From the Dalai
Lama’s cat to Deke, the Dharma Dog, animals offer the Buddha’s
teachings
May 31,
2015 by Justin Whitaker Patheos
In the Theragatha, or Poems of the Elders, the
Buddha’s close friend, cousin, and attendant Ananda tells us that
he has received 82,000 teachings from the Buddha and 2,000 more
from his disciples for a total of 84,000. This great vastness of
the Buddha’s body of teaching later became a metaphor for the many
ways that Truth, Dharma, or simply ‘the teachings’ could come to a
person.
In The Complete Book of Buddha’s Lists
— Explained (available for
free on
google-books) David Snyder notes that “The 84,000
Dhamma doors are a metaphor to basically state that there are
innumerable paths to enlightenment. This is a representative
teaching to the Buddha‘s tolerance for other religions.”
And in this 21st century, it has also come to
represent teachings from friendly
felines and man’s best friend, as found here in an
excerpt from Charles Prebish’s new book: A Puppy’s Path to
Nirvana.
To understand the teachings of the historical
Buddha for living beings, we first have to understand the way in
which he saw and experienced the world. He called this view of the
world the “Three Marks of Existence.” We prefer to call it the
“World According to Puppies.” It argues for three basic principles.
First, there is no permanent, abiding self. Second, the world is
impermanent, changing all the time. And third, all life experiences
what Buddha calls duḥkha,
which his disciples translate as “suffering” (but as you’ll see
later, we dogs describe quite differently).
To complicate matters, and unlike the beliefs of
some other religions, Buddhism doesn’t believe in a permanent,
abiding self or soul. To do so would contradict what we just
learned above. So there is no self—what the Hindus call ātman—in
Buddhism. For Buddhists, each individual is simply a conglomerate
of five “aggregates:” form, feeling, perception, mental formations,
and consciousness. We’ll explain these in another lesson. But
there’s no permanent “Bill” or “Sallie” or even “Buddha” (although
my family’s previous dog was called “Buddha the Beagle”). By not
presuming each individual has some permanent and even holy self,
there’s nothing to grasp after, and this helps to remove the basis
for what Buddha later identifies as the cause of all suffering. So
if there’s no permanent self, all you need to do is
LET GO.
Humans have a hard time understanding the notion
of impermanence. They try hard to grasp after things and
experiences which they think they can make permanent, lasting. OK,
it’s pretty hard to understand complicated notions like “quantum
mechanics,” so we puppies can make the notion of impermanence much
easier to grasp. We call this second mark of existence “The Road
Runner Theorem.” Everyone—dogs and people alike—grew up watching
the old “Roadrunner” cartoons. Poor old Wiley Coyote seems never to
be able to capture and kill Roadrunner because all of his schemes
rely on one basic principle: that Roadrunner will actually stop . .
. and stop long enough to be crushed by a falling boulder or
smashed by an oncoming truck. It just never happens because
Roadrunner never stops moving. Equally, everything in our world
never stops changing in each second, in each moment. So nothing—and
we mean absolutely nothing—stays the same. Everything is
continually changing and evolving. By the time I finish writing
this sentence, I won’t be quite the same “Dharma Dog” that started
the sentence. That’s why every important conversation we plan in
advance always changes just a bit when it’s finally time to engage
in it. The two beings involved keep changing, and what made sense
two hours before just isn’t quite the same later. Sure it would be
great to be able to retain the actual experience of the
game-winning home run you hit during your freshman year of high
school, or a great sexual romp with some hot partner you met
in college, but you can’t. So don’t be dumb. DON’T TRY!
Finally, Buddha’s third mark of existence is his
notion, which we’ll also explain more fully later, that all life is
suffering. We’ll see that he doesn’t mean that every single moment
is filled with suffering, but rather, when we can’t find permanence
and ongoing satisfaction in every moment, we become unhappy with
our existence, and engage in ongoing craving and grasping, which
binds us more tightly into the endless cycle of rebirth. Buddha’s
teachings help us learn to not only bypass suffering, but to
completely eliminate it. That’s pretty easy too: start by
GIVING UP
CRAVING.
Now all we need to do is see how to do all this
stuff.
Get this in
.pdf form, and check
out lesson
2.
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