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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Buried amid thousands of Buddhist sutras in Tibetan and Chinese collections is a small gem, a digest of Buddhist practical teachings concentrated into four easily memorized sentences that, carefully considered, may well serve as a guide for our own contemporary dharma practice. This sutra is easy to miss—just a single page resting alongside many others that were written in short format to facilitate memorization for safekeeping in the marrow of meditation practice.

The sutra begins, like so many others, with the words “This is what I have heard,” meaning the teachings that follow were heard directly from the Buddha and then committed to memory by his close disciple Ananda. It then provides a familiar setting: a garden in Prince Jeta’s Grove, where a “community of 1,250 monks and a large gathering of bodhisattvas” have come to hear the Buddha teach the dharma. He begins by getting right to the point, saying, “There are four teachings that bodhisattvas should practice as long as they live. What are the four?”

• Bodhisattvas should cultivate an aspiration for awakening as long as they live.
• Bodhisattvas should maintain spiritual friendships as long as they live.
• Bodhisattvas should practice patience, openness, and kindness as long as they live.
• Bodhisattvas should spend some portion of time dwelling in the wilderness as long as they live.

The Buddha then repeats these four ideals in a two-stanza poem, after which the narrator concludes by telling us that “everyone in attendance rejoiced and praised the Buddha’s teaching.” That’s it. One page. No further explanation. The sutra’s author would have assumed, though, that most readers or hearers of this sutra would have encountered each of the four ideals elsewhere, perhaps many times over, articulated each time in their own cultural and historical context. Following that same pattern, here is my own elaboration on these four ideals for our Western context and the temptation to claim that the scope of these four ideals may be comprehensive enough to serve as an overall guide for contemporary dharma practice.

The Buddha’s first point—cultivating an aspiration for awakening—is truly fundamental, a necessary point of departure for an authentic spiritual practice in any tradition. Thousands of times throughout Buddhist sutras, the importance of bodhicitta—the intention, aspiration, or thought of enlightenment—is stated and emphasized. Forming this thought in our minds and dwelling on it in meditation as an image of our own deepest human purpose puts us on a path of spiritual aspiration like the one that the Buddha taught. By placing this point first, the Buddha frames it as the beginning of the path. But the sutra doesn’t just say “Start here.” It goes further, entreating us to cultivate bodhicitta “as long as we live.” It’s not difficult to understand why. Your most important aspiration, the mental image that guides and empowers your deepest sense of purpose in life, is crucial. To be guided as you go about daily life by a profound image of the point of your existence and to question, cultivate, and extend this image further and further over the course of your lifetime is to open yourself to events of awakening occurring throughout life. For this central reason, the Buddha’s first ideal is that “bodhisattvas should cultivate an aspiration for awakening as long as they live.”

The Buddha’s second ideal is also emphasized throughout the sutras. It is that “bodhisattvas should maintain spiritual friendships as long as they live.” By spiritual friendships the sutra means relationships that are attentive to what is most important in life. Spiritual friendships, broadly conceived, are those that probe beneath the surface level of human interaction in search of what our being here is all about. For most of the people gathered around the Buddha that day, and for many of us today, the Buddha was (and is) foremost among spiritual friends. But only a few people back then were (and none of us today are) personally involved with the historical Buddha. So for us that’s a “friendship” of a very different kind even if it is one that occasionally jolts us into eye-opening realizations. More direct and personal are friendships with spiritual teachers, actual people in our lives who get to know us and who can therefore be very specific in offering guidance for each of us as unique individuals. Having a personal teacher who is dedicated to the spiritual health of others and who embodies the way of living that we most admire empowers us along the Buddhist path.

Like meditation, the experience of being on your own in the wilderness inevitably means coming face-to-face with yourself in ways that just don’t occur in ordinary life.

Spiritual friendships that are mutual and collaborative are also very important. Close friends who have learned how to be honest with each other and who share the quest for insight in life can inspire and motivate each other. Practicing the dharma is a communal affair, whether the community is a large, coherent sangha or just two friends making their way through life together as mindfully as possible. The inspiration that we all need comes from beyond our limited lives, and as the Buddhist tradition evolved it recognized that anyone might potentially be that life-enhancing “spiritual friend.” Being aware of this truth and purposefully cultivating connections to others that are anchored in spiritual life opens richer and more profound dimensions of our lives. Therefore the Buddha’s second ideal for bodhisattvas is that they “maintain spiritual friendships as long as they live.”

Third, the Buddha recommends that bodhisattvas “practice patience, openness, and kindness as long as they live.” The early Buddhist virtue of kshanti, often translated as “tolerance, patience, forbearance,” appears almost everywhere in dharma discourse and here it gets singled out for exalted praise. Kshanti teaches us how to avoid self-absorption, how to open our hearts and minds to others, how to understand them, to sympathize with them, and to see things as much as possible from their points of view. When bodhisattvas train themselves to be inquisitive and open to others, they find themselves able to both tolerate others and to learn from the differences between people that might otherwise be unnerving to the point of intolerable.

