To Do or Not to Do

Grief. Sadness. Pain. Impotence. Confusion. Lethargy. Numbness. The energy of rage and anger ebbs and this is what's left and I hate it. I want to DO something, anything, because, all the time I'm planning and then doing, I don't feel what I don't want to feel or think I "shouldn't" feel.

So, the activity: within moments after finding out about Lily, I started with obsessive "fact" collection, at first imagining her terror, over and over again. Then, I went grabbing after reasons, answers, future prevention, meaning. When that failed to help, I turned to fierce and unfair scrutiny on the response of the school: were these gifted but beleaguered human beings, who were in shock and mourning themselves, doing the "right" things in response? I called other mothers. Other mothers called me. I sent emails. I left voice mail messages. I am so sorry I did that. It didn't help one bit and I made the pressure on them even worse.

In between all of this flailing around, I kept checking back in with Luke and Matt, each dealing with this in their own way. They both, at eighteen and sixteen, have made it very clear that there's only so much time and direct attention they want from Kevin and me about this. So, finally, at the end of the week, I'd run out of places to hide from these facts: it happened, I can't change that; I have only minimal influence over how it affects other people, even those I love most; and I've got a whole lot of miserable feelings about all of these facts.

I will run pretty far and wide to avoid feeling like this. My usual tricks are no match. My usual tricks are just that - tricks.

I wasn't sure if I was going to take any of this down to the Zen Center itself. From the first moment I walked in there, circumstances threw me together with Shingetsu over and over again. There was an easy, informal, personal rapport made much easier for me by her enthusiasm about what I'm trying to do with The Heathen. I felt like she got it and me. Add that I was already seeing her every week to work on the precepts because ZCLA only offers its official precept course (something you need to complete before you can "take the precepts") during the time of our annual family trip, and it just seemed natural I'd talk to her about it. But, Roshi?

I'd actually backed off from going to face-to-face meetings with Roshi because I had no idea what to say, what to ask, when I went in there. Oh, it wasn't for lack of questions but there are always so many people in line it all seemed too intense and too short. No one question seemed quite worth placing before cross-legged cleric in the quiet room in half-light. So, when I occasionally got up the guts to go in, I usually ended up asking something tiny or "manageable," which Roshi would inevitably call me on. Then I'd think she was looking at me like I'm an idiot which, of course, she wasn't, but that's what I convinced myself I saw in her eyes which, even while I was thinking it, I knew wasn't true but it didn't matter because I had no idea how to stop doing it and besides it was all a little off because I'm writing about this so was I really "there?" Should I really be there? etc etc etc... You get the scrambled up picture. So I decided to stop going for a while until I got untangled some.

But I woke up this Sunday morning and I couldn't think what else to do. I got in the car and drove down to ZCLA. I got there in time for the short service that starts Sunday morning's schedule - The Gate of Sweet Nectar - which is the service that commemorates the end of the week. At ZCLA, people bring a donation of food or a toy that's put on the altar and there's a lot of singing and chanting that speaks directly to the suffering of all, much of it is along these lines:

Calling all you hungry spirits,
all you lost and left behind,
gather round and share this meal.
Your joys and sorrows,
I make them mine.

After, everyone walks in a line to the zendo and sits in silence for two half-hour sessions during which you can go have a face-to-face with Roshi. Roshi then gives an hour-long talk followed by lunch.

I planned to stay only for one of the half hour sessions. I stayed for both and, when it came time for anyone who wanted to talk to Roshi to line up, I got in the line.

There is no question people-- forget "people" -- there is no question I want some kind of answers to the mysteries of life and death, evil and pain and suffering...and that many people find answers (or maybe just solace) in their faith. My mom and dad think it's like turning to fairytales to make yourself feel better. They think it's kind of pathetic and, even, weak.

What's becoming clear to me is each faith has different ways of dealing with pain and suffering. Buddhism puts that issue front and center. The historical Buddha, Siddartha Gautama, was a prince who gave up everything in his drive to understand why people suffer. After putting himself through every religious practice of his day, he finally resolved to sit until he understood suffering. The result? The Four Noble Truths:

1) Dukka - which some translate as suffering. Huston Smith says Buddha meant even more than what we conventionally see as suffering. Smith says it "names the pain that to some degree colors all finite existence." "Life is dislocated."

