This is an approximation of a Dharma talk I gave at the Greater Boston Zen Center on Tuesday, November 12, 2013.

Healing myself and others, I vow to save all beings.

— from the Bodhisattva Precepts (BoWZ shorter version)

Sometimes a word or phrase will jump out at me as we chant or recite it during the liturgical portion of our service.  One word or phrase seems elevated above the rest, like a sonic bubble bursting through the surface of awareness.

This happened recently when we were reciting the shorter version of the Bodhisattva Precepts.  The phrase “healing myself” leaped out.

“Healing myself and others, I vow to save all beings.”

I’ve held this phrase as a little koan during the weeks since.  As a pebble in my palm.

How is it that we heal ourselves by vowing and working to save others?  How is it that we save others as we do this?

It seems fair to say that we’re conditioned to think of ourselves as separate beings, and that this gives rise to a fair amount of psychological (and, by extension, possible physical) suffering.

There no doubt are many practical benefits – physical, psychic and social – that flow from a strong self-sense.  We are embodied in a realm in which all is constantly in flux – where things, including us, come into being, cease to exist, and change states between those two moments.  Where we inevitably experience harm and loss between our coming into being and our ceasing to exist.  We’re no doubt programmed for protection of the skin bag that we are during this brief life, and this self-sense seems to be part of that program.

This program is only part of the picture, however, and yet it tends to monopolize our attention.  For many of us, it is the overwhelmingly dominant perspective.

Despite the fact that many Asian cultures are considered to be, and likely are, more communally-oriented than US and European cultures, this sense of psychic, even cosmic, isolation seems to be a pervasive feature of human experience.  Buddhism, with its many forms of antidote to this experience – its many ways to help us open our eyes, minds, hearts, arms and hands to the reality that we are and always have been thoroughly part of it all – arose from and has thrived in the cultures of Asia, after all.

In reality, though we are distinct, we are not separate.

The kind of suffering that the Buddha, and all teachers that have followed him, experienced and diagnosed and developed an approach to alleviating is the suffering we experience when we don’t genuinely feel – don’t know in our bones, know beyond knowing – that we are truly part of it all.

All in.

One common dictionary definition of the word “heal” is to “make whole.” I heal myself as I become whole.

From the Buddhist perspective, whole really means everything – the whole universe, the whole shebang.  From the farthest reaches of space-time to the poodle in your lap.  The stuff we understand and the stuff we may never understand conceptually, but which we stand under and stand in and embody, whether or not we’re capable of wrapping our minds around it.

All right here.  All me.

Sure, we can’t both ride that bike at the same time.  We have to develop wise and compassionate norms about how to produce and allocate and consume resources, and we have to develop wise and compassionate norms about treatment of beings in all the ways we are distinct in our not-separateness.

This is all part of what it means to be whole, personally and collectively.

But the not-separate orientation seems to be harder for many of us than managing our distinctiveness, our individual existence (hard as that is).

Zen has many resources for helping us realize and lean into our not-separateness, among them:  zazen, in which we practice just being here, nothing more, nothing less; the teachings; our liturgy, in which we move together and become a chorus; koan practice, in which we join with a teacher and the many teachers of old to discover something for ourselves, and for all beings, in one of the lovely, often quirky stories that have been preserved and passed to us; and service opportunities.

So how does all this heal each of us and heal others?

As I age, and as I continue to sink into Zen practice and let it sink into me, I feel more and more insignificant, I must say.

What a relief!

Imagining ourselves as somehow capable of standing outside of or above it all, looking for that place or believing you’ve found it – well, that’s a very fragile way to go through life.

On an individual level, we’re healed by coming to know we’re in the soup.  We’re part of this whole mess, this whole beautiful, wondrous mess.  By aligning our perspective, our plans, and our actions with that reality.

And, yes, others are saved in the process.

This notion of saving others used to grate on me somewhat.  In this culture, notions of religious salvation and efforts to save others smacks of proselytizing in order to save others from the devil in this life and beyond.  It also can sound filled with hubris, like “Here I come!  Zen Superman to the rescue of all of humanity!”

But there are more nuanced ways to think about how our practice may be saving others:

Saved from our delusions that cast others as characters in our own private dramas.

Saved from the tendency to view and treat people instrumentally if we unconsciously or consciously, subtly or not-so-subtly regard ourselves as masters of the universe, rather than part of the chorus that is the universe.

Saved from what happens when we check out:  loss of the contributions we’re capable of making.

Saved by the reduction in harmful conduct that tends to come with orienting our lives in accordance with the realization that we are part of it all.

Saved by the generosity and compassion and skillful service that can flow from that orientation.

I now see this notion of healing – of wholeness and integration – as a key to understanding and living all of the precepts.  Each of the other precepts offers a specific perspective on and guidance in what it means to be healed and whole in a particular domain of life.

We are here, in this zendo now, to heal ourselves and one another.  To enact and honor our wholeness.

Our inescapable wholeness.

It’s lovely to be here with you, to be part of it all with you.

