A friend and I were walking on the beach just before sunset one day. We walked leisurely and talked little, our words pulled from the air with the same slowness with which our feet moved through the shallow water. It was the kind of afternoon that calls for silence. Above us, the clouds were huge, backlit with that soft glow that signals the day’s end, and at one point we stopped and stared, and my friend remarked that the sky was like a painting. I agreed, and as we were turning to leave, a strange shape over the horizon caught my eye. “What is that?” I asked, pointing at what appeared to be a large triangle hovering over the ocean, rusty red and out of place in all that blue. A moment later, as the low-hanging clouds parted, we realized we were looking at a piece of the moon—illumination at 100 percent, a moon chart later said. Like a child transfixed, I plopped down on the sand right where I was and stared with my mouth agape as a blood-red moon slowly climbed up the sky, leaving a reddish wake on the water.

Syzygy (SIZ-eh-jee) is the alignment of two or more celestial bodies in a straight or near-straight line. An imperfect alignment results in the new and full moons, for example; a perfect one in an eclipse. The term comes from the Greek syzygein, which means “to yoke together.” In addition to astronomy, the concept is also used in biology, mathematics, philosophy, and psychology to refer to the union between two things. Figuratively, a yoke has connotations of subservience: a yoke is a heavy, oppressive burden. But in yoga—the Sanskrit term for “yoke”—this union is between a practitioner and the divine. Likewise, in Buddhism, there’s a metaphor that presents us with a far richer way of thinking about this alignment: Indra’s Diamond Net.

In the Avatamsaka Sutra or Flower Ornament Sutra—a collection of texts compiled beginning around 500 years after the Buddha’s death until about 300 CE—the universe is described as a vast net on whose every node hangs a glittering diamond. On the polished surface of this diamond, every other diamond is reflected, multiplying the reflection into infinity. Each diamond exists both in its own right and is also connected to every other diamond on the net. Just so, each one of us is unique, and connected to every other being and thing in the universe—which means we’re constantly affecting one another in ways known and unknown. 

I never suffer or celebrate by myself, because nothing I do or say or even think exists apart from anything else.

In the seventies, the mathematician and meteorologist Edward Norton Lorenz discovered what he termed the “butterfly effect.” Using a weather model, he showed that even minor environmental fluctuations—like the flapping of a butterfly’s wing in Brazil—could set off large and distant weather events, such as a tornado in Texas. Through this experiment, Lorenz was simply confirming what Buddhism has known for millennia. When I touch a strand of the net in my little corner of the world, the whole web trembles. This kind of knowledge confers responsibility, of course, but it also offers great comfort. The image of Indra’s Net is meant to liberate us. It’s meant to free us from the illusion that we’re singular, separate, and solitary. And the fact that we’re thoroughly interconnected means that neither my sadness nor my joy, neither my biggest failing nor my most resounding success is mine alone. I never suffer or celebrate by myself, because nothing I do or say or even think exists apart from anything else. What a relief! What an effective balm for our endemic loneliness. 

When I lived at Zen Mountain Monastery, I loved sitting on rainy afternoons during sesshin, our monthly silent meditation retreat. The mountain seemed especially alive then, and when I felt my energy flagging, I imagined drawing strength and life directly from the woods, the rushing rain, the two streams that converged just beyond the monastery gate and flowed into the Hudson and eventually the Atlantic. The practice never failed. I could start a period of zazen feeling utterly depleted, and after drawing to me the light from all the diamonds surrounding me, I’d gradually become infused with energy.

This yoke is not oppressive but liberating. It’s not burden but ballast. What’s singular is isolated and therefore infinitely fragile. A legion’s strength, on the other hand, is in numbers. Indra’s net reminds us that we’re always aligned—however imperfectly—and always together. When we’re flailing, this is a truth from which we can draw strength.

These are the places where I take refuge these days. A walk on the beach. The space between words. Under a painted sky and a rising moon, swollen with light and impossible to ignore. A sparkling net stretched tautly over reality, its diamond light reflecting endlessly.

I hope you find refuge too, either in places of your own devising or wherever you’re surprised into remembering that you’re not alone, you’re not forsaken. Everything is here, and it all holds you, perfectly.

The post Finding Refuge in Indra’s Net appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

When I began my journey with Nichiren Shu, I participated in a ritual called the Entering Faith and Returning to Rectitude ceremony (Jpn., Nyushin kisho-shiki), which marked a significant change in my path. This was the moment when I began to explore the idea of refuge, and in particular the way it relates to the three treasures of Buddha, dharma, and sangha.

For many of us in the West, the concept of refuge is often misunderstood or only partially understood, primarily because the words we use to describe the three treasures are not necessarily part of our lexicon. Yet the Buddha virtues of parent, teacher, and sovereign not only are key to helping us understand the teachings on refuge and the three treasures but also provide an incentive to more deeply explore becoming refuge ourselves.

In the Lotus Sutra, the Buddha said, “This triple world is my property. All living beings therein are my children. There are many sufferings in this world. Only I can save all living beings” (trans. Senchu Murano). Nichiren Daishonin expressed this teaching as the three virtues, explaining that a buddha has the lovingkindness and compassion of a parent, the wisdom of a teacher, and the mastery of a ruler who alleviates the sufferings of the world.

Whenever a problem arises that appears to be insurmountable, we can lean upon the Buddha as parent. This does not mean seeking another to solve our issues; it means accepting that we have a foundation based on the Buddha’s inherent desire for the awakening of all beings. When my own father died, I realized I was able to act boldly because he was always present to catch me if I fell. It is the same with the Buddha. Support comes from adhering to his teachings and in doing so—as we become attuned to the tenets of Buddhism—we become more upright and develop character.

Understanding Buddha as teacher relies upon our study of the dharma and its application in our daily lives—which in turn leads to a deeper understanding of dharma and daily life as inseparable. Teachings such as “changing poison into medicine” suggest that every situation occurring in our lives—especially those we view negatively—can lead to a greater good. Or, when a situation requires a response that we may not see clearly, faith can help us get through it, and so we are wise enough to rely on faith. And since we can always turn poison into medicine, practice is worthwhile in every moment. Knowing this can bring about joy and help us to cultivate beginner’s mind—another teaching.

With respect to the sovereign virtue, we can view sangha as the arena of practice, which allows us to see ourselves reflected in the mirror of our lives, developing and growing through polishing that mirror. We are all interdependent; there is no separation among us. Thus sangha creates a space to relinquish our individuality and tap into the Beloved Community. Although we may at first enter practice to serve our own purposes, within sangha we realize that community is the vehicle of transformation—of and for ourselves, and also for all living beings.

Taking refuge demands a deep dive into relinquishing our notions of individuality, even as we are transformed into individuals capable of creating and holding safe space for all beings. This is how we provide one another with a foundation to be bold and to walk the path of practice with confidence.

The post What Is the Meaning of Refuge? appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

As COVID-19 restrictions continue to dissolve, Buddhist writer Daisy Hernández has been thinking a lot about refuge. During the pandemic, Hernández found refuge in virtual BIPOC sitting groups, building up her home practice, and being a source of support to her journalism students as they navigated uncertainty and mental health crises. Just as it was then, writing continues to be a refuge for the author whose book The Kissing Bug came out in June, 2021. Now that she is starting to reemerge into the world, Hernández’s practices of refuge are just as important as ever. “The concept of refuge has felt really important these past few years,” she said on the latest episode of Life As It Is, Tricycle’s podcast with editor-in-chief James Shaheen and meditation teacher and author Sharon Salzberg. “I’m going to need to continue to work with it as I come out of my cocoon.”

Read an excerpt from the conversation below, and listen to the full episode here.

James Shaheen: Generosity really changes one’s state of mind, and it really gets one out of oneself and one’s own personal fears, which can be so imprisoning. I think of your book, for instance, as an offering.

