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.

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 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...)

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 Path of Love

By meditation, some men
can see the Self in the self;
others, by the yoga of knowledge;
others, by selfless action.

Still others, not seeing, only
hear about it and worship;
they too cross beyond death,
trusting in what they have heard.

Bhagavad Gita 13.24-25

I have the shoe thing down. Slip-off shoes or sandals are the way to go. I walked in to the Swami Sarvadevananda’s weekly class in the Vedanta chapel, knocked off my sandals with a kick of my heel on the carpet and put them up on the white wooden shelves almost without a thought.

The swami was already cross-legged on the dais, his long arms resting on the low table. He was in the middle of saying one of those many words which all sound the same to me. The one I heard was “Ishta” but wasn’t even sure how to spell it so I settled for phonetics. “…that from which all creation comes and which is beyond all change,” he said. “But we must create an image of it. We can only love what is concrete. We love human beings, beautiful flowers, the rising moon because they are tangible. But how do you love the Infinite?”

I guess you need to think there is an “Infinite” to begin with before you can start trying to figure out how to love It. As I sat there scribbling down notes, I was pretty sure I could accept that much, that there probably is an “Infinite” but “loving It?” Why does It need me to “love” It, to worship It? Isn’t recognizing Its existence or just being open to It enough?

“In the beginning, we need forms to worship, forms like Buddha, like Christ, like Ramakrishna,” the swami said. “God cannot be worshipped except in symbols. There is no religion in the world that is not practicing on the concept (a symbol) of God. To say: ‘my symbol is better than yours’ is silly.” The swami said we mustn’t confuse the picture of Ramakrishna - or any symbol for that matter - with God Itself.

So, according to the way Hinduism is practiced at the Vedanta Temple, all those icons in Hindu temples all over the world are not meant to actually be considered Divine themselves but to be images of the Unknowable or the Absolute Reality. They’re forms which appear in the minds of people meditating, a different one for you and a different one for me. They each represent some of the powers of God as most of us need something specific to love. And that is what Bhakti yoga is all about: Love.

This idea of a religion acknowledging that different people might need different approaches to worship is one of the more stunning features of Hinduism. Built into its very structure is the notion that there are those among us who might be more comfortable learning about God in an intellectual way (jnana yoga) which might include a concept of a formless Absolute that was everywhere present. There might be some of us who want to demonstrate our devotion through selfless action (karma yoga), and still others who might revel in learning to control their bodies and minds as a way of coming into contact with the Divine (raja yoga). “But,” the swami added, “most Hindus, like most people, find it more natural to worship a representation of the Absolute. And that practice is called bhakti yoga.”

There were about a dozen of us in the pews. I still wasn’t sure what kind of person I was but I was getting an idea. My natural inclination is towards the notion of God without form ­­‑‑ the guy on a cloud thing never sat well with me, ever, -- and I clearly feel safer inside a book than in a ritual or service so that would make me, by Hinduism’s terms, more comfortable with jnana yoga and likely to find the bhakti path a bit of a stretch. But I hadn’t started this with the idea of staying the same.

Hinduism considers Christianity a bhakti path, (the path of devotion) where Christ is the Beloved; the cross, a sacred symbol of worship. The idea is that, because we don’t know what Absolute Reality looks like or even how to express it, it’s natural for limited humans to worship God in a symbolic way. But the ultimate goal is to come face-to-face with the Divine yourself. “But,” Swami Sarvadenvanada said, peering up over the top of the small book in his hands, “first you have to be convinced, intellectually, that this can happen. Once your conviction is strong, you can then make a journey to practice this in your life.”

That is the problem isn’t it? How do you get that conviction? I could look at my life before all this as either a journey without conviction or a conviction without a journey. I had the desire to know more but I’d taken only those steps I could hide under a disguise called work, mostly as television news stories. Did conviction have to come first or was it something that could grow from a journey begun in its absence? Or maybe, just maybe, I already had it if I wasn’t afraid to admit it. Maybe my struggle was really over what my definition of God was and then, what to do about it. Should I be grateful to this explosion of interfaith dissension for being the final push out the door to figure at least some of this out?

