Is work a religion?

Is work my current religion? It's another beginning as all consuming as Hinduism or Buddhism was: new rites and rituals, a foreign language, obscure terms, ceremonial dress, even spiritual leaders although I doubt they think of themselves that way. I hadn't really thought about it before, but a workplace unifies around a core belief or set of beliefs and then the people in it struggle - sometime constructively and sometimes not - to act on those beliefs.

Three and a half months in to this new day job and I'm still learning when to bow or not to bow, and it's every bit as uncomfortable as being in a Mandarin-only retreat in polyester in July. And I'd like to say I'm better for all of my years of practice but, right now, that really is a big fat lie.

The Bowing Controversy - or To Bow or Not to Bow

I knew I had a hard time with the whole idea of bowing (see the end of the Path of Love) but I thought it was just my personality quirk. Then came all the hullaballoo over President Obama bowing to Saudi King Abdullah on April 2nd. You'd think President Obama had floated the idea of making the king a cabinet member.

I thought it was my little old outsized ego that kept my spine rigid, unwilling even to try out this bowing thing just to see if I could at least come to appreciate why it's so important in both Hinduism and Buddhism but here I find it isn't just my problem, it's cultural. We're all raised to think bowing down before someone implies weakness or, worse, fealty or subservience to another.

It seems to me that how we greet one another is less important than that we do. I know that when I'm concerned more about how someone else sees me, more about making clear my power and its importance to me, more about making sure my position seems dominant from the get-go, my relationships don't go very well. I've lived most of my life with that first in my mind and, boy, was that a waste.

All I can say is, the whole angry storm over the President's bow at least made me feel that I am a real American, not just a real egotist.

(In case you're interested, here are links to previous posts with some of my bowing challenges: Hemu's Morning Rituals, First Teacher, Path of Love, Doing It, The Destroyer of Time...there must be a few more but, you get the idea. Most of the bowing is at the end of the posts...)

Alarm bells

Okay, I'm gonna talk about why I've been so deliberately vague about the location of this retreat....

4:45am. I was almost late for the dawn sitting because my pants hadn't fully dried from yesterday's attempt to wash out the coffee I'd spilled on the drive up so I'd been up in the middle of the night dodging deer in the moonlight to use the dryer in the building with the washrooms. The day began with 108 full prostrations which, I'm telling you, is better than any morning calisthenics. From standing, you bow, then get all the way down on your knees and touch your forehead to the ground and then stand back up. 108 times. Empty brain. It was actually pretty great.

I didn't have half the trouble sitting I'd had the night before. No ticks. Legs didn't die. Minimal sweating. Mind, it wasn't easy to sit. For many of the half-hour sessions, I took counting to a new art form. I figured out how many times I counted to ten, on average, in a thirty minute session - somewhere between seventeen and eighteen times - and I'd just keep track of sets of ten. Counting to ten, seventeen or eighteen times doesn't sound so bad, now, does it? Better than sitting for thirty minutes without any way to mark time...over and over and over again. There were even moments I actually didn't fight sitting there, as much as one or two whole minutes. Those were lovely.

They did use the "wake up stick" (kyosaku) at one point, though. One of the officiants got it from the altar and creaked slowly behind all of us and ritually smacked those who asked to be hit twice. You had to ask to be hit which, my guess is, is the way it is in most zendos in the United States. I couldn't see how it was done but the sound of the people around me getting thwacked was pretty alarming, given the essential silence of the room otherwise. The stick didn't come out during every session of sitting and I don't know why it's used sometimes but not others but I sure am going to find out more about it.

Using the oryoki bowls and all the ritual that went with them wasn't so bad. While everyone was serious in their attempts to hew to the ritual, there was a low-key vibe that made looking up and following along as best you could okay.

But part of the retreat included a face-to-face interview with the center's spiritual leader. We were taught the ritual for waiting our turn, how to know when our turn was, what to do when we went in, and how to leave. I wasn't quite sure what I was going to say but I did know I was going to explain exactly who I was and what I'm doing. The monk couldn't have been sweeter. We talked for a while, about what I wanted from the practice and why but then he said, "I want you to be my student."

"But I don't live anywhere near here."

"That's okay. You can sit with people down in Los Angeles but you can be my student. Do you want to be my student?"

Although I didn't know much about Buddhism, I was pretty sure it wasn't supposed to go this way. There's a strong tradition of teachers resisting students when they first show up, waiting to see if their desire to learn is strong enough to overcome the first few "no"s.

It's a mystery to me about how one chooses a place to practice, a spiritual leader to guide you, if you aren't able to continue on with your family's traditions for whatever reason. I guess I'm looking for a teacher so committed to their own practice that who is or isn't around them doesn't matter all that much.

I hope I'm not doing the Woody Allen thing, running away from a club that would have me, but this just didn't feel right. I think I'm going back to take another class at ZCLA.

How to Zen

Feeding hungry ghosts?
A few of us came back for the second Zen Practice class at ZCLA. It was a relief that it was Luminous Heart again and not someone new. "We're going to down to the Buddha Hall in about three minutes to do the Gate of Sweet Nectar Ceremony which is the ceremony that closes out our week of practice and then we'll stay in that room and talk a little bit about how your practice is going."

Gate of Sweet Nectar? I don't know what I expected but I guess I assumed that all you did was meditate in Zen Buddhism. It never really crossed my mind there'd be services. In fact, that's probably the reason I decided to check Zen out. It sounded simple. Fun even. I think the first time I ever head the word "zen" was in the title, Zen and the Art of Motorcyle Maintenance. Of course Robert Pirisg is quoted as saying, ""it should in no way be associated with that great body of factual information relating to orthodox Zen Buddhist practice. It's not very factual on motorcycles, either."

But Luminous Heart was telling us we were about to go to a service in the Buddha Hall. "What I want to let you know there is some floor bowing and I didn't teach you that last time. If it's more comfortable, when you see people getting ready to bow, you can do this,” she bowed at the waist, “which is a standing bow, or you can simply stand and not bow. If you want to do a floor bow, you simply do this--" And, with that, the tall, more than middle-aged woman just dropped down right on the bare floor to show us. Once her head was on the ground, she lifted her hands, palms up and flat open, slightly above her head. When she stood back up, she said, "The symbology of it is you're bowing to the Buddha, you're bowing the Buddha in yourself, you're bowing to all the other Buddhas in the room. And this gesture?" She repeated raising her open hands, palms up. "It's as though you're lifting Buddha in the palms of your hands. We call it raising the bodhi mind. It's not necessary at all for you to do it but, if you wish to, you can do it."

While I felt appreciative of her acknowledgement that bowing can be tough for some of us, I realized, while she was giving us other options, that I have learned something: I can now bow without making a big deal of it. But it sure was nice to hear Luminous Heart acknowledge just how hard bowing might be for all kinds of reasons. For me, it wasn't creaky knees or joints but my pride, my dislike of kowtowing to anyone or anything, my discomfort with doing things that feel inauthentic and, more than anything, my fear of looking stupid. However, once I got that I’m not bowing to a statue or to a person so much as indicating, symbolically and physically, that I don’t think I’m above anything or anyone else, that I’m at least willing to hear what others have to say about their beliefs and practices, to be open-hearted, I could bow. I can bow in gratitude. That’s what my bows mean anyway. There are still times I feel stupid bowing, mostly when I imagine someone I know watching me do it, but that happens less and less.

We walked down the driveway to the Buddha Hall. On the porch outside, a woman stood with a wooden mallet in hand, occasionally hitting an iron bell. We had to walk by her to put our shoes in the rack and then walk behind her to get into the Buddha Hall. She didn't seem to notice we were there, all around her. She just stood there, waiting for her last ring to die away, ready to strike when it did.

There were a few people in the Buddha Hall when we walked in. The room was carpeted, about the size of a living room, with an altar on the far side, a square brown mat in the center for the officiant, and a variety of percussion instruments in the far corners on either side of the altar. Aside from that, the room was open. The handful of us newbies filed in to one side of the room and stood in a line with our backs to the windows, facing the center of the room and the double line of people on the other side. Together, we made a center aisle for the officiant. As people came in, they bowed in the direction of the altar and joined the line of people on one side of the room or the other. As they took their place, they did a small polite bow to those on the other side and then stood still with their eyes down. It was quite clear that you didn't chitchat and catch up with your neighbors while waiting for the ceremony to begin. And, just like at the Hsi Lai Temple even though the kind of Buddhism at the Zen Center is different, anyone who had to cross the center line, cross in front of the altar, paused and bowed as they did. Well, almost everyone.

The person ringing the bell started doing it faster and faster until there was a series of quite fast strikes, then the bell outside stopped and the woman came in. The service was ready to begin. A couple of gongs inside and then someone blew on a conch shell. I've never seen anyone actually do that except in weird Hawaiian movies., certainly not in person.

The chanter began to sing:

Calling out to Hungry Hearts

Everywhere through endless time

You who wander, you who thirst

I offer you this Bodhi Mind.

