in love one's intention can be for the sake of the other. But "the other" can 
always be considered a mental construct -- a projection of the self. Wishful thinking about who 
the other is or can become, so common in love, speaks from our own needs and presumptions. 
By this reasoning, even sacrifice for the sake of the beloved, if the beloved was a projection of 
one's own wishes, would be considered a selfish act -- and has often been so considered.

And it's the same with wisdom. The selfless intention in wisdom, which purports to be or do for 
the sake of "humanity" or "the environment" or the "planet earth," rests on an opinion about what 
will truly serve, it rests on conviction, personal faith, and the strength of will to hold one's 
creative insight in the face of opposition, sometimes against the ruling paradigms. And this 
requires more, not less self-will. Therefore, neither kavannot, mitzvot, love, nor wisdom can be 
selfless. This is precisely what Solomon saw. They carry a self reference with them everywhere 
they go.

And I saw all the deed of God, for a person will not be able to fathom the deed that is 
done under the sun, because though a man toils to seek, he will not fathom, and even if 
the wise man claims to know, he will be unable to fathom.

(Ecc. 8:17)


What purpose, then, do love and wisdom serve? If they are inevitably flawed by the imperfection 
that is structured into reality itself, what relief, release, redemption can we hope to achieve in 
them? Does love overcome dukkha? Does it have transforming powers? Constant love, Christian 
love, even in its individuated, self-referential form, puts itself out this way; it purports to resolve 
dualities, to reconcile enemies (Matthew 5:43-44.)  But what are we looking at 
phenomenologically when we speak of constant love? All we can know of love comes through 
experience. The constancy of the emotion and the integrity of the experience and what it leads us 
to do or refrain from doing are two different things, though boasted of and sung by poets and 
mystics.
 
Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove.
O, no! It is an ever fixed mark
That looks on tempests and is never shaken...


(Shakespeare. From Sonnet 116)

The love that lies behind the constancy of the emotion of love  -- even if we assume the emotion 
to be constant -- may not be all that constant. We drift in and out of love with our principal 
others. Judging by our behavior, when something goes wrong we are usually briefly estranged -- 
and this happens frequently enough. When thing go well, we fly to union, but union doesn't last. 
As the pseudonymous Solomon recognized in the Song of Songs:

I opened to my beloved; but my beloved had withdrawn himself, and was gone: my soul 
failed when he spake; I sought him but I could not find him; I called him but he gave me 
no answer.

(Song of Songs 5:6) 

How do we manage to call it love even when we are repulsed or find our lovers repugnant? We 
do it by holding the memory of all the separate approaches and separations in a single bigger 
basket. We love the abstraction of love.  As Rogers and Hammerstein put it: 

"Falling in love with love is falling for make believe.
Falling in love with love is playing the fool." 

In this they even echo the Solomonic criticism of "folly."

The constancy of the feeling of love is an accretion, an assemblage, a residue built up from many 
experiences of turning, principally our turnings from separation to approach where the 
appreciation for the other soars and strengthens. And in moments before we plummet 
into deepest intimacy,  where the overpowering visceral draw of the other makes us feel love in 
any or all of its four forms,  we feel and commit ourselves to its eternal verity. But these 
powerful turnings toward union with the beloved can only occur by virtue of the reality of an 
equal number of turnings away from intimacy toward distance, toward isolation, renunciation, 
revulsion, or solitude. If everything is changing -- because “this too shall change” -- love is 
changing too. This is the insight of the Song of Songs, the ceaseless rhythm of approach and 
separation, a rhythm wound into the universe, an intrinsic rhythm of life: lovers must part in 
order to renew their love. 

O my dove, that art in the clefts of the rock, in the secret places of the stairs, let me see 
thy countenance, let me hear thy voice; for sweet is thy voice and thy countenance is 
comely. Take us the foxes, the little foxes,  that spoil the vines: for our vines have tender 
grapes. My beloved is mine and I am his: he feedeth among the lilies. Until the day break, 
and the shadows flee away, turn, my beloved, and be thou like a roe or a young hart upon 
the mountains of Bether.

