This is a web site: where I try to make sense of daily bewilderment, meditating aloud on how the teachings of my guru Khenchen Thrangu Rinpoche, the golden rosary of his Tibetan Kagyu lineage and the Buddha himself come alive to rescue us all from the suffering in headlines and heartaches.
Friday, July 03, 2009
WHY KNOT
The inspiring website, www.ecobuddhism.org, not only has Karmapa’s aspirations and instructions for saving the Earth, but also teachings by my beloved guru Thrangu Rinpoche. The site has posted one from Oxford, England late in 2007 in which Rinpoche candidly addressed the sad subject of denial. After he made aspiration prayers for the environment, some very clear headed human asked Rinpoche if we all weren’t behaving exactly like the Tibetan monastic and social elite of Lhasa back in 1950, myopically partying happily as usual despite abundant evidence that a Chinese Communist invasion had become a clear and present danger. Here is the exact question:
Tulku Urgyen Rinpoche observed in his memoirs that Tibetans simply did not want to hear about the impending Chinese Communist invasion of Tibet in 1950, even though there were obvious and abundant signs. Is there a parallel with the global human situation now?
And here is Rinpoche’s exact answer: “This is pretty much the same phenomenon Tulku Urgyen was describing. It is very parallel. Because it is a parallel situation, we need to wake people up about global warming. We should make aspirations and recite prayers. And we need to have a lot of publicity. These two together will make powerful, effective action.”
Lamentably, we seem to have supersized the Tibetan way: here in America we are in denial about denial. All the news fit into print keeps revealing how ineffective aspirations, publicity and facts are in even denting the armor of entrenched habit. Story after story says this country is belly up. States can’t pay their bills, sick people can’t either, 10% of the working public can’t get a job and 10% of houses have been foreclosed. China doesn't want our money to be the gold standard, Iran and Pakistan don't want our politics, Europe doesn't want our advice, nobody wants our shoddy products. The United States of America is as bankrupt as General Motors for the same reasons: the past is past and we don't want to make the changes necessary for the present.
Someone should give the Senate and its corporate handlers a prize for defying gravity. Now is the time, yet it is beneath them. They and we are so stuck in old ways, there are no wheels in revolution. The so called climate change bill passed in time for Independence Day doesn't change anything about our dependence on fossil fuels, least of all dirty coal burning, and the gutting of national health care seems a ditto. With health insurers using our premiums to set our representatives against our best interests, you don't have to wonder who those hired voting hands really represent. Welcome to supersized NIMBY. Change? Not In My Banner Years.
The news, which includes stories that not even Obama wants to make minor changes like abolishing the discharge of gays from the military even if he knows it's the morally correct thing to do and would snap everyone to attention, defies the law of impermanence. You can't help but think the evident yearning polls show in this country for financial fairness, medical attention and environmental fitness--for radical change--is being almost as ruthlessly repressed as the yearning for voice and democracy in Iran. No matter how many Paul Reveres ride the news cycle warning us what could be coming, nothing happens-- except the guys at Goldman Sachs get even bigger bonuses. And they come with a side of blessings from the Federal Reserve. Somebody should rename that encrusted institution the Federal Deserved.
Addiction to the status in the status quo causes denial about the present fast fading fate of planet Earth and equally fast fading glory of this country. That's the sadly exact replay of the comfortable Lhasa elite. With their own health care, private planes, limousines and prepaid travel, our so-called representatives have become Mad Magazine cover boys grinning like a good Lhasa aristocrat: What me worry? As though they're going to be immune to climate change and carried heavenward in some political rapture, they turn their tongue to the other cheek, their one and only concept of Other. Except of course for the soul mate in Argentina.
As it's portrayed daily in the news, Wall Street and Washington business as usual has become a great visualization of everything the Buddha listed as a cause of suffering: attachment (to the past), aversion (to change), massive ego or self-interest uber alles and massive denial of the absolute truth of interdependence and impermanence. Throw in lack of generosity, discipline, exertion, and wisdom. America has indeed become Tibet in 1950. Even though we know what happened next, we have made no change in the denial of change.
Alarms may go off, but they don’t necessarily wake people up. That's the truth of suffering.
~Sandy Garson "Wordsmithing to attest how the Dharma saved me from myself!"
A dharma sister in Brazil just sent me the link to a wonderful new website, www.ecobuddhism.org, which has posted my teacher’s aspiration prayer for the planet as well as His Holiness Karmapa’s 108 must-dos to save the Earth and green the world. The list includes planting a vegetable garden and fruit trees, composting, being vegetarian and dishing the dirt to make young people more earthy and ecological. Best of all, it says to make healthy offerings of fruits and trees instead of candy and biscuits, and to plant trees as a long life aspiration equal to releasing birds and fish. This is wondrous news. It is especially thrilling because it describes what has been uniquely happening in my teacher’s sangha for the last ten years. I had no idea we would be the vanguard of a new movement when in March of 2000 I barged into the no water, no electricity, dirt floor kitchen of my Rinpoche’s Kathmandu boarding school to cook for 250 undernourished kids. But with the magic of those Biblical loaves and fishes, the three meals I prepared provoked huge changes in food shopping, that led to cooking classes, gardens, compost, nutrition talks—and inevitably a stream of “help us too” pleas from others who saw the children’s energy and immunity blossom. Last week I was asked by another Rinpoche’s monastery to come quickly to its kitchen. It had 100 young monks whose health needed boosting.
The noble truth of what has become the veggiyana is that strong bodies make strong minds. Almost 775 years ago, the Zen Buddhist patriarch Dogen Zenji wrote in one of his most important teachings that taking diligent care in the kitchen enables all members of the Dharma community to practice in the most stable way. Hunger, fatigue and sickness, he noted, are unbeatable distractions.
