Category Archives: Eastern Teachers

Teachers primarily of Japanese, Chinese, Korean cultures

Unknown's avatar

beyond genre

by

My heart goes out to so many people today.  It’s been a difficult weekend for many of my friends in the US.  In the wake of the shootings of Gabrielle Giffords and several others in Tucson AZ, there has been a painful out-pouring  of anger, confusions, and sadness. I’ve read so many words on so many pages that I can’t remember who said what any more.  Just like all of my American colleagues and friends who are so much closer to this specific tragedy, I search for the meaning in senseless acts of violence.  And the truth is, if by  “meaning” we are searching for an acceptable rationale, I don’t believe there is one to be found in it.

Yet that will not stop us from trying anyway.  We will draw time lines of the shooting, graph out positional dynamics, bullet trajectories.  We will dig into the mental health histories of the suspects or the accused.  We will find huge gaping wounds of neglect and abuse in their developmental paths.  We will appeal to biochemical soups in brain chemistry, theories of nature-nurture collisions, and the insufficiency of love to conquer all ills.  We will because we can.  And it will still not explain to anyone’s satisfaction how the chill wraps around our heart and stops the mind from perceiving the boundlessness of reality.  More than that, it will take us away from the work the must first be done.

Yesterday, amidst all the suffering of my friends, we opened sangha in our home.  We sat and we share about the presence of suffering.  A few days before, I had sat myself, frustrated that I could not really read, could not hold my attention for any length of time, because my heart was collapsing over the loss of two communities.  Sangha is a phoenix; she is growing from the ashes.  The other.  The other…  well, perhaps there is still magic left in this world.  Faced with these challenges, I thought that this is a good time to go back to basics.  Back to the Four Noble Truths and the teachings of my root teacher, Thich Nhat Hanh.

In The Heart of the Buddha’s Teachings, Thấy describes the Four Noble Truths in his inimitably gentle way.  By now, most of us can rhyme off the four without much thought and some of us might even give some snazzy interpretations of them.  Reading the first chapters then became, for me, a practice in mindfulness.  Not rushing ahead, taking it in word-by-word.  Making no assumptions, making no judgement.  And there in the 7th chapter was a jewel.

Some time ago, in a letter to one of my dearest dharma teachers, I had expressed frustration that people often skim over the First Noble Truth.  Suffering?  Why would I want to know about that!  He replied (and I paraphrase), “Oh yes.  They say: Suffering?  I’m an expert on suffering!  I can tell you all about it!  Now let’s get on with the Eightfold Path, OK?”  In the chapter on touching our suffering, Thấy explains why this doesn’t work.  It’s not that we don’t want to look at our suffering.  Likely as not, we can’t escape seeing it.  It’s because we really don’t know what to do after we feel its inexpressible arising from the belly.  And, we look away.

There are three turnings of the wheel of Dharma:

The wheel of the Dharma was put in motion twelve times – three for each of the Noble Truths… The first turning is called “Recognition”….  Our suffering needs to be identified.

There it is.  Calling it suffering and blowing it off as something that “just is part of being human” isn’t working the First Noble Truth.    Flipping to all the euphemisms (stress, dissatisfaction, imbalance) begs the question.  It isn’t enough to use aggregators like hatred, greed, and confusion.  It isn’t enough to point to it as an abstract concept, a societal malaise, cancer, what-have-you.

We need to get face-to-face with it.  We must name it.  Name it in every movement of our body, in every sound of our voices, in every fleeting thought we think doesn’t matter because no one heard.

May the merit of our practice to transform our deepest delusions give rise to an open-hearted understanding of each other, to meet each other as precious and unique, as beyond genre*.

Genju

*A powerful concept explored in “Face to Face: Therapy as Ethics” by Paul Gordon (Constable & Co. Ltd. 1999)

Unknown's avatar

fair to middling

by

What precisely is the middle way?… (To find it) you have to stay conscious.

