6 posts tagged “buddhism”

For generosity, nothing to do,
Other than stop fixating on self.

For morality, nothing to do,
Other than stop being dishonest.

For patience, nothing to do,
Other than not fear what is ultimately true.

For effort, nothing to do,
Other than practice continuously.

For meditative stability, nothing to do,
Other than rest in presence.

For wisdom, nothing to do,
Other than know directly how things are.

--translated by Ken McLeod

Lotus

Ever since I was a child, I've been interested in religion, my own and other people's.  One of my earliest memories involving books is of a volume of Greek myths for children; something about the illustrations disturbed me, and I wound up lying awake in bed, convinced that a vulture was going to come out of the closet and eat my liver.  (Perhaps the worst part was that I was not at all sure where my liver actually was.)

I cut my teeth, so to speak, on Greek mythology, on Norse mythology as illustrated by the D'Aulaires and by Willy Pogany, and on Egyptian mythology filtered through books on archaeology and ancient Egyptian culture.  I pored over color plates of Tutankhamen's treasures and learned the story of the cursed ring, the original one, from the Volsungasaga rather than the Nibelungenlied: Sigurd and Brynhild, Andvari and Gudrun.

But I also got interested very early in religion as well as mythology--people's beliefs and practices, as well as their stories.  Perhaps the thing that got me hooked was that big red Time-Life volume on Religions of the World.  It had text, and I read the words, but while I was a good reader at a young age, what I remember now--as with the D'Aulaires' book and Padraic Colum's The Children of Odin--is the pictures:  The D'Aulaires' Thor glaring through his bridal veil; Pogany's slender Loki and his up-curling hair, nibbling daintily on Gullveig's burnt black heart; the two-page color painting of all those Hindu gods and goddesses,  with Vishnu and Lakshmi on one page, Shiva and Parvati on the other, Brahma and Sarasvati split by the spine, and all sorts of gandharvas, apsarases, nagas,  and lesser deities around them; the golden vestments of a Greek Orthodox priest, offering communion to a small child on a silver spoon; the intensely saffron robes of Buddhist monks. 

By the time I was ten, I think, I had graduated to books with more words than pictures.  I recall a book with some black-and-white photos that I think was called The Five Great Religions; Amazon lists a book by that title with a publication date of 1974, which sounds about right.  This book had chapters on Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Buddhism, and one other--what was it? Hinduism?  Sikhism, possibly?  I'm not sure.  But books like the Time-Life volume, and The Five Great Religions, and Religions of the World, which must have been a college-level textbook with chapters on everything from Mesopotamian polytheism to Shinto, all taught me one important lesson.  They taught me to think of Christianity not as Religion, but as one religion among others--a great and important religion, a world religion (unlike limited and local polytheisms), but still just one of many, and by no means the most colorful or interesting one.  The pictures in the chapters on Christianity had nothing on that sensual and colorful spread of the deities of Hinduism.

Another thing that strikes me now is how very dull those books made Buddhism look.  I realize now that they concentrated on the Theravada traditions of Burma, Thailand, and Ceylon, which focus on self-liberation through the monastic life.  In those cultures, people who can't go off and live lives of monastic renunciation basically can't do anything meritorious except support the monastics and hope for a favorable rebirth in which such a life will be possible.  I'd have gotten interested in Buddhism much sooner if they'd offered me descriptions of Vajrayana ceremonies and pictures of thangkas or dancing lamas.  (That's "lama" with one "L".)

 I've come to a conclusion about something:  If there's any religion that can substantiate a claim to be The One True Religion in the World, it's Buddhism.

I know that's a pretty strange thing for me to say, an Episcopalian turned Druid who never quite accepted Christianity's claims to be the One True Way.  (I always found other people's religions too interesting.)  I've come to this conclusion, and to the point of daring to voice it aloud, after more than a year of reading about Buddhism, particularly Tibetan Buddhism, of experimenting with sitting meditation, of looking at Tibetan Buddhist sacred art and listening to Tibetan Buddhist ritual music.

