Times of great uncertainty and disruption call for an appropriate response. An Ecosattva is a being committed to protecting and serving all, including our precious Earth. We can all walk the path of the Ecosattva, responding to the cry of the earth with clarity and dedication to the interdependent well-being of ourselves, our communities, and all beings.

There are two things that any Ecosattva needs to cultivate to be able to meet the challenges of this moment: fierce compassion and equanimity. Fierce compassion means seeing the suffering of our times clearly, and being willing to take a stand, to act to relieve that suffering however we can. Equanimity is the spaciousness, the perspective to have our action come from a place of deep wisdom rather than reactivity. 

Compassion and Appropriate Action

In many temples in Asia, you see statues of a great being, the bodhisattva of compassion, Avalokiteshvara Kuan Yin. A bodhisattva is an awakened being. In this particular statue, you’ll often see many arms and many hands. In each palm, there’s drawn an eye. Sometimes the bodhisattva is male, sometimes female, transgender; it is very gender fluid. This eye on the palm of each hand, is the eye of wisdom. 

That if we look deeply into the situation, then our action will be appropriate action. But if we are caught up in our own story, and in our strong emotions, our anger, our reactivity, then we won’t be able to see the situation and its depth, and its complexity and its impermanence. Then our action may actually cause more harm than good because it doesn’t have this deep grounding in wisdom. 

It’s challenging to see a situation clearly. The Buddha said that most of our perceptions are wrong. So we need to act, but we need to try to see clearly. For this we need the skill of equanimity, which is non reactivity. It’s seeing things from all sides. 

The word in Sanskrit is upeksa. It means to be able to look and see from all around, like you’re standing on the top of a mountain. You’re not caught in any one side, in any perspective. 

During the war between the US and Vietnam, there was the School of Youth for Social Service. Thousands of youth were going into the countryside to rebuild villages, schools, roads and improve the lives of people. This School of Youth for Social Service was set up by Thich Nhat Hanh.

This was important work. It was often the difference between life and death for people. Yet every week, these young social workers would take a day of mindfulness for themselves to refresh themselves, to come together and practice and to heal, to listen to each other, to share from their hearts. 

They didn’t say the work of the war is too urgent, we have to work seven days a week. They understood that in order to sustain themselves, they had to take regular pauses to take good care of themselves. 

The peace activist A.J. Muste has said, “There is no way to peace; peace is the way.” The young social workers in Vietnam were practicing peace, not working towards peace in a frenetic or frantic way. That’s not how we create peace. We need to manifest it in every step. Not running for something in the future, but being peace in this moment, because the future is made of this moment. 

The young people in Vietnam would rebuild bombed villages. In one village in particular, they rebuilt it, and it was bombed again. They rebuilt it a second time and it was bombed again. They rebuilt it a third time. I believe it happened four times that they rebuilt that village and they didn’t say, “Hey, this isn’t worth it. Let’s just call it a day.” 

They weren’t rebuilding the village because they wanted a particular outcome. Of course they would have preferred I’m sure that the village remained unharmed, but they weren’t dependent on that as their outcome. They rebuilt the village time and again because that’s what they needed to do, not because there was any guarantee that their action was going to work, and succeed in the end. That is a deep example of “There is no way to peace; peace is the way.”  

We’re not doing something with the expectation of a particular outcome. If we do that, if we say, “I’ll only do this, if this happens,” we will burn out very soon. Because either we won’t do it at all, or we do it and if it doesn’t work, then we lose all of our energy, and we fall into despair. So it’s like the difference between conditional and unconditional love. 

It’s hard to practice unconditional love, and it’s very hard to work for change without wanting things to go the way we expect. If we want to survive with our energy, and our hope, our love, our enthusiasm intact, we have to look with this eye in the palm of our hand, which sees that no action goes unrecorded in the larger scheme and the larger flow of life. That an action done out of pure intent to bring joy or relieve suffering is never lost, even if in the immediate outcome it’s not what we want, and maybe it’s even the opposite. That eye in the hand of our action is the eye that sees that all we can do is what we deeply feel and know needs to be done. 

The only way we can be truly free and deeply powerful in that action is if we do it because we know it needs to be done. That is the power of equanimity, that we need to balance out the fierce compassion that drives us to action. 

In The World We Have: A Buddhist Approach to Peace and Ecology, my teacher Thich Nhat Hanh tells the story of a senior nun from Vietnam, who came to visit Plum Village, his monastery in France. She had been diagnosed with terminal cancer and was given three or four months to live. She accepted this and decided to put all of her energy into practicing to be fully present in each moment for the [remaining] days she had left to live. She was aware of her breathing, of her steps. She was mindful of each of her bodily movements throughout the day. Before returning to Hanoi, where she expected to die, a sister persuaded her to go get a checkup in France. The doctors found that all of the metastasized cancer had receded to just one area. She lived for more than 14 years after she was told she had just three months. 

He tells this story as a collective metaphor. We are facing a possible extinction as a species. If we can accept that things are going to change, maybe end, and we are on the brink of real collapse, we put our whole hearts knowing this is it. We live deeply, fully as a human species, with other species, and with the earth, understanding, “Okay, we’ve messed this up. Now we just have a little time. How can we live deeply with all beings on this planet?”

This is what the nun was doing when she was determined to practice. Because she said, “Well, my life is going to end in a few months. Let me give all of my attention to this step, this breath, this moment.” She wasn’t trying to live for 14 more years, that just happened. Her desire was simply to do what needed to be done, to practice with all of her energy for the few months that she was told she had left. So she was truly free. She wasn’t thinking, “I’ll do this so that I can get this in return.” 

That is really working with the mystery, the unknown, and letting life just unfold, and hold us and teach us. So that is what this practice of the Ecosattva path is, to give our best wholeheartedly, not with any outcome that we are attached to. We never know what may come of that action. 

♦

This article is adapted from a dharma talk given in November 2023 titled “Taking the Ecosattva Path: Equanimity and Fierce Compassion.”

The post Embodying the Equanimity and Fierce Compassion of Avalokiteshvara appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

Openheartedness—a state described by warmth, generosity, and care—is at the core of spiritual practice. The quality of having a receptive attitude toward people and experiences, without preferences, allows for meeting others with sincerity, compassion, and a genuine openness to connect on a deeper level. In turn, this way of being promotes a more harmonious world.

In Buddhist philosophy, heart and mind are seen as one. The heart-mind, or citta in Sanskrit, is the center that connects us to the field of awareness. Most of us face difficult challenges personally, psychologically, and externally, out in the world. Wisdom, joined with compassion, gives us the strength to find creative, intelligent, and loving ways to move forward and develop new vistas. A mindful heart gives us the foundation on which to build our awareness practices and then helps us find our way home. From a nondual perspective, our heart is the nexus that connects the personal with the universal. It is the hub that connects our personal “child-consciousness” with the universal “mother-consciousness.” When the “infant” joins with the “mother” consciousness, we are free and ready to serve from an open and loving vantage point.

