Sarah Conover has been a Buddhist practitioner for nearly three decades. She’s ready to answer your questions about the faith. What do you want to ask a Buddhist? Fill out the form below or submit your question online.
How is Dharma achieved?
I think the quick answer you’d get from any school of Buddhism might be: slowly, with patient perseverance. Perseverance, virya in Sanskrit, viriya in Pali, is considered one of the Five Spiritual Faculties in Buddhism on which spiritual progress depends.
I planned to stop with that glib but nevertheless true answer. However, it’s essential to clarify the term, Dharma. And after thinking about the various ways the term is used, I found myself in the midst of an important aspect of Buddhism I’d neglected to clarify in my own mind. As with every question that’s been asked for this column Dear Readers, you’ve helped me to be more precise in my own thinking.
I’ve recently been assisting in editing a book of sayings by the Venerable Ajahn Anan, a senior abbot in the Thai Forest tradition. While doing so, I ran into the issue of dharma versus Dharma, as well as dharmas(plural). There doesn’t yet seem to be a consensus about use of these terminologies amongst Western editors and publishers. However, Dharma with a capital D almost always denotes the teachings of the Buddha. Here’s an example from the forthcoming book: ”As you progress further on the path of Dharma and start to practice meditation, an even deeper level of stillness and tranquility arises in the mind.” That use of Dharma easily translates into: as you progress further on the path of the Buddha’s teachings and start to practice meditation, an even deeper level of stillness and tranquility arises in the mind.
Yet the terms Dharma, dharma, and dharmas are also used in Buddhism to denote truth, reality, and nature — the laws of nature singularly and as a whole. Therefore, it is understood that if you are studying the teachings of the Buddha, you are also studying reality and the laws of nature. Buddhism is a phenomenological map; that is, the Buddha studied “that which appears.” As his primary concern was to chart the road to happiness on that map, his central phenomenological concerns addressed the structures of human experience and consciousness.
It just so happens, said the Buddha, that if you investigate your own experience as well as that of the surrounding world, you will see that both realities arise under exactly the same conditions (and also cannot be separated as the subject/object I just inferred in using the word “both,” but that’s another thread we can follow sometime). According to the teachings of Buddha, all living phenomena express the Three Marks of Existence: all sentient beings experience stress and pain, all are impermanent, and none are self-instituting (none arise independently of conditions around them).
Since the Buddha taught a detailed path to happiness for the reality of our human predicament, he is teaching the Dharma about Dharma: The more we see life clearly through the teachings of Buddhism, the Dharma, the more we understand and know the nature of reality, of Dharma. So, circling back to the quote from Ajahn Anan above, it’s possible to understand his statement correctly using all variations of the term Dharma: ”As you progress further on the path of Dharma and start to practice meditation, an even deeper level of stillness and tranquility arises in the mind.”
Returning to the reader’s question, “How is Dharma achieved?” By going back to the map of the Buddha’s dispensation: the Eightfold Path. Observe your experience over time, and have confidence that by following the path, you are also learning to see the Dharma, how reality is constituted. A quote from one of the other great religious traditions seems apt: “Now we see through a glass darkly, but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known.” (Corinthians 13:12) The Eightfold Path, the Dharma, is what the Buddha bequeathed to us in order that we may achieve clarity of mind and heart, in order that we may see reality without obscurations and find happiness therein.
