Yours in the Dharma:  Essays from a Buddhist perspective by Sandy Garson

This blog, Yours in the Dharma by Sandy Garson, is an effort to navigate life between the fast track and the breakdown lane, on the Buddhist path. It tries to use a heritage of precious, ancient teachings to steer clear of today's pain and confusion to clear the path to what's truly happening.

Sunday, March 27, 2011

What Time Is It?

When the lights flickered this afternoon in Nordstrom’s, the Persian woman waiting on me told me how the lights had gone off last week during her dinner party. “It was our New Year,” she said, “so I had quite a job to make a celebration with no electricity.”


This reminded me Persians celebrate Nowruz, which means “new light”, on the vernal equinox. For them the rebirth of spring is the start of the year. They seem to be at the end of a long parade of New Years that seems to start with the Hebrews who were once their neighbors. Jews use the new moon of autumn harvest time for their Rosh Hashonah, which means head or start of the year. Because it's lunar, the date fluctuates from early September to October. Maal Hijra, as Islam's New Year is sometimes called, migrates on our calendar because the Muslim lunar year is 11 days shorter than our Christian solar one. Right now it's working its way backwards through November.



The Chinese have an altogether different lunar imagining, and call their New Year “spring festival” for it marks the end of winter in our February much like Lenten Carnival. The Indians have no agreed turn of the year but instead celebrate Diwali, the festival of lights in the fading days of autumn, and Holi, a literally colorful and chaotic rite of spring that usually takes place in March.



So, the truth is that nobody really knows when a year begins. Or how many months it has. Whether it starts when the harvest is in and life is secured as Hebrew rabbis thought or when the harvest is put in and the seed begins to sprout as the Chinese think. Whether it should be determined by rotations around the sun or proximity to the moon or some combination of both. Or why with us it’s January 1 and not on the December solstice like Christmas is supposed to be, marking the return of light.



All these conflicting ideas of how to calculate the passing days just goes to show that time is no sure thing. It's really whatever we imagine it to be and nothing fixed or guaranteed or substantial. My tomorrow is today in Japan, my summer is fall in Buenas Aires. My New Year’s moment in San Francisco is three hours after the ball falls in Times Square, New York. So when and where is it, the new year?


Mine may not be yours but it is not more right or wrong. We all have our own way of seeing things. That's exactly what the Buddha said: each of us lives in a world of our own making. And what we make of New Year celebrations is a shining example of emptiness, the timeless Buddhist teaching. All our hoopla and ado about somebody else's nothing is a great way to understand what that really means.



~Sandy Garson"Wordsmithing to attest how the Dharma saved me from myself!"
http://www.sandygarson.com
http://yoursinthedharma.blogspot.com/

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Thursday, March 24, 2011

How to Help This Catastrophic World

Last week, my teacher the very venerable Khenchen (great scholar) Thrangu Rinpoche posted this “Call to Prayer”, and I want to share it as a clear example of how a Buddhist meditator ought to think.



In this world there are natural disasters that take the lives of many humans and other sentient beings, or that injure them and cause financial and other difficulties. In recent weeks, there has been an earthquake in New Zealand, which killed several hundred people, and the great earthquake and tsunami in Japan, which took the lives of over ten thousand people and destroyed the homes, possessions, and livelihoods of millions of others. Additionally, problems at a nuclear power plant have caused the release of radioactive gases into the atmosphere. Due to these circumstances, many humans and other living beings have been injured or fallen ill. Their minds are filled with suffering and fear. They are experiencing great difficulties living their lives. In such a time as this, I myself am making as strong aspirations and prayers as I can that such sufferings quickly be pacified, and I encourage my faithful students to also make similar prayers and aspirations.



Maybe we can’t fix the radiation leaks or help comb through the rubble for survivors, maybe we don’t have enough funds to make a difference with food and shelter but as Rinpoche reminds us, many peoples’ minds are now full of suffering and fear, and we do have practices and prayers to help with that. We can do tonglen (sending positive thoughts on the out breath to take away negative ones as we breathe in) or Medicine Buddha (setting the stage for healing) or Chenrezig (praying to vanquish suffering in any form). We can beseech Mahakala to remove obstacles to Japan's renewal. We can sing with gusto the prayer for everyone to find themselves in the joyful paradise of Dewachen where there is no sickness, death or suffering. We have the power to do something.




This call to arms--welcoming arms-- is such good news in such bad times. The world is such a moral mess of spilled egos, it’s hard to know where to focus first. On Japan or Libya or Bahrain or now Burma/Myanmar or Darfur or the pointless suffering caused by Wisconsin and Washington DC? A tsunami of self-absorption and hatred has flooded the planet and threatens to destroy us. Since it is composed entirely of negative man-made energy, and energy keeps morphing without decrease, who's to say the procession of "natural disasters", all the major storms and earthquakes of the past year, isn't simply "the gods angry with us", a way of saying Mother Nature is erupting in gastric distress as she struggles to absorb all our bile?