My conclusion is that Buddhism is not so much a religion as a philosophy and a set of disciplines or a toolkit that can merge successfully with any existing religion and transform it.  Even a cursory glance at Buddhism and its history--and, to be truthful, that's about all that a year's study amounts to--shows that it melded with pre-existing religions in India, its birthplace, in China, Japan, Tibet, and the rest of southeast Asia.  Each of the great traditions of Buddhism has its own flavor, imparted by the teachers who carried it but also by the cultures that received it. The twist is that by "religion" I mean exactly the opposite of what most Western thinkers have meant by it for over 1500 years: I mean what is now called polytheism, animism, pantheism, ancestor worship, in other words, everything that "religion" meant before the monotheisms of Christianity and Islam began to dominate world culture.

The more I learn about Tibetan Buddhism, the more I find it essentially sane.  Underneath its exotic, colorful surface, underneath its intellectual complexity, it is essentially sane and simple.  It is about love, defined as wishing others to be happy; compassion, wishing others to be free from suffering; joy, sharing others' pleasure in their own happiness; and equanimity, having love, compassion, and joy toward all beings impartially.  It's about dedicating one's own quest for freedom, wisdom, empowerment to being able to help others get free.  It emphasizes the basic goodness of all beings, the basic joy and freedom of existence, the nobility of bodhichitta.  Bodhichitta is hard to translate into English, because the Sanskrit word "chitta" means both "heart" and "mind".  Bodhichitta is the wise heart and mind that seeks to liberate all beings from delusion so that they can be their best selves; it is the motivation to succeed in order to help others.

In addition to its essential sanity, the other quality which Tibetan Buddhism impresses on me is its completeness.  Again, I'm going to have to talk about that by first using words from Buddhist tradition, then backing up and seeing how those definitions might apply outside Buddhism.

Buddhism has described itself for centuries in terms of three "vehicles" or yanas.  The Hinayana or "Little Vehicle" is the way of the seeker concerned with his or her own condition: achieving enlightened awareness and getting out of the trap of rebirth, desire, frustration, death, rebirth, which in Sanskrit is samsara. It's about cleaning up your own act, pure and simple.  The Mahayana or "Great Vehicle" introduces the notion of bodhichitta, which is practiced by the bodhisattva.  The bodhisattva is someone who has vowed to achieve enlightenment, not merely for their own sake, but for the sake of all sentient beings, as the traditional phrase has it.  Some bodhisattvas have vowed not to leave the world of rebirth and enter nirvana until all other beings have done so--to be the last one out of the burning building, as it were.  The six paramitas or perfect virtues are the watchwords of the bodhisattva: generosity, ethical behavior, patience and forbearance, enthusiasm and effort, meditation, and wisdom.

The Hinayana tradition is sometimes identified with the Theravada tradition practiced in Sri Lanka and other countries south of India, but that is often seen as unfairly limiting.  Tibetan Buddhist teachers do not make that identification; rather, they seem to say that the Hinayana is where an individual needs to start; you need to get your act together (Hinayana) before you can take it on the road (Mahayana).  The Mahayana traditions include  Tibetan Buddhism, Ch'an Buddhism in China, and its better-known descendant Zen in Japan, Korea, and Viet Nam.

Tibetan Buddhism includes both Hinayana and Mahayana teachings, but its most distinctive characteristics belong to the third vehicle, the Vajrayana or "Diamond Vehicle".  The Vajrayana consists of teachings intended to allow the practitioner to achieve enlightenment in a single lifetime; they are a shortcut to Get You There
Now.  Much of these teachings consist of visualization practices that include secret mantras, complex mandalas, and identifying oneself with the visualized deity.  Traditionally, they can only be practiced if one is "empowered" to do so, that is, initiated by a teacher who has also been empowered.

