Fear in Daily Life

Have you not seen the idle man of Tao who has nothing to learn and nothing to do,
Who neither discards wandering thoughts nor seeks the truth?
The real nature of ignorance is Buddha-nature;
The illusory empty body is the Dharma body.

When I read these words, I reflect on the nature of fear. If, as the poem suggests, "the illusory empty body is the Dharma body", then why would we be filled with fears? I have started to reflect on how we can approach fear from two perspectives. One of them might be described as "Spinozistic" while the other may be described as "Buddhist".

Spinoza saw strong emotions as being rooted in a lack of proper perspective on life. Fear is literally a "passion", meaning it takes us by surprise and leads us to a feeling of diminished control.  In contrast, reason provides a proper understanding of the place of an emotion in the development of a human life. To understand the way an emotion unfolds and its proper function is to not overstep the role of that emotion. Let's say we are watching an action movie, and we see the protagonist surrounded by many explosions or gunfire. We "fear" for the protagonist's life, because we simply don't know how the movie will end for this character. When we are particularly empathetic toward this protagonist and know precisely why they need to go through their trials and tribulations--what lessons to be learned or skills to be gained--we start to see fear in the context of a greater whole. Fear has a necessary place in life, but it needn't consume us. On the other hand, overattachment to fear can lead to a life lived simply for the sake of avoiding fear. Fear is reified as a kind of demonic power or enemy.

A Buddhist view of fear is to understand it as a mind-created phenomena. To go back to the opening vignette, all feelings, thoughts, emotional states, are creations of the mind. As such, they are not alien to Buddha nature. The subtle mistake we make here is that as soon as any unpleasant emotion arises in our mind, we create a sense of self that wants to detach from it, and which is even based on a belief in our ability to successfully distance. Attachment comes from this belief that we have a self that is worth salvaging from any dire emotional state such as anger or fear. Contrariwise, if we were to see that eve anger and fear have Buddha nature, we wouldn't try to barricade ourselves from these states of awareness. Furthermore, we would be able to observe their arrival and going without attaching to them.

Fear is part of a greater context of lived experience governed by purpose (conatus) and reason, per Spinoza. But in Buddhism, fear need not have an ulterior purpose that it moves toward or acts against. In fact, by trying to interpret fear in terms of a larger sense of meaning, we may miss the fact that fear is just a part of deeper Buddha nature. All we need to do is to peer deeply into the impermanent nature of every moment to see what's underneath fear.