Lotus and Lily Field Notes

One of the things I really love about my Buddhism classes at Nalanda West is the wonderful variety of teachers from the community that lead the sessions.  They range from the highly erudite to the deeply passionate to the heartful to the profoundly philosophical.  Tonight our teacher was one of the community’s main translators, so in addition to an exploration of the bodhisattva bhumis (=”levels of attainment”–sort of a road map to enlightenment) we had a chance to discuss the idiosyncracies of the Tibetan language and the challenges of rendering them into English.

I usually do my best to stay at some distance from the seductive appeal of the vast edifice of Tibetan culture (having my hands full trying to understand the vast edifice of medieval Western Christian culture).  Many American Tibetan Buddhists are pretty bedazzled, and I can see why: it’s pretty fancy stuff.  Tonight was a nice occasion to get more than a few interesting glimpses in the linguistic dimension of this intriguing complexity, in the context of discussion useful concepts like the relationship between patience (good) and anger (seriously problematic).

One other very interesting note from tonight’s class, that really has me thinking: for one’s own personal practice, it’s only necessary to study enough to understand what one is doing for one’s self–study, start meditating, and refresh your memory from time to time.  Beyond that, the depths of study are for the purpose of accumulating deeper and broader understandings that can be used to help remove the obstacles others might be facing.

This is interesting to me both as a student of Buddhism and as a teacher of chant (and, from time to time, spirituality based on Christian forms of practice).  And I do think that a good chunk of the richness of my Buddhist study–and the value of it–comes from what it allows me to offer to others, both in casual conversations and more formal contexts.

A nice motivation to keep studying, indeed.  That really makes a lot of sense to me.

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We just got back a couple of hours ago from our semi-annual Gregorian chant retreat at St. Andrew’s House on Hood Canal. We had 25 happy retreatants, and we are pretty happy too. The weather was sublime (cool, mild, breezy, but sunny: the Olympics and the Canal were splendid ["canal" is a most unfortunate name: it's really more like a magnificent fjord]). This is our seventh retreat, and it really feels like the rhythms and processes by which we produce and facilitate the event have settled into a place of maturity and clarity. Our hosts at St. Andrew’s House (and Harmony Hill, where we had seven retreatants in a very nice “spillover”) cottage were kind, effective, and unobtrusive.  Very lovely.

And as usually happens, I come away from the weekend feeling most impressed of all by the power and wisdom and grace of the Divine Office. The hours of prayer flow so naturally, synch up so beautifully with the rhythms of the day: that is truly the star of the show.

The other consistent experience is that each retreat has a decidedly distinct flavor, influenced in part, of course, by the particular group of folks who happen to be there, but in large part too, I am sure, by the particular feast we are exploring. Other retreats have been more emotionally exhilarating, or more demanding, or more solemn, or have led to higher states of consciousness (even a vision or two). I’d describe the characteristic vibe of this one, for the group as a whole, as “grounded, and clear, and simple.” And maybe that’s an insight into an aspect of the Feast of the Immaculate Conception. Hmm, purity, clarity, freedom from the entanglements of human obscurations–that sounds just about right.

We offered a bit less specifically spiritual teaching this time: the group seemed to be mostly interested in exploring the nuances of chant performance in its musical and practice-oriented aspects. That was fine with me: it felt just right. I was able to engage in a couple of nice one-on-one conversations that elicited some reflections from a Buddhist perspective, and I was happy to be able to do that as well.

As I’ve been noting in recent days, doing more chant in preparing for the retreat–and certainly the many hours of chanting we’ve been doing since Friday night–stir up in me a stronger sense of connection with the Christian part of myself. This weekend, a lot of that experience, for me, was about Mary. Given that this is the seventh retreat we’ve done with Mary as the focus, that might not be surprising (including retreats on the “common” chants for Mary, the Annunciation, the Visitation, the Nativity, the Sorrows of Mary, the Assumption, and now the Immaculate Conception). But I must say that this weekend was uniquely moving for me. I know a big part of it was the image I chose–Victoria prepares many images from traditional and contemporary art on the theme of the retreat–a sculpture by Robert Graham from the Cathedral of Our Lady of Angels in LA. Here’s a somewhat different view of the same statue.

This image really spoke deeply to me, communicating as it does the power of purity in making oneself available as a channel of divine energy.

As the leader of the group I certainly feel an obligation to focus on others’ experience during the weekend. But this Mary connection seemed to be some sort of sliver of interesting possibility to explore in my own experience. And as usual, my strategy is likely to be: hold myself open, notice what’s happening, and allow whatever needs to express itself to unfold.

