At least one path to enlightenment is simple: do as the current Buddha did.
It sounds flippant, but I mean it literally. I don’t truly know that it’s simple, but it seems like a reasonable course of action. If I want to play piano well, I could do worse than to practice as competent pianists before me did. If I want to write a novel, I could do worse than to adopt the habits of successful novelists. I doubt any of the above would work via rote emulation, and it’s not likely to lead to procedural innovation, but with an earnest effort toward understanding and mastery I would expect reasonable results.
(For the rest of this post I will butcher the history and metaphysics and psychology of Buddhism, as I know very little and understand even less.)
So, a path to enlightenment. Renounce your current life, leave your home and family, set yourself to spiritual striving, study meditation under several teachers, wander the countryside, take in the poverty and hardships of the populace, starve yourself half to death, and then eventually vow that you will sit in one place and not get up until you are enlightened. Keep the vow.
I suppose the unstated criterion that would guarantee success is have the nature and nurture and setting the Buddha did. But I’m interested in exactly those differences. If you found enlightenment, with your genetics and your upbringing in your time and your place, what would you do? How would you phrase your learnings?
I like what I perceive as the pragmatic and realistic aspects of Buddhism. Yes, there is suffering, but there is a causal chain that creates it that you can come to understand and, with practice, break free of. Not that there aren’t a dozen dozen other approaches that amount to the same thing, but there’s a particular phrasing in the four noble truths that resonates with me.
We usually exist in a condition of suffering, or an inability to be satisfied.
This condition arises from attachment or craving, born of ignorance.
This condition can be ended by resolving ignorance and letting go of desire.
Here’s an instruction manual.
Irrespective of what I said earlier about following the Buddha, one no longer needs to wander the world much to accept the first noble truth; that is self-evident on cursory examination of one’s mind or perusing the world as brought to us through telecommunications. The third and fourth truths follow from the second, which to me is both the gem and the one I most wonder how it would look like from other points of view.
Would a 2022 American Buddha have a different diagnosis? I expect that to the extent the second noble truth is actually true there is some universality in the concept, and the underlying ideas behind it would overlap across time and space. But exactly as others have expounded on the Buddha’s teaching, the understanding and the phrasing would change — only perhaps moreso if the understanding was independently developed rather than illuminated by others along this framework. Four noble truths? An eightfold path? Why not three or five or ten?
There is reality (maybe) and there are models of reality, and each model is useful to the extent that you find it so for your purposes. I think the second noble truth may be saying that your particular model sucks and its model is better, as measured by the yardstick of the first noble truth. The third and fourth truths are about adjusting your model to theirs.
Ignorance is key to the second noble truth. It is only when I don’t know what ink is that I am flustered when my pen runs dry. Although that’s not quite right. And we’re back to noble truths three and four: I am flustered when I don’t know what ink is or I don’t know how to refill it.
And now we are back to science and philosophy, but not the institutional kind. What am I misapprehending about reality? How can I better view it? These may not be answerable immediately, but it’s also no good to me to wait for a few hundred years of theory development and peer reviewed research papers. I need something approachable in my lifetime, something practical. This means I won’t understand it fully, and the theory will have to catch up later.
Sitting under a tree for seven weeks was recorded in someone’s lab notebook as working once. I could do worse than trying that.