Oh wow ...

...I really missed the boat on this one. Talk about not being present....

Here's a lesson in impermanence, and in the need to stay connected.

There once was a man who had a major impact on my life. I don't know that he ever knew what a huge effect he had on me. He was a coffeehouse owner, a hobo, a poet, and a wonderful percolator of creativity and unity. It's hard to find words that haven't already been used to describe him, and better....

Suffice it to say that his slow, genuine life is something that both my husband and I honor in our lives. We mention him fairly frequently, and will continue to do so.

When I left New Orleans after college, I knew I was leaving an important and formative part of my life behind. I was also leaving a city and people I love behind, and I didn't know when I would be back. When we filled up at the gas station that day, I broke down and cried. I had to face impermanence head on, and just accept change.

Things change, time passes, people live and die. Bob Borsodi died, just as we all must. However, to learn that he was so racked with the pain of metastasized, fatal cancer that he leapt to his death from the Hale Boggs Bridge, into the Mississippi River...and not only that, that I missed his passing by more than four years....well, it's just given me food for thought. What a mindfulness bell.... I've got much to think about.....

A Cage Without a Bird -- Bob Borsodi

I have a dove that dwells

Within a cage without a door.

(I took the door off years ago.)

And pretty girls have asked,

Their minds full of externals,

"Is it safe?"

And how perhaps he needs a door

To protect him

Lest he sneak away somehow to the city outside

And be lost.

And compounding their request,

If he needs a mate

That he might want for friendship

In his prison without a gate.

Well, here it is.

The dove and I have achieved this rare liberty

Only after many years,

A tedious story of near disaster experiences,

Murky and dreary, too unkind to recall.

The surest safety

Comes from a source deep inside,

Deep inside the boney cage,

From a peaceful feeling there

Which I would do harm to explain.

And the sweetest friendship likewise

Comes from a free feeling there, deep inside,

That I would do harm to tame.

Yet peaceful and free

We do no harm to be.

Awakening

One of the deep honors of being a parent is the opportunity to be present when another human being reaches a new understanding of the world. Sometimes these moments are cotton candy sweet, happy affairs. Sometimes they're not. In either case the blessing witnessing - or perhaps even occasionally midwifing - these moments remains the same.

The other evening one of these moments happened for my youngest, and all I could do was just wrap my arms around him and let him mourn.

See, we have a two diet family. My eldest so and I are vegan, my husband and younger two have not been. We coexist, and Warren and I very frank about where food comes from. Both of us believe its important to really understand the origins of what's on our plate. It's so easy in our society to divorce ourselves from this knowledge, and both the meat-eating husband and I believe that's an ethical slippery-slope. (I'm giving my other half a hard time, but he honestly doesn't eat a lot of animal products anymore, which I appreciate.)

So the other night my little guy didn't understand what the optional meat for his bean burrito was all about. When I finally got through to him that it was ground up cow meat that my husband had cooked to add to his, and not vegan he was absolutely horrified. He finally understood, and he was absolutely wracked with grief for all butchered animals. Watching him extend his new knowledge into a growing sense of compassion was so wonderful. Holding him while he cried for them in empathy was painful, but beautiful, too. I'm grateful I was allowed to be there.

Please Help Save Darfur

Learn more about the situation at http://www.savedarfur.org/. Please consider embedding this on your site or blog or linking to this ad at YouTube. You can also forward the ad on to others here.

The Sangha Metta Project

This film looks to be (as far as I can tell from the trailer) a really good look at the Sangha Metta Project of Southeast Asia, "which which engages monks in HIV/AIDS prevention and care." To learn more about the film project and also to find links relevant to this issue, check out http://aidsfrontline.org/.

Pain, Experience, Growth, Compassion

In Coming to Our Senses, Jon Kabat-Zinn points out to us that the part of us that experiences pain is itself *not* in pain. This is true for both emotional and physical pain. Trying to find an awareness of this - if even for a moment - has been tremendously useful to me. I think this speaks into the topic of tinythinker's recent posts. Liberation and enlightenment (to my thinking) are not ceasing to experience, not becoming numb, but letting pain or other experiences in our lives simply happen - not becoming a burden in our hearts and minds, but allowing us to grow instead.