This is an approximation of a Dharma Talk I gave last night as part of our 2013 ango at the Boundless Way Temple in Worcester, Massachusetts.

A recording of the real deal is posted here, along with talks by other BoWZ teachers on this and other passages from Dogen’s Four Bodhisattva Methods of Guidance.  

This is the third of Dogen’s Four Bodhisattva Methods of guidance:

3 “Beneficial action” is skillfully to benefit all classes of sentient beings, that is, to care about their distant and near future, and to help them by using skillful means.  In ancient times, someone helped a caged tortoise; another took care of an injured sparrow.  They did not expect a reward; they were moved to do so only for the sake of beneficial action.

Foolish people think that if they help others first, their own benefit will be lost; but this is not so.  Beneficial action is an act of oneness, benefiting self and others together.

To greet petitioners, a lord of old three times stopped in the middle of his bath and arranged his hair, and three times left his dinner table.  He did this solely with the intention of benefiting others.  He did not mind instructing even subjects of other lords.  Thus you should benefit friend and enemy equally.  You should benefit self and others alike.  If you have this mind, even beneficial action for the sake of grasses, trees, wind, and water is spontaneous and unremitting.  This being so, make a wholehearted effort to help the ignorant.

The first time I read this passage a few weeks ago, the phrase “moved to do so” leapt out at me.

For me, being moved to do something is often an important pointer toward beneficial action that is an “act of oneness.”

In my experience, it’s too easy to allow oneself to be “tracked” into a job or another commitment that is not the deepest expression of who we are.

Perhaps a bit counter-intuitively, this sometimes can take the form of doing “good works” half-heartedly, when what we really want to do is something that superficially seems less civic oriented, but is something that we genuinely feel more drawn to do at the time.  We can berate ourselves for not doing more of what we think we should do with our talents for the sake of humanity.

One example of the latter experience in my life was the time I left a developing career teaching and practicing in the conflict resolution arena to join a tech startup.

It seemed like such a fork in the road.  Or, to mix metaphors, it was one of those apples and oranges moments.  I like both, and it seemed I had to choose one or the other.  It seemed I couldn’t have a fruit salad.

I sat with this decision problem for months.  I was really excited about the startup. It was doing something pretty cool, and the energy gathering there was palpable.

I thought I should do something more for the world, however, and that the conflict resolution work was it.

In the end, feeling a bit guilty about what I thought was a cop-out and a betrayl of principle, I joined the tech company.

And it was great.  An excellent move on every level at that life-stage.

And there were some big, fantastic surprises.

Shortly after we released our first product – which is a secure, online communication and collaboration tool – in the fall of 2000, this South African guy named Hannes Siebert walked into our office.

He said he was an early adopter of our product, and that he had a few feature requests.

We wouldn’t understand his world, he said, but he was dealing with an enormous, and enormously challenging, collaboration problem, and maybe helping him would produce features that others also would find useful.

Hannes explained that he had just been appointed as the neutral facilitator in the conflict in Sri Lanka, following a major impasse in the peace process.

He hadn’t yet been able to get the parties meeting face-to-face again, but he had revived the process online, using our software.

I nearly fell out of my chair.

“I do understand your world,” I said.  “We can help.”

And we did.

Our software became central to a new phase of the process in Sri Lanka.  It later was used by international election monitors, including Jimmy Carter, to help ensure the integrity of a national election there.

Hannes’s visit to our office marked the beginning of my involvement with the Peace Appeal Foundation, the conflict resolution NGO Hannes co-founded earlier that year with several other people, including five Nobel Peace Laureates.

And it marked the beginning of a long friendship and collaboration with this remarkable peacemaker.

We’ve since worked in Nepal, Lebanon and elsewhere in the Middle East, and, most recently, in Myanmar/Burma, where we’re seeing terrible violence among Buddhists and Muslims, but also glimmers of hope, I believe.

Though the war in Sri Lanka ended tragically, the software created by the company I was part of has been a critical tool in every peace process in which the Peace Appeal Foundation has been involved since then.

Not every story like this ends this way, I know.  It was incredibly fortuitous that Hannes walked into our office that day.

The larger point for me is simply that there’s integrity in doing what we genuinely feel moved to do.

We can’t predict – let alone control – the future, so sometimes those inner movements can be our best guide.

Years of sitting, and koan work, and, most of all, just living life have taught me that it’s usually dangerous to try to force answers to the big questions.  The right answers to the big questions often feel right, in my experience.  We feel moved by them, moved to act.  They often arise spontaneously – spontaneous is another word we find in Dogen’s text – but after long periods of sitting with the question.  Perhaps years.  They feel like authentic expressions of who we are.

And then there are the times when this is all wrong.

After we sold that tech company, I had to decide what to do next.

I had several opportunities to run young tech companies, and that’s what I wanted to do.

But the opportunities I was most interested in would have required a move or some other sacrifice by my wife, who had not yet earned tenure at the university where she teaches.  The things I wanted to do would have disrupted her career.

