On Trying To Be Buddhist

Two Quotes

For years I've loved Annie Dillard's writing.  An American Childhood is one of the most wonderful books I've ever read. But here are two quotes that hit me hard as a meditator (or someone who hopes to become one.)  First,

A schedule defends from chaos and whim. It is a net for catching days. It is a scaffolding on which a worker can stand and labor with both hands at sections of time.

And second - downright piercing -

How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.

Of course - I forget this over and over, as I think all sorts of grandiose stuff, while actually doing almost nothing.  Something to take to heart. 

Times Are Changing

I was reading an article online today involving an interview with Zen teacher Brad Warner and ran up against this quote: 

With bare-knuckle book titles like Hardcore Zen and Sit Down and Shut Up, author Brad Warner is not your hippie aunt's idea of a tranquil, exotic spiritual master.

Brad Warner is an interesting writer and, in his own way, advocate of thoroughly traditional Buddhism. I've followed and enjoyed his books and blogs for a couple of years.  But what hit me in that quote had nothing to do with him - rather it was the image of a "hippie aunt."  Wow.  I'm old.  In my youth, when I had aunts, they sure weren't hippies - they could have been "bohemian" but in fact, none of mine were (old New England family here - eccentric maybe, but not bohemian.)  Actually, I guess I'm the hippie aunt.  But a more advanced version, because I also really appreciate Brad Warner.  

New Year Wishes

Wishing everyone  a wonderful year of the female iron hare.

 



"As the light of this New Year blazes
With excellent virtue and happiness
May these dependently arising appearances inseparable from emptiness,
Bring benefit and prosperity in all the worlds there are,
May the light of auspiciousness always blaze bright"

Composed་by Khenpo Tsultrim Gyamtso Rinpoche at Tek Chok Ling near the great stupa in Boudhanath, Nepal, February 2010. Translated by Jim Scott.

With thanks to Tashi Mannox

 

I like having the new year start with the spring - hope reignites as the snow melts, as cardinals and house finches try out their liquid songs in the warmer mornings.  May the ice in our hearts melt too and all sentient beings find ways to help each other. 

When I'm Gone

I'm listening to some rather sad, elegiac music - and in the way music does for me, it creates images.  This piece gives me a sense of my world going on after I have passed.  Just for this moment, it is profoundly poignant.  The world without me.

A year or so ago I had a similar experience as I meditated.  I was looking at my shrine, particularly the statue of Guru Rinpoche, which, having been blessed by my teacher and accompanying me for decades, is very precious to me.  I had a piercing image of this statue and all my religious things in someone else's possession - perhaps even a stranger.  Just as I have acquired things once cherished by others, so what is most dear to me will pass to family or friends, or strangers at some point.  These things will continue; I will not. 

Though I believe in the Buddhist tenet of rebirth, according to which I will be around in some form, unless I get enlightened rather soon, it will not be with any awareness of continuity.  All I have learned will be forgotten - the results of all my good efforts deferred to some unknown future....all my bad efforts like little scraggly chickens coming home to roost.

Reflections on Aging - 4 - I Give Up

I give up.

Last night I watched Digital_Nation, Life on the Virtual Frontier on my local PBS station.  The program was described as "An exploration of how the Internet and digital technology are changing the way people work, learn and interact."  After watching it - in itself a wonderful example of the technology it described - I just wanted to throw in the towel.  I can not keep up with new technology.  On one level, I don't need to keep up - a large part of it is irrelevant to my life.  I have no need to text anyone; I find the blather of Facebook mostly irritating; I don't need a Blackberry or Ipod to keep me up-to-date wherever I go - because I rarely go anywhere.  I'm just right here.

Still - all this new stuff, and the profoundly creative ways people are inventing to use it (Twitter is a wonderful example of this) have a great appeal, even if I don't need them.  This reminds me of times in my childhood when I longed for toys that one way or another I could not use.  Anyhow, long story short (as the current slang has it) - I don't need these things, so I don't have them, and thus I do not learn about them.  And slowly, this makes me more and more out of date.  Last night, I gave up.

