The Razor's Edge

I remember back in 10th grade, clutching A Short History of Chinese Philosophy, I especially loved the chapter on Buddhism — like a museum collector hoarding things, I'd hug 二谛义, 中道, 涅槃, 般若 and stuff like that every day, flipping them over and over.

I remember during that time I liked Hesse's Siddhartha and Maugham's The Razor's Edge the most. I especially worshipped that Wittgenstein-like guy in The Razor's Edge who just swaggers around the world. If I get the chance soon I'll definitely reread the English version.

Siddhartha left an insanely deep impression on me, and only later did I realize the reason might be that it's the opposite of my most original understanding of Buddhism.

Usually people feel Buddhism is nihilism, pessimism.

But by the end of Siddhartha, what you feel definitely isn't nihilism or pessimism, but the freedom that comes from understanding, and along with it, a love for life.

Siddhartha's story isn't a story where each experience is used as a stepping-stone on the road to enlightenment, pushing forward nonstop until you reach the finish line; it's more like: after experiencing everything, feeling everything, bearing everything, you return to the starting point, look back, and discover that all those experiences weren't merely themselves. The lustful love with Kamala, the greedy desire with Kamaswami — those too are actually part of the final awakening.

In my understanding, Buddhism isn't teaching people to dodge suffering, and it's not teaching people to cultivate the next life or become a Buddha. On the contrary, what Buddhism tells you is that all of this is the result of countless conditions accumulating before this moment, and you have to learn to bear it.

In Buddhism there actually isn't a next life, and there aren't gods or Buddhas.

If I have to force it into words, Buddhism/Buddhist thought is probably talking about a kind of freedom. This kind of freedom often gets lost because of certain human tendencies, and the way to restore it is to break through all obscurations. So the so-called "if you meet the Buddha, kill the Buddha; if you meet the patriarch, kill the patriarch; if you meet the arhat, kill the arhat; if you meet your parents, kill your parents" — that is real Buddhism. Of course it's not advocating violence; it's telling people not to let these things become obscurations.

Buddhism is a kind of reality. Like when you usually see someone getting overly distressed and exhausted over some tiny thing, you can clearly see that fog in front of his eyes. This fog nowadays sometimes gets classified as a psychological problem, but it actually has an older name. Buddhism is about what you should do when that fog drifts in front of your own eyes.

Freedom probably comes from the lucidity that arrives after you understand that experiences aren't just the experiences themselves. The so-called becoming a Buddha/nirvana is probably saying that this lucidity will lead a person into a state of unrestrained ease that transcends everything.

But I think Buddhism, at the most fundamental level, is actually against trying to cultivate yourself into Buddhahood/nirvana, because the pursuit itself becomes a new attachment, a new obscuration. Even lucidity itself shouldn't be pursued — just like this piece of writing right now shouldn't get hung up on what "real Buddhism" is. You shouldn't even have the obsession of making this clear. Obsession itself is obscuration.

So vegetarian fasting and chanting the Buddha's name aren't Buddhism — they're just methods provided for certain people. Siddhartha himself didn't need to eat vegetarian and chant to become enlightened.

And that's also why samsara is like a driver that reboots the operating system and everything on it again and again — once you enter samsara you can't escape it either.

But people still have to walk the razor's edge, to go look for the ultimate truth.