Lotus and Lily Field Notes

I’ve been chanting Psalms, and teaching about chanting Psalms, for years now.  But ever since connecting up a few weeks ago with Cynthia Bourgeault’s Chanting the Psalms, and its vivid and compelling case for the contemplative depths of this ancient practice, I have renewed my own personal engagement in this practice.  What Cynthia has helped me see is that there is a non-verbal , non-conceptual profundity to the Psalm texts.  This has nothing to do with theology or even semantics.  It has to do with engaging the words, chewing on them, letting them speak in deep ways beyond reason or linguistic meaning.

I am so grateful for this new persective, since on any given encounter with the Psalms I am more likely than not to get very ticked off by the surface layers of meaning: the dualism, the baby-smashing, enemy-cursing, self-indulgent whining that are so often present there.  But no: there’s a way to see these texts as bearing a meaning beyond the meaning, not entirely independent of it, to be sure–but purified, perfected, wise in ways I can’t quite grasp.

It’s as though there is a sweet wisdom contained somewhere in there, that may require a great deal of maturity to grasp but *certainly* requires an open-hearted willingness to embrace what’s there without any conditions at all.  That takes trust, it takes patience, it takes a willingness to suspend judgment.  All by themselves, those are good qualities to cultivate.  But as my recent experiments seem to suggest, taking the Psalms as they are might just open up something deeper as well.  I’m curious to see what that might be.

This reminds, too, of the Buddhist teaching about how to relate to one’s thoughts in meditation, which is not a rejection, not an attachment, but a willingness to just *be fully present* with one’s thoughts as they are happening and let them emerge in simplicity and clarity–almost an attitude of welcoming.

So maybe the Psalms are just a particular form of thought, a playground within which the qualities above can be cultivated in a focused way.  Shamata (calm abiding) meditation is taught with focus on a seashell, a leaf or image of the Buddha.  So maybe the Psalms can function as exactly that same sort of support: not as an end in themselves but as a framework within which consciousness can be explored.

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After quite a long time blogging in relatively blissful isolation, I am beginning to discover some really excellent blogs about Buddhism and Christianity.  I’ve started listing them here on the site.

For examples, here’s a potent and lucid post about the issue of violence in sacred texts from ThinkBuddha.org, focusing particularly on the Kalachakra Tantra, which concludes:

…might it not be time to explore the possibility that the source of goodness, peace and ethics might lie not in ancient and bloodthirsty texts of spurious derivation, but rather in our own attempts, here and, now, to make sense of the world, and of the manifest sufferings that surround us?

This subject is dear to my heart: thank you, Will Buckingham, for exploring it with such erudition and passion!

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I chant Psalms, and teach the chanting of Psalms, because I believe in the power of intention. As you sing them you enter into a stream of sacred intention. For 2500 years or more, these texts have been on the lips of practitioners, Jewish, Orthodox, Catholic, and Protestant…

…but entering into that stream can be complicated. What exactly is the intention behind words like these?

137:8 O Daughter of Babylon, doomed to destruction,
happy is he who repays you
for what you have done to us-

137:9 he who seizes your infants
and dashes them against the rocks.

And what does one open oneself to, chanting words like these? Frequently communities choose to expunge these difficult passages. And while I understand this practice, even do it myself with regularity for my students–still, somewhere in the practice, the energy lingers.

The gift of Tantric Buddhism is the insight that energy of any kind is the practitioner’s friend. But what level of consciousness would it take to utter the Psalmist’s words with a crystalline clarity of intention–an intention aimed only at liberation?

What force is so powerful as to transmute not only the violence of the text, but perhaps still more challenging, the violent intentions of the generations who uttered them? Such transmutation, for oneself, for others, for all beings, would require not only the intention for liberation, but also the skillful application of penetrating insight: both wisdom and compassion.

A fantasy: if just one practitioner could utter the words of the Psalms, even Psalms like these, with perfect intention, how much negative energy could be dispelled? How much more could the work of liberation move forward in the world?

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Feeling fancy today, I thought I would try to sketch out a framework for the transformation of Christian texts into Buddhist teachings:

