Light on Enlightenment

Extracts from Light on Enlightenment by Christopher Titmuss

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Short Introductory Poems
Extract: Coping with Praise and Blame
Extract: Liberation from Suffering
Comments on Light on Enlightenment
How To Order

Introduction

WHAT THE SCHOOL TAUGHT - WHAT THE ENLIGHTENED ONE TAUGHT

I was lucky enough to leave school at the age of fifteen years and eight months, never to go back. In the last year of attending the John Fisher Roman Catholic Boys School, Purley, England, I took very little interest in the studies or exams and finished near the bottom of the class. I left school without a single educational qualification. It seemed to me then that school endeavored to minimise one's enjoyment of life, of fun and play. It wasn't worth the sacrifice.

Years later in a remote Buddhist monastery in south-east Asia, I recalled one event at school. It was the daily ritual of caning. The words of the Buddha came to mind when he said: I declare there is suffering and there is the resolution of suffering. His words brought tears to my eyes when I reflected on the needless suffering that boys in the school went through.

I remembered that upon leaving school I held the school record for the number of canings, a total of one hundred and eight strokes in less than four years. I don't recall committing any major offenses. Apart from failing to do wretched homework, I specialised in pranks. Unscrewing the master's desk so that it collapsed when he leaned on it. Leaving old smoked haddock under the floorboards so the classroom stank. Writing graffiti and sending paper darts flying through the air as the teacher wrote on the blackboard.

The school provided a small room for a humourless teacher, a certain Mr. Fleming, who handed out the caning daily, either at noon or 3.30 p.m. In fact, the cane was a whale-bone covered in leather. Punishment consisted of either two strokes, four strokes, six strokes or eight strokes. Or double eight. But nobody ever got double eight, not even me.

I can recall the fear and terror that boys experienced as we queued outside the room for our respective punishment. Some whimpered as they heard the whoosh of the whalebone strike across the palm of the hand of the boy in the room. Occasionally, we would hear Mr. Fleming yelling at a boy to keep still if that boy, stricken with fear, pulled his hand back or suddenly lowered it when the cane came down. Clearly, the values of the Middle Ages still held sway then in many English schools.

I far preferred to be caned than to have the monotony of writing out hundreds of times I shall not make a nuisance of myself in the classroom. After the strokes, I simply blew warm breath on the palms of the hands for several minutes until the painful sensations faded away. Then it was over. One could see that for other boys the terror and humiliation hurt more than the strokes on the hand.

I still have sympathy for that expression of extreme thought which says we only stop learning when we go to school. I greatly appreciate the immense significance of education - to learn to read, write, add and subtract are among the most powerful tools available to a human being. Education is a marvellous and indispensable tool for inner development but I believe it still remains often out of touch with the depths of inner experience and wisdom of the heart. The Latin word educat means to lead out, to bring out. Whether schools truly fulfill that mission is questionable.

It was rather ironic that thirty years after leaving school, I was invited to speak at a conference on the Philosophy on the Future of Humanity at Cambridge University. There I expressed the view that education easily abuses the mind through imposing on it too many demands to absorb knowledge, to be clever, to be ruthlessly self interested. The desire to add letters before and after one's name seems to imply that students are not satisfied with the number of letters in their name! To live wisely and intelligently requires a deep, meditative re-examination of priorities. Without this inquiry, we will go on demanding more and more from the minds of the young to force them to fit into the objectives of the private and public sector.

After I left school I got a job as an office boy for a weekly paper called The Universe. It sounds very cosmic but in fact it was a popular newspaper for the country's Roman Catholics. The newspaper didn't move away from the traditional teachings of the Church. But when Pope John XX111 became Pope he opened up the doors of the Church to reexamine its place in the contemporary world. He was a breath of fresh air.