Western thinking often considers the anatomical brain the only center of perception and information-processing, and the heart a physical organ that pumps blood through the body. While recent studies have shown that the heart is more than a mechanical organ and can affect one’s state of being, the conventional Western approach still focuses on and encourages us to be rational, practical, and calculating. My personal experience and decades of clinical experience as a psychologist, however, have made me realize that we need clear thinking, emotional warmth and caring, as well as spiritual openness to be whole. I believe that we function more fully when we allow the heart and mind to work together to form our perceptions, to consider their meanings, and to shape our responses. Openheartedness and the heart-mind connection is crucial.

If we live entirely from the perspective of a conventional sense of reality, we assume that at the core of our being is a separate self, apart from others, and often we feel alienated and alone. From this perspective, it is easy to suffer when our old painful patterns rear their heads. We can become gripped by difficult thoughts and feelings, worries, and desires. In our wish to heal these old wounds, we can get caught in what psychologist and meditation teacher Loch Kelly calls a psychological underpass. Our hurt parts or old painful patterns—and the attempt to overcome those wounds—can become our personal identification. We might identify with an orphan-self, seeing ourselves primarily as a victim of trauma, or as a survivor of hardship, a rehabilitated addict, or a wounded helper. 

Reducing our primary identity in this way does not respect our true essence or being—what Carl Jung called the Self, with a capital “S.” When we go beyond the separate self and all our identifications, we cross into awake awareness, wisdom, love, where the wholeness of “Big Mind,” or Self with a capital “S,” can flow. From this vast field of wisdom, benevolence, and freedom, our deepest wounds can now be met with a heartfelt love that is already there. The tension that entangles those wounds can gradually uncoil, making space for us to realize that we are and always have been a wave within the vast ocean of life. As we gradually gain access to this field of awake awareness in a stable way, we may eventually learn to hold the perspective in our daily lives.

So how do we practice from the place of our heart, where we might grasp awake awareness? First we must disentangle from thinking-managing-forehead mind, the place we focus from. Usually, the thinking mind and awareness are intermingled. But we can begin to experience how that awareness goes beyond conceptual thinking. We can allow awareness to unhook from the “manager mind” and to fill our whole body and heart. Then we can feel our heart as resonating from its own perspective. 

Brief intentions, dedications, and heart-opening meditations are a good place to start; they help us to set up formal meditations and simply embrace the day. Beginning our practice by being gentle and kind quietens the wandering or agitated conceptual mind. Like a scared child relaxes and calms down when it is held by a loving parent, our agitated thoughts and emotions become quiet when feeling the security of a caring heart. And so, heart-opening practices allow our nervous systems to feel more resilient and more interdependent with others in our lives. 

Then, through focus and emptiness-of-self practices, as well as more specific pointing-out-style practices and shorter glimpse practices, we reach into the field of awareness that is already there. Having crossed from a separate, isolated sense of self into awake awareness as our new operating system, we can embody and participate in life with full engagement and great compassion. 

Connected to the sacred and coming from that sense of fullness and richness, we can love our beautiful, troubled world and stay present with the challenges we are all facing. “Self-care” turns into “all of us–care,” as our compassion finds no limits or preferences. Or, as Loch Kelly puts it, “Compassionate action becomes our natural expression.”

With our deepest center, the cave of the heart, or the heart-mind, completely open, the aperture of our awareness is also open. And as we deeply understand and feel the inter-webbed-ness of all life, everybody and everything is family and kin.

The post The Cave of the Heart appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

To know that innately we have great powers, and that we can cultivate them in our daily lives, is truly empowering. I’d like to share with you Thich Nhat Hanh’s teaching on the Three Powers—the most potent antidote to the feelings of helplessness, powerlessness, uncertainty, vulnerability, and confusion that many of us are suffering from.

The first power is the power of understanding. In 2001, a 12-year-old girl came to our Plum Village Practice Center in France. Her father was an alcoholic and gave her drinks from the time she was 6 years old. Every time he drank, he gave her a glass. He had many physical and mental problems, and didn’t go to work at all. Her mother had to work hard to take care of the entire family. Growing up, this girl was angry at her father for drinking and not working, and she was angry at her mother for not standing up for herself.

When she turned 11, she joined a gang. One night she got very drunk, and when she woke up, she found herself naked—she had been raped. She came to us feeling broken in so many different ways. One day one of the sisters looked at her palms and said to her, “You know, I think you will die when you are 17, and you will die a violent death.” I was taking care of her during her stay at our monastery, so she ran to the room we shared, crying and recounting to me what had happened. I held her really tight, and I cried with her. I thought quietly to myself that the sister was right. If this girl continued to live this way, she would have a violent death at a young age. It was a moment when I literally could foresee her destiny.

In Buddhism, seeing a person’s destiny is understood as a miraculous power. However, by examining our own actions, habits, and personality, we can gain the capacity to look at someone and know what will become of them. If you drink every day, you’ll most likely become an alcoholic, right? And what will your marriage or relationship be? Most likely dysfunctional. And what will your children be? Most likely neglected or abused. We can tell a person’s destiny if we just stop and look. This is the power of understanding.

I held her for a long time and then I said, “My child, you’ll be OK, because now you know the path. You know how to practice and how to take care of yourself. You’ve learned about sitting meditation, so you can sit each day with your wounded inner child. When you have strong feelings, you can do walking meditation to embrace your sadness, your anger. You know how to be there for yourself, so you can change your destiny.” Thankfully, she practiced all this, and she didn’t die at 17. She’s about to turn 34, and she comes to visit me at the monastery every so often. Her parents didn’t change much, but she changed herself and thus her destiny.

What we choose every moment will affect our habits, our personality, and our destiny. Therefore, we must choose with awareness, with understanding and love, so we can care for ourselves better.

The second power is the power of love. The need to love and to be loved is real and present in every one of us, but sometimes we get confused about what it really means. I know a woman who in her late 70s rented out her house and moved in with her boyfriend. She was sure she had found “the man,” and she wanted to spend the rest of her life with him. Yet after only a few months she left to go back to her own house. It turned out she’d woken up one morning, and when she saw that her boyfriend didn’t have his dentures in, she thought, “Oh my god, he’s so ugly! I thought I was ugly!” So even at her age, she was taken in by her idea of love.

In Vietnamese, the word for “soulmate” is tri ky, and it means “one who remembers, knows, and masters oneself.” A soulmate is a person who remembers and knows their body, who can take care of and master their feelings and thoughts. Isn’t that revelatory? Even if someone loves us sincerely, if we don’t know how to be our own soulmate, we won’t be able to believe in the love that person is offering because we ourselves don’t know what love is.

Before I became a nun, this happened to me over and over again. I was hungry for love. My parents had passed away when I was a child, and during the short years that I lived with my mother, she was so physically and verbally abusive that when she disappeared, I was simply happy she was gone. All my life, I was always looking for someone to love me. After I became a nun I gradually realized what I was doing, and I have learned to be my own soulmate. Now I recognize this hunger in others, especially in young people who grow up without a stable home. Without consistent love from our parents or caregivers, we grow up craving that love. We crave it so badly that we throw ourselves out there. Love me. See me. Take me. Enslave me, even! We are so desperate that we’ll do anything to be accepted, even if our heart is broken again and again. But if we can learn that a soulmate is one who remembers themself, we learn to take care and not put ourselves through such painful experiences. We learn to respect our bodies, to choose where we want to be, who we want to be with, and what we want to do with our lives.

