In 1974, scholar Roger Jackson attended a lecture on karma and rebirth at the Library of Tibetan Works and Archives in Dharamsala. At one point, the teacher, the Venerable Geshe Ngawang Dhargyey, shared a story about two brothers who were reborn as fish as a result of their misdeeds toward each other. After the talk, Jackson approached the translator to ask about the story of the fish, inquiring whether it was meant to be taken symbolically. When the translator responded that it was intended to be taken literally, Jackson was stumped—and intrigued.

“As someone raised in the West with a somewhat skeptical, humanistic, scientifically informed worldview, this did not make sense to me,” he shared with Tricycle editor-in-chief James Shaheen on a recent episode of Tricycle Talks. “Yet it was clearly a central and seminal claim for these Buddhist teachers. And so I took it as a kind of koan, and over the years I’ve worked to try to understand it.”

In his new book, Rebirth: A Guide to Mind, Karma, and Cosmos in the Buddhist World, Jackson offers the first complete overview of Buddhist understandings of rebirth. In particular, he wrestles with some of the major questions surrounding rebirth: How can you be reborn without having a self? What is it that is actually reborn, and how? And can you be a Buddhist without believing in rebirth?

On Tricycle Talks, James Shaheen sat down with Jackson to discuss the practicalities of how and where one can be reborn, how understandings of rebirth have evolved over time, and how we can engage meaningfully with the concept of rebirth today. Read excerpts from their conversation below, and listen to the whole episode here.

On the Six Realms Where One Can Be Reborn:

Traditionally, there are six realms where you can be reborn. At the bottom, there is the hell realm, which is often subdivided into many different hells. There are hot hells and cold hells, as well as occasional hells. There is a vast range of different hells that we might end up in, largely, though not exclusively, on the basis of violence committed in a particular lifetime. If you go to temples in Thailand and Sri Lanka, you’ll see wall paintings that depict the miseries of the hells, and you can see that there’s a wide range of things human beings do to end up in the hell realms.

Slightly higher up, there is the realm of hungry ghosts or unquiet spirits. This realm is connected with Indian ideas of what happens to those we know and love after they die, and it’s more closely linked to the human realm. For the most part, we don’t have knowledge of the hell realms unless we have some kind of psychic ability. But the hungry ghost realm we occasionally interact with. We don’t see them much, but there are certain times of year when we’re more likely to encounter them, and in many Buddhist traditions we leave offerings for them.

Above the hungry ghost realm, there is the animal realm. From the Buddhist standpoint, the lives of most animals are, in Hobbes’s terms, nasty, brutish, and short. They live in fear, and they constantly need to find food, to reproduce, and so forth. It’s not a good existence, even if you’re the president’s dog.

Then comes the human realm, which is not the highest in this pyramid, but it is the realm that is considered most conducive to actual spiritual progress because it’s in the human realm that we have just the right mixture of pleasure and pain. We have intelligence. We are able to actually understand our condition. And if we’re not too miserable, we can actually do something about it.

Above that, there is the asura or titan realm, which is a realm of jealous, powerful, violent gods. And at the top, there are a variety of different heavens inhabited by gods and goddesses of various types who have very long, blissful lives that are not in fact outside of samsara.

It’s entirely possible within this whole scheme to be one of the highest of the gods in one of the higher heavens and still end up down in a hell realm in your next birth because some particular karma comes up for you at the time of death. It’s a little bit like a Ferris wheel—you’re up one moment, and before you know it, boom, you’re at the bottom. Complacency is not an option.

On Whether One Can Be a Buddhist without Believing in Rebirth:

In the end, I don’t honestly know whether rebirth is real. I suppose this is my version of Buddhist agnosticism. Given my own skepticism about traditional arguments and perhaps traditional depictions, it seems to me that it’s quite possible to be Buddhist in a tentative way. Now, that goes against the grain of what many people think religion is all about, which is commitment and faith. It may be that this is a very pale version of Buddhism. But I think that many people in the modern world are defining themselves religiously in somewhat similar ways. This first came to me many years ago when I first discovered that I just couldn’t buy the traditional arguments for rebirth, particularly those of the seventh-century Indian philosopher Dharmakirti. I thought that if I couldn’t believe these central doctrines, I might as well be honest and just ditch the whole thing. This was after about ten years of Buddhist practice, and what I realized at that point was that I had become Buddhist in almost every other way: culturally, ritually, the way I thought about the world. I believed in the value of meditation, compassion, and examining the mind. I believed in the reality of emptiness being the nature of things. There was so much there that was so rich and that I had become part of that I just thought, “Well, how much does it matter whether I accept X doctrine?”

Granted, there are more and less crucial doctrines to a religion, but religious scholars often point out that being of a particular religion is not just a matter of adhering to certain doctrines. It’s a much larger gestalt, if you will, or an aesthetic that you participate in made up of ideas, practices, rituals, memories, conversations, arguments, and so forth. Broadly speaking, that’s what it means to be religious, and literal acceptance of a particular doctrine plays less of a part.

On the End of the World and the Beginning of Time:

I close the book with a passage from the Rohatissa Sutta, in which the Buddha recounts a previous life as a seer named Rohatissa. Rohatissa was able to travel through the sky and wished to find the ends of the earth. Though he traveled for a hundred years as fast as the wind, he died along the way without having reached the world’s end. In the sutta, the Buddha explains that there is no “end” to the geographic world, and instead we should be seeking the place “where one is not born, does not grow old and die, does not pass away and get reborn.” That end of the world can only be found “in this fathom-long body.” The Buddha then proclaims, “The wise one, the world-knower, who has reached the world’s end and lived the spiritual life, having known the world’s end, at peace, does not desire this world or another.” I think the Buddha is making a kind of reflexive move, saying that we may want to find out where the end of the world is, or the beginning or end of time, but that’s not the point. The place where the world begins, the place where the world ends, the place where it finds its limits is actually within you. Within your own fathom-long body is where all of this arises and all of this ceases. And if you’re going to find an end to the world, in some sense, this is where you find it: within yourself.

♦

The post Do You Have to Believe in Rebirth to Be Buddhist? appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

Although most Buddhists in premodern Buddhist cultures accepted, and sometimes defended, the traditional Buddhist karmic eschatology, it is evident that since Asian Buddhists began to take account of modernity and Western Buddhists to take account of Asian traditions, those Buddhists that have bothered to talk about rebirth at all (and many have not), have typically done so by adopting one or the other of the four possible approaches to rebirth outlined below.

(1) Among literalists—who accept traditional descriptions of the karma-rebirth cosmology and arguments for it either unquestioningly or on the basis of their own analysis—the most common constituency is Asian Buddhists, whether in Asia or the West. These would include many traditionally trained Theravada monks and Tibetan lamas, with the latter category including such above-mentioned figures above as Sakya Trizin, Dudjom Rinpoche, Lama Zopa Rinpoche, and Kalu Rinpoche. Many of these teachers’ Western disciples have adopted a literalist idea of rebirth, as well, though they do not often write about their views, and what they do write is sometimes difficult to find outside of small Buddhist tracts and magazines.

(2) Neo-traditionalists—who seek to justify traditional cosmology and metaphysics in more “up-to-date” terms—comprise a large and diverse group. Among them, we might count Robert Thurman, who has argued for the truth and importance of the classical notion of rebirth but reframed it in evolutionary terms; B. Alan Wallace, who has argued on the basis of quantum physics that the mind is a more prominent factor in the cosmos than materialist science will allow, and, in the spirit of William James, that first-person experience is more reliable as a source of knowledge than philosophers will admit; Martin Willson, who finds rational arguments for rebirth unpersuasive but regards several types of empirical or experiential evidence as very promising; and the Fourteenth Dalai Lama, who accepts many of the premises and conclusions of Dharmakirti’s arguments, but limits their true applicability to the very subtlest level of the operations of mind and body, conceding that ordinary consciousness may indeed be impossible without neural activity.

(3) Modernists, who are uncertain about the literal truth of the traditional cosmology and metaphysics and generally unpersuaded by arguments for it, seek in various ways to maintain the language and imagery of karma, rebirth, and the realms of samsara—but recast in symbolic, psychological, or existential terms that are more amenable to modern sensibilities. Stephen Batchelor, with his “existential” interpretation of Buddhism, is the most prominent Western exponent of such an approach, but there are many others, as well. Alan Watts, for example, understood claims about past and future lives as a way of describing the multiple social roles we adopt in our present life. Trungpa Rinpoche seems (at times, at least) to have favored a largely psychological explanation of the six realms of rebirth and traditional ideas about death. David Loy recasts notions of rebirth within a new cosmological myth that effectively removes them from the traditional individual-survival framework. Richard Hayes regards rebirth as, at best, a useful fiction.

