Lotus and Lily Field Notes

Back to Nalandabodhi last night to start in on their Mahayana Path curriculum.  Our little group of five or so has been augmented by several senior students, who bring a wealth of knowledge and experience to our discussions.  As I thought might happen, it’s a bit intimidating, but very satisfying and helpful as well.

A couple of Buddhist-Christian points came up in the discussion. One had to do with the Kadampa practice of recollecting one’s accumulations of good and bad karma through the day.  One of the students commented that this sort of reflection led her rather easily into a Judeo-Christian feelings of self-judgment and guilt, and this led to a conversation about being mindful of such feelings and then letting them go.  I have been glad to discover this sort of tradition in Buddhism; it’s given me a way to re-engage with the self-examination that was so important a part of my youthful formation, but which I had put away as untenable.  But in a mindfulness context that steers clear of the paralysis of self-obsession, I’m discovering it can be rich and valuable.

But that conversation led to a comment by our teacher who talked about attending a Buddhist-Christian conference some years ago at which some Christian monks were present.  There were a lot of points of similarity, he said, but he noticed what seemed like the conspicuous absence of a clean, non-judgmental mindfulness practice in the Christian monastic tradition.

That observation rings true to me, at least in general.  It seems to me that in the Christian tradition it’s not easy to get out from under this sense of dependent relationship on God, and the anxiety (or, alternatively, the inflated sense of chosenness) that goes with that.  That makes it difficult to enter into a truly spacious, empty reflection on what is arising at any given moment.  Even practices as basic as Centering Prayer or Lectio Divina  have a certain charge about them, a “sacred word” (or a whole raft of ‘em) that contextualizes the mindfulness and inhibits it from becoming fully spacious, fully open, fully receptive.

But what about the mysticism of Dionysius the Areopagite or the Cloud of Unknowing?  What about hesychasm?  Even the Rule of St. Benedict evokes a mindful consciousness (as Benedict’s Dharma explores).

And yet there’s a difference between what is central and essential, and what is circumstantial.  A mindfulness practice that uses “Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, Savior, have mercy on me, a sinner” may result in mindfulness, but is that all it results in?

I’m not saying a “pure mindfulness practice” makes Buddhism better.  But I think it does allow for an unconditional spaciousness.  That might be appealing, or it might be intimidating (and maybe both by turns).  But it’s clear to me that such spaciousness is harder to get to in the Christian tradition, even in its mystical forms.

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I wrote a few weeks ago (my first day writing this blog, actually) about attending a Tibetan New Year Losar celebration at Nalandabodhi.  Tonight was the celebration at Pema Kilaya.  I think the two different dates have to do with the variance between the Nyingma and Kagyu traditions (the Wikipedia article says it’s January 30-February 1 this year).

In any case, I was there because Lotus and Lily meets in Pema Kilaya’s space on the 4th Sunday of each month.  It’s actually a very cool setup:  the 2nd Sunday we meet in a chapel at Seattle’s First Baptist Church, which is in the same building (Pema Kilaya rents their space from the church).  I love the fact that we migrate from one end of the building to the other: it perfectly symbolizes our dual practices all housed within one community and ultimately within each of us individually.

And the celebration was very nice: we got a chance to meet and mingle with the sangha members, have delicious catered food, and learn some Tibetan folk dancing.  Thank you Pema Kilaya for hosting us every month, and for including us in your community celebration in this way!

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A number of years ago I was making my first explorations of the spiritual landscape outside the Evangelical Christianity of my childhood, in the world of contemporary Judaism.  One of the notions that captured my imagination was the attention paid to the story in Genesis 32 where Jacob wrestles with an angel and is given the name “Israel”, “he strives with God”, as a result.  A large part of interpretation is which stories you pay attention to.  This one didn’t get a lot of play in my Sunday School, but what I learned was that this sense of obligation to stand up, speak up, make one’s point of view known to God is taken quite seriously in Jewish circles.  Abraham’s argument with God about the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah in Genesis 18 is another prized example.  Tevye in Fiddler on the Roof, as much of a caricature as he may be, seems just right in this sense.  It was almost shocking to me as a young man to come across this attitude: good Christian boys (and girls) didn’t challenge, question, or debate the minister, let alone the Almighty.

I bring this up here because my recent reflections on the Buddhist-Christian conundrum about the existence of God is sort of an Israel-like activity.  I can imagine myself saying to God: “Do you really exist?  What am I to do with the problematic nature of holding to absolutes, oh Mr. Absolute?  How can I hold the notion of Your existence in such a way as to help me, and not hinder me, as I walk forward on the path of compassionate liberation of all beings from suffering?”

I like the idea of posing these questions in this way.  Maybe “striving with God”, being a Buddhist-Christian “Israel,” is a useful technique for holding the emptiness.  I haven’t read much at all in the extensive literature on JuBu’s, but I find myself curious, writing this, about how Jewish-Buddhist practitioners deal with this issue of God’s existence.  There are certainly cultural differences that would shape the issue in different ways, perhaps so much so that the parallel isn’t relevant or useful.  For example, the typical Jewish upbringing might not make one quite so obsessed with ultimate questions like the existence of God.  Judaism, in my understanding, has a more practical and less idealistic bent than the tradition I grew up in.  But I am curious…

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Last night I went with a good friend to see the revised version of “What the Bleep Do We Know” (subtitled “Down the Rabbit Hole”).  It was longer than the original, had a bunch of cool new animations and some very interesting new explorations of quantum physics.  One of my favorite new sections starred “Dr. Quantum”, a pretty groovy cartoon character that explained Heisenber’s uncertainty principle and illustrated the effects of a limited perspective by visiting a two-dimensional world and helping an inhabitant to wake up to the presence of a third dimension.  Very effective.

