Lotus and Lily Field Notes

I just spent a very satisfying evening with my Peregrine colleague Bill McJohn listening to takes from our recent recording session (and if you click that link, be gentle!  I know I haven’t updated the page for over a year…hoping to change that soon).  We worked with the sublime harpist Cheryl Ann Fulton and the delightfully calm and competent engineer Bill Levey, and we’re pretty pleased by the results so far.  If all goes well, and I think it will, the CD will be out in early February, just in time for, um, Candlemas.  What marketing geniuses we are.
Gregorian chant is my lifeline to Christian tradition, and putting that passion and energy to work on developing a product has been surprisingly satisfying.  Our first CD, which we did three years ago, was a bit of stress fest, so it’s awfully nice to have a different sort of experience.

Gee, maybe all that Buddhist meditation has something to do with it…

Comments(0)

There’s a poem by Frances Thompson, called “The Hound of Heaven”, which begins:

I fled Him, down the nights and down the days;
I fled Him, down the arches of the years;
I fled Him, down the labyrinthine ways
Of my own mind; and in the mist of tears
I hid from Him, and under running laughter.
Up vistaed hopes I sped;
And shot, precipitated,
Adown Titanic glooms of chasmed fears,
From those strong Feet that followed, followed after.
But with unhurrying chase,
And unperturbèd pace,
Deliberate speed, majestic instancy,
They beat – and a Voice beat
More instant than the Feet -
“All things betray thee, who betrayest Me.”

(Here’s the whole thing.)

I’m starting to think that my own Hound is Buddhadharma. I find myself thinking pretty much every day now about basic stuff like impermanence, my desire that leads to my suffering, the ways in in which everyone I encounter is interconnected with me and the more I struggle to assert my autonomy the more firmly that interdependence is asserted.

More and more, it’s Buddhism that smacks me upside the head with its truth. It seeks me out and hunts me down and sets me straight and there is simply no escaping it.

Jesus, who came into my life when I was four years old, is a gentle messiah for me.  He sits quietly, often a room or two away;  on occasion I find myself sitting with him and listening a bit.  That seems to be OK with him.  He doesn’t do the hound thing.  There have been times in the past when I hoped for something different.  But now I know why: my Buddhist teachers, much more demanding (of me at least), chase me down with perfect intent, every time.

Ultimately the point is probably the grace of surrender, which at least for many of us requires the hunter.  It may not matter all that much who or what the hunter is, as long as we have the good fortune to be caught.

Comments(2)

There are times when nothing I encounter isn’t dripping with dharma. Last night I was listening to a Pere Ubu song with these lyrics:

I’ve got a vacuum cleaner in my head
It sucks up everything I know

And it just seems perfectly Buddhist.

Which might mean exactly nothing, and is therefore a perfect expression of the latest thing I’m learning about, dzogchen, the notion that nirvana and samsara are both concepts that stem from a common non-conceptual ground.

If I was to try to articulate how “vacuum cleaner” relates to this, I guess I’d say that there are ways of knowing that are beyond knowing, or maybe I’d say the “vacuum cleaner” is emptiness a la Nagarjuna, or maybe I’d just turn the vacuum cleaner on and grin at you and either you’d get it or you wouldn’t, or maybe I would be the one who wouldn’t get it.

I guess there’s a sort of hip insanity that might pass for wisdom, a notion that was popular in my boomer youth and has persisted in all sorts of alternative loony culture ever since. Warhol Hunter Thompson Talking Heads and Karen Finley to cite a few better-known examples.

Then there’s unhip insanity, of the “let’s blow up the Dome of the Rock so the Messiah will come” variety. And there are of course hip (say, university professor) and unhip (say, CIA analyst) versions of sanity too.

And Buddhism in general and dzogchen in particular would cite every one of these as either fully enlightened and completely confused.

At times Buddhism collapses together the relative and the absolute, and what emerges is very confusing and strange. Useful? Sometimes. Maybe it helps when our identity (which of course only has meaning in a relative way) is tattered and shredded by our expectations of stability.

OK, I feel now like some sort of incompetent rodent that has got himself buried up to his mole-like claws in solipsistic cleverness. How useful is that?

The “useful” part is important, because, unlike a lot of other forms of insanity, hip or unhip, Buddhist insanity opens up the possibility for being not just wise but also compassionate.

Comments(1)

A really valuable Buddhist-Christian resource, and one of the most lively communities on the subject on the Web, is the Yahoo Christian-Buddhist group.
The list isn’t perfect–in my humble opinion it could stand a bit more moderation when certain members start to rant in one-way fashion–but what list doesn’t have that problem?

A blog is very different from a group, and I’ve found that this admittedly rather one-way mode of communication scratches a particular self-expressive itch.  But the group provides an important (and probably much more valuable service), one that a blog simply can’t provide: a sense that those of us who love Christianity and Buddhism are not alone, and that there are friends and support resources available–and however little our families or churches or society in general misunderstand the path we’re on, we always have someone to talk to.

