Ornoth

My Austin kyūdō group doesn’t have a teacher; it never has. But we fall under the distant tutelage of a Japanese archery group based in Greenville, South Carolina. The South Carolina Kyūdō Renmei (or SCKR) is run by Blackwell-sensei, one of the most senior kyūdō teachers outside Japan, and his wife Reiko-sensei.

SCKR hold kyūdō seminars a couple times a year, which are attended by local South Carolina practitioners, Austin kyudoka, as well as people from all over North America.

Given my well-documented and very fundamental beginner struggles, I never attended a seminar. I didn’t want to take sensei’s time away from his many advanced students to deal with my remedial problems, and I didn’t want to waste an expensive trip if I wasn’t going to get the attention I need.

However, sensei offered to run a seminar just for us, only open to the comparatively junior members of Austin Kyūdō. It was an irresistible opportunity to get sensei’s help in a way that didn’t feel like I was imposing on other archers. So in September I joined ten other Austinites for a three-day kyūdō intensive.

And “intense” is the right word to describe my experience, from beginning to end. There’s way too much to be able to share it all, but I’ll do my best to briefly share the important parts of where I started, what I went through, some of the things I learned, and where I go from here.

The Honda Prelude

Just two weeks before the seminar, I was ready to call off the trip and quit kyūdō entirely. After two and a half futile years enduring consistent failure in stoic silence, I had finally reached my breaking point.

While everyone around me – even complete first-timers! – demonstrated basic competence and increasing proficiency, I simply couldn’t successfully fire a bow without injuring myself or damaging equipment. My arrows would fly through the air sideways and clang off the practice target, or flop feebly to the ground only a few meters downrange. I broke strings, stripped the feathers from arrows, and bruised my forearm. And the months I’d spent trying dozens of different ways to correct it had all been for naught.

In the interest of moving on, I’ll leave it at that for now. But to get a better idea how frustrated I was, I’d encourage you to read the blogpost I wrote eight months ago, entitled “All the Gear and…”. Just take all the anguish in that post and amp it up to eleven.

Ironically, that week I had a promising insight: that I clenched the fingers of my right hand so tightly that they were interfering with my release. That didn’t solve all my problems, but it seemed like a clue: one piece of the puzzle. But I didn’t even have time to put it into practice before the seminar was upon us.

So that was my mental and emotional state going into the trip: off-the-scale frustration, extreme pessimism, and the only thing I wanted out of the seminar was for sensei to fix me… Although I was skeptical whether he would, or could.

It was – if you’ll excuse the pun – “my last shot” at being a kyūdō practitioner.

The Tyranny of Logistics

Bearing so much emotional distress, I wasn’t very tolerant of the usual discomforts of travel. Other than two trips between Pittsburgh and Austin when we were deciding where to move, I hadn’t flown in six years: since before the COVID-19 pandemic. And it was my first time flying Southwest Airlines, whose asinine unassigned seating policy makes boarding a complete free-for-all.

Things didn’t get a lot better once we arrived, either. I had to share a room with another person, which added some more stress. Not only were we going to prepare communal meals, but because no one had bothered to communicate with one another, sensei and his friends had also prepared meals for us too, which was yet another stressor for everyone.

Even the seminar provided some unexpected wrinkles. Sensei vetoed my use of the familiar bow I’d brought. I’d purchased some used zori sandals for outdoor use getting to the dojo and fetching arrows, but those promptly broke, necessitating a special trip to the store to buy replacements. And although the seminar was supposed to be for his Austin students only, we were sporadically joined by 5-10 local practitioners. Despite being able to use the dojo 365 days a year, they took shooting spaces and sensei’s time away from those of us who had traveled from far away for a precious 2½ days with him. And I have to admit I got frustrated by seeing other kyudoka improving much more rapidly than I did.

But the underlying message here is that the seminar was extremely mentally, physically, and emotionally draining. In addition to my already-charged emotional state, I was dealing with lack of sleep, poor and insufficient eating, muscle fatigue, dehydration, headaches and nausea, social stress, and of course the emotional rollercoaster of judging every shot I took.

It was, in short, an incredibly draining experience.

Nana Dan the Sensei

I’m gonna be honest: I felt a lot of trepidation going into my first experience with Blackwell-sensei. In speaking with my friends who had worked with him in the past, my preconception was of a teacher who was willfully terse, irritable, intolerant, and easily offended. But after telling their daunting stories, my friends would always add the postscript: “… but as long as you’re serious about kyūdō, he’s really great!”

During the seminar, Blackwell-sensei was actually very willing to give me the benefit of his time and instruction, and he patiently listened to my observations and needs. Despite my skepticism and obvious frustration, he was able to see the mistakes underlying my problems, and gave me clear strategies for correcting them. And he did so with patience and graciousness.

While fixing my issues will take lots more practice and reinforcement, my shooting did begin to improve by the end of the seminar, thanks to his valuable and generously-offered instruction.

