Willing to Die For … || By Beth Hinnen, Certified Mindfulness and Meditation Teacher
A story of one of the Buddha’s great insights comes to mind these days. With AI being portrayed as having the possibility to end the human race, I am wondering, what am I willing to live for? Which for me is very different than what I am willing to die for.
Back to the Buddha’s story. He had many great moments of insight as Siddhartha, his name before his enlightenment. The first was sitting under a rose apple tree at age 10-11 (or 9 or 12). While his father was out managing the great estate, Siddhartha, spontaneously, found himself thinking and exploring with happiness and pleasure, born of seclusion. How he tells it, there was no grasping, or craving … just pure pleasant-ness (or maybe … pure awareness, a precursor to enlightenment). It was so profound, it fed the very insight I’ve been thinking about. Skip to Siddhartha being married and just having a child. He decides to leave that life to pursue the spiritual path. As it turns out, his father had hired an astrologer at his birth to forecast his future and the astrologer reported he would either be a great king … or a great spiritual leader. Whether he heard this, or intuition guided Siddhartha, millions and millions of people over 2600 years, have deep gratitude that he chose this latter path.
Which brings us to the insight I’ve been recalling. Five or six years out, after leaving his family’s great estate, Siddhartha had settled into a sangha, community, of a small group of ascetics. He, like all the rest, in their pursuit of enlightenment practiced extreme renunciation. The idea was, and still is, that having a body is the problem. They believed that’s where craving began — gluttony, alcoholism, sexual overdrive — which led to the spiral of suffering. So by denying the body nutrition, care, basic maintenance, one could renounce one’s self into nirvana (enlightenment, awakening). So committed was Siddhartha, he ate only one grain of rice per day. He gave a rather graphic description of what his body looked like. He was so gaunt, that his belly button touched his spine … and his spine touched his belly button. His face was like a skeleton, his skin hung on his bones, and he had zero energy. Not only had he turned away from his previous life of luxury and sense pleasure, he also adopted a prevalent belief at that time (which still exists today), that such renunciation was … the path to enlightenment.
Imagine Siddhartha sitting under a tree, near death, barely conscious, when the insight drops in (I paraphrase grossly), “if I die … I won’t succeed. … If I lose this body … there is no vehicle to carry me to my final goal of complete and total enlightenment.” And in that realization, Siddhartha intuits, (again, I paraphrase grossly). “How dumb.” Indeed, he recalls that time as a young boy under a rose apple tree, the pleasant feeling of simply being alive, thinking and exploring, born from seclusion. … He confirmed what scientists are now documenting … that being outside, connected to nature … to being-ness … is healthy for humans. And here Siddhartha got that, on the brink of death.
As luck would have it, a young girl carrying rice milk saw Siddhartha, a practical skeleton, and offered it to him. He gladly took it, … and received another great insight, the path of “the middle way,” … living somewhere between ascetic renunciation and sensual indulgence. Siddhartha recognized that clinging to a belief … severe asceticism … would kill him. What he finally trusted … was his own experience … his own insight. As it turns out, his ascetic buddies immediately canceled him when they saw he had taken rice milk. They turned away, accusing him of succumbing to sensual indulgence. Within a few days, Siddhartha made his final commitment to enlightenment, and sat under the Bodhi tree, awakening to his, indeed to humanity’s, True Nature.
This resonates so much with a few conversations I’ve had recently with people where I suddenly had to question my own views. Which ones am I clinging to … that keep me alive? In my last blog, “A Real Breakfast,” I wrote about how I’ve revamped my nutrition. … That process overturned years of beliefs, and still I struggle with some of them as I eat a full meal, and dessert. Even so, the belief … nay, my actual experience … that real food, real nutrition, in a sufficient amount are my path to health is core to what I’m now willing to live for. And I’m open to updating it with new information. Only, when I examine some of my other beliefs (or as the Buddha puts it, my views) such as … how people should drive … or go through the TSA line … how my cat should behave … or how I should behave … how the world is just fine … and how fear is the mind killer … I have to wonder if they are keeping me alive … or if I’m just willing to die for them.
Here’s the difference … being willing to die for a belief means, for me, that nothing can change my mind. Not new information … not science overturning previous findings (this happens in the health realm all … the … time) … not a friend’s testimony (where I can see, hear and verify their transformation) … not even the plea of a loved one (what I imagine intervention to be like). Nothing. I cling to my beliefs as if they will save me and carry me across some weird, designated invisible finish line. … Imagine if Siddhartha did not question his own belief about renunciation. … What if he skipped the rice milk? … “Naw, I’m good. I’m sure enlightenment is right here … I’ll just close my eyes for a moment,”… and he dies. … We would not have Buddhism here today.
For me, I’m now realizing I’d rather live for my beliefs, than die for them. And I can do this by … holding them lightly. Which means, I am open to recognizing that’s exactly what they are … beliefs … and they may some day be proven wrong. And honestly … I’d rather that be the case, than lose my life clinging to them. Unfortunately, today in the world, it feels like there are a lot of beliefs people are willing to die for.
So my question is … which ones are we willing to live for? … And could that lead us back to experiencing what the Buddha did under the rose apple tree … thinking and exploring with happiness and pleasure? If the thinking and exploring are the holding lightly of beliefs, imagine how much more fun the world could be.
About the Author: Beth Hinnen came to the spiritual path from the corporate world. After experiencing impermanence and greed, she left to study Yoga and has over 1,000 hours in Yoga teacher training, and ended up specializing in the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali, spiritual scripture that closely aligns with Buddhism. From there, she studied Zen Buddhism for over ten years, including in-person, month-long monastic retreats, until she earned certification, in January, 2023, as a Mindfulness and Meditation Teacher with Jack Kornfield and Tara Brach. Currently, Beth is a co-leader of the IMCD Council, and on the Teachers Collective, as administrator. She hosts a Meetup group called Yoga Meets Buddhism, and for the past three years, has held an online Dharma Wednesdays class that discusses the Yoga Sutras while also bringing in Buddhist teachings, along with Sufi poets, Christianity, Judaism and other spiritual paths that reinforce the words of Sri Swami Satchidananda, the founder of Integral Yoga where Beth studied. “The truth is one, the paths are many.” More information about Beth is at www.samayaco.org.
