Tag Archives: Four Noble Truths

lotus petals & the four noble truths of intergenerational relationships

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sundail

It was close. The various plans for holiday celebrations had been set for some time after that psychological window of a snowy Christmas. Still, it was a relief to have a dusting over the landscape followed by a 20-cm literal windfall a few days later. This space between the Christmas and New Year festivities can be trying as much as it can be contemplative. Or maybe there isn’t a difference as I often find the most trying times call for a deepest of contemplations. Of course, deep thoughts in this holiday period tend to have a preamble of frantic decisions over what to serve for breakfasts, lunches, and dinners. How many cookies? What kind? And who-thought-this-would-work types of “discussions”.

Totoro-cookie-cutterThis season, being the 3rd Great Feast of the Grandest Baby, I pulled out the stops on aiming for maximum robai-shin points. (Being only 3 weeks old on the First Great Feast, I figure her consciousness was primed for impression at this one.) Capitalizing on her favourite character, Totoro¹, I scoured the internet (and hundreds of ‘how to ice cookies’ videos) for that perfect Totoro cookie recipe only to end up – happily – making my own cookie cutter out of a donut cutter and using this cookie recipe.

The results were excellent – if one discounts the two attempts to make grey dough that ended up producing 56 cookies, half looking sickly green and the other half mahogany red. Icing is easier to tinge.

Totoro-cooies

 

This grandmother gig is becoming an interesting thing. Yes, it’s about creating that space for fun stuff and I’ll tell you now there’s nothing like hearing that gasp of awe when the Littlest One recognizes one’s attempts and squeals, “Tot’ro!” And the proof of the cookie being in the eating, it was heartening to see she actually liked the cookie too!

This, however, is also a reminder that the state of robai-shin² can’t settle for the glitter gel or sugar icing coating mis-coloured baked goods. The First Noble Truth of Inter-generational Relationships is that they don’t survive the sugar rush unless there is something of substance in them. The Second Noble Truth of Inter-generational Relationships is that although sugary distractions can bridge gaps, it quickly becomes the addiction we all indulge in: settling for the quick-fix, easy stuff that keeps us seeing only half the life we have.

lpitsWith the publication of my essay in Lotus Petals in the Snow: Voices of Canadian Buddhist Women³ about my mother’s dementia and dying, I’ve felt drawn into considering this pattern of inter-generational love. My own grandmothers were powerful women: One a devout Catholic who cooked for the parish priest and the other a devout Buddhist who supported the local monastics. The former was a fierce hotel owner who could bargain down any deal to her favour, sometimes to the degradation of poverty-stricken nomadic sellers; the latter a cheroot-smoking dame who had a deadly aim with a wooden clog when disrespected. I can’t see them baking Totoro cookies but my life has been shaped irrevocably by their fierce determination to carve their own way in a time when women were regarded as not much more than the cattle wandering the fields.

My mother was not that different though her relationship with self, others, and the world was a triptych of personalities laid out in highly edited scripts, more nuanced and cunningly aware of the societal demands she fell prey to. She didn’t bake cookies either. But under the rage and disappointments she felt so keenly there was a profound love which sadly could only emerge through the paths she had created by walking out her life. And this is the Third Noble Truth of Inter-generational Relationships: We walk out the paths of our life with those in that life. We are shaped by each others’ experience and carry those formations forward.

When we see that our path which we claim as some individualistic attainment is really inter-meshed with all those before and those to come that Fourth Noble Truth of Intergenerational Relationships has to be a powerful yet simple recipe whose eating will offer proof of the pudding’s or cookie’s ability to nourish.

How can we understand this crimson thread, this bloodline of truth and its avoidance?
How can we create our path with an intention set on cultivating enduring relationships?

How can we action this wisdom through our choices of behaviours, speech, and livelihood?

How can we titrate effort so as not to become depleted or manipulative?
How can we hold in gentle awareness all that has gone before without being weighed down by pathological regret and guilt, yet learning from the paths we walked accompanied by our parents and generations beyond them?
How can we stay committed to our path: focused without obsession or over-control, distilling the essence without becoming rigid or unyielding?

Happy Baking!
_______________________

¹ Totoro is a character from the animation My Neighbor Totoro“, a “1988 Japanese animated fantasy film written and directed by Hayao Miyazaki and produced by Studio Ghibli“.

