The Buddha’s first teaching came shortly after his awakening when he encountered a group of monks and explained the Four Noble Truths and the Eightfold Path as the solution to suffering.
But I think there was a teaching before that which encompasses the rest of what Buddha taught.
By the time he reached the Bodhi tree, Siddhartha Gautama knew he was on the verge of awakening. He sat under the tree and entered a deep state of meditation. Mara, the God of Illusion, came before him to stop the awakening.
Among other things, Mara represents what Carl Jung called our Shadow self - all the parts of ourselves that we deem unacceptable and refuse to deal with. The Shadow lurks in our unconscious as the rejected aspects ourselves and are too frightening to look at. Although we do our best to keep it hidden, the Shadow profoundly affects our behaviors and attitudes.
After three days struggling with the young Yogi, in desperation Mara threw his most powerful weapon at Siddhartha - self doubt.
“What makes you think you are someone who can awaken?” Mara screamed.
The young Yogi simply opened his eyes, looked right at Mara and said, “I see you Mara, let’s have tea.”
He looked right into his own darkness, doubts and fears and met it all with acknowledgement and compassionate invitation.
He awakened in that moment.
Thus, the first teaching - total self acceptance as the key to awakening.
Shortly thereafter, a group of children who had been attending to the meditating Yogi named him Buddha - the Awakened One.
Awakening requires that we look at all aspects of ourselves and bring them together in a unified whole - the Buddhist concept of Samadhi.
Loosely translated from Pali, Samadhi means concentration. Concentration in this sense doesn’t mean increasing our mental effort to focus more. Here it means to bring all the elements together in a unified whole the way water pools at the bottom of a basin in the rain.
Samadhi includes bringing all of ourselves into view with clarity, acceptance and compassion. Jung observed the only way to tame the Shadow is to look right at and meet it with kindness.
Mara is often depicted as a demon or serpent. In the movie Little Buddha, he appears before Buddha as a hairy, grubby little man.
I think he should have appeared as Buddha’s mirror image.
Doubt is considered one of Five Hinderances to awakening. We wonder if we’re okay - if we’re good enough, smart enough, thin enough, just plain enough. It’s a cultural epidemic.
In her book Radical Acceptance, Tara Brach called it “the trance of unworthiness.”
Mother Teresa, who ministered in the most impoverished slums of India observed:
“The biggest disease today is not leprosy or tuberculosis but rather the feeling of not belonging.”
Flash forward 2,500 years from Buddha’s awakening and I had a chance to meet with a senior Buddhist teacher at the Insight Meditation Center in California.
Ajan Sundara, senior nun from the Amaravati Monastery in England, listened patiently to my issues and doubts. Then she reminded me of Buddha and Mara.
“When you notice yourself in that struggle,” she said, “just smile and say, ‘I see you, Mara.’”
It was a simple expression of Buddha’s first teaching - self acceptance.
Throughout the rest of his life, Buddha would occasionally encounter Mara skulking around at the edge of the forest clearing where he was teaching, or hiding among the monks.
The monks found Mara’s presence frightening. But Buddha always met him in the same fashion:
“I see you Mara, let’s have tea.”
To me this suggests that throughout his life, even Buddha was periodically visited by his doubts and fears. And he met it with clear eyes, compassion and invitation.
I was in a writers group recently. And the subject came up of believing in ourselves and our abilities. Almost everyone in the group copped to struggling with that. In 25 years as a psychotherapist, I came to view self-doubt possibly the most common thing people struggled with.
What if it turns out to be true that self doubt is an illusion, that we’re all actually okay, we’re doing the right thing - we’re doing the best we can and it’s good enough. The rest is just the whisperings of Mara.
So when you’re stuck in the trance of unworthiness, wondering whether you’re good enough, whether you’re doing it right, whether you look right, whatever, simply look right at all of that and say, “I see you, Mara. Let’s have tea.”
We may have to remind ourselves again and again that it’s only Mara whispering in your ear and you can disarm him with clarity and compassion.