Two Rivers, a White Path, and the Hotel California (Part 1)

“O traveler, with mind that is single, with right-mindedness, come at once! I will protect you. Have no fear of plunging to grief in the water or fire.” The traveler, having heard the exhortation on his side of the river and the call from the other, immediately acquires firm resolution in body and mind and decisively takes the path, advancing directly without entertaining any doubt or apprehension.” — Shan-Tao, Four-Fascicle Commentary on the Contemplation Sutra

Pure Land Buddhists are called to awaken to the world of nirvana made possible through the dynamic and infinite wisdom and compassion that we call Amida Buddha. 

The excerpt above comes from the classic parable of the Two Rivers and White Path. It is a timeless story in Pure Land Buddhism and is a metaphor for all of our journeys trying to find spiritual peace.  It tells a story about a traveler trapped on the eastern shore where beasts and brigands chase him to the river’s edge. Those beasts and brigands represent our senses and perceptions that more often than not create mind-stories that prevent us from grasping true reality. 

He reaches the edge of the eastern shore and realizes he can’t turn back lest the beasts and brigands kill him but what lies before him are two massive rivers: one of catastrophic fires that represents our anger. The other river is one of treacherous waves that represent our greed. If he turns left the flames will incinerate him. If he turns right the waves will crush him. 

But, almost out of nowhere, a voice calls out to him, the voice of the historical Shakyamuni Buddha, telling him that there is a thin white path between the two rivers, and encourages him to make a break for it. On the western shore is the Buddha of Immeasurable Light and Life, Wisdom and Compassion. We call this Amida Buddha, but as I understand it, Amida is not a real person or a deity, but the manifestation of the ultimate truth that is Enlightenment. That voice calls out to the traveler and he knows that reliance upon the infinite wisdom and compassion of the great current of all life will keep him from falling into the flames or the waves. Though brought to the depths of despair - or may because of that - he awakens to what that beckoning call promises, gains a glimpse of the nirvana that awaits on the western shore, drops his ego, and single-mindedly takes a onto into the white path. 

I’ve heard this story a number of times but I really came to understand it through a classic song that popped up on one of my playlists the other day. It’s a song about another traveler trying to escape the beasts and brigands, fire and water in his life, who was trying to escape a place you’ve all heard of before: “Hotel California.” 

Released by the Eagles in 1977, “Hotel California” quickly reached the top of the Billboard charts. Over time, creative minds have argued that the song is a metaphor for everything from cannibalism or satanism to the excesses of the entertainment industry, to the prison of drug addiction. 

But, I’d like to argue that “Hotel California” captures the essence of the Parable of the Two Rivers and White Path, and is a metaphor for all of our spiritual journeys.

In one of the opening lines, our traveler remarks that the Hotel California:

“could be heaven or this could be hell…” 

This observation shows how the Hotel California represents the existence we all live in because from a Buddhist perspective there is neither heaven nor hell in the Christian sense, but rather Samsara. Also known as the Saha World, Samsara is the shore we’re on right now, it’s the unenlightened mundane world governed by our bonno or blind passions. 

After venturing into the mysterious lodging he is told: 

“[there’s] plenty of room at the Hotel California any time of year, you can find it here.”

This suggests just how enveloped we can be in the world of samsara. Jeff Wilson, who wrote Buddhism of the Heart and other scholarly books on Buddhism, defines Samsara this way: 

“Buddhists conceive of the world as a suffering-laden cycle of life, death, and rebirth, without beginning or end. At the root of this cycle are our blind passions of greed, anger, and delusion that force us to cling to what we think will bring us permanent comfort, pleasure or happiness. When we think like this, our delusions may grow further, only setting ourselves up for more disappointment.” 

If we think about it, each day is filled with cycles of metaphorical life, death, and rebirth with ample suffering along the way. We wake up on a Wednesday wishing it was a Saturday. We look forward to treating ourselves to a nice breakfast only to find out the diner is out of our favorite meal. We get to work and find a plum parking spot, but then open our laptops to find 50 unread emails. We look forward to going out with friends after work, but then no one asks how our day was and so it goes and goes and goes.

For the residents of Hotel California, we can see their suffering pushed to the extremes as their greed for worldly pleasures pulls them to, among other things: drugs addiction, alcohol consumption, and sexual indulgence as we see with these references to what the traveler encounters: 

“Warm smell of colitas…”

“Please bring me my wine…”

“Mirrors on the ceiling…”

“Pink champagne on ice…”

For the traveler at the Hotel California, these are the fires of anger and waves of greed he must navigate and not fall into. 

That last line about the residents who gathered for a feast, stabbing it with their steely knives is pretty well understood to be a references to drug use, but the line that “they just can’t kill the beast” is also indicative of the nature of samsara that Wilson mentioned: that suffering is cyclical in that the more we satisfy our cravings the more our cravings deepen. 

But for all of the depressing nature of this song and the mental suffering that we feel in the samsaric world, seeds of liberation from this suffering are present.  Yes, there’s plenty of room at the Hotel California, but not so much because of bad luck or being immoral people. The voices at the Hotel California tell the traveler this when they say:

“We are all just prisoners here, of our own device”

In other words the other guests at the Hotel California may be trapped there, but possibly through a kind of suffering that may or may not necessarily be of their own choosing. This also ties to the concept of Samsara in terms of what we call Yogacara or “consciousness only” Buddhism

According to Francesca Fremantle, a Tibetan Buddhist Studies scholar:

“The Buddha described all worldly phenomena as having three characteristics: impermanence, suffering, and nonself. We suffer because we imagine what is not self to be self, what is impermanent to be permanent, and what, from an ultimate viewpoint, is pain to be pleasure.

Samsara is life as we live it under the influence of ignorance, the subjective world each of us creates for ourselves. This world contains good and evil, joy and pain, but they are relative, not absolute; they can be defined only in relationship to each other and are continually changing into their opposites. Although samsara seems to be all-powerful and all-pervading, it is created by our own state of mind, like the world of a dream, and it can be dissolved into nothingness just like awakening from a dream.” 

This is such an important realization because it suggests a break from the cycle of suffering that we, as residents of Hotel California, as residents of samsara, can experience. The means through which we can check out of the Hotel California are the seeds of enlightenment that we receive through our Buddhist teachings.

Check back next week for part two.