(I am large, I contain multitudes.)**

As a kid growing up in California in the fifties and sixties I came to believe that the “me” I called Dan Gurney was separate from everything outside of my skin. I saw my situation as just another “Me versus the World” drama.

Inside I thought I was totally germ-free. To stay healthy I thought I needed to follow the rules of general hygiene and keep my environment as close to germ-free as possible. 

Image credit: http://modaainc.blogspot.com

Since then I have gradually become aware that my boyhood ideas were quite incomplete. In the past several months I have come across several articles that make the point that most of the cells inside my skin aren’t even human cells. 

For example, the California Monthly (a journal that comes to me from my alma mater, U.C. Berkeley) recently featured an piece titled “The Teeming Metropolis of You” by Brendan Buhler that begins:

You are mostly not you.That is to say that 90 percent of the cells residing in your body are not human cells, they are microbes. Viewed from the perspective of most of its inhabitants, your body is not so much the temple and vessel of the human soul as it is a complex and ambulatory feeding mechanism for a methane reactor in your small intestine.This is the kind of information microbiologists like to share at dinner parties....

My body, the one that I walk around in every day, could be regarded, quite reasonably, as a complex community of living microbes. 

From this perspective, we look after multitudes of sentient beings when we look after our bodies and minds skillfully, you know, according to the advice grandpa (hopefully) taught you: getting enough rest, taking regular exercise, eating nutritious food and perhaps most important, cultivating a warm heart, a forgiving nature, and a contented outlook. 

For me, knowing all this (I am large, I contain multitudes) is a happy twist on the Mahayana Bodhisattva vow to save all sentient beings. 

**By the way, the title for this post comes from Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass. I do not believe Walt was thinking about the microbes in his small intestine when he wrote that line.

Link to the article in California Monthly, The Teeming Metropolis of You

Faith

With a nod to Bonnie and Ruth for bringing it up:

when i was seventeen
i was bewildered
befuddled

i had lost faith in christianity
forlorn, empty—
like a forgotten garbage can

i knew that i was
—without faith in jesus—
not worthless or empty

i found a teacher and sat
for decades—
zazen

sitting practice:
me chasing after
ease, equanimity, enlightenment

these three had been here
all along
waiting for me to notice them

breath followed breath
sitting revealed faith
just sitting revealed what is

searching in shadows
feeling sun warm
shoulders, back, heart



a haiku:

like whales in the sea
we breathe, writhe, make love, pray and

sing in sure, blind faith

May I read it to you?

  Faith by Dan Gurney

Wean Yourself

One of my teachers usefully pointed out to me that my “scientific” skepticism about the existence of otherworldly realms was, essentially, fashionable.

Across the broad sweep of human experience, an enormous chorus of mystics and wisdom seekers have encouraged us to look beyond the evidence available through the “five” senses—beyond even what we can perceive aided by powerful tools like radio telescopes and electron microscopes.

I join that chorus. A meditation practice is one place to begin a search for what lies outside ordinary perception.



Here, listen to Rumi—

WEAN YOURSELF


little by little wean yourself.
this is the gist of what i have to say.

from an embryo, whose nourishment comes in blood
move to an infant drinking milk,
to a child on solid food,’to a searcher for wisdom,
to a hunter of more invisible game.

think how it is to have a conversation with an embryo.
you might say, the world outside is vast and intricate.
there are wheat fields and mountain passes
and orchards in bloom.

at night there are millions of galaxies, and in sunlight
the beauty of friends dancing at a wedding.

you ask the embryo, why stay cooped up
in the dark with eyes closed?

listen to the answer:

there is no “other world.”
i only know what i have experienced.
you must be hallucinating.

—rumi

108

 More about our meeting of the Society of Friends on November 30:

The mala I use

Friend Christian shared information about the “Mala” a Buddhist rosary with 108 beads. He reviewed traditional ways to use the Mala, how to hold it between the fingers, how to advance from one bead to another, not crossing over the larger “Guru” bead which marks the beginning and end of the sequence.

Christian talked about the significance of the number 108, especially as it relates to Buddhism. He shared this array of 108 defilements which must be overcome to achieve enlightenment.

(Several of us remarked that we had some work to do in regard to this list!)

The number 108 is, elegantly enough, the product of 1 to the first power times 2 to the second power time three to the third power, that is, 1 times 4 times 27 = 108

Christian shared how 108 refers to the number of defilements to overcome. It derives from the following:

The three sense experiences times the six senses  3 X 6 = 18

The three sense experiences are:
pleasant
unpleasant
neutral

The six senses are
touch
taste
smell
sight
hearing
consciousness
(Buddhism regards the consciousness as the sixth sense—it is consciousness that senses thought objects like loyality.)