Sadly, it doesn't take long to see that Himalayan people are more often than not malnourished. Mainly this is due to their traditional penchant for eating, to the exclusion of anything else except chilies, endless quantities of white food: bread, potatoes, rice, noodles, daikon, cauliflower and milk. Every Rinpoche or Khenpo I have cooked for suffers, not surprisingly, from high blood pressure and diabetes due to this diet. It definitely shortens their lives. So saving Dharma seemed to mean, for starters at least, making food more colorful, and fruitful.
Then Karmapa came along and said make the food more vegetarian. Protein became the problem for Tibetans hooked on meat, milk and butter. Cold turkey vegetarianism also exacerbated widespread iron deficiency. Two years ago, I was running around Kathmandu filling up trucks with kilo jars of peanut butter and sacks of raisins. Two years before that, I drove totally across the valley with half a banana tree on my lap, sticking out of the taxi windows, in order to get enough bananas to those 250 kids. That's when I knew fruits had to get closer to the kitchen and started to buy trees. I inadvertently and unknowingly smashed a pile of taboos by telling the monks to get their hands dirty in a garden and an orchard if they wanted long lives and strong minds.
Now Karmapa is telling them it’s a must-do more important even than meditating. So at Namo Buddha monastery they’ve planted over 2000 trees in the last eight months and tripled the size of the small vegetable garden we started. The abbess of the Tara Abbey nunnery where two dozen fruit trees were delivered last December told me with a beatific smile how wonderful it was to see her young students learn to touch the earth the way the old villagers where she comes from do. No nun is fainting any more, too weak from malnutrition to stay on the path.
What began with me taking off from a meditation seminar to learn the nutritional qualities of all the lentils in Nepal, what I called running around memorizing the difference in a hill of beans, so I could feed 250 people for one day has become an ad hoc program spread to the stomachs of thousands every day --and in a culture whose common Hello is: Have you eaten rice yet? The extra money offered for food has reduced the cost of infirmaries, infirmities and medicines. It is strengthening bodies for the extra effort to garden, which is reducing not only the cost of food itself but also the higher cost of driving a truck long distance to procure it, which reduces stress on the planet. It strengthens minds not only for meditation but the extra curricular classes in cooking and nutrition that empower students and monks to return to their mountain villages ready to reduce the rampant malnutrition there and break the ongoing cycle of physical suffering. Lama Sherab of Tsum has called for help. The schoolchildren are composting, tending a few fruit trees in the school yard and menu planning for cooking class every Saturday in which they prepare lunch for the entire school, population now over 500. They now know that raisins have iron which makes them peppy and peanuts have protein which makes them strong. They seem to love all this hands on extra curricular stuff. The Roots and Shoots Club that Jane Goodall started for them is now at the nunnery and monastery as well, along side puja practice. Many dharma sisters and brothers have happily joined hands in this veggiyana. Dharma Gaia Trust is out there supporting Buddhists supporting the environment, and contributed to those 2,000 trees. Dzigar Kongtrul Rinpoche is out there this spring teaching on minimum needs and maximum contentment. In an interview on the ecobuddhism website, he says: “Powerful interests might not be able to experience a change of heart—greed is not easily changed, after all. The karma is really ripening, and at the same time virtue is appearing in front of all of us. We can see that choice clearly. Instead of affecting indifference, we should reflect and act appropriately. As Buddhists, we can make strong aspirations for positive change to come about, within a time frame that is not too late. Thinking negatively, blaming anyone or feeling hopeless will not help. Taking hope and taking action is what will transform things.”
Who knew ten years ago in a dirt floor, electricity and water free kitchen, cooking red beans, rice pudding and eggs could do exactly that? Welcome to a world where giving peanuts makes a big difference.
I am setting up a website, www.veggiyana.org, for the dish on what's happening in the sangha kitchens and gardens around Nepal, so anyone hungry to transform things can come to the table. It will be ready in June. Om mani padme hung.
~Sandy Garson "Wordsmithing to attest how the Dharma saved me from myself!" http://www.sandygarson.com http://yoursinthedharma.blogspot.com/
For most of last week, I was glued to my cell phone. My Maine goddaughter went through twelve hours of surgery in Boston, and among the too many stresses that led to Dana-Farber Cancer Center were the increasingly unreliable behavior and erratic whereabouts of her blood mother. Edie had been a model mom who cooked three meals a day, drove car pools and shared homework problems right through high school. She was always there for her children. But while her daughter tried to raise two children, run a demanding restaurant, sustain a relationship with a man who couldn’t get a job, and help her best friend also her business partner manage ovarian cancer until it killed her leaving an estate to be managed, Mother turned into a roaming cell phone signal that didn’t come in or gave only impenetrable static. I wanted to give the get well gift of steady access.
Before she left Maine for Mass General, my goddaughter swore to me it didn’t matter any more that her mother was somewhere in the Maine woods on yet another misadventure. “I’m okay with not having her in my life right now,” she said. “Having her around has become like having a third child to take care of.” I didn’t argue because she didn’t need more grief than she was about to face in surgery. But I was, and am, willing to bet everything she was deceiving herself. That's why I clung to the phone.
My theory of family relativity has two truths, which interact the way they do in Dharma. Say what you will, relative truth is never the absolute one, and often contradictory to it. You can bet the vodka in matters of Mother, the absolute truth is that blood is thicker than brains. Mommy is the matter over mind. All the insouciant declarations that Mom’s behavior doesn’t affect you inevitably get belied by a stomach churn, a less springy step, a heavy sigh, a fleeting pang of self-pity, too much dope or drink, the phantom nerve pain that comes from an amputated limb, some unhappiness that creates an energy block that sets up a playing field for the likes of cancerous mutation. I have seen the scenario too many times.
