In my Eastern Religious Thought class, we began our study of Buddhism today. A year ago, our first class on Buddhism was our first class online, our first class after the pandemic took away any naive idea that we are in control of our own life and death.
It was stunning how quickly my students “got” Buddhism last year; and it is already stunning this year, as well; there is so much common experience of suffering (dukkha, or “out-of-jointness”) to draw on.
I had a colleague once who said she would never try to teach Buddhism to anyone under 35, and I admit that it has been difficult! But suddenly I have a class full of 15-18 year-olds who are 35 already in all the ways that are necessary to Buddhist understanding.
Siddhartha Gautama set his path towards enlightenment after seeing the four passing sights: an aged person, a diseased person, a dead person, and a person in contemplative awareness of the other three. When he settled into his own contemplation, Siddhartha Gautama fully “woke up” to the reality of impermanence, thus becoming the “Buddha,” the awakened one. His realization and acceptance of the impermanence of all things, and particularly of the self, led to a flood of compassion that turned him into one of the greatest spiritual teachers humanity has known.
But we don’t need the Buddha, or his teachings, to become awake, any more than the Buddha needed those things. We just need to become fully aware, the way he was. And certain occurrences and experiences in our lives can make that awareness acute—even inescapable—without respect to our chronological age.
--The Rev. Barbara Talcott
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