THE SECOND HELPING

At the feeding frenzy that is Thanksgiving, it's not hard to see what Americans mean when they insist God helps those who help themselves. I for one am still waiting to taste the Harvard beets that never got to me six years ago because somebody else short-stopped them and dug in too deep. This year the white meat was gone by the time I got to the turkey.

The morning after this beloved ritual of stuffing, grabbing gravy, and insisting everything has been served with a sprinkle of God’s blessing, it's also easy to see how the Protestant ethic, God helps those who help themselves, is the modus operandi of America's gluttonous economic system too. That's become the same sort of feeding frenzy, only with different people at the table. Once we ordinary “turkeys” are eagerly killed and gobbled up, these stuffed ones help themselves to the gravy made from us. Only they don't bother to pretend to give thanks.

A society this devoted to helping yourself has created a weird hierarchy in which people get rewarded in inverse proportion to how they benefit others. We so value grabbing over sharing, those who actually commit their lives to doing something vital for somebody else—social workers, schoolteachers, caregivers-- end up trashed at the poverty level of an income scale that shoots to the moon for people who do absolutely nothing but play with money, people who say of themselves, "we eat what we kill" without the slightest compunction to share. If you don’t believe me about the perversion of payrolls, read the Nobel winning economist Paul Krugman who this morning said in the New York Times, “there’s broad agreement — I’m tempted to say, agreement on the part of almost everyone not on the financial industry’s payroll — with Mr. Turner’s assertion that a lot of what Wall Street and the City do is “socially useless.”

The Buddha, of course, said the cosmos helps those who help others, because what goes round comes back at you. That’s karma, or destiny, a promise that it really is good for you to do and be good to others. And it isn’t supposed to be fattening.

As it happens, on the Dzogchen Ponlop paramita practice calendar, November is for meditation, which he says actually means honing the qualities of a Bodhisattva. First and most famously among them is the will to help others. So to balance the press prattle about takers, I’d like thank some givers. And I’d like to start with all those anonymous folks who spend their entire work year sewing up and blowing up those awesome balloons in the annual Macy’s Thanksgiving parade. Snoopy… Superman… Santa Claus…how wondrous to work only to put joy in the world! What would life be like if everyone’s job goal was to make others innocently happy like that?

I would like thank those who actually forego all monetary income and physical pleasures to become bearers of the Buddhadharma, actually living out the aspiration to help all sentient beings. This is not so easy. The Rinpoche level requires the stamina and stoicism for endless airport marathons of security checks, visa approvals and missed connections. Plus a punishing schedule with a different location almost every week, surprise food and strange beds, infinite interviews with total strangers, infinite requests for help. How they suffer to alleviate others' suffering.

At the lower levels, the food is terrible and the accommodations anything but gracious. Think floor. I think about an accomplished monk who struggled mightily without English language skills or familiarity to stick to his post in the middle of nowhere Colorado. Last year at this time, when he was packed and ready, he was denied a visa that would have let him go home to see his seriously ill mother in the Himalayas. He is still here, smiling and guiding those in retreat while other monks considered also seriously devoted to the Dharma burst out of their robes because the bright temptations of our culture—the gifts, attention and meals respectfully offered—blinded them to the beauty of their calling. Suddenly it seemed bleak. Now one is wandering somewhere in Ohio, struggling to find a job, finding out that no one tends to the needs of just another unemployed, unskilled guy in jeans.

I give thanks to the Nepali bamboo flute genius Manose who for the last two years has been circling the globe delighting and inspiring people with intensely sacred sound from his bansuri. His music so touches the human spirit that his CDs keep topping the charts and selling out, not only at yoga centers but Target stores. “I have enough money,” he says, “and it just keeps coming so I tell people: ‘Don’t pay me. Send money to help people in Nepal.’”

Thanks also to everyone who plucks a guitar string, hits a piano key or blows into a flute because no harm can come from this, only joy—after all the frustration of getting it right, of course. But thanks for sticking to the flatted fifths and syncopations and scat singing, because I totally agree with the country music disk jockey who used to close his hour-long NPR show with the tag line: “Just remember, making music is never the wrong thing to do.”

And thanks to those like Emmanuel from Silicon Valley by way of Nigeria who two weeks ago saw a photo of school kids in Nepal playing soccer in bare feet, and immediately tapped out an email message saying: “Soccer is my sport so I’d like those kids to love it too. I want to buy them shoes. How can I do that?”

Like Sioga who wrote from Ireland last week, “I am a retired nurse, a Buddhist for 35 years…a mother of two adult sons, widow and farmer, horse breeder and master gardener, with a passion for gardening. This past summer I spent in voluntary work with Wwoof Ireland, 'willing workers on organic farms traveling around Ireland, working in various gardens, tunnels, restoring a walled-garden, composting, soil amending, small animal care, and learned so much, shared of myself, time and talents in this exchange. …So, I have experience and confidence in the garden, and kitchen and would be glad to offer to be of service.”

Thanks even to those like the San Francisco dentist who last week said: “Even if you don’t have insurance coverage, I feel so strongly you should have X-rays that I will only charge you half price.” What a tidy resolution to a health care crisis!