But kshanti is even more expansive than this, because it includes the bodhisattva’s aspiration to maintain strength and resilience even when difficulties seem overwhelming, the difficulties of pain and suffering, of frustration and confusion, insecurity and fear, or hostility and conflict. Stories of the Buddha show us this ideal in action. When the Buddha is threatened with violence, when conflict and hostility begin to arise, he doesn’t lose his bearings. Instead, he becomes even more focused, fully intent on calming out-of-control anger and solving disputes with compassionate concern for the well-being of everyone involved. This power of personal presence is kshanti. Having cultivated it, bodhisattvas don’t fold when things get tough. They rise to the occasion with clear vision, a steady hand, and kindness. This calm, fearless openness was understood to be a sign of extraordinary strength. For good reason, then, the Buddha asks bodhisattvas to “practice patience, openness, and kindness as long as they live.”

The Buddha’s fourth ideal is that “bodhisattvas should spend some portion of time dwelling in the wilderness as long as they live.” This final point might seem out of keeping with the first three. Why is dwelling in the wilderness given equal billing with developing an aspiration for awakening, or with cultivating enlightening relationships or patience and kindness? Is substantial wilderness experience really an essential condition for Buddhist awakening? In this sutra and in many others the Buddha asserts that it is. Why? The most important reason is that in early Buddhism “wilderness dwelling” was a synonym for meditation. Buddhists who were serious about awakening carried that aspiration out by seeking some degree of seclusion from the mental spin of ordinary life so that meditative mindfulness and profound discernment might gradually become ingrained as their natural comportment. Some form of in-depth meditation practice has been considered essential to the quest for awakening throughout Buddhist history.

Practicing the dharma is a communal affair, whether the community is a large, coherent sangha or just two friends making their way through life together as mindfully as possible.

But there is something more than the practice of meditation implied here in this fourth ideal. Like meditation, the experience of being on your own in the wilderness inevitably means coming face-to-face with yourself in ways that just don’t occur in ordinary life. In social settings—even monastic social settings—consciousness is shaped by that communal setting. What and who you are is constantly being reflected back to you from others, a reflection that has a potent bearing on your sense of identity. But after even a few days alone in the wilderness that reflection begins to fade into the background and another dimension of personal accountability begins to emerge from within. You realize that there are fundamental decisions about the character of your life and death that are yours and yours alone.

Furthermore, isolation in the wilderness forces us to witness and come to terms with the enormous physical, spatial, and temporal foundations for our lives—the natural world, the planet Earth, the entire universe: it calls forth a mind-opening awareness that rarely arises in social settings. Gazing into the larger cosmos, we encounter head-on the sheer magnitude of reality and our infinitesimal position within it. Encouraging these dimensions of awareness to develop right alongside our visceral fear of being on our own helps individuate us as unique and mature spiritual beings. Expanding awareness in these ways, contemplative wilderness experience came to be considered a necessary condition for enlightened awareness.

In the Buddha’s own life, six years dwelling in the wilderness led up to his awakening and his lifelong vow to extend awakening to others. Even after devoting himself fully to teaching, however, he still realized that some time alone would be spiritually important throughout his life to rejuvenate and empower his teaching. In accordance with his example, “wilderness dwelling” in Buddhism never meant total or permanent seclusion from community. The Vinaya code of Buddhist rules forbade full withdrawal from the world, thereby declaring that although meditative solitude is important to the dharma, so is active community involvement. Similarly, Mahayana bodhisattvas rejected lifelong withdrawal from others by vowing to take collective awakening just as seriously as personal awakening. In these ways Buddhists committed themselves to cultivating bodhicitta along with and on behalf of everyone else through spiritual friendships and compassion. But with those qualifications in mind, and in conjunction with the first three ideals, the Buddha strongly advised that “bodhisattvas should spend some portion of time dwelling in the wilderness as long as they live.”

The Sutra on Four Ideals to Practice throughout Your Life, or in Peter Skilling’s translation, Four Dharmas Never to Be Abandoned, is very brief and utterly simple in its advice to practitioners. But a closer look shows us that it provides an amazingly comprehensive account of the Buddhist dharma in outline form, one perhaps worthy of memorization and practice.

An Important but Elusive Text

Although no Sanskrit original of the Sutra on Four Ideals to Practice throughout Your Life is known to exist, there almost certainly was one, since prominent Buddhists like Shantideva refer to it. Despite its apparent insignificance, its relative importance is demonstrated by the fact that we have three Tibetan translations of the sutra, two Chinese translations, and several commentaries spelling out its meaning. Nothing is known about the origins and history of this text prior to its first translation into Chinese in 680 CE. Although formatted in Tibetan and Chinese versions as a Mahayana sutra addressed to bodhisattvas, there are close parallels in early Pali sutras, and these four teachings were all initially developed there. Peter Skilling has translated it into English for us in his anthology Questioning the Buddha: A Selection of Twenty-Five Sutras (2021).