When we are our own soulmate, naturally we become a soulmate to other people.

It is a great happiness and freedom to be our own soulmate. We don’t have to compare ourselves with anyone. When we are our own soulmate, naturally we become a soulmate to other people. We are each the product of infinite conditions stemming from our parents, our ancestors, from society, education. Still, we are beautiful and whole just the way we are. Even though there’s suffering in our families, in society, in us, we can help create change. We can choose actions that are mindful, that are positive, that are wholesome. If we look at our parents and realize we don’t want to be like them—if we do nothing differently, then we will be like them, or worse. However, if we’re aware of what they do, and we use mindfulness practices to transform those habits in us, then we will change our own destiny. In that way, we are also kind to our parents. Now I’m older than my mother was when she passed away. I was kind to my mother because I was living a life of peace, of love, of healing. I helped many people. My mother wasn’t able to do that. She struggled to survive while causing a lot of pain to herself, to me, to her family. I changed all that for her. My mother has been liberated inside of me.

So when you have strong feelings, sit with them. That’s to be a soulmate. Be a soulmate to yourself—even to your bad habits. Say to them, Hello, my bad habits! Smile to them. You don’t have to reject them. Simply acknowledge them by their true names and embrace them with your mindful breathing. I know you’re there. You’re part of me. I’ll take good care of you. Please help me. Then you’ll have self-acceptance, self-embrace, self-love. As long as you still reject yourself, you cannot be happy. If you embrace and accept, then you can always take better care of yourself.

The third power is the power of healing, of transforming our suffering and bringing healing to ourselves. We can have many degrees, lots of money, and a high position in society, and yet we can feel so insecure and impoverished. It’s never enough! In Buddhism, there’s a teaching, “Know that you are enough.” In Chinese, the character for “enough” includes a head, a body, an arm, and two feet. Isn’t that amazing? Please remember this Chinese character when you say, “Oh, I’m nobody. I’m no good. I’m different. I’m weird. I don’t deserve a place in this world.” Ask yourself, “Do I still have my head? Do I still have a body, two arms (or one arm, even), and two legs?” Then you have enough. You are more than enough!

There’s a wonderful Japanese art called kintsugi. When pottery breaks, kintsugi is the art of mending it with lacquer mixed with gold dust, which means that the breaks are actually accentuated. They become more prominent, unique, and beautiful. In all of our lives there’s a certain brokenness, a certain pain. Instead of rejecting those parts of ourselves or our lives, we use a kind of kintsugi to mend them. We use mindful breathing, mindful walking, mindful thinking, in order to embrace what is. We sit quietly, being our own soulmate. In this way, those broken pieces aren’t wasted or thrown away. Instead, they’re held together with love, with respect, with dignity.

When you’re going through a difficult moment, come back to your breath, do walking meditation, sit with yourself. Be present. Be still. Be kind. That’s gold. Actually, you’re more precious than gold. Remember that you are precious and powerful, and to be your own soulmate is the greatest happiness and freedom!

♦  

Adapted from a dharma talk titled Be Your Own Soulmate at plumvillage.org.

The post How to Be Your Own Soulmate appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

I remember exactly the moment I realized the gap between how a person’s face appears and who they feel themselves to be. I was in my early 30s, and I’d gone to hear a lecture at the local university. Taking my seat, I happened to look into the eyes of a man sitting directly across from me. He was a very old man, with a sallow, melancholic face that had settled into deep basset-hound folds. When his eyes met mine, I saw that he was young.

Or rather, I saw that he was neither young nor old.

He looked away and the lecture began, but I was left with a permanent perceptual shift. The effect is rather like a duck/rabbit drawing, or like one of those postcards that seems to leap from two to three dimensions: I look at an old, wrinkled face and suddenly there is a smooth, young face looking back at me with shining eyes. I can also do the reverse and find the old man or woman looking out from a beautiful, unlined face—but I usually don’t. It seems unkind, as if I were rushing a young person toward an early demise.

Strangely, I find it hard to do the shift on myself. When I look in the mirror, I get stopped by the latest version of my face—and I’m almost always slightly shocked. Recently, a friend told me that when she looks in the mirror, she doesn’t recognize herself—and I understood. From week to week, there’s some new insult: the further droop of an eyelid, a perfectly straight tooth deciding to tilt. “You’re kidding!” I feel like exclaiming—as if there’s been some mix-up here, an unfortunate act of vandalism. “Anyone who knows me well could tell you: this face is not my real face!”

But then I remember that the people who’ve known me for years are unreliable witnesses. When they look at me, they see a palimpsest, a layered collage of my past and current selves. I know this, because this is how I see them. My best friend from childhood is now 70, but when I look in her face I can still see the 6-year-old girl with a Buster Brown haircut, flying past me on her scooter on the summer evening in Santa Monica when we first met. In the same way, I can look at my 36-year-old daughter and still see the wrinkled newborn I held for one long moment, her cheek against my cheek, before they whisked her off to an incubator….

Some years ago, a friend who had taken herself abroad for a secret face lift found that only her relatively new friends noticed. They didn’t realize she’d had plastic surgery, but they noticed a strikingly positive change to her appearance (“Did you get a new haircut?” “Were you off at a spa?”). Her family and close friends, however, didn’t notice a thing! They simply looked through her current face to the faces she’d passed through before.

If I can so easily perform the perceptual shift on a stranger and so swiftly see through the many layers in the face of a friend, why is it so hard to do the same for myself? Certainly, I endorse the belief that the increasingly lined and asymmetric face that I call “mine” is not “the real me.” And I sometimes find it unfair that, when I go out into the world and interact with people who don’t know me, these people simply take me at “face value.” Yet this is how I take myself! I look in the mirror, and my magic toggle switch gets stuck, trapping me in a kind of freeze-frame.

From the beginning, our sense of who we are is linked to seeing and being seen.

Of course, as a woman, I’ve been primed since early adolescence to assess my own appearance “objectively,” as if through the eyes of people who don’t know or love me. And somewhere along the line, this imagined gaze of others became more and more inseparable from my own sense of identity—not superficially, but in my very essence.

I remember so vividly my first day of junior high school. After my small elementary school, I felt lost and alone in a vast labyrinth of pea-green, barrack-like buildings. As I was walking down a long corridor, trying to find my way to class, I became aware of footsteps coming quickly behind me. Turning, I saw two older girls—one of whom whispered loudly to the other, “Piano legs!” And then they both sniggered with laughter.

I had no idea what “piano legs” were—but it was clear they were something shameful. This was the first time I’d ever thought of myself as composed of different parts, each of which could be assessed by others. From this moment on, I began to “itemize” my body according to externally derived criteria—and I was no doubt lucky to have made it all the way to seventh grade before this chopping-and-sizing-up began.

