I of the Storm

We in the precinct of the paramitas have come to the end of patience practice month not a second too soon. The universe has been way too accommodating this September, raining down a monsoon of opportunities for private practice in case all the public chicanery wasn’t enough. “Everybody’s stressed,” an old friend said on the phone from Phoenix, referring to her multimillionaire son-in-law with two fabulous houses and lots of first class airline tickets. “Read the news. Even a superrich guy like McAfee had to sell his multizillion dollar house underpriced to round up money.”

In smallville, where we never rich or nouveau pauvre reside, this was the month my condominium management job from hell produced an even worse cavalcade of client demands, time consumed by evening meetings and horrific screaming by a homeowner’s perpetually work-free boyfriend who wants to do away with me so he can have my job. This was on top of the even more tragicomic dysfunction in an office the cheapskate owners run with a changing array of unpaid high school interns. I even got to be face to face with luxury people who pay me $80 a week for 10-15 hours of complex work as they rushed to refuse a raise to $88 for next year.

During Patience month, the superman general contractor handyman I rely on at my job stopped showing up or returning calls, abandoning me in mid crises. Yesterday he fessed up. The corporation he’d sold his private business to was forcing him to “prioritize their way.” Although he was famously calm even in calamity, he had become stressed to the breaking point by losing his old customers, reputation and independence. The people he now worked for had no idea what it was like to be face to face with customers and stay on the human side as he'd always done. And there aloud was the corrupting truth of corporatism, the sole cause of our health care and financial disasters: those tidily removed from the effects of their decisions don’t have to take the affected into their accounting like real people fighting on the front line of reality.

This month the janitorial contractor failed to show up because his lady returned from visiting her native El Salvador so sick, he had to rush her to an emergency room and wait all day until someday took care of her. Then he had to spent two days at his house fending off her family who kept showing up to demand she come home and get back to work—their infinite demands being what weakened her enough to get so sick. A heating contractor with five kids confessed he was so stressed out from customer losses after following an attorney’s expensive advice to incorporate and change his company name, he needed to find something to help him get up in the morning and what did I know about meditation.

This was the month a young Nepali couple here in San Francisco found out the baby they’re expecting will be a girl, so I should think pink for my shower invitations. But the bad news is that little girl will not be in the pink if the little mother-to-be doesn’t eat more protein. Her family wasn’t vegetarian, she said, but as a youngster, she couldn’t bear to swallow meat or eggs, even when her late mother tried to force her. Ironically, only a week earlier, while I was plying her with corn pudding and mashed fava beans, she asked me why it was so hard for me to convince Tibetans in Nepal to add vegetables to their diet when vegetables were so available all around them. And here she was in protein-packed America, knowing she was in jeopardy yet resolutely sticking to her same old tofu and lentils. “She’s doing the best she can,” her husband said.

This was the month I lost rental income when the friend who signed up for my little cottage in Maine found herself glued to a chair at New York’s Sloan-Kettering Cancer Hospital, as the holistic advocate for her beloved sister being alternately bisected and battered by differing teams of specialists, often making matters worse. It was the month an older friend fell, broke her leg and had to move fifty miles away to live with cousins who could take care of her. She was stressed about her cats.

This was the month a tidy, conscientious couple each suddenly had to take on more than forty hours of work to pay for repairing termite damage to their front entry—something insurance refuses to cover. An older friend of mine was denied hardship refinancing for her apartment, meaning she is being forced to move—who knows where? A younger friend is completely out of work, so stressed he is trying to sell his house and go across the country to live with his parents. To really push the patience point, a family member, with whom I choose not to communicate to protect myself from more years of being harmed, showed up in my town because all is not whoopee anymore and invited me to lunch as though nothing had gone before. Because this was patience month, I went.

Of course the beat-all patience practice came from the computer. Twenty six hours down the tubes trying, trying and trying some more to sort out the scrambling of my charitable Veggiyana website just because I tried to post updates. That will teach you absolute truth about higher power and your own impotence in this world. The most frustrating part was the host support aides refusing to help me because I wasn't the original site manager, my cousin who knew how to do it. The world is so awash in crime and porn --during September criminal hackers hijacked the New York Times site, fearful web hosts have to be so vigiliant, mine wouldn't even let me onto my own Buddhist site! Stubborn me then solicited a tech professional who took my chair for four hours trying, trying, trying himself to fix things, all the while telling me nothing in the world requires as much patience as computers. They are merciless in demanding perfection; their way or no way.