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I am so impressionable.  When I’m doing a lot of Buddhist meditation or study, my heart just opens to the dharma ad it seems just perfect.  When I chant Psalms more regularly than usual (as I have the last couple of evenings, getting comfortable with the material for this weekend’s retreat), then the majesty and intimacy of David’s loving, terrifying, ever-present God seems all the more real and compelling.

It’s probably a good thing that my normal daily practice includes a modest amount from both traditions, thereby keeping me off the Glamour Wagon and in a sensible and realistic state of mild confusion.  I have been lectured at by many people from both sides of the Buddhist-Christian fence (and from other back yards as well) about the folly of dilletantism, yak’s heads with cow’s bodies (the Dalai Lama’s bon mot), and other skeptical views of this perpetual in-between-ness I find myself drawn toward.

But really, I’ve become just convinced, and no less so by virtue of the last year’s worth of Buddhist studies, that being in this unsettled, uneasy, trans-religious space is entirely healthy and positive.  Well, at least I’m convinced today.  Because part of the point is simply not to be convinced at all, to reside in a place of non-conviction, so that the currents and whirlwinds and eddies of experience can say what they have to say–and I’m not drowning them out by my preconceived notions of what kind of breeze is blowing.

So Buddhist-Christian-hood is, in the end, merely a metaphor, a convention by which I can trick myself into staying unbalanced, even when my outer self and some districts of my inner self are desperate for identity.  I am, in fact, not a Buddhist-Christian at all.  I would say I am nothing at all, but that is simply too definitive.  Even “I am” is way too precise, poses too many problems, eliminates too many possibilities.

Into such a consciousness, the chanting of Psalms that push so forcefully on the notion of a real God out there, and a real I to relate to It, is sort of exhilarating, in a strange way.  Something like wrapping up a glob of chutney in a wad of bubble gum and chomping away.  Certainly very stimulating.  Maybe a little crazy.  But quite possibly a very useful method for shaking up the conceptual status quo that I in my animal self and my personal psychology am so addicted to.

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There are times when, despite myself, I get caught up in the sheer majesty of the Christian edifice.  My Buddhist analysis tells me that no edifice is permanent, that its apparent solidity is a construction of my own consciousness, that it can be broken into pieces again and again through analysis (are there atoms in heaven? subatomic particles?), until all that is left is emptiness, and even that is concept, so we endlessly go on deconstructing and letting go–for that after all is the point.

But as I say, sometimes, despite myself…pondering great texts of majesty like Psalm 18 (“He parted the heavens and came down with a storm cloud under his feet”) or Psalm 93 (“Mightier than the sound of many waters, mightier than the breakers of the sea, mightier is the Lord who dwells on high”).  Pondering also the Immaculate Conception for our upcoming retreat (this weekend)–not an idea with which I am familiar or even very comfortable, but understood in this way it’s useful: imagine utter purity being present in the world, an utter purity that sets right by its very being all the errors and disappointments and obscurations of our many, many partial or confused or mentally afflicted thoughts and actions.  A being so pure that forth from it could come perfection itself, beyond purity, actual transcendent Being, right here and now.  And all that aimed at our impurities, our kleshas (to give them their Buddhist name), taking them all unconditionally away.

Ah, nice story.  Good bedtime story.  As I sit hear listening to the great slack-key guitarist Led Kaapana, whose music rolls along like heaven itself, what a wondrous story it does seem to be.

And who knows?  Maybe someday, after and quite possibly because of all this meditation on emptiness, a pathway to the Savior will open, and I will walk it.  Who knows indeed?

I have always been very impressed by those seekers who follow the path wherever in heaven or hell it might take them, and the labels be damned.  So would I have the courage, should the stars so align, to do the altar call thing again?  If that was really and truly the right choice, the fullest expression of integrity in that moment?  I hope so.  Being a coyote has many demands, but one of them is that you adopt the shape you need to adopt to get yourself out of your particular scrape.  Better a live Christian (metaphorically speaking) than a dead Buddhist.

…really, this music just takes me too far away.  It is in fact “Highway to Hana”, off of Led’s CD “Black Sand”.  Get it–it might turn you into a Sufi or a pagan, or just encourage you to get away to the islands for a week or two.  Which just might be the best highway to salvation of them all.

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I was thinking today, in the context of my Buddhist practice, about my friend Henry Yu who is a serious and creative Tai Chi practitioner.  He first learned the forms, and then started exploring what was inside those forms.  He says, “you have to find the way to follow the flow of energy: when you understand the energy flow, then you will do the form perfectly, without trying.”  Very much like any enlightenment-state practice: when we are fully in alignment with the Tao, or the Divine, or Buddha nature, then the practice flows easily and naturally: it is in fact the only thing to do.