As happened when I saw the original release, I found the film less effective in exploring the emotional and spiritual realms–the J.Z.Knight/Ramtha ideology gets a little thick after a while, and it was interesting to note that the further the discussion got away from experimental method and into the problems of life, the more fervent and impassioned and less convincing the speakers became.

The quantum-physics section in particular was vividly related to Buddhist teaching, in my estimation.  There was a section on the fundamental unity of all phenomena that reminded me very much of the Buddha nature.

But watching the story of Marlee Matlin’s journey through depression to acceptance and peace was singularly unconvincing.  And that to me is the key: there’s a New Age-y sense that the challenges of samsara can be easily resolved.  Maybe its true (what the bleep do I know?) but it doesn’t accord with my experience of the sticky and subtle grasping of the ego, and especially its grasping to the possibility of an easy bliss.

I hate to sound so conservative.  The teaching in the film that the reality we experience is only a pale shadow of the truly real seems right on to me, and I think both C.S. Lewis and Chogyam Trungpa would agree with that.  And the bizarre and profound nature of physcal reality at a quantum level is presented with dazzling clarity–it was a real gift to be able to see that explicated with such beauty.  But to me the path from asserting that reality’s existence to fully realizing it in an authentic way requires more tools than the film even pretends to offer.  I like the tools of the contemplative wisdom traditions–even if they are wrapped in the garments of the religious traditions that the film so readily dismisses.

So I give the film one big metaphysical thumbs up for such great teaching about the quantum universe and what it shows us about the limitations of our conventional understanding–brilliant!  But I have to go with a pretty big thumbs down for dropping the ball on the nuances of the personal spiritual journey toward breaking free of those conventions.

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As part of my (mostly) daily practice I chant an abbreviated version of the morning hours of the divine office: a Psalm, reading and responsory to signify the Night Office, and one of the three “Laudate Dominum” Psalms (148-150) that are part of the daily monastic service of Lauds.  Today I was making my way through Psalm 148 and the structure of it snapped into place for me:

“Praise the Lord in the heavens…praise him shining stars…fruit trees and cedars…creeping things and flying birds….old men and maidens…”

First I noticed that this procession of imagery recapitulates the Creation in Genesis 1.  But simultaneous with this admittedly rather pedestrian insight was something less ordinary: a physical sensation of the descent of a Presence during my chanting of the text, feeling it descending from “the heights” and “the waters above the heavens” through all the particularities of beingness (vegetable, animal, social), gradually getting closer to me, progressively more intimate and vivid with each passing verse.

I’ve learned to be skeptical of visionary experiences.  I’ve had a few, and and at times they have contained some beneficial information.  But they can also leave you tangled up in a distracting sense of glamour. 

So it may be that the most important dimension of this is to notice the experience, see what it might mean to relax, to let things be, to observe this experience and let it take its own shape without approach or avoidance.

Maybe all that grandeur is just samsara, relative and conditioned.  But maybe it’s linked somehow to the vision of the dharmakaya, the perfected Buddha-realm, which is often described in the sutras with a cosmic and highly detailed grandeur of its own?

I’m inclined to view this morning’s experience as a moment of receptivity and insight that gave me a clearer-than-usual view into a process of emergence: Being available to me most intimately out of the grandeur of the universe and all its creatures. 

So I say “praise the Lord” a bit more fervently today, not having a particularly clear idea what that means, but feeling a bit blessed by a nice touch of useful energy, at least this one time.

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One of the things I love most about my Buddhist-Christian life is that it puts a huge, and hugely stimulating, question in front of me just about every day:  does a creator God, in the Christian sense, exist?

The Buddha once compared a fixation on ultimate questions (such as those about the existence of God) to a man shot by an arrow who only wants to know where the arrow came from, who made it, and what kind of bird provided its feathers.  The focus should be on the remedy for suffering: that’s what Buddhism is all about.  In a very real sense, all the highly detailed statements about the levels and layers and dimensions of existence are entirely provisional: they’re just another way–a skillful means–to see clearly enough to find liberation from suffering.

This gets over-simplified into the statement “Buddhists don’t believe in God”.  That’s sort of true, but not nearly subtle enough.  It might be better to say “a belief in God isn’t going to do you any good–and it just might do you some harm.”

Christianity, by contrast, places quite a bit of importance on believing in God, in part because of what it will do for us but also because it’s just important for its own sake.  Gratitude for God’s goodness is a key Christian idea (and I’m personally grateful to John Cobb for helping me, just a few months ago, finally to see that).

I don’t want to be ungrateful.  But I do find myself experiencing spaciousness, freedom, discipline, and progress on the spiritual path by focusing on the liberation from suffering for myself and others, without paying much attention to ideas like “God”.

I’m not sure there’s a resolution to this dilemma, and I’m not sure I want there to be a resolution: I treasure that weird and awkward bind that Buddhism-Christianity puts me in.  It may be that this metaphysical conundrum (God?  no God?) is my favorite thing about taking such a position.

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John Malcomson, the stalwart founder of Lotus and Lily, commented on my post about the labels “Buddhist-Christian” and “Christian-Buddhist”.  First comment on the blog, which is a nice little milestone.  I have been writing so far without much thought of audience, and it’s interesting to notice how even this first smidgen of attention starts to shift things a bit.  I’m glad to have some conversations and not just bloviating on my own (though “bloviating” is sort of synonymous with “blogging”).

John writes “My sense is that Joseph is one of those persons who is a Christian who is being heavily influenced by Buddhism, and I am one of those Christians who is also a Buddhist.”

For a long while I resisted either of those labels, since definitions are by their nature problematic.  I was guided toward a more friendly attitude toward labels by a Zen koan I came across about year ago which includes the phrase: “knowing is delusion, not knowing is confusion”–and realized that while avoiding labels might be helping me steer clear of delusion, the result was confusion.  I think that was a key moment for me in being more willing to play with self-defining labels.  A squirrely business to be sure, but in this matrix of dependent origination it seems silly to just run and hide.