Not that he isn’t surly and cantankerous and all that. But I think it shows up in his interactions with more experienced students, with whom he has higher expectations and more established relationships.

My Threefold Incompetence

So what exactly did I get out of the seminar? Well, there were lots of little, specific learnings, but those will be documented in my kyūdō notebook, rather than here. And as far as I was concerned, the only thing that really mattered was figuring out the cause of my constant misfires.

Over the course of the weekend, we identified three specific issues with my release. I’ll distill them down as briefly as possible.

First, my grip on the bow was incorrect, which was causing the string to slap my wrist and the bow to invert itself. Fixing it requires both holding the bow more loosely, plus making small changes in how my fingers configure themselves on the grip.

My second issue was what I’d identified just before the seminar: by locking my fingers around the string, they interfered with the string when I released it, causing the arrow to fire off-kilter, with very little power, and stripping some of the fletching. Ideally, I wouldn’t lock those fingers at all during my draw, but for the time being I’m simply trying to consciously loosen those fingers before I release the string.

I developed the habit of locking those fingers because the string was prematurely coming out of the groove it’s supposed to sit in within the glove. Sensei gave me several techniques to counteract this tendency during my draw, including: keeping my right hand flat; being careful to keep my thumb level or pointed up, rather than downward; making sure my right elbow comes down and back as I draw; not drawing the arrow all the way down to the chin; and not holding my full draw for very long.

Of course, there’s an immense difference between a conceptual understanding of what one has to fix versus actually physically performing it reliably each time one steps up to shoot. And because I’ve spent two years developing muscle memory of improper techniques, my attempts to correct my form feel completely unnatural and wrong. So even though I know what I should be doing, it’s going to take time and lots of practice to learn new habits.

The Fourth Problem

As chance would have it, our kyūdō trip coincided with two Zoom calls that I wanted to attend, both organized by Cambridge Insight Meditation Center, where I practiced meditation for 12 years, and which has been an important part of my growth for more than two decades. Saturday’s call was in honor of CIMC’s founding teacher, Larry Rosenberg, who is in his nineties and in poor health; and on Sunday we celebrated the 40th anniversary of CIMC’s founding. These were intensely moving for me, and featured several of my dear old friends. A shaved-headed version of Ornoth even showed up in the background in part of the “community reflections” video they shared!

The main reason why I mention these here is because those celebrations included poignant messages about looking at how one relates to the challenges and suffering that arise in one’s life, and to pay close attention to what one is attached to, especially ego-based ideas about who one is and how one wants other people see them.

The applicability of these ideas to my kyūdō practice couldn’t have been clearer, and really put the past couple years into perspective.

To clarify further, here’s a citation from a recent article in Lion’s Roar magazine that stated things rather well:

Often a problem at home or at work isn’t just troubling because of the surface issue that the problem is about. It’s what the problem makes us feel and think about ourselves that is disturbing. Taking the time to examine those feelings and thoughts using our meditative practices often shows us that we have some internal hook by which the external challenge has grabbed us.

[…]

Try answering this self-exploratory journal question: “What is the difference between the actual problem posed by my situation and my perception of and feelings about my situation?”

A neutral observer would see that there’s really nothing objectively painful about my kyūdō practice, other than maybe an occasional abrasion. The towering mountain of anguish I’ve endured is entirely due to the meaning I’ve attached to my practice, specifically my need to be seen as a competent – if not a skilled – archer, both in my own mind as well as in the estimation of others.

My need to be a skilled kyudoka was the source of a great deal of pain: that is the fourth problem with my archery practice.

I would free myself from an immense quantity of suffering if I were able to let go of that need, or at least hold it more lightly. Like changing my shooting technique, that’s easier said than done, but just having that mind-shift cleared some space for me to relate to myself and my struggles with more ease, more compassion, and hopefully a little more freedom.

Since my early days as a tech consultant, I’ve known that I don’t thrive in my “stretch zone”; I thrive in the “comfort zone”. I want to enjoy life as it comes, in accordance with my own values, without unnecessary effort or discomfort. I don’t understand people who fixate on personal growth, always striving for something more, wanting to leave their mark on the world. To me, that sounds like living in a perpetual hamster wheel: lots and lots of effort, achieving nothing of value. Or as Devo sings: “Toil is Stupid”.

I had an exchange with one of the senior kyudoka from South Carolina which was especially discouraging. He told me that he enjoyed having the younger Austin people visit, because they reminded him that practicing kyūdō could actually be fun. If enjoying kyūdō is an alien concept to such a longtime practitioner, that raises a big question about whether I even want to continue. What’s the point, if there is no enjoyment?

Kyūdō challenges my self-image, my attachment to how I am perceived by others, and the basic values I hold toward life. Hopefully I can work through those challenges and find a better way to relate to them, so that I don’t have to suffer as much as I have for the past two years.

