My favorite thing about the title of this blog post is that it might get some people a bit hot under the meditation cushion, but it’s not too likely to get my website firebombed. However, had I replaced Buddha with Jesus or Mohammed… well, that could lead to a whole different set of consequences.
And what’s most interesting to me about that is what Buddha, Jesus and Mohammed all have in common is:
They are a collection of lines and squiggles that people interpret into sounds, add meaning to them and then act in some way based on what they think the person who created the lines and squiggles meant.
Silly humans.
Anyway, back to the Buddha sucking…
So, many people engage in meditative practice to achieve the goal of awakening or enlightenment. And they turn to their various teachers and books and tapes and workshops and retreats to travel down the “spiritual path.”
Now, I’m not going to argue about the validity of the motive or the existence of the goal or the reality of some sort of path. Instead, let’s just take a look at the success rate of one of the greatest teachers and his students.
The Buddha is often called “The Great Doctor,” because it’s said that he taught 84,000 different people and gave each one of them their own unique meditation technique because he could see exactly and perfectly what they needed to attain awakening.
First things first. In the area that the Buddha had influence over during the 45 years of his teaching, there were approximately 5 million people. So this tremendously powerful teacher only got to about 1.7% of the people in his neighborhood.
Leaving that alone for a second, let’s look back at the 84k who decided they wanted to hear what the ochre-robed one had to say. According to the texts, there were 500 “Arahants”, five hundred people who “Got it” (they are, it’s said, the ones who codified the Buddha’s teaching after the Buddha died).
So, 500 people who reached the goal. Five hundred who got the brass ring.
Five hundred out of EIGHTY FOUR THOUSAND.
Let’s to the math, shall we?
500 out of 84,000 is just less than 0.60% …
The greatest teacher that ever was, according to Buddhists, had a success rate of barely more than one half of one percent.
I don’t know about you, but there aren’t many things I’d put a lot of energy into with those kinds of odds.
Now, granted, if we were all living 2500 years ago in Northern India, there’s no way of knowing if you, me or your noisy neighbor would have been one of the 500… and there’s no way to know now.
As my friend, the meditation teacher Robert Hover, said to me, “The number of beings who must conspire to allow for your awakening is so vast as to be unknowable… so you may as well assume it’ll happen because that’s just more fun… but it’s completely out of your control.”
Kinda takes the pressure off, doesn’t it? 😉
Comments
15 responses to “The Buddha Su-u-u-cks”
What a relief! [Leaves cushion, exits for beer ….] 😉
And you’re under the impression that there’s something that isn’t completely out of your control?
As for the hearsay you’re attributing to an alleged Buddha as if it were fact, there are as many conflicting but romantic tales, statistics, stories, and quotes by/about that figure as there are regarding…oh, say, Madonna, or Franklin D. Roosevelt. Let’s not pay more attention to these charming anecdotes than they deserve, eh?
I haven’t found anything yet that’s under my control… though I do enjoy looking sometimes 😉
What’s funny about this charming anecdote is the logical inconsistency in it: If I were going to pass on an anecdote about a great teacher, I’d give the guy a higher success rate.
Well, let’s just hope that a great teacher’s notion of success and your notion of success have absolutely nothing in common. And perhaps that’s the point of the charming anecdotes? 😉
Ah ha ha…dear G. Cha –
Let’s DO pay attention to those charming anecdotes! I wanna soak ’em all up, and decide for myself – as we are humbly instructed to do by the ‘best’ of the Gurus/Buddhas/Saviors, past and present. I liken my ego’s hell-bent efforts (I do mean HELL) to attain enlightenment through its clever machinations to a puppy chasing its tail, a parakeet cuddling up to the image in its mirror. Whether the ‘hard’ numbers in Sashen’s piece are verifiable isn’t the point (to me). The point (to me) is there’s nothing my mind can conjure up worth defending. I write with a smile (can’t figure out how to do the little happy face you’ve both inserted!) and I’m hoping for more Sashen posts to crack the code I’m abandoning, moment by moment…! It’s all about MEEEEEE!!!!!!!!!!!
You seem awfully bored.
talking heads meets deepak chopra…
Speaking of Deepak and the Buddha… have you seen his “novel” called Buddha?
At first, given the size of DC’s name, I thought it was the Buddha writing about Deepak!
Well…. another site about……you, and only you. Be happy friend. You are doing a great job.
The believers, like me, exist only if there are atheist.
