Where is the Western Paradise?

I mentioned in my other blog that I would be talking about my journeys in Buddha-land; this is the first of those posts.

When I was about twelve years old I developed an intense interest in the back-end of wardrobes, but after checking a few and finding nothing but wood-paneling I worried that there might not be anything there.  With a sinking heart I opened hotel closets, pulled aside my friends’ clothes when they were in the bathroom, and looked twice when passing furniture stores because just maybe something might be mixed in amongst the dressers and armoires that would open onto another world.  Eventually, I got older and figured out that the only such portal was in my head, but even after transmigration ceased being a practical possibility the theoretical appeal never quite went away.

            That, I think, is where my fascination with Buddhist enlightenment came from: it gave me one last chance to board the train to fairy-land. 

For what are looking like more and more ho-hum reasons I wanted to think of the world as a mundane sheet drawn over a sparkling second-life, but it’s clear now that no hole in the forest leads to Redwall Abbey and no door in the mountainside to Minas Tirith.  Bash up against every wall in every train station in the world and you’ll still never make it onto Platform 9 and ^¾.  In such a methodical way my childhood fantasies went one by one into the wood chipper of reality.

Enter Buddhism.  Maybe Tatooine and Tar Valon and Midgaard are all made-up, but Deer Park is a real place and they say Siddhartha reached enlightenment there.  What exactly does that feel like?  How does it work?  When you finally understand the sound of one hand clapping, does the other one sweep out of the ethereal mists and pull back the mythic curtain once and for all, revealing the glorious whatever-it-is that’s hiding beneath?

I’d like to make the argument that enlightenment is real, and you can reach it by following the eight-fold path, but it doesn’t disclose a new world so much as it casts this one in a bit of a softer light.  Give me a few posts and maybe you’ll admit I'm not crazy.  I'll begin by showing that Buddhism (of which there are admittedly many forms) contains a stripped-down world-view based on a few simple logically inescapable premises that are perfectly compatible with scientific objectivism.  From there, I'll define the optimal way of life as described by that world-view, and pursue it to the realization (awakening, enlightenment) awaiting if you follow it all the way to the end.  I'll finish with a discussion of what that might be like, how to get there, and whether or not getting there is worth it.  Amu Namida Butsu.