Sit on my cushion.
Fidget.
Set timer for 25 minutes.
Fidget.
Start timer.
Sit upright.
Pick up timer to make sure it started.
Of course it started.
Set timer down.
Fidget.
Stuff.
Lots ‘o stuff percolating.
Noticing stuff.
Settling . . .
Stuff and settling . . .
Time passing. Life happening.
Noticing mind-and-body not really Mind. And. Body.
Not noticing noticing . . .
Just noticing . . .
Noticing . . .
. . . stuff.
Timer sounds.
It’s most wonderful that Yunmen’s Manifestation (Case 27 in The Blue Cliff Record) is the first koan I encountered, and passed through, following my 50th birthday, which was last week:
A monk asked Yunmen, “When the tree withers and the leaves fall, what’s happening?”
Yunmen replied, “The golden wind is revealing itself.”
Excellent. Excellent.
Life is like that.
A ways back I said sitting is bad for you.
I was talking about sitting at a desk all day, but I mused that meditation retreats, during which one may sit on a cushion for 8-10 hours daily, might be bad for us in similar ways.
I actually doubt that (though I obviously don’t know for sure). The studies of office workers examined subjects who sit 8 hours a day or more, five days a week, 48+ weeks a year, year in, year out. It’s hard for me to believe that a week on sesshin could shorten one’s lifespan if one isn’t sedentary during the other 51 weeks of the year.
And, we all know sitting (aka meditation) has many physical/mental/interpersonal benefits. You can read about those benefits here and here and here and here and here . . .
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.
I recently got a standing desk.
We’ve known for some time now that sitting all day will kill you.
Sure, there’s no way to avoid death, but why hasten it?
Makes me wonder about the wisdom of sesshins. So good and life-giving in so many ways, and yet . . .
Ironically, one of our sanghamates fainted tonight while we sat at Waldo (which is soon to be blended into the Greater Boston Zen Center).
Fortunately, he’ll be fine.
First time I’d seen that one in 21 years of frequenting meditation halls and other such establishments.
This is the text of a talk I gave this morning at the annual Credo service at the Unitarian Church of Sharon.
The modern translation of Credo is “I believe,” and the word creed has come to mean a statement of religious beliefs.
Being asked to talk about my religious beliefs presents something of a problem for me. I’ve come to think beliefs aren’t the most interesting or important – or even an essential – element of religion.
In fact, I’ve come to think that metaphysical beliefs can, for many – present company excluded – be a real impediment to development of a sense of wonder and reverence, of a broad and deeply felt connection to the universe, other beings, and oneself. For me, these are hallmark traits of mature spirituality.
Any praiseworthy ethical framework flows from this sort of orientation.
I suppose I do have my religious beliefs (including those just mentioned), but they’re quite spare.
I didn’t arrive at this perspective through a syllogistic reasoning process or an act of mental will, though I certainly have done my fair share of thinking about religion.
I was raised Catholic and still have a deep appreciation for the mystical tradition in Christianity. I’ve always had what I’d call a contemplative orientation.
As a young child I was troubled by the confusing and inconsistent ways in which people used the word God – it seemed like the free space in Bingo, or that proverbial blank to be filled in however one might wish – and yet I felt the deepest connection to . . . to . . . to what?
I made a secret shrine in a construction zone near the new subdivision to which we moved when I was eight or nine, and I sneaked away to pray there several times a week. I read the Bible, Jonathan Livingston Seagull – for those of you old enough to remember it – and all the Hardy Boys novels, of course, in a quiet little monk’s cell I made on my closet floor.
I eventually attended a Jesuit university.
In my late 20’s, shortly after finishing law school and entering law practice, I began to meditate. I soon became very involved in a movement called Contemplative Outreach, which is reviving the ancient practice of silent prayer within the Christian community. It was started by a Trappist monk, Fr. Thomas Keating – a lovely man who has had a big impact on my life, and on the lives of so many others.
I also encountered Zen during this period, initially through Kyudo, or Zen archery. I studied with Kanjuro Shibata Sensei, an archery master and the Imperial Bowmaker of Japan. He lives in Boulder, Colorado, much of the year.