Aversion to or Craving for these experiences: 2 X 18 = 36

Past, Present, and Future incidents of the aversion/craving: 3 X 36 =108

On a more practical level, 108 slow breaths (about 5 breaths per minute) takes just about 20 minutes. You can "count" your breath and use the mala to “time” a meditation period without need of any watch or timepiece. This “clock” ticks to the movement of the breath.

He also talked about about how this number appears in other religious traditions in Asia. He stated that the Catholic rosary has 54 beads on it, half of the 108 on the mala.






There are additional links he pointed us to. They are here:

The Significance of 108

The 108 Defilements in Buddhism

The Number 108 in Buddhism

Wikipedia on Mala

More on our meeting in coming posts.

Good vs. Evil

At our last meeting of the Society of Friends of the Buddha, one of my friends expressed his frustration when an excerpt from the Lankavatara Sutra seemed to say that everything is Enlightenment:

“When people attain Enlightenment in this sense, it means that everything is Enlightenment in itself as it is.”

“How,” my friend wanted to know, “is it possible that everything is Enlightenment. Is torture Enlightenment? Was bombing Hiroshima and Nagasaki Enlightenment? Was the Holocaust Enlightenment? How can Evil with a capital “E” be Enlightenment?”

My first response is to join him in wondering about this. None of the things he mentioned seems particularly enlightened to me.

Yet I’ve come to learn in 30 plus years of studying Buddhism to suspend my initial difficulties with Buddhist teachings. Too many times I’ve grown older, and wiser. Eventually I see wisdom that wasn’t apparent at first glance.

Shunryu Suzuki once said, 

"If it's not paradoxical, it's not true."

Is it possible that evil is not Enlightenment and evil  is Enlightenment?

Perhaps so.

The Lankavatara Sutra says that in some ultimate sense, there is a unity of all things, of all events, of all actions—and that unity is Enlightenment. This sutra may be describing ultimate reality, not our ordinary everyday reality.

I hold the paradoxical thought that good and evil both exist and don’t exist at the same time. In everyday reality (where I spend most of my time) good is good and evil is evil.

However in a more rarified state of awareness, the opposite is equally and simultaneously true:  The world cannot really exist when good is purely good and evil is purely evil.

Taoists might point out that good and evil co-arise. We cannot know evil if we do not know good; we cannot know good if we do not know evil. Good and evil not only co-arise—they are two aspects of a same oneness that is neither good nor evil, but both good and evil and neither good nor evil.

In ordinary day-to-day reality, as a practical matter, we must nurture good as we resist evil.

To skillfully oppose evil here in this ordinary, everyday world, it is necessary to know something about evil—in any guise it might appear. We must have some “sympathy for the devil.” We must not be so taken by our ideas of good and evil that we fail to see the co-arising of good and evil. As we get to know “the devil” better, we can learn to effectively (and playfully) outfox and outmaneuver him.

Unless we accord evil its due respect, evil can make us crazy—either as we fervently oppose it, or as we fall under its seduction, or as we lose our bearings in apathy.

Nirvana

“Nirvana, the Third Dharma Seal, is the ground of being, the substance of all that is. A wave does not have to die in order to become water. Water is the substance of the wave. The wave is already water. We are also like that. We carry in us the ground of interbeing, nirvana, the world of no-birth, and no-death no permanence and no impermanence, no self and no nonself. Nirvana is the complete silencing of concepts. The notions of impermanence and nonself  were offered by the Buddha as instruments of practice, not as doctrines to worship, fight, or die for.... If you know how to use the tools of impermanence and nonself to touch reality, you touch nirvana in the here and now.”

—Thich Nhat Hahn

Seeing Nirvana as the substance of all that is resembles seeing the arrow in the Fed Ex logo. It’s always been there, but until it pops out, you realize you haven’t seen it even though you may have looked straight at it countless times.

Here’s an Etheree:

It’s
Often
Well-hidden
Under my nose
Like animal breath
Ultimate Nirvana.
Ground beneath loving-kindness
Here, now, near, far, above, below
Everything, everywhere, everywhen—
Empty heart-center aglow in the void.


TNH's suggestion to look for impermanence and nonself everywhere and with dogged persistence is advice well worth considering.

