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Being Well, Well-being, Being a Well Being
Michel Clasquin
When we ask what "well-being" could
mean in a Buddhist context, immediately we see a huge gap
opening up within Buddhism. Buddhism was founded as a philosophy
and way of life for a handful of heroic men (and later women)
who regarded anything short of nirvana as non-well-being.
It cannot be emphasised often enough: The
Buddha never had any intention of founding a religious mass
movement to be called "Buddhism". His teachings
were reserved for the monks and nuns who were prepared to
ditch everything in a single-minded pursuit of Ultimate Well-being,
nirvana. Lay followers had their place, which was to
support the monks and nuns materially. Even a prominent lay
supporter like king Bimbisara was only allowed to hear a sutra
recited when he was on his deathbed.
This has left Buddhism without any sort
of theology of a lesser kind of well-being. Take Buddhist
teachings seriously (and literally), and there is no justification
for the sense of well-being that comes with eating a simple,
hearty meal, reading a good book, feeling the warm sun on
your skin. There is no justification for rejoicing in the
love of a good woman (or man), or on hearing the laughter
of children. All of those are, at best, dukkha, and
at worst, hindrances to the attainment of nirvana. A real
Buddhist drops those things, renounces them, puts them away
as childish preoccupations.
Now, we all sort of believe that enlightenment,
nirvana, call it what you will, is real and that attaining
it is possible. If not, there would be little sense in attaching
the label "Buddhist" to ourselves. But most of us
are not quite ready to take the plunge, to drop everything
and devote our lives entirely to a single-minded search for
it. The question is, what consitutes well-being until then?
Is there such a thing as "the good life" for the
luke-warm Buddhist?
At this stage, up pipes a voice from the peanut
gallery: "But isn't Buddhism the Middle Way? The middle
between extreme asceticism and extreme indulgence?" Well
done, grashopper, that's what it says in all the textbooks.
There's just one problem. Try advocating extreme asceticism
today and see how quickly you get locked up in the nearest
institution for the criminally feeble-minded. In the context
of his time, the Buddha was a moderate. But times have changed
and goalposts have shifted. Today, the traditional Buddhist
monastic life has itself become an extreme endpoint, and a
new middle needs to be found.
One strategy that could be used is to scour
the scriptures for passages that seem to support a lesser
form of well-being, ignore their historical context and blow
them up, exaggerate their prominence way beyond their traditional
importance. You see a lot of that in contemporary Buddhism.
Who hasn't come across that line where the Buddha says that
"having good friends is not half, but the whole of the
holy life"? It sounds very nice, but let us not forget
that the sangha was set up on strict lines of seniority. We
are here not talking about an association of equals (which
is what we nowadays think of as friendship) but of a kind
of monastic mentorship programme.
Alternatively, we can do what religions have always done.
If your philosophy lacks something and someone else's has
what you lack, you steal it. Buddhism has been remarkably
adept at this. If Buddhism didn't give much advice on everyday
life, then one could look for it in the works of Confucius,
or the Laws of Manu, or whatever other resource your culture
had to offer. Contradictions and incompatibilities between
the various systems were simply accepted as a fact of life.
But for the western Buddhism now taking
shape before us, this simply won't do. We remain deeply rooted
in a Christian culture that insists on there being a single
integrated system of thought and belief. Deeper still, we
are still trapped in Aristotle's dualistic logic. Black or
white, yes or no. Not third and fourth positions. Even if
we personally reject the Christian religion that was that
culture's most visible manifestation, we are still bound by
the deeper cultural restraints. The self-appointed avant-garde
among us can talk a great game about postmodernism, the variety
of narratives and so on, but if they were really free from
Christianity and Aristotle, why did they feel the need to
gather all their narratives, bundle them up into a single
system, and call it by the single name "postmodernism"?
It is a promising begnining, but cultural roots run deep.
Western society, perhaps unique among societies, insists that
philosophical reflection must be presented as a clear-cut,
unambiguous system, an "ism". Call it the west's
true original sin, our "ism-ism"
Therefore, if we are going to look elsewhere for
guidance on living the good life as a lay Buddhist, we need
to find some sort of well-developed philosophy that deals
with it and is, at least on some levels, compatible with Buddhism.
Of the major religions, Judaism probably has the best-developed
theology of common-everyday well-being, closely followed by
Islam. But both receive their philosophies from the basic
idea of the distant-but-close personal deity, an idea which
cannot be imported into Buddhism without a lot of philosophical
dexterity. Hinduism also gives well-being a place in its scheme
of things: kama (literally, pleasure) is a perfectly
acceptable goal, it says, at a certain stage of life. But
again, the broader stages-of-life scheme in which this occurs
is tied up with so many other Hindu doctrines that it would
be difficult (though not impossible) to extract just that
one aspect.
I would like to propose another candidate:
Epicurus of Samos, the Greek philosopher. Epicureanism has
received a bad press over the centuries, mostly from late
Hellenistic and early Christian writers who were going through
an ascetic phase of their own at the time. But Epicurus (whose
name means "the good advisor") was never an advocate
of unbridled consumerism, nor the advocate of wild orgies
of excess. He did teach that pleasure was the basis of all
human action:
I do not know how I can conceive the good,
if I withdraw the pleasures of taste, withdraw the pleasures
of love, withdraw the pleasures of hearing, and withdraw
the pleasurable emotions caused by the sight of a beautiful
form.