The very least favored option on my list of job prospects was going to work at a big law firm.  I’d left that world long ago, and I wasn’t particularly eager to return to it.

After months of searching for almost any other alternative that I thought would make me happier and would align with my wife’s career, however, that’s exactly what I did.

And it’s been great.  An excellent move on every level.

And there have been some big, fantastic surprises.

My firm has been very supportive of my work with the Peace Appeal Foundation, and has even provided pro bono services in support of some of the processes in which we’re involved.

I have been invited to serve on the boards of some interesting startups, and my firm has allowed me to do this.  I’ve been able to be involved with multiple companies at once, not just one.

Other interesting opportunities that may become deeply meaningful to me and be very beneficial to others are emerging.  Opportunities that never would have come my way – indeed, never would have come into being at all – if I had not joined my firm.

And I’m incredibly happy in my marriage.

The fruit salad that began with an apple and an orange has gotten ever more colorful and delicious.

Fruit salads do happen, it seems.

As I’ve sat with Dogen’s passage over the past several weeks, I’ve also come to see him pointing to the value, at times, of doing what we do not feel most moved to do.

We can’t predict – let alone control – the future, so sometimes the needs and priorities of others can be our best guide.

“Foolish people think that if they help others first, their own benefit will be lost; but this is not so,” Dogen tells us.  “Beneficial action is an act of oneness, benefiting self and others together.”

The lord of old interrupts his dinner and his bath to make a wholehearted effort to help others.

In a nutshell, I hear Dogen advising us in this passage to do what we’re advised to do in our lovely, shorter version of the precepts:

Making use of all of the ingredients of my life,

I vow to take up the Way of Not Sparing the Dharma assets.

The ingredients of our lives include our opportunities, our likes, our preferences, our off-beat – and even mainstream! – interests.

The ingredients of our lives also include our seeming constraints, our dislikes, others’ preferences, and others’ interests.

It’s not either-or.  It’s not self versus other.

Of course, discerning what to do in a given moment can be tricky.

Like so many Zen practitioners, I have found zazen and koan practice immensely helpful training for sitting with this koan that is my life.

I have found them precisely to be this unfolding koan that is my life.

Sitting – whether on the cushion, where we’re not especially encouraged to engage in discursive thought, or off the cushion, where that can be a useful component of our deliberations – is a form of action, of course.

Eventually, however, in most situations, we must stand up.  Take a step.  Make a move.

We must act, well, more actively.

Dogen provides us with two helpful decision principles, I think:

• Do what moves us.

• Act primarily for others’ benefit.

It’s lovely when we feel these principles are served equally well by some choice that is available to us, but that won’t always be so.

When it’s not, I have found it helpful to bear in mind that I just might be surprised by what follows that first step.

We can’t predict – let alone control – the future.

The best we can do is make good use of the ingredients of our lives.

Doing our best to discern what’s right at this particular juncture.

Acting with good intentions.

Knowing, and trusting, that whatever we do from this frame of mind and heart is an act of oneness that benefits self and others alike.

This post is an approximation of a dharma talk I gave this morning at the Greater Boston Zen Center.

These are the first few paragraphs of an article from the front page of the November 30,  2012 edition of the New York Times.  It’s titled “Ethnic Hate Tears Apart a Region of Myanmar.”

SITTWE, Myanmar — The Buddhist monastery on the edge of this seaside town is a picture of tranquillity, with novice monks in saffron robes finding shade under a towering tree and their teacher, U Nyarna, greeting a visitor in a sunlit prayer room.
But in these placid surroundings Mr. Nyarna’s message is discordant, and a far cry from the Buddhist precept of avoiding harm to living creatures. Unprompted, Mr. Nyarna launches into a rant against Muslims, calling them invaders, unwanted guests and “vipers in our laps.”
“According to Buddhist teachings we should not kill,” Mr. Nyarna said.   “But when we feel threatened we cannot be saints.”
Violence here in Rakhine State — where clashes have left at least 167 people dead and 100,000 people homeless, most of them Muslims — has set off an exodus that some human rights groups condemn as ethnic cleansing. It is a measure of the deep intolerance that pervades the state, a strip of land along the Bay of Bengal in western Myanmar, that Buddhist religious leaders like Mr. Nyarna, who is the head of an association of young monks, are participating in the campaign to oust Muslims from the country, which only recently began a transition to democracy from authoritarian rule.
After a series of deadly rampages and arson attacks over the past five months, Buddhists are calling for Muslims who cannot prove three generations of legal residence — a large part of the nearly one million Muslims from the state — to be put into camps and sent to any country willing to take them. Hatred between Muslims and Buddhists that was kept in check during five decades of military rule has been virtually unrestrained in recent months.
Even the country’s leading liberal voice and defender of the downtrodden, Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, has been circumspect in her comments about the violence.

The article goes on to describe how Muslims in Rakhine State have been subjugated by Buddhists, the squalid conditions in which they live, and the humiliation they suffer.   It also describes how the Buddhists there, whose lives generally are better, but which are far from good, fear for their security as the state’s Muslim population grows more rapidly than the Buddhist population.