(Song of Songs, 2:14-17)

Memories of this variability in the rhythms of love are what we suppress when, in recollection, 
we compose the longer view of love's durability. But Solomon makes love simple in its four 
manifestations:

Two are better than one, since they have good reward for their toil. For if they fall, one 
will lift up his friend, but woe to the one who falls and has no second to lift him up.

(Ecc. 4:9)


THE COVER-UP OF LOVE AND WISDOM

Why do we cover-up the ceaseless alternation of connection and estrangement? Because we do 
not like not knowing where we stand. We love mystery and authority. Precisely through the 
constancy of the feeling of love we assure ourselves of the stability of the underlying bond, a 
stability sure to be interrupted by death if by nothing else -- a realization of which we are only 
too aware. This emotional constancy, which is gilded with spiritual values and becomes the basis 
of spiritual love, functions just like the illusion of constant identity, which is also papered over 
by a false sense of personal strength and durance. It covers-up the unsettling shifts in our 
personality centers that linger in the penumbra of consciousness.

As with love, so too with wisdom. The phenomenology of it is less elevated than the 
philosophical arguments supporting it. Real wisdom has gain and loss in it, and terror and 
solitude. It fights against and stands opposed to mystery and authority: to ending in vague 
unknowability, to doing what the ancients or the holy texts or the clan leader or the priests or the 
government tell us to do. Real wisdom is full of sacrifice, repeated self-sacrifice of course, but 
principally the sacrifice of wisdom itself: of wisdom once gained to new wisdoms coming in. But 
the solace of having eternal beliefs is so crucial to us that we have to make them very general in 
order to persuade ourselves of their eternal and universal relevance. This makes our eternal 
wisdoms so general as to reduce their meaning, accuracy and usefulness in the individual case. 
As we live, we are thrown back upon ourselves to jettison our eternal wisdoms, to develop 
smaller transient wisdoms that rise and pass, Sufi fashion, impermanent in the world. We change 
and even our changings change, so we must leave behind us a trailing refuse of small wisdoms as 
the price we pay to be present at our turnings. 


RETURN TO DUKKHA

To return to the dukkha-filled universe with which we started. Our tragic flaw seems to be that 
the dukkha that is potentiated in the heart of all of our turning points, because of the chaotic 
causality in oscillating systems, becomes actual and most poignant in the moments that most 
powerfully shape our destinies, the signal events, the meaning bestowing turning points in love 
and wisdom. Which brings us to a paradoxical realization: one can accede selflessly to the force 
of circumstances during the long legs of the oscillators between the turning points. We can 
practice detachment and perhaps even succeed in ending dukkha there, but at the turning points, 
which are brought on by the signal events of life, when our freedom briefly opens and comes to 
meet us, we bring suffering on ourselves every time we choose the road not taken.

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I --
I took the one less traveled by,
and that has made all the difference.

(Robert Frost. From The Road Less Taken)

Since love and wisdom have value precisely because they are free, and we can't love or be wise 
without the freedom to be hateful and stupid, love, wisdom and freedom are all tied up in the 
conscious turning points in life. They are the moments in which we touch our freedom in a world 
otherwise strongly determined by inheritance, upbringing, culture and happenstance. That's why 
it is of the highest importance for us to know where and when our turning points occur, so that 
we can engage rather than shrink from them, enter them skillfully with the right intentions and 
emerge with a self-directed life. We love and grow wise only to the extent we consciously 
experience the turning points at the extremes of our bio-social rhythms. 

Though by saying yes to life, yes to passion, yes to attachment, yes to belonging, yes to history, 
yes to progress, we achieve a certain freedom of action, because of the power of intention in our 
turning points, we are also and always free to suffer: release comes in bondage, suffering comes 
in freedom. Strange.