Seeking the Target

So where do I stand?

Sensei actually gave me both hope and a number of specific changes that I can incorporate into my shooting technique. It would be logical to make a sincere effort to adopt his suggestions, to see whether they actually improve my shooting or not. That will take time and practice to prove out, but that’s an investment I’m willing to make.

I’m also willing to work on my relationship with kyūdō. It’s important that I learn how to let go of the frustration that comes with identifying as a competent archer, while at the same time asking myself whether kyūdō’s endless self-improvement treadmill is something I am able and willing to tolerate over the long term.

As such, I am not going to quit kyūdō… yet.

But at the same time, I am only suspending judgement long enough to work with sensei’s suggestions. Those changes might not help, and I might still decide that I can’t cope with kyūdō’s perpetual challenges and frustrations.

So we’ll see. The arrow’s journey continues, for the time being.

I can’t help but point out the huge contradiction between the fictional stories we humans tell each other—which all end happily ever after—and the reality of our lives, which must invariably come to an unhappy end.

This won’t be the most joyful article you read today. It’s been lingering in my outbox for a while, as I struggled with whether sharing my feelings was worth the negative reaction they might elicit from readers. But I think it’s an important point to talk about, so I’m posting it as-is, despite my trepidation about whether anyone shares these thoughts and feelings or not.

Over the past year, I spent some time exposing myself to mainstream entertainment media: movies, television, and so forth. As I did so, I couldn’t help but notice the stark contrast between my life and the lives of the characters depicted on the screen.

In that constructed world, happy endings aren’t just the norm; they are nearly inevitable. The romantic lead winds up overcoming all obstacles, conquering their foes, winning their love interest, and living out a long life. You have to search awfully hard to find a lasting tragic outcome in mainstream media. As a society, we seem unwilling to acknowledge that sometimes—oftentimes—things just don’t work out.

Even the bad things that happen along the way: in the stories we tell one another, they’re heavily foreshadowed, or else they’re somehow “deserved”. There aren’t any surprises: nothing bad ever happens purely by blind chance, and there are absolutely no unjust outcomes. No matter what the challenge, you can bet it is temporary and that the protagonist will overcome it in the end.

While I was observing all these media messages, the protagonist in my real-world life was beset with problems. Biking home from work one day, I was hit by a car that ran a stop sign, and had to foot all the medical and bike repair bills myself because American law simply doesn’t protect cyclists.

On the way home another night, I had a solo bike crash that resulted in a mild concussion. But more severe were the injuries inflicted at the hospital, where a botched IV left me with a foot-long hematoma and an elbow that wouldn’t move for six weeks.

Not long after, I was diagnosed with a painful gall bladder, and had to radically change my diet while waiting two months to undergo surgery to remove it. Following the surgery, my symptoms came right back.

Next, after taking my cat to the vet, he had a mysterious reaction to the routine vaccinations, and the young, healthy pet that I expected to enjoy for many more years was suddenly and unexpectedly dead.

Since all of this happened while I was out of work, it left me struggling with unplanned financial pressures.

While living this discouraging reality, the preponderance of “happily ever after” stories on television seemed amazingly artifical. Although I wouldn’t pretend to assert that life is nothing more than suffering, it’s pretty clear that suffering happens to all of us. And some kinds of suffering will stay with us until the end of our lives.

When you think in terms of happy endings, in the real world nobody dies happy. Some people may accept its inevitability better than others, and some live long enough to welcome it. But in general, people who realize they are dying must be pretty profoundly unhappy about it. In the book of our lives, when we reach the final chapter, we all suffer our ultimate loss. In the real world—the one we live in—the hero always dies, and in all of history not one person has been born who lived “happily ever after”.

Whether it happens tonight or a few years from now, our lives inevitably end. We mourn the tragedy of someone who dies young, saying it was “before their time”, as if there were some cosmic sense of justice overseeing our lives rather than a blind roll of the dice. As a child, I was given an early lesson in that fallacy when my older sister—recently married and a new mother—died at age 21.

Even more tragic is the gradual decline and infirmity that inevitably comes with old age: having to somehow find the inner strength to be okay giving up everything we’ve ever been, seen, done, or enjoyed. As our future dwindles to months—to days—the grand story that we spent our entire lives constructing must end, and in a manner I would describe as “unhappily”.

So what is the point of my persistently rubbing this in your face? Is it just so that I can be a smug pessimist? Not really. It’s more that I felt a need to provide a more realistic counterpoint to the ridiculously fanatstic stories we’re indundated with by modern media.

I think it’s incredibly important that we acknowledge that we will die. While most people try to avoid thinking about death, for me it is a vital, pressing reminder to derive maximum joy out of each moment of every day. My intention here is actually constructive, rather than nihilistic: I encourage everyone to live and pursue their happiness with wisdom and insight that derives from that sense of urgency.