And it describes how all this has generated an escalating spiral of conflict.  After Buddhists recently accused Muslims of the rape of a young girl, Muslims burned Buddhist monasteries and Buddhists destroyed mosques.

Some of you may know that I’m part of an NGO that helps catalyze and support local stakeholder owned and led peace process to end wars and national dialogue processes to prevent them.

I’m also a Buddhist.

So reading this article was a bit disconcerting for me.

I was in Beirut this time last Saturday.  We’ve been providing assistance to a national dialogue process there, and we’re becoming increasingly involved in emerging peace processes elsewhere in the Middle East.

We’ve also recently become deeply involved in the situation in Burma, the subject of this article.

I got involved in the international conflict resolution field in grad school almost 20 years ago.

I had come to study contemplative spirituality, but another front page New York Times article, this one about the genocide perpetrated against Bosnian Muslims at Srebrenica, near the end of the war in the former Yugoslavia, derailed that plan, inspiring me to study the relationship between religion and conflict.

I ultimately developed a theory about why religion so frequently appears as the fault line along which violent conflict occurs.

Social psychologists have shown how even trivial identity differences — like being randomly assigned to a blue team or a red team in an experiment about group conflict — have a  propensity to generate hostility in environments where tangible and/or social resources are perceived to be scarce.

Psychologists also have confirmed what we already know about ourselves, more or less reflectively:  we quite naturally seek physical, mental and social security and stability, and the impulse to develop secure and stable individual and group identities is part of our strategy for doing so.

My theory suggests that religions historically have served this identity impulse more comprehensively and effectively than other cultural markers, like language or ethnicity (though these often are tightly intertwined with religious identity), and that this explains why conflict so often occurs along religious fault lines. In 1999 I published an article in the main journal in the conflict resolution and peace studies fields in which I described this theory, and it still gets a lot of play today.

More recently, the political scientists Pippa Norris and Ronald Inglehart have shown, through rigorous statistical analysis of mountains of empirical evidence from the majority of rich and poor countries in the world, that societies where there is a high level of existential insecurity — where people lack basic resources, like sufficient food and clean water; where illiteracy and lack of educational opportunities make it more difficult for them to voice their needs and concerns and better their situation; etc. — are societies that remain deeply and traditionally religious.

Their analysis and my theory seem like two sides of a coin:  existential insecurity breeding strong individual and group religious identity, and religious identity supplying the fault line upon which violent conflict often occurs in environments marked by scarcity.  I believe we have a recipe for religious conflict of the type we see in Burma.

It’s tempting to judge Mr. Nyarna, the teacher featured in the article from which I read.  Sure, the situation is difficult — more difficult than most of us likely can imagine — but he is a Buddhist teacher.  He seems to sacrifice the precepts so readily, and so unreflectively.  The seeming lack of nuance in his perspective, the seeming inability to consider the other’s perspective; it’s quite arresting, at least to me.

One of my mentors from grad school is Herbert Kelman.  Now 85 and still active as a scholar and practitioner, Herb is a famous social and political psychologist and the longest-standing facilitator of dialogues between high-level Israelis and Palestinians.

Herb’s class on the psychology of international and intrastate conflict and their resolution was the first class I took in the field.  In one of our early class sessions, I naively said that war is pathological behavior.

I got a deservedly blunt reply. War is definitely not pathological behavior, Herb said, even though it is tragic. It’s the product of complex causes, and frequently a response to unmet human needs, and those causes and needs can be understood.

I can’t really begin to relate to the conditions in which the people of Rhakine state — Buddhists and Muslims alike — live.

I know how difficult it can be to honor the precepts, act compassionately, and not get lost in my own “default mode” certainties, when I feel slighted here in my own secure and comfortable environment.

Mr. Nyarna’s perspective and conduct may be as tragic as the conditions in which he lives, but they are not pathological.

And I know from my colleagues who have begun to work in Burma that there are many devoted Buddhists and Muslims who are striving to promote understanding, collaboration and reconciliation.

I once contributed a chapter on religion and conflict to a book on conflict resolution. My chapter surveyed the dominant attitudes toward conflict within our five largest religious traditions.  Not surprisingly, one finds perspectives and resources for inciting conflict, and also for pacifying conflict, in each of these traditions.

Although I gave a few examples of Buddhist perspectives that might contribute to or justify violent conflict, I was somewhat gentler on Buddhism than I was on the other religions. I speculated that features like meditation practice, Buddhism’s distinctive perspective on the self, and the emphasis on interdependence make Buddhism relatively less likely to incite or inflame conflict.

While I still believe there’s a measure of truth to this, I now think I was idealizing to a large extent.

For me personally, I do think — I do hope — that Zen practice, along with other disciplines, relationships and experiences, has helped me become gentler, more genuinely caring, less reactive when I perceive threat or offense.

But I see with some regularity how fragile these qualities are; how dependent they are upon my sense of security; how quickly they can dissolve when I feel threatened or slighted; how vigilant I must be to maintain them, even in this privileged environment.