It was a very sweet service. It helped that most of it was in English although there was some chanting in Japanese and some in, I guess, Pali or Sanskrit, I'm not sure which. All of it was easy to follow in the books everyone was given just before the service began. The chants talked a lot about feeding hungry spirits, both figuratively and literally, I guessed, as there were cans and boxes of food all over the altar. When it came time to bow, most people did the floor bows but some just bowed from the waist. I had no problem doing the floor bows although it's quite a trick figuring out how to do it when you're standing so close to everyone else; a standing person takes up much less room than one who's kneeling with their head on the floor. You kind of have to step out of line a bit and angle yourself so you don't put your butt in someone's face.

After the service, we ZP2 students stayed behind in the Buddha Hall where Luminous Heart explained the hungry ghosts. While, in some sense, they do refer to beings who are not currently living, they are also us, the part of us that wants and needs and is desperate to have. That helped me. I'm not so sure where I am on the idea of ghosts in other realms. Yes, my name (Marley) is associated with a pretty famous ghost in literature, Scrooge's partner, but I'm not entirely certain ghosts have much meaning for me except in the realm of fiction. However, when you describe them as that part of me that's never satisfied, well, there's no doubt that is real. And it does make me think of all the people I know, both dead and alive, whose disappointments are still palpable to me. I don't expect any of them to appear before me but I think I can feel in my body what this service is trying to address. And the food on the altar? People are supposed to bring a can of food to the service that goes to a local food bank.

Luminous Heart asked if the service made anyone uncomfortable. One guy said he didn't care for the bowing. Luminous Heart said she’d had trouble with bowing at first, too. "I was raised Presbyterian and, when I came into another practice and had to learn to bow, my mentor had also been a Presbyterian so, when I said, ‘I'm not going to bow!’ he said, ‘Bowing is very good exercise for Presbyterians because their necks are soooo stiff!’" She laughed. "You don't have to do it but you could experiment with it and see what that feels like to bow to the universe or to yourself or to love. Take it at your own pace. Each of us has their own history about what each of these things mean: bowing, incense, candles, black robes, all of it.”

She then asked about how the week between the two classes had gone, our "practice," she called it. One guy talked about the difficulty of sitting while suffering from allergies and bad knees. "When you start to meditate, every ache, every pain, every habit that you have--" Luminous Heart pulled her hand across her nose in a fake dramatic sniffle, chuckled, and then said, "everything it is that you do, that we all do, and that we think we really must do or we'll probably die if we don't do it immediately, comes up. So it's very interesting to experiment, to notice that you want to scratch your shoulder. You can scratch it if you want to, it isn't good or bad, but try to just notice the itch in your shoulder. Period. Just to notice the itch. "

Just typing that last sentence, I'm starting to itch, like, everywhere: under one of the pads on my eyeglasses, under my left shoulder blade, in my left ear, in the crease in my right elbow, etc. I bet you're pretty itchy now, too, just because I've made you think about it. Well, that happens when you're sitting. Especially when you first start. You’re supposed to try to ignore those.

Uh-huh.

Luminous Heart said, when you do, "Sometimes it gets greater and it probably will because your mind is saying, 'Oh, my goodness!!! Scratch that itch now!' Well, if you want to scratch, you scratch. It's just interesting to begin to experiment with what we think we need to do with our bodies." Luminous Heart then distinguished between this kind of shifting around and the kind we really should do, like, if your back starts to hurt, for example.

When it was my turn, I talked about how hard I found it to sit with my eyes open. “My black cat seems to plant herself wherever my eyes appear to be. And what harder to resist than a set of big green eyes staring up at you?”

Luminous Heart nodded and said, "The more you can learn to do it with your eyes open," she said, “then you can be sitting on a bus or in line at the bank with your eyes down like this and still know when it’s time to step up. You're not caught up in what's around you, nor are you avoiding it. You notice there's a cat walking by and then the cat isn't there any more and there you are again. So, it's a good practice."

That, or doing it in a room without the cat.

Another guy talked about the fact that, in the past, he tried to sit for twenty-five minutes but he had a hard time finding that much time with a small daughter.

"It is said here very, very often that it's about six hundred times better to sit for a short bit every day than to sit for an hour one day and none the next and thirty minutes the next. The continuity of the practice is what builds the stuff, the energy, the qi ("chee"), that thickens the concentrating ability so if you want to start with five minutes, that's fine. But at least you will have put your tush on the cush at least for that day. Your psyche knows that, you're whole being knows that. Is your child an infant?"

"Sixteen months."

"I meditated with my daughter when she was an infant. If you can meditate with her, it's heavenly especially if you do it right before they go to sleep, it goes right into their bodies."

A younger guy said he wakes up in full "monkey mind" so he found it helpful just to sit by the side of his bed for five minutes before heading out the door for work. "When I could hear the birds and keep coming back to my breath, that was good. As opposed to when the thoughts that go whssh, whssh, whssh."

Luminous Heart, who earned her living as a psychotherapist, pounced on his statement. "Everybody has monkey mind. There is no such person that doesn't, including Buddhas. Everyone thinks. We're not going to be stopping thinking! So the issue is: can you come back? Are you coming back? If you have maybe two breaths that are focused, then good on you, you know? That's better than zero. There's no such thing as a 'bad' sitting. Your tush was on the cush and you were present. That’s what counts."

Boy, is this a liberating idea: nothing gets in the way of meditating more, for me, than this idea that I'm doing it "wrong" or even that I'm just no good at it because, the moment I sit down, my mind starts to race. I thought the point of meditating was to stop your racing mind, to stop thought. Luminous Heart said that wasn't the point. You simply notice what's going on and then come back to the breath. The point is that coming back.

One woman said that, when she gets a focused breath or two, she'll suddenly notice that she's had them...and lose focus.

Luminous Heart broke up. "Yes! 'Aren't I wonderful that I had that focused breath' and then you're gone. It's very funny. You can feel yourself popping up after a while: 'I'm getting this down, aren't I wonderful!' Clunk." She laughed, "So I want to encourage you to keep doing what you're doing. Keep that one committed time. You want to be realistic but maybe just a little bit outside what's easy to do and then, if you can find one other time you can sit a little, then do."

Next up, our first zazen (seated meditation) in the zendo. Luminous Heart reviewed the ritual involved in walking in to the zendo….and there was a lot of it. On Sundays at ZCLA, there are two half-hour sessions of meditation with about ten minutes of walking meditation – “kinhin” - between them. The only time you can enter, leave, go to the bathroom or get a drink of water is during the walking meditation. But, because we were coming in to sit for the first time in between the first and second session, there was an additional, pragmatic ritual: we had to wait until everyone was back in front of their cushions so we didn’t inadvertently take someone’s seat. “They'll be in walking meditation and we'll enter after the clap, step over but not on the threshold, bow, and then take any empty seat. If you go to the far side of the room, make sure you walk behind the altar. If you pass any of the seats marked “monitor”, you pause and give a little bow of acknowledgement. When you get to your cushion, bow to it – it’s the Buddha’s seat, your seat – then turn and bow out (to the rest of the room) and then sit and turn around to face the wall.”

Wow. The saving grace to this overwhelming list of things to remember was that Luminous Heart somehow conveyed that no one would bite our heads off when we made our inevitable mistakes.

Once we got to the zendo, we took off our shoes again, and picked up whatever we needed – one of the small round cushions called zafus or a small bench or a chair – and waited in the vestibule. The stream of people in the kinhin walked at a pretty good clip around the U-shaped room. It was a little confusing to hear that we weren’t supposed to walk in front of the altar yet that’s just was this “kinhin” was doing.

When the clap came, each person put their hands up in a prayer position and kept walking until they got to their cushion and stopped. The abbot, Roshi Wendy Egyoku Nakao, stopped in front of the cushion facing the altar. We then started filing into the room.

I was so intent on bowing at the right time and remembering not to walk in front of the altar, I stepped right on the thick wooden threshold. I wondered why it was so important not to step on it, was it one of those mindfulness tests?

When I found an empty cushion, I put my zafu down on it, bowed to my cushion, the seat of the Buddha, then turned and bowed to the room, and sat down.

Facing the wall.

Unordained

We were a sea of faces, lined up across the steps leading to the Hsi Lai Buddhist Temple's main shrine, our last moments as temporary Buddhist monastics snapped and recorded.

Those wearing the orange robes are the Venerables, our teachers. In the rows of gray behind them, are all of us "Preceptees"

As soon as it was over, there was talking – a lot of it – as well as teasing and laughter as people brought out their own cameras to photograph their groups before our “unordination ceremony” stripped us of our robes.

It was a relief to laugh, to smile, to compare notes, and I sure was looking forward to going home to Luke, Matt, and Kevin, to my own home and life, but it was also disorienting. I’d walked in a line, from dawn until bedtime for a week, with the same people, looked at the same set of rounded shoulder blades in front of me, got poked by the same playful tormentor behind me. I guess you can’t help feeling literally connected to others if you do everything together but what surprised me was the deep affection I felt for this small group of strangers. I mean, we’d barely spoken to each other and yet it was odd to think I’d get in my car in a couple of hours and just drive off.

