Why the buddha smiled

Slowly freezing to death? Those were the days before cell phones. Eventually I made it to my cottage, crawling up the hill on all fours, before anyone else had woken up. I plunged into a hot bath and kept the hot water running until it had drained the geyser.

Lying in bed, I thought about that Buddha smile. Obviously, it had to wait until I had recovered. But I suddenly decided otherwise. Maybe deliriously, I asked to be hoisted up the scaffold around the Buddha and strapped to the scaffolding for extra support for my back. There I sat face to face with that enormous head that had no mouth. It would have to be about the size of an outstretched hand. I had a bucket of mortar and a spatula and proceeded to sculpt the lips. It struck me then that this was quite symbolic: to catch the serene Buddha smile whilst experiencing intense pain and, maybe, with some suffering added for good measure.

The Buddha, of course, drew a distinction between pain and suffering. Pain is principally physical; suffering is largely psychological. The two are interconnected. But if you add the one to the other, without distinguishing between the two, your hurt becomes unbearable. Better deal sensibly with your hurts.

The upshot: India succeeded in concealing its plan of preparing for the first nuclear weapons' test at Pokhran on May 18, During Pokhran-II tests, Indian scientists calculated the orbits of US spy satellites and moved their equipment at times when they believed there was nothing above them.

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Let's reshape it today. Nothing much. The problem is that desire is a house builder, as the Buddha discovered on the night of his awakening. You will not build another house. Only a self has desire unlike rocks and trees , not because it is some spiritual essence unique in nature, but because the liking or not liking of something is itself what creates the self, the person who likes or does not like what is happening in this moment.

This then creates the conditions for suffering to arise, for only a self can suffer rocks and trees do not. We can only be disappointed if we set ourselves apart from what is happening by wanting it to be other than it is.

The crux of the second noble truth is not what you want but that you want. As the Buddha says in Majjhima Nikaya 43, greed and hatred are makers of measurement; they are delimiting and therefore limiting functions.

They carve our minds into boxes and compartments, hemming us in with habits, wishes, wants, and needs. Consciousness, which like a luminous mirror is capable of reflecting whatever object it encounters selflessly and thus naturally , is restricted, distorted, and even perverted by the likes and dislikes of our emotional habits—even those that seem innocuous. Under such circumstances, it is impossible to see things as they really are. Fortunately, there is a relatively easy and accessible way to counter the powerful forces of desire: the cultivation of equanimity.

Every moment of mindfulness is also a moment of equanimity. It is not a disengagement from the object of awareness but rather a full and complete engagement with it. It is engaging with the breath, or with a feeling tone, or with a thought, without simultaneously wanting it to stay as it is or wanting it to be different than it is. Awareness without wanting is not the same as having no emotion, for equanimity itself is an emotion.

If a neutral feeling tone lies at the midpoint between pleasure and pain, equanimity as an emotional response lies midway between liking and not liking, wanting and not wanting, greed and hatred.