Monster Media 1994 #2/Monster Media No. 2 (Monster Media)(1994).ISO/text/bbessays.zip/ESSAY_12.TXT

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          BPS Newsletter Cover Essay #12 (Spring 1989)


                      A REMEDY FOR DESPAIR

                        by Bhikkhu Bodhi




   Most of us live in the cramped cold cages of our private projects,
   frantically struggling to stake out our own little comfortable place
   in the sun. Driven in circles by anxious yearnings and beckoning
   desires, we rarely ever glance aside to see how our neighbor is
   faring, and when we do it is usually only to assure ourselves that he
   is not trying to encroach upon our own domain or to find some means
   by which we might extend our dominion over his.

   Occasionally, however, it somehow happens that we manage to detach
   ourselves from our obsessive pursuits long enough to arrive at a
   wider clearing. Here our focus of concern undergoes a remarkable
   shift. Lifted above our habitual fixation on myopic goals, we are
   brought to realize that we share our journey from birth to death with
   countless other beings who, like ourselves, are each intent on a
   quest for the good.

   This realization, which often topples our egocentric notions of the
   good, broadens and deepens our capacity for empathy. By breaking down
   the walls of self-concern it allows us to experience, with a
   particularly inward intimacy, the desire all beings cherish to be
   free from harm and to find an inviolable happiness and security.
   Nevertheless, to the extent that this flowering of empathy is not a
   mere emotional effusion but is accompanied by a facility for accurate
   observation, it can easily turn into a chute plunging us down from
   our new-found freedom into a chasm of anguish and despair.

   For when, with eyes unhindered by emotively tinged blinkers, we turn
   to contemplate the wide expanse of the world, we find ourselves
   gazing into a mass of suffering that is vertiginous in its volume and
   ghastly in its intensity. The guarantor of our complacency is the
   dumb thoughtless glee with which we acquiesce in our daily ration of
   sensual excitation and ego-enhancing kudos. Let us raise our heads a
   little higher and cast our eyes about, and we behold a world steeped
   in pain where the ills inherent in the normal life-cycle are
   compounded still more by the harshness of nature, the grim irony of
   accident, and the cruelty of human beings.

   As we grope about for a handle to prevent ourselves from plummeting
   down into the pits of despondency, we may find the support we need in
   a theme taught for frequent recollection by the Buddha: "Beings are
   the owners of their kamma, the heirs of their kamma; they are molded,
   formed and upheld by their kamma, and they inherit the results of
   their own good and bad deeds." Often enough this reflection has been
   proposed as a means to help us adjust to the vicissitudes in our
   personal fortunes: to accept gain and loss, success and failure,
   pleasure and pain, with a mind that remains unperturbed. This same
   theme. however, can also serve a wider purpose, offering us succor
   when we contemplate the immeasurably greater suffering in which the
   multitudes of our fellow beings are embroiled.

   Confronted with a world that is ridden with conflict, violence,
   exploitation and destruction, we feel compelled to find some way to
   make sense out of their evil consequences, to be able to see in
   calamity and devastation something more than regrettable but
   senseless quirks of fate. The Buddha's teaching on kamma and its
   fruit gives us the key to decipher the otherwise unintelligible
   stream of events. It instructs us to recognize in the diverse
   fortunes of living beings, not caprice or accident, but the operation
   of a principle of moral equilibrium which ensures that ultimately a
   perfect balance obtains between the happiness and suffering beings
   undergo and the ethical quality of their intentional actions

   Contemplation on the operation of kamma is not a cold and calculated
   expedient for justifying a stoical resignation to the status quo. The
   pathways of kamma are labyrinthine in their complexity, and
   acceptance of this causal order does not preclude a battle against
   human avarice, brutality and stupidity or stifle beneficent action
   intended to prevent unwholesome deeds from finding the opportunity to
   ripen. Deep reflection on kammic retribution does, however, brace us
   against the shocks of calamity and disappointment by opening up to
   our vision the stubborn unwieldiness of a world ruled by greed, hate
   and delusion, and the deep hidden lawfulness connecting its turbulent
   undercurrents with the back-and-forth swing of surface events. While
   on the one hand this contemplation awakens a sense of urgency, a
   drive to escape the repetitive round of deed and result, on the other
   it issues in equanimity, an unruffled inner poise founded upon a
   realistic grasp of our existential plight

   Genuine equanimity, which is far from callous indifference, sustains
   us in our journey through the rapids of samsara. Bestowing upon us
   courage and endurance, it enables us to meet the fluctuations of
   fortune without being shaken by them, and to look into the face of
   the world's sufferings without being shattered by them.

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