Mahayana scriptures can seem bewildering, garish, even fanciful to modern readers. They seem to be remote from our ultimate concern, from our search for truth, from our longing to see things as they really are. Among such texts are the three Pure Land scriptures, which tell of an ancient Buddha named Amitabha (“Infinite Light,” or Amida in Japan). While we cannot endorse such texts as historical records, neither should we dismiss them as simply false or as fiction; rather, they awaken our creative imagination. They speak the language of myth.

A myth is a symbolic narrative that communicates important truths that cannot properly be revealed in any other way. To understand a myth we have to enter into it. To enter into the myth of Amida is to immerse ourselves within an imaginative narrative, like living through a poem. This is to recognize that there is a deeper dimension to human consciousness that transcends the scheming will. This is to recognize that there is a source of infinite value, an indefatigable, compassionate impulse that is eternally reaching out to bless us and fulfill itself through us. We can embrace this impulse or, rather, allow it to embrace us. We can be “grasped never to be abandoned” by Amida’s compassion, to use a refrain of Shinran, the founder of Shin, or True Pure Land Buddhism. The myth of Amida and their forty-eight vows affirm that, in spite of the painful and sometimes tragic events that may mark our lives, there is a benevolent, existential current that seeks to well up within us and to flow through us.

In his book, Jesus Christ and Mythology (New York: Scribner’s Sons, 1958), theologian Rudolf Bultmann states, “myths give to the transcendent reality an immanent … worldly objectivity. Myths give worldly objectivity to that which is unworldly.” In other words, myths enable us to connect with the transcendent, the sacred dimension, the “great matter.” In Dynamics of Faith (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1957), another theologian, Paul Tillich, writes that “humankind’s ultimate concern must be expressed symbolically, because symbolic language alone is able to express the ultimate.” Symbols and myths, he argues, are the authentic language of religious life and the only way in which the sacred can reveal itself directly. A symbol can never be fully “translated” into other terms but must be approached through the symbol itself. Since a symbol has multiple levels of significance and depth, its meaning can never be exhausted. For this reason, understanding them is a process that is never finished, never complete.

When symbols are structured into narratives, they form myths. The Pure Land of Sukhavati and its presiding Buddha Amida are symbols, and the narrative of Dharmakara, or Amida, that we encounter in the Pure Land scriptures is a myth. This means that we should not subject them to a literal interpretation. So how can this myth be understood in a meaningful way? The story of Amida and the creation of the Pure Land offer a myth of deliverance or liberation. They offer the promise of reconciliation with ourselves by means of a dynamic state of transformative awareness that embraces both our undoubted impulse toward self-transcendence and our inescapable fallibility. Through entering into the drama of this mythic narrative, we may go deeper into its significance in our own lives. To take a myth literally is idolatry. To interpret a myth, on the other hand, unleashes its transformative potential. Understanding a myth is never complete but rather refreshed and renewed each time we immerse ourselves within its narrative.

According to Bultmann, through interpreting myths we enable for ourselves a more authentic mode of existence. Myths draw on images and themes that are familiar to us and that belong to the visible world, albeit their intention is to evoke realities that are not visible and that call to us from beyond the horizon of the known. Rather than offering a description or explanation of the visible, outer world, myth is concerned with interiority, with human imagination. Myths are poetry.

Bultmann developed an approach to interpreting myths that he called “demythologizing.” This process does not aim to deconstruct myths, nor does it simply translate them into other terms (which would then make them redundant), but consists of a never-finished exercise in creative interpretation, an exercise that is always transformative. Through the practice of demythologizing, we may harvest the existential riches latent within myths.

In approaching symbols and myths, we must commit to a kind of wager. In this case, we must wager on the fact that Amida’s myth has something significant to say to us about our existence and that through opening ourselves up to its significance, through entering into it, we will be recompensed with an enlarged self-understanding. While we remain outside the myth, as a spectator, it can never come alive for us as a world of living significance. We will never know what the ocean feels like until we plunge in. Understanding begins not by means of a bird’s-eye view (which is impossible), but from a particular and restricted standpoint. We may then go about the process of verifying the myth by saturating it with intelligibility. This results in a transformation of consciousness. Through their interpretation, symbols and myths assume the gravity of existential agents; they become means by which we can bring alive our understanding of what it means to be human and what is of maximum value to us.

What could it mean for us to demythologize, or deliteralize, the myth of Amida and the Pure Land? It would mean to understand it not as a narration of historical events that happened a long time ago but as revealing something about the nature and purpose of human existence and of the possibilities that may unfold within it. The Pure Land is life understood as a field of going for refuge. From our side, from the inside, the world manifests itself to us as infused with sacred meaning, as a call toward enlightenment. The world unfolds before us as a dimension that not only enables but also invites, and even enacts, liberation. The Pure Land is the present moment sacralized. The Pure Land is epiphany.

The Pure Land is not necessarily an external, material world, but rather a spiritual dimension that we can begin to inhabit as we open ourselves to the blessing of Amitabha. In The Collected Works of Shinran, the Shin founder offers a tantalizing reflection in relation to the inside-or-outsideness of the Pure Land when he writes: “Hence we know that when we reach the Buddha-land of happiness, we unfailingly disclose buddhanature.” Buddhanature is more commonly interpreted as a potential within us; something that can come alive as we become spiritually sensitized, like a seed that grows and then flowers. Yet Shinran appears to be saying that awakening to our buddhanature is in fact the same as being reborn in the Pure Land. We might say, perhaps, that the Pure Land is neither inside us nor outside but both; it discloses to us the sacred context of our lives. 

To offer a different perspective, the Pure Land might also be seen as a kind of cosmic sangha, which is inconceivably vast, and infinitely more refined, a field of blessing, saturated with value and significance. This suggests that, instead of being a place, the Pure Land articulates a relation, even the spirit of kalyāṇa mitratā, or spiritual friendship. The Vimalakīrti Nirdeśa declares that the Pure Land is this very world. We see it as impure owing to our distorting perceptions and afflictions. Amida and the Pure Land are not really separate from one another, neither are they separate from us. To enter the Pure Land is to enter into Amida’s body, even to be reconstituted by Amida as Amida. It means to be welcomed into Amida, but not in such a way that submerges or dismembers us. Rather, it entails recognizing more completely how we are intimately connected to others as we realize our solidarity with them, as we awaken to our shared cares, fears, and longings. In his Collected Works, Shinran articulates this sentiment: 

When a foolish being of delusion and defilement awakens shinjin [true entrusting], 
He realizes that birth-and-death is itself nirvana; 
Without fail he reaches the land of immeasurable light 
And universally guides sentient beings to enlightenment. 

Amida symbolizes the sacred world breaking in on us or erupting within us. Amida is a transcendent factor that works upon or through us but which never fully belongs to us. Better, it can never be appropriated by us. Nor can it in any way be manufactured or contrived. Amida is pure compassion reaching out to all beings through us. Amida’s infinite light eternally shines upon all without exception.

The myth of Amida and the Pure Land do not contradict historical or factual truth, but rather they enable us to wake up to the value and scope of our human existence.

The post Demythologizing Amida appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

Mitra Bishop Roshi is the founder of Mountain Gate-Sanmonji, a Rinzai Zen temple nestled high in the Sangre de Cristo Mountains of northern New Mexico where she offers a uniquely American approach to practice. 

Her own training was more traditional: starting in the mid-1970s, she studied at the Rochester Zen Center with Roshi Philip Kapleau, and later spent four years at Sogen-ji in Okayama, Japan, training with the Rinzai teacher Shodo Harada Roshi. She urges students to address their buried trauma—using psychotherapy, if necessary—to deepen their Zen practice. 

Mitra Roshi also leads nonsectarian retreats based on Zen principles for women veterans experiencing post-traumatic stress, called Regaining Balance. She explores all this in her new book, Deepening Zen: The Long Maturation.

How would you characterize your teaching style? I don’t teach classic Eastern Zen. I teach a really American format, which is not something that a lot of Zen centers in America do. They still stick to the straight and narrow. What I’ve learned through working with students and my own observations studying at Sogen-ji and Rochester has shaped my way of teaching in probably a more radical way than that of most Zen teachers in America.

What did you hope to achieve with your new book? It’s for the dharma, and to let people know that there’s not just one way to do Zen practice—that people’s histories and experiences have to be taken into account. There is no one-size-fits-all Zen practice. That’s how we were taught in the old days, and I’ve seen so many people crash and burn because they didn’t get a chance to work with things in a way that would have enhanced their practice, taken them deeper, and helped to transform their whole lives in a positive way. There have been so many instances of misbehavior among Western and Eastern teachers who have trained in that way. They have had the straight and narrow [approach], and so they have shoved their issues aside, putting them in a drawer somewhere. There were issues in their personalities that they never had a chance to work with and clean up, so to speak. That is probably the greatest fault of most American Zen today. The emphasis on “just this”—there are very few people who can handle that.

Zen practice is often associated with a distinctly masculine energy. As a mother, grandmother, and great-grandmother, do you bring a different, uniquely female perspective to the way you teach? Probably. Since I can’t transform into a male persona, I probably do. I understand trauma. I’ve had trauma—it took me a long time to work through it with a lot of psychotherapy—but I also was doing a lot of Zen practice at the same time. I recognize that trauma can impact your Zen practice. There are people who can’t do Zen practice effectively because they can’t remove themselves from dissociation. So that already was telling me something. 

Did you encounter that masculine approach in your own training? Rochester Zen Center was called “the boot camp of Zen.” And it was. Roshi Kapleau’s last teacher was Yasutani Roshi, who was from an old samurai family. It was all very dynamic and intense. Then I went to Sogen-ji, which was really different. You have this idea that with Japanese Zen you’re at the tip of a spear all the time. At Sogen-ji, while it was very strict, there was also a deep sense of compassion. I also saw over the time I was there that [the practice] is [more] flexible. 