As I said in my original post, the label “C-c-c-c-christian” is a hard one for me to own.  I find myself going to bat a lot more for “Buddhism” than I do for “Christianity,” and I certainly talk smack a lot more about the latter than the former (sheesh, typical convert-in-all-but-name, eh?).  I’m also hanging out a lot with Buddhists and some with Buddhist-Christians, and not very much at all with Christians.  But it’s also true for me that, at this stage of the journey, I’m not ready to embrace the label “Buddhist”, in that clear sense John describes, as in “Hi, my name is Joe and I am a Buddhist.”  Though I kind of wonder why, and it will be most interesting to see if that shifts in the course of time.  But for now, John, I guess you’ve got it about right.

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This l-o-n-g post (apologies for that!) is a continuation of this post and this one.  The series is a preliminary consideration of John P. Keenan’s The Gospel of Mark: A Mahayana Reading (unfortunately the book is not in print and not easy to get–I’m trying to track down my own copy but for now am grateful to the University of Washington library for the use of their copy).  Lotus and Lily will be discussing the book in our group sessions in coming weeks. 

I do want to interject here that my writing about the topic to this point feels uncomfortably dry.  I spent a few more hours with the commentary at the Priory Spirituality Center (while my wife was leading a wonderful visual meditation workshop) and I’m getting more and more excited.  It does require taking some time with some foundational concepts to make sense of it all–but I’m convinced it’s well worth the effort.  My reading so far (I’m through the commentary up to Mark chapter 5) has been exhilarating and transformative.  The Dzogchen Ponlop Rinpoche (Nalandabodhi’s spiritual director) talks about meditation without a right view being like trying to go rockclimbing without any arms: there’s just no way to progress.   So all this preliminary stuff is in the category of “right view”…  I hope in future posts to focus on Keenan’s treatment of individual gospel stories, which should be quite a bit juicier (and, I hope, quite a bit briefer!).

Here we’re considering the last three of the six “Thematic Design” elements in Keenan’s introduction.

The Truth of Ultimate Meaning

Mahayana Buddhism emphasizes an ultimate truth that is beyond all conceptual elaboration.  Language is inherently incapable of describing it.  There’s much debate about exactly how one approaches this ultimate truth (at my Nalanda West class we’ve been exploring these various schools in some depth).  Keenan sees the figure of Jesus as represented in Mark pointing to this ultimate meaning in several ways.  One key metaphor is the wilderness.  Jesus is baptized in the wilderness, is tempted in the wilderness, retreats to the wilderness throughout his ministry.  For Keenan, Mark’s use of the wilderness as a narrative device calls to mind the non-verbal, fundamentally empty nature of ultimate truth, and Keenan’s commentary will explore this metaphor in some depth.

But pointers to the ultimate truth beyond words also appears elsewhere in the gospel narrative.  Throughout the gospel, in Jesus’ encounters with those he heals “[Mark's] point is not that one assents to the content of some verbal teaching, but that one is converted and attains faith.”  The existential experience of faith-beyond-words does remind me a great deal of the Tibetan Buddhist teaching I’ve been receiving.  “None of the faithful who pop in and out of Mark’s narrative seeks for signs of certitude, but are content to experience the saving force of Jesus’ word to them.”

Finally, Keenan mentions Mark’s eschatology: “the mythic expression in Mark’s narrative for the reversal of all expectancies and all constructs.  …the cosmic and dramatic descriptions are to be seen as mythic narrative elements signifying the complete otherness of ultimate meaning from all conventions and all plans.”

So if we keep Jesus attitude to conventions, plans, names, forms–all conceptual elaboration–in mind as we read Mark, it’s possible to see a consistent position of opposition and resistance to the conventional.  In fact, it’s just this resistance to the conventional that becomes the narrative driver of the gospel story, as we shall see later on.

This is a fascinating take on the transcendence of Jesus–not pointing to some concretized theological principle of god-man or salvation or a prescriptive ultimate truth, but rather an ultimate truth that evades our definitions, conceptions, and expectations.

The Truth of Worldly Convention

In Mahayana teaching, the relative truth of our everyday experience is a subject of much attention.  In some schools, it’s a vehicle for gradually liberating oneself from its very limitations in order to directly experience the ultimate truth.  In others, the worldly truth is shunned by those who dedicate themselves to cutting through illusions.  But the whole notion of the “Middle Way” is to avoid attachment to extremes of all kinds, even “emptiness ineptly grasped” (Keenan gets this phrase from his own translation of Gadjin Nago’s Foundational Standpoint of Madhyamaka Philosophy).

And, for Keenan, this is the path that Jesus follows.   Though he spends time in the desert, he doesn’t remain there: he comes back into human society, into the contingent and confused doings of everyday people.  This is where he delivers his message: a message aimed at ultimate truth but couched in the terminology of worldly convention.

Jesus is thus a teacher of “the middle path”, using everyday language to point to that which is beyond words.  “[Jesus' teachings'] are skillful rhetorical strategies directed toward insights that go beyond words and images, that finally fall silent in the wilderness of no-speaking.” ”Ultimate meaning triggers conventional discourse but is not captured therein.  No rhetorical discourse brings about faith.”  Keenan contrasts Mark’s rigorous avoidance of explanation and conceptual hooks with Luke’s strategy: “In Luke, if one knocks on the door, it will be opened.  In Mark, one knocks at a closed door that, remaining closed, rivets attention to the mystery it hides.”

Mark is the gospel of “the truth of paradox lived, not merely described verbally.”  So the function of language is tricky, imprecise, slippery.  We start out the book identifying with disciples, then distance ourselves from them due to their obstinacy, but in the end we identify with them again in their confusion and questioning.