The stories of Ghandi, Aung San Suu Kyi, and others who show great courage and moral leadership in the face of great adversity are deeply moving and inspiring. And, without intending to detract one bit from the amazingness of what they did and the ideals they represent, some figures like this have at least some element of privilege in their backgrounds.  Their “micro context,” if you will, perhaps gave them a somewhat firmer personal footing from which to see the possibilities, and to act in these courageous ways. Ghandi was a lawyer.  Aung San Suu Kyi is the daughter of a once powerful general.

Siddhartha Gautama, the historical Buddha, was a wealthy prince.

To be sure, others act and lead with great courage and moral vision without the benefit of economic or social advantages.

And, yet so many people are just trying to survive in environments they perceive to be zero-sum.  We are so moved by those who exhibit great courage and vision in dire circumstances because we understand how difficult that is to do, and appreciate why it is so rare.

Yes, we must stand against prejudice, injustice and violence.  Speaking out against the sort of conduct we’ve just read about no doubt is an important part of what needs to be done. This seems especially true to me when we see intolerance and injustice perpetrated by those who are relatively well off, by any standard, against those who are less so.

And we need more than advocacy.  Not just conflict resolution efforts, in contexts like Myanmar/Burma, but also economic development efforts, and public health efforts, and more.

As much as I’d like to think that whatever degree of virtue I exhibit, from time to time, when I feel challenged in the comparatively small ways I sometimes feel challenged, is not contingent upon my life circumstances, I can honestly say I’m not so sure.

How would I respond if I were Mr. Nyarna?

I hope I never face a test so severe.

This post is an approximation of a Dharma talk I gave tonight at the Greater Boston Zen Center.

I’d like to hold up and offer a few thoughts about a short passage from Torei Enji’s Bodhisattva’s Vow, a beautiful text that’s sometimes part of our liturgy.

Before I get there, let me say a bit about Torei Enji.  The reason for this mini biography will be clear in just a moment.

Enji was an 18th century Zen teacher. When he was just five, he met Hakuin, one of the most important Zen teachers of all time.  Among other things, Hakuin revived koan practice within the Rinzai tradition, and so contributed significantly to our own koan tradition.

Upon meeting Hakuin, Torei Enji resolved to become a monk.  It took a couple more years for him to convince his parents, so he was perhaps seven when he entered Hakuin’s monestary.  He eventually became its abbot, after Hakuin died.

Torei Enji’s Bodhisattva’s Vow includes this short passage:

“If someone turns against us, speaking ill of us and treating us bitterly, it’s best to bow down:  This is the Buddha appearing to us, finding ways to free us from our own attachments — the very ones that have made us suffer, again and again and again. ”

When I was five or six, about the age Enji was when he met Hakuin, my aunt Pat gave me a small cloth pouch full of polished stones.

Perhaps less dramatically, but still not altogether unlike Enji’s first encounter with Hakuin, this little offering was a signal event in my life.

I was fascinated by these stones; absolutely rapt by their rounded edges, brilliant colors, and high gloss finish.  They were the most unusual, beautiful objects I had ever seen.

I loved playing in the dirt when I was a kid, but these stones bore little resemblance to the stones I knew.  Most of the stones I’d seen had jagged edges, with dull finishes and colors.

Where did these stones come from? Pat brought me to her basement and showed me the little tumbler where, perhaps a month earlier, she had added a batch of the ordinary stones with which I was familiar, a few handfuls of sand, and a copious amount of water, and then flipped the power switch to start the cylinder turning day and night.

For weeks the stones collided, the sand agitated, the water lubricated and washed clean.  And those lackluster, ordinary stones became the exceptionally smooth, luminous objects that I found so captivating as a child.

Today I have a collection of small and mid-size stones that I’ve gathered from rivers and beaches around the world. I have stones from Maine and Rhode Island, from Oregon, from Greece, and elsewhere.  They sit in little glass containers or serve as paper weights around my office and home.  They’re among my most cherished possessions.

None of the stones I’ve collected are as smooth or shiny as the rocks Pat tumbled for me.  These days I’m more interested in the features of rocks that have been hewn by their normal environments.  I’m interested in their extraordinary ordinary features.

I selected each stone carefully in some special place.  Each is interesting to me for some quality it has:

It’s shape.  Some stones are quite angular; some are incredibly symmetrical; some are almost cylindrical.

It’s texture.  Certain larger, reddish stones on Block Island are a nearly-perfect oval shape, yet their surface is quite coarse.

It’s mass.  Small stones can be quite heavy, large ones quite light.

It’s color — or colors. Some are white as clouds, and almost glow from inside. Stones come in almost every shade of gray.

Veins within the stone.  My favorite stone so far is small and dark grey, is rounded and sort of triangular at the same time, and has a single brown ring around the circumference of one point.

What fascinated and inspired me about Pat’s stones, and what fascinates and inspires me about the stones I see everywhere today, as an adult, is the fact that all of these stones — each unique — is the product of countless meetings.