Share the Joy

Not long ago, I was at a lecture about sustainable farming. The speaker pointed out, perhaps somewhat indelicately,

“You’ve heard people say, you are what you eat. That’s not quite right. You are what you don’t defecate.”

That night I became keenly aware that our bodies have the wisdom to get rid of useless, harmful stuff. It's what they do. When we eat junk food and the like, our bodies put the junk in the toilet.  Our bodies are so wise. We must take care of them so they work as they're meant to work.

But what about our feelings, perceptions, impulses, consciousness?

We must deal with more than toxic “food” for the body. We must also rid ourselves of toxic material for the mind: harmful images, thoughts, music, and so on. Much of it will come via the Internet, television, and the radio.

How do we our detoxify this stuff? At what cost?

My guess is that we disassemble much of it in our dreams. We forget stuff, too. If we have a place in our homes for a meditation practice, perhaps it serves the heart much as the bathroom serves the body.

As a blogger, I’ve come to appreciate more and more the importance of lifting up the spirits of my readers. Blog friends have helped me learn this.

We have the responsibility to share the good, to, as steven at golden fish said in a comment on this blog recently, to “bring the greatest goodness i can into this world in whatever time i am given.”

Thich Nhat Hahn writes:

Writing is a deep practice. Even before we begin writing, during whatever we are doing—gardening or sweeping the floor—our book or essay is being written deep in our consciousness. To write a book, we must write with our whole life, not just during the moments when we are sitting at our desk. When writing a book or an article, we know that our words will affect many other people. We do not have the right just to express our own suffering if it brings suffering to others. Many books, poems, and songs take away our faith in life. You people today curl up in bed with their walkmen [iPods today] and listen to unwholesome music, songs that water seed of great sadness and agitation in them. when we practice Right View and Right Thinking, we will put all of our tapes and CDs that water only seeds of anguish into a box and not listen to them anymore. Filmmakers, musicians, and writers need to practice Right speech to help our society move again in the direction of peace, joy, and faith in the future.

—Thich Nhat Hahn,  The Heart of the Buddha’s Teaching, (Parallax Press, 1998) pg 83-84

Bobby McFerrin lifts spirits in this clip of Ave Maria. It sure lifted my spirits this rainy Sunday morning. If you've got four and a half minutes to cheer up your heart, I invite you to share the joy.

Authenticity and No Self

Bonnie, over at Original Art Studio (link at right or right here) got me thinking about authenticity as a blogger. I left a comment there that developed into this post below. Thanks, Bonnie!!

What (who?) is my real, authentic self?

I ask myself that question as a husband, a father, a friend, a kindergarten teacher and as a blogger, too.

The answer is the same for all my “selves.”

I'm most authentic when I don't wish to take back my words, or to undo what I’ve done.

Many times I have heard someone say something mean or hurtful, followed, eventually, by a recantation like, "I’m sorry. I didn't really mean the hurtful words I said."

I've done this myself.

How authentic were my mean words? How authentic was my apology? Just wondering.

From a Buddhist point of view there is no "self." Seen from this very helpful perspective, the issue of authenticity shifts, lightens up, and even disappears, sort of.

Sort of, because I've learned—the hard way—to force myself to become familiar, even friendly with, my "shadow side,” the dark, negative, angry, sad, and scary realms within. Darkness doesn’t like being lit up with mindfulness. Fear, anger, sadness—they don't like being lived with, looked at, tolerated, accepted. They lose their power when I'm able to sit with them. Poor babies. Poor monsters under my bed.

So the question remains. Given my multifaceted "self," what facets do I want to display to my family, to my friends in real life, to my readers in blogland and to my students in kindergarten?

Maybe karmically that is the key question for me: What sort of person do I wish to be as I stand up in kindergarten as a teacher of very young and very impressionable children?

That's easy. I wish to share the positive, uplifting, optimistic facets. These facets are solidly genuine, really authentic, and surely worthy of sharing. And they’re the facets of me I wish to cultivate.

I’ll look under my bed in private.

Where Science and Buddhism Meet Part 1

Last post I just linked to the video...

Here, for your convenience, is the video ready to go



Enjoy

And here's Part 2

Where Science and Buddhism Meet

If you should have 20 minutes or so to watch some video, I recommend linking over to Stream Source's blog (there's a link in the "Blogs I Read" list) and watch parts 1 and 2 of this video.

Maybe because my father worked for Stanford Linear Accelerator Center and JPL with the top physicists of his day, I find this sort of inquiry absolutely fascinating.