What is the nature of liberation from suffering? For myself it didn't take long for me to realize that freedom from suffering didn't mean freedom from pain.

I've had plenty of unhappy things happen to me, frankly, running the gamut from (fairly "minor") molestation (at 4), to emotional and verbal abuse. And I've certainly experienced a variety of other difficulties in terms of situation and circumstance. But that hardly makes me unusual, and my struggles and pains are nothing compared to, say, those in Darfur struggling for their lives, or the many children in sexual slavery around the world, struggling with captivity and abuse. My "sufferings" are meager, I know that. Nonetheless, some days they have a deep impact on my heart and mind. Mindfulness and loving-compassion help me refocus, though I'm sure that some of the stuff stuck in my head will take years to sort out. Gives me something to do on sleepless nights, I guess.

In any case, while I struggle with the aftereffects of some of these experiences, I'm not sorry I had a single one of them. Each experience I've had has been an opportunity for growth. I've done my best - at least since I became an adult and started my own life - to never shirk from an opportunity to grow. Everything I've experienced has added to who I am, and what I understand.

Every painful experience I have allows me the opportunity to understand another viewpoint. For instance, it is very easy for me to extend my compassion to people struggling with abuse, past or presence. What I have been struggling with lately (and this partially relates to my lack of serious posts, recently) is learning how to extend that mindful compassion beyond where that compassion is comfortable or easy. Tengu House had a post on this recently, wherein he (?) ponders how to extend that compassion to the folks that kidnap, harm and abuse. This is a difficult but essential question, I think.

Whether or not reincarnation is a reality, I think that there is no question that Wrong Action a person undertakes will lead their future suffering. Reincarnation makes this easier - a person's wrongful act will be something they suffer with in the future. To my thinking, reincarnation means there's no escape.

On the other hand, if you don't believe in reincarnation the answers can be less straightforward, and extending compassion to a violent, "monstrous" person becomes a greater leap of faith. In this case it may be that you simply have to start by letting your "hands lead your heart." Making a deliberate, conscious decision to always extend compassion moves us all towards the emptying of samsara, towards world peace, towards the end of suffering.

In The Heart of the Buddha's Teaching, Thich Nhat Hanh speaks of the Five Powers (see chapter 24, pp. 184-191): faith, energy, mindfulness, concentration and insight. With these wonderful tools we can grow both our own Buddha nature, and also begin to see that we all have Buddha nature - villains and victims alike. When we choose to feel compassion for someone who has committed great harm we are mindfully applying what we have learned about compassion and loving-kindness, Buddha nature and co-arising. Compassion without hesitation frees our own mind from suffering and waters the seeds of our own Buddha nature.

The first of the four noble truths is that suffering exists. Unenlightened beings can cause suffering and frequently do. Shantideva made a really good point when he said: "It is natural for the immature to harm others. Getting angry with them is like resenting a fire for burning." Perhaps one can view the Wrong Actions of human predators the same way one views the actions of a rabid grizzly bear. There is no point in being angry at the bear, and it isn't very hard to have compassion for her/him. However, the bear must be dealt with for everyone's safety and be at least imprisoned, if not put down. (Note - I am strongly opposed to the death penalty and do not mean to imply that killing is the best way to deal with human predators. In addition, I am a vegan, so of course I am highly interested in fair and compassionate treatment for all of our fellow creatures.)

Anger can be understood as a strong aversion to someone or something. Aversion is the opposite of attachment and is no more useful. Acting from anger is not acting in wisdom. By deliberately choosing compassion we do not poison ourselves, and we also help to break the cycles of violence and hatred that keep us from achieving the end of suffering for all beings. There is no point in me not forgiving former abusers. It may be hard, but forgiving them allows me to not identify myself with the past's painful events. As Master Cheng Yen said: "To be angry is to let others' mistakes punish yourself. To forgive others is to be good to yourself."

Flower (Lapsana apogonoides) image courtesy of jam34.

Brother Karma Needs Help

With no money in their hands and little or no help coming from the state, family of 23-year old Karma Lama is finding it very difficult to save their young son.