I spent a great deal of time on silent retreat at monasteries and convents in Colorado and New Mexico.
During this era, I began to feel that my world, that I myself, was divided between interior and exterior, between the contemplative perspectives and pursuits that had become so important to me, on the one hand, and the rough-and-tumble world of business and corporate law, on the other.
Unable to reconcile these seeming poles at that life-stage, in 1995 I turned down an offer of partnership in a good law firm to study at Harvard Divinity School. I planned to get a Ph.D. and become a scholar of comparative religion.
It turned out to be an absolutely brilliant move, but not for any of the reasons I thought I was making it.
During my first year I took a class on comparative theologies in which one session’s readings, and much earnest discussion regarding them, focused on the problem of syncretism – of combining religious perspectives and forms.
In reality, all religions are syncretistic, a fact too few religious people appreciate. The overt syncretism of Unitarian Universalism is one of the things that attracted me to it.
One of those class readings and the discussion that flowed from it revolved around questions like, “If a person borrows from Christianity and Buddhism, might his brain be reincarnated in a newborn’s body and the rest of him end up in heaven? Are these people putting themselves in some sort of metaphysical jeopardy?”
I’m not joking.
In the very probing, yet balanced, manner of the scholars I had come to learn from, I reflected for a moment, then raised my hand and asked the group,
“Are you serious? Who cares?”
This didn’t endear me to the professor or most of my classmates.
Around the same time, the NY Times published a huge expose about the battle of Srebrenica, which occurred in July 1995, near the end of the war in the former Yugoslavia. Thousands of Bosnian Muslims were massacred in an assault the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia later declared to be an act of genocide, and the worst mass slaughter on European soil since World War II. It seems NATO – the Clinton administration and other western powers – may have let Serbian General Ratko Mladic overrun a supposed UN safe zone where the Bosnians were encamped. It was inconveniently located in territory western officials believed would have to be ceded to the Serbs in order to achieve a peace accord.
The NY Times article contained a picture of a Muslim woman hung from a tree limb, a rope around her neck. She killed herself to avoid being killed. I broke down in tears.
I knew then that the academic study of religion, or of theology, at least, was not my calling – at least not then. I retooled my program, and my path, by combining my legal background with my interest in religion and international affairs. I created a course of study in international conflict resolution, and eventually ended up teaching and practicing in this area at Harvard Law School for several years after I graduated.
I eventually returned to private law practice, but I’m now also part of an NGO that helps create and support broad-scale peace processes to end civil wars, as well as broad-scale national dialogue processes to help avert them. We helped end Nepal’s civil war in 2006. Our current project is in Lebanon, and it’s beginning to spread elsewhere in the Middle East.
The meditation practice I began 20 years ago seems to have contributed to the progressive dismantlement of the religious conceptual framework I inherited. I sat alone during 10 years in the middle of those 20, until eventually finding a spiritual home in the Zen tradition.
I’m part of an emerging western Buddhist community called Boundless Way Zen – BoWZ for short. Last year I became one of its very junior teachers. BoWZ has a strong, if informal, connection to Unitarian Universalism. Our most senior teacher, James Ford, is minister of the First Unitarian Church in Providence.
I consider myself nontheistic, which I prefer to the term atheistic. For me, non-theism is about being religious without a reified idea of god, or even needing to speak of god, nor standing in opposition to the many wonderful people who do speak of god.
A revered, ancient Zen teacher once said, “Not knowing is most intimate.” That’s certainly my experience.
This “not knowing” is not the “I don’t know” of agnosticism. It’s not the product of indifference or laziness or resignation.
It’s a full-to-the-brim sort of not knowing.
Unlike the author of the author of the late 14th century classic of contemplative Christian spirituality, The Cloud of Unknowing, however, I don’t experience this “not knowing” primarily in theistic terms. That just doesn’t resonate with me completely anymore, particularly not in terms of the person-like images of God presented in the Hebrew Bible and some of the sayings attributed to Jesus of Nazareth. All ideas break down.
For me, this not knowing can’t be contained. In words, in beliefs.
Or, rather, it’s contained by, and it contains . . . this.
Just this.
Nothing extra. Nothing less.