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One Mind
Directed by Edward A. Burger
Commonfolk Films, 2016
China, 81 minutes

In the spring of 1986, as soon as foreigners could acquire permission to travel into the remote mountains of south central China, I set out on a journey to locate and contemplate the monastery ruins once inhabited by the most famous masters of Chan Buddhism’s golden age. Although it was well known that what remained of these slowly deteriorating monasteries had been brutally destroyed in the Cultural Revolution, I had hoped to see what little might still be visible. In the midst of these explorations, I wandered into Zhenru Chan temple in Jiangxi province, which was not only intact but also inhabited by a handful of Chan monks who had been allowed to continue their traditional practices in rural seclusion despite government suppression everywhere else. What I saw there was extraordinary, a profound trace of a lost world. Although images of this monastery remain vivid in my mind, I hadn’t been back again to visit in the intervening 30-some years. So it came as a very pleasant surprise when I was asked to review the superb film One Mind, a documentary contemplation of the meditative life at Zhenru temple.

It would be entirely inadequate to say that One Mind, directed by Edward A. Burger, is about Zhenru (“True Suchness”) Monastery, although it certainly is. The film is more importantly an open exploration into the state of mind that is cultivated and lived at Zhenru Monastery, experienced through the filmmaker’s own longtime participation in this meditative way of life. One Mind (yixin) was the phrase used by early Hongzhou Chan masters to name this quality of profound awareness, and it has been carried through the monastery all these centuries into this revealing film, communicated through masterful technique and the filmmaker’s own personal experience.

The film opens, sans visuals, with the brisk sound of wind in bamboo, and it’s soon understood that the film’s soundtrack is fundamental in evoking this Chan state of mind. Later on, we hear the sounds of what we are seeing—monks’ sandals scurrying into the meditation hall, then their breath; heads being shaved; rain on stone; wooden fish clapping. When a storm bears down on the monastery, a monk pounds a huge drum, matching the power and fury of the thunder—a breathtaking minute of sound and sight. At other times, on carefully chosen occasions, silence prevails.

Moving along in perfect alignment with the sounds of the monastery are exquisite visuals. Close-up shots alternate with wide-open perspectives. Sometimes we see only a fragment—monks’ walking feet but not the monks; a single worm struggling in the topsoil as a monk hoes the ground. And sometimes the entire valley comes into view, contextualizing the community in overall space. Although the film is shot in full color, the monastery and valley come in earthly, muted hues. Everything seen is wood, stone, metal, and ceramic, with dim light and fog muting these already matte organic colors. Browns, greens, and grays are the color of bark, leaves, and well-worn monastic robes rather than of glossy painted and plastic surfaces. As is true for Mennonites and other religious communities committed to an older order of existence, these basic elements of wood, stone, and earth constitute the world.

And just as it is in Zhenru Monastery, language is at a premium throughout the film. The filmmaker doesn’t narrate; there are no wordy descriptions telling us what the monks are doing. They just do it, and viewers are there to witness. This is not to say that language is entirely absent, however. It does appear in three fitting ways. First, the film begins with passages on the screen inspired by the final chapter of the Avatamsaka (“Flower Ornament”) Sutra, in which a pilgrim, Sudhana, travels arduously in his quest for enlightenment through many landscapes and teachers to consult the bodhisattva Maitreya. “Great Teacher,” Sudhana pleads, “please guide me on my quest for an awakened mind.” “Young Pilgrim,” Maitreya replies, “to find the awakening you seek, turn your gaze inward now toward the landscapes of the mind.” As the film progresses through various monastic practices of labor and meditation, further instruction from Maitreya is projected as text upon the scene. These occasional teachings help set the Chan practices we are observing into the larger Buddhist context of the quest for enlightenment.

The film’s second use of language is when a monk addresses the viewer about what he is doing. This language is subtle and multilayered. It tells us about tea or turtles or gardening or head shaving, but in each case there is at least one more layer of Chan wisdom explicitly spoken or implied. Picking tea is about tea, but it is also about mindfulness and awakening. And the third form of language in the film is the monks’ ordinary worldly talk: “Put it here” or “It’s time to finish our harvest.” In many of these moments there are no translated subtitles. If you understand Chinese you can hear what they’re saying, but for the most part you’re better off not understanding, so that these sounds and their human origins blend into the background audio just like the babble of the stream. Other than these three occurrences of language, the film offers no story line; no individual human interest stories. “True Suchness” tells its own story.

Because we see monks engaged in the chores of the monastery through all four seasons, we know that One Mind was not the work of a large film crew flown in for a frantic three-day shoot on location. Indeed, the long-cultivated meditative quality of this film has already been conveyed to us throughout, clearly the effect of the filmmaker’s having been a resident in the monastery and a participant in its communal life. He is thus able to show us not only the detail of Chan monastic life but also how it coheres in the experience of “one mind.” The result is a deeply moving glimpse into classical but contemporary Chan meditative life. At one point Maitreya instructs Sudhana: “Young Pilgrim, continue forth in gratitude,” and gratitude is precisely the response that One Mind is likely to evoke from its audience. This is an authentic Chan film.