If you would be delighted to ponder how what Buddha taught 2500 years ago and what quantum physics have in common, then go over there and watch... LINK to Part One

You Have No Other Moments

"Don't move. Just die over and over. Don't anticipate. Nothing can save you now, because this is your last moment. Not even enlightenment will help you now, because you have no other moments. With no future, be true to yourself—and don't move."

—Shunryu Suzuki Roshi

I have the good fortune to know many of Suzuki Roshi's students. Even more auspiciously, my first meditation teacher was Kobun Chino Otogawa, Suzuki Roshi's protegé, brought from Japan to further the transmission of Soto Zen Buddhism to California. Kobun helped get Tassajara going and he ran Haiku Zendo in Los Altos in the seventies. That's when he was my teacher. I sat many many many hours with Kobun. My gratitude is boundless, infinite really.

Suzuki's advice was given to Zen students practicing meditation. The advice is perfect off the cushion if you simply remove the two mentions of "don't move."

108 Friends: Lost and Found

This poem is in a form that I call 108 Friends. It has, not counting the title, exactly 108 words. The number 108 has significance in Buddhism.

Lost and Found

on my original birthday,
i burst out—screaming—after
bathing for months
in warm, dark, inner waters
that had been pulsing, gurgling
and holding me in
safety, happiness, and ease.

at birth i was
blinded by light and dark
deafened by noise and silence
pinched, prodded
lost and abandoned—
mother gravely ill

deeply lost
finally i found
help from Shakyamuni
whose own mother died.

shut my eyes,
become only breath
laser focus:
inhale, exhale, pause, inhale exhale, pause....
count 108 pauses without once losing track
dwelling in emptiness,
bathed in a dim, warm glow
surrounded by Kindness,
swaddled in Compassion
afloat in Joy—

lost and found in Love

Walter Update

It's said that people who maintain a long-term meditation practice are preparing for death.

I cannot say if that's true. Perhaps people who meditate seek to live life fully awake. I can say that in meditation ordinary day-to-day consciousness can fall far away. And in meditation's deep peace we have the possibility of discerning more skillful ways to live.

********************************

My friend, Walter, has been near death for the past few days. He had had seizures and was put on high-dosage seizure medications which put him in an unresponsive state that doctors described as a coma. Recently the doctors stopped his anti-seizure medication.  Soon after, Walter regained ordinary consciousness and began talking with people. The doctors described the process as "bringing him back from the edge."

When Walter was asked about having his eyes closed for three days he said, "I was doing zazen the whole time."

Of course!

Walter's zazen gladdens me.

Keep it up, my friend.

Walter, and Quiet Love

I took a long walk today, thinking of my friend Walter, my oldest friend, who is now in his eighties. For years now, Walter and I have studied the Dharma together. Walter's been teaching me: "It's all about opening the heart! The only thing that matters is Love!" I read these words and I hear Walter's enthusiastic voice. "The only thing that matters is Love!"

I've come to love Walter. Just a few days ago, doctors gave Walter got the kind of news no one wants: Brain cancer.

When I got back from my walk, I checked in on the few blogs I follow. Synchronicity. Three of them included poems about life and death. Original Art, Shaping Words, and Whole Blooming World.

I took bits and pieces of the poems, and assembled this:

Quiet Love

One must have a mind of winter
Of the pine-trees crusted with snow;
Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.

I wonder in which season I will die.

Life and death, a mystery
I don't know what's our destination

This is what I think of
in the clean cold start of the new year.

When the flame is blown out, where does the light go?

I cannot hold the answers.

I give this year to quiet love.

P.S. Tomorrow school will start up in 2010. I'll turn into "Mr. Kindergarten." As Mr. Kindergarten, I give my all to the 29 students in my care. I have a little energy left when I get home: just enough to find something to eat, take care of my spirit, and ask after my wife's day. But not enough energy to blog here regularly. So, there will be somewhat less frequent posts here starting tomorrow. I respect you, my readers, enough not to post just to put something up on the web.

Do Bugs Have Buddha Nature?

Shunryu Suzuki said,

"If you are not a Buddhist, you think there are Buddhists and non-Buddhists, but if you are a Buddhist you realize everyone's a Buddhist—even the bugs."

I've enjoyed the sentiment of inclusiveness in that quote.

Today I find Suzuki's remark a little Buddhocentric. (Is "Buddhocentric" a word?) Whatever: we can say bugs are sentient beings, yes they are. Bugs have "Buddha nature" and so do all the bacteria that live inside bugs' digestive systems.