As an 18 year-old I could not appreciate fully the changes to the Church since I preferred my BSA Super Road Rocket 650cc motor bike with its lowered handlebars, rear set footrests and a sponge fixed to the top of the tank for my chin to rest on to maximise speed. It is an uncanny matter of existence that our love of freedom does not necessarily fit comfortably with our institutions. There seemed to be a greater freedom on the motorbike than in the salvation that the Church offered.

At the age of twenty two, I quit my second job as a London journalist with the Irish Independent newspaper, crossed the channel, and headed East with the princely sum of £50 in my pocket. My parents thought I was foolish to throw away a promising career to go hitchhiking around the world. I loved them so I said I would not be away from home for long. In fact, it was ten years and ten days before I returned to England having kept travelling East until I got back home without turning around.

After three years of living out of a backpack, I abandoned it in Thailand for the begging bowl, brown robes, shaved head and bare feet of a Buddhist monk. I soon realised that the outer journeys of life are small change compared to the challenge of the inner journey and what that demands from us. Very occasionally Western missionaries would come to our monastery from outlying villages where they attempted to convert the local Buddhists and Muslims. Mercifully, not with much success!

The missionaries demanded to know why I had become a Buddhist and abandoned my Christian faith. I told them Jesus sent me. They were not amused. And I was not trying to be funny. I regarded Jesus as an inspirational, free and enlightened person, a Jewish rabbi, whose passion for life couldn't be quenched. I believed he would have applauded my commitment to shake off the yoke of the past, of the unhealthy aspects of Western conditioning and explore the down to earth teachings of the Buddha.

I still believe the Buddha's teachings rank as the most comprehensive message of awakening available to humanity. I should add here that I am not a Buddhist. I have no appetite for labels. Neither am I concerned with the promotion of the religion. That's not my cup of tea. Yet I believe the Buddhist tradition offers a genuine education about life.

In the early 1980's in Devon, England, I became the co-founder of Gaia House, an international retreat centre offering teachings and practices dedicated to liberation, inquiry and insight meditation. There is a hunger in society for teachings and practices that apply directly to the realities of daily life. I believe that this book addresses those realities in a clear and straightforward manner, and I hope it will be used as a resource for clarity, inquiry, and for discovering an enlightened life. The issues I have addressed apply as long as men and women walk on this earth, and the book can be read and re-read by the individual and in group discussions to explore the truths of daily existence.

I am often asked with alarming regularity why I eventually disrobed. Was I disillusioned? The thought arose at that time When the fruit is ripe it has to leave the tree. That's not intended to be a conceited statement. It was time to change. Sometimes our freedom expresses the ending of one form of relationship and the start or return to another. That does not mean to say that we believe we are moving to something better and getting rid of something bad.

The book reminds us of deep truths that we may have forgotten or need to attend to. It attempts to communicate in clear and practical terms the message of enlightenment. The Buddha had one clear intention throughout his forty-five years of teaching; he sought to enlighten human experience and end, once and for all, the daily problems common to humanity.

The Buddha gave bold, uncompromising teachings which he referred to as the Dharma, an ancient Sanskrit word that also means duty. He frequently made it plain that our primary duty expresses the determination to discover insights into life, to penetrate into the notion of self existence and realise the joy of freedom.

For a hundred generations, that is around two thousand five hundred years, the teachings of the Buddha stayed in the East. Then the teachings began taking firm root in the West. Some of the responsibility for that belongs to Westerners who journeyed to the East to listen, practice and realise the teachings of the Buddha, and some of the responsibility belongs to Asian teachers travelling to the West. Some Westerners returned to the West to teach the Dharma.

I travelled overland to the East, spent about ten years there, six of them as a Buddhist monk in Thailand and India, before returning to the West to become a servant of the Dharma.

The teachings examined in this book address every feature of our lives. They are profound teachings intended for thoughtful men and women wishing to uncover the veils of existence. They are for people who sense that life is neither blindly mechanistic, nor inherently benign, neither destructive nor in the hands of a Supreme Figure. The Buddha taught the Middle Way which points to the ground between self-hate and self-infatuation, between notions of free choice and inner latent forces. The question of who we are and what we are is one of his many concerns.

