Happy News for a Happy New (Tibetan) Year (and Meditation Lesson 5)

Today, March 2, 2014 is Losar, Tibetan New Year and this message came from one of the most revered and savvy expounders of Tibetan Buddhism, His Eminence Dzongsar Khyentse Rinpoche, in his own English:

Buddha’s teaching on dependent arising distinguishes him from all others as the supreme expounder of the truth. Once dependent arising has been pointed out to us, it’s a truth so blatantly obvious that we wonder how we missed it. Yet in our daily lives, our craving for independence is so strong that we forget how entirely dependent we really are.

We may notice that we depend on food, for example, on shelter and even friendship, but we forget, or perhaps fail to notice, the fine and intricate web of subtle phenomena upon which we are equally reliant. And because we ignore this  reality, we find ourselves falling over and over again into a realm of disappointment, where we become numb because we are too hopeful and then sink into the agony of hopelessness.

But the truth is that our conditioning rules us. We both create conditions and depend on conditions, some of which are good, and others we wouldn’t wish on our worst enemies. Those of us alive today are extremely fortunate because the name of Shakyamuni Buddha still exists and still has meaning.  Shakyamuni Buddha is therefore an important condition, a "dependent arising," that can help us shape our lives.

For those who don't know what dependent arising means, the facile explanation is: you never walk alone, or no man is an island and even if he is, he's part of the sea. There is no such thing as independence, absolutely nothing that exists all by itself with no connection to absolutely anything else.  No. Life, the universe, the whole shebang is just one thing after another, a shaggy dog story in which the hip bone's connected to the shin bone and the shin bone's connected to the ankle bone and you're no home alone.

What the Buddha realized is that everything that happens happens only as the result of something that just happened, endlessly. There's no start or finish. More importantly perhaps, there's no straight line: it's all an endless spinning circle of one event leading to the next in repeating cycles. He drew a wheel of interdependent origination with 12 sectors, one feeding into the next and so on back around. Dharma students study and often have to memorize the 12 nidanas, links of interdependence. And you can do this easily through books or even on the web by searching Nidanas. 

So instead let's talk about what interdependent origination means to us everyday. The Vietnamese Zen Buddhist elder Thich Nhat Hanh wrote a beautiful short tract tracing all the links in, for instance, your breakfast glass of orange juice, starting with the sun that shines on the tree, the person whose land the tree rises from, the rain that waters it, the person who tends the tree, the people who tend the person who tends the tree and so on until the entire universe is in your stomach with that orange juice.

The Japanese Zen roshis will ask you: Who was your mother before your mother was born?  This brings us to ancestors without whom we would not be here. You know that old joke: children are hereditary. Chances are if your parents didn't have any, you won't have any either. So we owe our existence to thousands upon thousands of beings who came before us and did whatever they did to survive, reproduce and allow their children to survive.

His Holiness the Dalai Lama always speaks of compassion, how caring for others and being connected to others comes back to us as happiness because there's no way we can avoid contact with others. We're told to treat every single being as our precious mother because, see ancestors above, energy never dies it just morphs, so at some point earlier in time any living being we encounter today could have been our mother. We have a debt to pay.

And that brings us to the law of karma, lately known as what goes  'round comes 'round, once known as "give and ye shall receive." The law of karma unlike the laws of Congress is simple: karma literally means action, as in an action-reaction--reaction chain of events. Its law says virtuous action begets blessings and more virtue while harmful action unleashes negative energy and thus distressing events. According to the law of karma, you can change the course of your life by changing your current karma: every virtuous action you commit will produce a positive outcome for you, the more the merrier. Nothing happens haphazardly or mysteriously if you look closely enough. That's why sometimes, as I've said before based on my sometimes painful personal experience, not getting what you want turns out to be the happily ever after your good karma earned you.

And finally, interdependent origination on the most mundane basis brings us to adjectives and the way we sling them around. Good bad, small, tall, here, there, east, west.....What makes you so sure? Adjectives are a rush to judgement, a search for the absolute, when in fact everything is relative. This is to say, what you see is merely the effect of a momentary collision of causes, action and reaction. So in a second it will all be different: new action and reaction. Everything is always in play like this and thus continually shifting. Nothing is as fixed as you may think it is.

Take this idea of good and bad. As i think I've written before, Tibetans might describe the Chinese invasion of their country and the genocide still going on as bad, really really bad. But can we say that it was all bad when in fact it was the Chinese pushing the Tibetans out of their country that cracked the shell on their secret wisdom and let it leak to us. So what happened to Tibet has been good for us. The Dalai Lama says: Nothing is all bad.

Here's how my beloved Rinpoche likes to explain how adjectives confuse and muddy up our perception of reality: hold up your hand, either one will work. Now extend upward your pinky and your ring finger. Look at those two: one is small, one is big, right? Your ring finger is a big finger, right? Okay, now put down your pinky and thrust up your middle finger. Uh oh. Is your ring finger still big? What just happened?

There's the theory of relativity for you, the theory of dependence on causes, the teaching that nothing exists in a vacuum by itself unchanged by any connection to anything else. So that's us: a huge mash-up of causes and conditions changing so constantly we can't pinpoint anything as fixed.

So happy new year.  None of us are stuck; none of us are good or bad or tall or short or anything at all except changing. When you sit quietly and meditate, watching your thoughts streaming endlessly across your attention span, you can see the constant changing. If you look more carefully, you can even see how one thought leads right into another, interdependent origination in HD. And when you really see that, you begin to see how you alone are the master of your own fate. Happy New Year of the Wooden Horse. May it carry you to the joy of no suffering.

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