This is just some of what’s been happening in my small world. As we plunge into October, which will be exertion month, life in these United States feels like a cultural earthquake at 8 on the Richter scale. “Things fall apart,” Yeats said, “the center cannot hold.” We are suffering the birth fangs of impermanence, the sea change of seeing change.

The Dzogchen Ponlop Rinpoche defines the paramita of patience in three ways: not caring about beings doing harm—not being bothered by that but remaining still as a log, enduring the pain of situations with calm and clarity and enough resoluteness to not let pain hijack or detour you on the path, and finally, to appreciate the inescapable truth—suffering, impermanence, emptiness.

There was no way to deal with such a heavy barrage of stressful public and private issues this month, nothing to do but just give up. "What me worry?” It was a seismic shift for someone so used to sticking her neck out, she damaged it years ago. But with too many fires to put out, there really was nothing to do—except be patient. A people pile-up like that teaches you to give up hope of influencing anybody’s outcome, neither the national health care fiasco nor the little protein problem. Just worry about the virtue of your own. As a cousin of mine used to say: Everybody has to walk their own gangplank. Calm was called for.

Learning to keep that calm was learning to get out of the way—not so much of others as of my own expectation that I was going to make a difference--change the world-- or be a failure if I couldn’t. Fortunately the Dharma teaches that changing your mind IS changing the world.




~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

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.5 License.
Click here to request Sandy Garson for reprint permission.

Yours In The Dharma 2001-2008, Sandy Garson @copy: 2001-2008 Sandy Garson
All rights Reserved

First, Boo No Harm

The paramita practice calendar created by the Dzogchen Ponlop Rinpoche says September is for Patience, and wonder of wonders, the universe jumped right in and sent along enough obstacles and negativity to require transcendental quantities of it-- in all three forms. And not just for me, myself and I.

This was the month all Americans forced to exist in what’s most accurately called the Pharmakaya were asked to do exactly what the paramita politely describes: not care about beings who are harming us, not care about the harm they are doing and not get bothered by such harmful actions. So instead of screaming at ersatz Town Hall meetings or taking impolitic placards of misspelled words to impolite tea parties, September has been patients’ time, Shantideva says, to just remain as still and unmoved as a log when someone is harming you.

In other words, meditation words, stay calm in this whealth care crisis. Perhaps visualize Obama’s cool calm…and for Buddha’s sake, don’t think: yeh, he can afford to keep calm because he’s going to get world class medical attention forever without having to worry how and at what cost. Patience is avoiding discursive thoughts like that.

September has been the month bubbly ranneth over Wall Street while we on six-pack (mine’s water bottles for the car) Main Street stood stuck in unemployment, credit card assistance, mortgage refinancing and even post office lines, waiting for the some day our stints (or is it mints?) would come. So instead of noisily screaming “You lie!” at Congressmen and Senators who in theory represent you but in practice represent their corporate sponsors, September has been the perfect time to practice the patience of undertaking pain.

“When you encounter difficult situations with beings,” Dzogchen Ponlop says, “you should endure the pain, remain still, calm and clear and continue with your Bodhisattva mission, so to speak.” What a transcendental chance to practice pain we got this month when consumer protections were torpedoed, finance reform dismissed, and the Supreme Court edged close to letting corporations buy representatives outright, turning this country into their company store indenturing all us citizens for lifetimes.

And September provided a fabulous opportunity to practice that third form, “the patience of accepting truth”, having the courage to “understand the path that is sometimes inconceivable” and truly believe in the reality of emptiness. All you had to do was read about and watch Barack Obama in nonaction, fulfilling none of the promise gestated nine months ago at his inauguration. If September’s news didn’t instill true realization of the emptiness of expectation, hopes and mental activity--and what the path to inconceivable suffering looks like, I don't know what will.

More on personal patience practice in a moment…


~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

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.5 License.
Click here to request Sandy Garson for reprint permission.