Except for complete enlightenment—and the absolute truth is I don’t know that at all, I do not know anything stronger than the primal force of Mommy. This is of course simply code for the basic human need to be cared for or cared about—specifically with compassion, described in the Dharma as removing the causes of suffering. Since so much suffering is caused by the stark feeling of loneliness, Mommy is the manifestation of desire to have somebody standing by, somebody seemingly stronger who will be there without question or judgment, somebody who, as the old Sinatra song sings, will love you all the way, “taller than the tallest tree is, that’s how it’s got to feel.”
Mommy is a tenacious and tremendous trope. It is the essence of Buddhism, which was designed to make all human beings behave toward all beings like a mother caring for her precious child. A bodhisattva gives all to prevent suffering, shining as endlessly and effortlessly as the sun. That’s the miracle of Mom, for you--and why the new Mom-in-chief Michelle Obama is far more popular than the "what, me make cookies?" Hillary Clinton ever was. Is it not the hope for unconditional love in this lean and mean world that drives the thriving house pet business? It’s the nutshell for the whole idea of refuge. “A man don’t mind if the sun don’t shine, or the stars grow weary and dim," is the lyric of the poignant song Lost in the Stars, "just so long as the Lord God’s watching over him, keeping track how it all goes on.” That’s what people want or don’t from government too. That’s me glued to the cell phone. That's the comfort of karma, the yidam deities who see all suffering, and me praying continually to the Three Jewels for protection or guidance. I wouldn’t get through the day if I didn’t go through it mumbling: “Rinpoche” or “Guru Rinpoche” or “Karmapa, don’t leave me with this. Don’t leave me.” Remember the chilling words of the historic Jewish plea: “My God, why have you abandoned me?”
Because my mother died when I was 22, I learned first hand what a big deal that loss really is, even if I didn’t think so at the time. I still had my beloved great aunt who had no children of her own and had adopted my mother and then me to fiercely guard. Her death two year’s after my mother’s was the 8.0 earthquake that ripped open the landscape, tore away all shrubbery and shelter and left the scar of immense craters. Nobody rushed into the vacuum of that eerie, lonely and scorched lunar terrain where cries for help! or here!, or hear! just echoed and bounced back like boomerangs. I don’t wish the desperation on anyone.
Ten years later, my best friend died at 35, leaving three children between the ages of 3 and 12. I was the official godmother of the eldest, and because my friend was an only child, she made me solemnly promise that after she died, I would always be there for her kids. She confessed she was haunted by the memory of a fourth grade classmate who showed up in ragged, ill-fitting clothes because she was an orphan with no one to care about her.
I can’t count how many tedious 13 hour drives I made to where her children lived, for graduations, birthday parties, special school events and shopping needs. I took phone calls all hours of the day and night for prom protocol, sibling rivalries, cooking guidance, nightmares and outfit coordination. The absolute indelible memory I have of those dozen years comes from the summer after she died when I brought the children to my house for a week. I went up to tuck the three-year-old in and kiss him goodnight, and as I started to sit on the edge of the bed, he pushed me away with enough strength that I hit the floor. I picked myself up, understanding how much he could not bear to know, to experience, what he was going to be denied because he’d lost Mommy.
It has been, I now see, my life’s work to find this need and fill it. A few years ago at my teacher’s boarding school in the back of Kathmandu, the headmistress pointed out a very shy, little six year old for whom, it turned out, nobody came although he did have family. I “adopted” him. That year I simply took him out for pizza on Saturday and bought him a winter coat. It was enough for him to remember my name and eventually make me a drawing. So I made an effort to stay in touch and the headmistress wrote he was more engaged in activities and with others. When I showed up this past December asking for him, a bright nine-year-old came running with a huge grin to hug me unabashedly. “I’m so happy,” he said, “Now I am so happy.”
Yesterday I had to rush out to buy shoes for one of my teacher’s monks who lives here in America because, he confided, he needed a new pair. Last year I freaked out the young cashier at a Gap store by showing up at the register with 15 pairs of maroon men’s socks, all for visiting monks who sheepishly confessed that’s what they needed most. So few dharma students think of the monks as human men who might need little ordinary things, but someone years ago taught me to check up on their basics, so it has become my ritual. As a result, many monks call me “Ama-la”, dear mother. Even to my surprise, the two high ranking Bhutanese lamas who are traveling with the museum show of Bhutanese ritual art objects, because I had them to dinner and served them home made Bhutanese food. Mommy is very global. It's a thriving recession-proof business.
My business plan evolved from the advice of Isak Dinesen in an obscure essay written as an “Oration at a Bonfire, Fourteen Years Late.” It dates from 1953 and is about “a matter which is called feminism.” Trying to pinpoint the real, or what she calls the profoundly inspirational difference between the sexes, she says: “A man’s center of gravity, the substance of his being, consists in what he has executed and performed in life; a woman’s, in what she is. If one talks with a man about his parents, he will generally relate what his father has done in the world, saying My father. …And if then one asks about his mother, he replies, ‘Mother was lovely. …”
“The woman’s function is to expand her own being,” she goes on. “…A man who has accomplished nothing and created nothing is not held in much esteem. But I have known many women…who had no achievement to display, but who had possessed much power and exercised decisive influence and left their imprint on everything that surrounded them. …A man can assert himself in his lifetime and in history by a single deed. Columbus discovered America… . If in history we were told about a woman who had discovered America, we would probably exclaim, ‘What a madwoman!'”
And here’s where she speaks for me: “Out of deep personal conviction I wish to add that precisely our small society—in which human beings have achieved so much in what they are able to do and in the concrete results they can show—needs people who are. Indeed our own time can be said to need a revision of its ambition from doing to being. …I wish to insinuate into the minds of the women of our time, as well a those of the men, that they should meditate not only upon what they may accomplish but most profoundly upon what they are.”