There is no one-size-fits-all Zen practice.

In the book you often mention susok’kan (“extended breath”) practice. Could you describe that? It is the fundamental practice in Rinzai temples. We call it the “extended breath.” You are relaxed in your shoulders and belly, sinking deep within. You let yourself breathe out normally, and when you get to the point where you would automatically breathe back in, instead, you take it further out, focusing on your body. What it does is eliminate the possibility of thought. You cannot focus to that degree and also carry along other stuff. 

And as you go deeper— and I’ve added this aspect to it, because it’s important—you have a sense of openness to possibility, what Seung Sahn Sunim called “don’t-know Mind,” or Suzuki Roshi called “beginner’s mind.” It’s as if you’ve landed on some different planet that you’ve never heard of and you’re exploring what it is like to be there. There are no preexisting assumptions about it because it’s so different. For many people there’s a sense of yearning to return to “don’t-know what,” and you can put that sense of yearning to return also into that extended outbreath. It is extremely powerful and extremely effective for Zen practice, but this is where the whole thing about working with your history comes in. You cannot do it effectively if you are holding back in any way. And if you’ve been traumatized, you’re going to hold back. If you are dissociated, then it really is impossible. But it can be worked with, and this is what I’ve discovered both in my own practice early on and in working with students. I did a lot of psychotherapy all along the way, which helped a lot, and I gradually became aware of what was going on inside and was able to work with it. And, of course, the practice goes much deeper as a result of the work you do in psychotherapy.

Could you talk about the significance of kensho (seeing one’s true nature) versus what Torei Enji, the 18th-century Rinzai master, called “the Long Maturation”? Kensho is important. You can work on the Long Maturation from the get-go, but kensho helps you move toward it faster. It’s as though you’re finding your way up a mountain path in the pitch-black dark, and then there’s a flash of lightning, and suddenly you can see the path ahead. You have a much better sense of where you’re going and what you need to do. And that’s what kensho does. 

Most people who have kensho these days don’t have a very deep one. That’s why it’s so important not to stop there. A kensho will allow you to become more aware of your behavior, and then you have a choice. You can elbow it out of the picture, which is what traditional Zen practice will do, or you can choose to open to the bodily experience of that and explore it beyond words and release its hold on you. That is part of the Long Maturation. It’s becoming aware of our behavior patterns—all of them, not just the dysfunctional ones—and going down through the clouds to our true nature, which is unattached to anything. 

What led you to focus on serving women with trauma through Regaining Balance? My own history. Women veterans are at the bottom of the pecking order, and often out in the cold. There needs to be something that will help them. Our Regaining Balance retreats are pretty effective, because we’re teaching them ways to help themselves get grounded. Susok’kan is known to be very grounding, and there were other things that I did in my own trauma work that I felt were extremely helpful. We teach them the extended breath meditation. They do it twice a day for up to half an hour each time. They also go for a walk in the forest, which is also healing—to be in nature. 

And we teach them tools to help themselves de-stress. There’s a wonderful app called ArtRage. It’s aptly named and it’s quite excellent. You have a choice of background colors and textures, and different kinds of brushes, pens, pencils, palette knives, and so on. You use your finger to translate what’s going on in your body energetically to color in form. It’s not about making a pretty picture. It’s similar to journaling, which we also teach them. Handwriting descriptions of the energies in your body keeps you from getting hijacked by your amygdala [the part of the brain that regulates emotions]. And so you are able to begin to process some of those feelings without knowing what they are necessarily—they’re just uncomfortable. 

Our third tool is to go outdoors and focus in a particular direction—we do the cardinal directions—and you write down three words that describe something that you’re seeing within that view. You come back and turn those words into a sentence. Each sentence comes together to create a poem. Then we each contribute our sentences to a group poem. It teaches awareness, focus, and attention. 

♦

Deepening Zen: The Long Maturation by Mitra Bishop Roshi is available now through Sumeru Books.

The post Deepening Zen through Poetry and Psychotherapy appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

To view a statue carved by the Busshi—a community of Japanese sculptors who create intricate wooden replicas of Buddhas and bodhisattvas—is to view a style of sculpture that has been virtually unchanged for nearly 1,400 years.

In Yujiro Seki’s documentary Carving the Divine: Buddhist Sculptures of Japan—which is currently available to watch for free as part of Tricycle‘s Film Club series—viewers get an inside look at how the Busshi have passed on their meticulous carving techniques from generation to generation. The film introduces us to Master Koun Seki, who has devoted his life to his craft while also running a school for apprentices and other emerging artists. Watching Master Seki interact with his pupils, viewers quickly learn that the craft requires immense dedication.

Tricycle spoke with Yujiro Seki about this ancient art form and its preservation.

How would you describe the traditions of the Busshi to those who are unfamiliar with this community?
Simply put, Busshi are the practitioners of a 1,400-year-old lineage of Buddhist wood carving that’s at the heart of Japanese Buddhism. The Busshi tradition was most likely introduced by the artisans from the Asian continent, one of whom was Tori Busshi, in the mid-seventh century. At first, the styles of Japanese Buddhist sculptures were very similar to their contemporaries from China and Korea, and the primary material they used was bronze instead of wood. But around the 11th century, because of Japan’s diplomatic break from China and the advent of a legendary Busshi named Jocho, among other factors, Japanese Busshi began producing their own style, called Wayo style.

Even today, the craft of a Busshi differs considerably from Western notions of creativity. Busshi are almost always required to create the exact figures that have been established by generations of predecessors—though Carving the Divine features one great exception to this rule. This rootedness in tradition has led to an almost unbelievable level of technique and stylistic refinement among Busshi. Throughout history, Busshi have worked closely with the government, temples, wealthy patrons, and middle-class laypeople. Undoubtedly, the Busshi tradition is one of the greatest legacies of Japan.

What inspired you to create a film about these carvers?
Making a documentary about Busshi was the last thing I had in mind when I was younger. I am a son of a butsudan (Buddhist altar/furniture) maker. When I was little, I was surrounded by Buddhist objects: furniture, statues, incense, shrines, and so on. My father took me to temples all the time, where he’d meet with clients, so I didn’t think there was anything special about the environment I grew up in. It was just a part of family business.

When I became a young adult, I grew fascinated with the art of cinema and came to the United States to pursue the path of a filmmaker. By being so far away from home, interacting with people from different cultures and seeing different kinds of art, I finally realized that the environment that I grew up in was special, and developed a new appreciation for Buddhist art.

I found that modern Busshi would be the perfect subject to put my heart into. Though many aspects of Japanese culture have been appreciated by the Western world, the Busshi tradition remains virtually unknown outside of Japan. Since my family had been in the Buddhist furniture and statues business for so long, I had access to the Busshi world. I knew my Japanese identity would allow me to make a movie few others could, and believed my American sensibility help me share it effectively with a Western audience.

Do people training to become Busshi spend a lot time studying Buddhist teachings and texts?
I’m sorry to dispel idealized notions of the Buddhist carver, but at least in initially developing one’s craft, having a deep understanding of Buddhism has nothing to do with becoming a successful carver.

In order to complete the “hard training,” as it’s called, having talent, patience, and perseverance are basic prerequisites. But I did find it interesting that, just like learning a language, the younger the apprentice, the faster he or she was generally able to learn about this craft. If you become wrapped up in your ego and refuse to suppress your anger and disobey your master, you make little progress and will quickly be dismissed.  The only way to survive is to diligently listen to your master even if you think they are wrong. So whereas I didn’t see much connection between pupils’ purported passion for Buddhism and their success at carving, the Buddhist values of patience, of overcoming the ego, and the conscious negation of suffering would all be very valuable to a Busshi in training.

How do novices adapt to this lifestyle where they are expected to be so obedient?
The Busshi culture is the epitome of a micro-authoritarian society, where the hierarchical structure is firmly established and there is no place for negotiation. The master holds power almost like that of a god. You must always obey your master—period. Below the masters, there are various degrees of seniors. If you are a novice, you cannot disobey the seniors. If you’re bullied you can talk to your master, but most of the time you must tolerate unreasonable living circumstances. It is common for novices to not even be allowed to work on wood, but constantly be kept busy with menial work for a quite some time.

Yes, the biggest challenge is to suppress your emotions, go with the flow of things, and accept the tradition as it is.

I was struck by one quote by one of the senior sculptors who essentially says that younger artists should try their hardest to attract foreign interest in their work because Japanese people tend to overlook Buddhist art, as they are desensitized to it. Have you found that to be the case?
Though this statement could be a mere opinion of one person, I believe it contains some brutal truth. As Japanese people, we grow up with treasures around us—to the extent that it’s hard to appreciate them because we see them all the time. I am a perfect example of this: I grew up seeing Japanese Buddhist objects more than an average Japanese person because of my family’s business, and I didn’t have any appreciation for them, because while they were amazing, they were also so familiar. It wasn’t until I left Japan, lived abroad, and saw Japan from the outside that I developed a new appreciation for Buddhist art.

Related: Kamakura Craftsmanship

It’s very difficult for Japanese people to see what’s truly in front of them in these sculptures. And the fact there’s still a craftsman occupation called a Busshi—artisans who make and fix these sculptures—never even crosses the mind of most Japanese people today.

Nonetheless, this is an artistic tradition that needs to be more widely appreciated to be kept alive. So I think this statement by the Busshi in the film is not about forgetting Japanese opinion and only seeking the approval from abroad, but leveraging recognition from abroad to remind Japanese people of the treasures that lie in front of them.

Update (1/23/2019): Yujiro Seki has changed the name of his documentary from Carving the Divine: The Way of Būshi, Buddhist Sculptors of Japan to Carving the Divine: Buddhist Sculptors of Japan. He has also switched the English spelling of the Japanese word Būshi in his film to the more commonly used Busshi. (Not to be confused with bushi, another term for samurai.) The article has been updated to reflect these changes.

