The Wisdom of No Escape: How to Love Yourself and Your World (11 page)

Genuine, heartfelt ritual helps us reconnect with power and vision as well as with the sadness and pain of the human condition. When the power and vision come together, there’s some sense of doing things properly for their own sake. Making a proper cup of tea means that you thoroughly and completely make that tea because you appreciate the tea and the boiling water and the fact that together they make
something that’s nourishing and delicious, that lifts one’s spirit. You don’t do it because you’re worried that someone’s not going to like you if you don’t do it right. Nor do you do it so fast that it’s over before you even realize that you made a cup of tea, let alone that you drank six cups. So whether it’s smoking a cigarette or drinking a cup of tea or making your bed or washing the dishes – whatever it might be – it’s ritual in the sense of doing it properly, if you can hold the sadness in your heart as well as the vision of the Great Eastern Sun.

Chögyam Trungpa, Rinpoche, loved ritual. He drew from all traditions – including Tibetan, Japanese, and British – to create rituals, one of which was how he would walk into the shrine room. You would be sitting in the shrine room and then suddenly you would hear the crack of the ceremonial sticks (
gandi
), the ping of the small gong, and the boom of the big drum: ‘crack,’ ‘ping,’ ‘boom,’ ‘crack,’ ‘ping,’ ‘boom.’ As the sound gradually came closer and closer, you knew that Rinpoche was just about to enter. Then there he was, with his procession of attendants. He was just entering the shrine room to give his talks, but somehow the ritual of it created an environment in which the space would open up. You felt as if you were in a timeless space. It wasn’t June 22, 1989; it was no particular time of day or night or calendar year, it was just space. He knew that if he created all these sounds and rituals, all of us would benefit from that experience of timelessness.

Native peoples have always understood about the seasons, the sun coming up and going down, and the earth, and they have rituals to celebrate all those things. So that no one can miss the fact that we are all connected, puberty rites and all the other ceremonies are well choreographed, like a beautiful dance. The old people know how to do these things and they pass the knowledge on, and that’s called lineage. Black Elk was a Sioux holy man in the 1880s, a time when his people were losing heart, losing their spirit, because the way they had always lived, which had given them so much sense of being connected, was being destroyed. Yet it was still early enough that they had not lost all of it. When he was nine years old, he had a vision of how he might save his people, a vision about horses coming from the four directions. In one direction the horses were white, in another direction sorrel, in another direction buckskin, in the last direction black. With them came maidens carrying sacred objects, and the grandfathers singing prophecies. Each direction had its whole ritualistic symbolism. He never told his vision to anyone, because he thought nobody would believe him. But when he was about seventeen years old, he felt he was going a little crazy, so he finally told the medicine man, who immediately understood and said, ‘We have to act it out.’ They did the whole thing, painting their bodies in the way he had seen, enacting the entire vision.

When he was in his twenties, things had completely fallen apart. He ended up being in Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show, with some other Indians. They were taken on a ‘fire-boat’ to Europe to do a show in London with all their ponies and their Indian clothing. One night Queen Victoria came to see the show. Now, you wouldn’t think there would be much in common between Black Elk, an Oglala Sioux from the Plains in 1886, and Queen Victoria, but that night nobody else came – just Queen Victoria in a shining carriage and her entourage. When the show was finished, she stood up and shook hands with all of them with her little soft hand. He really liked her. Then she bowed to them, and they were so impressed with her and her bearing that the women did something called the tremolo and the men did the whooping, and then they all bowed to her. Black Elk described her as ‘Grandmother England.’ She had so much majesty and presence. ‘She was little and fat and she was good to us.’ About a month later, she invited them to her Silver Jubilee. As he said, when he and the other native people got to this great big building, everyone was yelling, ‘Jubilee! Jubilee! Jubilee!’ He said he still didn’t know what that meant, but then he was able to describe what he saw. First in her golden coach came Queen Victoria, the horses all covered in gold and her clothes all gold like fire. Then in the black coach with the black horses was the queen’s grandson, and in the black coach with the gray horses were her relatives. He described all the
coaches and all the horses and then all the men arriving in their beautiful clothing, riding on black horses with plumes. The whole ceremony meant something to them. He said that before the Jubilee he felt like a man who had never had a vision, but that seeing all that pomp and circumstance reconnected him with his heart. When Queen Victoria in her golden coach came by the Indians, she had the coach stopped and she stood up and she bowed to them again. Again they threw all their things in the air and whooped and hollered and did the tremolo, and then they sang to Grandmother England. It cheered them up.

