I first met God when I entered grade one at Holy Rosary, a Catholic elementary school, where the classes were so packed we had to crawl over one another to get to our seats. Towering black-robed nuns patrolled the aisles with rulers ready to smack naughty hands, and priests, who were known to be next to God, bestowed their blessings upon our little bowed heads. Obsequiousness was paid off in holy cards. 

It was in that environment, edged with fear and awe, that I learned I was marked with original sin from birth, and my vocabulary expanded to include words like sin, devil, penance, judgment, hell, virgin birth, and fallen from grace. These ideas, plus a whole raft of dichotomies like “good and evil’ and “blessed and condemned,” were presented as a guide for my future development, which was understandably erratic as a result.

While training to receive our First Holy Communion, we were all given our own copy of a small, moss-green handbook called a catechism to memorize. We were told it was filled with all the questions and answers we would ever need to know about God, starting with:

Q. Who is God?

A. God is the Supreme Being.

You have to realize that at this point I am just a tiny little girl fascinated by the color yellow. 

God, on the other hand, is an enormous concept that has confounded the best of the world’s thinkers. Socrates, Hume, Nietzsche, Foucault… all would have rolled over at such an easy assumption! But at Holy Rosary, it was not open to discussion. Some of my friends seemed to latch onto the God-thing right away, but I didn’t. And I spent the next 30 years of my life asking the same question over and over again: Who is God?

I want to make clear to those whose belief in God is incontrovertible, and this includes many dear friends: I tried. I went to Mass, I took Communion, I mastered the art of folding my hands and looking holy, but the rapture just never came.

The real fault line appeared with the budding of my female consciousness. Why did my brothers get to be altar boys and I didn’t? Why did the nuns teach us girls how to clean furniture while the boys did secret sacrament stuff in the sacristy? Was this really God’s plan? These glaring omissions in His apparent “guardianship of all beings” created even more bewilderment in me. But I finally drew the line at confession. One day I was on my way to church to admit to my paltry list of 13-year-old sins when suddenly it dawned on me: Why do I need to confess through a priest? 

I needed a personal relationship with my budding spirituality, and from that moment on I decided to talk to God directly. But it never became a two-way street. After a while, my end of it started to sound distinctly whiny. I always seemed to be asking God for things. Could God get me a boyfriend? Give me a sign that I was doing ok? Or at least make my hair better? Apparently not… 

So, as I got older I gradually stopped trying. But my habit of God continued. After all, I had been trained from a very impressionable age to believe that the answer to all my spiritual and existential questions was somewhere “out there.” I spent the next years of my life trying to attach myself to some savior-substitute: therapy, gurus, success, money, politics, sex, drugs…whatever. The list goes on. I wasn’t even sure what the questions were. I just had a perpetual and profound sense that I was living in the dark and it made me anxious. But no matter how hard I tried, I never found “it.” Nothing ever came down, landed on my head, and saved me from my confusion.

And then something happened.

After several adventurous moves I found myself as far away from home as I could possibly get and still be on the same planet; at the junction between two great deserts deep inside the Western Australian Outback. I was working for the government teaching art workshops to the Aboriginal people of the area who, I discovered, had their own spiritual and artistic traditions honed over approximately 30,000 years. I was a bit out of my depth. 

One day I walked out into the bush and sat on the edge of a cliff. My mind was jumping from one thing to the next like a grasshopper on speed. However, as I raised my eyes and looked out, the sharp contrast between what was happening internally and what I saw before me hit me like a blow. I had never in my life seen such an empty landscape. In front of me was a seemingly endless expanse of pure flat desert. I could see for miles and miles and miles. There was not a tree, a road, a rise, or speck to catch the eye. Below was a haze of milky beige and above a cloudless opalescent sky, the two melding together ad infinitum.

I thought, “What would it be like to have all that space in my head?” 

And suddenly my mind stopped. Boom.
Everything went still.
The air moved. The dry grass rustled.
The sun beat on my skin. 
And I was quiet.
My mind was quiet… and wide open.

This lasted for an incalculable moment. When it passed, thoughts began to arise again, but this time they were crystal clear: 

1. I wanted to learn how to extend this experience.
2. This must be what meditation is about. 
3. And I needed a teacher. Not just any teacher. An authentic teacher.

This realization moved me deeply and became a tsunami that swept me along until I found that teacher. But the first thing I had to do when I set foot on the Buddhist path was check my old habits at the door, and that included any notion of being saved. Instead of getting raised up toward some happy union with perfection, I got set down on my bottom and instructed to experience my own psychological mess. I found so much anger, jealousy, pride, unsolved hurts, and revengeful black goop that it’s no wonder I was loath to give up on being saved. God help me! 

This early stage of meditation was tough and lonely. It involved unraveling all the sticky threads of my thought processes strand by strand, including the big knot that had hope written on it. The hope I had carried with me from first grade that some all-powerful being or thing was magically going to relieve me of my existential angst. I discovered a finely honed, philosophically rich spiritual path that relies solely on direct personal experience. Through progressive stages of meditation practice and study, I began to realize that underneath all the confusion is a natural, inherent, and intuitive wisdom. No one is bestowing anything on anyone. It is already there. 

As Chögyam Trungpa explains in Crazy Wisdom, “There is a certain kind of intelligence that is connected with totality, and is very precise. It is not verbal; it is not conceptualized at all; it is not thinking in the ordinary sense. It is thinking without scheming. And it is something more than that. It is a self-existing intelligence of its own.” This is what the Buddha, who was definitely not a god, taught: that the fundamental nature of our mind is peace. But even he could only point the way. Uncovering the full depth of this truth is a completely personal process.

No one is bestowing anything on anyone. It is already there.

Discovering Buddhism brought my spiritual journey into focus. It is nontheistic, which means that a belief in God is not part of the teachings. However, God can be a habit, as it was in my case. It took me many years of meditation to actually stop sitting with my face tilted ever so slightly toward heaven, subconsciously waiting for an external, superior, and all-knowing being to land. I even tried to deify my teacher, but he refused to fit any mold. Eventually, I began to understand that reliance on a deity of any kind is an impediment to experiencing my own life directly. And then one day I realized that my habit of God was gone. Poof! And a new lighthearted confidence has taken its place. 

God had been in my life for a long time, but I never knew him, or her, or them. Not even close. But I can know my mind, and the more deeply I look, the more remarkable the journey is. The confusion that dogged me throughout my life has gradually lessened under the gentle touch of meditative awareness. It’s been a path full of pitfalls and ego trips, but I now know the absolute honesty of the practice. No tricks. No shortcuts. No escape. No savior. Just the experience of innate, intelligent awareness and an overwhelming compassion for all of us who suffer. It is the kind of hands-on spirituality that I yearned for, and will continue to practice for the rest of my life.

The post Goodbye God appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

This spring, Buddhists worldwide will celebrate Vesak, a holiday that marks the Buddha’s birth (and also death and enlightenment), with paper lanterns, gifts, and the bathing of a baby Buddha statue. And although the Buddha was born many moons ago, Vesak’s current iteration is a recent development in the tradition’s 2,500-year history, says Dr. Hwansoo Kim, an associate professor of religious studies at Yale University and author of The Korean Buddhist Empire: A Transnational History, which covers the topic. In fact, celebrating the life of Shakyamuni, the historical Buddha, is a thoroughly modern practice.

Vesak has been celebrated throughout Buddhist history, but the emphasis on the historical Buddha (rather than other deities and bodhisattvas) started as a way to unite Buddhism across Asia in the colonial period. According to Kim, Vesak as a “really festive, massive, and theatrical” holiday started in Sri Lanka in the late 19th century. After colonizing that country in 1815, the British had banned Buddhist celebrations—a move that was supported by Christian missionaries. Buddhist leaders, including the Theosophist Colonel Henry Steel Olcott and the Buddhist revivalist and writer Anagarika Dharmapala, petitioned the colonial government to reintroduce the Buddha’s birthday and designate it a national holiday.

“Their argument was ‘You’re actually damaging your legitimacy by undermining the local custom, and you’ve got to really integrate Buddhism as a whole into your colonial rule to be effective.’ And the colonial government took it seriously,” Kim said. It worked, and Vesak Day became a national holiday in Sri Lanka in 1884.

This new Vesak Day looked a lot like Christmas, and that wasn’t an accident, either. Modern Vesak celebrations were based on characteristics of Christian holidays, Kim said, with cards, carols, gifts, and parades— even a Buddhist flag—that ended up “recovering a sense of pride among Sri Lankan Buddhists who had been marginalized in society under colonial rule.”

With their work done in Sri Lanka, Olcott and Dharmapala took their cause for creating a pan-Buddhist movement on the road, giving more than a hundred talks in Japan toward the end of the 19th century. Japan’s Buddha birthday celebration, called Hana-matsuri (literally “flower festival”), soon followed and became entwined with the country’s military ambitions. “The late 19th century is really a fascinating period, the way Buddhists helped each other [understand] their own tradition, cope with Christian missionary work, and make Buddhism relevant,” Kim said.

Yet even as the birthday celebrations continued to spread throughout Asia in the 20th century, the Buddhist world never agreed upon a single day to celebrate it. Thus different countries each designated a separate holiday based on either the lunar or the Gregorian calendar and continue to maintain distinct birthday traditions today.

