IMMACULATE PERCEPTION

The first granddaughter of my oldest childhood friend officially arrived at 5:38 PM to brighten winter solstice, the occasion that gave birth to Christmas. She appeared pure and perfect, unstained as the Dharma. She had flawless feet and hands, two eyes, fat cheeks and jet black hair. That much anyone could see. Although I don’t have that third eye of wisdom--yet, I reckoned she also had her own energy and karma and certainly all her eggs to carry on this giving birth tradition.

Her entry into my life was coincidentally preceded by one of those prefab e-mails that spin around the Internet. Asked to name the world’s seven wonders, a classroom of students, after some dispute, settled on the usual suspects: China’s great wall, Egypt’s pyramids, yada yada. But, it seems, one little girl anxiously held out because she had different vision. Her seven wonders were the five senses that connect us to the world plus our sense of humor and our ability to love other beings in it. The story, spinning round at the height of the Christmas shopping frenzy, was “a gentle reminder the most precious things in life cannot be built by hand or bought by man.”

With my face pressed against the window of the hospital nursery, I stared at five of those wonders unfurling in the newborn and waited for the last two to rise again in me. This was a gentle reminder that it’s wonderful, a life. With the wave of an invisible baton, a choreography is launched. Two people merge and the energy they release magically morphs from a seed to a bud, then the red-faced newborn evolves from fetal to flower. For engineering, you can’t beat it.

I knew from my own eyes and from Dharma teachings that this baby was pure perfection, for we are all of us pure and perfect too, imbued with shining Buddha nature. It is the glory of Dharma to remind us we are every one a unique gem, a wonder of the world. Other traditions remind us too. An Episcopalian priest wrote on the holiday Op-ed page that each of us is as much an incarnation of the divine as Jesus. That’s the point of the holy story, he said. Jesus like the Buddha is a reminder of all we can be. We enter holy and stay that way and exit with the same potential, realized or not. The Buddhist analogy is that you can bury the ore in bottomless filth but you can’t destroy its innate gold.

Although Lenscrafters can whip up corrective lenses in under an hour, we don’t see ourselves as golden deities in a palatial mandala. The baby’s father, for example, will tell you he’s an engineer. Jesus, whose birthday many are celebrating, said the kingdom of God is here on Earth but most people cannot see it. I suppose for the moment they could be forgiven since Muslims from Morocco to Mindanao and power mad Christians across the American south have in his name thrown up such a thick smoke screen. But Jesus was saying: what you see is what you get. And he was only echoing what Shakyamuni Buddha said five hundred years earlier: Samsara and Nirvana are inseparable.

It’s the vision thing. The relatives and nurses couldn’t see that this newborn had evidently created such virtuous karma, so much merit, in past forms that she’d just been born to a beautiful mother and a clever father in a rich society where every advantage would be hers. They could have been celebrating her just reward, toasting the joy her good spirit could bring to lighten suffering. They could have seen her arrival in the world as the sun on solstice brink, ready to turn brighter and warmer in the sky.

They were much too busy figuring out who she looked like, all anxiously hoping for mini me. She uncorked a flow of opinion that bubbled up around her: she was going to be tall, going to have thighs, definitely going to be very smart. The walls of expectations and judgments started piling up to hem her in like the newly escaped walls of her mother’s womb. Even her name carried the burden of somebody else’s focus, having been predetermined and laid upon her by a father anxious for something lean and gender neutral, something to foster success in today’s workplace.

There she was, a clean slate, like gurus say the mind is, and already others were writing on it, staining it. When eventually she looks into a mirror, who then will she see? A pure and perfect deity, carrier of magnificent karma, or a hopeless mess who cannot get it right? Her fetal position seemed to be the question mark. There is Oy to the world and there is peace on earth, good will toward men. All is calm, all is bright or all is qualm, all is fright. We totter on the brink and fall into the arms of our own perception.

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