TIKKUN  

To undertake relatively selfless action in love and wisdom based on clear intentions and an 
appreciation of turning points (teshuvah in Hebrew) has many resonances in Jewish thought. 
Tikkun olam -- a Hebrew phrase for repair of everything, is relevant in our study at this point. 
Tikkun is undertaken for the benefit of others, for all creatures, for creation, in partnership with 
God, and is most effective in moments when, from skillful understanding of timing, actual deeds 
are performed. Then, as Michael Lerner in Jewish Renewal explains: 

We have the capacity to overcome the many blinders that have, throughout history, kept 
us from fully recognizing ourselves or recognizing others as  vehicles of God's presence. 
Transcendence, then, is a psychological, political, ethical, and spiritual continuum 
involving a transformative and healing praxis of tikkun, rather than a spiritual escape 
from a fundamentally flawed world.

(Michael Lerner. Jewish Renewal p. 29)

But tikkun cannot be entirely selfless. It needs a core self that learns from experiences and makes 
conscious choices, a self that takes responsibility for action, a decisive self, a self with "ego 
strength." And this core self in tikkun olam confronts the conditions of dukkha and responds to 
them directly. Tikkun wants us to enter the fallen world and raise up its sparks, redeeming its 
energy, ameliorating its problems. (The sparks of light, in Cabalistic mythology, come from the 
shattering of the vessels in the moment of creation -- as in the breaking of cosmic symmetry in 
the Big Bang.) By reaching down and lifting up the sparks, in daily life, in real circumstances, 
we modify dukkha through tikkun, through personal action for progress on the historical scale. 

In full maturity perhaps we reach a point in the practice of tikkun and kavvanah where we 
inhabit an adamantine, diamond self in our turning points, where we relinquish egotism (in the 
sense of motives of personal aggrandizement,) but don't disappear from the field of worldly 
action. Instead we hold to a residuum of self in order to understand timing, to frame and hold an 
intention, to exercise self discipline and to practice virtue (virtue in Greek means strength,) and 
to distinguish our strengths from their destructive counterparts and to choose between them. And 
in this reduced self state we can, in certain moments in the heart of turnings, briefly take on the 
limiting case of a selflessness that is fecund and creative. And when we do so our creative 
freedom enters the world through deeds of action. A small self is needed for this, a “still, small 
voice,” a self to steer with, a self with ingrained humility. Too much self is hubris, and hubris 
undermines action, but too little self undermines decisiveness.

The relatively selfless self, the humble self, the Watcher, is characterized by quietude, 
intelligence, dispassion, steadiness, imperturbability.  These are often mistaken for transcendent 
or eternal qualities because of our yearning for mystery at the edges of the knowable. But the 
Watcher is real and natural and has a perspective on the play of phenomena that brings it to the 
spiritual position that "this too shall pass."  But the Watcher is not the eternal soul, because the 
Watcher too shall pass -- the Watcher comes and goes from day to day, and the Watcher is born 
and does die with you.

Though we can strengthen ourselves to be present in the Watcher at crucial moments during 
turning points, and this may give us the power to make conscious use of our freedom, all of the 
components of the collection of drives and awarenesses that make up our multiple selves, 
including the Watcher. wink and evanesce.  And some of these have their own freedoms too, but 
only at certain times and under special circumstances. When it is time to build, the builder 
module ascends to consciousness, when it is time to tear down, another component of the 
personality takes over. Some of them are free and some are constrained, and they change places 
according to the spatio-temporal situation -- because the world is neither wholly free nor wholly 
determined. This shifting causal complexity varies with the turbulence in near chaos conditions 
which enter into outer events as well as into our neural substrate. 