The unordination ceremony was officially called “The Relinquishing of Monastic Precepts.” It took place in the main shrine and was the ordination ceremony in reverse. We ritually took off and handed back our prayer mats, our begging bowls, the orange bag for the begging bowls, and our brown robes, all symbols for what we were really giving back: the requirement to live by the monastic precepts. While there was the same amount of chanting, bowing and kneeling, the service seemed almost underwater…or maybe I was. There were people in the room who were crying. Whether it was from relief that the week was over or because they regretted that their time as a monastic was over, I couldn’t tell. Me, I wasn’t sure what I was feeling. When I’m done something, I’m done, and that hadn’t gone completely; I had to struggle to be where I was, not to run through the checklist of what I needed to do to get out fast while I stood with my neatly folded brown robe, both hands curling up from the bottom around the front edge of the square of brown fabric, ready for my turn to hand it over just when I’d gotten good at keeping it on, keeping the open side of the robe from flying open as I walked. (That double wrap of the loop did the trick.) I was also just starting to know when to kneel, when to bow, when to stand up, to be able to chant with comfort “Na Mo Ben Shi Shi Jia Mu Ni Fo” (“Homage to Shakyamuni Buddha” ) on the way to meals. I could even remember which way my folded hand towel was supposed to hang and which way the folded edges of my prayer mat were supposed to face when I held it in front of me when I walked. All this, just when it was time to go home.

As we walked back up the hill to our room for the last time, I thought about Hemu. While the collision of my non-ritual self with a 24/7 ritual life was bound to be stressful, there was one notion I hadn’t considered: how much easier it is to live a spiritually dedicated life when absolutely ever facet of your existence is proscribed and provided. I am not saying it isn’t hard, that it doesn’t require more discipline than I currently have, but Hemu and the hundreds of thousands of dedicated lay followers of religions all over the world like Hemu somehow find a way to live a life centered on the practice of their faith while also remaining, as the Hindus say, “householders.” They have families and jobs and still the most dedicated among them do all that their faith calls them to do. That seems even harder than owning nothing and living full time at a monastery. Perhaps what I’m missing is the complete lack of personal time, of a personal life. The monastics in charge of the retreat went to bed an hour or more after we did and got up hours before. And I’m not sure if there’s anything like time off.

Maybe it’s all hard. Or it just seems that way to someone with only enough discipline to muscle through an intense week of practice but who appears to lack whatever it is that you need to sustain a daily practice.

After a cup of way-too-sweet mocha at a grocery store coffee counter with the Hindu flight attendant, I started the drive home. I can take any one of three different highways so I had to turn on the radio to see which way had the least amount of traffic. The clatter of the news radio station was overwhelming. I couldn’t listen to it long enough to get to the traffic report. I decided just to drive and take whatever came.

When I walked in the door, Matt ran to hug me. “Are you okay?”

“Of course I’m okay.”

“Are you sure? You seem kind of quiet.”

I told myself he was just looking for the drama. “Yes, I’m fine. Stop.” I kissed him again and said, “I’m going to put my stuff down and take a shower.”

I took my knapsack of stuff and the bag we were each given full of parting gifts - a few books, our Certificate of Completion, a copy of the huge group photo, a collection of the daily essays we wrote – back to my room. I couldn’t believe how much stuff Kevin and I had. It was just our room, no messier than usual, but the stack of books next to the book shelf by my bed, the computer and pile of notebooks on the desk, the closet which I’d said just the week before had “nothing to wear” in it -- all seemed repulsive.

After my shower, which turned out to be much shorter than I’d planned, I found myself carefully going through drawer after drawer in the bathroom, throwing old make-up, lotions and hair products away until there was little left and each had a clear place to be.

13 July 2007

Suffering and compassion

Compassion. At least once a day someone says the heart of Buddhism is compassion. Today one of the Venerables – that’s the title of the women in black robes – said instead of getting angry in our minds about the Discipline Master’s actions and barked commands, we should recognize the difficulty of what she’s doing and the selfless compassion that’s involved.

Okay…

My first reaction to that statement was relief: if she felt the need to address angry reactions to what was going on, then at least I had company. I mean, one of my feet was developing a deep blood blister where the cotton shoes were rubbing, my back and thighs were coming up with odd twinges from kneeling and standing motionless for long periods on marble floors, it was over a hundred degrees at midday, and people were yelling at us because we couldn't flawlessly follow dozens of rules we'd just heard for the first time 48 hours ago - in Mandarin. I was feeling especially mortified by my glaring imperfection, me, Miss Teacher's Pet Rule-Follower, unable to kneel when I was supposed to kneel, bow when I was supposed to bow, stand when I was supposed to stand.

That morning, when I’d blown it yet again, and was looking frantically through the chant book, I suddenly noticed the commands to kneel, bow and stand, in some cases, were actually in the chanted words themselves. So most of the people knew when to kneel, bow, and stand because it was actually in the words they were saying, the same words I was chanting but couldn't understand. I started to cry. Right there, in the front row, in my gray and brown robes. I felt like I was six. Unfair! It’s all unfair!

I sat in the air conditioned auditorium afterwards. A nun was speaking Chinese into the microphone up front when the teacher from Torrance passed me a note. It said: "If you would be interested in similar experiences without the frustrations, look into the Shambala Center in Eagle Rock – very American - or anywhere that’s oriented towards laity.”

I scribbled "thank you" on the note and gave it back to her. I was grateful for the kindness of this stranger I’d been wordlessly muddling along with for four days. But I had another reaction as well: Sure, I am pushed to my limits by all this but I don’t think I want diluted Buddhism, one made palatable for my American idiosyncrasies. Certainly not for this project because that would be off-point but I'm not sure I'd want that anyway. First, it’s unfair to think I was learning how to become just another practicing Buddhist when this retreat's very title, "Short-term Monastic Retreat," told me otherwise. I'm quite certain the rigors of clergy training in any faith would put me into the same state, no matter what the religion. But if the point of Buddhism is, as they said, to reveal the true nature we all have hidden by our greed, anger and ignorance, well, it was plain that this retreat was certainly kicking up a dust storm of my defects.

The Venerable standing in front of us in the auditorium was talking about our attitudes towards this retreat, the challenges we were facing in ourselves because of its rigor, she said that the lack of complicated morning skincare should feel freeing. “You should be happy because no one will be looking at you anyway. No matter how good your skincare products, you cannot use them on your mind.”

Someone laughed. I thought it was in appreciation of the idea. It does make its point in a funny way. But the Venerable barked, “You laugh? Aren’t you ashamed of yourself? Where is your mind? No one’s going to look out for you. We have this structure, these corrections to help you.”

I was shocked. I felt like I’d fallen into some alternate universe where conventional social niceties were violations and what would be rude disregard was a virtue. It sure felt anything but compassionate to me. If that’s compassion, it’s a pretty muscular definition unlike any I’ve known. I don’t think of stern admonitions demanding to know “where is your mind?” as compassionate. But perhaps I should consider it.

My mind is usually on anything but where I am or what I’m doing. Instead of concentrating on the rituals I'm learning, I'm almost exclusively focused on pleasing those around me, doing it "best" and, therefore paradoxically, doing it worst. I've had jobs where practically my entire concern was over what people thought of me rather than the tasks at hand. Right now, I get in the car to drive the boys to school and I swear the car drives itself. I remember none of the actual driving because I’ve nursed whatever worry I have to some kind of action plan for the day. And it's never occurred to me that this might be a problem. I love the world that swirls in my head – most of the time – and I think I even use it to protect myself.

I remember when I first realized that I didn’t have to actually be in the car with my squabbling family, that I could look out the window and conduct thought experiments in my head – If I can see that man walking his dog on the street, can he see me? Will any boy ever want to kiss me? If I broke my leg like Helen Pilling, would as many people want to sign my cast? – and, whatever imperfections I decided my family members had, would fade. I could no longer see them or even hear them.

A lot of the time, I am still that little kid worried about what the world thinks of me. My head is crammed full of it.

On the other hand, the very idea to do what I’m doing came from one of those mind-wandering drives. About a year before 9/11, I’d gotten tired of feeling bewildered when I listened to news reports of people of faith in disagreement or at war with each other over matters of faith so I decided to take two freshman survey courses at the local state university: Intro to the Bible and Intro to World Religions. On my final drive home from the classes, I felt a deep relief that at least I now understood some of the basics of what people believed, of what was actually written in the Bible. But, as my car left one freeway for another, I began to think, "I still have no idea what it feels like to actually practice any religion. What would happen if….?” And this project is what came of that mind ramble. I’m not so sure I want to give those rambles up. Or if I should even try, what the purpose might be, and what any of this has to do with religion.

But the central purpose of Buddhism is to alleviate suffering and there is no doubt that these nuns think suffering comes from our thinking, from an out of control mind. And, believe me, I could see and feel my mind run riot almost moment by moment in the four days of not talking and just doing.

