Category Archives: Western Teachers

Teachers primarily of American and European cultures

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fair to middling

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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

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practice compounding

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A writer sifts his reading through his emotional, psychological, spiritual and aesthetic experience, transmuting into language that is his own.  This in itself is stabilizing.  Instead of floating around on effervescent clouds of disappearing thoughts, he gradually becomes rooted in his own approach, his own vision, and imagination.  Even if he just writes a paragraph, he will “have” something from which he can build.  Money isn’t the only commodity subject to the “power of compounding.”

Robert D. Richardson, Jr., quoted in Gail Sher’s One Continuous Mistake

The art of practice is not different.  It slips through the openings of our experience and transforms into a lexicon, a syntax that is unique to who we continuously become.  If we trust it, it is stabilizing.  In my practice, I find myself tentative about trusting this ever-shifting process.  I realized when I read this passage that this sense of ungroundedness may be related to my focus on watching those “effervescent clouds of disappearing thoughts.”  It makes sense then – this feeling that I am continually sliding off to one side or the other of the path.  Or, in an effort to not let a single disappearing thought feel unwitnessed, I tend to cultivate a meta-ruminative approach which has me spiralling out in ever-widening arcs of watching the disappearing disappear.

As much as it seems blasphemous to aim for stabilizing, it is unavoidable if practice is to have a solid base.  (I think we’ve become to caught up in the literal language of practice anyway, rendering it into pseudo-dharma gobbledegook at best.)  It is interesting to bring attention to my language about practice.  Not just the verbal lexicon but also the physicality of how I communicate my concepts and understanding about practice are revealing.  We got a late start one morning and I noticed how my body moved as if sitting was no longer an option; the time had come and gone – as if once the clock hands moved past the appointed hour, intention too is spent.  I noticed the hugeness of the effort to break through the trance of “too late.”

It’s easy to reframe these moments as some type of noble truth.  Oh, notice that suffering.  Oh, isn’t it great that you noticed the noticing noticing.  Oh, do a metta practice of not-sitting.  This is the tyranny of the forebrain which loves to complicate to obfuscate.  How about we just sit?  How about we eat?  How about we write?  How about we pick up that brush?

I think this is the process of stabilization.  In doing what is intended, I build the core, the central mold around which I can layer on the materials of my life.  This is the “having” Richardson writes of in his biography of Ralph Waldo Emerson.  Not the acquisitive, avaricious greed of materialistic or spiritualistic ownership but rather a confirming of true nature.

On the cedar chest is a wooden unicorn that once lived as a mold for making sculptures.  Some years ago, it broke in two around the girth and the right leg fell off.  I finally got a moment that was a repair opportunity and glued it back together.  The gouges in along the midline of the creature are a revelation of building that core of practice.  The channel marks where the material was cut to separate it from the wood carving.  I imagine the hundreds of sculptures it took to create the deep groove and in some places, where there isn’t a sufficient volume of wood, an eventual wearing away.

The strength in the core of the unicorn sculpture came from a long timeline of compounding that began in the walls of cellulose cells of the tree it once was.  Building that core in the art of practice means compounding the strength in the body, heart, mind cells so that it endures our efforts to sculpt it into a form at once unique and of service to all.

Thank you for practising,

Genju