Taking things lightly

"To be a Buddhist is to learn to take everything lightly, including your own death...and beyond. The heroes and sages of the Buddhist tradition are not noble warriors or fearsome prophets, but tiny, wizened monks who don't care what people think of them. Like all holy fools, they say incredibly stupid things that turn out to embody enormous existential truths.

A lot of Zen Buddhist teaching comes in the form of koans; little philosophical problems which, superficially at least, bear a close resemblance to riddles. Probably the best known are 'What is the sound of ne hand clapping ?' and 'If a tree falls in a forest and there's no one there to hear, does it make a sound ?' The koans, while undoubtedly profound, are also playful. They sound like jokes because, to a Buddhist, there's a great big joke at the very heart of our existence. Being is nothingness. Reality is illusion. There's not only nothing to be taken seriously, there's not even really a 'you' to take it seriously or otherwise.

Traditional representations of the historical Buddha show a serenely handsome youth with a clear, impassive face. But all over China, you will also find a strikingly different depiction: a bald, fat laughing monk who has come to represent a future reincarnation of the Buddha. According to legend, this Maitreya Buddha is due to arrive on earth in 2,000 years or so, after mankind's immorality has reduced the whole world to a desolate battlefield, to teach us patience and tolerance.

The size of the gap between our high opinions of ourselves and the dust to which we all come to at last is a clue to the jolly face of the Chinese Laughing Buddha. Perhaps he understands that, faced with a true awareness of the human condition, the only responses open to us are laughter or tears, and he chooses the more enlightened path.

The ability to find the world funny is a powerful survival tool; if only we could all remember more often than not that the choice is available to us, we would almost certainly improve our quality of life."

"The Naked Jape: Uncovering the Hidden World of Jokes"
Jimmy Carr & Lucy Greeves (2006)