DIAGNOSED WITH Nephrotic Syndrome a year back, the condition of the young monk has now worsened and he has progressed into the End Stage Renal Disease. Doctors need to replace Karma’s kidneys fast or else he is staring at certain death and in between he needs to have regular dialysis sessions to keep the system working.

For more information, there is a blog about his situation. Let's pass this on, y'all, and spread the word. I'll bet between all of us, we can help Karma out....

Please Get Involved

Consider joining the ONE Campaign to Make Poverty History at http://www.one.org.

Car-ma

OK, this is a car commercial, but I love this:

(Found at Awakening the Buddha in us - thanks!)

Love

Via Entering the Path I found a quote by Brad Warner:

“Transcending emotions doesn’t mean you have no feelings. You have them. But you recognize them for what they are and respond appropriately without letting them develop into what we call emotions, which are really just feelings that have been blown way out of proportion.”

To an extent I agree with this. However, in my humble, unschooled opinion, he's oversimplifying things. The breadth and depth of the palette of human emotion is a good thing, with a potential for great beauty. It's an essential part of what it means to be human, I think. If a human incarnation is to be viewed as a precious thing - an opportunity not to be wasted - it seems to me that human emotion is something not to be wasted, as well.

Problems arise when emotional experience becomes an attachment. Recently, just as I was ending my meditation practice, I had the thought that emotional pain can very easily become an attachment if one is unable or unwilling to move beyond past experience. However, not all emotion is pain and not all emotion is attachment. One can experience intense pain, one can experience intense emotion. I don’t believe suffering is dependent on either. It’s all in how you greet your experience.

There is much emphasis in Buddhism on loving-kindness and compassion. Compassion - the root of lovingness and kindness – is an emotion. I can’t think of another way to describe it. When one practices compassion and – as a consequence – kindness, one experiences great joy. This is not (should not be) the end result of practicing loving-kindness, but it’s a wonderful lagniappe. The emotional rewards of being loving are the fruit, not the tree.

The context of Mr. Warner's blog entry relates mostly to romantic love, so I'll focus my comments on love, specifically. To truly know and love someone - once one has moved beyond romantic love and on to the deeper realities of everyday love - can be one of the great joys of life. Within the structure of real love (whether it be filial, marital, or what-have-you), there is a great deal of room for mindfulness, compassion and understanding. Love can provide a fantastic context for one's daily practice - great opportunities for growth are to be found in our daily interactions. One might even argue that they are necessary for love to continue to ripen and expand.

I am a humble (I hope.), unknowledgeable student of Dharma. So perhaps I simply don’t understand the Truth of what Mr. Warner is saying. I also am not as well-read in Zen thought as I am in the other branches of Buddhism. So perhaps my lack of understanding lies there. In any case, for now, I’ll have to disagree. In my mind a feeling is an itch, and an emotion such as love - while a much “larger” issue – is still a useful experience.

Ussannatā

(...this is a Pali word, meaning abundance, or fullness.)

I deeply appreciate the insight of all who have commented on this to me.

Right about the time I was reading Kunzang's wonderful commentary, I realized that I really did need to turn my view of emptiness around. So to speak.

I've long understood the usefulness, particularly in Buddhism, of studying/understanding paradox. However, in this case, I got hung up on the ideas and words of a specific concept. It took me a while to get over my over-intellectualizing of sunyata.

Anyway, I finally realized the truth of the fullness of emptiness. And vice versa. And once I got my head around the necessary duality of the concept, I was able to easily mesh the concept in with the concept of compassion. (By seeing our interdependence and co-arising, we see the absolute necessity of compassion and loving kindness. By exhibiting loving-kindness we are moving all of us towards enlightenment and the end of suffering. (At least that's my coarse and primitive sum-uppance. Gosh, this whole paragraph looks (is?) so droll and self-absorbed.))

I also realize that by approaching my understanding in this way, by coming at the mountain via more the idea of interdependence and co-arising, I am limiting myself. However, it's a start, and as I am just beginning to sort out the first few steps on this Path, I am content. For the moment.