The swami then talked about how Ramakrishna eventually left rituals behind and disliked discussing theories once he saw that Divine light. He simply wanted to love God. “Ramakrishna said, ‘What use is it to walk into a grove of mango trees and discuss the number of branches, the shape of the leaves, or who planted the trees or when they were planted? What is the need of all this? Just eat the mangos.’” Swami Sarvadevananda laughed.

It would be great to have the kind of faith that was clear as seeing fruit hanging from a tree. But, right then, I couldn’t see the mango grove let alone the fruit.

“People are emotional more than rational,” Swami Sarvadevananda said. He was getting warmed up. “Can we use this emotion for God? All Ramakrishna cried for was to see the face of God and, when he did,” the Swami’s hands were flying farther and farther from his body. “He was filled with JOY and JOY and JOY!”

Why was this extreme abandon the swami described so off-putting?

Ramakrishna lived in the late 1800s and frequently went into spiritual reveries so intense, he’d lose all consciousness, sometimes for hours. At least once during one of these episodes, he fell down and broke his arm. Thank goodness earlier that day I’d spent some time with Christopher Isherwood’s books on Vedanta Hinduism. In his introduction to Vedanta for Modern Man, Isherwood said, “Ramakrishna is presented always as an exemplar (and not the only exemplar) of Vedanta.” He said that, while the Vedanta Society did worship Ramakrishna, it was “a matter of individual choice” and “no student of Vedanta need necessarily take part… much less discard his loyalty to any other divine personality.” So, when Swami Sarvadevananda became rhapsodic about Ramakrishna, Isherwood’s thoughts gave me permission to learn from Ramakrishna without worshipping him or even, necessarily, being comfortable with him. It made it possible for me to stay in my seat and listen.

“In our early devotional life we need rites and rituals – puja, and the like – every day. We do this until devotion grows. For many people, just thinking about God isn’t enough. That’s why the Catholics have mass, Jews have Torah study. It’s a great help to have spiritual people leading us to the highest experience of God. So, you start with the formalities, like when you first meet someone. When you start a journey, we have these little formalities: do this, don’t do that. But, once you love God, it’s not so important. All of these rituals are the reason that India has produced so many numberless saints and seers. There are rituals all day in the temple and from birth to death. Many think: ‘Oh, these rituals are so bad.’ Okay. But it’s like cleaning the bathtub with the baby. You don’t throw away all of the flavor of love that goes with the puja. Suppose you only bring the philosophy? That’s like bringing the structure without flesh and bone. There’s no sweetness, no manifestation of joy. Don’t destroy the rituals until they’ve raised your consciousness to the Divine. If you discard it, then you’ve got nothing but dry bones.”

I was getting pretty excited about the notion that I might be able to cut to the chase, to by-pass all those rituals that felt confusing and made me feel awkward and just stick to the reading, the meditating and the discussing but that wasn’t what the swami meant. Reading and learning about Hinduism without entering into the ritual, devotional part of it, was going to get me nowhere. Karen Armstrong, a former nun, wrote in The Spiral Staircase,

Religion is not about accepting twenty impossible propositions before breakfast, but doing things that change you. The myths and laws of religion are not true because they conform to some metaphysical, scientific or historical reality but because they are life-enhancing. But you will not discover their truth unless you apply these myths and doctrines to your own life and put them into practice.

But, how?

The swami said, “Make a small altar in your room and put pictures of those who inspire you, those who you find divine. A picture of Christ, of (the Vedanta’s) Mother Durga, of the Buddha, and, after you shower, offer flower incense every morning and ask for their blessings. If you don’t do anything ritualistic and I ask about what you did, you will talk, talk, talk, about what happened in your office – that’s it. You have to make a separation between mundane life and spiritual life so that, eventually, you see the face of God everywhere. But you have to start with a ritual.”