(4) Like those in the other groups, secularists vary in their motives and arguments, but are in accord that rebirth just doesn’t matter very much. Even if it was taught by the Buddha and his followers over the past two millennia, it is actually superfluous to the real meaning of the dharma, today as in pre-BCE. India: as a way to understand reality and live wisely, compassionately, and meaningfully within our present lives and in the common world we share. Thus, writers like Owen Flanagan, Robert Wright, and Jay Garfield deliberately put rebirth in abeyance when attempting to engage Buddhism with modern philosophy or psychology. Engaged Buddhists either reject the idea outright, as B. R. Ambedkar did, or largely ignore it, like Thich Nhat Hanh and many others. And, for the many modern people who do not identify as Buddhist but wish to draw on Buddhist insights and meditation techniques for specific purposes in their daily lives, rebirth is irrelevant at best, a distraction at worst, and in any case hardly worth worrying about.

These categories must be taken with many grains of salt: the lines between one and the other are not always sharp, such that, for instance, the difference between literalism and neo-traditionalism is not always clear, nor that between modernism and secularism. By the same token, many of the thinkers discussed here are too complex to assign solely to one category. Thus, in various contexts, the Fourteenth Dalai Lama may be read as a literalist, a neo-traditionalist, or a modernist—and he even has propounded a secular ethics that might align him with the fourth camp. Batchelor and Hayes may be classified as modernists but show strong secularist tendencies; indeed Batchelor, for his part, has most recently described his as a secular Buddhism, even though he presents Buddhist doctrines, including rebirth, symbolically and existentially, as a modernist would. And a figure like Thich Nhat Hanh, who largely eschews discussion of rebirth, hence appears “secularist,” clearly has both traditional and modern elements at work in his public ministry—and perhaps in his private convictions as well.

Literalism as Radical Cultural Critique

It might be argued that the very effort to think about Buddhism vis à vis modernity that generates these four categories is itself open to criticism. Most of the thinkers we have surveyed attempt in one way or another to align traditional Buddhist cosmology and metaphysics with modern Western ideas and practices, whether simply to make it comprehensible, to defend it, to reject it, or to reinterpret it along less traditionally “religious” lines. One might suggest, though, that such efforts stem from a failure to recognize that traditional Buddhism is in fact almost entirely incommensurable with modern science, psychology, and aesthetics. This is the stance taken by Donald Lopez in his analysis of “the Scientific Buddha”—the Buddha imagined by moderns as perfectly consonant in his life and teachings with the scientific perspective and procedures developed in the past several centuries in the West.

Lopez finds that such a Buddha never existed, and to posit him is to do serious violence to the way Buddhists have traditionally understood and lived in the world. According to Lopez, the Buddha and the tradition he founded are in most ways incompatible with modern, Western ideas and values, and must be acknowledged as such. Indeed, says Lopez, The Old Buddha, not the Scientific Buddha, presented a radical challenge to the way we see the world, both the world that was seen two millennia ago and the world that is seen today. What  he taught is not different, it is not an alternative, it is the opposite. That the path we think will lead us to happiness instead leads to sorrow. That what we believe is true is instead false. That what we imagine to be real is unreal. A certain value lies in remembering that challenge from time to time.

Lopez says, in effect: don’t try to align Buddhism with science, psychology, or contemporary philosophy, don’t try to justify it, don’t try to reimagine it; rather, understand it as a radical critique of modernity and its complacencies. Perhaps, then, this is a fifth approach: literalism as radical cultural critique.

Lopez’s approach is a demanding one, for it forces modern Buddhists to hold in mind opposing ways of understanding the world, an exercise in “negative capability” only sustainable by a few.

The vast majority, I expect, will opt for one of the four approaches to rebirth outlined above, or some combination of them. Each of them, I believe, has a role to play in the ongoing colloquy among Buddhists as to how the tradition ought to be imagined and enacted in the modern world: literalists remind us of the classical Buddhist outlook, so different from our own; neo-traditionalists provide ways to argue for the traditional cosmology and metaphysics, or something akin to it; modernists either suspend or reject the classical paradigm, but find new, nonmetaphysical ways of making it meaningful; while secularists raise vital questions about just how much of tradition can be jettisoned in the process of finding a place for Buddhism in our disenchanted world.

Buddhist Agnosticism

My own view—certainly debatable—is that one or another form of modernism best points the way forward. I am particularly drawn to the various forms of “Buddhist agnosticism” that have been articulated in recent decades. The term was coined by Stephen Batchelor, but may appropriately be applied to any thinker who finds traditional rational, empirical, or faith-based arguments in favor of rebirth problematic but does not reject the idea outright, admitting that—with our present limitations—we simply do not know whether past and future lives are real. One interesting agnostic argument comes from an unexpected source, the late Tibetan lama Lati Rimpoche, who in a 1986 conversation with Buddhist scholar Richard Hayes suggested that Westerners uncertain about karma and rebirth (which Rimpoche concedes are “beyond absolute proof”) should remain open to the possibility that the traditional cosmology and metaphysics are true, and in any case behave as if they were true by living ethically and compassionately. In that way, they will generate happiness for themselves and others in this life, and if there are future lives, they will be happy ones; conversely, if they behave negatively, they will bring misery to themselves and others in this life, and face a sorrowful rebirth, if rebirths there are. As Hayes rightly notes, this argument (which appears in Indian Buddhist arguments as well) is akin to Pascal’s famous “wager” regarding the existence of God and the reality of final judgment. Leaving aside the question whether so tentative an acceptance of religious claims might itself be problematic in the eyes of God or amidst the subtleties of karma, we may agree with Hayes that Rimpoche seems to place these doctrines in a mythical space, as opposed to a historical or scientific framework. Access to this mythical space can be gained, not by logical proof or through a methodical empirical investigation of the sensible world, but by exercising one’s imagination and then having the courage of one’s imaginings.

For Hayes, reading traditional cosmology and metaphysics as myth—as “fictional”—allows modern people to imagine ways of living quite different from their own, not unlike a good novel; to the degree that a novel or other work of art may widen our perspective and ennoble our lives, to the same degree engaging with the traditional Buddhist imaginary allows modern Buddhists to enter more meaningfully into the streams of Buddhist life and provide meaning within their own.

Along similar lines, Batchelor opts for a “middle way” agnosticism in which one “does not have either to assert [rebirth] dogmatically or deny it; one neither has to adopt the literal versions presented by tradition nor fall into the other extreme of believing that death is the final annihilation.” This, he asserts, does not mire us in indecision. Rather, it allows us, as in Zen, to confront with ruthless honesty “the Great Matter of Life and Death,” and “is a powerful catalyst for action, since in shifting concern away from a hypothetical future life, to the dilemmas of the present, it demands…a compassion-centered ethic” that will bring joy to our lives and the lives of others. In his writings, Batchelor seems ambivalent about entertaining traditional cosmology and metaphysics even at the symbolic level; he often implies that we simply ought to get beyond these outmoded conceptions. Recall, however, that at the conclusion of a debate with Thurman hosted by Tricycle in 1997, he says that if he were to utilize the traditional Buddhist vision, “I would try to behave as if there were infinite lifetimes in which I would be committed to saving beings.”

As-If Agnosticism

I myself would argue without ambivalence for what I call “As-If Agnosticism.” My stance is agnostic because, like Hayes and Batchelor (and many others), I do not find traditional descriptions of karma and rebirth literally credible, nor am I fully persuaded by arguments in their favor, whether rational, empirical, or faith-based; on the other hand, I cannot rule out the possibility that such descriptions (or something akin to them) may in fact be true. The universe, after all, is surpassingly strange. In the spirit of Wallace Stevens’s famous statement that “we believe without belief, beyond belief,” I propose that we live as if such descriptions were true.

I am not suggesting we simply take up wishful thinking: if only there were past and future lives, if only karma works the ways tradition says it does, if only glorious and perfect buddhahood awaited us all at the end of the rainbow. Maybe they do, maybe they don’t. But as Buddhists have argued for millennia, Western humanists have claimed for centuries, and scientists have recently begun to recognize, the world is actually built far more on our ideas, aspirations, and speculations—the As-If—than we suppose, and the solid foundations we presume to lie beneath us—the “As-Is”—are much more difficult to find than we assume. It’s not, therefore, that by living as if certain doctrines were true we really are in flight from some bedrock, objective reality, because that reality—though it certainly imposes limitations on us, most notably at the time of death—turns out to be far more a matter of convention and far less “just the way things are” than we had thought. Freed from the illusion of perfect objectivity, therefore, why not think and live as if Buddhism were true? In doing so, we empower ourselves to enter, as fully as is possible in a skeptical age, into the ongoing, ever-changing life of the dharma, adopting Buddhist ideals, telling Buddhist stories, articulating Buddhist doctrines, performing Buddhist rituals, and embodying Buddhist ethics in ways that make meaning for ourselves, provide a measure of comfort to others, and perhaps contribute in some small way to the betterment of the imperfect and imperiled world in which we all live.