One Mind was screened on Tricycle’s Film Club in December 2017.

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My involvement with Buddhism began at the age of 13, when it just showed up at my door. In 1961, my family hosted our town’s one foreign exchange student for the year, and to my good fortune it turned out to be a high school senior from Thailand. I teased her mercilessly for being a Buddhist, and she in turn ridiculed me for being 13. But for some reason she taught me to meditate, and for some reason I took her teachings seriously. Ever since that time I’ve been meditating, studying Buddhist philosophy, and conceiving my life in Buddhist terms.

In spite of that beginning, it has never felt quite right for me to take vows in a particular lineage or enter into a formal relationship with a Buddhist teacher or in some other way formally declare myself a Buddhist. Although I am steeped in Buddhist ideas and practices, I’m also thoroughly American and contemporary in my worldview, which makes it difficult for me to take an existential interest in certain basic Buddhist ideas such as rebirth or parinirvana. Now, because of a knee injury, I can’t even sit in a proper Buddhist meditation posture. Thus all of the obvious, outward signs of being a Buddhist are missing from my life. The problem has been that whenever I’m tempted to do anything that looks traditionally Buddhist I begin to feel like an impostor, someone posing as what he can’t possibly be. Yet even though I don’t look like one, I can’t help but conceive of myself as a Buddhist, a real Buddhist, albeit a contemporary American one. So perhaps the advent of what is now called “secular Buddhism” saves me from identity confusion. Maybe this is my true sangha—at last.

Maybe, but something is missing for me, because if secular means “not religious,” then my sense of impropriety returns. By any definition of religion that interests me, I am a religious person, or at least I aspire to be. I can’t help but think that something important is lost if English-speaking Buddhists make a particular point of identifying with the antireligious orientation of secularity, and because secularity is so thoroughly identified in our culture with antireligion, I don’t know how the connotation can be avoided.

For me, religion is best defined as having to do with the very meaning of human life. Big-picture definitions seem most appropriate—definitions such as Paul Tillich’s image of being grasped by an ultimate concern, an unavoidable concern that connects directly to the essence of life. In that sense, religion is the spiritual dimension of human culture and life, a dimension that will always be present in some way whenever human beings confront what in Zen is called “the great matter of life and death.”

There is a political dimension to culture, an economic dimension, a religious one, and others, and although an individual may not be particularly astute or competent in any one of them, that doesn’t mean that this dimension of human life doesn’t exist. You can be politically agnostic, unengaged, clueless, or incompetent, but that doesn’t mean that politics doesn’t affect your life, or that this dimension isn’t always in play in spite of your disengagement. You can be musically tone deaf and have no understanding of music, just as you can be spiritually “tone deaf” and not understand what people are doing when they engage deeply with matters of ultimate concern. But that deficit is simply an individual’s own lack of awareness, not the absence of this fundamental domain of human life. In this regard, the religious dimension of human culture is no more optional than politics or an economy. That was Tillich’s point, and even if all religious institutions are currently inadequate to dealing with these issues, the human questions themselves don’t go away, just as widespread political corruption doesn’t get us out of politics. Instead of denying or ignoring the religious dimension of life, we should seek to find ways to cultivate and develop it, so that in our time it can be rediscovered and reenvisioned.

Important religious leaders in all traditions are reformers. They cultivate the religious dimension of life by opening up new possibilities for what it might mean to be religious in their time. If we allow religion to be identified exclusively with a particular form that it took in the past, something that will always be inadequate to the present, we fail to take our own moment in time seriously and surrender the opportunity for renewal and reform. We don’t do that in the political realm with democracy, for example. If, from our contemporary point of view, the Greeks or the Enlightenment-era founders of modern democracies didn’t live up to their own principles or mistook which principles were most important, we don’t turn our backs on democracy or claim that politics is dispensable; we just try to show what it would need to look like in our time. Although earlier democratizers couldn’t see what history now allows us to see—the ills of gender inequity, racism, economic injustice, lack of human rights, and more—we are nonetheless in the historical lineage of democracy that moves from their meanings to ours. The fact that our religious inclinations will differ substantially from those of the past doesn’t lift us out of the domain of religion, given an appropriately comprehensive and historically astute understanding of what religion entails.

The Anglo-American tendency to define religion as a belief system is misleading, and quite modern. Belief only comes into play in religion when the shared mythic or narrative basis of culture is broken, when a community’s understanding of what is of unsurpassable importance has been disrupted or thrown into question. Only then do participants notice that they hold such beliefs and begin to investigate them or cling to them. Belief is just the tip of the religious iceberg. When we come to worry about our belief in God or in rebirth, the worldview that supports that belief is already disintegrating, and the movement of history is already ushering in cultural transformation. Religion conceived as the forced effort to believe what is no longer believable is simply absurd. As contemporary people, we can only believe what we think to be true, and some ideas that we have inherited from traditional cultures, like a theistic supreme being or reincarnation, may simply be implausible in our time. For many of us, these ideas are not even serious candidates for belief. At this point in human cultural history, our imaginations turn to other directions when we ponder the basic structures and meaning of our existence.

