Escape from Samsara
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by Harold Stewart
In the third chapter of the Lotus Sutra The Buddha compares the lives of men attached to Samsara to children trapped in a burning house who are reluctant to leave until he entices them forth by promising them toys. Our natural impulse as well as our spiritual duty is to escape from this burning World, yet we are so fascinated by the conflagration that we prefer to sit among the flames, awaiting incineration. The Buddha had first to find a way out for himself before he could succeed in guiding others to safety and not lead them further into the Fire; and so he always adapts his skilful means to the kind of danger and the character of those to be saved. The supererogatory Compassion of the Bodhisattva, who regards other Sentient beings as himself, even moves him to re-enter the burning house at the risk of his Life to rescue those incarcerated in Samsara. Is not such escapism morally sublime?
But surely, it will be objected, the Buddhist longs to escape from this World into Nirvana? Since the Unconditioned State is spoken of in the Pali scriptures only in negatives, a stereotyped misconception has long ago been impressed in Western minds that Nirvana is a sedative addiction to Lotus-eating, a self-submergence into mindless oblivion that is righteously condemned. Now it is notoriously harder to eradicate misunderstandings implanted by faulty translation from Asian into European languages than it is to disseminate new ideas; and so it is difficult to convince the wrongly informed that The Buddha expressly denied that Nirvana meant annihilation.