If the Hinayana emphasis on taking care of oneself (and its often devotional manifestation, for laypeople, in Theravadin Buddhist cultures centered on the ordained monastic community) can be compared to Protestant Christianity, and the compassionate, self-giving bodhichitta of Mahayana, with its many saint-like bodhisattvas, can be compared to Roman Catholic Christianity, the only thing the Vajrayana can be compared to is magic.  In Western culture, in Christianity, those high-speed, short-cut techniques of transformation have been cut off from religion proper and relegated to the realms of magic, the occult, the forbidden and transgressive.  The banishment of our Western Vajrayana has been so complete and effective that most people do not even think of magic as a form of union with the Divine, a way of becoming one's best self; they know it only as a means of controlling reality or other people, of attracting love, money, or power that one cannot gain legitimately, by normal means.

Ceremonial magical traditions teach that magic may have two purposes: thaumaturgy and theurgy.  Thaumaturgy, literally "wonder-working", is magic for purposes such as healing, attracting wealth, gaining knowledge, or any basically practical purpose.  Theurgy, "god-working", is magic meant to elevate the human being to godhood; to attain union with the gods or God and manifest the greatest potentials of the self.  Mainstream Christian theology, centered on the fourth-century doctrine of original sin, developed to a point where either of those goals was (and is) considered unacceptable, an attempt to usurp Divine prerogatives.  (Of course quite a lot of Christian ceremonial magicians would disagree.)

What fascinates me in Tibetan Buddhism is that all these different aspects of religion--devotion and ritual, self-improvement, service to others, and magical transformation--have remained united, and have been practiced equally (if not always to the same extent) by monastics and laypeople.  You don't have to be an ordained monastic to meditate, study with a teacher, or take Vajrayana empowerments; on the other hand, you don't have to be Tibetan to get ordained, either--there are some notable American-born Tibetan Buddhist teachers, such as Lama Surya Das and Pema Chodron.

I think what I'm looking for as I study Tibetan Buddhism is a way to put those pieces back together, to reunite magic, devotion, theurgy, thaumaturgy, service, and philosophy in a Western cultural context, as a Druid.  I'm looking Eastward to see what light the Buddhist traditions shed on the West, and that light is considerable.  It's not that I don't think the West has worthwhile traditions of its own, but the fire has been damped down on our altars.  A little borrowed flame from the East could help re-kindle it.
 

The other day I sat down to do some long-postponed computer maintenance.  My home computer is a Windows PC that is now about five years old—a feeble senior citizen in the world of computers.  I went through my personal files of pictures and documents and deleted a great many things, then ran the defragmentation tool for the first time, with some trepidation.  I hope the computer is happier; so far, I have not seen any enormous improvement in performance, but I suppose time (and repeated defragging) will tell.

While clearing out files, I opened and looked at a lot of documents to determine whether to keep or discard them, most of which were writing practices or extracts from my old longhand notebooks.  Almost all of the dubious documents I skimmed to evaluate were either snippets of erotic fiction that I had hoped to incorporate into some longer work or reflections on my religious orientation and spiritual state of being.  Much of both types of writing dated from late 2004; I must have been determined then to start archiving longhand material on the hard drive and to use the computer more, the notebook less (a thing which has now come to pass).

That was two days ago.  This morning one of those spiritual-state-of-being snippets is still with me: a reflection on two of my favorite writers, Ursula K. Le Guin and Gary Snyder.  Snyder and Le Guin are both long-time residents of the Pacific Northwest, and much of their writing, poetry, fiction, or essay, is grounded in that terrain and shows an intimate concern with it, ecologically, politically, spiritually.  In that snippet from October 2004, I lamented that both these writers, living on the Pacific Rim, were oriented toward cultures across the Pacific; Snyder toward Japan, China, Zen, and the other traditions of Buddhism, Le Guin toward Taoism and its literature.  I, on the other hand, was firmly and continuingly oriented toward “the West”—that is, toward European culture, European literature, Christianity, and specifically Anglican Christianity.