Authentic religious thinking, traditionally called theology in the West, is a form of second-order critical reflection on religious belief and practice. It aims to propose ideals for thought and practice that inspire full engagement with the most vital questions and concerns in life. Theology is thus a form of contemplative practice. Belief, conceived in a static way, is neither the essence of religion nor the primary focus of a flourishing life, and contemporary Western thinking about religion needs to reorient itself in recognition of that. That reorientation, however, will not be successful if it simply dismisses the role of belief altogether. Although it is not the essence of religion, belief is far from irrelevant in any dimension of human culture. We do, in fact, believe many things to be true, even if in the movement of contemporary philosophy we find it necessary to rethink what it means to say that something is true.

What we think and what we do are interdependent. What we come to believe is shaped by the daily activities that give particular form to our lives, and by the substantial background of culture that develops through all our practices. An important point developed in the Aristotelian lineage of Western thought is that through the force of our practices and habits we develop particular dispositions so attuned to various dimensions of the world that we perceive things in a certain way and therefore hold beliefs of a certain obvious kind. Reciprocally, however, all doing presupposes forms of believing that make these particular practices seem worthwhile. We eat the way we do or raise our children the way we do or practice meditation the way we do because our current beliefs are structured in such a way that this makes sense to us.

The stark dichotomy between believing or thinking and praxis is further undermined when we recognize that one of our most important practices is thinking. The practice of thinking is essential to a mature human life and, when fruitful, leads to beliefs that disclose something important about our own here-and-now acts of existence. I think this is lost on some Buddhists, both Asian and Western, who valorize nonconceptual approaches to meditation while disdaining conceptual contemplative practice.

Two prominent failures are noticeable in this anti-intellectual tendency. First, it fails to grasp that some of the most important forms of Buddhist meditation are conceptual, reflective practices. Second, it fails to see the dangers inherent in unreflective practice. Unreflective practice is as dangerous as unreflective belief—both are examples of unwarranted, unjustified blind faith. Just like beliefs, practices ossify and become dogmatic. We are, however, less susceptible to that danger when we practice critical thinking in a spirit of open engagement. Since their earliest history, Buddhists have placed philosophical, reflective practice under the broader rubric of meditative praxis. Thinking with clarity and vision is one form of meditation that requires cultivation, just like the others. Theory and practice—thoughtfulness and action—will both continue to be the central domains of cultivation for our engagement with the great matter of birth and death.

Secularity—which is to say, our time in history—is the age of science and technology. To the extent that we’re secular, we no longer experience ourselves as being looked upon, overseen by powers out beyond us. Modern subjectivity is secular insofar as we experience our own human agency as supreme—we are the agents of creation and strive toward greater and greater control. Hence Immanuel Kant defined “enlightenment” as maturity: growing up to capitalize on the rational powers in our own hands. The danger that we vaguely sense in this historical development is that our drive to control everything is precisely what we can no longer control. We see the cosmos as being at our disposal, something there for us that we can manipulate toward our own ends and desires. In addition, by aligning itself so closely with science, secular thinking tends to identify truth with the empirical, the calculable, the measureable, and thus the spiritual dimension of human life—questions about the very meaning of human life—begin to seem illusory. Because no other vision of the Good has yet arisen to replace previous concerns such as afterlife in heaven or liberation from the cycle of death and rebirth, consumerism has tended to become our default mode of fulfillment, a kind of global faith in our secular world.

Nietzsche hints in this direction in his famous “death of God” passage in The Gay Science. The madman proclaims the “death of God” and is distraught—he cares deeply and fears the repercussions of this loss. He assumes that with this loss the grounds for higher values have been undermined. The jeering atheists who just laugh at him are thoughtless, smug, and self-satisfied. They are perfectly content not to strive for higher values or for deeper self-awareness or to seek new forms of freedom. Rather than discipline themselves to ponder the meaning of birth and death, these secularists much prefer their current pursuit of poisonous greed, disdainful aversion, and pleasurable delusion. Although Nietzsche’s madman is crazed and disabled by the enormous implications of his insight, the atheists, already dead to any value beyond the most banal forms of self-satisfaction, are worse off.

In the absence of any viable way to assert the existence of God or any other absolute foundation, two paths have opened up. The first is reactionary, a form of nostalgia for the premodern past that manifests in dogmatic attempts to live as though we still reside in some earlier epoch, as though we could still live medieval lives, as though a static human nature can still be taken to sanctify static values. The second path is secularity, which simply accepts our loss of values, rejects the religious past, and tries to make due by focusing elsewhere. Both reactions can’t help but adopt modern ways of thinking about religion. Both theists and atheists assume that faith is a certain kind of belief: certainty about the truth of otherworldly, supernatural propositions. They both proceed as though the question of the existence of God is ultimately an empirical hypothesis about what really exists or doesn’t exist out there, and like all good modernists, both pursue evidence for their convictions about belief and disbelief. While the hopelessness of the theistic effort is obvious, we should recognize that contemporary atheism is equally immersed in an untenable, uninspired vision of who we are as human beings.

