The Buddha pointing at the Moon

There is a legend that Buddha likened his teaching, his Dharma, to a finger point at the Moon, which, in this analogy, represents the ultimate truth that can only be apprehended by experience and can never directly communicated in human language. He also liked his teaching to a raft that could ferry you across the river of greed, hatred and delusion. As he said, once over the river you would cast the raft aside, you wouldn’t carry it further, once it was of no further use to you.

This tells us that the Buddha perceived an ineffable truth about human existence in this World and that his teachings shouldn’t be confused with ultimate truth itself. In modern parlance, we might say that this truth must be written in the stars: it must be part of the fabric of our Universe. It asserts that human life, although it has come about over billions of years, through the vagaries of cosmic, stellar, geological and biological evolution, is not a purely accidental and meaningless process.

For those who have experienced the joy and freedom that the Buddha’s teaching can bring, it represents one of the great breakthroughs in our understanding of the human predicament (religious Buddhists would, of course, elevate the Buddha’s attainment even higher). For the danasattva, the human pursuit of wisdom is an unending quest to deepen our understanding of the Great Dharma at the mysterious heart of our World, the Buddha’s Dharma being but one great step in that quest.