Lotus and Lily Field Notes

Inspired by Cynthia Bourgeault’s reference to it when I met her a few weeks ago (OK, and a couple of bouts of insomnia), I have at long last started digging into Meditations on the Tarot, which I’ve owned for years but never read.  I’m on the second letter, which explores the notion of Love as the ultimate objective of the spiritual quest.  The writer contrasts this Western (Jewish/Christian/Muslim) aim with the Eastern aim of unity with Being.  Relationship/twoness on one side, being/oneness on the other.

I know this is a bit like that old saw: “There are two kinds of people in the world: those who divide the world into two kinds of people, and those who don’t.”

Nevertheless I think this is an important, maybe a fundamental, distinction between the spiritual journeys of west and east.  And yet: in conversation with my Nalanda West mentor today, we talked about these as two poles of a wonderfully unstable dynamic compound: “not one, not two”.   It’s all one…and yet we continue to exist and be in relationship.
The Meditations author speaks most compellingly of the power of preserving personality on the Christian path.  I think he sells Buddhism short, surely, and misses some of the nuances of Buddha-nature.  But when he says things like “those on the path of unity no longer have the ability to shed tears” there’s something valid there.

After working through a number of books that play softball with the distinctions between West and East, it’s utterly refreshing to hear this potent articulation of what’s *unique* about the Christian journey, not in a triumphalist sense, but in a deeply reflective, careful, and respectful way.  What a treasure!

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Elaine Pagels’ Beyond Belief is a new phase of my project to explore Buddhist-Christian synergies. It’s an explication of the Gospel of Thomas and the role it played (and didn’t play) in the development of orthodox Christianity in the early centuries AD. With Dr. Pagels I respond to passages like “If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you.”  The line has interesting parallels with mysticism the world over: whether it’s Buddha nature or the rose blooming within the Sufi mystics or the Hindu”you are that”.
I was drawn to Pagels’ book in part because of my contact a few weeks ago with the Contemplative Wisdom Community, which has many admirable qualities and which is composed, among other things, of a number of groups that use the Gospel of Thomas as their core text for meditation and study.
Pagels describes a conversation with former SF Zen Center abbot Richard Baker roshi in which he says “had I known the Gospel of Thomas, I wouldn’t have had to become a Buddhist!”

While I get the connection it seems to me there’s still a missing piece: a lineage of teachers who understand the wisdom tradition and can accurately and fruitfully represent it.  Tibetan Buddhists are extremely interested in (one might say obsessed with) lineage, and I have been influenced by their insistence on a certain level of authenticity through recognition by a master.  Or at least, it seems a challenging or problematic or maybe just wildly idealistic aspect of Christianity that one is expected to either get pure and useful teaching directly from the Holy Spirit or from Jesus, or get it very indirectly through a wholly political framework of church hierarchy.

So I’m not sure the Gospel of Thomas, all by itself, is quite it.  I can see value in Christians using it to validate their interest in a more expansive, mystical, and non-belief-oriented spiritual practice–but in the end won’t they be better off continuing their journeys within traditions that actually possess the resources to support this?

I am coming off as an Eastern religions snoot, I guess.  But throughout human history it has been the teaching lineages that have allowed wisdom to be preserved and to grow from one generation to the next.  We had that, once, in our tradition: the abbas of the desert tradition and the abbots after them.  But it feels to me, anyway, that the integrity of the lineage has been shattered by the church’s jousts with the modern world.  And shattered too, maybe fated from the beginning to be marginal, because “I am the Way and the Truth and the Life.”  Good ol’ John the Evangelist.

Pagels directly takes on this “Gospel of John vs. Gospel of Thomas” question in her book.  Both positing a more cosmic Christ than the other gospels, but John drawing out the implication of externalized dualistic exclusivity and Thomas drawing out the implication of inner monistic wisdom.

I like it.  But if I was Baker Roshi as a young man (ok, or even me as a young man) and had just the Gospel of Thomas–I don’t think that would really get me onto the path all by itself.

So maybe the Contemplative Wisdom Community and others like it will be developing and training teachers to share this wisdom.  But, if I may say so, I think a good grounding in good grounded Buddhist lineage teaching wouldn’t be a bad part of the preparation.

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I just returned from a lovely, lovely discussion at Nalanda West about Penetrating Wisdom, the book I’ve written about the last couple of days.  It’s been about three months since my class there came to an end, and being back with the community, poking around concepts and beyond-concepts, history and philosophy, and in particular the fascinating and challenging notion of guru devotion I wrote about yesterday.  What a precious gift it is, both to have the wonderful teachings to talk about, and to have the people to talk about them with!

