|
Buddhist pilgrimage “Before my enlightenment, while I was still an
unenlightened Bodhisatta, I thought: ‘House life is crowded and dusty; life
gone forth is wide open. It is not easy, living in a household, to lead a
holy life as utterly perfect and pure as a polished shell’.” So Gautama, who
later called himself the Supreme Knower (i.e. having achieved
samma-sambodhi). Then he dumped his wife and kid, his parents and his steed,
and took off. (Ideally) Buddhist
pilgrimage is the process by means of which a pilgrim reaches nibbana
(Sanskrit: nirvana). Nibbana,
and which is held out by some (mainly by members of the dozens of Mahayana
sects) as salvation, ‘happens’ when the pilgrim eliminates her addiction to a
permanent personal identity (Pali: (made up of the 5) khandhas, i.e.
the constituents of the persona) or the affects of addiction to (or
(infantile) obsession with) a personal identity, namely greed, hatred and
delusion, or when she experiences the ‘liberating (i.e. wholly releasing)
insight’, namely “All that is subject to arising is subject to cessation”. The above quoted
‘liberating insight’ is elsewhere abstracted as “Sabbe dhamma anatta”,
to wit “know that all dhammas, i.e. all experiential facts (i.e.
identifiable phenomena), internal and external, are not-atta (hence
‘not own’, i.e. have no own being)”, whereby atta (Sanskrit: atma)
is suggested to mean: ‘unborn, unageing, unailing, deathless, sorrow-less,
undefiled supreme surcease of bondage, nibbana.’ The reason why the belief
in a permanent identity needs to be eliminated is because neither it nor its
constituents are either permanent or owned. Attaching to something that isn’t
one’s own and is, moreover, impermanent results in the sense of loss, which
in turn is experienced as dukkha (variously translated as trouble,
difficulty; pain, sorrow, suffering, sometimes anguish). Buddhist pilgrimage,
therefore, is the process by means of which attachment to a permanent of
identity, indeed to such-ness (or thing-ness = thatha), is gradually (or
suddenly) loosened, then eliminated, ended, terminated, in the case of the
supreme pilgrim, i.e. the Tathagata (now called Buddha) in/as nibbana,
hence with the complete annihilation of all (personal) dhammas. Since the goal of Buddhist
pilgrimage, namely ‘atta’ (and/or nibbana) was never cleanly
(i.e. positively) defined (hence identified) by the Tathagata, Buddhist
pilgrimage proceeds merely ‘in the (extremely vague, fuzzy) direction of ‘detachment from all
dhammas’ (specifically from the fixation of a permanent personal identity)
rather than ‘to’ a positively defined state (i.e. nirvana). Note: the negatively described (i.e. not - not, neti
- neti) goal offered by the Tathagata was eventually re-scripted as a
positive goal by Mahayanist. That goal was then elaborated during about 1000
years in the Prajnaparamita sutras ad absurdum. Hence, Buddhist (meaning
‘waking up’) pilgrimage serves to increase the degree of detachment (i.e.
craving, desire, addiction, self-obsession), which, in turn, reduces the
level of experienced suffering. The inventor of Buddhism
was Guatama Siddartha, and who is reputed to have lived about 580 B.C. He
called himself Tathagata. He did not call himself
Buddha, or ‘The Buddha’. Nor did he call his dhamma (i.e. instruction) Buddhism. The nut of the Tathagata’s dhamma
|
|
|