The Three Patterns

A final theme Keenan explores is the way Mark presents conversion as a movement from a deluded view to a perfected view.  Keenan connects this to the structure of consciousness taught in the Yogacara philosophical school.  To speak once again in greatly simplified terms: the spontaneously emerging constellation of causes and conditions, the soup of phenomena, experiences, feelings, memories, and so forth, is called the “other-dependent nature”.  We normally construct a coherent but completely imaginary universe: the frozen judgments, static concepts and deluded notions that we impose upon our encounter with this raw stuff of experience.  This artificially created, delusive consciousness is the “imaginary nature”.  But by letting go of our pre-conceived expectations, we are able to see dependently arisen experience just as it is: empty of independent existence.  The resulting clear seeing is the “perfected nature”.

Keenan identifies a major thrust of Jesus’ work in the Gospel of Mark as a call to conversion from the imaginary to the perfected: letting go of conventional understandings and seeing the truth of emptiness.  The scribes, the Pharisees, and most notably the disciples repeated exhibit a clinging to imaginary, frozen consciousness.

Mark’s rhetorical strategy is a “doubling back”, revisiting important ideas time and again, reframing them, refusing to let them remain static, so as to help loosen the hold of our fixed ideas and open us up to deeper, less conceptually bound ways of understanding.  One of the most important examples is the assertion of Jesus as “the Christ and the son of God.”  This occurs once at the beginning of the gospel, then again in Peters assertion, and finally in the mouth of the centurion at the Crucifixion.  Examined carefully in their narrative contexts, each of these assertions brings a different dimension of meaning.  There is no clear and precise way to correlate these contexts together, so in the end we are left with a question about Jesus’ identity, an openness rather than a definitive statement.  So in the end Mark is offering not dogmatic forumlas or conceptual assertions but rather a call to conversion, inviting us to abandon all fixed notions about Jesus and the kingdom and to open instead to a penetrating awareness of the present moment in all its suchness.

Similarly, the geographical “way” that Jesus travels (a horizontal, physical dimension) is interwoven with the vertical path between wilderness (emptiness) and civilization (dependently-arisen phenomena).  “The result of that interweaving is a doubled doubling back, for all aspects of the way, both horizontal and vertical, interpenetrate.  Together they constitute the middle path, the way followed by Jesus and offered to his disciples.  And that middle way is the path to awakening to who Jesus is and what he is all about, for he has no discernible identity apart from his embodiment of the middle way.”

The idea that one of the gospels would present a Jesus with “no discernable identity” is utterly delightful and refreshing.  But reading the text with Keenan, I think he has hold of–or should I say, doesn’t have hold of?–something essential and profound.  I eagerly look forward to continuing this exploration!

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I’m really loving Ajahn Munindo.  Listen to this: 

Instead of attempting to cover up the empty feeling with food or perfume or extreme sports, the practice of Dhamma encourages us to trust that, if we discipline attention carefully and skilfully, we can turn around and receive that feeling without reacting or shying away from it. How does it actually feel to feel, ‘I want something and I feel this sense of lack, this sense that I’m not all here’? If we really listen to this, what we can find, instead of an increase in our suffering as our perceived enemy takes us over, is a genuine, naturally arising, warm sense of joy.

This image of turning around and receiving our feelings really gets me.  So often I just want to climb out of my skin, make my whole emotional superstructure just go away.  But that is not the way to peace.

There is a strain of Biblical intepretation, kind of fringy but still very powerful, represented by teachers like Emmett Fox and Religious Science, that views the “law” referred to in the Bible as an awakening to what is truly so.  Of course I suppose any orthodox Christian would say that, but in this tradition “what is truly so” is more deeply rooted in our own experience: God’s law is written on our heart.  But I guess that’s pretty orthodox too.  It just seems to be taught, oftentimes, at least within the mainstream context, as though the law is something external, something that has little to do with our own deep inner sense of rightness.  I’m sure in the Buddhist world there are plenty of teachers and adherents with the same attitude. 

 For me the best Buddhist teaching…Christian teaching…any spiritual teaching has to come from that place of a deep trust of what is fundamentally true about us, however covered over by confusion and misunderstanding.  If we can turn around and receive what our own experience is telling us, a truly clear seeing becomes much more available.

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Lately I’ve been applying my (limited) understanding of the tantric approach to practice in my daily chanting of Psalms.  As I understand it, Buddhist deity yoga involves postulating the presence of an external being that embodies the qualities of enlightenment, then taking in that energy and dissolving it into oneself at the conclusion of the practice session.  That’s probably a pretty simplistic explanation, and I put this activity under the category of “spiritual experiments.” 

But what I want to note here, what seems very genuine or useful, is an opening or an awakening that seems to be emerging for me in relation to the Psalm language.  Because after all, Psalm language is God-language.  My working with Psalms over the last several years (mostly through my work with Gregorian chant) has not been because of a strong attraction to this sort of language–I resist it, I don’t understand it, on many levels it seems senseless at times almost offensive to me.

But viewing this work through a sort of tantric lens, I find myself, during the chanting process, actually imagining the presence of God (imagination is a great big deal in tantra).  It takes me back to my early religious formation, when experiencing God during prayer was a prized experience and something I regularly tried to do.  But this feels different somehow: it’s not really that I think or believe that this object of my imagination is actually “God” in some specific sense.  Rather, the exercise seems to be opening me up.  I feel more relaxed, less resistant.  It’s one of those experiences of opening a door long closed: release of energy, sense of relief, some curiosity and some uncertainty as to just what to do next.

I was given a lovely book by Ajahn Munindo called Unexpected Freedom (and guess what? the ENTIRE TEXT is available on the web!).  The friend who gave it to me thought of me because the book describes an upbringing in an evangelical home much like mine.  I am getting a great deal out of reading it (mostly during the hiatus periods between my Tibetan Buddhist classes), and one of the things that most struck me was his account of rediscovering prayer as a Theravada Buddhist practitioner.  For him, within that tradition, there was no question of imagining deities or anything like that.  But he describes a similar sort of openness which I’ve been getting a hint of myself:

When we kneel before the shrine – that which symbolises perfect wisdom, perfect compassion and perfect freedom for us – and we express our good wishes for all beings – the bronze statue, beautiful and serene as it is, is not listening to us. We are not asking the Buddha to grant us any favours. Rather, beholding an image of the Buddha helps configure the ‘divine principle’ in our minds and creates the appropriate inner space – a sacred place – in which we feel totally free to speak and in which we can feel perfectly received.