~Sandy Garson "Wordsmithing to attest how the Dharma saved me from myself!" http://www.sandygarson.com http://yoursinthedharma.blogspot.com/
His Holiness the Dalai Lama was dutifully in Berkeley April 25 to help the American Himalayan Foundation raise more money at a splashy event. But as usual when he comes to town, he also dutifully visited his own people. Somewhat hastily, the local Tibetans in exile arranged a public audience, and sold tickets to cover its costs. I was thrilled to be invited to it by Tibetan friends, for it isn’t everyday you get a legal way to eavesdrop on private conversation.
Mongolians were there too, a surprising lot of them, easy to distinguish because they wear pointed little caps that are distinctly not Tibetan. Their vanguard had specifically been invited to His Holiness’s last Tibetan assembly two years ago, and he started that one by forcefully insisting both groups recognize each other as inseparable family, if not sisters and brothers as he called them, then at least first cousins who share a common cultural and religious bloodline. Was it not, after all, the Mongolian emperor who gave the Dalai Lama his name, nine incarnations back? His Holiness implored the two groups to stick together to keep their common culture from falling apart in exile. He suggested Tibetans establish a community center where Mongolians would be welcome, and recommended using it to set up mother tongue language classes for children born here, social gatherings and artistic programs, anything to keep their culture on life support.
This reminded me that more than twenty years ago, His Holiness began a concerted campaign of consulting Jewish organizations for advice on how a people can survive whole in the tatters of Diaspora. Evidently His Holiness noticed Jews seem to excel at hanging on to their Jewishness wherever they end up. Among the anti-assimilation lessons he learned was the value of inculcating children both at home and away in an essentially parallel universe of specifically Jewish community centers, day or overnight camps, and nursery schools. At one point, I was asked to link the education director of the Tibetan Children’s Villages, headquartered in Dharamsala, with various American camping associations, Jewish and not, so the Tibetans could send teachers over to work as summer counselors, getting first hand, how-to experience in campfire circles, color war, arts and crafts, and volleyball.
This year’s program began with Tibetans proudly telling His Holiness they raised half a million dollars for a community center, most of it from two large, well-known foundations. Then they showed off their newly established Sunday morning language and cultural classes with a children’s chorus, all three dozen members dressed in one form or other of chuba. A few plucked Tibetan “guitars”, blew into wooden flutes, or banged drums as the rest serenaded His Holiness not just with folk songs, but with the free Tibet’s anthem. That of course brought down the house and a lot of tears. His Holiness seemed very moved.
I say “seemed” because the Tibetans in charge of this event decided to stuff all us “yellow hairs”, or Westerners, up in the peanut gallery of the venue’s balcony. In surprisingly blatant discrimination, Tibetans and Mongolians were sent through one entrance, Westerners forced to go around the block to another. We all actually met in the middle of the courtyard where security lines were also segregated, at least until they stopped moving and a concerned monk began directing westerners into the Tibetan/Mongolian lines, churning up the sort of pandemonium sadly common to Tibetan gatherings in Asia where frantic pushing and shoving frequently causes injuries.
I stood in line over an hour for an event that took maybe 35 minutes, these words of Tibetan friends echoing in my mind: "We don't mind. We'd stand for two days just to see His Holiness pass by in a car." The security check that had been holding it up cleared away all cameras, backpacks and bottles of water. All tickets were for general seating, but the left orchestra section was strictly reserved for Mongolians, the center for Tibetans, and the balcony for the rest of us, called in the signage: Westerners and Dharma students. It was packed. Rumor had it the Tibetan section was way oversold.
The mistress of ceremonies proudly announced the Tibetan flag was flying high over Berkeley, and the theater resounded with enthusiastic cheering for the city council. Only six weeks before, the California state legislature had been blocked by its Chinese-American members from acknowledging March 10, the 50th anniversary of the Tibetan uprising against Chinese genocide. That’s how easily the flow of Chinese money drowns American morality these days, making us complicit in their crimes. Here's to Bezerkly’s defiant tradition of free speech!
The Tibetans introduced their latest venture, a quilt project for which all families in exile in California have been invited to sew a square with the names of relatives killed in the uprising for independence, or the ongoing genocide. The initial quilt was unfurled and presented to His Holiness who politely held it up for all to see. From my far perch, it looked to be white on the edges with red and blue squares arranged within. The wicked part of me realized how Americanized this project was because the Tibetans weren’t making carpets. But this fleeting thought was quickly replaced by one about how increasingly urgent His Holiness' aspiration has become for exiled Tibetans to find ways not only to refresh the world’s memory about their plight, but to keep alive their own of Tibet. Of their genocide the Jews could proclaim Never Again! But Chinese’s new monetary muscle means for the Tibetans, Ever Again, which means His Holiness is now a goalie stuck in the cage smacking back to fend off the opposition’s efforts to score. Dutifully responding to his plea to Tibetans making their way to the freedom of America to use that freedom to tell Tibet’s story, my Khampa goddaughter recently launched Voices of Tibet, a project dedicated to interviewing on videotape the remaining survivors of the great escape to give their great grandchildren and the rest of us authentic, uncensored history. You can read all about it at www.Voices of Tibet.org. Finally His Holiness spoke. You never know what he’s going to say, so I leaned forward to hear as best I could. He went straight into a new and ingenious save the culture tack. Mongolians and Tibetans, he started, surprisingly adding Nepalese and Indians, even people who live inside the traditional borders of China, “when we study and practice Buddhism, we are all one, the same, without nationality to separate us.” Reminding everyone in the audience that Buddhism was inherent in Himalayan culture, perhaps its common cause,--he mentioned Ladakh in India and ancient kingdoms like Mustang in Nepal which are far from Mongolia-- he urged more and more serious Dharma study. “Buddhism has no nationality,” he repeated. “In this, all of us become one.” Of course he meant Tibetan Buddhism, implying Tibetan culture could be kept alive in the entire swath of the Himalayas as well as the entire swath of the Americas--anywhere people, for instance, chant Om Mani Padme Hung or present a khata.