Let the final word belong not to me, however, but to the Buddha, who in the Rohitassa Sutta (Discourse about Rohitassa) recounts a previous life as a seer named Rohatissa, “possessing magical potency, able to travel through the sky…[with] speed like that of a light arrow easily shot by a firm-bowed archer.” Conceiving the wish to find the ends of the earth, he traveled for a hundred years as fast as the wind, yet “died along the way without having reached the end of the world.” There is no “end” to the geographic world, explains the Buddha, but that is not, in any case, the end-of-the-world we should be seeking. Rather, we must seek the place “where one is not born, does not grow old and die, does not pass away and get reborn.” And where is the end of the world in this deeper sense—nirvaṇa—to be found? “It is,” he says, “in this fathom-long body endowed with perception and mind that I proclaim (1) the world, (2) the origin of the world, (3) the cessation of the world, and (4) the way leading to the cessation of the world.” As a result, 

“…the wise one, the world-knower, who has reached the world’s end and lived the spiritual life, having known the world’s end, at peace, does not desire this world or another.”

From Rebirth: A Guide to Mind, Karma, and Cosmos in the Buddhist World by Roger R. Jackson © 2022 by Roger R. Jackson. Reprinted in arrangement with Shambhala Publications, Inc. Boulder, CO. www.shambhala.com

♦

Watch Roger Jackson in conversation with Jay Garfield on the topic of rebirth from a Live@Tricycle event series called “Secularizing Buddhism.”

The post A Case for ‘As-If Agnosticism’ as an Approach to Rebirth   appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

Do you have to believe in rebirth to be a Buddhist? Roger Jackson, emeritus professor of Asian studies and religion at Carleton College and author of Is Enlightenment Possible? Dharmakirti and Rgyal Tshab Rje on Knowledge, Rebirth, No-Self and Liberation, explored the question with Tibetan Buddhist scholar Jay Garfield in a recent discussion on modern Buddhism. The discussion was part of a recent Live@Tricycle event series around the new anthology Secularizing Buddhism: New Perspectives on a Dynamic Tradition.

To answer the question, Jackson suggests that what you practice may be more important than what you believe. He categorizes belief in rebirth as “a matter of working within what I would call a particular aesthetic, a Buddhist aesthetic, in which many of these, if you will, metaphysical or cosmological questions are either shunted aside or put in suspension, and you participate in the life of the tradition, uncertain about certain aspects of it.” 

For Jackson, the question, “do you have to believe in rebirth to be a Buddhist?” is “a good one,” but not “the essential” one. Rather, “the glue that’s held [him] together as a Buddhist has been the doctrine of emptiness.” And it’s that very “glue” that he uses to reconcile the doctrine of no-self with that of rebirth—a compatibility that was questioned in this recent discussion. In the process, Jackson shows why, despite the concepts of no-self and emptiness, Buddhism is not nihilistic. 

***

There are many presentations of [no-self versus reincarnation] in early Buddhist tradition, but in some ways, the classic presentation of it is by Nagarjuna, the great philosopher of the Madhyamaka school and great philosopher of emptiness. In the 18th verse of the 24th chapter of his fundamental stances on the middle way (a verse I’ve heard His Holiness the Dalai Lama discourse on for two hours at a time), he makes an equation between emptiness and dependent origination. 

Dependent origination is another way of talking about how causes and conditions bring about events in the world and it’s all impermanent. In the context of that chapter, Nagarjuna’s opponent says if everything is empty—and Nagarjuna has spent 23 chapters showing this is empty, that is empty, time is empty, motion is empty, causation is empty, to the point of seeming utterly nihilistic—then basic items of the Buddhist path and cosmology are empty too, and they’re annihilated. Then Nagarjuna says, you’ve totally misunderstood what I’m doing. I’m talking from the ultimate standpoint. 

From the ultimate standpoint, there is no substantially existent causation or time or motion, or Buddha for that matter. But, in fact, conventionally all these things are reasonable and exist. And in fact, in one of the great jujitsu moves in Indian philosophical history, he says it’s not only that emptiness does not annihilate rebirth and the path and Buddhahood and arhatship. It’s that if things were not empty, none of this could actually be the case because the world is a changing, shifting, impermanent world. Dependent arising is simply the term that describes that, and things cannot dependently arise if they are not empty, because the opposite of being empty is being permanent, independent, and partless. It’s a brilliant move.

I would say that emptiness does, as Nagarjuna brilliantly argues, establish the validity of the conventional world, but what the conventional world actually consists of—whether there’s rebirth or not, whether the sky is blue, whether there’s Mount Meru—all these are matters for conventional philosophical debate. 

But the key thing is the harmony between dependent arising and emptiness, such that to say things are empty is to say that they arise dependently. To say that they arise dependently is to say that they are empty. This is a point that Nagarjuna makes, Tsongkhapa in the Tibetan tradition has made very powerfully, and His Holiness the Dalai Lama makes repeatedly. It’s a key to showing that the doctrines of emptiness and no-self are not nihilistic. 

♦

Click here to watch the full discussion with Roger Jackson and Jay Garfield, part of Secularizing Buddhism—a week-long conversation series with Tricycle and Shambhala Publications celebrating the launch of the new anthology, Secularizing Buddhism: New Perspectives on a Dynamic Tradition. 

The post Why the Doctrine of No-Self Is Not Nihilistic appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

We have been wandering since beginningless time in these
samsaric worlds in which every being, without exception, has had
relations of affection, enmity and indifference with every other
being. Everyone has been everyone else’s father and mother.
–Patrul Rinpoche (1808–1887)

In the ambulance, lurching bumper to bumper down York Avenue toward the emergency room, my 94-year-old mother changed her mind.

“I wanted to die. I’ve been telling everyone.” From the gurney, she craned her neck to look up at me, jouncing beside her in the back of the van. “But here I am strapped to this contraption—” Between blasts of the siren, she wheezed. “All I can think is: I want to live!”

The ER reeked of urine, vomit, and antiseptic. Gurneys lined the corridors, one jammed up against the next; officers from the NYPD lounged by the entrance, chatting up the techs. Call bells and IVs beeped. Doctors and nurses hunched over computers at their stations or rushed back and forth past patients calling from their cubicles. Deluged by addicts who’d overdosed, by car crash and stabbing victims, none of the staff paid attention to my mother, despite her age and her pneumonia.

My mother arrived sporting a T-shirt proclaiming in bold aqua: “Nancy at Ninety.” We’d all worn them at her birthday celebration four years earlier. That was her unique hospital attire. Her style had always been her own creation. As a child, she’d insisted on wearing white gloves when she went with her nanny to play in Central Park. Long after she’d stopped riding horses, she wore her old jodhpurs when she chaired meetings at the League of Women Voters or painted in a studio in SoHo. Even in her eighties, she complemented a silk chemise with pants tailored to look exactly like those jodhpurs. In chemise and jodhpurs, she orchestrated her signature dinner parties—small gatherings of eight or nine friends—which she called “my theater.”

My mother wore her T-shirt instead of her green hospital gown throughout her two-day stay in the ER. No matter how I wrangled on her behalf, no beds were available, and neither were any nurses. She voiced her outrage: “Why isn’t anyone attending to me?” She spoke with the entitlement of someone who had been born to wealth and had long since mostly lost it. Her demand for immediate service touched a raw nerve, especially since I was trying very hard to help out. I thought, but didn’t say: No, Mum, you’re not the center of the universe. Just an ordinary human, suffering like the rest of us.

After a half day’s wait, she was given a bed in a curtained space all her own instead of a gurney in the corridor. Although she was squeezed into a shared cubicle that was intended for a single patient, my mother was lucky to have even that. But for her, the cubicle—with its sheet separating her bed from that of a groaning stranger from Bangladesh—felt like an indignity and became the stage set for high drama.

The “villain,” my mom’s cubicle-mate on the other side of the curtain, was an intense little man sporting a dyed carrot-colored Mohawk. With a stream of Bengali invectives, he screamed for morphine as he passed kidney stones. Each time he thrashed in pain, he flung out an arm or leg, bashing into the curtain that served as a makeshift wall separating his half of the cubicle from my mother’s. And with each seeming invasion of her half, she shouted, “Get that crazy man away from my bed!”

The racket in the ER increased as the night went on. All along the corridor, patients, packed end to end on gurneys, pleaded to be housed in cubicles, and those like my mother, assigned to cubicles, begged to be sent upstairs to rooms in the hospital. In the corridor right outside my mother’s cubicle, three hefty NYPD officers closed in on a screaming woman as she jumped off her gurney. Heading toward the street, she pulled on the rubber tube feeding her oxygen and hollered, “Lemme outta here!”

Despite ongoing pleas from me, no nurse or aide took time to replace my mother’s tee with a hospital gown, to wheel her to the bathroom, or at the very least to change her diaper. “I’m utterly wet,” my mom told me. After six hours of asking politely for some help, I wrote a nasty note to the nurse, but then crumpled it up and stomped down the corridor to track down an adult diaper.