Now I look back at that nine-year old praying at his shrine – or throwing a ball, or chasing his dog, or hugging his parents, or staring at the night sky – and understand why Jesus pointed to children, and the lilies in the field, when adults asked him how to enter the Kingdom of God.
He also reminded them that “the Kingdom of God is at hand.”
Here, now.
These hands. No hands but our hands.
My family is new to this community, yet Esther and I saw immediately how it accommodates a range of religious perspectives, including those that emphasize belief more than mine does. I’m so impressed by the open-mindedness and big heartedness that makes this possible.
Just this includes everything. In the words of another revered, ancient Zen teacher, there is “nothing worth begrudging.” Nothing that can’t teach us; no fact, experience or viewpoint that can’t serve as grist for our individual and collective mills.
The modern meaning of Credo is “I believe,” but I understand its ancient usage conveyed a somewhat different meaning – something more along the lines of “I give my heart to this.”
And, I do.
Soon after I walked out of dokusan last night, I realized the right response to the koan I’d just gotten “80% right” (as Josh put it as he suggested I sit with the koan a bit longer).
This often happens: I present a koan that isn’t yet ripe – or, rather, I’m not ripe with the koan – and then it ripens and falls from the tree moments after I’ve left the dokusan room.
I woke up for a moment last night thinking about this. Half-awake, half-asleep, I thought: I wish I could go back to that koan and that meeting.
Then, immediately, another thought: Always a koan. Always a meeting.
This post is based upon a Dharma Talk I gave on February 4, 2012. During the Boundless Way Zen Winter Ango, each of the Guiding Teachers, Senior Dharma Teachers, and Dharma Teachers is giving a talk on Bodhidharma‘s Outline of Practice. Recordings of our talks can be found online.
Bodhidharma’s Outline of Practice
Many roads lead to the Path, but basically there are only two: reason and practice. To enter by reason means to realize the essence through instruction and to believe that all living things share the same true nature, which isn’t apparent because it’s shrouded by sensation and delusion. Those who turn from delusion back to reality, who meditate on walls, the absence of self and other, the oneness of mortal and sage, and who remain unmoved even by scriptures are in complete and unspoken agreement with reason. Without moving, without effort, they enter, we say, by reason.
To enter by practice refers to four all-inclusive practices: suffering injustice, adapting to conditions, seeking nothing, and practicing the Dharma.
First, suffering injustice. When those who search for the Path encounter adversity, they should think to themselves, “In countless ages gone by, I’ve turned from the essential to the trivial and wandered through all manner of existence, often angry without cause and guilty of numberless transgressions. Now, though I do no wrong, I’m punished by my past. Neither gods nor men can foresee when an evil deed will bear its fruit. I accept it with an open heart and without complaint of injustice. The sutras say, ” When you meet with adversity don’t be upset, because it makes sense.” With such understanding you’re in harmony with reason. And by suffering injustice you enter the Path.
Second, adapting to conditions. As mortals, we’re ruled by conditions, not by ourselves. All the suffering and joy we experience depend on conditions. If we should be blessed by some great reward, such as fame or fortune, it’s the fruit of a seed planted by us in the past. When conditions change, it ends. Why delight in its existence? But while success and failure depend on conditions, the mind neither waxes nor wanes. Those who remain unmoved by the wind of joy silently follow the Path.
Third, seeking nothing. People of this world are deluded. They’re always longing for something — always, in a word, seeking. But the wise wake up. They choose reason over custom. They fix their minds on the sublime and let their bodies change with the seasons. All phenomena are empty. They contain nothing worth desiring. Calamity forever alternates with Prosperity. To dwell in the three realms is to dwell in a burning house. To have a body is to suffer. Does anyone with a body know peace? Those who understand this detach themselves from all that exists and stop imagining or seeking anything. The sutras say, “To seek is to suffer. To seek nothing is bliss.” When you seek nothing, you’re on the Path.