And what is the effect of giving up?  Right now I have a sense of looking on at some activity or play that is becoming less and less comprehensible.  Part of me longs to try to keep up - for many reasons.  And part of me is sure that there is a better use of my time.   The task is to find it, and see what I may learn.

Light Dawns

When is a hole not a hole?  When it is a black hole.  I may be the last to find this out - I feel pretty stupid at the moment, but there it is.  For years I've taken the term at face value - that it is a hole, and it is black because, somehow, no radiation can escape it.  But much of what I have read about black holes made no sense given this understanding. 

This week I finally went looking for an answer and found many - here is one of the simpler ones: "A black hole is an object containing so much mass concentrated in a relatively small space that light cannot escape." So it is a hole only in terms of our perceptual field - not in its nature.  It is an object, a massive one, though not as physically large as its mass would imply. 

There's more.   "If you take any object and compress it down, there will be a point that it becomes a black hole. If you could compress the Sun down to a radius of 2.5 km, it would become a black hole. For the Earth, that radius is 0.9 cm. ... That radius is called the Schwarzschild Radius....[This radius] acts as an event horizon; a point at which nothing, not even light or radiation can escape it...   What actually happens to the mass within the Schwarzschild radius [that is, within the event horizon] is a mystery. Some theorists believe that an extremely dense state of matter will stop the black hole from compressing any further, while others believe that the black hole will continue compressing infinitely down. It’s unknown if you would encounter the black hole itself when passing through the event horizon, or if you would still continue to travel down to the compressed inner black hole itself."

Another source says, "once an object is inside of the event horizon it cannot escape. There are very interesting ideas about traveling into the black hole, through a tunnel called a worm hole, and coming out the other end at a white hole, but these are only fantastic ideas and hints from relativity equations, nothing solid."

Now I'm much happier - perhaps slightly more informed. 

Happy New Year.

Words and Meaning

Something I was thinking about yesterday: you can know how to define a word, i.e. put it into other words; and you can know the meaning itself beyond words. These aren't the same.   In the long run, the meaning beyond words is primary, and definitions in words must rise from that inarticulable ground meaning.   Otherwise no words have meaning. 

So words are always secondary, yet I, and people like me, live amid them, rarely pausing to sink consciously deeper, into the meaning.  Of course the sense of the meaning is always there - but as the flavor, not the focus. 

One of the many things this makes clearer for me is the trouble I've always had with big abstract words and philosophical terms, especially those I didn't run across often.  Words like ontological and eschatological.  Each time I read the words, I had to recall the definition - or look it up again.  Comprehending was a two step process rather than immediate - and it never had that lucidity that makes understanding such pleasure. 

Cycle of Energy - Cycle of Exchange

[I wrote this back in 2001 - not sure if or how I would change it now ...]

Musician Ray Lynch writes of the performances of the Renaissance Quartet, "When we were completely 'on' and sensitive to each other, and the audience was absorbed, a ‘cycle of energy' was created around the event that was really remarkable. . . "

This is a familiar process for artists - especially those in the performing arts. But I think, somehow, that this cycle of energy is potential in every human interaction. Is that really so? What is its source - and purpose (insofar as anything has a purpose - or perhaps not purpose but direction, as water flowing downhill has a direction.) I think when I interact with someone, we can create this cycle of exchanged energy - it happens when we each have something to give, and choose to give it. The root of such an exchange and of the desire to give, really, is appreciation, each of us for the other. Ultimately, it is a manifestation of love, the sense of the value of the other's very being, that engenders the urge to contribute to him or her. I think we all desire - even crave this. We also fear to give it - we fear loosing our own energy and also fear the vulnerability that allows such an exchange. But this energy, by its very nature only increases with being given - and this of course is the secret of the cycle of exchange. Each moment of giving strengthens and increases the cycle.