Meanwhile, though, a little effort is in order, as we struggle to understand what’s really going on…tracing the outline of the form, even when we don’t fully understand it, is not such a bad thing to do.  And at this point it’s kind of the only option!

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Our “Life of Brian” screening at Lotus & Lily tonight was a pretty big success.  Lots of folks brought snacks, and we managed to get the digital projector/computer/speakers setup to work OK, and despite the continuing heat (from which we weeny Northwesterners are all suffering) it was a fun evening.  The scene I most remember from my original viewing (27 years ago, when it first came out!) was as vivid as ever: Brian saying “you have to think for yourselves!” and the crowd of avid followers saying “yes!  we have to think for ourselves!”).  Absolutely brilliant.

Most of the rest was delightfully silly rather than profound (the Roman centurion correcting Brian’s Latin grammar for his “Romans go home!” graffiti, the lovely stoning scene, the haggling, the Judean People’s Front/People’s Front of Judea conflict, and much more.

But, despite my intentions, I can’t help but make an observation or two (oh brother…).  The film really reflects its late-70s point of view (the Star Wars reference, which just seems hopelessly pointless and dated), but also the absurd squabbles among radical groups, which looks from the viewpoint of 2006 as a view into an entirely different era.  I remember something of those days, being touched briefly and lightly by them as an undergrad at Berkeley during the very same era. The teenage daughter of one of our group members was there tonight: she’s a very bright and aware kid but I suspect that primary satiric thrust was a bit lost on her.  It’s just an issue from another time.  Or maybe I’m just out of touch with the current incarnations of sectarian progressive micro-politics.

On the whole from the film, a bit less of the Buddhist-Christian insight than I might have thought.  I think the Monties have a more generic and less precise decontructive task to engage in: more strictly fun than intentional. Not really Zen humor after all, but British humor: class conscious and role conscious and unable to resist the strictly silly, especially when it works so damn well (as it does most of the time).

I have this coninuing alternate-history fantasy where Buddhism somehow makes it into the European religious scene earlier on, due, say, to some consequential central asian battle in the 8th century going one way rather than another.  And I wonder what European chant traditions might look like; and I wonder what Monty Python might look like: can we imagine a zany British infused with just a bit of Zen consciousness, perhaps a direct descendent of the great 19th century musical hall performer and well-respected roshi Arthur Hacklesley?  It could have happened.

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By Seattle standards it has been a hot day, and unusually muggy–at 9pm it’s still 85. So my brain is sluggish (is that a good enough excuse?) and not very inclined to plumb the depths of Buddhist-Christian wisdom tonight. Victoria and I did have a very good conversation earlier today about our Immaculate Conception retreat coming up, and I have been reading Genesis and also more about the bhumis of the Bodhisattva path. In addition I am reading an excellent history book by Tony Judt, called Postwar. He tells the story of Europe after World War II in a gripping way, while not shirking on details that might seem totally wonkish in someone else’s hands. He conveys a vivid sense of the sweep of history, and the causes and conditions on many different levels that cause things to develop as they do. It’s terrific stuff. In that it describes the roots of the era that I grew up in, an era that already feels like it’s slipping away into the past, there’s also a certain personal poignancy to the story.

And one more personal, poignant note: a couple of days ago we completed watching the entire run of Upstairs, Downstairs–all 5 years worth. It’s taken us about 18 months to get through it. And when the house at Eaton Place was cleaned out and everyone dispersed, I felt an unmistakeable sense of the impermanence, the transience of the shapes of our lives.

And this has been on my mind a lot since the shape of my life right now is probably as stable as it has ever been: I am riding my bike to work every day and working on chant stuff in the evenings and enjoying my time with Victoria in what feels like a remarkably regular and consistent way. And in a flash, through an economic shift or a health discovery or a slip or who knows what other slings or arrows — in a flash this could all crumble. Or it could remain the same, and just slowly drift into lower gear and mellow and fade. I understand better than I ever have the words of Herodotus: “I count no man happy until his death.” Because who knows what will happen?

Ah, it’s probably just the heat.

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Reading the DPR (that’s “Dzogchen Ponlop Rinpoche”, the spiritual leader of Nalandabodhi, and author of most of the materials I’ve been reading for my classes this past year).  (I figure after a year it’s OK for me to use the initials to refer to him.)