² I wrote earlier about “robai-shin” here, interestingly about recipes there too.

³ To encourage purchase of the book, Lotus Petals, whose entire price is donated to charity, I’ve taken down the original blog post on 108 Zen Books. Please purchase the book here (Canada) & here (US and other countries).

invitations from the buddha, rsvp: book review of Gowans’ philosophy of the buddha

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Christopher Gowans’ Philosophy of the Buddha gives me some hope that I might get a handle on the convolutions philosophers tend to put into explaining the fundamentals of Buddhist thought. It’s well over 10 years old in print and I suspect some challenges have arisen around his explanation of non-self though I have yet to find anything via my oracle Google. I did however come across an essay by Gowans on Buddhist Well-Being that outlines his approach to this intersection of Western philosophy and Buddhist ideas.

Gowans’ interest in this meeting place of thoughts and ideas introduces his essay:

First, what is the proper philosophical elucidation of Buddhist ideas? Second, in what ways, if any, do these ideas relate to ideas in Western philosophy (contemporary as well as historical)? Finally, to what extent might these two domains—Buddhist philosophy and Western philosophy—learn from one another and challenge one another? That is, to what extent might they critically interact so as to advance our philosophical understanding?

The first point – the proper elucidation of Buddhist ideas – is the gist of this book where

(the) first goal is an accurate and insightful understanding of the Buddha’s teaching. We should assume neither that a perfectly objective account is possible nor that any interpretation is as good as another.

Gowans is insistent throughout his book that we are held tightly by our own perspective and, while not necessarily a negative thing, it would be naive to believe that objectivity would be possible. That being said, he does an excellent job of guiding us down the intricate path of Buddhist ideas and principles. Where the interpretations are likely to be convoluted or conflated with Western ideas, he sets up the investigation so that ideas are challenged not as a means of showing off but rather to truly tease apart the complex layers of understanding. His strategy is particularly helpful in working through the concepts of impermanence, non-self and suffering where he holds up the objections and the support all the while questioning the answers.

As for that thorny issue of non-self, Gowans does a remarkable job of breaking it down into substance-self and process-self; the former being a belief of the Buddhism-curious (he calls them stream-observers) that various aspects of form and experience confirms the existence of a distinct substance with an identity (think: sun and plant) while the latter proposes a self “consisting of over-lapping and ever-changing aggregates (p78 Kindle edition)” which have “no independent reality but do have a form of dependent reality (p60 Kindle edition).” Even more so is his explanation of dependent origination which includes imagery of aggregates as “neighboring sandbars…each is a unified nexus of processes that is part of the overall network of processes (p81 Kindle edition)” and the challenge of explaining causal conditioning and freedom to choose action “without recourse to distinctness” of the component parts.

After establishing the underlying Buddhist thought, Gowans tackles the Four Noble Truths and Eight-fold Path with the same steady and unrelenting intensity of examination all the while returning to a common sense rendering of the teachings.  These two sections of his book contain some of the best and most clearly written explorations of the core teachings of Buddhism. And they are enhanced by a tone and quality of writing that is absent of the writer’s need to show he is doing what he is doing.

The final chapter is perhaps the sweetest. In it, Gowans proposes the Buddha’s teachings are an invitation to live selflessly (the theme of ethics runs through all the chapters.

“The first invitation asks us to think about the quality of our life as a whole in a fundamental and sustained way.”

“The second invitation asks us to consider why the fragility of our lives is a source of dissatisfaction.” (Go beyond the obvious that we don’t have what we want, don’t want what we have and get confused regularly by all of it.)

“The third invitation brings us to a crucial juncture. What, the Buddha asks us, can be done to overcome this dissatisfaction?” (The answer can be one of despair, frustration or hope.)

“The (fourth) invitation asks us to reflect on why fulfillment of desires is so important to us.”

“The (fifth) invitation (and hardest to accept) is to consider whether piercing through the illusion of selfhood might reveal not nothing, but…everything.”

“The final invitation asks us to discover on our own whether there is any truth in what he says.”

Gowans book makes for a good introduction to Buddhism and a training in critical thinking that many practitioners would find useful, especially in these days of “quotable Buddhism” and a leaning to fundamentalist-type clinging to what we think is what the Buddha taught. This is definitely a keeper on the book shelf.