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

To tell the truth, I have no idea which element of my hyphenated identity as a Buddhist practitioner and a scholar of comparative religions is more prominent in my conviction that religious diversity, which also includes indifference to organized religions, is simply a normal, natural aspect of life. Yet I was brought up to think that it was a huge problem. At some point, fairly early in my life, it just became ludicrous to me to think that of all the people on earth, only a relatively small group of very conservative German Lutherans had their heads on straight and had all the correct answers to every difficult problem or existential issue. Truly, how much sense could that make! I did not have many resources with which to come to that conclusion—very little lived experience encountering much diversity, no like-thinking friends or mentors, and few books or other intellectual stimulation. But it just didn’t make sense to think that the group into which I was born was so superior to every other group on earth, or that other people didn’t feel affection for their own lifeways, whatever they might be. Given the ease with which I thought past the indoctrination I was given, I am somewhat impatient with people who buy into religious chauvinism—or chauvinisms of any kind.

John Hick is fond of talking about adopting a pluralist outlook regarding religious diversity as a Copernican revolution regarding religion that is necessary in our time. While I basically accept his idea, I would add that overcoming our discomfort with that diversity is critical in that Copernican revolution required for religious believers at this time. There are two parts to my claim. The first is that religious diversity is a fact, and it is also a fact that religious diversity is here to stay. There simply are no grounds to dispute those facts. The second part of my claim is that we need to find the resources and means to become comfortable with and untroubled by the fact of that diversity.

Related: One Way to Nirvana 

The sun does not revolve around the earth, and one’s own religion cannot be declared the One True Faith. These are equivalent statements, of equal obviousness and clarity, no matter what previous religious dogmas may have declared. It is as useless to hang on to the dogma that one’s own religion is the best because that is what one was previously taught as it would be to hang on to the dogma that the sun literally rises and sets because it appears to and because the Bible seems to say so. Religions always get into the most trouble when their dogmas lead them to deny facts on the basis of authority; but dogmas die slowly. I was amazed in the fall of 2011 to discover that some Jain pundits still declare that the earth is flat because that’s what Jain scriptures state. When empirical evidence is presented to them, they respond that some day science will catch up with their scriptures.

Exclusive truth claims and religious diversity are mutually exclusive; they cannot survive together in any harmonious, peaceful, and respectful way. Surviving religious diversity involves coming to a deep and profound realization that religious diversity is not a mistake or a problem. It does not have to be overcome, and there is no need to suggest that other traditions may have partial truth or to try to find some deeper, overarching or underlying truth that encompasses the many religious traditions. To accept this truth often requires profound inner adjustments, but they are not very hard to make in the face of obvious evidence.

What is such incontrovertible evidence regarding the naturalness of religious diversity? From the comparative study of religion, we learn that, no matter where or when we look in the history of humanity, people have devised a great variety of religious practices and beliefs. This diversity is both internal and external. That is to say, not only are there many religions around the world; each religion also contains a great deal of internal diversity. Even those religions that proclaim they are the One True Faith are internally very diverse. How could they imagine that someday there will be one universal global religion to which all people will adhere when they cannot even secure internal agreement about their own religion’s essentials? Why should we expect that in the future, such diversity would disappear and the religious outlook of one group of people would prevail over all others? That has the same cogency as expecting that most people would give up their native tongue to adopt another language for the sake of an ability to communicate universally. And, as I have argued in the past, having a universal language would actually be very helpful and make communication easier, whereas having a universal, common religion would not significantly improve anything. In fact, it would rob us of a lot of interesting religious and spiritual alternatives, a lot of material that is good to think with, in the felicitous phrasing of anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss. It would be helpful if we could all talk about all those alternatives in a language we could all understand. It does not seem that we are likely to have that common language anytime soon. But diminishing the number of religious alternatives, per the vision of religious exclusivists, does nothing to enrich our human community.

Related: Dialogue Across Difference

However, the vast variety of data available from the cross-cultural comparative study of religion does not provide theologically the incontrovertible proof regarding the normality and naturalness of religious diversity that I am seeking. Those data are simply a fascinating kaleidoscope. They present us with facts but say little about how to value those facts. There would seem to be an obvious, simple theological justification for religious diversity available to theists and monotheists. I used to suggest to my Christian and theistic students that the deity they believed in had obviously created a world in which religious diversity rather than uniformity prevailed. One would think that for those to whom belief in a creator deity is important, the manifest world that the deity had created would be acceptable. But my students objected to that logic, saying they knew that God wanted them to stamp out religious diversity. Factual information is often unconvincing to those with settled theological opinions. Unfortunately for them, one of the most famous monotheistic justifications of religious diversity was from the wrong revealed scripture, so it didn’t matter to them. The Quran states:

To every one of you we have appointed a [sacred] law and a course to follow. For, had God so wished, He would have made you all one community. Rather He wished to try you by means of what He had given you; who among you is of the best action. Compete therefore with one another as if in a race in the performance of good deeds. To God shall be your return, and He will inform you concerning the things in which you had differed. (Q. 5:48)

Take out the theistic language, and this advice is not too different from what I propose.

On the other hand, what I propose is quite different from what the Quran says in one significant way; for we need to locate the rationale and need for religious diversity, not in what unseen and unknowable metaphysical entities such as deities might decree, but in how human consciousness operates. If we are to speak of Copernican revolutions in how we view religious diversity, I would suggest that we shift our focus from how we think of God and instead put much more emphasis in thinking about how and why we construct and accept the theologies we do. In other words, shift the gaze from theology to spirituality. Shift from looking to something external, even an external as abstract as Ultimate Reality, as the source of our religious ideas. Instead look to our own quest for meaning and coherence. As I am fond of telling my follow Buddhists who want to believe in strange, nonhuman origins for some of their texts, sacred books do not fall from some other world into our sphere, neatly bound between two covers. They are the products of cultural evolution and are accepted only because they seem coherent and helpful to humans. For those who are or want to remain theists, such a move does not jeopardize their belief system. Belief in an external deity is such an attractive alternative that most people prefer it to nontheism. In fact, in some forms of Buddhism, it can be hard to detect how Buddhists have remained true to the nontheistic origins, though more sophisticated exegesis of such forms of Buddhism can always rescue a nontheistic core. However, thinking there could be an unmediated text, creed, or religious practice—something independent of human agency—is not only a strange idea but also an idea that is devastating to flourishing with religious diversity.

Moving from theology to spirituality and human consciousness would be a realistic and very helpful move. It is also a typical nontheistic and Buddhist move. According to Buddhism, human minds create our worlds, both their problems and their possibilities. This is probably the biggest difference in the claims made by theistic and nontheistic religious, though a nontheist Buddhist would argue that theistic religions are actually created by their adherents, not by the deities they worship. (Interesting is that both Buddhists and students of comparative religions agree on the point that religions are products of human history and culture, not of direct divine intervention into history.) We have created our problems, and only we can solve them. That becomes something of a bottom line for Buddhists. We need to train our minds to be less attached, less mistaken, less shortsighted, and, most of all, less self-centered. After all, discomfort with religious others is a form of self-centeredness.

How do we take that perspective into solving the “problem” of religious diversity? First, I would argue that religious diversity exists because it is psychologically and spiritually impossible for all human beings to follow one theological outlook or spiritual path. We are not built that way. That’s just not how we are. Religious diversity, which is inevitable, natural, and normal, flows from our different spiritual and psychological inclinations. Therefore, inevitably, we will encounter religious others. Second, I would argue that the acid test of a religion’s worth lies with what kind of tools it provides its adherents for coping gracefully and kindly with their worlds and the other beings who inhabit them. Discomfort with religious diversity and the wish to abolish it is a psychological and spiritual deficiency arising in an untrained human mind, a mind that does not know how to relax and be at ease with what is, with things as they are, as Buddhists like to say. Solving the “problem” of religious diversity has much more to do with human beings’ attitudes toward one another than with somehow adjudicating their rather different theological and metaphysical views. Thus, I am suggesting that we should start, not with religious creeds and questions about religions or metaphysical truth, but with questions about how people are—different from one another—and about how well religions function to help them live with how they are.

♦

From Religious Diversity, What’s the Problem? Buddhist Advice for Flourishing with Religious Diversity, by Rita M. Gross. Reprinted with permission of Wipf and Stock Publishers. 

[This article was first published in 2015.]

The post The “Problem” of Religious Diversity appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

The Book of Joy: Lasting Happiness in a Changing World, published in 2016, is based on five days of talks between His Holiness the Dalai Lama and Archbishop Desmond Tutu in Dharamsala, India. The leader of the Tibetan community-in-exile and the anti-apartheid crusader have been friends since they met at a gathering of Nobel Laureates years ago, and the week they spent together was punctuated by laughter and a birthday party for the Dalai Lama.

Below, the book’s editor, Doug Abrams, recalls moderating the discussion between the legendary religious leaders and activists.

You had the opportunity to spend nearly a week with the Dalai Lama and Tutu. Tell me about spending time with them. They just love each other and have this incredible friendship. We knew they would enjoy being with each other, but we didn’t know how much it would mean for them to be with each other.

