The Four Cornerstones of Buddhism
By Rev. Master Seikai
[This article is Chapter 3 of Rev. Seikai’s book Depth Spirituality: Buddhism in the Age of Desire, published in 2017, pp. 6-12.]
Into this world we’re thrown
Into this world we’re thrown
Like a dog without a bone,
or an actor out on loan,
Riders on the storm.
A song like Riders on the Storm by Jim Morrison and his band, The Doors, gave me hope as a kid that maybe someone out there understood my reality. The inexplicable, persistent longing for something better than what the adult world and life in it seemed to offer, combined with a very vague memory of something vital and precious existing in my childhood, laid the groundwork for my life as a Buddhist monk. When I finally held in my hands a book which laid out the Buddhist teaching of dukkha, the unsatisfactoriness that is inherent in human life, I was thrilled to the core of my being. Somebody—the Buddha—understood the human condition and spoke to my heart.
My suffering is what brought me to Buddhism, compelled me to enter monastic life, and remains the driving force behind my efforts to practice. Dukkha, together with anatta, the law of no permanent, immutable self, and anicca, the law of change, form a tripod representing three of the most observable and important characteristics of human life. Along with our tripod of dukkha, anicca and anatta, Buddhism embraces the law of karma: karma means action, and its result is known as vipaka. I like to think of these four characteristics as the four cornerstones of Buddhism. To keep the cause-effect duo of karma and vipaka in the back of ones mind is part of the price of admission into deeper spirituality, and as long as we go along pretending that moral cause and effect doesn’t exist, we cannot ever get out of shallow water where spirituality is concerned. Our society, as a whole seems largely unaware of the law of karma, because we seem not to be able to tie causes and their eventual effects together very well. We’re starting to get it, but it’s taking time.
It is a noble undertaking to try to find for oneself the cause of suffering, as the Buddha did when he sat himself down underneath a large, spreading ficus religiosa tree in India 2500 years ago. That a human being today is capable of retracing the Buddha’s steps insofar as being able to look at, pinpoint, and learn to refrain from causing any more suffering to come into the world, seems both incredible and inviting. Certainly it requires a measure of courage to even make a serious attempt, a determination that there is just nothing else more important in life. In my case, you could use the word desperation.
The entry into deeper spirituality is not particularly easy to make, because it generally has a high price; we have to give up something in life that we used to think was precious to us. A woman who visited the temple where I live said she one day realized how attached she was to things, that she had closets full of things, and as it happened, she had to clear them out just so she could share her house with someone else. That set her on the road of giving things up, and she found that she enjoyed it; it was as though a weight was being lifted every time she hauled another load off to the Salvation Army or the Goodwill store. After that she began to see that she was holding on to more subtle things than just physical stuff, fear for instance. She was afraid of losing her sense of herself, who she was in a world in which having an identity – and I do not mean credit cards, driver’s licenses and the like – is regarded as so important. She was beginning to see that this whole idea of having a self is a fragile construction, and that to give it up is a scary proposition. But it is the beginning of seeing the reality of anatta – the lack of a permanent, enduring self not subject to change, anicca.
It’s easy to follow the crowd; it’s what most people do without any real thought about it. If we are to penetrate beneath the surface of a consumer-oriented, superficial world, a world which worships youth and beauty, rejects the wisdom of old age, chases after wealth and happiness, we must on some level reject the values of the world in favor of spiritual values. True spiritual values appreciate reality for what it is, rejecting what we as a society have fabricated as worth pursuing. Mother Theresa, the Albanian nun who spent most of her life working with the desperately poor in Kolkata, India, was quoted as saying that by comparison to America, India is a wealthy nation because it embraces spiritual values, whereas America is drowning in the ignorance of materialism.
Of course, the world is changing. Even in India, the oldest civilization on earth, the one most steeped in spiritual values, materialism has taken hold; there are wealthy, Western-style neighborhoods and shopping districts springing up. Modern, industrialized society seems bent on pursuing wealth and a version of happiness based on it, until we simply run out of gas. Whether running out of oil or befouling our planet to the point where the interdependence of the myriad life forms on it breaks down to such an extent that life-sustaining systems collapse altogether comes first is a question that will be answered in this century. Most of humanity alive today may be dead by then, but our children and grandchildren will be facing difficult questions about how to live, and about the future of our planet.
