Free Maya by C. W. Huntington

substitute a caterpillar for the grasshopper, leaving several eggs instead of one, so that the soft, living body of their victim writhes and squirms as it is eaten alive.
    This was a natural world far removed from the bucolic scenery of my childhood experience. But as an adult, how could I have remained so terribly naïve? It now seemed to me that I had been living, all these years, in a Disney film, some fantastically romanticized world that had nothing at all to do with the merciless truths of nature. It was all there in the title of Becker’s book: Denial of Death . Why had no one ever pointed this out to me until now? Why had no one forced me to look?
    There is a Sanskrit phrase describing the teaching of the Buddha as yatha bhutam darshanam , “seeing things as they are.” In Chicago I had studied Buddhism in the context of my graduate work in Indian religion and philosophy; but early on I had decided to specialize in the Hindu philosophy of Vedanta. Chicago was now far away; decisions I had made there no longer seemed quite so important. After reading Becker I decided to take another look at what we had learned in those classes and seminars on Buddhism. I began by reviewing the basic doctrines in the Pali canon. Pali is the classical language of Theravada Buddhism, the form of Buddhismpracticed in Thailand, where Mickey had lived as a monk. This was where I turned for a fresh look at the most fundamental of all Buddhist teachings, the so-called four noble truths.
    According to the first of the four truths, every dimension of our present experience is infected with a kind of existential dis-ease called, in Pali, dukkha . Dukkha is the gut-level understanding that things are not in our control, and the anxiety that accompanies this understanding. Dukkha is most apparent at times of sickness and physical pain, or when confronting the infirmities of old age. But it is also present in the inevitable force of change and loss, in the shadow of death that falls over all our earthly joys. In order to enjoy our lives we repress any disturbing thoughts—including the thought that this present sense of well-being cannot last. However, some 2,400 years before Freud, the Buddha taught that while disturbing thoughts may be successfully repressed, the effects of repression boil up unpredictably, giving shape to all manner of perverse desires and fears. Even the best of times—what we call “happiness”—when viewed through the lens of this first Buddhist truth, are seen to be permeated by a chronic, inescapable unrest.
    The second noble truth teaches that dukkha originates in tanha : an insatiable thirst. The commentaries make it clear that the word “thirst” has two primary connotations, craving and clinging: “Craving is the aspiring to an object that one has not yet reached, like a thief stretching out his hand in the dark; clinging is the grasping of an object that one has already obtained, like the thief clasping tightly the object of his desire.” Reflecting on these words, I looked back over all the years I had spent reaching out for one thing after another—clothes, cars, status, sex, knowledge—only to see the anticipated pleasure slip through my fingers.
    To have and to hold, till death do us part.
    And what does the thief want now? What is the rarefied object of his present desire?
    The third noble truth—that the flames of this chronic malaise might once and forever be extinguished, not at death but here in this life—was a proposition truly beyond reckoning. Rifling through the Pali canon I discovered that the Buddha was reluctant to speak on the topic of nirvana, and when he did it was always through the media of poetry, parable, and metaphor:
    Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â  Certain recluses and brahmans have abused me with groundless, empty lies. They claim that I have led people astray withthese words: “When one reaches nirvana,