Ornoth

American Buddhists really like Rumi, the prolific Sufi (Islamic) poet and inspiration for the proverbial dervish dancers.

I can’t count the number of times he’s been cited in the dharma talks I’ve heard and publications I’ve read. So while my reading list was at an ebb, I picked up and read one of Coleman Barks’ Rumi collections, entitled “The Soul of Rumi”.

Now, I’m a prose guy. Despite the fact that words are my preferred medium of artistic expression, poetry rarely connects with me. So it should come as no surprise that I wasn’t particularly whelmed.

The elements of Rumi that appeal so much to Buddhists—his praise of silence and the meditative state, and his immersion in the present moment—aren’t the primary themes of his work. He is much more fixated on the mysteries of faith and the ecstatic experience of God, which make for kind of flat reading for someone as skeptical and practically-minded as myself.

But having said that, there are three bits that I thought I would pull out for contemplation.

The first two actually come from the same passage, where Rumi is, in typically non-linear fashion, addressing himself to hidden truths. Among the rambling, disconnected thoughts is the following sentence:

Look for the answer inside your question.

For me, this gets at one of the first premises of Buddhism, one of the ones westerners never seem to examine. When we are suffering the angst that comes from an unfulfilled desire or unanswered questions, we typically do not consider the quality of the motive behind our desire or question. Is it a wise question? Is it the right question to ask? What does that question tell us about ourselves and our spiritual maturity?

The Buddhist suttas include stories that describe times when the Buddha was asked metaphysical questions about the meaning of life, or the existence of God(s). When asked such theoretical questions, the Awakened One refused to answer, explaining that such unanswerable questions are not useful. They have no practical influence on how one should live one’s life, and thus are distractions from the cultivation of wisdom.

There will be times when you find yourself with philosophical questions like why justice and fairness do not prevail, or how a man can do harm to another, or why there is suffering. Before you look for the answer, look first at your question: what is motivating you to ask it, and is it a useful question to ask? You may find more wisdom in understanding the reasons behind your question than you will by letting the question lead you around in a fruitless quest for an answer.

A few sentences later, still addressing the source of answers to our spiritual questions, Rumi goes on:

The answer lies in that which bends you low and makes you cry out. Pain and the threat of death, for instance, do this. They make you clear. When they’re gone, you lose purpose. You wonder what to do, where to go.

The longer I live, the more I see how pivotal our understanding of death is to our happiness. As humans, it is our nature to take all our gifts for granted until they are taken away from us. A cell phone or a car or a television is just another everyday appliance until we have to live without it. But we take just as casual an attitude about our comfortable homes, our eyesight, and even our ability to string coherent thoughts together. We only properly appreciate these things when there is a real and imminent possibility that we shall lose them.

The ultimate possession we’ll lose is our experience of sentient life. Ironically, we spend most of our lives taking it for granted, assuming that we and everyone around us will live to a ripe old age just because it’s statistically more likely than not.

As Rumi says, you gain incredible clarity of purpose when you accept your own very real mortality. Every moment is to be savored; every experience—even every tribulation—is relished simply because it is the experience of life. You don’t need to ask yourself the meaning of life, because experiencing life provides meaning. You needn’t worry about what to do or where to go, because whether you are here or there, whether you are eating or playing racquetball, the fact that you are living outshines all other pleasures and pains.

But the person who doesn’t foresee their own death, who wrongly thinks they have all the time in the world, squanders their most precious commodities: life and time. They wander around aimlessly, without happiness, and without any sense of urgency other than an anxious feeling that their purposeless life has no meaning.

It’s an aphorism for a reason: life is short. It might sound ironic, but if you view life that way and value it like a precious commodity, you will enjoy it and find it more than fulfilling. Whereas if you view it as a given and value it like any unending resource, you are guaranteed to enjoy it less and find it empty and lacking in purpose.

Finally, Rumi has this to say about religious practice:

Hypocrites give attention to form, the right and wrong ways of professing belief.

I find this just as prevalent in Buddhism as any other religion. There are people who effuse about the retreats they’ve been on, the teachers they’ve studied with, the books they’ve read, and the objects of faith they’ve collected. It’s commonly referred to by Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche's term “spiritual materialism”, and is usually not highly regarded among American Vipassana practitioners.

I feel this somewhat acutely, since I’m not particularly attached to the ritualized forms of practice. In fact, I’m naturally skeptical of any practice until I can be shown and convinced of its value. A good example would be metta practice, which I only took to recently, after realizing the specific manner in which it would contribute to my spiritual growth.