I’m not sure I’m a ritual sort of girl after my experience trying to do Hemu’s rituals but this seemed at least a bit more within reach, something worth trying, at least.

Outside the cut glass windows of the chapel in the Vedanta Center, it was already dark when someone in the class raised their hand to ask Swami Sarvadevananda another question. “Can’t you do good work with out this?” Clearly I wasn’t the only one wondering if rituals were required, if we measured up if we didn’t do them.

“What happens to that good work when the world collapses into dust?” the swami answered. “When there is no world anymore? Ritual devotion adds spiritual flavor, makes our life more peaceful. More good will get done in a more substantial and permanent way by practicing devotion. One ounce of spiritual practice is worth more than tons and tons of frothy talks. How many times do we listen to great scholarly talks given by great (teachers) but, then, once we get out of the temple and someone asks what was said and many will answer: ‘I don’t know.’ (Whereas) someone else will speak simply, from the heart, and the world changes.”

Swami Sarvadevananda glanced at the small clock on his table and, before closing his book and ending with a chant which included “Om, shanti, shanti, shanti.” or “Om, peace, peace, peace,” he looked ahead in the book to next week’s topic. “Next time we’ll read ‘The Need of a Guru” which will answer the question: Who can help us and how we can reach the truth? Who can hold our hand?”

Wearing socks on his feet, the swami stepped down from the carpeted dais and walked down the center aisle to stand in the back to greet each person as they left with the night’s book tucked under one arm. Some bowed to him, others bent down to touch his feet.

At the end of one of the last classes, I’d told myself I’d finally do it, finally bow and touch his feet, but there was there was a ridiculous and growing chorus of voices in my head: “Will you bow? Will you touch his feet?”

“Don’t be ridiculous. What a moron for even thinking of doing it.”

“What’s the big deal? You signed up for going through this so just do it and see what it feels like.”
“Nah, get outta town.”

I could go on because “they” did in my head. It’s amazing how many things I can think of in the short walk from one end of a small room to the other. Well, I told myself, at least I’m certain about one thing: I’m just not a bow-er.

That night, I thought I’d gotten over it, that I was going to be able to do it but, when it was my turn, I still couldn’t. I stood rigid, an awkward distance from him. There was going to be no spine-bending from me.

He smiled and asked, “Are you staying for dinner?”

“Not tonight. I have to get home.”

“Okay.”

“Is there a time you could teach me some of the rituals, Swamiji?” At least I’d learned what to call him: Swami-ji or Maharaj.

“Oh. After class on Tuesday.”

“Thank you, Swamiji.”

I sort of bobbed my head but I couldn’t even squeak out a “namaste” so there was nothing to do but turn and walk out of the chapel.

I took my sandals from the shelf, dropped them to the carpet and slipped into them, opening the heavy wooden door into a cold night.


(4 October 2006)

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)

First teacher...

He who teaches this primal
secret to those who love me
has acted with the greatest love
and will come to me, beyond doubt.

No one can do me a service
that is more devoted than
this, and no one on earth is more
precious to me than he is.

Bhagavad Gita 18.68-18.69

Swami Sarvadevananda told me to ask for him at the bookstore. I was nervous opening the glass-paned wooden door and stepping up into the small store. The raw wood shelves were jammed with books on Hinduism as well as on every faith imaginable. There was other stuff, too: incense, incense burners, some photos, and small figures for sale. I looked around for someone to talk to and then realized that, down behind the boxy checkout counter, a gray-haired woman was bent over, peering at an old computer.

“I’m here to see Swami--,” I realized I’d only seen his name on the website and had no idea how to pronounce it. I stumbled through some approximation of it.

The woman looked confused so I did my best with all those syllables a second time and then said, “I have an appointment.”

She dialed the phone. The voice on the other end did not belong to the swami I’d met. When she hung up she said, “Oh! You don’t mean Swami Swahananda! You mean Swami Sarvadevananda!” but she pronounced his name “SHARva-day-veh-nan-duh” The other swami was Swami Sarvadevanada’s boss, the head of the Hollywood Vedanta Society temple. I confess I was still completely confused, their names still indistinguishable to me.