But what he had in mind
were simple, easily attainable, everyday pleasures. To eat
some goat's cheese and drink spring water while sitting in
the winter sunshine, at ease with the world, that was the
Epicurean ideal. One needs food to survive, and eating is
pleasurable. But while one should not spurn extravagant dishes
if those are what is available, neither should one become
dependent on them and refuse to eat simpler, but still nutritious
food. Epicurus allowed marriage and sex as a civic duty, but
regarded sex as one of the lesser pleasures since it was not
required for individual survival. It could be avoided with
no adverse effects (It seems he was not entirely consistent
in this: not only did he raise a family, but he also had a
relationship with the courtesan Leontis. We may never know
the details of this relationship).
Beyond physical pleasure, there was mental
pleasure derived from the company of like-minded people and
above all from giving up all fear of divine retribution and
of death. Pleasure was not a mere physical sensation, but
is tied up with wisdom, honour and justice in a complicated
causal web of relations not unlike that put forward by the
Buddha:
It is impossible to live a pleasant life
without living wisely and honorably and justly, and it is
impossible to live wisely and honorably and justly without
living pleasantly. Whenever any one of these is lacking,
when, for instance, the man is not able to live wisely,
though he lives honorably and justly, it is impossible for
him to live a pleasant life.
Mental pleasure at the
highest level was ataraxis, freedom from mental disturbance.
Wait a minute, doesn't that start to sound familiar? Can we
not imagine the Greek philosopher meeting the Indian arahant
and exchanging a few knowing nods and smiles?
Actually, we know very little about Epicurus.
According to Diogenes Laertius, he wrote three hundred books.
But only about 70 to 80 pages of these have survived. Even
so, from these and from the writings of his followers, we
can reconstruct his philosophy. He followed the atomic theory
of Democritus, but introduced an element of free will into
it. Like Buddhism, Epicureanism is a finely balanced mixture
of freedom and predetermination. Epicurus believed that gods
might well exist, but if they did, their perfection lay in
their complete ignorance of and non-involvement with mere
earthlings. Therefore, to fear the gods and try to appease
them was superstitious and useless. Serious people should
rather turn towards the enjoyment of a sober, but not severe,
lifestyle and the attainment of a serene mind. Once again,
we see Buddhism and Epicureanism moving in parrallel. The
difference lies in what one regards as a sober (ie middle
way) lifestyle. In the Buddha's India and the Greece of Epicurus,
the extreme of indulgence was much the same in both places.
But the extreme of asceticism in India was far more developed,
far more extreme, than in Greece. Diogenes the Cynic was probably
as near as any Greek ever came to the ideal of the Indian
sannyasin, but even his lifestyle would be called lax
by Indian standards (Diogenes did not avoid sex, for example
- he scandalised Athenian society by performing it in public).
So, what we can see from this is that the
concept of a middle way is a social construct that depends
on the extremes between which it is placed. These extremes
vary from one era to another (admittedly, the extreme of indulgence
seems to be depressingly the same everywhere, but even that
can vary. Epicurus freed some of his slaves in his will, but
he seems to have had no scruples about owning them in the
first place). A middle way is a living, evolving conceptualisation,
which needs to be constantly created and recreated as circumstances
change. It is not something that was laid down once and for
all in Iron Age India.
The Buddha seemed to have recognised this:
on his deathbed he gave his monks permission to alter or abolish
the minor regulations. Unfortunately, nobody had the presence
of mind to ask which regulations were minor, and it was later
on decided that they had better hang on to all of them! An
unfortunate failure of nerve on the part of the arahants,
it seems. When the Mahayana arose several centuries later
and felt it necessary to make changes that would lead to greater
lay involvement, the result was a schism that remains with
us to this day.
Like the Buddha some 200 years earlier,
Epicurus seems to have died of food poisoning, a common enough
cause of death in those days, when he was already suffering
from kidney stones. But physical pain did not lead to mental
suffering. On his deathbed, he wrote in a letter to his friend
Idomeneus:
We have written this letter to you on a
happy day to us, which is also the last day of our life.
For strangury has attacked me, and also a dysentery, so
violent that nothing can be added to the violence of my
sufferings. But the cheerfulness of my mind, which arises
from there collection of all my philosophical contemplation,
counterbalances all these afflictions.
We should not push the
parallels too far. Epicurus apparently believed that death
meant annihilation, a view that the Buddha specifically rejected.
But still… Over the centuries, as we saw above, Buddhists
have adopted insights from other philosophies, and that included
the adoption of personalities. Tibetan demons were tamed and
re-appointed as Protectors of the Dharma. Chinese demi-gods
were reinterpreted as manifestations of Buddhas and bodhisattvas.
Perhaps in the distant future, our descendants will light
incense to the memory of the bodhisattva Epicurus, who, out
of his infinite compassion, taught the dharma of everyday
well-being.
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