1. Direct appropriation. Not easy to do, due to the near-perpetual reliance upon God-talk in the Christian Scriptures. However, holding an expansive & empty view of “God”, some of the clearer teachings of Jesus could be a starting place.
2. Translation. Nan Merrill’s Psalms for Praying is a good example. She substitutes “Love” for “God”, which is pretty darned effective, and repositions “the enemies” that are so challenging in the Psalms as internal obstacles–kleshas, if you will. The Psalms lend themselves relatively well to this kind of poetic rethinking; other texts are more difficult to uproot from their native soil.
3. Archaeology. An effort, along the lines of the Jesus Seminar, to reconstruct the “original face” of scripture. Tricky business. And there’s still all that God-talk.
4. Incisive re-reading. This is what Keenan does, I think, in his Mahayana intepretation of the Gospel of Mark. Not so much an archaeological or translation activity as a creative rereading in light of an alternative perspective. At times Keenan has to shoehorn the text a bit to fit it into his paradigm, but it’s generally pretty potent and satisfying. Not many texts will lend themselves to such intense revisioning. Paul is tempting, John seems impossible.
5. Tantra. This is a huge arena of possibility, and not one I understand all that well. (So of course that makes it very attractive!) The basic idea, I think, is to engage with a text, not because of its surface meaning, but because of its energy content and potential. So even the most blood-soaked and violent texts, the vengeful longings of Psalms and Revelation for example, or–to cite another challenging example–even the most theologically challenging “sustitionary atonement” texts–are rich resources for energetic harvest and transmutation by the practitioner. One of our Lotus & Lily friends told the story last weekend about growing up in church and, from the agae of 12 or so, quietly refuting the Nicene Creed under her breath: “I don’t believe in God, the Father Almighty…” I love this charming story so much–but I think the tantric idea would be to give up this resistance and to plunge directly into the heart of the delusive notion of monotheism. Within that maelstrom of activity and energy are all the resources one needs to be propelled toward enlightenment. Just embrace it all, believe it all, accept it all–because all that Christian nonsense, as much as anything else in this universe–contains the energy you need to power yourself toward enlightenment.

Reading scripture is a tricky, multi-dimensional process. I don’t know whether this sketchy outline is useful as a starting point, or whether such a starting point is helpful even as a concept. I do know that I keep reading, and I keep my eyes on the page, and I keep waiting, and listening, and wondering.  At one time or another, and maybe simultaneously, all these come into play.

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Considering there’s a whole magazine dedicated to the question “what in enlightenment?”, I’m not sure this post is going to live up to its title.  However, the question comes up over and over again in Keenan’s “Mahayana Mark” (and in Lotus & Lily, for that matter).  The notion of Jesus as teacher of enlightenment is, I think, central to Keenan’s work: every healing story and teaching episode, and even the passion itself, is seen as a finger pointing to the possibility of awakening to the true nature of reality.

Talking (once again) about the contrast between Jesus’ awareness and the disciples’ blindness, Keenan remarks, “Other-dependent conciousness is characterized by a twofold process: its initial proclivity to grasp images and ideas as it seeks security in a radically impermanent world and, upon awakened conversion, its recovery of the original purity of joy and zest in celebrating that very impermanence.” (134)

The Dzogchen Ponlop Rinpoche provides a helpful explication of the three-fold nature of enlightenment in the Nalandabodhi study curriculum:

• Realizing the true nature of emptiness – (the dharmakaya or “truth body”)
• Manifestation of enlightenment in the form of joy, bliss, and luminosity – (the sambhogakaya or “enjoyment body”)
• Manifestion of enlightenment in this-world solidity – (the nirmanakaya or “created body”)

All three of these terms are present in Keenan’s formulation.  But I must say that, despite this passage, at times I think Keenan’s philosophical approach to Mahayana Buddhism fails to emphasize that middle term, the luminous and joyful aspect of enlightenment.  This could be because of his primary source for Buddhist understanding, the Japanese Buddhist writer Gadjin Nagao’s Foundational Standpoint of Madhyamika Philosophy.  This is a book Keenan translated himself and I’m not familiar with the author’s background or specific orientation.  It may be that the joyful/luminous aspect is particularly found in the vajrayana, tantric stream of Buddhism which is so prominent in Tibet (where my current teacher comes from).  Not sure about that (I’m in over my head, Buddhist philosophy-wise) but sometimes Keenan’s version of enlightenment seems a bit dry and careful.  I find myself missing the (literal and figurative) passion, the sense of abandon and risk I find in the story of Jesus, the wildness of John the Baptist, the wonderment and strangeness of the miracle stories.

One of the things that has become clear to me from my Nalandabodhi studies is that the path to enlightenment has many different overlapping, and at times contradictory, layers.  There is room in such a world for the primarily philosophical.  But as I work through Keenan’s book again, I long for a multiplicity of Buddhist commentaries on Christian scripture, teasing apart layers of depth, celebrating the diversity of the 10,000 gates to the dharma in the kaleidoscopic panoply of metaphor, story, wisdom and blindness that infuses the Judeo-Christian scriptures.

OK, I’m digressing.  But if Christian scriptures contain coded in their pages somehow the story of enlightenment, how will we liberate its meaning?

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In my daily reading lately, post-Easter, I’ve been confronted with the Book of Revelation.  Crazy stuff, man.  Bad dream stuff.  Locusts that sting like scorpions: “they were allowed to torture them for five months, but not to kill them, and their torture was like the torture of a scorpion when it stings someone.”