I remembered my first clumsy efforts to fasten Caitlin’s diapers. To be struggling with my mother’s 25 years later felt topsy-turvy.

“Mum, I’m doing it,” I tried to reassure her. Gingerly, I pulled back the covers and saw her distended belly, long slim legs. I forced myself to look at her frail pelvis swaddled in the drenched diaper. This is my mother. My tears welled up. Biting my lip, I pulled the covers over her again.

My elegant mum. I imagined her in her cozy living room, surrounded by her vibrant oils painted over many years. She is presiding at one of her dinner parties. With impeccable posture, she tilts her head back in a laugh and crosses one leg over the other to show off a shapely calf. “I can’t stand conversations about ordinary minutiae,” she’d often told me. “At my dinners, I only invite people with something original to say. And I rarely invite people who know each other,” she’d drive home her point, “so there are no boring stories about children and grandchildren.” Like me, I supposed, or my daughter, Caitlin.

Returning to my mother here and now, I pulled back the covers once more. As I tried to roll her on her side, my fingers trembled and slipped. Bumbling, I strained to pull off the sopping diaper, balled it up, and hurled it onto the floor. I strove to turn her, to heave her up without hurting her. But her body resisted my pushes and pulls, and she began to whimper. Stumbling in the cramped space, I finally lifted her buttocks and slid the fresh diaper underneath. I stretched the sticky fasteners all crooked, but somehow they held the diaper on. I remembered my first clumsy efforts to fasten Caitlin’s diapers. To be struggling with my mother’s 25 years later felt topsy-turvy.

As the evening went on, it became increasingly clear that a bed would not free up in the hospital until the next day, if then. “You’re not at the top of the list,” a nurse let us know. “There’s another woman even older than you who’s been waiting 30 hours here in the ER. She has pneumonia too, and she’s a hundred and four.”

I dimmed the lights and, scrunched between two open folding chairs, settled in for the night. Now I followed my breath in and out—not an approach I would suggest to my mother. A third-generation German Jew, my mother was adamantly secular. She worried that Buddhism, which I had practiced for 40 years, might be dangerous, maybe even a cult.

Her IV antibiotics on drip, oxygen clipped to her nostrils, my mother clutched her thin blanket, trying to cover her bare arms. I laid her winter coat over the blanket for added warmth, and she slept. I slept too, on and off, on my two chairs with my own coat as my blanket. It felt a bit like camping out, and I appreciated that—making do as best I could with whatever was available. It’s how I like to live. My mom, absolutely not a camper.

After midnight, the lights suddenly blazed and a  handsome young resident strode into our cubicle. Green scrubs, designer haircut, silver cuff on the helix of one ear. He looked like he’d been sent from Central Casting. “How are you doing?” A disarming smile.

“I wouldn’t say I was comfortable,” said my mother, with a raised brow.

The resident dragged a stool right up close to the head of her bed.

Thrilled at the entrance of this new player, my mother struggled to sit up. In her Nancy at Ninety T-shirt, she lengthened her neck and tilted her head back in a characteristic pose, graciously welcoming. “Do make yourself comfortable,” she gestured, with the IV tube swinging. She leaned confidentially toward the young resident. “What is it you would like to discuss?”

Then she turned to me. “Could you roll up my bed so I’m more upright?”

Struggling past the blue IV tubes, the clear line for oxygen, I managed to crank up the bed a few inches.

“My pillow,” said my mother, and the doc reached to adjust that. He stood up, his clipboard in hand, and in a courteous tone rivaling hers began, “There are a few questions I need to ask you.” He cleared his throat. “It’s not that we’re expecting that you won’t be coming out of this hospital soon, but just in case . . . we do need to make sure that you have an advance care directive—”

“Of course,” she broke in, “I’ve set everything up, a health care proxy, all of it. . . . I’ve been fully ready for a long time; it’s really what I’ve wanted. To die, that is. Just think of all the expense and trouble I’m causing everyone.”

“Oh Mum, stop!”

The young doctor continued, “So we’re just going to ask you these questions because it’s part of the required admission process. In fact, we can’t admit you to the hospital proper until . . .”

It’s well past midnight, I thought, paltry chance we’ll be seeing that admission to the realms upstairs any time soon.

“So in the unlikely case that you had a stroke or a heart attack with no hope of recovery . . .” The resident looked down at his checklist. “. . . leaving you unconscious and unable to breathe without the assistance of a machine—”

“Oh, I’ve figured out all that,” my mum cut him off again. Then she directed me: “Dear, do get out my advance care statement from my wallet,” gesturing in the direction of her handbag. Several times over the past few years, my mother had shown me this miniature statement, beautifully calligraphed, then copied and reduced to create a tiny version of itself.  “A friend wrote it out,” she told the doctor. That list had been penned by Genie, my college roommate, who had befriended my mother in our sophomore year, when I’d let my mother’s many letters to me stack up unread.

My mother continued, “My young friend copied it in her exquisite hand, beautiful and perfect,” and aside to me, “just the way Genie does everything” (rekindling my old fear that Genie was a much better daughter to my mother than I).

She sure knew how to needle me. “Okay, Mum,” I snapped. I reached for her handbag, rummaged inside, yanked out the wallet, and foraged for the damned statement.

Unflappable, the young resident went on with his protocol. “Well, it’s just that we need to know if something happens, if you have a stroke or heart attack and your condition will not improve, would you allow CPR or an artificial respirator or—”

My mother waved her hand with the IV attached to her wrist. “Oh, I made that absolutely clear. If I would never again be able to enjoy friends, appreciate art, music, or conversation, how could I possibly want to be resuscitated?”

My mum. I had to hand it to her. What spunk she had, what commanding presence.

“Darling, please read the statement to the doctor.”

I adjusted myself so I could get more light from the corridor and read aloud the opening: “If I become terminally ill; if I am in a coma or have little understanding—”

“Barbara dear,” my mother interjected, “tell the doctor about the marvelous film Frontline featured about Genie and Jeff.” She explained to the doctor, “The film’s about Genie’s husband, Jeff, who had some incurable blood cancer. It’s about his death. . . .” As was her way, my mum veered into a new story.  “And of course, when Jeff was at Yale Law School, during the weekends when we were in the country, they would stay together at our apartment in New York. That’s where Jeff asked Genie to marry him.” She’d begun with tragedy and moved on to romance.

“Mum!” This time, I was the one to interrupt. “Not now!” Her dramas within dramas drove me mad. I heard my voice trembling. I handed the miniature directive to the doctor.

As he skimmed it, he kept nodding his head. “Yes, well, you do cover the essentials.” An alarm beeped shrilly from somewhere close. “Terrific that you carry it with you, and—”

Abruptly my mum silenced him again. “Tell me,” she interrupted, “Do you have a girlfriend?”

Taken aback at this breach in his doctorly script, the young resident stuttered, “Well . . . well, yes. I do.” He ran a hand through his blond hair. “A nurse on this floor, in fact.” Then he cut himself off, as if he had perhaps said too much.

“Wonderful!” she pronounced. “When all this nonsense is over…” She waved her arm, including in one sweep the corridor of sick and injured, the officers from the NYPD, her nemesis on the other side of the curtain. “You must bring her over to my apartment for a festive party and join me for dinner!”

I’ve heard it said in many dharma talks that every being, in one birth or another, has been one’s mother. Yet I am reflecting about my particular, unique, and challenging mother. On my recent visit, five years after that night in the ER, she is frail, mostly dozing as she enters her one-hundredth year. I happen on a copy of the miniature advance care statement. I sweep back to the dashing doctor, to years of tangles, conflicts, sweetness, fun. Unaccountably, my mind opens—to the fragility of life, the nearness of death. I find myself warmed by memories of my mother’s bold spirit, and the blessing of graciousness, her particular brand.

The post Cycles of Motherhood appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

The word samsara is based on a verbal root with the sense “to flow” and means the “flowing-on” of the stream of consciousness from one moment to the next and from one lifetime to another. The Buddha is recorded as saying that the origin of this process is “beyond reckoning,” or fundamentally unknowable. He offered a series of metaphors to illustrate a vast scale, such as eons as many as the grains of sand in the Ganges river bed, only to say that the process goes back even farther than that.

In samsara, beings are viewed as wandering through various realms of existence, viewed as “stations” upon which consciousness is established and then falls away each time one dies. Some of these are heavenly, while others are hellish, and one moves through them according to the quality of one’s intentions and actions. From the modern perspective this may be viewed as a good thing, as we get to live on past this lifetime, but in ancient India “flowing on” again and again was seen more as an affliction, since we consequently experience suffering again and again. “The waters of the four great oceans are small compared to the ocean of tears you have wept for loved ones lost to illness, aging, and death” is just one of many poignant images offered in the texts.