The Dalai Lama went on to say accurate understanding of the Dharma of Nagarjuna and Shantirakshita—the Indian Buddhadharma that became the Mahayana and made its way to Tibet to turn into the Vajrayana, could only come from being as close to the lineage origin as possible. Since the Sanskrit or Pali or subsequent Indian original teachings had been lost to time and the Muslim invasion, the closest we come today would be original translations of Marpa and others into Tibetan. Therefore to study Dharma properly means learning Tibetan. This is a canny way to keep the language alive, one that my teacher also tries on grounds that every subsequent translation into whatever dialect or language alters the true meaning in the same way subtle shifts happen in, say, whispering down the lane.
Lastly, His Holiness reminded the Tibetans that when they came out of Tibet, peacefully settled around new monasteries, and went quietly about their Buddhist business, they were very much on moral high ground. Thus they easily earned the world’s sympathy. To keep that means keeping the moral high ground, allowing absolutely no slippage from best behavior. “This is all we have left,” he warned. “I am personally not bothered by the Chinese more and more fiercely calling me names because this is all they have left. It is a sign of weakness. Even the Chinese people have begun to see the justice of our cause. So we must continue it as we have done, nonviolently with the moral force of our excellent conduct.” The applause was deafening.
The Dalai Lama bowed and left.
~Sandy Garson
"Wordsmithing to attest how the Dharma saved me from myself!" http://www.sandygarson.com
http://yoursinthedharma.blogspot.com/
Every so often, my belief that nobody reads the blither of this blog gets shaken by an emailed comment from someone who has. In the past few months, when I’ve written mostly about loss of hair, loss of money, loss of family and face, the occasional comment condemns me. I have offended some reader or other by not always writing about Dharma with the high falutin’, high brow poetry of there being no there there. I’m chastised for making a big deal of stupid little events in everyday life.
Actually, since there are already more Buddhist philosophy texts than we can all read in the next six lifetimes, stupid stuff is supposed to be my point. The details of daily life are where we trip and trick ourselves. It’s one thing to wait at a bus stop thinking there is no bus, that bulbous vehicle is just an illusion, and quite another thing to board with your ticket ready, mindful of the people in front AND behind you, not push or pull or grunt at all those folks who got seats and whose Buddha nature gets harder and harder to imagine as you bump along straphanging for dear life.
Asking for his blessing on this blog, I told my teacher, over the years I have noticed with great lament how many Dharma students keep a firewall between their practice on the cushion and the raw doings of their daily life. It’s almost as if they’ve checked their Dharma like heavy baggage and come into what’s called post meditation with only carry-on habits. I said I wanted to use the blog to strengthen my own effort at integration with hope that it might encourage others to try it as well. Otherwise, why bother to be Buddhist? “Yes,” he said. “Good.”
Yesterday a friend dropped off a bunch of back issues of Bodhi, the Voice of Vajrayana Buddhism, and as fate would have it, the first thing I found this morning, opening the first of them with my coffee, was this Middle Way teaching from the Dzogchen Ponlop Rinpoche: …”how are we to relate to all the things we see and feel in our day-to-day lives…? Is it all just nothing, to be ignored? No. …To help sentient beings form a path to ultimate realization while still living and taking part in the everyday world, the Buddha taught the two truths: the relative and the ultimate truth. The relative truth, the appearances and experiences all ordinary people believe to be real, can become a stepping stone to realizing the ultimate truth… In fact, there is no other stepping stone for realizing the ultimate than the relative.”
Most of us, or so it seems to me in my unenlightened confusion, are not tucked into the serene seclusion of a monastery where we can sit imagining a bus to be an illusion. We are running around in relative truth, stuck in the slambang of Samsara, looking for a way out. So why tuck the Dharma teachings away for later or somewhere too high for our reach? The lotus, remember, comes out of mud, fertilized by a lot of filth. Hopefully you can read all about it here, the fertilizing filth of 21st Century life that gets you on board a Dharma vehicle.
Down here where all the ouch becomes grr-ouch, it may be helpful to remember the Lojong slogan variously translated as: if you can practice even when distracted, you are well trained, or the ability to practice through distraction is a sign of progress. As I said in an earlier post, last fall three great teachers came to San Francisco, all saying the same thing: sitting in serenity in a cave is easy; walking in the world and keeping the equanimity you can get in that cave is the true test of practice. The point of enlightenment, Jetsun Tenzin Palmo said fearlessly, is: are you a happier person day by day? Do you breathe easier?
Ponlop Rinpoche has asked his students to practice the paramitas this year in a personal way by dedicating each month of the year to one of the six. March was patience, May will be meditation, which in the Mahayana context, he says, means focusing enough to become intimate with the Bodhisattva qualities of compassion and kindness to others. Mother’s Day is in May, a good start for such a focus.
April has been Diligence, or Exertion, which doesn’t mean becoming workaholic, but rather overcoming the huge obstacle of laziness by delighting in practice. Obviously, something delightful is not something you want to drop, so pleasure in practice turns it into a favorite carry-on, a reach for, a cloth to polish up your Buddha nature. One particular aspect of laziness Dzogchen Ponlop Rinpoche pointed out is no self-confidence, basically shrugging off practice because you think you’re too stupid or busy or weak to bother. Or you are not good enough. Diligence is getting a grip on that old “I think I can, I think I can” little train that could attitude. It helps you to notice when you’re backsliding into “I can’t deal with this”, as I did with the hair cut and financial loss.
Someone once asked Tulku Urgyen how to maintain a daily practice when they had to run off to work, chores, family obligations that took up almost their entire day. Rinpoche replied—at least in the book transcript I read: “Start your practice in the morning and go up to the mantra. Stop there and carry the mantra with you through the day as the continuation of practice. Close when you come home. That makes your whole day practice.”
