Eyes closed in contemplation,

she traces the trajectory,

feels arrow alight in target.

Success!  Power!  Ah, the joy!

What a crap last line to that poem!  It sucks the air right out.  I could envision  Donald Trump making such a comment.  It’s like the arrow hitting dead center in the wrong target.

“There are, of course, many ways to act compassionately toward others.  The discipline of Buddhism includes both practice for oneself and practice for others, with the idea that giving others the means to continually enhance their own capacity to overcome misery and become absolutely happy is the ultimate compassionate act.

“We chant for the happiness of others.  We teach others how to chant.  And we study Buddhism together, those more experienced sharing their knowledge and insights – and, in turn, having their practice refreshed by the realizations of new comers.  We continually work to expand our ability to create harmony with others in all our environment – among family, friends, coworkers, neighbors and so on.

“Fulfillment arises from recognizing this mission of helping others realize their potential and from exerting oneself to make it a reality.  Living without compassion is a shallow existence.  The Bodhisattva way, the path of helping others, is the certain path to absolute happiness.”  Hochswender, Woody, Greg Martin, and Ted Morino.  The Buddha in Your Mirror: Practical Buddhism and the Search for Self.  Middleway Press, 606 Wilshire Blvd., Santa Monica, CA 90401.  2001.  Pp 118-119.

No.  No.  No.  No!  This passage about the Way of the Bodhisattva misses the mark.  It misses the target and just tunnels into the grass where, one hopes, it will not be found again.

Yesterday Babs volunteered to go help two friends who had furniture arriving.  We had visited our friends two days ago and heard the news that the furniture was on its way.  One of our friends had lined up younger members of her family to help shift things around after the movers had delivered the boxes and furniture.  So Babs called the lady late in the evening to see how the delivery had gone.  It hadn’t.  The moving van was snarled up in snow storms and road traffic.  It would arrive the next morning (the “yesterday” in this story).  Babs, of course, volunteered to come up in the morning to help because the family members would be at work.  We went to help our friends yesterday.  As the day wore on order grew out of the chaos that naturally happens when one gets rid of some possessions and replaces them with other things.  Clothes got sorted into the proper drawers.  TV sets got hooked up.  Boxes stacked in the garage got re-stacked in groups of similar items.  And our friend who was feeling overwhelmed at the prospect of doing all the work by herself heaved a sigh of relief.  She was over the top of the heap of confusion and could see daylight again.

I think Babs’ spontaneous and natural response while talking with our friend is a really good example of something my guru used to teach.  He made a great distinction between “trying to be kind” and just “being kind”.  It has always taken me a lot of effort to see this distinction.  Babs, on the other hand, doesn’t need to worry about such a distinction.  She is kind.  She doesn’t have to try.

As I was reading the Buddha in Your Mirror and ran across the passage I quoted above, it struck me that what the authors were proposing is the kind of worthy goal one hears about in business programs.  Use your product.  Learn to love it.  Then, get out there and sell the product.  If you love the product, how can others not love it?  OK, I’m being facetious here.  The authors mean well.  They mean to encourage Nichiren Buddhists to chant not just for their own spiritual progress but for the happiness of others so that these others may in their turn become Nichiren Buddhists.

Yet what the authors inadvertently advocate is building an attachment.  Sure it is an attachment to a positive activity, chanting for other’s happiness and edification.  But it is still an attachment to outcome, “absolute happiness”.  It’s still trying to act the way a Bodhisattva  acts rather than just being a Bodhisattva.

Contrast that kind of activity with Babs’ spontaneous offering of help.  In essence, she responded to a friend’s need for no purpose other than to be of aid.

Perhaps the authors would have been closer to the mark if they had worded the last sentence in the quote a bit differently.  What would the reader get if the sentence read, “The Bodhisattva way, the path of helping others, is a beautiful path to being in this life.”

And as for rewriting things that miss their target, let’s go back to that opening poem.  If the writer (me) was writing about the process of spiritual visualization, then that last line has got to go. 

I wasn’t.

Jue ju verse: curtailed poem,

Four lines, seven syllables,

Tells no story, creates mood.

The universe in a mustard seed – more or less.

Last week I decided to pull out all of the jue ju poems I’ve used at the beginning of these blog entries.  I wanted to look at them as stand alone poems.

