Clear Vision Trust

The Evolution of a Buddha

from Who is the Buddha? by Sangharakshita

'Who is the Buddha?' This question has always been crucial to the Buddhist quest. Through it, Buddhists determine their ideal, their goal in life, and their whole spiritual path. It is as an essentially practical question in this sense that it appears as the title of this book. We shall be examining, through the following chapters, some of the significant events in the Buddha's life, as it occurred 2,500 years ago. However, the question 'Who is the Buddha?' is not answered by a simple biography - at least not in a very helpful sense. Besides, matters of historical fact are not fundamental issues to Buddhists. Scholars continue to dispute over whether certain details in the various traditional records may or may not be regarded as true statements of what actually happened. But for those who follow in the Buddha's footsteps the facts of his life, such as they are, are secondary to their significance as a guide to the spiritual path. Many biographies of the Buddha, both popular and scholarly, have appeared before now, and some of these are both informative and inspiring. But our approach here is different. Our aim is the specific one of reflecting on the Buddhist conception of who the Buddha is.

We are therefore taking each of the major elements in the Buddha's career as the starting point for a consideration of the ideal and goal of Buddhism as he exemplifies it, and as we also can strive after it. To begin with, however, it will be useful to get an idea of the spiritual context within which the man, Siddhartha Gautama, became the Buddha. That is, the Buddha cannot be recognized for what he is except from within the context of Buddhism itself. From the Buddhist point of view the Buddha did not arise from nowhere. It is true that Buddhism as we know it starts with the Buddha. But he did not invent or create the Dharma, the truth around which Buddhism developed. He discovered it - or rather he rediscovered it. The Buddha takes his place at the centre - or at the culmination - of a vast pattern or system of spiritual hierarchies. To know who he is we also have to know, in a manner of speaking, where he is. If we cannot get some measure of the scale of the Buddha's achievement against our own human experience, the question 'Who is the Buddha?' cannot realistically be addressed at all. Therefore, not only do we need to take in as comprehensive a view as we can of the Buddhist 'scheme of things', but we should also try to see Buddhism itself in the most far-reaching perspective. 'Who is the Buddha?' is another way of saying 'Where does Buddhism propose to lead us?' To answer it we need to have some idea of where we are now - and even of how we came to be here. Before we look at where the human quest ends, we should also, perhaps, look back at its origins, where it begins.

In the beginning, we may say, life was a mystery. That, at least, was how it seemed to primitive humanity. Without formulating it as such, people felt, as though in the blood, that life was strange, incomprehensible: a mystery. Then later on, though still during humankind's unrecorded past, people began consciously, explicitly, to think about life. Our ancestors apprehended that they were - without knowing how or why - in the midst of what seemed to be a strange and even hostile world, surrounded by all sorts of things which they could not understand or control. In the morning they saw the sun rise, and in the evening they saw it set. But why the sun rose and why it set, and what happened to it when darkness fell, they just did not know. Sometimes there were great storms - the world grew dark, rain fell, thunder seemed to crack open the earth and the sky would be lit up by an intermittent and terrible glare. But what caused these disturbances no one could tell. The days might be long and warm, or they might be short and freezing, but why they should be so was, again, a mystery. Eventually, they discovered that they could strike two stones together to make fire - and here was another mystery.

Sometimes people felt acutely miserable, and their bodies were racked with terrible pains. Why? They didn't know. And sometimes something even stranger happened. Someone would be found lying on the ground, quite still. Usually it would be an old person, but not always; and sometimes it would be a child. When you called them they did not answer. You saw that their eyes were fixed and staring, but they did not recognize you. When you drew near, when you placed your fingers near their nostrils, you discovered that they no longer breathed. When you touched them you found that their flesh was cold and hard. If you left them where they were then sooner or later you noticed a dreadful smell coming from them. And this was the greatest mystery of all.

Almost as soon as these mysteries arose, it seems, they would have been named and given a place in a larger pattern of meaning whereby people could make some sense of their lives. And this world view - the particular view of the world held in any one society or social group - would satisfy people for perhaps a very long time indeed. But eventually some inconsistencies would appear, some aspects of the world or of themselves would be discovered that could not be explained within that system, that would not fit into it. Some people would then simply choose to muddle along with the old system, making a few adjustments here and there, while others would dismantle the whole apparatus and start again from a completely different governing principle.