The process of rebirth is driven by delusion and desire, with “beings roaming and wandering on, hindered by ignorance and fettered by craving.” If one dies encumbered by grasping or clinging, the process will continue; but if one is able to abandon all attachment in this lifetime, then the mechanism for rebirth will no longer function. The “on-flow” of samsara ends with the “cessation” known as nirvana, wherein the influxes (asava) upon the mind of greed, hatred, and delusion are finally stopped like streams that have “dried up” (khaya).

As Buddhist teachings evolved over the first several generations, the distinction between samsara and nirvana increased. Various Abhidharma schools identified a strong division between the “conditioned” phenomena of our changing experience and the “unconditioned” phenomena that are “beyond this world.”

The Madhyamika philosopher Nagarjuna deconstructed this dichotomy, arguing that when all phenomena are regarded as empty (having no intrinsic nature since they are interdependently conditioned), the polarity of the two words collapses. In fact, in expressing the view that would come to dominate later forms of Mahayana and tantric Buddhism, Nagarjuna declared that “there is no distinction whatsoever between samsara and nirvana.” With this insight, the meanings of samsara and nirvana are turned inward to refer not to outer worlds, fallen or perfect, but to inner perspectives, deluded or awakened, on the world as it actually is.

The post What’s in a Word? Samsara appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

Imagining Your Ideal Self

You can spend the rest of your days attempting to become some imagined, perfect person, but I recommend you don’t waste your life striving to become some unattainable version of yourself. You’ll never reach the place of perfection, and that’s perfectly all right. The path to perfection will only lead to exhaustion and disappointment; meanwhile, your actual life will be passing you by. The more peaceful and practical approach is to simply be yourself at every moment, accept that this being human is a messy ordeal, and learn to be OK with getting your hands dirty. There’s no actual happiness to be found in always trying to be someone else at some future time, because the fact is, you’ll never quite get there. Why not instead, show up fully, right here, right now? Allow yourself to let go of the idea that who you are already isn’t enough, and realize this deep acceptance is the path to real freedom.

_{From A Fool’s Guide to Actual Happiness, by Mark Van Buren © 2018. Reprinted with permission of Wisdom Publications. Mark Van Buren is a Mindful Living trainer and musician. He is the owner and head instructor of Live Free Yoga Studio in River Edge, New Jersey.}

Developing Moral Resilience

In these complicated times, we have plenty of opportunities to transform moral suffering into moral resilience, what ethicist Cynda Rushton defines as “the capacity of an individual to restore their integrity in response to moral complexity, confusion, distress, or setbacks.” When we have moral resilience, we are able to stand strong in our integrity, even in the midst of moral adversity.

There is a Japanese practice called kintsukuroi, meaning “golden repair.” Kintsukuroi is the art of repairing broken pottery with powdered gold or platinum mixed with lacquer, so that the repair reflects the history of breakage. The “repaired” object mirrors the fragility and imperfection of life—and also its beauty and strength. The object returns to wholeness, to integrity.

I am not suggesting that we should seek brokenness as a way of gaining strength, although some cultures do pursue crisis in their rites of passage as a way to strengthen character and open the heart. Rather, I am proposing that the wounds and harms that arise from falling over the edge into moral suffering can have positive value under the right circumstances. Moral distress, the pain of moral injury and outrage, and even the numbness of moral apathy can be the means for the “golden repair,” for developing a greater capacity to stand firm in our integrity without being swayed by the wind.

Over my years of traveling to Japan, I have held several of these exquisitely repaired vessels in my hands. I have seen that the “golden repair” is not a hidden repair. It shows clearly the cracked and broken nature of our lives. It combines ordinary stuff and precious metals to repair the crack but not hide it. This, I believe, is how moral transformation happens and integrity opens—not by rejecting suffering but by incorporating the suffering into a stronger material, the material of goodness, so that the broken parts of our nature, our society, and our world can meet in the gold of wholeness.

_{From Standing at the Edge: Finding Freedom Where Fear and Courage Meet, by Roshi Joan Halifax, PhD © 2018. Reprinted with permission of Flatiron Books. Roshi Joan Halifax is the founder and abbot of Upaya Institute and Zen Center in Santa Fe, New Mexico.}

What Not to Give Up

For those of us who engage in rigorous spiritual practice, the journey will often be a negotiation of boundaries. The relief that Buddhist practice brings, after all, is loosening our grasp on the small self; we find that we can separate from our personal views, and this brings tremendous peace of mind. So in the beginning of practice, thrilled by the potential of separating from our ego, many of us are willing to give up large chunks of our personality or identity. And yet, the more we progress down this path, the better we get at understanding when the sacrifices being asked of us are too much, when endurance is hurting rather than helping. We become more skilled at understanding what our best self needs. Paradoxically, we learn that by establishing firm boundaries, we can be more giving and genuinely altruistic.

_{From Bow First, Ask Questions Later, by Gesshin Claire Greenwood © 2018. Reprinted with permission of Wisdom Publications. Gesshin Claire Greenwood ordained with Seido Suzuki Roshi in 2010 and received dharma transmission in 2015. She is currently a graduate student in East Asian Studies at the University of Southern California.}

Being Content with Everything

The Buddhist view of happiness might best be described as contentment. The word contentment describes a state of mind in which we are satisfied with what we have; in which we have dropped our ordinary wishes for this or that and are just focused on what we have to work with in this particular moment. When we are content, we aren’t passive or disengaged with life. We simply appreciate whatever is happening, maintaining acceptance toward all the various situations that life brings. We feel joy, appreciation, gratitude, and connection with ourselves and others. When emotions arise, they help us know ourselves better and see the areas of our personality and character that still need to develop and mature. The emotions are thus a source of information, an inspiration for spiritual growth, and a measure of our own personal development.

_{From Stop Biting the Tail You’re Chasing: Using Buddhist Mind Training to Free Yourself from Painful Emotional Patterns, by Anyen Rinpoche and Allison Choying Zangmo © 2018. Reprinted with permission of Shambhala Publications. Anyen Rinpoche is a scholar and master of Dzogchen meditation. He is the founder of the Orgyen Khamdroling Center in Denver, Colorado. Allison Choying Zangmo is a longtime student of Anyen Rinpoche’s and is his personal translator.}

The Watched Mind Brings Happiness

The restless, agitated mind,
Hard to protect, hard to control,
The sage makes straight,
As a fletcher the shaft of an arrow.

Like a fish out of water,
Thrown on dry ground,
This mind thrashes about,
Trying to escape Mara’s command.

The mind, hard to control,
Flighty—alighting where it wishes—
One does well to tame.
The disciplined mind brings happiness.

The mind, hard to see,
Subtle—alighting where it wishes—
The sage protects.
The watched mind brings happiness.

_{From The Dhammapada, translated by Gil Fronsdal © 2018. Reprinted with permission of Shambhala Publications. Gil Fronsdal is the primary teacher at Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, California.}

The Buddhist Logic of Rebirth

If we trace mental phenomena back far enough, as in the case of an individual’s life, we come to the first instant of consciousness in this life. Once we have traced its continuum to this point of beginning, we then have three options: We can either say that the first instant of consciousness in this life must come from a preceding instant of consciousness that existed in the previous life. Or we can say that this first instant of consciousness came from nowhere—it just sort of “popped up.” Or we can say that it came from a material cause. From the Buddhist point of view, the last two alternatives are deeply problematic. The Buddhist understanding is that, in terms of its continuum, consciousness or mind is beginningless. Mental phenomena are beginningless. Therefore, the person or the being—which is essentially a designation based on the continuum of the mind—is also devoid of beginning.

_{From An Introduction to Buddhism: Teachings on the Four Noble Truths, The Eight Verses on Training the Mind, and the Lamp for the Path to Enlightenment, by the Dalai Lama, translated by Geshe Thupten Jinpa © 2018. Reprinted with permission of Shambhala Publications. His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama, the spiritual head of the Tibetan people, is a Nobel Peace Prize Laureate and the author of over 100 books. Geshe Thupten Jinpa is a Buddhist scholar and the Dalai Lama’s principal English-language interpreter.}

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Buddhism is famous in the West as an “atheistic religion,” in the sense that, unlike the Abrahamic religions of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, it does not recognize a single creator deity. However, one should not assume from this that Buddhism has no gods. It has not one, but many.

In traditional Buddhist cosmology, the gods—or deva in Sanskrit, a cognate of “divinity”—are distributed among 27 heavens (svarga): six are located in the sensuous realm (kamadhatu) along the slopes, at the summit, and in the air above Mount Sumeru, the mountain at the center of the world; 17 in the meditation heavens of the realm of subtle materiality (rupadhatu); and four are in the immaterial realm (arupyadhatu), where there is no form, only consciousness. Because each of these heavens is located within samsara, the realm of rebirth, none of these heavens is a permanent abode of the gods who live there, and none of the gods is eternal.