To be compliant to the times is to know your particular position in the time, and your position in 
the time is a cultural time-and-place. By definition, it is always the time-and-place in which you 
find yourself. And it is in this moving stream that biographical events unfold and your personal 
history develops. Your clearest sense of yourself lives at the growing tip of your time line. So to 
be compliant to the times with full consciousness is to connect with your opportunities. To take 
your opportunities is to do what is close to hand. This is our perpetual starting place, perpetual 
because we are always in our starting place, always here-and-now, always "close to hand." And 
there is always something to be done close to hand. 

This sensibility that favors engagement has been called "the way in life" and has been described 
in relation to King Solomon by Jacob Needleman:

Throughout history...the idea of the way in life has been spoken of as the 'path of the 
warrior' or as the 'teaching for kings.' Both the warrior and the king represented, in 
literal fact and symbolically, the individual engaged in all the forces of life, as opposed to 
the priestly class or the ascetic removed or protected from many of the influences that 
permeate the greater world. Often, this idea of the way in life was transmitted as the 'way 
of the magician,' that is, in the language of sorcery. Again, it is a matter of the individual 
who confronts and masters all the forces, high and low, that constitute reality... No one 
can become a magician unless called to it by God -- as was Moses and, we shall soon 
see, Solomon.

(Jacob Needleman, Money and the Meaning of Life, p.82)

Needleman further illustrates the way in life by quoting from Hakuin, an 18th century Japanese 
Zen master and artist:

Frequently you may feel you are getting nowhere with practice in the midst of activity... 
Yet rest assured that those who use the quietistic approach can never hope to enter into 
meditation in the midst of activity. Should by chance a person who uses this approach 
enter into the dusts and confusion of the world of activity, even the power of ordinary 
understanding which he had seemingly attained will be entirely lost...

(Hakuin quoted in Money and the Meaning of Life p.85)


The methods, skills and insights for Solomon's version of the way in life are spelled out most 
clearly in the Book of Proverbs where wisdom is found not in the cloister or the study, but in the 
streets:

Wisdom crieth without; she uttereth her voice in the streets: she crieth in the chief places 
of concourse, in the openings of the gates: in the city she uttereth her words, saying How 
long, ye simple ones, will ye love simplicity? and the scorners delight in their scorning, 
and fools hate knowledge?

(Proverbs 1:20-22) 


PERSONAL ENGAGEMENT AND AUTHENTICITY

The mythology surrounding Solomon depicts him as both a lover and wise man, as a king and a 
magician, as a founder of alchemy, as a conjurer of devils, as a sinner and repentant. But 
whatever he acquired, he acquired on his own. He did not have a guru. Mysterious wise men did 
not reveal secrets to him. God may have granted him an "understanding heart" but it was 
Solomon who devised his understandings from close observation and long experience. The sense 
we get from the writings is that Solomon's wisdom and powers were personally cultivated, 
acquired individually, gleaned from life directly, experientially, learned anew. And so it must be 
for us too if we want to live authentically.

But we must not make Solomon's mistake. As Adin Steinsaltz put it, Solomon’s great error as 
king and man was to suppose that others could live with the unshielded intensity of insight that 
he did, that they could endure his existential commotion without going mad. That others would 
even want to cultivate it, that others would be able to live with full authenticity, was Solomon’s 
misapprehension. But people love mystery and authority, and Solomon's expectations for 
spiritual renewal could never be met because “of his inability to discern the significance of the 
petty and the trivial.” (Steinsaltz. Biblical Images. p. 159.)

Though seen through a dukkha eye, subtle powers can emerge from attention to timing based on 
the onceness of life, the quietness of the Watcher and the power of appropriately framed 
intentions. New capacities for action can develop in us. Unheralded virtues can appear. 
Something like the siddhis (powers) described in the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali can emerge. But 
not every intention can be accomplished, even with impeccable timing, even by Solomon. 
Dukkha is always there. Whatever is built up immediately starts to fall down. Love too is built 
and falls apart and wisdom falls apart too. 

