Monday, October 6, 2014

Suffering Apparent Injustice and More Questions


I was all set to write more about suffering injustice when someone sent me another translation of this phrase which blew what I was going to say.

In a book on Chan Buddhism, Peter Hershock (who is coming here to Austin in a few weeks to talk with us for a day) says that the practice was “suffering apparent injustice.”

He says that when we are good and bad things happen it is because of bad karma earned in previous lives.

At one point Buddha is asked if things sometimes just happen, and he says yes. So this teaching is a little bit in contradiction to Buddha…who also said that if a teacher contradicts the Buddha, then you should follow the teacher.

Another reason that an injustice may be apparent is that we think life shouldn’t be that way. We think sickness, old age, and death are unfair.

N wrote that some Christian missionaries had a dilemma because they didn’t know whether to help the poor since the meek will inherit the Earth (my words, not N’s).

So might we say that Bodhidharma didn’t believe in injustice? Some accuse different political factions of that.

When do we want to change things? There are two pieces of pie for dinner. One is covered with mold, and the other is steaming hot, having just been pulled from the oven. I’m served the moldy pie. Is that just?

Should I eat it as Suzuki Roshi ate the bad cucumbers, without wincing? Or as Buddha knowingly ate some bad pork and died (as the story goes)? He didn’t want to insult his host.

I think tomorrow I’ll try to nip suffering in the b_tt. Ouch!

Sunday, October 5, 2014

Suffering Injustice—Many Questions.

Tangled Mess

Bodhidharma ((who brought Zen (Chan) from India to China around 600 CE)) said in his Outline of Practice that the essence of Chan practice is: suffering injustice, adapting to conditions, seeking nothing, and practicing the Dharma. Why would one of the wisest men who ever lived suggest that we should practice “suffering injustice”? Would the world go to “hell in a hand basket” if we all did that? Do we really have a choice but to do that?

I’m not sure how this all started today. I kept running into people suffering injustice. Or maybe they weren’t “suffering” as Bodhidharma prescribed. I heard in a Dharma talk the other day that someone was looking forward to joining a monastery so they could start suffering. What did they mean?

First I saw this YouTube video of Michael Brown protestors interrupting a symphony in St. Louis:


St. Louis American, an African-American newspaper, had a good description of the event.

Second, I read this book review in the Los Angeles Review of Books about Chinese Comfort Women. Did they suffer injustice, especially since they refused to talk about what had happened to them (until now)?

And lastly, I read this on Jewish Feminism.

Oh… it all started in Torah class last week. We read in Leviticus that women are sequestered twice as long from the community when they have a girl rather than a boy.

And, I remembered that Burmese nuns are low on the seniority pole, even if they have been practicing for decades. They still need to bow to a novice male monk.

So many questions here. What did Bodhidharma mean by “suffer”? Are there times when suffering might not be the right action? Have the African-Americans in Ferguson been suffering all along and that is the problem (they haven’t been protesting).

Here is Buddha’s Dart sutra that describes how our mind creates a mental feeling when the body has a bodily feeling. 

Jews are told to create injustice. “You shall not aggrieve a stranger or oppress him, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt” (Exodus 22:20). They are told that not coming to someone’s aid makes one responsible for their trouble (don’t have a reference here). 

Saturday, October 4, 2014

Second Chances (Eating Meat and Not Wearing a Helmet)

Sometimes we get a second chance. When we do wrong, and realize it, we can respond in a variety of ways. We can say, we made a mistake…we shouldn’t have done that. What that says to me is that we got caught, and being caught, made the action a poor choice. A little better response might be to feel remorse. We say, “I feel terrible for what I did. I am sorry that I hurt you.” But the real growth and forgiveness come when we alter our behavior.

I realize, when eating meat, that I’m contributing to an industry that is using a great deal of resources to produce nutrition that could be derived from other means (see: http://www.peta.org/issues/animals-used-for-food/meat-wastes-natural-resources/). Many of us “know” this. I also know that the wholesale slaughter of animals does not make us a peace-loving species. Yet many of us, myself included, pay others to raise and kill animals for food. We may be ignorant of the facts. We may realize that we are doing the wrong thing, but do it anyway because we “enjoy it” or because we believe that we need the protein (see: http://www.vrg.org/nutrition/protein.php).

