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LEAD ARTICLE | EASTERN HORIZON 5

This time of year, Buddhists, too, celebrate the light – Yet the Buddha’s story reminds us that suffering is our
quite literally, celebrating the Buddha’s enlightenment. most powerful teacher. Our despair about the world
But this celebration is not about decorations and happy falling apart is exactly the place where we can see light
songs. It’s about a man who went through hell. The inside of darkness. When we let ourselves really look,
Buddha left his privileged home and wandered for many we see so much more than the narrow content of our
years, seeing sickness and war everywhere he went. tiny skulls or the sensational clickbait of media designed
Overcome by so much suffering, he looked for spiritual to paint the multicolored world with one brush. In the
teachers who could alleviate his pain. After years of midst of wildfires and war, we see people being kind
wandering without finding answers, he sat down under and decent to each other. The same aches and pains
a tree and resolved not to get up until his questions that we complain about can remind us how miraculous
were answered. and unlikely it is that we exist in the first place. The
challenge is to hold it all. Not just the darkness of
The Buddha had hit rock bottom. As he sat under the cruelty and suffering, but the light that’s right here in
tree, his mind did what happens to all of us when we sit front of us, right next door, right underfoot.
still with no distractions -- his mind went wild. He was
visited by every torment that his brain could muster. And then we have a choice. If light and darkness are
Sadness, rage, sexual longing, boredom. And the Buddha always present, what’s our response? When the Buddha
just sat through it all. Just sat there, unmoving. Finally, had his awakening, he considered keeping his insights
as the morning star rose, the Buddha experienced deep to himself. Instead, he chose to devote the rest of his
insight. His first words were, “Together with all beings, I life to sharing what he knew, to make the world better.
have awakened.” For forty years, he taught what he had discovered,
passing on a way to live in a world filled with suffering
What did he wake up to? He discovered what’s there that continues to offer healing and courage to this day.
for all of us to see when we sit still and watch what Knowing that the world will always be burning, our
our minds throw at us. He discovered that many of our choice is whether to settle into despair, or to use our
demons dissolve with time, that there’s much more energies and abilities to work for what we know to be
good in the world than we believe based on our narrow good and right and kind.
focus on what’s wrong, that most of the darkness
eventually passes, and that most of the suffering is of On the eve of what many believe is a new era of
our own making. And at the most fundamental level, he darkness, our choices about how we’ll go forward could
discovered that we are completely interconnected with not matter more. EH
everyone and everything, and that the separateness we
feel is a painful illusion.

What Buddhism celebrates is the Buddha’s descent into
his own inner hell and his ability to see his way through
that darkness. But what does this story have to do with Jan 23, 2025
the climate crisis, or rising hatred in the world, or the
feud you’re currently having with a colleague at work?
When problems seem overwhelming, our first impulse
isn’t to look right at them. We search for distractions like
parties and Netflix and doomscrolling on social media.
And why not? Who would sign up to enter the hell
realms that the Buddha experienced?