Rinpoche seems to be saying what he was saying the day after 9/11: what we can really do if we want to do something about these current catastrophes is to pour as much positive energy into the world as we possibly can. We can soothe the situation with mission creep. We can generate a flood of bright light that rolls up against and pushes back this overwhelming flow of black thoughts and negative activity. We can create a high tide of helpfulness against disasters both natural and man made. All that negative energy—that arrogance, aggression and lust for power-- has caused the very sort of suffering our minds have the power to counteract. We can, as Rinpoche says, realize how many minds are filled by fear and try to work with that. Mind-o a mind-o.



The beauty of this is of course that there’s just no way the pure intention to alleviate suffering by praying for others can hurt you. It may even help you vanquish your own.


~Sandy Garson"Wordsmithing to attest how the Dharma saved me from myself!"
http://www.sandygarson.com
http://yoursinthedharma.blogspot.com/

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Monday, March 14, 2011

Knee Jerk Reaction

A month ago, the basic teachings on impermanence and the suffering of change hit me in high definition. I woke up with startling pain in my right knee. Just like that, I couldn’t walk.


The offhand diagnosis—being hands off and over the phone three days after my call for help—was arthritis caused by the degeneration of age. My cartilage had become brittle enough to tear; fluid was rushing into its cracks, swelling up. Cartilage does not heal itself like muscle, bone or blood. It's inert. Cartilage is the canary in the coal mine, the siren that screams: Alert! Here comes time, the tsunami that follows the earthquake of birth. Apparently that's why the doctor said since there was no cure, she would not sign me up for an X-ray.


I thought about friends and family members who’d had trouble with their knees, and sometimes needed to have them replaced. This really depressed me because their stories of cause and effect made my sudden failing seem unfair and pointless. I’d never had the elating moments they enjoyed, the high-energy joys they took in trade for destroying their knees. I wasn’t a daredevil skier or marathon biker or tennis competitor. Nobody has ever accused me of exercise. Why me?


My sudden limp, my having to manage stairs by putting both feet on each step like a child, my need to cling to banisters for dear life made my spirit throb as painfully as my knee. There are certain milestones in life devastating to pass because you wish you could somehow get around them. My first came during my 30th year at a rock concert in a college gym, when moments before the warm-up act, two teen-aged girls approached the row of folding chairs where I sat on the aisle, stopped, turned in and said with much politeness: “Excuse us, ma’am.” It took a decade to get over being old enough to be called “ma’am.” Who knows how long will it now take me to recover from the young man who, when I limped out of Office Depot last week burdened by a ream of paper and a shrink wrapped folding chair, chivalrously rushed over and said: “Let me help you get to your car with that.”


“Why thank you very much,” I said, much surprised and a little flattered. “Oh no need to thank me,” he replied in all sincerity as he took the chair from me. “I like to help old people.”


The Western medical doctor very obviously didn’t want anything to do with me since arthritis isn’t ta-da! curable, and I not so obviously didn’t want anything to do with her offhand offer of physical therapy because, ta da!, it offered not one helpful moment in my three year fight against chronic pain from my neck. PT’s mechanized, militaristic attack on my body turned out to be as brutally and expensively useless as the effort in Iraq or Vietnam, especially after simple and cheap hands-on alternative therapies like posture correction, massage and sacral-cranial touch worked perfectly. So I’ve gone back to acupuncture and taken up indoor swimming (free thanks to Medicare) and smeared on lots of trusty Traumeel cream and do flex stretches here at the computer. I am up and while not exactly running, I can walk without limping all the way.


As life would have it, direct perception is the focus of my weekly Dharma class and last week, the concept of pain came up. I say “concept” because I was immediately reminded of the 9th Karmapa’s very clear teaching in Ocean of Certainty about how to bring pain onto the path to liberation. He starts by asking if you take a knife and stick it into a wooden table, obviously displacing molecules, does the table feel pain? How is this different from sticking a knife into your skin to cut yourself? You feel “pain.” Well, what exactly is that pain? What precisely caused it? Where is it coming from and going to? Can you precisely pinpoint it? What exactly does it feel like? Is every beat as strong as the last or is there variety? People who do this questioning do report that it lessens the intensity of suffering. Evidently, we fixate on the initial shock and replay it over and over as though that’s what’s continuing to happen, when in fact the instant replay of our imagination is preventing the latest real time news from getting through. Pain is often created more by mind than neuro-transmitters.


Anyway, one of the class members brought up the fact that he had a permanent cramping in his foot. At first he was obsessively focused on it, as it was so painful and debilitating it overwhelmed everything in his life. But gradually he remembered the teachings and began the examination of where exactly the pain was emanating from, how often, etc. “And amazingly enough,” he said, “the pain got very manageable. I started to notice that it was itself energy, an energy calling for attention. So I started trying to channel it in a positive way and now even though my foot is still cramping, I don’t notice pain much and just go about my normal life.”



