What is Dharma?
Buddhism, Dharma or Buddhadharma as Buddhist themselves call Buddha’s teaching, is an expression of Buddha’s insight into the nature of reality itself. This is a realization of the potential of each human being, and therefore central to Dharma is a human being and its capacity for understanding.
The whole Buddhadharma is woven around Buddha’s insight, through which one attains crucial transformation of the personality and attains freedom. This is not a mere intellectual expansion of knowledge, but something much deeper. It is a healing or closing of the gap between the ‘me’ and the ‘world’, between ‘me’ and ‘others’, between the conflicted parts of the self – the gap that is a permanent source of conflict and a mark of the entrapped nature of our existence
Where does this conflict originate? Our conventional, ignorant view paints the world, other people and ourselves as existing independently and of itself. Seeing things as concrete, defined and fixed leads toward seeing them as different, separate and divided. That division and separation soon becomes opposition. Opposition is the first stage in the experience of gap and conflict.
This simmering inner conflict between us and others and us and the world is rooted in the ignorant view governed by the laws of self-centeredness.
Self is not given
What did the Buddha see upon his enlightenment? In the remarkable resonance with contemporary insights about humanity and nature, 2 and half millanas ago Buddha realized that the fixed view of the self that causes the fixed view of the world and all the consequential conflicts, is illusory.Instead of a firm center or self-essence, through attentive and deep observation, Buddha has uncovered an ever changing series of fenomena – feelings, perceptions, sensory inputs, motivations, volitions and patterns of thinking and acting that emerge and disappear due to causes and conditions. Through the lenses of a clear mind rooted in the present moment, the question Who am I has brought him to the revolutionary answer. Self is neither given nor firm, but constructed and permeable. When what we considered solid and unchangeable, under a mindful observation dissolves into something conditioned and soft, this is a true liberation. It implies that neither self is given, nor our experience of reality as difficult and entrapped.
Realization of the realm of freedom
Our life is an open realm of freedom, if we only manage to encounter it. Whenever an unexamined view of the self is dominant in us, our self-centered nature, whose main motivating force is personal gain, will be getting stronger. The fixed self that wants everything for itself will encounter other fixed selves and a fixed world in a permanent conflict accompanied with pain and disappointment. Disclosing the truth about the self, we can nurture a ‘higher’ nature that does not see the difference between the self, others, and the world, equally takes care of everything it encounters and nurtures understanding and compassion instead of a conflict. Such perception of the world is inevitably infused with a sense of freedom and ease.
Dharma of a path of liberation that Buddha taught upon his awakening consists of eight points. They are gathered in three parts: morality, meditation and wisdom. The principle of Buddhist morality is non harming of oneself and the others, the principle of meditation is the cultivation of mindfulness and the principle of wisdom is not conforming with any delusory finality. While morality engages with cultivation of beneficial life conditions, and wisdom with seeing into the true nature of fenomena, meditation or cultivation of the mind is creation of the conditions that allow us to perceive that ture nature.
Cultivated mind can abide in the ‘here and now’ – the only place and time where the truth about the nature of self and the others manifests itself.
Insisting on the here and now that is stripped for any additions we eagerly add to it due to our entrapment in concepts, attitudes, and illusions, is the main characteristic of buddhist meditation.