The Science of Awakening

AFTER A SHORT conversation with The Buddha, the serie-killer Angulimala (* ) suddenly understood and wanted to be a disciple of Him: His way of killings was broken !
He was named "Ahimsaka", which means "Nonviolent One"...

What happened to Angulimala the killer then, at that moment ?
Why did his violence life suddenly become the past ? ...




OF COURSE his Awakening could never be a sudden happening or an isolated event in Angulimala's life, as The Buddha stated: All things happen in the interdependence of others ... This exists because That exists and This does not exist because That does not exist ...
Therefore, an isolated event could never exist !


PERHAPS Angulimala did never enjoy the killings !
Perhaps he never wanted the killings !
Perhaps the Killing Process did never totally take over his body-and-mind !
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Or perhaps deep inside his Consciousness, he always knew there was something ... not right in his doing, but he did not know how to stop the killings ! And the conversation with The Buddha was just a last push to be at the other side of the River ...
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PERHAPS one of the main reasons why The Buddha did not consider himself as a holy One but a simple teacher to his disciples was that : He knew what he understood is nothing but the Truth !
He knew he did not introduce anything new but discover the Evidence , like the falling Apple of Newton as we understand today ...




CLEARLY ONE OF THE major difficulties in the teaching of The Buddha at that Time, was that he did not have many means to transfer his knowledge to his disciples. That is, His knowledge is even today, out of our ... imagination, but he did not have many tools to project or to abstract out something ...

THE UNDERSTANDINGS such as (Vector)Spaces, or Processing systems, or Parallel Executions ... , for example, did never exist those days, thousands of years ago ...

As a result of that, His teaching is often ... absurb to be understood (** )! And we have to break our head today just to understand some very small ... leaves from the forest of His knowledge ...




BUT ONE THING we do understand for sure today : the elimination of the Killing process from Angulimala's brain was merely ONE step in a life-time recursive process, which began to purify his body-and-mind long before his meeting with the Buddha, and its ending was still not in sight at that moment: The Awakening Process ! (*** )

© October 2001 ,
Nguyen Sau Rieng


NOTES :

Old Path White Cloud, Thich Nhat Hanh , Parallax Press, Berkeley, California.

Although it is very plausible to ... understand something in the language of Science today, to be truly happy, we do not need to understand anything. Furthermore, if we are too busy with explaining and understanding, we could fall into the domain of Mind again, with arguments and reasonings ! ...
As I stated in "Seeking for the true Happiness ... ": On one side of the River we need doctrines, we need arguments, we need debates ... to say something, but on the other Riverside, we need ... nothing!
And as the Buddha saying: My teaching is not a doctrine ... it is doing and experiencing ...

Clearly, the way to The True Happiness or the way to the True Liberation is also the same as the way of Awakening !

Therefore, the discoveries of effective methodes to eliminate processes from our brain would deserve to be the greatest discoveries of human being ...

Furthermore, the processes in our brain could never be a chaotic mess !
They are certainly well organized in some ordening and very closely related to each others . That is, there would certainly be some kind of rules imposed on them and the Creation, the Existence and the Elimination of some processes do always have some impacts on others (and on our life, of course).

Therefore, fully understanding of That in the language of Science today would be one of the most interesting and the greatest challenge of human being ...