Plants have have sentience so deep and so powerful and so profound that their multiple intelligences are barely discernible to any but the most spiritually connected humans. Plants have "Buddha nature" too. Not to mention fungi.

I've come to feel that all of life—from the mitochondria in cells to blue whales to the daffodils awakening outside my front door—all life is deeply and irrevocably interrelated. All life is sentient. All life is sacred. Even stuff we think of as not living is sentient: rocks, water, air. I think rocks know when they're hot or cold. Water freezes when it gets cold; evaporates quickly on hot days. Sentient.

We can say this or that has Buddha nature. Better yet, we give the Buddha some time off. I don't think he wants to lay claim or put his name on wisdom that is self evident to anyone willing to look closely and feel deeply about anything and everything alive.

Six Perfections

First, a disclaimer: I'm not a perfectionist.

In fact, I'm slightly allergic to the whole idea of perfection.

A wise first grader once told me, "Only God is perfect!"

I agree with that kid—well, I agree in those fleeting moments when I believe in God. In regard to God, I'm among those who must endure having both great faith and great doubt. I have great faith that God's real, and great doubt in my ability to fully understand or even believe, sometimes, in that reality.

I accept my imperfections because they make me human: imperfect and okay, just like everyone else.

Ah, to continue...

As the solstice passed, I was playing the Native American flute in my meditation room. I was trying to contemplate the Seven Factors of Awakening, as a misty rain fell outside the open window. And what did my mind do? Why, what minds are so good at: getting distracted. My mind started down the path of another thought-complex: the "Six Perfections," another list from that trusty source, Buddhism. (Buddhism has lots of lists for minds like mine.)

The "Perfections" or "Paramitas" as they are called in Sanskrit, arise in another tradition of Buddhism, the Mahayanas, mainly. They are:

1. Generosity: Dāna paramita (giving of oneself)
2. Ethical Behavior: Śīla paramita (virtue, morality, discipline, proper conduct)
3. Patience: Kṣānti (kshanti) paramita  (patience, tolerance, forbearance, acceptance, endurance)
4. Energy: Vīrya paramita (energy, diligence, vigor, effort)
5. Concentration: Dhyāna paramita (one-pointed concentration, contemplation)
6. Wisdom: Prajñā paramita : (wisdom, insight)

I cultivate these six qualities in my ordinary lay life. Let me describe two examples:


Remembering Generosity while shopping at Fircrest Market has prompted me to pick up extra cans of food—good food, the kind I would want to eat if I were in need—and drop it in the Redwood Empire Food Bank bin outside the store. Donating food like this always feels better than giving in to that inner voice that would have me "just skip it this time." (Yes, I have heeded that voice, too, and I know how crummy it feels to be stingy.)


Remembering Patience helps me find joy where I would have overlooked it while waiting in lines at the post office, bank, or grocery store. There are always interesting people to watch while standing in line. And, if I know the clerk (as I usually do) I can think of a funny story to tell or think of a question to ask about how life is going for him or her.

I'm not posting this list of the Six Perfections the day after posting on the Seven Factors of Awakening to suggest that one list or the other is the best. Either list could support a lifetime of contemplation and cultivation. Having been exposed to many traditions of Buddhism—not to mention Christianity—I am presented with many worthy objects of mind to contemplate. Sometimes, it feels like too many!

9:47 Pacific Standard Time

Winter in the Sierras

Photo by Ian Parker

The winter solstice will arrive at 9:47 tomorrow morning here in California between the Sierra Nevada Mountains and the easternmost waters of the Pacific Ocean.

I like to re-affirm my deepest intentions at the solstices and equinoxes. For me, these occasions are like quarterly New Year's resolution sessions occurring in Mother Earth time.

As for me, I plan to renew my intention to cultivate the seven factors of awakening—seven factors that the Buddha is said to have taught some 2500 years ago, and are still worth pondering today. (I often think of the Buddha as one of the world's greatest teachers. Not many of us have people thinking about our teachings for 25 centuries; ordinary teachers like me are happy if our students remember what we've taught for 25 seconds!)

In any event, those seven factors of enlightenment, in case you're wondering what I'm seeking to cultivate are:

• Mindfulness (sati) i.e. to be aware and mindful in all activities and movements both physical and mental
• Investigation (dhamma vicaya) into the nature of the world and of the teachings of Buddha
  
• Energy (viriya)
• Joy  (piti)
• Ease (passaddhi) of both body and mind
• Concentration (samadhi)
• Equanimity (upekkha), to be able to face life in all its vicissitudes with calm of mind and tranquillity, without disturbance.