Gemmon in Krakow

Never plan to see a friend you haven't seen for almost two years for the first time at 10pm if you want to get any sleep.

When I got back from visiting Luke, Gemmon was in the hotel. We started talking that night and stopped long enough to get a few hours of sleep before setting off first thing in the morning in search of Amon Goth's house, the infamous concentration camp commandant of the Płaszów camp on the outskirts of Krakow.

I'd forgotten that Gemmon had decided to become a Buddhist, in part, because of the Holocaust. About 40 years old now, Gemmon and her generation grew up in Germany with their faces shoved squarely into their country's culpability for the atrocities committed by their elders during Hitler's reign of terror and it's hard to imagine anyone more fearless and obsessed with owning the full weight of that responsibility than Gemmon. She knew so much more about precisely what happened than I did. To this point, I've learned only what I had to about the Holocaust, what came towards me at school and in popular entertainment but Gemmon told me she first began reading the accounts of Germans who lived through the period because she wanted to know "how in any possible way they could have survived this without feeling failed as a human." Then she began to read as many of the survivors' written accounts as she could as well as the diaries of people who were killed in the camps. "I kept asking myself: could I?  Would I?  Finally, this was the reason I got into practice."

Gemmon hadn't changed much in the year and a half since I saw her last. She no longer has the shaved head of a Buddhist priest, although she remains one, she says, "for now." After things didn't work out at the Zen Center, Gemmon went back to work as a hospice nurse, this time in Zurich. I asked if she missed the zendo, missed Los Angeles. She teared up. "I sometimes miss the Pacific and I sometimes miss Roshi but never the Pine House." (where Roshi lived and the workplace personnel conversations took place.) And Gemmon added that she didn't think she'd have a teacher like Roshi or live in a community like that again but that didn't mean she was no longer a Buddhist priest. "For me, my robes are alive."  While Gemmon had clearly processed her feelings of loss - much of into gratitude - still, after almost two years, Gemmon's hurt seemed fresher than I expected.

I cannot continue to feel this way for two more years. Perhaps it was just that, in catching up, my more recent parallel tale of job woe stirred up her old feelings...or maybe it's that, while I only lost a job, Gemmon lost a job, a home, a teacher, a way of life, and a country.

We'd come to the Auschwitz retreat for slightly different reasons. I'd decided to come to leave behind my tiny ego bruises, to plunge fully and completely back into this effort, and to begin my approach to Judaism. Gemmon's reasons, the questions she was asking, were much more complex. "I don't think it's difficult to have compassion for the victims, but the perpetrators? Is it possible to have compassion for them? I've read their stories. I've heard them talk. They don't have nightmares. They compartmentalize what they did. They killed people - for them it was just another day at work -- then they went home to their children. How do you have compassion for that?"

Am I supposed to have compassion for that? What happens if I can't?

This is the really tough part of Buddhism, the dark side of "we are all connected, interrelated."

Gemmon said, "You are right that it is tough but I think it is actually even tougher to be attached to our hatred as we are suffering under it." She sent me a verse of the Dhammapada about this which is below.

 I guess that's what we are all here to face at Auschwitz and Birkenau. For a week.

The verses of the Dhammapada that Gemmon sent 

Never here by enmity

are those with enmity allayed,
they are allayed by amity,
this is the timeless Truth.

Hatred is, indeed, never appeased 

by hatred in this world. 

It is appeased only by loving-kindness. 

This is an ancient law.

For hate is never conquered by hate.
Hate is conquered by love.
This is an eternal law.

Chapter 1 of the Dhammapada as it is in Wikisource

1:1 (1)