And there will still be suffering. During the economic crisis that began in 2008 up to today, I’ve never ready anything or heard anything to suggest that our problems as a nation originate with a lack of true spiritual values, and yet, if we could see through a deeply spiritual lens, we might realize that many of our problems originate in the mind, and persist because of shared views about the world we live in. But if we wish to look through the lens of dukkha, the existence of suffering, anicca, anatta and karma – laws which govern life in the human realm – we must abandon attachment to the superficial world. It doesn’t matter, at the root of it, what country we live in, we will always be up against the same issue: whether or not to penetrate beneath the superficiality of the world and awaken to a deeper reality. We cannot be content with a static or dogmatic view of the world we live in, a world which is always changing. What we need to do is involve ourselves in spiritual evolution, a lifelong learning process, a willingness to be constantly challenged on the level of our assumptions about life, what makes us happy and fulfilled, and what is truly worth pursuing.
We are involved in a learning process that extends over many lives. Whether or not we decide to use this one lifetime that we currently occupy to engage ourselves in the learning process, and to lift ourselves up spiritually, is up to each and every one of us. This decision cannot be forced upon anyone: conversion is only ever real if it comes about from the very center of a human being, the deepest inner core of where we live. It cannot be faked. Although in Buddhism we generally do not speak of God in the way that other religions do, if one understands religious truths in terms of God, then one ought to expand ones idea of God to include karma. If we can think of God as including karma, then we should know that he is not going to be fooled by anything we do or say in this life, but he is going to keep track, if you will, since the law of karma is inexorable. If we kill beings, if we lie, cheat, steal, or perpetrate suffering or unhappiness, we will have to own up to that karma at some point, whether in this life or a future one is up to you.
Karmic consequences, which in Buddhism are regarded as an aspect of suffering if they are unwholesome, will be your teacher, if you allow them to be. This is a subtle and easily misunderstood aspect of deeper spirituality, which is difficult for most people to understand because we are conditioned to think in terms of crime and punishment. The law of karma has its inevitable, inexorable side, but it also has its deeply compassionate side – which is that it is one of the means by which the universe teaches us what we need to learn. What do we need to learn? Increasingly sublime truths which start with the more basic lessons of not killing or harming other beings, learning to be kind and generous, and eventually compassionate and even wise beings.
We have overpopulated our world to the point where there is very little wiggle room left. Learning to be compassionate and wise beings capable of taking care not just of ourselves, our families and the people immediately around us, but of the entire planet, is a new reality and paradigm; religions will need to embrace this new paradigm in the future.
All the many ins and outs of what any one of us need to learn in this lifetime are far too complicated for me or anyone else to write about. But, as my master would say, we come into existence as a result of a critical mass of karma, the inheritance of karmic effects, or vipaka, from previous existences. Non-dogmatic religions including Hinduism and Buddhism point this out as a matter of fact. They also point out that our karmic inheritance will almost certainly have some particular theme, a particular moral or spiritual error that has been repeated numerous times over the course of many lifetimes. People who have the courage to walk the spiritual path always report the same thing: the same set of circumstances, a particular challenge in life, like the scene in play, will reappear over and over. And even in common parlance there is the saying: that’s the story of my life; which is to say that we humans intuitively recognize that we repeatedly confront the same or similar sets of circumstances in which we have erred in the past, and slowly but surely, are relearning the essential lesson contained therein, even if it takes hundreds of attempts to finally get it right.
The movie Groundhog Day was a wonderful metaphor for this aspect of human life. The main character, played by Bill Murray, is a television reporter who is covering the activities of Groundhog Day in Punxatawny, Pennsylvania, where every February 2nd, a groundhog is lifted out of his den at an appointed time to see if the sun is shining and casts a shadow or not. But the TV reporter, who has a lousy attitude, finds himself in a nightmare wherein every time he wakes up in the morning, it is still February 2nd. Bill Murray relives the day dozens, perhaps hundreds of times, slowly improving his attitude; initially he despairs, deliberately causes all sorts of havoc, tries repeatedly to kill himself, but wakes up the next morning just the same. Every morning, he knows what is going to happen in advance, and slowly but surely learns how to navigate that one day, causing the least harm possible, learning how to honor, respect and treat the people he repeatedly encounters with kindness, grace, good humor and even compassion. It is a very Buddhist story. Just imagine the compassion of a universe which would allow someone to make that many mistakes, but never give up on the person, even if it takes an uncountable number of lives.