Yet here is a bedrock truth of human existence: from the beginning, our sense of who we are is linked to seeing and being seen. Infants enter the world ready to focus on anything that looks like a face, and even the simplest schema—two round black dots for eyes and one black line for a mouth—will draw their fixed attention. Just as an infant’s mouth roots around for a breast, so an infant’s eyes seek to fasten on the eyes of another face. And the two are interconnected: a human mother’s body is shaped so that, during the hours spent breastfeeding, her gaze is naturally drawn downward to her child’s face.

How fortunate—for a puking, mewling infant who is utterly dependent for his very survival on his primary caregiver’s steady attention—if his caregiver finds him irresistibly attractive. Once, long ago, when I looked up the word cute, I was startled to learn that its root has nothing soft or fuzzy about it: rather, it is related to “cut” and to the sharpness of “acute.” I mused then that the cuteness of small humans seems designed to pierce through any hard shell of adult self-centeredness, so that—even at three in the morning—a mother or father may be jolted out of sleep and drawn to their child like a magnet. They are attracted—and at the root of attract is tract, meaning “to pull.”

Our own culture exalts thinness, but there are cultures that revere obesity, which to them represents abundance and ease. And even within a single culture, standards of beauty change fairly rapidly over time: from small, dainty mouths to “bee-stung lips”; from a flat-chested, hipless look to plunging cleavage and “Brazilian” butts. . . . But people who study the cross-cultural criteria of beauty tend to agree that certain traits are universally perceived as highly desirable, such as symmetry and the appearance of youth. As they point out, these traits are associated with good health, and so it makes sense that, over the ages and around the globe, they have been favored in mate selection. While I don’t happen to believe that there must always be some form of intelligent design, some form of deeper purpose underlying human biology and behavior, I find myself wondering: if the cuteness of children helps to pierce the hearts and elicit the attention of adults, and if the beauty of adolescents and young adults helps to attract a mate, is it possible to look in the reverse direction and see any value whatsoever in the fading beauty of old age?   

Certainly, the 13th-century Chinese poet Chu Shu-Chen could see no value in her own faded beauty, as she expresses in her sad poem, Morning:

I get up. I am sick of
Rouging my cheeks. My face in
The mirror disgusts me. My
Thin shoulders are bowed with
Hopelessness. Tears of loneliness
Well up in my eyes. Wearily
I open my toilet table.
I arch and paint my eyebrows
And steam my heavy braids.
My maid is so stupid that she
Offers me plum blossoms for my hair.

(Trans. Kenneth Rexroth)

If I could look in the mirror and, rather than getting fixed in the image that (at least mildly) disgusts me, as I tend to do, and as Chu Shu-Chen clearly did, could I let this very unattractiveness finally cut through my identification, just as cuteness cuts through a caregiver’s self-preoccupation?  

I was only in my 40s when I first noticed the gaze of strangers tending to dart more swiftly away from me than in the past. And now I often feel that the gaze passes right through me, as though I was a transparent column, standing there, taking up space. Gradually, I’ve become more accustomed to being perceived in this way, but given that I don’t feel much different internally than I ever did, it is strange to grasp that I seem to have become a shade in these strangers’ eyes, someone who doesn’t exist as fully and vividly as they do—unless I rather assertively say something to them about the weather, or their adorable child or dog.

Yet sometimes, out of nowhere, I find myself savoring the invisibility—the way some women who wear the full hijab, with only their eyes peeking out, insist that they wouldn’t choose to dress otherwise, that they appreciate a sense of protected privacy under all those folds of dark fabric, a secret inner world and shared sisterhood, hidden from prying eyes. For myself, I’ve realized that my own pleasure in invisibility is akin to what I feel when sketching, when I gradually lose myself in the role of pure observer—and the world, in its infinite shapes and colors, seems to offer itself up to me to be observed. Maybe this is one way of embracing one’s diminishing ability to attract the gaze of others: to fully take up the mantle of invisibility, to appreciate it as its own kind of superpower, and also as a reminder—again and again, to cast one’s gaze outward.

When Jane Goodall was a young woman, her beauty sometimes got in the way of her life’s work. She seemed, by temperament, someone who had no need or desire to be in the limelight. As a small child in the English countryside, she disappeared for several hours until her frantic family found her crouched in the darkness of their chicken coop, staring at the hens. In Africa, she knew that the publicity from photojournalists would help to further her cause, but she often felt impatient and exasperated with their relentless focus on her. Her passion was to sit quietly, at a distance, until she became such a part of the landscape that her beloved chimpanzees seemed almost to forget that she was there. As she grew older, she must have felt a certain relief at no longer being so captivating for the camera. Perhaps she, too, can offer a clue in the quest to celebrate one’s diminishing ability to pull the gaze of others toward us. Who knows what creatures we might then perceive, with ever more startling clarity, performing amazing antics, chattering and swinging from vines, in the jungle around us? (And at the other extreme, just think of the ever-expanding roster of people who have been so entranced by the sight of their own faces, that they have fallen off cliffs and dropped into volcanoes while taking selfies!)

When my mother turned 50, she began to say that she found her face “funny.” Now, when I remember this, it seems to me that she was onto something. Certainly, laughter seems very far away from Chu Shu-Chen when she looks in the mirror. Once, some years ago, as I was settling into my bunk at the start of a meditation retreat, two women who had arrived a bit late came into the small room, apologizing for their commotion. They both looked to be in their 60s, and I could feel that they were close friends. One of them seemed to have suffered some form of facial paralysis. Half her face looked perfectly normal, but the other half was slumped and drooping and partially held together with bands of tape. As she tried to climb the ladder to her bunk, the tape gave way and her face slumped further, so that she was trying to hold her face up while simultaneously pulling herself up the ladder. Suddenly, she began to laugh, and then her friend began to laugh too. They laughed so hard they began to snort and wheeze, and I began to fear that the woman—who had finally made it to the top—might tumble down. Although their laughter felt painfully contagious, I restrained myself because something about it seemed very intimate. I sensed that it was based on their past together, and the fact that the woman with the droopy face hadn’t always been thus. From the half of her face that didn’t droop, it was clear that she had once been a very attractive woman, and this seemed to be the source of their hilarity—the absurdity that things had come to this! It was as if she was saying, “But this isn’t me!” and as if her friend, through her laughter, was responding, “I know, I know!”

But what if we could laugh at ourselves even when we are most beautifully smooth and symmetric?

Not long ago, a friend came across a quote from the distinguished chef and food writer M. F. K. Fisher, in which she wondered why on earth people were surprised to discover themselves growing older. To my friend, the quote revealed the attitude of someone who had gracefully and rationally accepted old age as part of the natural cycle of human life, a cycle from which they never expected to be personally exempt. In the moment, I gave my friend a nod of agreement, thereby accepting M. F. K.’s sharp rap on my knuckles. But what is dawning on me now is that, if we were really seeing clearly, then we would be surprised—at any stage of life—by the face we saw in the mirror! When we are young, at the peak of whatever physical attractiveness we may possess, there is much less incentive to feel the gap between how we happen to appear at any particular moment and who we really are: that timeless essence that is before and beyond any form that we so briefly pass through. I can remember my Zen teacher, Toni Packer, saying that for most of us, the sense of self lies right behind the eyes. What happens when we begin to feel less tethered to that sense of self?

