Chapter 8
It was now a few weeks later and I couldn’t believe how fast time was flying. So I just jumped on the airplane and rode, knowing it was my job to take in some good stuff between take-off and landing. I was taking in some good stuff. Hegel was blowing my mind. He was working through the whole history of philosophy and showing its abstractions to come to Absolute Knowledge which is within the Whole. It’s the realization of Spirit. And I know I was adding in something he didn’t mean but I imagined a total loss of ego and all of us swept away in this Universal Spirit and I was trying to imagine what that might feel like. It would be very mindful for sure. And Hegel would probably accuse me of abstracting us out of the world with this idea of “swept away” but I just kept thinking it anyways, calling myself some Zen Hegelian Saint although all these words might contradict each other anyways. A nutty idea indeed.
I was riding my bike home in the drizzling rain, thinking these wild thoughts and just feeling happy. I got home and entered to find Paige crawling out of the little alcove. She looked mighty glad.
“Repeat after me,” she said.
I agreed to and then she said a poem, allowing me to repeat each line after she said it. The poem went like this:
“He that has no longings
He that fully understands
He that entertains no doubts
He that has plunged into the deathless
Him I call a Brahmin.”
“What’s that?” I asked.
“It’s the Diamond Stanza, some ancient lines of wisdom.”
“And is that the goal? To lose longings, find understanding, entertain no doubts, plunge into the deathless?”
She looked surprised at me. “Of course not. If you make that your goal you’ve already failed according to the first line of the poem. A goal is a longing and so you must forget it - but be careful not to long to forget it.”
I was frustrated. It’s a vicious cycle.
“Yes, of course you’re right. The more I learn of Buddhism the more I understand it’s all about letting go, not attaining. But this capitalist culture lends itself and trains its pupils to attain, to get this, to work towards that, to set standards and strive for them. The zen mind is really a blow to the western thinker. It flips is all and it’s hard to see it through these eyes. I keep thinking within the context of moving towards something when Buddhism is not about movement at all. I need a paradigm shift,” I said, thinking of the gestalt-switch analogy Thomas Kuhn made in describing the often sudden change in world view in a paradigm shift. What once was a duck now is a rabbit. I said all this knowing quite well that there’s nothing inherently wrong with the capitalist system and a Buddhist can live anywhere and in any system. I can’t hold onto this excuse like it holds any weight. I need to let it go, feel it leave me, and let it hover like a leaf in the breeze. A leaf sways, almost untouched by gravity. Perhaps cotton in the wind is a better example. Little bits of heaven cloud floating like bubbles but not prone to pop.
I said, “Well, here’s one for you Paige. ‘Betake yourselves to no external refuge. Look not for refuge to anyone besides yourselves. Hold fast as a refuge to the truth. Be ye lamps unto yourselves.’ That’s the Mahaparinirvana Sutra. Pretty cool, huh?”
“That’s nice,” Paige said.
“It tells me that the idea that nirvana and salvation is in the woods or in a temple or in some place where you are not, or even a place where you are, is to miss the ultimate point that peace is within you and only within you. To desire an external place with which to ‘betake yourself’ is only to add to your craving and with it your grief. You could easily go somewhere that you’ve convinced yourself is sacred and get wholly put out by it because you’d realize that every place is the exact same place. You dig?”
“I dig it. But I still think that if we were to head on up to Canada everything would be great,” Paige said sarcastically.
“That’s how I feel about Detroit,” I returned. “You know, way down into the low inner city where everything is just roses ad tulips and fine sweet-smelling wine.” I said this laughing because I knew what inner-city Detroit was and I knew if Paige and I were there we’d lock ourselves in-doors, occasionally peeping out a window corner as though World War III were happening right on American land. And we’d find some on-line delivery grocery service so we’d never have to leave the house and we’d just slowly rot away because we were little porcelain in shard-ville. And these images intensified both my awareness of how gentle and fragile my friends and I were and my overall sadness of the world. Sad because I was too fragile to make a change.
Paige was definitely the more knowledgeable between the two of us when it came to Buddhism. She taught me that Dharma was the way of things, the law, the teachings of the Buddha, morality, the objective. Karma was action, the things we do. And Karmapala was the reaction, I suppose you could say. Like if I took a soda and poured it on some poor fellow’s face that would be my Karma. The Dharma would say, in an objective sense, “It’s wrong to pour soda on some poor fellow’s face.” And Karmapala would cause me to trip while I was doing it and fall flat face into a sea of mud and the soda can would slip from my hand, fly up in the air, land on my back and then drain itself on my back. The scent of the sugary liquid would attract a farm of ants who would travel quickly and spread all over me. Being that the fall knocked me unconscious, the ants would mistaken me for dead weight. Since they can lift hundreds or thousands of times their body weight they would collectively and miraculously lift me and carry me to their queen who would order me bound and chained, forever to be their measly ant slave underneath their dusty hill. So the triad makes it all work. The Dharma expresses how to live. The Karma is the way you live. The Karmapala is the effects for choosing the actions you made. This example is, of course, a bit extreme and, admittedly, implausible but it’s less exciting to say I poured soda in his face and he punched my lights out.
One thing I considered greatly in my Buddhist inquiries and practice was that I was a westerner. I did not want to be using this wisdom to escape or deny my roots. Carl Jung criticized westerners for trying to drop their roots to become enculturated into something else. This is to deny who you are. I also remember a wise teacher I once had telling me a story about a conversation he once had with a colleague. His colleague said, “I just want to pack up, move to India, and become a Hindu.” My wise teacher correctly replied, “No, no. That’s not the way it works. You can’t become a Hindu. You are a Hindu and that means you’re born into it. You can’t choose your culture.” I imagine you could become like a Hindu. But how can you simply throw away an indoctrination such as we get by being born into western culture? And why would you want to? So my Buddhist studies took me to places I never imagined before, but they did not take me out of the west. And perhaps it’s for this reason that the Buddha offered his teachings as advice and guidance, but not as a definitive route. You get to the end your own way. So long as you free yourself from Dukkha, suffering, you’ve made it. I had a long way to go. I imagined I was a pebble on some lonely cliff overlooking an endless ocean.
“Do you know what a Mondo is?” asked Paige. And surely I didn’t.
“Well,” she continued, “it’s question and answer in dialogue or story format. It’s either oral or written form. You want to do the oral form now?” I did indeed. “Well, we’ll just go back asking and answering each other’s questions. You first.”
“Do dogs have Buddha nature?” I wondered aloud.
“Woof. Does a cat have Buddha nature?”
“Meeeoww. Does a mountain have Buddha nature?”
“Shhhhh. How many Buddhas can dance on the tip of a needle?”
“Five hundred and twenty if ten of them are on the slim fast diet. Where’s enlightenment?”
“In my shoe. Are you my mother?”
“I am your brother. Do you like pudding?”
“Roll me over. What’s a wild river?”
A gateway to wilder rivers. Where’s the shore?”
“At my fingertips. Are you enlightened yet?”
“No, I’m confused. Are you feeling samati?”
“I’m learning Karate. Should we stop?”
“Have we started? Is it okay to answer with a question?”
“No, two points deducted. Where are we going and where’s Godot?”
“To Hell in a hand basket. This is going nowhere.”
“That’s no question.”
“Then why did you answer?”
“Now that’s a question.”
“So why don’t you answer?”
“Alright, I’m done. I don’t even know if we were anywhere near doing it right,” said Paige.
We had a good laugh and put this lesson to rest. I felt good that the shore was at my fingertips. I looked at my hands in awe. It was there. Right inside my fat hitchhiker’s thumb. I started thinking that Buddhism is not crazy but we sure were.
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