And another huge reason for this post—perhaps surprisingly—is to offer some collective sympathy. You and me and everyone we know: we are all in the same unfortunate position. Our lives—the beautiful epics we’ve worked so hard to construct—will end as tragedies. There will be no happy endings. As such, I offer everyone my sympathy and understanding and fellowship. Being alive and also being aware of the inevitability and proximity of death: this is a difficult, unpleasant, anxiety-ridden state, but one that we all share in common.

Believe me, I feel for you.

This spring, my Experienced Practitioners practice group finally closed the book on their interminable preoccupation with metta. Next fall we will take up a new topic which I’m particularly excited about: renunciation!

In our final sitting of the spring “semester”, Narayan gave us a new homework exercise to practice with over the summer break: “What would it mean to me to renounce suffering?” So I’ve been sitting with that question for a few weeks.

“Suffering” is an important but somewhat ambiguous term in Buddhism. The similie of the two arrows, which I’ve mentioned before, is key. If you stub your toe, that’s simple, objective, factual, unavoidable suffering. That’s the first arrow.

The second arrow is all the optional, unnecessary mental proliferation that we add on top of that: “I’m such a klutz! I’m always stubbing my toe. I hate my body. I’m a worthless person and unlovable and everybody hates me and I should just be taken out behind a barn and shot rather than continue to be a burden on the rest of the universe!”

This might surprise some of you, but all that additional “stuff” actually didn’t come from your big toe or from other people or from the rest of the universe; it came from your head, and you piled all that on yourself. The second arrow only ever comes from one place: your head.

Unfortunately, when a Buddhist says “suffering”, it’s usually not clear whether she means only the first arrow, only the second arrow, or both. That’s why, when I was doing my year of karuna (compassion) practice, I specifically differentiated between those basic life experiences that we can’t avoid (the first arrow, which I call “pain”), and the unnecessary mental suffering we manufacture ourselves (the second arrow, which I call “angst”).

Having said all that… My navelgazing with respect to renouncing suffering pivots on understanding what the questioner means by “suffering”: pain, angst, or both? Between these two poles, I see five different ways to respond, but only one real answer.

Let’s begin by working with “suffering” as unavoidable pain, with or without the optional angst.

The first (and by far most popular) way to respond to pain is avoidance. If this is how you renounce suffering, you believe that life would be grand if only you could avoid everything that might be unpleasant. Or at least minimize it.

How’s that project going for you? That’s nothing more than reactively hiding from the unavoidable, just like any other unenlightened, pleasure-seeking slob out there glued to his recliner with a fistful of Doritos and a Bud. I think you’ll find lots of examples who’ll tell you that’s not a particularly effective method of “renouncing suffering”.

The second way to escape suffering is to deny that it even exists, which is a surprisingly popular option, especially among people younger than age 50. “Death isn’t going to happen to me, nor will I ever get sick. I’ll never be in pain, or grow old and frail, and I’ll never owe the government any taxes, either. When I look back on my life, it’s been one long series of easy but emotionally fulfilling victories.” A Buddhist would call this delusion, one of the three poisons, rather than any effective method of renouncing suffering.

Both of these strategies fail because there is no way to get through life without experiencing some form of pain and discomfort and dissatisfaction. A really smart guy once expounded a theory along those lines; he called it the First Noble Truth.

There is, however, one obvious way to avoid pain. Most discomfort (like all pleasure) comes through our sense doors: the familiar five senses plus the mental sense that encompasses thought and emotion. So one could theoretically escape pain by permanently closing all one’s sense doors, so that one never again receives any unpleasant (or pleasant) sensory input. The only catch is that you can only reach that state if you’re clinically dead. That seems like a suboptimal strategy for renouncing suffering.

Okay, so we can’t eliminate all pain, because it’s unavoidable in this lifetime. What if we accept that fact and limit the definition of “suffering” to only refer to the second arrow: that additional angsty proliferation that we cause ourselves? That sounds like something we might actually be able to control. That would be a much more achievable goal, right?

The question hinges entirely on whether you believe that we can truly eliminate all forms of self-loathing, anger, and greed. Sad to say, but so far human history doesn’t provide many practical examples. How many people do you know who never get angry, upset, or down, even under the most unfair or difficult circumstances? Any?

That same smart dude (above) said that the suffering we create for ourselves is the product of just three things: our compulsive desires, our consuming dislikes, and our confusion and delusion about how the world (and particularly our hearts and minds) work. He called that Noble Truth Number Two (this guy was really into making lists).

If you’re like me, getting rid of desire, aversion, and delusion sounds like a gargantuan task. How do you get rid of something that appears just as inherent to life as breathing or digestion? The only obvious alternative is acceptance; learn to live with it. But giving in to our ignorant emotional impulses is totally contrary to the idea of renouncing suffering.

