Sacred Joy

A bodhicitta prayer has to be there, of course; some variation of the Four Immeasurables. The one that is second nature to me now runs:

Bodhicitta is precious
May it arise in those who have not cultivated it;
In those who have cultivated it, may it not diminish
May it ever grow and flourish.

May all beings have happiness and the causes of happiness
May all beings be without suffering and the causes of suffering
May all beings never be without the sacred joy that is without suffering
May all beings dwell in the great equanimity
Impartial, free of attachment and aversion.

By this merit may enlightenment be attained
May we overcome the afflictions of evil
May we liberate all beings from the ocean of suffering
The stormy waves of birth, old age, illness, and death.

It’s the Mahayana in a nutshell: the commitment not just to my own enlightenment, the relief of my own suffering, but the enlightenment of everyone and the relief of everyone’s suffering.

I don’t mind that it’s quixotic: aspirations ought to be quixotic. And it’s in the context of countless lives: nobody’s expecting Eddie to end all suffering by next Thursday. But I do have problems. My goal is not really ataraxia (though that was probably Buddha Shakyamuni’s original goal.) I do not wish to be liberated from my attachment to beauty, goodness, and truth; and I don’t want to stamp all distress out of my life: birth, old age, illness, and death are the price of admission to the show, and I’m content to pay them.

Buddhists tend to get over this hurdle by insisting on a technical definition of “suffering” – it’s specifically the distress caused by mistaking the nature of the self – but I’m pretty sure Shakyamuni meant all the suffering, and that’s certainly the plain sense of the prayer.

Nevertheless the setting of the largest possible context appeals to me (as you would expect of someone who is culturally a Protestant): the project of undeceiving myself is not private affair, its completion entails undeceiving everyone; beetles, deities, and even Eddie.

And probably the thing I’ve always liked best about the prayer is the “sacred joy” that is sandwiched awkwardly between the negatives. “Never be without the sacred joy that is without suffering”: it’s almost an aggressively clumsy way of putting it. An apophatic impulse, maybe? I’m not sure. It’s everywhere in Buddhist thought, though: the conviction that if you clear all the impediments away, what you’re left with is not going to be the dark nihilist void, but rather a radiant, continually unfolding delight.

It may be due to my atheist upbringing that I seem so impervious to nihilism. Never having identified that sacred joy with Old Nobodaddy (as Blake calls Him, in a certain mood) I can dispense with Him without calling it in question. It is to me one of the most obvious, important, and persistent facts of the universe, and a metaphysics that doesn’t account for it fails as miserably as a physics that can’t account for the sun rising.