For me, this recent experience of actual prayer, legitimized for me in my current framework by the tantric teaching of openness to the sacred in all things (even in our imagination of God!), feels very much like “totally free to speak and perfectly received.”  Within that space, dharma practice, mindfulness, the heart of love, all feel much more possible.

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At the conclusion of last night’s Nalandabodhi Mahayana view exam, our faithful teacher/facilitator Robert Fors commented, “A lot of serious practitioners just can’t stand this philosophical stuff.”

I must admit that I am ready from a bit of time away from “this philosophical stuff.”  The upcoming sessions (18 of them!) will be on “Mahayana Path”, covering topics like the Four Immeasurables and Bodhichitta.  My analogy during our discussion last night was that it’s like we’re learning all the details of automotive engineering without ever learning how to drive.

OK, so it’s time to start driving.  I’m looking forward to this next phase. 

And I’m looking forward to exploring the possible points of contact between the practicalities of the bodhisattva path and the path of love-the-Lord-your-God-love-your-neighbor.  I’ve found Buddhist precision and thoroughness so helpful, and am hoping that a similar clarity will shed light on the basic question: what does it mean to practice Christianity?

This blog’s tag line, “Buddhist view, Christian practice” would suggest I have a clear idea about that.  Shh…the truth is, what it means right now is “chant the divine office,” which seems like a provisional answer but not a real one.  I’m not looking for nor am I expecting to find *the* right answer.  And it may be that the journeying is the whole and entire point (that view has gotten me through a lot of rough patches).  But it does seem that love-God-love-neighbor is a key: Jesus certainly made that point, and he’s in line with Jewish tradition as well on that one.  My perception is that in the Christian tradition there is a lot of confusion and wishful thinking about just what that means, how one practices that, without the beautiful clarity I admire so much about the Buddhist path.

So I think bodhisattva-hood is a crucial point to explore and understand.  A good point of focus as I get behind the wheel…

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This has been a very stimulating 24 hours or so, with a couple of great sessions.

Last night at Lotus and Lily we completed our discussion of The Good Heart, a book about which there is much to say;  suffice it for now to note that the comments by the Dalai Lama and Father Laurence Freeman on the resurrection led us into an excellent discussion about one of my favorite topics: what is the self?  Is it ultimately real?  Does it persist after death?  What does one make of the traditional Christian teachings on the bodily resurrection?

There is a flavor of Buddhist-Christian discussion, as in the discussions among many religious traditions, that starts with the assertion “we’re all really talking about the same thing.”  On a topic like this, I really have to wonder, though.  The Buddhist teaching on anatman (not-self) is a pretty challenging position in relation to much of the Christian teaching on the self.

From my own “Buddhist view, Christian practice” perspective, the aim of liberation from the confines of my conventional self is very appealing.  But one of our members made the excellent point that, in the words of Paul, “we shall all be changed”–that whatever self might persist will be radically transformed, perhaps to the point where any definition of that self could no longer fit any notion of “self” we might hold.  It’s a very interesting idea, and maybe provides a point of contact between the traditions.  As Robert Thurman said at a talk I heard him give a year ago here in Seattle, “All Buddhist frameworks are heuristic.”  This surely must apply to anatman–is not the point of this idea to relieve our suffering?  And does not the Christian vision of a hopeful life of perfection in the divine presence have its own practical consequence for our practice and our living?

What I appreciate so much about L&L is the venue it provides to explore these topics in some depth, in community, over time.  That makes the exchanges remarkably rich and rewarding.

Tonight was the final exam in the “Mahayana View” portion of my Nalandabodhi class, which was conducted “Indian debate” style.  Pairs of students sit opposite each other and ask questions about the material–OK, we know the questions ahead of time, but it’s still a pretty intimidating format.  I always feel relieved and proud to get through these sessions!  This one was particularly challenging, since we were working with some rather sophisticated distinctions among various Tibetan schools (shentong and rangtong: is ultimate reality completely empty, or is it empty and luminous?  Stuff like that).  I actually happy that we’re moving on to the “path” portion of the class, which has more to do with the applications of the admittedly rather refined and subtle concepts we’ve been working with.  Still, it’s been a wonderful experience and has enriched my understanding of Buddhism–and the depth of my questions about Christianity–immensely.

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For our Lotus and Lily group meeting tonight I’ve put together the first draft of a “Lotus and Lily Chant Book.”  We’ve been experimenting with chanting as part of our meetings for a few months now, and the time seemed right to put together a book with some basic texts for us to work with on an ongoing basis.

With any community, developing music that really works is an art form, and I’ve always been fascinated by the process.  For Lotus and Lily at this stage, after a number of different kinds of experiments it seems best to focus on good chanting texts rather than on melodies–which at times feel too complex and distracting.  It seems to me that the “tune-of-the-week” approach has been a bit of a burden for people, so it’s time for something different.

So this first version of the chant book has just texts.  My idea is to start with chanting them in very simple ways, in a zen-like monotone, and let further elaborations emerge as seems appropriate over time.

The book in its initial incarnation is just six pages, divided up into “Invocations” “Essences”, “Wisdom”, “Mantras” and “Conclusions”.  Thanks to Victoria’s ever-present design genius it looks pretty nice, with little lotus and lily glyphs to indicate the texts from the two religions.  There are some theravada, mahayana and mantrayana texts; the Christian texts are mostly from the divine office and the Gospels.  I’m really looking forward to seeing how this project grows and changes over time.