On the retreat schedule, every morning after breakfast, we had a walking meditation. Sometimes it was a normal deliberate walk, other times it was as slow as our breathing. We were supposed to be utterly conscious of our bodies as the weight shifts from one foot to another. We were always in a line, always behind the same person.

This morning, Ven Miao Hsi was busy so we had had a new leader, an earnest young nun who was concerned that we looked so nervous. Well, yeah, we were nervous. There seemed to be so many ways to go wrong, so many ways to be "unmindful." She seemed particularly concerned about my furrowed brow. "You seem worried. I can tell by the lines on your face."

I thought: well, I suppose there's botox for that. Unfortunately, I could ever pay someone to inject paralytic toxin into my face so, instead, I choose to think of the deep lines around my mouth as my "smile" lines and the twin vertical lines over my nose as my "thought plumes." On my sane days, I'm even rather proud of those. But the collision of all of these present moment-by-moment rules with my people-pleasing performance anxiety and churning storytelling brain was eye-opening. I hadn’t considered the extent to which I fundamentally operate from “I think, therefore I am.”

If thinking is the source of suffering, (which it’s pretty hard to argue it isn’t) I think I embrace suffering. In fact, I might go even one step further: I can’t think of a lesson I’ve learned in my life that was worth anything that I learned without suffering. I mean, would I be on this retreat if I didn't believe in the value of suffering?

Well, maybe there is one.

When I gave birth to my sons, I learned I was capable of sustained, unconditional love. I suppose some might argue there was suffering involved, physical and structural life changes, but I can’t call any of it that. Although sitting here right now in front of this keyboard, I can go into the future, the future when, if I’ve done the job right, my boys will leave without a thought for their independent lives and, yes, I will suffer then. I can weep right now, thinking about it.

Is this evidence of the damage thought can do? Is this an example of how not being where you are, where your body is at this moment, can saddle life with unnecessary pain, wiping out present joy?

“Anyone can be a Buddha,” the shorn nun said. “All sentient beings are equal. No one is more likely than anyone else.” We just have to come to know that, to be able to see this “precious pearl” we all have hiding under the muck of our greed, anger and ignorance. And this “compassionate” stress on being present in the here and now is meant to help us see everything that we contribute to our own muck.

One of the Venerables asked if we thought our life was tough, if we thought this retreat was tough. “Easy or tough, depends on your mind. Happiness and suffering all come and go. Nothing is permanent.”

Not even this retreat.

11 July 2007

The Heathen gets...ordained?

Ordination day at the Hsi Lai Buddhist temple and it’s over 100 degrees.

Even the nuns looked nervous. They’d spent three hours the day before trying to teach us everything we needed to do during the ritual and we’d given them good cause to be nervous.

Along with having no clue that the retreat was conducted exclusively in Mandarin, I didn’t fully understand that we were literally going to be temporarily ordained. The central purpose of the retreat was to give lay people the experience of a monastic life, if only for a week. The idea is that there might be people who long for this kind of commitment who can’t do it in this lifetime because of the commitments they already have to their parents, or spouses, or children. So the central ritual is a temporary ordination and we spent the first full day preparing for it. Part of the preparation was explaining just how serious, sacred, what we were doing was, even if it was only for a handful of days.

In the auditorium before the training and rehearsal, they went through a list of things that would disqualify us from going through the ceremony – which seemed like kind of an awkward time to be going through a list like this. People had rearranged their lives, some had come from all over the country and even Canada to be at this monastic retreat, so none of us were going to want to find out we might not be able to fully participate. I mean, I could give a list a mile long as to why I shouldn’t be allowed to be ordained even temporarily, the most obvious was I knew essentially nothing about Buddhism, but the Discipline Master said no one could go through the ceremony if we were “from another religion” and “intended to return” to that religion. Did that apply to me? Am I from “another religion?” I can’t say I’m Buddhist but does that mean I’m from another religion?

I feel like I’ve spent my life hearing that I don’t belong. My father was raised in a Jewish home but, according to Judaism I’m not Jewish because my mom is not. I think I’m not Jewish because I don’t know a thing about it, not because my mom isn’t, but I guess that just helps make the point. I went to a grade school with an Episcopalian tradition. I wasn’t Episcopalian. I’ve been asked quite often if I’m “born again” without anyone really taking the time to explain, precisely, what that actually means. I’m from a neighborhood and family filled with guys but the school I went to for twelve years was all girls. It gets even more petty: in third grade, my telephone number didn’t begin with CH7 the way everyone else’s did. Sitting in the coat closet before school one morning with Nanny and Wendy, Nina and Helen, I knew that, if my telephone number began with CH7, they would like me better. I just knew it.

So, you bet I was “from another religion” if that actually meant “not Buddhist” and I guess I could say there was a distinct possibility I will return to this nothing from which I came but I had laid everything, everything, out in my application and interview: I told them who I was, what I’m doing, and why I’m doing it. Full disclosure. So, now what? We were about to get our final training to go through this ceremony that would make us actual monks in training for the rest of our time here and, well, should I go through it? Could I?

I found Venerable Miao Hsi sitting alone at her desk during the break before dinner. She assured me I was good to go. As I was. Okay. I was going to become a temporary Buddhist monastic or nun. It was kind of like becoming a judge without even knowing there were three branches of government. But if Miao Hsi didn’t think it was a problem, if she thought I might learn something worth learning from this, I set my own doubts aside and just tried to do what I was told to do.

And what were we taught? Everything. In some ways this was the best part for me in that they started from scratch without assuming anyone knew how to do even the most basic of acts correctly. Like bowing. Finally someone taught me how to do it and, the only way I could draw attention to myself was by not bowing.

First, you bend at the waist, then you reach forward with your left hand to the far corner of your brown cushion then, as you kneel down, you put your right hand down, too. Once your head is touching the cushion, you turn your hands over, unfurl your fingers so that your palm is flat open, ready to receive “the feet of the Buddha.” Then you gently lift them up above your bowed head before standing back up in a smooth, even motion. When you walk into the temple, you do this three times. When you leave the temple, you do this three times. And, at all sorts of points in the ordination service, you do anywhere from one to nine of these sorts of bows.

It was so much easier bowing in a crowd than alone. And being taught how to do it correctly – and when – was great, even if I was usually a beat behind because of the lag in translation. I think if religious institutions everywhere simply posted or handed out a “how to” guide in the back of every pew, “kneel here, sit here, bow here, etc.,” there’d be a lot more people willing to at least check out a new service or two. New people like me are always worried we’re going to be up when everyone is down or down when everyone is up and the fear of being mortified has kept me outside of more than one religious institution. Even Thomas Merton, the Catholic monk, wrote about the trauma of the uninitiated in his autobiography, The Seven Story Mountain.

“Another thing which Catholics do not realize about converts is the tremendous, agonizing embarrassment and self-consciousness which they feel about praying publicly in a Catholic church, The effort it takes to overcome imaginary fears that everyone is looking at you, and that they all think you are crazy or ridiculous, is something that costs a tremendous amount of effort.”

He should know; he was writing about himself long before he became a monk, when he was beginning to think just about becoming a practicing Catholic. And I don’t think this feeling is confined to those wanting to learn about Catholicism. So I was incredibly grateful and relieved that nothing was taken for granted at the Hsi Lai retreat and tried to throw myself into doing whatever I was taught carefully and in synch with the rest of the room.

Monastic robe. They were going to hand them to us in the ceremony and we were going to have to know how to put them on correctly. Not so simple. The robes hang from one shoulder and then close underneath the opposite arm with a small cloth loop around a fabric knob. It’s pretty easy, at least for me, to put the robe on the wrong shoulder or inside out and, when you sit down or kneel or stand up, you can pull the knob out of the loop without knowing it. I cannot tell you how many times someone pointed out that I was walking along, unaware that my robe was flapping in the breeze...until I figured out that I could wrap the loop around the knob twice.

Sitting mats. We were given a sitting mat that was actually beautiful, orange and red geometric shapes, bordered in black. It came already folded like an accordion in four longitudinal pleats with the corners together on one side. We were told to walk with the folded mat draped through our fingers, open edges to one side. I still can’t tell you which but I can tell you that the nuns think which side matters a lot but for a good reason: if you hold it right, you can easily unfurl it in one effortless motion and then drape it on the cushion you kneel on. To make the mat fit on the smaller cushion, you have to make a horizontal fold in the middle of the sitting mat as you lay it down, kind of like a Mad Magazine rear cover. And, like the Mad Magazine cover, when it’s folded right, it makes a picture; in this case a properly folded mat makes the shape of a square cross. When it’s not in use, you either carry it in front of you like this --->>>

…or hang it over one arm, underneath your robes.

The hard part of opening it up is making sure it’s flush with the far edge of the cushion and then neatly draped with that fold, in synch with your neighbors - which is a heck of a lot easier to do if you can figure out when to begin. And getting it elegantly folded back up with the edges open on the correct side and on one arm (where it stays during the service) while politely turned away from the front altar? Hah.