Related: The Meaning of Nirvana in Buddhism Explained 

Rebirth as a god is based on virtuous actions performed in a previous life, and when the god’s lifespan is over, the being is reborn some place else. Thus, no god in Buddhism has the omniscience, the omnipotence, or the omnipresence of God in the Abrahamic religions. This does not mean, however, that gods have no powers. They have powers far beyond those of humans. And over the long history of Buddhism, Buddhists, including monks and nuns, have propitiated various gods for blessings and boons. A substantial part of tantric practice, for example, is devoted to inviting gods into one’s presence, making offerings to them, and then requesting the bestowal of various powers (siddhi).

What then is the status of the Buddha? Technically, he is a human, among the five other rebirth destinies (sadgati) in samsara: gods, demigods, animals, ghosts, and denizens of hell. But he is unlike any other human, both in his relation to the gods and in his physical and mental qualities.

In his penultimate lifetime, the Buddha-to-be was a god, abiding, where all future buddhas abide, in the Tushita heaven. It was from there that he surveyed the world, and chose the place of his final birth, his caste, his clan, and his parents. After his enlightenment, the Buddha spent 49 days in contemplation in the vicinity of the Bodhi Tree, concluding, the story goes, that what he had understood was too profound for others to understand, and thus futile to try to teach to anyone.

Related: Who is the Buddha? 

The most powerful of the gods, Brahma, descended from his heaven to implore the Buddha to teach, arguing that although many might not be able to understand, there were some with “little dust in their eyes” who would. This is an important moment because it makes clear that the Buddha knew something that the gods did not, and that the gods had been waiting for a new buddha to appear in the world to teach them the path to freedom from rebirth, even from rebirth in heaven. For this reason, one of the epithets of the Buddha is devatideva—“god above the gods.”

Although a human, the Buddha has a body unlike any other. It is adorned with the 32 marks of a superman (mahapurusalaksana), such as images of wheels on the palms of his hands and soles of his feet, a bump on the top of his head, 40 teeth, and a circle of hair between his eyes that emits beams of light. Some of the marks are characteristics found in animals rather than humans: webbed fingers and toes like a duck’s, arms that extend below the knees like an ape’s, and a penis that retracts into body like a horse’s. His mind knows all of his past lives and the past lives of all beings in the universe. In fact, he is omniscient (although the various Buddhist schools have different ideas about exactly what this means).

Even in the early tradition, it is said that he can live for an eon or until the end of the eon, if he is asked to do so. And in the Lotus Sutra it says that his lifespan is immeasurable. He can go anywhere in the universe. He can perform all manner of miracles.

Did he create the universe? No. Is he omniscient? Yes. Is he omnipotent? It depends on what you mean. Is he eternal? Sort of. Is he God? You decide.

[This story was first published in 2014]

The post Was Buddha God or Human? appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

Many people in the West seem to believe that practicing Buddhism simply makes one “nice” with a side of serenity. We’re usually seen as the syrupy sweet, semi-stoned sounding motherfuckers unaffected by the negative emotions that so trouble the benighted masses. We experience no feelings but kitteny-soft ones and exude a constant vanilla-scented air of peace and bliss. Anything else just ain’t Buddhism.

But I’m a Buddhist, and I’m often accused of being a loud-mouthed asshole . . . mostly because I am.

I wasn’t always like this. I was actually a bashful little kid, the sort who would walk nervously up to a new person and say “Hi, I’m Brent, do you want to be friends?” That’s about as smooth as approaching a girl at a bar and shouting: “Hey, I have a penis! Do you have somewhere I can keep it?”

When I was about 13, I decided I was done being myself—wretchedly shy, awkward, and withdrawn. I was done suffering the taunts and shoves of my more aggressive and confident classmates, scuttling around the school with my eyes down hoping not to be noticed.

To that end, I became funny in public. I’d actually always been pretty funny, but only with my similarly maladroit friends. It was hard at first, but I rapidly gained confidence when I realized I was quicker with my wit than most folks. I became a class clown; I was always ready with an inappropriate comment during a lecture or film. When people made fun of me, I made fun of them back, and I was better at it. And I soon understood that I didn’t have to wait for someone to attack me—if I attacked first, they’d go on the defensive, and I could keep them there. In an effort to protect myself, I went from class clown to class prick.

This has caused a few problems in my life generally—and my practice specifically. Although Buddhism has chilled me out and toned down some of my more prickish tendencies, I still find that I take refuge more often in humor than in the Three Jewels of the Buddha, dharma, and sangha. I’ve been using levity to hide my insecurities and weaknesses for so long that I’m finding it hard to stop. Comedy has been my impenetrable exoskeleton for almost 30 years. But now it’s a marrow-deep habit, and I’m starting to think I may need an extraction to get it out. Something more than just a shot, anyway. This isn’t as simple as getting rid of the clap.

My irony and nihilistic snark undermine most of my honest reactions before they can even fully form. My authenticity gets twisted because my inveterate, bone-breaking sarcasm always shoves its way to the forefront. Over my many years of haphazard practice, I’ve had some breakthrough insights, and I’ve acquired a few scattered pieces of wisdom. And yet I constantly find myself being disingenuous with other people out of knee-jerk, smart-ass self-defense. Even as my practice tries to open me up, I’m still shielding myself against the chances of being exposed as that scared little boy. There’s not really much of that kid still in me besides some general anxiety and twitchiness. But by cutting down on myself and others I can pretty much guarantee that no one will get to the bottom of me, least of all me.

With my nearest and dearest, I’m pretty open and honest. But there are still nervous tics. I’ll occasionally be glib when I should be attentive, or vulgar when I should be considerate. It’s crushing when someone close to me walks away uncomfortably puzzled by our conversation knowing that I could (and should) have prevented it. But instead, I had done the usual: lapsed back into self-serving sarcasm while part of my consciousness just sat there, mouth open, watching it happen against its will.

One of the finest results of meditation is the increased gap between stimulus and response. That gap before I react gives me time to notice my habitual patterns and sometimes even decide whether to stay a slave to them or break loose (when this happens, the feeling is liberating—like getting naked in public).

But this humor thing, it’s sunk deep in me, and it’s barbed. It’s taken years of practice simply to notice that it’s entwined with my rage and my fear. I’ve been host to this nasty, deceitful, internal threesome for almost three decades, and I’m only now poking my head into that fetid room and trying to pry the tangle of sweaty limbs apart.

For me, Buddhism is all about authenticity and unity. The wisdom and insight cultivated from meditation allow us to see things as they are and act in the most skillful way. All situations, no matter how similar, are fluid and require their own genuine responses. It’s not always wrong to kill. It’s not always right to be honest. There is no concrete morality or script that we must rigidly adhere to no matter what—this destroys authenticity.

As for unity, I don’t mean it in the way pie-eyed hippies do. I’m not talking about some shirtless drum-circler muttering, We’re all one, man, while he’s waiting for the mushrooms to kick in. I’m referring to the illusion of subject and object, the false dichotomy of “me” and “other” that forces isolation into our lives and assassinates our compassion and empathy. Unity brings us all together because there isn’t actually anything separating us in the first place.

My attack-dog humor is absolutely crippling to both authenticity and unity. I’ve got it on a shorter leash than ever before, but it’s still a vicious beast fiercely protecting its yard. And it may be rabid.

It’s terrifying to imagine letting go of my cynical and aggressive comedy and presenting myself totally exposed to this cruel, frightening world. But until I do that, I won’t ever learn what it means to be authentic, and I’ll certainly never be liberated. I’ll just keep grinding along, madly clutching my security blankets, and insisting that I’m keeping it real by using comedy to point out the unseen and jar the status quo.

And I do use it for those things. But because I’m gripping it so tightly, I’ve lost the ability to put it down when it’s not helpful. I’ve just contrived another way around actual reality.

What’s the point of Buddhist practice if my own actions continue to obscure what’s in front of me? Why spend all these hours meditating and trying to cultivate kindness and compassion if I’m going to allow this rusty armor to immobilize me? I certainly don’t like confronting the painful and toxic parts of myself but that’s the whole goddamn reason I do this. I started meditating in order to understand and curtail my own suffering. If I stop at understanding and do nothing to curtail, I may as well quit.

Buddhism has given me all the tools necessary for transformation, and the one I need right now is not a pair of tweezers but a giant fucking chainsaw. I’ve been too scared to pick it up because I’ve never used something so big and powerful. But now it’s time to shred, to sever, to split and cleave and sunder. It’s time to fill that big bastard with gas, run it hot, and press it to the ossified plates and scales that are paralyzing my progress. The armor has to go, and hopefully it’s not going to take some skin with it.

I don’t believe in rebirth in the traditional sense where consciousness or karma or whatever is transferred to a new life. But moment-to-moment rebirth is not only possible, it’s inevitable. I have to stop resisting and evolve toward awakening, even—especially—if that means chewing through my cherished protection. Put your foot on this thing while I yank the cord and fire it up. Then stand back. It’s gonna be a mess.

