Connecting or separating

Friday, November 27, 2009 at 11:43 am (buddhism, practice)
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This post at the Progressive Buddhism blog really gave me a lot to think about: Saving the world by sitting on our butts.

Sometimes when a person most needs the support of friends and family, some of those folks desert the person. There are all kinds of reasons why you or I might cut off contact with a friend or family member. Some of the reasons might be correct (from a Buddhist or compassionate point of view). Sometimes we know our action is not correct — but we do it anyway.

Sometimes when we try to support or engage with a person, even with good intentions, we do more harm than good (see The lesson of the cicada for a resonant example).

Some practitioners of Buddhism think it’s best to sit on the cushion, that going out into the world and engaging with other beings is not the ideal practice. (Others such as the Peacemakers think almost the opposite.)

If you were in the middle of a Buddhist retreat and you got word that someone you care about was in the hospital, would you promptly leave the retreat and go to that person?

Sit with that for a bit.

Then look and see whether you had these thoughts:

  • It would depend on who it was.
  • It would depend on why he or she was in the hospital.
  • It would depend on the travel arrangements.

That’s a lot of dependencies, isn’t it?

Breathe.

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Learning to be patient

Tuesday, November 24, 2009 at 10:00 am (buddhism, meditation, practice)
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This morning I was sitting with a situation. I’m not sure how to respond to the situation.

So, first, I just looked at it. I set the situation in front of me, and I looked at it.

I saw that thinking would not actually yield anything except a bunch of scenarios, all of them pretty much equal. So, I quit thinking.

Then this well-known Zen saying appeared in my mind:

Spring comes.
The grass
grows by itself.

After a brief interlude of calm, peaceful feelings, I thought: Geez, you’re turning into someone like one of those well-meaning Christians who go around spouting proverbs at people. “Do unto others …”

As that thought drifted away, and I watched it go, I remembered the full moon, hidden by nighttime clouds. The moon is always there, even when we can’t see it. When the clouds move aside, we can see the moon.

Breathe.

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It just keeps on getting better

Sunday, November 15, 2009 at 10:19 pm (buddhism, practice, quotations, self, zen)
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Well, just in case anyone is wondering, I’ll provide a little update. I’m almost at the end of my first determined study of the Diamond Sutra, which I started in July. Yesterday I spent about two and a half hours on chapters 27, 28, and 29. There are only three chapters to go, but it’s really blowing my mind now — so I wasn’t quite ready to complete it today!

I am still sitting for 30 minutes every morning. I went through a very restless period for about a week or two when I kept quitting early almost every day (only about five minutes early, but I was in some weird agitated state, and my one leg hurt and I just couldn’t get past it). That was followed by about five days that were so excellent, I told someone that my legs had fallen off (I was thinking both of Dogen saying “Shed body and mind,” and of the legend about Bodhidharma’s legs falling off when he sat for nine years). Since then, I’ve had both kinds of days.

I went to another three-day silent retreat recently; I think it was my fourth one. Maybe my fifth. No, probably my fourth. Anyway, I realized that it’s quite likely that I will gain some new wisdom each time I go to a retreat, and so, even if they are damned inconvenient and very difficult, I will continue to go. When I’m able. I was inspired by the Zen master, who said he attends about one retreat per month. Whoa. That’s a whole lot of distance on the bodhisattva path, I’d say.

I came across a reference to a new book, Ten Zen Questions, not long ago. I had an Amazon gift certificate, so I bought it — and it’s inspired me to take a more active approach to questioning reality. I think a lot of Western Zen people put a big emphasis on a kind of psychotherapy style of practice — you’re looking deep within yourself to discover your true self, after all. But the explorations recounted in this book keep bringing me back to that Bodhidharma quotation about the mind and reality:

If you use your mind to study reality, you won’t understand either your mind or reality. If you study reality without using your mind, you’ll understand both.

Another way it appears:

Using the mind to look for reality is delusion. Not using the mind to look for reality is awareness.