Begging bowls. All Buddhist monastics have one and only one bowl from which they are supposed to eat and drink everything. Different sects vary in how rigidly they treat this practice. During the Hsi Lai ordination ceremony, we were going to be given a ceramic bowl during the formal ritual and required to carry it with us the rest of the week in a bag slung over the shoulder opposite from the brown robe shoulder. We learned how to receive it during the ritual, bow, and then put the bowl into the tight, zippered pouch without dropping it on the marble floor. The bag was orange, round, made out of parachute-like material with a long strap so the bowl end up carried on one hip underneath the robe. All fine, but the straps, which had to lie neat and flat across one shoulder, were wrinkled and hard to smooth down. I often felt the person behind me straightening out my strap and I did the same for the person in front of me.

Oh, yeah, and the ceremony was dozens of pages long with chants and call and response sections in a booklet where everything was in Chinese characters, phonetic syllables, and English translations. The only way I could keep up with the chants was to stick with the phonetics so I rarely got a chance to truly understand what I was chanting. When I asked Miao Hsi about this later, I found out that the meaning doesn’t matter so much as the sound we were making together. It's all about the sound more than the words. It’s funny what a big difference just knowing that makes. I kept getting frustrated that I wasn’t intellectually engaging with the content of the texts and so missing most of what was meaningful but, in fact, had I just let go of my intellect and gone with just what was happening there at that moment, I would have gotten more of what that ritual experience was designed to offer.

There was a lot of kneeling as well as bowing all the way down, sometimes once, sometimes three times, sometimes more and the number of times didn’t always match what the manual said. And there was no question, the small group of us English-only speakers up in the front row were by far the worst in the room of over two hundred “preceptees.” I could feel the shrine full of gray, brown, and black waiting for us so many, many times.

I got stuck most often on getting the sitting mat refolded. It was possible to kind of shake it back into order if you held it right but I rarely got it right. (Until the second to last day, one nun or the other would come by and just grab the mat out of my hands and turn it around so the edges were facing the right way.) And kneeling down and touching your head to the cushion without the ceramic bowl flying around and smashing on the floor was an art in itself. I never broke the bowl – a MAJOR faux pas, I mean, monks are supposed to go without eating if they break their bowl – but mine certainly clattered against the floor and a dining room chair once or twice.

Given all of this, it’s no wonder the nuns seemed particularly on guard when it came time for the actual ordination.

I was so intent on doing what we were supposed to do, when we were supposed to do it, all I felt during the ceremony was panic about messing up, the challenge of standing still for so long on marble floors in the incredible heat and raw, cracking feet, and relief when it was finally over. I was, for the moment, a Buddhist nun. I was, most certainly, an empty suit.


9 July 2007

The outfit

The temporary monastics, all of us!

(The people in the orange and red robes are the real deal)

Monastic retreat: arriving

The truths of Buddhism are living truths and they cannot be handed to us by anyone. They must be discovered and experiences by each and every one of us.

Master Hsing Yun
Buddhism, Pure and Simple

It was the kind of summer day that burns out power grids when I walked through the entrance shrine with its five enlightened beings and back out into the sunny courtyard of the Hsi Lai ("shee lai") Temple and monastery in Hacienda Heights for the Eight Precept Retreat, eight days, seven nights. We were were supposed to bring nothing but a toothbrush, toothpaste, soap, shampoo, some underwear, white socks, and a sleeping bag. The form also said we’d need to bring, or buy from the temple, brown lo hans which are cloth, semi-open shoes. Nothing else was allowed.

So, with a small knapsack and sleeping bag in hand, I followed signs around the central courtyard and up the carpeted marble stairs to the registration room where I got a name badge with both English and Chinese characters on it. I was also given a thick manila envelope filled with a few booklets, a pen, a pad of paper, and a schedule for the week. Every moment from 5:20 in the morning until 10:20 at night was accounted for. Good, I thought, at least I won’t have the problem I’d had in Olema where, aside from making my meals, there was nothing running interference between me and my so-called “monkey mind.” In Olema, I’d felt like I was constantly policing a band of small children in my head.

I went to another table where I was given the clothes I was to wear for the rest of the week: two knee-length, slate gray tunics with matching pants that looked like raw silk but were made out of a heavy, manmade material. A robed nun put a folded dark brown cloth in a plastic bag on top of the rest. Then a woman behind a table directed me to still another table where a nun asked if I wanted to make a donation for food. They’d only asked for eighty dollars for the full seven nights of room and board so I gave sixty more. It didn’t feel like quite enough but I’d emptied my pockets before I got out of the car so it was all I had. I was then sent to still another table in the back for a translation device.

Yes, a translation device. A United Nations-like earpiece wired to a receiver I could clip onto a belt – if the gray outfit had a belt.

I hadn’t really focused on the part of the application where they asked what language we spoke. And I admit I ignored the moment in the interview where the cheerful nun had said, almost in passing, “You know you might not understand everything – we do a pretty good job of translating but still there may be some things you’ll miss. Don’t get upset. Just go inside (yourself). Notice what it brings up in you.”

She really meant it: the entire retreat was going to be in Chinese. Mandarin, to be specific.

Of the 207 or so people who came to the retreat, no more than a couple dozen of us spoke English. I turned out to be one of perhaps ten non-Asian people there. That meant I had to learn how to use and wear one of that translation device every waking moment and figure out how to keep it in my uniform’s pockets, battery functional, wire to my ear, while learning how to bow, kneel, take on and off various robes and other ceremonial items and take it on and off to go into the bathroom, all without accidentally dumping it or the earpiece on the ground. It also meant that someone from the temple had to be translating absolutely everything that was said from 5:20am when we got up until we went to our rooms around ten each night. Just think of the logistics and effort that required from the temple staff…kind of amazing.

Once my arms were full with papers and stacks of clothing and devices and my knapsack and sleeping bag, I followed a nun up a steep hill behind the monastery along with a young blue-haired girl who was wearing the most amazing amount of make-up. It was quite a contrast walking behind these two: the compact, shorn, Buddhist nun wearing heavy robes in the desperate heat followed by this brightly colored, barely-dressed girl wearing nothing more than a magenta bra under a cobalt blue sun dress as she struggled up the hill in her platform sandals.

Oh, and did I mention I was in the midst of the worst menopausal hot flashes of my life? Wave after wave of raw burning rose up from my ribs, tearing up over the sides of my neck and face with a heat no amount of sweat could cool. One swept over me as we topped the hill and walked into a building that said “Buddha's Light Publishing.”

One by one, the six other women meant to share the one bathroom flanked by two small rooms arrived. Other than the minimal conversation required to sort out which two drawers were whose, and an exchange of names, there were no real introductions. We were not supposed to talk in our rooms or, really, anywhere, for the full eight days and seven nights except for a couple of special sessions mid-week. So, with my roommates, I had little to go on but external appearances. All I knew was the bed next to mine was assigned to a white, middle-aged woman with fairly long semi-dyed blond hair who was an active Buddhist from Toronto. When she asked the nun a question, she called her “Sifu ” which I found out later meant "Teacher." The bed on the other side of her was taken by a heavy-set Indian woman with glasses who marched into the room and chose her two drawers before anyone had a chance to think about it. Perpendicular to us, was the final bed in my room which was taken by a tall, middle-aged Chinese-American woman who was our group leader. A woman from Miami and a teacher from Torrance shared the other room with Blue.

The nun took Blue Girl’s and my remaining valuables - cell phones, car keys, any jewelry – and sealed them carefully in separate envelops for safekeeping. I finally got a close look at the nun’s name tag: Venerable Miao Hsi. When she wasn’t our mother duck, she ran Buddha's Light Publishing. And, we learned later, she’s fully ordained like all the nuns in this brand of Buddhism. There’s no difference between the monks and nuns in terms of the rituals they can perform.

Once we were all there, Venerable Miao Hsi ran through the rules for the week in a kind but clipped manner: “Put your tooth brush, tooth paste, soap, cup and shampoo in this basin.” she said, holding a round plastic bowl. “Everything else you brought, including any make-up, any clothes other than the underwear you need, put those away. Your second set of clothes and the robe,” she held up one of the brown folded cloths wrapped in plastic, “should be carefully folded and on the shelf whenever you aren’t wearing it. And you won’t be wearing the robe until tomorrow night.” She then moved to the side of the bed I’d been assigned to demonstrate. “When you get up in the morning, here’s how you leave your bed: you take your blanket or sleeping bag and fold it first lengthwise in three and then you fold it again: one end into the center and then the other end on top to make a perfect square. Everything’s in threes. It should then be placed with the pillow on top at the head of your bed and look very neat.”

We then awkwardly followed her into the small hall outside the bathroom. A large clothes drying rack stood in one corner. “Your towel must be folded on this rack in the same order as your beds. Number one (that was me) goes here,” she said, placing her hand on a rung, “Followed by two, three, four. The other room, you go down here. When you fold your towels, the edges must be together, neat. The open side, the side with the edges, faces to the left, just like this. Every towel the same.” Venerable Hsi then took one of the small hand towels – the only towel we got, the only towel we were allowed – to demonstrate the required degree of perfection. “There will be room inspections every day so it’s important that everything be in place.