Of collisions.

Of friction.

Just like each of us.

Torei Enjei writes about our most challenging encounters and reminds us of their value.  They’re grist for our mills, for our tumblers.

Some of my most challenging encounters have come in the context of my most intimate relationships, including family relationships, like my relationship with my parents.  The depth of the love in these relationships can be so palpable, so solid and unquestionable, yet there also can be tension, perhaps because we live in such close quarters physically and/or psychologically.

(I imagine this sounds familiar, at least to some of you.)

My parents just spent two and a half weeks with us.  Extended visits in the recent past occasionally have had some stressful moments, in part because of some personal challenges some members of our family have faced in recent years, and the ways in which we’ve found it challenging, individually and collectively, to deal with this.  Normal life stuff, to be sure — and challenging, to be sure.

I wanted this visit to go well, but I was a bit anxious.  I was determined to keep an even keel if there were tension, working with and through it, and yet I knew how that can be hard for all concerned, including me.  There were any number of ways tension could arise — any number of potential triggers.

Like discussion of politics.  It’s funny how some topics, like politics or whatever, can be proxies for other topics, how they can be vehicles for circling around the heart of the matter.

As we entered the house after I picked my folks up from the airport, my parents walked through each room, observing what had changed since their last visit.

My dad noticed an Obama campaign poster hanging in one room — Shepard Fairey’s large “Vote” print.  “Oh, no, here we go,” I thought in a flash.

I saw my dad grimace, tilt his head slightly, and then seem to begin to speak.

And then something wonderful happened:  silence.  He just moved on.

I breathed a sigh of relief.

And there was no mention of politics during their entire visit.

We had a lovely time together.  Sure, there were little moments, but they really were little.  There were mostly lots of really pleasant moments.

I’d like to think we’ve each learned something from past moments of tension.  My dad and I sometimes have banged heads metaphorically since I was a kid, and I think some of our rough edges are becoming smoother as a result.

Incidentally, during my parents’ recent visit, my wife, Esther, and I were musing about parents generally.  Esther walked past our seven-year old son after this exchange and playfully said to him, “You can’t choose your parents, Ellis.”

To which Ellis replied, “Yeah, and you can’t even choose yourself!”

What a wonderfully disarming thought.  Many of us spend a great deal of time judging others by our own idiosyncratic standards.  We might also judge ourselves against some cosmic standard of perfection we’ve inherited or constructed.

But we are all products of conditions, and many of the conditions that influence who we are now preceded our birth.

We’ve each certainly made countless choices since our births, and those choices and their consequences are now part of our karma — the past conditions that influence the conditions of our present.  We can “choose ourselves” to a meaningful degree in this moment, and yet we’re always playing the hand dealt by prior moments.  Our capacity to influence the course of events large and small, great as it sometimes is for some of us, is doubtless less great than some of us often imagine.

Perhaps mindfulness of this can help us all be more gentle with ourselves and with others.

Encounters that are painful, where we feel misunderstood, judged unfairly, even maliciously attacked — they sometimes can be great teachers.

People’s behavior toward me often can provide clues about where my own rough edges lie.

Hard as it can be to accept, this can be the Buddha appearing to me, finding ways to bring my blind spots into view; or to make me own up to and work to transform those shortcomings or forms of selfishness or inclinations toward indifference of which I’m aware, but which I’d rather not address.  The very ones that have made me — and others — suffer again and again and again.

And sometimes they also provide opportunities to see others’ rough edges and to respond skillfully in ways that respect the fundamental dignity of all concerned, including oneself.  They can be invitations to some form of constructive engagement about what I know is not right, much as I might prefer to avoid conflict — to avoid any type of engagement that creates the risk of more uncomfortable feelings.

One way to read Torei Enji’s guidance that “it’s best to bow down” is that we should be passive, avoid confrontation, let it slide.  Letting it slide often is a good response, perhaps particularly for those of us with a tendency to fight fire with fire.

But I hear Enji saying something more nuanced: that it’s best to bow to this moment that has presented itself, just as it has presented itself, much the way we bow reverently here in the zendo.

Or the way we bow to pick up a stone.

It’s best to recognize these challenging moments as something precious, as gifts, as opportunities to respond creatively and skillfully — hard as that can be, particularly in the moment.

Each moment, including the very challenging ones, is a vast ocean of meetings.

Of fragmentation.

Of combining.

Of friction.

And of possibility.

And polishing.

There’s nothing to polish, and therefore no polishing, from one perspective, of course.

And, yet, in an equally valid sense, the to-and-fro of daily contact provides constant grist for our individual and collective mills.

In and through the rough and tumble of life — and regardless of whether one has smooth edges or jagged edges, a glossy finish or a dull one — we can’t help but shine like those stones my aunt Pat gave me.

The real question for each of us is whether we’ll open our eyes, open our hearts and minds, open our arms and hands, to that reality.

This post is based upon a Dharma Talk I gave tonight, our last at “Waldo,” as our practice space at First Church in Boston has been known.