Fourth, practicing the Dharma. The Dharma is the truth that all natures are pure. By this truth, all appearances are empty. Defilement and attachment, subject and object don’t exist. The sutras say, “The Dharma includes no being because it’s free from the impurity of being, and the Dharma includes no self because it’s free from the impurity of self.” Those wise enough to believe and understand these truths are bound to practice according to the Dharma. And since that which is real includes nothing worth begrudging, they give their body, life, and property in charity, without regret, without the vanity of giver, gift, or recipient, and without bias or attachment. And to eliminate impurity they teach others, but without becoming attached to form. Thus, through their own practice they’re able to help others and glorify the Way of Enlightenment. And as with charity, they also practice the other virtues. But while practicing the six virtues to eliminate delusion, they practice nothing at all. This is what’s meant by practicing the Dharma. (Translated by Red Pine)
I’ve read Bodhidharma’s little practice manual several times since it was selected as our Ango text a month or so ago. It’s almost impossibly rich. There are so many directions in which one could go in a talk on this text. For a while, I really wasn’t sure where to go myself.
When I first read the piece, however, I had immediate, stream-of-consciousness reactions to each of the five paragraphs describing the two paths Bodhidharma identifies. I jotted down these reactions – each of them a little phrase – in the margin of the text. I ultimately decided just run with them. To use each these little reactions as a launchpad for reflection on the paths Bodhidharma charts for us.
Each paragraph of this text is action packed, so I’ll just tug on a thread here and there.
The Path of Reason
When I read the first paragraph of our text, which is on reason, I thought, “The dog stops chasing its tail.”
Reason as we think of it in the west has this quality of parsing. Of dividing the world into pieces.
This is endlessly useful in a relative sense.
Yet, this slicing and dicing can make us crazy. It does make us crazy, individually and collectively, when we lose the perspective that embraces the whole, unifying the parts.
We can become like dogs chasing our tails when we’re stuck in this parsing mode.
The irony is that the dog thinks it’s chasing something other than itself, when in fact it’s chasing a feature of itself it doesn’t recognize as such. It sees this and that. The dog sees itself as this, and pursues that. Jeff pursues cessation of pain. Pursues happiness. Pursues wisdom. Pursues enlightenment. Pursues his tail. The answer is out there.
To my thinking, Bodhidharma is telling us, with more than a touch of humor and irony, that the tails is us, and we can’t lose it.
I chased my tail for decades in spiritual and other matters, and sometimes still do. I turned down an offer of partnership in a good law firm nearly 20 years ago to do graduate work at Harvard Divinity School, in part, as a strategy for getting answers to life’s questions. I thought I’d get a Ph.D. and become a scholar of comparative religion.
It turned out to be a brilliant move, but not at all for the reasons I expected. I eventually exhausted my search for tidy, rationally satisfying answers –not ended it the way a mathematician ends her work by logically equating one function to another, but literally by exhausting myself from the search.
And that’s when things really started to happen.
For me, Bodhidharma’s wonderful guidance has this quality. Reason isn’t always about making one’s way syllogistically toward an answer.
The “right” answer to a koan often has this non-linear quality. Just like life.
A personal case in point: My dad is rather conservative. When my youngest brother – the other center-left member of our family — or I visit, our father often tries to draw us into debates about politics. Often he succeeds, and this can lead to fireworks – and not the glorious kind we enjoy seeing and hearing on the 4th of July.
I was telling Josh Bartok about this dynamic and, specifically, about an encounter with my dad during a visit this past Thanksgiving. I knew I’d handled the moment poorly, and I was still unsettled about what had happened.
Shortly after we arrived at my parents’ home in Colorado, my dad said, “We’re not going to talk politics this time, Jeff, but you have to answer one question for me: Do you still like Obama?” I smiled, then thought for a minute before venturing a nuanced answer I hoped would create an opening for some genuine, open dialogue:
“It’s a complicated question,” I said. “He’s acted differently in some respects than I expected.”
“You haven’t answered my question. Do you still like him?”
“I’m trying. My answer is nuanced. As with most human beings, he’s done some things I like, and some things I don’t like.”
“You won’t answer the question.”
Sigh. “Yes, on balance, I still like him.”
“He’s a jerk,” my dad said.
I walked away muttering similar expletives.
When Josh heard this story, he asked how I could have approached my dad’s question as a koan. I was stumped – stumped the way I’m often stumped when I’m too close to something, when it’s in my blind spot.