In the midst of this standoff between premodern theism and modern atheism, a new and as yet only vaguely formed possibility has emerged: the possibility of post-theistic forms of religious life. While atheism is still caught in a binary opposition with what it must deny, post-theistic religion steps onto new ground. Nietzsche’s “death of God” narrative drops the first post-theistic hint that as we come into our new scientific self-understanding as dependent products of biological and cultural evolution, new forms of enlightened life will emerge. This hint, taken up a half century later by Heidegger, is that the “death of God” might allow for a deeper, richer sense of spiritual life than any found in traditional religions, that this “death” clears the ground for new, revolutionary forms of spirituality that were unimaginable so long as the life-negating, otherworldly structures of theism and afterlife were the primary religious concerns.

That, it seems to me, is our historical assignment, our calling: to affirm the religious dimension of human life by reenvisioning and reformulating spiritual sensibilities at the cutting edge of contemporary thought, practice, and experience. In contrast to the triumphalism and dogmatism that characterize both theism and atheism, a thoroughly post-theistic religious practice would be experimental, moving forward in humility and openness toward a range of new possibilities for enlightened human life.

This post-secular orientation would begin in contemplative practice in order to build habits of mind and body inclined to question the instrumental character of current common sense, which imagines ever new means but never ends, leaving us without ideals and goals suitable to our time. It would cultivate respect for traditional cultural practices through which things in the world mattered in ways other than our instrumental use of them. Post-secular thinkers would be attuned to the imaginative dimensions of earlier religious expressions in text and art, contemplating them not as believers or critical disbelievers but rather as inquirers in search of their own lineage, asking who we are and, given the patterns that have given rise to our identity and situation here and now, who we might become in our unique time.

Post-theistic religious engagement would recognize that the romantic spirituality that gave rise to our interest in Buddhism in the first place—the quest for authenticity, for wholeness, for self-actualization and self-realization—still harbors the hope of escaping from history and the contingencies of finite beings. Instead we might recognize that human beings and human cultures are never complete, not capable of completion because they are finite; that there is no final wholeness, since like evolution itself, there is always more to come. The universe is still experimenting with us and through us, and still sharpening capacities for more comprehensive awareness. Such a historical consciousness will be one of our best cures both for lack of religious imagination and for the barren scholasticism that threatens to engulf academia today. It will help us to realize that human beings have already turned out to be far more malleable than our static conceptions of human nature ever allowed.

The corrupt and maladaptive character of many modern religions and the anti-religious bias of contemporary culture make it tempting to go secular—to refer to the Buddhism of our time as “Secular Buddhism” so that we’re not associated with the anachronistic, supernatural thinking that religion often entails. This is where Secular Buddhism has made a significant contribution, and we are certainly indebted to the bold positions that these Buddhists have articulated. Although Buddhism faces a unique set of challenges in response to contemporary societies, there are serious conflicts with our world that few Buddhist leaders other than Secular Buddhists have been willing or able to face directly, questions of the status of life after death or alignment with developments in the sciences, for example. Secular Buddhists have taken these challenges and in doing that have opened a place for Buddhists like me, for whom the adoption of traditional Asian culture is not possible. Yet in my view, the best parts of Secular Buddhism aren’t really secular insofar as they inspire our contemporary encounter with the great matter of birth and death.

For this reason, I hope that we can take Secular Buddhism beyond the limitations of modern secularity to the more challenging route of reenvisioning the religious dimension of Buddhism for our time. The most important and revolutionary contribution we can make is the joint effort to cultivate a contemporary Buddhist sensibility—one grounded in the long nontheistic tradition of Buddhist thinking and praxis but addressing the kinds of suffering and the possibilities for awakening arising in our time.

The post Religion Resurrected appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

The Flower Ornament Scripture (Sanskrit, Avatamsaka Sutra; Chinese, Huayan Jing) is one of the most influential of all Buddhist classic texts. Early Mahayana lore in Central and East Asia held that this sutra was the first teaching of the Buddha immediately following his awakening, and that because of its exalted origin, very few at the time could grasp its full meaning. Over the centuries, the Avatamsaka came to be considered one of the most profound of all Mahayana texts. In the 20th century, D. T. Suzuki, widely considered the most influential figure in the introduction of Zen Buddhism to the West, remarked that “Huayan [the school of thought based on the sutra] is the philosophy of Zen and Zen is the practice of Huayan.”

For many years, the Los Angeles–based artist Tom Wudl has been meditating on theAvatamsaka Sutra, slowly and carefully producing drawings and paintings inspired by it. Grounded in a daily meditative discipline that includes both silent meditation and contemplation of images in the sutra, Wudl’s art probes the depths of Buddhist visionary experience.