Tonight’s conversation was especially rich for me because we spent quite a bit of time talking about Buddhist devotion and Christian devotion, and the differences between them.  Several of us had been brought up Christian, and just about everyone had interesting perspectives to share (I think it’s safe to say that just about everyone has an opinion about Christianity).  A few leading thoughts emerged for me:

• Christianity is just as vast and multi-faceted as Buddhism, and yet in many circles it gets lumped together as “Christianity”.  In addition, recent history (post-Reformation, at least) has significantly messed with the clarity and integrity of the tradition: its wisdom is hard to discern.
• The essential purpose of devotion is to coax the ego to let go and allow one’s native inner wisdom to emerge.  Say what you will about “original sin”–in the wisest domains of Christian understanding devotion to Christ is intended to bring out the true self, the fullest manifestation of human possibility.  Not more than a hair’s breadth different from Buddha nature, in my opinion.
• Wise Buddhism understands that the leap of faith implied by devotion is built on a superstructure of careful analysis and scrutiny.  Traditionally this scrutiny isn’t practiced: young boys go to monasteries and they get what they get.   In the Christian, Jesus-as-guru context, there’s less examination of the object of devotion, but centuries of philosophical and theological inquiry demonstrate that Christian devotion does not have to be mindless.

So I came home from this conversation delighted and inspired–and was even more delighted to see my blog-colleague Wulfila writing at great length about one of my Buddhist-Christian heroes, John P. Keenan.

Wulfila makes this comment:

It wasn’t apparent to me how one would love, or offer worship to, or dance before, or feel devotion towards Fr. Keenan’s Christ through any commonly-recognized liturgical or sacramental means, unless coincidentally and non-essentially, because it just happens to lead some particular person to understanding. Part of this probably reflects Fr. Keenan’s indebtedness to Bultmann and his aniconic Protestant program of “demythologization,” but I think it is a very partial depiction of Mahayana Buddhism, which appears to me to have a vigorous devotional element in addition to the more philosophical currents that are Fr. Keenan’s exclusive concern.

Though I haven’t yet read the book Wulfila writes about, I can well understand this critique.  It seems to me that the Mahayana has a breathing-out-then-breathing-in quality: Keenan is fantastic for articulating Christianity in terms related to the breathing-out-letting-go phase, but that needs to be supplemented by other sources (um, have they been written yet?) that explore the breathing-in-devotional-commitment phase.

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The last several weeks have been a distracting melange of travel on family and workplace business, and a very busy but satisfying stretch preparing for and recording tracks for Peregrine’s forthcoming second album.

There’s much fodder for this venue in all that, but I am also learning that in Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs blogging is somewhere up there with self-actualization–it doesn’t happen when I am busy pedalling through other more mundane concerns.

Having the mental space to write a blog is an instance of the Tibetan Buddhist “precious human life” notion: maintaining a thoroughgoing gratitude for having the time and space to study the dharma. And I feel quadruply blessed: not only do I get to study the dharma, but I get to mix it around with Christian wisdom, multifaith magic, art and philosophy and music and much more.

And when the stress piles up and the mental space for such seemingly important but certainly entertaining diversions is no longer available: well, then, it’s a chance to practice patience and humility and forebearance. And certainly makes sitting down to craft a little blog post seem like a delicious luxurious rarity. Praise be!

I am getting back in the swing of things a bit, though, with a couple of books that have come into my life from various directions. Nothing like books to stimulate growth…

The first is Zen Gifts to Christians by Robert E. Kennedy. It’s an exploration of the famous Zen ox-herding parable, with much good insight–and poetry too! The Lotus & Lily group will take this on as our next reading project. I’m looking forward to it.

The second is Penetrating Wisdom: the Aspiration of Samantabhadra by the Dzogchen Ponlop Rinpoche, the teacher at my Buddhist center. A group of students from my beloved Monday night Buddhism classes continues to meet and discuss texts; I’m really happy I can join them for at least the next few weeks to talk about this text (before the Christmas Gregorian chanting season heats up…).

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I’m continuing my study of Stephen Chase’s Angelic Spirituality, as the angel mania continues to rise up in me (I’m sure Rosemary Guiley’s reminder, in the section on “Protestant Angelology” in her Encyclopedia of Angels, that John Calvin thought it was a bad idea to be messing about with angels is part of its appeal for me).