Josh gently slapped me on the back, smiled, and said, “It’s great to see you, Dad.”
Yes. The answer is orthogonal to the question, yet meets it perfectly. So simple.
I don’t intend to denigrate this tail chasing, and I don’t think Bodhidharma does either. It can be very productive; it can lead to something. For many of us, as in my case, that something is a sort of exhaustion, which can create an opening in which we realize what we’re after is not an object of thought – not something we can conceive of. It’s in subject position. The subject encompasses us, and yet isn’t limited to us.
The dog discovers itself.
The Path of Practice
Bodihdharma’s little practice manual breaks the second path – the Path of Practice — down into four practices: suffering injustice, adapting to conditions, seeking nothing, and practicing the Dharma
Suffering Injustice
When I read Bodhidharma’s paragraph on the practice of suffering injustice, I thought, “You’re bound to step on a stone from time to time. Just don’t curse the gods when you do.”
I imagine the path of practice as having stones here and there. Some of them are jagged. Every now and then one jabs us through the sole of our shoes, and it hurts.
I don’t see these stones as the natural, personal conditions of existence – old age, illness and death. For me, that’s the subject of Bodhidharma’s next practice, adapting to conditions.
I hear Boddhidharma talking more about the social landscape – the conditions we create for ourselves. This includes our own past transgressions and their karmic effects in the present.
But I also hear Bodhidharma talking about something more diffuse and subtle. Much of our misguided behavior can be traced back to our various human default modes, chief among them the illusion of separateness at the root of our greed, anger and ignorance.
I think Bodhidharma is holding this up for us to see, in ourselves and in others, and he’s inviting us to use it as grist for our mills.
He says, “When you meet with adversity don’t be upset, because it makes sense.” Makes sense, how? With so many of us striving to make life conform to our selfish ideals, we’re bound to spend much of our time scheming and railing against the world and one another.
And, he says, “With such understanding you’re in harmony with reason. And by suffering injustice you enter the Path.”
When we see through the illusion of separateness, without losing sight of our own and others’ genuine distinctiveness, we’re no longer compelled to try reflexively to make the world conform to our selfish ideals. We see how that impulse is one source of injustice.
But, what does it mean to suffer it? I don’t think Bodhidharma necessarily means we suffer it passively. I suspect he means one now has freedom of choice – choice not to respond tit-for-tat, or else to internalize our feelings of hurt and let them fester and progressively break us down. One has the choice to respond skillfully, in ways that tend to reduce suffering. And because everything is connected in this Indra’s net of a universe, all beings are saved in the process.
Adapting to Conditions
Why delight in good fortune, Bodhidharma asks? “Those who remain unmoved by the wind of joy silently follow the Path.”
When I finished reading this last line of Bodhidharma’s commentary on the practice of adapting to conditions, I thought, “Yes, but don’t resist the urge to smile as that wind passes through you.”
Zen sometimes is seen as overly stoic and serious. It probably is in some quarters, but our teachers make it rather hard to maintain that perspective here.
Reading this paragraph, however, one could be forgiven for concluding that Zen is a super intense and dour religion.
I’m inclined to think Bodhidharma is having a little fun here. He’s just told us to smile at the injustices we suffer. Now he seems to be telling us not to enjoy our good fortune.
It seems pretty clear to me that he’s simply reminding us that things change, and that getting too attached to anything we like is a recipe for suffering.
I had an awful affliction for a long time – an illness of the heart. I suffered with it for decades (as did some of those around me). My life was filled with mostly wonderful stuff, but I couldn’t enjoy it. I eventually came to understand that I had walled off my sorrow – or at least I thought I was walling it off. In truth, I was attached to it.
It seems to be a law of emotional physics that we can’t know happiness unless we can grieve, and vice versa.
So, I hear Bodhidharma telling us: Things change. Be happy and grieve as they do. But, don’t get attached to the happiness or grief. Let them pass. Know that you are the ground over which they pass; the space through which they pass. Find your ultimate joy and consolation there.
Seeking nothing
As I read the sentence “When you seek nothing, you’re on the Path,” I thought, “The path is boundless. Don’t get lost!”