The post I Take Refuge in the Humor appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

A commonplace of Buddhist history holds that wherever the dharma goes—from Mongolia to Thailand, from Afghanistan to Vietnam—it adapts to the local scene in a spirit of accommodation. But there is another way to explain the dharma’s ability to take root in very different societies. At crucial turning points, Buddhism has arrived in the nick of time to save its hosts from cultural paralysis. A good example comes from the Tang dynasty, where for centuries Buddhism was confined to urban enclaves. Then a catastrophe, the An Lushan rebellion, forced many ordinary Chinese to rethink their fundamental values. Crisis alone, it’s important to see, wasn’t enough to generate the necessary change; the Chinese had to use new tools supplied from outside the cultural mainstream—that is, by the dharma.

An exotic import from India, Buddhism brought an entirely new architecture of consciousness, a structure of metaphors, symbols, and myths that allowed the Chinese to experience their lives in ways unavailable before. As Americans, we find ourselves today in a similar dilemma, unable to respond to epic change because our old ways of thinking just won’t budge. What happened in China could happen here: Buddhism might offer us a route out of our impasse—if we don’t domesticate it so rapidly that its transformative elements get lost because they are challenging. For the Chinese in the 8th century, the problem was their fixation on the past, but for modern Americans, the problem is the very opposite: it’s our imprisonment by the future.

To understand this imprisonment, think back to 1979. In a speech announcing his run for the presidency, Ronald Reagan invoked an idea at the heart of our way of life. He told his audience that Americans, unlike people everywhere else, live in a constant state of anticipation because they know the future “will be a great place.” In the decades following this speech, much about the United States has changed, but in 2013 a very different president, Barack Obama, still chose “Faith in America’s Future” as the theme of his second inaugural address. This continuity was no accident: for centuries, the entire Western world—but especially the United States—has believed that history is leading us to some version of a heaven on earth, an article of faith that has its sources in messianic Judaism, Christian end-time theology, and Puritan ideas about predestination. What we call the “modern era” began when preparations for Christ’s return assumed a new and revolutionary form as technological control over the whole of Creation. Progress, innovation, development, growth—these became the new Commandments. And personal salvation was reimagined as the competitive pursuit of material success.

Yet more and more of us have begun to feel that the future we were promised has failed to arrive and probably never will. Not so long ago, our prophets of the future conjured up gleaming white cities and flying cars, saucer-shaped houses under bright blue skies, and robots happy to lift the weight of our drudgery. Inequality would be a thing of the past. But now, almost everywhere we look, we can see the return of the re-pressed. Our middle class is shrinking at an alarming rate. Almost a quarter of all children in the United States are growing up in poverty, while automation threatens to eliminate the kinds of jobs that might have given them a leg up. Asia gets applauded for its explosive growth, but hundreds of millions have been left behind, a permanent underclass not so different from those that seem to be emerging in Spain, Portugal, and Greece.

Even worse than the bad news itself is our failure of imagination. It might be true that the wheels of government always move at a frustrating pace, but the problem surely goes much deeper than that. It goes to the basic architecture of our minds, the structures of meaning and feeling that our culture provides. With the New Deal now a distant memory and socialism a dirty word, we have lost the power to imagine ourselves as moving forward together. And if we lose the future as our cherished ideal, the holiest of modern holies, what could possibly replace it? For many people, its demise invites resignation and despair, or the unapologetic selfishness of the lifeboat mentality. Unless we are willing to accept this fate, we will have to find an architecture to replace the one that has already failed us. No matter how many politicians try to revive a future whose time has passed, mainstream thinking is probably not the place to look. I believe another option exists, an option from outside. The core of the new architecture we need, if we are willing to try it out, might well be the Buddhist teaching of rebirth.

But rebirth is undoubtedly the third rail of Buddhism in the West. Virtually all the great teachers we admire from Buddhist tradition—Dharmakirti, Huineng, Dogen, Tsong-khapa, and of course the Buddha himself—accepted its reality. For many of us, though, it’s a profound embarrassment, the one relic of the past that shadows a religion otherwise resonant with quantum physics, cutting-edge neuroscience, and modern rationality. Yet rebirth could be viewed as something other than a failed attempt at scientific truth. We might see it as a myth like the ones explored by Mircea Eliade, Joseph Campbell, and Karen Armstrong. These thinkers make a distinction between logos—representing rational thought and empirical facts—and mythos, which furnishes the paradigms that give raw experience the structures we need before we can start to think logically. As mythos, rebirth would surely have a place among the primal stories that, in Armstrong’s words, “reflect and shape our lives.”

Whether or not we feel ready to subscribe to the logos/mythos distinction, we should recall the prajnaparamita [perfection of wisdom] movement’s claim that no representation of reality can be unconditioned, all inclusive, or unmediated. All knowledge is mythos from this point of view—creative and only relatively true—while the ultimate reality is described as empty like the cloudless sky. When we evaluate a claim about the world, we modern people tend to ask, “Does it correspond to the facts?” But from the prajnaparamita point of view, the facts are determined by the questions we raise. Instead of searching for objectivity, we should judge beliefs by their results: What actions will follow if we think this way? Can this idea make us more aware? Will we become more compassionate, or less understanding?

We find ourselves today unable to respond to epic change because our old ways of thinking just won’t budge.

The results of the great myth of our times, the myth of the future, have become as obvious as they could be. The future, we should have learned by now, is less about getting ahead than it is about me getting ahead ofyou. Even when the aim is only to improve ourselves, we will naturally look down on everyone like the person we used to be. We will feel contempt for the unimproved because we see our old selves in the same light. But the tyranny of “better than” is the target of prajnaparamita, which insists there is nothing to attain. Nothing can be added to, or taken from, the inherent perfection of things as they are now. According to these teachings, wisdom doesn’t come when we’ve grasped the ladder’s highest rung but when, looking down on our illusions, we no longer need a ladder. In our society today, rebirth could operate as a counter-myth, reminding us that whatever we achieve—an Oscar, the Nobel Prize, a place on the Forbes Global 2000 list—our next life could take us back to square one, shoulder to shoulder with those we left behind. To desire such an outcome for ourselves while pursuing complete enlightenment is the bodhisattva’s way.

In Zen, the tradition I know best, perhaps the most important text that deals with rebirth is the koan called “Hyakujo’s Fox.” With its roots in Yogacara psychology, which emphasizes the unconscious, Zen has a soft spot for stories like this, saturated with Chinese magic and myth. The text explains that whenever Hyakujo (Chin., Baizhang) prepares to deliver a dharma talk, an unknown old man enters the teaching hall at the end of the long queue of monks, taking his seat in the back and listening to the discourse unobtrusively. Then, as quietly as he arrives, he simply disappears.

Time after time when Hyakujo looks down from the rostrum he can see the old man entering and sneaking off, but one day the master intercepts the stranger before he gets away.

Blocking his escape route, Hyakujo asks, “Who is this standing before me?”

“I am not really a human being,” the old man replies. “I’m actually a fox in human form, and a fox I have been for my last 500 lives.” The fox explains that long ago, in an age presided over by a prior buddha, he had been the celebrated abbot of a temple on the very site of Hyakujo’s present monastery. One day a student had approached him to ask if an enlightened person would still remain subject to the karmic law of cause and effect or if he would get free once and for all. Confidently, the abbot declared, “He gets free.” But as it turned out, this answer was wrong and retribution followed. “Since then,” the old man laments to Hyakujo, “I have been doomed to undergo 500 rebirths as a fox. I beg you to tell me something that will set me free.”

When we look carefully at the fox, we can recognize a version of ourselves. If we’re Buddhists, we probably want the ultimate in wonderful futures—complete enlightenment, maybe even buddhahood—and reaching that condition means getting away scot-free from all kinds of suffering. But more often than we might care to admit, the enlightenment we seek is an enlightenment-for-me, a liberation that leaves everybody else still trapped on the wheel of birth and death, a wheel our own actions have helped to turn. China at the end of the Tang dynasty and America today are unalike in countless ways, but the abbot’s wish to leave it all behind is much the same as ours. Our modern worldly equivalent might be an Ivy League degree, a gilt-edge career, an expensive home and vacations in Chiang Mai—all meant to signal that we never again will have to scrimp to make the rent, or ride the bus because we can’t afford a car, or mollify an angry boss. “I’ve escaped,” our success will proclaim. “I’ve made it to the future of my dreams.” Eight centuries after the koan was composed, it can take us by surprise because students of Zen still get caught in the trap the story sets for them.

Ironically, the fox’s wish to escape locks him into a cycle of rebirths, a hell of repetition not so different from the one in which we find ourselves. Our consumerism heaps up mountains of debt, yet we continue to borrow and to spend, consciously aware it’s unsustainable but still unconsciously convinced that we can see an exit sign up ahead. The koan is designed to help us recognize that the only way to avoid a fox rebirth is to accept whatever happens as our personal responsibility. When the fox pleads with Hyakujo to tell him how he should have answered when he was asked about getting free, Hyakujo reminds him of his embeddedness in the here and now. “The person of enlightenment,” Hyakujo says, “does not ignore causation.”