There’s only one option left. We’ve already agreed that we can’t get rid of the pain inherent in living, and our only hope is to eliminate the angst that we make for ourselves in how we respond to that pain.

We can’t do anything about the first arrow, but as for that second arrow… That smart dude had something to say about that. Yeah, it’s his big Third Noble Truth, which states that it is absolutely possible to uproot and remove the causes and manifestations of suffering. That is, after all, the base philosophy that the whole Buddhist project derives from.

So for a Buddhist, there’s no question: of course you can eliminate those self-destructive negative mind states! Your whole life is built around both the premise and the practice of renouncing suffering. There is no more vital task for a Buddhist than abandoning all that unnecessary, self-generated angst.

So when asked “What would it mean to me to renounce suffering?”, my answer is immediate, unambiguous, and obvious. It means having an active practice, as expounded in the Buddha’s Fourth Noble Truth: the eight-step path (another of his lists) that describes how it’s done in detail.

Whatever my teacher intended with this question, for me there’s no need for a lot of intense inquiry about it. As a Buddhist, I have already renounced suffering, and while I have hardly defeated it, I have a pretty good idea what renunciation of suffering looks like.

QED, done, case closed. Next question please.

I recently completed my sixth “sandwich” retreat at CIMC: a nine-day non-residential meditation retreat that starts with all-day sittings on Saturday and Sunday, then evening sittings all week long, followed by another weekend of all-day sittings. All told, it adds up to about 50 hours on the cushion and a lot of sleep deprivation.

First let me relate some of the odd circumstances of the retreat.

Four days before the retreat, I had just begun my regular Tuesday night sitting at CIMC when we felt an earthquake shake the building. That was interesting.

Then, two days into the retreat we began feeling the effects of Hurricane Sandy, which caused them to cancel Monday night’s sitting. It also canceled my planned trip to Foxwoods, and delayed the delivery of my new laptop for two days.

And then on Saturday, one of the cooks came in early that morning and fired up the stove and filled the building with natural gas, such that once everyone arrived at the center, the teachers chose to evacuate the building until the gas company gave an “all clear”.

So it was an interesting week. Combine all that with the usual sleep deprivation, a birthday, a doctor’s appointment, and my mother’s shoulder replacement surgery, it was pretty stressful.

Another interesting bit happened when I was outside, doing walking meditation in a local park. I looked down and saw the shackle of a padlock on the ground. Someone had used bolt cutters and cut the lock. When I’m on retreat, I’m always on the lookout for stuff like this; the obvious symbolism being unlocking one’s heart. It was only later that I read the word stamped onto the shackle: HARDENED… A very nice addition to the symbolism.

I really wasn’t expecting any major revelations. After all, this was my sixth sandwich retreat, and I knew what to expect: a whole lot of sitting and walking. But I actually came back with four major insights, which I’ll share in abbreviated fashion here.

One thing I’d been kicking around before the retreat was how much of our suffering is purely a fabrication of the mind. For the most part, when we’re suffering it’s because of an image of what things were like in the past, or how they are going to be in the future. If you stop and look at your real, present-moment experience, we’re almost never actually experiencing painful circumstances. It’s all just our minds telling us how bad things will be once we get to some future time. It’s like being afraid of shadows on a scrim.

Another item. I have a longstanding story that I’m different because when I meditate, no big emotional traumas come up. But this time I suddenly remembered something that does come up for me that doesn’t bother most people: physical discomfort! But how to work with it? It didn’t seem to me like there was much wisdom to be gained in just watching your own pain…

Well, I asked Michael in my teacher interview, and he had some great observations. He agreed that relaxing into the pain was a pretty useless pursuit. He also said that one could watch one’s relationship to pain, but that too wasn’t all that fruitful.

Instead, he recommended whole-body awareness as something that he’d found useful from his Chan practice, and that was later reinforced when I talked to Narayan. So I guess I’ll be trying a little of that, although I find it a challenge not to narrow the field of attention down to a specific part of the body.

Another thing that came up during a group discussion with Michael was the idea of continuity of mindfulness. He was of the opinion that it would be freeing and effortless, while I challenged him by asserting that it would be tiring and require continuous mental effort not to get distracted.

After talking it over with Narayan, I think the difference is between concentration practice and wisdom practice. In concentration practice (samatha), one must exert effort to continually bring the mind back from any distractions to the object of concentration (usually the breath); whereas wisdom practice (vipassana) is more relaxed, focusing on accepting present-moment life as it is. The only mental effort involved in wisdom practice is in staying in the present moment by steering clear of thoughts of the past or projections and planning about the future.

So in that sense, I’ve been spending a lot of time on concentration practice, and not so much on wisdom.

One final revelation actually related to the “homework” that usually accompanies the sandwich retreat. This year we were to observe when resistance arose and how we could detect it. I was pretty interested, because I tend to be a resistant type, and that resistance manifests as frustration, which then can sometimes escalate into anger.