What has changed today is that people have now, in most places in the world, a very considerable range of world views - of beliefs, myths, and philosophies - to choose from and learn from. This can only be a good thing. As Kipling shrewdly demanded of an earlier, nationalistic age, 'What should they know of England who only England know?'('The English Flag') You can hardly be said to know your own culture if you have nothing to compare it with, and the same goes for anything else one wants to know: knowledge is essentially comparison. You cannot really understand even your own religion except in relation to other religions. Of course, one hasn't always had the information one needed to make these comparisons. Fifty years ago you hardly ever heard another religion apart from Christianity even mentioned - you were not given to understand such religions existed at all. But today all this has changed. Kipling's apercu now seems almost a truism, and one finds one can learn a great deal about one's own faith from studying other systems of belief. Things we would have taken for granted in the past we can now see for what they are by comparison with different things of the same nature. And one appreciates and understands them all the better for it.

Side by side with this development, however, and linked with it, we have seen a break-up of the old unified culture in which there was a commonly accepted overall view of things. We live in an era of the specialist, of the person who knows more and more about less and less. Although we have developed areas of densely cultivated knowledge, they just don't link up into any kind of network of ideas. The central split is of course between science and the humanities, but the fissures extend and proliferate within these 'two cultures' to produce a seriously fragmented system of knowledge. This very modern problem of isolated specialization presents us with the acute difficulty of having to try to make sense of our knowledge piecemeal. It's as though we have just four or five pieces of a jigsaw puzzle and we can't make out what the whole picture is supposed to be.

There is, therefore, for anyone who is at all reflective, a pressing need - as much as there was for our primitive ancestors - to find the other bits of the jigsaw. There are, of course, many people willing to supply the missing pieces. The Roman Catholic Church, for example, is an ancient and venerable institution, and in the course of 2,000 years it has worked out all the answers. You only have to buy a copy of the latest catechism to find all the questions and all the answers neatly set out. Should any fresh questions arise, these will be swiftly answered by an encyclical from the Vatican. Many people find that this system deals with the mystery of life very satisfactorily. The same goes for Islam, which also lays down a conclusive and thoroughgoing context of meaning for human life. Marxism too, in its various forms, provided - at least until recently - a comparatively all-embracing world view that explained everything in terms of economic evolution leading to a political and social utopia.

Those whom the more established systems of thought fail to satisfy can turn to any number of 'cults' or fringe religious groups, even psychological and political movements, for something that will validate their aspirations and make them feel positive and progressive. And it is possible to go from one to another, to change your direction, as often as you like. I knew an Englishwoman in India who claimed to have changed her religion seventeen times. She had started off as a Roman Catholic and had worked her way through the Vedanta and the Swedenborgian Church and the Ramakrishna Mission and many others. By the time I knew her, when she was middle-aged, she was a Seventh Day Adventist, and even then thinking of moving on to something else, because this religion prohibited the consumption of tea. I remember visiting her once (this was in Kalimpong), and while we were having a nice cup of tea together there was a knock on the door and she turned pale. 'My God,' she whispered, 'That's the minister', and quickly hid the teapot. I believe she went on to Australia, but whether or not she found something that suited her better I don't know. One may laugh or one may cry at the sort of predicament she was in - but she was at least searching for the truth in her own way.

The fact is that, whether one is making a point of searching for the truth or not, it is simply not possible to avoid the practice of philosophy altogether. Everybody has a philosophy of some kind. It is just that some people are good at philosophizing and others are not. You can meet all sorts of people who have developed, without any academic training of any kind, an articulated philosophy of their own that is consistent and integrated. But whereas these individuals may have worked out a clear conceptualized version of their own attitude towards life as a whole, others may have only a very rudimentary or embryonic idea of what they take to be the central reality and purpose of life. Like it or not, we all begin as our remote ancestors did in a state of confusion and bewilderment, but it is up to us where we go from there.