I think “seeking nothing” can manifest in several ways:
When we seek to understand/know this nothing – when Mu is burning in our gullets like a hot iron ball – we’re on the path.
And when, having been seared by that iron ball, we’re truly seeking nothing, not even nothing, we’re on the path.
And, being unaware of the Buddha Dharma and wandering through this life, unaware of this nothing, and therefore not seeking it, we’re on the path.
We can’t be off the path – and, still, it’s easy to feel lost. And, feeling lost, it’s easy to transgress (see above).
Practicing the Dharma
Bodhidharma gives us his definition of Dharma right up front: It’s “the truth that all natures are pure.”
Having previously talked about delusion and attachment as if they’re real – and he of course knows they are, relatively speaking — he tells us “Defilement and attachment, subject and object don’t exist.”
And he tells us “Those wise enough to believe and understand” all this “are bound to practice according to the Dharma.”
One could be forgiven for thinking this sounds rather circular, like that dog chasing its tail:
All natures are pure.
That act of kindness that seems so good, it’s pure. Just like that act of violence.
If we realize this, we’ll practice according to it.
Sounds like it doesn’t much matter what we do.
But, Boddhidharma encourages us to practice charity and the virtues, everywhere, always, precisely because everything is worthy of our attention and loving regard. “[T]hat which is real includes nothing worth begrudging,” he tells us.
Nothing worth begrudging. I love that phrase.
That person who committed that violent act – not worth begrudging.
The act of violence itself: What does it have to teach us about the world we live in, the world we and innumerable past and present conditions – physical and social — have helped create?
I heard a scientist who studies serial killers interviewed on the radio some time ago. He’s identified a genetic condition he believes all of them share. He contends this genetic condition predispose them to do what they do. It prevents them from feeling empathic the way other people do. They know what they’re doing is wrong, but they can’t regulate their conduct; they can’t relate to the pain they’re causing.
I don’t have the skills to assess the strength of this scientist’s claims. If they’re true, then, for me, this provides another very compelling argument against the death penalty. Who knows? Perhaps his research ultimately will lead to a gene-based therapy eradicating the suffering this type of conduct causes so many people.
I’m holding this up here simply because I’m so impressed by the open-minded, open-hearted way this scholar approached his work. He certainly didn’t approve of this conduct, but he approached it with great curiosity. He didn’t just begrudge it, or the killers. And this disposition may eventually help save many beings, in a very literal sense.
It wasn’t until I’d read the next to last sentence of this final paragraph of Bodhidharma’s text that I had my little stream of consciousness reaction: “But while practicing the six virtues to eliminate delusion, they practice nothing at all.”
I hear Bodhidharma saying, “Ultimately no merit, but let’s all try to keep up the good work anyway.” It does make a difference here and now.
I’ll stop here, except to say, maybe this is why Bodhidharma came from the west: to give us this wonderful little text for our Ango.
There’s so much wisdom to be found in song lyrics.
There’s also plenty of drivel. I guess it’s all in the ear of the beholder.
I’m partial to stuff at the intersection of folk and rock, sometimes leaning a little one way, sometimes leaning a little the other. Here are just a few of the many, many songs in this broad genre that speak to me dharmically.
The kids unwrapped their presents hours ago. There were a whole lot of them. They — we — definitely are among the most fortunate people on this planet from almost every point of view, not least of all our access to basic and not-so-basic material resources. I am very grateful for that.
The kids seem grateful, too, though, at six and three, they don’t yet have a global perspective on their good fortune, nor even a particularly keen local perspective. Ellis, our six-year old, is developing a pen pal relationship with a boy in Uganda, but his ability to relate to the differences in their circumstances is limited at present.
The relative abundance we enjoy prompts so many questions:
How have we arrived at a moment in history when some children wake up on Christmas morning to a rash of presents while other children wake up starving?
How on earth can we tolerate this?
How and when does one sensitize one’s children to these realities without overwhelming them or being a complete killjoy?
Beyond the moral shock one hopefully feels and expresses at these disparities, what — practically speaking — can and should we do to change things? Needless to say, the problems are complicated, and so many social, political and economic efforts to address them have failed miserably.
