Tag Archives: paramitas

Unknown's avatar

endurance

by

There’s a wall the springs up about halfway through anything I try to do.  I used to think there was no warning; as I learned to listen closely to my body, I began to detect the early sounds of the bricks thumping into place.  It doesn’t stop me from running smack into it but it has taught me to slow the pace so I don’t embed myself deep in the stonework on contact.

In the last few years, this wall has been building.  I could see its beginnings from the distance.  Every moment I spent in chaotic frenzy trying to fix things or get things done, added a brick or two.  Every excuse that took me away from practice provided the mortar to seal the cracks.  And here it is now.

Frank was away  – a weekend retreat at Zen Mountain Monastery.  When he calls (you’re calling me in the middle of a retreat???), I chatter on about nothing, my voice blocking any view of the wall behind me.  In another conversation, the pain and exhaustion spill over.  I’m tired of being tired.  I’m tired of not understanding why this wall is sitting here.  He says sagely, There’s no understanding this.  Just accept.  A weekend with Zennies and you sound like a Zen Master, I shoot back.  Only because he’s right.

I tend to bypass that first step, acceptance, in the hopes I can get on with endurance.  It seems more noble to act the character of teeth-gritting effort than to seem to surrender.  Yet I know from every other encounter with suffering that the resistance to its presence delays just getting on with it.  In facing the difficult and the unwanted, there is only one practice:

be with it; it is already here.

Roshi Aitken describes the poet Basho’s response to difficult circumstances on a pilgrimage:

Fleas, lice,
The horse pissing
Near my pillow

Aitken goes on to quote R. Blyth’s commentary of the poem: “We must be cold and hungry, flea-ridden and lonely, companions of sorrow and acquainted with grief….  It is the feeling ‘These things too…'”

Although there’s a danger of becoming an emotional masochist, the intent is to know honestly what it is I’m dealing with.  What is it that is here?  What is it that has taken up residence in the center of my chest, my throat, and deep in my gut?

And then it becomes clear that all which went before is in preparation for this moment.

Thank you for practicing,

Genju


Unknown's avatar

generosity

by

It’s been a week of watching the outpouring of generosity for the people of Haiti and of hearing sad news of the loss of lives.  One person who died in the earthquake was Superintendent Doug Coates, the acting police commissioner for the UN mission in Haiti.  Driving home after a meeting with an old friend last week, I listened to the radio as Luc, his son, spoke of the family’s hope that Coates would be found alive.  He also spoke of his father as his role model and how he valued his father’s mentorship of young service members.  In the previous week, I sat with 8,000 people at a funeral of a police officer and listened to his stepson, Lukasz, deliver the a eulogy that closed with a hope that he would grow up to be like his step-father.

In the midst of their grieving, these were generously given gifts.

In The Practice of Perfection: the Paramitas from a Zen Buddhist Perspective, Roshi Robert Aitken starts with Dana, practicing the perfection of giving.

Mutual interdependence becomes mutual intersupport.

He tells a Zen story of Hui-hai who said the gateway of practice is Dana Paramita (the perfection of generosity).  When asked to define Dana, Hui-hai said, “Dana means ‘relinquishment’… relinquishment of the dualism of opposites…of ideas as to the dual nature of good and bad, being and non-being…and so on.”  Aitken speaks of it as “the self forgotten” and a “specific kind of compassion that arises with gratitude.”

(Generosity) is a living, vivid mirror in which giving and receiving form a dynamic practice of interaction.

In Burmese, when we receive a gift we sometimes say, “I feel too badly about this.”  It always seemed a strange thing to say when someone is being generous.  But it is meant to convey that I am insufficient to respond to your gifts.  Used skillfully, it lifts the giver in honour and acknowledges the value as unsurpassable.  It reminds me of that moment during a formal retreat meal, or oryoki, when the food server lifts the serving dish above her head and bows.  As I mirror that bow, I am filled with gratitude, humbled by her service, and willing to receive what is offered.

Receiving is also an act of generosity.  To create the space for the giving, I have to relinquish all ideas of independence and separateness.  I must willingly surrender to being in need – something with which I am not always comfortable.  Similarly, there is no room for heroism in giving.  It is simply the process of being born and dying, Roshi Aitken says.  It is wearing our clothes, eating our meals, answering the telephone.  It is just being who we already are, being all that with a will and aspiration to practice.

Thank you for practicing,

Genju