Although it’s only a start, it has the very satisfying feeling of the beginning of something pretty wonderful…

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I got a brochure today from the Nitartha Institute, which is a two- to four-week summer intensive “for in-depth study, contemplation and meditation on the profound teachings of the Kagyu and Nyingma lineages.”  One of my teachers at Nalanda West attends every year and it does sound like an amazing experience.

As I prepare for another exam in my (comparatively wimpy) weekly Buddhism class at Nalanda West, with Two Truths and Three Natures swirling around in my brain, I wonder: would such an intensive experience be a good thing for me?  Talking with my wife about it earlier today, I found myself saying: “a little Buddhist study is making me very happy–would a lot of Buddhist study make me even happier?”

Since the Institute is in New Brunswick this summer and I have little time off available right now, it’s a question that can wait to be answered for another year.  But I was kind of proud of myself to think of asking it, since my typical approach in pursuit of things spiritual is to try to do too much and then burn out and not do anything.  I think my current rhythm of “a little Buddhism, a little Christianity, then a little lunch” is going pretty well.

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In the first post in this series, we considered some basic Buddhist concepts that John P. Keenan makes use of in his The Gospel of Mark: A Mahayana Reading.  Now let’s dig into his “Thematic Design” section, in which he lays out six key concepts that figure in his interpretation.  In this post I’ll talk about the first three of these concepts; in the next post in the series I’ll cover the last three.

On the Way

The Gospel of Mark is striking for its sense of constant motion: Jesus is continually on the go.  Traditional Christian comment might understand this as emblematic of a journey toward a preordained and cosmically significant conclusion.  But the Mahayana notion of “path”–essentially a process of practice that unfolds in each moment just as it is–puts the journeying in a different context.  The “fruit” that arises from the “path” is not a linear, logical outcome: it arises from staying focused on the path and not its result.  So from this point of view, the trajectory of the gospel is not toward a fixed and final conclusion–neither the fulfillment of a cosmic plan nor a journey toward some abstract spiritual realization.  Mark’s style in depicting Jesus on the way–impatient, hurried, almost obsessively eager to move on to the next event–supports this notion of path as a spontaneously arising journey.  This style beautifully evokes and illuminates the Buddhist “middle path.”

Emptiness

In Keenan’s reading of Mark, Jesus is a teacher of emptiness, continually pulling the rug out from under certainties and insisting on a spontaneous awakening into the present.  Mark uses the disciples in their “obdurate clinging to their own ideas about precisely who they are and who Jesus is” as a way to highlight the emptiness teaching.  Over and over, in Keenan’s reading, Jesus and the narrator subvert the disciples’ expectations and sense of certainty.  This parallels the Madhyamaka school’s philosophical method of refusing to make positive assertions.  At this writing I’ve only read a couple of chapters of the commentary, but am impressed by Keenan’s point that (at least in those early chapters) Mark steadfastly refuses to provide any but the barest details of Jesus’ actual teaching.  The narrative is so much more about the concepts that those around him (disciples, enemies, those he heals) rush to apply to his presence and activity.  This is a very rich vein indeed for reflection.

Dependent Co-Arising

Rather than acting out a pre-ordained divine plan, Mark’s Jesus responds to the causes and conditions that confront him–in particular conditions that emerge from the conflict between his own practice of “the path” of empty awareness and the forces of opposition that build up against him.  From this view, Jesus’ predictions of his suffering and death indicate his insight into the nature of dependent co-arising.  Similarly, his individual encounters with those “on the way” result from each particular set of unique circumstances.  Interestingly, virtually all of the people Jesus heals during the gospel disappear immediately from the story.  Only the most fixed players in the story–the disciples and those in opposition to Jesus–stick around to drive events forward.

Furthermore, the relationship between the relative world of dependent co-arising and the deeper reality of emptiness provide the two terms of the “middle path” that Jesus walks.  We’ll explore this notion more in the next post.

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Part of my daily practice these days makes use of a wonderful resource I picked up a few months back from Liturgical Press (as fine a publisher of the kind of geeky monastic/liturgical stuff I love as anyone I know).  The book is Benedictine Daily Prayer, a brand-new publication, which offers a pretty thorough slice of monastic liturgy, in English.  No chant is included, but as a way to get in touch with the rhythms of traditional Benedictine prayer it’s pretty glorious.  From what I can tell, they’ve adhered closely to the pre-Vatican structure of the divine office.  Which makes it a great tool for helping me deepen my work teaching and singing Gregorian chant.

Today I was reading a selection from the office of Vigils taken from the Book of Proverbs.  And the text really struck me–not least because it is one of a myriad of Bible verses I memorized as a child, so I can’t help but quoting from the Good King James: “Trust in the Lord with all thy heart, and lean not on thine own understanding.  In all thy ways acknowledge him, and he shall direct thy paths.”

What a potent statement!  At one level it might be seen as standing in contrast with Buddha’s teachings about the need for rigorous investigation and the notion that we are each ultimately responsible for our salvation (which as I’ve said before is one of the deeply appealing and meaningful aspects of Buddhism).  Lord=good; your understanding=bad.  Which is problematic.  And yet…

In Buddhism as in most spiritual paths the big problem is the problem of deluded ego (what Merton calls “the false self”).  So “Trust in the Lord with all thy heart” is a particular sort of remedy.  Interestingly, in that Shentong session I wrote about yesterday, this issue of *trust* came up.  When one is confronting sublime and inexpressible reality, a certain ineffable and not fully rational trust is most helpful.  Following this line of thought, I can take “thy own understanding” to refer to “the understanding of your deluded self.”  The New RSV has “do not rely on your own insight.”

Substitute the word “guru” for “Lord”, and it seems to me that it’s recognizable as a Buddhist attitude.  But in Buddhism it is, I think, rather more subtle, because ultimately “your own insight” is exactly what you have to rely on.  The guru’s role is to help you discover your true insight, and to distinguish that truth from the many false versions we construct to protect our egos from suffering.

