REFLECTIONS ON KING SOLOMON AND THE BUDDHA Chapt 6.

Reflections On King Solomon And The Buddha - Section 1

Chapter 6 - Dukkha 1A

by Ira Rosenberg

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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Last Updated 09/17/98 (rge)