LIBERATION
Gotama Buddha's first mission was to make some sense out of his personal digust with his own life and his confusion about the necessity of the suffering of old age, sickness and death. His mission changed to that of Liberation and finally to aid all sentient creatures teaching them how to obtain that liberation.
Now it is always a great temptation to link the apparent objectives of Buddhism with suffering, but that would be an error. What really is this Liberation? It is a magnificent thing when you divorce it from intellectual and philosophical ideas. It is the liberation of the unstained mind to soar where only the human mind can. To caress a tree, to climb a mountain for no reason at all, to play with a dog, to throw pebbles in the sea, to run, to laugh, to be. That is liberation. It is to float without identity to music, to fly with a bird. It is to sense and to discriminate and to sleep and to meditate with tranquility. It is to sit down and stand up when it is appropriate. It is to sacrifice for the benefit of others. It is to be the world. From wanting to get off this weary world it is wanting to stay on it and dress its wounds. It is to save a life, no matter how insignificant. It is to understand, to be curious and to be creative. It is these and thousands of other magnificent things. So don’t think that Buddha's liberation or your liberation is simply the removal of suffering. Don’t set goals to end Suffering, don’t set goals to achieve Awakening. Don’t set goals to end your confusion and doubt. Just go about the task of liberating the apparently separate mind and body which appears to be yours.
Liberation is just that, to unite and free the mind and body. Free them from what? From the chains that bind them. From the chains of craving and clinging, to be sure, but also from the chains of sensations and emotions that have no utility, from perceptions that are hollow and false, from an agitated consciouness, from Volition that is tainted, from believing that what the senses see is reality and all there is, from Becoming with duality, from giving continual new birth to Identity, from the folly of false views of old age, illness and death and from Ignorance.
That is what Buddha's Liberation is about. It is true that one consequence of this is that Suffering dissolves. It is true there may be an Awakening. But there are magnificent experiences that arise of sensitivity, discrimination, natural intelligence, true compassion, benevolent love, the joy of equanimity and natural happiness.
So when you think of Buddha and his Mission think of these things and know that what Buddha offers as a master teacher is True Liberation, for every sentient human creature.
Buddha was a Teacher, a man of passion with a Mission, which he himself could not reject: the Liberation of all sentient creatures.
But Buddha declared that there are no sentient creatures to be liberated.
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It is certainly true, but why did he insist on this point? It was precisely because he had the strong character which he had. He held a great aversion to all that prevented human liberation, but he did not perceive the oppression in a personal way.
It was the abstract idea of the oppression of the mind on which he fixed his attention. What he saw immediately around him, what he had seen in himself and the lives of all around him in the palace, was Clinging and Craving.
It was the easiest to see. The Vedas, the Mahabharata, all the sacred texts showed that to be true. Despite all the Brahmanic learning he had received, he had fallen into the trap. He knew how easy it was. He saw too with clear vision that clinging and craving, with the other members of the cycle of Dependent Origination, was a universal phenomenon, an all-encompassing stain in the human mind. As such, no single person was chained. All wore the same chain.
Thus one single person could be free while the chain remained.
Thus there was in his mind no question of there being the necessity of individual liberation.
There had to be Universal Liberation from the disease of the stained mind, which caused Universal Suffering.
With the force of the revulsion of his own apparent captivity, his revulsion was greatest for what was most apparent, universal clinging and craving. We saw that his rejection of the Materialsists was much greater than the Eternalists for precisely that reason. It was the universal tendency to cling to and crave the world of the senses that was the prime enemy. Thus Clinging and Craving became the focus and Mental restraint, called often in error "renunciation," the first orange banner to fly over India.
Later we will see that a new Buddhist idea provided ways to change that focus and provided another great tool to obtain that same Liberation. That idea would be eventually the direct attack upon Ignorance which took the form of Duality.