You Want to Escape from Samsara?
Samsara is like a sky filled with various intricate cloud formations. Spectators find those formations enchanting, they get fascinated by…
Samsara is like a sky filled with various intricate cloud formations. Spectators find those formations enchanting, they get fascinated by them, and so they get attached/repulsed by them. Some formations feel so sweet, spectators want to stay with them forever, while other formations feel so scary, or so disgusting, spectators want them to go away forever.
The deluded, untrained minds consider those formations as something very real. Being perceived as real, those formations attract or repulse the spectators.
Because the cloudy sky is in constant flux, constantly changing, the act of attaching to those formations causes suffering. Untrained minds don’t want desired formations to disappear. Also, they don’t want undesired formations to appear. In a word, it’s an endless suffering.
Because of that unbearable suffering, poor deluded individuals want to escape. They get to the point where they want to leave samsara. Leave it all behind. But they can’t. Try as they might, they cannot escape the prison.
Then they hear about the enlightenment. About people who did manage to leave samsara behind. About people who have reached nirvana.
Naturally, some people who are suffering want to do the same. They want to eradicate suffering. They look at the ever changing formations that appear so enchanting to them, and decide that there must be a better, more just world where the experiences they enjoy will not betray them. They then envision that shiny new world as consisting of permanent, sturdy, never changing beautiful and desirable experiences. They call it ‘nirvana’.
But that approach is akin to the situation where we’re taking a long walk carrying a heavy bag on our right shoulder. After a while, the pain we feel that is caused by the heavy bag weighing on our shoulder becomes unbearable. But we must keep walking. What we do then is move the bag from our right shoulder to our left shoulder. At that moment, we feel immense pleasure, because the pain is subsiding.
However, that pleasure is merely the beginning of a new pain. And so on.
That is not a proper way to escape from samsara. We cannot escape from a prison by burrowing our way into another prison.
A person who truly escapes samsara is not looking for another, more just, more pleasant world. Such world does not exist. All that needs to be done to reach nirvana is to stop looking for such world. It is the search for a more pleasant, more just world that is causing the suffering.
Once we abandon such foolish hopes, we find ourselves in the same world, watching the same ever changing cloud formations. Only this time, we don’t find them enchanting nor fascinating.
As one Buddhist master said, when they asked him how does it feel to be fully enlightened: “Nothing special”.