The mind is the basis for everything.
Everything is created by my mind, and is ruled by my mind.
When I speak or act with impure thoughts, suffering¹ follows me
As the wheel of the cart follows the hoof of the ox.
1:2 (2)
The mind is the basis for everything.
Everything is created by my mind, and is ruled by my mind.
When I speak or act with a clear awareness, happiness stays with me.
Like my own shadow, it is unshakeable.
1:3 (3)
"I was wronged! I was hurt! I was defeated! I was robbed!"
If I cultivate such thought, I will not be free from hatred.
1:4 (4)
"I was wronged! I was hurt! I was defeated! I was robbed!"
If I turn away from such thoughts, I may find peace.
1:5 (5)
In this world, hatred has never been defeated by hatred.
Only love² can overcome hatred.
This is an ancient and eternal law.
1:6 (6)
Everything will end.
When I understand this, all quarrels fade away.
1:7 (7)
As the wind topples a brittle tree
So will temptation³ topple me
If I am lazy, unrestrained, apathetic, seeking only endless pleasure.
1:8 (8)
The wind cannot uproot a mountain.
Temptation cannot uproot me
If I am alert, self-controlled, devout, unmoved by pleasure and pain.
1:9 (9)
The saffron robe⁴ is perfectly clean
But I am not ready to wear it
When I have not cleansed my spirit,
When I disregard truth and neglect to practice self-control.
1:10 (10)
When I have removed all defilements,
When I am filled with self-control and truthfulness,
Then I am truly worthy to wear the saffron robe.
1:11 (11)
When I see the truth as false,
When I believe illusion to be reality,
I am unable to find the truth.
1:12 (12)
I must see the essential reality as real,
And discard illusion.
Only then can I find the truth.
1:13 (13)
As heavy rain will penetrate a poorly-thatched roof,
So passion creeps into an unreflecting mind.
1:14 (14)
The rain will not penetrate a well-thatched roof.
Passion does not enter a tranquil and reflecting mind.
1:15 (15)
I grieve now, and I grieve in the future.
When I do wrong, I am doubly-grieved.
I mourn and suffer when I see the results of my actions.
1:16 (16)
I rejoice now, and I rejoice in the future.
When I am virtuous, I doubly-rejoice.
I smile and give thanks when I see the results of my actions.
1:17 (17)
I suffer now, and I suffer in the future.
When I do wrong, I suffer doubly.
It pains me to know that I have done wrong,
And it pains me even more to see the consequences.
1:18 (18)
I am happy now, and I am happy in the future.
When I am virtuous, I am doubly happy.
I am delighted to know I the good I have done,
And I am even more delighted to see the consequences.
1:19 (19)
Even if I can recite large portions of sacred texts,
If I do not put those into practice
Then I am like a shepherd counting someone else's sheep,
No closer to enlightenment⁵.
1:20 (20)
If I know just a little of the sacred texts,
But I put those teachings into practice,
Casting off desire, ill-will, and delusion,
Practicing wakefulness and meditation,
Free of attachments to anything, here or in the future,
Then I may become enlightened.

Heaven, Hell, and Reincarnation...or not

Death was a hot topic at the Los Angeles Buddhist-Catholic dialogue this month, death and what happens after.

Professor Chris Chapple invited me to go to the Buddhist-Catholic dialogue a while back and I've gone when I could. This group of Buddhist and Catholic spiritual leaders and academics have been meeting together for over twenty years. It's been going on so long, there is a real personal warmth between all of the clerics and academics in spite of the great variety of their beliefs, backgrounds, nationalities and outfits. I mean, you've got sweet Sister Thomas Bernard in her wimple, white sweater and orthopedic shoes as well as a number of Catholic priests from different orders in their collars, interspersed around the table with Buddhist leaders of various traditions. If you didn't know better, you might think that there were representatives from three different religions because of the striking difference in dress between the Buddhists from the "northern" or Mahayana tradition (Chinese, Japanese, and Korea) and the "southern" or Theravadan tradition (Sri Lanka, Thailand etc.) For example, Venerable Miao Hsi from the Taiwanese Hsi Lai Temple and Professor Jeung Park, who's also an abbot in a Korean Buddhist order, dress in robes that look like closely tied coats. Phrakru Sumanatissa Berua from the Wat Thai Temple, on the other hand, is partially, but not fully, wrapped in bright orange cloth with one shoulder completely exposed.

Here's a photo from one of the meetings back in 2008 so you can get a sense of what I'm talking about....

Over the past four or five sessions, the group has been working their way through a pamphlet that the Archdiocese of Los Angeles gives out to its flock: "What Catholics Should Know About Buddhism." The Buddhists at the Buddhist-Catholic dialogue are correcting mistakes they find - and they've found quite a few.

