There are many old friends here--and many familiar faces I've met elsewhere--all gathered to ask a question about the essence of Dharma apart from cultural and sectarian convention. If the Buddhadharma isn't the robes or the bowing; if following the Buddha Way can be accomplished by any number of practices, of which seated meditation is but one; if the Dharma is not a thing that resided in India or China--then WHAT IS IT?
I don't know, but Paul Haller feels studying the Sandokai and meeting teachers from a variety of Buddhist sects will help us tease through the puzzle. So I'm game.
Each of the myriad things has its merit,
expressed according to function and place.
I had thought it would be nice to get out and about. I lived in San Francisco for seven years, and I used to live in this neighborhood. It was a different life then: I had a biochemist boyfriend; I lived in a moldy old house; I was presumed to be a geneticist.
I was tied to the elements of my life in ways both wholesome and otherwise. Mostly, I liked my entanglements. I was my entanglements: relationships engender identity. So I was that person once. Just being back in San Francisco, some feeling of being the old Self is revived. I realize I visit this place, and other places I have been tied to, in an attempt to reconcile Then with Now. In an attempt to find out who I was, and what I am. If I am not a PhD student, and and my true self is not a scientist; if my ideas and concepts about myself can change so radically--WHAT AM I? Who is this walking down the street? What is this remembering? Where does it come from?
When I walk down the streets of what, four eon-years ago, was my neighborhood, I can barely see anything, because everything is so familiar. It's grimy, it's Victorian, it's chaotic. In the coffeeshop, on the streetcorner, on the steps of houses, the people are all different, but they're the same. Same personalities, with different faces.
Along the projects, two emaciated black women with headscarves are sitting in the sunshine. As I pass, I bid them a neutral, but cordial, good-day. They return the greeting, and I hear one say to the other, "That was real polite."
In the Walgreens, the lady at the checkout has nappy bleached-orange hair. I ask her how she's doing today. "Blessed and delivered," she says. "Blessed and delivered."
Aren't we all?
I went out to a café in the evening, thinking it would be enjoyable. It wasn't, really. Maybe I would have been restless anywhere, but it didn't feel right. I wanted to be back at the Center rather drinking bad tea in a room full of people pretending to ignore each other. It was dark and cold and windy. San Francisco summertime.
It was late, and wakeup was at 6am. Trudging up Church Street, I saw a pair of legs that left me breathless. They belonged to a gargantuan homeless man steering a bicycle laden with bulging sacks. There must have been twenty bags hanging off the handlebars, the top tube, the racks. He wore a massive backpack and cutoff pants. In the middle of each calf, grimy bandages peeled away from a pair of bloody wounds. Symmetrical black mouths. Filthy. How does that happen? It was too much. But it is his life--and the merest corner of my life.
I walked quickly, and took the Jizo Shingon as my mantra, for this strange man, and all who travel through this realm.
OM KA KA KABI SAN MA E SOWA KA
It was more of a question. How do we come to fear others? And how are we connected with them anyway? "Emaciated black women" equals crack, or AIDS. "Filthy bleeding man" means danger. This story might be true or it might not. If it is true, are we are Blessed and Delivered, regardless? Even on crack? With AIDS? When abused and brutalized?
Perhaps the question is not whether life is sacred, in all its decay and defilement, but how.
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