Perhaps this is what Solomon means when he says: 

And I hated all my toil that I toil under the sun, that I should leave it to the man who will 
be after me. And who knows whether he will be wise or foolish. And he will rue over all 
my toil that I have toiled and that I have gained wisdom under the sun; this too is vanity.

(Ecc. 2:18)

The Targum  sees this as a reference to the generation of Reheboam and to Jeraboam who 
usurped the kingdom and implies that Solomon foresaw the split kingdom and the loss 
of sovereignty.


“LOVE THAT'S ONLY SLIGHTLY SOILED” (Cole Porter)

Love and wisdom are not banished from the Solomonic world because they are slightly soiled.  
And justice doesn't always triumph, but it sometimes does. There's no faultless compassion that 
is entirely selfless and beneficial either, but there is sometimes compassion and it is often 
beneficial. And wisdom, though it is flawed, still brings insight, healing and invention. And 
societies, though they do not progress to perfection, can make improvements over time. There is 
no karmic law of direct cause and effect in the doings of humanity. Causality is much more 
complex, and in my view even our best intentions are swimming upstream against a vast tide of 
cosmic intentionlessness that preserves diversity.

Solomon well describes the field in which we act. It is a much modified and limited world of 
love and wisdom, a world flawed by dukkha. To live meaningfully in the flawed world we must 
accept that there is no radical solution for dukkha. In the cracked but still functional human 
universe we have a reasonably good chance of muddling along in our own lives, (and on the 
larger scale surviving as a species,) but it is our task to place the ourselves, through action, in the 
field of the needs of the whole world -- to see how well we can navigate with the power of love 
and wisdom through the intense creative potential of our own turning points.


JEWISH DUKKHA

On the deep level of the Jewish wisdom tradition, what has happened in the fallen world is that 
love and wisdom -- whose pulses can but don't have to be mutually supportive -- have been 
knocked out of whack with each other. God's mercy and Justice are likened to love and wisdom, 
but being kind and telling the truth, as our experience proves, is very hard to do, especially at the 
same time, because the two may be in actual or apparent conflict. When the right and left hand of 
God-- the wisdom hand and the mercy hand -- are not cooperating -- the fault is not in God but in 
us.  When the two hands fight each other it is because we haven't made the turnings from below 
that would help unite love and wisdom in the pulse of our own creative lives. This image brings 
us close to the heart of Jewish dukkha.


Return unto me, and I will return unto you, saith the Lord of hosts. 
But ye said, wherein shall we return.

(Malachi 3:7)


In true growth we often endure spiritual crises. Perhaps they come from the pressure of the 
energies of love and wisdom on each other. Sometimes love provokes inwardness, because to let 
someone into your life where none has gone before you need to open up inside and change the 
model by which your expectations and possibilities form. Sometimes inwardness generates love, 
as in recognizing love for an absent partner, or outwardness in new meetings. And sometimes 
separation evokes the wisdom of solitude as much as the longing of  loneliness. And sometimes 
the power of loving unity suggests its own transience, bringing out the wisdom that this too shall 
pass.

Because we are free, we are not constrained to integrate love and wisdom, but neither are we 
always incapable of doing so. Perhaps because love and wisdom, after which we quest, are not 
unified, they await their culmination in some new expression of humanity in action, humanity 
struggle to unify wisdom and love under prevailing conditions, prevailing but always passing 
away, hopeless and hopelessly noble, uncertain and unstable. And this "loving wisdom"
or "wise loving" becomes an act of unification briefly reassembling what has been torn apart by 
the centrifugal forces of creation working out through our culture -- creative deeds that evolve all 
planetary life and then unravel.