One Continuous Mistake, Gail Sher

This postcard has hung for years, pinned to the frame of the window in my study.  Each time I look at it, I feel a mix of fear and calm tumbling through my abdomen.  I wonder sometimes what she’s doing walking down the center line of highway.  At other times, I envy her courage and trust in herself – whatever rounds that bend, she will meet it with equanimity.

There’s a lot of weight place on equanimity in practice.  It is often seen as the lodestone in treading the Middle Path.  Conventionally, equanimity is explained as an even-handed presence to all things arising.  It is the practice of non-discrimination, non-preference, the absence of desire for things to be one way or the other.  I’ve never been much of a fan for equanimity although I do try to cultivate it, a bit like knowing a bowl of hot oatmeal will do good on a cold day but chocolate would be so much better.

Lately however, threaded through my readings for chaplaincy and just plain interest, is a nuanced understanding of the Middle Way.  I think I have taken (and perhaps it is unavoidable given the way it’s verbalized in teachings) the Middle Way as the Mean or Average of the extremes.  Living the Grand Mean, as some statisticians might put it!  Little wonder it has felt like pabulum and has contorted my sense of right and wrong, beneficial and harmful actions.

In Bhikkhu Bodhi’s mind-boggling anthology of the Buddha’s discourses (In the Buddha’s Words), the Potaliya Sutta addresses the pitfalls in sensual pleasures.  (No real meaning in picking that one; the book falls open at random.)  Potaliya asks the Blessed One how to “cut off (the business transactions, designation, speech, and intentions)” of a householder.  The sutta runs along several allegories of letting go, cutting off the attachments through right understanding of their nasty consequences.  Then the Buddha says,

Having seen this thus as it really is with proper wisdom, he avoids the equanimity that is diversified, based on diversity, and develops equanimity that is unified, based on unity.

Bhikkhu Bodhi’s notes explain that “diversity” means the five cords of sensual pleasure and “unity” means the fourth jhana or level of consciousness.  But that isn’t what struck me.  “Equanimity that is diversified” versus “equanimity that is unified” suggested that equanimity itself is not a singular concept.  Balanced practice or the Middle Path is not about “absence of equanimity” versus “presence of equanimity.”  It is the quality of the state of equanimity.  I’m struggling with this concept and attending to the way equanimity is diversified – scattered across all the pleasures, distractions, wanton ways (oh Yes!), equally loving all the things I hate.

Further along in my reading on pastoral ethics (and I so wish that had something to do with meadows and bodice-ripping), this point arose: the challenge of doing good and not doing harm does not lie in the absolute statements of “help… but at least do no harm.”  It is in the middle space between right and wrong.  In Gentle Shepherding: Pastoral Ethics and Leadership, Joseph Bush, Jr. writes:

(E)thics is not solely a matter of philosophical abstraction from life.  Rather, ethics makes contact with life itself, but it does so utilizing the philosophical and theological resources that are accessible to us “in the middle.”

In other words, we are challenged at points that are pivotal in our lives.  Joseph Bush suggests that the middle is where  we are trying to determine what to do, how to act, how to respond beyond the context of what is absolute good or bad, right or wrong.  To push the point a bit further, while we acknowledge the right thing to do, we struggle with what we should do.  Among the many models he discussed, one impacted my thinking most because it broadens the need for practice and deepens the intention.  It categorized actions that we are, as spiritual practitioners, obligated to cultivate:

Do no harm
Prevent harm
Remove (the potential for) harm
Do good

The two middle dimensions of practice he presents are the messy middle ground of being for me.  They call for a willingness to step forward and act with discernment and an inability to know the real outcome.

Sher talks about becoming Olympians of middle-way points.  And it’s not easy because equanimity is more quickly diversified than my mutual funds.

Before figuring it out you must want to figure it out.  After figuring it out you must demonstrate the courage to say “no” to the forces all around you that will tempt you away.  Universities, corporations, the media, spiritual authorities, even friends and family will push you to squelch the part of you that knows.  A tremendous amount of consciousness is required to stay with your hard-earned understanding. (Sher, pp.28)

Thank you for practising,

Genju