The Buddha would agree. As stated in the suttas, particularly the Kalama Sutta, all his teachings were offered with the attitude of, “Try this and see if it is of value to you. If not, then disregard it.” So far, I have chosen to focus on Buddhism’s meditative and ethical practices, and disregard the more ritualistic, mystical, and dogmatic elements of contemporary Buddhism, since I do not see how they would be of value to me in my situation.

Naturally, I try to keep that skepticism reined in when others describe their own practices. The point isn’t to judge others, but to confirm my own belief in what’s right for me, free of the judgments and expectations of others. But I still find it discouraging when I see someone who is enthusiastically engaged in the outward forms of Buddhism (or any spiritual practice) without regard for the vital inner work that it points to.

So I finally read Herman Hesse’s “Siddhartha”.

I’m not sure why I hadn’t before. I think it’s Nietzsche’s fault. My preconception was that anything philosophical, with such a long and obscure name, and written by a German, would certainly be a death march to read. But on the contrary, I found the writing pretty mundane: something that would be entirely readable at a high school level.

In terms of content, it was okay. Most of the book talks about the protagonist’s various failed attempts to find enlightenment: first from teachers, then from asceticism, then from hedonism and materialism. That didn’t have a whole lot of value to me. Like, most of us don’t need to know what doesn’t work; we want to know what does! In the end, Siddhartha finds his own path to wisdom, and it resonates somewhat with what I feel.

But there was one especially interesting nugget near the end of the book. Siddhartha’s lifetime friend Govinda chose to follow the Buddha, and they talk about how Siddhartha was unable to gain enlightenment from his teachers. Then they have the following exchange:

       Govinda said: “Oh, Siddhartha, you still seem to like joking a bit. I believe you and I know that you have not followed any teacher. But have you found, if not a teaching, then certain thoughts, certain insights that are your own and that help you live? If you told me a little about them, you would delight my heart.”
       Siddhartha said: “I have had thoughts, yes, and insights, now and then. Sometimes, for an hour or for a day, I have felt knowledge in me the way we feel life in our hearts. There were a number of thoughts, but it would be hard for me to communicate them to you. Listen, my Govinda, this is one of my thoughts that I have found: Wisdom cannot be communicated. Wisdom that a wise man tries to communicate always sounds foolish.”
       “Are you joking?” asked Govinda.
       “I am not joking. I am telling you what I have found. Knowledge can be communicated, but not wisdom. We can find it, we can live it, we can be carried by it, we can work wonders with it, but we cannot utter it or teach it. That was what I sometimes sensed in my youth, what drove me away from the teachers.”

I find this singularly insightful. I have no doubt that deep wisdom exists, but it does seem very difficult to share with others, at least until they’re ready and willing to hear it. But even then, the ultimate teacher of wisdom is life; no one can “tell” you wisdom.

I’ve seen that problem in action at some of the dharma talks I’ve attended, where in the Q&A period it becomes readily apparent that someone in the audience has completely missed the point of the talk, and the speaker struggles to find a way to plant what’s in his or her head into the listener’s.

For the past couple years, I’ve listened to dharma talks by the hundreds, both in person as well as via podcast. Have they made me any wiser? All I can honestly say is that in some cases they’ve given me meaningful things to think about. But as I stated earlier, it’s exactly that contemplative analysis—“thinking about it”—that fosters the growth of one’s own true wisdom; just listening to someone else’s words unquestioningly won’t do it.

And, of course, the teachings that I’ve internalized have only taken root because my mind and heart happened to be a fertile field at the moment. Five, ten, twenty years ago, I was a different person, and hadn’t had the life experiences necessary to be able to understand many of the things I’ve since come to believe.

And then there’s my own writings here in my journal. In many ways, I write these entries for myself, but there’s also a secondary desire that some of the nuggets of wisdom that I uncover will be of some value to my friends who read my entries. But Hesse’s assertion still rings true: I can’t just put wisdom down on a screen and expect others to receive it. The things that come as insights to me might seem simplistic or self-evident to you—or even to me—when they’re put down in writing.

Naturally, I’ll continue writing, and hope that my philosophical musings don’t become repetitive and bore you to tears. But I realize that you’ve got to find your wisdom yourself, and I can only make vague gestures toward the things that I have uncovered for myself.