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Lives

The Buddha told Subhūti, “Bodhisattva-mahāsattvas should pacify their minds thusly: ‘All different types of sentient beings, whether born from eggs, born from wombs, born from moisture, or born from transformation; having form or no form; having thought, no thought, or neither thought nor no thought — I will cause them all to become liberated and enter Remainderless Nirvāṇa.’ Yet when sentient beings have been liberated without measure, without number, and to no end, truly no sentient beings have been liberated. Why? Subhūti, a bodhisattva with a notion of a self, a notion of a person, a notion of a being, or a notion of a life, is not a bodhisattva¹.”

We prefer our own lives to those of others. We can never fully shirk this preference, for to do so would mean becoming something other than human. This is why the extreme few who have achieved this level of self-abnegation are objects of as much misunderstanding and disgust as reverence: Shakyamuni Buddha, St. Francis of Assisi, Arya Asanga.

As every kind act we do for another being involves some measure of self-denial, it follows that doing anything truly worthwhile with your life requires a great level of self-denial. The road to authentic self-denial² is long and fraught with difficulty. The first stage of this process leads one to asceticism, and more importantly, the paradox at the heart of asceticism: that you must "lose your life in order to save it."

The age in which the everyday person could be expected to understand asceticism has long since passed. To them, what passes for asceticism is more often than not basic ethical behavior: abstaining from meat and intoxicants, recycling, fasting, perhaps boycotting certain conglomerates. Their understanding of self-denial never rises above the level of mere acts or practices, for what they fail to understand is the perspective that binds these practices together. For the self-denying individual, practices (ἀσκήσεις) can be the royal road to this perspective, but practices in themselves are no replacement for it.

Pursuing asceticism is not a worthwhile end in itself, even when it is practiced for the purpose of one's individual liberation. This is the path of the so-called "pratyekabuddha," the one who practices selflessness for their own selfish benefit. The criticisms of Mahayana Buddhist commentators throughout the years ring true: it is not enough to lose your own life, and it is not enough to save your own life, even if such an idea of "absolute negation" is a comforting one. You must instead negate your own life to save another life, even every life.

It's common to say that those who practice altruism and empathy are selfless. The secret to true empathy is to take this as literally as possible, and internalize it, behaving as though you had no self. You yourself are not a being; you yourself are not alive. It is only in this way that the lives of the most marginalized will become meaningful to you: the 66 billion chickens and 500 million cattle slaughtered annually; the birds colliding into communication towers; the dying coral reef. This level of detachment is a supreme gift, and one of the few worth cultivating.

At any moment, you must be ready to see through yourself to see another, and indeed, to see every other all at once. You must learn how to deaden yourself and heighten your senses in order to feel what they feel. Then, lose your life to save them.

Footnotes

1: Vajracchedikā Prajñāpāramitā Sūtra

2: There are many who will try to pass their self-loathing off as self-denial. Self-loathing is in fact the antithesis of self-denial. Intense self-loathing is irreparably bound together with narcissism, for the self and its perceived flaws are the depressive's sole object of attention. The difference between such a person and what the world will call a "narcissist" is not in the amount of attention they pay to themselves, but the kind. The narcissist loves the one they see in the mirror. The depressive despises them. Both spend hours looking in the same mirror.

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