Ritual can be the Queen of England or the people of the Great Plains. It somehow transcends time and space. In any case, I think it has something to do with holding the sadness and pain of samsara in your heart and at the same time holding the vision and power of the Great Eastern Sun. Our whole life could be a ritual. We could learn to stop when the sun goes down and when the sun comes up. We could learn to listen to the wind; we could learn to notice that it’s raining or snowing or hailing or calm. We could reconnect with the weather that is ourselves, and we could realize that it’s sad. The sadder it is, the vaster it is, and the vaster it is, the more our heart opens. We can stop thinking that good practice is when it’s smooth and calm, and bad practice is when it’s rough and dark. If we can hold it all in our hearts, then we can make a proper cup of tea.

^*
Samsara is the vicious cycle of existence; nirvana is the cessation of ignorance and of conflicting emotions, and therefore freedom from compulsive rebirth in samsara.

^†
The state in which all experiences are transformed into transcendental knowledge and skillful means.

^*
Symbolic hand gestures that accompany tantric practices to state the quality of different moments of meditation.

^†
Words or syllables that express the quintessence of various energies.

fifteen
the dharma that is taught and the dharma that is experienced

T
raditionally, there are two ways of describing the teachings of the Buddha: the dharma that is taught and the dharma that is experienced. The dharma that is taught has been presented continuously in books and lectures in a pure and fresh way since the time of the Buddha. Even though it all began in India, in a very different kind of time and space and culture than we know today, the essence of the teachings was capable of transmission to Southeast Asia, Japan, China, Korea, Vietnam, and Tibet – to all the places to which Buddhism has spread – by people who could express what they themselves had been taught. Nowadays there are so many wonderful books on the basic teachings; you can read Joseph Goldstein and Ayya Khema and Suzuki Roshi and Chögyam Trungpa and Tarthang Tülku and all the translations of Herbert Guenther. There are so many different ways you can read and hear the teachings, and they all have slightly different flavors. But you will find that if in each one you
choose a theme, like the four noble truths or loneliness or compassion, they all say the same thing about it, according to their own style or culture. The teachings are the same and the essence is the same.

The dharma that is taught is like a jewel, a precious jewel. Like bodhicitta, it can be covered over by dirt and yet is unchanged by dirt. When someone brings the jewel out into the light and shows it to everyone, it resonates in the hearts and minds of those who see it. The teachings are also like a beautiful golden bell hidden away in a deep, dark cave; when someone brings it out and rings it, people can hear the sound. That’s the dharma that is taught. Traditionally it is said that the dharma can be taught, but one has to have ears to hear it. The analogy of three pots is given. If you’re like a pot with a big hole in the bottom, then when the dharma is put in, it just goes right out. If you’re like a pot that has poison in it, when the dharma is put in, it gets reinterpreted and comes out as poison. In other words, if you’re full of resentment and bitterness, you might reinterpret it to suit your own bitterness and resentment. If the pot is turned upside down, nothing can be put into the pot. You have to be awake and open to hear the dharma that is taught.

The dharma that is experienced is not a different dharma, although sometimes it feels quite different. A common experience is that when you hear the teachings, they resonate in your heart and mind, and you feel inspired by them, but you can’t figure out
what they have to do with your everyday life. When push comes to shove and you lose your job or the person you love leaves you or something else happens and your emotions go crazy and wild, you can’t quite figure out what that has to do with the four noble truths. Your pain feels so intense that the four noble truths seem somewhat pitiful by comparison. Trungpa Rinpoche once said that the dharma has to be experienced because when the real quality of our lives, including the obstacles and problems and experiences that cause us to start questioning, becomes intense, any mere philosophical belief isn’t going to hold a candle to the reality of what we are experiencing.

