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Righting our wrongs and other questions
Ok, I have was having a friendly discussion with my sister. She is Christian, I am Buddhist. She asked me several questions, to which I did not have an answer. The first was, "How do you redeem yourself when you've done something wrong?" I mean, Christians sin, and they pray to God and ask for forgiveness. What does a Buddhist do?
The next question was even more difficult. She said that Christians know that they will never be perfect in this lifetime, and God has told us that we do not have to be perfect, and we will still be accepted into Heaven regardless. Are Buddhists always chasing that feeling of perfection? How do you know when you've reached it?
My sister said that she does not think she has met anyone who is 'enlightened.' Technically speaking, once you reach enlightenment you are no longer alive and/or a human anymore, right? Just a spiritual entity?
The next question was even more difficult. She said that Christians know that they will never be perfect in this lifetime, and God has told us that we do not have to be perfect, and we will still be accepted into Heaven regardless. Are Buddhists always chasing that feeling of perfection? How do you know when you've reached it?
My sister said that she does not think she has met anyone who is 'enlightened.' Technically speaking, once you reach enlightenment you are no longer alive and/or a human anymore, right? Just a spiritual entity?
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Comments
See MN 61.
Buddhists are encouraged to understand the nature of feelings and why they arise, not merely chase after them. Buddhism is concerned about observing actions and their results, not gaining acceptance.
As for achieving perfection, Buddhism is ultimately about perfecting a skill as Thanissaro explains in his essay "Ignorance":
The four truths are (1) stress — which covers everything from the slightest tension to out-and-out agony; (2) the cause of stress; (3) the cessation of stress; and (4) the path of practice leading to the cessation of stress. When the Buddha first taught these truths, he also taught that his full Awakening came from knowing them on three levels: identifying them, knowing the skill appropriate to each, and knowing finally that he had fully mastered the skills.
Stress he identified with examples — such things as birth, aging, illness, and death; sorrow, distress, and despair — summarizing it as five clinging-aggregates: clinging to physical form; to feelings of pleasure, pain, and neither pleasure nor pain; to perception; to thought-constructs; and to sensory consciousness. The cause of stress he identified as three kinds of craving: craving for sensuality, craving to take on an identity in a world of experience, and craving for one's identity and world of experience to be destroyed. The cessation of stress he identified as renunciation of and release from those three kinds of craving. And the path to the cessation of stress he identified as right concentration together with seven supporting factors: right view, right resolve, right speech, right action, right livelihood, right effort, and right mindfulness.
These four truths are not simply facts about stress. They are categories for framing your experience so that you can diagnose and cure the problem of stress. Instead of looking at experience in terms of self or other, for instance, or in terms of what you like and dislike, you look at it in terms of where there's stress, what's causing it, and how to put an end to the cause. Once you can divide the territory of experience in this way, you realize that each of these categories is an activity. The word "stress" may be a noun, but the experience of stress is shaped by your intentions. It's something you do. The same holds true with other truths, too. Seeing this, you can work on perfecting the skill appropriate for each activity. The skill with regard to stress is to comprehend it to the point where you have no more passion, aversion, or delusion toward doing it. To perfect this skill, you also have to abandon the cause of stress, to realize its cessation, and to develop the path to its cessation.
Each of these skills assists the others. For example, when states of concentration arise in the mind, you don't just watch them arise and pass away. Concentration is part of the path, so the appropriate skill is to try to develop it: to understand what will make it grow more steady, more solid, more subtle. In doing this, you develop the other factors of the path as well, until the doing of your concentration is more like simply being: being a luminous awareness, being present, being nothing, being one with emptiness.
From that perspective, you begin to comprehend levels of stress you never noticed before. As you abandon the cravings causing the grosser levels, you become sensitive to subtler ones, so you can abandon them, too. You see more and more clearly why you've suffered from stress: You didn't grasp the connection between the cravings you enjoyed and the stress that burdened you, and didn't detect the stress in the activities you enjoyed. Ultimately, when you've abandoned the causes for other forms of stress, you begin to see that the being of your concentration contains many layers of doing as well — more layers of stress. That's when you can abandon any craving for these activities, and full Awakening occurs.
The path to this Awakening is necessarily gradual, both because the sensitivity it requires takes time to develop, and because it involves developing skills that you abandon only when they've done their job. If you abandoned craving for concentration before developing it, you'd never get the mind into a position where it could genuinely and fully let go of the subtlest forms of doing.
But as your skills converge, the Awakening they foster is sudden. The Buddha's image is of the continental shelf off the coast of India: a gradual slope, followed by a sudden drop-off. After the drop-off, no trace of mental stress remains. That's when you know you've mastered your skills. And that's when you really know the four noble truths.
