Ornoth

If you know anything about Asian religion, you probably know that Buddhism has an awful lot of symbology associated with it. From depictions of a seeming multitude of deities to elaborate mandalas to lots of ritual adornments, and a plenitude of mythical stories passed down from generation to generation.

We are generally told that this symbology does not reflect belief in the literal images, but that they are primarily metaphoric in nature. Manjushri is depicted with a sword, which represents how penetrating wisdom cuts through ignorance and delusion. Avalokitesvara, the embodiment of compassion, has eleven heads with which to hear the cries of the suffering, and a thousand arms with which to aid them.

This kind of symbolic representation extends deeply into the Buddhist canon, but it’s rarely discussed amongst western practitioners, who often struggle to accept it, viewing the mythic elements as extraneous and decorative and not a central part of the core teachings.

But there are some topics which Asians (and the canon writings) are quite emphatic about. Asians assert the literal reality of things like rebirth and the ability to recollect one’s past and future lives, which westerners usually are reluctant to accept at face value. To a westerner like myself, those concepts seem like they might be yet another instance of densely-piled Asian symbolism, but no one ever seems to come out and admit it.

Well, here’s where it gets personal…

My commutes to and from work this fall have included reading “The Collected Teachings of Ajahn Chah”, a book that I snapped up while visiting Abhayagiri Monastery, the final destination of the California Buddhist Bicycle Pilgrimage I took back in September. For those of you who don’t know, Ajahn Chah was essentially the root teacher of modern Theravada Buddhism. And because he welcomed foreigners to his monasteries, he’s like the grandaddy of one of the most successful branches of Buddhism in the west.

So in the middle of this book, I read the following passage. I cite it here almost entirely because I think the context and the sequence of points is important. Emphasis is mine.

Anger is hot. Pleasure, the extreme of indulgence, is too cool. The extreme of self-torment is hot. We want neither hot nor cold. Know hot and cold. Know all things that appear. Do they cause us to suffer? Do we form attachment to them? The teaching that birth is suffering doesn’t only mean dying from this life and taking rebirth in the next life. That’s so far away. The suffering of birth happens right now.

It’s said that becoming is the cause of birth. What is this ‘becoming’? Anything that we attach to and put meaning on is becoming. Whenever we see anything as self or other or belonging to ourselves, without wise discernment to know it as only a convention, that is all becoming. Whenever we hold on to something as ‘us’ or ‘ours’, and then it undergoes change, the mind is shaken by that. It is shaken with a positive or negative reaction. That sense of self experiencing happiness or unhappiness is birth. When there is birth, it brings suffering along with it. Aging is suffering, illness is suffering, death is suffering.

Right now, do we have becoming? Are we aware of this becoming? For example, take the trees in the monastery. The abbot of the monastery can take birth as a worm in every tree in the monastery if he isn’t aware of himself, if he feels that it is really ‘his’ monastery. This grasping at ‘my’ monastery with ‘my’ orchard and ‘my’ trees is the worm that latches on there. If there are thousands of trees, he will become a worm thousands of times. This is becoming. When the trees are cut or meet with any harm, the worms are affected; the mind is shaken and takes birth with all this anxiety. Then there is the suffering of birth, the suffering of aging, and so forth. Are you aware of the way this happens?

[…] You don’t need to look far away to understand this. When you focus your attention here, you can know whether or not there is becoming. Then, when it is happening, are you aware of it? Are you aware of convention and supposition? Do you understand them? It’s the grasping attachment that is the vital point, whether or not we are really believing in the designations of me and mine. This grasping is the worm, and it is what causes birth.

Where is this attachment? Grasping onto form, feeling, perception, thoughts, and consciousness, we attach to happiness and unhappiness, and we become obscured and take birth. It happens when we have contact through the senses. The eyes see forms, and it happens in the present. This is what the Buddha wanted us to look at, to recognize becoming and birth as they occur through our senses. If we know the inner senses and the external objects, we can let go, internally and externally. This can be seen in the present. It’s not something that happens when we die from this life. It’s the eye seeing forms right now, the ear hearing sounds right now, the nose smelling aromas right now, the tongue tasting flavors right now. Are you taking birth with them? Be aware and recognize birth right as it happens. This way is better.

What’s being said here—and the flash of insight that came to me on my way to work—is that the concept of rebirth is a metaphor for attachment. When something becomes so important to you that you have to have it, you are setting yourself up to suffer when it inevitably changes. When you can’t stand something so much that you have to push it away, you’re setting yourself up to suffer because you cannot control it. That is what Luang Por Chah is referring to when he talks about the abbot taking birth with each tree: if he is attached to the trees, he (metaphorically) lives, suffers, and dies with them.

In that way, you are “reborn” as many times as there are things that you become attached to.

That also elucidates the nihilistic-sounding descriptions of nibbana as freeing oneself from the endless cycle of birth, suffering, and death, never to be reborn again in this world. It’s not about some crazy kind of metaphysical suicide; it’s about never placing ourselves in the position of experiencing the suffering that comes from seeking lasting happiness from something that itself is impermanent and subject to suffering.