What you will discover as you continue to study the dharma and to practice meditation is that nothing that you have ever heard is separate from your life. Dharma is the study of what is, and the only way you can find out what is true is through studying yourself. The Zen master Dogen said, ‘To know yourself or study yourself is to forget yourself, and if you forget yourself then you become enlightened by all things.’ Knowing yourself or studying yourself just means that it’s
your
experience of joy, it’s
your
experience of pain,
your
experience of relief and ventilation, and
your
experience of sorrow. That’s all we have and that’s all we need in order to have a living experience of the dharma – to realize that the dharma and our lives are the same thing.

I’m so struck by the quotation that appeared on the bulletin board yesterday. It said, ‘The everyday
practice is simply to develop complete acceptance and openness to all situations, emotions, and people.’ You read that and you hear it and maybe I even talk about it, but basically, what does that mean? When you read it, you think you sort of know what it means, but when you begin to try to do that, to test it against your experience, then your preconceptions of what it means completely fall apart; you discover something fresh and new that you never realized before. What personal identification with the dharma means is, live that way, test it, try to find out what it really means in terms of losing your job, being jilted by your lover, dying of cancer. ‘Be open and accept all situations and people.’ How do you do that? Maybe that’s the worst advice anybody could give you, but you have to find out for yourself.

Often we hear the teachings so subjectively that we think we’re being told what is true and what is false. But the dharma never tells you what is true or what is false. It just encourages you to find out for yourself. However, because we have to use words, we make statements. For example, we say, ‘The everyday practice is simply to develop complete acceptance of all situations, emotions, and people.’ That sounds like that’s what’s true and not to do that would be false. But that’s not what it says. What it does say is to encourage you to find out for yourself what is true and what is false. Try to live that way and see what happens. You’ll come up against all your doubts and fears and your hopes and you’ll grapple with that.
When you start to live that way, with that sense of ‘What does this really mean?,’ you’ll find it quite interesting. After a while, you forget that you’re even asking the question; you just practice meditation or you just live your life, and you have what is traditionally called insight, which means that you have a fresh take on what is true. Insight comes suddenly, as though you’ve been wandering around in the dark and someone switches on all the lights and reveals a palace. You say, ‘Wow! it’s always been here.’ Yet insight is very simple; it isn’t always ‘Wow!’ It’s as if all your life there’s been this bowl of white stuff sitting on your table but you don’t know what it is. You’re sort of scared to find out. Maybe it’s LSD, or cocaine, or rat poison. One day you moisten your finger, you touch it and get a few little grains, and you taste it, and my goodness, it’s salt. Nobody can tell you otherwise – it’s so obvious, so simple, so clear. So we all have insights. In our meditation we have them and perhaps we share them. I suppose that’s what all these talks are, sharing insights. It feels as if we’ve discovered something that no one else ever knew, and yet it’s completely straightforward and simple.

You can never deny the dharma that is experienced because it’s so straightforward and true. But traveling the path between the dharma that is taught and the dharma that is experienced involves allowing yourself and encouraging yourself not to always believe what you’re taught, but to wonder about it. All you have to do is to live that way and it
will become your path. The quotation on the bulletin board goes on to say that the way to do this is to stay open and never to withdraw. Never centralize into yourself. These are not just sweet little aphorisms, but actually the most profound teachings put in a deceptively simple way. You might think, ‘Oh, yes, never withdraw, fine, but what does that mean?’ Obviously, it doesn’t mean that you’re a bad person to withdraw; you’ve been taught about maitri and loving-kindness and nonjudgmental attitude and acceptance of yourself, not being afraid to be who you are. Do you see what I mean? In Zen
Mind, Beginner’s Mind
Suzuki Roshi says that he got a letter from one of his students that said, ‘Dear Roshi, you sent me a calendar and each month has a very inspiring statement, but I’m not even into February yet and I find that I can’t measure up to these statements.’ Suzuki Roshi was laughing at the fact that people use the dharma to make themselves feel miserable. Or other people who have a quick conceptual grasp of the dharma may use it to become arrogant and proud. If you find yourself misunderstanding the teachings, the teachings themselves will always show you where you’re off. In some sense, the dharma is like a seamless web that you can’t get out of.