Every little bit helps so I mumble some mantra or other through the day, and it does magically open up a space in which steam dissipates. I know because I have a ridiculously low threshold for annoyance. If I pay attention to practice—don’t just read the elegant texts and leave their lessons on the shelf, nobody gets to notice it too much these days. I’ve somehow managed to raise the bar so that I’m only ticked off maybe twice an hour instead of ten times, and catch it faster and faster. Sorry to say, I am still a fount of frustration behind the wheel of a car—remember Woody Allen in Sleeper? But at least I notice, and sometimes when I catch myself ready to scream at a slow driver in the fast lane or somebody who turns abruptly without a signal, I scream Karmapa Kyenno instead as a cry for help.
My personal trick to take Dharma to work is to use it to remember which floor of the parking garage I find space on. Since this is a spontaneous happening, every day my car gets left on a different floor and most days, the rigors of the job wipe out all memory of where the car is. Having spent way too much time wandering from floor to floor wondering where the now damn Toyota is, I’ve developed a little dharma device. If I’m end up on floor two, I go up in the elevator thinking about the absolute and relative truths. On three, I take refuge in the three jewels three times before starting work. On four, I recite the four noble truths, on five name the Buddha families. If I end up on six, I name the paramitas three times in the elevator going up, on seven I think of the seven branch prayer and do the seven offering mudras, as long as I’m not carrying anything. If I have to go all the way to eight, I remember there are eight auspicious symbols, but truth told, I end up singing to myself that famous old Contadina tomato paste advertising ditty: Who put eight great tomatoes in that little itty bitty can?” Know the rules so you can break them, Trungpa Rinpoche supposedly said, and never lose your sense of humor.
Finally, because getting a street parking spot in San Francisco is nothing short of a blessing, I always dedicate the merit when I turn the motor off, going as it were from one vehicle to the other.
I just spent a week in silent retreat at a well known meditation center in northern California, among approximately seventy other practitioners, most from a different Buddhist tradition. Here, despite their worthlessness, are notes jotted in the privacy of my room.
There are four residence halls, named in Pali: Metta, Mudita, Karuna and Upekkha, and I who have come to wrestle down the blackness overcoming my mind have by amazing cosmic circumstance been assigned to Mudita, which means Joy. How did they know that is my favorite word, and the lost sense I’m desperate to recover?
In the dining hall, we’re asked to scrape our plates as much as possible with a long handled rubber spatula before sinking them in the soapy washing bins. I can’t stop watching a curly headed guy with a pregnant stomach and sweat pants sloppily pleating around his ankles, scrapping his plate reluctantly with palpable disgust. The thought that most guys are typically unwilling to clean up their own mess is quickly overwhelmed by the thought of how metaphoric the image is. All of us have come here to scrape our minds clean of habit barnacles and karmic stains.
The schedule, published and posted everywhere, is a reminder this is no vacation.Wake up is at 5:00 and meditation starts at 5:30. Breakfast is at 6:45 in the dining hall down the hill. The evening program starts at 7:30 and ends with meditation until 9:30 or 10 PM. Lunch is at 12:15, dinner at 5:15, everything vegetarian and soy milk and sugar free. No food in the room please.
Mingyur Rinpoche says fear is actually pain, so we should apply to it the mind remedies recommended for pain.
In the morning, six or seven black tailed deer munch on the wild greenery of the gentle slopes.Many retreatants pause to stare in fascination at what appears to them excitingly exotic wild life. This reminds me how other people, particularly those whose gardens and foundation shrubbery have been noshed to the nibs by deer bereft of wild habitat, see these creatures as a huge annoyance, rats on long legs, and demand their death. That’s how we each create the world we live in, isn’t it?
My teacher Thrangu Rinpoche says deer have good minds: they eat only greens, do not disturb other animals and are not aggressive in any way.Deer adorn many Tibetan monasteries, surrounding the wheel of dharma, because the Buddha’s first sermon fell not on the ears of human beings but of peaceful deer.
Mingyur Rinpoche refers to the brain as the body’s office.
There are only teabags here, none strong. At Tibetan retreats, strong chai is offered or plain milk tea, and sometimes even coffee. Buddha means the one who is awake, so not surprisingly Buddhist meditators for millenniums have appreciated tea, and more recently coffee, for its caffeine. But this is Northern California, center of social correctness, so most tea is decaffeinated and no coffee is provided.
Following instructions, I brought some coffee, but it was ground too fine for the infuser basket in the thermal cup I also brought. Happily, the dining hall had a supply of one cup drip cones, so I stuck a paper towel in one and tried to brew my coffee, without delaying the line for the hot water—an impossible feat.I was so embarrassed. Within minutes, two different women retreatants tapped my shoulder and in pantomime showed me where their coffee filters were, inviting me to help myself any time. The kindness of strangers…
On the third afternoon, Mingyur Rinpoche pointed out the inevitable trope toward happiness. Bliss is our birthright and we are simply trying to make our way home to it.The instinct for happiness defines us. Just moving your leg when you are sitting on the meditation cushion because a new position feels better, bringing relief from some form of pain, shows the drive for happiness.
There is so much gray hair and limping from bad hips, this crowd looks like an elderhostel.But there are quite a few young people too—always a heartening sight. People have come from down the road and down Mexico way. There are probably as many men as women although two or three people make the distinction difficult. I see notes left for Sergio, Gita, Margaret, Alan, Mark. When I wonder what made them come, all I can think is how a dharma sister asked Rinpoche why her children weren’t interested in Buddhism, and he said without hesitation: “They haven’t suffered enough yet.”
For work duty, I have been assigned to evening meal preparation. This turns out to be mostly chopping vegetables for soup or washing lettuce for salad. As I was leaving to attend a teaching, I overheard the cook with eye liner say: “I wish I could go.”I turned back and said in good faith: “I’d be happy to trade places with you, if you’d like. I don’t mind.”Immediately she dismissed me with a loud, cynical cackle of “Ha ha.”
Somebody left a Hershey kiss in my shoe!
