​The Buddha's teaching on knowledge and wisdom, Dharma, serves to remedy the confusion, existential discomfort, and pain that afflict all beings. What the Buddha taught is premised on insight gained through direct observation, reasoning, personal experience, and realization.
The Buddha's path of Dharma serves to uncover an innate nature, common to all life, that is uncontaminated by delusion and endowed with natural qualities of truth, beauty, and goodness. This awake condition is termed "bodhi" or "enlightenment."
The entire purpose of the Buddha's teaching is to free all living creatures from a universal condition of bewilderment and suffering. The Buddha's teaching, the Dharma, is a path of knowledge and practical application that is founded on a deep insight into the causes of our bewilderment and what remedies it. The Buddha's enlightenment was an awakening to our true nature, and consequently, his teaching addresses how to unveil a natural heritage of innate sanity that we are born with.
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The Buddha pointed to what can be directly observed with our senses and understood through reasoning. As such, his teaching resembles the knowledge tradition we in the modern world refer to as science. Yet, while our sciences are concerned with what can be known as objective material phenomena, the Buddha's teaching, the Dharma, goes further, identifying conscious experience rather than matter as primary in constructing the realities of ourselves and the perceived phenomenal world. This is an essential premise for understanding Buddhism.
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Most importantly, the Buddha's saw how the ground of our being is pure, and how suffering is not fundamental to our innate nature. Seeing how our minds unnecessarily are bewildered and lost in confusion and suffering, the buddha dedicated his life to guiding others to freedom and enlightenment.
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For more than two millennia, the Buddha's vision and his teaching, the Dharma, has provided entire cultures, and countless individuals, with a vision of gentleness, caring, and wisdom. This has been reflected in Buddhist cultures where there is a pervasive trust in the truth, creativity, and goodness basic to all creatures.
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​​As someone born into Western modernity who has had the privilege of studying and practising the Dharma under the guidance of great Buddhist masters, I wish pay homage to a tradition that I see as the light of the world, and share its value in terms of my own language. It is here that I have found it particularly useful to define the vision and value of the Dharma in terms of the classical triad of truth, beauty, and goodness.
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These pages are in honor of my teachers, and are dedicated to sharing the spirit of their greatness.
The three bodhisattvas depicted here - Manjushri, Vajrapani, and Avalokiteshvara - embody the principal qualities of enlightenment, namely wisdom, strength, and compassion. These can be understood as parallels to the Western "transcendentals", truth, beauty, and goodness, and can also be seen as representative of the dimensions of perfect awakening - dharmakaya, samboghakaya, and nirmanakaya.
Truth
Truth is validly knowing what is. This is the objective of all knowledge traditions or sciences. But since knowing is a cognitive quality situated in a subject, a science that fails to understand how our individual first-person subjective experience constructs our perceptions, is confined to observing and mapping the tangible and the objective. It would be foolish to dismiss objectivist science; we are all indebted to it, and in recent years we see the emergence of a cognitive science. Yet, these sciences still offer little insight into the nature of our mind, and how it is our individual minds that are fundamental to our understanding and experiences of ourselves and the world, and particularly to our experiences of happiness and suffering, sanity and confusion, entanglement and liberation.
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This is where the Buddha's greater science of Dharma exceeds in its scope, offering insight into the basic goodness of who we are, and liberation from the narrow constructs of our confusion and entanglement. The nature of the Buddhist path is cutting through our confused experience, and opening up to a realization of truth, which is the ground for immense flourishing. This allows for an unfolding of the power and creativity of beauty, and the goodness and caring of love.
Beauty
The experience of truth, even in mere glimpses, sets us free and unleashes our power and creativity. This is where we enjoy being alive in the world; this is where we might celebrate the world in art such as poetry, painting, music, or dance. While sometimes art in the modern world is limited to the experience of pain, mediated by confusion, this does not need to define our understanding of art. Artful creativity is found in the experience of liberation, and cultures that are privy to such uncontaminated experience of reality, are sensitive to the raw and luminous quality that lies at the core of ourselves and the world. This experience prompts sacred art - artistry that comes from a greater place of connection to what we truly are, and our natural strength and beauty.
The freedom of truth is not the property of ego. It is the selfless panoramic experience that is free of the barriers between self and other. Selflessness allows for a warmth and openness that sees the world without the insecurity of ego. It is love, warmth, goodness, caring. This dimension of who we are is naturally there at all times. Yet with self-centering, we loose sight of our own goodness and confidence, ending up with an insecurity that artificially constructs barriers between self and others.
The innate quality of who we are is a warmth that is not trapped behind such barriers of self versus other. While perfect selflessness might be the ultimate potential of who we are, there is no reason why we should not presently be capable of dismantling our armor and allowing the others in. We know the sense of joy and freedom when this happens. Sometimes we let in only one person, the experience of love, love for a significant other. Sometimes we might sense or at least appreciate the selfless love of the sages - the selfless empathy that embraces others.
It is here that we encounter a robust and enduring quality of happiness that oddly enough is not a property of our ego. There is warmth without a central radiator. Countless human traditions extol the beauty and value of selfless love, but we should recognise this is not about moralism, but about what truly enables our own, and others', happiness.
Goodness
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About Jakob Leschly
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