Tag Archives: ethics

start with the seed

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 “I’ve taken a lot of Prozac, Paxil, Wellbutrin, Effexor, Ritalin, Focalin. I’ve also studied deeply in the philosophies of the religions, but cheerfulness kept breaking through.”

Leonard Cohen – prelude to Ain’t No Cure for Love, Live in London Disc I

There was a time during which I woke up every morning, and in that waking felt intense anger that I had woken up. Physically and mentally, that is. Not deeply in any sense of the word. Woken up to the reality that I had not died in the night – quietly, softly, without fanfare. When people ask me if meditation has helped or why they should practice mindfulness (secular, therapeutic or otherwise), I veer away from this story because it’s just not that believable. What can I say to them? “Oh well, I felt profoundly suicidal all my life until one day I didn’t. Gee, I think that was the meditation! Well, it could have been psychotherapy but heck, the therapist had transference/attachment issues which really sank that ship.”

Let’s face it, friends. We all know our share of dharma teachers and longtime practitioners with serious Icky Disorders that we should be careful about assuming meditation/mindfulness is sufficient for insight and transformation. I’ll leave this here for the moment. Let’s go back to a time before pandemics and mindfulness wars.

The last few years have been a heady journey into the bowels of the many worlds of mindfulness. I mean that deliberately to point to the challenges of taking a path without a clarity of intention and insight to the consequences of our actions. Shit can happen and does. And the mindfulness worlds are no different in containing the good, bad, and ugly. More than that, I discovered it is a landscape in which the good needs the the bad and ugly in order to germinate, sprout, and bear fruit. I’m not naive – being a survivor of decades of throat-cutting academic studies, employment in highly competitive venues, and just plain dealing with toxic family issues. And yet. And yet, I fell into the hell realms with an ease that was impressive!

Good things happened though. I think – I’m told – our work made a contribution to setting a course towards the role and importance of sila in teaching mindfulness. More than that, thanks to the evolving conversations around intersectionality, uncovering our biases, and decolonizing our perspectives, the zeitgeist of mindfulness now seems to curve our life towards compassionate care for each other. The core intention of mindfulness is the arc of opening our heart/mind and with that we can let go of the dualistic discussions of mindfulness.

But… there is still the issue of practice and transformation. Practicing good intentions is not sufficient for cultivating wisdom and insight. Our transformation is firmly rooted in our ability to feel the consequences of our action. As skillful as we may believe we are, the fruit of our action informs us of our skillfulness – and the honesty of our intentions. Our willingness to experience the bitter taste of (hopefully unintended) consequences or the sweetness of wholesome outcomes is the teaching, is karma. It fuels our willingness to change our actions, evolve through the lessons of experiential consequences, and learn the nuances of being blameworthy.

Because each of you has his or her own death, you carry it with you in a secret place from the moment you’re born, it belongs to you and you belong to it.

Jose Saramago, Death with Interruptions

Now let’s return to those waking moments when I felt betrayed by Death. Honestly, to hope that death would be an extension of falling asleep is a misunderstanding of responsibility and a vast ignorance of belongingness. This sense that my practice was in cultivating belongingness wasn’t some great insight or a jolt of connection. In fact, it arose from the pain of all the not-belonging I felt day by day, moment-by-moment. As our dear Leonard Cohen did, I tried everything – meditation groups, sanghas, sesshins, dokusans, mindful self-compassion, teaching, reading, learning, writing, and way too many talks. Through all the disappointments, it came back to practice.

Practice – call it meditation, zazen, koans, what have you – has been a continuous thread of saying mu, no, neti-neti, slowly eroding away that craving to belong to be proven worthy of the tribe. And slowly, slowly “cheerfulness” kept surprising me. One morning I woke up, not just literally and caught my breath in the silence, in the empty space when anger had been. One day, I felt the gut punch of someone saying to me, “It hurts when I hurt myself.” One night, I fell asleep without expectations of living or dying.

There’s no magic in practice or prostrations. There’s only the embodied feeling of the consequences when they don’t align with my intentions to be kind, supportive, compassionate, caring, loving. Therein is the seed of liberation and the transformation of our unskillfulness.

I’ve missed you all. Thank you for being here waiting.

For an incredible ride into the world of transformation and insight, give C.W. Huntington’s powerful novel Maya a whirl.

Genju

Before Buddha was Buddha by Rafe Martin: bedtime stories to wake up by

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Disclosure: I was provided the book for an honest review.
Connection: Rafe Martin is in my social media circle and I’ve likely known him in some Jataka Tale or the other.
Previous reviews: Endless Path – Awakening Within the Buddhist Imagination: Jataka Tales, Zen practice, and daily life

Rafe Martin adds Before Buddha was Buddha: Learning from the Jataka tales to already prodigious library of mythic tales drawn from the Buddha’s past lives. The morality themes in the stories resonate with other morality tales from the same period such as Aesop’s fables. The primary – and crucial – difference, however, is the portrayal of human frailties: animals typically carry the tone of moral decrepitude in the Greek and later Renaissance fables whereas, in the Jataka Tales, the moral lack is equally possible in humans as in animals. Perhaps this is the deep appeal of the Buddha’s past lives and its potential for discomfort; we are not spared painful lessons by being at the top of this food chain.

In the introduction, Martin offers one of the least addressed challenges to Prince Siddhartha Gautama’s sudden realization that aging, illness, and death occur. Not only quietly challenging this hole in the plot of the Buddha’s coming to be, he also offers the insight missed by many others: it’s the felt sense, that deep embodied realization of the reality of aging, illness, and death that wakes us up. It’s the beginner’s mind of all beginnings. The familiar, the taken-for-granted, the obvious is inescapably real.

And the rest, as is often said, is commentary.

The heart of the Jataka teachings is that this human birth is precious. And the rhythmically pounding message is that it’s not the final destination. The animals in the Jataka tales are by turns blind and aware of this message. Their actions move them in the direction of becoming human; whether we choose to see it as rebirth or realizing their own-form compassionate nature depends on our own landscape. The naga king who chooses to become the silver snake, the monkey king who sees through the delusions of humans and their self-making, the two cousins reborn over and over as fawns and osprey – they begin to understand that the path to liberation is through the human birth and.

Yet, I wonder if that idea has a risky edge of elevating our human capacity above the others. Perhaps it doesn’t matter because the human lives lived by the future Buddha in the Jataka stories are equally challenged and, after many, many failed attempts at liberation, seem to finally arrive at the base of the bodhi tree.

Because I’ve felt too many dharma talks rely on students having already cultivated clear comprehension and too many teachers presume vicarious learning suffices, Martin’s commentaries for each Jataka tale are important to read because they offer a clear perspective of the intent of the tales. As we learned from the Zen story of Gutei’s finger, much can be lost in translation. Martin skillfully draws from the teachings of Zen masters and threads together the sometimes elusive morals in the tales. As he emphasizes in the tale of the Bodhisattva Robber, it helps to know what is really being taught.

I read each chapter as a bedtime story, letting the echoes carry through me the next day and the days after. It’s not about savouring – although there is that too – rather, it is about letting the nuances fill out the spaces between sleeping and waking up. I hear in Martin’s writings, always, the urgency to wake up, “like the dragon when he gains the water, like the tiger when she enters the mountain. (Dogen)”