***

This article was originally published on June 1st, 2018.

The post Carving the Buddha—the Same Way—for 1,400 Years appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

What is the role of contemplative practice in times of crisis? And how can meditation actually support us in meeting the greatest challenges of our time?

Meditation teacher Oren Jay Sofer takes up these questions in his new book, Your Heart Was Made for This: Contemplative Practices for Meeting a World in Crisis with Courage, Integrity, and Love. As a member of the Spirit Rock Teachers Council, Sofer has spent decades exploring the relationship between contemplative practice and nonviolent communication. In his new book, he lays out twenty-six qualities of the heart that can expand our capacity to respond to the challenges of oppression, overwhelm, burnout, and injustice.

In a recent episode of Life As It Is, Tricycle’s editor-in-chief, James Shaheen, and meditation teacher Sharon Salzberg sat down with Sofer to talk about the dangers of burnout, the power of being patient with not knowing, and the role of curiosity in nonviolent approaches to conflict. Read an excerpt from their conversation below, then listen to the full episode.

Sharon Salzberg (SS): You begin the book with the quality of aspiration, which you describe as an act that connects us with a sense of what is possible. Can you say more about the power of aspiration?

Oren Jay Sofer (OS): Aspiration is a verb. It’s not something that we have; it’s something that we do. To aspire is to connect with the energy of our life, to the spirit inside that moves us. Aspiration is how I translate the Pali term saddha, sometimes translated as faith, conviction, or confidence. I think about saddha as a stirring inside of our heart that yearns for something better and that trusts that there’s something meaningful about being alive, that there’s something fulfilling, just, or good in this remarkable, mysterious experience of being conscious. The Buddha’s placement of aspiration at the beginning of his teachings is so brilliant to me because he makes the connection that if we don’t have a sense of what’s possible, we won’t try.

[The meditation teacher Anagarika] Munindraji was fond of saying that any aspiration can be accomplished if you’re wholehearted and you know the way. That stayed with me all of these years as an invitation to really look deeply and ask, What is my aspiration? What is it that I’m here on this planet to do? If we all were able to listen deeply and ask ourselves that question, we could change this world so profoundly because I think that what all of these crises are calling for is not for all of us to do the same thing but for each of us to find our vocation and to contribute in the way that only we can, whether that’s through teaching or parenting or making art or doing direct social change work. The articulation of an aspiration on a collective level can move entire populations, and holding fast to that vision can power social movements in the face of tremendous resistance and odds.

James Shaheen (JS): You write that aspiration can help provide us with the energy for change. Sometimes we think of energy in terms of all or nothing, and it can be very easy to get burnt out. So how have you come to view energy in a more sustainable way?

OS: I love exploring [the theme of energy] because it’s present in our lives at all levels. In Western society, we tend to have an all-or-nothing approach to energy, which comes from the fossil fuel industry’s extractive model of getting as much as possible as fast as possible for the most productivity. Many of us are conditioned to live our personal lives with this sense of pressure to strive and to push past our limits.

There are many ways to reclaim a more balanced relationship with energy and cultivate the kind of sustainable power you’re referring to. We can look to nature and the cycles of the seasons, day and night, and our very breath. All religious traditions honor cycles of activity and rest. This is a very potent investigation in each of our lives to explore how we relate to our energy and how we can start to see the degree to which we’ve become disconnected from our bodies and from the rhythms of the planet. 

JS: Do you think that disconnection is what leads to burnout?

OS: Absolutely. When we’re disconnected, either we’re unaware of the signals that our body is sending us to rest, or we’re aware of them and we override them. This is one of the key factors that leads to burnout. Angela Davis says that anyone who’s interested in making change in the world also has to learn to take care of themself. I think that the conversation about energy is deeply connected to the conversation about rest. In order to have sustainable energy, we need to learn how to rest—and how to reclaim our right to rest. Once we start to examine this, we begin to see that self-care and rest are actually radical acts.

JS: Learning to rest often requires patience, and it can be particularly hard to practice when we feel stressed or under pressure. How have you come to understand patience, and how can practicing patience actually support us in responding deliberately?

OS: There’s a powerful quote from Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” where he says, “For years now I have heard the word ‘Wait’ . . . this ‘Wait’ has almost always meant ‘Never.’” When we look at social transformation, sometimes patience can mean passivity, and there’s a certain kind of healthy impatience with oppressive conditions that urges us to act. And yet at the same time, there’s a need for patience on the moment-to-moment level.

Through the lens of contemplative practice, I’ve come to understand patience in relation to our resistance to whatever’s happening. With patience, we can learn to bear the internal tension of resisting pain and unpleasant experiences, whether it’s unpleasant sensations or the pain and rage related to oppression or the destruction of the earth. Having patience on the moment-to-moment level allows us to have more breathing room so that we can tolerate the discomfort we experience when we disagree with what’s happening or when it goes against our values. That capacity to bear discomfort on a moment-to-moment level starts to open up more space inside us so that we can draw on other resources to make a more wise and empowered response. That way, we’re not reacting based on discomfort and resistance.

JS: You also mention the etymology of the word patience. Can you tell us about that?

OS: Patience comes from the Latin patientia, which means “suffering.” To be a patient in a hospital is to be one who suffers. In a sense, patience includes the willingness to bear discomfort consciously. And I think for many of us who are troubled about what’s happening in the world, I see us called to be patient with not knowing. The more we’re able to be patient with not having an answer and not being able to see the outcome, the more sustainable our energy can be because the more we need certainty, the more strained our internal resources become and the less resilience we have to stay engaged.

SS: You’ve mentioned the connection between patience and rest. Can you say more about how we can reclaim our right to rest?

OS: There are a few things that are important to me in examining our need for rest and how to honor it. The first is expanding our definition of rest. I love Tricia Hersey’s definition of rest in her book Rest Is Resistance and her social media platform, the Nap Ministry. She defines rest as anything that connects the body and mind, which broadens the sense of what it means to rest. If we take an evolutionary perspective, we can see that our ancestors engaged in downtime activities that were very regulating for our nervous system, whether it was threshing or weaving or toolmaking or engaging in chit-chat conversations. Any kind of downtime can be recharging.

I think it’s also important to be very real about the barriers that are there to rest. Rest is a human need. It’s a right; it’s not a luxury. And yet the structures of our society often make it so that those who have access to rest are those who have resources. There are very real economic pressures just to meet basic needs like housing and healthcare, and then there are also internal barriers to rest, like how our sense of self-worth and belonging gets tied to how much we accomplish and how well we perform. We might think that the busier we are, the more important we are, so some people feel proud of being busy and not resting.

I’ve found that it takes a very deliberate effort to learn how to rest. It involves learning to honor our limits. What can we let go of and say no to? A lot of that rides on cultivating self-compassion, seeing the suffering of being tired and strained and stressed and actually being willing not only to do something about it but to feel it. We can also investigate other questions: How much of my activity is necessary and how much of it is self-imposed? Can I relinquish my need to please others to take care of myself? Can I lower my standards in order to get more downtime? What would it be like to not always be productive? I think that we can find rest in small ways in short moments if we’re willing to look for it and break from our habits.

JS: Patience and rest can also open up space for curiosity. Can you say more about the power of curiosity in transforming our relationship to afflictive emotions?

OS: Well, we can’t transform anything if we don’t understand it. In order to understand it, we need to get curious. Curiosity doesn’t have an end or a goal. It’s just an openness to understand and to receive and absorb and learn. And there’s a certain kind of radical curiosity that we cultivate in contemplative practice that I think has a direct connection and support for social change, which is that we get interested in all of our experience, including what repels us.

It’s one thing to be curious about a beautiful sunset or a fascinating connection we have with a person in our life. It’s another thing to be curious about someone who annoys us or about our back pain, our depression, or a social condition that troubles us and keeps us up at night. Curiosity brings us into the experience of something to start to understand how it’s functioning so that we can engage with it in a more clear and skillful way.

Curiosity plays a direct role in nonviolent approaches to social transformation. Dr. King and Gandhi were both huge proponents that the initial stage of a noncooperation campaign began with being curious and gathering information. A strategic nonviolent approach to any social change work includes curiosity and openness to one’s opponent and really understanding what their needs and values are, not creating an enemy in our mind’s eye but seeing a potential partner to join us in beloved community. And so curiosity has that power to open the door to empathy and to deep connection.

The post Nurturing the Energy for Change appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

As we move toward another winter season, I’m reminded that in the communities I love, there are two separate worlds unfolding. In one, people are looking forward to a season of connection where holiday gatherings, parties, and travel abound. In the other world, people are having difficult conversations about risk tolerance, taking stock of safety measures needed for travel or gatherings, or abstaining from these activities altogether. 

Over the last few years, I have witnessed the incredible dissonance between these two worlds within the Buddhist communities I practice and teach in. This spring, when the US ended the COVID-19 Public Health Emergency, I saw practitioners who were thrilled that meditation centers were dropping mask mandates and couldn’t wait to get back to a “normal” retreat. I also spoke with, sat with, and cried with others who knew that for them, this change meant something close to exile from the dharma communities they cherished. Overwhelmingly, that second group of people were chronically ill, immunocompromised, or disabled.

I feel acutely aware of this in part because I currently live with a chronic, invisible illness that places me at greater risk of long-term suffering and disability were I to contract COVID. Retreat practice and sangha have always been a deep refuge for me, so I was heartbroken as meditation centers that had once been my spiritual home became increasingly risky to access. Even as rates of the virus surged, I have found it difficult, and at times quite unwelcome, to out myself as vulnerable and ask for accommodations. As a result, I have lost the unfettered access to once beloved communities, practice opportunities, and aspects of my livelihood.