Or we can acknowledge that this is all true, and feel sad for the killing of animals and resources, but continue to do so. Perhaps we rationalize our behavior with the argument that it isn’t eating 1/1000 of a cow that hurts the environment, but the mass eating of many animals. (In 2008 in the USA: Cattle: 35,507,500, Pigs: 116,558,900, Chickens: 9,075,261,000, Layer hens: 69,683,000, Broiler chickens: 9,005,578,000, Turkeys: 271,245,000, see: http://www.animalliberationfront.com/Practical/FactoryFarm/USDAnumbers.htm).

Believe it or not, I didn’t mean to write a diatribe about eating animals. I guess this guilty meat eater leaked.

What I wanted to write about is not wearing a helmet when riding a motorcycle. We had a wonderful secretary in St. Louis who loved to ride on her motorcycle with her husband. I guess one could call them “bikers.” They had Harleys and cherished them.

They had a serious accident, riding together and having a great time. I can imagine how they loved to feel the breeze across their face and their hair blow in the wind. And they mended fine.

A few years later, still without a helmet, they had an even more serious accident. Now our lovely secretary had to give up her job. She has trouble walking, and says she can’t type anymore.

We sometimes say, “oh, if only I had a second chance.” They did.

I could tell many similar stories of other accidents on motorcycles or bicycles. I scolded a friend the other day for not wearing a helmet. I hope he’ll change him way. He has a good head. “Yes, I have a helmet,” he said, ”it’s at home!”

I made my son wear a helmet when he rode his bike. He refused, so his bike didn't get ridden for over a year.  We never really had much of a discussion about it (that I remember). I was just trying to protect him, and he was worried about his fashion statement (as I remember). I wonder how he remembers it.

When he was in the third or fourth grade we lived in Evanston. a suburb of Chicago. There was a man who walked the streets. He had been a stockbroker until he had a bad bike accident (sans helmet). Now he could only tell his story, trying desperately to get kids to wear their helmet. He’d tell them how he used to be able to think, but now he can only walk the streets and tell kids to wear a helmet.

We’ve arrived when we have changed our actions. I hope it is not too late.

Friday, October 3, 2014

Revenge


Revenge is interesting. We think of it as an antidote when we are injured. Today ISIS beheaded another man. They apparently are doing this as revenge for our actions. And now we’ll bomb them to retaliate. And so wars continue from the beginning of time.

Two biblical quotes that relate here (of many): turn the other cheek, and an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth. Some say that an eye for an eye is not about revenge, but rather the legal idea of paying for damages that is caused. If I make a man blind, then I need to pay the blinded man the money that a slave would cost so that I can have the slave see for him. This is not out of rage, but rather an attempt to ”set things right.”

"if a man cuts off his neighbour's hand, or foot, he is to be considered as if he was a servant sold in a market; what he was worth then, and what he is worth now; and he must pay the diminution which is made of his price; as it is said, “eye for eye.” From tradition it is learned, that this for, spoken of, is to be understood of paying money; this is what is said in the law, “as he hath caused a blemish in a man, so shall it be done to him again.” Not that he is to be hurt, as he has hurt his neighbour; but inasmuch as he deserves to want a member, or to be hurt as he has done; therefore he ought to pay the damage.'’ Maimonides, Hilchot Chebel. c. 1. sect. 2, 3.

Perhaps “turn the other cheek” is one of least followed maxims there is. We are inclined to protect ourselves. When we turn the other cheek we are allowing injustice to continue. In a sense turning our cheek is creating more war, not less. Maybe that’s why it is not followed very often.

Thursday, October 2, 2014

Time


Sometimes I feel like I’m in a torture chamber and these two metal plates are slowly moving toward me to crush me. I can’t stop their movement. Before I know it, it will be 10:30pm, our official bedtime (though we almost always go to bed later that).

I need to figure out how to do my stuff before then. I don’t worry too much earlier in the day, because I have the rest of my life left. Oh, I mean the rest of my day. But by 5:20 pm I’m starting to clutch. Especially when I’m going to the temple tonight to sit.

When I wake up, I usually am tired with what I was thinking about yesterday, and not yet into thinking about anything new. I just expect something to happen as the day progresses.

It is like taking pictures. I have no idea what is going to call out to me, “take my picture.” Something eventually does. I remember a teacher of mine bragging that he went shooting with a friend and his friend couldn’t find anything thing to take a picture of, but he found treasures everywhere he looked.

I was wondering if it is a defect in my seeing that I can’t see pictures everywhere. Why are some vistas not pictures and other vistas pictures?