It is as if you woke up one day to find yourself in a strange bed in some kind of inn. You don't know how you got there and you don't know where you are - except that it's somehow a temporary place to stay, with people coming and people going. All you know is that it's not your own place and you don't recognize the road it's on. You've just woken up and you're bewildered and confused and wondering what's going on. This is surely more or less how we feel about finding ourselves in the world at all. Here we are with a body, two eyes, two ears, a mouth, a nose, thoughts ... dropped off in the middle of England or wherever, dumped down in the tail-end of the twentieth century. What brought us here, we just don't know. We just wake up and here we are.

So when you wake up in this imaginary inn all you want to know is where you go from here. You need someone to give you a map showing the surrounding country, so that you can see the route you have come by so far and the direction you need to take to reach your destination. And this, as one might expect by now, is where Buddhism comes in. It is when the human condition is looked at in these quite elementary, even existential, terms that the teaching of the Buddha seems to come into its own.

Encountering Buddhism, what we discover, essentially, is a very comprehensive system of thought. (The word 'thought' is not ideal, but it must do for the time being.) This is not to say that the different forms of Buddhism that have arisen over more than 2,000 years all necessarily hang together neatly. But as well as being used as a blanket term covering the whole range of different approaches to the teaching, 'Buddhism' needs also to be appreciated in essential terms as representing a consistent and complete philosophical scheme.

Encountering Buddhism concretely, however, coming into contact with actual Buddhist groups, meeting flesh-and-blood Buddhist individuals, we find only too often the same sort of piecemeal approach that characterizes modern knowledge as a whole. There are a lot of schools in Buddhism (and they are 'schools' rather than 'sects') - Theravada, Zen, Pure Land, T'ien-t'ai, Gelug, Kagyu, Nyingma, and so on. But it is rare to find followers of one school of Buddhism knowing anything much about the teachings of any other school. I have had a good deal of contact with Theravada Buddhists, for example (admittedly, in most cases, a very long time ago), and my experience was that - whether they came from Sri Lanka, Burma, or Thailand - they knew absolutely nothing about Zen. In the vast majority of cases they had not even heard of it. Conversely, one can meet Zen monks - even Zen masters - who haven't a clue about what the Theravada might be. As the world becomes a smaller place this is gradually changing, but one has to be careful when picking up a book on Buddhism, or listening to someone talk about Buddhism, that one isn't just getting the version of Buddhism put forward by one particular school.

Within Buddhism there is also a tendency to present a partial and unbalanced account of the teaching. A particular set of doctrines may be set out very clearly, but they are not related to other doctrines that perhaps look at the same issue from a different angle. For instance, there is the teaching of duhkha, that human existence is inherently unsatisfactory, that it can never be quite as we would like, that, indeed, even if we got everything we wanted, life would still be unsatisfactory. It is a fundamental doctrine, without which the whole of Buddhism rather loses its point. However, if it is not always firmly located within the context of the Four Noble Truths which go on to summarize the way to transcend it, the teaching of duhkha will seem just a rather sour fact of life.

Take another doctrine, that of the tathagata-garbha - literally the 'womb of Enlightenment' - according to which all sentient existence carries within it the 'seed' of Buddhahood, of supreme and perfect Enlightenment. If this doctrine of universal potential Buddhahood is not related to the Noble Eightfold Path which adumbrates the necessary steps to be taken in order to realize Enlightenment, we can come away with the notion that we actually have Buddhahood in the palm of our hand, as it were, and that all we have to do is wake up to the fact. Such teachings, if not put in their proper context and related to an overall framework, can be quite misleading.

This goes for meditation too. We can no doubt very usefully take up meditation as a purely psychological exercise. But as soon as we begin to see it as more than just a 'profane' training, as soon as we begin to acknowledge that it is some sort of 'sacred' or spiritual practice, we need to acquire some understanding of the general spiritual framework or context within which its practical spiritual purpose is defined. In the East it doesn't matter so much, because there the whole culture, the whole society, provides that framework, and if one has close personal contact with a good teacher then one doesn't need to know very much about the doctrine intellectually. But that situation does not obtain in the West, and if we are to take up Buddhist meditation we must have some knowledge of the general principles of Buddhism.