We arrived on the tarmac and the Dalai Lama came down—which he rarely does because it shuts the whole city down—to greet Tutu, and they embraced. Arch, as he likes to be called, is holding the cheeks of the Dalai Lama like a grandfather holding a beloved child’s face. He goes in for a kiss on the cheek of the Dalai Lama and the Dalai Lama is all giggles because he was taken away from his family at the age of 2 and probably has had very few, if any, kisses in his lifetime!

We had this amazing opportunity not only to have a dialogue but also to have the Dalai Lama teach us to meditate and Archbishop Tutu give the Dalai Lama communion.

What was your favorite moment during that week? We planned for what we thought would be a small birthday party for the Dalai Lama, but 2,500 people came out! This was one of the most moving parts of the entire experience.

Children who are sent to India from Tibet at a very early age to attend these boarding schools operated by the Dalai Lama were there. The children’s parents send them away knowing they may not see them for 13 years, if ever again. The school had done a whole curriculum on joy in the face of adversity, which is really the core of the book. It’s not, “How do we have joy when everything is wonderful?” but “How do we have joy when life is challenging?”

We watched the Dalai Lama dance for the first time at his party. As a Tibetan Buddhist monk he is prohibited from dancing, but Arch, being African, was having none of it. The school band was playing “We Are The World,” and Arch gets up, and he’s all elbows as he’s dancing. He pulls up the Dalai Lama —who was about as comfortable on the dance floor as a junior high school boy—and His Holiness starts shuffling back and forth, swaying with a little bit of jazz hands.

Another incredible moment was when we were talking about their deaths and the Dalai Lama said to the Archbishop, “I think that at the moment that I die, I will see your face.” It was an unbelievably beautiful expression of love and friendship.

The Archbishop and the Dalai Lama were laughing the whole week, and one of the running jokes was about who was going to heaven. The Dalai Lama was saying that maybe if Arch—as a “believer”—went to heaven first, he could argue to get him in. Or he could hold on to his skirts and get a free pass. At the very end when we were talking about death, the Dalai Lama said, “You know, I’ve decided. I don’t want to go to heaven. I want to go to hell. There are more people there who I can help.”

Spirituality and prayer can be viewed as passive, but both the Dalai Lama and Desmond Tutu have combined political action and spiritual practice. In The Book of Joy, Tutu says that it was important to recognize apartheid as a part of reality but not to accept it is inevitable. Both the Dalai Lama and Desmond Tutu have been incredible social justice activists around the world in addition to dealing with their own countries and causes. I think they would say that taking action is the proving ground of one’s spirituality. It’s how we interact in our relationships, fulfill our values, and determine if we’re really living our spirituality.

And I think they would both say compassion is one of the ways that we hold on to our humanity, even during a struggle. I remember the Archbishop telling me how he would begin each day by praying for the well-being of the members of the apartheid regime, even though he was actively working for the movement’s downfall. Ultimately, he says that helped him work with them when the regime change occurred. This is a really profound reminder of the important role of righteous indignation and anger but not, as the Dalai Lama would say, letting that anger turn into negative experiences that get in the way of our goals.

Related: The Dalai Lama’s Little Book of Wisdom 

Not surprisingly, what you’re talking about here points to the Buddhist teachings, including the practice of shifting your perspective. Early on in their conversations, Tutu turned to the Dalai Lama and said, “Why are you not morose?” The Dalai Lama did not know what the word “morose” meant, so Thupten Jinpa, his translator, interpreted this as sad. “Why are you not sad?” The Dalai Lama has been exiled—one of the most tragic and heartbreaking things that can happen to anybody—but he still seems luminous and full of joy.

The Dalai Lama said to Tutu: “I would never have met you. Or I would never have met all of the people I’ve met.” Then, Tutu replied, “You know, you’re almost saying that it’s not despite the adversity that you discovered this joy, but because of this adversity that you have discovered this joy.” This was an incredibly powerful reframe, because we often think of happiness as “don’t worry, be happy.” And what they were really going after is the idea that at the deepest level, these sources of suffering can be seeds of joy.

There are a few parts in the book where these two wonderful men disagree. One time is when the Archbishop says negative thoughts and emotions are natural and unavoidable, but the Dalai Lama thinks they can be avoided by cultivating “mental immunity.” Arch was really wanting to remind people of the four fundamental human emotions—fear, anger, sadness, and joy—that all our other emotional flavors come from. Three of those we often consider negative: fear, anger, and sadness. Arch was really adamant about not beating ourselves up when we do have these human experiences. The Dalai Lama agreed that these are very natural, but said that you can experience less anger, fear, and sadness by disciplining the mind and cultivating practices of joy. The Dalai Lama is saying that if you do these meditative and spiritual practices before you start having negative emotions, then you’re less likely to fall into fear, anger, and sadness. And then the Archbishop is there to remind us to be easy on yourself once you’ve fallen in and before you’ve recovered.

We live in a time of war, genocide, climate change, and refugee crises. Did the Archbishop and the Dalai Lama think that this book was particularly important to publish now? We didn’t know how timely the book would be. The question they are continually asked from people around the world is not how to live with more joy, but how to experience joy when so many others are suffering.

Arch and His Holiness say the world is actually getting much better. It is very easy to get fixated on an election cycle, a terrorist attack, or another particular issue. And certainly we are very much aware of all of the violence that’s happening in our world in a way that we weren’t even a couple generations ago.

One of the interesting statistics is that up until a few hundred years ago, your chances of dying at the hands of another human was one in four. Now it’s one in 100,000. This doesn’t mean contemporary conflicts are not incredibly concerning or horrific. But I do believe what they say in the book: despair—the loss of hope—is in many ways the enemy.

The Dalai Lama and Archbishop both said that human beings are fundamentally good. The aberration is when we harm and hurt each other. The Dalai Lama sat up straight in his chair one day and said to Archbishop, “What you said before, that sense that humans are fundamentally good—that should give us some confidence. That should give us some hope.”

The Archbishop is very adamant that hope is different than optimism. It’s not this sense of, “Oh, yeah. Let me be optimistic and hope that things get better.” It’s really a fundamental conviction in humanity, in the future, in the possibility of what we can create together. We can zoom out, realize that we don’t recognize the whole picture, and be able to laugh at ourselves and the outrageous comedy of errors that is human life. And finally, to be able to have forgiveness and gratitude for all that we have and open our hearts in compassion and generosity. Then we have the possibility to not only experience more joy for ourselves, but also to create a more joyful and peaceful world.

At the Dalai Lama’s birthday party, a student asked him if joy can be a part of creating world peace. He had a really wonderful response: “Yes, absolutely. Because when you think about it, when you have a happy family, there is less conflict. When you have a happy community, there is less conflict. And when you have a happy humanity, you have less conflict.”

[This story was first published in 2017]

The post Jazz Hands and Joy appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

I live in the heart of the Bible Belt. When this article is published, many of my family and friends will fear I am destined for hell. Some Christians, like many others, misjudge what they do not understand. Some simply scratch their heads when they hear of a Christian examining Buddhism, meditation, or even just alternative experiences and faiths. Other Christians will have much stronger objections than that.

I know this well, for there was a time when I was one of them.

My journey into examining Buddhism and developing a practice of meditation began when a marriage counselor, a Christian, suggested I read the writings of Richard Rohr. His works Everything Belongs and Falling Upward make reference to the renowned Trappist monk Thomas Merton, whose engagement with Buddhism led me to read books by the likes of Thich Nhat Hanh and the Dalai Lama. The more I read, the more I found I had little grasp of Buddhism and its many schools. But I noticed how the teachings of the four noble truths and eightfold path were in many ways—though not all—consistent with the teachings of Jesus and Christian doctrine.

For instance, the Buddha’s teaching on right view affords a deeper understanding of Jesus’s warning not to be “conformed to this world but be transformed” (Romans 12:2) and to “let my mind dwell on whatever is good, right, and pure” (Phillippians 4:8). My thinking has transformed in such a way that I perceive my peers’ negative reactions as arising from their own attachments rather than as deliberate efforts to hurt me. By stewarding my mind skillfully, I am better equipped to avoid misjudgments or dwell on difficult circumstances that might otherwise result in unskillful means of dealing with pain.

In my pursuit of mindfulness I have found myself giving thanks for all things at a far deeper level. I’m more thankful for simple things as I eat a piece of fruit, walk in the woods, and endure the trials of life. Yes, as I become more mindful I am even grateful for difficulties and pain, as they allow me to access greater compassion for those going through their own hardships.

Releasing attachments, meanwhile, has bolstered my belief that I should “not store up for [myself] treasures on earth, where moth and rust destroy, and where thieves break in and steal” (Matthew 6:19). The biblical observation of how “the earth should change and . . . the mountains slip into the heart of the sea” (Psalm 46:2) has been illuminated by my understanding of impermanence, as has the admonishment to forget “what lies behind and reach forward to what lies ahead . . . press on” (Philippians 3:13). Striving to maintain a beginner’s mind opens me to a faith in Jesus beyond the preconceptions that I’ve carried since I was a young man. Finally, after so many years, I see genuine Christianity anew.