For me, it was pretty easy to spot, because in most instances I started swearing to myself. Once was when I learned that a package I was expecting (my new laptop) hadn’t been delivered; another was when a magnetic card reader failed to read my card on the first swipe.

The connection between the triggers I observed was immediately apparent to me. In each case, I had an expectation that something would transpire in a way that was beneficial to me, and that expectation hadn’t been met. Even though they were minor things, they were upsetting because they impacted me. In other words, it was clear that the problem was that I was living from a place where my ego was dominant.

From there, I started playing with the idea of living from a place where ego wasn’t so central, relaxing my grip on my “self” (or its grip on me). I found that really interesting. Narayan cautioned me not to take the ego as a concrete thing; by viewing it as just a passing sense of self, I could avoid setting up a futile battle royal between my “self” and myself. Good advice.

So although I didn’t expect it, I came away with a number of things to work with, so it was a surprisingly productive retreat.

Since 2009, I’ve oriented my meditation practice around the brahmaviharas, the Buddhist virtues of lovingkindness (metta) and compassion (karuna). I’ve just completed a year of intensive karuna practice and thought I’d do a quick debrief, much as I did last October after twelve months of metta practice.

I certainly found compassion a more productive practice than metta. I think part of that is because metta’s basic friendliness is my default mode to begin with, whereas compassion isn’t quite as natural and intuitive to me. After all, I’ve always been more prone to blame someone for causing their own problems than to empathize with them.

Compassion also has a proximate cause: it is a response to obvious suffering. So when someone is under mental or physical stress, that provides a prompt that reminds one: this is a situation that calls for a compassionate response. For me, that makes it easier to evoke than metta, which is just a vague kindness with no immediate intent behind it, rather than a response to an obvious need.

I used the Buddhist concept of the two arrows to structure my compassion practice. The first arrow is the painful event or situation: the basic discomfort that cannot be avoided, like the pain of a stubbed toe. The second arrow is the additional, unnecessary discomfort that we inflict upon ourselves: “Why am I always stubbing my toe? I’m such a klutz! I’m worthless and no one loves me and it’s always going to be this way until I die…” The second arrow is the self-generated fear and anger that proliferate as a result of how we relate to an event.

A couple of my insights this year had to do with the nature of these two kinds of suffering.

It’s odd to me that when people think about that first arrow—physical or emotional pain—they usually think of it as applying to humans. But it’s equally true that many animals experience pain in a very similar way. And a sensitive person might even leave open the question of whether plants experience some kind of analogue to the pain we feel. When we wish for everyone to be free from pain, I think it wise to extend that to all forms of life.

But the second arrow—the proliferation of painful mental states that we add to simple pain—that is indeed the exclusive birthright of sentient beings.

As my meditation practice grew, I came to see how we allow our mental states to compound this indirect suffering on top of simple, direct suffering. I also discovered that we actually choose to do this. The second arrow isn’t required; it’s completely optional, and if we are truly free, we can choose not to harm ourselves with it.

Ironically, this is how I discovered the primary thing blocking my compassion for others. While I find it easy to feel for someone who is experiencing a simple, unavoidable pain, I find it extremely difficult to empathize with someone who is allowing their own mental state to create additional, unnecessary suffering. It’s hard to feel compassion for someone when you know that the pain they are feeling is entirely within their control (or would be, if they were only self-aware enough to realize it). Again, I find myself falling back on blaming people for their misfortune, because I see their ignorance as something they have chosen, a shortcoming they have neglected to address.

Getting past that view will be one of my ongoing challenges.

Those are some of the insights I’ve experienced through my karuna practice, but they are more of a small side-effect of the practice, which was primarily oriented toward nurturing the experiential, felt sense of compassion, which doesn’t translate as well to a simple blog post.

As for what’s next, I can’t say. After two years of structured brahmavihara practice, I think I could use something a little less directed. And the two remaining brahmaviharas—equanimity (upekkha) and taking joy in the happiness of others (mudita)—I feel I already have a good handle on.

The only two things that stick out right now are being a little more relaxed in terms of letting more thoughts and emotions arise during meditation, and continuing to look more carefully at the body and the breath for any indication of physical manifestations of emotion.

But I think the main change will be giving up both such a structured, approach to meditation and such a strongly directed technique. After two years of focused practice, I think I’ll let things be a little more relaxed and free-form for a while.

I must admit, I’ve always been kinda confused by vegetarians.

Many, if not most, vegetarians avoid meat out of compassion for other living beings. This is, of course, a laudable sentiment that I personally agree with and support. If I were a vegetarian, this would be my primary motivation.

On the other hand, vegetarianism that’s based on the sanctity of life doesn’t make much sense if you agree that plants are just as much “living beings” as animals. Is killing and eating a plant really any less violent than killing a cow or a lamb? Why? Is it because we feel more “kinship” with that cow than we do, say, a turnip?

