Smaller-Scale Buddhism

Here's something I figured out on my own: The key to applying the teachings of the Buddha to one's life is to create personal allegories. To "get" any of the teachings, you have to scale down the philosophical concepts of Buddhism in such a way that they are understandable in the context of one's everyday life. Some concepts in Buddhism are difficult to understand because they are so extreme and abstract, while others conflict with a scientific understanding of the world. These ideas have to be interpreted to be useful.

I don't know much about Buddhism, but I think that I have learned how to scale down two of the difficult introductory concepts of Buddhism so they work in my life.

Dukkha
Dukkha is suffering, and the teachings of Buddha are intended to lead the student away from dukkha. Buddhist literature describes dukkha, explains where it comes from, and shows how to escape it. People usually interpret dukkha to refer to mortality-related topics like pain, physical illness, death, and sorrow.

Most people deal with pain, death, and sorrow infrequently, which makes dukkha seem like an abstract concept at best and really painful to think about at worst. But mortality is really just the biggest, scariest and most profound forms of suffering. Buddha also referred to some pretty mundane forms of dukkha: association with the unbeloved, separation from the loved, and not getting what is wanted.

In short, dukkha also refers to dealing with people, to being alone, and to managing one's desires. These topics are far easier to think about regularly than death. In fact, these are topics that you must think about regularly.

Do you have a difficult relationship with your coworkers? That's dukkha. Do you find it hard to be by yourself (or even so scared of being alone that you keep poor company)? That's dukkha. Did your big plans for lunch get derailed by a rush of customers? That's dukkha, too. Dukkha is everywhere, if you look. You can focus on dealing with that dukkha as practice for dealing with the big, scary, profound, dukkha that is mortality later.

Samsara
In Buddhist tradition, samsara is the antithesis of enlightenment. It's the endless cycle of suffering caused by birth, death, and reincarnation. Samsara is visually represented as a wheel, rolling endlessly through birth, death, and rebirth. with one's life after rebirth being influenced by one's karma from the previous life. (Hindus, Sikhs and adherents to a few other religions also believe in samsara, but I'm talking specifically about the Buddhist conception of the word.)

Some interpretations of samsara get a little baroque. In Tibetan Buddhism, for example, samsara involves a gradual but more or less inevitable downward fall through six stages, from near-godhood down to hell, passing through the states of demi-god, human, animal, and hungry ghost on the way. Hell in Tibetan Buddhism isn't an eternal state of punishment, though: It's a state of woe you reach as a direct result of your actions, which you can eventually leave. Once you've left Buddhist hell, you enter back into the rest of the cycle. It's an endless, predictable process.

Ghosts, gods, and reincarnation. These are superstitious words! They make samsara pretty difficult to stomach if you're of a pragmatic mind. A better way to think about samsara than as an abstract religious concept is as a cycle of behavior. And, just like dukkha, you have to think about samsara on a small scale. Samsara is the process of moving inevitably between pain and happiness and back. This is samsara on a human scale. Within the larger context of birth and death, we experience smaller cycles of pain and happiness. The big wheel of samsara has many small wheels within it.

Part of being in a cycle of behavior is experiencing peaks of emotion, peaks which one experiences regularly as rewards or as respites from the painful portion of the cycle. (Those peaks of emotion might only be peaks relative to the rest of the cycle, but they're still peaks. Even the most miserable person can point to one moment and say, "That was the best part of my day.") Peaks like that are the anchors of cyclical behavior. Painful behaviors become cyclical because you get attached to certain parts of the behavior that is causing you pain.

An easy way to think about this is in terms of substance abuse: A drinker might feel great at drink number three, progressively worse as she continues to drink, and feel awful and useless and guilty in the morning. She might perk up in the afternoon just in time to do it again in the evening. A really bad problem drinker would do this every night. That's is a cycle of physical suffering repeated on a daily scale. That is samsara.

Or think about eating a fast food burger for lunch every day. You might eat it, feel bad about having eaten something bad for you, then eat the same damn burger again the next day because all you remember is how good it tasted.

It can be about other people, too. Some people seem to do the same things in every relationship they get into, and as a result their relationships follow predictable patterns of elation, disillusionment, and pain. That's also samsara: a cycle of emotional suffering repeated on a human scale.

Now, I think it can be painfully obvious to an outside observer when someone is locked into a pattern. Particularly for the examples above, it might look as if breaking the cycle should be incredibly easy. Those examples are just examples. Not all cycles are that obvious! Do you do anything that you enjoy but which also hurts you? Do you cling to anything painful simply because it's familiar?