Now, I have a friend who is a really accomplished poet.  Even though we haven’t written each other in a long time, I decided to get her comments.  So I emailed her the whole lot.  No message other than “Hi” along with the poems.  (Well, I didn’t want to prejudice her response, did I?)  The next morning I had back her response, a lovely and poetic improvisation on the winter morning at her house. 

Crossed communication.  No helpful commentary regarding my short poems.

On further reflection, however, I realized she had given me some insightful constructive criticism.  For one thing she showed me what a skilled poet could do extemporaneously.  More to my needs, she told me, in effect, that critiquing my poems was my own business.  It was a tough love lesson for me as a would-be poet.

We have all had experience with crossed communications.  Last Thursday at the Joliet Buddhist meditation evening, we had a discussion of how attachment (suffering) arises in one’s mind.  We pieced it out of our own experiences and the thoughts of a Theravadan Buddhist monk in the area.  We got it pretty clear that suffering begins at that moment when one attaches to a desired interpretation of reality or a desired outcome in a situation.  We settled in to meditate where upon one of the participants opined that she wished Chicago were San Francisco.  San Francisco had beautiful weather, exciting views, and real curb appeal.  Chicago had cold, grey weather, was flat, and sprawled all over.  Hmm.  Maybe we should have spent more time defining what attachment was as well as why suffering came from attachment and less time theorizing about the insufferable workings of the human mind.  Crossed communication.  It occurred because those who were exploring the Theravadan concepts and how it explained times of suffering in their own lives really weren’t paying attention to the other meditators who, in hind sight, had other needs, other questions to be answered. 

Of course, one could brush it off and say that those others should have jumped into the discussion, asked their own questions, and helped to redirect the conversation so as to meet their needs as well.  But, that’s not what happens when talking about something comes across as highly theoretical, when the discussion seems to be among the intelligentsia.  What does happen is that the conversation becomes limited to the few who are ready to discourse about theory.  The rest become excluded, become members of the unwashed masses.

As a would-be poet, I fit into that great mass of the unwashed.  When I wrote to my friend, I didn’t know what to ask, and I just flooded her with a bunch of unrelated jue ju poems.  Fortunately, she tossed them back to me without comment.

So I downloaded as much as I could find from the Internet.  Definitions of jue ju poetry. How to translate jue ju poems into Spanish and English.  Jue ju poems found on the walls of an American prison in which Chinese immigrants had been incarcerated.

And I have sent a couple to Poetry Magazine.  Let’s see what happens. 

This is one of the ones I sent:

Finger opens my email --

empty today too of you

save your smile in memory --

and hovers above delete.

It is said Chen Rong would soak

his cap in ink, bash it on

paper, and with fine tipped brush,

paint dragons while drunk.

Imagine the film of a walk around a foggy outcropping, each frame unrolling across your view like part of a story.  The mists stir like smoke with light breezes.  Rocks are outlines of a larger, more solid body.  Tree branches swim forth like claws.  A large eye pops open to view you.  There is movement throughout the landscape.

If you are a Westerner, this could be the opening shot sequence of a movie about impending danger, the appearance of magic in dimly perceived landscapes.  If you are an Easterner, this could be the story of the power of insight, the sighting of reality beneath outward appearance.

As I was creating the opening of this blog entry, I had dragons in mind.  Dragons and communication.  Communication and the way we humans are so willing to find an explanation for what we see and so very willing to believe the explanation we invent.  This is my contention: One of the evolutionary strengths of human intelligence is the ability to scan reality for patterns and to extrapolate an explanation for what is observed.  That is helpful to survival.  If a human being can spot black and tan stripes and a flicking tail and if a human being can remember that past experiences indicate the high probability of a tiger, then said average hominid would have a greater chance to get the hell out of the area and live to pass on his/her wisdom to the next generation.  His/Her sons and daughters, having heard the story countless times over many camp fires, would come to believe that tan and black stripes in nature indicated a moment of life/death need for appropriate action.

Wikipedia has this entry on European dragons: “Many European stories of dragons have them guarding a treasure hoard. Both Fafnir and Beowulf's dragon guarded earthen mounds full of ancient treasure. The treasure was cursed and brought ill to those who later possessed it.  Though the Latin is draco, draconis, it has been supposed by some scholars, including John Tanke of the University of Michigan, that the word dragon comes from the Old Norse draugr, which literally means a spirit who guards the burial mound of a king. … Many others assume the word dragon comes from the ancient Greek verb derkesthai, meaning ‘to see’, referring to the dragon's legendarily keen eyesight. In any case, the image of a dragon as a serpent-like creature was already standard at least by the 8th century when Beowulf was written down. Although today we associate dragons almost universally with fire, in medieval legend the creatures were often associated with water, guarding springs or living near or under water.”