For many in the US, the rationale for dropping protections, like masking and free access to testing, has been deceptively simple: today, only members of vulnerable groups or the elderly are likely to die from COVID. Take a moment and really read that carefully. Allow the unspoken part of the sentence to grow louder. Place yourself in the shoes of someone who is chronically ill, disabled, or elderly and is receiving the message from our government and institutions that their life is acceptable collateral damage to neighbors who are eager to get back to normal at all costs. Ableism like this is baked into every aspect of the culture, and our meditation centers are certainly not exempt from it.

It may be helpful to remember that COVID-19 is still among the top leading causes of death in the United States. This year, Long COVID will also induct millions of new people into the ranks of the sick and disabled. Depending on which study you review, Long COVID affects anywhere from 7.5 to 40 percent of people who contract the virus and has more than 200 possible symptoms. It can last for months or indefinitely, and there is no cure or standard effective treatment. Long COVID can negatively impact a person’s quality of life, leave them bedridden, unable to work to support themselves, and more. Unfortunately, as a culture, we seem eager to forget this reality. Our yearning to return to “normal” is incongruent with the fact that vulnerable people must continue to live, work, and practice in a world that often feels like it would rather pretend they don’t exist than adapt in a compassionate way. In the Buddhist community, how do we face this truth, rather than turn toward delusion?

Ableism like this is baked into every aspect of the culture, and our meditation centers are certainly not exempt from it.

This delusion is consistently fortified by the invisibility of sick and disabled people in public spaces. Whether these spaces are physically inaccessible, or a person feels too unwell or unsafe to join them, the end result is a disappearance from the public eye. I often think about this in relation to dharma communities throughout the country. Which sangha members are now absent from your local sitting group? Who are the longtime community pillars that have quietly absented themselves from our meditation centers? Did they just stop practicing, or do they no longer feel safe in the communities that used to be a refuge? 

I’m not alone in longing for a spiritual community that holds on to an ethos of care at a time when masking and other precautions are unpopular. Monica Magtoto, a movement teacher who supports many meditation retreats, shared her concerns about dharma centers dropping mask requirements in a recent conversation:

“As someone who has experienced the life-changing impact of retreat, knowing that that experience is now not an option, or is now a dangerous option, for so many people is disheartening to say the least. It’s a huge reminder that many dharma spaces are only created with the most privileged and able-bodied in mind. Are we living the precepts if we choose to exclude or do active harm to so many? Are we living the eightfold path?”

Today, meditation centers have a wide range of approaches to COVID, and while some protocols are inclusive, many reinforce the message that our sick, elderly, and disabled sangha members are acceptable collateral damage. For drop-in groups and daylong retreats, a vast majority of centers have eliminated previous precautions such as masking and onsite testing. Some communities offer suggested recommendations like vaccination, testing negative with an at-home test, or not attending when sick. Other centers have kept mitigations like air purifiers and CO₂ monitors, and a few even hold occasional outdoor events. For most residential retreats, precautions have typically dropped to a testing requirement on the first day of the retreat. A very small number of retreat centers do offer retreats with a focus on practice outdoors, and some retreat centers have brought back masking for specific retreats this fall as COVID cases see a seasonal increase.

One notable outlier, the East Bay Meditation Center in Oakland, California, still has a wide range of COVID precautions in place, including masking, clear descriptions of the air filtration systems present in their space, and priority seating next to windows and air filters for the elderly and disabled. On their website, they share:

“When we commit to justice movement building and mindfulness, this means that we commit to self-care as collective care, and we also dedicate ourselves to supporting the health of our communities. This is not achieved through policing. It comes about through building relationships of trust that express themselves in our saying to one another, ‘I’ve got your back. Your health and your family’s health and the health of the people with whom you come in physical contact with are important to me.’”

While we may have seen public declarations like this in 2020 and 2021, such an explicit statement committing to collective care today is relatively uncommon. To those living with chronic illness and disability, however, such sentiments can offer tremendous refuge and allow us to better plan where we sit or go on retreat. This refuge is especially needed as meditation centers resume prepandemic levels of programming with fewer safety precautions. In the past year, I have watched the meditation centers I work with make sweeping changes to their COVID policies, often with little to no leadership or input opportunities for vulnerable groups. One colleague who works at a retreat center, and asked to remain anonymous, shared her thoughts about how dharma communities are showing up for the sick and disabled, and her own experience with Long COVID: 

“It feels hypocritical that we wouldn’t ask our sangha, who are dedicated to awakening and freedom from suffering, to put on a mask to alleviate someone else’s suffering. It feels deeply contrary to our mission. How is it that we are not open to being even slightly uncomfortable when it could mean someone else’s life? The stakes are too high and long-term effects are still not even fully known. When I share this view, people often respond, ‘Well, that’s because you have Long COVID.’ Well, yes… that’s precisely the point.”

This is not the first time a dharma community has faced this type of devaluation of sick people. In fact, it goes all the way back to the time of the Buddha, in the Kucchivikara-vatthu Sutta. In this sutta, a monk was incredibly ill with what was likely dysentery. He couldn’t care for himself and, due to his illness, also couldn’t do anything to support his fellow monks. Because of this, the monks stopped caring for him. As you might imagine, the Buddha had some things to say about this. He said to the monks:

“Monks, you have no mother, you have no father, who might tend to you. If you don’t tend to one another, who then will tend to you? Whoever would tend to me, should tend to the sick.” 

This is not far off from what we face today. Without a public safety net that demonstrates true care for us, if we don’t take care of one another, who will? The Buddha is clear that if we would care for him, then that grace should also be extended to others. This is at the heart of our dharma practice: not just to meditate and receive the teachings, but to truly live them. It’s said that the Buddha once shared with his attendant Ananda that sangha, with its admirable friendship and camaraderie, is the whole of the holy life. So many of us know this in our bones: the friendships we’ve made and the support we’ve both given and received within our dharma communities are jewels of immeasurable value. But how are we living this teaching today, if we cannot extend this sacred friendship to our sick and disabled sangha members? 

As we explore this question, perhaps even more questions will reveal themselves, opening up deeper teachings around sangha, sila (right conduct), and our own mortality. We may ask ourselves: What delusions are we clinging to, particularly in terms of how we devalue the sick, elderly, or disabled? Are we denying the inevitable reality that, in time, we too will become sick, disabled, and pass away? Are our decisions truly aligned with our commitment to nonharming? As we sit with these questions, it is likely we will also ask how we might do better. Fortunately, there is a simple place to begin: actively listening to those who are sick, immunocompromised, and disabled and taking their needs for inclusion and safety in our communities seriously.

The post Sangha in the Age of Long COVID appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

Lama Rod Owens has long been fascinated by the relationship between social liberation and ultimate freedom. As an author, activist, and authorized lama in the Karma Kagyu school of Tibetan Buddhism, he has worked at the intersection of social change, identity, and spiritual practice, exploring how activist work and spiritual practice can support each other. Recently, he’s been grappling with the question of what freedom looks like in our current political context and how spiritual practice can support us through our current crises.

In his new book, The New Saints: From Broken Hearts to Spiritual Warriors, Owens draws from the traditions of Tibetan Buddhism and Black liberation movements to put forth the notion of the New Saint. “The New Saint is a rethinking of what it means to be a bodhisattva right now, with a particular focus on relative justice and its relationship to ultimate liberation,” he told Tricycle’s editor-in-chief, James Shaheen. “It’s about the contemporary experience of people in a world that seems to be on the edge of catastrophe.”

Shaheen sat down with Owens on a recent episode of Tricycle Talks to discuss why he believes that the apocalypse is an opportunity for awakening, the power of connecting with our ancestors and unseen beings, why the New Saint is not necessarily a good person, and how fierceness can be a form of awakened care. Read an excerpt from their conversation, then listen to the full episode.

You refer to the New Saint’s magic, which depends on two practices: the expression of awakened care and the development of our capacity to disrupt habitual reactivity. Can you walk us through what you mean by awakened care? Awakened care is my experience of bodhicitta. We traditionally define bodhicitta as the awakened heart-mind, but I would say that it’s the magic of the bodhisattva. It’s this view of deep connectedness and deep empathy, where we’re doing the work of liberation not just for ourselves but for all beings. When I am attempting to get free, that labor is also helping others to get free.

Not only do I have to choose freedom, I have to understand that I deserve to be free.

When I began to think about this in terms of the New Saint, I began asking myself, What is my actual felt experience of bodhicitta? The first thing I felt was love, this deep acceptance, holding space for everything and wishing for everyone and everything to be free. I also experienced compassion, tuning into the suffering of both ourselves and the world and actually committing to freeing ourselves and others from suffering. The other piece of this is joy. I feel deep joy for having the capacity to choose to benefit beings through my practice. I’m overwhelmed by that, and there’s deep gratitude in that joy as well. And of course, everything is based in emptiness, so we have the capacity for all of this to happen because of the profound potential of emptiness and space.

When all of this is streamed together, it begins to awaken care, a deep, profound care, the kind of care that says, “I’m going to do everything that I can to get free because I care that much for myself and for others.” An important point here too is that I have to care for myself enough to want to get free to begin with. And a lot of us aren’t there either. Some of us don’t really believe that we deserve to be free from suffering. Not only do I have to choose freedom, I have to understand that I deserve to be free.

You write that awakened care can cause us to lose a sense of agency so that we’re swept up in the agenda of the liberation of all beings and things. So how is it that we surrender to the agenda of liberation? [The author and filmmaker] Toni Cade Bambara has this notion of wanting to make revolution irresistible so that it’s the sweetest, most important thing that we could be doing, and it just becomes what we do and who we are. In awakened care, I’m trying to dissolve the sense of self, and that’s going to bring me into a more direct relationship with the essence or with emptiness itself. In a way, we can describe it as the cultivation of virtue.

When we practice goodness, it becomes a habit, where we’re choosing how to reduce harm moment to moment. We’re just attuned to choosing what will reduce harm. For me, that’s another way that we get swept up: we’re reprogramming ourselves to choose what is conducive to liberation. I want to get lost in that so that everything I do becomes an expression of goodness and therefore an expression of virtue.

