Guess?

I don't cry as much during my Buddhist podcasts as I used to. When I was grieving mom and John quit his job and life was hard, I cried a lot during my dharma talks. Not so much, I still listen with the same fervor and have gotten pretty good at meditating (almost) every day, but today's story made me cry. I've heard it before, as it is the Buddha becoming enlightened, but you'll never guess which thing it was that almost prevented him from attaining enlightenment, I wouldn't have guessed it, but it makes total sense:


Buddha (or Siddhartha, because he wasn't awakened fully yet) sat down under the Bodhi tree and said he wasn't going to move until he became enlightened. Mara - the god of bad stuff - kept hurling things at Siddhartha all night as he sat under the tree. All kinds of horrors came at him, greed, fear, aversion - it all came to him. The arrows were hurled at Siddhartha and as he overcame each, they turned into flowers. The story goes the next day, after his enlightenment, the Buddha sat in piles of flowers.

Just as dawn breaks an all arrows have been thrown, Mara throws one more.

Know what is is? The last thing Siddhartha must face before he becomes THE BUDDHA?

Doubt.

Doubt.

Who are you to think that you can be a Buddha? Who are you to think you deserve this? You don't. You do it wrong. You are wrong.

And the Buddha places his hands on the earth (he didn't seek his answer up in the sky, this is one of the things that I love about Buddhism, he reached for the earth) and gathered strength from the ground and became enlightened.

Doubt. Of all the slings. Fear, hatred, greed.

It's doubt that is the last and therefore the most serious one.

Imagine what you could be without doubt?

A Buddha.