It is from all the turning points in love and wisdom that the fan of possibilities in fan-shaped 
destiny radiates out along the four paths of love and wisdom or other paths and possibilities. At 
the nexus moments one can switch planes, change paths, revolutionize one's life. In love when 
sex changes to eros and you "fall in love with each other" it happens, when eros becomes philia 
and the lovers become friends it happens, and from philia to agape, love of the creation, and with 
tikkun as a response to love, it is the same growth. In love, the turning points serve to weave the 
interpersonal world together in rich and variegated textures. In wisdom. at the nexus moments, 
healing can transform to personal growth, or personal growth to healing; then personal growth 
can become creativity, or creativity personal growth as from the turning points the fan of 
possibilities widens out.

In wisdom cultural evolution occurs. But because we're by nature problematic animals, born to 
suffer, born to die, riddled with inner contradictions, we can never find permanent happiness or 
peace. Even to consider happiness or peace the goal or meaning of life brings suffering. It must 
be that nature ordains the meaning of human life to be something different: something like the 
full play of our propensities, the exploration of our genome, the expression of our potentialities, 
diversity, even if our explorations entangle us in situations that give us suffering. Perhaps the 
creativity through which we evolve culturally is itself a response to our inner conflicts, a neurotic 
conflict only being the personal coloration of a species-wide conflict coming from our creative 
and problematic natures, from which the some of us, having been numbed by fear of life, no 
longer suffer. 

Our real task in life is to struggle imperfectly with love and wisdom. We are not to cease to 
individuate because our temporality limits us or because we must inevitably fail. But we must 
find the core of ourselves for the very sake of doing, so that we can do for the sake of the world 
from the center of our uniqueness, sometimes through pleasure and sometimes through pain, and 
with no assurance of success.


DUKKHA AS A FRIEND

The Buddha said all quests are foolish but the one that liberates us from the wheel of rebirths, but 
we have found that the notion of rebirth is itself illusory, a fantasy compensation for the 
unredeemed suffering in a single lifetime, which in our view is all we have. Since the props of 
the karmic system have now been kicked out from under us, we will have to sustain the 
meaningfulness of life in the terror of its imperfection by finding the meaning in the 
imperfection, from the freedom, from the onceness itself. When we bravely throw aside the 
comfort of rebirth to face the onceness of life, dukkha remains, but by accepting dukkha as an 
ongoing feature of life, as a troublesome and almost incorrigible friend, we discover new and 
deeper motivations for compassion and understanding that do not require an afterlife and may 
not even require God.

We pay attention differently in our onceness. Our mindfulness is a mindfulness of the flow of 
time as well as the arresting totality of the moment -- of process, of history, of social 
development, more of progress and retrogression and less of circularity. And in paying this 
attention, which is really Solomon's attention to timing, we may discover better means for 
mitigating, if not eliminating, the sting of dukkha in its current temporal manifestations. By 
relinquishing ourselves to the onceness of life we may free ourselves to find better ways to deal 
with it. In this we return from the East to the West, but we bring the meditative disciplines with 
us as tools. Mindfulness and the clear analysis of the impermanence of the self strengthen us to 
be ourselves in the moment. 

To the extent we struggle with, rather than transcend dukkha, we become capable of social, 
cultural and ecological advancement by developing competence in the turning points of fourfold 
love and wisdom, not in pursuit of a final goal, but toward endless openness and diversity in the 
onceness of our contributions, living our lives and building civilizations, arts and inventions and 
moving beyond the planet itself in some as yet unforeseen way. 

To be willing to live according to our own best lights, without assurance, in the face of radical 
uncertainty, mortality and onceness, is what I call authenticity. To make the commitment to take 
on the project of one's life, to discover and possibly invent new values, to establish one's own 
criteria for validation, which means that for better or worse our efforts may fail, to deal with the 
problems, perplexities, mysteries, paradoxes and binds of our lives with mind and heart together 
in all its stages of growth, with its pleasures and sufferings, confusions and understandings, this 
is our problem to solve, to solve by living. Plunge in.


Copyright 1998 Ira Rosenberg										Page 1
REFLECTIONS ON KING SOLOMON AND THE BUDDHA