Yours In The Dharma 2001-2008, Sandy Garson @copy: 2001-2008 Sandy Garson
All rights Reserved

Not So Cold Storage

One of the most awesome characteristics of the Himalayas is how every Buddhist house, no matter how crude or cramped, has its own shrine room. This separate space invariably gleams with walls complexly painted in dazzling Technicolor and a spotless floor covered with blazing colored rugs. Even the brass statues and copper butter lamps its owners have accumulated radiate brightly, although the room abuts-- as it did in one ordinary house in Paro, Bhutan—an abysmally grimy, soot covered kitchen that has no windows, vents or chimney. Opening that door to the sealed sacred space really transports you from Samsara to a pureland, open sesame!

The shrine room in the Kathmandu apartment of one of my dharma sister’s could be a bowling alley. Totally out of all proportion, it’s startlingly bigger than the whole rest of the two-bedroom place. Yet my friend has never tried to turn it into anything else. “It wouldn’t be right,” she says, “even if I needed the space.”

You don’t consistently find that kind of decorous devotion, that priority, on this continent. I know one childless California couple who’ve turned the third and smallest bedroom of their little house into a shrine room for their own occasional practice and a childless Maine couple who built a small retreat cabin for themselves back in their woods. I suspect this is why their properties get chosen to house Rinpoches.

I’ve heard that a widowed dharma sister down in southern California cleared out her living room furniture and created a shrine room big enough for weekly classes, a natural extension of her therapy business. And I learned that a couple in northern California turned their unused basement into a shrine room so their meditation group could have a consistent place to meet. These are public spaces.

Devoting a whole room of your house to private or public Dharma shows real commitment, a generosity hard to escape or rescind. After all, can you just go ahead and divorce the Dharma by redecorating? So these rooms rebuke the feint of heart. I want to say I am a very devout Buddhist who tries everyday in every way to practice Dharma, but I have to say I have never dedicated more than the corner of a room, and invariably a very private one like a bedroom, to a shrine, even when I had a lot of rooms in my house.

Truth told, I was already in the dharma maybe a dozen years before I got inspired enough to cobble together some version of a shrine: a table covered by a cloth, two candles, a Rinpoche photo and a small ersatz jade Buddha found years ago at the weekend market in Bangkok. Over the next few years, I played at home improvement by buying a brocade cloth to cover it, shiny brass statues from Kathmandu, even seven offering bowls. The real kick I got out of that shrine came from the table I chose to support it. It was an antique 18th Century New England tavern table, so every time I saw it there far from the smoky rowdiness of an 18th Century hostelry, serenely bearing statues of White Tara and the Buddha instead of sloshing ale tankards and chewing tobacco, I got a little thrill at intimations of how I was somehow purifying its karma.

I live now in an apartment where I am using another table for a shrine in that nook of the bedroom intended for a book shelving or entertainment unit. It's the indented space between a former fireplace and the window on the abutting wall. It’s overhung with a thangkha I had professionally painted for my practice, and covered with an expensive brocade from Hassim in Varanasi, a mandala offering, six statues that were gifts or purchases, photos of Rinpoche and the Dalai Lama, plus seven offering bowls filled with rice and topped with representations of the standard gifts. The lollipops I use as torma sit in front of the rupas they were offered to.

My shrine, as my friend Tommy says of everything else in the world, is what it is. It’s alternately called “charming” or “idiosyncratic” by other western Buddhists who ask to see it. In more frank moments, I call it a cop out. This is because I converted the old formal dining room of an Edwardian flat into my private sleeping space, and had I been a good Tibetan or really committed Buddhist practitioner, I would have turned the grand old breakfront built into an entire wall into a natural shrine. That is of course exactly what Rinpoche’s monks, visiting my place for dinner, thought I did. So I remain haunted by the dismayed surprise on their faces at finding I’d stuffed the glassed-in shelves not with statues and brocade-wrapped texts, the open space in the midway not with butter lamps and flowers. I had filled the see-through shelves with sweaters, tee shirts and shawls, the open space with all sorts of little boxes stuffed with earrings and other bling.

