Falling in Love with the Buddha

“How can there be laughter, how can there be pleasure, when the whole world is burning? When you are in deep darkness, will you not ask for a lamp? Yellow leaves hang on your tree of life. The messengers of death are waiting. You are going to travel far away. Have you any provision for the journey?” –Buddha, Dhammapada, p146

If cancer teaches you anything, it is that nothing lasts forever. It is one thing to know this in your head, quite another to know it in your heart & experience it first hand. I remember my very first chemo treatment. All the energy in my body had disappeared. Gone. I tried to get out of bed but it was useless. I remember actually laughing because it was so absurd. My body was as good as dead. How does a person cope with the realization that life can be so fragile and that the things you love, and the greatest pleasures, do not last?

The Buddha searched for these answers and found them. I fell in love with the Buddha because of the balanced outlook ( at least to my understanding ) on reality. The bad news was the fact that life is full of suffering. If you are going to live, you are going to suffer. Pretty simple. Our suffering is linked to how we perceive ourselves and our need to have & identify with things like social roles, pleasures, material things. The real suffering was not physical, but existential in nature. The good news ( and thus the balanced outlook) was that there was a way to stop suffering. His advocacy of using meditation following his 8 fold spiritual path became a way to transcend suffering. The Buddha helped me cope with chemo and cancer by teaching me how to meditate and using his spirituality to be present in the "now".

There are many things that can hijack the mind and make you live in the past or future. Living in the past is no good- where the ghosts of shame or guilt often live. Living in the future is often fueled by fear. Fear of the unknown, fear of failure, fear of actually being successful or happy. The Buddhist meditation forces a person to live in the present and face the existential issues one needs to face. His 8 fold path provides a way to process those issues and helps you move on with your life.

There are a lot of people I know that are into "healing". They are always "healing". They seem stuck in "healing". "Healing" becomes their sole identity and they don't seem to be able to move on with life. One of the greatest things about the Buddha's path is that it rebuilds a person's life so they don't get stuck in the process of healing. There may be a part of us that is always healing, but the greater part has to at some point get on with life. And that often includes helping other people, our planet, and/or our four legged friends. If everything is impermanent, like the Buddha said, then so is the healing journey. Ironically, that can be a very scary thing. Starting chemo was frightening, but even more so was stopping it.

The Buddha also helped me appreciate people and have compassion for them. When I was a kid, I lost a lot of friends to cancer. I didn't want to make any more friends because loosing them was too painful. The Buddha helped me focus on the present and enjoy the friendships. Some people may cope with loss by going to either extreme- either never making friendships or attachments, to being so clingy that you suck the life out of people and will do anything to keep them from leaving. The Buddha's path is a middle road between extremes. It allows you to be existentially intimate with someone, while letting them live their own life and travel along their own journey ( even if it means they are not physically present in your life).

I have been very inspired by Noah Levine's work with Buddhism. Check out http://www.dharmapunx.com/index.asp or http://againstthestream.org/


Baha'u'llah had a very similar spiritual insight about our sufferings and why we suffer:

“So fierce is this fire of self burning within them, that at every moment they seem to be afflicted with fresh torments….the whole human race is encompassed with great, with incalculable afflictions. We see it languishing on its bed of sickness, sore tried and disillusioned.” –Baha’u’llah, Book of Certitude, p.49

“…to set their affections upon it would still be unseemly for such as have quaffed, from the hands of Thy mercy, the wine of Thy presence; how much more when they recognize its fleetingness and are persuaded of its transience. The chances that overtake it, and the changes to which all things pertaining unto it are continually subjected, attest to its impermanence.” Baha’u’llah, Prayers and Meditations, p. 116

“O My Servant! Free thyself from the fetters of this world and loose thy should from the prison of self. Seize thy chance, for it will come to thee no more.” –Baha’ullah, Hidden Words, p40


I will always be eternally grateful to the Buddha for helping me face my cancer & the despair that came with it, and for also helping me move on with my life after treatment.