Today is the one-year anniversary of the founding of this blog. It’s been a good experience for me, because through writing this blog, I have discovered many other interesting Buddhist blogs. Through them, I have been challenged and informed. You can see some of the blogs I like best in the blogroll here, under the heading “Zen Blogs.”

When I started it, I thought I would post one photo and one quotation to the blog each day for 108 days. That’s not how it turned out. I soon wanted to write other things related to my practice — not just quote the words of others. Also, the daily posting dropped away in February as I became busy with my homework for a university course in the traditions of Buddhism.

I like to think that even though this blog does not have a large readership, people might discover it through one search or another and gain something helpful or useful from what they find here. I appreciate all the supportive comments I have received.

What next? Don’t know!

Breathe.

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.

SPOILER ALERT: If you have not seen the first two episodes in Season 6 (the current season), don’t read any more.

What happened to George made me think about karma. And that led, in turn, to some thinking about no-self.

One way of understanding karma is to see it in terms of cause and effect. The sutras often say we plant a seed (cause), and the kind of fruit (effect) we get depends wholly on that seed. So then you naturally ask, “What did I ever do to deserve this?”

What did George ever do to deserve being hit by a bus?

Well, the simple answer is: He walked in front of the bus.

I’m not joking. Seriously, that is cause and effect. Now, if you don’t watch Grey’s Anatomy, you don’t know George. George was one of the sweetest people you could ever hope to meet. He had a lot of friends — most of them women. (He wasn’t really close with guys.) He was never mean or cruel. As a doctor, he was super-sensitive.

You have to ask why a guy like that would get killed in a brutal, painful way — and at a young age. How can that be right?

Karma isn’t about right or wrong. Some people would say George must have done something really awful in a past life — that would explain why he had this painful death. That view assumes that death is a bad thing for the person who dies. But if you watched the season opener of Grey’s Anatomy, you know who’s really suffering — his friends, and his mom. They are all suffering a lot. But George — he’s gone. Do you think the dead suffer?

Now, being hit by the bus would be horribly painful. Pain is suffering. And for the short time George lived after he was struck by the bus, he probably felt a lot of physical and emotional pain. The direct “seed” of all that pain is the bus. And why did George step in front of a moving bus? To save a life. Someone else’s life.

What kind of cruel universe rewards a hero — someone who saves a life — with horrible pain and anguish? Stop. The universe isn’t cruel. It isn’t good, either. The universe simply is. A common word used in English-language texts about Buddhism is suchness. It is as it is. Just that.

George’s intention was to save the woman who stepped into the path of the bus. It was a good intention. And that seed bore very good fruit — the woman’s life was saved. All her friends and family were spared the terrible suffering that George’s friends and family are experiencing now. George’s intention bore wonderful fruit.

What if George had simply been walking down the sidewalk and been killed by a bus that ran off the road? Then there would have been no intention on George’s part. Yet his friends and family would suffer just the same.

I think when people die, the greater suffering occurs among those who miss them. What George’s friends at Seattle Grace are experiencing is their loss of their friend, and it’s affecting each one of them in an individual way.

This is where I started thinking about self and no-self. All the bits and pieces of George’s life up to that moment had made him into a person who would save someone else’s life at the cost of his own. And each one of us is also a conglomeration of bits and pieces. We have not deliberately chosen each bit or each piece — they come from all over, starting at the moment we are conceived.

But no-self acknowledges that we can unwind or unravel those bits and pieces. We can reconstruct ourselves (with time, with Right Effort). That’s why karma is not destiny. In the Diamond Sutra, the Buddha says you could wipe out all your previous bad karma if you practiced with diligence and attained the perfection of wisdom.

If you could unwind George’s life and examine it, you would see how his impulse to save the woman from the bus fitted perfectly with his whole persona. Whether it was the best use of his talents or his potential — well, that’s not how cause-and-effect works. If you make a decision that yields immediate fruit, then you forfeit the future. If you plant a seed that’s going to take 20 years to bear fruit, maybe you will not be around to harvest that fruit.

In other words, karma can be viewed as a system, just as the whole universe is a system. Everything is interconnected and linked. Each of us influences other people, and other people influence us. But we’re not just leaves blowing in the wind.

We do make decisions. We are able to choose.

Breathe.

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.

I recently came across a post about karma at the Dharma Folk blog. It compares two texts about karma, written by two different present-day Buddhists (as opposed to long-dead sages). The ideas expressed by the two authors don’t exactly contradict each other, but they are different.

A lot of Buddhist teachings (some would say “philosophy”) are like this. Even if you stick with the oldest texts, you will find differences that confuse you. On some Buddhist forums, people spend thousands of words debating these distinctions. Of course, this is the way of religion (and philosophy) — debate over meaning is always going on.

First, there is the question of what karma is. Is it your past actions (of body, of thought, of speech) coming back to repay you in kind? This is a general way of thinking about karma. The past actions might be from this life or from a previous life.

Then there’s the matter of intention. It is said that for a past action to cause some effect, that action had to be intentional. Are you off the hook if while sleeping you dreamed a bad thing about somebody? I don’t know.

Third, there’s the whole question of rebirth and past lives. I have read that a lot of Western Buddhists reject the whole idea of rebirth. I have trouble understanding how we can be reborn in a new life if we have no self, no soul, to begin with. Yet, what is not born cannot die, and all beings are also that.

Fourth, we know that all great teachers practice skillful means, and what one teacher said to one audience of hearers might not match, exactly, the words said by another teacher to another audience at a different time and place. Is this a contradiction? Is one teaching more true than another? (I am often reminded of a lyric from Jesus Christ Superstar, which I memorized in full in my youth: “And what is truth? ‘Tis but a changing law. We both have truths. Are mine the same as yours?”)

Some texts refer to karma as a fruit. The seeds you have planted will grow into what they must be. A seed of evil or sorrow will always yield a fruit of evil or sorrow. A seed of goodness and compassion yields a fruit of goodness and compassion.

There are teachings that say all one’s bad karma can be erased in a single moment, under special conditions that make it so. Can you cause these conditions to come about? Deliberately? By design? I don’t think so. The harder you chase that goal, the farther away it will recede. No goal, no aspiration.

Breathe.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I am still studying the Diamond Sutra. Chapter 14 is a long one, and it has challenged me fiercely.

1. Charity / generosity
2. Morality / ethics
3. Forbearance / patience
4. Vigor / perseverance/ diligence
5. Meditation / concentration
6. Wisdom

These are the Six Perfections (Paramitas). In the commentary on Chapter 14, I found much to ponder about forbearance.

In this sutra, the Buddha focuses on three of the Six Perfections, namely, those that counteract the Three Poisons: the perfection of charity, which counteracts the poison of desire; the perfection of wisdom, which destroys the poison of delusion; and the perfection of forbearance, which eliminates the poison of anger. Although this sutra only mentions these three by name, each is closely related to the other perfections: charity with morality, forbearance with vigor, and wisdom with meditation. (p. 235)

Merriam-Webster says that to forbear is “to control oneself when provoked”; to “be patient.”

Is it the perception of anger that forbearance eliminates? No, because if anger arises, then we will have a perception of that anger. With forbearance, we restrain our actions. We look our anger in the eyeballs, unflinching, and we refuse to budge. Looking at it, unmoving, we allow compassion to arise. We provide the space for compassion; we stop time so that compassion finds time to emerge.

In the fall 2009 issue of Tricycle, there’s a brief essay about forbearance on pages 14-15. Forbearance might look like cowardice, author Hsing Yun has written. But because of the great strength required to control our emotions, in fact forbearance is “an act of courage.”

Breathe.