Sunday, October 22, 2017

Why Isn't the World Enough?

It seems that humans have an innate impulse to seek transcendence. A god of some sort, soul, spirit, or some realm beyond our own.

I don't understand why. Perhaps it's that the world is too mundane for some, and that the spiritual imagination seeks broader, more idealized horizons--some truth untarnished by time, something purer than the world of form with all of its imperfections and disappointments.

Again, I don't understand this impulse, which is not to say that I am immune to it. From time to time, I too find myself instinctively yearning for some truer reality not subject to the vacillations of life--as if one existed.

One of the many marvels of Chan Buddhism is how it redeemed the physical world. Indian Buddhism often eschewed the natural world of form and time as something to be transcended and relinquished. Chinese Buddhism, on the other hand, fully embraced the world that we live in. The song of birds, the heat of the noon sun, the pain in our hearts: these are not imperfections to be overcome, but the very expression of reality itself.

The earth beneath our feet and the air in our lungs is the great reality. Why seek salvation in some speculative reality--call it God, the soul, or the Dharmakaya--when the only world we have ever known surrounds us every moment of our lives?

That's the great irony: people seek to escape into some truer reality when in actuality, the world they wish to abandon is actually that which they seek! We chase phantom ideals when the breathtaking vistas of the human spirit are always present--the air that we breathe, the longing in our hearts, the pain of a stubbed toe...

Time and space are not impure obstacles on our spiritual path to some greater reality; they are reality. Why can't that be enough?