One stream of awakened care is love, which you describe as a form of radical acceptance. Can you say more about how you’ve come to understand love? It’s hard to change when you haven’t really told the truth about what’s actually happening, and so the first expression of love is actually allowing ourselves to hold space for everything that’s arising. This is how it is. I don’t have to like it; I just have to name it and notice it.

I think what keeps us from doing that profound radical work of love is heartbreak. When I start telling the truth about how things really are, then my heart is going to break because I have been so concerned with telling myself narratives about how I want things to be in order to feel good about what’s happening. When I let go of that and say, “This is it. This is what’s happening,” my heart breaks, which is the experience of having to touch into this deep disappointment.

Once I start doing that, then there’s an honesty that awakens, and that profound holding becomes love. This is what’s happening, and therefore, I can make a choice to change what needs to change now because I’m not lost in these delusions and narratives about how I think things are; I know how things are. It creates a deeper intimacy with all phenomena and all beings, because you’re with the truth now, and you know that the truth is that everything and everyone deserves to be free.

Another aspect of the work of the New Saint is reclaiming beauty while also disrupting capitalism and overconsumption. So how can beauty help us access the sublime and the transcendent? When I surrender to beauty, I’m letting go of the ways in which I’m protecting and guarding myself. I’m allowing myself to expand, and I’m letting go of the sense of who I think I am, and then beginning to experience and touch into the actual expression of spaciousness. And when I do that, things get more fluid and more inviting. The world becomes less antagonistic, less rigid, less sharp. It becomes more translucent for me when I’m surrendering and opening. And that is the experience of the sublime. That translucent fluidity really is about connecting to this ultimate experience of emptiness itself. But it’s not about materialism. And so instead of accumulating luxury goods that I can’t afford, I connect to the energetic expression of beauty, which feeds a deeper sense of self-worth. That self-worth is about me wanting not to suffer and wanting to actually experience ultimate liberation.

Let’s go a step further and talk about desire. You say that yearning is the first step in touching the divine. How have you learned to work with and channel yearning? You have to want to get free. Desire or yearning is the last thing we give up before ultimate enlightenment. That yearning for enlightenment is going to take us to the threshold, and to go beyond that threshold, we have to let go of wanting to get free, which I think will be a really hard choice to make. But I am training myself to yearn for things that lead to freedom, liberation, fluidity, and movement, not to continue yearning for the things that create rigidity and separateness. And the more I yearn and the more I practice, the more I begin to experience what freedom is, so I know that this is what I should be focusing on: not the rigidity but the experience of getting open and clear and translucent and fluid. That’s it. And so I just start yearning for it. In the same way that we yearn for our bad habits, we can start yearning for experiences of liberation.

The post The Magic of the New Saint appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

In the cacophony of clicks, clatter, bells, and whistles that is social media, the art of conversation has been reduced to drive-by comments—swift, reckless, and as enriching as a fast-food binge, and usually as enjoyable as a carjacking. Our keyboards and smartphones are battlegrounds where restraint meets impulse, and, sadly, impulse often wins. Yet, in this era of digital verbosity, the Buddhist eightfold path offers an antidote to this affliction—a call to right speech remains ever relevant.

Right speech, one of the ethical imperatives of Buddhism, isn’t about censorship; it’s about intention, awareness, and the karmic ripple effect of words. Imagine if, before spewing a half-baked retort based on a headline skimmed with one eye on the television, we paused, breathed, and considered the weight of our words and the comment we felt mindlessly compelled to spew from our smartphones. Right speech isn’t an archaic muzzle but a revolutionary act of freedom from the knee-jerk need to be part of the noise, to throw your single penny into a fountain overflowing with coins.

Scroll through any comment section and you’ll witness a battleground of unbridled tongues (or fingers, in this case). Each comment is often more about the commenter’s eagerness to speak than any meaningful engagement with the article, and often telling others more about themselves than they realize. The endless stream of terse comments is mostly worthless idle chatter. (Did you read the article, Karen?) It’s as if the act of commenting is an end in and of itself—a noisy echo chamber where listening and understanding are casualties trampled underfoot by the rush to be heard and seen. 

Although it would fall under the warning against idle chatter, I’m not talking about your “So cute!” comment on Aunt Janet’s 400th picture of her cat’s lazy eye. The internet needs more lazy-eyed cat pictures and Aunt Janets. And in those instances, social media is working as it should—connecting us to family and friends scattered across a busy, noisy, and often harsh world.  

The drive to voice our opinion that I’m referencing, even when it’s half-formed, clashes with our Buddhist contemplative tradition, which teaches that every action—including speech—should arise from a place of awareness. What would happen if we treated every comment as if it were a pebble dropped in water, its ripples reaching far and wide? The same could be said for every social media post, but that is a whole other psychological rabbit hole.

Restraint as rebellion, attention as an act of revolution.

The precepts built around the teaching of right speech are not simply a means to shackle the unruly but a way to unchain ourselves from our basest impulses. By connecting with this moral imperative, we learn to choose words that enlighten, engage, and encourage. Our words may even ignite emotions in others or trouble them deeply, but they should come from a clear sense of awareness and intention. This isn’t control; it’s liberation—a path to awakened interaction that can turn the comment section from a ridiculous romper room of Pavlovian responses into a space for introspective dialogue that furthers the dharma (I can dream).

For those brave minds willing to swim against the rough rapids of hasty and, let’s say it—worthless—commenting, here’s a radical proposal: read the article. Fully. Reflect. Then—if you must—leave a comment that contributes, that respects the silent work of reading, and that honors the exchange of ideas. This is right speech for the digital age—restraint as rebellion, attention as an act of revolution.

The comment section is a microcosm of the world. It can be a wasteland of worthless words or a refuge of thoughtful exchange. By applying right speech, we can choose the latter. We can choose to be part of a solution that reveres silence as much as speaking, that values reflection over reaction, and that places understanding at the heart of communication. Or choose the wasteland of hungry ghosts wandering in a state of self-inflicted ignorance. Choice is the key operative here.

So the next time you’re about to launch into a comment, pause. Think. Reflect. Your words have power. Use them wisely and intentionally. This is right speech. Each moment, each action is a great sutra unfolding before us, teaching the dharma. Your digital footprint reveals the path you’re on, one comment at a time. And be careful! The author might be lurking and waiting to pounce—and you don’t want to be that Chad they call out with the burn, “Did you even read the article?”

The post Read Me! appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

Twenty years ago, my daughter, Mia, had a shattering revelation at the age of 4. We were watching one of those nature movies about sea life. Out of the blue, a school of tunas appeared. These were of the massive, bulky, ten-foot-long, 2,000-pound variety. Mia’s mouth dropped. She looked over at me with an expression of disgust. “Tuna is a fish?” she half asked, half exclaimed. 

Mia’s experience offers an entry into a hypothesis and an argument I will try to weave together. The hypothesis, “non-buddhism,” will help me formulate the difficult argument. The argument is that Buddhists should commit to advancing animal liberation, which necessarily entails an anti-speciesist or vegan stance. This is a difficult argument to make to Buddhists because Buddhism has struggled mightily with the issue for millennia and, as a result, has formulated many arguments against my contention. 

To say that Buddhism rejects animal liberation is, of course, only half of the story. For every prohibition the Buddha makes against, say, “strict vegetarianism,” in one text (typically from the Pali canon associated with Theravada Buddhism), we get an offsetting proclamation in another text (typically from the Mahayana canon) that “meat-eating I have not permitted to anyone, I do not permit, I will not permit.” Buddhism, taken as a whole, suggests too many variegated and often contradictory positions on the issue to offer us unambiguous guidance. Indeed, even the seemingly univocal lay precept “I undertake to observe the rule to abstain from taking life” and the bodhisattva pledge “sentient beings are numberless; I vow to save them” are, in actual practice, filled with loopholes.

My sense, derived from forty-some years of participation in American Buddhism, is that intra-Buddhist rumination about what counts as a sentient being, what role intention and motivation play in moral responsibility, the karmic repercussions of killing unawares, the argument from ultimate emptiness, and so on have contributed to the contemporary Buddhist culture of technicality around ethics generally, including the topic of animal liberation. Given Buddhism’s divided path on such a momentous topic—after all, the lives of trillions of beings are at stake annually—where do we go from here? Do we leave it as an intractable “personal choice” matter, or might Buddhism contain the goods unequivocally to clarify the issue?

The Tuna Heretic

To view the argument of advancing animal liberation—or any argument—through the lens of non-buddhism, you must take a heretical stance within Buddhism. 

A heretic is typically a devoted practitioner whom the authorities of their tradition deem dangerous. Think of the beloved Dominican prior Meister Eckhart (1260–1328), who was condemned for notions such as you are “the creator of the eternal word, and without you, God would not know what to do”; or the magnificent Sufi mystic Al-Hallaj (858–922), who was executed for proclaiming, in the grand nondualist tradition of ego-dissolution, “I am the truth.” As the fates of these two figures show, a heretic’s devotion invariably takes a form that appears wickedly mistaken to the status quo, so mistaken to warrant condemnation and even death. So why should you want to take such a position? Our two mystics already gave the short answer—namely, that you and not “God,” or indeed “Buddhism” or “the dharma,” abide at the heart of value, meaning, and truth. A heretic, in short, remains committed, albeit in a complicated way, to their tradition and, crucially, takes on the responsibility for transforming it. 

