Continued (3) — The Tantric Vision: Living Without Condemning Life
Part Two — The Songs of Saraha

Some people become so immersed in material things that they make money their god, while others become so hostile to it that they see money and materiality as the source of everything evil. Some believe in nothing beyond matter and the material world, and hold that life contains nothing beyond today’s pleasures and whatever can be possessed or mastered. Others believe that the earthly world, the body and materiality are sources of impurity that must be killed, destroyed and removed in order to reach a higher, heavenly truth. In all these ways of thinking, believers move only from left to right and right to left, without ever being able to remain centred between these two worlds and transform the fullest power of both into a force of transcendence.

We slide from one desire into its opposite, turning our backs on one world in order to face another. In a Tantric interpretation, the Buddha’s message of the Middle Way rests on the insight that whatever we condemn intensely has already contaminated us. The person who seeks power is obsessively focused upon power, and the enemy of power is equally obsessed with it. Madly pursuing material things is to be trapped by materiality, but rising in hostility against materiality is also to remain centred upon it. The rigid and ideological religious believer holds in mind a narrow, framed and diminished concept of God and remains fixated upon it; the person who flees from God and calls himself an atheist may be equally focused upon that same concept. Their directions differ, but what governs and fills their world remains the same.

The Tantric vision asks us to free the centre of our consciousness from this trap and bring this illness to an end. The Buddha held that all the suffering of our life begins with desire—the wanting to possess something. From this, people have concluded that the Buddha’s aim was the destruction of desire. But this is not so. It is said that one of the Buddha’s disciples came to him and said: From the moment I rise each morning until the moment I fall asleep, I concentrate on how to eliminate my desires, yet I do not understand why I have never felt that I have even approached awakening. The Buddha smiled and replied: Then remove your final desire, which is nothing other than the desire to have no desire. Tantra is, in practice, an unfolding of this insight of the Buddha within life: living without craving, without turning the absence of desire itself into an object of hostility toward wanting and seeking.

This insight can be understood only by recognising that the Buddha’s central message is freedom from attachment, and that desire is only one manifestation of attachment. Living without attachment means that one can live life in its fullness without clinging to it.

There is a beautiful story about this. One day a beggar heard that a liberated mystic lived far away in a desert and knew the way to freedom from the suffering of the world. The beggar, suffering from his poverty, endured the hardship of the journey and finally reached the mystic’s dwelling by the route he had been given. To his astonishment, he found a palace adorned with enormous gardens and filled with material splendour and beauty. He asked to see the mystic, and when he was brought before him he said: What kind of mystic are you, when you have immersed yourself in such luxury and material wealth? The mystic smiled and said: Yet I am ready at this very moment to leave all of it behind and travel with you, and along the way I will tell you its story. He took the beggar by the hand and the two left the palace. They had gone only a few hundred metres when the beggar said: I left my begging bowl in the palace. If possible, let us go back so I can collect it, because my life depends upon that bowl. The mystic smiled and said: The whole difference is that I can leave behind this entire palace, while you cannot leave behind your begging bowl.

The wisdom in this story is the spirit of the Buddha’s teaching on freedom from attachment. What causes the suffering of our life and prevents transcendence is not material things, the pleasures of life or our dreams, but our attachment to them.

This is why Zen says that life is a gate through which only an emperor can pass and that this gate remains closed to beggars, because only an emperor approaches it without need. To live like an emperor means to live without need, detached from need and desire; the gates of the world remain open only to such a life.