2) Tanha/Samudaya - The cause of this suffering is desire which Huston Smith says is, more precisely, the desire "for private fulfillment."

3) The Third Noble Truth says that the cure for suffering is to overcome selfish desires. Huston Smith phrases it this way: "If we could be released from the narrow limits of self-interest... we would be relieved of our torment."

4) The Fourth Noble Truth describes how to do that, how to work towards alleviating suffering. The "how" is the Eightfold Path, the practice we know as Buddhism.

All that's great to read about but what does it really mean when you're in it, inside the beast itself?

I sat in line on my cushion just like you sit in the zendo, meditating, eyes almost closed, counting my breath, one to ten and then back to one again, back to one again every time I caught my mind wandering off. It wanders off a lot. It sometimes takes me quite a long time to notice that.

Roshi signaled for the next person to come in by ringing a small bell in her room. When it's your turn, you have to answer her bell by tapping an iron bell hanging on a low stand twice with a thick wooden mallet made of a smooth gnarl of wood. Those gongs let her know you're coming down the short hall. I didn't know what I was going to say but, as the person before me bowed out of the room, a cartoon-like image popped into my head of a squirreled-up ball of energy, reaction, anger and activity, floating high in the air over a barely undulating golden brown, well, hum almost. So I walked in, bowed, and told her about it.

She was quiet.

When you go in to a face-to-face meeting in the zen tradition, the teacher doesn't look at you most of the time. They sit in pretty close to the same posture as in meditation, with their eyes down.

I continued. "I feel like that ball is me, what I normally do, most of the time. But it's not working. Not with this. " I told her I had been able to sit some but I kept thinking there was something I was supposed to be doing, at least to help my children but I was at a loss as to what that was.

She nodded and looked up. Her face was as warm and open as I'd ever seen it in any face-to-face I'd had with her. "Hearts are breaking everywhere because of Lily's death. And there is no way of knowing what this will become, what will come from this. So we sit, really sit, fully present for what is. "

"But I hate what is. And there's literally nothing, nothing I can do about it. Nothing."

"We can only start where we are. Here. Now. By being fully present, by feeling what we feel."

"I'm not sure what that means. And I'm afraid that, even if I did, even if I could just 'feel what I feel,' I would end up not being able to do anything, to help anyone, to be of service to my children or anyone else."

"You know how much damage is done by people avoiding what they feel? Mmmm?" She looked right at me for a painful moment. "It's only from that place of just being fully present for what is, that the right actions arise."

For the first time something about this made some sense. Perhaps it takes something this horrific to show us just how futile it is to try to work around what is and what you're feeling about what is. I have no idea anymore what the right actions are because, much as I'm desperate for something, anything to DO, there is simply nothing to be done.

So what is true? What is?

I don't know.

And I feel what I feel about that.

And hating those facts does nothing more than make the pain worse.

In the talk about practice that followed, someone asked how they could tell the difference between feeling feelings and wallowing in them. My question, my fear, precisely.

The answer from one of the other priests? "You feel feelings in your body. 'Wallowing' is when you start making stories up about them in your head." Stories like obsessing on the faults and errors of anyone involved before, during and after, for example.

Just knowing, really knowing, that there is nothing to be done right now, except to sit with these devastating feelings, helped. Some.

Monastic retreat: arriving

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

Master Hsing Yun
Buddhism, Pure and Simple

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Okay. No looking.

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

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

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

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




7 July 2007


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

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

While waiting for the swami....

In the Kumbha Mela program, Swami Sarvadevananda was identified as representing something called the Vedanta Society. Professor Chapple had told me this branch of Hinduism was the first to have real impact in the United States. With a call, I found out that Swami Sarvadevananda was out of town for a couple of weeks. I found my teacher – at least I hope I have – but I'm going to have to wait to actually meet him.

In the years I’d spent stewing about this project, I’d decided I should explore the faiths in related pairs, hoping that I might understand each more deeply by coming to understand both what they shared and how they differed, in theology and in practice. Given that Buddhism developed, essentially, as protestant Hinduism – so much so that academics, in fact, refer to it as non-orthodox Hinduism – I thought I should find out more about it while waiting for Swami Sarvadevananda to return.