Daisy Hernández: Right now, we’re precisely around the two-year mark where I said goodbye to my students. I assumed that I would see them the next week, and instead, I got the email that said, “We’re all going online. Get out of your dorm rooms, and figure out how you’re teaching this class online until further notice.” I definitely initially took refuge in being of service to my students because it was a shock for all of us, of course, but I was aware that I could stay where I was. For them, they just had a few days to take everything and head back home. For some of them, they could not head back home because they had parents who were immunocompromised or they had difficult home lives. We forget that for many students, college campus is actually the refuge. For them, it wasn’t just about going back to a parent’s home—it was figuring out an auntie or a cousin that could take them in.

In those initial weeks, there was so much goodness in being able to focus on how I could support them and how I could alter the class. We were about to start a module on literary journalism, and usually I have students interview people on campus. We changed it up and they interviewed people in their social circles around how they were coping with the pandemic. It was sort of literary journalism on the spot, but it was a refuge for me. I had to be really careful though—I noticed that after the first three weeks, I was exhausted. I realized I could take refuge in work up to a certain point, and then it’s very easy to lose oneself. So I had to course correct a little bit and notice when I needed to walk away. I started working with a timer. I started really paying attention to my dogs and to stop and take them on walks. I really had to be careful of that.

Sharon Salzberg: I also sometimes think about writing as a refuge, and I wonder if you see a relationship between your practice and your writing.

DH: I can’t imagine writing without a practice, and maybe vice versa as well. I think for me, the writing itself is definitely a refuge. When I was writing my latest book, The Kissing Bug, I was interviewing so many families who have faced a ravaging chronic disease: Chagas disease. The parasite that spreads the disease can often decimate the heart. I spent a lot of time with one patient who had reached a point where he needed a heart transplant and was living with a left ventricular assist device. He spent a lot of time with me, and we talked a lot about what was happening for him as he was waiting for a heart to become available, and then we also talked a lot about his childhood because he had begun to experience cardiac symptoms when he was a teenager. Those interviews were really difficult. It was an incredible refuge for me to know that I was going to be able to incorporate what he was sharing into a piece of work that would raise awareness of this disease. . . There’s a lot of energy and serenity that comes with transforming someone’s story into a narrative that will reach readers around the country. 

At the same time, when I was interviewing him, it was really important for me to have a meditation practice, especially a lovingkindness and tonglen practice. In moments like those, I’m there as a journalist. I’m not there as any kind of caregiver. It’s not appropriate for me to try to comfort the person I’m interviewing. They haven’t invited me to do any kind of therapeutic work. They’ve invited me to share their stories. That’s the work that I’m there to do. Sometimes my role is to just allow the silence to be there between us and to silently send someone lovingkindness. There were times when I would actually say out loud wishing him well as he went on his journey. For me, creativity, journalism, and the practice form a triangle. They’re three legs of the same stool.

♦

Listen to the full podcast episode: 

The post “Three Legs of the Same Stool” appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

In the world of spiritual support and mental health, there has been a big push to offer services online to help people cope with the sudden change and loss spurred by the COVID-19 crisis. Lama Rod Owens is one meditation teacher who has begun offering daily meditations and dharma talks on social media and through his online sangha, Bhumiparsha, which he co-founded in 2018 with Lama Justin von Budjoss. A graduate of the Harvard School of Divinity, Owens is the co-author of Radical Dharma: Talking Race, Love, and Liberation, and the author of the forthcoming Love and Rage: The Path of Liberation through Anger. 

Owens also has wisdom to share for those feeling alone at this time. He spent three years “socially distanced” on retreat in upstate New York as part of his training as a lama in the Karma Kagyu tradition of Tibetan Buddhism. Tricycle recently sat down with Owens via video conference to talk about how we can work with the challenges and consolations of the pandemic from a tantric perspective.

During your three-year retreat, what did you learn about the effects of solitude on the psyche? Normally, we stay busy and moving and distracted all the time. Now we’re in this period where many people aren’t working; they’re sitting around, and they’re forced to deal with their minds. People might also be struggling with boredom. I had to confront that [reality] strongly on retreat. I learned to give everything space, which is the root of my teaching right now. I [learned to] look at boredom and say, OK, there you are. Same for the pain or the suffering or trauma that came up: OK, there you are. Welcome, and here is a lot of space for you to roam in.

I also experienced a kind of heartbreak. It was an intense period of learning how to have gentleness, patience, and kindness. I learned how to be alone with myself, which meant I had to work through the trauma and the hate and all the ways I struggled to love myself. In order to sit with myself, I had to unpack all the histories and narratives [that affect my life].

You’re saying that there are gifts that come from practicing radical self-acceptance in solitude. Yet that’s not easy. The tantric, or Vajrayana Buddhist tradition, is about doing the hard work while we have the chance—for example, contemplating death and dying [while we’re still alive]. Right now, there is a tremendous amount of heartbreak, trauma, and mourning. This is an apocalyptic moment. The veil has been ripped. We may be seeing capitalism in a different light, or seeing the inconsistencies and lack of care and ability in our governments. We also may be seeing that these systems don’t care about us—so we have to care about each other. In a sense, we are dying, but we’re also preparing to be reborn. That’s what excites me about this—that we have this incredible opportunity to reset and re-emerge into something new. And even though we’re sitting in place in quarantine, we’re changing. The whole world is changing. 

But we didn’t choose to go into lockdown, and that lack of agency can negatively impact what could otherwise be an opportunity. Most people have never trained in quarantine or sheltering in place, and many of us don’t have the skills to work with what it means to be isolated. 

We also may not realize that this is a period in which we are accumulating vast amounts of trauma. When quarantine ends we won’t just transition, we’re going to need to go through a re-acclimation period, and some of us may need mental health therapy during this adjustment. Right now, we’re just trying to deal with the moment. We’re trying to survive, and take care of people, and avoid getting sick, or manage sickness. Because of this, we may not have the capacity to deal with post-pandemic right now or envision a new future. And that’s OK.

You mentioned this pandemic has caused certain people to see our systems of government in a different way—and perhaps made evident the inequity in our systems. How can we support people who are in unfair positions? I’m feeling sort of helpless at home—I have energy to mobilize and want to be a source of support, but I don’t want to cause more harm in my efforts. Exactly. It’s a conundrum for many of us. For me, I have to trust that I can work from the place where I am. Wherever we find ourselves, we have to live there, for now, and do the work that’s been given to us in those locations. When we move out of the pandemic into this post-pandemic space, we can start to do something different. If we are sitting in a lot of privilege, the question may be: How am I going to emerge from this with a new relationship to my resources? How am I going to engage in the work of actually deconstructing a system that has created this kind of hierarchy that I have enjoyed?

As I’ve said before, we’re not all going to make it [through this pandemic]. I hate to use a cliché but, that’s life. And that’s not an excuse—life and what Buddhists call samsara isn’t supposed to be fair. There is suffering here and karma that informs the experiences that we’re having. No one deserves the suffering, but we’ve also contributed to it. We’re not helpless bystanders.

From what I understand of karma, it’s not what happens to us, as much as what we do with what happens to us—which may mean that the appropriate response to today’s grief and loss is a sense of acceptance. And compassion too. We need the compassion for the reality of being human. There has to be a gentleness and kindness and recognition of the basic fundamental discomfort we’re all experiencing. We’re having slightly different experiences, but we’re all moving through this together. For some of us, this may even be an opportunity to rest or have fun—to add new pleasures to our lives. Of course, many of us are still working. Even if you’re working, take an opportunity to add more fun to your day. Figure out what fun feels like for you. What sparks pleasure?

It’s hard to enjoy all this time off when you don’t know when your next paycheck is coming. This is a super anxious period for many because there’s so much insecurity. We have to take that seriously, and find some balance. All along it’s important to contemplate impermanence and death. When we do that, we begin to understand that this is what’s always happening. We’re always in between something. We’re always in and out of the moment. What does it mean to show up to the anxiety, the fear, and the terror in this moment? How can we give that space? We can use whatever tools we have to work with that energy and to come into a different relationship with our lives and with the world. That’s the preciousness of this opportunity.