The history of human ethical development can be viewed as a glacially slow progression of extending respect to other life forms. We began back in the caveman days, when Grog came up with the revolutionary idea that he shouldn’t cross the river and kill Kracken’s whole family, since they were kinda the same as his family.

Tens of thousands of years later, mankind is still struggling with the idea that people from the neighboring country are kinda the same as we are, even though they talk funny; that people are still people, even if they worship ridiculous pagan gods (or, heaven forbid, some blasphemous variation of our own); and that we are all one, even if our skin color isn’t.

Here’s where I give vegetarians credit: they’ve extended that idea of kinship, and the compassion that comes with it, to other mammals. You don’t eat cows and pigs and dogs and lambs because, dammit, there’s something about them that we can identify with and care about. We don’t want them to suffer and die just for our convenience. Well done, Captain Vegetable!

But that’s just one more incremental step along a long path of ethical development: one more case of us realizing that just because something is different doesn’t mean it isn’t worthy of our honor, respect, and compassion.

The next steps in our ethical development are obvious: extend that same degree of compassion to birds, fish, shellfish, and insects. Giving mammals preferential treatment over other members of the animal kingdom makes about as much sense as giving Jews preferential treatment over Muslims.

Oh. Right. We’re not quite there yet, are we? Maybe someday.

Objectively, fish and insects are life forms just like you and I, and the more we respect life, the more we must care about their suffering, too. There are already people who, instead of swatting them, escort their household bugs outside, being careful not to harm them.

Assuming we finally manage to extend our compassion beyond our fellow humans and other mammals, to fish and insects, it’s only a matter of time before we finally admit that plants are living beings, too.

And here is where I must ask of my vegetarian friends: why is the life of one stink bug more precious than our annual destruction of millions upon millions of tomato plants, or corn stalks, or Christmas trees?

The precedent has already been set of humans taking action to save an individual redwood or a swath of forest from being clear-cut. That action makes no sense unless the idea has begun to take root that all life—even vegetables!—is worthy of our respect and compassion.

Of course, I’m not arguing that vegetarians should stop eating vegetables, or ethically regress by resuming eating meat. It’s an unfortunate and unavoidable fact that right now, humans must eat formerly living beings in order to survive.

That’s an interesting realization, because it establishes an ethical dilemma for us: our survival requires us to kill living beings. Since most religions say that killing is one of the worst actions one can perform, doesn’t that mean that mankind is inherently evil?

That’s an interesting contrast to what we normally hear, which is that humans have a favored position in the universe. Judaism, Christianity, and Islam all assert that man was created in God’s image, and Buddhism says that a human rebirth is a rare and precious opportunity to attain enlightenment. A good example is this quote, attributed to Anagarika Darmapala at the 1892 World Parliament of Religions:

To be born as a human being is a glorious privilege. Man’s dignity consists in his capability to reason and think and to live up to the highest ideal of pure life, of calm thought, of wisdom without extraneous intervention.

But how do we reconcile this self-congratulatory view of ourselves with the gory fact that every day of our lives we must kill and eat our fellow living beings?

Now let me set the question aside and take a bit of a side track, because that idea dovetails nicely with some of my own feelings concerning the sanctity of nature, and particularly trees.

Since childhood, when my summers were spent along wooded lakes in Maine, I’ve felt a deep spiritual respect for trees. In college, there was a particular pine tree deep in the woods behind campus that was “my tree”, where I’d go to commune with nature, and more recently I have similarly rooted myself to a particular spot near the Arnold Arboretum’s “Conifer Path”.

Combining this with my previous train of thought has given me a better reason to admire trees from a spiritual standpoint. Think about it: unlike us, trees don’t need to kill anything in order to survive. In fact, trees do zero harm at all, yet they have the longest lifespans of any complex living organism on our planet.

From a Buddhist perspective, trees are the epitome of equanimity, stoically accepting life as it is, with no need to control it or change it. They are equally connected to the air, the earth, and to water.

As a result, it is no surprise that euphemisms like “the Tree of Life” fill our language, and that trees play a central and symbolic role in all major religions, be it the bodhi tree that the Buddha reached enlightenment beneath, or the Judeo-Christian images of the olive branch and Tree of Knowledge.

I seem to be in implausibly diverse company in my respect for trees’ spiritual nature:

• Willa Cather: I like trees because they seem more resigned to the way they have to live than other things do.
   
• George Bernard Shaw: Except during the nine months before he draws his first breath, no man manages his affairs as well as a tree does.
   
• Friedrich Nietzsche: The pine tree seems to listen, the fir tree to wait, and both without impatience. They give no thought to the little people beneath them devoured by their impatience and their curiosity.
   
• Ralph Waldo Emerson: The wonder is that we can see these trees and not wonder more.
   