A few minutes later Swami Sarvadevananda came walking down the brick path. He pulled his keys out from somewhere inside his orange robes and opened the door to his tiny office. In his hand was my proposal. He’d read it overnight.

The swami began as if we were in the middle of a conversation, not the beginning. “I think this should be the question: Why religion? What’s the need of religion? Religion must help one to rise from animalistic instincts to human, and human to divine, and from divine to godly, from godly to an infinitely compassionate personality like Christ and Buddha’s. So, this is a great question and many people don’t understand: what is religion? Thousands and thousands of fanatics and followers and they don’t know what is religion!” Swami Sarvadevanada’s hands were flying. His lilting, accented voice made the already new words and thoughts even harder to follow sometimes. “They don’t know that the transformation of life is religion. Transformation means fighting with my evil tendencies inside, which is meanness, ugliness, which creates pain and suffering for others. That which brings even a little pain for others is not religion, it cannot be religion! ‘Blessed are the peace-makers.’ So, who remembers that word in the scripture? Eh? You should be peaceful, you should radiate peace!”

It was hot in that room even though the windows were open but the swami was untouched by it, his hands kept dancing farther and farther away from him as he talked. It was exciting to see him grab on to this crazy idea of mine instead of what I’d feared would happen. I’d come up with all sorts of ways imaginary spiritual teachers might reject me and my crazy project but I don’t think I had even one scenario that came close to this – complete acceptance.

He was really on a roll. “The transformation of life is religion and anything that causes even a little bit of pain for others isn’t. Sri Ramakrishna, who was born 1836, did not know the complexity of life and other religions. He was a seeker and lover of God.That is called religion. ‘I am religious’ does not mean that I go to any temple and bow down my head twenty times and come to my room and beat my wife, eh? Or I’m a religious person so I can go and straighten you by telling you are on the wrong path, and I can go to heaven, by killing you, if need be, forcing you to believe in my way. That’s a nasty concept of spirituality that has nothing to do with spiritual life. Have you read The Life of Sri Ramakrishna?”

Ramakrishna was the guy on the top shelf of the altar, the main guru of the Vedanta branch of Hinduism. I’d picked up a few books that morning. “I just bought The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna.”

“Christopher Isherwood also wrote a book about his life. What Ramakrishna did was simple, he didn’t go for any philosophy. From the early days he wanted to know the secret of the universe. From the early days he felt the pull for seeing God and, after going through rigorous spiritual practice, he declared, ‘As many faiths, so many paths.’ He was born into a very spiritual family. His father (was apart from his wife when) he had a dream in which a deity said, ‘I shall be born in your home.’ About the same time, his wife also had a vision of a beam of light from Lord Shiva entering her womb and felt she had conceived a child!” And Ramakrishna was born, his given name was Gadahar.”

Okay, it must be said: I get nervous around immaculate conception stories. I always wonder if they were trying to compete or maybe the devout think us regular folk won’t pay attention, might not value the message, unless they hype their leader’s story. This was one thing the former biology major in me might never ever get over. I can accept the notion of divinity in people, of certain people, perhaps, being more in tune with that Something More than the rest of us. But beams of light causing a pregnancy in a person? A metaphor, a “true” story I can handle, but insist that it is True, that actually happened and that my faith depends on acceptance of that “actual” fact, well, I don’t know what to do with the big “no way” in my head.

Swami Saradevanada decided to give me the highlights of Ramakrishna’s life, a kind of book-flap synopsis. He said Ramakrishna began his spiritual journey by worshiping God, the Mother, in the form of Kali, a black female Hindu goddess. He went to the Kali temple in Dakshineswar on Ganges River near Bengal every day, demanding that she appear before him. “He’s like a mad guy, daytime and nighttime he is meditating on Mother. When the excruciating pains set in he used to cry, ‘Oh, Mother, another day is gone in my life and you have not come. What is the meaning of this life?’ And he’d cry and weep and rubbing his face on the sandy bed of the Ganges, so much is his urge to see the face of the Divine Mother who is the cause of this universe – that is called religion.” He cocked his head to one side and smiled. Swami Sarvadevananda really liked that story.