These teachings have made their way into my thinking, and my library, during a family and marital crisis that has led me to fundamentally question whether my experience is, in fact, consistent with the belief system to which I’ve adhered for so long. Lately, the tumult in my life has seemed immune to my usual remedies: the Bible, prayer, and the fellowship of other Christians. In my study and meditation I began to see how much of my life was the result of living up to others’ expectations, how little I forgave myself, and how much, even as a Christian, I was prone to harsh, if unspoken judgment of myself and others.

But as I’ve noticed this tendency in myself, my questioning has grown to include not just my habits but my faith. I recently confessed to my wife, son, and daughter that I had begun to wonder whether God even existed. To be sure, these concerns were, and remain, disconcerting to those who have known me as an elder in the church, a Sunday school teacher, and an apologist for the Bible and Christianity. They were and still are dismayed. I can see their pain, their concern, and their suffering, just as I’ve become acutely aware of my own.

As I write these words, I sit in a one-bedroom apartment, having separated, about eight weeks ago, from my wife of 31 years. In Christian circles, at least those in which I have fellowshipped, worshipped, and in whose tradition I have raised my children, such a decision is considered cowardly, selfish, and sinful.

I have, in short, failed at what is for many the litmus test of Christian manhood.

But amid this chaos, I have nevertheless returned to my faith, albeit in altered form. While Buddhism does not acknowledge a creator God, I am comforted by the Dalai Lama’s words of encouragement to Christians to allow Buddhism to make them better practitioners of their faith. For many Christians, that call would mean I return to my wife. But in the reflective wisdom of Buddhism, I have seen more clearly the message of Christ’s forgiveness.

Though my grappling with divorce is hardly complete, I find myself clearly seeing the pain and suffering of others when they react to me in anger, while recognizing that I am not bound to judge them as they might judge me. I recall the words of the Apostle Paul: “I do not even judge myself.” These are healing words from a man who considered himself “chief among sinners,” and who, according to the Bible, presided over the stoning of Stephen, a disciple of Christ, before Paul’s own conversion from his Jewish faith.

Rest assured, my words are not an attempt to reconcile Buddhism with Christianity. In my own experience I find it difficult to reconcile some of my choices with my beliefs about either path. I am imperfect. And yet in the silence of meditation, I encounter what Buddhists would call the compassion of Avalokiteshvara and Christians call “the peace of Christ.” I have seen the struggle of others in a new light as I realize how my own grasping for permanence in religious vocation and in my marriage has caused both myself and others so much pain. Similarly, I see how my lack of compassion has stranded me on the throne of judgment. As I seek the grace of family and friends, I long to reciprocally grant them grace in their pain, failings, and fear.

I no longer find it necessary to believe the Bible is literally true. Its truth is sufficient, though I often struggle to understand it. I see the message of Jesus—to love my neighbor as myself—more clearly, and pray that I become more like him each and every day. But I see the contradictions in my behavior and my belief, just as Paul did in his writing in Romans 7:15 when he admitted, “what I am doing I do not understand; for I am not practicing what I would like to do.” And as I sit in meditation, to quiet the storms of my mind, I find his presence there to comfort me as I endure the tough love of some of my Christian friends.

Upon reading this, many Christians will suggest I have taken words of the Bible out of context, that I have distorted the words of Jesus, Paul, and other writers. Perhaps they are correct. I pray not. But I am reminded of the words of the disciple Peter, one of Jesus’s inner circle, the cornerstone of Jesus’s church, in his description of Christ: “And while being reviled, He did not revile in return; while suffering, he uttered no threats” (1 Peter 2:23). I pray I will respond the same way to those who might revile me.

While I have yet to entirely reconcile my faith with my newfound Buddhist outlook and meditation practice, I long to live as Jesus did in understanding and compassion, comforting those who suffer. I will do it in prayer, in study, and in sitting.

[This story was first published in 2015]

The post Bible Belt Buddhism appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

Let me say, right at the start, that I am not going to be diplomatic. The extent to which the notion of forgiveness has insinuated itself into contemporary Buddhist thinking disturbs me deeply. Although many may disagree with me, I feel that current interpretations of forgiveness in the Buddhist community undermine the teachings of karma, encourage the cult of victimhood, weaken human relationships, and obfuscate the practice of purification.

In contemporary Buddhist settings, forgiveness is interpreted in several ways. One is as a way of letting go of our expectations and disappointments in others—in other words, letting go of our attachment to a different past. Another interpretation is as an extension of lovingkindness. In the Tibetan tradition, it is sometimes presented as an extension of patience or of compassion. These are all key practices, and they appear in virtually every Buddhist tradition, but to call them forgiveness? Well, that may be unforgivable. As Idries Shah writes in Knowing How to Know: A Practical Philosophy in the Sufi Tradition, when you adopt the methods developed in another culture, those methods and the ways of thinking associated with them eventually take over, and you lose touch with your own understanding and training. In the same way, by importing the foreign (to Buddhism) notion of forgiveness, contemporary Buddhists are unwittingly importing a very different system of thought and practice and undermining the powerful mystical practices in Buddhism that may have inspired them in the first place.

These various interpretations of forgiveness all overlook the fact that the meaning of forgiveness is grounded in the language of debt. In days of yore (and, in some cultures, not so yore), when I impugned your honor, I incurred an obligation to you, a debt that had to be paid somehow. From there, the notion developed that when I do any kind of wrong, to you or anyone else, I have incurred a debt, to you or to society or to God. When we view interactions with others in terms of debt, we are, wittingly or unwittingly, reducing our relationships with others to transactions. Human feeling, human understanding, human empathy all go out the door. “I owe you” or “You owe me” now becomes the defining expression of the relationship.

Whether the debt is a debt of honor or a material debt, if I am in debt to you and am unable or unwilling to honor the debt, you can choose to use whatever power you have to compel me to make good on what I owe, or you can choose to forgive the debt. In today’s world, the person owed has a certain moral power supported by custom, the law or the state. As the American anthropologist David Graeber writes in Debt: The First 5,000 Years, “There’s no better way to justify relations founded on violence, to make such relations seem moral, than by reframing them in the language of debt—above all, because it immediately makes it seem that it’s the victim who’s doing something wrong.”

Forgiveness releases me from my obligation to you and from the threat that you will bring those instruments of power to bear on the issue. In this sense, forgiveness is itself an exercise of that power. In the Tibetan Vajrayana tradition, the four kinds of awakened activity (pacification, enrichment, magnetization, and destruction) provide an effective template for meeting conflict. One begins by trying to talk things out, and if that doesn’t work, then one brings in additional resources—time, money, a mediator, and so on. If those efforts fail, one may try to compel a resolution, but if that is not possible, the only course of action that remains is to sever or destroy the dynamic in the relationship that gave rise to the conflict. Forgiveness represents the implementation of the fourth stage—destruction. All other efforts at resolution having failed, we make the unilateral decision that the only way to be free from the shadow that the debt casts in our own life is to forgive the debt.

There is no grace in the operation of karma, just as there is no grace in the operation of gravity. The only way to stop the evolution of reactive patterns is to change our relationship with those patterns.

Such self-interested motivation is hardly awakened activity. Awakened activity is exclusively motivated by the wish to help others awaken (bodhicitta). The self-interest implicit in this exercise of power reinforces attachment to a sense of self. As taught by some Western Theravada teachers, this self-interest is made quite explicit: people are encouraged to practice forgiveness to make themselves feel better. For me, at least, such interpretations go against the basic tenets of Buddhist practice. 

Related: Three Ways to Practice Forgiveness 

The act of forgiveness changes the relationship. It does not go back to what it was before. Something necessarily comes to an end. Consider what happens with a bank loan. As long as I owe money to a bank, the bank and I are tied together. When the bank forgives the loan and writes it off, I am free to live my life without the threat of collection, foreclosure, or court action, and the bank frees itself from any further obligation to collect on the debt. The relationship between the bank and me with respect to the loan is ended. To forgive the loan is to end the relationship. This is one of the overlooked aspects of forgiveness—the dynamic in the relationship that tied the two parties together no longer holds. It is gone.

Forgiveness is also a way for you to step out of the transactional framework that has reduced our relationship to what is or is not owed. In this sense, forgiveness is about returning to the human quality in our relationship, but the power to do so still rests with you, not with me. 

Because of this essential power imbalance, it is easy for me to regard myself as a victim, a victim of circumstance, a victim of your harshness or callousness, or a victim of societal or state power. Victimhood is always a temptation because the status of victim releases me from any moral or social obligation. Ironically, when you forgive my debt, you may reinforce my identity as a victim  (which is precisely what the political right complains about).

All these aspects of forgiveness are often overlooked when people talk about forgiveness. To come closer to a measure of understanding, take a few minutes now and consider: What do you really mean when you say to someone, “I forgive you”? 

What about personal responsibility and forgiveness? When you forgive me, you allow me to go on with my life without the burden of obligation. Others will see you as compassionate, and I will usually be grateful. But your forgiveness on its own does not and cannot do anything about whatever I did to incur the debt in the first place. That is out of your hands. 

One of the central principles of karma is that no one can intervene in the way my actions evolve in me, not even a buddha. Only I can do something about that, through purification practice or other means. In Christianity, where the notion of forgiveness is central, the picture is quite different. Even here, the language of forgiveness operates in strange ways. When God forgives our sins, which are regarded as debts incurred to God, it does not mean that our relationship with God is over. On the contrary, it means that the relationship has been restored. But this restoration is possible only because of God’s grace (again, the power element), and God’s grace can enter only a mind that is sincere in its remorse. The words of Claudius in Shakespeare’s Hamlet speak to such sincerity:

My words fly up, my thoughts remain below; 
Words without thoughts never to heaven go.