Buddhism is a vast subject. Therefore, putting it in a context which is familiar to the modern Western mind is not to be taken too literally - it is not like finding a big box into which we can fit a smaller box. It is a matter rather of laying out the Buddhist system of thought as a whole in terms that should be sufficiently familiar to all of us - as a way of looking at the world - not to require much explanation. And the idea that functions most comprehensively in this way is the principle of evolution, derived from the biological sciences. The fact that the Christian faith in particular has become reconciled to this principle only with the greatest difficulty makes it also a useful tool in highlighting some of the more distinctive features of the Buddhist vision. Nothing like the kind of tour de force we meet with in the works of the Catholic thinker Teilhard de Chardin is required to bring Buddhism and modern evolutionary ideas together.

We now know that the theory of evolution was anticipated by a number of thinkers, by Kant, Hegel, and others - and even, according to some, by Aristotle himself. But Darwin was the first to trace the operation of evolution in detail within the field of biology. To attempt to refute the principle of evolution in that field today would be like saying the earth is flat. It is the given basis for all the biological sciences. If anything, the idea has invaded all sorts of other disciplines, from politics to astronomy, so that one could fairly say that just as the Elizabethan age was dominated by the concepts of order and hierarchy, so the modern world is dominated by the concept of evolution.

In taking up an idea that is generally understood in scientific or at least academic applications and applying it in a spiritual context, we have, of course, to draw some precise boundaries. Scientific knowledge depends on the evidence of the senses - but, just because Buddhism has never tried to resist the evidence of the senses, that does not make it a 'scientific religion'. It is certainly true that Buddhism's appeal in the West owes much to the spirit of empirical, open-minded inquiry which the Buddha laid down as axiomatic to the spiritual quest - and this lack of dogmatism does align Buddhism in some important respects with the Greek scientific spirit rather than with the dominant religious traditions in the modern West. Equally axiomatic to the Buddhist notion of the spiritual quest, however, is the recognition of a transcendental Reality - which is not, of course, a provable scientific hypothesis. As a practising Buddhist one starts from the evidence of one's own experience, which will tend to support more and more the idea of a spiritual order of evolution, and it is on the basis of this evidence that biological evolution carries conviction - not the other way round. Therefore, if we look at ourselves as in any way constituting some kind of key to the universe, then on the basis of our own experience of progression we may fairly conclude that progression is in some way inherent in the universe.

In this respect, at least, Buddhism inclines more towards a traditional, pre-scientific viewpoint. If we look at a traditional civilization, we find that everything, every activity, every piece of knowledge, is linked in with ideas of a metaphysical order. Ordinary things, ordinary events, accepted ideas, are not just of practical use. They have a symbolic value, they point beyond themselves, they have meaning. Amidst our own fragmented, 'specialist', economically defined culture we may find it difficult to appreciate this attitude, but it is the basis for the Tantra, and it was the world view of our own society until comparatively recently. According to this view everything is interconnected and nothing can ever really be ordinary - in the sense of being without a deeper meaning - at all. Rather than look for scientific proof of spiritual realities, we may say, paraphrasing G.K. Chesterton, that it is because we no longer believe in the gods that we no longer believe in ourselves. Our project as Buddhists must be to replace a mechanistic universe with one that has meaning, that carries throughout its fabric intimations of spiritual values.

Buddhism therefore looks at the rational knowledge derived from the senses in the light of a knowledge that is derived not from the senses and reason alone, but from a fusion of reason with emotion in a higher faculty of archetypal knowledge which we may call 'vision', 'insight', or 'imagination'. It is not a question of justifying Buddhism in scientific terms, but rather of understanding sense-derived knowledge by means of knowledge that is not sense-based. In other words, the knowledge that is derived from the senses fits into a much larger pattern of knowledge that is not derived from the senses. From a Buddhist point of view, there is a hierarchy of levels of being and consciousness, a hierarchy of degrees of spiritual attainment, which seems to be reflected in, or as it were anticipated by, the whole process of biological evolution. It seems to make sense, therefore, to regard both biological evolution and the hierarchies of spiritual development as being - from the Buddhist point of view - in their separate spheres, exemplifications of a single law or principle.

It is clear that according to the principle of evolution life is not just existence. It is a process - a process of becoming - and humankind is not something apart from the rest of nature, as the theistic religions usually teach. Humankind itself also comes under the operation of this great process of becoming. It too is evolving and developing, not just towards new forms of existence and organization, but towards new and higher levels of being.