Going into this, I had just one book on Buddhism: a bright orange book called The Teaching of the Buddha that my husband, Kevin, had found in a hotel room somewhere.

Are you supposed to take Bibles and other sacred texts left in hotel rooms? I kind of don't think so... I think stealing is another big no-no across all religions, yet another thing to feel bad about.

I figured this stolen property was as good place to begin as any and, on the very first page, I found a symbol of a wheel like the one Peter Patel was talking about when I first walked in to the Hindu mandir in Whittier, a wheel with spokes, but it was the symbol of Buddhism, not Hinduism.

It was no accident. Buddhism started near India in what is now Nepal. The original Buddha, Siddartha Gautama of the Sakyas, (563 B.C.- 483 B.C.) was actually a Hindu who began his spiritual journey by first going deeper into Hinduism just as Christianity wasn’t started by someone who declared himself a creator of a new faith but by someone wanting to deepen his own - Judaism.

I had two weeks to kill so I thought I'd use the time to check out the two Buddhist temples I knew about so that, when it came time to study Buddhism, I’d know where to go: the Wat Thai Buddhist temple in North Hollywood or the Chinese Hsi Lai Temple in Hacienda Heights.

I’d been to the Thai temple because they had an open-air food market on Sundays and I’d seen, through the wide-open doors of the tall temple, monks in orange cloth, sitting on bright cushions around the sides of the temple, available to anyone who wanted to chat. However, when I went to its website, there was very little information in English and the only classes offered were Thai language classes.

At the Hsi Lai Temple, on the other hand, where I’d been as a chaperone for one of Matt's school field trips when he was in seventh grade, they offered regular Buddhism classes as well as meditation and chanting in English, making it an easier place to get started. The one substantive difference I got from the temples’ websites, in addition to the languages of the services, was that the Wat Thai Temple practiced Theravada Buddhism, a form which has “changed no teachings laid down by Buddha.” This brand of Buddhism is primarily practiced in Thailand, Cambodia, India, Laos, Burma, Sri Lanka, etc. The Hsi Lai temple website said it followed the Rinzai Ch'an (Zen) school of Buddhism as well as the Pure Land school and its headquarters was in Taiwan. None of it meant a thing to me. But Hsi Lai had classes. On Buddhism and meditation. That Sunday. In English.

It was odd to drive up a dry hill, past houses too new to have developed character, take two quick turns off the road and find an elaborate, full-on Chinese temple and monastery, yellow roof dragons and all. Steep staircases led up to a grand entrance hall and, once I walked through it, around what looked like a devotional wall, I was outside in an upward-sloping, open courtyard. The main shrine was on the far side of the grand sqaure with well-tended gardens and covered walkways. When I got directions to the temple from the website, it said Hsi Lai literally means “Coming West.”



It was kind of great to stand in such an exotic place with little more than a half-hour drive from my house but it was kind of intimidating, too. You have to have a lot of faithful followers to build something like this.

I finally noticed a small sign taped to a wooden stand which pointed the way to another stand and then another which finally led to two classrooms - one for beginners and the other for people who knew something. You know which one I walked into.

Instead of a chalkboard up front, there was a plain altar of blond wood with a small brass Buddha statue. A United Nations of about twenty people took up most of the desks in the room while two interpreters for the deaf sat on the right side translating for a few people who needed their services.

A small, well, nun, I guess she'd be called, came to the front and took the microphone. The schedule said she was the Venerable Jue Qian. I don’t know what surprised me more – the fact that she thought she needed a microphone in a room this size or her appearance. She was young. Very young. She could have been thirty but maybe not. Her head was shaved, her clothing and glasses, basic. And, she was quirky. She began the class in an oddly intimate way. “Good morning. It’s a very nice day today. Still a little bit cold for me. Ever since I moved from Singapore, lips is dry, skin is dry, nose is dry and I realize that my body has not gotten used to being here. Does anybody have any suggestions about this?”

What followed was a sweet interchange of suggestions about how to adjust to the dry desert air and about how much water was, indeed, “enough.”

“Okay, before we start, any questions?”

