Sunday, May 1, 2016

"Right Speech" and Some Not-Swearing on the Eightfold Path

So. The Eightfold Path of Buddhism. I can't really begin to get into the absolute intricacies myself, but the general idea is that there is a "middle way" between the extremes of lifestyle that people tend to gravitate towards in the search for ultimate happiness: either over-the-top indulgence and frivolous living, or a lifestyle with almost everything stripped away, living on the absolute bare necessities. The second kind of lifestyle doesn't really sound like any fun to me, and I'm pretty sure it's the same for you. "Give up your phone, your computer, all your clothes, your house, your car, and any food that someone doesn't offer to you first." Uh, sorry, no.

But minus the iPhone and the car, that's pretty much what Siddhartha Gautama, Buddhism's founder, did. He was the son of a Kshatriya raja, a king, and a soothsayer said at Siddhartha's birth that the child would grow to be a great king... but if he ever saw the sights of human misery or the tranquility of a monk, he'd become a religious teacher and a Buddha (Enlightened One.) Which of course scared the bejesus out of the king - son's gotta follow in the family business! He spent around 30 years keeping Siddhartha from seeing a dead body, an aged person, a diseased person, or an ascetic monk. These four oddly specific sights (which I guess included his own grandmother) would eventually creep into Siddhartha's life, long after the prince had completed his education and married, and had a son. Around age thirty, Siddhartha happened upon some of these scenes, and everything began to unravel. His awareness of the suffering and pain in life culminated in an experience where he entered his harem room at the palace and had a vision that all the beautiful young women there would become old and wrinkled. Poor guy.

Anyways, he panicked. He kissed his wife and infant son goodbye in the dead of night, took the kingdom's best horse, and rode off into the distance. Then he chopped off his hair, sent the horse back, and traded clothes with a beggar. So begins Siddhartha Gautama's ascetic life.

I think that the story of his origins is hilarious in its own weird way. And I managed to tell the whole story without swearing! (More on that later.) But anyways, it ended up that Siddhartha was traveling around with some other monks, starving and basically torturing himself (he slept in a cremation ground among rotting corpses, and on thorns, in hopes that the pain would enlighten him). And it wasn't fun. And it wasn't helping! He was so thin from starvation that he could put his hand on his stomach and feel his own spine. One day, he's walking along a stream and faints because he's so out of energy, and hits the cold water. That wakes him up, and he realizes, after everything, after ALL THIS, he hasn't found enlightenment. So he deals with his problems the way we all tend to do nowadays, and he goes to a food stand and eats a meal.

This, of course, caused his monk friends - who just happened to be passing by - to call him a traitor. So he (probably) shrugged, finished his meal and sat under a fig tree, and he meditated. He decided to meditate until he received enlightenment. And he did! From then on, he was known as the Buddha. First step now was to find his friends, and preach what he learned. In that first sermon, in Deer Park, the Buddha "taught that neither the extreme of indulgence nor the extreme of asceticism was acceptable as a way of life and that one should seek to live in the middle way." (This quote and the story of the Buddha all come from Hopfe's Religions of the World, 13th edition, a great read for information on all of the major religions.)

So the middle way seeks to remove all suffering and indulgence - nothing excess, just a balanced life that can and should eventually lead to Nirvana. It's not a state of bliss you're looking for, but an escape from craving and desire. As we've discovered in Dr. Salazar's Ethics class, the most direct guidelines for achieving this are given to us through the Eightfold Path, which the Buddha revealed when he gave that first sermon.

(The Eightfold Path of the Buddha)

The Eightfold Path involves all different manners of balancing your life with the world around you. I was asked for class to not only (somewhat embarrassingly) disclose which of the branches I thought I had the most trouble with, but then to take a week and work on it. And when my first thought had four letters and began with an "f", I knew which one I was going to end up pursuing.

Right Speech is based on Right Thinking, according to the writings of Thich Nhat Hanh. "Sometimes, when there are blocks of suffering in us, they may manifest as speech or actions without going through the medium of thought." Maybe it's silly, but I swear like a sailor in my casual life. And Right Speech involves "Not speaking cruelly. We don't shout, slander, curse, encourage suffering, or create hatred." And up until here, I assumed if I didn't say something scandalous in front of a boss or professor, I was doing okay. My friends know, my parents put up with it now (probably a red flag, after years of admonishment), and anybody who's gone out for a beer with me after work has noticed the difference between how I "am" and how I "act" at work. I put those in quotes because it's really apparent to me that I've been actively behaving during the day - like a first-grader told to sit still for a lesson. And that's not the way it should be! It's a bad habit, and one that I needed to relieve.

So I quit. Cold turkey. I wrote "DON'T SWEAR" in Sharpie on the palm of my right hand (where I record all the important things) and set off on my week of chaste speech. It started off easy enough, doing homework alone on a Saturday afternoon, and then I went out that night.

At dinner with a couple friends, I checked my hand a couple times and kept up with the no-swears thing for a couple hours, feeling a little proud, like how someone feels when they start a crash diet right before bed and are 8 hours into the diet by the time they wake up. Then my purse got caught on the bathroom door and I dropped an f-bomb and it was back to square one.

I decided I couldn't just not swear, and I couldn't really do it alone. So when I got back to the table... I apologized. I explained that I was working on a school assignment to better myself, and that I had decided to minimize swearing in my life, at least for the week. And I apologized for the swear. (Which of course, devolved into banter from my friends trying to get me to repeat whatever swear I said, but, you know, what are friends for?) My mission evolved here: I'd also decided on no censors. No "Christ on a cracker" or "crap" or "strumpet." The whole point wasn't to try and make myself radio-appropriate, but to be able to say that I don't need the swears to enhance my speech. I don't need to offend or be cruel to show how strongly I feel something - because after that week, I noticed that's what I was using them for. Like my own words weren't enough to convey my message.

Withdrawal for the first few days hurt. And to break a habit, whether it's smoking or fingernail-biting or not using the f-word more than the word "the" in a day, is kind of hard. But coming out on the other side (without any really cool stories about my squeaky-clean speaking saving the day), I feel relieved. Not because I don't have to play along anymore, but because I feel less bound by the modifiers in my sentence structures. The big difference came when I noticed I was swearing less (although never 100% not-at-all) in my own thoughts. My efforts didn't just change what I said aloud, they changed how I think. And it only took a week!

I'm out of my no-swear week now, and I'm kind of glad to be back. There's a lot of fun in a well-placed word, and sometimes I really do feel so strongly about something that I need to just throw the words in and let it out. And that's okay! That's the most important part, I've found, is that that's okay. There's a difference between excess and moderation. And maybe I won't be happening into Nirvana any time soon (no WAY I'm giving up my phone nor potato chips), but my own lifestyle has been improved a little bit, and for that I'm thankful. I take my own words more seriously now, and so do the people around me. I'm a little more radio-appropriate, and a little closer to figuring myself out, too.

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