~Sandy Garson
"Wordsmithing to attest how the Dharma saved me from myself!"

http://www.sandygarson.com

http://yoursinthedharma.blogspot.com/

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Worth The Trip

The Dzogchen Ponlop Rinpoche paramita practice calendar made October exertion month, and by the most auspicious coincidence, precisely the time my own Rinpoche was a mere hundreds instead of the more normal thousands of miles—and oceans —away. So I made the enormous effort to go see him for the weekend he went public. And, as it turned out, so did dozens of others. Here’s to them, and to everyone who goes the extra mile to get to the Dharma.

In “namtar” (spiritual biographies), talks and texts of commentary, we are continually reminded of the long, perilous journeys seekers of the Buddha’s truth were forced to endure to pick up a kernel or two of it. Great gurus were made by great hardships crossing the Himalayas, or in the case of Atisha around the year 1,000 A.D., crossing the Bay of Bengal to get to Sumatra. Not long after that, the remarkable yogi Rechungpa trekked from Tibet to India in the desperate throes of leprosy, fueled by dogged determination, and consequently brought back to the Vajrayana the practice of Vajrapani. The late Tulku Urgyen in his juicy memoir Blazing Splendor reminds us that even in the 20th Century, devout Khampas on pilgrimage to Lhasa or Tsurphu endlessly confronted bandits, burst bridges, worn horses and dwindled food supplies, yet they persevered. And right on the turn of the millennium, His Holiness Karmapa escaped Chinese captivity in order to get authentic teaching by slogging through snowdrifts at night and riding ponies down the steep escarpments of sacred Nepalese valleys.

Framed in this grand perspective, four hours, a flat tire and a speeding ticket on the unnerving I-5 plus one hour in enervating LA freeway traffic and another madly dodging the absurdly dodgy drivers on the freeways around San Francisco Bay does not look like suffering. Especially when the reward was two days of teaching and a talk on how Dharma can help you surf the heavy waves of these troubled times.

Still, only gumption gets you going to an unknown city where you must push your way through a puzzling and poorly marked maze of speedways, nest in a generic motel and scratch alien territory for decent, safe food, all in order to grab a seat in a strange space where mostly strangers who seem to know each other are packed in like sardines and lines for the toilet are long. Nobody ever talks about this sometimes disconcerting and spooky experience. So it was immensely gratifying for Rinpoche to open his remarks by acknowledging how everyone crammed into that room had deflected the abundant, glitzy distractions of Los Angeles, including a beach that was probably an easier place to be in the abnormally high heat of that mid October weekend. He thanked us for this amazing choice of coming to hear Dharma, because we didn’t have to.

According to what I heard and overheard, what people didn't have to endure to be there included two other flat tires and a delayed flight. Those who came by air constantly had to find rides and those who had cars had to find parking places good for at least three hours. One woman drove alone more than a day and parked herself in a bare bones off-ramp motel to be at this gathering where she knew absolutely no one. There was no food within walking distance except McDonald's or scary prepacked salad at a low-grade supermarket, and no GPS guidance toward a real meal. One couple drove six hours each way and stayed only two hours because they had to get back. One couple drove eight hours each way to stay slightly more than 24, due to pressures from work. Every effort was made, as some Dharma defenders like to say, to be here now.

The reward was a “head” start on surviving these desperate times. Rinpoche advised those of us who had bothered to be there to rely on aspiration prayers, particularly the Verses of the Eight Noble Auspicious Ones by the late Jamgon Mipham Rinpoche. Other students had reported back on its astonishingly positive effect, and if that wasn’t convincing enough there was, as always, the ancient story of the dog’s tooth actually becoming a Buddha relic because the old woman on whom it had been foisted off steadfastly believed in it to have that kind of power.

For those still skeptical of aspiration prayers or those who wanted a two-pronged putsch, Rinpoche recommended relying on the boomerang karma known as merit: being generously charitable to others inevitably brings good fortune back at you. What goes round comes round. And of course the third way was the Lojong slogan loosely translated as: remembering emptiness is the best protection. That is to say, never lose the view of Mahamudra in which impermanence is peripheral vision and emptiness the center of attention. Nothing is really happening and even if you think it is, it's all going to change to yet another happening in a second. Don't get sucked in and hooked.

In other words, just getting there and back didn't do it for the paramita practice. Any which way you went, exertion definitely had to extend way beyond October. But then, Dzogchen Ponlop says exertion really means overcoming your laziness to find joy in the Dharma


~Sandy Garson
"Wordsmithing to attest how the Dharma saved me from myself!"

http://www.sandygarson.com

http://yoursinthedharma.blogspot.com/

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The Land of the Fee and Home of the Rave

What can you say about the theater of the absurd health care drama this past week? It takes a pillage?

Well, here we are at the 20th anniversary of real freedom, the fall of the Berlin Wall, conveniently forgetting it's also the bigger anniversary of Kristallnacht.

And here we are at yet another commemoration of Veterans' Day with only a Demander in Chief to lead us veterans of scarring wars with the barbarians of the insurance industry and Huns of Wall Street. Ah domestic violence.