Now, the author, Susan Blackmore, is definitely using her mind — maybe too much! But her accounts about her experiences on the cushion (and off, to some extent) have prompted me to watch more of the things my mind does — more than just my feelings and reactions and impulses, that is. For example, lying in bed this morning, I asked myself what I actually know (knew) at that moment, when my eyes were still closed. I knew I was on a bed and under covers. Did I “know” what bed I was in? I remembered getting into my own bed last night. But did I really know that was the bed I was in when I woke up — without opening my eyes?

The book and its questions have challenged me to look at memory, at perceptions, at my six senses (the 18 domains) from some new angles, which is very interesting. I am finding that more and more of what I consider to be reality is in fact just stuff in my head.

Another thing I noticed concerned vision (and memory). I was sitting on my cushion and asked myself what I knew about the room (where I always sit). I realized I could not see the floor lamp, which was about 18 inches to my right, but a little behind me. How did I know there was a lamp there? Of course, I remembered it. I bought it recently, to replace an old one that stood in the same spot. I remembered the old lamp too. In fact, I remembered both lamps equally well. So how did I know which one was there?

I feel as if I am pushing the edge of something. Give way, something says, pushing. The edge yields a little and springs back. I’m going to go on pushing it.

Breathe.

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5,000+ Buddhists in U.S. military

Tuesday, October 13, 2009 at 9:04 am (buddhism, practice)
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Air Force Cadets can practice inside a 300-square-foot Buddhist chapel at the Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs, Colo., according to National Public Radio.

The chapel was paid for by the Frederick P. Lenz Foundation for American Buddhism.

Out of 1.4 million people in the military, 5,287 identified themselves as Buddhists as of June 2009.

In September, NPR broadcast a story about the first-ever Buddhist chaplain in the U.S. Army.

Breathe.

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Leonard Cohen, at the Zen monastery

Friday, September 11, 2009 at 2:26 pm (buddhism, practice, zen)
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A long 1998 article about Leonard Cohen’s Zen practice appears in Utne Reader:

Apart from Cohen’s 26-year-old son, Adam, and his 23-year-old daughter, Lorca, the Japanese roshi, or spiritual teacher, seems to be the one still point in his endlessly turning life, and now he accompanies Sasaki to Zen centers from Vienna to Puerto Rico and endures punishing retreats each month in which he does virtually nothing but sit zazen 24 hours a day for seven days on end.

And later:

… Cohen is telling me that he makes no claims to piety or knowledge; his training here, he says, is just a useful response to the “predicament” of his life. At times, as I listen, I can see the coyote trickster who has been working the press for decades. I feel disconcerted, almost, by his very niceness, his openness, his courtesy, as he keeps thanking me for “being kind enough to come here” and tends to my every need as if I were the celebrity and he the journalist …

And my favorite:

“For me,” he says, his voice soft and beautiful, a trace of Canada still in it, “the process is really more like a bear stumbling into a beehive or a honey cache: I’m stumbling right into it and getting stuck, and it’s delicious and it’s horrible and I’m in it and it’s not very graceful and it’s very awkward and it’s very painful” …

It’s delicious and it’s horrible. Hallelujah.

Breathe.

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The Metta sutra and Metta chant

Friday, September 4, 2009 at 8:21 am (buddhism, practice, quotations)
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Only recently was I introduced to the Metta chant. The practice of chanting these words reinforces our aspiration to feel true compassion for all beings — and very specifically, not only the nice ones, but also including the most horrible, awful people we can imagine.

The chant starts with us, ourselves:

Aham avero homi
May I be free from enmity and danger

abyapajjho homi
May I be free from mental suffering

anigha homi
May I be free from physical suffering

Then it continues:

Sabbe satta
May all beings

sabbe pana
all breathing things

sabbe bhutta …
all creatures …

avera hontu
be free from enmity and dangers

abyapajjha hontu
be free from mental suffering

anigha hontu
be free from physical suffering

sukhi – attanam pariharantu
may they take care of themselves happily

Dukkha muccantu
May all being be free from suffering

Yattha-laddha-sampattito mavigacchantu …
May whatever they have gained not be lost …

You can read the complete chant here, at BuddhaNet.