You posted a beautiful prayer for sustainability on your website where you invoked guides, benefactors, ancestors, and even the Earth. One’s relationship with mentors and deities is an important component of the tantric tradition. How can these mentor beings support us at this time? I think we always need a source of refuge to hold us. We need a belief system that we can rely on to support us through these hard and overwhelming experiences. Over the past few years, I’ve been thinking about what it means to take refuge. I believe that this is a time when the beings of the unseen world are trying to touch into this world to help. But many of us don’t have faith in the belief that we can touch into that realm in a really direct and powerful way—that we can access the wisdom of our ancestors, due to histories of colonization and industrialization that cut us off from these beliefs.

Much of my work is about teaching people how to open up to that source of resiliency, energy, and love. We can feel really helpless and alone and just thrown out into the brutality of the world. And I just don’t think that’s the whole truth of things. I believe there are beings ready to support us and to love us if we just open our minds to that. 

The post Accessing Refuge appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

This article is part of Trike Daily’s Sutta Study series, led by Insight meditation teacher Peter Doobinin. The suttas, found in the Pali Canon, comprise the discourses the historical Buddha gave during his 45 years of teaching. Rather than philosophical tracts, the suttas are a map for dharma practice. In this series, we’ll focus on the practical application of the teachings in our day-to-day lives.

In the sutta “About Cunda,” the Buddha gives a profound teaching following the death of the beloved monk Sariputta. Ven. Sariputta and Ven. Moggallana were two of the Buddha’s dearest friends as well as the two chief disciples—the arahants, or fully awakened beings—whom the Buddha first asked to teach the dharma.

Not too long before the Buddha’s own death, both Sariputta and Moggallana passed away. In and of itself, the illness and death of Sariputta, as well Moggallana and the Buddha, offer a potent message: all human beings are subject to sickness, aging, and death.

As the sutta relates, Cunda, Sariputta’s attendant, went to Ven. Ananda to inform him of Sariputta’s death. Ananda was the Buddha’s attendant (and first cousin) and a key member of the community of monks who followed the Buddha during his 45 years teaching the dharma in northern India. This community of monks—the sangha—was a tightly knit group, dedicated to the Buddha, the dharma, and each other. This bond was an important component in the way of life followed by the Buddha and his students—the great blessing of friendship.

So upon learning of the death of his dear friend and comrade in the dharma, Ananda immediately went along with Cunda to see the Buddha and tell him the news.

Ananda related his grief to the Buddha, saying, “It was as if my body were drugged . . . I lost my bearings, things weren’t clear to me.” It is a poignant moment, in which Ananda displays his humanness. Ananda was no different from the rest of us. He felt the pain that we all feel when we experience a great loss.

The Buddha also expressed his pain—the inalienable pain elemental to human life—in the days after Sariputta and Moggallana died. Addressing a gathering of monks, he remarked, “This assembly, O bhikkhus, appears indeed empty to me, now that Sariputta and Moggallana have passed away” (SN 47.14).

In response to Ananda, the Buddha offers a teaching that all of us can take to heart. He begins by asking Ananda, “when he attained total Unbinding [death], did Sariputta take the aggregate of virtue along with him? Did he take the aggregate of concentration . . . discernment . . . release [from suffering] . . . the aggregate of knowledge & vision of release along with him?” No, Ananda responds, he didn’t take these qualities with him. The point the Buddha is making here is crucial. The good qualities that are innate to human beings are ever-present. They are, to use the Pali word, akaliko, part of the ever-present truth. These qualities are timeless; they transcend birth and death.

Our goodness, the Buddha tells Ananda, remains. As human beings our task is to develop our goodness, which is what Sariputta did. So it’s what he left behind. We also leave behind our goodness, to the extent that we develop it and let it shine in the world.

But even while acknowledging the Buddha’s teaching, Ananda continues to lament the loss of his dear friend. “It’s just that he was my instructor & counselor,” he says, “one who exhorted, urged, roused, & encouraged me. He was tireless in teaching the Dhamma [dharma], a help to his companions in the holy life. We miss the nourishment of his Dhamma, the wealth of his Dhamma, his help in the Dhamma.”

The Buddha responds by reminding Ananda of the great truths he has taught his disciples through the years: that each of us is subject to sickness, aging, and death, that each of us will eventually be separated from all that is dear to us. It is the way it is, the Buddha tells Ananda. “What else is there to expect?” the Buddha says. “It’s impossible that one could forbid anything born, existent, fabricated, & subject to disintegration from disintegrating.”

Then the Buddha gives one of his most well-known teachings. He tells Ananda that “you should remain with your self as an island.” Given that Sariputta is gone, given that he himself will soon be gone, given that all human beings are “subject to disintegration,” the Buddha, delivering a vital message to Ananda and his fellow monks, says: “each of you should remain with your self as an island, your self as your refuge, without anything else as a refuge. Remain with the Dhamma as an island, the Dhamma as your refuge, without anything else as a refuge.” Our task, the Buddha says, is to rely on what’s inside us. Our task is to develop our goodness—the qualities of virtue, concentration, discernment. Our task is to find our own release from suffering. The dharma, the teachings that the Buddha has passed on, provide the path by which we pursue these tasks.

The Buddha, however, doesn’t leave it at that. He doesn’t just say, “Be an island unto yourself.” The Buddha’s teachings are never meant to be showcases for rhetorical flourish and verbal brilliance. His teaching are, always, eminently practical. The Buddha, above all, teaches skills. Here, he notes the skills that we need to cultivate in order to be “an island.” The main skill, the Buddha indicates, is the skill of mindfulness. Specifically, right mindfulness. The Buddha culminates this teaching to Ananda by delineating the four foundations of mindfulness, the four primary ways of practicing mindfulness that the dharma student is asked to develop.

In practicing the first foundation of mindfulness, the practitioner “remains focused on the body in and of itself.” All the mindfulnesses that we practice begin by putting the mind on the body—the breath is the anchor point in the body, the place where, first and foremost, we learn to put the mind. In practicing mindfulness of the breath/body, the dharma student develops concentration, the capacity to remain in the present moment, in the body, with a quality of ease and well-being.

The second foundation of mindfulness, in which the dharma student puts his attention on “feelings,” entails being mindful of the sensations in the body—the way the body feels, whether pleasant, unpleasant, or neutral—and the way we’re relating to these feelings.

Practicing the third foundation of mindfulness, the dharma student is mindful of the different states of mind—desire, aversion, delusion, and their myriad subsets—and how we relating to them.

In practicing mindfulness of feelings and states of mind we develop discernment and concentration.

The fourth foundation of mindfulness offers ways of being mindful in which we put our attention on certain mental qualities, such as the four noble truths, in the service of developing discernment.

It’s through cultivating these specific skills of mindfulness, the Buddha teaches, that the dharma student is able to “remain with his self as an island.”

In the end, it’s up to us to find happiness in this life. And, the Buddha tells us, we have an extraordinary capability; we have everything we need to do that. There is a goodness that is ever-present in life. There is a goodness in us. And, within, we have the ability to develop our goodness. If we do this, the Buddha teaches, we will come to know true happiness.

♦

Peter Doobinin’s previous sutta studies take a look at the Thana Sutta, Yoga Sutta, Nava Sutta, and Lokavipatti Sutta.

The post Sutta Study: About Cunda appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

A few years ago, in the middle of a weeklong meditation retreat, I joined the queue to speak to the group’s most senior teacher. I’d spoken to him before, of course, many times, both during one-on-one practice discussions and in more informal settings, like the potluck lunches the group organized every now and then. But this time I had some questions I wanted to ask, and they weren’t about meditation. They were about him.

I was thinking about taking refuge, the ceremony in which you make a more formal commitment to the practice. I wanted to find out more about what I was getting into, so I did a bit of research online into Buddhist communities in the United States generally, and into the one I was sitting with in particular.

What I found was, well, concerning. Besides the lurid allegations about various Buddhist teachers in the U.S., there was a bit of specific gossip about the group I was in, and about its head teacher. I didn’t know whether the things people were saying were true, and even if they were, they didn’t seem serious enough in themselves to make me want to leave the group. But I did have some questions.

