Seats

The Shuso (head student) for our Spring 2013 practice period was officially installed today.  For the next six weeks, he will share the Abbot’s seat (figuratively – they still get their own cushions).  Literally, they share responsibility for leading the practice period, nourishing and teaching the participants and the sangha with their decades of dharmic experience and wisdom.  Between them, they have over a century of commitment to Buddha’s way. 

It’s interesting that where we sit looms so large in our conceptions of status.  This first week of the practice period has seen the usual handful of seat-change requests, some for physical reasons, but several for perceived status slights: upper platform, “senior” platform, the dreaded floor cushions, and the usual complaint about practice period participants getting all the good seats.

Even as a culture, we can’t decide on the best place to sit.  The expensively remote sky box– all the way up in the back, farthest from the field of play – or the theater box, hovering above the stage.  No wonder we have trouble finding a seat that matches our self-image.

Dogen reminds us that realization “has nothing to do with sitting or lying down.”  And the Lovingkindness Meditation gently chides us to remember that there’s something more important to do than worry about our seat:  “Standing or walking sitting or lying down, during all one’s waking hours, let one practice the way with gratitude.”

Not Disappear

This morning we said goodbye to a resident who is going back to the “real world.”  You don’t get to just turn in your keys and drive away once you’ve entered the temple.  There’s a ritual of farewell, a bow made to everyone, while they all bow back.  A public acknowledgement that you opened your mind and heart to the way, that you practiced and worked here.  In short, that you were seen, and that you mattered. 

When someone leaves the temple abruptly, it’s like an amputation.  The part is gone, but the pain remains.  Abandonment issues fester in the unsaid goodbye, in the belief that someone (either the leaver or the stayer, or both) wasn’t good enough to deserve attention and commitment. Resentment and anger flare unexpectedly, long after the parting. 

The Surangama Sutra asks us to “resolve never to abandon anyone.”  So, a leaving is serious business.   The one leaving is reminded that they “return to the marketplace with gift-bestowing hands,” the capacity to be generous in the face of breathtaking greed.  They also “go with the deep gratitude and best wishes of us all.”  Both of these are, of course, just sneaky ways of saying, “You take us with you, and we stay with you.” 

Eijun-roshi, the abiding abbess of Green Gulch Farm, says that a friend is someone who doesn’t turn away.  To leave and yet not turn away is an act of inclusion, a willingness to expand our heart beyond our address, a realization that sangha is not a place.  

The Practice of Companionship

The spring practice period opened today with a peregrination to various altars, including one atop the roof, at sunrise, sans bees.  Standing in the cool breeze under a softly glowing, partly cloudy sky, forty-two participants – some residents, some commuters – agreed to spend the next six weeks exploring the theme of “Dharma Friendship.” 

The idea of the good friend, the path-partner, prevails in Buddhism.  Without it, sangha fizzles.  “Only a Buddha and a Buddha,” Dogen surmised, could understand reality – because only through others do we see reflected the reality we’ve made.  And only with others do we have a prayer of changing it.  No one goes it alone.  The self-made (wo)man is the epitome of delusion.  Nothing that’s you was made by you, not even your idea of who you are.  Tozan’s jeweled mirror isn’t a piece of glass, it’s other people – in truth they are you.

So, we’ll spend six weeks exploring we, muting I.  The metaphors are legion – front and back foot in walking, light and dark, boat and shore, inquiry and response.   The point is so profound and so astonishingly simple: Our life is an “and.” 

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.