As a teenager, I went through a period of acute disorientation whenever I gazed into a mirror. It was a bit like when you say a word over and over until it seems to disconnect from any meaning and just floats in the air as a sound. I would look at my own face and—gradually moving beyond all the superficial itemizations (“I wish my forehead was higher…I like the shape of my eyes. . . . ”)—I would find myself losing all sense of identification with my reflection. Or rather, I would feel the sheer absurdity that—of all the millions of living beings that I might be—I happened to be this one: a 16-year-old girl staring at her reflection in a bathroom in northern California.

Unfortunately, far from making me laugh, the experience was disturbing to me, somewhat dizzying, and it got so I couldn’t go into the bathroom without leaving the door slightly ajar. Finally, I told my father about it, and he said, “Ah, yes, the mirror experience!” He normalized the discomfort for me so that gradually it faded, and I could go into the bathroom, shut the door, and stare at my face like any teenage girl, wishing my forehead was higher, pleased with my eyes. . . .

Show me your face before you were born!

When I first discovered this Zen koan, many years after the mirror experience, I had a feeling of “Aha!” That’s the face I’d glimpsed in the mirror and found so dizzying. Apart from my father labeling the experience, which gave it some validation, I had no way of working with it, no practice through which to take it more deeply into myself and let it become an opening. I simply stopped at the fear and profound disorientation it induced.

And now?

I confess that I’ve never been much of one for faithfully carrying out the written spiritual exercises that come at the end of essays like this one. (In fact, I’ve sometimes even wondered who the Goody Two-shoes are who do!) But the following is an exercise that I can recommend because it is one that I have been doing myself for the past several weeks, and I can testify that it brings a liberating sense of relief:

Look steadily at your own face in the mirror. Allow the various judgments to arise: my crow’s-feet are so deep, my lips are so thin, my neck is sagging….

Have compassion for yourself; don’t be quick to dismiss these judgments as signs of what a vain and superficial person you are. Remember that the identification of self with face is primal and profound, and—particularly if you are a woman—this identification has been powerfully reinforced, from your most formative years and in all manner of ways, by the surrounding culture.

Keep looking until the various “itemizations” drop away and you are left only with the basic underlying emotion. For many people of a certain age, this will be a feeling of dismay, aversion, surprise bordering on mild shock, bringing with it the question: how can this be me?

Stay with this question. Let yourself be penetrated by the sense of disconnection between how you appear and who you feel yourself to be. Let this sense of disconnection cut through the superficial layers of identification with this current version of your face.

Now—as if you were looking at the full moon and seeing its various waxing and waning shapes—see if you can picture the earlier phases of your own face looking back at you, taking you through time: young adult, adolescent, child, baby. . . .

Look into your own eyes and see the witness who knows: none of these versions, even the loveliest, the ones with whom I would have been happiest to remain, have ever been the real me. The lined, drooping face has always been there, lurking in the perfectly smooth and symmetric face of the young person you once were.

Keep looking until, like the woman holding her face together with tape and one hand as she climbed the ladder to the top bunk, you find yourself bursting into laughter.

This laughter is your answer to the famous Zen koan: Show me your face before you were born! And though Chu-Shen was disgusted when her maid offered her a plum blossom, your laughter is also another way of conveying a Zen image that recurs in paintings and poems, and that I will pose as this question: On the gnarled branch of an old tree in winter, can you see the spring blossom burst forth?

The post Show Me Your Face appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

Martine Batchelor: Something that is important to explore, look at, and be careful with in terms of the dharma of relationships is ending a relationship intentionally. In the dharma, we talk a lot about patience, generosity, compassion, and forgiveness. But, as the Buddha says, we need to have as much compassion for ourselves as for others. So in a relationship, we need to care for and protect ourselves. 

Long ago, I was teaching about compassion, and this young woman came to me and said, “I’m not sure if I am compassionate enough.” She explained that she had a husband who was a drug addict, which was not really the problem, but his dealer was coming to threaten the family. After three years of this, she finally left him. When she asked me, “Do you think I was compassionate enough?” I nearly said, “You were too compassionate.” I told her, “You were really compassionate enough, and it was a good idea to leave him for your own safety.” 

We’ve talked about the parami of courage, the parami of courage of saying no, the parami of courage of saying “Yes, I love you, but from afar.” If we are harmed in a relationship, then we have to save ourselves. We have to be able to end a relationship knowing that life is complex, life is rich, and it does not depend on having that harmful person in my life. There are other people out there who will be supportive and beneficial to me. We have to have the courage to protect ourselves, to take care of ourselves in relationships.

Laura Bridgman: That’s true. And even if a relationship or situation isn’t overtly harmful, it could be that the relationship isn’t really serving our growth and development, whether that’s in our life or our practice. That can be a more subtle, nuanced sense that I need to separate, I need to go in another direction here. I found it helpful to discern what’s driving my desire to move away or to stay. I liked what you were saying about the parami, for instance. We may sometimes feel that we should be generous or compassionate. We may assume that compassion or generosity is one thing, and saying no and having a boundary is another. They can actually go together. There can be a compassionate way of saying no. Saying no can actually be a generous gesture in the sense of not continuing with an unworkable relationship or situation. 

When we look at our relationship with these qualities, we don’t need to take a fixed position on them. “I should be compassionate, I should be open,” I don’t think that’s what the Buddha meant. It’s more like a process of balance. If my heart is closed, how come? What’s keeping it closed? That’s a generous attitude. And if my heart is stuck open and I’m not able to hold my boundaries, what do I need here? What would support me to feel where my line is in this relationship?

Martine Batchelor: I have observed that when a relationship is very good, you don’t question it. If the relationship is very bad, then hopefully, you get out of it. But the most difficult thing about ending a relationship is when you are in the middle: one day is good, I stay; one day is bad, I go. Up and down. That is a difficult place to be, and so one needs to bring wisdom and protection to that. 

There was another story that struck me. I once had a lady come and again ask, “Am I compassionate enough?” She explains, “We have many children in this family, but I am the only one who still sees my father. But I only see him once a year.” Your first reaction may be, “Wait a minute, once a year? That’s not very compassionate.” But she was the only one who was able to even do that. And why? Because what he wanted once a year, at least, was to be taken to a restaurant and he would be so cantankerous, shouting at everybody. The experience was a disaster. That’s why nobody else wanted to meet him. I told her, “That’s very courageous of you and compassionate to do it once a year. Because that’s what you’re able to do. But you cannot do more. And that’s wisdom: to know what my limits are in that situation.”

Laura Bridgman: This makes me think of practicing with doubt. For instance: Should I stay? Should I go? We get pulled between these different viewpoints of all the things that justify staying and all the things that justify going. We get caught up in the swing back and forth between the two, which can make us feel helpless and caught in doubt. We think, I want to have a clearer sense of what’s needed, but I’m not clear. So I get pulled back and forth. We can be so driven to be absolutely sure and get it right, to make the right decision. We may choose one way and then really regret it and punish ourselves for getting it wrong. It can be compassionate to recognize how much pressure we put on ourselves to find our direction in a relationship. I’ve found that when I actually take that pressure off, that supports a bit more clarity and wisdom in discerning what’s needed. 