Most of the retreatants have been Hinayana practitioners of the Burmese Theravada mindfulness tradition, taught to monitor their thoughts and movements as a way of achieving nowness.Watching them raise a spoon from the soup to their lips or raise their foot to take a step walking up the hill is like watching a movie in the slowest possible motion. The self-absorption is painful to behold. Trungpa Rinpoche once said the problem with Zen people putting all their attention into perfectly washing a plate was that the activity became the entirety, blotting out any chance to glimpse the nature of mind and step closer to enlightenment.
A small troupe of wild turkeys hangs around. The hens seem polite and quiet. But one of the males struts around displaying all his feathers, especially his fan of a tail, like a proud peacock. Trying to keep a grip on this territory and those hens, he spends all his time either squawking gobbledegook at the top of his lungs or pointing his teeny, waddled head at another turkey or one of us with scolding screeches that end up in a high pitched neigh echoing loudly across our enforced silence. I think of Tom Turkey as the comic relief, the perfect reminder of all those cocky politicians, TV personalities and overprivileged CEOs full of the sound and fury of Samsara, signifying nothing. I also think this is going to give new meaning to calling someone a real turkey.
While the others are sitting in silence in the big meditation hall, or doing their housekeeping duties, I am playing hooky in my room praying as hard as I can to the lineage, and to Guru Rinpoche as my teacher has instructed. The traditional teaching is you need the blessings of the Bodhsattvas and gurus to progress along the dharma path. I pray to Mahakala to destroy all obstacles on that path. I pray to White Tara for health, wisdom and life long enough to do as much good as possible. I pray to Chenrezig last thing at night to protect all beings and round them up in his pure land of Dewachen. This is what the Theravada group leader superciliously referred to as "noise."
Somebody asked Mingyur Rinpoche if prayer matters. He asked her for her name and when she gave it, Marian, he called out to her. “Marian!”Then he said: “You answered, didn’t you, when your name was called. That is a programmed response. When you pray to the Buddha or Bodhisattvas, you’re calling out to them. Why wouldn’t they respond?”
A senior citizen with white hair is worried bad knees will keep her from doing prostrations to enter Tibetan Buddhism.She doesn’t want to be left behind. I take her aside where nobody can see us talking and tell her I waited 15 years to do prostrations because I have severe orthopedic problems. I tell her after I started I made those problems worse. I shared the three things I learned: you can do table top prostrations, just lowering your head; you can get on your knees and stretch out from there without having to stand up and fall down each time. But best of all, when in England a 94-year-old woman in a wheelchair asked Ato Rinpoche how she could ever become a Buddhist when obviously she couldn’t prostrate, he said without missing a beat: “Just put the lineage tree in front of you and pray hard for refuge.” How this woman brightened!
Questions, so many questions. Mingyur Rinpoche has been beyond generous in making space for questions, and the Theravada meditators have swelled with them, as though these Tibetan Buddhist teachings are waking them up. I feel like I’m watching bulbs pop out of the ground in warm spring sunshine.
It is Easter Sunday morning and I have arisen a lot earlier than I normally do on Sunday.Clarity dazzles. The sky is without blemish, and the sprinkling rains have left the earth glimmering green, the rolling hills covered in velvet. Everything is HD. So it hurts my heart to watch these Theravada meditators walking along staring at their feet on the ground, their faces pained from forced focus on what they think of as mindfulness: now I am raising my foot, now I am putting it down. How I long to make a joyful noise to wake them up. Look, look up! See the sky! Mix your mind with space. That is the teaching. See it now: the clarity, infinity, capacity, emptiness itself. What blessings to have been showered with such wisdom, to know this.
Now that Mingyur Rinpoche has learned to pronounce the word burrito, he likes to use it. He likes to throw it off his tongue, burrrrr…ee…toe, as an example of something that seems to make people happy.Of course people always want more of what pleases them, don’t they? So they eat more and more burr… ee…toeand then, oops! Too many burr…ee…toe. Stuffing yourself with happiness leads only to suffering. So better to seek the only source of happiness that doesn’t do that: realizing the nature of the mind that craves burr…ee...toe.
So many people come to these retreats burning with a life crisis question that needs to be answered and pounce on the teacher, hoping to shake a clear do this or that instruction out of them. In the group interview today, a gray haired woman behind me asked, slowly in obvious pain, how to know the right time to leave a bad job and not end up jobless. I could feel her anxiety, waiting for an answer, and her huge let down when Mingyur Rinpoche said knowing was no problem. He just knew the time had come to start teaching and to travel. His failure to provide an explicit how to guide was as baffling as answering in Urdu. So I wrote her a message on a napkin in the dining hall, saying when students asked him questions like that, or asked him for a divination, Trungpa Rinpoche used to say: you already know the answer in your heart of hearts. The only reason you need to ask me is because you somehow don’t like the answer your innate wisdom has provided and keep hoping for a “better” one. I watched her let out a sigh and smile as she read this. On the hill, she waved at me.
I heard somewhere that Kalu Rinpoche said it's good to say om mani padme hung to all creatures you encounter because it helps raise them to higher rebirth, and because they can recognize the sound, it will dispel fear. I keep breaking the silence by whispering Om mani padme hung to the squawking turkey and to the deer when they are close enough.One fawn stood stone still about three feet away and just looked at me as I kept up the recitation under my breath.
I have started to think of my breaking the silence to help others get answers to their painful questions as saying Om mani padme hum like that. What a blessing to be able to do this.
The retreat management announces the closing ceremony will have Tibetan style to it. We will get to come up one by one and present a khata to Rinpoche.There are only 40 khatas for sale so folks will have to share.Back in my room, I discover I have five khatas—my most expensive ones.When nobody is in the hall, I run around and put four of them randomly on four doorknobs in a reckless act of generosity. I have absolutely no idea who I have gifted.