OK, anyway: reading the DPR this morning about the ten bhumis, or stages of bodhisattvahood.  Bhumis get talked about a lot around Nalandabodhi.  It’s hard for me not to think of Boy Scout merit badges.  I have found, though, that the sometimes insanely organized Tibetan Buddhist way of describing things always winds up imploding on itself in various ways, sometimes hilariously.  Last year Robert Thurman was in town doing a teaching, and the thing he said that has stuck with me the longest is, “in Tibetan Buddhism all models are heuristic.”  Meaning: provisional, artificial, intended to point to something beyond them.  The tradition is certainly stuffed full of mental models, but I’m getting the idea that each of them works pretty much like a Zen brush painting: the finger pointing at the moon, not the moon itself.

So the bhumis are sort of like that: a framework to help toward an understanding that doesn’t really fit into any set of seven or ten or twenty-two anythings.  But, as I keep finding over and over again, the models really do point to something useful.  Today, for instance, I was reading about the second bhumi (on the baseball card it would say, “nickname: the Stainless”), which has to do with the quality of discipline.  But get this: a discipline that is, at the level of bodhisattva realization, *utterly unselfconscious*.  Now that I find fascinating.  What is discipline, anyway, but a method for taming *oneself*.  So what is one taming, if there is no self to tame?  Yet the lack of a self to tame doesn’t mean that taming is unnecessary.  Discipline is described as the fertile soil into which the seeds of generosity are sown: no soil, no growth.

Another brilliant angle: each of the ten bhumis is characterized by emptiness, and from that perspective each of them must be identical (or maybe it’s better to say, “nothing can really be said definitively about any of them”).  So the bhumis, the DPR says, are descriptions of the various ways emptiness is perceived by beings of different stages of understanding.  It’s like this: that Barca lounger is empty, that Eames chair is empty, that throne is empty, that picnic bench is empty.  What’s there?  Nothing.  What does it rest on?  A particular kind of realization of that nothing.

As Kramer said in the Seinfeld episode “The Junior Mint”: it’s very refreshing!

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This Sunday our Seattle Lotus & Lily group will be screening Monty Python’s Life of Brian (you can read a few reviews here).
We are a serious group.  A respectful group.  A group that earnestly explores the intersection between Buddhism and Christianity.  And we will shortly return to our regular activites of more serious studies.  But this week’s film experience is our Feast of Fools, a chance for us to unwind and get silly and let our hair down after our months of hard work on Keenan’s Gospel of Mark commentary.
There may be a somewhat serious point behind what we’re doing as well, though: we got the idea for watching the film because lines from the movie kept cropping up in our conversation over the last couple of months.  The film aims its satire primarily at the benighted followers of Brian, a reluctant messiah from the 1st century (the real Messiah keeps showing up in the background, in far more reverential settings).  I don’t think it will be difficult to draw parallels between this confused, attached, and overheated group of disciples and the group of official (but no less confused) disciples we encountered over and over again in Mark.

The humor of the film is certainly a little broad (ahem) and at times deliberately tasteless (this *is* Monty Python, after all).  So if you prefer the sophistication of Noel Coward or the intellectual depth of George Bernard Shaw, you might find yourself groaning (and of course, if it’s not your cup of tea at all, you should feel comfortable opting not to join us this time).  But I hope we can all just revel in the pure silliness of it all, have a good zen laugh or two, and enjoy a “completely different” evening together.

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Still abuzz with preparations of various kinds, with the latest round of parody lyrics for my company retreat taking the bulk of my creative energy (my favorite thing about this activity is the way it lets you crawl inside great songs, in this case everything from Sam Cooke’s “Cupid” to “Goldfinger” to “Mack the Knife” to “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds.”)  But also lots of work getting ready for the summer retreat and this crazy death ritual performance (sometimes I feel a bit like Alice Cooper).
I have noticed before that being in a deeply creative space is pretty darned scary: it’s the intensity of that space, the overwhelming and complete nature of it that at times in the past has caused me to pull back into safer territory.  My work with chant, which I love, which I feel compelled to do, nevertheless has a certain aspect of safety for me: it’s a very constrained world, and that takes away some of the terror of wide open spaces that other kinds of creativity seem to take me to.   And lyric writing, even this seemingly innocuous silly parody of silly office doings, has a similar sort of potency.  So, for example, it’s very hard for me to imagine writing my own lyrics, or even my own songs.  Too much wide open spaces for me, cowboy.  At least at this point.

But I have been exploring wide open spaces of a different sort lately, in the Buddhist analytical meditation work I’ve been doing. It’s a very formal and structured way to get to “everything you know is wrong,” as taught originally by the wonderful philosophic master Nagarjuna and expounded upon by numerous Indian and Tibetan masters.  Last night at Nalandabodhi our class was dedicated to a practicum exploring this method.  It’s a great method: you systematically dismantle all connections between cause and effect that might bring circumstances about–and then at the end (my favorite part) you quite deliberately dismantle the dismantling and let everything just flow back into the present moment, just as it is.   Quite thrilling, actually.

