In todayand#8217;s FBA Dharmabyte, and#8220;Life Gone Forth is Wide Openand#8221;, Padmavajra takes us into the strong experience of Going Forth into homelessness. Sometimes life presents us with extremely difficult choices that seem to set us apart from those we love. Through personal reminiscence and classic Zen poetry that evokes a truly rich awareness, we see the Buddha, Hakuin, Dogen and Ryokan as they struggle to make sense of this fleeting world of form.
This excerpt is from the talk and#8220;The Buddha, Hakuin, Birth and Deathand#8221; given at Padmaloka Retreat Centre, 2004
This talk is part of the series and#8220;Tangling Eyebrows with Zen Masters.and#8221;
[music] Dharma Vites is brought to you by Free Buddhist Audio, the Dharma for real life. Our work is funded entirely by donations from our generous listeners. If you would like to help us keep this free, come and join us at freebuddhistaudio.com/community. Thank you, and happy listening. [music] And we find him in his early life, longing for a completely open life without constraints, without dust, a completely open life, to get to grips with this issue, the problem of birth and death. Life at home may be cramped and dusty, but life gone forth, he said, is wide open. Life gone forth is wide open, gone forth, you live out under the open sky. Quite literally in the Indian tradition, you live out as a wanderer, and eventually he decided to go forth. That's the traditional term, go forth, capital G, capital F, go forth. Live home, clan, caste, country, he adopted the patched, discolored robe of the wanderer, cut his hair right off. And although his family grieved, they didn't want him to go, he just left, to wander, to get to grips with the vital matter of birth and death, of life, to get right to the bottom of it, right inside it. It's interesting when you tell the story of the Buddha's going forth. I've found this on doing Buddhism courses, or even in just chatting to people, and people know a bit about Buddhism. They can get a bit annoyed that the Buddha went forth, that traditionally it said he left his wife and child, which is even more emotionally loaded. And even some Buddhists in the modern west are uneasy about it as a kind of paradigm, a kind of model. Isn't it selfish? Isn't it self-centered to leave that? Well, of course, we wouldn't actually be here having this conversation traditionally if the Buddha hadn't left home, which is kind of interesting. It can seem like that, it can seem selfish, but it's actually nothing of the sort. Sometimes life presents you with extremely difficult choices. Deep inside yourself, you feel moved, called, to get to grips with things deeply. And that seems to set you apart from those you love, those you care for, those who love you, those who care for you. They just don't seem to see life like that. You see life in such diametrically opposed ways. They say life is for family, life is for career, life is for money. There's nothing deeper to look for. Just be a decent citizen. Why look deeper? It seems so perverse, so weird. And you can find yourself in that poignant, painful position of either having to stay and compromise, even forget the problem of life and death, or go, and leave those you love. They might even turn into enemies, which is, of course, the last thing you want. It's very painful, very poignant, but it does happen. These choices do come up, I know, friends of mine who've really had to grapple with this, and there's no easy solution. And leaving home and following the spiritual life doesn't necessarily supply easy immediate answers either. Siddhartha's quest didn't do that. He didn't kind of go forth, and then everything was, you know, he walked into the kind of spiritual sunset and everything was kind of sorted out. It wasn't like that. He studied and practiced with the great teachers of his time. It said he mastered their teaching and attained what they taught, which was seemingly a profound level of meditation, and apparently, eternal, transcendent, formless state. But although that was all very well and good, as far as he was concerned, it did not reveal to him the deep meaning of existence. It didn't provide any answers, any clues to the matter of life and death. He still felt dissatisfied. There was still the great question, the problem of birth and death, always. Even when he was offered the leadership of various spiritual communities, because he was so brilliant, he could not accept. Something was driving him on. His deep intuition was driving him on. A kind of faith, if you like, was driving him on to really get to grips with this problem, this great matter of birth and death. He plunged into severe ascetic practice, which was popular at the time, really pushing himself, forcing himself, fasting, not washing, practicing breath control until he had almost passed out, pushing the body to the limits, shunning all pleasure to get at the truth. He became a kind of leader, or was regarded as a leader of a religious group. Five ascetic friends who regarded him as their kind of guru. And after six very tough years, he actually realised that he'd got nowhere, nowhere at all, which is quite a thing to acknowledge when you've been going down a particular track for a long time. Well, it seems a bit, you know, I wasted all this time, but he realised that he was going nowhere. In fact, where he was going was death without actually getting to grips with the nature of things, and he had a great spiritual crisis. He couldn't go forward, he couldn't carry on in extreme asceticism. That would just lead to death. At the same time, he couldn't go back home. There was no going back. It was really up against the sheer cliff face. He couldn't go forward, he couldn't go back. So he took food, he cleaned himself up, started to look at things differently at which his ascetic friends just left. And he said he'd kind of given up the struggle, and they left him on his own, just with himself to find another way into this great matter of birth and death. For Siddhartha, there were no precedents in that there was no Buddhism, no Dharama, just himself and his deep spiritual yearning. He was regarded as the great pioneer. We call him the Buddha, because according to Buddhist tradition, he kind of hacked through the jungle to the Dharama to the way things are. He discovered what was beyond birth and death, or what was inside birth and death alone. This is why we have him sitting here at his enlightenment. We hope you enjoyed the talk. Please come and help us keep this free at freebuddhistaudio.com/community. And thank you. [MUSIC PLAYING] [MUSIC PLAYING] [MUSIC PLAYING] You [BLANK_AUDIO]
