Enlightenment, You Say?

I've been reading a fair amount about Buddhism recently, because as a white dude living in Japan and trying to feel out various cross-cultural ways of conceiving things, reading a fair amount about Buddhism is sort of an inevitability.

I confess to having grown up with a keen interest in the supernatural. Not really the sort of interest you'd get from reading some manifestation of scripture or sitting in some kind of pew, however. No, my fascination with the supernatural was largely informed by the vast stretches of time I spent playing video games, especially fantasy role playing games. Chrono Trigger, Final Fantasy, The Legend of Zelda, Lufia II Rise of the Sinistrals, Golden Sun, Tales of Symphonia, Ogre Battle 64, Fire Emblem, the list goes on, composing a library of other titles that I can't remember yet still exist in my memory as flashing images of pixellated mages and dark-matter spewing dragons on the black screen of my mind.  Like a lot of kids I was easily captivated by tales of magic, spirit realms, and sword-wielding, prophecy-confirming young heroes rising from obscurity to save the world from misguided middle aged dudes drawn in by the dark side.  That's pretty much how they all go, because whatever the twists and turns the stories take, deep down their appeal is simple and the same: what budding young nerd wouldn't like to experience military triumph on the tip of the Flaming Sword of Argorath alongside a party of hot anime babes? If Nietzsche is right and one of the primary sources of human motivation is the will to power, there is no better (quicker, safer, more reliable) way to step into the shoes of the ubermensch than to turn on your PS3.

Of course, after you reach a certain point, you step out of your own adolescence and into an awareness of the outside world that poses an existential question: will you continue to seek moral perfection (for being unshakably and unquestionably right is a baseline function of many, though not all, RPGs) and self-actualization in the determinist matrix of medieval-themed computer programming, or will you look to level up in the infinitely more complicated and less-likely to bend-to-your-summoner-skills external world? I'm still nostalgic for video games, and every once in a while I pop one into my Nintendo DS, but I generally end up turning it off after fifteen or twenty minutes; I find myself increasingly unable to marshal my attention for something that just isn't real.

Which doesn't mean that the desire for vitality and electric transcendentalism video games used to satisfy in me has died. Like most people lucky enough to have been born into a culture that services your essential needs more-or-less with a smile, I've always been on the lookout for colorful lights to string in the sky and pulses of plasma to pump through my veins. For a long time, plugging into a world of digital angels and mythical weaponry was enough, but it's not anymore.

So where do you turn? I listen to a lot of Dragonforce, but that's pretty much like video games on tape, palatable because you can do something else at the same time and a song lasts six minutes instead of 60 hours. I tried painting but I sucked at it. I tried Japanese calligraphy but I didn't have the patience. I tried guitar theory but the best I could ever get was competence, which is cool but nobody ever beat the Final Boss with competency. You need your ultimate spell, the enchanted sword of a dead legend (who you may or may not be the reincarnation of), and probably some kick-ass magic resistant armor. A working knowledge of the pentatonic scale just doesn't cut it.

So where do you turn? Do you turn to God? Part of the reason that video games are fun is that they simulate a world in which god can actually exist, and you get all of the badass stuff without having to worry about the stuff that doesn't make any sense. I looked for God, but the only place in which He seems to fit is on a laser-disc. And yet, and yet, what about the Buddha? Eastern religion is pretty hip these days, and from what you hear the Buddha isn't quite like every other deity on the block. Turns out he's not really even a deity. What about Enlightenment? What the hell is that, exactly? From a boy who was always fascinated with the possibility of revelation, of spiritual sustenance, of being whisked off into a fantasy world where magic is real and legends tell the truth I have grown into something close to a man who sees through the improbability of such things. Nevertheless, I wanted to leave no legitimate stone unturned, so I started studying about Buddhism, and what I found, while not evidence for a spirit realm, was still pretty interesting. More to follow.