Craving, for instance, is something you experience every day, but until you totally abandon it, you don't really know it. You can experience stress for years on end, but you don't really know stress until you've comprehended it to the point where passion, aversion, and delusion are gone. And even though all four skills, as you're developing them, bring a greater sense of awareness and ease, you don't really know why they're are so important until you've tasted where their full mastery can lead.
For even full knowledge of the four noble truths is not an end in and of itself. It's a means to something much greater: Nirvana is found at the end of stress, but it's much more than that. It's total liberation from all constraints of time or place, existence or non-existence — beyond all activity, even the activity of the cessation of stress. As the Buddha once said, the knowledge he gained in Awakening was like all the leaves in the forest; the knowledge he imparted about the four noble truths was like a handful of leaves. He restricted himself to teaching the handful because that's all he needed to lead his students to their own knowledge of the whole forest. If he were to discuss other aspects of his Awakening, it would have served no purpose and actually gotten in the way.
So even though full knowledge of the four noble truths — to use another analogy — is just the raft across the river, you need to focus full attention on the raft while you're making your way across. Not only does this knowledge get you to full Awakening, but it also helps you judge any realizations along the way. It does this in two ways. First, it provides a standard for judging those realizations: Is there any stress remaining in the mind? At all? If there is, then they're not genuine Awakening. Second, the skills you've developed have sensitized you to all the doings in simply being, which ensures that the subtlest levels of stress won't escape your gaze. Without this sensitivity, you could easily mistake an infinitely luminous state of concentration for something more. But when you really know what you're doing, you'll recognize freedom from doing when you finally encounter it. And when you know that freedom, you'll know something further: that the greatest gift you can give to others is to teach them the skills to encounter it for themselves.
And how do you perfect a skill? Through practice.
No, that's ridiculous.
You do not have to have answers to her questions. Anyway, she probably doesn't want your answers, because "knowing the truth" is more comfortable when it isn't challenged. However, as a Buddhist, you have chosen a path which inherently challenges you to not accept something until you have experienced it for yourself. Doing this does not offer comfort, but it does offer openness and the ability to learn spiritual truths.
As for your own questions:
The concept of redemption relies on feelings of guilt and of needing to appeal to a higher power to curry favor and escape punishment (or exclusion from heaven). Yet note that even Tibetan Buddhism has a "redemption" prayer ritual -- the Vajrasattva puja. I would refer you to reading Kohlberg (psychologist) and his stages of moral development to provoke more thinking along these lines that you are already questioning.
Are Buddhists chasing a feeling of perfection? What psychological purposes could be served by comparing yourself to an ideal, and coming up short ... or of meeting the ideal? As for Christian attitudes towards perfection, I have often heard them claim that God doesn't expect us to be perfect ... but why then did Jesus (Sermon on the Mount, Matthew something) tell us, "Be ye therefore perfect, even as your Fath which is in heaven is perfect."
No, I've never met anyone who I feel is enlightened. But then I'm not enlightened so how would I know what it looks like? And how would I know whether or not enlightened people "hang around"? If we argue that Jesus and Buddha were enlightened avatars ... well, they did hang around for a while, didn't they? But no longer than any unenlightened being.
Keep on asking your questions. Because as long as you have not defined "the Truth", you are open to discovering it!
For the Buddha, all wrong doing comes from ignorance or 'not-knowing'. In the Pali language, the word for ignorance is avicca, which literally means 'not-knowing'. Thus, there is always perfect forgiveness in Buddhism because the 'sinner' is never a 'person' but always 'ignorance'.
Similarly, when Jesus was losing consciousness on the cross, he uttered: "Forgive them, for they know not what they do".
For Theravadin Buddhists, each evening they chant the following verses:
These are stock phrases found in the Buddhist scriptures, such as in the following example:
Whilst fully enlightened beings, namely Buddhas or Arahants, are perfect because their minds are completely free at all times from greed, hatred and delusion, for most of us, being free from ignorance is good enough.
When one is free from ignorance, their mind will have sufficient harmony with the world, with life and with death.
Please recite the following words, to help you understand the Buddha:
If a spiritual being, regardless of their happiness, love or other attainments, is not free from 'self-view', they remained unenlightened in the Buddhist sense. Enlightened beings are alive. The Buddha was enlightened and alive for 45 years. All enlightened beings are enlightened when they are alive.
(Matthew 5:48, for those interested.
I am not well-acquainted with Theravadin Buddhism, so THANK YOU for sharing that wonderful evening chant of admission. Absolutely beautiful!