I mean, if I can do that (whoever “I” is), then maybe a little dangerous creativity wouldn’t be so bad after all, eh?

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I’m juggling many creative projects right now, most of them involving Gregorian chant (of course), though I am working on another set of work-related parody lyrics for an upcoming office retreat.  Totally different space, totally different kind of work, both very satisfying and a little unsettling.

For our summer Gregorian Chant retreat, which happens in just two weeks, Victoria and I are both hard at work, taking care of logisitics but also noodling quite a bit about the feast of the Immaculate Conception, our theme this summer.  This is the last of seven (!) retreats focusing on feasts of Mary.  The Immaculate Conception is an odd one, both historically and theologically rather snarled up.  It refers to the purity of Mary’s birth (not Jesus’ as is often mistakenly thought).

The purity of Mary is one of those strange topics that gets feminists up in arms, and I can certainly appreciate that.  I can see how this notion has been used to disempower women, by setting up Mary as an other-worldly ideal to which other women should aspire (even if in limited ways).

What we are seeking to do in our retreat is to focus on the notion of original purity, not as a characteristic only of Mary as specially and uniquely chosen vessel of divine grace, but rather as a foundational aspect of each of us.  In Buddhist terms, the absolute reality is Buddha-nature, inherent luminosity/emptiness that is without blemish–immaculate.  Enlightenment can be understood as a confusion as to this inherent nature: we do not know we are pure and so we do not function that way.

Original sin, in this view, is the framework of delusion that conceals this true nature from us.

The tension between this understanding and the traditional one can be summed up in this question: so is it *my* nature that is originally pure, or is it the nature of *another* (Mary and Jesus, though in different ways) whose purity is somehow imputed to me?  Was the lady that Bernadette Soubirous saw an objective reality, or a mirror of the purity in Bernadette’s own heart?

Close Buddhist analysis would assert that the very notions of self and other are in themselves delusive: conceptual cages through which we look at a distorted version of reality.   I think this frees up some both/and possibilities: Mary’s purity yields Jesus’ purity yields my purity, and yet my purity is not capable of being linked definitively with either of them.

Hmm.  Scholastic logic and Buddhist philosophy may not sit that well together.  This territory is not the most comfortable one I can imagine exploring, but it is rich and interesting to be here taking a look around.  I am grateful that I have this Buddhist context to apply to these Christian ideas, and I look forward to the deepening that reflection before and during the retreat is likely to bring.

The odd mysteries of the Christian faith, even when they seem not to get clearer over time, just continue to resonate, and reverberate, and nourish me–perhaps most of all when I find clear understanding eluding my grasp.

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The other night I saw, for the first time, The Song of Bernadette.  It surprised me: truly a great religious film–great because of the wonderful music, wonderful script, wonderful presence of Jennifer Jones (OK, she’s a babe, but a convincingly transcendent babe).  But also great because the whole production manages to express the jaw-dropping wonder of ultimate reality intersecting with human life, with the greatest of subtlety and respect.  The film was made in ‘43: how come *that* war, on occasion, managed to elicit such sublime expressions of the triumph of the spirit, while *ours* just keeps slogging deeper into depression?

But I’m really not feeling blue: I’m feeling inspired, both by the film and the related-but-different work I’m doing putting together our recreation of a medieval monastic death ritual for this Nalandabodhi program on August 19.  I am feeling once again inspired by the beauty of the tradition and the beauty of its ritual.  It’s quite reliable, really: I work with chant and I get inspired.
In writing about his music for the film, Ernest Newman said that he listened to “great religious music” by composers like Mendelssohn and Wagner, but it all left him cold.  he found his key by realizing that what Bernadette Soubirous witnessed in that cave near Lourdes was not, as she described it, so much the Virgin Mary as simply “the lady”.  So his music went for that: the encounter with beauty.  Not with dogma, or a religious figure, or heavenly creature.  Just beauty.

And when I am immersed in the chant and feeling its wisdom and power, as I have been today, it seems very similar: an encounter with nothing other than beauty itself, just as it is.

Why would I ever stop?  Why would I ever need to explain it in any other way?

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More meditation thoughts (though I suppose that is something of a contradiction in terms, eh?):

Continuing the exploration of the nature of arising, from Nagarjuna, whose radical skepticism about cause and effect I was musing on yesterday.

It seems to me that where this sort of analytical meditation leaves you is in a state of not-knowing, not-grasping, a wholly holy (holey?) consciousness through which can flow the beams of uncommon wisdom.  And this thought skittered through my head as I was exploring this: perhaps this state is something akin to the “mystery of the faith” articulated in the mass.  Though Protestants too, at least in my own upbringing, emphasize this same notion of mystery, as in “the unknowable ways of God”.