Bunny slope hiking trails have been thoughtfully carved across this landscape, often leading to forest altars or meditation platforms or a bench atop a lookout. Spring is sprouting everywhere. Wild blue iris and yellow poppies have popped up amid the moss and grass still wet enough to be glinting in the sun. Birds are hopping about, chirping and scavenging. Clouds scud across a deep blue sky in breezes that are blowing all sign of April sprinkles away. Some of the retreatants are doing their housekeeping work detail, others are sitting silently mindful of their passing thoughts. The deer are on the far hill, the turkeys down below as I climb the hill behind the residence halls to the clearest vantage point. Checking to confirm I am alone, I stretch my arms out as wide as they will go and slowly start to spin, around and around like a prayer wheel. I flap my arms to be a flag and shout Om mani padme hung to nobody and everybody, giddy from the joy and glory.
~Sandy Garson"Wordsmithing to attest how the Dharma saved me from myself!"
Now that the panic has passed, I want to feel embarrassed for the outburst. But instead, I keep feeling that howling in public to reveal pain may be an honest way to help others understand the Dharma path is not a bunny slope. Even after two decades of practice with the motivation to help all sentient beings, somebody with hair on her head slipsliding along the sidewalks of Samsara in ordinary clothes can be ambushed by powerful emotion, and hurled into that tangled darkness where it’s easy to mistake coiled rope for a live snake. A huge pile up of bad news--deaths, disease, family fatwas and financial devastation— blocked the view. But I stand by the consoling words of my Dharma sister Nancy: “Don’t beat up on yourself. We’re all here in human bodies because we’re not yet perfect enough to be Buddha.”
Fortunately, the Dharma welcomes panic attacks. Mingyur Rinpoche says in his new book, Joyful Wisdom, they demonstrate the awesome power of mind to turn a passing thought into an emotional cyclone tearing up everything in its twisted path. How better to see we have nuclear power, so we will want to work on nonproliferation? Sometimes Biblical characters panic too, and rudely demand God explain why he hast abandoned them. The Bible is full of retrograde moments of lost faith or lost cause, because without ignoble backslide, how can redemption happen? Where would be the happily ever after once upon a time, say, in the belly of a whale?
When the appearances in our life have become so strong we cannot overcome them, my teacher Thrangu Rinpoche recommends bringing obstacles to the path. He says we should be grateful for disturbances of the peace, for without adversities how would we know whether our samadhi has validity, that it’s working? That’s why great meditators deliberately abandon serene settings of solitude to seek “a very crowded place where disturbing emotions can easily arise. …This practice will develop realization.”
It seems the reverse can do that as well, because slinking from the cacophony of city life into the silence of retreat has made that ugly, scary darkness all gone. For a week, I read the words of my perfect teacher, prayed passionately and sat stone still watching my mind. I tricked myself into doing that this time by visualizing myself seated in a reviewing stand to watch troops parade by, these being of course my thoughts. Because in a parade like that, you can't really distinguish one passerby from another, and because sitting in the reviewing stand means you are definitely not part of it, one degree of separation was magical, forcing me to follow Jetsun Tenzin Palmo's admonition to not get stuck focused on what arises by looking at the space in which it arises. The distance in this view severed the shoots of suffering, as the prayer to the wisdom deity Manjushri puts it.
So many times, students stubbornly seek out a teacher, any available teacher, to earnestly download the confusion of some job, health, or relationship crisis, desperately hoping to get back a clear do this or that answer. And the letdown from a spout of general philosophy seemingly unrelated to the question leaves them more depressed and bewildered. You can see them painfully wondering why after they asked a question in such painstakingly detailed English, the teacher answered them in Tagalog.
So I feel very grateful to have beseeched the Buddhas and Bodhisattvas and my teacher to tell me what had gone wrong, and to have got in return the enormous blessing of an unmistakably clear answer. In the secure, breathe-easy environment of a retreat center that provided a comfortable room, dependable meals and inspiring scenery--everything all taken care of, no worries-- I could easily see Khenpo Tsultrim Gyamtso's point that fear really is just a thought about the future. It is not now. So many things will change between now and that feared future, including what to fear.
My teacher would probably describe this retreat as bringing pain to the path. “This refers in particular,” he says, “to the mental pain of feeling sad and poverty-stricken. Usually one tends to feel that such pain is doing one considerable damage. The practice is not to fall under the sway of such an impoverished state of mind. Usually one feels that the situation is unbearable, but here one mixes one’s mind with this sadness and looks directly at this disheartened state and sees its actual nature, which is emptiness. This enhances one’s meditation. …it enables one to recognize the nature of one’s mind.”
It is significant comfort to look him straight in the eye and realize the Buddha actually does have business with you. Even though he doesn’t speak in the language of your daily struggle, knowing nothing about the craziness of 21st Century computerized, credit swapped culture, he has perspective, something all too easily obscured by the instant gratification of the faster and faster short run. The Buddha is still here because he is a useful reminder that this too shall pass. It’s all impermanent, illusory, insubstantial--these i's have it. Life is one big Ipod shuffle, The mind training, “Emptiness is the best protection because it cuts the solidity of your beliefs”, really does turn out to be the thingamabob that does the job. Twenty six hundred years and still working, a true energizer battery.
Oddly, or maybe not, Dzogchen Ponlop Rinpoche’s sangha is practicing the paramitas this calendar year by devoting a month at a time to one of the six, and April is exertion. A retreat is exertion to the max. But, I am happy to say, if you make the effort when you are the worse for wear, you will probably be the better for it. Dharma is a mindboggling gift.
Om mani padme hung.
~Sandy Garson "Wordsmithing to attest how the Dharma saved me from myself!" http://www.sandygarson.com http://yoursinthedharma.blogspot.com/ Technorati Tags: Yours In The Dharma, Sandy Garson, Dharma, Buddhist, Buddhism, Spirituality, Religion
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