What made Mia’s revelation so shattering was that it rendered her a heretic. She had loved spooning tuna out of the can, spreading it on warm toast swathed in creamy mayonnaise. Yummy! Her image of tuna was formed by Madison Avenue. Some readers might recall Charlie the Tuna, the hip mascot of StarKist, with his thick Buddy Holly glasses and Beatnik red beret. Charlie’s pleas that his impeccable “good taste” made him a prime candidate for a can of StarKist were met with rejection: “Sorry, Charlie!” With cute cartoon Charlie’s benign assurance, Mia believed tuna was just some delicious flaky stuff in a can. And now “the Real” of the matter was starkly revealed: she was eating the mutilated flesh of a once majestic living being. She was eating a once-living, feeling animal whose exquisite head and tail had been chopped off, whose silver iridescent body had been gutted, boiled, fileted, minced, and stuffed into a tin can for human consumption. Not yummy. 

From that moment on, Mia was a tuna heretic. For, on the matter of eating it, she was now in a position—indeed, unavoidably compelled—to decide, or like the original meaning of the Greek word hairetikos, heretical: “to be able to choose; to be able to have a distinct opinion.” My argument is that with the aid of non-buddhism, you will similarly find yourself standing at the starkly forked pathway of animal suffering and liberation.

Why non-buddhism?

The original impetus for my conception of non-buddhism came from the work of the contemporary French thinker François Laruelle. He calls his work “non-philosophy” or, more recently, “non-standard philosophy.” I came across Laruelle over ten years ago while working on a critique of Buddhism. I wanted my critique to avoid being just another reformist corrective to Buddhism. So I set out to emulate, in one crucial manner at least, a rigorous scientific method: it must leave its object, Buddhism, just as it is.

No one practices Buddhism, only a variation of Buddhism.

Like a scientific investigation, my critique would not determine what postulates or assumptions properly constitute “Buddhism,” or the value, truth, or relevance of any of the claims made in the name of “Buddhism.” Instead, I would ask: how does “Buddhism” work? What does it do? Who is its subject, its ideal person?  How does it go about creating its subject in the real world? What does the proliferation of so many plural Buddhisms reveal about the principle singular formation, “Buddhism?” (My neologism, “x-buddhism,” is intended to index the relation of the many to the one. No one practices Buddhism, only a variation of Buddhism.) These were the questions driving my critique. 

Such an approach would open the possibility of speculative applications of Buddhist material. So the “non” is not a negation of or an anything-but Buddhism. It means “Buddhism,” but not under the “punctilious gaze” of the masters, as Laruelle puts it. The “non” indicates Buddhism mutated through certain operations. In short, non-buddhism does things with x-buddhist materials. My idea was that the speculations enabled by these operations would, in turn, ensure Buddhism’s vitality and relevance in the face of what I was increasingly coming to see as its diminished role at The Great Feast of Knowledge.

The Great Feast of Knowledge

So let’s begin here, where it all began, at The Great Feast of Knowledge. This is a non-buddhist trope intended to accomplish two related aims. First, it aims to provide a realistic picture of x-buddhism’s place in the larger world of thought and practice. Second, it aims to remove a significant hindrance to x-buddhism’s diminished place within that larger world, namely, the principle of sufficient Buddhism.

The trope of the Great Feast asks you to imagine a colossal medieval-type hall crammed with massive wooden rectangular tables, around which are sitting, standing, pacing, gesticulating, and arguing the motliest throng of human beings you can imagine. These are the representatives of Knowledge—philosophy, psychology, history, physics, biology, politics, literature, religion, law, and so on ad infinitum. The Feast is a place where x-buddhism’s ideas—its various concepts, beliefs, myths, truths, fantasies, hopes, and dreams—are subjected to the invigorating ordeal of being debated, contested, complicated, contradicted, refuted, maybe ridiculed, and maybe embraced by other traditions.  

A crucial feature of the Great Feast is a guard standing at the entrance. The guard’s task is to collect the weapons from the various authorities that seek access to the Feast. Anyone may enter but shorn of sword and insignia. So imagine “Buddhism” arriving, arrayed with its battery of dharmic concepts; its inexhaustible treasures illuminating the darkness of the world; its bodhisattva field marshals armed with seductively confident arguments; its Buddha, glowing with the sovereign nimbus of the thaumaturge. Stripped down, deprived of their authority, and bereft of their institutional robes, titles, lineages, publishing houses, and PhDs, the Buddhist agents enter the hall indistinguishable from everyone else. They take their seats amid the chaotic swarm. The Feast begins.

Biology comes over to Buddhism’s table. Is it true that you find desire a problem? 

The Buddha responds: I don’t envision even one other fetter—fettered by which beings wander and transmigrate for a long time—like the fetter of desire. 

Biology is dumbfounded. But we are animals driven by self-preservation. Desire (craving, thirst, attachment) is precisely the mechanism to ensure our biological reproduction. In what sense can it be considered a “fetter”? 

Philosophy overhears the conversation and chimes in: Buddhism, you seem to assume another world beyond this one. Can you offer us any proof for this quite incredible transcendental assumption?

Psychology’s ears perk up: You also seem to denigrate the human being, its very body full of craving, its mind full of dreams, its emotions full of loving attachments. Does Buddhism exist for the person or the person for Buddhism?    

The Principle of Sufficient Buddhism

What might physics, neuroscience, poetry, sports, or love say to Buddhism about the value of desire? The trope of the Great Feast of Knowledge asks you to subject your x-buddhist concepts, beliefs, and theories to the vast perspective opened by the world of ideas. How does your concept fare? A non-buddhist analysis predicts that one result will be particularly far-reaching. This result is the revocation of the principle of sufficient Buddhism. 

This principle holds that all things are “Buddhistizable,” to coin an ungainly but apt term. Buddhism possesses assumptions and concepts that may be applied to virtually any other domain of inquiry, thereby bringing that domain into Buddhism’s field of vision. From everyday issues like relationship troubles and job woes to problems with addiction and depression, to the nature of consciousness and quantum reality, Buddhism, the principle holds, can provide a sufficient explanation and solution. From the perspective of non-buddhism, the price that Buddhism must pay for this sufficiency is too high. As long as Buddhism remains regulated by this principle, it will remain unable to “think” beyond its self-reflection. It will thus be incapable of offering the rigorous account of reality that it purports to provide. Instead, it can only offer us a circularity in which Buddhism gazes into a matter only to see its image reflected back.

If the reader doubts the massive load-bearing function of the principle of sufficient Buddhism, ask yourself what happens once it is dismantled. On the negative side, Buddhism loses its preeminent status as an enlightened wisdom. For, in dialogue at the Feast, its assumptions, such as karma and rebirth, will rarely, if ever, prove incontrovertibly sufficient. Let’s focus on the positive side. Laruelle likens the move to that of non-Euclidean geometry. The decisive difference between Euclidean and non-Euclidean geometry concerns the behavior of a line. Euclid’s fifth postulate assumes parallelism. In upholding this postulate, along with the other four, Euclideans radically limit the field of possible forms. Rejecting this postulate, though preserving the other four, non-Euclidean geometry, by contrast, envisions radical new possibilities; namely, it permits elliptical and hyperbolic curvature. In removing a postulate that was not self-evident, non-Euclidean geometry can describe actual reality more accurately. Might removing the principle of sufficient Buddhism similarly enable us to envision radically new and eminently practical—and as such, more realistic and rigorous—possibilities for ourselves?

The Real

One matter above all occupies Buddhism’s specular gaze and needs to be discussed before presenting an argument for animal liberation. I mentioned earlier that the shattering aspect of Mia’s tuna revelation was that “the Real” burst through an otherwise benign moment. Her disturbing realization was that she was not eating happy little nuggets endorsed by an innocuous cartoon fish; she was eating the mutilated flesh of a brutally eviscerated animal. The idea of “the Real” allows us to talk about disavowed features of reality that threaten to undo our constructions of goodness, order, sense, and meaning. 

For instance, anthropomorphic cartoon mascots like Charlie the Tuna and the Chick-fil-A “Eat Mor Chikin” rebel cows enable us to hold at bay the Real of fifty-six billion horrifically tortured, maimed, mutilated, and slaughtered land and aquatic animals every year in the United States. Such disavowal allows us to maintain our sense of ourselves as good people committed to justice and anti-oppression. But when reality fractures and the Real breaks through, as in Mia’s case, what then?

The concept of the Real is taken most recently from Lacanian psychoanalysis, but it is an ancient element of thought about reality that spans philosophy (Plato’s forms, Kant’s a priori, for example), science (laws, forces, empirical realism), psychology (the unconscious), religion (God, the Absolute), even art (the sublime, the true and beautiful). Buddhism’s version is expressed in several similar “first names.” First names are those terms that I put in parentheses that symbolize the Real. Candidates for Buddhist first names are, for instance: no-self (anātman), emptiness (śūnyatā), dependent origination (pratītyasamutpāda), pain (dukkha), and the dharma. I emphasize that these names symbolize the Real because they can never adequately represent it, much less capture it. And this is where non-buddhism can help. 

Buddhism, like all other sufficient systems, believes that, through its concepts, it does capture the Real. When Buddhism adduces the existential priority of pain, it is confident that it is thinking the Real. That is, Buddhism identifies the Real of human pain as dukkha. By contrast, non-buddhism sees such a move not as a thinking of the Real of pain, but precisely as resistance to the Real of pain. How so? Just ask yourself whether a phenomenon as colossal, monstrous, or immense (no word is big enough) as “the existential priority of pain” can be adequately represented by a concept such as dukkha. Buddhism, in short, aims to teach us what there is and how it all hangs together. 

Discovering such a principle is a timeless human yearning if the history of ideas is any indication. It is the yearning to know, to embrace intimately, or even to be consumed by, that which is fundamentally real. It is a yearning born from the lived human experience that involvement with the things of this world—its objects, people, events—does not produce abiding pleasure and, indeed, is too often the very source of pain. 