One of the primary themes in the Avatamsaka is the ultimate interdependence and interpenetration of all things. This theme appears in the sutra itself and in later commentaries as “the jeweled net of Indra,” a visual image of a net strewn through space with sparkling, multifaceted jewels hanging from each of its countless interstices. Because of the interreflection among jewels, the appearance of each jewel depends on the appearance of other jewels, just as all things in the world reflect the influence of other things. The implication of this is that each jewel—each object in the universe—“contains” the entire cosmos within it.

The net linking all jewels together brings the complex interconnection between all things into visual display. In many of Wudl’s paintings, this net provides the background skein that ties all images in the work together into a cosmic totality. In Fragrant Flame Light Blazing, for example, the larger woven network appears in the background while finer and more tightly interwoven nets surround each flower, telescoping up so closely that you can sense what the sutra means by juxtaposing “fragrance” and “light.”

Flowers and jewels are the sutra’s images of perfection; they symbolize the mental depth and expansiveness of buddhas and bodhisattvas, those serene and deeply conscious beings in whom the magnificence and utter beauty of the totality come fully into awareness. The sutra describes flowers composed of gems, flowers that exude miraculous fragrances, flowers that emit heavenly music, and flowers whose color takes ecstatic possession of anyone whose gaze happens upon them.

The innumerable flowers that appear in the sutra are a focal point of Wudl’s meditative art. Looking closely at The Known Universe, you can see that gemstones constitute the inner structure of the flowers, while in Unattached, Unbound, Liberated Kindness, the largest rose in the painting opens up into the caverns, or “mines of jewels,” that the sutra describes. In each flower we contemplate the Buddha’s transcendent mind of awakening. The paintings’s geometric shapes of net and cut gems fuse with the soft, rich surfaces of the flowers in a way that foils our inflexible expectations. The organic and inorganic interpenetrate.

The Avatamsaka Sutra is a compendium of numerous Mahayana sacred texts that circulated independently in northern India, Central Asia, and China until they were collected into one massive text probably in the 3rd or 4th century CE. Early portions of the sutra and then the scripture as a whole had an enormous impact on the shape of Chinese Buddhism, inspiring in the 7th and 8th centuries the formation of the Huayan school, which would become one of the two most important traditions of East Asian Buddhist philosophy. Similarly, the sutra was readily absorbed into the forms of Mahayana Buddhism that developed throughout Central Asia from Tibet to Mongolia.

The teachings of the sutra encompass virtually all of the most important Mahayana ideas and practices, but more than any other sutra it develops the concept and imagery of infinite interdependence, a worldview in which relations and movements undermine our mental grasping for stable, separate things. Seen at a level of sufficient profundity, it claims, even a simple flower contains the cosmos in its entirety, and from beginning to end this vast scripture aims to awaken in the reader a deep sense of how that seemingly absurd statement in fact describes the true nature of our world.

Reading the Avatamsaka is an exercise in meditation. The sutra guides the reader through shifting perspectives from one visual metaphor to another. This is what makes the sutra so difficult for us to read. It puts very little emphasis on story or narrative, in order to concentrate the reader’s attention on visualizing the world in a new way. The sutra aspires to evoke for the reader the depth dimension of the world in which we dwell and to teach us how to live insightfully in such a world—the world as it appears to the Buddha, where all things are integrated into a universal network of interdependence.

This cosmic vision and the meditative practices that generate it now inspire Tom Wudl’s artistic practice. Each painting demands uncompromising concentration from the artist. Repetitious detail and patient, delicate brushwork draw us as viewers toward that same state of focused absorption. One work—Unattached, Unbound, Liberated Kindness—took four years to complete. Internalizing the sutra’s teaching of the inexhaustibility of any single object in the universe, the artist probes into the depth and interior plurality of each flower so that we may glimpse the intricate complexity of its inner composition.

Tom Wudl’s paintings and the sutra that inspired them guide us in visualizing a world through the eyes of the buddhas and challenge us to consider the possibility that, in truth, this is our world.

A Translation of the Avatamsaka Sutra

Strewn about are flowers of beautiful mines of jewels,
Resting in the sky through the power of ancient vows.
Over an ocean of various adornments, stable and strong,
Clouds of light spread, filling the ten directions.

In all the jewels are clouds of enlightening beings;
Traveling to all quarters, blazing with light;
Rimmed with glowing flames, beautiful flower ornaments
Circulate throughout the universe, reaching everywhere.

From all the jewels emanate pure light
Which totally illumines the ocean of all beings;
Pervading all lands in ten directions.
It frees them from pain and turns them to enlightenment.

The Buddhas in the jewels are equal in number to all beings;
From their hair pores they emanate phantom forms:
Celestial beings, world rulers, and so on,
Including forms of all beings as well as Buddhas.