“Orient” means the east.  To be oriented is, at root, to be facing east.  The writers I described as being oriented to “the Orient” are looking westward across the Pacific.  The culture I called the West, the Occident, is located to the east of me, across the Atlantic.  Orient, Occident, east, west—ultimately, these terms have little meaning to people who live on a turning globe where printing, publishing, and the Internet can make the language, literature, religion, and culture of people thousands of miles away accessible, available.

The greater irony behind this is that now, two and a half years later, I, too, am looking East (or is it West?)—looking toward “Eastern religions” to provide me with something that my “Western” European heritage does not. 

I am looking to Shinto, the indigenous, pre-Buddhist religion of Japan, to provide me with models of what a living polytheism looks like in a world of cars, computers, and pollution, a world where “religion” is defined in ways antithetical to the Shinto experience.  Shinto has no founder; it has sacred texts, but no scriptures; it focuses on ritual, on action, rather than devotional feeling, intellectual agreement on dogma, or ethical codes; and it remains inextricably grounded in place, in nature, in mystery.  Here we will build a shrine, for here people have encountered that mysterious aspect of nature which the Japanese language calls kami,and two thousand years later, people are still visiting that shrine, that place, and having that encounter with mystery.

Western scholars of religion have looked at Shinto and predicted that it will fade away because it is too “primitive”, not intellectual enough, without an ethical code to guide behavior, without substantive teachings on the afterlife and the results of good or bad behavior.  Yet the same Japan that is full of factories, cell phones, anime, Hello Kitty, and all the rest is also still full of Shinto shrines, which are regularly visited by a large percentage of the population.  Clearly, something is going on with Shinto which Western definitions of religion as the experience of a privileged founder, enshrined in a canonical holy text and passed on in dogma and ethical precepts, do not encompass.

I am also looking to Buddhism, particularly to the Mahayana and Vajrayana traditions of Tibet.  In a lifetime of being interested in other people’s religions as well as my own, Buddhism is the one religion in which I have never been terribly interested.  Perhaps the Four Noble Truths just don’t make the right impression on a precocious child with more vocabulary than life experience.  But a chance connection of associations led me to start reading about Buddhism last year, for the first time in decades, and I began to find something I didn’t know I was missing: practical instruction in how to deal with nagging negative emotions like anger, irritation, anxiety, worry, and an approach to compassion and service to others that didn’t involve making oneself miserable in their stead.

For years I had been beating my head against a wall of frustration—against the hard truth that Christian prayer, the Daily Office, the Eucharist, were not making me a kinder, more patient, more compassionate person.  I could walk down a city street, fingering my rosary and repeating the profound, inspiring words of my beloved Julian of Norwich, the English visionary recluse whose book of her visions is the first English text written by a woman, and turn instantly from her words about divine love and forgiveness to cursing a driver who threatened me with a careless turn, or sneering at a woman I thought was badly dressed, and then snap back to the prayer, almost without perceiving the contradiction.  A few chapters of Pema Chodron’s remarkable book No Time to Lose had more effect on my general levels of irritability and judgmentalism than decades of daily psalms, and I had to stop and think about that.  I’m still thinking about it, in fact.

When I looked to the Christian tradition for practical help in dealing with anger, anxiety, frustration, and the like, I found three ancient counsels that go back to the earliest monasticism of the Church: prayer, fasting, and vigils.  Prayer meant memorizing and reciting the words of Scripture, especially the Psalms, and meditating on them.  Fasting, of course, means not eating.  Vigils meant staying awake and limiting one’s sleep in order to pray more.  What do you get when you add up not eating and not sleeping in order to repeat, over and over, something you’re supposed to believe, or else?  I think it’s called “brainwashing”.  I decided there had to be a better way of dealing with my negative emotions than brainwashing myself.

I no longer brainwash myself to believe a map of the world that doesn’t match my experience.  Instead I watch my own experience and look for sources that confirm or explain it—in Celtic mythology, in Shinto, in Buddhism, in discussion with other members of my Druid order.  Orient or occident, before me or behind me, to my right hand or my left, above and below, spirit is all around me, and my druidry grows out of my encounters with its mystery and power in daily life.