It’s quite possibly more important than philosophy or theology.  Imagine that!

Comments(0)

In case there was any doubt, here’s a site dedicated to the notion that the New Testament gospels were translated directly from Sanskrit.

I love the scholarly imagination, the more so when it resides outside (far outside?) the mainstream.  Is the CLT (Christian Lindtner’s Theory) valid, as factual history?  I’m not qualified to say.  Does it surprise and delight and amuse?  You bet it does. Does a vision of interconnectedness that has the NT gospels coming from India provide fodder for the imagination?  Hooooaah!

It’s within such spaces that our own divinely ordained spiritual creativity can emerge.

Which reminds me: I’ve been feeling penitent about my grumbling yesterday regarding lineages and authenticity.  Despite what I said, it’s a balancing act between the authenticity of one’s own vision and the wise guidance of mentors and teachers.  Never one without the other.  Don’t you think wise teachers in any tradition get that and communicate that, and are detached enough from dependence on their students to encourage it?

Another tidbit from my Nalanda West group a few days ago: a wise guru only wants the student’s enlightenment, and therefore will encourage the student to do what they need to do, and go where they need to go, in order to achieve.

I think the Christian tradition kind of encourages us to view Jesus as our guru, with the notion that, no matter what we need, Jesus is always best, and no matter what other paths might potentially take us there, Jesus is “the way the truth and the life”.   Sorry, but it just seems so limiting, and really not very compassionate–as though the fact of our getting enlightened matters less than the way we go about it.

There are lots of problems with human gurus, but maybe this is one problem with our human-and-divine one.

Comments(0)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Comments(2)

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

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

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

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

Wulfila makes this comment:

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

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

Comments(0)

As I mentioned yesterday I’m reading Penetrating Wisdom by the Dzogchen Ponlop Rinpoche, the first section of which talks about the guru relationship and the total devotion that’s required in order to make that effecdtive.  One vivid image is that the guru wakes you up, not with a gentle alarm clock, but with a bucket of ice water that not only snaps you totally awake but, by soaking your pillow, your sheets, and your mattress, makes it utterly impossible to go back to sleep again.

Over and over again in my study of Buddhism over the past couple of years, I have encountere a call to surrender that is so distinctly familar: it’s the same call I turned away from decades ago in my youthful Christian days.  Pretty ironic.  Pretty silly, maybe, to take decades and decades to the get the place of being willing to say, “well, OK then.”

Maybe it’s the humor of Buddhism that makes it possible.  Maybe it’s the philosophical framework.  Or maybe it’s just different enough to get past all my programmed resistances and touch me at my core.

But, at least at first blush, this realm of guru devotion brings the world of Buddhism much closer to a framework I already know.  Jesus the guru, surrender the call, freedom from the failed experiment of egocentricity the goal.  And a painful, painful path to walk.

Comments(0)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Comments(0)

Between travel, intense work deadlines, and an rapidly approaching Peregrine recording session, I just don’t have many spare brain cells to work with.  Any blogging that happens in the next week or two will be as a result of grace or good karma.

Comments(0)

Dual religious identity newly elected to the House of Representatives, courtesy of this most miraculous of weeks, news-wise.

Thanks to John Malcomson for the link…

Comments(0)

I saw another episode of The Monastery on TLC the other night, and continue to be impressed by the depth and integrity of its presentation of monastic life.  One scene in particular was most moving, as one of the men visiting the monastery was shown at confession with one of the brothers.  They were sitting out in the open air, in the New Mexico desert, and the camera was watching them from a good distance away.  At the end the man bowed his head and the monk gently put his hand on it–a beautiful image of compassion and release and absolution.

Much of what the show presents is the encounter between a group of men steeped in the casual me-first ethos of the wider culture and some very sturdy old-fashioned monastic virtues like patience and humility and obedience.  Just the kind of stuff that I, stimulated by so much around me growing up, completely rejected as a younger person.  And I don’t know, there is value and virtue in finding one’s individual genius.  That is the vision of the “artist’s way” that is the paradigmatic emblem of secular liberation.  I do feel a strong connection with that path.
But I am noticing my attitude toward traditional virtues softening a bit as I approach my sixth decade.  Getting older is part of it, to be sure.  But part of it too is my study of Tibetan Buddhism, which for all its wildness and flair for the dramatic and “crazy wisdom” has also a very strong moralistic core.  That core is in a sense all the more powerful for me because it’s presented as an aspect of relative, not absolute, truth.  When emptiness is the rock-bottom reality, then no rules can possibly be ultimate.  But as skillful means, patience and humility and the rest have inestimable value as tools to train the consciousness to be better able to experience the unconditioned suchness.

And then, armed with this perspective on the virtues, I turn back again to Christianity, and find, at last, a context for and a way to connect with moral teachings that I have spurned for decades.  And I see a priest blessing a man at confession, and the whole world opens up.