I sat politely on the other side of the desk. All I could think was: now why did he have to go and tell me a story like that? If that is religion, I haven’t got a prayer.

Of course the story ended with him seeing the Divine as a beam of light coming from the image of Kali. But – and this was what got my attention – it was through that vision that Ramakrishna came to realize that God had no form. “He reconciled all religions as true: ‘he’ and ‘she’ – gone. Now, you can understand what Hindu philosophy is. It is like a gateway. And after that what happened? Mother is gone, the form is gone. He’s lost into infinite waves of light, an ocean of light and joy.” Swami Sarvadevananda’s “joy” is so much more than a bland single syllable. It’s an explosive word that starts out like the word “jaw” and ends with a curlicue of sound as his mouth wraps around the sound of the “o” and “y.” Jahw-oy! …and he was remained in that ocean of jahw-oy for twenty-four hours!” The swami said Ramakrishna soon came to realize that there was nothing but God.

“He was going to Calcutta afterward. He was so humble that he will run, run towards anyone calling God. So one day a public (carriage) took him by mistake through a red letter – what you call it?” he asked, “A red zone? What is the word? You know, with prostitutes?”

“A red-light district?”

Swami Sarvadenanda nodded, “Yes, a red-light district. And the car he was in was moving and the ladies were looking and Ramakrishna was looking at them and saluting them, ‘Oh, Mother! You are here in this form?’ So if you see the end result is, what? The end result is you see the one Mother - call it whatever name you wish – the oneness in every being. That’s spirituality.”
He sat back, waiting for me to speak. I guess everything my written manuscript provoked in him had been said. I started to ask him about 9/11 but he didn’t want to talk about events like that, at least not right away. “We are trying to understand what is religion first.”

“Right.”

“We must understand our weak point. We must diagnose the disease and then put the medicine there. So if any religion does not allow anyone to think freely, if any religion contradicts normal rational and reason-based thinking, even like this Vedanta, this philosophy, we should discard it as poison! Say ‘I have no need of that religion.’”

Did he really say that? Throw away even his religion if anything he said sounded false or contradicted my own sense of truth? He was saying I had a choice to reject some or all of what he believed. I was surprised, surprised and relieved. That meant he was giving me permission to have my doubts about Ramakrishna’s immaculate conception, for example, which, therefore, gave me room to consider what of his wisdom, his practice, his ideas might have meaning for me. It wasn’t all or nothing.

Okay, so I didn’t have to run out of the room. At least not right away.

The swami continued, “And nowhere is that so strongly said except in this Hindu religion. (Other religions) say my book is the only book, you cannot deviate one letter from there, no? But Hinduism says you need not believe a single word we say, you (can) discard the whole Vedas, the foundation on which the whole spiritual tradition of India is based, unless you find it verifiable. Verified and verifiable. If you can’t, forget it.”

In the briefest of pauses, I tried another question. “Were you born into this part of Hinduism? Was your family also of your same tradition?”

“What if one is born or not, what does it matter?” With that one statement, the swami tossed away my personal question, returning to what he considered the more pressing topic at hand: the necessity of different paths for different seekers. “It’s like you want to eat fish? Fried fish? You want to eat McDonalds? Go. You want curry? Someone makes curry. But the question is: are you eating fish or not?” He laughed. ”Why fight? That my fish is better than your fish?”
The swami lifted a fold of his orange clothing with two fingers and said, “I wish to dress this way, you that; you should have your freedom, I should have my freedom. So, in our dress we don’t fight with each other. In our food, we go to restaurant and we choose one out of so many types food. So, why in the world would we have to have only one religion that survives and others will have to go?” He seemed very pleased with his analogy.

But I was trying to get to specifics. “So, if I came to you and said this is the path I want to follow, what would happen next?”

“Spirituality would unfold in your heart. What we’d do is give you some guidance.”