My warped priorities haunted me this past weekend when we made a farewell party for the two Bhutanese monks who’ve been here in San Francisco since February, part of the traveling museum showing of sacred objects from their Himalayan nation. The show ended in May, but they’ve had to remain specifically to do pujas over the objects wrapped in crates in a cargo terminal at San Francisco airport waiting to be shipped later this month to Musée Guimet in Paris. Twice a week by bus and by BART, they trek to the cargo terminal for their two-hour ritual of incense burning and chanting. Other than that, they’ve been pretty much free.

And how do you think two Bhutanese monks spent their summer vacation? Building shrines to meet demand! They sawed raw wood, carved, hammered together and even painted three of those gaudy floor to ceiling breakfronts with the myriad little glassed-in statue nooks you find in all monasteries in the Himalayas. People paid for the effort, putting the first real money in their pocket. They bought new shoes.

Our party was in an East Bay back yard of a small, three-bedroom, one-bath house that does not have a garage. A family of four lives here, and for three weeks the two monks did too, while the owners traipsed back and forth to Home Depot for wood, nails, paint, and glass to create an authentic looking shrine. It’s now sitting pretty in their dedicated shrine room, which is part of what we celebrated. It's the picture here.

But this is not just any shrine room! It is one of those ubiquitous backyard storage sheds you find at Home Depot or Lowe’s, those corrugated metal pitched-roof structures with one door and one window, where you’re supposed to stick the lawnmower, kiddie pool and spare tires. That is indeed what it looks like in the yard, but open the door and voila! A floor to ceiling red/blue/yellow painted shrine filled with radiant statues, offering bowls and butter lamps; thangkas covering the metal walls, brightly colored Tibetan carpets obscuring the metal floor and those gaudy brocade banners dangling from the pitched center of the roof.

Talk about changing karma! And ingenious use of space. Here’s hoping turning storage sheds into purelands, mentally and physically, becomes all the rage very soon.

~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

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.5 License.
Click here to request Sandy Garson for reprint permission.

Yours In The Dharma 2001-2008, Sandy Garson @copy: 2001-2008 Sandy Garson
All rights Reserved

ONE TASTE PRACTICE

Rinpoche came again to Maine this summer, so the annual retreat was back on, if only for five days. Except for new and very exciting teaching material, it was the same old same old: same place, same faces, same solemn atmosphere and disgusting food. The same sangha that has organized it for a dozen years ran it with the same tightfistedness that squeezes out spontaneous little joys and sends people to the periphery to smile in secret.

The spirit behind that sangha is an excruciatingly thin man whose absolute sincerity shutters this retreat in silence. He never stops exhorting attendees to restrain themselves and refrain from speaking until specified times-- which he thinks are too long. His sincerity also encourages him to keep talking during the silent meditation hour, speaking up to tell those on the cushion what to think, how to view and where to sit. Many of the silenced find his perpetual interruptions, his evident fondness for monopolizing the mike, as annoying as the interminable program-postponing pitches of the infamous fundraising drives on NPR.

Several years ago, one Boston Brahmin chafed by the inflexibility of this man and his regime said that all he needed were sideburns and a hat to look like a perfect Puritan preacher. He was puritanical, fundamentalist enough be the incarnation of Cotton Mather. She referred to his chillingly cold wife as Carrie Nation.

Oddly enough, their sangha was said this year to be studying Mind Beyond Death by the Dzogchen Ponlop Rinpoche. This is a book that very emphatically starts by relaying an important message from the lineage: no two people practice Dharma the same way. Everyone drives the vehicle their own way because there is no one correct and only method of achievement. This echoes the Buddha who is said to have taught 84,000 dharmas because that is the number of variations in the way human beings can learn, and he wanted to reach everyone on their own terms. That is in fact supposedly the telltale sign of a Bodhisattva: the ability to tailor teaching to fit every individual student.

For many people, individuality is the joy of Buddhadharma. It is not, thank God, an organized religion. At least not as monotheists of the Western world know it. But it seems to be necessary for some former monotheists of the West, perhaps merely out of habit, to organize Dharma into recognizable church group activity. Thus the rigid twelve-step programs and exclusive catholic hierarchy of Shambhala, which this particular group leader was once a lowly part of.