• Mikhail Gorbachev: To me, nature is sacred; trees are my temples and forests are my cathedrals.
   
• Ronald Reagan: A tree is a tree—how many more do you need to look at?

Trees give us a model of simplicity, acceptance, and meditative silence. If you searched the world over for the best master meditation guru alive, you could do no better than to follow the example of a tall, strong tree, standing silently while the world flows and transpires all around him.

If I was to be reincarnated after this life is over, I think, contrary to most people’s belief, that coming back as a tree might well be the wisest choice one could make.

And if you were looking for evidence of divinity in our world, I think this is where you should look. Surely the pattern of growth rings in a tree are the literal fingerprints of whatever force—personified or otherwise—created us.

Among the books I got this Xmas were two with a common theme: bicycle racing. Having little else to do this week, I sat down and read them both on Saturday, and I found an interesting, if not totally unexpected, commonality.

First, I’d like to share a few citations with you. I’ve kept a larger part of the context, but I’ve bolded the particularly pertinent sections.

The first excerpt is from Tim Krabbé’s novel “The Rider”, his not-really-fictional telling of his participation in the 150k half-day Tour de Mont Aigoual race. It’s one of the few true classics of the genre:

In interviews with riders that I’ve read and in conversations I’ve had with them, the same thing always comes up: the best part was the suffering. […] How can that be: suffering is suffering, isn’t it? […] Because after the finish all the suffering turns to memories of pleasure, and the greater the suffering, the greater the pleasure. That is Nature’s payback to riders for the homage they pay her by suffering. Velvet pillows, safari parks, sunglasses: people have become woolly mice. They have bodies that can walk for five days and four nights through a desert of snow, without food, but they accept praise for having taken a one-hour bicycle ride. ‘Good for you.’ Instead of expressing their gratitude for the rain by getting wet, people walk around with umbrellas. Nature is an old lady with few suitors these days, and those who wish to make use of her charms she rewards passionately. That’s why there are riders. Suffering you need; literature is baloney.

The next two excepts are from Lance Armstrong’s new/second book, “Every Second Counts”:

I’d suffered more in winning the Tour a second time […] But in a way, suffering made it more gratifying. Suffering, I was beginning to think, was essential to a good life, and as inextricable from such a life as bliss. It’s a great enhancer. It might last a minute, or a month, but eventually it subsides, and when it does, something else takes its place, and maybe that thing is a greater space. For happiness. Each time I encountered suffering, I believed that I grew, and further defined my capacities—not just my physical ones, but my interior ones as well, for contentment, friendship, or any other human experience.

And he goes on to say:

The experience of suffering is like the experience of exploring, of finding something unexpected and revelatory. When you find the outermost thresholds of pain, or fear, or uncertainty, what you experience is an expansive feeling, a widening of your capabilities. Pain is good because it teaches your body and soul to improve.

Here’s one final example, from Paul Fournel’s Oulipo avant-garde classic “Need for the Bike”, wherein he talks about bonking, which he calls “blowing up”:

Why not give up the bike after a blowup? Because the blowup is a journey, and the cyclist is first and foremost a traveler. Then because, after a blowup, your organism is altered. There’s a kind of purification in falling flat, an impression of fasting. A threshold is crossed …

I find it interesting that suffering is such a universal thread in writing about cycling. The discussions go far beyond the more familiar “no pain, no gain” mantra and describe suffering as necessary, integral to happiness, and even transformational. The texts, especially Krabbé and Fournel, wax poetic when talking about the suffering of cyclists, reading more like Zen Buddhism or Existential philosophy than a description of riding a bike. Here’s more of Fournel’s treatise on bonking. Note the eloquence and panache that he uses to describe this most humbling of experiences.

There are warning signs of a blowup, but they aren’t appreciably different from from the signs of normal tiredness. Now that I think about it, metaphysical anxiety might be one hint. Riding is absurd—climbing to descend, going in circles, behind this mountain there’s another, why hurry? … Riding is absurd like peeling vegetables, skiing, thinking deeply, or living. The moment these questions come up, while you’re riding, you should take note. That’s when your quads are demanding more oxygen from your heart than your lungs can provide. That’s when it gets foggy. If you’re on a friend’s wheel, he’ll pull away by two bike-lengths without accelerating. You come back, dancing on your pedals, but then you lose the two lengths again. You do this rubber-band trick ten or so times, and then you let him go, telling yourself you’ll catch up soon. In fact, the next time you see him is when he turns around and comes back, worried, to find out what happened. At that point you won’t recognize him, or, better yet, you’ll recognize him, but only as someone who might buy your disgusting bike.

Well, if drugs make for more interesting novelists, and tortured lives make for better painters and composers, why shouldn’t the kind of cycling-induced mental impairment I talk about in this previous post (Defining the Natural High, 6/11/03) produce better philosophers? It does, however, make me wonder about my recent enquiries into Existentialism and Buddhism, though!