What Kind of Fear is Appropriate For The Path to Fearlessness?

We as a whole suspect that dread is horrendous and difficult, yet the Buddhists do exclude dread in the extensive rundown of mental hardships contained in the Abhidharma, the center lessons on Buddhist brain research.

The Buddha dharma certainly extols the virtue of fearlessness. One of the three significant sorts of giving will be giving somebody assurance from dread. It is the essence of the abhaya, also known as the “no-fear mudra,” which is the well-known posture of the Buddha in which he holds up his hand with the palm facing out. Indeed, becoming a Buddha makes you fearless.

Dread is defensive; it assists us with trying not to meander into a ravenous place of extreme peril. In the Buddhist sense, it is also helpful because it embodies the first noble truth’s fear of suffering. The reality of enduring alarms us to the way that we are not monitoring what we truly are. We are misled about misery. We should be aware of our misery. In fact, we ought to be terrified of suffering. Otherwise, there would be no reason for us to take any action.

The way to fearlessness is to start with the right kind of fear.

Dread will persuade us to attempt to grasp the world and ourselves, and when we do, we will come to see the value in the second honorable truth: that the habit of creating an absolute self is the cause of suffering. We go through life being absolute, as if no one else matters, but we can come to realize that this habit doesn’t work when we examine it. We can cultivate deep concentration and meditation on that topic and, in the end, let go of that gut feeling that we are “the real me” in opposition to everything and everyone else. We will descend into the lower realms of existence if we do not overcome this sense of self-absoluteness. That is something it is sensible to fear.

The third honorable truth is nirvana — the way that it is feasible to turn out to be for all time liberated from misery but not dead… That is extreme valor. Furthermore, the Buddha offered us a way to understand this as the fourth honorable truth, which depicts an instructive interaction including study, fixation, reflection, and changing your way of life.

You can reach a point where you are connected to both your own nobleness and the nobleness of others if you follow this path. You understand there is no absolute self, and, consequently, oneself is an adaptable, social thing. You see yourself as connected to the universe. Your sense of being cut off from the world and isolated from other people has diminished. Your sense of global connection has grown stronger over time. You don’t worry about being connected.

It is said that we are afraid of things we shouldn’t be afraid of because we are ignorant of them. Regularly we dread connectedness, however, it is as a matter of fact the disconnectedness that we should fear. The way to fearlessness is to start with the right kind of fear.

D.G.Shastri

Courtesy: Robert A F Thurman

(The author, previous teacher of Indo-Tibetan Buddhist Examinations, Columbia College, is one of the featured experts at Worldwide Buddhist Culmination on ‘Reactions to Contemporary Difficulties: Philosophy to Praxis, Delhi, April 20 and 21)

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