Which isn’t the same, actually, as wanting some answers. In fact, what answers I might get wasn’t so important to me. What was important to me was that the teacher be open to questioning—even (or especially) when the questioning was about his own behavior. And I genuinely expected that he would be. The group as a whole put a lot of emphasis on maintaining an open, questioning mind-set, and the teacher had a reputation as someone who didn’t put too much stock in formality.

I realized my mistake within minutes of entering the room. When I tried to explain why I was worried by referring to a scandal at another Buddhist group, he told me that most of the gossip that was reported about teachers was just false. When I told him I was thinking about taking refuge, he told me not to, since I was clearly doing it for the wrong reasons. He also told me I had no right to be asking these questions. For much of the conversation he was shaking with rage.

That, to say the least, was not what I’d been expecting from a senior Buddhist teacher, especially one whom I had previously known as a genial and open-minded man. Suddenly I felt very alone, in that retreat center hours from home, in a group that hung upon the teacher’s every word.

Later, I went to a friend I trusted, an older man who’d sat with the group for years but had already let slip that he had some doubts about the head teacher. When I told him what had happened, he told me the teacher had clearly “fucked up”—and not for the first time either, but that people who clashed with him tended just to leave the group. As we turned back toward the retreat center, he said to me, with a mixture of regret and resignation, “This is a great community. But you have to realize that it’s not a democracy.”

“Not a democracy” would probably be a fair description of many Buddhist groups in the West. The teacher is often a revered figure. I’ve noticed that this is especially the case in Zen and Tibetan groups, bastions of guru yoga, in which the teacher is seen as a path to enlightenment. But I’ve also seen teachers in vipassana circles being accorded an uncritical kind of veneration.

Related: Why I Quit Guru Yoga

Part of the reason for this, I think, is the idea of dharma transmission, a sort of apostolic succession in which intimate knowledge of the dharma is said to be passed down from generation to generation, ultimately going back to the Buddha himself. As I’ve seen time and time again in various groups, teachers who have transmission hold not only spiritual but also institutional authority: they’re often deferred to when it comes to making decisions for the group. Indeed, they are held in such high regard that the usual checks and balances—financial auditing, a board of directors, and so on—are often felt to be unnecessary.

The result of this is that many sanghas suffer from an alarming democracy deficit. Formal consultation with ordinary members of the group is rare. Leaders are almost never elected. Decision making by democratic processes such as voting is virtually unheard of.

That should surprise us, for Western Buddhists tend to see themselves as cooperative, progressive folk. Many of us would probably uphold egalitarianism and democracy as key values. Yet most of our groups are organized in a way that we’d never tolerate in our governments or even, increasingly, in our workplaces.

Why is this? There are many possible explanations, but my hunch is that a big part of the reason we give teachers so much power is that we think that’s what Buddhism is. At least, a lot of us have come to assume that firm guidance by a wise teacher with an ancient lineage is part and parcel of the Buddhist tradition.

That impression is not entirely wrong: the enlightened master certainly is a fixture of many Buddhist traditions, as any encounter with koans will tell you. But it’s not the whole of Buddhist tradition. Buddhist tradition is vast and varied, and there are many different strands within it. One of these strands—albeit one we don’t hear much about—has a great deal to convey about democratic theory and practice. Moreover, this is no marginal, newfangled part of the tradition, but one that goes right back to some of the most ancient texts in the canon.

For some practitioners, democratic values may be enough in themselves for them to start taking steps to make their sanghas more democratic. To them, the fact that democracy has a place in Buddhist tradition will be neither here nor there. But I suspect that there will be more than a few Western Buddhists who still worry that moving away from what they see as time-honored forms of practice in a hierarchical environment will mean that they are no longer practicing Buddhism. That is simply not the case.

As for the rule, that when decisions are made, one should put into effect the opinion of the majority . . . ancient scriptures say . . . among three people to follow what two of them think. . . . This has become a good practice . . . from the past into our present.

These words were taken from a document held in a Japanese temple. The document is dated to 1355, and it comes from Gakuen-ji in Izumo Province, one of the oldest and largest monasteries in the country. What were these monks up to? Was their apparent enthusiasm for making decisions by majority voting just an exception, an eccentric departure from what other Buddhist temples were doing at the time?

Apparently not. As the German historian Markus Rüttermann has shown, several Japanese monasteries were making decisions by majority vote during the same period. The monks of Jingo-ji in Kyoto, for example, also made decisions facing the community by majority vote, according to a temple document dated to 1185. So the monks of Gakuen-ji were not a breakaway sect. They were representative of a common way of doing things among Japanese monastics from the 12th to 14th centuries.

Some will see this phenomenon as interesting enough in itself: a whole tradition of Buddhist monasticism where majority decision making was the norm! But skeptics about Buddhist democracy will want to ask more questions. For instance: was this Japanese tradition itself an anomaly, an aberration from the mainstream of Buddhist monastic practice?

Let’s look back at the words I have just quoted from Gakuen-ji. They don’t merely say that majority decision making is a “good practice.” They also say that it has been around for a long while, “from the past into our present.” And they claim that the practice is sanctioned by “ancient scriptures.”

Which ancient scriptures are these? It’s a good bet that the reference is to the vinaya—the set of scriptures relating to monastic practices, parts of which contain discussions of majority voting. Particularly interesting is the Fivefold Rules of Discipline, which tradition asserts was brought from Sri Lanka to China in the 5th century by the celebrated Chinese pilgrim Faxian (Fa-hsien), who translated it from Sanskrit.

The Rules of Discipline text outlines seven different techniques for resolving disagreements, among which is “finding out of the will of the majority.” It then describes several different areas of disagreement for which voting may be appropriate, at least under certain conditions. It also describes the use of voting sticks, which can be handed out and then counted.

As the German scholar Egon Flaig writes in his book on majority decision making (Die Mehrheitsentscheidung, 2013), similar discussions are found in the Pali vinaya, especially the Mahaparinibbana Suttanta, the Mahavagga, and the Culla- vagga, texts that became part of the canon by the 4th or 3rd century BCE. Flaig points out that they are the earliest texts we know outside Europe dealing with decision-making procedures.

In these texts, majority voting emerges as perhaps the central way in which decisions should be made within the monastic community. Voting is held by secret ballot (using voting sticks) or by show of hands, or by whispering one’s preference into another monk’s ear. It’s also laid down that a course of action is illegitimate if the assembly leader knows that the majority doesn’t agree with the decision being taken. At the same time, if there’s a dispute about how monastic rules are to be applied, the decision can be taken by a committee elected for the purpose as well as by a majority vote in the monastic assembly. When it comes to ordination, or for decisions of very personal nature, unanimity is recommended. The monastic assembly has a leader, furthermore, and he can strike down decisions if they threaten the unity of the sangha. And older monks can ask younger monks to relinquish their opposition if they think an important law is at stake.

All the same, the evidence for democracy within Buddhist monasteries is quite strong. Japanese monastic records show that majority voting (Japanese, tabun) was certainly practiced in Japan from the 12th to 14th centuries; and the vinaya texts suggest that this was not a new development but one in accordance with a tradition that stretches back to the beginnings of Buddhism.

Related: Is the Dharma Democratic?

Might this tradition go back even further than that? Egon Flaig thinks so. He suggests that democratic practices in early Buddhism grew out of the context of the republican city-states of ancient India, which flourished in the 5th and 4th centuries BCE. They were often governed by a council of nobles (sabha) made up of male aristocrats, ruling either on its own or with the help of an assembly (samiti).

Were these city-states democracies? Much of the answer hangs on who got to attend their assemblies, which have been compared to the popular assemblies of ancient Greece. Unfortunately, the halls in which the ancient Indian assemblies were held could probably hold only around 500 people, far less than the 6,000 or so that could meet in the open-air assembly (ekklesia) of classical Athens. Rather than being a genuinely popular assembly, then, the samiti may have simply featured a slightly less restricted elite than the sabha. It’s true that some Greek sources, like the 1st-century BCE historian Diodorus Siculus, used the Greek word demokratia with reference to the Indian city-states. But by this point Greek authors had started to use the same word for any nonmonarchical or republican state. So Flaig is probably right to stop short of calling the Indian city-states democracies; he uses instead the term “para-democracies.”