A square-faced white man raised his hand. “I was with some people who said they were Buddhists who told me of a ceremony where you scrape out the insides of a wooden Buddha, consecrate it with fire, and then fill the insides with gems and money. I’ve never heard about anything like this before. Do you know what they were talking about?”

The nun paused for a moment, then brought the microphone back up to her mouth. “I have heard of some people who say they are followers of certain sects who say that they are the ‘reincarnation of such-and-such- a thing.’ Or, ‘I have a special achievement of such-and-such-a thing and now I have special ritual ceremony’ or ‘I am able to see your past and future’ and a lot of people believe in them. And they ask, ‘In order to have a special Buddha statue to have supernatural power, I need diamond, I need gold in order to make it very grand and, please, give me money, give me diamond.’ You have to decide whether this is okay for you or not. We never ask devotees for money. We never ask for anything. It must come from the heart of the giver. So what I’m trying to say is: in Buddhism we always talk about simplicity, how to make things as simple as possible.”

She continued, “People say you shouldn’t judge your teacher. No. This is wrong. You have to judge your teacher, whether (you think) your teacher is telling you this thing for her, for this teacher’s benefit, or for the benefit of the students. Some teachers just teach for the benefit of themselves or their temple.”

I don’t know why but every time someone in robes says it’s up to me to choose what to think I breathe easier.

The square-faced man had another question. “What’s the difference between a lama and a rinpoche?”

“A lama can’t marry, like the Dalai Lama. But say you want to have relations with another person. Then you are rinpoche, you can marry. However, we follow the practice like in India. In India they have a concept: as a human being there are four stages of life. And the last stage you live apart, apart from the family members to practice as lay people. So this is the practice in India and it is brought into some of the practice of Buddhism. We have Mahayana, we have Theravada, we have Chinese, we have Thailand, Korea, Japan, la-da-da-da. Mahayana, Theravada is the earliest. And the Tibetan Buddhism is the latest and it is a mixture of religions in Tibet. Lots of rituals. Lots of dancing, lots of offerings. When Buddhism go into certain countries it will change. It will change according to the culture, according to the people of that country. I am not surprised that in a hundred years, if I haven’t died yet, I will see that in American there will be a Western Buddhism. Right now, Buddhism in the United States, in Europe, in England, is still not considered western Buddhism. It’s very, very strong influence of Chinese or Tibetan or Thai.”

But the Venerable Jue wanted to be very sure we got the message. “You have to judge. I even tell the devotees here not to do whatever we say. Even they need to judge us. Even monastics, we have our bad habit. We are still human. We still have emotion. We still get sick. I still dislike about the weather. If I’d already achieved, I wouldn’t feel anything about the weather.”

The group laughed and the small nun smiled, pleased. “Only difference, I just have the courage to shave off my hair, to live a simple life.”

No one else has raised their hand so the same man asked yet another question. “When the Dalai Lama says he’s going to reincarnate as the Dalai Lama isn’t that really the ultimate attachment?”

Like Hinduism, Buddhists believe in reincarnation. Attachment to things, to others, to life itself, was considered the main source of suffering and the principal goal of Buddhism was to relieve suffering, your own and others.

The nun scanned the room, looking from face to face. “Anyone have any idea, anything to say to this before I answer?”

One student answered, “The Dalai Lama is coming back to relieve the suffering of all sentient beings.”

The nun’s face didn’t let on what she thought of that answer. She said, “Everybody heard of Bodhisatva before? Bodhisatvas in the Lotus Sutra mention about one thing: the beings refused to achieve Buddhahood. You know why?”

A dark-haired woman in the back volunteered, “They keep coming back until every sentient being is saved.”

“Correct. The Bodhisatva have great compassion because they are doing something that is very difficult to achieve.” Meaning, liberating every last sentient being. And that liberation comes, in part, from getting rid of the attachments that cause suffering. “You can test whether you have achieved the concept of emptiness, of non-attachment. Somebody scolds you. Criticize you. If you have no mind of angry, not even a single thought. Not even ‘I forgive him,’ that sentence never arise. It’s just like words coming in and words coming out. It’s the time that we let go on the spot. We heard it, we feel it, but we let go immediately.”