The effort was actually suggested by the representative of the Archdiocese of Los Angeles, Right Reverend Alexei Smith who was ordained as a Melkite Greek Catholic priest.(* explanation of his unusual relationship with the Archdiocese below) "If we're going to be teaching our Catholic kids about these various world religions," Father Alexei said, "we should be teaching them accurately."

It's a pretty remarkable thing that representatives from all of these religious institutions have cared enough about building relationships with each other that they have devoted this much time and energy over decades to do it and with such little notice. And this is by no means the only group like it.

After four sessions, the group was just about to finish correcting this sixteen-page pamphlet. I know, it sounds like watching paint dry, but it wasn't. It wasn't just that there were a number of errors in the text itself but, on occasion, the Buddhists didn't agree among themselves about what should be said instead. Although they are all Buddhists, there are nuances in their tenets and beliefs as different as their dress.

But then, today, death got on the agenda. In the previous meeting, one of the Buddhists had said that, unlike in the West, many people consider themselves Confucian and Taoist and Buddhist or Daoist and Buddhist and Shinto. There just isn't the rigid separation between faiths. However, one of the Buddhist clerics said, in Japan, it wasn't until someone in their family died that they turned to Buddhism.

Professor Michael Kerze, an adjunct professor at Los Angeles Valley College, said he thought that was odd, given what he understood about Buddhism. "Why do (people in Japan) turn to Buddhism for funerals? Given Buddha's vision of samsara and being reborn, why turn to Buddhism for funerals when this is just one passing into another life?"

Ven. Dr. Karuna Dharma, (cleric on the far left in the photo above who was born Joyce Adele Pettingill in Beloit, Wisconsin) abbess in a Vietnamese Buddhist order, said, "When somebody passes, they're headed for a new life. It's very important for Buddhists to try to help them towards a good new life."

Venerable Miao Hsi, added: "It's like a very grand spiritual send off."

Phrakru Sumanatissa Berua from the Wat Thai Temple said: "Actually death is the final journey of the human being. In Buddha's time, there was a very beautiful woman, a woman so beautiful that every male, chase behind her. Even monks. She pass away. Buddha say: 'Keep her. Don't burn her.' Her body lay there for days. Buddha say 'She's there. Anyone want to go there now?'"

I don't know about anyone else at that table, but there's a pretty strong image now stuck in my head.

The Wat Thai monk continued. "The Buddha have to teach them that this," the monk bent his fingers back to his body draped in bright orange, "is impermanent so they can decline from attachment. Everything is illusion. It's not real. So when we have a funeral we have to teach about that: life is impermanent. We like to say that the people who pass away are our teacher, that life is impermanent." So, he said, in his tradition, in the Theravada tradition, the funeral is not so much for the person who died, for aiding in their transformation into a better life. "That's governed by their karma, by what they did in their life. You did good things, you go to good place; you did bad things, you go to bad place - that's what Buddhists believe."

Professor Jeung Park, a Korean Buddhist abbot, explained that, for Buddhists, the concept of a sentient being or "sattva" is different than other religions. He said, for Buddhists, even people who pass away are "sattvas. Because they return. In other religions, whoever passes away aren't counted. For Buddhists, they are because they are in a cycle of samsara. Understand? We are reborn again continuously."

But Professor Kerze had more questions, questions his religious studies students asked that he didn't feel he was answering fully. "My students ask me 'But what, exactly, is reborn?'"

Professor Park said, "We deny that any kind of self exists." No 'atman' - that Hindu term for the "I" that can say "my mind." Wikipedia says it's the Hindu term for soul.

Rev Karuna Dharma said, "I wouldn't use the word 'reincarnation.' 'Rebirth' is different from reincarnation." There seemed to be general agreement from all the Buddhists clerics around the table on this point, no matter what the tradition.

But Professor Kerze persisted, "It's said that Buddha remembered 'all his previous lifetimes in the process of enlightenment.' What was he remembering if there is no 'soul' consisting through these lifetimes?"

Father John Raab said he, too, didn't understand. "Even if you called it "rebirth" instead of reincarnation, what is being re-born?"