Comments(0)

I just love meaty, excellent books on religious history.  This one, Eamon Duffy’s The Stripping of the Altars, is a fine example.  And it’s this book that has got me into yet another jag, mooning about the high romance and glamour of the whole traditional Christian edifice: saints, devotions, rosaries, pilgrimages, relics, prayerbooks, and the quasi-magical deployment of all these tools in service of aspirations both high (mystical awakening) and low (protection from plague, devils, an unfortunate end).

Really, it does remind me of the panoply of Tibetan religious culture, matching it blow for blow in complexity, richness, color, and diversity (if not, at least to my tastes, in unadorned spiritual wisdom).

And though I do my very best to make a distinction between my own state of awakening (or not) and the fuzz and fluff of religious culture…I do love all that blingdom of God stuff.

Books of Hours are the bling-iest of religious bling, late-middle-ages style, and one of the great things about The Stripping of the Altars is Duffy’s detailed treatment of the way these books were used in service of the whole range of religious aspiration.  Fascinating stuff.  Warning: the book is laced with quotations from Middle English sources, which will work well if you’re up on your Chaucer but otherwise canne make slowe gouing.

However, for the impation there are also plenty of pictures to enjoy.

Naturally, a book with this title is going to spend quite a bit of time on the dismantling of that gorgeous compelling culture.  I most likely will skip that part, despite the complicity of my religious forbears (Protestant, low-church) in such matters.

Comments(0)

Yesterday Victoria and I presented our “Entering Sacred Time” program at the Priory in Lacey. It’s a day-long exploration of Western medieval prayer practice, including Gregorian chant (early medieval, monastic) and the Book of Hours (a late medieval adaptation of monastic practice for laypeople).

We had about 20 people present, a very nice and engaged group. We’ve done this program multiple times in the past, usually with the help of Peregrine; doing it with just the two of us was a bit of a departure but it worked out pretty well.

I am fascinated, not to say obsessed, with the medieval divine office as expressed both in Gregorian chant and books of hours. Spending time with both the musical-vibration aspect, as embodied in Gregorian chant, and the visual aspect as embodied in books of hours, is just endlessly interesting, both historically and experientially.  When I look back at the last several years of work we’ve done, it might be summed as “medieval devotion, translated into accessible contemporary terms.”  To get there we’ve done quite a bit of unpacking and translating and reinterpreting.  We’ve thought a lot about the experience of chant, the experience of visual meditation, ways to think about traditional Catholic devotional practice, with a lot of attention to Mary but wading into other waters too, like the Passion and the saints.  To keep ourselves sane, but also simply to make sense of the material, we’ve looked a lot at Buddhist tradition in particular to find parallels and outside-in ways of understanding.
It’s probably not an overstatement to say that my relationship with medieval devotional practice is by far the most successful and meaningful aspect of my relationship with Christianity.  Finding ways to bring this material to life, to make it meaningful and useful for others, has the feel of a life’s work, a passion, a calling.  Most of my other encounters with the religion, in its contemporary Catholic and Protestant forms, are fraught with ambivalence and difficulties of all sorts.  But give me a good medieval devotional text or print, and I am ready to dig in and uncover its mysteries.

For cultivating wisdom and compassion in my present-moment everyday life, there is nothing like Buddhism.  But for a compelling religious culture that dazzles and amazes and draws me in more deeply all the time, I simply can’t get enough of medieval Christianity.

Comments(0)

Jon at The Wild Things of God writes about experience and belief, and the potential of ice cream for improving interfaith relations.

Just see what makes your ice cream taste best. That just might be real. Taste and see (Psalm 34:8). If it does, it’s probably more real than a belief.

This reminds me of the zen parable:

A man walking across a field encountered a tiger. He fled, the tiger chasing after him. Coming to a cliff, he caught hold of a wild vine and swung himself over the edge. The tiger sniffed at him from above. Terrified, the man looked down to where, far below, another tiger had come, waiting to eat him. Two mice, one white, one black, little by little began to gnaw away at the vine. The man saw a luscious strawberry near him. Grasping the vine with one hand, he plucked the strawberry with the other. How sweet it tasted!

Having just returned from a rather daunting, if ultimately very successful, trip to take care of some family business, I am profoundly enjoying the taste of being in my home, with my cats, my internet connection (!), my bicycle, and the thousand and one other comforts I am privileged to enjoy every day.  The Dzogchen Ponlop Rinpoche likes to say that there’s nothing wrong with enjoying the pleasures of life: the only problem is in expecting them to stay around forever.

I love the idea that in the shared taste of ice cream we are able to come together in our common humanity–in the desire and longing and love of beauty that rumbles inside us every day and leads us to do 95% of what we do.  It’s tempting to put fancy stuff like ideas and beliefs ahead of such humble experiences, but we do so at the risk of losing touch with the reality of who we are.

Comments(0)