Form/Emptiness

"Form is no other than emptiness, emptiness no other than form; form is exactly emptiness, emptiness exactly form"
-Heart Sutra

I have been slowly studying the Heart Sutra. This (quote) I get. Still, I wonder at the idea of placing understanding emptiness before compassion. Can one not understand and practice ego-less compassion without having understood Sunyata?

Sunyata

Lately I've been focused on deepening my understanding of Emptiness. It's been slow going - this is where it is obvious to me that being able to participate in a local sangha would be good.

I started my exploration of sunyata after reading an excerpt from Bodhi magazine (Vol. 8, No. 3) in Buddhadharma's Spring 2007 issue. There's an article there by Dzogchen Ponlop Rinpoche called "Emptiness First, Then Compassion." He writes:

When we try to practice compassion without the view of egolessness, or emptiness, we are often not really helping because we ourselves are so confused. Our own lack of clarity only produces further confusion. If we have an idea that we think will help someone, it is usually based on our own interpretation of what we think they require or want. We are not looking at their situation from their point of view. Instead of giving them what they truly need, we give what we think they need. There is a difference between the two. Furthermore, we have value judgments about how they should accept our help, and so we "help"them further by imposing conditions and guidelines.

Compassion and loving-kindness that is free from ego clinging allows us to see the suffering of others from their own perspective. We can see beyond our own ideas and beliefs. We can see what they need from their point of view, and we can apply our own wisdom at the same time. with this more open and clear view, we can see more realistically what will meet their actual needs and be truly beneficial.

I do understand what he is saying. However, for myself, I come to the idea of egoless compassion and loving-kindness through my attempts to broaden my ability to be compassionate. There was a point when I realized that to be truly compassionate and loving I needed to move beyond my own concepts and try to understand the needs and feelings of others in order to better "serve" them. (I wish I could think of a better word than "serve" - the best thing I can think of is my own crudely-realized idea of bodhicitta, though it is only in recent years that I've come to have a (beginner's) understanding of this concept.)

I guess it's a matter of perspective. For me, the idea of linearly studying one concept before another does not work as well as a more holistic approach studying many aspects of Buddhism at one time. I'm not suggesting a scattered approach leading to little understanding. It's more about the concepts of interdependence extending into my understanding of the Dharma - no one concept being free of others.

Perhaps the Venerable Dzogchen Ponlop Rinpoche and I have different styles of thinking. Or perhaps I am just not knowledgeable enough to have a separate perspective, and I am just deluding or confusing myself. ^_^

Links I've recently been looking at on the topic:

• Emptiness Is Form
• Emptiness ('Sunyata')
• Shunyata - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
  

"Love is the Law"

You know, I love my husband very much. We've been married for almost 16 years. It hasn't been easy, but it has been very much worth it.

My husband is passionate about his beliefs. We have a different religious context, but we come from the same spiritual context. He is all about loving-compassion. Check out his opening blog entry. I'd love to know what you think, and so would he. ^_^

Action as Compassion

I found a section on CNN.com called CNN Heroes. Each of the people mentioned has, as a result of their experience, seen a need to take action to make the world a better place. They come from many walks of life, but they all express loving-kindness and compassion for their fellow earthlings and/or the earth itself. They are my inspiration today, you might consider checking them out. ^_^

The Walk Itself...

Thus we see that the all-important thing is not killing or giving life, drinking or not drinking, living in the town or the country, being lucky or unlucky, winning or losing. It is how we win, how we lose, how we live or die; finally, how we choose. We walk, and our religion is shown (even to the dullest and most insensitive person), in how we walk. Living in this world means choosing, and the way we choose to walk is infallibly and perfectly expressed in the walk itself.

- R. H. Blyth

Found this via BigHappyBuddha. Thanks for the inspiration.

Juan Mann's Loving Compassion

My 12 year old thinks that Juan's efforts are full of Loving-Compassion. I agree.


Here's a related Australian news clip:


And to learn more, here's the website: http://www.freehugscampaign.org/

"Avilokiteshvara - Buddha of Compassion"

This is nice:

From allinthemind The mantra of Buddha Avilokiteshvara ... The mantra of Buddha Avilokiteshvara (Buddha of Compassion), what the mantra means, some tibetan throat chanting by Lama Tashi, along with a few visuals. Please enjoy!