I panicked. All I could think was, how am I going to remember all of this? And what does this have to do with religion?

Let me say, straight out, I never put things down in the same place twice. I am the key-losing sort. I like to think it’s because I am too focused on the people in my life and the things I’m thinking about to worry about such mundane and routine things as order but the truth is, I’m a slob. A recovering slob, the way you have to be if you’re a mother or someone in charge of a workplace, but I’m the sort that comes up with reasons why unmade beds are actually good. (“Airs out the sheets.” “You’re going to just mess them up when you get in them later.” “It feels homey.” Etc.) But now I’m going to have to use just one single tiny hand towel all week and remember to fold it so carefully that all the edges match perfectly and that the opening is on the left not the right side every time I hang it up?!?!??! And they were going to inspect and critique whether or not I'd folded my slippery sleeping bag into thirds lengthwise and then again horizontally into a perfect square that could stay neat all day and whether or not my toothbrush was lined up perfectly parallel to my toothpaste and soap? This was a non-detail-person’s nightmare. I mean, I actually like chucking each section of my newspaper across the room in the direction of the wastebasket when I'm done reading it in bed. Kevin doesn't like it and I have no idea why I like doing that except it makes me feel all swashbuckly. And I have no idea how my shoes end up right in the middle of the room where people walk but they always do. Kevin claims I'm secretly out to get him. I'm not. Really. I swear. At least, I don't think I am.

Ven. Miao Hsi continued. “This is part of your mindfulness training, to keep track of your mind. There is no talking at any time but you may always come ask me any questions you have or with any problems you have.”

I admit I watched Blue Girl more than the nun during the demonstration and I couldn’t help but have sympathy. “No way” was practically screaming out of her head, probably with at least one expletive between the two words. A decade ago that would have been me, full of bristle and rage, caught up in a mental argument with what felt like rigid arbitrary rules. When I saw her reacting, I realized that something had changed in me. Maybe it’s my age or maybe it’s my determination to know something I don’t know but, while I did feel overwhelmed, sure I’d never remember everything I was supposed to do, I still felt willing to see what following these directions might mean to me. Plus, I reminded myself, I can do anything for a week. Well, almost anything.

But Blue Girl couldn’t. Long before sunset, long before dinner, her mother came back to pick her up and she was gone.

Now, what I’m about to describe may seem extreme – and it was – but it’s meant to give people of all sorts a direct experience of what life is like for a monk or nun-in-training in this sect of Chinese Buddhism. While there were a few people in attendance who were actively considering whether or not they might want to become a monk or nun, most who signed up for this retreat were simply practicing Buddhists. This intensive session is something this sect encourages people to do at least once in their lifetime. It was meant to be tough. Just how hard core? All the men -- even the fourteen year-old boy -- had to shave their heads.

There were a few people there for other reasons like me. One of my suitemates turned out to be a world religions teacher in a local public high school. But I feel the need to warn you: what I’m about to describe is not the everyday practice of Buddhism; it’s the daily practice of a monk-in-training for this particular branch of Buddhism which is a Chinese order blending many different strands of Buddhism including Pure Land Buddhism with elements of Ch’an (known more commonly in the United States as Zen.) This branch of Buddhism is among the largest Buddhist denominations in the world, that is, everywhere but here in this country where pure Zen Buddhism is much more widely known and practiced.

Pure Land is sometimes described as the branch of Buddhism closest to Christianity in that it says that “liberation” from suffering – the goal of Buddhism – can be reached through the grace and intervention of a higher being and that chanting the Amitabha Buddha’s name can help call on that grace. Most Buddhist sects don’t get into the issue of God or any notion of divine being at all; most sects do not consider Buddha to be a divine figure like God. It’s not a matter of whether they do or don’t believe in God or a god; Buddhism’s focus seems much more pragmatic than that. The Four Noble Truths, the essential core revelations of the historical Buddha – a Hindu prince named Siddartha Gautama – are simply these:

Dukkha: All worldly life is unsatisfactory, disjointed, suffering.
Samudaya: There is a cause of suffering, which is attachment or desire (tanha).
Nirodha: There is a way out of suffering, which is to eliminate attachment and desire.
Marga: The path that leads out of suffering is called the Noble Eightfold Path.

So what all sects of Buddhism share is a focus, primarily, on the pragmatic alleviation of suffering. There are two main branches of Buddhism (Theravada & Mahayana) and they’re split along a simple idea: what's most important, your salvation or the salvation of others? The Hsi Lai temple is part of the Mahayana branch, the branch that focuses on the salvation of others first and this retreat was designed to help us learn how to reduce our suffering. But first I guess we had to learn all the ways we suffer and why.

The “Eight Precepts” we were supposed to follow during the retreat were 1) no killing, 2) no stealing, 3) celibacy, 4) no lying, 5) no use of intoxicants, 6) no eating after noon, 7) no use of decorations, dancing, or watching entertainments and 8) no sleeping on comfortable beds or sitting on comfortable chairs. The first five precepts are supposed to be followed by every Buddhist except the third, for lay people, isn’t celibacy but to refrain from sexual misconduct.

Okay, so following the precepts was the big picture. The devil was in the details. Our most basic actions were broken down into rules. And it didn’t stop with towel folding.

Once we’d given up all of our belongings and gotten into our grey tunics and pants, brown lohans and white socks, head shaved if we were men, hair pulled back tight if we were women, we went to the auditorium to get the rest of our rules of conduct in the auditorium from a frightening six-foot tall Chinese nun who was called, just for the retreat, the Discipline Master.

This woman could give Roald Dahl's Mrs Trunchball a scare. Her eyebrows were black, her shoulders were broad, her glare was a weapon. “Sit up! Don’t be lazy, leaning back on your chairs!” She barked harsh Chinese syllables into a wireless microphone close to her scowling mouth. A beat or two later, a sweet voice translated her barks into my ear. “This is not respectful. You must cultivate a respectful posture. Don’t bend your body even if no one reminds you. You must cultivate this so it will be part of your life.”

She was imposing, her fierceness mesmerizing. A few syllables later, the sweet voice in my ear said, "What are you looking at?”

What are you looking at? It took me a moment but I suddenly realized, in this room of over two hundred people, she meant me, she was talking, no, yelling at me, me and a few others. I thought I must be hearing something wrong. Looking? There's a problem with looking? Isn't it respectful to look at someone when they speak to you? Disrespectful not to? I "look", like, all the time. I’m dependent on looking. I learn by looking. I support what I hear by reading lips and body language. I've even made a living my entire life by being a careful looker; after all, isn’t that what reporters are? Professional lookers? How am I going to be able to know what’s going on without being able to look at anything, especially when they’re speaking Mandarin? I mean, I wouldn't have known I was one of the people she was speaking to if I hadn't been “looking.”

But, then, she wouldn't have been speaking to me.

Okay. No looking.

I had no idea how I was going to pull that off or why she thought it was so important but the muscular nun was pretty riled up about it. "You're about to become monastics and still you look around? Where is your mind? You only have seven days here! Are you going to waste your time looking at others?"

But no looking was just the beginning. The scary nun, along with about a dozen other women in robes, told us how to sit – with our back straight, not against a chair back ever, eyes down; how to stand – feet only slightly apart, toes turned slightly out, right hand resting in the palm of the left at the waist making the bottom of a comfortable triangle with your head as the apex, eyes down; how to walk – mindfully, quietly, in straight line in order of tallest to smallest without looking around at anything or anyone; and even how to sleep – on your right side, somewhat curved, with one hand under your head. We were supposed to “Stand like an oak, walk like a breeze, sit like a bell, sleep like a bowl.” (If we had been actual monastics in training, there would have been someone coming in at night to make sure we were, indeed, sleeping like a bowl.) And, whenever anyone of the monastics addressed us by saying “Preceptees” in Mandarin, we were to answer “Ah-mi-tuo-fo.” It took me two days to actually understand the syllables we were supposed to say loudly and why. It’s the Amitabha Buddha’s name in Pali.

In our dorm, that first afternoon, Sifu (Ven Miao Hsi) said, "When you’re dressed and your rooms are in order, line up outside. We’re going to dinner.”

Although the shadows cast by the buildings were growing, we were having a record-breaking heat wave and the heat was still intense. Those of us who were ready first stood waiting, looking at nothing, until everyone was in their proper place in line with the back of our right hands resting on the palm of our left. Our grey outfits were buttoned all the way up to the neck, our translation devices were in our pockets with a wire up to our ear pieces and, with our hands held just so, we walked single file in silence, back down the hill to the dining hall. Our schedule said it was time to learn Buddhist meal etiquette.




7 July 2007


A class led by Master Hsing Yun on the Heart Sutra (YouTube) it isn't in English but it has voice-over translation

The Destroyer of Time

One of the consequences of this project is that words I used to use without much thought, words like “miracle”, I can’t trot out so willy-nilly these days. I mean, before I started all of this, I’d have just let my fingers tell you that, by the end of this night, I’d sat still – as in no-moving-at-all still -- for more than ten hours and, for me, that was a miracle. Now that I’m quite certain that I have no idea what qualifies as a miracle, what I can say is: something’s changing and this is my evidence. The event? The Vedanta Society’s annual Kali puja.