So what’s different between Nagarjuna’s form of unknowing and the Christian assertion of mystery?  I do think there are some surface differences, in that Christianity revolves around the bright shining center of revealed truth through the Bible (Catholic version: the Bible and the tradition of the Church).  So I think it winds up being something like, “Yes, it is a mystery, and unexplainable.  Therefore you must take on faith what is revealed in the Word/the Church.”  Whereas the Buddhist version is “Yes, it is a mystery, and unexplainable.  Therefore you must let go, let go, go beyond, beyond, completely beyond.”

Still, I like this “mysterious” connection between the traditions, and the notion that there is some undefinable and indescribable core of Something/Nothing to which the surface elements point.  And, in order to connect with that core, we groom and train our minds and heartsthrough our practices, in the symbolic and representative forms our traditions offer us.

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For some reason, lately Amahl, one of our cats, has been clambering upstairs and harrassing me during meditation.  He yowls, butts his head against my knees, paces back and forth in front of my humbly lowered but slightly open eyes.

Today when I was (supposedly) deep in meditation he knocked the lamp behind me over, and before I knew what I was doing I was grabbing him and tossing him away, with an, “Amahl, you stupid…”–literally most of the way through this instinctively violent reaction before I caught myself doing it, and laughed sheepishly, and thought “if this is the way you behave in the middle of meditation, hmm, maybe you’re not quite as far along as you might have hoped…”

Amahl’s presence in my meditation space does have its more obviously beneficial (or maybe just more reassuring) aspects, however.  I am in the middle of an exploration of Madhyamaka reasoning, analyzing the relationship between causes and effects.  As with most of this stuff, the real point, I think, is to break one free of the attachments associated with habitual thinking, but this particular practice is really kind of weird.  The idea is to talk oneself out of the notion that individual phenomena actually arise, by determing that (1) a phenomenon cannot arise from itself, (2) a phenomenon cannot arise something other than itself, (3) a phenomenon cannot arise both from itself and from something other than itself, and (4) a phenomenon cannot arise neither from itself nor from something other than itself.

This is, as it were, the polar opposite of good ol’ testifyin’ Pentacostal Holy Spirit stuff.  Cerebral and dry, right?  But today, as I was trying to reflect on these notions, with Amahl pacing in front of me, I suddenly got it, for just a split second.  For just a second I perceived all these moments of discrete individual Amahls, disconnected from one another, spontaneously arising with no relationship to each other.  And at just that moment I hit the 4th reasoning, which implies that *phenomena cannot be causeless.*  So if  this pacing cat is neither caused by itself nor by something else nor by both nor by neither, then we are left with only one conclusion: this arising (of kitty-ness, or anything else for that mattter) cannot be established at all.  It’s not that they don’t exist.  They simply can’t be established.

Which leaves us, somewhat like a certain cat I know, pacing back and forth, flicking our conceptual tails, trying to grasp onto an answer, find a way out of the conundrum.

And that right there, that’s the place to be.  That’s the hanging-on-the-cross moment right there.  Forsaken yet glorified.  Sunk deep in complete mystery, yet completely awarke and aware.  Very nice indeed.  So thank you, my teacher Amahl, for giving me… (oops, he’s just run away–probably chasing a moth).

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This post is about Lotus & Lily business.  Those looking for a day’s helping of insight will have to search within the original purity of their own minds.

After our “summer break” session watching The Life of Brian on Sunday, July 23 (a chance to get our yaya’s out after all that heavy serious Mahayana philosophy), we’ll resume reading Buddhists Talk about Jesus, Christians Talk about the Buddha, edited by Rita M. Gross and Terry C. Muck (New York and London: Continuum, 2000). I understand that a discussion of the introduction to this book took place a number of sessions ago, so we will launch directly into the first set of readings.

I haven’t read the whole book, but have read some parts of it, and I think there will be ample room for very interesting discussions.  At a first glance, anyway, a lot of the book more oriented to questions of identity (as one of the essay writers puts it: “location, location, location”) than the more-or-less precise analysis we’ve become used to.  But that’s good stuff for us to chew on, too.
So here’s a proposed reading schedule.  Brickbats and suggested improvements are of course welcome:
Sunday, July 23: The Life of Brian
Sunday, August 13: BTJ/CTB I: Buddhist reflections on Jesus (Cabezon & Gross, pp. 17-51)
Sunday, August 27: BTJ/CTB II: Buddhist reflections on Jesus (Kim & Machida, pp. 52-73)
Sunday, September 10: BTJ/CTB III: Christian response (Borg & Crossan, pp. 77-86)
Sunday, September 24: BTJ/CTB IV: Christian reflections on the Buddha (Harris & Muck, pp. 89-106)
Sunday, October 8: BTJ/CTB V: Christian reflections on the Buddha (Swearer & Thurston, pp. 107-128)
Sunday, October 22: BTJ/CTB VI: Buddhist response (Burford & Uno, pp. 131-142)