More important, as Flaig himself admits, the Buddhist monasteries were more democratic than the Indian city-states in one crucial respect. Where the city-states had a council of nobles and a slightly less elite assembly, the Buddhist monasteries did away with the council of nobles, and made do with just an assembly. Moreover, it looks like their assemblies included all monks, not just an elite subset.

It may well be, then, that though the earliest Buddhists received some democratic ideas from the republican city-states of ancient India, they decided to go further along the democratic road themselves. In other words, the idea of doing things democratically in ancient India may have been not just something in the air. It may have been a distinctive part of Buddhism as a movement, right from the start.

That this may have been the case is hinted at in a Pali canonical text, Digha Nikaya 16, which relates how the chancellor of the king of Magadha comes to the Buddha to ask whether he should attack the confederation of the Vajii, a league of republican city-states.

The Buddha doesn’t respond directly, but notes that alongside a number of other positive practices the Vajii have frequent and well-attended assemblies, and he suggests that as long as they do, the king of Magadha will never conquer them. The idea that democracy is good partly because it helps you vanquish your enemies may not seem like a very Buddhist one. But in a fiercely competitive world like that of the ancient Indian city-states, there could have been no higher recommendation for the practices of popular rule.

There is, then, good evidence that democracy was something that Buddhists have long thought about and practiced. Indeed, Buddhists have been thinking about and practicing democracy as long as there have been Buddhists at all. It may even be the case that one of the things that made the earliest Buddhists distinctive was that they took democratic decision making further than anybody else.

For those of us who place importance on acting in accordance with tradition, there is no reason to reject democracy in our sanghas. Democratic practices such as making decisions by majority vote have at least as solid a place in Buddhist history as authoritarian practices such as dharma transmission.

Indeed, you could argue that Buddhist authoritarian practices were simply a reflection of the authoritarian institutions that have been the norm in many countries for much of human history. The democratic practices, by contrast, might plausibly be considered an intrinsic part of Buddhism as an intellectual and spiritual movement—a part that has been eclipsed or pushed to the side for too long.

Where does this leave us as practitioners? Well, it means that we now have a choice, even if we want to insist on cleaving to Buddhist tradition. Do we emphasize the more authoritarian parts of the tradition, or the more democratic ones?

If we emphasize the more democratic aspects of the tradition, we should probably not worry too much about what democracy looks like precisely in our individual communities. Electing leaders would be one way of doing it, as would taking votes on all key issues facing the community, following the lead of monasteries like Gakuen-ji.

But there are also any number of ways in which more democracy can be injected into a group. Service positions could be filled by pulling names out of a hat, for instance. In the group I currently sit with, the task of leading an evening session rotates through regular attendees on a weekly basis. In a group I used to sit with in San Francisco, a silver owl or a plastic bug (any object will do) was passed around, giving the person holding it the momentary right to uninterrupted speech.

I myself wouldn’t be surprised to find out that such practices are more common than we think; probably many small groups have set themselves up in a democratic way as a matter of course. We shouldn’t make the mistake of seeing this as the kind of thing that you do only if you aren’t a real Buddhist group that doesn’t know about sacred traditions like dharma transmission.

Conversely, those Buddhist institutions—and there are plenty of good ones—that do continue to uphold practices like dharma transmission should be aware that they represent thereby one part of the tradition—not Buddhist Tradition, period. They should also be aware that they can easily move away from such practices without being less Buddhist as a result.

And where does this leave me, half a decade on from the shock of my one-on-one encounter with that senior teacher? For a while, of course, I was put off the whole practice. After some thought, though, and some conversations with friends, I decided to take refuge after all, though with another teacher. And I don’t regret it.

Since leaving that community, I have sat with vipassana groups, Hindu-related meditation groups, and the Religious Society of Friends (the Quakers). For a few years I was a fully signed-up member of a Zen group, but eventually the focus on the teacher was, once more, too much for me (even though that particular teacher seemed pretty down to earth).

Today I sit with a small group that professes no lineage or transmitted teacher. We meet on a basis of equality, as people who are interested in meditating together and talking about it afterward.

Is it a Buddhist group? I don’t necessarily see it like that, and we don’t signal that message to the outside world. More than anything else, it’s a group in which meditation is practiced, and most of that meditation proceeds in a Buddhist manner (rather than, say, a Christian or Hindu one).

At the same time, though, there’s nothing un-Buddhist about it. And it’s especially not the case that it’s un-Buddhist because we do things in an egalitarian way. There’s no reason to think that we’re not following Buddhism simply because we don’t have a teacher whom we look up to spiritually and in terms of decision making.

Actually, if I think about it at all, I feel that the earliest Buddhists, who clearly cared about democratic modes of organization, would approve of the way we do things. I feel as though we’re carrying on their tradition of spiritual equality, and that gives me a lot of contentment.

The post Democratic from the Start appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

In one sense, at the core of sanctuary is the failed quest to find home in the places where we live. For centuries, millions have sought refuge from genocide, violence, economic loss, and political oppression, forced to venture into unfamiliar places. Some have climbed mountains, some have swum the seven seas, others have crossed deserts to save their families’ and their communities’ lives. Millions have been forced to leave when their ancestral lands were destroyed; others have fled refugee camps when it has become too dangerous to remain, leaving generations of descendants with an insatiable yearning to return home. Displacement is an embodied experience, imprinted on our bones. Since the advent of nations and boundaries, the discarded have left home and their descendants have sought to find it again.

Spiritual teachers espouse the thought that home is in the heart. When I ask, “Where do I belong?” they respond, “Look within.” But it is difficult to find oneself without acknowledging the social and cultural dimensions of homelessness.

In 2013, my partner and I had fallen into serial homelessness, pressed by the quadrupling of rents in Oakland, California. At the time we were renting a home in Oakland and renting out a home we owned in Albuquerque. We tried to buy the home we were living in in Oakland, so we sold our New Mexico home to have the funds. The bidding system for purchasing the home was not in our favor, and we didn’t get the house. It led to six sublet agreements in other places, one after another, to stay in Oakland, and our savings dwindled.

As a Zen priest, I was asked by several people, “What lesson did you learn from losing your home and having your financial resources drained?”

I couldn’t respond.

A quick answer would have minimized the emotions that were erupting inside me. I didn’t want to reduce a journey into the depths of my suffering to a simplistic response. If I had been looking only for a physical home, it would have been easier. But I needed a place that would fill the ancient hunger for home that resides in me from an ancestral past.

My feeling of displacement has its roots in the African diaspora and the systemic dehumanization of blacks in the Americas and around the world. I needed time to reflect, to explore the nature of intergenerational homelessness without figuring anything out. I could barely breathe.

During my time of reflection, I met with the former owner of the home my partner and I had been unable to purchase. It was a beautiful day in Berkeley’s Elmwood district. My landlord and I each expressed our disappointment in our not being able to purchase her home. I tried to stave off feelings of victimhood, but the struggle persisted. As I continued, it became clear that the sense of not belonging, the loss of language and culture, and the wish for a perfect home is imprinted on my bones. I saw that trying to purchase her home was an effort to resolve an experience of uprootedness that goes at least as far back as the slave trade. With this insight, I walked out of our meeting as if I’d never seen Berkeley before. I was in an altered state, feeling as lost as my ancestors must have felt when they landed in this country. My world had changed, and I was trying to reorient myself to a very new perspective. The loss of her home had uncovered what had been buried beneath each response to rejection my whole life. It marked the beginning of a slow, gradual path toward compassion.

Pema Chödrön, the renowned Western Buddhist nun and teacher, reminds us that the mantra at the end of the Heart Sutra is meant to ease fear and cultivate compassion within suffering: “Gone, gone, gone beyond, gone completely be-yond, awake, so be it.” Yet we aren’t transcending or going beyond suffering. Our lives are gradual paths of groundlessness. When we can accept that people and things are always shifting and changing, our hearts can open.