The Hindu goddess Kali is terrifying – and she’s meant to be. Her annual celebration - or puja - is a big deal at the Vedanta Society because Ramakrishna had his first direct experience of the Divine after years of obsessively praying to “Mother Kali.” I’d been warned that the Kali puja at the Hollywood Vedanta Center was so popular, so dramatic, so theatrical, that people from all over southern California came, many with no interest whatsoever in Hinduism, making it impossible to get in the small chapel so, if I wanted to be able to see what was going on, I was going to have to get there early.
It was supposed to begin at ten o’clock at night so I got there four hours before. Even so, there were only a couple of spaces left in the small parking lot. With my notebook, a pen, a bottle of water, and a small bag of emergency cashews in hand, I walked to the chapel, passing by a wooden stand with a paper signed taped to it that pointed the way to the bookstore for those who wouldn’t be able to get in the building later that night. The white shoe racks were already standing outside to accommodate the crowds and keep the doorway clear.

Inside, most of the pews were gone and the raised altar area was lit up. A group of orange robed nuns and white-robed helpers were scurrying back and forth, preparing. But, even in all the tumult, you couldn’t miss her. 

In one of the corners of the normally muted ivory altar alcove was a human-sized representation of possibly the most dramatic deity in all of Hinduism, Kali, surrounded by blood-red silk that had been pinned to the fabric walls in her honor. Jet black with red accents, Kali is the mother of the universe, the power of time, the goddess of creation and destruction. She’s usually standing on the white body of Shiva, her consort, on a large silver lotus blossom. Every year a different local artist made a new representation of Kali and this one was stunning. Her four black arms each had red palms. A sword in the shape of a vicious question mark and dripping with painted blood was raised high over her head by one of her left arms while her other left arm held a recently severed man’s head by the hair with blood still dripping from the neck. Kali’s two right arms offered boons and protection. A vertical third eye was in the center of her ebony brow, her long black hair was thick and wild, and a necklace of fifty skulls hung from her neck. With embryos for earrings and a girdle of men's arms circling her waist, if you can get with Kali, the others, like the friendly elephant figure of Ganesh, the god of success, the remover of obstacles who rides on a mouse, or Hanuman, the playful obedient monkey, are a piece of cake.

A young man, dressed in sweats and a loose shirt, was busy marking off two narrow but long rectangles on the carpet up front with masking tape. When he stood to leave, pieces of paper with marker scrawl made clear that only monastics could sit within them. I grabbed a small round silk-covered cushion filled firm with seeds or husks of something and put it right behind one of the rectangles, insuring a clear view of Kali, and sat on it.

It was a few minutes after six in the evening.

Ramakrishna was an extremely emotional and devotional guy who cared little for what anyone else thought. Christopher Isherwood’s biography of Ramakrishna, written for a western audience, began almost apologetically by acknowledging that most of us western, factual materialists or even those devoted to almost any Judeo-Christian faith, might have a pretty hard time swallowing the stories about this fairly recent historical figure.

This is the story of a phenomenon. I will begin by calling him simply that, rather than ‘holy man’, ‘mystic’, ‘saint’, or ‘avatar’; all emotive words with mixed associations which may attract some readers, repel others.

I only ask you approach Ramakrishna with the same open-minded curiosity you might feel about any highly unusual human being: a Julius Ceasar, a Catherine of Siena, a Leonardo da Vinci, and Arthur Rimbaud. Dismiss from your mind, as far as you are able, such categories as holy-unholy, sane-insane, wide-foolish, pure-impure, positive-negative, useful-useless.

It is difficult, in fact, to reconcile this very emotional, experiential figure with the cerebral, almost protestant form of the faith one sees most days in Vedanta centers across the country. Perhaps it’s an accommodation to western tastes but, given that Hinduism’s central tenet is you must find whatever path suits you, it makes sense that the Vedanta centers would highlight the parts of their practice that might encourage instead of alienate us westerners.

Ramakrishna’s single-minded pursuit of direct knowledge of God made many people – even those who ultimately came to be his main disciples – consider the possibility of insanity before coming to revere him. He spent most of his life in the Kali temple in Dakshineswar, India, on the banks of a river near Calcutta (Kolkata)where he would spontaneously disengage from what was going on around him in a state of spiritual ecstasy that could manifest itself as dancing with abandon for hours or, more often, in an inability to talk, walk or move. After his death in 1886, Narendra, who had been both a follower and one of Ramakrishna’s biggest doubters, who became Swami Vivekananda, helped found this sect and finally introduced it to the United States in 1893. In his first visit here, Swami Vivekananda often wore a western clerical collar, so Americans would understand his role. He also concentrated on the tenets of the faith more than its rituals. Deities like Kali weren’t stressed in the United States…at least at first.

So, for those of us with a more theoretical rather than devotional bent, the Vedanta center’s almost protestant simplicity and well-stocked bookstore make it easy to forget about all of those exotic, multi-armed, sometimes well-endowed gods and goddesses. The worship of deities is, in some sense, optional in Hinduism. They aren’t meant to be “God” or “Gods” but representations of some of the powers of the Absolute Reality of which we are all a part. As an example of how different the concept of these deities is from the Judeo-Christian concept, the Upanishads, one of the central sacred texts somewhat equivalent to the Christian Bible, says: “The life of a god is eternal in comparison with a man’s life on earth but it is non-eternal from the standpoint of the Absolute.” So if you identify God as infinite, omnipotent, and eternal, these Hindu figures aren’t that. Their purpose is to offer different pathways for different people so they can personally come to know or experience the Infinite Unknowable called “Brahman.”

To tell the truth, it's an enormous relief not to have to consider directly worshiping these fearsome figures as “God.” But, given that they were, in some sense, the most well-known part of the faith even to outsiders, I felt I couldn’t pretend they didn’t exist any longer. My very western antipathy to idol worship had prevented me from coming to understand what those figures did have to offer.

As I settled in to the round rustling silk pillow on the floor to watch the nuns in orange and the novices in white prepare for the Kali worship ceremony, the striking sight of Kali in the back corner was soon rivaled by the incongruous profusion of flowers. They were everywhere. Too many vases to count crowded on every ledge on the altar, spilling out onto the floor all around. Kali’s flower is the red hibiscus although it’s clear that any red flower will do. Shiva’s is the white jasmine blossom though, again, color clearly trumps the species. After draping three firehose-sized garlands on Kali and smaller garlands on the photos of Ramakrishna, Vivekanada and Ramakrishna’s wife, (yes, Ramakrishna was, uniquely, in a lifelong celibate marriage) a young novice stuffed more flowers in the U of the garland so all that was visible was her scary black head. The head nun, a large, brisk elderly Australian woman, occasionally gave clipped directions in a regular voice that seemed like a shout in a room where people usually chanted, if they spoke at all.

So, what’s Kali’s story? There are many versions with slight variations but the one contained in a book called Kali: The Black Goddess of Dakshineswar for sale in the Vedanta bookstore was this: Demons were running wild and even the gods themselves were having a hard time dealing with them. So Shiva along with Vishnu, Brahma, Indra and the “other mighty gods” beamed rays of blinding light and…

…all the gods’ rays joined at one point and, slowly, the blazing concentration of light took shape in the form of a woman. The light of Shiva formed her face, Yama gave her hair and Vishnu her arms. From the light of Chandra, the moon god, her two breasts were formed. Indra modeled her waist and Varuna her thighs. Earth gave her hips and Brahma feet. The light from the fire god, Agni, fashioned her three eyes.

But the gods didn’t stop there; they gave her weapons.

Shiva gave her a trident drawn forth from his own, Vishnu a powerful discus, and Indra, the king of the gods, gave her a thunderbolt identical to his own. Surya, the sun god, bestowed his rays on all the pores of her skin and Varuna, the god of the ocean, gave her a divine crest jewel, earrings, bracelets and a garland of unfading lotuses.

Kali fought the demons, slaying most easily with her sword or gnashing them in her teeth but, when she encountered one who could regenerate from drops of its own blood when cut, she simply picked him up and swallowed him.

Once all the demons were gone, however, Kali’s destruction didn’t stop. She was in such a frenzy, she kept “smashing and slashing the dead demons all over again.” The gods didn’t know what to do to stop her but Shiva, Kali’s consort, had an idea. Covered with ashes, he lay down among the corpses. Kali, still raging with blood lust…

…found herself standing on top of a beautiful male body – nude and besmeared with white ashes. Awed, she stood still for a moment, looked down at him, and saw straight into the eyes of her husband, Shiva.

And she stopped.