I feel blue, but not in the usual sense of the term. Green is my favorite color, yet I seem to want to look at the color blue lately. I have changed my desktop color to Classic Windows Blue, and at home my wallpaper is this lovely Medicine Buddha. Blue is associated with healing in Tibetan Buddhism.

Medicinebuddha

Perhaps something is healing in me right now, or something needs healing.  Perhaps it is something to do with creativity, creative ideas, the goddess Athena, the throat chakra, music, poetry, speech, writing, song--all things which I associate with the color blue. Blue is a calming color, a color that lowers the blood pressure and soothes the mind.

I need soothing. Despite my attempts to avoid emotional drama in real life and online, to read, watch, and listen to nothing that arouses anger, exasperation, or any "red" sort of emotion, I keep generating drama myself, or if not drama precisely, then angst. I am quite happy with my job, my home, my marriage, my pets, but I am the Queen of Angst when it comes to my spiritual life.

I recently joined a Neopagan, druidic organization which bases its theologies and practice on the religions of the Indo-European cultures of Europe--Greek, Roman, Irish, Baltic, what have you.  (If you're familiar with the Neopagan scene, you probably know what group I mean.)  But after a couple of weeks perusing their website and my membership materials, and hanging out on some of their web fora, I had the uncomfortable realization that they had One Right Way of doing things, and that way was not mine. It's extremely important to this group that one read the right books, and avoid and disparage the wrong books; that one look to scholarship about the ancient cultures and their religions as normative for one's own spirituality; that one study, invest intellectual energy, and learn a great deal of information.

Unfortunately, that information does not seem to translate into practical applications.  It didn't seem to make the members who were active on the webgroups more patient, gentle, and compassionate in dealing with newcomers or with one another.  It didn't seem to lead to innovations in ritual; all of the rituals I saw on the website looked a good deal alike.  It didn't seem to motivate people to live more lightly and take better care of the Earth, or at least there was little discussion of such issues.  It reminded of nothing so much as the people who translate Shakespeare into Klingon or learn to write Elvish with a brush pen--except that the lovers of Klingon and Elvish do it for the sheer pleasure of the doing, whereas the members of this Druid group seemed to do it for the sake of spiritual one upsmanship.

I didn't renounce my membership and flounce off in a huff, but I detached, largely by unsubscribing to most of the e-mail lists.  Then, after feeling rather peaceful for a couple of days, I began angsting about whether I should be involved with Druidry at all.  Did I really want to pursue Second and Third Degrees in AODA and try to start a local Druid group here in my mid-Atlantic state?  Perhaps I should concentrate on the New Hermetics, with which I'd had a good deal of success, and not worry about a specifically Celtic, nature-based path.  I should certainly be doing New Hermetics work every day, and twice on weekends, yes indeed.

Fortunately, a long, rambling, intimate post-dinner talk with my spouse cured me of that nonsense. *Of course* I want to study with and advance in AODA, because whatever I do, whatever I decide is right for me spiritually, they'll support me in it, even if the nearest AODA member to me lives about two hours away.  That includes doing New Hermetics work and even experimenting with Tibetan Buddhist practices, which I am attracted to right now.  It is typical of me that when I become interested in Buddhism (or anything), I am attracted to the most complex, brightly-colored kind of Buddhism, with the most unusual names.

So I am reading about Tibetan Buddhism and may actually finish Bob Thurman's The Jewel Tree of Tibet in the near future, having picked it up and put it down several times. What I'm reading resonates with me, the way a great bell continues to resonate long after it is struck, and the overtones keep humming even if one doesn't consciously hear them.  The theories, the practices, the art, the stories, the mantras, are all humming in my head, and I am feeling calmly blue and waiting to hear what the blue Medicine Buddha wants  to say to me.