Beyond the Sky and the Earth Read Online Free PDF

hysterical outburst.
    There are frequent power failures in the evening. We go to bed early, because it is too cold to do anything else, and there is nothing else to do anyway. I read my book of Buddhist teachings by candlelight. My first exposure to Buddhism came through Robert, who had practiced Zen meditation in his days as a musician. I had never been at ease in the Catholicism in which I had been raised; it left too many false notes and dead ends in my head. The basic teachings of Buddhism stretch and trouble me, but they also ring clear and true. According to my book, this is the first of four degrees of faith: a feeling of mental clarity when hearing the Dharma—Buddhist teachings.
    The historical Buddha was born a prince, Siddhartha Gautama, in northern India, in the sixth century BCE. A sage predicted that he would either become a great monarch or abandon worldly power altogether and seek enlightenment. Alarmed at the prophecy, Siddhartha’s father created a world of rich comfort in the palace so that the boy would not be bothered by spiritual questions. At the age of twenty-nine, however, the young prince managed to get out of the palace, and was shocked at the suffering he found outside the walls. He was especially disturbed by the sight of an old man, a sick man, a corpse, and a mendicant. Realizing that his life was also subject to decay and death, he decided to leave the palace and seek the true meaning of existence. For seven years, he practiced rigorous asceticism until his body collapsed. Practice was no longer physically possible, and he still had not reached enlightenment. He understood then the truth of the middle way—that neither extreme of self-indulgence nor self-denial could lead to the realization he was seeking. After bathing in a river and drinking a bowl of milk offered to him by a village maiden, he sat under a Bodhi tree to meditate, and as a full moon rose, he came to understand the true nature of reality, and the way out of suffering.
    The first of the Four Noble Truths taught by the Buddha claims that life is suffering. The second truth explains why. We suffer because the self desires, grasps, clings, is never satisfied, never happy, never free of its many illusions; we desire what we don’t have, and when we get it, we desire to hold on to it, and when we are sure we have it, we lose interest in it and desire something new. In our constant, blind striving for something more, something better, something new, something secure and permanent, we act in ways that hurt ourselves and others, and create bad karma, which leads to rebirth and therefore more suffering. Even if we manage to be content with what we have, we are still subject to old age, sickness and death, and so are our loved ones. The third truth says that we must end this ceaseless wanting and grasping if we want to end suffering. The final truth explains how—through the Noble Eightfold Path of Right Understanding, Right Thought, Right Speech, Right Action, Right Livelihood, Right Effort, Right Mindfulness, Right Concentration.
    The Buddha did not claim to be a deity. When asked about the creation of the universe and the existence of God, he refused to speculate. He was not offering a new religion but a way of seeing and living in the world. For me, though, one of the most interesting things about Buddhism is not that there is no all-powerful God who we must fall down and worship, but that there is no permanent self, no essence of self. It isn’t even clear among scholars if Buddhism accepts the idea of a soul, an immortal individual spirit. Separateness is an illusion. Nothing exists inherently on its own, independently of everything else, and a separate, permanent, inherently existing self is the biggest illusion of all. There is nothing we can point to and say, yes, this is the self. It is not the body or the mind, but a combination of conditions and circumstances and facilities. At the moment of death, these conditions and