In Christianity there is The Holy Bible, and in Islam there is the Quran. What about Buddhism? I have to stop myself from giving you an entire history lesson on Buddhism but basically the short answer is, there are lots of separate texts.
Buddha focused his efforts on diligent practice. Every day he walked the same path he walked since his awakening underneath the Bodhi tree. He calmly walked to the village to receive alms, calmly returned to the forest to consume the food, kept himself in ease and peace as he went on to resolve the suffering of the people who sought him.
Naturally everyone following his path focused their efforts on their individual practice. There wasn’t a real need for documenting anything because the dharma was just so evident in how the Buddha conducted himself. But alas! Nothing is permanent and the Buddha came to pass, and the followers found themselves in a new conundrum: how do we maintain the way of the dharma?
So the followers with the best memory convened and did a cross examination of their memories and when they were all in unison, they decided to document it. There are many types of these texts and these are what you call sutras (ironically the Heart Sutra or Diamond Sutra are not these types of sutras, but more about that some other time).
Why I’m telling you this is, in the sutras there are many many stories of how people came to enlightenment after talking to Buddha literally once. Oh, you’re suffering because of a loved one’s death? Boom! No more suffering. Oh, you’re suffering because your village was raided? Boom! No more suffering. He seems like a magician when you just read the sutras, converting people left and right.
So this raises the question (which I’ve talked about before): why was it so much easier people to attain enlightenment back then? It seems like practically everyone who talks to the Buddha gets enlightened. But it’s probably a lot of bias in record keeping, because why would a sutra outlining the Buddha’s teachings focus on instances where people didn’t get it? Also if a person continued the same kind of discourse for multiple days it’s practically as if they had one conversation and got to awakening.
Even the Buddha, one of the greatest teachers of humanity, didn’t have a 100% rate of success. Perhaps the most notable example of someone not awakening with the Buddha is his very own father. To his father, there was no Buddha; there was only his son, Gautama Siddhartha. When the Buddha spoke, he did not hear the wisdom of the dharma; he just heard his son speak and could not see beyond the idea of “my son”. So even to his death he never awakened.
What are some other reasons why one might not get the awakening? The most common reason is when one is so consumed in their own belief that other perspectives have no room to grow in their mind. Some notable cases of these are recorded in the sutras. There are variances to this case though:
- Some people actually do not have it in their brain to have the mental flexibility to consider multiple ideas about the same situation. In this case it would be how they are born.
- Some people through traumatic incidents have a significant warp in their cognitive processing to prioritize safety and prevention of similar incidents. In this case it would be something they experienced in life, but the aftermath is significant.
- Some people developed a very stubborn belief system through karma and the karma prevents the person from considering other views (“but if I think like that, I’d get in trouble with my mom”).
Regardless of how you coach, regardless of who coaches, there is always going to be a case where a person cannot reasonably consider different perspectives.
This gives me a lot of relief and assurance that it’s fine to not measure up to my goals, because even my teacher, Buddha, did not succeed all the time. Regardless of what you pursue in life, the chances of you always getting 100% of what you want is close to zero. And the worst part is, you may not get what you want even when you did everything right.
We like to believe that we have a lot of influence in what happens in our lives. That is true, we definitely have the most influence compared to everybody else. But what’s stopping a random palm tree leaf from falling right on top of my head, cracking my skull open on my morning walk? Nothing. I can do all the right things but as long as I am alive, I am always available for death.
I can prepare for a test the best way I can but I can have food poisoning on that day. I can shoot a basketball with the most perfect form measured with machines to have the ball be impacted by a minute difference in wind or temperature. Some days we have a streak of bad luck and we may try very well multiple, multiple times to not get the outcome we want — and we get downtrodden, thinking that this life isn’t for us.
But that is the mistaken view of life. Life is not about doing everything well to always get the results we want all the time. In fact, I’d wager that everything going our way is going to be somewhat catastrophic. Do you remember the Jim Carrey movie “Bruce Almighty”? In the movie Bruce briefly becomes a god and now he has to answer all the prayers from the world, and to speedrun the process so he can go have a good time he responds to everyone’s prayer with a YES.
Stock market crashed because all the stocks went up. Money lost value because everyone won the lottery. Nobody died so population went out of control. And so on. So if everything going our way all the time is BAD for us, that also means things not going our way is actually… GOOD for us.
You can flip a coin wishing for a head. But you get a tail. Then another tail. Then another tail. Then another tail. Then another tail. What the fuck! You make sure that the coin is fair, and in fact you skew the coin just a little bit so it would land on a head. But boom! Another tail. Now you may think whether this is worth it.
But over time, over hundreds, thousands, ten thousands, millions of sample — everything follows its true probability distribution. Most of the variances in our lives are significant because we don’t give our life enough samples. And in these sampling errors we start forming erroneous beliefs about how life should be, but how life actually is.
Your basketball skills might not improve the way you want in a matter of weeks. Matter of months. Matter of years. But regardless of what you may think or feel about it, the fact of the matter is as long as you keep playing basketball, as long as you keep providing more samples, you are going to see your probability distribution materialize. But even with that, can you guarantee that the next shot is going to go in? No. What are you gonna do about it though, not shoot the ball?