Recognizing the problematic, often hallucinatory, role that such yearning plays in the ideological production of meaning, non-buddhism aims to suspend Buddhism’s claim over the Real. It does so by “foreclosing the Real.” The idea here is that the Real of human pain can never be adequately articulated in a given thought system, and so is ultimately foreclosed to that system. A related idea is that it is precisely the Real that nonetheless causes the ruminations on pain that we call Buddhism, and Buddhism itself encapsulates these ruminations as the quite particular idea it terms “dukkha.” So, in short, while x-buddhism thinks the breached, Real, non-buddhism thinks from the foreclosed Real. Readers would not be wrong to hear echoes of the Buddhist idea of “abandoning the raft” here. 

By revoking the principle of sufficient Buddhism, foreclosing the Real, and positioning ourselves as heretics, we can now fashion innovative usages of Buddhism.

Axiomatic Animal Liberation

We can fashion “more real” usages out of Buddhist materials (concepts, texts, practices, texts, etc.) because the strictly Buddhist sense of the material is suspended. It is important to note that we do so by interrupting, not revoking, the Buddhist usage. This move allows non-buddhism to create experimental axioms for itself of the nature, “If we assume that x…” It is from these axioms that we create new usages of Buddhism.

I can now state the non-buddhist argument for animal liberation. The argument holds that Buddhism and animal liberation are inseparable. Consequently, a Buddhist practitioner must actively eliminate the exploitation of nonhuman animals for any purpose, meaning committing to an anti-speciesist or vegan stance. At a minimum, this engagement must take the form of refraining from using animal products and includes veganism. 

I realize that nobody wants to hear such musts, but recall that non-buddhism aims to be inventive, experimental, speculative, and rigorous using axiomatized and abstracted Buddhist ideas. So let’s try it out. First, I will state three theorems. As you read them, please ask yourself what it would mean for a Buddhist to reject the theorem. Then, I will frame the argument using the four noble truths: pain as an innate characteristic of sentient existence; pain’s origin in craving (desire, thirst/hunger, want); craving’s interruption; the way to do it.

Three Non-Negotiable Theorems

Theorem 1. The animals whose products you use and consume are sentient beings who perceive and feel pain. In 2012, “The Cambridge Declaration of Consciousness” was signed by “a prominent international group of cognitive neuroscientists, neuropharmacologists, neurophysiologists, neuroanatomists, and computational neuroscientists.” The declaration concludes that “humans are not unique in possessing the neurological substrates that generate consciousness. Nonhuman animals, including all mammals and birds, and many other creatures, including octopuses, also possess these neurological substrates.” 

Theorem 2. Every sentient being is an inalienable One indisputably deserving of dignity, freedom from exploitation, and protection from unnecessary pain. Being fellow sentient beings, nonhuman animals are not categorically distinct from Homo sapiens. The human-derived “animal” category permits the “othering” that invariably leads to exploitation, enslavement, cruelty, and death. 

Theorem 3. Buddhism is a rare force for compassion in the world. Subtract its compassion imperative, and Buddhism’s value as an agent of betterment is fatally compromised. More than ever, the world needs the robust, unambiguous displays of compassion that Buddhist training can offer.   

Four Truths to Make You Noble

First ennobling truth: Pain is inevitable, but you can contribute to its diminishment. You actively participate in the animal-industrial complex when you use and consume animal products. Among the countless horrific actions of this complex that you will be disassociating from as a Buddhist animal liberationist, let’s look at pigs alone (figures from 2020). Crammed shoulder to shoulder in stifling hot trucks, deprived of food or water over distances that might take days, these highly intelligent animals experience terror, sadness, and despair to a degree inconceivable to most humans. Some 330,000 of them will die during this inhumane transport. The other 131,563,000 will arrive, terrified, at the slaughterhouse. There, it is not unlikely that the males will have their testicles ripped off without anesthesia. Piglets are sometimes killed by having their heads slammed against the ground. Eventually, all the “viable” pigs are stunned into unconsciousness. The most common methods of stunning are done with a penetrating captive bolt (a metal bolt is shot into the brain), gassing (typically with carbon dioxide), and electricity (an electrical current pierces the animal’s brain via tongs). After stunning, the hind legs of the still-living pig are tied, and the pig is lifted upside down while a slaughterhouse employee cuts its neck arteries, causing it to bleed to death. An emotionally animated, socially attuned, deeply feeling, loving pig went into the slaughterhouse. A ghastly human commodity called “pork” came out. 

A truth is ennobling only when it is lived.

Second ennobling truth: Craving. The root cause of killings every ten hours equaling the “deadliest conflict in human history” (60 million during World War II) is our craving for animal flesh, eggs, milk, leather, etc.

Third ennobling truth: Cessation. That needless slaughter will cease with the cessation of our craving for animal products.

Fourth ennobling truth: The Way. Stop using and consuming animal products.

It’s as simple as that.

A truth is ennobling only when it is lived.

Regarding nonhuman-animal justice, English philosopher Jeremy Bentham famously said, “The question is not can they reason, but can they suffer?” Regarding Buddhists today, the question is not, “Can they reason their way out of this and other such anti-speciesist arguments,” but “Shouldn’t they do whatever they can to reduce suffering in the world?”

The post A Non-Buddhist Argument for Animal Liberation appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

We’re living in deracinating, doomscrolling times, rife with “polycrisis” and pessimism. The urgent humanitarian crisis in Gaza heads a long list of current reasons to be anxious about the future. Yet despite this, GDP growth is trending up in the US and China, and some are currently bullish on global economic growth. There’s an obvious disconnect between the state of the world and the dominant growth paradigm. There’s a whole discourse on rethinking it and finding new models that measure well-being and sustainability. But this discourse itself could use a new approach. 

Part of the problem is a blind spot in our linear conception of growth that limits our ability to imagine a qualitatively different future and take action to usher it in. We tend to forget that growth sometimes unfolds in surprising, non-linear ways that we don’t see coming, like a butterfly breaking out of a chrysalis. That’s often the way of epoch-making, transformative change. We rarely recognize it until it’s in the rear-view mirror.

While we’re living through it, it’s natural to imagine the future as an extension of present growth trends. Today’s trends are dark. Our economic system depends on endless GDP growth, fed by exponential population and consumption growth, driving conflict, ecological overshoot, and climate and extinction crises. 

Technological growth points to a similarly dystopian place. Global knowledge doubles every year (soon it will double every twelve hours). Each of us processes about five times more information (and counting) than a generation ago. This leads to overload, chronic stress, anxiety, and depression. Worldwide depression rates rose 50% from 1990 through 2017 (and roughly doubled during the pandemic). And then there’s rising AI anxiety.

These are all compelling arguments for stepping off the growth treadmill. Except for techno-optimists and a few fiscal policy experts, it’s clear to most of us that we can’t just do more of the same thing, in hopes of “growing our way out” of such problems. Yet it’s not as if we can solve them by magically shutting growth off, either. To step outside the dilemma, we need a different mental model.

Metamorphosis might be a less blinkered and more hopeful way to think about growth. Almost all animal species undergo it, transforming their morphology to adapt to ecological pressures. Although humans tend to see metamorphosis as the exception and non-transformative growth as the rule, in nature, it’s really the other way around. Most biological growth contains the seeds of sudden, dramatic transformation into something entirely new.

Humans don’t undergo biological metamorphosis, which may explain our limited notion of growth as becoming a larger or more developed version of the same thing, rather than transforming into something else. Yet human metamorphosis is a deep theme–perhaps the deepest–of mythology, psychology, and wisdom traditions.

In nature, metamorphosis isn’t just physiological, it’s also neurological. It literally rewires a metamorphic animal’s brain by respecifying old neurons and adding new ones. The human brain also has this latent capability, which contemplative practice can unlock. 

Neuroscientific research confirms that meditation and other forms of contemplation enhance human neuroplasticity, changing the way neural structures connect and synchronize. At virtually any time of life, contemplative practice can change the brain’s physical structure to enhance cognitive functions like memory and attention, as well as socially active functions like compassion, empathy, relatedness, and resilience.

Keeping this in mind might help us have more hope for the future, because if humans have an innate mental capacity for metamorphosis, human societies and economies, which are based on our mental constructs, could have it too. Positive, transformative changes could be underway right now, even if they aren’t easy to perceive or predict from where we sit.

Metamorphosis is an emergent process which doesn’t just suddenly come out of nowhere. It’s encoded and inchoate in genes and gene expression, part of an ancient and continuous evolutionary dance between changing conditions and strategies for adapting to them. In that sense, it is always preparing and unfolding, covertly, like a caterpillar in a cocoon. Whereas growth is an overt process we can witness and measure, metamorphosis is long in preparation and can be hard to recognize until it bursts forth.

The same could be true of social and environmental change. Indeed, this is how change leaders who are grounded in contemplative practice often talk about our crisis-ridden, panic-inducing times, and how to navigate them.

Joanna Macy wrote in 2009 of “the Great Turning” as “the essential adventure of our time,” where “the ecological and social crises we face…caused by an economic system dependent on accelerating growth” are undergoing a revolutionary transition “to a life-sustaining society.” 

While we can’t know how fast this metamorphosis will unfold, or what losses might accrue before it does, “we can know that it is under way and it is gaining momentum,” Macy writes. “To see this as the larger context of our lives clears our vision and summons our courage [and can] save us from succumbing to either panic or paralysis.”

Systems thinking pioneer Peter Senge said in a recent interview, “Urgency by itself puts you in a mode where you just try harder to do what you have been doing all along. You get into a contracted state where you say, ‘my God, we’ve got to make this work.’ But that’s not very conducive to imagination, or building trust, relationships, or mutuality. It has taken humans a long time to dig ourselves into this hole; we aren’t going to dig [ourselves] out quickly. It’s way too urgent to act just out of urgency. We need to relax. That’s the paradoxical situation we’re in.”

Many on the front lines of social and environmental change concur. When things seem most desperate, we need hope the most, and can least afford panic or paralysis. When the stakes are highest and demand for solutions is most urgent, that’s precisely when we need to check in, slow down, and go deep.