The Book of Proverbs, like much other Christian scripture, makes a great deal more sense if we avoid the temptation to externalize its messages.  As long as we don’t stray into thinking that “the Lord” is somewhere out there, some other magical term to the equation that has the power to unilaterally save us, it’s good sound advice: “be skeptical of your own motives above all.  There is a wider reality that can help shape you into a truer expression of your genuine being.”

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Tonight was the last class in my Nalanda West Mahayana View series, and it was excellent as ever. We have been exploring the two schools of Rantong (“empty of self”) and Shentong (“empty of other”). The latter school focuses on a fundamental luminosity that is beyond emptiness. Rather difficult stuff, but it brings Christian negative theology strongly to mind. I’ve been developing an itch to read “The Cloud of Unknowing” lately, stimulated I think by this line of Buddhist reasoning (or beyond-reasoning) I’ve been encountering.

I must say it is quite breathtaking, after this rigorous and careful deconstruction of concept after concept, and layer after layer of imputed and imaginary reality, to come across, at the end, this assertion of luminosity. It’s as though we’ve been peeling away layer after layer of the onion, but at the center, when we are fully expecting to find…nothing, we find instead…something. Marvellous!

And an excellent discussion as well tonight of the many pitfalls that lie between where-we-are, embedded in luminosity but unaware of it, and where-we-may-yet-be, fully awake to the sacredness of all reality, empty and luminous. It’s easy to get tripped up along the way, because a luminosity that is tinged with *anything* else is not true luminosity (though it might very well feel like luminosity and look like luminosity). An interesting take on “Lucifer” as the angel of light that’s not quite perfectly bright.

Better to avoid such dualistic thoughts, I suppose, but there is something there: even in Buddhism a sort of implied relative dualism between the accurate view of suchness and our dream-like delusions of suffering or bliss.

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The Lotus and Lily group has read several books on the nexus of Buddhism and Christianity (see the bibliography for details), but I’m reading one now that is the most potent exploration I’ve come across yet. I have been working my way through a fascinating commentary on the Gospel of Mark, “The Gospel of Mark: A Mahayana Reading” by John P. Keenan. It’s a rare treasure, published by Orbis in 1995 but unfortunately now out of print. It is giving me insights into Jesus, and a way to understand his teaching and presence, that is based entirely on a Mahayana Buddhist point of view.

[Update: I just discovered that the publisher Wipf & Stock has reprinted the book and it's available online.  I ordered it and will update again if anything goes awry.  But this looks promising!]

The group has agreed to spend some time working with the book, though it is rather dense. I’m excited to have the opportunity to facilitate these sessions–in no small part because it will motivate me to dig into the material more deeply than I might do otherwise!

So what I’m doing here is the first of a few posts that will give me a chance to think through the material in the book in preparation for these sessions–a combination of thinking out loud and note-taking that I hope will be useful.

But I think a necessary first step to is to provide some background on the Mahayana Buddhist lens he uses as the basis for his commentary. His own introduction covers this material, but I find that somewhat inaccessible and complicated by his use of a lot of literary-critical ideas that may be more confusing than helpful.

For starters, I found this chart, which helpfully lays out the historical development of the term. The details are less important than the fact that Buddhism split into two major “camps” at around the turn of the first millennium (hmm, right around the time of Christ…). The more conservative Theravada/”hinayana” school focuses on a core set of teachings of the Buddha, while the Mahayana school accepted additional texts (sort of like the Christian apocrypha, though far more significant historically–a better, but still rather loose, analogy would be if a branch of Christianity based on Gnostic texts like the Gospel of Thomas continued to grow and flourish for centuries).

The more conservative school is still followed in Southeast Asian countries like Sri Lanka, Thailand, and Cambodia. Its most visible American presence is in the teaching of “Insight Meditation” or “vipassana”. Mahayana Buddhism was the main vehicle for the spread of Buddhism through Tibet, China, Japan, and Korea. All the major schools of Buddhism in these countries, including Zen, Pure Land, Esoteric and many others, are based on Mahayana thought.

It’s important to note that both Mahayana and its more conservative counterpart agree on many fundamental points, in particular the Four Noble Truths and its direct implications. Many of the practices of both meditation and devotion, as well as assertions about the nature of human experience, are shared in common.

Though there are certainly many points of divergence, the key characteristic of Mahayana for our purposes is the teachings on emptiness. This set of insights was articulated most clearly by Nagarjuna, a 2nd-century Indian figure revered by all schools of Mahayana Buddhism (though not all would completely agree with him…). The sacred texts that supported this teaching are called the “Prajnaparamita” (perfection of wisdom) sutras, and the most famous one is the Heart Sutra (naturally, it has its own web page). This sutra is chanted regularly in many sanghas all over the world.

A key phrase of the Heart Sutra is “form is emptiness, emptiness is form”. Now I heard this phrase for a long time and read analyses of it for a long time, before I started to see how crucially important this idea is. And since it’s crucially important to Keenan’s reading of Mark as well, it will be helpful to spend some time thinking about it.

The two terms “emptiness” and “form” refer to what is known as the “two truths”–an absolute, perfect reality, and a relative reality that accords with our everyday experience.

For the mahayana school, “emptiness” is a crucial term that points toward perfected reality, which can be provisionally formulated as: “all phenomena are empty.” That doesn’t quite mean “nothing exists”, but rather that everything we experience is impermanent, is dependent, is divisible into constituent parts. But the kind of analysis that Nagarjuna introduced and taught, avoids making specific assertions like that–instead, it applies what we might call a methodology of emptiness to all phenomena. The methodology insists that all assertions of any kind must be rejected. So for any proposition, it can neither be asserted to be true, asserted to be false, asserted to be neither true nor false, or asserted to be both true and false.