So as I sit here with the metal plates slowly crushing me, I write about time. At the gym, I want time to go faster so I can go home. But the rest of the day I want it to go slower so I can get something done. Ideally I’d like a time app that would work slowly or quickly as needed. If I were king, I could do that. All the clocks in my kingdom would be synchronized to my time. We’d all go to bed at 10:30 pm, but it would be my 10:30 pm, not the arbituary one.

I realize I’m not king, though, and that clocks are pretty consistent.

Back to the drawing board. Samuel Johnson wrote, “If you don’t get half your work by 10 am, chances are the other half will go undone.”

Off to sitting.

Wednesday, October 1, 2014

Miracles and Gratitude

My neighbor’s grandson was saved by a medical miracle, or so the mother claimed. 

I read recently that gratitude is the practice for spirituality. 

I use to tell my students that it was a miracle that we have a shallow depth of field when the lens is wide open, because otherwise it would be hard to focus. Now that doesn’t matter because of autofocus.

Miracles are not rational. You need to produce three miracles to become a saint.

I found an old book at the University of Chicago libraries that I read over and over again. I was intrigued by those events that contradicted the laws of nature. I was surprised that the Jesuit/Buddhist teacher Robert Kennedy said that G_d doesn’t mess with laws of nature. And Einstein famously said that G_d doesn’t play dice with the universe.

I’ve come to see almost everything as a miracle. So much in my life seems like it is a long shot. I can’t think of anything that isn’t a miracle. The fact that I can type this post, and have it appear on my phone so that I can reread it as I’m riding a bus to hear a Dylan Thomas poetry reading is a miracle. Actually a succession of miracles. Yes we can explain these miracles. We can say that the bus is possible because we discovered the wheel and the combustion engine. And rubber and glass. They are all miracles. The fact that Dylan Thomas lived. Life on Earth. Earth. All stupendous miracles.

Gratitude seems connected with the idea of recognizing miracles. Taking gifts as something commonplace is rejecting there specialness. I hear a baby cry in the other room. A baby that was once the size of the tip of a needle. Someday he’ll write poetry or build skyscrapers. A skyscraper coming from the tip of a needle. And if I hadn’t married my wife he might have never landed on Earth 45 years later. 

Such a chance operation, as Cage would call it. See: http://www.poets.org/poetsorg/text/poetic-technique-chance-operations “Chance Operations are methods of generating poetry independent of the author’s will.” Ha, do we think we are in control? I’m sure Cage knew better than believing that we could really will things to happen. A delusion. When we learned that the unconscious decides before the conscious mind realizes it then we see that we may be driving the car, but we don’t determine where it is going. It has a mind of its own. Another miracle.

But what about evil? Like stubbing your toe or worse. Do we have gratitude for that too? Is that sadism? Do we reject the gift because if doesn’t stay new and perfect forever? Or do we honor it in all its permutations?

Tuesday, September 30, 2014

Rage is Empty


I've been watching the Sopranos, a series about the mafia. I guess in the early days the Italian immigrants didn't display a lot of rage. They laughed a lot, even as they were performing their nefarious deeds. Now it is different.

Both Tony Soprano and his sister display tremendous rage even if someone looks at them in the wrong way. His sister was put in jail because she assaulted another soccer mom at her kids' soccer game. As part of her sentence she needed to take an anger management class. Tony talked about this with his therapist and it was evident that he was starting to consider that such a class would be good for him.

His therapist kept saying that depression was rage turned inward. I started to think about whether rage really existed at that point if it did not show its ugly eye. Was this a transformation?  Sometimes I surprise myself with my feelings. “Where did that come from,” I think? I thought that I was a nice guy and then I thought that!

In my reading of the Torah today, I came across a section when the Lord tells the Jews that if they follow his laws they will defeat all armies and slay all beasts.

It is hard to believe that the Jews were so gullible. Rather I think a better reading is that, in the same way that rage and depression are interconnected, so are our external and internal threats. If we do the right thing perhaps our internal enemies and beasts will be slain.

When we look in a mirror we see ourselves.  If we are five feet from the mirror it will appear that we are ten feet away. We form a connection to the illusion in the mirror, perhaps in a similar way to the connection of rage and depression, or the connection of our external and internal enemies.

We live in two universes. One we create and nurture. The other and bigger one (?), does what it does, presenting us with continual challenges and gifts.

I wrote about this also in another of my blogs: http://kenshinsbarmitzvah.blogspot.com/2014/09/parshat-bechukotai-2nd-portion.html

Who's in the world?

Xiushan said, "What can you do about the world?" Dizang said, "What do you call the world?"