The Metta Sutra is a different text (read a good English translation here). The teaching is the same:

As a mother would risk her life
to protect her child, her only child,
even so should one cultivate a limitless heart
with regard to all beings.
With good will for the entire cosmos,
cultivate a limitless heart:
Above, below, and all around,
unobstructed, without enmity or hate.

Breathe.

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Buddhism without the Buddha

Wednesday, September 2, 2009 at 8:16 am (buddhism, practice)
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This blog post by Vince Horn of Buddhist Geeks strikes a lot of notes that I hear people asking about when they are curious about Buddhism in Western countries. Or maybe I should say, people who are not familiar with Buddhism — and who live in non-Buddhist countries — frequently ask about these matters:

Secularizing Buddhism — Making It Accessible, or Stripping the Roots?

One of the clearest things I ever read on this topic was in Brad Warner’s book Zen Wrapped in Karma Dipped in Chocolate — which I lent to a friend and may never see again, so I’m not able to quote it exactly. Warner is not the most reverent or traditional Buddhist teacher you’ll ever meet (not by a long shot!), but at one point in the book he goes off on a short tangent about people who believe you can reap the benefits of Zen meditation without including any Buddha-Dharma.

He finds that idea baseless and unsupportable, basically saying that the people who are trying to do that are eating a sandwich made of bread with nothing in the middle.

Warner is a Zen teacher who’s not fond of days-long silent retreats, endless chanting, or even wearing his official teacher robes (this is all in the book). He’s not talking about rituals; he’s talking about Dharma, about fundamental teachings, when he says it’s no good to cut the religion out of Buddhism.

Vince Horn is on the same track when he writes about secularization of Buddhism in the West. But at the same time, he points out that Buddhism, in its 2,500 years of practice, has been adapted to many different cultures:

If you’ve spent anytime studying the history of Buddhism, you’d see pretty quickly that it is an ancient and constantly evolving religious tradition. It has a series of both practices and beliefs that have spread and mixed with many other influences. Buddhism as it entered Tibet from India melded and mixed with the Shamanistic Bon tradition there. As it entered China it mixed with Confusionist and Taoist influences, and now as it enters America it is mixing with our scientific culture and strange beliefs about the extreme difference between religion and science.

I feel distinctly uncomfortable whenever I hear someone say, “Buddhism is not a religion.” Horn wrote:

… there is a kind of violence in trying to strip something from its historical roots, and also a kind of arrogance in thinking that we can even do that successfully.

Yes, yes — that matters, and it matters very much.

Now, just as Protestants started practicing Christianity without the Latin Mass, without celibate clergy, and without swinging a censor full of incense around inside their churches, I think Buddhists in the West can change some of the external practices of Buddhism as well without destroying (or forgetting) the foundations and the essential teachings, such as the Four Noble Truths. There is a living, breathing baby who must not be thrown out with the bathwater.

This is not to say that secular practices adapted from Buddhist practices (e.g., Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction) should be scrapped or changed. However, I think it’s essential to make a distinction and say clearly that there is Buddhism, which is a religion, complete with practices and beliefs and history — and there are other techniques and programs, possibly inspired by Buddhism, which are neither religious nor based in religion.

So, don’t say, “Buddhism is not a religion.” If you’re doing something that’s not a religion, please don’t call it “Buddhism.”

Breathe.

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Put her down, Ekido

Monday, August 31, 2009 at 8:38 am (buddhism, practice, zen)
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One of the basic teachings of Zen Buddhism is letting go. Sometimes when I am having trouble letting go, I hold my fist in front of me. My thumb points away from me and my four fingernails are visible in a row parallel to the ground. I look at that closed hand, and then I fling open all five fingers, my palm to the sky.