Making the deep changes the world needs will require the grounding, relaxation, creativity, compassion, and resilience that contemplative practice cultivates. Contemplation unlocks the protean, metamorphic capacity of minds to change and become something new. Staying grounded in it in the face of conditions that demand new leaps of adaptation could be what triggers metamorphosis in our civilization.

Our current trajectory may seem headed for a dark end, but not everything points in that direction. Out of the ravages of extractive and exploitive linear systems are emerging circular, regenerative models for agriculture, finance, and civilization. Their uptake is growing. So is an emergent social field of changemakers and contemplative practitioners working to envision and help build a positive future. 

These seeds and seedlings of a better future are germinating and growing unpredictably in the present. They’re a wildcard that may yet hijack our dystopian growth narrative toward metamorphosis, from a self-destructive civilization into a life-sustaining one.

The post Metamorphosis appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

When regrets about my failures and misfortunes begin to overwhelm me and my life feels disappointing, I have learned to seek guidance from two of my spiritual heroes, the Zen master Taizan Maezumi Roshi (1931–1995) and the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900). Maezumi Roshi once responded to my expressions of remorse for opportunities lost as he had to many other practitioners at the Zen Center of Los Angeles. Smiling gently but unable to resist the urge to tease me, he said that I had so far failed to appreciate my life. “Please encourage yourself,” he had also written, “so that your practice is fully to appreciate this transient, frenzied life as the whole self-contained, self-fulfilled life.” And Nietzsche, whose suffering and loss were exponentially greater than mine, came to believe that the ultimate challenge in life is amor fati, to love your fate. Think of “fate” here as the simple, unchangeable “given”: what simply is, whether we like it or not. For Nietzsche, self-pity, disabling regret, and disappointment that reality is the way it is or that the past was what it was were clear signs of spiritual weakness. In Ecce Homo, he writes: “My formula for greatness in a human being is amor fati: . . . not just to bear the given, the necessary, still less to conceal it . . . but to love it.”

Excellent advice from both Maezumi and Nietzsche, but without serious reflection, I would have probably responded by saying something like, “Oh, sure. Of course I appreciate my life. There have been amazingly good times, times of plentitude and peace, times of friendship, love, and laughter. I reflect back on these with gratitude and appreciation.” But this response wouldn’t have satisfied these two contemplative spirits. Maezumi would most likely have sighed in loving disappointment; Nietzsche would have scowled in open condemnation. They hadn’t exhorted me to appreciate and love only the good things in life—the pleasures, successes, and victories. They had challenged me to appreciate the whole mess—pleasant and painful—and to love what can’t be changed, no matter how debilitating it has been. They had directed me to love it all, the good, the bad, and the ugly, because there it is: reality, staring me in the face.

But is that feasible—to love and appreciate my injuries and sicknesses, my humiliating weaknesses, my dishonesty, greed, and egocentricity, and the numerous acts of cowardice by which I have hidden all this from everyone? Am I somehow to love everything I should have done but didn’t, everything I shouldn’t have done but did? I cringe every time I bring any of that to mind. Even though I would prefer to be oblivious to all of these weaknesses of character and pretend that they don’t exist, they frequently come unbidden to mind, often accompanied by a growing sense of disappointment. Regrets, guilt, and shame don’t necessarily outnumber the successes, pride, and pleasures in my life, but they do weigh more heavily on me.

So if Maezumi and Nietzsche meant loving the whole of my life, including the humiliating failures of spirit, the challenge is magnified enormously. But why should I appreciate the unappreciable? Why even attempt to love the seemingly unlovable dimensions of my past, my character, and whatever life has doled out? Even if this demand were intellectually plausible, it would still strike me as viscerally unpalatable. But taking their admonitions seriously, given my respect for these two insightful teachers, I realize that what they were teaching was their realization that spiritual depth and human shallowness are inseparable. They are always found together.

If we have imagined that the great Zen master and the world-renowned philosopher didn’t face excruciating failures and setbacks or experience suffering or make mistakes as we have, we would be dead wrong and would have missed the point of their teachings. In fact, the tales of woe in these two lives approach tragic dimensions. They both faced extreme hardship, suffering, even humiliation, but in visionary moments, they broke through to the other side of these difficulties, tapping into an enormous reservoir of personal power. In that awareness, they witnessed the magnificent beauty of all life just as it is, encompassing, as it does, inconceivable difficulties, hardships, and challenges. They experienced the miracle that this present reality has unfolded precisely as it has.

The crucial point is this: Because we are finite beings, pain, failure, and depression are inevitably woven into the very fabric of our lives. To accept that basic fact is to finally come to terms with what it means to be human. This fundamental self-acceptance is the basis of self-respect, and self-respect is the seed and substance of an awakened life. Because the past is what it is and, as a result, I am who I am, my task is to embrace the whole of my life without denial or revulsion. Lacking that level of self-integration, I’m not really working with who I am, thereby disabling the only chance I have to make skillful, transformative moves in life. As both Nietzsche and Maezumi knew, the most vibrant individuals are those who have learned to smile upon all aspects of their experience with open, honest inclusion.

Recognizing who you are and learning to be at ease with it is the essential, nonnegotiable point of departure for any greater profundity in life. It is only through a disciplined integration of all dimensions of our past that we learn to work through the problems that have been so disabling and, on that basis, to work creatively with the world. Nietzsche called this reintegration of the past “knowledge acquired through suffering,” and it’s what Buddhists contemplate in their meditations on human suffering. These practices demand unflinching honesty, a level of truthfulness and openness about our lives that is not easy to acquire. The Perfection of Wisdom sutras upon which Maezumi’s Mahayana Buddhism was founded stress the idea that the capacity to tolerate the truth about oneself and the world—to set aside self-placating delusions and face the way things really are—is absolutely essential to the awakening of freedom in life. Nietzsche frequently wrote that one measure of spiritual strength is how much truth you can bear. Being able to maintain a courageous inner dialogue between successes and failures, joys and suffering, strengths and weaknesses requires the capacity to face the truth and to gather all aspects of your life into an intelligible whole. Love the truth, Maezumi and Nietzsche seem to be saying, whatever that is, because the truth will set you free.

This truth about my life includes far more than my own choices and decisions. It also encompasses aspects of my life that I had no role in creating—the imprints of family, community, culture, language, and the long and complicated history of our species. All of this just happened—it is my fate or destiny. It includes accidents that have befallen me, humiliations and suffering that have come my way through no particular fault of my own. We must somehow embrace not only what we did or didn’t do but also what’s been done to us and what simply happened for whatever reasons. To regret or deny or resent any part of this is what Buddhists call delusion. Maezumi and Nietzsche exhort me to embrace it all as the essential content of my life—not just to accept it but to appreciate and love it.

With that in mind, we can see that what both Maezumi Roshi and Nietzsche were pursuing was something much larger than just appreciating or loving their own individual lives. What they both aspired to appreciate and love is life itself, the agonies and the sublimities of all living beings. For Maezumi, this is the basis of the bodhisattva’s vow to absorb the suffering of all sentient beings and take the challenge to redeem it, to make it right. Maezumi called this “wisdom sought for the sake of everyone.” Beyond the Zen master’s own personal awakening, then, is the depth dimension of that goal—the awakening of their community, of the entire species so that all human beings might participate in the creation of a new world. By extending their sense of responsibility as far as possible beyond their individual lives, Maezumi and Nietzsche imagined themselves embracing all humanity and all life. And they aspired to do this not just in thought and intention but in everything they do.

Still, I wonder how to go about loving what I quite honestly don’t love. Where do I even begin? Nietzsche suggests the answer in a paragraph in The Gay Science entitled “One must learn to love.” He starts with our love of music, showing how that love wasn’t simply innate but was cultivated over long stretches of time through much listening. We listen repeatedly until the music becomes part of us. And it is not just love of music that is acquired this way, Nietzsche says. We had to learn to love everything we now love through patience and discipline until gradually a space opens within us for that new love to reside. “There is no other way,” he tells us. “Even love has to be learned.” Even the love and appreciation of oneself. So Nietzsche challenges himself: Amor fati—to love the given, what cannot be changed. “Let that be my love from now on,” he writes. “Someday I want only to be a Yes-sayer.”

Becoming a “Yes-sayer” means affirming all past and present reality as the necessary starting point for creating a new future. But how is this affirmation to be accomplished? Through practice, Maezumi Roshi says. Daily, focused, mindful practice of mental-spiritual disciplines specifically designed to enable embracing reality as it is, without excuses, avoidances, or delusions. Embracing it fully allows us to work with it by bringing all positive powers at our disposal to bear on it: presence of mind, attentiveness, energy, kindness, patience, courage, generosity, wisdom, compassion—and finally, love. These can be learned, and even if this aspiration feels like it’s too far beyond us, for Maezumi and Nietzsche, the path of that transformative learning is simple and right here where we already are: Carefully designed intentions. Daily practice. Simple steps. Just do it.

The joy of waking up to who and where you are—and loving it—is an ecstatic experience of freedom.

Although in his era Nietzsche’s culture lacked the explicit and highly sophisticated practices of interior transformation that Buddhists had been developing for over two millennia, he had mastered the essential formula—“long practice and daily work”—and attempted to apply it in his own way. Nietzsche called this kind of self-discipline “a rare and great art” and knew from experimenting with his own life that through the everyday practices of self-acceptance and self-sculpting, human beings could “experience their most exquisite pleasure.” This pleasure, the joy of waking up to who and where you are—and loving it—is an ecstatic experience of freedom. So when Nietzsche asks himself “What is the seal of having become free?” he answers, “No longer to be ashamed before oneself.” That’s saying it plainly: the “seal,” or sign of freedom, is that you have learned to love your fate, to appreciate your life, and by pushing through debilitating shame, to tap into the selfless energy of openhearted living.

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