Okay, so attachment leads to suffering. The goal is to give up all attachments so there will be no more suffering. Does that mean I'm not supposed to feel attachment to Kevin? To my children? You bet my attachment to them causes me to suffer. When Matt or Luke scrape their knees, my knees hurt; my knees actually hurt right now just remembering them scraping their knees. I don't think I want to give up that kind of suffering but I guess there are other kinds I could definitely live without if I could just figure out how, like how attached and worried I am about what other people think of me. That suffering I could do without. I mean, it's the reason it's taken me two years to actually put this stuff up on a blog. Every time I thought about doing it I imagined one person's and then another's reaction - all hideously and personally critical, or course.

And what's this “no mind of angry?” I’ve been married more than two decades. I’ve worked in an office. I have teenage children. Let’s just say: I “suffer” from anger. And, yes, I have to admit: I am attached to my idea of what I want to happen. Well, plans require goals, don't they?

“When even a single thought arises that ‘I forgive him,’ that is still an attachment. This is the most highest stage of practice. Very, very difficult.” You bet. I still consider it a major triumph when I can have that "I forgive him" thought arising.

In the class, people started asking all those questions that, for some reason drive me nuts, questions like where, specifically, souls are when they were between incarnations. How can anyone, even someone wearing robes, talk with great specificity about the unknowable? The specific location or state of souls between lives: there are no end of essays, theories, films, novels and plays that could be spun off those words in the effort to come to grips with that question. And every one of them would be about as real to me as a white bearded guy on a cloud. I imagined standing up, shouting: “Why ask such questions? Why put a monastic into a corner demanding the details, the description of a photograph that doesn’t exist?” How could that question have any meaning anyway, stuck as it is in our limited concept of space and time and concrete, physical reality? Emerging from the struggle to move beyond the senses, I can accept that I don't know everything or even very much so that it's entirely possible that there's more to existence than what I can touch, taste, see, hear and feel. I might even be able to go as far as entertaining the idea that this “something” is, in part or in its entirety, related to each of us in some way. But the idea of asking for a description of where that “it” is when we aren't alive feels like asking if fish could wear plaid pants.

Well, they could, couldn’t they? In theory.

But I suppose I have to accept that my conviction that there might be some underlying unseen force – or Force - could be just as absurd to someone else as questions like these felt to me.
Most Hindus would probably argue that there was no difference between a bearded guy in long white robes and a detailed theory of multiple lives or even Swami Sarvadevananda’s ocean metaphor, so long as it helps you feel connected to the Divine. So, what possible difference should it make to me if it works for someone else?

Aren’t we’re all just slogging around in a black bag, trying to feel around, feel shapes, smell through the fabric to get something our brains, our hearts can hang onto that might give us some faith that there’s a good reason we’re in this bag in the first place? For me, I want to know how to live a happier life in the bag and, perhaps, if there’s something I might be able to do for others nestled around me in the bag that might be of some help. Even more, I want to find out if it’s possible to shred the bag to see what’s out “there.” What I can't get is: why ask for promises and concrete descriptions about what’s outside of the bag from someone else who’s in it, too?
And what on earth do rituals have to do with any of it?

As I type this I hear that Gilda Radner character on Saturday Night Live, Roseanne Rosannadanna saying, “Mrs KD from Fort Lee, New Jersey, you ask alotta stupid questchuns!”
If this is how I feel, then how on earth am I ever going to find any answers, any peace in ritual? How did these things come to be related to the quest for meaning? Until now, I’ve led a pretty ritual-free existence. Thanksgiving. Christmas. Big life events like weddings and funerals.

I guess I actually do have some everyday rituals but they don’t involve bowing down to or before or even near any specific icon. I light a candle in my office when I start work and blow it out when I finish. I don’t know why I do it or how it got started but I do it. I clean my small rented workspace myself, waving off the cleaning crew that was offered when I moved in. I get some peace in supporting my work this way. And I never start to write without reading some of the sacred literature that's flooding into my office. I read until that small inner bell chimes with recognition at some passage and then I sit, as empty as I can, meditating for a while. Those are my rituals. More than that feels false. Will I ever feel differently?

