Category Archives: reflections

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sweet dharma

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The pink arrow is pointing at our daughter, the intrepid adventurer, on her way to Cameroon with International Children’s Awareness Canada. I got home long enough last week to throw my still-damp toothbrush into my purse and take off with Frank and the Kid for the airport in Toronto.  Thankfully, Frank’s broken ankle was assessed as healed and he got to drive.  Had I known that would designate me as the the parent-in-charge-of-keeping-the-child-quiet, I likely would have broken it for him again and driven the entire way.  Not really.  There’s something sweet about being in a closed metal box hurtling down a highway at high speed, in the company of a young woman who is finally finding her true self and doing so while on her way to an adventure.

This isn’t the first time for Alex.  A few months after the 2004 tsunami in India, she left for the outskirts of Chennai where she worked in an orphanage for 10 weeks.  Then came a year-long trek through New Zealand and a realization that conquering all the mountain peaks in the world doesn’t change the nature of suffering although it can bring one close to the nature of deep personal dukkha.  When she got back from India, she was powerfully moved by the ways in which we can corrupt generosity and compassion.  When she got back from New Zealand, she was equally moved by the reality that progress doesn’t bring with it generosity and compassion.

These adventures result in long evenings with Frank, deep in discussions about the sociological-political-complexity-laden-entropic windings of the world.  Having no brain for such things, I tend to retreat into Facebook or my tumblr treating them as distractor video games so I don’t have to face my massive ignorance of how the world really works.  To give her credit, Alex does try to educate me but I have such a resistance to seeing the world writ large.  When she returned from New Zealand, she brought me Emma Larkin’s book, Everything is Broken: a tale of catastrophe in Burma.  It changed her life, she said, wanting me so much to be excited by it.

And I was.  Excited, that is, by the fact it had changed her life, giving her passion and direction to fit the steamroller attitude that often hides a deep compassion for others.  The book was bland in comparison;  it left me frustrated by circumambulating writing and a refusal to dig deep into the psychological-emotional power of the events of Cyclone Nargis.  Alex was unimpressed by my critique of Larkin.

I try.  Really.  But we speak vastly different languages and I try to explain that listening to her debate with her father is like listening to a symphony.  A delight to attend but hardly something I want to or am able to perform in.  She points out that she got her abilities from somewhere and, given her father’s haplessness, I have to bear the burden of that legacy.

Brat.

So now it’s onto Cameroon and the possibility that it will give her more training in the upaya/skill-in-means of Bodhisattvas.  Charles Prebish in Destroying Mara Forever: Buddhist Ethics Essays in honor of Damien Keown notes that Keown called Mahayana’s emphasis on the bodhisattva ideal as a paradigm shift away from the ethical approach of the earlier Buddhists.  There’s more to this but what is important for me to hang on the wall until the Kid returns is what Keown calls normative ethics or upaya1, one of two aspects of skill-in-means:

Upaya1 does not enjoin laxity in moral practice but rather the greater recognition of the needs and interests of others.  One’s moral practice is now for the benefit of oneself and others by means of example.  Through its emphasis on karuna the Mahayana gave full recognition to the value of ethical perfection, making it explicit that ethics and insight were of equal importance for a bodhisattva.

If the righteous indignation of events in India and New Zealand have given rise to a determination to find a way to benefit others and if that benefits the Kid, I will call that sweet dharma, indeed.

Thank you for practising,

Genju

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window on the oblique

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Matters of the heart tend to slide into my life when I’m looking the other way.  They settle into the corners and wait patiently for me notice.  If I’m not too caught up in the desiccating winds of my internal critic or the howling banshees of blame, I do catch a glimpse of them snuggled against each other, taking warmth from the light of inspiration and opportunity they carried in with them.

Sometimes, if the light dies, as it does from my neglect or blindness, they grow cold, tire, and drift away through the cracks and crevices in the gyp-rock walls and floor planks.  That usually (often!) happens when I’m caught in the busy-ness of life.  Not living.  Life.  As an Object of a verb and not a present participle, Living.

This is what it is for now.  At the end of 60 days on May 4th, I will count 32 of them spent on the road.  I am developing a profound respect for those of you who do this as the primary way of earning a living.  Or perhaps, I should write “earning a livelihood” because I fail to see the Living aspect of this.  And that is the challenge of practice, I suppose.  How to be immersed in the process of Living while doing what one needs to do.

There were some moments while at Upaya after the Chaplaincy program.  I had a week without formal obligations while Frank attended the Trauma Resource Institute’s training.  It promised to be a delicious time devoted to writing the last two chapters of our clinic guidebook.  In fact, it was a double no-brainer because one chapter was on Self-compassion and the last on the ethical and spiritual basis of mindfulness.  I intended to live out self-compassion by taking the time in beautiful inspiring places to write and where else to culminate the last chapter on spirituality but in a spiritual place!  One and a half days of the five worked out that way.

It may not seem like much but that was enough to still the brain and allow me to see the gentle relationship that sat quietly in the background and emerged on the last day.  Four of us doing what needs to be done, cultivating a community of those dedicated to the alleviation of suffering.  I’ll keep you posted.

Thank you for practising,

Genju