Perhaps because Trungpa Rinpoche’s step-by-step Shambhala path came first to break ground in America, it continues to be mimicked as the right way, the only way. And many practitioners continue to rebel against such rigid organizing to go their own way, often into more flexible, and authentically Tibetan, sanghas as ours is supposed to be.

But sadly, very sadly in dismay, I am writing to say suffering exists because it is not. What I learned on the sidelines from people who could not keep silent was how many had of necessity left this particular sangha to pursue their valued dharma practice without negative interference. The number of abdicators went as high as eight. Also some who had not towed the line and adhered to rules had been thrown out—as unceremoniously as the moneychangers in the Temple. Nobody dared breathe any of this to Rinpoche, especially after they had been suddenly quite cordially invited to show up for a sangha photo op, making the group look for Rinpoche far larger and happier than it is.

Truth hiding behind appearance is what Buddhadharma is all about, isn't it?

I would like to suggest a solution to this sad situation, something to illuminate the enlightenment path. But I can only say two different women lamented in confidence that they didn’t know why their particular energy offended leaders of this pack so obviously that they were made to feel unwelcome in it—because I happen to be very familiar with the circumstance. Once upon a time, I was running the kitchen for this retreat, overseeing the care and feeding of Rinpoche. Then presto chango! without explanation I was persona non grata—because, I discovered, I was not solemnly silent and constrained enough while tending to Rinpoche’s needs to fit the resident concept of “religious.” I spent too much time in the kitchen, not enough on the cushion. Rinpoche’s satisfaction was not their point.

Attending this retreat has consequently been unnerving, and getting rudely ignored at times outright upsetting. But the teachings are worth fighting for and this year I promised myself I would learn the practice of One Taste: keeping equilibrium without distinguishing good or bad. I would just focus on what Rinpoche had to say. I would en-lighten myself by shedding all worries about anything or anybody else and smile in the blessing of being responsible for nothing but showing up to learn some Dharma. I would dedicate any merit to my late Dharma sister Joan who I was really missing.

I was getting better at letting go, feeling more confident about how much none of this stuff really mattered anyway and actually starting to enjoy having nothing else to do, when one of Rinpoche’s monks called my cell phone. When I asked, as I habitually do, if there was anything he or any of his cohorts needed, he paused, leaving lots of empty silence, and then almost in a whisper, he said: “food.” That’s how I discovered the monks were going hungry because the leader of the pack, having no real interest in food himself, hadn’t been thoughtful or generous enough to consider their needs might be different.

As soon as the afternoon teaching session ended, I took off for the supermarket. I was my old self born again. I ran home and slammed pots and chopped with fury, a woman on a mission to make Tibetan food to put a treat in the retreat. Under cover of darkness I delivered a whole mess of dishes to the secret place where Rinpoche was being stowed. “Very happy,” the monk whispered the next day when I passed by outside the shrine room. “Everybody now very happy.”

Well, not everybody. I later learned that finding my food in the kitchen the next day incited such a tantrum in the sangha leader's wife, she chafed one of the monks as badly as her husband had that Boston Brahmin. An argument was going on when another monk came to the rescue. “Sandy Garson brought that food,” he said, “because she requested teachings and Sandy Garson understands Tibetan people and their culture. She knows you make an offering for a teaching, something pleasing to the teacher, and she knows this food pleases Tibetan people.”

None of this surfaced on the face of the retreat. Rinpoche taught with the same smiling equanimity the days he had to eat paltry helpings of soup and the day he got to eat beef ribs and emadhase. The monks performed their tasks with consistent grace and no sign of verbal bruising. The leaders kept on as though everything was under tight control. And I kept focusing on just the teachings, not worrying what Rinpoche and the monks were going to eat because it was not my assignment. Rinpoche was showing such mastery of One Taste, I wanted very much to do that too.

Truth hiding behind appearance is what Buddhadharma is all about. And so it was at this retreat.

I dedicate it all to the memory of Joan.





~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

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.5 License.
Click here to request Sandy Garson for reprint permission.

Yours In The Dharma 2001-2008, Sandy Garson @copy: 2001-2008 Sandy Garson
All rights Reserved