Depending Yet Non-Depending Both

Portland Buddhist Priory Posted on by

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There are many different facets to the Three Treasures and whole books have been written on the subject; this article will just touch on one small facet of training with the Three Treasures. Lately I have been reflecting on the Sangha Treasure and especially how we come to both rely on it and how it helps us to become independent in a real way.

In the beginning, since I wanted to know how to practice, I felt like I needed to associate with the Sangha, especially my seniors, in order to learn. But as my practice developed, it became clear that there was more to learn from the Sangha refuge than what I could learn from it in the usual sense of transferring information from them to me. There was a kind of giving and receiving that I had not encountered before: it was more about receiving what I actually needed rather than what I wanted or even liked. In this respect, the Sangha is different from our usual social groups.

I remember going to my first weekend retreat and sitting down at a meal. It was explained that the meal was to be held in silence and I felt a nearly overwhelming sense of gratitude that I could spend time with people and not feel required to be social. It seemed like a great gift we were all giving one another.

In our tradition, most of the time when we get together, the first thing we do is go to the meditation hall and turn our backs to one another and face the wall; the Sangha supports us in our effort to look at ourselves and shows us that this is not a selfish endeavor. Even though this tone can seem a bit cold, there is something very supportive, in a concrete way, to sitting and practicing with others, even though most of our attention is given to looking at what our own minds are doing.

For many of us, we want something from others (even if it is to be left alone) and in terms of practice, it is useful to look at that aspect of ourselves and ask if there may be something in this way of relating to others – the interaction tinged by wanting – that might increase our suffering.

Human beings are mostly social animals and there are very few of us who can really thrive when we spend too much time alone; really, Dharma practice isn’t asking us to be alone. Instead, the practice of the Dharma is asking us to look at where we grasp after various kinds of relationships and to work on bringing a spirit of letting go to those relationships. Dharma practice is asking us to, in a sense, experiment with that question of what we actually need.

This is one way that the Sangha becomes a mirror that reflects ourselves back to ourselves and helps us to see ourselves more clearly. Perhaps unwittingly, and just by showing up and doing nothing other than participate, we are providing that service for others as well.

In the Zen world there is a great spirit of finding awakening on our own (the technical term in Japanese is jiriki, or self-power) but it is a mistake to take this too far by thinking that we do not need a teacher or the Sangha. As I mentioned, when we begin practice, of course it should be clear that we need a teacher and a Sangha. But even after training for some time, even after our teacher is dead and gone, it is still good to take refuge in the Sangha. Since the Treasure of the Sangha is a precept, it is essential, from my perspective, that I take refuge in the Sangha and I cannot foresee a time when it will not be so.

It is difficult to describe this in words that make sense, other than to say that we both depend on the Sangha and are independent of it. One of my teachers used to say that we keep the precepts because it is what Buddhas do. The Buddha himself spent his whole life with other people and lived from his alms bowl. Just that thing of not accumulating wealth and depending on the offerings of the community that he lived in, meant that he depended on the Sangha that surrounded him. There are also numerous occasions listed in the development of the monastic rules when he sought the advice of the Sangha (including the lay Sangha). Even someone as senior as the Buddha took refuge in the Sangha; he never gave up on the Sangha.

That he had complete peace of mind, arising from his practice, meant that he did not depend on anything, including the Sangha.

Because the real nature of our relationship to others has this quality of depending and non-depending both, when we are unclear about our relationship with others, we can have a sort of push-me pull-you tension that makes it difficult to see how to relate in a mature way as a whole person. In the past, it seems like a lot of people in the west came to religious or spiritual practice out of guilt or other external pressure which doesn’t seem to be very helpful. In reaction to this guilt or other forms of pressure, internal and external, and perhaps because of disappointment in the humanity of our fellow practitioners, a common reaction may be just to chuck the whole thing rather than trying to participate in the Sangha.

But by bringing these feelings and reactions to our meditation practice, within the context of a regular practice of participating with the Sangha, and not discarding the influence of others out of hand, we are given the opportunity to go more deeply into our own practice.

In general, the Buddha’s wise advice about suffering is that the precepts are areas of human life where suffering arises and, he suggests, we would do well to look into each of these areas, in detail. This means looking more deeply into the area of our life which is the Sangha refuge. It means being willing hang in there with each other and being willing to look closely at our own strong views, potential misunderstandings, fears, frustrations and disappointments and find ways to bring that spirit of letting go to bear.

There is a story of a time when Ananda went to the Buddha and asked something like “World Honored one, it seems to me that half of the successful life of practice is having good Dharma friends, is that right?” and the Buddha replied “No, Ananda that is not right, the whole of the life of practice is having good Dharma friends!” Good Dharma friends will do their best to support us in doing the practice and point us back to our own hearts and minds when that is good to do.