This vicious story means Kali’s evil, right? Well, not really. Kali is beloved. As the Mother of the Universe or as Time or the Destroyer of Time, she ‘s kind of like a mother tiger …but yours. Although nothing and no one will survive Time, Kali’s destruction is creative, wiping away sin, decay, and disease to allow for a new start. “She’s Cosmic Power, the complete picture. Nothing is missing. All good (symbolized by her right side) and all bad (symbolized by her left side) is within her.” She’s black but that means she’s clothed in space, without any real form, and will continue to exist even when the world ends as pure energy. The necklace of skulls, one for each letter of the Sanskrit alphabet, represents the idea of creation by the naming of things, an early instance of the idea of Logos or “the Word” found later in the Christian Bible. Her embryo earrings represent creation and the girdle of men’s arms represents “human action as well as its resulting karma that has been taken back by Kali.” Kali is an extremely popular deity in India and is considered the patron saint of working people.

From information available on line, I also learned that the Kali puja back in the Indian headquarters of the Ramakrishna Order ended with the sacrifice of a goat.

A live goat.

So I came to the Center a bit worried about that, looking for evidence that that might be part of the night. But I figured that the person who warned me about the crowds – the American woman named Leslie - would certainly have told me if goat killing was part of it, right? But, what if she forgot? Or assumed I knew? I mean, I can’t even go to scary or violent movies because I can’t convince myself that someone isn’t really being hurt, that it isn’t real. The images of every single terrifying movie scene I’ve ever seen even by accident while flipping the channels never leaves my mind. Then, again, I’ve eaten slaughtered animals almost all of my life, I just haven’t had to see the process by which they ended up on my plate. Is there really any difference?

At the BAPS Sri Swaminarayan Mandir in Whittier(note: location now in Chino Hills) , there was no goat-killing. There was an absolute ban on killing anything, even a fly, even by accident. I was pretty certain the Vedanta Society couldn’t and they wouldn’t even if it were allowed, still, there was a tiny part of my brain that never stopped checking for any evidence that a live goat might be part of the evening to come. But there, amid the profusion of flowers and scurrying nuns, I finally noticed another small, mostly brown figure on Kali’s left. It appeared to be a representation of a headless animal at the goddess’ feet. A papier mache goat meant there wouldn’t be a real one. Right?

During the four hours it took to prepare, I sat on the cushion on the floor in silence, absorbed in the coming and the going. Small groups of friends, families with their elders, younger families with small children came in to bring gifts, which they left in bags on the front of the carpeted stage before bowing down until their heads touched the floor. Some of the younger women appeared to be particularly taken by Kali in all of her finery. Many took photographs. One young father brought a daughter wearing her very first sparkly dress who couldn’t have been more than two up to the carpeted steps leading up to the altar and tried to teach her how to bow but the wide-eyed child was too excited to focus enough for the lesson.

Once sheets of plywood covered in red fabric were on the ground, the nuns covered them with trays of blossoms and fruit; brass and glass dishes and pots; countless candles; glasses of sacred water; bowls of colorful powders; piles of tulsi leaves still on their branches; trays with jewelry, perfumes, bathing products or stacks of saris; and bouquets of incense and then dimmed the lights.

Here and there I saw faces I was beginning to recognize. A woman from the small class in the living room sat down on the carpet with a friend; the good-looking man who had marked off the carpet with masking tape was back to take his place inside one of those rectangles reserved for the monastics, tossing his white – what was it? A dhoti? What is that separate wrap of cloth on top called? – over his shoulder just as I’d seen the other monastics do. Even though all of us sitting on the floor were close enough to touch, there was at once a sense of privacy and an almost intimate and immediate accommodation for any small adjustment that any neighbor made. Most, except the smallest children, sat still, some with cream-colored shawls trimmed with orange or red over their heads. By the time the ceremony began at ten, even most of the children were still, asleep in their parents’ laps.

Although there are countless skills I lack, I did have one small trait that prepared me for this project. My legs have always been just a tad too short to reach the floor in most chairs so I’ve spent a lifetime sitting cross-legged even on normal chairs…at my own kitchen table. Or so I told myself. There had to be some explanation for the hours passing without my feeling rammy or restless or my knees and back starting to ache. But I didn’t and they didn’t. At one point I thought I really should drink something, drink some water, but it seemed too disruptive, not to anyone else but me.

The ceremony began so quietly, with such little fanfare, I was surprised when I realized it had started. The officiating swami, Swami Aparananda, a slight, grey-haired man who had come from Berkeley to officiate, was followed by Swami Sarvadevananda carrying a ring binder with the complex ceremony’s order of rituals and chants. In the hours of dipping flower after flower in sandlewood paste or sacred water, chanting over each joint in the swamis bodies to purify them, lighting of one stick after another of incense, and the presentation of tray after tray of offerings each given to Kali one by one, I lost all sense of time. At first I made notes in my book but soon I was floating on an image of two men in a perfumed smoky sea of fire and flowers, presided over by a goddess whose image - with the exception of her red tongue – was submerged in blossoms. For anyone who might have tried and failed at meditating, this was what we were all doing, eyes open or shut, whether we knew it or not, whether or not we were trying. Time became elastic, nonexistent, as we drifted in the dim half-light. There was no point in counting or knowing or clock watching. The swami’s movement from one object to another with a purpose unknown but a purpose nonetheless was our only reality.

One woman sang:

She comes with stars in her hair,
Garlands of lives she wears,
With her sword she severs chains
And shows how to love again.
Dazzling dancer
Nature’s song she sings,
Love is the message she brings.

Finally, around two in the morning, just as I began to get delirious, the service seemed to be wrapping up when a woman came to the center of the stairs and said, “Please move into the living room for the Homa fire which will be followed by the flower offering immediately after and then Prasad.”

It was after two o’clock in the morning and there were three more ceremonies?

Leaving the cocoon of the carpeted chapel in bare feet was a shock. No matter how hot the day, around here the temperature plummets as much as thirty or forty degrees at night so we tiptoed quickly across the cold bricks to find our shoes and, along with hundreds of people in every state from exhaustion to special-occasion adrenaline, we walked to the same building where the swami ate dinner with everyone after classes.

The wood paneled living room wasn’t big enough to hold everyone so some stood outside, watching through the sliding glass doors as Swami Aparananda and Swami Sarvadevananda, the ring binder still in hand, faced the fireplace. In the small manual The Worship of Sri Ramakrishna, the homa fire was called “a very ancient belief and practice that any offering…to a Deity should be offered to fire.” The Vedas call fire “the mouth of the Deities.” The purpose of the homa fire is to wipe out differences, to see that, when you get right down to it, all that we see as form, all that we see as substance, really is nothing, indistinguishable from ash.

A wooden frame was ready and, though hard to light at first, it soon took hold, turning a banana, a flower, an apple and a number of other things I couldn’t see into ashes while Swami Sarvadevananda led us in repeating the name of God twenty-eight times. When the ceremony was over, the swamis scooped ashes out into dishes and put a fingerprint of them on every person’s head as they left the room, mine included. Walking out, lightheaded, almost nine hours after arriving, the ashes on my skin felt like they had real weight. I think I was trying to see what the blotch of ashes looked like from inside my head out but I soon gave up. It was three-fifteen in the morning. I fell into the flow of people back to the chapel for the flower dedication.

The swamis began by laying prone on the floor in front of Kali. When they stood up, assistants picked up new voluminous bowls of flowers and stood at the bottom of the altar stairs. People began walking up the stairs, taking a flower, bowing down on the floor and then giving their flower to a swami for Kali. I wasn’t sure until the long line finally had an end whether or not I would or could do this. I was in an altered state after all those hours of sitting so, when the end of the line finally started to pass me by, I found myself in it, unwilling to be just an observer any longer.

At the stairs to the altar I took a yellow flower with a red stamen from the bowl and then climbed the soft, padded stairs. Swami Sarvadevananda seemed a bit surprised to see me but I didn’t to look to see if there was more in his eyes. The silver lotus blossom was full to Kali’s knees with flowers and the various offerings. Did people get these things back? Like some of the food we were going to eat next, the food they call “prasad,” made into holy food by spending some time as an offering? Maybe those who brought them got them back afterwards but I wasn’t sure.

I knelt, touched my head to the ground and handed over the flower. I felt like a gawky colt. Up close, I could see that some of Kali’s flowers, especially those on the garlands that had been put round her neck almost ten hours earlier, were starting to wilt but the riot of color was grand against such a black but unexpectedly gentle face. I turned, walked down the stairs to join in the final prayer which ended:

Om, I bow down to you,
O Ramakrishna!
Who established the truth of religions
Who is the personification of all religions
and The Embodiment of the best of all incarnations.

We walked outside to eat a full meal just a few hours before sunrise, ten hours after I first sat down in the chapel.There were baskets full of flowers from the altar by the doors. I took two still-perfect flowers – one pink, one giant yellow hibiscus with a violent red stamen and stain at its heart – and left.
And the flowers floated, whole and unblemished, in a globe full of water on my kitchen table for a week.

21 October 2006

(Note: Here's a picture of Kali I found online that isn't quite right - Ramakrishna's Kali has a total of four arms - her two "bad" arms (the one with a sword and the other with the severed head) on the left and her two "good" arms on the right - but I include this picture so you can see the girdle of men's arms and the necklace of skulls...)