There are two different ways of looking at any evolving phenomenon: in terms of its past or in terms of its future; in terms of what it was or in terms of what it may come to be. The first of these ways of looking at phenomena - in terms of its origins - is traditionally called the genetic approach; the second - in terms of its destination or purpose - is the teleological method. So if we take an example of humankind at its best - someone who is intelligent, self-aware, morally responsible, sensitive to others and to the world around them - we should be able to look at them from each of these two perspectives. From a genetic perspective, we can look back at the complex evolutionary process described by Darwin, including that critical point at which self-consciousness - or more precisely, reflexive consciousness, which is roughly identifiable with specifically human consciousness - emerges from simple animal sense-consciousness. This whole process we can characterize, from the Buddhist point of view, as the 'lower evolution'. But there is also the teleological perspective: we can also look at what an aware human being may develop into, what they are in process of developing into, and this development we may distinguish as the 'higher evolution'. We have got so far in evolutionary terms propelled by the unconscious urge to grow and develop which fuels the origin of species, but to enter into the higher evolution takes conscious effort, or what we call spiritual practice. The lower evolution is the province of the biological sciences, leaving the higher evolution to be mapped out by the religions of the world, especially, of course, by Buddhism.

This sort of model of Buddhism is crucial to an understanding of who the Buddha is and what our own relationship to him might be. By means of it we can locate our own situation, which is probably a little short of our central figure of the fully integrated human being, and thus somewhere in the upper reaches of the lower evolution. We can also see the evolutionary process stretching ahead of us as far as Buddhahood - and beyond, inasmuch as Buddhahood is not a terminal point, but is by its very 'nature' limitless. And somewhere in the midst of this continuum we can envisage another critical point, where Insight into the nature of Reality - Insight with a capital I - replaces our faint, confused, and intermittent apprehensions of something that transcends our common perception of things. In this way, we know where we stand, we know the direction we must take, and we have something to aim for.

Before focusing on those stages in the evolutionary process that concern us as individual human beings we can restate what has been said so far in traditional Buddhist terminology. According to Buddhism the nature of existence consists in change or 'becoming'. It is not simply some 'thing' that is subject to change - existence itself is change. And the specific manner of that change was expressed by the Buddha in a formula known in Sanskrit as pratitya-samutpada and translated as 'conditioned co-production' or 'dependent origination'. This formula or law goes as follows: 'This being, that becomes; from the arising of this, that arises. This not being, that does not become; from the ceasing of this, that ceases.' So if existence is change, change is conditionality. Existence is seen as an infinitely complex and shifting pattern of physical and mental phenomena, all coming into being in dependence on certain conditions, and disappearing when those conditions disappear.

Pratitya-samutpada is not traditionally invoked as a cosmological principle, but there is no reason why it should not be. In the Digha Nikaya of the Pali canon there is a very long discourse delivered by the Buddha, the Agganna Sutta, which deals with the evolution of the universe and the origin of humankind. But for our present purposes we may say simply that in dependence upon the lower evolution arises the higher evolution.

What this does not mean is that the higher evolution is entirely the product of the lower evolution. Pratitya-samutpada expresses the middle way between seeing the lower evolution as essentially the same process as the higher evolution and seeing them as completely different processes. The basic Buddhist approach is in this sense scientific - it describes what happens without necessarily committing itself to an interpretation of those facts.

Within this universal framework of conditionality, however, there are two types of conditionality. On the one hand there is a 'cyclic' mode of conditionality, a process of reaction between opposite factors: death arising in dependence on birth, good in dependence on evil, happiness in dependence on suffering - and vice versa. It is a characteristic of human experience that is all too familiar - as Keats puts it: 'Ay, in the very temple of delight / Veil'd melancholy has her sovran shrine'.('Ode to Melancholy') This is samsara or the round of existence, as depicted in the Tibetan version of the Wheel of Life.

On the other hand there is a cumulative development of positive factors progressively augmenting each other, and this 'spiral' mode of conditionality provides the basis for the spiritual life. Thus in dependence on the arising of faith, joy arises, and so on in an ascending series of mental states all the way up to Enlightenment itself. The essential characteristic of a positive mental state is that it does not produce a negative reaction but instead produces a further positive factor. An act of true generosity, for example, is not succeeded by a niggling resentment when your gift does not seem to be appreciated. You simply derive joy from giving. It hardly needs saying that the cyclical principle governs the lower evolution, while the spiral mode of conditionality comprises the higher evolution.