From one perspective — which is global, longitudinal and diffuse — things are changing decisively for the better, and they have been changing with increasing rapidity for some time. Watch these short, amazing videos by Hans Rosling, a Swedish physician, public health scholar and statistician, to see how and why:
200 years that changed the world
(The rest of this post may not make much sense unless you watch the videos, or at least the first one, which is just four minutes long.)
I can relate a bit to Roslings’ story about his mother’s first washing machine and what it meant for their family. My paternal grandmother, who died in 2003, six months shy of her 100th birthday, told me many stories about how cars, air travel, modern medicine and other innovations she had witnessed transformed her world.
My father (her son) worked three jobs when we were young — as a laborer for the Northern Illinois Gas Company (by day), as the foreman of a janitorial crew (at night), and as a floor salesman at Sears (on the weekend) — to make ends meet and better our living standard before eventually getting his first white collar job as a bank teller. Many of my own early Christmas presents, some of which were technological innovations like the walkie-talkie, were “purchased” with S&H Green Stamps that my mother collected from gas and grocery store purchases throughout the year during that just-making-ends-meet era, so the space beneath the tree would seem to overflow for my brothers and me, just as it seemed to overflow for our kids this morning. Her mother, my grandmother, who was widowed at an early age, no doubt was equally ingenious at providing more for her three girls at Christmastime than her secretary’s income otherwise allowed.
My parents wanted to create better circumstances for us than their parents and immigrant grandparents had been able to create for their children. Stories like this abound in the west and, increasingly, around the world. Stories of aspiration, of hard work, of creative insight skillfully applied, and of resulting innovations that help transform the world and improve others’ lives. The Rosling family’s washing machine. The Internet that made the Arab Spring possible.
I’ve worked in entrepreneurial environments for much of the past 25 years — sometimes as part of new businesses, sometimes as an advisor to them. I’m presently involved in a solar energy startup that’s developing technology with the potential to supply the world’s energy needs, cleanly, at half the cost of the cheapest fossil fuel. I advise a new fund which invests only in companies that treat their employees well, engineer their operations for sustainability, and the like. Many of my colleagues and friends are involved in similarly promising enterprises. These and many other businesses like them are examples of the types of enterprises that give Rosling, and me, hope for our common future.
The picture is not all rosy, as we know. Businesses are profiting today by solving problems created by past business activities, and some of today’s new businesses no doubt are creating other problems. There’s way too much greed and corruption. Wealth distribution within some rich and developing countries is far too uneven, and currently moving in the wrong direction. Even at their theoretical — imaginary, really — best, business activity and technological innovation are just two potential forces for positive change. Happy endings aren’t guaranteed. But, like Rosling, I’m inclined to be hopeful, in part because I’m in the business world, see parts of it that give me reason to be hopeful, and so can’t paint it all black with an overly broad brush, as I see many people doing these days.
There is much progress on other fronts, as well. Steven Pinker’s recent, exhaustively researched book, The Better Angels of Our Nature, makes the case that (in Peter Singer’s words) “our era is less violent, less cruel and more peaceful than any previous period of human existence.”
You may doubt all this, insisting that the world surely is going to hell in a hand basket, but, with the exception of a few notable and not-to-be-discounted problems like global warming, the trend data is decisively against you.
There’s another perspective, of course — this one intensely local, in-the-moment, and specific. Seven billion of them actually, way too many of which still are defined by poverty, anguish and hopelessness. It’s the perspective of that starving child, whether he is in Mumbai or Manhattan. Of the poor, lonely, elderly woman who has no one with whom to share Christmas.
This is the perspective to which Jesus and other ancient and contemporary prophets give voice. Though hope for the future is a key theme in prophetic discourse, from this perspective there really is no hope other than the hope that’s actualized here-and-now. There is no arc of progress. Only food for the hungry. Shelter for the homeless. Clothing for the unclothed. Speech on behalf of the voiceless. Here. Now.
We obviously need both perspectives. Moreover, and more than ever, I think we need to integrate both perspectives, in relations among nations, within national governments at all levels, within companies, within our homes, within our hearts.
All seven billion of them, but especially those relatively few hearts that awoke to plenty this Christmas morning.
Turning Words 