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Last night Lotus & Lily brought to a conclusion our exploration of Keenan’s commentary on Mark.  I for one am in a celebratory mood: we’ve taken on a difficult text and done some excellent work with it.  Hooray for us!
But the work goes on: from the emptiness of the wilderness to the teachings empty of content (as Keenan loves to point out, much of Jesus’ best teaching in the gospel is indicated simply by “he taught them”–without explaining what the teaching was) to an empty transfiguration (focusing in the end on “just Jesus”–not the brilliance or glamor but of the simple presence that was left in the aftermath) to the self-emptying of the cross to the final shocking image of an empty tomb.

Emptiness is a core Mahayana teaching. In my Buddhism classes we’ve been learning that emptiness has three characteristics: impermanence, dependence, and multiplicity. In other words, all phenomena are empty of a permanent nature, empty of an independent nature, and empty of a singular, indivisible nature. I realize that in this formulate the notion of emptiness may seem overly philosophical and abstract, but it’s intended to cut like a diamond knife right through our delusive attachment to permanence independence indivisibility–*particularly* when it comes to our own rotten selves.

The teaching on emptiness is the Buddhist equivalent of the empty tomb, or the emptiness of the cross: a teaching to shock us out of our attachments and wake up to something larger. What’s become crystal clear to me in my re-reading of Mark through Keenan’s eyes is that the story of Jesus is as good a whack on the side of the head as any Zen master could provide–assuming, that is, that we are able to get past the blinding aura of dazzle and glitz that centuries of imputed messiahood, triumphalism and imperial values have bestowed on the Man of Galilee.

But viewed in his raw and naked form, the Tempted One, the Suffering One, the Risen One is nothing but an icon of emptiness. Perhaps articulated through a Buddhist lens that helps to define just what that “emptiness” is (impermanent, dependent, multiple), we can see more clearly what a vision of enlightened, awake possibility Jesus presents us with.

To me, anyway, this gospel of emptiness begins to open up the opportunity for embrace, not mere toleration or laborious translation, of the gospel narrative. Perhaps it’s simply a perfectly constructed story of Buddhist liberation. No, even better: it’s a perfect parable of what liberation might look like for us: shocked again and again out of our expectations, on the road with Jesus or maybe without him, confused, healed, misunderstanding and then grasping. I love the slow, steady pace with which Buddhist teaching and practice unfolds. But maybe the lurching road to Jerusalem, full of crazy highs and exhausting lows, and winding up in the end back where it starts, in Galilee, is a suitable and appropriate pilgrim path for us Buddhist-Christians to explore.

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Tomorrow is our last “Mahayana Mark” session, in which we’ll be discussing the resurrection narrative.  Here is one thing Keenan has to say that I particularly like:

The empty tomb itself proves nothing.  An empty tomb merely means that there is no corpse in it.  Mark is not trying to demonstrate the truth of the resurrection within the context of imagined thinking, for no such demonstration is possible.  Rather, the point is that Jesus is not there within conventional frames of reference, and thus not within the realm of words and judgments that might be called upon to demonstrate his renewed existence. (393)

When I was in high school I heard a speaker, Josh McDowell, who had written a book called Evidence that Demands a Verdict that told a very different story.  (Interestingly, I encountered Mr. McDowell’s work again a few weeks ago at my parents’ church: the bulletin included a slick anti-Da Vinci Code brochure authored by him).  Nowadays he has a website, www.josh.org, that lays out his rationalist point of view with great clarity.  For him, the empty tomb proves it all, and “the “realm of words and judgment” is indeed called upon, most insistently, to “demonstrate his renewed existence.”

At that time, as a 17-or-so-year-old, I was confronting with growing alarm and dis-ease the reality that I was not going to be convinced by rational arguments.  The way I was beginning to formulate it at the time was, “Even if Jesus has risen from the dead…what of that?”  And now I find, like the most wondrous soothing balm, these words of Keenan:

The story of Jesus has no final conclusion, for the resurrected life of Jesus is not a given data, once learned and perhaps imitated.  Rather, it is the life story of each Christian, embodied in particular circumstances and taking specific courses, as needed and possible in different lives.  The Gospel is open-ended, for the action of the story depends on decisions which the Church, including the readers, must still make.  Stories end, but the gospel goes on. (397)

“Not a given data” [perhaps 'datum' would be better, but...] says that what’s important, what one can focus on, is not this brassy iconic firm and fixed “risen Savior” that sits there in heaven waiting for me to come up to him and poke my finger in his side and say “oh wow!”  But rather that gorgeous emptiness, that opening of possibilities: the empty tomb, the empty possibilities, like the emptiness of the cross and the emptiness of the parables and the emptiness of the wilderness and even the empty heads of the uncomprehending disciples.

