Unitarian Universalist Meeting of South Berkshire

March 4, 2007

“The Right View: First of the Eightfold Path”

Rev. Kathy Duhon

We begin our Buddhist sermon series with a famous story from India. Three blind men come upon a large animal and one says that he recognizes the trumpeting sound and knows this to be an elephant, but another asks, “What is an elephant?” They decide to investigate and each reaches out to touch the elephant. One feels the elephant’s tail and says, “An elephant is thin and long, like a dangling rope. Another blind man says no, for he has felt the ear, “An elephant is like a rug, it’s wide.” The third man is sure that both are wrong for he has felt the leg and says, “An elephant is like a pillar, it’s high.” … Not only are we all blind, sensing only ever a segment of reality, but we need others to help us illuminate the whole. Today we go to Buddhism to open our sight to the right view of the world.

I am beginning the first of a sermon series on Buddhism’s Eightfold Path, hoping to address this profound teaching about once a month. Some of you will realize and remember that I have been doing some other sermon series recently. Most noticeable was last year’s seven “deadly sins”, from Christianity. I enjoy this way of chewing on topics gradually, over time, and with more depth, and I hope that you do too.

Some of you might have noticed, though, that we only made it through six of the seven so-called “deadly sins”, having gotten too filled up with other topics in the holiday extravaganza from Thanksgiving to New Years that I could not stuff in “gluttony” as well. One might say that our worship service calendar was too fat to be able to turn our minds and hearts, not to mention our bellies, to the issue of gluttony. Surely it would have been an unfair reminder, though, during the season of feasting, but now, in the mud season, I will only make a few observations to bring that series to its close.

Gluttony is not just a personal issue concerning excessive, inordinate desire, as all of the “deadly sins” come down to in some way or other, which we will find resonates with Buddhist teaching. Gluttony is also a social justice issue, a question of how we are eating as a society – who is able to eat, where our food is coming from and going to, and whether it is being wasted while many suffer from hunger. We should chew on what to do about gluttony as a global issue, and consider how this affects our own lives. How will we share so that all will be nourished? Thinking about gluttony involves waking up to the reality of the world, and having a right view, as we will discuss today. All week, I have been contemplating the first Buddhist step of right view, and I just keep finding applications for it.

We turn to Buddhism now, but before we begin the first step along the eightfold path, I will give a little introduction to this religion which has enriched our world so much, and was first brought to this country by the Unitarians, almost 200 years ago.

The Buddha lived in India in the 6^th century B.C.E., and taught, based on his own transformative journey. His way is a middle way, a philosophical and psychological way, a way of compassion, and fundamentally, a way of using our mind to journey to a better life for ourselves and the world. When asked who he was, whether a god or whatever, the Buddha said that he was awake, which is what the word Buddha means. And he wanted to wake up the rest of us.

The Buddha taught the four Noble Truths, which are: First, life is difficult and filled with suffering; we are out of joint, dislocated, unfulfilled. Second, the diagnosis for this problem is that we have desire, craving, for private, self-centered fulfillment and that our attachment to such craving brings us the pain. The Third Noble Truth states that we can cease this suffering; we can withdraw from craving and desire with non-attachment; liberation is possible for all. The Fourth Noble Truth is that the Eightfold Path will lead to the extinction of suffering and to enlightenment. This is a prescription for our difficult lives, and this path of Buddhism will bring us happiness.

The first step on the path is “right view” or “right understanding” of the nature of reality. This is a crucial one, including for the Buddha himself in his development. The legend has it that the young Siddhartha Gautama, a prince in what is now Nepal, was given a fortune-telling at his birth, which said that he would either be the greatest conqueror, a universal King uniting India, or, a world redeemer through renunciation. Since his father wanted him to be a great king, he decided to restrict his son’s view of the world, so the story goes. The young prince was kept in a palace and given all manner of pleasures, trying to keep him attached to the world. But he managed to take a journey in which he saw an old man, and so learned the fact of old age. On a second journey he saw someone who was diseased, and on the third, a corpse. On the fourth the legend says that he saw a monk, in withdrawal from the world. After learning of the inevitability of decrepitude, disease and death, Siddhartha decided to quit the distractions of the palace and go into the world, impoverished and seeking truth, withdrawing in order to enter the true reality. He took many years to find the path of enlightenment, to eventually come to wake up under the Bo tree and become known as the Buddha.