The post Reflections of the Flowerbank World appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

When we examine our own giving, we often discern that we give for a wide variety of reasons, often with mixed motives. Although we may have the well-being of the recipient in mind when we give, we also give in order to receive.

Giving often creates the expectation that it’s now our turn to get something. We give because we like the other person and hope to be liked in return. We give in order to be accepted or recognized in a particular community, to be admired, honored, or praised. Often we give in order to think well of ourselves, in order to think of ourselves as truly generous people. Even the admirable desire to become a profoundly generous person still maintains the primacy of self-concern. It focuses on me, the giver, rather on those who might need my help. But it is a mistake to simply reject these mixed and sometimes immature motivations, because for most of us these are the motives that do in fact drive our lives.

The movement from ordinary states of self-concern to selfless giving always involves a gradual transformation of character, not a sudden leap. Like any form of strength, generosity needs to be intentionally cultivated over time, and everyone must begin in whatever state of mind they already happen to be. Understanding and accepting who you really are right now is as important as the commitment to become someone more open and generous. Whatever the quality of motivation, when we intentionally reach out to others in giving, some degree of transformation occurs. We become what we practice and do in daily life. When we engage in acts of giving, we begin to feel generous, and the force of this feeling encourages our wanting to give.

Generous feelings are not always enough to make someone truly generous, however, because there are other important capacities entailed in effective giving. One of these is receptivity, a sensitive openness to others that enables both our noting their need and our willingness to hear their requests. If we simply don’t notice the problems and the suffering all around us, our generosity won’t amount to much. And if we don’t present ourselves as open and willing to help, we probably won’t help, because we won’t be asked. Our physical and psychological presence sets this stage and communicates clearly whether or not we care about the plight of someone there before us.

The traditional Mahayana embodiment of receptivity is the Bodhisattva of Compassion, Avalokiteshvara, whose multiple arms are always extended in the gesture of generous outreach. The Bodhisattva of Compassion welcomes and invites all pleas for help. Other familiar forms of presence, other gestures, restrict the field of asking and giving. Eyes down and arms folded tightly around ourselves communicate that we are self-contained, not open outwardly. Arms raised in gestures of anger or self-assertion say even more about our relations to others. The extent to which we are sensitively open to others and the way in which we communicate that openness determine to a great extent what level of generosity we will be able to practice in daily life. Practicing mindfulness, we open our minds to the very possibility that someone may need our assistance, and we welcome their requests for our help.

If we are both open to offering help and notice when help is needed, but are mistaken and ineffectual in how we go about giving it, then what we intend as an act of generosity may in fact just compound the difficulties. Without practical skill and wisdom, giving may be counterproductive or misguided in a number of ways. First, giving is best when it is based on a sound understanding of the overall situation. Effective generosity requires understanding who might benefit from your giving and how that giving might affect others beside the recipient. It is important to know when to give, how much to give, and how to do it with integrity, both for the well-being of the recipient and for that of others, including yourself. Wisdom is involved in knowing how different ways of giving might be received by others, and to what effect. There is also wisdom involved in asking how often to give and at what intervals. Intelligent giving is learned through practice, both as a meditation when we reflect on possible giving and as an activity in the world. Moreover, wisdom includes mindfulness that is watchful for our deepest ingrained habits, most especially the intrusions of self-concern and the always-present manipulations of self-interest.

Related: Rich Generosity

One of the reasons that practicing generosity is so closely linked to Buddhist enlightenment is that the quality of our giving always proceeds from the true state of our character. Normally, we act as separate and self-contained beings who need to attend to our own well-being and security. Grounded in that ordinary but limited self-understanding, the generosity that we are able to practice is at least partially self-concerned. Still, as we practice generosity in the spirit of selflessness, we develop a sense of interdependent connection to others, a sense of community and reciprocal responsibility, and we begin to understand and feel all the ways in which our selves are in fact interlinked with others. When barriers separating the self begin to dissolve, generosity becomes easier—more natural—because more in alignment with our self-understanding. When this occurs, the motives that initiate giving become less patently selfish, and the meaning of the Buddhist sense of no-self begins to become clear. Indeed, every act of generosity reminds us of the possibility that we might actually live the bodhisattva’s vow, the vow to engage in everyday life as though the well-being of others is just as important as our own.

To act generously is to awaken a certain kind of freedom: freedom from the stranglehold of self-concern, and, consequently, freedom to choose a level of responsibility beyond the minimal charge most of us have for ourselves. To give unselfishly is at least momentarily to be free of ourselves, free of greed and attachments, resentments and hatreds, habitual and isolating acts of self-protection. This experience is exhilarating because it entails an expansion out beyond the compulsive anxieties of self-protection. In this sense, the practice of generosity is the practice of freedom, and it carries with it all the joy and pleasure that are associated with liberation. Indeed, there may be no greater sense of fulfillment in life than the simultaneous feelings of human interconnection and pure freedom that arise from an authentic act of selfless generosity.

The post The Bodhisattva’s Gift appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.