An Appropriate Offering

Portland Buddhist Priory Posted on by

(Go here for the original July email newsletter)

A few people recently raised the question of what an appropriate offering for the temple alms bowl might be and I thought I might take the opportunity to mention a few things about that. First, the Dharma is offered freely at our temple and there is no charge for any of the temple events or services: that is the basic thing. Making offerings is a matter completely up to the individual involved.

In our practice from Japan, monks typically wear hats like the ones shown in the picture above and typically the hats are worn in such a way as to cover the face of the individual monk. This makes it hard for the individual monk to be recognized, but it also makes it difficult for the monk to recognize who is making the offering.

I was taught that the purpose of the way these hats are worn is to emphasize that, ideally, the offering is not a personal matter and to emphasize that the offering is made and received from a place of faith in the Three Treasures. Similarly, from our Chinese heritage, there are always little red envelopes next to the alms bowl at our temple which enable those who wish to make an offering to do so more or less anonymously.

Traditionally, monks on alms round will just walk, restrained in body and mind, in meditation, alms bowls extended, through an area, sometimes ringing a bell, to let people know that they are there but not accosting people in any way. Monks (and by extension, the temple) do their best to refrain from questioning the quality of the offerings made.

Also, the Buddha advised that monks receive offerings as a honey bee gathers nectar from flowers, never doing harm to the flower. I take this to mean that the temple should work hard to care for, and husband, the kind donations of people and this means that we need to avoid putting excessive expectations on donors or to use guilt or other emotional manipulation to lever donations from people.

Of course there is a practical dimension to offerings made to the temple; offerings make it possible for us to function as a temple and for people like me to live as monks. That dimension needs to be cared for. We try to keep you apprised of the state of the temple’s fiscal situation and trust that, in your wise discernment, you can recognize the cost of the things. (It is literally the case that I have no other source of income except what the temple, and by extension, you all, give. And I should say that I am content and grateful to be able to live in this way.*)

We (the temple) try our best to live by the traditional intention of practice, accepting what is put into the alms bowl without judgement. I and the temple view making offerings as a spiritual matter. We encourage people to give what they feel is best, based on their perception of what is good to do and what their means allow. It is my intention to do my best to not second guess another person’s offering should I notice what they might put in the alms bowl or how they choose to make offerings to the temple: the longer I am alive, the harder it is for me to be certain that I know what it is like to be someone else.

Each of the different aspects of practice are for our own internal use; generosity, as a practice, is no different. We each have the opportunity to ask ourselves “would generosity be a good thing for me to work on?” If the answer to that question is some kind of affirmative, we have the opportunity (maybe even responsibility to ourselves) to work out how we want to practice it. Giving to the temple is just one possibility.

(*I am able to take advantage of the Oregon Health Plan which is a kind of income for which I am grateful.)

On Working Meditation

Portland Buddhist Priory Posted on by

Published in two parts in the May and June 2017 Newsletters. To see the whole newsletters go to: May 2017 or June 2017

Priory rose

Rose from the Priory Garden, June 2017

On Working Meditation

(This is a slightly revised and edited version of an article originally published in the Pine Mountain Buddhist Temple Newsletter and maybe somewhere else.)

Most of us spend a great deal of time doing the work of supporting ourselves and taking care of our surroundings and the people we live with. We spend much, if not most, our waking time working. For me, one of the attractive parts of Buddhist practice is that practice gives me a means to make this work an expression of my religious life: as Reverend Master Jiyu-Kennett put it, practice gives us a means of sanctifying the mundane.

Training in the work-a-day world may seem to be a contradiction for those of us who yearn for a quiet and peaceful life, but in my experience bringing the Mind of training to the work that I do has, while taking a bit of effort, served to improve my experience of work and the relationships that arise as a result of work. Training has helped me to turn work that might have otherwise seemed to be a drudge into something not only bearable but enjoyable and edifying.

I first started training as a lay person about the same time I entered the working world in earnest, and, at the time, the monks that I was looking to for teaching advised me to look at work not merely as a means of making money and a living, but to look at it as a means of practicing the paramita of giving and generosity. They advised me to think of work as a means of doing Buddhist service. Most memorably, the monks advised me to try do work that I loved or, better still, to love the work that I did.

So, I entered the work world trying to orient myself towards this advice while still being mindful of the need to earn a living and take care of myself responsibly, which are important parts of the equation. We can, through good intention and mild misunderstanding, approach work from an overly idealistic point of view, expecting it to be always nice and perfectly enjoyable, but as most of us know, this does not turn out to be the case: work can be difficult, boring or frustrating and our every good intention and effort can seem to be thwarted by those with whom we are thrown together in the work place.

Most of the people reading this are not at the beginning of their working lives and, so, are not in a position to choose a new job, but the question remains, how can we bring our training to our work?  How can we make our work an expression of practice?  How can we come to love our work in spite of its various difficulties?

