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

Bike Riding

The soul...in its very essence, is free, unbounded,
holy, pure and perfect. But somehow or other it
finds itself tied down to matter, and thinks of
itself as matter. It is a fact of everybody’s consciousness
that one thinks of oneself as the body.

Swami Vivekandanda
The Chicago Addresses

(Swami Vivekanada, an excerpt from his opening remarks, the first World Parliament of Religions, 1893)

(Swami Vivekanada, an excerpt from "Why We Disagree", the first World Parliament of Religions, 1893)

Waking up to the first really cool Saturday, I decided to throw my bike in the back of the van to ride while Matt was in his three-hour theater class.

It was perfectly clear. The mountains that sit at the edge of the valley were plain, their features distinct: crags, trees, a ruffle of houses around their bases. The air slipped by my neck, my cheeks, my hair, and made the translucent yellow wind-breaker slick close to the front of my arms but sound like a sail behind. I rarely get on a bike without remembering how it felt to ride one when I was eight, a surge of power and independence, imagining that my bike was a car that could go anywhere I wanted.

No wonder I’m afraid to age, afraid to die. I like my body. I like having one. I like having this one. Sure, it’s had its share of defects: two lazy eyes that had to be surgically corrected when I was just two, some illnesses, but not many. And it heals quickly. After all, isn’t that the real miracle? Not that we get sick, but that, with all of these complicated interlocking systems that seem pretty fragile, we spend so much of our lives healthy?

And then, oh, those sensations…the touch, the smell, the taste, the beauty that seems to land like thunder deep inside; the sounds of tires humming, of a bird at dawn, of a tune played for the ninety-ninth time; the smell of my husband’s skin, of my sleepy cat’s fur; the slip of silk against skin, the cold of water in my throat, the fuzzy-soft of the pink angora sweater my grandmother used to wear, the squirm in my sons’ bodies when I tickled them. When I was still allowed to tickle them.

Yes, I am attached to this body. Very.

That these profound joys will become increasingly elusive and, finally, gone, is terrifying. I don’t remember anyone touching my grandmother in the years before she died except to help move her between the wheelchair and the bed and back. Accidental touching. No more touching with intent, with recognition, with communion.

I mean, I still have the same car I bought new in 1995 and I put every single one of its 130,000-plus miles on it. I don’t want a new car or a new body. I like this one. Its flaws are familiar, its resilience known.

But, whether I want or don’t want, whether I resist or accept, I know my car will not work one day. I’m not going to have a choice. It’s just going to be too expensive to fix one day. But the metaphor Swami Sarvadevananda uses doesn’t help that much. I’m not sure that the “I” that drives the next body, the next car, is the same “I” that’s in this one. As deeply pleasant as it sounds, the notion of personal reincarnation, of getting a body back (and, if you do a good job in this life, a better one in the next!) I simply can’t reconcile with Swami Sarvadevananda’s ocean metaphor – that we’re like ripples on a single ocean, rising up for a lifetime and then fading back in to the whole -- which does feel possibly true to me.

If we are like waves on the ocean, bits of the Absolute that rise up into form for the flash of a lifetime and then return to that of which we are made, then doesn’t it make more sense that it isn’t that I, Marley, would be reincarnated again, personally or specifically, but the root essence underlying each and every one of us – God, if you will – that “reappears?” I mean, even if you stick with science, you have to admit that the raw material we’re made of certainly reappears in other forms. But the idea of the me I think of, the me who likes drugstore marshmallow eggs and watered down orange juice, coming back again? That feels like pure wishful vanity. But I have a Swami now to ask such questions.

It was time to head back to pick up Matt so I headed out of the park, off the bike path and onto surface streets leading back to the studio where his class was. I’m still new to bike shoes with clips on the bottom so, at a major intersection, I squeezed the handlebar brake levers to stop at the red light and then, in slow motion, feet still stuck to my pedals, I fell over to one side like a cartoon character. The skin tore off the knee that caught me, my other shin got whacked black-and-blue by the handlebars.

Okay, maybe there are some sensations I can live - or die - without. Or maybe the key is to get to a place where it’s possible to feel that the sensuous and the painful, the ‘good’ and the ‘bad’ are equal, the same, no different; to not get too attached to either as neither one is permanent, eternal, meaningful.

But I have a confession: I’d rather have a skinned knee and contusions than nothing. I guess, by Hinduism’s terms, I have a few more lifetimes ahead of me.


(30 September 2006)

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)