There is a flaw in your math. You are assuming that only 500 people “Got It”. What about the ones they passed “it” on to. Let’s say each reached out to one other person, and they to one and so forth….now we have exponentially increased the number of people reached through Budda. Its foolish to think for a second he “only” transformed 500 people…and they kept it all to themselves…on another note…if I am so fortunate and blessed to have such an impact on “just” 500 people…I will leave this world knowing it had purpose.
Recalculate your math based on exponential growth and I think you will far surpass 84,000.
Hi Carrie,
Point well taken. And my math still holds. The “500” are, according to the Pali scriptures the number of Arahants who achieved awakening as a result of the direct teaching of the Buddha (though, Ananda, the 500th, got there after the Buddha’s death and on the morning of the meeting of the Arahants).
My first point is simply that the person who is held out as the greatest teacher (one of the names used to refer to the Buddha is translated as “greatest teacher”) had such a small percentage of “success stories” … so small in fact, as to be statistically meaningless. And small enough to wonder about the cause-and-effect relationship in “getting it.”
I was mostly exploring the direct effect of the master teacher.
Now, regarding the indirect effect, to say that the total number of people who “got it” (as a result of the continued passing of the teaching) is “large” only has meaning in relation to:
a) The total number of people who received the teachings. That is, 84,000 is a small number if 1000x or 1,000,000x that number were practitioners, and/or if the total population since the time of the teachings is approximately 112 billion (which it is), and;
b) The number of people who “got it” WITHOUT having received the teachings is commensurately small. That is, if there are 84,000(or 84,000,000 or 84) who got it without “practice” or without Buddhist teaching, each different result suggests something about the efficacy of the practice.
I would hope that given the number of practitioners today and the number who claim to have, or are attributed to have, “gotten it”, the meditative community would engage in an active debate about how reliable the techniques for “getting it” actually are… and, perhaps, discover that there are other factors that do/don’t lead to the pinnacle realization.
Other factors like epilepsy, brain tumors or suicidal depression perhaps? Of course, the question remains, what in reality (as opposed manic abstractionism,) is the “it” that is “gotten” beyond being the denouement of the hero’s story? Judging from some accounts it sounds like a disease!
That said, Buddhism is richer and has more to offer than the mere and usually isolated, egotistical quest for enlightenment, and its success as a practice should not be judged solely on that one criteria.
Other factors like, randomness, un-reproducible psychological tendencies, neurological “wiring”, or, for all I know, diet, phase of the moon, or whether Brittany is in or out of rehab at any given moment.
I agree that many stories make the “it” seem not worth striving for. But that’s always the way of it: We hear about something we think will make us happy and we go after it regardless of the evidence that it didn’t necessarily give that result to those who got what we think we want. And the real kicker is that if we found a million people who got what we want, and didn’t win the happiness prize along with it, we would think that we’re special! “Oh, well that million people didn’t get happier along with the Big-E, but if *I* got it, I’d be different!”
And while Buddhism does have much to offer, it’s BUDDHISM itself that holds enlightenment out as the goal.
With regard to the “egotistical” part… well, that’s been a comical debate for 1000+ years. The Mahayana claim that the Theravada approach is egocentric, while simultaneously saying that “ego” is only a concept. So, their own teaching invalidates the argument they use to justify the “Maha” in their “yana.” (That and the idea that what one realizes when they vow to enlighten all beings is that everything is in the mind, and therefore there are no beings to enlighten and/or all beings are always enlightened).
Suffice it to say, the enlightenment thing has been a big sales pitch without a lot of evidence that the E-store is open, or has what you want in stock.
E-xactly,We keep hearing the same nonse being banted around. Namely enlightenment is the goal and within the same breath that there is no one….or no thing to be enlightened. It would be nice if they made up their minds……or no minds. Also what are the bench marks to know when you have made it “there” If it’s a state then cognition of the fact is normally experienced outside of that state. eg I can only compare oranges to apples once I have apples.This creates a paradox…namely if I can remember the experience then I’m not in that state…….If I can recall suffering then I’m not in bliss. In other words beware of anybody selling eternal states of bliss!
Thank you alot for this forum……..it’s nice to have a critical mind as appossed to an open one.
Hi Matt,
I love your admonition, “beware of anybody selling eternal states of bliss.” I would add, “ESPECIALLY, if they can’t introduce you to a statistically relevant group of people who have achieved the goal!”
You would never invest money with a financial planner who says “While I have no track record to substantiate my next comment: I can make you millions of dollars if you simply do what I say!” Or, you would never go to a doctor who says, “I don’t have any survivors of this surgery, but I’m sure that it will work.”
Yet, people fork over money and time to teachers who promise some future state of attainment, with nothing to back it up (and one or two students who ostensibly “got it” out of thousands who haven’t does NOT prove that “it works”).