دار بيبليون
Notes of the intervention of Lwiis Saliba and his poem The cry of Nietzsche and the awakening of Buddha translated from Arabic by the author
Zoom session of Wednesday 18 May 2022
Two days after the celebration of VaisAkh: The Nirvana of Buddha
Lwiis Saliba:
Great festival of Vaisakh, where we celebrate the birth, nirvana and death of the Buddha.
Two days ago, we could not ask Dr. Jacques Vigne the questions because of the bad connection, it will be next Wednesday. As for my contribution, it will be now.
Jetsunma wrote to me. She was very happy about this celebration of Vaisakh done with us, it should always be celebrated inwardly and in community. She also wrote to me that this celebration was held at the White House in the presence of Joe Biden.
My talk will be on the theme of “The price of the Buddha’s awakening”, based on a poem that I composed and for which Geneviève Koevoets (Mahâjyoti) has put my French translation into versification. I will read it in Arabic and she in French. It retraces the Buddha’s journey in a personal way.
The awakening of Buddha
“Nietzsche’s cry ” ‘God is dead, thank God, thank God!’ It is paradoxical as a koan, a shatah in Sufi terms.
I – Nietzsche’s cry:
God is dead
May God’s mercy be upon him.
God is dead thanks to God, we say: Thank God
Long ago we invented him,
Then he created us, we worshipped him.
So in our image we thought him.
Terrifyingly frightening, so we feared him.
He burned with fire! Severe was his punishment.
It is in our image that we have created this God, he is violent and vengeful.
Nietzsche is more than an atheist, he is an anti-theist, and so is Sartre, in Les Mouches for example: he puts Jupiter on stage who says to Orestes: “I created you” Orestes replies “I refuse to serve you”.
In the East, God is made to intervene in the smallest details of our lives, he controls our human destiny in the smallest details. Cf. the Muslim ‘Inshallah’ which has passed into the French language.
This God is far away, he resides in the Most High. We worship our ego in him, we have made him a destroyer, who actually makes us confuse the licit and the illicit, imprisoning the mind, oppressing women and children. It has been imagined to be full of hatred because it makes many human beings burn in hell. Religions in fact only give out bad checks: “Do this or that, and in the next life you will have your reward! Of course, all this is not verifiable.
He is far away and now resides in the Most High
We have worshipped our ego up to him.
Buildings have been erected for it.
We have made him a creator of the soul,
Destroyer of the spirit (Ruh) and its flame.
We have, in his name, made contradictory
Lawful and unlawful of things to be conceived
Where our interest was mixed with power.
Enslaving the woman and killing the human being.
Strangling children and eating the inhuman.
Imprisoning the mind and captivating our soul.
Suppressing uprisings without getting the blame.
Machismo is in all religions including Buddhism. In general, this enslavement is attributed to divine will. This is where we can best see the revolution of Buddhism, which makes a considerable conceptual saving, that of the intervention of an external power considered divine.
“God is dead, come out of your caves, break your chains, slavery will not return,
Fear is diminished…. “
God is dead…
Come out of your caves, go break your chains.
Slavery will never again be in pain…
It will not return for that very reason.
God is dead…
Let’s have his funeral
Let’s free our minds
Panic is derailed
Fear is diminished
Alliteration in Arabic, between cry and awakening. Nietzsche’s ‘cry’, for example, is also an awakening and an awakening.
This terrifying aspect of God to enslave man, created in the image of a dictator, is refuted by anti-theism.
“God is dead!” But where are his ‘exclusive agents’ who trade in belief in him, the clergy who profit from him and accumulate wealth. In Arabic, there is a proverb that puts together two of the oldest businesses in the world: religion and prostitution…
God is dead…
But where have his ‘exclusive agents’ gone?
Who then cry and weep for their abusive power
And who are deprived… of the accumulated goods?
It is in his name always that they have dominated us,
Freedoms suppressed, scandals perpetrated.
A sharpened trade, too late to regret!
To get out of it, a kind of anti-theistic revolution is needed; not only the clergy, but the concept of God and his obligatory intermediaries.
“Around his remains, people are gathered, but the news of his death is hidden. Yet the time of shame has passed.
Around his remains now gathered
The news of his death is now hidden.
And to hide this secret is proof that they lie.
Their sun slowly begins to set.
Clinging to each of its rays tempts them…
The time of shame is over for them,
Sooner or later they go, without a glance behind them
No, the thing is not so strange to me it must be said:
That you are mortal. So are they, and that’s worse!
How to get out of this system? Each religion destroys the previous clergy but reinstitutes another one that does the same exploitation of society. In fact, we must destroy: Nietzsche is like Shiva, he is destructive and liberating.
We can only “get out of the woods” by destroying this idea of God and hell as well as heaven. But what does the Buddha say about this? This is what we discuss in the second part of the poem.
“Is God dead? O soul, do not ask the essence of death, why run?
II – Buddha’s awakening
Is God dead?!
O soul, do not ask why ‘die’?
O soul, in the invisible, stop running.
With effort and patience, the ascent must come.
Realisation: the path from self to self.
What is the difference: he insists on silence, he refused to speak out. Thich Nhat Hanh quotes Buddhist source texts explaining how the Buddha refused to answer the great metaphysical questions. “I only answer questions that are directly relevant to practice and help purify the body and mind to achieve liberation from suffering. He separates himself from religions and philosophies that each make their own montage, as it were. The Buddha says: “If you are wounded by an arrow and a doctor approaches, you don’t ask all the details about the doctor before you are operated on, because you may die trying to guess answers to metaphysical questions. This is actually stupidity. A lot of people spend their time arguing, arguing about these questions instead of being free from suffering. This is the point of the Buddha’s silence. It brings us back to our responsibility in the search for the essential.
“Realisation, the path from self to self. What does it matter if from nothing I came to what I am? No waste of energy. The day will come when the human being will realise his nature.
No matter if from nothingness one has come to you.
The exhaustion of thinking about these matters will be
Followed by heavy regrets to find joy again.
You must aim at the target and recover the way.
And then a day will come when you will awaken,
Your soul freed then…You will find!
The essence of the Buddha’s message is to go beyond dogma, he did not want his own message to be taken as dogma.
A monk came and asked him, “Is there a Self, or not?” The Buddha just sat there without saying anything. So the monk Vachagota left. Ananda asked him why. He replied, ‘The teaching on the emptiness of the Self is meant to guide our meditation, but it should not become a doctrine…People who consider it as such would become prisoners of it. The Dharma should be taken like a raft to cross the river, or a finger pointing to the moon. One becomes detached from it once it has served its purpose!” What is the point if one does not practice? “If I had told the monk Vachagota that there was a Self, I would have contradicted myself; if I had told him that there is no Self, he would probably have clung to it as if it were a dogma and would not have benefited.
Since time immemorial, people have been killing each other by saying, “My doctrine is the right one, the others are the wrong ones”, and after that one forgets to practice. We are like the person wounded by the arrow who asks questions instead of taking care of himself. This is what man does in his stupidity by ‘arguing’ instead of ‘getting out of this inn’.