What I see after reading Keenan is a gospel full of emptiness, which means a gospel full of possibilities and full of freedom and full of of liberation from all our clinging and desire and the suffering that generates.  In short, a pretty darned Buddhist gospel.

I’m looking forward to the discussion tomorrow, and looking forward even more to continuing the journey of study and exploration that reading Keenan has opened up for me (and, as it seems to me, for many others in our group).  I feel deeply grateful to John Keenan for his important and eye-opening work.  It’s not always easy, but it has continually opened up new insights into the gospel, and Jesus, and the net of domestication that has been woven around the profundity and clarity of his message.

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As part of my lengthy time hanging out with Nalandabodhi people for 4th of July fireworks, I got into a discussion with several of them about Christianity and Buddhism.  I find this is rather tricky territory: a number of the Buddhists I know were raised Christians and don’t necessarily feel all that amicable about the tradition.  Anyone who reads this blog knows that I have ample sympathy for that situation.  Nevertheless it’s hard not to feel defensive.

The main critique of Christianity I was hearing from this group is that it is lacking precision and method.  Couldn’t agree more: that troubles me as well.  What I said in response was, “right–the focus of the religion is devotion to Jesus.”  And one of the people in the conversation pointed out that guru devotion is a core element of Tibetan Buddhism too.  Rigor and devotion: not such a bad combination.

This all puts me in mind of this week’s upcoming Lotus & Lily session on John’ Keenan’s Mahayana interpretation of the Gospel of Mark.  It’s our last session, on the resurrection.  And as Keenan points out, what Mark does at this juncture is point to the resurrection as the final emptying out, the virtual disappearance of the savior just at the point when one would expect a triumphant affirmation of his glory.  “He is going before you into Galilee” is the only information the disciples get.  Back to Galilee–back to your life, back to the present moment: that’s where the savior is located.  Only in the here and now will you find the transcendence you seek.

So how does that satisfy the devotional impulse?  I think Keenan’s Mark (or Mark’s Jesus?) thwarts that, just as he thwarts attachment in so many other ways.

Handling this human impulse toward devotion takes wisdom and skill.  What is starting to come into focus for me is that that impulse benefits greatly from the rigorous discipline of the Buddhist philosophical framework.  But the question also arises: how does one make use of a Christian devotional impulse?  If love of Jesus is what calls, how does one answer?

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There are certain Buddhists I know who are aflame with evangelical fervor about the dharma and, like their Christian counterparts, want to spread the Good News.  I do like the idea of telling a good story, but when it contains a more or less subtle form of one-upmanship I lose interest pretty quickly.  And these seems to me to be something inherently contradictory between the dharma’s firm assertion that enlightenment is in the hands of the individual practitioner, and a conviction that this or that particular flavor of the dharma is somehow *it* for the masses.

But a completely hands-off, do-your-own-thing-it’s-all-groovy mentality is squishy and thoughtless.  Passion and committment are good, and confidence in one’s journey does seem to somehow inevitably spill over into gospel-preaching of one kind or another.  It’s not really such a bad thing.

But conversations like these, one one side or the other of the huge fence that divides Buddhism and Christianity, make this particular fence-sitter defensive and uncomfortable.  One way or the other, I instinctively rush to the defence of the Christians/Buddhists when the Buddhists/Christians start talking this way.

How does one hold prophetic fervor and conviction, while holding on to two traditions?  Puzzling.

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…atop the 4-story Nalanda West building in lower Wallingford, with a picture-perfect view of the Lake Union show.  “Oooh, that looks like a lotus flower!”  “Those sparkley flashes look just the play of thoughts, flickering in and out of existence!”  “Red white and blue: om, ah, hung.”

Usually I witness 4th of July evetns with a bit of a sinking feeling: the celebration of imperial power.  It was nice and refreshing to see it all in a different context: the play of energy, the interpenetration of nirvana and samsara, the exploding colors arising from emptiness and dispersing again.  And the whole thing so damn beautiful against a velvet sky, with the Seattle skyscrapers behind and the whole city watching from every rooftop and street.

Blessed by the Fourth of July.

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