The Buddha's teachings never fall comfortably into a single convenient category, nor did he intend them to. One can hardly call the Dharma a religion when the Buddha took no interest in temples, religious worship, belief in God or soul. There is a relationship between Buddhism and the Dharma which has been insightful - and sectarian through clinging to views. The Theravada and Mahayana Buddhist traditions originally consisted of commentaries on the same early texts of the Buddha's teachings that I am using. Some Buddhist schools have replaced devotion to God with guru devotion, chanting instead of hymns, and fretting about rebirth instead of liberation.

Neither can one place Buddhist teachings into philosophy. The Buddha questioned again and again views, opinions, intellectual cleverness and infatuation with ideas. Western academics and students show an increasing degree of interest in the Dharma but mostly from a cerebral standpoint rather than from their day to day experience and practice.

Nor can the teachings fit into the field of psychotherapy, which relies mostly on the exchange of language between therapist and client to understand certain features of the make-up of the personality. Generally speaking, psychotherapy examines issues of self involved in relationship to matters past, present or future. Psychotherapy explores our attitudes, certain states of mind and the impact of others upon our lives. A tradition that is barely a century old cannot expect to have the same depth of experience and realisation as a tradition two thousand five hundred years old triggered by a profound and unstoppable awakening.

I believe neither religion, study nor therapy goes far enough, nor deep enough, into the nature of existence. Many in those respected fields would also agree.

Yet devotion, analysis and personal issues do deserve care and attention. At times, these approaches offer support for living reasonably well-adjusted lives. They can provide an invaluable resource for inner wellbeing and, for some, point to something deep and profound. If we are willing to take risks for change we might gain wonderful and illuminating insights into this myriad field of existence.

In that respect the Dharma is a beautiful teaching embracing far-reaching ethical values, significant depths of meditation, healing of the heart, profound wisdom while also pointing directly to an enlightened life. The Buddha, himself, said that only those who see the Dharma see the Buddha. To be enlightened is to see the Buddha. There is no fading away of an authentically enlightened life since it sets the vision and direction of our own life.

I have attempted to cut through the superficial face of the religion of Buddhism to reveal the indispensable features of the Dharma. Originally the teachings were transmitted orally for ten or fifteen generations. Rather skillfully, the Buddha drew together the priorities for enlightenment into small lists, which made them easy to remember and easy to transmit orally. His approached worked. This book consists of a short commentary on each of the primary topics that the Buddha emphasised, beginning with the Four Noble Truths. Commentary on primary texts is a tradition that goes back more than two thousand years.

It is my intention that readers have a thorough and comprehensive picture of what it means to embark on the journey to enlightenment. It is no easy task, it is much harder than you think. Let no one ever deceive you into believing that enlightenment is a quiet, sublime state of mind or a sudden moment that fades into personal history. Enlightenment is one with the truth of things. It never fades. It requires the enlivening of every resource available, inwardly and outwardly.

Enlightened people who have skills in communication only point the way, but human beings must walk the path. To step out in this direction may create ripples, if not waves, not only in our lives but also for others as well. To face our existence, to focus on the three-fold inner training of morality, depths of meditation, and wisdom, will challenge the very core of our being. The discipline of the Dharma will impact upon our views of our education, career and future prospects if charged with egotism and self delusion. The Dharma confronts the supreme value of the West, namely the elevation of the self.

This book serves as a guide away from the world of possessiveness, clinging and egotism to the awakening of the heart and clear perception into the nature of things. Enlightening our existence puts our brief exposure on this Earth into another realm of understanding altogether.

In the Dharma,
Christopher Titmuss
Totnes, Devon,
England

May all beings live in peace and harmony
May all beings be liberated
May all beings be fully enlightened