Then Reverend/Professor Jeung Park made a point I'd never heard before. The whole idea of rebirth is not really that important in Buddhism. At all. "It's more like a teaching tool to help people see the benefit of living a moral and ethical life." He said that the notion of karma and of dependent origination (that nothing can exist on its own) are much more important than any notion of rebirth for Buddhists. "It's not a big topic or a main notion for Buddhism. So don't spend too much time arguing about it."

It was pretty funny. Everyone who wasn't Buddhist was pretty hung up on nailing down just what, exactly, Buddhists mean when they talk about reincarnation or rebirth while Professor Park was telling us the whole concept was little more than a teaching tool, nowhere near as important as living an ethical and moral life; the idea that nothing can be alive on its own, separate and apart from countless other people and circumstances; and the idea of emptiness or no "self", which is a pretty tough idea to wrap your head around. And it seemed as if most of the other Buddhists around the table agreed.

Those central concepts each make a certain amount of straightforward sense to me. Dependent origination -- that I couldn't exist without my parents and their parents and their parents' parents is easy to see but it's more than that. My continued existence is also completely dependent on a complex and almost infinite series of people, places, events and circumstances - things that are happening or not happening. No one is breaking in to my house right now with a gun so I am able to type these words. I have a glass of water beside me that probably began as snow in the High Sierras and then ran through hundreds of miles of sluices, pipes and pumping stations with the help of many forms of energy with the oversight of who knows how many people to get into my glass where I can use it to keep me alive and functioning for another day. What this means is that the 'me' I hold to be the center of my universe is, according to Buddhism, not self-sufficient, not self-contained, not at all the same as what I really am.

The Heart Sutra says that "Form is emptiness and emptiness is form." This second notion - emptiness - is actually, according to Roshi Bernie Glassman easier to understand if you understand the first idea of dependent origination. It's not that there is nothing, that I am nothing, that Buddhism thinks everything is a big void. It's "empty" because "nothing can exist separate and apart from a web of causes and conditions. Suffering comes, in part, from our ignorance of this fact.

For me, it's pretty easy to see the trouble I've gotten myself into when I've acted as if my actions don't affect a vast web of other people, when I act as though this "self" is self-contained, unaffected by and not affecting others.

My guess is that part of the reason rebirth is not as important as we outsiders might think is that heaven, hell, and rebirth are all temporary - all part of the endless cycle that doesn't end until you've moved beyond karma, beyond the cycle of birth and death, by "realizing" the truth. And, like in Hinduism, you can only realize the truth while you are alive. Being alive is precious, it's temporary, it's fleeting, it's our chance to break free of our ignorance of the truth.

Sitting at that table, I was moved by the determined attempt at understanding and by its limits. Is it possible without at least some direct experience of another's faith? I think that's especially true in Buddhism because Buddhism is, at its heart, about directly experiencing what is unknown, beyond words, beyond concepts and using that direct experience to reduce one's suffering. But it sure was a relief to be sitting there watching people far more knowledgeable than me struggle with the same questions and concepts that make me feel like my brain is missing a few critical gears.

---

* Right-Reverend Archimandrite Alexei Smith was appointed by Cardinal Roger Mahoney as the Director of Ecumenical and Interreligious Affairs. He is the only Greek Catholic priest in the United States serving a Roman Catholic Archdiocese in such a visible position. I didn't know it but the Catholic Church is actually a communion of 22 Churches all united to Rome: Roman Catholics are one of those Churches, and by far the largest and hence most dominant and the Greek Catholic Church (not Greek Orthodox Church) is another.

If you're interested:
Minutes from a past Buddhist-Catholic Dialogue, October 1- 4, 1998

So, you want to be a monk?

How can we overcome our ignorance if we pretend that we are wise?

Master Hsing Yun
Buddhism, Pure and Simple

Buddhism. I needed to start somewhere so I went back to the Buddhist temple I knew because I’d gone along on one of Mark’s school trips: the Hsi Lai temple in Hacienda Heights, California. Why? It had classes on Buddhism taught in English. One of the pieces of paper I’d scarfed up after my first class was an invitation to attend what the flyer said was a “Short-Term Monastic Retreat .” Anyone could take one. Anyone could apply. Its objectives were “to teach traditional Buddhist practice and discipline” and to allow lay people “to experience the monastic way of life.” It was happening in just two months so I filled out an application, telling them exactly who I am, what I’m doing and how little I knew about Buddhism, and then went to the temple for the required interview. I figured, if they’d let me go, I’d go.