Pity, these headlines. I so love excuses to drink champagne.

~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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EVERY DAY IN THE DHARMA IS HALLOWEEN

I’ve never thought of Halloween as Buddhist practice, but that weird and scary truth collided with me last night in the middle of San Francisco’s Castro Street costume cavalcade. It hit me as a bigger surprise than my even being there, for as far as I knew, I was going late in the afternoon to my friend Sonia’s Day of the Dead food fiesta in the abutting Mission district. Tall and lanky Sonia comes from Spain where this season of death and shut down Americans signify with Halloween is celebrated as el dia de los muertes, making it her turn to make dinner for the handful of family-less young foreign professionals I’ve brought together. We gather on each other’s holidays for kitchen revels we call “family” dinners.

This one started later than we anticipated. As it did, Billy and Ana, who comes from Cuba, consulted an iPhone pumpkin face app and carved a feline face on the great pumpkin offered to me that morning as a friendship gift. Once a candle was safely nestled in it, all of us went to work on the array of dishes Sonia managed to create in an aging studio apartment kitchen of minimal equipment: vegetarian paella, tuna empanada, potato omelet (tortilla espagnola), sopa secca, leek soup and Catalonian chicken with stewed fruits. Between bites, we talked about the meaning of Halloween, and thus equivalent rites and rituals in the countries we represented. After a desert buffet, Nepalis, Ram and Rakita, announced they needed a walk to digest this culinary extravaganza.

Actually, we were all feeling our stomachs as round as that devilishly flickering pumpkin, but since more family was en route, only four of us went out into the noisy nightscape. "Where are the costumes we've heard about?", the Nepalis innocently asked. Chinese-American San Francisco native Wayne turned us up 18th Street toward the Castro.

The infamous epicenter of Halloween hoopla was only five blocks away and every couple yards, the crowds and mayhem we had to walk through thickened. We were brushing against convicts in stripes, a bevy of crossdressed blue tints, pirates, footballers and cavemen, stepping aside for Alice in the white pinafore of Wonderland, Clarabel, Dr. Spock, Spiderman, Superman, happy hookers with brightly painted faces and a serenely sleek white jellyfish. Almost every building was decorated with cobwebs, goblins, black cats, spiders and pumpkins candle lit. Nothing seemed untouched by this occasion. Effort had definitely been made. Even the almost full and ghoulishly jolly moon contributed special effect. I in my ordinary everyday clothes started to feel very self-conscious as we huddled on the corner of Castro Street, trying to not get sideswiped by the onrush.

Bare-chested cowboys passed, a man riding a yellow bathtub duck, the phantom of the opera, clowns, a man dressed as the famous dachshund sign from the now defunct Doggie Diner. “Yesterday I passed an entire elementary school in fairy tale trick or treat finery mobbing the local shopping street," I said aloud as though my companions might hear and care. "Then I walked into my office and I felt so let down because nobody was dressed up as anything. ‘Okay,’ I said to perk the atmosphere, ‘trick or treat. I’m disguised as me.’ ”

Castro Street was studded with gaudily sequined studs-- one crossdresser parading by in gorgeously glittery red high heels chunky enough to look comfortable. The crowd flowed like a river of wigs and boas, wicked black witch hats and bared human flesh. In the midst of such a carnival of free flying imagination, I stood as…well, as me. Others had for a brief and certainly shining moment escaped by pretending to be somebody else, and there I was stuck on me.

I started to think about not being in costume, of having so defensively declared the day before that I was dressed as myself. Of course, life is a come as you are party, so who would blame me? But still, if given this one chance to do otherwise, why did I so stubbornly show up as myself? That translates as my self, when as a Buddhist I’m supposed to dump the my and thus have no self.

Who would think you could start doing Mahamudra in the middle of Halloween night in the Castro? But there I was. Every new costume that came in view came with my question: who is this self I am dressed as? Did clothes make the woman? When are clothes not some kind of costume? Frankly, on that Castro corner the predominant get-up was navy blue San Francisco policeman and it was not pretend because the city was making damned sure there were no shootings as in years past.

I stood there trying not to be jostled by police or paraders, trying to figure out who was dressed in this loose orange and black outfit on my body. Maybe, I whispered to myself, I should’ve made an effort like everybody else out here tonight. I could have dressed up as White Tara or something.

The trick or treat truth of the Dharma hit me like a three-jewels slot machine kaching!

Almost exactly a year ago, Jetsun Tenzin Palmo visited San Francisco and in an intimate Dharma talk, she said our basic ignorance is simply not knowing who we are, not having right awareness. “You are so silly,” she chided. “You don't even realize the joke's on you. You work so hard at visualization practice, struggling to imagine yourself as the deity, don't you? But really all along, the truth is and has been that you already are the deity—visualizing itself all day long as you!”

So there it is. Every day in Samsara is a Halloween costume party. Every day a bright light is burning behind whatever face is carved onto us pumpkins. Every moment on the Buddhist path prior to enlightenment is trick or treat. That's what I learned about life celebrating the day of the dead.

~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.
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Yours In The Dharma 2001-2008, Sandy Garson @copy: 2001-2008 Sandy Garson
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