And so I can say with no trace of irony that I do recall my past lives, and that I have in the past been my parents, my lovers, my friends, and many of the places and plants and animals in nature. Because in some way I have grasped after them deeply enough to become attached, causing myself some degree of suffering when they eventually changed.

Have you never felt the pain of visiting the neighborhood where you grew up and seeing how it has changed? Or lost a dear pet? Or found that you had grown estranged from your best friend? That’s the kind of rebirth that ajahn is talking about.

Similarly, in that metaphorical sense I can foresee my own future “lives” by looking at the things that I am drawn toward. My cat? Of course I’ll suffer when he dies. Cycling? Yeah, that’ll be hard to give up. Nature? My affinity for nature will someday cause me a great deal of suffering when I’m no longer able to get out and enjoy it. In a sense, I am “becoming” these things, because my sense of self has become firmly attached to them.

Even if it’s obscured by a somewhat opaque veil of metaphor about rebirth and past lives, this remains one of Buddhism’s core teachings: eventually, all our attachments come back to bite us, unless and until we learn how to let go of them gracefully.

A couple weeks ago I discovered a Buddhist book club being run by the owner of Trident Booksellers. I promptly snatched the current book from the BPL and read through it. I took a few notes to bring to the discussion, and I thought I’d post them here, as well. So here’s my notes on Pema Chödrön’s “Start Where You Are: A Guide to Compassionate Living”.

This was the first Chödrön book I’ve read, and I can’t say it lived up to her popularity. Her writing style didn’t come across as particularly noteworthy, and what she had to say… Well, the book is focused mostly on particular practices—tonglen and lojong—which might be useful to some, but which would raise a bunch of questions for beginners. So I found the book overall of limited value. Despite that, there were a few interesting things I could pick and choose from.

One thought pertained to the defensive barriers that we establish around ourselves. Those mental and emotional barriers keep our tender bits safe, but they also distance us and alienate us from other people, as well. But the thing Pema wrote that I found interesting was that this armor we surround ourselves with, which seems so solid, so trustworthy, is really just made of thoughts that we churn out. There’s nothing to them but what we think they are. I know, it’s one of those things that is kind of patently obvious, but it’s also something that we tend to forget on a daily basis.

The next point follows a similar vein. All your past: it’s just an idea. It has no real existence. Worse yet, it’s an idea that only you hold. For example, no one I know remembers the Jimmy Castor Bunch, or their 1974 album “Butt of Course”, featuring the “Bertha Butt Boogie”. Even people who shared your life with you—your first girl- or boyfriend—have a completely different image of that “shared” past than you. You think the past is a fixed thing that defines you, but ultimately it’s just a series of ideas that absolutely nobody but you holds. So is it really all that important?

Pema also stated one of the major themes of Buddhism fairly succinctly. I’ll paraphrase it here, but the basic idea is that helping others is one of the most effective methods of self-improvement, while improving yourself simultaneously helps others. It’s kind of a feedback loop of sorts, where helping others—something that’s all but forgotten in our competitive, acquisitive society—helps ourselves much more than our secular selfishness ever could.

Buddhism encourages its adherents to give of what they have to others, in part to reduce one’s attachment to material things. Even in western cultures we think of sharing as a good thing; however, Pema suggests we go further, being willing to give away things we might really value that would make others’ lives happier. While we can all relate to sharing, giving valued things away is much more difficult because it challenges our ideas of security and possession and attachment. If you’re serious about losing your attachment to material goods, you might well consider practicing this kind of “giving until it hurts”. According to Pema, it won’t actually hurt, but give you an enduring sense of happiness.

The lojong practice includes a number of pithy sayings that one is meant to contemplate. The one that seemed most interesting to me instructs you to “Always meditate on whatever provokes resentment”. That’s a very interesting instruction, because it asks us to step back whenever we feel hatred, anger, jealousy, or fear and analyze the origins of those feelings. Its at those points when we can work with the root causes of careless speech and action and overcome the unconscious behaviors that cause tension and conflict with the people around us.

The other saying that I found especially revelatory was “Don’t expect applause”. Even the best practices and living as the embodiment of lovingkindness and compassion will not guarantee others’ gratitude. Even that internal sense of satisfaction you get at having taken the moral high ground isn’t predictable. This can be incredibly frustrating, and is another emotional reaction which is worth studying. Perhaps the best orientation is to expect the unexpected and approach each situation with curiosity, rather than a sense that if you “do the right thing” you’ll be rewarded somehow.

One final topic that came up during the group discussion that I found interesting was the assertion that there’s limited value in reading about Buddhism. Buddhism is extremely practically focused, and the measure of one’s success is in how one lives, not in what doctrines one understands or agrees with or how frequently or long one sits in meditation. Most books on Buddhism echo a surprisingly small number of core tenets, and once you’ve heard them, there’s little point in further study. The real practice is in learning how to apply those beliefs to Real Life, and that’s where the real learning and growth happens. Buddhism isn’t about the books or the ideas, but about your mind, your heart, and your actions, and bringing them all into alignment.