In traditional medieval interpretation the two highest orders of angels are the cherubim (the “near ones”, who represent and embody perfect knowledge of the divine, and the seraphim (the “burning ones”) who represent and embody perfect love. This balance of knowledge and love is a persistent thread in the Christian tradition, and it makes a neat parallel to the Buddhist pairing of wisdom and compassion. Both head and heart are necessary: one must see clearly into the nature of things (self, other, the divine), and one must respond with open-heartedness. Neither really works without the other. In the Christian vision one ascends through wisdom and then through love to the divine. The Buddhist view is that the two arise simultaneously (the famous Tibetan coital image of the yab-yum makes this brilliantly clear). Christians, ever the fans of hierarchies, do resist that piece of subtlety–but otherwise the notions are pretty darned close to each other. For this reason I have put this post into the “B-C root texts” category: I really starting to see this Angelic Spirituality book as having that level of relevance.
And I continue to be amazed and delighted by the wisdom that emerges from these traditional medieval texts when they are skillfully parsed and illuminated by Chase’s excellent comments. The experience reminds me very much of that other great revealer of medieval mystical insight, Bernard McGinn (His series on the history of mysticism, The Presence of God, is an indescribable gift).

And I find myself sensitized to the value of the scholastic distinctions the medieval thinkers delight in, due to my recent encounter with the Tibetan flavor of this scholastic tradition. The slicing and dicing is not for its own sake but to train the brain–and the heart–toward greater receptivity, flexibility, and openness to the sublime mysteries of being. Such a path does not come naturally to this child of the 60s–and it certainly has not come early. But this very tardy student is grateful for it in any case.

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Since the first Center for Sacred Art Gregorian chant retreat in July 2003 we have been singing for two weekends a year about various aspects of the Virgin Mary.  This has been profound and satisfying for all who have attended, but it has seemed important to carry our exploration into other territories, at least for a while.  The chant repertoire is vast and multifaceted, and I feel a  certain obligation, both to my students and to the form itself, to honor that.

So a year ago at our retreat I suggested that it would be interesting to have a series of retreats on “the saints I’d most like to have dinner with”.  The ones I named at that point were: St. Michael the Archangel, John the Baptist, Mary Magdalene and John the Evangelist.  Though these plans do evolve over time, we are on track to do the St. Michael retreat in January.

To prepare for this I have started reading a fascinating collection of medieval writings on Angelic Spirituality edited by Steven Chase.  I’m in the introduction right now–it’s knocking my socks off.  What Chase is presenting is a form of spiritual formation and practice that involves engaging with the energies and possibilities of the angelic realm, as a way to connect to the divine, actualize compassion within oneself, and experience community more deeply.  The texts, from Dionysius the Areopagite and Gregory the Great and Richard of St. Victor and others, explicate this spiritual path in some detail.  What I love about Chase’s approach is that he identifies this arcane world of the celestial hierarchy with a very concrete and practical spiritual journey.

It reminds me very much of Tibetan Buddhism in the precision and detail of the schemas, its intention to connect both to the non-physical and physical worlds simultaneously (makes me think of the Buddhist teaching on relataive and absolute truth as the two wings of liberation–wings!  And at once I am awash in wonder at the cross-connections and synergies and possibilities.)  Angels, as Chase describes them, are quite literally an interface between the divine and human realm, participating in both, drawing the human to the divine without leaving the human behind.  And, as the Fathers knew in their often politically incorrect but nevertheless deeply wise understandings, that interface is a model for our own development and formation into spiritual beings: apparently the term “angelization” was not unknown to them.
There’s more to the front story, but as is typical I find myself going instead to the back story.  Ever since I read Rembert Herbert’s brilliant explication of the patristic underpinnings to the spirituality of chant in Entrances: Gregorian Chant in Everyday Life, I have been fascinated with the spiritual possibilities of the great medieval thinkers–Herbert focuses on Origen, Cassian, Gregory the Great, Benedict, and Bernard of Clairvaux.  Chase helped me out by referring to this patristic domain of thought and contemplation as the “sapiential tradition”.  It’s exceedingly hard to engage with this stuff: texts aren’t much available in English, and the explication of them tends to be dry and scholarly and/or so thoroughly laced with dogmatic Christian conviction that I can’t quite get to this essence of wisdom that I suspect is there.

For the accessibility and openness of the Buddhist communities I’ve encountered, which are very actively keeping the Asian versions of this sensibility very alive and real in the present moment–I am incredibly grateful.  And though I am drawn philosophically to the  core of those teachings, and may indeeed draw closer yet, soon enough, I think I’m aware that IF such wisdom was alive and well in the West Christian world, I might never have seen a reason to leave.