It was a beautiful day, an easy drive. I brought oranges for the temple and, when I walked in to the entrance hall (Bodhisattva Hall), an attendant gave me a plate and even showed me where to assemble it. It’s kind of great that at least some of this is feeling a bit less bewildering. I mean, you don’t go empty-handed to someone’s home for dinner and you don’t go empty-handed to a Hindu or Buddhist temple.

As I waited for my turn in an auditorium with raked seats, I watched the two monastics - both nuns - doing the interviews. One was giving a Caucasian woman a stern talk I could only partially overhear. Something about "very hard" and "no make-up” and "no communication at all. You understand?" And who was at the other table? The meditation nun from my one and only day at the temple, the one with the road-building story. I was relieved when she waved me up to her table.

She motioned for me to sit in the chair in front of her while she read my application. I watched the crown of her shaved head as she turned the pages where, in answer to their questions, I'd explained exactly who I was and why I wanted to come. All that kept me from exploding in anxiety about what she might ask was that I'd been completely honest about my ignorance about Buddhism. I’d also been explicit about this project.

She lifted her square face and said, “So you’re finished with Hinduism?”

“Well, no, I’ll never be finished,” I said, “but it was time to come here.”

She smiled. “When you think of a monastic retreat, what’s your idea of it?”

“I think it’ll be difficult, that I’ll find things inside myself that I’ll have a hard time with. But I also think I need to deal with them to learn. I can’t really learn just by reading books. I have to do something.”

“Yes, but why do you want to do this?”

“I don’t know. All I know is a couple of years ago I felt I had no choice.”

“I know what you mean. I had a good job, lots of money and one day it wasn’t important anymore. My boss said, ‘I don’t care about money.’ I said, ‘I don’t either.' But I meant it. So I renounce. So I know what you mean.”

I was taken aback. First, I tried putting hair and a business suit on this dumpling of a woman, who wore nothing but robes and eyeglasses, but got nowhere. She seemed too content with being precisely where and what she was to have ever had any of the accoutrements of drive or ambition. But I wasn’t just my imagination spinning out that froze me. It was that this nun saw something of my situation, of what’s driving me to do what I’m doing, in her own decision to become a monastic. What? I started trying to figure out what I said or wrote that might lead her to such a mistaken conclusion. I’d felt there were little arrows pointing at me, as I walked up the steep steps, past the burning incense and the first altar with all of the offerings to get to the interview, labeling me as what I am: “Unqualified” and "Too late, too far to go." But there she was, smiling at me, thinking we had something in common. I had no idea how to respond.

Luckily she asked what I knew of Buddhist principles.

I told her I knew about the Four Noble Truths. “There’s suffering in life, it’s caused by desire, eliminate desire and you eliminate suffering and Buddhism tells you how to do that and the importance of, uhm, cause and effect.”

She corrected me: “Dependent origination.”

“Yes, and I know detachment is the answer.” I mentioned that I’d taken her meditation class and I liked her story about the road builders. (see very end of the 3 Nov 2008 post)

She said, “I love stories.”

“Me, too.”

“There’s another one that might be good for this retreat.” She started putting my papers back their folder. “There was a man in the back of a temple, bowing down and doing prostrations yet people are beating him. He say to Buddha, ‘It’s not fair. You are a statue, doing nothing and yet you are untouched up there, and here I am, doing my best and yet people are beating me. Why?’ And Buddha say, ‘When you make a statue, you scrape and hit and chip away until it’s in its perfect form. We are different because I have accepted all of these blows, these difficulties. You haven’t.’” The nun looked up from my file and raised her eyebrows at me with a smile. “It’s these difficulties, these hard things that lead to your perfection. We must go through them without attachment to what we think it should be. You remember that (on the retreat.) Mm?”

“I will.”

“You may not understand everything – we try, but it’s very hard to make everything clear – but, when you don’t understand, just go inside and notice what comes up for you, mmm?”

“Okay," I said. "and thank you.”

As I picked up my bag from the floor, she smiled and put my file away.


21 June 2007