And the words of the hymn “Amazing Grace” speak to the entrance of God’s grace:

Amazing grace! How sweet the sound
That saved a wretch like me!
I once was lost, but now am found;
Was blind, but now I see.

When God’s grace enters a sincere mind, through the action of grace that person is freed from the reactivity that gave rise to the original transgression. But this direct intervention by a higher power into the mindstream of another person is not a Buddhist notion. You may forgive me—that is to say, you may forgive the supposed debt I owe because of my transgression. It may well be that by saying to me that you do not hold the transgression against me, you help me come to terms with the reactive process within myself. Yet it is still up to me to work through the reactive patterns that gave rise to that transgression. 

In the Protestant context, the picture is a bit different. With the elimination in all but name of the mystery of God, forgiveness has evolved to a social protocol that functions to restore a sense of connection when a break or disruption has occurred. It would be easy for me to understand forgiveness in this context as an application or extension of lovingkindness, compassion, or patience, though in doing so, I would be ignoring the intrinsic power dynamic that lurks just beneath the surface of social interaction.

My concern here is that in today’s world, many people who practice Buddhism seem to feel that when someone forgives them, they have been absolved and the matter ends there. Forgiveness in their minds completes the transaction, albeit not as it would have ended if the debt had been paid. No mention is made of the power of grace, and not many individuals would claim that power for themselves.  Karma does not work that way, however.

Karma is not based in transactions. It is based in evolution. Patterns of behavior set in motion by our actions in the world continue to evolve and shape our perception and predispositions. That process does not stop until we change our relationship with those patterns. As the 11th-century Tibetan teacher Gampopa wrote in The Jewel Ornament of Liberation, “Samsara is notorious for being without end.” There is no grace in the operation of karma, just as there is no grace in the operation of gravity. The only way to stop the evolution of reactive patterns is to change our relationship with those patterns. And that is what purification is about. 

In Buddhist thinking, the analogy of dirt is used to understand how such actions affect us. When I do harm to you, I set in motion a process that will ripen in time in my own experience. I have, as it were, introduced some dirt, some impurity, into my experience of life. Purification is about removing that impurity so that it does not fester and generate problems in my stream of experience. 

Related: Three Tactics from the Buddha to Forgive without Feeling Defeated 

One set of traditional teachings on purification is called the four forces: regret, reliance, remedy, and resolution [see below]. Regret (or remorse) means to acknowledge the harm or wrong we have done, to know we have done wrong and to regret it. Reliance means to renew our connection with spiritual values. Remedy means to do what we can to remedy the harm or wrong or, if that is not possible, to do some good, not as compensation (let alone penance), but to set the evolution of habits in a different direction. Finally, resolution means to stop feeding the inner patterns that moved us to do that harm.

Apology is part of the third force, remedy. An apology can do much to mitigate the harm done and to set things in a more constructive direction. Even in serious medical situations, when a doctor does something wrong, in many cases what the aggrieved party wants most of all is a sincere apology. To know that the doctor knows he or she did something wrong and sincerely regrets it may put patients at ease, if only because now they have some confidence that no one else will suffer the same fate. 

What constitutes a sincere apology? A sincere apology consists of an admission and expression of regret not for the results of an action but for the action itself. Feel the difference between the words “I’m sorry if I offended you” and “I’m sorry I spoke harshly to you,” or even “I’m sorry—that was insensitive on my part.” In the latter two versions, I am acknowledging my action. I am not making the apology conditional on your state of mind. We can only take responsibility for our actions and the intention motivating our actions. 

Purification in the spiritual sense is about creating the conditions for reactive patterns to release themselves. More than this we cannot do. If we try to let go of a pattern directly, the survival mechanism on which the pattern is based goes into operation and the pattern is usually reinforced, not released. In neurological terms, purification often involves creating the conditions in which an experience from the past can move from intrinsic memory to narrative memory. The key capacity necessary for that transition is to be able to experience in open awareness the emotional material associated with what happened. All purification practices do precisely this. Some practices use ritual as a way to create a space for that material to be experienced without acting it out or reliving it. Other practices make use of specific behaviors to create that space for awareness. Still others use visualizations (deity practice in the Tibetan tradition, for instance), or powerful positive emotions (lovingkindness, compassion, joy, or equanimity). Through such practices, we experience what we could not or would not experience before, and our relationship with those reactive emotions change. They become experiences, and they no longer run the show. That shift changes everything.

Needless to say, the path of purification is not easy. It involves experiencing precisely what we have always ignored or suppressed. For instance, the Tibetan practice called tonglen, or “taking and sending,” extends and deepens our relationship with compassion. In this practice, we imagine taking in the pain, illness, negativity, confusion, and ignorance of others, freeing them from those afflictions, and then sending to them the joy, health, goodness, good fortune, well-being, and understanding that we experience in our own lives, giving it all away so that they may enjoy it, too. Practitioners are often surprised a few months into this practice by the deep and difficult emotions they find themselves experiencing in reaction to taking in pain and negativity. Understandably, they would prefer simply to be forgiven for their own negativity and to continue to repress their own pain.

One final point: purification is not about being pure. Purification is about changing our relationship with the reactive patterns that run our lives. Purity, on the other hand, is a spiritual ideal. Many religious traditions and many practices have been built around purity, usually by taking a practice of purification to an extreme and idealizing a hypothetical end state. However, the idealization of purity is a pattern based on a deep and often unacknowledged aversion to dirt. Sadly, unless open awareness plays a role in the practice (specifically by bringing acceptance and equanimity into the picture), every effort made to avoid dirt reinforces the aversion at the core of this pattern.

As I wrote at the beginning of this piece, forgiveness is a notion foreign to Buddhism. Many Asian teachers do not understand the nuances of forgiveness in Western usage, and they naively associate or equate it with teachings and practices with which they are deeply familiar. On the other hand, few Western teachers take time to consider, let alone understand, the Abrahamic resonances that color their interpretations of Buddhism. 

Buddhism has sometimes been viewed as a science, an equivalence that was promoted in the late 19th century in an attempt to establish the legitimacy of Buddhist thought in the minds of the Western colonialists who occupied Asia. But it is not a science. Its objectives and methods are completely different. More recently, Buddhism has often been presented as a psychology or psychotherapy—again, an attempt to translate Buddhist thought into Western idiom. But it is not a form of psychotherapy. Psychotherapy’s aims are cultural. Buddhism’s aims are soteriological. Today, as Buddhism becomes more and more part of the spiritual landscape of Western culture, it risks being taken over by indigenous Western spiritual perspectives. For this reason, I encourage all those who find inspiration in Buddhism—teacher, student, monk or nun, working stiff or retreatant—to take care to understand, practice, and present Buddhism on its own terms, in its own vocabulary, so that all who seek a path of freedom as exemplified by the Buddha may find it. 

The four forces: regret, reliance, remedy, and resolution 

Regret means that we admit what we did and acknowledge the harmful consequences of our action. The intention of regret is to remove any defense or justification of the action in our mind. In Buddhism, nonvirtuous actions are regarded as negative because they grow into unpleasant and painful experiences, not because they violate an authority or law. Therefore, regret does not involve guilt. Suppose you unwittingly drink a glass of poison and learn right afterward that what you drank is poisonous. You haven’t violated a law. You don’t feel guilt, but you do feel regret because you will suffer from the poison. Reliance means that we renew our connection with spiritual practice, whether it be through devotion, compassion, awareness, or presence. Most of what we do that is negative happens when we fall out of attention and mindfulness. Reliance means that we deliberately reestablish our practice so that the conditions for negative action are no longer present in us. Remedy means that we act in a way that disrupts the operation of the pattern behind the negative action. If we can, we correct the negative action—apologize, make restitution, or make amends. If we cannot remedy the action itself, then we undertake a positive action with the explicit intention to remedy the negative—make a donation to charity, do some community service, help a friend, or better, help someone we don’t like. Remedying does not by itself remove the patterns of negativity established by the negative action, but the introduction of a positive dynamic changes the way the action develops into experienced results. Resolution means to form the intention not to act that way again. As long as we retain the slightest sense that we might repeat the action, the patterns associated with that action have a place to grow and develop. To stop the karmic process from evolving further, we renounce completely any defense of the action and any intention to act that way again. The resolution we make irrevocably commits us to cutting through the pattern and doing something different whenever that issue arises in the future.

Adapted from Wake Up to Your Life: Discovering the Buddhist Path of Attention © 2002. Reprinted courtesy HarperOne.

The post Forgiveness Is Not Buddhist appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

Journalist Katherine Ozment’s new book, Grace without God: The Search for Meaning, Purpose, and Belonging in a Secular Age details the author’s attempt to answer her 9-year-old son’s question of “what are we?” after he witnessed a Good Friday ritual. After Ozment realized that she couldn’t decide what her “religionless” family might be missing, she set out to answer these questions for herself, and interviewed the nation’s faithful Buddhists, Muslims, Christians, and Jews, as well as members of non-denominational spiritual and ethical communities.