Let go, let go.

Two monks, Tanzan and Ekido, were walking down a muddy street in the city. They came upon a lovely young girl dressed in fine silks, who was afraid to cross the street because of all the mud.

“Come on, girl,” Tanzan said. He picked her up in his arms and carried her across.

The two monks did not speak again till nightfall. Then, when they had returned to the monastery, Ekido couldn’t keep quiet any longer.

“Monks shouldn’t go near girls,” he said, “and certainly not beautiful ones like that one! Why did you do it?”

“My dear fellow,” Tanzan said, “I put that girl down hours ago, back in the city. It’s you who are still carrying her!”

I first found this story here. It is also at Wikipedia in a slightly different form.

Breathe.

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The fire-boy, chasing fire

Saturday, August 29, 2009 at 8:52 am (buddhism, meditation, practice, quotations, self, zen)
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Experience the oneness of all things and all beings:

All the universe is an unceasing process, pursuing things and making them the self, pursuing the self and making it things.

This comes from the chapter titled Ikka Myoju in Dogen’s Shobogenzo (The Heart of Dōgen’s Shōbōgenzō, tr. Norman Waddell and Masao Abe, p. 33). Dogen said the only way to experience this truth is through zazen, or sitting meditation. We can read and study and chant and listen to Dharma talks for 1,000 years, but without zazen, we realize nothing.

He was, in fact, rather insistent on this point. Not only did he compose the Fukanzazengi to praise the benefits of sitting meditation; he also spent the first chapter of Shobogenzo doing the same.

I keep working on the teaching of no-self.

“Pursuing things and making them the self”: This begins when we are babies. I think it might start when we grab our toes and perceive them as our own, as part of the body, connected to us. We construct a self with I, me, mine — my toes, my hunger, my contentment, my toys. We add things to the heap as we grow older — my accomplishments, my pain, my money, my car. All of this adding is done with the mind only.

“Pursuing the self and making it things”: What am I? Am I this house, this son or daughter, this husband or wife? Am I this gun or computer or cash register or mixing bowl? Am I this set of beliefs I have adopted? Am I these clothes I wear? Am I these shoes?

The story of the fire-boy is retold here.

Breathe.

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Knowledge vs. wisdom

Thursday, August 13, 2009 at 8:36 am (buddhism, practice, quotations)
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As I continue to study the Diamond Sutra, I encounter references to “wisdom” quite often in the commentary. Of course this makes a lot of sense if you know that the Diamond Sutra is also called “The Perfection of Wisdom.” This sutra is the pithy condensed version, by most accounts — we also have the “Perfection of Wisdom in 8,000 Lines” and even longer versions, about two dozen in all, according to the Buddhist scholar Red Pine. The Diamond Sutra is complete in only 300 lines.

At the excellent blog thinkBuddha, author Will Buckingham recently considered the distinction between knowledge and wisdom. He was mulling over a politician’s lament that kids nowadays do not know some of the important dates and events in their national history.

Given the innumerability of the objects of knowledge, establishing if there are things that are worth knowing for everyone, and establishing what these things are is a difficult process … Nevertheless, just for the time being, I want to leave this question to the educationalists and policy makers, and to ask another question, a question that I think is often overlooked: the question of what exactly we do with the things that we deem worth knowing.

Here, I think, things become more interesting, because this question forces us to deal with the ethics of our relationship with those things that we know, or that we claim to know. Because it seems to me to be more important, in the long run, that we should treat each other well, than that we should know any particular facts about battles, commandments or laws of nature. [Source]

In other words, all that knowledge in your head, or my head (and they are the same thing, are they not?), is not good for anything at all unless we use it for good.

There’s a line in the Temple Rules of the Kwan Um School of Zen that often floats up into my thinking:

If a snake drinks water, the water becomes venom. If a cow drinks water, the water becomes milk.

Breathe.

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