A place to begin is in the practice of mindfulness and the cultivation of a still attitude toward what we are doing.  When I was a lay person I worked in some very busy kitchens.  I had many responsibilities and there was a fair bit of pressure to get things done quickly. I was required, by the nature of the job, and the need to pay my rent, to learn how to multi-task and work with a number of people with as many or more orientations toward the work we were doing.  (I could observe myself through a work day in various states of enthusiasm or its absence and I could imagine that others were similarly variable.)  It is true that in the basic instruction for mindfulness we are encouraged to just do one thing at a time, which is great if you are in a situation where there isn’t much going on, but in that work situation I wasn’t going to have that luxury.  Looking a little more deeply, I could see—through putting more energy into being still and aware—that a day is made up of a succession of individual events. When you juggle you might have five balls going at once but you are actually only doing one thing at a time.  Once you toss a ball into the air you are on to the next thing and the balls in the air are taking care of themselves until it is time to catch one and do something else with it.

In other words, if we have many responsibilities going on at once it is possible to practice mindfulness in the midst of them, and this practice actually helps the functional and practical aspects of our job. On another level, this stillness and awareness helped me to become more aware of how my own mental state influenced the harmony of my interactions with my co-workers.  At one point in my working life, I worked as a line cook in a restaurant and had the position of wheel man. What this means is that I worked preparing individual meals for costumers and coordinating the meal preparation with the other cooks on the line and the serving staff.  A server would give me a meal ticket and I would decide what needed to be cooked when and by whom and then, when all the plates were ready, let the server know when things were ready to be delivered to the table.  This is reasonably straight forward if there are two cooks and two servers and three or four customers.  But when the restaurant is full and there are five cooks, and six servers, then it becomes another matter.  By applying mindfulness and awareness to the situation I was able to avoid acting on my own petty impulses and occasionally sooth the feelings of those around me and thus, get through a shift with reasonably little blood drawn.  Looking back on it (perhaps through the gloss of years) I even enjoyed it at times and have certainly benefited from the experience.

Another practice that can be cultivated in the work place is the cultivation of the Mind of Service.  An important part of the practice of Dana, or the paramita of giving and generosity, is simple service to the world and our fellow humans. In our culture (and I think it is useful to point out that we are both influenced by and create our culture) the constant overt and covert question is “what can I get from a situation, person or job?”  We may not have an expectation that we should get something for free, we may be willing to work for what we get, but still we want to get it (whatever it is). To live from this attitude is to create suffering for ourselves and those around us.  Living from this attitude is to be motivated by and to act on greed and is often based on the feeling that something is missing from our life.  The Buddha taught that if we can diminish and eventually let this view cease to be a motivator for us, we can diminish our difficulty and increase our natural joy and satisfaction in life.

The practice of Dana is one of the best means of training ourselves to not be greedy and to not be stuck in the cycle of greed.  In one sense, it is really the beginning of practice because it opens the heart to the possibility that there is a deeper and more satisfying place to live from then the pursuit of what we want.  It opens the heart to this possibility because it is an expression of that deeper place.  Dana, of course, benefits those who receive but really, the more important benefit is that, in giving of ourselves, we are taking active positive steps to putting ourselves in harmony with the deeper truths of wisdom and compassion—and we are relinquishing our suffering.

In terms of the working world, what we are doing for work can be Dana or it can be the pursuit of greed—depending on our attitude and not on the work itself.  In other words, one could be a physician and be doing that work solely because one can make a lot of money at it, or take the attitude that it is a good means to help oneself and others and do ones best to do that work as an expression of training.  One could do the work of a stockbroker or a garbage hauler and have exactly the same choice to make.

In a very important sense, it does not matter what the work is that you have chosen to do; what is of critical importance is the attitude that you take toward that work. There are some exceptions to this; for example, doing work that is illegal or breaks the precepts, as in the Buddha’s teaching on Right Livelihood.  Broadly speaking, though, what truly matters is the attitude of mind and heart that you bring to work, over and above what kind of work you do.

Each type of work—and I will not use the term profession because the variety of work goes beyond the limited sense of profession—and each type of person, will have their own best practical way of sanctifying the work into selfless service.  In this article I can only encourage you to look carefully and honestly at your attitude toward work and see how you are influenced by the impulse to get as much as you can from it.  We can all be willing to learn how to live with a little bit less.  We can put into practice the possibility that we can actually be happy and not get all that we want.  I am not advocating a simple minded approach to this where, for example, if you are in some kind of business situation, you should be content not to make a profit at it, but rather, maybe, to reflect that you have many employees who are depending on your business to make a living.  What can you do to insure that those people will be able to continue to have a job?  Would it be good to profit yourself slightly less and them slightly more?