“Like, things to do and read?”

“Suppose I will put to you the very first question. You are asking me: what is religion? I would put that question to you back. I would say: who are you talking?”

Silence. I had no idea what he was asking me.

He tried again. “Are you a man, are you a woman?”

“Uhm, I’m a, ah, woman?”

“Yes. Are you the woman talking?” Meaning was the person sitting across from him. Is this everything that I am, the sum total of my existence?

“No.”

“Who’s talking?”

“I, well, there is a drive to know this that (comes) before the issue of ‘woman’ or ‘man’.”

My answer wasn’t good enough for him. “My question is a specific, intellectual question: who is that “I”? You say, ‘I drove here.’ Who is that ‘I?’ Is it the physical flesh and bone only? Is it the eyeballs?”

“No. That, I’m clear about. It is not just what I can touch, taste, hear, see. I know that.”

“That is what the rational mind wants to explore. In Vedanta, we say explore more. Go in.” He began to demonstrate what beginners like me should do, the questions we should ask ourselves. “Who sees? I see. What is the ‘I’ that sees? First comes: The eyes are seeing? No. No, eyes cannot see. My mind is seeing? Go one step more. Mind cannot see. Mind is also matter. Because when you sit for meditation, what do you see? Your mind is rambling here and there and there. So, your mind can be seen by somebody. You say: ‘My mind is not very happy today, I’m not happy, my mind is upset today.’ You say:‘My shirt.’ ‘My spectacles.’ And ‘my mind.’ So you are using the word ‘My mind.’ So the question really is: who or what is beyond the mind, the thing that claims possession of it?”

So, I am not my body. That makes sense to me, it makes sense that there’s more to life than this specific collection of skin and bones, dark hair and hazel eyes. But, until Swami Sarvadevananda pointed it out, I’d never really thought about the phrase “my mind” that we all use with its implication that there was something to which my mind “belonged”, something that can observe my thought process.

But rolling ideas around like this is comfortable. I think I’m looking for what might make me uncomfortable, what might challenge my assumptions, what I think I ”know.” I said, “I would like you to tell me things I can do or read. I want to take direction.”

“You have this wonderful basic understanding of spiritual life, about life, about who we are.”

I wasn’t at all sure what he meant but I said, “That’s good to hear.”

“We say, in Indian psychology, that we are the product of all our past thoughts and deeds. And Hindus believe and Buddhists believe that we are not in one life. Eh? One life theory is Christianity, a Judeo-Christian idea: one-life theory. There comes more responsibility, you know? If you have the one chance only, you have to do the best you can do and, if you don’t, then you are going to hell, they say. But Indian hell, Hindu hell is a little less disruptive,” he chuckled, “because you do some bad karma, you go to hell, and then come out and, then again, start your journey. You are not forever lost. Also, to go to heaven is not our goal because that is also temporary, the result of good actions. The goal is to realize God. So this is the many life times theory has a little hope and a little relaxation, also. ‘I could not do this much?’” he continued with a happy shrug of his shoulders underneath his orange robes, “‘Okay, I’ll do it the next time.’”

The swami’s smile was so broad it jostled his eyeglasses. I told him how much I appreciated all the time he was spending with me.

“This talk,” meaning the talk we were having right then, “is not talk, merely. For me, for my spiritual journey, I am worshipping God through serving you. I am talking to you, actually I’m serving God in you. We serve God through all of our actions.”

“And following what I’m driven to do is--"

“Exactly. All our duties are nothing but a chance to serve God. God has given you the life. God has given you the strength – it is to be utilized with proper understanding. God has given you the quest to know the truth and the skills to do it. It is like the waves – God is the infinite ocean and I am only one ripple and you are another ripple and we are dancing in God, we are crying in God, we are serving in God, there is nothing but God. So, to bring this awareness, read the Upanishads. It is the ancient wisdom of our spiritual practice.”

I felt like I’d gotten a seal of approval. “I’m almost through the Bhagavad Gita.” The central text of Hinduism, it seemed like the right place to start.

