Reflections

All that glitters is not gold ~ Shakespeare An article called Broken Gold was recently published in the Buddhist magazine Tricycle. In it various students of the dharma reflect upon their disillusionment with their teachers and/or sanghas. The individual contributors are very insightful about their experiences and the article as a whole is a thoughtful contribution to the subject. It details how three people who have been betrayed by their teacher or sangha face their personal “struggle with the story”. This is Buddhist-speak for the persuasive narrative that seduces us into self-pity or adversarial thinking, as in its- me-against-the-world. The moral of the story seems to be one about personal accountability. As the editor writes in her eloquent introduction: … at a certain point what matters most is not so much what shattered one’s trust and scattered one’s sangha, but the question: What heals? And in a way, this is true: what matters is not who-did-what-to-whom and why,...

Knowledge of yourself will preserve you from vanity ~ Miguel de Cervantes Recently, a friend of mine laughed about the piety he observed at his local dharma center. “True self is no self,” he mused, “yet here we are trying to sit the right way, bow the right way, give the right answers and get enlightened. Before meditation we were just full of ourselves. But now the mask of righteousness hides us from ourselves.” His observations on the quest for no-self reminded me of Rousseau's comment about freedom born free but found everywhere in chains . Spiritual practice can definitely serve as a mask that hides us from ourselves. This is particularly true when the self is weak. The weaker we are, the more prone we are to narcissistic defenses that compensate for our feeling naked and exposed. They are inversely proportional to ego strength. In our “culture of narcissism” (as Christopher Lasch once called it), hiding from ourselves has become the rule rather than the exception. And s...

'SAMAYA HO!' exclaimed the Guru. `The bond is formed.' 'SAMAYASTVAM!' I replied. `You are the bond!' 'SAMAYA HRI!' exclaimed the Guru. `The bond is all!' 'SAMAYA TISHTHA!' I replied. `The bond is strong!' 'RAMO HAM!' exclaimed the Guru. `Let the fire burn!' 'RAGAYAMI!' I concluded. `We are burning together!' ~ The Secret Life and Songs of the Lady Yeshe Tsogyel The transmission of teachings in Buddhism is different from intellectual learning. It cannot be learned from books. As Buddha said in his famous Flower Sermon “the subtle Dharma Gate does not rest on words or letters but is a special transmission outside of the scriptures”. This is why it is sometimes called mind-to-mind transmission. In most Buddhist sects, once you receive transmission, you become part of the unbroken thread that began with Shakyamuni. You become your teacher’s dharma heir and belong to his lineage. The 14th Dal...

Even if someone broadcasts to the whole universe slanderous and ugly rumors about you, In return, with an open and caring heart, praise his or her abilities — this is the practice of a bodhisattva. ~ 37 Practices of the Bodhisattva, verse 14 Our first reaction to pain is usually a defensive one, acting from within the closed system of a self-centered narrative. This separates you (the offender) and me (the offended) in a literal way, limiting my action as a self-protective “response” to something you have “done” to me. Whether I act out this response (e.g. by retaliating or by withdrawing from you) or “act it in” (e.g. by repressing my desire to defend myself in these or other ways), I am caught up in the turmoil of the world projected by experience. In this way, taking refuge in a morality or an institution, conforming to guidelines or precepts (such as 'the dharma') as a way to deal with someone else harming me, is no less reactive than adopting a punitive attitu...

Om Gate Gate Paragate Parasamgate Bodhi Svaha! ~ The Heart Sutra And the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time . ~ T S Eliot, Four Quartets We want The Absolute. Whether we call it Truth, Beauty, God or One, it is what we imagine to be beyond our own finitude in the (non)experience of completeness, perfection, nirvana or, as one recovered alcoholic I know calls it in fond memory: oblivion. We seek It in faith like homesick children seeking refuge in Once Upon a Time , oriented toward Its pregnant absence as in a déjà vu, naïvely expecting that, upon remembering It, we will be magically transformed, in a Holy Communion, finding ourselves home at last. But we never do. As long as we pursue the Absolute as a thing that is “out there”, we ground It in a world of objects that, in faith, was the very thing we had wished to transcend. So the more we try to grasp It, the f...