Thus ultimate reality is beyond concepts, beyond name and form, beyond language.

But what of the everyday reality that we experience? To describe this, Mahayana Buddhists make use of the term “dependent co-arising”. This is in fact a relative, partial-and-inadequate conceptual way to describe that indescribable emptiness we were just talking about. In a relative way, we can say that the contents of our experience are brought about by causes and conditions–we can articulate those causes and conditions and can in fact make quite thorough statements about what precisely they are. So I can dissect my experience, analyzing, for example, my mornning toast into its consituent parts of bread and jam and toaster and my own intention in toasting it, and on from there to the grain and the farmer and the baker and the farmer’s and baker’s parents, and on and on.

On one level (“emptiness”) this analysis points toward something beyond concept; but on another level (“form”) its a perfectly acceptable way to describe “what goes on”–just in a relative way.

So now that we have at least a provisional understanding of the concepts of “form” and “emptiness”, we can address the statement “form is emptiness; emptiness is form”. This takes the profundity one step deeper: the two truths in fact interpetrate, are both true at the same time, and in fact cannot be understood apart from each other. Clinging entirely to the relative has its obvious limitations, but by the same token clinging continually to the “really real” wraps one into an fruitless grasping after the ungraspable.

The fancy Sanskrit name for all this philosophy is “Madhyamaka”, which translates as “the middle way”–and that is a very key point. The Mahayana path is a middle path, between the extremes of absolute nonconceptual reality and the relative reality of the phenomenal world.

OK, I’ve tried to make this as brief and accessible as I could. It’s complicated stuff with a lot of variations and debates among various schools, but I think understanding these terms will give us enough to venture into Keenan’s interpretation of Mark: the two truths are emptiness and form, and there is a middle way that enables us to engage with both.

In short, Keenan’s proposition, which I find incredibly provocative, is that Jesus as presented in the gospel of Mark can be seen as a teacher of exactly this middle way. His actions, teachings, interactions with the disciples and others, and even his passion can all be understood as manifestations of a committment to a reality that can’t be described and yet is contained within the suchness of everyday life.

Next: the “thematic design” of the commentary, which summarizes the key ways Keenan links up the Gospel of Mark with Mahayana Buddhist teaching.

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When I was in my early twenties I was in Long Island, NY, visiting my parents. They are West Coast people (Seattle, Bay Area, now Sacramento) but spent a couple of years running a business on the East Coast around the time I was finishing college. I spent a number of weeks there after graduating, working and saving money before my big trip to Israel (yet another Tale from the Interfaith Frontier).

One evening I was talking with my father about religion and such. Not always the easiest topic of conversation for us. He cares passionately about his evangelical faith, and my questions and resistance have been the source of more than a little tension between us. But I won’t forget one moment, when he said, describing his own conversion experience in his early thirties: “When I accepted Jesus as my savior, that’s when I knew that I was really loved.”

My dad has intensely blue eyes (he’s 1/2 Swedish), but I’ve never seen them be so blue and so bright as the moment when he said that–it was electrifying.

My experience of Jesus and the Church has rarely if ever been so unambiguous. The convert’s zeal and joy has escaped me as I have found myself wrestling for decades with ideas I have a hard time understanding, let alone accepting. And while it is indeed wonderful and exciting in recent years to have been able to reconnect to the life and teachings of Jesus as embodied in the poetry of the liturgy, the celebratory joy I saw in my father’s eyes has not been part of that experience either.

But what I’ve been realizing over the past few months is that the dharma makes me feel just that much passion. I feel gifted by it and blessed by it, and grateful for it, in much the same way that Dad feels gifted and blessed by Jesus and grateful for His salvation.

And what might be the best part is that I’ve been able to share this with him. On a visit last year I told him that I was studying Buddhism and “Dad, it makes me feel the way Jesus makes you feel–like it is just the right thing for me.” I find that whenever I can tell my own true story, without defensiveness or resentment or guilt, my father accepts me, and that’s what I felt that night. For which I am very grateful indeed.

My own Buddhist-Christian journey, to this point anyway, has not always been an easy one–the two traditions often feel very different and don’t always sit comfortably with one another in my heart. But when I reflect on the light of Jesus in my Dad’s eyes, and the light of the dharma I feel growing within me, then I have a sense that a deep peace between them just might be possible.

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When the Lotus and Lily group met a few months ago to decide on an “official” name, one of the points of discussion was whether we are a “Buddhist-Christian” group or a “Christian-Buddhist” group. We went back and forth for a while and ended up with the “Buddhist” first. Some liked one better than the other; some didn’t care.

For me, “Buddhist-Christian” is by far the more pleasing combination, and here’s why: “Christian” is more like a noun, carrying with it implications of identity and family origin, almost a genetic imprint. “Buddhist” is more of an adjective: an attribute that I have more consciously adopted on what I perceive to be its merits.

Christianity runs in my blood and I don’t seem to be able to escape it; so I make do by deliberately applying the adjective “Buddhist” to it, and thereby I find my peace. At least for now.

Of course, the whole identity thing is both ridiculous and confusing. For quite some time, a few years, I resisted labels of all kinds, or at least attempted to. And I continue to feel quite awkward with the phrase, “I am a C-C-C-Christian.”

I talked with some old college friends a few days ago by phone (they were having an informal reunion in another town that I was unable to attend). One of them, now an administrator at a liberal Christian seminary asked me about my “spiritual journey”–it was a refreshingly direct question, showing me that this particular friend had not changed a whole lot in the last 25 years! I told him I was a “Buddhist-Christian”, because, well, you have to say something in such situations, right? And then as others got on they phone they would say “so, you’re a Buddhist-Christian…?” To which my first reaction was “Doh!” Labelled again!

But in fact it felt pretty useful, reasonably accurate, maybe a way to stake out a social position, here in the relative world, that I can actually live with for a while.

Anyway, to me it’s better than “Christian-Buddhist.”

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