Even though the number of “religiously unaffiliated” Americans continues to rise, the need for organized faiths hasn’t disappeared. People still crave the things that religion once provided—the feeling of community, a moral blueprint, opportunities for ritual practice—and in wake of their absence, have begun designing practices that serve similar purposes. Drawing upon traditions from Zen Buddhism and Judaism, one group at the San Francisco Zen Center created a ceremony to mark their teens’ coming-of-age.

—Marie Scarles, Editorial Assistant

Religions have long provided coming-of-age ceremonies marking the transition from adolescence into adulthood. Adolescence is a difficult time, and yet in America today if you don’t go through a religious coming-of-age program, transitioning into adulthood consists of getting your driver’s license and graduating from high school. We mark this transition by letting young adults drive and continue their studies. Where is the opportunity to state values and commit to something beyond academic achievement and material success? Religions provide structures to acknowledge this passage, but parents who don’t want their kids to profess a creed and pledge allegiance to a faith tradition have to create meaning themselves.

As fog lifted off the Pacific coast on an unseasonably cold Mother’s Day, sixteen families gathered under the rustic roof of the Green Dragon Temple at the Green Gulch Farm Zen Center in Marin County, California. Incense filled the air, and ritual bells alerted the group that the ceremony—a culmination of nine months of study by a group of teenagers—was about to begin. Sixteen girls and boys would pass from adolescence into adulthood before their mentors and families. Even though the event was being held in a zendo with a statue of the Buddha near the center, the ceremony itself was a secular one. Many of the parents who had signed their kids up for the yearlong program were seeking a meaningful coming-of-age ritual that differed from Christian confirmation or a Jewish bar mitzvah.

Kathryn Guta was sitting beside me on the raised platform along one side of the room. As we waited for the official ceremony to begin, she told me she had been raised Catholic but left and hasn’t looked back. When she adopted her daughter, Lakpa, from Nepal, she knew that she wanted her to be grounded in basic morality, and to learn tools to quiet her mind and examine her experience in a nonjudgmental way. She decided to let her choose her framework, so when Lakpa was young, Kathryn took her to all kinds of religious communities, searching for the right fit. At first, Lakpa didn’t like any of the groups they tried. Then Kathryn found the Zen center and started attending public lectures there herself. She learned about the coming-of-age program and liked that it was a structured approach and focused on important virtues while being free of religious dogma. Each month the students explored a value, such as listening, persistence, and connection. Through the study of these values, the mentors hoped to help the teens explore what they stood for and what they would seek to give to the world.

Lakpa had been sick that morning and wasn’t sure she could make it, but her mother encouraged her to come. She wanted her to see the program through because she wanted to give her daughter something, as her own parents had given her the Catholic faith. “Soon she’ll be on her own,” Kathryn said. “This is the last chance I have to do something like this for her.”

The ceremony began with the students walking in from the back of the room in two lines, one of girls and one of boys. They streamed past the large wooden Buddha set on a platform-like chair and came to sit on cushions in front. Though their hair was neatly combed, no one was formally dressed; they wore plain white shirts and dark pants. Then the mentors took turns asking the girls and boys rise and tell the group one word that sums up what they stand for and one gift they will give to the world in their lifetime.

The mentors then called up the parents to speak directly about the qualities they most appreciated in the children and their hopes for them. The ceremony was sealed when the mentors gave each student a new name that combined the quality they saw in him or her and their hope for the student in adult life.

When Lakpa stood, her hands tucked into her light-colored hooded sweatshirt, she coughed several times, cleared her throat, and said, “I stand for friendship, and my gift to the world is humor.” Kathryn came to the front of the room and spoke about Lakpa’s struggles, comparing them to the recent Nepali earthquake and calling her daughter a mountain. “You came from the mountains and you have become a mountain. Your feet are planted in the sweet earth. You have also experienced earthquakes.” At this point, both mother and daughter began softly crying. Kathryn closed by saying that, despite all the difficulties, it has been her honor to be Lapka’s mother. The mentors instructed Lakpa to take her gifts into the world as she moves into adulthood and presented her with a card bearing her newly given name: Mountain Humor.

Other students rose and recited what they stood for (change, kindness, compassion) and what gift they offered the world (acceptance, honesty, joy). Their parents walked up and, standing about six feet from their children, told them how profoundly they had touched their lives and what they hoped for them: that you will be happy, that you will be at peace with yourself, that you love yourself as much as we love you. One father told his daughter, “I’m a bow and you’re the arrow. As much as I’d like the arrow to go far, I’d like the bow to be stable.” He ended by saying, “Thank you for everything you’ve given us.”

The parents’ stories were at once unique and universal. They were as different as the kids, each of whom stood and proclaimed an identity and purpose, and alike in their love for their children. The ritual called on them all to put forth their best selves, the ideal of what it is they see in themselves. It was the epitome of the “as-if” world Michael Puett says ritual gives us, that ceremonial situation in which all is aligned so that when we go back out into our chaotic lives, we can remember this touchstone and return as needed to the sense of what is best in us.

The program began about 20 years ago when several parents approached the abbot of the San Francisco Zen Center at the time, Norman Fischer, and asked for his help guiding their sons through adolescence. The parents wanted a Buddhist ceremony similar to the bar mitzvah Fischer had created for his twin sons. Fischer obliged, spending two years meeting regularly with the boys. Over the course of that experience, he developed a program based on nine qualities of maturity, or virtues, that they explored together. Today’s program follows that model.

How do we become who we are meant to be? This is a question religion has long engaged. But just because we lose religion, we don’t have to lose the question, or the rituals that help us answer it. Coming of age is a human transition, not a religious one. We all leave childhood for adulthood and take up our places in the world.

Before the ceremony, the students and parents attended a dharma talk. “Today is one of those days that’s never happened before,” the teacher said by way of opening. He laughed and went on to explain: “It’s boundless and unpredictable. What will you do with today?” He said that the Zen tradition is about finding your place. “Can you stand your ground, speak your truth, and honor your gifts?” he asked. He encouraged listeners to seek a life based not on image but on a felt sense, on what we know in our “heart brain.” He said material wealth and exploitation would not bring an extraordinary life. In fact, that would be an ordinary one. Instead, “what is extraordinary is to settle down in what is ordinary and bring it alive.”

The post Coming of Age in a Secular Era appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

In September, President Barack Obama sat down with the writer Marilynne Robinson to talk about the intersection of democracy, citizenship, and spirituality.  

“There’s all this goodness and decency and common sense on the ground,” Obama said, “and somehow it gets translated into rigid, dogmatic, often mean-spirited politics.”

When the apparent leader of the Western world wants input on the “direction the country should be going in,” the notion that we ought to listen is clear. 

How we can be generous folks who “take care of somebody’s who’s sick” and yet oppose Medicaid lies at the heart of Robinson’s new collection of essays, The Givenness of Things. The author of the stunning trilogy of Home, Gilead (which won the Pulitzer), and Lila, Robinson is, at once, a very contemplative and a very American writer, drawing both resilience and humility from her grounding in scripture. With elegant and unblinking forthrightness, the characters in Robinson’s fiction grapple with faith, mercy, and striving to love thy neighbor (or son or father) as thyself. 

In her new book, Robinson considers these same questions of grace on a national scale, urgently calling readers to task as citizens who must take responsibility for both the present and the future of this country. With titles such as “Memory,” “Fear,” and “Awakening,” each chapter was originally presented as a lecture. Taken together, the prose is powerful and fluid. In “Value,” Robinson praises the American spirit of generosity, particularly when it comes to “rescuing each other” in the wake of natural disasters. She is, however, bewildered at the absence of this same response following the financial crisis, condemning the growing self-righteousness in blaming the poor. In her chapter on “Fear,” Robinson maintains it is not a “Christian habit of mind” and, therefore, that pervasive anxiety is not only reprehensible logic for justifying racism and violence but also a breech of faith for a Christian country. 

Throughout the book, she pulls equally from Shakespeare, Calvinism, and other seminal influences of Western thought while turning over timeless Biblical impasses, such as the reconciliation of “sin and forgiveness,” through the lens of 21st century circumstances. Arguing that our individual wellbeing and our collective welfare are interdependent, Robinson also tackles discrimination, the decline of the study of the humanities, and the commonplace American obsession with the “acquisition of homicidal weapons.” Woven throughout is her claim that the country has lost sight of its benevolence, its commitment to meaningful education, and its charity—traits that, not that long ago, were common American and Christian ideals.

In looking to restore our collective morality, Robinson gives voice to the soul and the heart. Advocating for the necessity of a rich inner life, Robinson reminds us that acceptance and understanding are the most powerful means of finding security, as much for the country at large as in one’s own heart. “To value one another is our greatest safety, and to indulge in fear and contempt is our gravest error,” she writes.   

“I defer to no one in my love for America and for Christianity. I have devoted my life to the study of both of them… And I take very seriously Jesus’ teachings.” 