When we’re overwhelmed by pain and suffering, or by groundlessness, we move to the next beyond. Pema Chödrön says that we are developing a compassionate and patient
relationship with our fear. The quaking in our lives is the very nature of going beyond, flexing and extending our heart muscle that is often stiff with arrogance, opinions, anger, self-righteousness, and prejudice.

The experience of renting six sublets, one after another during our period of homelessness, forced me to ask once again, “What is home?” Each time we found a physical home and experienced suffering, we were living out the mantra, “Gone, gone, gone beyond, awake.” The experience wore down our fixed views of home and of life. As it became too much, we had to go back to basics, to the ordinary things of our lives, not waiting for a gigantic breakthrough but allowing the disintegration one step at a time. When fear, angst, frustration, or “Why me?” arises, ground yourself in the ordinariness of your life and live one day at a time. Suffering teaches us this. When we suffer this much, we can only be still and take each moment as it comes.

Homelessness is like walking in a dark forest, step by step. It’s an initiation. Feel into the mystery, not knowing what you may touch. In this way, homelessness can be the beginning of a new life even when it feels like the end. In the midst of an initiation, how you see life is tested and if you are open, it will transform you. Going forward, you’ll see the world in a different way, as when I walked out of the meeting in Berkeley and saw a new and different city. A gradual breakthrough of consciousness began when our bid to purchase the house was declined. The seed for transformation was planted.

Homelessness is more than just the loss of a physical home. It is also the loss of culture, connection, identity, and affiliation. This hunger for home is deep and wide, touching the nerve of ancient displacement and dispossession. In modern times, we see homelessness as a crisis of industrialization. But its roots are ancient and visceral, a trauma that passes from generation to generation.

The Vietnamese Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh writes:

. . . Please call me by my true names,
so I can hear all my cries and laughter at once,
so I can see that my joy and pain are one.
Please call me by my true names,
so I can wake up
and the door of my heart
can be left open,
the door of compassion. . . .

I first heard this poem before entering the path of Buddha and recognized in it the cry for a lost ancestral home. The tears welling from deep inside me expressed a longing for connection with my origins, to know the ancient ceremonies, medicines, rituals, dances, and ways of the land that were lost when we became American slaves. Later I realized that Thich Nhat Hanh is encouraging us to see ourselves in the other, to open our hearts to every living being, including perceived enemies, and to forgive everyone.

I couldn’t do it right away.

I couldn’t feel the interbeing of joy and pain. I couldn’t digest the lines in his poem, “I am the twelve-year-old girl, / refugee on a small boat, / who throws herself into the ocean / after being raped by a sea pirate. / And I am the pirate. . . .” I couldn’t be both the mayfly on the river and the bird that eats me. I couldn’t be the slave and the master, the one who hates and the one who loves, the oppressor and the oppressed.

I did not feel interrelated to other living beings as the poem teaches.

I had mountains to climb before I could reach that understanding.

A reflection on the naming of enslaved Africans helped me to see more of what was tangled with the feelings of homelessness. While other ethnic groups’ names were changed at Ellis Island, enslaved Africans—more than ten million purchased and traded—weren’t even considered human and were given the last names of their owners. Although many have since changed their names, most people of African descent still have surnames that are more like brandings.

My last name, Manuel, is Portuguese. King Manuel of Portugal, the largest slave trader of the time, brought Africans to the Caribbean, in particular Haiti, and so I carry the name of a man who was blind to my ancestors’ humanity. At the same time, our slave owners’ names are not without connection, because they evoke a relationship with our new origins in America.

We are admonished by patriots, “If you’re not happy here, go home!” “I am home,” we think, or even say, but you may not feel you are home in a place where we are told in many ways we don’t belong.

Those who have reclaimed African names, who have been given them at birth or when entering the priesthood of an African tradition such as Ifá, Candomblé, Santeria, or Vodoun, still work hard to fit in, in America and even on the continent from which enslaved Africans were dispersed. It’s not just that descendants of enslaved Africans have suffered enormously; we’ve had to do so without our names or knowing our blood lineages. For us, the effort to find our place can feel abstract, even numbing. Without our true names, it is difficult to consider anywhere home. The destruction of names, tribes, lands, cultures, languages, and truths, and the absence of documented lineages are a large part of our struggle. Wise spiritual teachers rarely consider this when they offer guidance for “finding home.

When the journey of finding home takes ancestral homelessness into account, we begin to understand the need for sanctuary in a new way. The hunger for home is deeply layered. When we seek a vision of being healed, multigenerational displacement motivates within some of us a desire to find our indigenous lands of origin or to create sanctuary or shared community with those of similar ancestral origin, places where we can enter life fully without fear. We need places to breathe and heal our disconnection from the earth. Our spiritual journey requires us, first of all, to understand the pain of the loss of our ancestral identity and to experience the extent to which we have wandered. This loss of home is in our bones and begs to be acknowledged, not merely transcended.

Those who have tasted dispossession through slavery, holocaust, war, ethnic cleansing, massacre, or forced migration are admonished by patriots, “If you’re not happy here, go home!”

“I am home,” we think, or even say, but you may not feel you are home in a place where we are told in many ways we don’t belong.

A friend who lives in Haiti told me that in the Haitian Kreyòl language, the word for home is lakay, which literally means “being at home.”

This is significant because having a home and being at home can be entirely different experiences. Having a home conjures up a physical locale. We are born in a place, indigenous to some land, somewhere. We have residency, or citizenship. Among Haitian people, it is important to know exactly where you are from. When first meeting you, Haitians try to situate you in relation to others. The question “Where are you from?” means, “Where are you a person?” And if you are not at home, when homelessness is deep-seated and outside our control, where are you a person?

From the moment we acknowledge that there is discord between our homeplace and who we are, we no longer feel at home. Suddenly, we’re uncomfortable with our surroundings and become distressed. We may find ourselves living on the streets, because we don’t feel at home anywhere. Being at home is an experience in which our heart and spirit resonate with the place where we dwell. It’s being settled and still—as we are in sitting meditation.

Home cannot be an experience of shame, terror, or rejection, but rather one of safety, freedom, and respect, an experience of love and being embraced, of being known and knowing who you are.

Offering sanctuary to those who are invisible, displaced, or discriminated against because of class, ethnicity, heritage, beliefs, race, religion, sexuality, gender, or physical ability is to respond to the hatred expressed in the world. Accepting refuge in a sanctuary is a chance to reclaim who we are.

“Taking refuge” is the English translation of saranagamana; sarana in Pali means “shelter, protection, sanctuary”—a place where safety and peace are possible. To take refuge in the three treasures—buddha, dharma, sangha—is to follow a path that leads us home to who we are, a path of awakening.

Zen master Shunryu Suzuki says, when you “strive for God, it means you are striving for yourself.” We reach out for love and acceptance, and through practices like prayer and meditation, ceremony, drumming, and chanting, we honor ourselves and evolve in a creative spiritual community. Revitalizing ourselves in community gives us the energy we need to shift our sense of who we are and transform the way we live.

Taking refuge, we gain insight and see possibilities. With the support of others, we awaken to the conditions that cause us suffering. When we say, “I take refuge,” we’re appealing to what brings us home to ourselves.

Tenshin Reb Anderson writes, “If taking refuge is the return flight to our own true nature, the appeal is not made to something outside ourselves nor to something inside ourselves. It is made to the great openness of being that transcends outside and inside and from which nothing is excluded.”

Buddha, when he discovered that he was subject to old age, illness, and death, left his privileged home. He could no longer live in the family palace. The illusion of comfort vanished. In the sanctuary of the forest, he began to recognize a path on which he could understand the full range of suffering and experience his connection and interdependence with others. He found a place within himself where no one is less than or other or invisible.

Like Buddha, sanctuary as part of the path in finding home was to invite into my life the possibility of coexisting despite an experience of oppression. Without sanctuary, I wouldn’t have had a place to meet myself, which is simply to say, I wouldn’t have arrived home.

The post The Hunger for Home appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

Fear is a given; it is a fundamental part of life and consciousness. And while it may not feel good, fear is useful and necessary. In spiritual life, the problem with fear lies in whether we have the wisdom to respond well to it.