The Venerable Jue was looking through her thick glasses from one side of the room to the other. “Ever think about if the Buddha was so powerful, why couldn’t he make himself live forever? Why couldn’t he stay in this world forever so he could keep on teaching? Any comments on that?” The original Buddha was an actual historical figure who lived in India around the fifth century BCE.

The square-faced man stepped in to the vacuum again. “My understanding is that his Buddhahood goes on but it needs to be directed to another body because bodies wear out.”

The middle-aged woman next to him added, “I agree with what Dave said but is it also that, since he is only here with us for a lifetime, for so many years, people will listen. It’s not going to last forever, so listen up?”

The nun then launched into the story of Buddha’s death. “We have many precepts as monastics. One of them is: anybody offer something to us, we have to take it. That’s why even the monks in Thailand, you offer them meat (even though they’re vegetarian), they will take it. This is the true practice of the Buddhist monk.

“So, someone offered a mushroom to Buddha when he was eighty years old and, because of some poison in the mushroom, he got sick. His body was getting weaker and weaker. He knew it’s time for him to say goodbye. A disciple said to him: ‘Can’t you just live on?’ Buddha said one thing: ‘In my teachings, I teach about suffering and I mention about birth and death, that this is the truth of this universe. Nobody can change it. Nobody can escape it. Not even me.’”

But, Venerable Jue said, the Buddha was never really dead because we all remember him, his words and his spirit. “There is no come and there is no go. We’re all very attached to come and go, that something come here and something go there. But to Buddha, there is no come and no go. There’s no yes and there’s no no.”

There's just nothing for me to do with that statement, at the moment, except to report it. Even just typing it, I feel ahort-circuit coming on.

The Venerable Jue Qian spent a lot of time talking about “cause” and “condition.” She said, “This is very important in Buddhism. Even in a temple, no one will stand up and teach without first being asked a question. In Buddhism we always say: ‘cause and condition’, there must be a cause for this condition to arise. This is very important in Buddhism. Everything leads to another thing. It’s a circle. No action, no being can come from nothing and it takes the right condition for it to happen. This means we are all connected and there is no way we can take an action without affecting others or others affecting us. But there must be cause and condition. If plant seeds when no water, the condition of the soil wasn’t right to grow a plant. If soil fertile and ready to grow a plant but no cause, no seed - no plant. Need both things. Need a willing student before anything can be taught.”

Other than the interpreters for the deaf who took over for each other from time to time, the students were still, listening.

“There are so many temples, so many churches around here. How come you are here today, at this one? Why are you here and yet there are so many people haven’t even thought of coming in here? That’s not my answer. I can’t answer for you. That’s your answer.”

My answer is simple, isn’t it? Mark's class trip came here so it was a place I knew and there were classes in English. Okay, maybe it was a bit more complicated since, without the determination to find out more about faith, about different faiths, it wouldn’t have mattered where Matt’s class trip went or in what language Hsi Lai’s Buddhism classes were taught. I guess my "cause" was my desire to understand Buddhism and the "condition" that allowed it were the classes the Hsi Lai temple offered in English – without either I wouldn’t have been in that classroom.

Wrapping up the class with a few announcements, Venerable Jue held up a few flyers. The first was for a Thanksgiving potluck lunch. Both concepts – what a “potluck” was and Thanksgiving - were new to her. “I don’t know what’s this, this ‘potluck’," she said. “I just know Thanksgiving and I never have a chance to see this Thanksgiving. This will be my first time.”

A woman in the class said, “A pot luck is where people bring food and you eat whatever you bring.”

“So we will share the food together? Oh!”

The woman also tried to explain Thanksgiving. “Do you know what the origination of Thanksgiving is?”

“No. Can I get it on the internet?”

Many people pitched in to explain the history and purpose of Thanksgiving to her, stumbling to the realization that, in a strictly vegetarian temple, there could be no actual turkey.

The Venerable Jue was surprised to hear there could be a substitute. “Tofu turkey? Really? They have that here? I never saw before. I will be very, very interested to see it! I saw a picture on the internet when I was in Taiwan of tofu turkey.”