Robinson—who has “spent most of her life in Presbyterian and Congregational churches”—is a Biblical scholar as well as a practicing Christian and a professor at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. As an American Buddhist, I felt a particular admiration of Robinson’s bold, even proud, invocation of her religious identity, not least of all because it also forms the underpinning of her tremendous literary accomplishment. At a time when many Western intellectuals assume that to be “religious”—to believe in the unseen or the unproven or the unscientific—inherently detracts from one’s legitimacy as an artist or thinker, Robinson’s conviction is refreshing. Her stance contrasts both what the liberal left might assume about writers and what the conservative right might assume about Christians. That Robinson’s relationship with God bolsters both her art and her political agenda feels almost radical, precisely because, as a culture, we’ve become so accustomed to the expectation that one is either religious or intellectual.

In reflecting directly on the current state of religion, Robinson expresses equal concern for the hypocrisy of Christian fundamentalists as well as for those whose staunch secularism has replaced a sense of awe or wonder in the universe. “There is at present an alienation from religion, even among the religious, that is a consequence of this privileging of information, for want of a better word, over experience, or of logic over history,” she writes. Urging us not lose connection with our own humanity in the face of expanding technology and scientific data, Robinson’s brings to the fore the obligation and honor we have in cultivating an ordinary, which is not to say unexceptional, compassion—a compassion that often arises when we contemplate the mysteries of both the “cosmic and microcosmic.”

As I considered not only the book’s content but also its grounding in an empathic, spiritual pragmatism, it seemed all the more timely. In April 2015, as PEN America was awarding French weekly Charlie Hebdo the “Freedom of Expression of Courage Award,” a protest that began with six prominent writers, including Francine Prose, Teju Cole, and Michael Ondaatje, soon evolved into a much larger international debate. At the crux of the writers’ objection was the concern that while the murder of the newspaper’s staff was undeniably horrid, PEN’s celebration of the magazine was tantamount to rewarding what they saw as shameful post-colonial bullying of the disenfranchised. 

Related: The Dalai Lama’s Big Brother: Gyalo Thondup’s memoir recounts the founding of the Tibetan Government-in-Exile and the CIA’s part in the Tibetan resistance.

Both support for and disapproval of the protest grew publicly in the following days, giving rise to many worthwhile conversations about free speech as well as about the portrayal of religious observance in the Western world. In her individual letter of protest to PEN, novelist Rachel Kushner objected to what she identified as a “kind of forced secular view.”

While Robinson, as far as I understand, was not directly associated with the PEN debates, I couldn’t help but think of Kushner’s refusal of a “forced secular view” as I read this book, particularly because during that same spring, I attended a separate PEN event as part of their annual World Voices Festival in New York City. Entitled simply “Prayer and Meditation,” the evening brought together a stage full of a writers and artists, including Kushner, who’d been commissioned by PEN to create an original “prayer for our time.” Against the backdrop of a roaring international debate about censorship and religion, this small, quiet night of prayer and meditation was, to me, just as significant. While not at all an explicit act of protest, it was still act of bravery: artists and intellectuals giving voice to their faith and supplication—unabashedly and communally. It was a beautiful reflection of faith as common ground, not in the specifics of how we pray, but rather in upholding the importance of room to do so.

With this collection of essays, Robinson accomplishes two things at once. She calls for solitary and national self-reflection in order to find and protect meaning in our everyday lives and provides a place for that very contemplation within the substance of her work. Robinson’s rhetoric may seem quiet from the outset, but deceptively so in that, like meditation itself, the results are galvanizing, even radical. 

The post Protecting Meaning in Everyday Life appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

Ruben L. F. Habito is a master in the Sanbo Zen lineage, the founding teacher of Maria Kannon Zen Center in Dallas, Texas, and a professor of world religions at Southern Methodist University’s Perkins School of Theology. He is also a former Jesuit priest, and as a young ecclesiastic was sent from his native Philippines to Japan, where he encountered Zen and entered formal training under Yamada Koun Roshi, with whom he studied for 18 years. Discovering Zen was epiphanic for Habito (“it pointed to a realm beyond language”), and koan study became for him a profound foil to the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius, a set of meditations and devotional practices for Jesuits that Habito had been practicing since entering the order. During his time in Kamakura, the seat of Sanbo Zen, a fusion of Rinzai and Soto traditions formerly called Sanbo Kyodan, Habito met Maria Reis, who became his wife and mother of their two sons. (Habito left the Jesuits but continues a deep engagement with the religion.)

In 1989 Habito and Reis moved to Dallas, where Habito founded Maria Kannon, named for the Virgin Mary and Kwan Yin [Guanyin], the bodhisattva of compassion (Kannon in Japanese), two figures who became inexorably linked in 17th- and 18th-century Japan, when Christianity was banned; Christian practitioners found a worthy manifestation of Mary in the veneration of the bodhisattva, who became known as Maria Kannon. Habito is the author of several books on the relationship between Christianity and Zen practice, among them Healing Breath: Zen for Christians and Buddhists in a Wounded World and Living Zen, Loving God, both from Wisdom Books.

I first met Ruben in 1990, just one year after he arrived in Dallas from Japan. I was a student at Perkins School of Theology, and in the discernment process for the priesthood in the Episcopal Church in the Diocese of West Texas. Ruben had me from the moment he began his required class, “Religion in Global Perspective,” with a few minutes of silence. For the duration of the semester, I was part of a small group that met in Ruben’s office and breathed, and we visited the place he and his students were using as a zendo and breathed some more.

It was nearly a decade later that my own practice began shifting from a focus on passage meditation to attention to the breath and pure silence. But I was floating around without any guidance. So I made an appointment to see Ruben, and when we met, in the middle of the public gathering area of the Annual Meeting of the American Academy of Religion, he gave me the koan “Mu” while we sat at a plastic table, surrounded by academics and religious scholars of all stripes. Over time, working with Ruben has radically altered how I imagine Jesus guiding his disciples. I hear the parables as koans now, solved not by reason but by action. A Samaritan cares for an injured man: “Show me that!” The first will be last, and the last will be first: “Show me that!”

True to form, Ruben took the lead in commencing our interview, first by asking that “we take a few minutes of silence together,” and then by saying, “So we can begin. Ask me questions that will open our conversation.”

—Jane Lancaster Patterson

How did it all start? What led you to Zen when you were living in Japan as a young seminarian? My Jesuit spiritual director then, Fr. Thomas Hand, was studying Zen with a master in Kamakura, and he encouraged me to check it out. I just plunged right in and found it very nourishing and very resonant with what I had learned from my Jesuit spiritual formation. It emphasized the more contemplative aspects rather than the discursive and meditative kinds of things that the Ignatian Exercises, which I had been practicing for six or seven years, are known for. Zen became a way for me to come back to that place of silence, no words, and just find a sense of belonging to the universe.

What kind of training did you receive from your teacher, Yamada Roshi? Yamada gave me the basic guideline on just sitting in a very simple way, but it didn’t stop at that. There is a whole program of koan training in our Sanbo Zen tradition that guides a person deeper and deeper into the intricacies of the spiritual path. Yamada Roshi gave me the confidence that I could remain within my Christian context and practice and at the same time really enter into Zen with full commitment.

So he was open to students from other religious traditions? Yes. His teacher, Yasutani Hakuun Roshi, had a different view of Christians coming to Zen. He said you have to check your religion at the door and really come with an open and empty mind to be able to receive the benefits of Zen.

My teacher, Yamada Koun, instead of telling Christians to “check your religion at the door,” said, “Just come and sit and be still and follow the guidelines of Zen.” He realized that it was not so much the religious tradition that needed to be put aside but the concepts that people with a religious background are attached to. He felt there were certain terms in the Christian tradition like God, Holy Spirit, and so on that had enough power in them to point to an experience that is beyond concepts.

Related: We Are All Refugees: Seeking Our True Home 

Was there any conflict for you in bringing the two practices together in your own life? I needed to go through a struggle for about 10 or 12 years to sort out theological concepts—to weed out the conceptual accretions—and see what in the Christian tradition really leads to a genuine experience but is caged in Christian vocabulary or doctrinal terms. I experienced a very liberating affirmation that what unites us is the experience.

Some Christians may claim that you jumped ship when you started Zen practice in earnest, and on the other hand, some Buddhists may say you are only dabbling in Zen so long as you remain a Christian. So let me ask you: are you Buddhist, or are you Christian? If you put “or” there, then I have no answer. If you ask me, “Are you a Buddhist?” I would say that I am seeking to live in a way that is modeled by the Buddha, the Awakened One—with wisdom to see things as they are, and with a compassion that comes out of seeing the way things are; namely, that everything is interconnected. I’d like to be that.

Are you Christian? I have tried to live in the way that Jesus taught us to live—to live in the love of God, and share that love with others. So if you ask me, “Are you Christian?” I would say that I would like to be, and I am doing the best I can to be worthy of that name. But if you ask me, “Are you Buddhist and Christian?” I would be hesitant, because that would compromise the two traditions, to suggest that they can just be mixed.

Many people I encounter in Western Buddhist sitting have rejected Christianity because they have suffered under a very punitive form of it. Some people feel wounded by the very language of the faith. Even a word like “salvation” can be painful. Right—the hellfire and thunder and so on. “If you don’t take Jesus as your savior, then you’re damned forever.” But if you look at that word itself, it comes from the same root as the Spanish toast ¡salud!, which means “to your health; well-being.” In Latin, it’s salus, and the Greek origin is holos, which means “whole.” The wholeness that we are all longing for, that we are all meant to arrive at, is what we would correctly understand as salvation. We all need that kind of salvation.