In Buddhism, fearlessness, in regard to both internal and external obstacles, is often extolled as a virtue. It takes fearlessness to tackle one’s own neuroses, and it takes fearlessness to not become overwhelmed when facing, say, physical danger. In the Majjhima Nikaya of the Pali canon, a whole sutta, the Bhayabherava, is devoted to how to overcome “unwholesome fear and dread.” But fearlessness is not the whole picture.

The presentation of the dharma as a whole is couched in terms of taking refuge from samsara, from the round of dukkha, or suffering. But one does not seek refuge unless one is afraid. Which means that fear, and not just fearlessness, has an important role to play. How is this seeming paradox to be reconciled? Different Buddhist traditions have approached it in different ways. One well-known approach is what we might call the heroic path, the path of overcoming perceived shortcomings, including fear. As you progress on the heroic path, so the logic goes, fear will naturally decrease. Reach a level of spiritual perfection and you will feel no fear at all. So get busy perfecting yourself right away!

By contrast, there is what might be thought of as a pragmatic approach. Here, we start from the way we actually find ourselves to be—fallible, vulnerable, and mortal. The Japanese Pure Land schools call this our bonbu nature. On the pragmatic path, the foundation is not striving to better ourselves; rather, the basis is naturalness and honesty about our very imperfect selves.

Here’s a little story I heard about fear. There was a monastery in the mountains in China. Wild deer would come onto the monastery’s beautiful grounds. The monks loved the deer and enjoyed feeding them. When the abbot heard about it, he came out shouting and waving his arms and attacking the deer with his staff. The deer became alarmed and ran away. The abbot put up a notice saying there must be no more feeding the deer and any deer seen on the property were to be chased off. The monks protested, saying, “We came here to learn kindness and compassion. What sort of example are you, getting so mad at these gentle animals? This can’t be right.” The abbot addressed the community: “Look, there are hunters in these mountains. The only defense these animals have is their fear. If you take that away from them, they will all be killed very soon.”

If we did not have fear—if we were truly fearless—we, like the deer, would be in terrible danger without knowing it. We have awareness in order to be wary. The most primitive animal will shrink away from noxious contact. Consciousness itself is closely related to fear, and to grasping as well. If we did not need to get things, or to run away from things that want to get us, then we would probably not have developed consciousness at all. We would not need it. Rocks do not need to be conscious. They are all-accepting. Acceptance is also one kind of Buddhist ideal, but it would be a mistake to take it to an extreme. We are not aiming to be rocks.

It is sometimes said that faith takes away fear, and there is truth in this. But I think the more important point is that faith redirects us from mundane stress to the great fear and exhilaration that frames our spiritual life. When the practitioner experiences such fear, she knows that she is close to the raw energy of life itself, the élan vital. It is this life energy that gives meaning to the holy life. If we try to hush it up, we might well end up pouring a kind of sanctimonious avidya, or ignorance, on top of the worldly kind.

As a young enthusiast for the dharma, I began on the heroic path and learned much. But along that way I also encountered, at every step, self-deception and spiritual pride. As I have mellowed with age, I have found greater peace, sanity, and spiritual consolation in the more pragmatic approach of starting with things as we find them. It’s a fact that we get frightened, and simply exerting more and more willpower to overcome our fright, or posing as though we’re unaffected by it, does not send the fear away.

Pragmatically, it may make more sense to view relating to fear as akin to using fire to combat fire. The pragmatic dharma-farer can use greater fear to drive out lesser fears. When we realize our smallness, seek refuge, and find a place within the great dharma realm, we have nothing to lose. Such a reorientation helps one find peace in the center of life’s whirlwind. But the whirlwind does not stop. From that position, the wise person, cherishing the fear and mindful of the dharma, chooses the most compassionate course, fearing more for others than for self and realizing that we are all in one boat together.

Fear has its uses, too. For instance, if one wants to cultivate awareness, one can readily see that one is never so acutely aware as when one is frightened. At such times one stays compulsively alert and cannot sleep. The cultivation of awareness, therefore, is a refinement of the energy of fear that is close to the core of our basic makeup.

Fear is sometimes exciting, as when one is testing a new motorcycle to its limit. Usually, though, it is unpleasant. But either way, it motivates us. It gets us moving. The most basic action that it suggests is to run away—and in many situations this is the best course. It might be brave and magnificent to stand up to an enemy who is much bigger than you are, but it is also a first-class way of getting yourself killed. If a tiger comes, you had better run away, or you will soon be its next dinner.

Fear galvanizes. We can do feats of strength when we are frightened that we cannot achieve at other times. Fear mobilizes all of our resources. Zen Master Dogen says that we should train in Zen with the same energy we would employ if our hair were to catch fire. If that were the case, one would most certainly be alarmed and take urgent action.

Clearly, there is a range within which fear puts us on our toes and brings out our best. When there is too little, we become complacent, bored, and lazy. When there is too much, we become paralyzed. When I first began speaking in public, I sometimes would sweat and shake and be unable to even get my words out. I found that the best thing was simply to tell the audience that I felt terribly nervous, which to my surprise allowed me to relax a bit and the audience to become more sympathetic. And the thing went off all right.

From experiences like this I realized that the venom that paralyzed me was not so much the fear as the pride that made me try to hide the fear, that wanted me to present myself as a master over my human nature. But when I could be natural and share how I was feeling, a bond was established with the audience. Fear can connect people.

Fear and love are closely related. To cut ourselves off from one is to cut ourselves off from the other. Suppressing awareness of our own vulnerability, we inevitably and correspondingly lose sensitivity for those around us. I find that the most wrenching fear that one experiences is the fear one feels for others. Love is like that. When one loves, one fears for the other. When one fears for them, one watches out for them. I have been much more afraid when my children were in danger than when I myself was in a life-threatening situation. This is true not only for regular people. Just as a mother is fearful for her child, the buddhas, ever watchful, are fearful about what shall become of us.

It is common to see the dharma in terms of self-development and, ultimately, self-perfection. But any perfection that does arise does so as a by-product. It is all very well to take techniques from Buddhism and use them to enhance our worldly lives, but that is not really what the dharma is about. It is about taking up a more wholesome attitude to reality as it is.

If we could somehow get rid of the traits about ourselves that we don’t like and by force of will make ourselves perfect, we’d probably be much the worse for it. Achieving success in the heroic endeavor, one would probably just become completely egotistical about one’s superb achievement. Even before arriving at such glory, one would along the way be tempted to pose as having made more progress than one actually had and turn a blind eye to one’s own failings. I’ve certainly done this.

We are deluded beings, weak and vulnerable. We are especially vulnerable to self-centered impulses that arise from our karmic continuum. It is no good pretending that because one has read a few books on Buddhism or been to a retreat or two, one is now immune to any such failing. Even more sad is the case of the person who, after many years of rigorous Buddhist discipline, realizes, with despair or cynicism, that he is still prey to powerful, unbidden emotions and so concludes either that the dharma does not work or that he himself is a hopeless failure.

Realizing that we are hopeless cases is, in a sense, essential. We are not going to eradicate features of our basic nature, and real spiritual awakening has more to do with facing this honestly than it does with arriving at a fantasy of some kind of Superman Buddha dwelling within one. To see our real nature, our human nature, is not cynicism—it is awakening.

Knowing one is imperfect, and deeply so, undermines pride. It puts one on firmer ground—a ground of empirical reality. It is, in fact, a relief. It may be a disappointment, but even there one can observe the ego at work and, hopefully, laugh at oneself. This too is part of one’s all-too-human nature. Disappointment with oneself is not something to get rid of; it is something to share with others.

In Buddhism, we talk a lot about impermanence. The Buddha talked about impermanence in order to make us frightened. You might think it odd that Buddha wanted to frighten us in this thoroughgoing way, but how else was he to get us to take our spiritual and existential situation seriously? Life is short. There is much to be done. Our very world is in peril because of our spiritual state. I recently came across a listing of countries that are considered dangerous to visit, and the list included more than half of the countries on the planet! There are ecological perils, military perils, health perils, and, above all, spiritual perils, perhaps the greatest of which is losing concern about all the other perils.

