Fascinating 😉
Did want to make one point about this.
“ The Buddha escaped suffering by leaving the realm of mortals, the world of material desires. He left behind all attachments. The growth of civilization meant little to him. Cultural creativity was of no concern. Family lost its meaning. The middle way was the only way. But isn’t it true, as Nietzsche argued, that such an attachment to non-attachment is itself a form of nihilism?”
I’ll let the Buddha speak for himself, this is my take on it.
If you have a leak in a water pipe, it is not necessary to first understand the true nature of plumbing and how and why pipes come to leak in the first place, in order to stop being rained on in your living room. You need to simply find the source of the leak and fix it. This means removing whatever is between you and the leak, piece by piece until the leak is revealed. Then you see the source of it and can fix it.
I believe the Buddha was not trying to forever distance himself from all attachments and live the life of an ascetic. I think he was merely separating himself from desires and pains and emotions in order to find the source of his suffering. Once you reach a point of believing that all things are separate: you, the water, the pipe, the hole, you realize the reverse, that all things are connected. Not in some mashup of chaos theory, but a simple truth: we are actually all interconnected. Everyone and everything around us help to define who we are. Would we truly know who we are, without family and friends and work, and hobbies and home and environment and space? If the sky wasn’t up, would we know that we were “down” here, would there even be a difference?
The act of separating ourselves from all the constituent parts is a revealing process. In the beginning it feels like endless layers of stuff are being removed, giving us the sense that we are part of everything we are attached to. But these are all things we’ve collected over time in an effort to stop the suffering: the loneliness, the aching, the fear, the loss of love and loved ones. It’s a mistake to think these things are who we are.
That’s my take on what the Buddha was doing. To be high up a mountain, in a cave with nothing but water and bread, is no different than being in a condo in Paris with caviar and a good Bordeaux, if you’re still suffering. If you still are trying to separate yourself from the stuff.