“When you have a question, make a point, and when you come we can discuss one of these points. How long it takes you to come here?”

“You won’t believe this but I have been all over, temples all over. My office? I can almost walk here.”

“Is it?”

“I couldn’t be closer. It takes five minutes, unless there is a Hollywood Bowl event. Then it can take half an hour.”

The swami told me the times of the classes he taught and then said, “Above all, if you have any questions you can come talk.”

I gave the personal questions another shot. “Now, did you always know you wanted to be---what do you call yourself? Are you a sadhu?”

“We are sadhus. ‘Sadhus’ means we are celibates from our childhood and they call me assistant head, so-called assistant minister.’

“You always knew that you wanted this life?”

“Because I was born in that culture, as you asked me. When I was a very young boy, the sadhus, the monks, the renounced people used to come and their life is so attracting, so much alluring, their faces beaming with joy (jahw-oy!) as it were. That attacted me very much. As I grew, fifth grade, sixth grade boy, the sadhus were very kind. They said: ‘What you are doing? Come here.’ So our home was not that far from the headquarters of the Ramakrishna organization which is near Calcutta. So on vacation I used to go and stay there on the banks of the Ganges. The sadhus meditative life and unselfish love filled with purity, peace, and no outward pretense attracted me most.”

“How many brothers and sisters do you have?”

He looked pained at the question, like I’d gone one step too far. “I have brothers and sisters but that has nothing to do with what actually God calls you.”

I was nothing if not nosy and persistent. “Have your other brothers and sisters—"

He interrupted, “They are also very spiritual. Nowadays western materialistic ideals are creeping in through the television and other media otherwise in each Hindu Indian family but every morning and every evening, they start with God, they end with God, they pray in between, and before food they pray because the culture is there. All that intense practice goes only for a few very sincere people but, even our father, grandma, mom, our aunti, won’t eat before they take a bath, repeat the holy name, pray and meditate some time. Before that they will not eat at all. So, that is the tradition there. But these sadhus are more profound in their practices. From the early days I never thought of becoming anything but a monk. Seeing them, their joy, their freeness, their openness, their relentless service to others and how they are so princely even though they have no possessions!”

The swami said the Ramakrishna Mission was a huge organization in India. “We have 150 or 160 (temples) in India and activities are multifarious for the poor, for the downtrodden, for flood relief, for tsunami relief. For anything, these monks just jump and go to be the first to help with whatever they can: with material help, with medicinal help, with building up their homes and houses, and with establishing schools and community halls and everything. So that dedication also inspired me.” He tried to explain his thinking at the time. “What is this life, you think for yourself? Only eating, sleeping and dying? Do something for others. At least if you don’t see God, at least you don’t hurt anyone, don’t harm anyone and be a better person, be a loving, caring person.The world is full of misery. You can give a little peace to others.”

“And how did you end up in the United States?”

Swami Sarvadevananda smiled and raised his eyebrows. I’d hit a sore point. “Thaaaat is not my choice. Our organization has a central control in Calcutta and we have all over the world centers. We are not big like the Catholic church - about fourteen hundred, fifteen hundred monks, nuns and novitiates. According to the need of the work, the senior sadhus think who will be fit for what work and send us. I was in one village center, I was the head of a center actively working with the poor people, the needy people, building their homes, giving them education and self-employment skills to the women. Education gives them the strength to become self-reliant.”

“What village was it?”

“Sikra, a village near the border of Bangladesh. So, this was the way I was working very happily in the center and suddenly I was called here!”

“And you weren’t happy about it.”

“In the beginning, I was not at all! Because I had no idea to come and I never imagined in my life to come over here. It is not my choice. I was saying: ‘Please don’t send me, don’t send me. Send some other person.’ I was quite happy with the poor people, being with them, building up their hearts, giving them some shelter, giving them some education and the center was not very affluent but there was a great joy to serve these people. But, anyhow this is also a service to God, what I’m doing.” He laughed. “I didn’t plan. God plans! If you accept, it’s joy. If you resist, suffering.”