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In recent days, sangha members and other friends have written to me, sharing the fear and sadness in their lives: stories of illness and addiction, a loved one’s death, violence and war (a friend in Ukraine), lost jobs, lost relationships, and lost hope. What do I as one person, one friend, one Buddhist priest, have to offer to them? I sometimes feel powerless in the face of so much pain. 

What do I, as one friend, have to offer?

Of course, as a friend, I lend an ear, a shoulder, and some practical advice when I can. We sometimes cry together, and I share the usual encouraging words. “The sun will come out, there is hope…” It is what any friend might do or say. Sometimes, there are no words.

But as I lend a shoulder or cry a shared tear, I wonder if that is all I have to give.

I feel helpless, for the violence, illness, and all the rest remain.

Then, as one person in society, do I have something to offer?

Even as one person, one citizen, I can offer action. Individuals, collectively, can move mountains! Let us all work for a world in which there is no war and violence, no addictions, where illnesses find their cure, loved ones live long, and all are at peace. We must never give up the effort, for we can turn the tide. I look forward to a better world, somewhere tomorrow.

But in the meantime, though we march and carry signs, give money and time, better days seem yet so far away.

I still feel helpless. The violence, illness, and all the rest remain.

So, as a Buddhist priest, what do I have to offer?

If it helps someone in heart and spirit, I might pronounce mysterious words, light a candle, an incense stick, or ring a bell. I chant for someone’s health, their healing, in memory of those they love and lost. It is an act I can offer to calm their hurting breast for a time. Such gestures offering hope and strength to others are precious and powerful. Is the power merely in the heart and mind? Perhaps, yet it is a real power nonetheless. I do it, even if I frequently doubt the power beyond mere emotional effect and psychological reassuring. I do it, for giving hope and strength to others is precious and powerful in itself.

Nonetheless, in my robes before an altar, reciting strange sounds, ringing bells, and striking drums, is that all a priest can do?

Despite the chants and drums, the violence, illness, and all the rest remain.

Thus, ultimately, as a Zen priest, what do I have to offer?

Here is the real power to heal. Here is a true cure.

I have sitting, zazen, and shikantaza. I can guide folks to sit at the heart of suffering, violence, addictions, illness, fear, and sadness. To know the light and stillness that shines and rests quietly at the core of suffering, violence, addictions, illness, fear, and sadness. To know the unbroken wholeness beyond victors and victims, loss and need, and even birth and death. 

Here, there is no suffering, violence, no excess desire in addiction, no bodies or illness, nothing and nobody to fear, no loss, no sadness. Here, there is a peace that sweeps in all the world’s broken pieces, a fullness encompassing all this life’s strivings and lack, a heart that beats on as our little lives come and go. Though the violence, the illness, and all the rest remain, here they do not remain, and all is clear.

Sitting is a marvelous power. As the hard borders, tensions, battles, needs, and longings of the “little self” soften and fully drop away, it reveals this, which is precious beyond words.

As a Zen priest, this is what I have to offer.

It was so in the Buddha’s time, in the time of Dogen, the great Zen master, and in all this world’s days of suffering, violence, war, addictions, illness, loss and longing, fear and sadness. While neither the Buddha nor Dogen could make the suffering, violence, loss, sickness, and death vanish completely in daily life, they knew a wisdom and compassion that shines through it all, a serenity and flowing wholeness that can liberate us from it all—even when all remains.

For that reason, I will continue to reach for every tool I have to ease the suffering of others. Let’s do all of it: a kind word, a shoulder to cry on, shared silence, and collective social action. I will light incense, chant a chant, and ring the bell.

But, most of all, I will offer sitting, just sitting, a stillness amid the storm that allows one to see through all this life’s suffering. One encounters a realm of wholeness that cannot be broken, even amid our sometimes broken hearts.

Yes, in this frequently hard life, this world we call samsara, the violence, illness, and all the rest remain.

And yet, in the stillness and clarity shining through the strife, they never were at all.  

The post What Do I, One Buddhist, Have to Offer? appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

Compassion does not exist outside of us. It’s not a concept we can access through rational thought or philosophizing. It’s an innate force within each and every one of us. It is unwavering love and protection for life, or the courage of our shared heart. When we turn toward rather than away from that which we perceive as dark, difficult, or absent of light, then our compassion is unlocked. Compassion is found in being willing to venture beyond our comfort zones and walk through the portals of discomfort, pain, and vulnerability for ourselves or another.

♦ 

From Luminous Darkness: An Engaged Buddhist Approach to Embracing the Unknown by Deborah Eden Tull © 2022 by Deborah Eden Tull. Reprinted by arrangement with Shambhala Publications, Inc. Boulder, CO.

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It’s Christmas morning and I’ve just come in from an early morning walk with a friend. The streets are still quiet, but whomever we meet seems animated by that “Good will toward all” sentiment of the day. “Merry Christmas,” something rote but right, going beyond the customary “Hi,” if that much. May that little extra last into the New Year. My companion and I agree that it’s a relief to have the big build-up to Christmas over. I’m grateful to have the peace the season promises. I do find, however, on reflection this morning, a moment of sheer grace in recent days which gives me some hint about the possibilities of finding the spirit of the season—the spirit, it should be in any season—in the most unexpected places.

One of those days of the the general frenzy of the countdown to Christmas, I found myself in the local hardware store, in the midst of a project. The place was thronged with folks buying holiday ornaments and the other trappings of the holidays and I had a hard time securing help. Taking matters into my own hands, I seized on a stray clerk who seemed to be in a holiday daze himself, spinning from one demand or another, but for a moment at loose ends, it seemed. I’d noticed him before, a burly young man, the sort I’d normally presume was informed, competent and available solely for my purposes. But I’d also noticed—how was this apparent?—that he had about him a sensitivity, vulnerability a life of his own that would be worth knowing about: an individual, in short. I’d gotten as far as putting a name to the face—Eddie—and we’d had a brief conversation or two reaching a little way across the divide of customer and clerk, that divide that seems necessary to the efficient running of the commercial machine. He had a family, I knew that much (and how, I wondered—but politely didn’t inquire into—did he support them at this likely minimum wage job?)

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A Soto Zen teacher told me that by sitting zazen, one is taking refuge in the true self. Compassion, including self-compassion, and kindness, including to one’s self, is where the true self exists. Sitting on my cushion at the same time every day, year after year, has helped me to experience moments of this true self. This is what happened to me recently when I experienced the resolution of some unhappiness that I’d been carrying with me for many years. 

I remember, vividly, an earlier time when I was embarrassed, and angry, toward a friend I’d known since middle school. The event happened in the early days of the AIDS epidemic.  

I’d known this friend, Philip, since the seventh grade. We knew even then what we were about, and that we liked boys, though we could never let anyone else know. This was 1964 in Ohio farm country. Some of our ideas about what it meant to be gay were pretty hilarious, but somehow we made our way, and supported each other into adulthood.