The Buddha's working out, in his first discourse after his Enlightenment, of the principle of pratitya-samutpada as the Four Noble Truths can be correlated with the evolution model equally simply. The first and second Noble Truths, which are that pain is inherent in sentient existence and that this pain arises in dependence - ultimately - upon craving, are concerned with the lower evolution. The third and fourth Noble Truths, which are, respectively, that this pain ceases with the ceasing of craving, and that the way to bring about an end to craving is by undertaking the Noble Eightfold Path, take us into the higher evolution.

By taking an evolutionary perspective we can discern some absolutely fundamental practical principles of the spiritual life. Within the lower evolution forms of life develop as a group - evolution works as a collective process - whereas the higher evolution is necessarily individual, which means that one individual can outstrip the rest. It is for this reason that self-awareness, mindfulness, is the starting point - the growing point - of the higher evolution. It is as though self-awareness generates a degree of energy sufficient to carry you through the whole process of the higher evolution in a single lifetime. Buddhist practice is concerned solely and exclusively with the development of the individual, that is, with the higher evolution. Once this is clear we can bring the whole range of Buddhist teachings into focus.

The Buddha lays down a path of practice leading to Enlightenment, but then he says very emphatically, 'You must walk the path yourselves. I've walked it for myself, but I can't walk it for you. No one can save another. No one can purify another. It's up to you to do it for yourselves.' In this sense Buddhism is a do-it-yourself religion. The corollary of this is that anyone who makes the effort can obtain the same results. There aren't some chosen few who can do it and others who can't. If no one is going to do it for you, this also means that if you make the effort, you can attain. You don't even have to call yourself a Buddhist. If you accept the principles and follow the path, you will infallibly get the right results.

This is one reason why Buddhism is, by its very nature, a tolerant religion. Buddhists are not tolerant out of sheer indifference or apathy. They are tolerant because everybody has to find out the Truth for themselves. This is the nature of the Buddhist path. You have to allow others the same freedom that you claim for yourself - freedom to grow, to develop spiritually, in their own way. Therefore there is no conception of religious war or religious persecution in Buddhism. You find, for example, that the king of Thailand, who is the Buddhist king of a largely but not wholly Buddhist country, has as one of his titles 'Protector of all Religions'.

So there is no compulsion. The Buddha's teaching, the Dharma, is called, in Pali - the ancient language in which much of it was first written down - ehipassiko dhamma, that is, 'the teaching (dhamma) of come (ehi) and see (passiko)'. It is the teaching that says come and see for yourself. Don't accept just on trust. Believe because you understand, experience and verify for yourself. Don't believe just because the Buddha tells you. This is what the Buddha himself said: 'Monks, don't accept what I say just out of respect for me. Just as gold is tested in the fire, so test my words in the fire of spiritual experience.'

When the Buddha's aunt and foster-mother, Mahaprajapati Gautami, confused by the conflicting versions of his teaching given even in his own lifetime by his disciples, asked him straight, 'What do you really teach?' the Buddha replied that she could work it out for herself: 'Whatever teachings you can be sure conduce to tranquillity and not to greed and hatred; to freedom and not to enslavement; to decrease of worldly ties and not to increase of them; to contentment and not to covetousness; to solitude and not to social distractions; to energy and not to sluggishness; to delight in good and not to delight in evil; of these teachings you can be sure that they constitute my Dharma.'(Shakespeare 'The Tempest' act I, sceneii)

One of the most prevalent ways in which some Buddhists take a one-sided view of the Dharma is in thinking of it in an exclusively negative manner, as just a matter of rooting out the whole of the lower evolution and leaving it at that. But it is evident from passages like those quoted above that the Buddha's own conception of it was one of positive growth, of a conscious effort to evolve and progress as an individual. As well as leaving the lower evolution behind, we need also to take some positive steps in the direction of the higher evolution. As well as giving up meanness we want to cultivate generosity. As well as avoiding being harsh and callous we want to develop kindness. And there is a set of four meditation practices which are specifically concerned with developing the whole range of positive emotion. These meditations are called the four brahma viharas, 'the abodes of the gods'. The first consists in the development of metta or love towards all living beings - a desire for the well-being of others, a wish that they may grow and develop. The second brahma vihara is karuna or compassion for those who are stuck, whose growth is stunted. Thirdly there is mudita or 'sympathetic joy' in the happiness of others - which is like when you go out into the garden in early summer and see the flowers all springing up and blooming. And the fourth is upeksha, equanimity or peace, an experience not of sitting back and putting your feet up, but of a vibrant spiritual equilibrium.

