Shugetsu Dharma Talk

This is pretty much what I said in the dharma talk this morning.

Almost everyone from the monastery is in Japan, on a pilgrimage. In Japan, you are automatically a Buddhist. In the US you become a Buddhist. It’s a conscious act, and an unconventional one.

Christianity suffuses our consciousness. Everybody here recognizes Noah’s Ark, or Adam and Eve. If I say, “Jesus died for your sins,” you recognize that. I want to talk today about what Buddhism has to offer Christians and other religions, but first I want to talk about what it means to be a Buddhist.

Being a Buddhist means the Buddha is your teacher. You follow the teachings of Shakyamuni Buddha, a man who lived 2500 years ago in what is now northern India. Even at the time of the historical Buddha, there were people who wanted to be his disciples who had never met him. To become a disciple—this was before the days of the precepts and whatnot—to become a disciple of the historical Buddha, you recited the refuge vows. You solemnly intoned, “I take refuge in the Buddha. I take refuge in the Dharma. I take refuge in the Sangha.”

You can consider all the things we conventionally tend to take refuge in: the arms of a lover, money, or material possessions. And everybody here knows on some level that a shiny new car doesn’t really solve any of the world’s problems, at least not for long. And life has a way of taking it all away from us. Sixty years ago, on a hot summer morning, nobody in Hiroshima had any idea their world was about to change. One flash and everything’s gone. They thought it was a weather reconnaissance plane; they didn’t even bother to strafe it.

All we can do is to take refuge in what is really true. The inner experience of taking refuge in the Buddha is one of returning to our own enlightened mind, to clarity and compassion. Taking refuge in the Dharma is relying on our own capacity for understanding and generating language, for using it to understand the truth and share it with others. Without the capacity for language, both silent and spoken, we would not be human, and we certainly could not address the ideas that take us beyond suffering. Finally, we take refuge in the Sangha, in the truth of this physical body, the vehicle for our practice. We feel the truths of experience through the body, as the body, which feels so much joy and suffering. So taking refuge in the Three Treasures of Buddha, dharma and Sangha, means to take refuge in the purified aspects of mind, speech and body. Acting from that place, we create karma that is wholesome.

The purpose of this talk is to discuss what Buddhists can do for the world, how to bestow the three treasures upon the world. I don’t claim to have any final answers in this regard; these thoughts are very much a work in progress, something that I’m working with and trying to figure out for myself.

Turned outward, the Buddha treasure is our own calm mind, unruffled and brave. We can remain stable and clear in difficult situations, and help others to remain calm and see the truth of the matter.

The Dharma treasure is our ability to share the truth with others. There is so much in the Buddhist teachings that is of benefit to everybody, and it need not be presented to them within the context of the religion that preserves and protects the truths. Impermanence; Indra’s net, the interconnectedness of all things; the four noble Truths; the searing fact of karma, are tools that anyone can benefit from, especially people who want to work for positive change in the world, regardless of what form they hope it will take.

Our unpurified mind, speech and body don’t always bring about positive results, in spite of our good intentions. The gift we offer is born of our own practice, of cultivating the ability to look deeply at things, and to calmly hold and feel the great pain and contradictions of this world. By our continual activity of cultivating our mind, we increase the chance that our responses to things will be skilful, rather than fraught with fear, anger, or self-interest. So often, idealistic action doesn’t always lead to the best of consequences: at the very least, people burn out; at the worst, they actually cause a painful situation to deteriorate further.

Ideally, we should be able to offer people of all backgrounds a view that goes beyond the polarity of “good” and “evil.” We’ve all heard rhetoric about punishing evildoers, or that this other group is evil and must be destroyed. We should be able to offer an understanding of a situation as having arisen in dependence on myriad factors. An individual’s action can be evil, but not the person. They act as they do because of the events of their life and the choices they have made, whether consciously or out of habit. And their habits themselves are a result of cultivation. The predilections one is born with—which we tend to see as biological—are classically described as the result of karma generated in previous lifetimes.

It’s important that this softening of a polarized identity extend to ourselves. We all know how easy it is to imagine that we are “good,” and that by doing the right things, whether it’s recycling, or our favorite activism, or really working hard at practice, we will assure ourselves a safe and favorable outcome. This is exactly the problem of fundamentalism that leads to violence. Years ago, it seemed that we were in a rational age, that religious conflicts were relics of the past. We thought we were in an age of reason, that you could think of the Crusades from a geopolitical perspective. Now we see that religious violence is the wave of the future. Beyond the reasons governments have for encouraging violence, humans on their own are willing to hurt one another for the sake of religion.

People are so convinced of the necessity to preserve a religious tradition, and the values system and cultural lifestyle that it represents, that they are willing to do terrible things in order to make the world safe for their religious tradition. We have to see that this tendency extends beyond the players in the nightly news, and is found within each one of us. I spend a lot of time with progressive-minded folks, and I can tell you that the progressive, liberal version of this delusion is to believe that, when the revolution comes, we’ll be spared because we voted the right way and sympathized with the right causes. As if somehow life won’t hurt us if we just do all the right things, whatever we want to believe those are.

It is extremely important that we look at ourselves and identify our own myths about virtue and rightness, and how we’re going to escape suffering and create a controllable world one day when everything goes our way. And we have to be able to see who we have stereotyped as evil. Recently I was showing a group around the monastery, and we came to a huge truckload of really beautiful topsoil that had been donated to the garden by Longview Fiber. Several people didn’t quite know how to comprehend that Longview Fiber could do such a thing—they’re evil because they kill trees! This is not to say that killing trees is good, but that whole scope of things is much more complex and interesting that we want it to be.

In zazen, we are able to touch a deep place of true safety and stability in an uncertain world. The Zen tradition is held within the context of Buddhism, and other religions contain within them contemplative traditions that lead practitioners to that same deep place. It makes me extremely sad to hear Muslims being typecast, or Christians being demeaned, because everyone is yearning for that deep place, and valuing the tradition that helps them find it. Followers of those traditions, the vast majority, would be shocked and stunned to think that others think of them as violent, terrorists, baby-murderers.

We need to really be honest with ourselves about the myths we use to make ourselves feel good and safe.

And then we come to the question, “what do I actually do in the world?” I don’t know, but I have a sense that what is needed is always right in front of us, if only we are willing to see it. If our motivation is clear and not self-serving, whatever will undertake will have a wholesome quality to it. We may not ever see it turn out the way we’d expect, but hopefully we’ll have no regrets either.