In Tibetan Buddhism maybe this energy could be called “wrathful”, a form of skillful means, compassionate movement toward liberation, but here (“in those days people will seek death but will not find it; they will long to die, but death will flee from them”) I can only think of Abu Ghraib and Gitmo and Inquisitions.  It takes wisdom to penetrate such a text in useful ways.  Too bad such wisdom, if it existed, has been buried under reformations and counterreformations, fundamentalisms and modernisms.  The wisdom of our tradition is buried in the dustbin of history. 

But the Book of Revelation, just as it is, cries out to be misinterpreted:  “Read me, take me seriously, construct vengeful fantasies about the literal end of the literal world.”

On the heap of texts that need to be transmuted by wise dharmic readings, this might sit at the top.

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I love Buddhist stories: Zen stories about heaps of flax and Tibetan stories about Bengali tea-boys and essential stories like the Buddha’s Four Sights seem to me to point like an arrow right to the heart of the truth: impermanence, an embrace of suchness, a sensitivity to a nuanced and subtle fragrance.

Stories in Judeo-Christian scripture cause me to struggle and squirm: they are sometimes violent and frequently dualistic.  Joshua and the battle of Jericho, Abraham’s sacrifice of Isaac, the apocalyptic vision of the saved and the damned: I don’t buy the ideology or philosophy behind them.  I don’t feel that deep, balanced wisdom, but rather accounts of our projected fantasies and fears and hopes, fully validated with the imprimature of scriptural authority.  Those Bible stories: big, big trouble.

But as much as I may love the Buddha-nature-soaked stories of monks with begging bowls, dakinis and mountain-top-dwelling sages, and the wisdom those stories represent for me–despite all that philosophical correctness and profound, unvarnished wisdom–those stories doesn’t speak to me down in my guts the way those Bible desert stories, the stories of Jacob and Jeremiah and John the Baptist, kings and battles and miraculous healings and water springing from rocks, speak to me.  Somehow Bible stories penetrated my being deeply and thoroughly as a child, found a place in my heart that they seem utterly unwilling to relinquish.  They hold a place within my own particular psychic structure that Buddhist stories, however wise, simply can’t occupy.

So I’m left with the continual, annoying, difficult work of struggle, re-translation, re-purposing, re-configuring.  I will be with Moses as he approaches Pharoah and shudder over the carnage of the first-born to come, and Samson in his moment of blind defeated despair, just before crushing a whole temple-full of Philistine innocents to prove the glory of God, and Paul in his triumphal escapes and shipwrecks, certain through it all of the triumph of Christ.  I don’t like it.  I know there are better and more helpful and more true stories, a whole Asia worth of them.  But those Asian stories aren’t my stories, and these Bible stories are.  As much as my parentage and my noble and ignoble deeds in present and past lives, these stories are my karma, what I have to work with.

So that’s what I do: I work with them.  And am unspeakably grateful that I am no longer left alone with those stories as I was for so many years: I have the perfect companion of the dharma to help me understand and reflect on them, bring wisdom to them, and find in some way, at last, to find peace in their presence.

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As I mentioned yesterday, I have beeen enjoying singing the chant responsories from the Nocturnale Romanum as part of my daily exploration of Christian liturgy (which serves as an interesting counterfoil to my daily Buddhist practice).  These are beautiful, elaborate chants that are part of the matins service (the lengthy pre-dawn session of chants and readings prescribed in the Rule of St. Benedict).  This being the third week of Lent, the responsory texts are taken from the story of Joseph in Genesis.

The account of Joseph’s betrayal by his brothers, who sell him into slavery in Egypt, his subsequent unjust imprisonment and redemption through his remarkable ability to interpret dreams, his elevation to a position of prime importance in Pharaoh’s court, finds its culmination in a dramatic scene where he confronts his brothers, come from Palestine seeking grain during a famine, reveals himself, and forgives them, wanting only to know if his old father is still alive.

I think there’s something to the idea that good dramatic literature is the province of the West: it’s not something that a Buddhist frame of reference has nurtured very much.  It could well be that such earth-bound dramas map well to the dramatic–and dualistic–context of Judeo-Christian spirituality, while the all-embracing nature of the Buddhist view is less interested in cultivating a high degree of poignancy.

Emotion is a key spiritual value in the West: it plays an important role in both Catholic and Protestant traditions.  But it seems to me that the brilliantly described emotion of Joseph, overcome when he sees his younger brother Benjamin after many years apart (Genesis 43:30), can be just as easily hitched to the skillful means of tantra: using emotion to obliterate emotion; using dualism to obliterate dualism.  Not a practice that has been developed yet, but perhaps it will be someday.

When I chant the text “I am your brother, Joseph, whom you sold into Egypt.  Is my father still alive?” the door to such a practice seems to open wide.

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