After this exchange the fox declares that he has finally been liberated from his cycle of rebirths. Now he can die peacefully, and he takes his leave. Shortly after, Hyakujo orders a priest’s funeral to be held later the same day, much to the consternation of his monks, who protest that no one at the temple has died. Their doubts and confusion only grow worse when Hyakujo leads them through the woods, where he finds the lifeless body of a fox. Hearing the story now, we might think the fox has indeed gotten free from birth and death just as he had wanted all along, but actually his liberation only comes after he sees the impossibility of his ever escaping: he won’t come back as a fox next time but he will still come back. Everybody does, forever.

How can this be possible? Isn’t the point of Buddhism to break out of the cycle of rebirths? According to the prajnaparamita view, however, neither birth nor death actually exists—except as “skillful means,” stories told to help us liberate ourselves. As the bodhisattva Avalokiteshvara declares in the Heart Sutra, “all phenomena are marked by emptiness; they do not appear or disappear, are not tainted or pure, do not increase or decrease. There is really . . . no ignorance and no extinction of it . . . no old age and death and no extinction of them.” In the Zen tradition, the Four Great Vows of Huineng make the same point in a slightly different way:

Sentient beings are numberless; I vow to save them all.
Desires are inexhaustible; I vow to end them all.
The dharma gates are infinite; I vow to enter them all.
The buddha way is unexcelled; I vow to attain it completely.

If sentient beings really are numberless, saving them will take forever. If the dharma gates are infinite, we will need an endless number of lives to pass through every one. Instead of trying to escape rebirth, the man or woman of Zen should embrace everything as the Buddha Way, and everybody’s problems as their own.

This is the fox’s discovery. What has changed is how he sees himself: no longer as an “isolated individual,” in the words of the Diamond Sutra, but as one part of a living whole, which will continue after his death, his most recent change of form. If this insight surprises us, we are not alone: remember the grumbling of Hyakujo’s monks when they are told to prepare the funeral. But this reaction only shows how thoroughly they remain trapped in the foxlike way of seeing: unconsciously they still regard themselves as separate from everything else, and they still believe the future can provide a personal, a separate, salvation. What the fox learns, and what the monks have yet to understand, is that rebirth is unstoppable because we have never been separate, even momentarily. As the Japanese Zen master Dogen wrote, “In the entire universe not a single thing is outside of buddhanature”—not even, as the koan gradually makes clear, a fox found dead on a mountainside.

To this insight, however, Dogen adds an important complication. After telling us that nothing falls outside of buddha-nature, he goes on to deny the possibility of any “second existence other than this universe here and now.” This one sentence seems to put an end to the teaching of rebirth along with a heaven or a hell. No “second existence” appears to mean “no life after this one.” Yet Dogen’s writings clearly indicate his acceptance of the standard view. There ceases to be a contradiction, though, once we shift perspective from the “I” to the “we.” However many times we may experience rebirth, none of them can ever free us from dependent co-arising (pratityasamutpada): we create and recreate each other constantly in ways that make firm boundaries between us impossible to preserve. You are becoming me and I’m becoming you, unstoppably and inescapably, all the time. And this might just be the medicine we need in 21st-century America.

Like India in the Buddha’s time, and like China in the Tang, we have our version of the ruling class—what is sometimes called the 1 percent—and they love to remind us that their power and wealth are justified by their hard work, intelligence, and creativity, along with a little favored treatment from heaven. In a society that holds out success as a possibility for everyone even though resources are limited, the only way to disguise the privilege of the few is by promoting competition as a cultural ideal. Competition, though, is a game very few can win, and so it is hardly surprising that many of us suffer from a sense of having failed to reach our full potential by becoming the next president, the next Angelina Jolie, or the next Bill Gates. From our first day in school or our first time in a sports arena or a concert hall, we are taught to measure our worth against the achievements of others. That’s what grades are for, as well as all the trophies, prizes, scholarships, and awards that some of us will win or lose throughout our lives.

Buddhism may seem to reinforce this competitive mentality. In meditation practice, as in Wall Street finance, some people win big, while others never see the payoff they expected even though they’ve invested every cent. True, the Buddha taught that each human being is capable of waking up, but the reality can seem less than fair, because a single lifetime is simply too brief to reach the goal of total liberation. Even the Buddha is supposed to have required countless prior lives of preparation. One way to explain why rebirth became so important to Buddhism is that it gave everyone a second chance—in fact, an endless series of chances. Combined with the bodhisattva ideal, which held that the dharmic winners will remain behind until the rest of us win, too, the teaching of rebirth helped to germinate a spirit of radical equality. This spirit expressed itself most powerfully in the Lotus and Flower Ornament sutras, both composed in the 1st to 4th centuries of the Common Era. The Lotus Sutra taught with utter confidence that everyone is on the way to buddhahood and will arrive there in due time. The Flower Ornament stridently proclaimed the absolute value of every life:

The Buddha is vast, extending
    throughout the cosmos,
Regarding all sentient beings equally,
Universally responding to all hearts, he
    opens the door of wonder,
Causing them to enter the
    inconceivable pure truth.

This is an image of a universe diametrically opposed to the one imagined by the Tang’s mandarins, with their fear of losing status. It’s also an image of the universe radically different from the one inculcated by our culture, with its miniscule elite of superbillionaires and its multitude of people hanging on, a check or two away from destitution.

No one is better than anyone else—that’s a fundamental lesson of rebirth in the Mahayana, the “great vehicle” designed to transport all passengers to enlightenment. Another lesson is that getting there means traveling together in coach, with all the usual inconveniences. In Suhrllekha, the Letter to a Friend, a verse treatise on awakening attributed to Nagarjuna, the author reminds us that even the gods cannot escape from karmically conditioned ups and downs. For a while, Tushita Heaven is a Technicolor paradise:

Bejeweled bathing pools, always
    brimming with fragrant pure
    water,
Are ringed and overhung with all
    varieties of marvelous blossoms. . . .
The gods roam about, sporting
    playfully. . . .
Such joys and sensual bliss cannot
    even be described
[But as their] merit runs out, they
    come to an end, and [the] five signs
    of ruin appear.
They are then beset by suffering
    exceeding their earlier pleasures.
          –trans. Bhikshu Dharmamitra

It might be reassuring to think of the cycle of rebirth as a competition we can win, but Nagarjuna would disagree. The gods don’t fall from heaven because of their misdeeds or mistakes. Instead, their supply of merit simply runs out and then down they go. At first, this idea might seem to be the ultimate in negative thinking, but Nagarjuna wants to convince us that our liberation doesn’t depend on conditions that are typically beyond control, even the control of the gods. We don’t have to care about conditions, he insists, because waking up is a possibility anywhere at any time once we break through the shell of an isolated self.

This idea sounds appealing, true enough, but what might it mean in practice? Are we prepared to see the life of a homeless man as equal in value to a billionaire’s, or equal to the life of a great novelist or a scientist who has found a cure for some kind of cancer? Speaking only for myself, I would much prefer to be among these “winners,” and I feel terror when I contemplate ending up on the street. But Nagarjuna says that if rebirth is real, then sooner or later every one of us will experience the homeless man’s life, not once but again and again. Liberation doesn’t mean moving up; it means developing a mind of absolute equality.

The dream of progress is just another way of trying to be better than everyone else, but the Buddha taught we will always remain equals in the most basic sense: none of us—as isolated selves—will ever manage to escape from sickness, old age, and death. Denying such an elemental truth can only make us strangers to ourselves, and to everybody else. If we recoil from this humanness, then we will probably close our eyes to the humanness of other people as well, especially their experience of suffering. And this insight points us to what may be the most import aspect of rebirth. Only by accepting the suffering of others as our own responsibility can we bring ourselves back from the realm of the preta, the “hungry ghosts” trapped between the living and dead by their unmet needs—needs they can only meet by taking care of others first. When we acknowledge that suffering is our common ground, we can sometimes feel as though everyone we see has been our mother, father, daughter, or son in a previous incarnation. Rebirth might seem to feed our egos, promising that we will come back again, but all our good deeds this time around are going to benefit future human beings who won’t even know our names. We ourselves won’t ever know who we were. Needless to say, this line of thinking conflicts with our competitive, future-obsessed culture. Rebirth as a myth or metaphor, which is part of a larger architecture of the mind, asks us to resist the pressure to believe that the future will deliver or redeem us. It reminds us that we are bound to everyone, and that by helping others we discover an unacknowledged, undervalued part of ourselves. A teaching that has caused so much embarrassment to modern, skeptical Westerners might turn out to be the one we most need to hear if we want to change the way we live now.

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