On his 16th birthday, Philip was given a red Mustang convertible. He would come by my house on Friday nights, and on the way out of town we’d pick up hamburgers and shakes at the drive-through, then head for the busy airport in Dayton.  

We’d park off the road at the edge of the airport, close to the fence, where we could sit right where the passenger jets came in for landing. The planes came very close, the car would shake, and we would throw our arms around each other and yell and scream as we looked up at the huge tires. We were never boyfriends, but it felt good to get close together like that.

After college, Philip followed in the footsteps of his two older sisters, who had become flight attendants. In those days, a male attendant was very rare. He was stationed in Los Angeles, and he traveled all over the world.

I moved to New York City after college and worked in publishing, eventually as the publicity director for a major publishing house. One year, after a plane had crashed and killed everyone on board, I developed a severe fear of flying. I knew the names of several on the flight who were traveling to the same book convention that I was. The next time I had to fly to Los Angeles for business, Philip put me on a direct flight from New York to LA on the same plane he’d be working on. He took me to the galley of the huge DC-10 airliner and had me help the flight attendants stock their carts. It was a lot of fun. He’d made me part of the flight crew, which kept me too busy to be scared. What a brilliant idea. 

On our plane’s approach to LA, he took me down to the storage deck and showed me a small window that was right over the landing gear, explaining that this was for the pilot to check if there were any problems.

I lay flat on my stomach to peer out the little window for the last twenty minutes of the flight. The view was spectacular. I was ecstatic, and it brought me back to those days Philip and I sat staring up at the incoming jets. Finally, the airliner came softly down. I felt as if I had landed the plane, myself. I was, once again, a bona fide fearless flier.

Two years later, Philip lost his job. He had AIDS. Both the pilots union and the airline felt he could be in danger of infecting people, though, even then, doctors knew this couldn’t happen.  

I’d left publishing and become a clinical social worker, working with many men about my own age with AIDS. I was now traveling regularly to the West Coast, from New York to LA to see Philip, and then from there to San Francisco to see my older brother, and friends, all of whom had AIDS.

One day, I received a call from Philip’s partner, Jim. I could tell he desperately needed respite from taking care of Philip. I flew out the next week and rented a car to drive with Philip from Los Angeles to San Francisco on the Pacific Coast Highway.

What Jim didn’t tell me was that Philip was having delusions. Philip’s paranoia showed itself when we were quite a few miles along. He told me that he knew he was being followed by FBI agents, who wanted to get information from him. If they were successful, they would kill him. Then added ominously, “You, too.”

I watched over him like a bodyguard, even when we went out to visit friends. When, a couple days later, I took him to the airport to fly home, we hugged, but at that point both of us were afraid of each other. 

Months later, I came home to find a message from Philip on my answering machine.

It was urgent. He sounded happy. 

When I called back, he wanted to know if I still knew people on the Today Show. He was referring to my former job as a publicist. 

“Sure, but what for?”

“My doctor and I need your advice. I’m cured!”    

He was crying. He wanted to know what I thought. Would I handle publicity for them.  

I got excited and was already making plans.  

There was a long pause.

“Though there is a side effect. I don’t have a heartbeat. It’s a touchy subject.”

“You can’t feel it?”

“I’m getting used to it.”

I told him I had another call on the line. After I hung up, I called Jim, who told me Philip kept calling his doctor demanding to be told that he was cured. The doctor was losing his patience.

I was sad about this, but also I was angry, not just at Philip, as if he’d played some sick joke on me, but for revealing in the end that AIDS was here to stay. 

A year later, I was at a hospice in LA. I was there to say goodbye. The hospice was near the airport, and at one point a plane roared over our heads. Sitting on the bed with him, I reached over and we held on to each other. 

I often think about Philip’s call to tell me he was cured. But, thirty years later, a faraway event that had made me angry and embarrassed has now changed to compassion, tenderness, and kindness. I know that all those negative feelings were not just about Philip tricking me. The anger that lasted for decades was my unacknowledged grief. I finally found refuge in my true self.

For a precious five minutes, before Philip told me he had no heartbeat, both of us knew, and we were dead certain, that AIDS was beaten.

I imagine seeing him, my brother, friends, and all my former clients, suddenly cured back then, and alive today.

I settle back into that moment when Philip told me he’d found a cure, and I fell for it. I’m no longer angry or embarrassed. I remember it now as five minutes of joy. My heart stops. I take a deep breath, and I believe him all over again. 

The post Philip Found the Cure appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

In Akil Kumarasamy’s debut novel, Meet Us by the Roaring Sea, an unnamed AI programmer begins translating a Tamil manuscript in the aftermath of her mother’s death. The manuscript, written in the late 1990s, follows a cohort of young female medical students living on the edge of the Sri Lankan civil war who attempt to develop an ideology of “radical compassion.” As the programmer delves deeper into the students’ collective treatise, she slowly becomes unhinged by the question of what it means to care for another.

Kumarasamy grew up in a South Asian community in an area of New Jersey formerly known as Dismal Swamp, and from a young age, she was interested in questions of compassion and how communities can care for each other after catastrophes. Her short story collection, Half Gods, directly explores the impact of the Sri Lankan civil war on South Asian diasporic communities, but in Meet Us by the Roaring Sea, the war takes on a more spectral presence. The novel swirls between a near-future Queens and the shores of South India, slipping through time and space—and between consciousnesses. Characters investigate how to take on another’s suffering, whether through self-inflicting pain or through physically extracting and ingesting others’ traumatic memories. Along the way, Kumarasamy offers a poignant and at times unsettling meditation on friendship, climate change, artificial intelligence, grief, and memory.

Tricycle spoke with Kumarasamy about the novel, the border states of compassion, the ethics of translation, and how literature can help us bear witness to suffering.

To start, can you tell us about your childhood growing up in a South Asian diasporic community? I grew up in New Jersey. My parents came from South India, and my mother was really influenced by Zen Buddhism. She was particularly drawn to Thich Nhat Hanh’s teachings on using Buddhist practice to navigate the Vietnam War and using compassion to enact social change. I also grew up reading the Buddha manga series, by Osamu Tezuka, so from an early age, I was learning about how the Buddha challenged the ideas around him, as well as how compassion and social justice can come together.

At the same time, I grew up in the South Asian diaspora, so there were a lot of interfaith conversations happening. People were practicing Buddhism and Hinduism simultaneously. From a young age, I practiced Vipassana meditation and was surrounded by different forms of religious practice. All of these practices and conversations affected my formation in how I think about writing and engaging with the world.

Can you share more about the relationship between your practice and your writing? How has that interfaith grounding influenced your approach to your work? A big question in my work and in my life is what we do with suffering. How do we reach out to other people as we navigate the seas of suffering? Zen Buddhism has influenced how I approach this question, particularly in thinking about impermanence and interconnectedness, and this shapes how I form books.

