Tag Archives: zen

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this field of boundless emptiness

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Botataung Pagoda

Every Sunday my family began the day with an early morning Mass at the Sacred Heart Cathedral.  Latin Mass.  The rafters resounded with the Credo in Unum Deum and Kyrie Eleison thankfully absorbing my screechy accompaniment.  I lived for those moments of transcendence which set into all of my ten years a deep yearning for total devotion to prayer.  Unlike my peers I needed no bribery for surviving the never-ending chants or the choking scent of the incense censer (interestingly called a “thurible” and for a stunning display of one version check out the last scenes of the movie “The Way” which is about a father’s journey along El Camino de Santiago).  Besotted little Love Dog of the Teachings, I was only too eager to be there front and center absorbing the ceremony and answering back whole-heartedly.

In the afternoons my parents would have their poker parties.  Don’t get me wrong; they were every bit as devout as a good Catholic couple would have been in the wild 50’s of post-war Burma.  But they also knew to feed their attachments to good liquor and cards.  The house would transform into a speak-easy of beautiful men and stunning women navigating around tables of cards, dice and other games I can’t recall.  In the background the strains of Dorsey, Miller, Nat King Cole and the Andrews Sisters erased all trace of the resonant Latin chants.

That was when my grandmother stepped in.  My father’s mother, a cheroot-smoking, shoe-throwing devotee of the Buddha, was not impressed by the exposure I was getting to the three poisons.  Though I doubt she actually thought of it that way.  Perhaps it was more an issue of trying to neutralize the Latin Mass.  In order to marry my grandfather (who was Catholic), she had to agree that her children would be raised Catholic.  So my father, although his devotion to the mystery of being expressed its way in both forms of worship, lived his life a staunch Catholic with a worldview shot through by a quiet Buddhist thread.  And I, swept off to the Botataung Pagoda each Sunday, lived out both their hopes of the Buddhist lineage.

But I didn’t know that at the time.  Sundays were simply, complicatedly, a day of Latin chants followed by the shedding of frilly dresses for the tomboy pants and a walk along the railway tracks that lead me and my grandmother to the pagoda’s turtle pond.  There she bought large compressed balls of popped corn which I fed the turtles, watching them wait semi-submerged and then rise lazily to break off a piece of the chunk I threw into the broad lotus leaves.  I still can’t eat popcorn without thinking “turtle food.”  These interwoven rituals became my practice roots.  Not grandiosity of the Mass, the priests or monastics, the genuflections or prostrations , the soaring Kyrie or monotonic memorized recitations of the suttas that floated in the background of the pagoda grounds.  These were the forms of religion, vaguely activating in the heart but not captivating enough for devotion.

The turtle pond, however, was a different bright boundless field. At its edge I learned the early lessons of transcending sights and sounds, of leaving no trace and reflecting mirror-sharp reality.  This became and continues as the center of my circle of devotion.

The field of boundless emptiness is what exists from the very beginning.  You must purify, cure, grind down, or brush away all the tendencies you have fabricated into apparent habits.  Then you can reside in the clear circle of brightness.  Utter emptiness has no image, upright independence does not rely on anything.  Just expand and illuminate the original truth unconcerned by external conditions….  The deep source, transparent down to the bottom, can radiantly shine and can respond unencumbered to each speck of dust without becoming its partner.  The subtlety of seeing and hearing transcends mere colors and sounds.  The whole affair functions without leaving traces, and mirrors without obscurations….  With thoughts clear, sitting silently, wander into the center of the circle of wonder.  This is how you must penetrate and study.

The Bright, Boundless Field.  In Cultivating the Empty Field: The silent illumination of Zen Master Hongzhi, translated by Taigen Dan Leighton with Yi Wu

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spirituality, ritual, and being a selectionist-buddhist

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Dad&Mum We had our first formal zazenkai today after a few years of hunkering down in formless practice. As formal as it gets, I suppose, given my tendency to laziness when it comes to form and ritual. Yet those moments of chanting and prostrations are a lovely dance we should all take part in if we are to learn to embody practice, to live vow.  And I felt it was important to honour the 7th day after my mother’s death.

Oh.  That’s my father and mother to the left.  They cut quite a dashing couple in the old days – which were actually the new days for them.  New days of hope that the British Occupation would bring them comfort and opportunity – which it did.  I think the picture is taken after WW II and around the time of Great Optimism.  They were both rising stars in the newly formed government, sometime after Aung San’s assassination and the military take over by Ne Win in 1963.  By then, they had learned to weave through the many political ups and downs including losing much of their acquired wealth when Ne Win demonetarized the Burmese kyat.  In fact, they had both retired and built their dream home only to have my father return to work when asked because, drawing from the rhythms of his poverty-ridden childhood,  he couldn’t imagine a world that didn’t need him or a family that ever had enough money to survive.

This was their legacy: work hard, do what’s necessary, never wonder if things could be better, make them better by waking up each morning and doing what is necessary.

Monk: What is the essence of your practice?
Basho: Whatever is needed

So today, we chanted the Honoring of the Bodhisattvas, lowered our bodies to the ground in gratitude for all the Bodhisattvas and Mahasattvas, the Stream of All Our Ancestors which now includes my parents and the parents of some of my friends whose mothers and fathers made their transition this week.

There’s a reluctance about the form of practice.  I feel it in myself even now after these years of lighting incense, bowing, prostrating, and stepping back before turning away from the altar.  As if somehow I would like this Buddhism to be something pure and separate from the religiosity of my childhood, the cathedrals and the black-frocked Christian European priests speaking to us poor Asians as if we were just south of a Neanderthal lineage.  And yet I resist the neo-spirituality I find that sucks in Buddhism as the panacea for and talisman against all sins past and future.

So yes, I’ve shopped my way around but in my defense it was only because of my ignorance of the many factions (I use that deliberately).  I grew up in a cultural Buddhism which had little to do with meditation and a lot to do with chanting at the pagodas, prostrating and feeding male monastics.  That said, a bit of buffet-surfing was to be expected and having (quickly) settled in Zen, I am quite content and even allow my Latin-Mass Catholic heritage to relish in the rise and fall of Namo Shakyamunaye Buddhaya.

Still, I have to say that meeting so many on this path who are caught in the confounding of being spiritual and being non-religious frustrates me.  Even more do claims to a Selectionist-Buddhism, as if that makes it more spiritual, annoy the heck out of me.    If there was one thing I learned standing my parents’ deathbed – even a decade apart – was that rituals don’t help ease the pain.  That’s not why we step into that space.  Rituals offer an opportunity to see how our mind grabs the nearest thing and makes it fuel.  That’s all.

And that’s likely the most important teaching we will ever receive whether it’s lifting a cup of coffee to our lips, checking the rear view mirror before backing out the driveway, packing our life’s belongings to cross an ocean, or bowing to the stream that awaits us as future ancestors.

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Note bene: Interestingly, I am reading Dispirited: How contemporary spirituality makes us stupid, selfish and unhappy by David Webster.  He has a fascinating thesis on spirituality having been hijacked by the New Age and the buffet mentality of seekers.  The book is good if somewhat problematic in being poorly edited, the occasional philosophical rant and difficulty with having to infer whether he’s talking about “authentic” or “let-me-look-spiritual”  spirituality.  But I’m liking it and, for the more philosophical among you, it may be worth the read.  (He actually does a great job of it on his blog post, Spiritual But Not Religious.)