But for now, we have just this one lifetime to work with, and it does no more good to think ahead to the next one or the one after that than it does for the athlete to think past the next basketball or baseball game to a future opponent; as the cliché goes, looking past this one game, you’re going to get beat. And even within this lifetime, we can only live one day at a time, and if our minds are constantly projecting into the future or reliving the past, then we are forever missing out on the present moment. As John Lennon once said, “Life is what is happening while you’re busy making other plans.” This is of course one of the most basic teachings of Zen Buddhism: stay in the present; pay attention to what is right in front of you. Overlooking what is right in front of us, thinking about something else, having the mind wander all over the place, we do low quality work. We foster unhappiness.
The means by which an appreciation for what is right in front of us is developed, no matter how mundane the task might appear to be on the surface, is the practice of meditation. I will have much more to say about meditation, for it the basis of my entire life, the root of all wisdom, the key to entry into the reality of a peaceful existence.
But first let us return to the meaning of human life. Human beings, needless to say, can aspire to any one of a hundred, a thousand, or perhaps a hundred thousand different things. Usually those aspirations are focused around an occupation – artist, athlete, business man or women, mother, father, cook, farmer, accountant, doctor, lawyer, Indian chief, etc. As a young guy I was good at geography, so for a while I thought I’d be a geographer. Then I got interested in gardening and growing food and thought I’d like to be part of the back-to-the-land movement of the 1970s. But my natural longing for religion got the better of me and I started to explore the matter of religion – I did not, by the way, fancy myself a priest, minister or such-like thing – and I started to practice meditation. That was when my life changed radically. Within three years I became a Buddhist monk. But the point I am making here is not that meditation will lead to being a monk, or that anyone should give up what they are doing with their lives and follow a completely different path; what I am saying is that we all have the capacity to listen to our own hearts, and to follow the guidance that is inherently there.
To the extent that any person has the longing to better themselves spiritually, to rise up from the noise and confusion of the everyday world, they can do so – and it won’t be easy. Generally speaking this movement away from being mired in unhappiness, confusion, frustration or unfulfillment – dukkha – starts with a person listening, just a little bit, to that very quiet but insistent voice speaking in their own heart. It might involve a radical change of circumstances in life and then again it might not; what will most certainly change is ones attitude of mind, like the character in Ground Hog Day. Listening to my heart, I started to practice meditation. At the time, Transcendental Meditation was what was available, so that’s what I did, but that is neither here nor there; I was beginning the journey of a lifetime, a journey based on faith rather than on any particular idea I might have had as to what I wanted to do with my life, or what anyone might have told me I should do, or what society as a whole puts forward as being desirable.
What I hope to communicate is that every person has a deeper purpose for living to fulfill than what they appear to be doing on the surface. People need to make a living somehow, support themselves somehow, have families and raise children if they are so inclined, be part of a community and society. But then we have to question more deeply what the heck we’re doing here, and what will truly satisfy the deeper longing of the heart. And that is no easy thing, for society as a whole does not support or encourage this. You are pretty much on your own, at least until you are able to narrow down the focus of where you are headed to a path, a group, a church, or a discipline to become a part of. I went through this whole transformation as a 19 year old, and within a year of my dive into the waters of meditation, I was delivered to the gate of a Zen Buddhist monastery in the far north of California.
Although the Buddhist approach to deep spirituality generally does not employ ideas about God, having been brought up in Christianity, I am comfortable going back and forth from one religion to the other. I do not have a universalist message per se, but my understanding of the meaning of deeper spirituality is that we humans can adopt for ourselves and practice the God-like characteristics of love, for God is infinitely loving; patience, for God is infinitely patient; compassion, for God is infinitely compassionate; and non-greed, which is contentment, for God is infinitely content. In doing so, we greatly diminish the suffering of this world, we fulfill our purpose for living, and we bring happiness into this realm of existence.
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Pine Mountain Buddhist Temple. 