The four brahma viharas do not come naturally; they are not endowments of the lower evolution. They have to be consciously developed, for, as we have seen, spiritual development is the development of consciousness. Whereas the lower evolution is an unconscious development on the material level, the higher evolution is a conscious development on the mental level. At the same time the whole of evolution, lower and higher, is a continuous process. Of the two general scientific theories of evolution, that it is a mechanistic, random process, and the opposite view, that it could not have taken place without some kind of purpose or direction, the Buddhist approach would go with the second view. It is very broadly 'vitalist' in that it recognizes a will to Enlightenment somehow present in all forms of life and manifesting in any gesture of consideration or act of intelligent good will. With the beginning of the evolutionary process you get the impression of a sort of fumbling, with a lot of false starts - it seems a bit hit-or-miss. But then as you follow it further, whatever it is that stands behind the evolutionary process seems to become surer of itself, as it were, and to define itself more clearly as time goes by. And with the emergence of the aware individual human being undertaking the spiritual path it becomes fully conscious of itself, thereby speeding up the whole process.

The Buddhist has to tread very lightly in this area to avoid misunderstanding. Evolution is just a metaphor or model for Buddhism, a temporal model. In speaking of some 'thing', some reality behind the evolutionary process, we are simply using a different model, a spatial model. If we speak in terms of developing from one stage to another, that is to look at reality in temporal terms. But if we speak of what is there all the time, the absolute reality which is always here and now, that is to speak in spatial terms. So this is the function of the 'Will to Enlightenment' or bodhicitta, in this context - to transcend these spatio-temporal models. It is not a sort of cosmic life principle - not the life-force of the universe, or any kind of causative first principle - but rather a liberation principle, a will to transcend the universe or samsara.

We may say, in fact, that transcendence, self-transcendence, is what the whole of evolution, from the amoeba upwards, is about. We can say further that this evolutionary principle of self-transcendence is expressed in its highest and most fully self-conscious form in the figure of the Bodhisattva, the one who, according to Mahayana Buddhism, dedicates himself or herself to the cause of helping all sentient existence to Enlightenment. The Will to Enlightenment of a Bodhisattva is a fully committed volition to perpetual self-transcendence. And from the Bodhisattva to the Buddha there is only, as it were, a step.

It is from this perspective, seeing spiritual development in terms of perpetual self-transcendence, that we can best appreciate the often half-understood Buddhist concept of anatman, or 'no-self'. This is sometimes interpreted as meaning that we don't really exist, that there's a sort of hole where one imagines one's self to be. In fact, the point of this teaching is that we have no substantial unchanging self, no soul. Indeed, putting it more dynamically and experientially, we can say that for radical change, radical development, to take place - for a fully conscious self-transcendence to be possible - there can be no unchanging self.

We may look at Buddhism from a purely academic perspective as just an activity or philosophical position of a number of individuals calling themselves Buddhists. On the other hand, we can take the vast and awe-inspiring perspective of the Buddha's teaching itself. From this latter perspective, we are all frail, impermanent beings, born into the world and passing out of it with apparently little to show for our trouble - but at the same time we embody the universal possibility of Enlightenment. Just as the scientific concept of evolution involves a progression towards new biological organisms through periods of time that are practically unimaginable, so, according to Buddhism, our own lives take their place in a context of literally unimaginable temporal duration, in which, however, they are of literally cosmic importance. For among all the life-forms in the universe, from the amoeba to the highest realms of the gods, it is only the kind of sentient life to which human beings conform that can be, in the words of Lama Govinda, 'the vehicle for the rediscovery of the transcendental and inconceivable nature of mind or consciousness' - that can become, in short, a Buddha.