Happy Birthday

Around this time of year, varying according to the calendar in vogue, the day of the equinox and the fullness of the moon, birth and awakening are celebrated with particular joy and poignancy.  Around this time, 2,576 years ago, was born a Nepalese prince who, in his mid-thirties, would wake up to the illusory and painful causes of suffering, and then teach the alleviation thereof.   Around this time a half-dozen centuries later, another mid-life sage would be publicly and gruesomely tortured to death, and then (according to one version of his biography), come back to life, again to show that existence beyond suffering is possible.

Their suggested paths to end suffering might sound different on the surface – the prince chose wisdom and compassion, the carpenter chose love and humility. The semantics hardly matter (though the bulwarks since grown up around them might have you believe otherwise).  As Rumi explained, “There is but one light that shines though many windows.” 

And the light they both saw in their waking from dream-death, that both delivered with eloquent urgency to a self-suffering world, is available to all of us on the day of our own birth and in every moment hence.  The Pali Canon called it Right Protection:

By patience and forbearance, by a non-violent and harmless life, by lovingkindness and compassion does one in protecting others protect oneself.

Quiet and Flurry

For the past week, we've been in sesshin, quietly collecting body and mind in one suchness.  The sitters went deep, quickly, touching that place where tears arise both from sadness and from finally, finally accessing an inner realm that has been ignored, denied and pushed away for too long.  That place of feeling what we're feeling.  That place of coming home to our heart.  That place of our true selves.

When we find our place right where we are, practice occurs, and we rejoice in the obviousness of this fundamental point.

At the end of the week, we celebrated our Shuso (head student) who had navigated a practice period laden (fraught?) with unpredictable meanders.  At her ceremony, she sang "Zippity Do Dah."  What a wonderful day.  She cried.  We cried.

As William Stafford wrote in his poem Cutting Loose:

Sometime from sorrow, for no reason, you sing.

No Discrimination

On Saturday morning, we will celebrate the life of Mahapajapati, aunt to the Buddha and founder of the women’s lineage.   One of the earliest and most ardent convents to her nephew’s discoveries about the origins and cures of suffering, Pajapati wanted full experience and full participation in the middle way.  So she asked the Buddha for ordination.

And he refused, for reasons that are lost to history.  (That doesn’t prevent modern-day audiences from cringing, and suspecting misogyny.)

Undeterred, Pajapati went to her son, who conveniently was also the Buddha’s personal attendant, to see if he might offer a different perspective to the sage.  Ananda chose an argument that is so 2013 – non-discrimination.  According to the ancient texts, the conversation went something like this:

Ananda:  Cousin, you have said that anyone, regardless of who or what they are, is capable of understanding the teaching, aligning their life to mitigate suffering, and realizing cessation of debilitating desires.  Is that not so?

Buddha:  Yes, that is so.

Ananda: By that logic, women are fully capable of attaining the way.  So would it not be a good idea to ordain them, too?

Buddha:  Yes, Ananda, it would. 

It was the only time the Buddha changed his mind.  He didn’t have much choice – his own realization of non-duality pretty much nixed any possibility of a different decision. 

A few hundred years later, Nagarjuna offered this terse codicil:

If you want to avoid the problems caused by discrimination, 

stop making discriminations.

What Does It Mean To Die?

On Friday, we commemorated the passing –Parinirvana – of the historical, flesh-and-blood Buddha, Prince Siddartha of the Shakya tribe.  The word “nirvana” translates literally as “blown out,” and is often likened to a metaphorical candle.  But that would be to miss the point of our true being.  What is blown out in nirvana is not light, but heat, the heat of passions.  Our Nepalese prince was one of the few known historical cases of a person who survived the extinction of greed, hate and delusion and lived to tell about it.  Most of us just go on to the next karmic classroom, to again graduate or flunk. 

So, the physical body of the prince succumbed to death, the ultimate impermanence.  So what?  The real lesson of Parinirvana is that 2,500 years later, the understanding – the enlightenment – of that prince is very, very much alive in every single person who makes any effort whatsoever to reduce suffering and to be kind, compassionate, joyful and tranquil, even for one second every day. 

To say that the Buddha is dead is silly.  Of course the body isn’t sustainable – “all conditioned things are of a nature to decay.”  And there will come a time for all of us when the light fades and we know it won’t come back on.  What to do then?  The Buddha, in his last breath, was direct and clear on this point:  “Be a lamp unto yourself.  Strive on untiringly.”

Who Am I?

On Wednesday, we will celebrate the traditional birthday of Bodhidharma, a quasi-historical figure who may -- or may not -- have been many things: an Indian prince, the bearer of Buddhism from India to China, the confounder of Emperor Wu.  Third in line for his father's realm, Bodhidharma didn't have much chance at inheritance.  So, he studied and traveled and faced a wall for a few years.  And in that flexibly vagrant life, he was able to become what was needed in the moment, not as a chameleon, but as a witness to the cries and suffering of the world.  Before the Emperor, he refused to define himself.  "I don't know," was all he said, eerily mirroring the response of another spiritual adept five centuries earlier who said to another prefect, "That's what you say I am."

