Tag Archives: ethics

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angulimala and the price of belonging

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Every so often, I come back to the story of Angulimala.  There’s a well-written version here and it is one of the most beloved Buddhist stories of salvation.  Angulimala was a brilliant student of a well-known teacher who turned against him when other students became jealous.  The teacher set a task to test Angulimala’s dedication to his teachings: he was to collect a thousand human little fingers.  In some versions, Angulimala was set the task to prove his unquestioning loyalty to the teacher.  In others, the teacher believed Angulimala had slept with his wife and set him up to commit these crimes so that he would be punished by the law, a rather passive-aggressive move on the teacher’s part.

There’s the obvious cautionary message about what teachers can do when caught in their own tangles of desire.  I would say it’s regardless of enlightenment because I don’t believe true enlightenment is a permanent condition anyway.  There’s also the obvious moral call to be one’s own lamp in matters of principled action.   But that’s not really where the power of the story lies.

At its heart, this is a story about the restrictions we place on our vision of others.  We need them be a certain way, to act a certain way, to meet our needs a certain way.  We believe certainty is a scripted safety net which makes life safe within margins.  When that script is challenged it doesn’t matter if the challenge is real or not; the ripples of fear are immediate and cannot be calmed easily.  

It’s also a story about our need to belong and what we are willing to forfeit to have that place where we are accepted as trusted and valued members of a community.  It’s easy to fall into the mind-trap that gives precedence to a felt sense of belonging over principled action because the former “feels” more real, has more “real” correlates with safety than the latter.  We all need something we can hold onto; a dharma name, a robe, a shawl, a jacket.  Nothing wrong with that unless we look away from the coin we’ve used to purchase it.

I don’t claim to know what the teacher and his student should have done or might have done.  I need to spend a bit of time counting the little fingers I’ve collected while thinking I was truly practicing.

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what price my soul

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A little while ago I was asked to offer one of my projects as bait for a rather large fish.  Ah, you know the ending already.  I wasn’t distressed by the outcome really.  Well, I was briefly, but having had reservations about the whole thing, I was relieved that the fish spit out the bait (no idea if it took the hook).  What I am putting myself through the ringer over is the (eventual) willingness to be bait.  

In the process of deconstructing my decisions, I heard various explanations.  That’s what you get for wanting to be famous.  That’s what you get for wanting their approval.  That’s what you get for trying to prove you’re better than they are.  That’s what you get for (fill in the blank with some attribute that points to greed, anger, and ignorance).  Perhaps.  I don’t deny that these baser desires course through my nightmares and day dreams.  And yet, there is something else that wasn’t being offered.

We want things.  We work hard for recognition, acknowledgment, visibility.  But it can’t stop there if it is to be truly the work from the heart.  And my decision – ambivalent as I was about it – had at its heart the desire to create accessibility, to open doors.  And perhaps I wanted that too much, so much that I was willing to sell my soul for it.

On the funny side, one might say that as a Buddhist and hence not having a soul, I thought it was a pretty cheap trade.  My empty soul for a big fish.  On the sad side, it was another wake up call to not make assumptions about practice and communities of practitioners.  One friend emailed me saying he was sorry my project was “hindered by mundane superficialities.”  I liked that.  Hindered, not scuttled.  It puts it into perspective.  It reminded me of a dear friend who used to say, “That’s a non-problem.”

When we have aspirations, we are willing to do what we believe is necessary to achieve them.  In fact, wise diligence says we must be willing to do what is necessary to bring something to fruition, to make it real, to realize it.  Effort – it’s not just for the cushion.  Yet somehow, it’s easier with coming back to the breath than with finding solid ground in the light and shadow of human (and corporate) interactions.  

But practice is not about “easy.”  Practice is about discovering that edge where we’re entangled in desire and principle.