I thought about that the next day when I decided to walk to the bank. The route was flat—recommended —but long: 1½ miles each way. After three blocks I started to feel searing pain in my entire leg, a massive protest against this forward movement. I stopped at the next corner, turned around and told myself I should go back: this was a message that I was making matters worse. I was brought up to be very fearful so I wanted to go back to bed. But another voice kicked in from somewhere and told me to go on ahead, to stop being a wimp and start to fight through the pain. I heard that guy in the Dharma class say his pain was only the stirring of energy. The pain was just energy.


I don’t know how, but I found the courage to walk on. For the next two blocks I did the Tara mantra to work with my not inconsiderable fear. Two more blocks for the Mahakala mantra to remove obstacles (i.e. crippling arthritis)--a little touch of hope, and three or four blocks for Chenrezig, my standby for help with suffering. I made it to the bank and by the time I got back home, I had no pain. I felt like the old... whoops, make that original, me. Later, the Chinese acupuncturist said my pain came from fluid damming the flow of energy around my knee and the forceful circulation from all that walking had broken through its blockage. I had triumphed.


That was quick. The pain is back. So much for impermanence. I so badly want to bargain—I’ll do this if that pain goes away-- that last night I sunk to wondering whether I had been crippled because in moving to a smaller apartment I had to remove the Medicine Buddha thangkha that hung for 10 years over my bed. It’s now in a closet. Was Medicine Buddha mad at me and striking back? I worried. I took the thangkha out of the closet, then told myself: “this is stupid” and put it back. But just in case he did want appeasement--you can never be too careful, I said his mantra three times with my hands clasped in prayer.


This morning I focused on the Tibetan idea that physical ailments are simply manifestations of mind’s dis-ease. This meshes with the concept of pain as blocked energy and with my experience of ailments. My father, who never heard a word I said in any conversation, became hard of hearing before old age. One of my goddaughters was so stressed by her roles as survivor of a best friend, abandoned daughter, and parenting partner of a man who refuses to earn income she developed breast cancer and had to have her femaleness removed. Just as a woman I know who hates heterosexual men “solved that” by developing breast cancer and had hers amputated, making her at least in her mind no longer femininely attractive to them. I who used to stick my neck out way to far to help way too many people ended up with two herniated, useless disks that now prevent me from doing that.


So I have started to rethink this suddenly crippled knee. Something brittle tore, forcing fluid to flow through the cracks, building into a dam that is blocking the energy that would let me propel myself forward as freely and unselfconsciously as I’m used to. Oddly, this actually happened at a particularly painful moment of my life when for the first time, changed financial circumstances made me less flexible, constraining me from traveling abroad and spending my local way around town as freely as I have been used to. Since at my age there's little hope for fixing such brittle circumstances, I have been actively struggling to get the pain of reduced circumstances out of my mind. And in the midst of that suffering, I awoke with such startling physical pain in my knee, my body itself was reduced in scope. It could no longer go forward at will. Was that coincidence or what?


~Sandy Garson"Wordsmithing to attest how the Dharma saved me from myself!"
http://www.sandygarson.com
http://yoursinthedharma.blogspot.com/

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Sunday, March 06, 2011

The Fog of More

Clarity, as anybody trying to practice Dharma knows, is mighty hard to come by. But I somehow had a small Eureka! moment last week, a putting of two and two together that added up to something I’d like to share.


An endless and endlessly crude political race to the bottom, through the bottom line, continues to dominate the news even though it flies in the face and splats on the facts and frustrations of the country. And while people are literally screaming in pain for the social justice of economic and educational opportunity, along with a little rule of law in financial matters like mortgages and credit cards, nothing about this vicious spin of Samsara has been more puzzling than the ambivalent, uncompassionate silence of Barack Obama. Why is there no "their" there?


Well, although nobody else seems to have noticed, a few weeks ago he actually did clear the air about why he doesn't care and there is no they're there. With his wife Michelle Marie Antoinette off skiing in Colorado while ordinary working people protested for their pay, he bid public farewell to his friend and press secretary, Robert Gibbs, a man who laundered and spun rinse cycles as he protested professionally for the pay of $192,000 a year. Since that would pay three firemen to really put out fires or four teachers to set children straight—and they have to fight for the pittance now, we need to note that in his friendly send-off for Gibbs, Obama flipped us all the bird with this bit of flippancy: “Now he can go make some real money.”


Does that clear up the fog of this President’s view for you?

~Sandy Garson"Wordsmithing to attest how the Dharma saved me from myself!"
http://www.sandygarson.com
http://yoursinthedharma.blogspot.com/

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