Zhimen’s  Lotus Blossom (Case 21 in The Blue Cliff Record)

A monk asked Zhimen, “When the lotus hasn’t emerged from the water, what is that?”

Zhimen replied, “Lotus flower.”

“After it emerges from the water, what is that?”

“Lotus petals,” replied Zhimen.

I traveled much too much last year, and that alone wore me down.

A few weeks after I returned from a crazy, 12-day trip around the world last May that included a stop in China, however, I also started having serious health problems.

It began with three, 48-hour bouts of severe flu-like illnesses, spaced about 10 days apart.  I was completely bedridden during the first two of these periods.  I had a high fever, and I was borderline unconscious, and mildly delirious when I wasn’t completely passed out.  I really only remember what seems like 10 minutes of the first episode, which was here in Boston.  I remember a bit more of the second, which was in a hotel room in Paris, but I don’t remember much.

I was in a hotel room in Stockholm, Sweden, and on an overnight ferry from Stockholm to Talin, Estonia, during the third episode.  It was slightly less severe, and so I was more conscious.  That wasn’t a good thing, because the experience was nearly intolerable.

I began having terribly debilitating gastrointestinal problems after the first episode.  (I’ll spare you the disgusting details.)  I lost 10 pounds in a couple of weeks.  I had other awful symptoms, some persistent, like extreme fatigue, muscle weakness, and gushing eyes at night, and some that happened once or twice and never returned, like pounding headaches in the back of my head that woke me in the middle of the night and kept me up for several hours at a time.

I went to see my doctor about a week after the onset of symptoms, and I saw him and many specialists frequently for the next seven months.  I had many rounds of blood and stool tests, a colonoscopy, and an endoscopy.  These tests and procedures didn’t offer any clues.

We eventually began to suspect parasites that one finds in China, but not so much here, even though the many tests designed to reveal the full range of likely suspects had been negative.  Sneaky creatures, these.

Infectious disease doctors began to treat me “empirically,” which basically means throwing a series of drugs at the patient to see if anything sticks.

I got the pounding headaches at night while taking a two-week course of one of these drugs, which targets a broad range of parasitic worms.  The headaches prompted an emergency MRI of my head, because a pathologist friend of mine feared I was plagued by a worm which attacks the brain and requires immediate surgery that’s done well in just two places in the U.S., neither of which is Boston.

The drug I was taking when the headaches gave us that big scare actually seems to have been a turning point.  I had my first solid you-know-what in ages shortly after that.  They remained a rare occurrence for months, but things have slowly gotten better.  I’m now somewhat more regular, and I have considerably more energy.

Still, I haven’t yet fully recovered, and the past year has taken a toll.  I started turning grey during this illness.  There are a few other signs of “extraordinary wear and tear.”

I turn 50 in July.  I felt like 30 before this saga began.  Now I feel like, well, 50.  I hope to feel like 40 again, and I now believe that’s possible, but 30 somehow doesn’t seem realistic anymore.

I’m not telling you all this to evoke expressions of sympathy, though I’ve certainly appreciated the support I’ve received from family and friends.  It’s been a tough year.

I’m telling you about this experience because it really got me thinking about life – my life, and life in general.  And death.  About the fact that I am of the nature to get ill, grow old, and die.

And because it got me thinking about worms.

Worm infections were common in North America generations ago, when public health standards weren’t what they are today.  They’re now pretty rare here, but they’re still relatively common in many places, including China.

During one of the most intense phases of this whole episode, Josh reminded me that a worm infection is one theory about the cause of the Buddha’s death.

According to this story, the broad outline of which is surely credible, he and his entourage were visiting a village where someone offered him a bowl of rice and meat.  Typically vegetarian, he was hungry and wanted to be gracious.  (Actually, some versions of the story, perhaps the most mythologized versions, say he knew the meat was bad, and he was staging his own death.)  He ate the meal, became ill, and died.

If I did have worms, and if I got them from meat I ate in China, it’s pretty ironic.  I mainly feed myself plants, and I typically only eat meat when someone has prepared or purchased a meal for me and I don’t want to decline the generosity.  I’ll certainly be reconsidering that policy before my next trip to the developing world.

Anyway, this whole experience was bizarre and unsettling, and also strangely reassuring, in a variety of ways.

Here are three ways in which it was both unsettling and reassuring:

First, and most obviously, there is the very tangible reminder of my mortality, for which I’m strangely grateful.

Talk about a practice of not knowing.  I mean really not knowing.  Not knowing what I had when I was very sick, and not knowing still.  It seems we’ll never know exactly what it was.

What a powerful reminder this has been to try to live meaningfully.  What a powerful reminder that my number truly will be up someday – perhaps sooner, and differently, than I’m inclined to imagine.

One day as I walked from home to catch a train to Boston for work and more doctor visits I heard a HUGE bang.  I looked to my left to see that two cars had just had a head-on collision perhaps 15 feet away, and that one of the cars was now hurtling right toward me.  My heart pounding, I jumped out of the way before it hit the spot where I’d been walking.

