You’re Always Safer in Buddha Mind
By: William B. Turner
Tags: Enlightenment, Safety, Buddha, Buddhism, Meditation

The Buddha

The goal of the Buddhist path is to abandon your daily, human identity and become the Buddha, or a modern manifestation of the Buddha. Some Buddhist teachers talk about how English as a language depends heavily on nouns, on words that supposedly denote specific things with inherent characteristics, such that the easiest way to state the point in English is to say that you want to become the Buddha, or you want to be the Buddha.

The Buddha is safety, security.

But not self tells us that no things have inherent characteristics. Things only come into being as the result of conditioned arising. Because of this, that. Without that, no this. There is no Buddha to become as a noun. Nouns are all misprisions. “The Buddha” lived a human lifetime as the result of causes and conditions. When causes and conditions changed sufficiently, that lifetime ended. No more “the Buddha.” Ever. At all.

Grabbing at safety and security ensures that we miss it. Relax into it.

Shifting from ordinary mind to Buddha mind, or consciousness, as we like to say here, is not so much becoming anything as adopting a way of living. When he awakened, the Buddha was still the same physically. His body did not change, although apparently his appearance did. The tradition has it that the first people who saw the Buddha after his awakening remarked that he obviously had figured something really important out.

But his first students were his old ascetic buddies from just before he sat down to meditate and awakened. The official stories contain no indication that they couldn’t recognize the Buddha for having become the Buddha. He spent the rest of his life teaching because he had realized how humans can end our incessant suffering and wanted to let everyone know what the answer is.

He offered safety, absolute security. From his mind to yours.

He was boundlessly compassionate. He wanted to help other people. After he died, his attendant, Shariputra, kept repeating of him, “He who was so kind.”

To some extent, anyone can emulate the Buddha in this respect just by being kind. The Dalai Lama tells us to be kind. It’s pretty simple. Adopting the five precepts — do no harm, do not lie, do not steal, avoid irresponsible sexual activity, avoid intoxicants — is a good start.

If being kind by itself does not appeal to you for whatever reason, there is also the self interest aspect to this. Obviously, there are a lot of theories around about this. Accepting the Buddhist theory is a choice, but the Buddha claimed to have discovered the path to the deathless, which obviously does not mean that the historical Buddha lived forever. He died. His body expired. Twenty-five hundred years ago. He’s dust.

He’s safe. He was safe before his body died because he knew he would never come back after that lifetime. Absolute security.

The physical is but an approximation of the mental, the ephemeral, the consciousness stream, which is primary. A mental image that may help is to think of the historical Buddha as dissipating mentally into space, as if his slice of consciousness got into the transporter on Star Trek and got transported into deep space at maximum possible dispersion. He’s space dust. He’s literally enlightened in having become pure light. No mass. He only helps entities who are light sensitive to see.

If we accept his claim at face value, he never came back. He escaped the otherwise endless round of rebirth that inevitably results in yet another death. Recall that Buddhism is non materialist, or anti materialist, although “anti” may not be quite right. Ours is a heavily materialist culture. We think, along with our language, that things are what matter. Notice the very subtle pun on “matter,” which means both “that which is significant or important,” but also “that which has mass and is tangible.” It’s built into our language at the most basic level.

The life of the body is what matters (!) to us, which makes us insecure, makes us feel unsafe, since bodily life is fragile and will end eventually, one way or another.

For the Buddha, mind, or consciousness, was primary. We have seen that we only know anything because of consciousness. Without consciousness, we would not exist as such. We can only think or talk about humans and being (!) human and living human lives because we operate within consciousness, which is universal and infinite. In the immediate aftermath of a person dying, the body stays the same for some time. Bodily decay takes time. But the person is dead already. The difference between life and death is the presence and absence of consciousness.

Our slice of consciousness will return as another birth. Unless we realize the deathless and absolute safety and security. Never another bodily birth to worry about.

We have some access to consciousness. If you are reading this, you are conscious, necessarily. But between the ordinary, daily consciousness most of us know via our monkey minds and the enlightened consciousness of the Buddha lies an annoying mess of static. What we’re doing with meditation is trying to tune out the static and hone in on the signal of pure, enlightened consciousness. Think about slowly turning the tuning knob on a radio as you drive through an unfamiliar place. You never know when you will hit a station, and whether the station is anything worth listening to, or how long it will last.

What the Buddha did was to create a radio station that always broadcasts the perfect music of peace and bliss that reaches every part of the earth and is always available to anyone who has a precious human birth and the good sense to tune in.

“The band in heaven plays my favorite song/ Play it once again, play it all night long.”

We can put this into a psychological idiom by recalling that Tibetan master Chogyam Trungpa, when someone asked him what gets reborn if we have no self, replied, “your neuroses.” Where does the static come from? Either the Buddha did not know, or he did not think it was very important to say, because he did not talk about that. He did give the example of the person who gets shot with an arrow and refuses to allow the removal of the arrow until they know who shot the arrow and the characteristics of the arrow itself. Intellect can be useful, but it can also be a distraction. Some questions are fascinating but irrelevant. We do not need to know where the radio station is or the details of how radios and radio waves work to find the station playing the song of perfect enlightenment and listen to it.

So be kind to everyone. If that doesn’t appeal by itself, be kind to yourself. Regardless, meditate and allow wisdom to emerge. Follow the path of the Buddha to the deathless, so that your next death will be your last.

Enjoy the absolute safety and security of the deathless, after the Buddha.

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