Also, it is worth pointing out that our greed is not limited to material wealth.  I certainly see in my own mind that there is greed for positive affirmation, power and control, and the simple pleasure of doing a thing well.  It is good to look carefully at these things.  I know of someone who worked for some time as a social worker and he said that, in retrospect (he had moved on to other things), he realized that much of why he went into that line of work was so that he would not have to work under other people—he could be his own boss.  When he started he was convinced that he was going into that work to “help others”.  As I say, many of the people who read this will already be thickly involved in a career or line of work and it is still possible to, in the words of the Lotus Ceremony, “adroitly convert all covert work” into selfless service by changing our attitude toward it.  Are you complacent?  Do you look down on the work that you are doing?  Are you attached to getting praise?  Are you stuck on being in charge?  On not taking responsibility?  It is an act of giving to convert these things.

Talking about mindfulness and Dana lead naturally the topic of love.  Recently, at a Dharma discussion at the temple, someone asked, with not a little surprise, whether it was possible to love selflessly?  The answer given was that yes it is and that it starts with the practice of Dana.  When we think of giving love in the context of our working lives we normally think of those rare people who have the good fortune to do work that they love, like the professional baseball player who loves to play and happens to earn a fortune at it, or the starving artist who loves his art and the vision of it and so is willing to starve in order to produce it. Buddhism is pointing to something a little different.  In Shundo Aoyama’s book Zen Seeds there is a story of a company in Japan who was having trouble with graffiti in the bathroom.  After many warnings, admonitions and repaintings the graffiti did not stop until there appeared, in faltering script, a note that said “please do not dirty my good work place with graffiti”. The note was left by the person who cleaned the bathroom and it so impressed the people at the company that the graffiti stopped.  This story, in its way, expresses what is possible to reveal in our own mind.  The cleaning person viewed the bathroom with respect and gratitude, pride and joy—it was that persons “good work place”.  They did not look down on their work (nor, probably, over-inflated it) but clearly felt that it was important to do well.

By cultivating mindfulness and the mind of being present and still in what we are doing we begin to also see what we are doing with a realistic appreciation—work is a series of small steps in impermanence.  When we motivate our selves to work selflessly and to work as service this leads to joy, gratitude and true appreciation.  When we are willing to do what needs to be done without grumbling about whether it is high or low, or aggrandizement, this is activity in selfless love.  It is by letting go of the desire for reward that love becomes selfless and we can bring this attitude to the work that we do, whether at home, in the working world or at the temple.

Also, the work that we engage in can be a great support and ground for our practice or it can become distracting from practice, again depending on our attitude.  In a formal question and answer ceremony at Shasta Abbey, I said I really appreciated practice and that I intended to continue to do it.  My teacher’s response was “That’s good, you know what this means don’t you?  Now you have show up and be willing to be kicked around.”  (I’m sure he meant “be kicked around” in the nicest possible way.)  In a way, that is what work is like and how it benefits us in general.  In showing up each day and going through what we must, in order to do the job we have taken responsibility for, there is a very beneficial grounding that goes on.  In a down to earth way, we have the opportunity to see how we create views of life that are not in accord with how things actually are.

It is also a tremendous offering to be steady, consistent and reliable in the world of impermanence.  This steadiness and willingness to show up regularly—to be kicked around—in addition to greatly benefiting beings, can really give us the opportunity to see clearly the deeper patterns of suffering and disharmony in our lives and thereby help us begin to convert them.

Alternatively, work can detract from practice.  If we find that conflicts continually arise between what we are doing for work and having time to practice, we should look carefully at that and be willing to take refuge about it with the sangha or our teachers.  Practice does not require that you stop leading a full or normal life (however you define it), but we all would do well to look and see if and why our busyness (and these days not just the busyness of work) is keeping us from spending our precious time in doing the practice?  If there is no time (even for five minutes a day?) to simply sit and look at a wall, maybe we can ask ourselves if things have gotten out of balance.

In my youth when I was beginning to practice and trying to determine what I should do with my life, a lay minister of our order told me of an idea called “projective hindsight”.  He suggested that I imagine myself at the end of my life, looking back on my life reviewing how I had spent it.  How would I feel if I looked back and saw that I had devoted my life to drug use and crime? (He didn’t ask me that and I didn’t consider it as a viable option, just a bench-mark.) Or just frittering away my time? There were, and still are various possibilities for me, as there still are for all of us.

I decided way back then that, regardless of what I did outwardly – and this “outwardly” idea is important because practice is often about cultivating inward stillness and intention – the thing I most wanted to be able look back and see was that I had made doing Buddhist practice the important thing that I worked on internally in my life. I wanted, and continue to want, to able look back and say honestly that I did my best to apply practice in all the many small, and occasionally large, choices that make up a life.  I made this choice well before I decided to become a monk, and I have not regretted that decision.