Yesterday
morning in her dharma talk, City Center Abiding Abbess Christina Lehnherr noted that being busy and trying to fix things is a type of violence. Ironically, in an earlier talk she had said
that busyness is a form of laziness. Either way, the point is the same – the greed of
relentless improvement severs us from the fundamental generosity of accepting
what is. Impatience flares with
our inability to achieve an endless set of perfections, particularly when other
people don’t seem to be working on themselves as hard as we are.
As if we could criticize someone into
enlightenment.
Buddhism reminds us that any
type of reality is
dependently co-arisen (a fancy term for messy). There’s just too much going on
for us to control it into perfection.
It’s not that we aren’t good enough, it’s that it just isn’t
possible. But we have to do something! We can’t just sit here!
Well, yes we can. For sixteen hours yesterday, 95 people
sat in the City Center zendo in silence. Apparently, they preferred that to any weekend home
improvement project or entertainment.
They preferred to listen, witness, explore and accept whatever came up –
including, perhaps, the inability or unwillingness to accept. There in
unhurried silence was the possibility to help each other negotiate our bumps
and potholes rather than throwing more rocks in the road. There was a curiosity and a willingness
to ask, “Are they really doing it wrong, or are they just not doing it the way
I would?” -- a key question when our well-intended corrections cause not
perfection and happiness, but anger and resentment.
Most importantly, those 95 people
decided that they could no longer go it alone. They chose sangha over rugged individualism. They chose to look in the mirror
of other people to find their own true self. They decided to trade in the need to be right for the
opportunity to be kind and helpful.
They rejected Sartre’s “hell is other people” in favor of Rumi’s field of
possibilities:
Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing, there is a field.
I’ll meet you there.