The illness, the car wreck, turning 50:  It seems the universe really does want me to be aware of my mortality.

I get it.  I truly get it now.  And I’m truly grateful that I do.

Second, there’s the reminder that our day-to-day experience is contingent, just like our very existence.

The “me” I know and tend to think of as stable from moment to moment is contingent upon my physical condition, which is contingent upon what I eat, which is contingent upon what I eat has eaten.  Etc.

Everything is related through-and-through, and constantly changing, and so contingent.

And, it follows, I’m not completely in control.  I suppose I’m not even mostly in control – physically, mentally, and otherwise.  In fact, the whole “I’m in control” narrative is coming from a distorted conception of “me.”

The reassuring flip-side of this is that I don’t have to go through life burdened by the delusion that I am in control.  I can let go of that feature of what seems to be the human mental default mode, and just be part of it all.

I can have an influence.  In fact, I will have an influence, whether I try to or not.  To breathe in this realm of radical interdependence is to have an influence.  So I’ll try to have a positive influence, knowing all-the-while that I’m not in control and I can’t be sure what will come of my actions.

Third, there’s the reminder of the terror and the beauty of life.

The experience of being delirious at times, and of generally being a bit off-kilter, excitable and irritable when I wasn’t completely delirious, was really scary.  This was not the me I know.

We were on vacation during the latter two delirium episodes – the ones that occurred in Paris and Stockholm.  Having two little kids cooped up in hotel rooms with a crazy man was not a recipe for fun.  The kids’ bouncing on beds, shouting and screaming playfully, would have mildly pressed my buttons even if I’d just spent a week on sesshin.  I had almost no capacity to deal with that under the circumstances.

It’s not our practice to yell at our children.  The wisdom of that policy was confirmed by my behavior during our stay in Stockholm.  I lost it with the kids a couple of times.  That was really disturbing for them, and the confusion and guilt I felt when I began to regain my senses was just horrible.

Yet it also provided great opportunities for redemption and learning.  The delirium, the yelling: they were the muck at the bottom of the pond in which the Lotus blooms.

I learned to apologize to a six-year old and a three-year old, deeply, sincerely.  I don’t think it necessarily was bad for them to see an adult – their father – do that.  They were incredibly understanding and forgiving.

(My wife assures me that we had a lovely vacation nonetheless, and that these moments were passing little blips.  I feel like I owe my family a very pleasant, sane vacation, and we’ve got one planned next month.)

As I make this point, I’m aware that it’s easy to get lost in, to try to cling to, the beauty of that Lotus when it’s in full bloom.  To favor what appears to us to be beautiful, worthy, redeeming or whatever.  But this koan invites us to see that no Lotus, Lotus, Lotus petals are all one.  All part of an unbroken cycle.  All present in whatever is present here and now, whether or not we deem it to be desirable.

From one perspective, it’s terrifying and disgusting to think about worms burrowing through sewage and trash as pigs eat it and them; of the pig’s slaughter; of me eating the pork and the worms; of the worms making Swiss cheese of my innards; of the pork, the worms, and, ultimately, me, returning to the soil.  Yet, the soil the worms turn is the soil from which the Lotus blooms.

I started sitting in the Christian contemplative tradition, which developed in monastic circles.  I’ve always been struck by the image of the medieval monk with a skull on his desk.  Often these images have a worm slithering through the holes in the skull.

A reminder of our mortality.  And of renewal.  Of terror-beauty.  Life-death.

Two sides of one coin; not even two sides.  Not even one.

Where to go with all this?  There is no conclusion, really.  Nowhere to go.

I’ll close with a few lines from the German romantic poet Rainer Maria Rilke that I’ve always loved:

For beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror . . . and we are awed because it serenely disdains to annihilate us.

Let everything happen to you

Beauty and terror

Just keep going

No feeling is final

One more thing:  It is both odd and quite personally meaningful to me to be giving this particular talk, coincidentally, on the day Maurice Sendak died.  I learned of his death early this morning, when my wife sent me a text after hearing about it on NPR as she drove to work.

Sendak, of course, is widely considered the most important contemporary author of children’s literature.  His Nutshell Library – a collection of four small books – which was published in 1962, the year I was born, is among my favorite works of literature of any kind.  Many people know Sendak through Where the Wild Things Are, his genre-transforming book that was made into a movie a few years ago.

Sendak upended the idealized images of the physical and social landscape, and of our interior lives, that were so common in most of the children’s literature that preceded him (setting aside some exceptions like the tales of The Brothers Grimm).  He embraced and held together the beauty and the terror of life in his writing, incorporating the full spectrum of human experience and emotion in contemporary children’s literature.  Kids also experience the terror of life alongside the beauty, and he validated that experience for them.

Sendak certainly initiated me into the beauty and terror of life, as he’s now done for my own children.  I’m deeply grateful to and for him, and I’m unsettled and strangely reassured to be giving this talk on the day he died.