Liberation

Liberation is the ultimate goal of Buddhism. Liberation in the Buddhist sense has little in common with the political ideal of liberation. A person can have complete freedom in the political sense and still be held captive – to habits, obsessions, addictions, etc. Buddhist liberation seeks to free us from all the internal things that hold us captive (including a desire to be liberated). 

In our ordinary life, we constantly encounter new sensations. In each encounter with a sensation, there is both the particular quality of the sensation and our response to it. Generally, we seek pleasant sensations and try to avoid unpleasant ones. One life strategy is to try to manipulate the world to maximize pleasant sensations and minimize the unpleasant; another is to seek this same end by changing how we respond to sensations. 

Buddhist liberation is a radical approach to the second of these. The word “radical” comes from a Latin word meaning root; the Buddhist approach seeks to get to the roots of the problem. As we approach the root, we see that a desire to maximize the pleasant and minimize the unpleasant is still part of the problem. Even this must be uprooted.

I don’t remember where, but somewhere I read in a description of this “radical” approach of Buddhism that we must free ourselves from all the chains that hold us, “both the iron and golden chains.” 

There are many interpretations of just what iron and gold chains symbolize in Buddhism. In this article, I’ll provide an interpretation based on a naturalistic point of view and my own quest for liberation.

Preference and Principle
Like everything in the world, our actions have a cause, which in relation to our behavior we can call a motivation. In an article I published here in March, 2024, titled “Preference and Principle”(1), I suggested that these inner motivations could be reduced, for simplicity’s sake, to the following two: preferences and principles. At base, our preferences are motivated by biology; our principles are motivated by things we have been taught or learned in some other manner.

Most people, most of the time, do not give much thought to what motivates their behavior. It just seems natural to act upon these motivations. But when we have a strong motivation to act on a preference that strongly goes against our principles, then we become conscious of a problem. For example, I suspect that most readers have experienced having a strong sexual desire, on which they knew they should not act. Such an experience reveals the divided nature of the self. 

Some people, and I am one of them, become acutely conscious of their motivations, and recognize that we are, to a large degree, puppets to these motivations. We wonder what it would be like to be free of them.

The Buddha preached a message of liberation. Through meditation he had discovered that desire was the ultimate cause of dukkha (which is usually translated as suffering, but which I would translate as unpleasantness.) In a sense, all motivation is a kind of desire – though often the root desire is so subtle that we are unaware of it. But in deep meditation, we become aware of even the subtlest movements within our awareness. To truly understand Buddha’s teaching on desire and dukkha, one needs to become proficient in meditation. Here I’ll try for a simpler understanding.

Iron Chains
I have interpreted iron chains as being biological motivations. Some of these biological motivations are very obvious, such as our desire to eat and procreate. Some are a little more subtle like our desire for security, status, to be special (to be the alpha of our social group). Christianity marked out sexuality for special attention, but some of these other motivations have reeked more havoc. For instance, the desire to be the alpha male has given us the long history of invaders, and the brutal wars they have wrought, right up to our own times. 

Many religions (and here I will use that word as inclusive of spirituality, though in other places I make a distinction between these two) have developed practices to combat our biological motivations, or at least the more obvious appetites like sexuality and gluttony. These practices at times take on the form of extreme asceticism or mortifications of the body. The Buddha had practiced such asceticism, but ultimately rejected it. He, or at least later Buddhist philosophers, discovered that there was a gentler way to tame biological motivations. (And after all, if one believes in compassion for all sentient beings, should one not extend that compassion to one’s body?) The first two sentences of the Dhammapada give a clue to this gentler way. They read: “Mind is the forerunner of all actions. All deeds are led by mind, created by mind.”

If mind is the forerunner of actions, then if we are truly mindful, we will always get a hint of what our mind (our brain) is doing before we act. Through the practice of mindfulness meditation we can carve out a little space so that when we see what our brain is planning and them we can decide whether or not to act on it. This is not easy, but with persistent practice we can become quite skillful at it. 

Using mindfulness to break the iron chains of our biological motivations is a more wholesome way of dealing with the problem than the various forms of ascetic practice that attempt to repress these motivations. As Freud suggested, a repressed mind can become a demonic mind. In the catechism classes of my youth, I was taught that these motivations were the voice of the devil. In the article “Preference and Principle” I describe how I came to think of them as my inner dog, which needs loving but firm guidance. 

This mindfulness practice also leads to self knowledge. Over time we begin to see what our self is and how it operates. We begin to see how motivations arise, and how we get taken in by these motivations. We begin to understand how the self is an effect whose cause is elsewhere. We begin to realize both the isness and the otherness of this strange thing we call our self.

Golden Chains
While most of the world’s religions encourage their faithful to curb their more overt biological motivations, most also try to inculcate a set of religious principles. In the terminology I’m using here, they provide golden chains to keep us tethered to religious principles. This is also true of many ideologies and ethical systems. In encouraging us to free ourselves not only from bad motivations but also what many consider to be good ones, Buddhism is quite different from other religions. 

Why should we try to break these golden chains? The answer to that question is too complex to provide here, so I will just give an example and let the reader consider its implications. I had a sister-in-law who was Filipino. She was very strongly Catholic and very loyally Filipino. In the decades that she lived in the West, these commitments were unchanged. She remained staunchly loyal to the ethics and traditions in which she was raised.

Many people praise this kind of preservation of one’s traditional values. Yes, adherence to such values gives one an anchor, a mooring in the changing world. But to be anchored is to be chained. If one is seeking ultimate liberation, one has to be free to change with the changing tides. 

Oh Bull!
So should we actually become liberated in this way, and if we do, what then? The Zen sequence of drawings called the Ten Bulls gives an answer. Plenty of examples of this sequence, and interpretations of its meaning, can be found on the Internet(2), so I won’t go into that here. I will only mention that in the first image of the sequence we find our erstwhile seeker in the market place, and after this seekers quest is complete, we find our seeker back in the marketplace.

Get liberated and go back to ordinary life, that is one way of interpreting this tenth image. But the ordinary is no longer so ordinary. Chains aren’t so restrictive when you have the key to remove them. The marketplace in the tenth image is the same as it was in the first, but the seeker is changed and how he responds to it is changed.

In Buddhist metaphysics, the notion of liberation is not just getting free in this life, but of breaking the chain of birth and death that a belief in reincarnation posits. The Mahayana Buddhist ideal of the Bodhisattva adds a dimension to the notion of liberation, but that ideal is also based on reincarnation. If we do not believe in reincarnation, or any form of individual afterlife, then liberation is just in this life. 

Liberation for a naturalist may lack the seeming profundity of the saintly Bodhisattva. Without the belief in reincarnation, liberation is just a strategy for reducing unpleasantness and positioning oneself to enjoy the fullness of life in its everyday happenings. But is that not value enough? And all the money in the world can’t buy it. 

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Notes:

1. Preference and Principle.
2. Wikipedia, under the title “Ten Bulls,” gives a basic introduction and provides one version of the images. Interesting interpretations of the series written by Lewis Hyde can be found in Two Essays on Oxherding. Many other articles and versions of the images can be found with a simple search, using either “Ten Bulls” or “The Oxherding Series.”