The next flyer was for a class the temple was just starting and the nun made a strong pitch for it. It seemed the temple administration had noticed that there was considerable confusion on the part of Americans about some of the rituals and the temple decided to try to help. “Why do we have to chant the sutra so many times. The sutra is like the teachings of the Bible. Like in the Bible it says that ‘Jesus say da-da-da-da-da-da.’ The sutra is like that. Chanting is the time when peace really come to our mind and to really have a time when we ourselves touch the Buddha, when we communicate with the Buddha. I encourage all of you to take this class. We never ask the devotees to be very diligent with memorizing the sutra. So that’s the reason why for the dharma function. Reverend will introduce the dharma function and why there are so many dharma function and why do we need to make prostration. I realize something about why people here don’t like making prostration. Indians are very small and tiny. Chinese are also small and tiny. Prostration is more easy for us. I realized that most of our western friends are very huge. So, it’s not because of our practice but because of our mat. Our mat is so small!”

The class couldn’t believe what she was saying. The laughter was nervous. Could we have misunderstood her accented English?

We hadn’t. “So,” Venerable Jue concluded, “that’s the reason if I have chance to become an abbess here I will make a bigger mat. That is my vow!”

A middle-aged woman with dark hair in the back said she did prostration by herself in the temple when people weren’t so close to her but then square-faced Dave-of-a-thousand-questions chimed in again. “I don’t know when to do the prostrations. Everybody’s down and I’m up and I’m down when they’re up.”

What an absurd set of reactions I’d had to poor “Dave,” a man I’d never seen before that class. At first, there was gratitude that at least someone was asking questions when I didn’t know what to ask followed, in a trice, by frustration that he was asking so many questions, so many questions that irritated me and now this: I could kiss him. “Everybody’s down and I’m up and I’m down when they’re up.”

Me, too, Dave. Those of us who didn’t know what to do find it easier just to sit and watch rather than get caught in the wrong place at the wrong time or worry that we might. And it was pretty clear Dave and I weren’t the only ones in the room who felt that way.

With that, the Buddhism class was over, I grabbed one of every flyer at the back of the room – including one about something called an 8 Precept Retreat – and then walked up the hill with most of the others to a building behind the temple for the meditation class.

The meditation room had a gray marble floor and a wide wood bench built-in against all the walls with individual seats marked by wood strips. At each, there was already a stack of two flat cushions, one square, the other a narrow rectangle and, beside the pillows, a tightly rolled towel. A statue of Buddha was in the center of the room, lit only by the shaded light that came in through the wide open doors.

A squat, no nonsense elderly nun herded every new person into a corner to give us a few tips before the meditation began. She told us how to sit: on top of the narrow rectangular pillow with one foot up over the other knee or both, if possible. “Protects the back.” After you sit, “rotate around in both directions” to get the most comfortable place to sit and put a towel over your legs. You “get cold when you meditate.” Let your arms fall into your lap, both palms up, one hand resting in the other palm, thumbs together. Sit. “Concentrate on breath.”

Men were on one side of room, women on other so “nothing interferes with empty mind.” Seems to me if your mind was going to get disturbed by members of the opposite sex, it would be far less disturbing to have them right next to you rather than across the room where you can easily see them. Or in another room. And isn't the point to get to a place where it wouldn’t matter if there were other people around you at all?

We then sat for twenty minutes in complete silence, followed by a short break and then another twenty minutes. It was really hard. I could sit for twenty minutes alone in my room but something about being in a new place or maybe it was I'd just come from a class where my mind was filled with new thoughts and ideas but I couldn't quiet my mind in any way.

When it ended, the elderly nun unfolded herself, rotating her ankles, rubbing the blood back into her legs and then, after asking if we found it hard, she squinched her glasses back up her nose a bit and said, “Man was digging a hole in the road. He said, ‘Life is hard.’ Another man, digging a hole in the road, said, ‘This is hard but I do it for a pay check.’ Another man digging a hole in the road is smiling. ‘I’m thinking about all the people who will arrive safely home because of the work I am doing.’ Meditation is like that. It may hurt. You may be doing it just to get something. Only you truly know what you experience. But you get out what you contribute to meditation. There is no substitute for experiencing it yourself.”

Now, that, I know is true. There is no substitute for experiencing any of this for myself.


(24 September 2006)