We view the world in many ways that are false. The Buddha taught that our unhappiness is not so much because of what the world is bringing to us, but is about how we perceive the world. Today, our view is often constricted by a medium to large sized rectangle in front of our faces: the screen on either our computer or our T.V. Our view is also often restricted by the walls inside of which we spend so much time – our homes, our workplaces, and our classrooms.

If you ask people what the sky is like at this moment, who could answer? And yet that used to be a huge part of people’s daily view. If we do not view the world around us beyond our electronic screens and protective walls, we will not know that our elderly neighbor is shut in by the cold, or that the animals are struggling resourcefully for food in the snow, or that the lake has changed once again, inviting an early springtime beauty, and if we do not have these views and more, we are less compassionate as beings, more closed up, and not as happy.

It isn’t only our physical view that is circumscribed. We are unconscious of so much. You know it. Who hasn’t said to the other members of their family – there is not a maid or a surprise helper who will come and pick up that backpack or wash that dish or take out that trash. It seems that some have a view of the world which assumes magic.

My daughter Anna just initiated a community meeting at her workplace, where very good people are working to make the world a better place by feeding the hungry and teaching us about that hunger. Yet the office workers seemed not to be able to view the farm-working volunteers who were shouldering long, cold hours and spending watchful nights up with the goats in labor, working without end. The regular staff were amazed to have their eyes opened through a couple of meetings that Anna helped to make happen, but really their view could have been widened by talking, walking outside, even imagining the larger truth that was behind what was happening on their busy farm.

We have views that put us at the center of the universe and that are unconscious of the needs of those both near and far. Our view of the world is often filled with fantasy, magical thinking, delusions, and distortions, and these irrational, unreal views can be quite destructive to ourselves and to our loved ones. We are in a fog about our relationships, our finances, our health, our jobs – you name it – we have created some fiction about it. Dysfunction begins in our own minds when we tell ourselves what is convenient or soothing or wishful, but unfortunately, is not true. Usually we can notice better when someone else’s view of the world is dysfunctional than we can about our own view – until we fall into some big, big mess, of course.

And what of the larger, global view? We need to see it and understand it in order to do something about it. In ethics, they teach that the first step to being able to make an ethical decision is to have the right understanding, which is the right view. Genocide is not okay with us, neither is torture, hunger, nor the denigration of our environment, but if we do not see these things, we will not be able to do anything to change their power for suffering in our world. Religion is one of the main institutions that has the huge responsibility of providing the right view, educating about the needs of our broken world. As Unitarian Universalists, we do this well, and we bear the joyful burden of continuing to open people’s eyes to issues of peace and justice.

We can be mindful, the Buddha taught. We can open our view to wisdom. We can see the world as it is, filled with suffering and cravings, attachments and conditionality, compulsions and consequences. And that sounds depressing, but the truth does set us free.

An awakened mind is compassionate because when we pay attention and see the reality of suffering around us, we are able to open our hearts and our minds and be present and loving. When we learn to leave behind the attachment to things, ideas, images, schedules, even identity, we settle into the reality of our interdependent existence, which brings us peace.

One of the most important ways to have a right view, the Buddha taught, is to accept death. We live as though we will not die and we make all kinds of bad choices based on this. If we lived with death’s reality close to our hearts, we would choose the good life, we would be more awake to the present.

I will finish with these words from a sutra. “Perfect Wisdom spreads her radiance…In her we may find refuge;…she brings us safety under the sheltering wings of enlightenment. She brings light to the blind, that all fears and calamities may be dispelled…and she scatters the gloom and darkness of delusion. She leads those who have gone astray to the right path….the Perfect Wisdom of the Buddhas….”