Lizard Sitting

Last night I stayed up late with a lizard.

I found him (?!?) behind the door in our bathroom, tired and injured. My guess is that he found his way in, and then my cats found him. I can't imagine what that was like.

Anyway, he was so tired and weak, it was easy to get him into a "Tupperware" container to take outside. As I did so, however, he climbed out of the container and up on to my wrist.

For a moment we looked at each other while we each decided what we would do. I decided to do nothing, and let the lizard decide what was most important to him. He watched me, wide-eyed - half-afraid I was going to eat him, I suppose. When he realized I intended him no harm he relaxed, and let the warmth of my body provide him with strength and healing.

He let me carry him through the house that way, and after a brief conversation with my husband, I decided to sit with the injured lizard and allow him the chance to rest. What an amazing thing that was. Every little while he would feel warmed up enough to move up my arm and on to the table next to me, but each time he realized that he was still injured and too tired to get back to his life yet. So he allowed me to lift him back to my skin each time, where he'd watch me for a little while and then close his eyes and rest. I also tried a couple of times to find him a warm and safe place outside to rest, but each time he crawled further up my body and looked at me, as if to say, please let me stay a while. So I did.

We sat together for quite a while, but eventually other responsibilities called me - if nothing else it was well past when I should have gone to sleep. So we reached a compromise. After a little coaxing from me he found that he could warm himself on the top rim of the lampshade on the little table next to us, so he made himself comfortable and went back to sleep. He was still there (and alive) this morning when I came back into the room, but eventually I found that he had moved on. Hopefully he went out the nearby door (open to the warm spring weather) into the sunshine.

I am very grateful for the opportunity to sit with this lizard and be mindful of my experience. I am grateful that I was able to share a little love and warmth with him. I wish him the best.

Om Mani Padme Hum....

OK, not trying to pinch other folks' stuff, but I found this quote on lotusinthemud, as well, and I thought it speaks to my other post about suffering and loving transformation.

Imagine walking along a sidewalk with your arms full of groceries, and someone roughly bumps into you so that you fall and your groceries are strewn over the ground. As you rise up from the puddle of broken eggs and tomato juice, you are ready to shout out, "You idiot! What's wrong with you? Are you blind?" But just before you can catch your breath to speak, you see that the person who bumped you is actually blind. He, too, is sprawled in the spilled groceries, and your anger vanishes in an instant, to be replaced by sympathetic concern: "Are you hurt? Can I help you up?" Our situation is like that. When we clearly realize that the source of disharmony and misery in the world is ignorance, we can open the door of wisdom and compassion. Then we are in a position to heal ourselves and others. ~ B. Alan Wallace, Tibetan Buddhism from the Ground Up

"We can move mountains with a single breath."

So, I was reading Rinchen Gyatso's booklet "You Can Move Mountains: An Introduction to the Mind-Science of Dharma" and found this quote:

People don’t like to talk about suffering.... We don’t like to think about the ways in which we cause our own and other’s suffering, because that would mean we would have to change our lives.

He also writes:

[...] we can dramatically change not only our experience of the world, but also ultimately the experience of all beings that share this world with us, if we begin to make small changes in our own minds. With each breath, we turn a little to the right, a little bit closer to fully embodying the wisdom and compassion that exists within us.

I take from this that a constant move towards love and compassion will ultimately leave (when I/we die) the world a better place. Rinchen Gyatso continues:

We are not the victims of circumstance: we create our circumstances. Within each of us lies the power to change our lives, and to positively affect the people around us. Like ripples in a pond, we can change everything and create the world we truly want; a world filled with people who work for peace and the benefit of others.

As war and strife continue around us, as violence bubbles up in our world, we must keep from feeling helpless, that nothing we do matters. Everything matters. In The Heart of the Buddha's Teaching, Thich Nhat Hanh writes:

In the year 255, Vietnamese Meditation Master Tang Hoi taught that our consciousness is like the ocean with the six rivers of our senses flowing into it. Our mind and our body come from consciousness. They are formed by ourselves and our environment. Our lives can be said to be a manifestation of our consciousness.