“I can’t tell you how grateful I am that you were open to this and how much I’m looking forward to working with you.”

“Please come to the class and give me a call, ask me any questions. It is a lifelong journey. Many people in this country, they want instant effect. Ah, so many impressions, good, bad, have accumulated in our mind and now our mind has to be cleansed. Cleansed how? By loving others, caring for others without keeping any selfish motive.”

“I know this project will be, at best, only a beginning. What happens after—”

“--will be your own journey. In your writing, you referred to Huston Smith. Huston Smith was closely connected with our Vedanta ideas.”

“He was?”

“There was a senior swami who passed away in St Louis, Swami Satprakashananda. And Huston Smith used to go there and he learned Vedanta and this universal idea of oneness. He’s very close to us. Our nuns know him. I also met him. A very humble and spiritual person!”

“See, there’s no accident that I’m here.”

“I tell you one thing: we do not publicize this Vedanta in the newspaper. We are a very silent group but at one time Vedanta created a great impact in this country. Alcoholics Anonymous which is so popular everywhere? Who is the founder? A Vedanta student.”

“I didn’t know that.”

“He employed all the Vedanta principles. Read their books, ideals, goals – all Vedanta. Vedanta has had an impact in subtle ways but it’s not that popular a religion.”

The swami told me Ramakrishna himself had actually spent time practicing other religions. “He one day prayed to Mother: ‘Mother, you are also worshiped by people in the churches. How do they worship? Why not make me like that?’ He had one Christian devotee and he used to go and ask him what is in the Bible. And one day he saw the image of the Christ, the baby, with the Madonna and that vision became tangible and that ray of light came.” Ramakrishna then spent “day and night, not a second thinking of any aspect of god or goddesses; only Christ and Christ and Christ. Then he practiced Islam. No one in the world ever appeared before who in one lifetime has ever practiced all those disciplines that you find in Huston Smith’s book. That’s why Ramakrishna finds truth in every religion. There is truth in every religion.” But, the swami said, there is only one important question. “Are you sincere? Are you following that? Are you living that life? Or are you only fighting for the purpose of fighting in the name of religion. So this is to be understood and this message should go to everyone. Swami Vivekananda (the first Hindu representative to come to the United States) said, ‘I did not come here to convert Christian into Hindu or a Hindu into Muslim or Muslim into Buddhist. We want to make a Hindu a better Hindu, a Christian a better Christian, a Muslim a better Muslim.’ So, we are not to convert. If you are following a path called Christianity, why not love God and see God? ‘Knock and it shall be opened unto you. Blessed are the pure of heart for they shall see God.’ Where have these principles gone? You’re are talking about other things, abortion, gay marriage, this, that --- these are social issues. Why are you bringing them into religion? Why not make your life spiritual? God sees gay? No, God sees the heart of your love. Eh?”

I felt heavy when I stood up, a thanksgiving meal’s worth of new ideas in my head, but then I remembered a question I’d wanted to ask Hemu but hadn’t gotten the chance. “Now, I watched them last night, the other students. They touched your feet.”

“In the Indian tradition, they do.”

“Is that what the greeting is?”

Swami Sarvadevananda stood up, too. “Anyone senior to us, we touch our head to their feet – it’s our deepest respect. It means I am bowing down my head to you - not you, the person - but the God in you, manifested better, because you’re senior. Our mom, our dad, our elder brother, our elder sister, anyone in the society that is a teacher, a school teacher, because their wisdom is higher. So, we go and touch their feet, but in this country we follow our own way. Okay?”

He was letting me off the hook, giving me an alternative I might be able to handle. He put the palms of his hands together in front of his chest and said, “Namaste. This means: ‘Salutation to you, the Lord in you.’ So, when you do, you remember the God in me is bowing to the God in you. This is the Indian custom.”

I tried it out. “Namaste.” Not too weird.

He said it back., “Namaste.”

And, with that, I dropped my notebook and pen on the floor.


(27 September 2006)