And even so, I can’t escape this longing, which crops up every single time I touch the depth of the patristic genius, to drink more deeply of that sweet wine.  Elusive, maddening, always just out of reach, hidden from me by my own limitations and neuroses but also by the limitations and neuroses of the historical stream that has swept this wisdom from the life of the West and made it almost irrecoverable.  Where do you go, today, to sit at the feet of a master and imbibe the secrets of the ways of the angels, as Dionysius and John Scotus Eriugena understood them?

[ok, here comes the tantric empty-it-all-out phase of the reflection] Of course, angels are simply symbols of the possibilities of the interior life.  Those possibilities are always there shining, without condition, in every moment.  I don’t need to retroject myself back to St. Gregory’s Rome or Cassian’s Marseilles to experience that.  It’s all right here, even here in Seattle, Washington, USA, in the sixth year of the second Bush presidency.  And it’s all right.  So I just notice those longings, let them be what they are, keep up my study and preparation.  And maybe listen a bit more closely than I did yesterday for the beating of wings.

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“History,” Stephen said, “is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.”

-James Joyce, Ulysses

One of the distinctions between Buddhism and Christianity that I have long reflected on (not that I’m the first to do this) is the difference between the social-historical milieu into which Siddartha Gautama was born and that of Jesus of Nazareth.  The overly simplistic version says that the Buddha was brought forth into the world in nearly ideal circumstances to present teachings and have them disseminated clearly: an orderly, settled, calm Vedic world that didn’t attach a great deal of importance to history in the first place (evidenced by the complete absence of any historical writing from the period). In the midst of this calm environment, he was able to simply and accurately dissect the bases of consciousness, and articulate this vision to a largely receptive audience.  Jesus, on the  other hand, came into being in the midst of the “nightmare of history”: a poor child in an occupied, fraught, and violent land, a land oozing with the fantasies of revenge and elaborate theologies of good and evil to explain all the blood spattered among the unyielding stones.  What could a prophet do in such an environment?  Compromise, or die.  Whether by choice or circumstance Jesus ended up dead, and regardless of the facts of the resurrection it is the death–brutal, shocking, seemingly pointless death–that set its stamp on the Christian religion, setting into motion centuries and centuries of violence, crusades, the inquisition, etc., etc.

No question that Buddhism has been the justification for plenty of violence; but it seems to me that these occasions are more blatantly and obviously contradictory than the Christian variety, which has its antecedents in Joshua and Revelation and many points in between. And as if to demonstrate that contradictions don’t last, Buddhist kingdoms have regularly collapsed on themselves, from Ashoka to the Afghan kingdoms to those of western China.

OK, its oversimplistic.  But I am convinced that Christianity lives in the shadow of history in a way that Buddhism, more or less explicitly, does not.  So being in a Buddhist-Christian space means being at the intersection of the historical and the ahistorical, the timebound and the timeless.  Impossible?  Contradictory?  Absolutely!

To come back to the Stephen Dedalus quote with which I opened: as a Westerner and  Christian there is no possibility of waking up from this nightmare of history; as a Buddhist, there is nothing to do but wake up.  But I think both the Buddhist and the Christian would agree that the “from which” of the quote is a bit mistaken.  The Christian vision is to embrace the nightmare with love; the Buddhist vision–or at least the Bodhisattva vision–is to release, abandon, and empty out the nightmare, but then return to embrace it again anyway.

So in this profound sense there is little difference between the path of the Buddha (with his long, long, careful seasons of teaching) and Jesus (who had to speak quick and cryptic and at times almost violently, eager to transmit the wisdom as rapidly as possible under challenging circumstances).  The question may lie in how well that message was received and understood by those who passed it along.

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At Lotus & Lily tonight we got into a lovely passionate discussion about the phrase “the Son of man did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many.” (about which I ruminated a few days ago here).  There was a shared resonant energy about “ransom” and its implications (“o Lordy, won’t you please take care of me?”); Buddhism says: “nope, you’re really going to have to take care of yourself.”  Ravi Zacharias may not think that’s appealing, but our group was of one accord in preferring it.  What a nice bunch of folks to be working with!
Along the way somebody brought up the series of audio recordings by Cynthia Bourgeault, “Encountering the Wisdom Jesus“, in which, apparently, the death of Jesus is described as a form of self-emptying love, a pointless act that by its very pointlessness points the way to emptiness (the example given was O. Henry’s Gift of the Magi).  This sounds like familiar ground, promising territory to explore.

Speaking of new and interesting discoveries, the work of Bernadette Roberts seems very much worth exploring further as possible Buddhist-Christian “root texts”.  A Catholic mystic who fell, somewhat inadvertently, into the experience of no-self, she remains within the Christian tradition but recognizes that Buddhism may have the best language for describing what happened.  Another one to put on my list…

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