Austerity and Ego

Monks dressed in sack cloth remembering the suffering of Jesus in the cross. It is an enduring image and the path of the spiritual is often seen as a mortification of the mortal flesh in search of higher pleasures.

Well this is correct in a way. Once we have stopped trying to grasp permanently at physical entities especially our self and realise our grasp of things is only supposed to be temporary then the hardships of life just pass by and we remain unaffected.

By contrast stuck with the idea of a need to grasp this world permanently the best we can do is lie to ourselves and pretend to ignore the affects of suffering. We wear the sack cloth but we do so with effort to resist the discomfort and suffering. This is Ego. It is like a challenge to see how long we can resist the discomfort of sack cloth. The discomfort does not go we simply take up resistance to it. What an exhausting process! We may even magnify the suffering to see how much we can endure and string we are. This is nothing more than a circus trick. We are not progressing on the spiritual path. Buddha realised that austerity and self imposed suffering by itself achieves nothing. It will actually make things worse as it comes from the Ego which is the actual thing we are supposed to be putting under scrutiny. In the very act of enduring suffering we are strengthening the problem!

Enlightenment takes a long time, and such wisdom is no use to those who have not yet decided to let go of the need to hold on to the world with a permanent grip. This incidentally is even more exhausting. Unenlightened we try to take grasp of the world in a permanent way, feeling in our heart that if we let go then we will disappear. And in such a state the enduring of suffering is a necessary thing. Psychology says that people ensure suffering much better if they do so as a Hero on a quest turning the suffering into a challenge that they can win again.

The lesson here is that in the very long term the quest is different. It is to gradually realise that constantly resisting and trying to become victorious over suffering is not the path. The path is no longer needing to struggle to attain anything or defend anything from suffering. If we just stop acting under the conviction that the things that happen do so according to some fixed centre or unchanging self then they just happen and suffering is replaced with humble acceptance. Tolerance is also replaced  with humble acceptance. There is no effort anymore and no energy is expended when things happen.

Buddha found Middle Path. In the same way as austerity for its own sake is Ego. Indulgence is the same.  Winning, accumulating, succeeding, owning, keeping all these things can be just the opposite of resisting hardship in austerity. "Can be" in that when it is done with respect to the centre of Ego. Middle Path is anything other than this. If we are expending energy enduring hard things or ignoring good things then this is not middle path.

Buddha is not expending energy here to stay away from Mara's daughters and tolerate Mara's demons. Buddha has no fixed centre to move in one direction or the other. Against the daughters a centre appears that is attracted in that moment, and against the demons a centre appears that is repelled in that moment. But each centre only belongs in its moment and evaporates afterwards. None of those centres is Buddha for there is no fixed centre.