Related: Bible Belt Buddhism 

In your experience—both in your own practice and in working with students—does something different happen in Zen meditation in the mind for a Christian from what happens for a Buddhist? If we take the mind according to the Zen context, as that which leads us to what is beyond words and concepts, then I would say that whether you’re a Christian or a Muslim or a Jew or an atheist or a Buddhist, what happens in Zen practice should not be different. It’s an immersion into the silence and an appreciation of all that’s there. And all that’s there is not something we can limit through our thoughts and concepts and our restricted notions of being or nonbeing.

With a student, then, you’re listening for whatever concepts they’re holding on to, and inviting them to put them down? When a student comes to me—whether Christian or Jewish or Buddhist or atheist—I just deal with the matter at hand. Now, if the student comes with questions and expressions that come from a religious background, then I try to help them use those very words to lead to the realm of mystery. A person’s own worldview and background and vocabulary can be the gateway to that.

So you are trying to find out whether someone’s concepts are going to be in the way, or whether they’re going to be part of the path? Yes, precisely. It’s very difficult to discern, but really important, because otherwise we might also be throwing the baby out with the bathwater. If we unskillfully reject or ignore a concept or term just because it comes from a particular culture or philosophical or theological matrix, then we might be missing an opportunity to go beyond the concept. One needs to be very sensitive. A listening ear is really important for guiding others in walking this path.

Is the God you know now the same God you walked into Zen practice with the first time? Over time, my sense of God would have shifted no matter what. It started happening in my mid-teens, even before I entered the Jesuits. I had this experience of sitting in a classroom, in an English literature class. I was only half-interested and I started looking out the window, at this clear, blue, empty sky. And then it came to me: that the universe is finite, but unbounded. Suddenly the notion of God “up there,” up in the sky, didn’t make any sense for me. There was no place for it anymore. I felt relief, but at the same time, a sense of anxiety. What do I do if there’s no such thing? How do I live my life? The notion of God that I had as a child had to die first, and the death of that God is what led me to the God that is beyond words and concepts.

In the way that emptiness is beyond words and concepts? If you really look at what the term shunyata is trying to say, it’s another mind-boggling thing that cannot be caged in a strict rational form. In one sense, there’s nothing left. But you can also say that’s where everything begins. I was doing this kind of mental gymnastics when I was preparing for ordination. Reading the Pauline letters [in the New Testament], the notion of pleroma[fullness] in Paul, and ta panta en pasin, the “all in all,” caught my attention. The Greek expression struck me: fullness in a way that there’s nothing more that can be filled. Ultimate fullness corresponds to emptiness.

We also call it “mystery,” that which makes our mouth just shut in holy wonder. And I believe that that’s what Zen opens to us, that sense of mystery, that sense of awe that what is, is. Form is form, and yet we know that that form is also emptiness. I’m saying nonsense here, perhaps. But that’s the kind of holy nonsense that Zen comes from.

It seems that Zen is a practice of experience of the mystery, not talk about it, though it may result in some talk. The New Testament, likewise, is the words left by people who had an experience. They wanted to find a way to talk about that experience. But it isn’t really like normal talk. Your new book, Zen and the Spiritual Exercises: Paths of Awakening and Transformation, discusses this parallel. St. Ignatius proposed a series of meditative and very discursive exercises for examining your sinfulness, checking out your day, seeing what you did that was according to God’s will and what was not—a very left-brained kind of approach to spirituality. Zen is a more direct way of inviting people to “just sit and behold in the silence.” Can those two go together? For me, it is the “Contemplation on Divine Love” [the final contemplation in the Spiritual Exercises] that is the summit of the exercises. That’s exactly what happens in sitting in stillness in Zen. You’re simply soaked in that divine love that is beyond words, and you allow it to fill you, inundate you, and move you so that you can live a life grounded on that, offering yourself to others.

We don’t usually use the word “goal” in Zen, but can you discuss how we may arrive at a kind of goal? I would rather call it the fruit or outcome of practice. In spiritual paths in general, there seem to be three stages that have distinctive characteristics but that are related in a developmental way. First there is the stage of purification or purgation: when a person begins to receive the impulse of the infinite. In the Buddhist tradition, we call it the bodhi mind, when you begin to ask, “What is this all about?” “How can I live my life in the most authentic way?” In Zen, I would say that’s the stage when one begins to realize that there’s a big gap between one’s true self and where one is right now. From a Christian perspective, it might be a sense of being separated from the ultimate reality that we call God, a sense of sinfulness.

As one goes through the purification stage, one gets to a sense of illumination, where you have these insights: “Ah, I need to do this,” or “That’s a wonderful realization of this or that reality,” and so on. The stage of illumination gives us a clearer sense of where we’re heading, that we’re on the right track. Then it culminates in the stage of union, where one experiences that one is not separate at all. Those three paths seem to have congruencies: purification, illumination, and union. That’s what I try to map out in my new book, taking Zen on the one hand and the Spiritual Exercises on the other as parallel paths of transformation.

What kind of person results from this practice? One becomes an ordinary person, but in an extraordinary way. Your words are still there, your hang-ups may still be there, you still have to deal with all your karmic baggage and so on, but you see it in a totally different light. You’re at peace with yourself, at peace with the world. Not in a complacent sense, but in the sense that you can simply devote yourself to a life of compassion. From a Christian perspective, we use the word perfection, but it’s not that now I’m perfect. It really means living as Christ did.

Becoming Christlike? Yes. And what does that mean? Emptying oneself—kenosis. This happens not in any abstract way, but in really giving yourself utterly in the service of others, so that you may be of benefit. It’s like the Buddhist chant “May all beings be at ease”—there’s a congruence there. I won’t use the word same, but you can see how Christianity and Zen resonate with one another.

I think this is actually where there’s the deepest point of contact, but contemporary Christianity doesn’t promote it very much. Sometimes I wonder whether Zen has attracted the number of Christians it has because it’s the corrective needed for the way we’ve been living with our Christianity. It speaks to those who want to live authentically. The emerging church movement, where Christians are trying to live in a way that is different from the so-called institutional forms of Christianity, is an indication that those institutions are not living up to the task of providing spiritual nourishment. That calls for deeper reflection and self-critique on the part of the managers of that institutional church. There you go—you’re one of them!

Yes, I’m one of them! So it seems that the use of koans in the Sanbo Zen lineage has made using traditional scriptures for teaching a natural move for you. Oh, yes, indeed. Right now, I am looking at scriptural passages—Psalms and Proverbs and so on—to see how they might also be material for koans that can provoke an experience in the practitioner right here and now. In this way, Christians might find that Zen practice can enhance an appreciation of what was already there in the Christian Gospel. It might also invite people in Zen practice to consider that it doesn’t just have to be the Buddhist vocabulary that they can use in order to go deep into Zen, but that there are other fingers pointing to the moon. These passages might lead us to a full revelation of that moon.

The post Other Fingers Pointing to the Moon appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

How deeply does our Judaeo-Christian history affect how Buddhism takes root in the West? In a thought-provoking article on Buddhist Geeks, Dennis Hunter examines how Buddhism in the West has fused with the Judaeo-Christian roots of Western culture. Hunter argues against the popular notion that science and psychology are the dominant forces that have shaped Western culture’s religions and philosophies. Instead, Hunter says that we should focus more on Buddhism’s intersection with Christianity:

When Buddhism takes root in a new culture, as it has done many times before, it always fuses with elements of the native religious traditions in that culture. In India, Buddhism took on aspects of the Hindu cosmology and iconography in which it first arose. In China, it incorporated major elements of Taoism and Confucianism. In Tibet, it fused with the shamanistic Bon religion. In Japan, it mixed with Shinto. . . . If the Dharma always melds with elements of the dominant spiritual practices of a new culture, maybe we’re barking up the wrong tree by focusing so much on the intersection of Buddhism and science. Perhaps the spotlight really belongs on the intersection of Buddhism and Christianity.

According to Hunter, try as we might we cannot ignore our culture’s Judaeo-Christian heritage or pretend that it doesn’t profoundly influence the ways in which Buddhism takes root in the West. To further illustrate his point he references a story told by Tricycle contributing editor Clark Strand. Strand realized how deeply embedded his Christian beliefs when a plane he was on began plummeting towards the ground while the smell of smoke filled the cabin. Instead of reciting a Buddhist mantra, Strand found himself reciting the Jesus prayer, asking Christ for mercy before safely landing. Hunter recounts Strand’s story to suggest the depth at which Judaeo-Christian beliefs and practices are buried within us, whether we can admit to it or not. Strand himself believes that in order for Buddhism to flourish in the West, it has to build on the deeply embedded roots of our religious history:

Judaeo-Christian roots are indigenous to the soil of American culture in a way that the exotic flowers of Asian Buddhism simply are not. According to Strand, the best way to help Buddhism truly flourish here is to graft it to those roots, not to try to dig them up and replace them.

To read more about the relationship between Christianity, Buddhism, and the West, read “God Is In the Zendo,” Robert Hirschfield’s Tricycle profile of Catholic Priest and Zen teacher Father Robert Kennedy Roshi.

The post Christian Buddhism in the West appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.