Going on Being: Buddhism and the Way of Change : a Positive Psychology for the West

Book by Epstein Mark

Chapter 1
Going on Being

There is a story that has kept popping up in my work over the years that
embodies much of what I have learned about how
people change. It is a story that has served a number of different
functions as I have wrestled with the sometimes competing worldviews of
Buddhism and psychotherapy, but it ultimately points the way toward their
integration. It is one of the tales of Nasruddin, a Sufi amalgam of wise
man and fool, with whom I have sometimes identified and by whom I have at
other times been puzzled. He has the peculiar gift of both acting out our
basic confusion and at the same time opening us up to our deeper
wisdom.
I first heard this story many years ago from one of my first meditation
teachers, Joseph Goldstein, who used it as an example of how people search
for happiness in inherently fleeting, and therefore unsatisfactory,
pleasant feelings. The story is about how some people came upon Nasruddin
one night crawling around on his hands and knees under a lamppost.

“What are you looking for?” they asked him.

“I’ve lost the key to my house,” he replied.

They all got down to help him look, but after a fruitless time of
searching, someone thought to ask him where he had lost the key in the
first place.

“In the house,” Nasruddin answered.

“Then why are you looking under the lamppost?” he is asked.

“Because there is more light here,” Nasruddin replied.

I suppose I must identify with Nasruddin to have quoted this story so
often. Searching for my keys is something I can understand. It puts me in
touch with a sense of estrangement, or yearning, that I had quite a bit of
in my life, a feeling that I used to equate with an old reggae song by
Jimmy Cliff called “Sitting in Limbo.”

In my first book I used the parable as a way of talking about people’s
attachment to psychotherapy and their fears of spirituality. Therapists
are used to looking in certain places for the key to people’s unhappiness,
I maintained. They are like Nasruddin looking under the lamppost, when
they might profit more from looking inside their own homes.

In my next book, I returned to this story obliquely when I described
locking myself out of my running car while trying to
leave a meditation retreat that I had just finished. I knew I had locked
my keys in the car (it was idling away right in front of me, for goodness
sake!), but I still felt compelled to look on the ground for them just in
case I might somehow be miraculously saved. Being locked out of my car,
with it running on without
me, seemed like an apt metaphor for something akin to the title
of my first book, Thoughts Without a Thinker. Something like a car without
a driver, or, in this case, a driver without his car. Humbled by my own
ineptitude, I felt closer to Nasruddin in my second pass through his
story. Rather than seeing him simply in his foolish mode, as a stand-in
for psychotherapists looking in
the wrong place for the key, I now felt sympathy for Nasruddin, allied
with him searching in vain for what he knew was not
there.

But it was not until some time later, when I came upon the same story in
someone else’s work, that I could appreciate it in yet another way. In a
marvelous book entitled Ambivalent Zen, Lawrence Shainberg told how this
same parable captivated his imagination for ten years. He, too, thought
that he understood
it. The moral, he concluded, is to look where the light is since darkness
is the only threat. But he determined one day to ask his Japanese Zen
master (who is a wonderfully engaging character as described by Shainberg)
for his interpretation.

“You know the story about Nasruddin and the key?” Shainberg asked his
master.

“Nasruddin?” the roshi replied. “Who is Nasruddin?”

After Shainberg described the story to him, his master appeared to give it
no thought, but sometime later the Roshi brought it up again.

“So, Larry-san, what’s Nasruddin saying?” the Zen master questioned his
disciple.

“I asked you, Roshi.”

“Easy,” he said. “Looking is the key.”1

There was something eminently satisfying about this answer; besides having
the pithiness that we expect from Zen, it made me look at the entire
situation in a fresh way. Shainberg’s roshi hit the nail on the head.
Nasruddin’s activity was not in vain after all; he was demonstrating
something more fundamental than initially appeared. The key was just a
pretext for an activity that had its own rationale. Freud evolved one way
of looking, and the Buddha discovered another. They had important
similarities and distinctive differences, but they were each motivated by
the need to find a more authentic way of being, a truer self.

Somebody vs. Nobody

I love this story because it connects me to something fundamentally true
about my own process of self-discovery. I had the sense very early of
feeling lost and cut off from myself. This feeling
motivated my spiritual and psychological search, but it also had the
potential to make me feel terrible about myself. In my discovery of
Buddhism, I found a method of cutting through the self-
estrangement that so bothered me. I found a new way to look at myself.

In the 1970s, there was a saying in Buddhist circles, “You
have to be somebody before you can be nobody.” This was a popular
statement because of how clearly it summed up a very obvious phenomenon.
Many of the people who were drawn to Buddhism were attracted by the ideas
of “no-self” and “emptiness” that are central to the Buddha’s psychology.
But these are difficult concepts to understand; in the Tibetan Buddhist
tradition, for example, monks often study the scriptures that explain them
for years and years before even meditating. In the West, people who were
suffering from alienation or from spiritual and psychological distress
often mistook the Buddhist descriptions
for an affirmation of their psychological emptiness. “You have
to be somebody before you can be nobody,” was a way of telling them that
their psychological work of raising self-esteem or
creating an integrated or cohesive self had to precede efforts at seeing
through the ego. In many cases, this was indeed sound
advice; but the categorization of people into the two categories
of “somebody” and “nobody” created another set of misunderstandings.

When the Buddha taught his middle path, he had the temerity to suggest
that both “somebody” and “nobody” were mistakes, that the true vision of
who and what we are involves looking without resorting to the instinct of
intrinsic reality. “Somebody” was the equivalent of clinging to being,
while “nobody” was the same as clinging to nonbeing. In either case, the
mind’s need for certainty was shortchanging reality. The correct view, the
Buddha perceived, lies somewhere in between. The self-centered attitude is
as much of a problem as the self-abnegating one. We can be proud or empty;
in either case the problem lies in our sense of self-certainty.