My intuition is that the ground of this exchange - appreciation, love - is what Buddhism calls bodhicitta, a concept which adds emptiness into the equation. Ultimately, bodhicitta is emptiness that manifests (when it does) as compassion; it is the essence of enlightenment. Those rare beings in whom the capacity for this exchange has become fully activated, who can always interact in this way, are, by that, in paradise themselves; they are like deities. They are also fully present to their own emptiness - they are transparent - and so recognize themselves as clear lenses through which this energy can pass and be focused. It becomes focused on those who are not (yet) transparent; it warms them; sometimes it even burns them - but in all, it illuminates the ground within. It helps them to move toward their own transparency, when the opaque becomes clear, and forms, empty but apparent, turn as flimsy as distant rainbows.

But in practical day-to-day terms, giving this energy to others is not a simple matter, nor is the transparency that makes the process possible. The full, experiential, awareness of emptiness lived day to day and moment to moment is what creates this transparency, and anyone hoping to act from that ground or base must be completely free of anything other than this emptiness. Just as a person struck by lightning may survive if he is not wearing anything like a watch or belt-buckle that can hold and focus the lightning's energy, so, the person who wants to live in this energy exchange must be clear - not obstructed with possessions, and images of himself. 

 

 

Aging and Memorization - 3

I've always been drawn by the idea of memorizing things.  In my childhood I learned  the whole of "Jabberwocky," among other things, pretty much spontaneously.  When I was in my early twenties and a new convert to Catholicism, I got caught up by the idea of memorizing the Bible - in Greek no less.  Part of my motivation was that if the Russians conquered us and forbade any sort of religion or worship, I would have my own memory to depend on to preserve scripture.  (Dear heaven, how naive - I'm embarrassed.)  Anyhow, I only got as far as the first two lines of the Gospel of John.  But I still remember them - in Greek.  A year or so later, after moving to New York, I put a bit of effort into memorizing some Shakespeare sonnets.  From my years of practice in the Tibetan Buddhist group I belonged to I have many verses of prayers in Tibetan. But this current project, to memorize The Precious Treasury of the Basic Space of Phenomena is different. 

It's no longer a question of simply memorizing, but of coming to understand this text and making it part of my life through this intense process.  In addition, there is still my initial intention to test out whether this would improve my memory, focus, and concentration over-all, but that is really tangential.

It was all going quite slowly through September, but in October there's been a small shift.  Now I can recall and recite the first three verses very clearly and simply - there is no feeling of trying to remember the next word or phrase - I know them.  And the meaning continues to expand.  When I return to Longchenpa's commentary, it makes more sense to me; several questions that have puzzled me for years are resolved by what these verses say.     

And, a bonus, I do feel as though I'm remembering other things more easily - very ordinary things like where I put my car keys, old memories, and the details of recent conversations.  I hope this gets stronger and is not just an illusion.

Aging and Memorization - 2

Now it's mid-September and I still have only memorized four verses of The Precious Treasury of the Basic Space of Phenomena.  I have continued to work on it, but find that for the most part, I'm just maintaining what I've already got.  The next verse is a long and complex one - I have yet to really begin to work on it. 

Toward the end of August, I began to despair of really getting much further and of my ability to memorize anything at all.  However - as I speculated in my previous post, it might be that the difficulty of the text is the root of my difficulty in memorizing it.  To test this, I first tried one verse from The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, (FitzGerald translation.)  I got it in about fifteen minutes, went over it again a couple of times during the following week and have it still.  Ha. 

Today I began another Buddhist document - Samantabhadra's Aspiration to Noble Deeds.  I've repeated this prayer many times over the years, but in different translations (and frequently just in Tibetan.)  So, although it's familiar, the competing versions I've used insure that I don't have it clear in my mind. 

This morning I started work on it - and within half an hour, I had the first two verses done.  They won't stick unless I work on them some more, but I think it won't take too much repetition.  Now I have to decide whether to continue or not.  Since this is one of the greatest and best known prayers that spans all the Buddhist traditions, it would be worth doing.  Another excellent thing with which to fill my mind.  But I'm not going to abandon The Precious Treasury.  It will be very interesting to compare my progress in each.