In the Beginning and in the End

When we entered a new millennium 15 years ago, it was deemed to be a significant event; the beginning of something momentous.  Was it?  Or was it just a trick of calendar-making, like the 1st January, which is, really, an ever-shifting point in the earth’s orbit around the sun.  And because the year 2000 was such a nice round figure, does that mean anything?  Or, is it a tendency of the mind to read significance into things that are arbitrary and random, like predicting the future from the tea leaves left in your cup? 

The early Roman Emperors started their calendar from an arbitrary date of the mythological founding of Rome.  At their whim, they named some months after themselves and kept tinkering with the number of days allocated to these months to suit their self-importance.   As a consequence we are saddled with names like July and August, each of them 31 days long at the cost of February which lost a couple of days.   Our own government officials may one day wake up to this possibility of achieving immortality.

When we sit in meditation at the BRC on the night of the 31 December, I sometimes suggest that we visualise ourselves perched as tiny creatures on our planet, twirling and circling in its orbit around the sun in a vast gyrating galaxy of stars and other planets as we count down to midnight with 108 beats on our Tibetan gong.  We assemble for a candlelight circumambulation of the Buddha in the garden and chant traditional monastic verses - realising that this is done amongst Buddhist communities around the globe - at midnight in their part of the world. We then watch our sky lanterns drift slowly across the valley as we say goodbye to the past year and hello to the new.  

A true beginning of anything is, of course, a baffling concept.  But that need not be so. The Buddha maintained that no true beginning of anything can be found;  only an ever-receding trail of causes and effects which keeps turning circular in a continuous cycle of “Becoming” as he called it - a process that never ends.  

We are woven into this fabric of reality; a constituent part of a never-ending causal chain of events.  In this sense, we are not human beings; we are human “becomings” ; a work in progress.   When I first came across this statement when I was in my early teens, it resolved a conceptual issue I had been grappling with.  

Unlike my peers, who had a much healthier obsession with girls and soccer,  I would often gaze at the night sky in Amsterdam from the attic and tried to come to terms with a universe of stars, galaxies and planets that was, it seemed, infinite .       

Its beginning was equally mystifying.  Was it created in a Big Bang as cosmologists speculated; or was it brought into being by a Supernatural Being?  To me, neither of these propositions was a genuine beginning:  What was it that exploded at the Big Bang; how did it get there?  If God created the world ex-nihilio - “out of Nothing” - as the Bible has it, does this explain anything?   Because, in that case, where did God come from?  I discovered, of course, that these conundrums had occupied the brightest minds in history.  Who was I to grapple with them?  I was therefore left either with a belief or wonderment.  I chose the latter.  So, with a shrug of my shoulders I would go back to my homework.   But I believe that such musings made me a Buddhist without knowing it. 

On one occasion, the Buddha discussed this type of “indeterminable” (avyakrta) with his monks.  Avyakrta concern concepts and ideas he felt were not worth getting too worked up about because they are unknowable in the usual sense of having an indisputable, logical description of it. Unlike Aristotle, the Buddha used a fourfold logic in his philosophy.  Whereas Aristotle maintained that something either  is or  is not the way you claim it to be, the Buddha maintained that this does not exhaust all possibilities.  For instance, the universe may well be, simply, endless - which is not the same as being finite or infinite.  We may therefore pose our question on  wrong premises.  But let us not get bogged down in semantics:  the Buddha didn’t…… 

Still, like a birthday, New Year’s Eve is an opportunity to reflect on the past; on what has gone before -  and to  welcome the rest of your life,  We should do this, of course, upon waking everyday. Indeed, certain traditional Buddhist meditations are designed to do just that.  One could, for instance, visualise what it would be like to have only 24 hours to live: how would you fill your day?  Or, even more poignantly - how will people remember you after you have died?

Louis