It's interesting that the first question we ask new acquaintances, perhaps even before we know their name, is "What do you do?"  As if occupation were identity.  We confidently identify several "I's" that are "me."  Parent, worker, student, child, retiree.  The more, the better.  Proof that we are somebody because we are somebodies.  (Don't ask where the "I" is in that agglomeration.)

Now, imagine answering What do you do? with, "I listen to your inmost request and become what is needed to support you to fulfill it."  Well, that would certainly change the conversation, wouldn't it?  We might find that the party had suddenly moved to a far corner of the room.  Having someone offer to be your mirror isn't exactly the basis for chit-chat.

Bodhidharma knew that Emperor Wu needed to be told that his temples and pious good works were not his true nature.  In refusing to define himself, Bodhidharma suggested that perhaps the Emperor, too, might take a break from his identity.  But the Emperor did not understand, and missed a golden opportunity to find the sacred within himself.

"The goal of those who practice is freedom from appearances," Bodhidharma says in his Wake-up Sermon. "Not using the mind to look for reality is awareness."   Appearances involve a small number of tightly-held, carefully-crafted, deeply-cherished "I's."  Awareness gives the capacity to end the suffering thereof.

The Practice of Life

Practice is an interesting word.  It connotes, ambiguously, either preparation or implementation, rehearsal or performance.  There is practice for (concert) and practice of (law, medicine).  We call what we do “Buddhist practice.”  But is it preparation for, or implementation of … what?  Compassion?  Kindness?  Empathy? Equanimity?  And are we already those things, or do we need to practice them first lest our enlightenment be judged?    

Next week a rather large number of people will voluntarily put themselves into “practice,” not to settle the matter of its ambiguity, but to settle themselves squarely in its maw.  First, the winter practice period begins.  A ten-week leap for both residents and commuters into the practice of not knowing.  Soon thereafter, a non-residential program (Establishing the Path of Practice) begins.  It lasts a whole year.

Why do this to yourself?  Why burden an already over-burdened life with more commitments, more study, more investigation of the places that scare us (either because they are too dark or too light)?  Perhaps because there’s an inkling that so far in this life, we have been practicing for.  Practicing for the time when the right partner comes along, when we’ll reach the executive suite, when we’ll have enough money, when the kids have moved out (or back in), when we won't have to be scared/worried/angry anymore.  In other words, we’ve begun to suspect that in living a life of what if, we’re missing a lot of what is. 

And Buddhist practice is nothing if not a relentless practice of what is.  It’s not a practice for.  It’s a practice of.  Our life is not a rehearsal, it’s a choice:  tighten the karmic knots, or loosen them.  And only in unflinching intimacy with our every moment can we apprehend the consequences of what we’re doing. 

“If we don’t use our daily life as a practice, nothing is ever going to change.”

(Ani Tenzin Palmo)

Longest Night

Perhaps the Winter Solstice wasn't the longest night in our personal 2012.  Maybe it was when a loved one died, when a child was sick, when a relationship withered, when something precious was lost or broken.  For the residents of Newtown, their longest night came a full week before the official astronomical event.

The wisdom and the comfort of the Winter Solstice is that it's nature's own reminder of the intimacy of light and dark -- like the front and back foot in walking, says Sekito's poem.  We'd find it silly to believe that only the front foot makes progress, especially since the propulsion and momentum come from the back foot.  Just so, our lives don't move at all unless light and dark are both present, waxing and waning to their own rhythm regardless of our calendared highs and lows.

Zen Master Dōgēn said not to call winter the beginning of spring.  But maybe he was wrong.  For as much as winter's long night connotes death and decay, it also invites rest and surrender to the nourishment of the dark, rich earth -- without which spring's exuberant creativity couldn't happen at all.

Eighth Day, Twelfth Month

Rohatsu Sesshin ended Saturday.  The name means “eighth day, twelfth month” – the traditional date nearly 2,500 years ago that a mid-life Indian prince woke up to all those Buddhist mainstays that we now take for granted (whether or not we understand them): suffering, ignorance, impermanence, emptiness, no-self.

The temptation, borne perhaps of our acquisitive culture, is to believe that the prince got something, and that if we practice hard enough and long enough, we’ll get it, too.  After all, he was very clear that enlightenment is the birthright of every sentient being.   But if we read the fine print of the sutras, including the Buddha’s own words, they are equally clear on one important point that we tend to overlook in our effort to get enlightened:

A Buddha is an absence, not a presence. 

This doesn’t mean the prince ceased to exist on that morning so long ago.  And it doesn’t mean that we will cease to exist when we wake up -- which is, I suspect, a major fear we have about enlightenment, however much we want it.  I won’t be me anymore!

Well, of course not.  Because what’s absent from an awakened being is greed, hate, delusion and 105 other defilements.  And since we tend to overly-define ourselves in terms of our suffering, it’s our definitions of ourselves that are at stake.  We don’t get to keep them when we wake up. 

So, we do things like sesshins for two reasons:  to practice dropping our stories (delusions) again and again, moment after moment, for days on end.  And in the space thus created to imagine what we might be like without them.  Daring, perhaps, to believe that we actually are kind, compassionate, empathetic, tranquil.  Because we’ve made some space for them to move in.  Because we like who we are when they do.  Because they are what our heart calls “I”.