My first book of short stories, Half Gods, deals with the aftermath of the Sri Lankan civil war and asks how different diaspora communities can heal and connect with each other. In my new novel, Meet Us by the Roaring Sea, my main question was how we can practice compassion in modern society. Both books are concerned with how we can care for others when we ourselves are deeply suffering. These questions also show up in my own practice, particularly in thinking about temporality, death, and grief.

In the new novel, an AI coder begins translating a manuscript that revolves around the notion of radical compassion. Can you say more about the idea of radical compassion? In the novel, the main character has just lost her mother. There’s something about death that just cracks open reality. It makes you realize the illusion of everything, and it forces you to question how you’re engaging with the world. As she is grieving, she starts translating a manuscript about a group of medical students who are coming up with a new idea of radical compassion.

The students are living through a drought at the edge of a war, so they’re suffering themselves. The only way for them to leave their own suffering is to reach out to other people, to see that they are connected to the refugees coming to their shoreline, and to see that their suffering is not a singular thing but something larger.

The Zen Buddhist priest Joan Halifax talks about the edge states of compassion. For example, let’s say someone falls onto the train tracks and someone else jumps to try to save them. If the second person lives, we would say, “Oh my gosh, you were so compassionate, you jumped to save them.” But if they die trying to save the person, then we would say, “You’re delirious. You’re crazy.” So there’s this border state of compassion. Compassion can have a turbulent edge to it. 

I was interested in thinking about characters being pushed to these edge states—pushed to the point where compassion can become self-destructive. I wanted to explore the borders between people and also how comfortable we are in being open to other people’s suffering.

Throughout the book, the medical students veer toward different edge states: for some, radical compassion becomes self-destructive; for others, it turns to cruelty. How do the students navigate these dangers, particularly in finding a balance between self-mortification and total hedonism? In the inner manuscript, the medical students are trying to figure out what it means to care for each other. They’re constantly negotiating the balance of how to open themselves to the suffering of others in a meaningful way.

But within the collective, there are three schools of radical compassion. Some students self-inflict pain, seeing how much they can tolerate as a way to open themselves up. Some starve themselves and give away food. All of them have this goal of awakening and collective liberation. But they approach what it means to be compassionate very differently.

We’re not separate from the pain of others, and the book is trying to show that entangling yourself with the suffering of others has a cost. Characters lose things: physical objects, houses, belongings. Is that part of compassion? To gain this understanding of another’s pain, do you have to shed something? There are a lot of burnings in the book, as well as rebirths. Characters are constantly negotiating these borders.

One question the novel raises is how you can come back after entering into another’s suffering. What is the process of return? Has writing the book given you any insight on this question? When you witness something, are you forever altered? Can you go back to a time before you’ve witnessed something? In the outer story, witnessing becomes embodied when characters physically ingest other people’s memories and traumas. These experiences become part of them in a physical way. Can they return to what they were like before?

In some ways, you can’t fully return to the place that you used to be. Now that you’ve seen something, it has changed you, and you cannot go to that earlier version of yourself. I think this goes back to the idea that there is a cost.  

These characters are forced into situations where they finally have to see, look, and break down the veil that’s in front of them and reach out. I don’t think there’s any going back from that.

I’m curious as to how you view the role of literature in relation to the act of witnessing, particularly in your choice of pronouns. How can literature help us bear witness to another’s suffering? In this book in particular, I was very conscious of the pronouns I chose to use. The inner manuscript is written in the first person plural, and the outer story is written in the second person. They’re unusual points of view, and both call for the reader’s participation. I think the second person invites the reader to step into the narrative space, which is almost a liminal space between first and third person. The book is addressing you. With the first-person plural, it feels like you could be part of that we, too.

“To gain an understanding of another’s pain, do you have to shed something?”

For me, literature is like an opening. It can open someone’s mind to other ways of thinking, other ways of approaching the world, or seeing people in their lives. Literature can create a wedge in someone’s mind, and that can be an opportunity for someone to think differently and possibly to act differently in the world.

I think literature is the closest you can get to someone’s psyche. Reading a novel, you get to see a character in the whole span of their lives: the public moments, but also the private moments you can’t normally see. If we got to see all these different facets of people, we might feel more compassionate toward them than we do toward the limited versions we get to see in passing.

You also touch on the power of art in moving through grief: two of the characters take up writing or sculpture after losing their parents. Can you say more about how creative practice helps them in navigating these losses? The main character studied Tamil in college. After her mother dies, she begins translating as if it’s a road to salvation, as if the manuscript is helping her climb out of her grief. For her, the act of translation is like an act of resuscitation, bringing these young women back from anonymity. 

The character’s childhood friend Sal has also just lost her parents, and she uses art as a vehicle of social change and social justice. She has all this pain, anger, and grief; what is she going to make of it? Her instinct is to use these feelings as a way to create something larger that might speak to others.

I think, in some ways, art is this weird transformative vortex where you put your anger, grief, sadness, happiness, everything, and through this alchemy machine, you’re able to mold these feelings into something else. Art can be a way to channel grief and reach other people in the process. It’s at once an act of reaching out and an act of recognition: I see your grief, I hear it, I feel it. Reaching out to other people can be a way to rescue yourself, too.

One of the questions that the main character wrestles with is whether the women in the manuscript want to be resuscitated or brought into the English language. How do you examine the ethics of translation, particularly the ethics of sharing a story that isn’t your own? This is a tricky line for her, because by bringing these young women into English, she’s broadening their audience so more people can read about them. But the text itself is a very anticolonial text, and the women are specifically pushing against the British Empire and its influence on Indian society. So it does feel like this monstrous thing: these young women might not want to be in English, but at the same time, now their message has a broader audience.

I think this gets to the moral question of translation. Sometimes, a text might not be meant for a larger audience. Maybe it’s not meant to be read by everyone. And maybe there’s certain knowledge in a text that is not meant to be shared. By sharing this knowledge, there’s a possibility that it will be taken and used and commercialized.. So there is a strange trade-off in translation.

How do these questions impact how you think about your audience? I try to be aware of the fact that the English language has so much power. Only three percent of literature from other languages gets translated into English. I am writing in English, and that’s probably the language I will continue to write in. I wanted the book to wrestle with the currency of the English language. What does it mean to be writing in this language of power?

The main character is translating a manuscript from Tamil, and the medical students draw from Tamil texts in crafting their notion of radical compassion. Can you share more about how Tamil literature influences your work? When we think of the classical languages of South Asia, we tend to talk about Sanskrit, but we don’t often talk about Tamil. Many of the ancient Sanskrit texts are about gods, but Tamil texts are often about people: people who are lovesick and go through all the stages of love and heartbreak. So I was very interested in thinking about the lives of everyday people, using these Tamil texts as a launching point.

In ancient Tamil literature, there are the Five Great Epics, and two are by Tamil Buddhist writers. One of these epics, the Manimekalai, is about a Tamil Buddhist nun. She was a fiercely independent woman, and she was really influential in how I envisioned the young women in the manuscript. The young women draw from the ancient texts, but they’re also building from them and taking them into their present moment. In writing this book, I was reaching back into ancient Tamil Buddhist texts and bringing them into the present.

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