Buddhism is a refuge, a space where we are accepted as we are, with our faults and fears, and where we are encouraged to do what we can for the good of all sentient beings. The buddhas are working to help us all the time. They see us as being in peril. We do not see this as clearly as they do. This failure to see clearly the spiritual peril that we are in is ignorance, avidya. Vidya means to see clearly. A-vidya means to be without such clarity. If we saw our plight more clearly we would be more motivated to respond to our peril. Things will not inevitably get better of their own accord. The state of our world depends upon the spirit in which we approach and care for it, and that spirit is much more soundly based when it is grounded in an acknowledgment of our true nature—fears and all—than when we pose as purer than we are.

There is an apparent paradox here—that holding too tightly to our ideals may well make us worse by making us blind to reality and thus very likely to get ourselves into trouble in both worldly and spiritual ways. Becoming proud of ourselves and our own understanding, we easily get into quarrels and rivalries. Many of us have been members of spiritual communities in which unkind quarrels have broken out or, even worse, have gone on and on in a hidden, underground kind of way, suppressed by the attempt to pose as being more enlightened than we really are.

This is often the result of an unwillingness to acknowledge fear, a refusal to see its central place in our makeup, its intimate connection to life itself. We are blind to our own blindness and do not see the danger. The blindness is much more dangerous than the fear. We do not see our own role in its creation. If we did, then we would be more afraid, and our practice would be more careful. We would see the spiritual danger that threatens us and threatens others even more. We would value the help of the buddhas and ancestors and be less arrogant. Then our fear would bring us a little bit of enlightenment, and we would realize what a gift it is.

The post The Gift of Fear appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

In honor of Black History Month, Tricycle is presenting a special video series, “Teachings for Uncertain Times,” featuring 13 teachers of color, here on our blog, Trike Daily, throughout February. The videos are free to watch.

In the following video Tuere Sala, a co-guiding teacher at Seattle Insight Meditation Society and retired prosecutor, explains how taking refuge is an essential step to developing trust during times of turbulence.

“I have, over the years, come to develop an enduring trust—in the dharma and in my practice—that will support me no matter what situation I encounter, no matter what comes before me,” Sala says. “This trust did not come from someone else telling me what to do or someone else telling me how to believe. This trust came out of my own practice, my own working with the practice in my everyday life. It’s called taking refuge in the dharma, the Buddha, and the sangha. It’s this refuge that we take when we apply these teachings to our own life.”

Download a transcript of this talk. It has been edited for clarity.

♦

Watch other videos in the “Teachings for Uncertain Times” series

The post Teachings for Uncertain Times: The Power and Importance of Community appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

The day after the election, my sweetheart, who lives in North Carolina, asked over the phone for my hand in marriage.

Sitting in Ohio on my $50 sofa surrounded by mounds of used tissues, I mustered a smile and asked, “Do you think when they make gay marriage illegal again that they’re going to grandfather us in?”

“Exactly.”

“It doesn’t work that way,” I said and started crying again because I didn’t think gay marriage would be the first target. It would be the civil rights of transgender teenagers trying to use the bathroom at their high schools. And the civil rights of my sweetheart who has been called out in the women’s bathroom for not conforming to feminine norms.

­And I was crying on a $50 sofa the color of sand because once upon a time the Colombian women in my family were undocumented and now the country had elected a man who demonized families like ours. The fact that my Cuban father had voted for this candidate sat at the center of my mind like a bruise.

The used tissues accumulated on the sofa. Still on the phone, but now with a friend in her late 50s, I listened to her fears of losing Obamacare, of having no safety net of any kind if she got sick. Another friend, a rape survivor, began to disassociate as she realized the country had just elected a man who bragged about sexually assaulting women. A student whispered in class, “It’s been hard.” My therapist nodded when I told her all this, then confessed, “A number of my clients are struggling.” I looked up from the chair in her carpeted office and realized I was one of them.    

Refuge. That is the word I have been contemplating since the election, since I turned off the cable news and the two political news podcasts I had followed daily for years. Some days, refuge is silence. I listen only to the ticking of the clock, to the ladder propped against my apartment building because it is November and the dead leaves have gathered on the roof and two men in baseball caps have come for them.

Other times, refuge is the dharma. I listen to a Buddhist podcast as I wash dishes. I read a book my sister bought with a title like Buddhism For Beginners. I lie in bed listening to a dharma teacher in Minneapolis who reminds me to stay with the bruise, and I notice that this time I am able to do it. The first two times I listened to his post-election talk, I thought: I can’t. Everything hurts. The only yoga I could manage was child’s pose. Now, after a few weeks, I can be with this sensation of my throat closing quickly and furiously, this mind jumping from memory to imagination, screaming that the world is an incredibly unsafe place. I can feel my chest contracting and I am able to stay with it. I am able to stand it.

I begin to take refuge in being reminded that the Dalai Lama is in exile. That’s right, I say to myself. The most well-known face of Buddhism knows firsthand what it means to be targeted, to lose your country. If he can do it . . . But when a friend reminds me that many people around the world live under dictatorship, I stifle a sob and manage to say, “Yes, but not us.” Always critical of American exceptionalism, I discover I am deeply attached to it.

Inspired by a woman on Instagram, I make a protest sign that reads: “You voted for him because you’re afraid of people like me.” I stare at the words. Would the Buddha have written this? A friend and scholar told me that the Buddha deliberated with monarchs and advocated for peace. I stare at my sign. I don’t know what the Buddha would have done. I know what I am doing. I take my sign downtown to the protest in Cincinnati and stand next to a young white woman whose multicolored sign reads: “At first they came for the Muslims but we said: BACK OFF.” I decide she is enlightened.

One of my favorite teachings from the Buddha is one in which he tells his students that friends are not half the holy life—they are the entire holy life. We take refuge in the Buddha and the dharma, but the sangha, our communities, is a refuge too. I have been lucky in this regard. When I lived in Oakland, California, I sat with a people of color sangha and later when I moved to South Florida, I found a Colombian-born teacher who ran a Zen center where we chanted in Japanese, heard dharma talks in English, and told stories in Spanish over green tea.

Now, having moved to Ohio for a teaching job, I am part of a white sangha. Sitting together for a discussion of a Tricycle article after the election, I listened carefully. I admired these practitioners and their commitment to the dharma. I was surprised, though, to not hear anyone mention their material vulnerability in the face of the election results. I listened some more. Then, I shared too much too deeply, my voice catching in my throat, and as these moments about race tend to go, I wound up feeling guilty and exposed for having shared too much too deeply in a place that could not offer me refuge.

I recalled my first job after college 20 years earlier. Those were my first days in room after room filled with white people whose lives were either nothing like mine or who didn’t speak about their lives in any way that I could understand. Back then I had not known what to do. This time, I did.

Back in my car, I called a Buddhist friend in New York. Her family is Hindu and Muslim. “I’m getting my Canadian passport lined up,” she said.

We remembered 9/11 together: the registrations, the attacks on anyone thought to be Muslim. We wondered why this felt more terrifying than the aftermath of 9/11. We decided it’s the words.

We had both grown up aware that we belonged to immigrant families and that we were considered outsiders, and in that childhood in different corners of the United States, we learned the weight of words. We learned how certain verbs came before the start of white flight. How demonstrative adjectives acted as borders in the mouth: those people, that neighborhood. We learned to never trust personal pronouns. We, they, you, I—the slenderest words could bruise.

This election cycle had been a condensed version of everything we had learned to fear in our childhoods. The difference was that along the way we had decided to investigate Buddhism, to learn how to be in this world with the violence of words and also their emptiness. We had taken refuge in the dharma, in the possibility of waking up. Now my friend wanted to know how I was finding refuge during this time. She wanted to know what was working. Sangha, I wanted to tell her, but instead I said, “You. I’m on the phone with you.”

Read more from Daisy Hernández 

The post Finding Refuge in a Time of War appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.