Give me liberty or death -- all is Samsara anyway!

The Ocean of Samsara


For me personally, one of the most difficult concepts in Buddhism is that of that vast ocean called samsara. This is the ocean that we humans will essentially swim in for all of our lives. To me, this ocean basically symbolizes the joyous yet deadly appetite we all have for life itself. The hunger for life itself can and does cause great pain. Samsara is indeed a vast and beautifully crystal clear swimming pool that essentially is the content of our lives. The human content of our lives is full of good stuff including being born, suckling at the breast, making friends, learning to drive and purchasing that first car, having sexual relations, playing a violin concerto perfectly and receiving flowers after the performance or having groupies groping you depending on your point of reference. The pool of samsara is also, unfortunately, about having your own children and watching them grow and leave, attaining the perfect gym-bunny body and then developing cancer, going through a painful divorce, or building a financial empire like Enron that supplies you with riches to be squandered for years – until, of course, it all comes crashing down around you and you wind up in jail. The ocean of samsara is vast and tricky indeed.

The concept of desiring things seems simple for isn’t life essentially about working and building and winning and gaining? It would seem that a life built upon these principles would signify a worthy existence that would be both joyous and fulfilling. Unfortunately, the other central concept attached to Buddhism is the notion of suffering. There can be no surer simple life truth than all sentient existence involves suffering and that suffering is indeed the other part of samsara that is the pungent dump that suddenly is bobbing an inch from your face as you are swimming in the beautiful crystal pool. The samsara pool is, in fact, all about suffering.

I have recently married a beautiful woman and have almost completed another masters degree during my lap swimming in the samsara pool. But I have begun to notice some floating excrement now in various forms. Upon seeing our wedding pictures I can’t help but notice how the creases in my face are plainly evident and the lack of muscle tone in my posture really is asserting itself now. It is not difficult for me to realize that though great joy is coming at me, time is also growing shorter.

Another facet of the samsara pool is the false sense that the more you swim in it, the more you will begin to gain a ready mastery of the proper swimming strokes needed to keep yourself floating merrily along. It would seem logical that the longer you swim, the better you seem to become accustomed to the swimming. Your stroke production becomes magnificent and you feel very powerful, until, of course, your foot becomes ensnared in some barbed wire and the more you try to extricate yourself, the more you bleed and pull away at your flesh. Indeed, life will invariably provide some new and difficult situations that will quickly befuddle you and remove all sense of any kind of swimming mastery for this, too, is the very nature of samsara.

In Googling the word samsara, some of the first definitions that come up include:


• This doctrine of samsara obviates any dream of an eternally happy afterlife; if the changing world is but an illusion and we are condemned to remain in it through birth after birth, what purpose is there in atmansiddhi? The goal became not an eternity in a blissful afterlife, but moksha, or "liberation" from samsara .This quest for liberation is the hallmark of the Upanishads and forms the fundamental doctrine of both Buddhism and Jainism (Richard Hooker http://www.wsu.edu:8080/~dee/GLOSSARY/SAMSARA.HTM).

• In most Indian philosophical traditions, including the orthodox Hindu and heterodox Buddhist and Jain systems, an ongoing cycle of birth, death, and rebirth is assumed as a fact of nature. These systems differ widely, however, in the terminology with which they describe the process and in the metaphysics they use in interpreting it. Most of these traditions, in their evolved forms, regard Samsara negatively, as a fallen condition which is to be escaped. Some, such as Advaita Vedanta regard the world and Samsaric participation in it as fundamentally illusory (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samsara).

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As we can see, there seem to be many different takes on samsara. One of them even shows how we can bottle it and spray it on ourselves, which seems unnecessary because we are forever swimming in it when we are alive! The pool of samsara is endless indeed.

One of the areas which to me is the most difficult in coming to an understanding of samsara is the idea that we can somehow control our swimming in this pool. I often catch myself thinking that if I could just finish this degree, or just manage to teach a few more sections of English Composition, then I will feel that I am on the right path towards being a successful teacher. But of course this isn’t the case because just behind the next corner will come a new challenge or angle that negates all that has been learned before and this often brings me to a place of having to change gears yet again and abandon a prior goal. This is a maddening experience, yet there it is. As we continue to swim in the pool of samsara, we realize that all is forever changing and melting away and that no matter how hard we try to grasp at a buoy or a raft – we realize that there is no respite and all that we can do is to continue swimming forever forward for this is the only alternative. Change happens and you have to deal with it. And all is forever changing.

Even some simple discussion about the pool of samsara is difficult indeed for it always implies that if we learn about the pool, then maybe we can learn to negotiate its depths and to dodge the piles of excrement bobbing by and the corpses floating down river – but of course we can’t for as we float in the pool of samsara we become so involved that we can’t seem to notice all of the obstacles that arise and fall away again and again. Often we ourselves can act as the obstacle for the other swimmers and we can become false lighthouses throwing out luminous beams that excite our fellow swimmers, yet these beams also lead them to crash into the coastal rocks and to cut themselves into bloody hamburger meat.

I think that we all make rather generous negative contributions to the ocean of samsara. One of my poorer contributions is the sick anger and envy that comes with a desire to “be better” than everyone else. It is purely an ego drive. If there is any undertow for me that exists within the ocean of samsara, it is my striving for dominance. This demon takes on many shapes and sizes, but I have felt its demon breath most intensely within my two hobbies of tennis and guitar playing. No matter how much I have practiced my tennis game over the years – I still lose many easy matches. No matter how much I practice the guitar, there is always someone playing a hundred times better than me. My mind continues to harbor the illusion if only I was really good at these skills, then I might have a chance at some true happiness. This, unfortunately, does not happen. I continue to mourn my lack of competence within the sphere of these two activities.

Ultimately, as I am swimming within the pool, I get a sense that my ego will eventually get a big rush of competence and that I will be transformed into a highly competent avatar of shining ability. Of course this never happens and though I speak about praising humbleness as a virtue – I deeply despise humility because I know that I must have it within these two pursuits for I am no Andre Agassi or Eric Clapton. Nor will I ever be. And this realization becomes my personal adult swim within the pool of samsara. I often perceive myself to be an eighty-pound weakling floating meekly along waiting for death. Perhaps I enjoy the feeling of rage that comes with never getting any where because I know that I am too weak to move toward large-scale triumphs and successes. Had I made better choices when I was younger, well, perhaps then I could have found some simple career success, but I spent way too much time hitting tennis balls or strumming the guitar!

The constant striving towards becoming is indeed a horrible source of human suffering. As somewhat of an academic, I have experienced this pain quite acutely. For the teacher and educator, the procurement of new degrees seems to be one of the ultimate connections to the bitter striving that is a constant undertow within the ocean of samsara. Though as humans we are forever trapped in the “dynamic of becoming” and change, the person who chooses to pursue academic degrees must continually be working on the next paper, the next reading, the next examination until at long last all of the hard work has culminated in some form of a degree or grade. This kind of life rhythm often feels like a slow torture conducted within a dungeon with no light coming in from any window. You are simply trapped and you must lean into the pain. There is a strong tendency to want to somehow reach some point of completion, yet the real completion is just beyond the hand’s grasp.
The ocean of samsara is vast indeed and the wildly swirling waters are evermore complicated, confusing and draining. For myself, the ultimate koan seems to ask me to maintain an awareness that all is in a constant state of flux, yet somehow to stay aware that there is a now and to notice it for what it is worth.