For the Easterners among us there is this: “To the man in the street, the dragon was a benevolent and generally auspicious creature, bringer of rain and emblem of the emperor.” (Michael Sullivan.  The Arts of China.  University of California Press, Berkley.  4^th Edition. 1999.  Page 185.)  “Hidden in the caverns of inaccessible mountains or coiled in the unfathomed depths of the sea, he awaits the time when he slowly rouses himself to activity.  He unfolds himself in the storm clouds; he washes his mane in the blackness of the seething whirlpools.  His claws are in the forks of the lightning.  His scales begin to glisten in the bark of rain-swept pine trees.  His voice is heard in the hurricane which, scattering the withered leaves of the forest, and quickens the new spring.  The dragon reveals himself only to vanish.”  (Okakura Kakuzo.  The Awakening of Japan.  n.p., 1905.  P. 77.)  Each definition a wonderful explanation of the dragon. 

I am particularly attracted to Kakuzo’s lovely depiction of the dragon.  It’s a depiction that could only be written after the term dragon had been conceived, elaborated, and believed.  It is the description by an author who was trying to get back to the original cause of the term.  Poetic.  An overlay of metaphors on the merely real.

The emperor – yellow gowned –

calls his heavenly power,

clasps seed and soil in union,

controls the realm with dragon claws.

But, here’s the definition of dragon that frames my contention: “Here be dragons.”  It was the phrase used by medieval map makers to explain what lay just beyond the edges of the known world.  

A fresh wind stirs the mists, swings the tree branches, and dislodges a discarded pie tin, glinting faintly on the hillside.  The tin slides down and comes to rest in another crevice.  The scrolling film unveils more of the outcropping.

Geese graze now on the golf course,

process in ritual steps

in lines along the fairway,

leave shit, and take wing again.

In prasad, does one bring food to the feet of the guru out of devotion or out of gratitude?

I had the good fortune to attend the American Meditation Society’s Thanksgiving meditation retreat for 24 hours last weekend.  I got to enjoy the company of friends I hadn’t seen since the 2004 Thanksgiving retreat.  AMS is the meditation group I have been a part of for some twenty years now.  So chanting and meditating and hanging out with friends was like feasting at the family church.

At supper one of the discussions had to do with attending mediation and spiritual retreats offered by different spiritual masters.  The discussion finally came up with the question, “If the Buddha were here, wouldn’t you go to see him?”  I took that question to mean why wouldn’t one want to be in the presence of a spiritual master.

The next day that question was part of the morning satsang, the spiritual sharing presentation.  Now the lady giving the morning satsang was not guilty of being a proto priestess.  She spoke her own thoughts woven from her experiences at the retreat and from passages taken from Gururaj’s lectures.  While alive, Gururaj quite often described himself as a tour guide.  When he lectured, he taught how one could step onto the spiritual path and how one could move along it.

“Just be your natural self and live in compliance with nature itself, for nature constitutes the entire universe.  You flow with the current.”  “This must be recognized.  Every moment that you live; it's a lesson.”  “Do you see?  Awareness!  Be aware!  And once a certain awareness is developed to a certain degree, then choices come on their own.  You do not need to choose anymore.  You are chosen.  You are the chosen people of Divinity.  Is it not true? That's what all theologies say, nothing new which I'm telling you.”  Gururaj Ananda Yogi.  Audio tape: US‑85043—Being Chosen, Not Choosing.  © American Meditation Society, 1985.

“The secret of life is this: to be involved in the process and yet experience the calmness within.”  “Be involved in the process and yet at total peace and calm and filled with joy all the time.  The ocean cannot exist without its calmness [nor without] its waves.  And so, that is the secret of life – when man can live the process and that which caused the process in this procession of life.  It is very easy.  To find the calmness, it is instantaneous.”  “Be as a child to enter the kingdom of heaven.  Now a child is not encumbered by all the scheming imaginations of the mind.  What this means is that we have to still the mind.  And yet, it is impossible to still the mind, for the mind is a process.  Then what can you do?  What is the answer?  The answer is to go beyond the mind.  To stand above the mind, observe the play of the mind, observe the processes of the mind, observe the likes and dislikes, the loves and the hatreds.  Observe the greed and the lust and the avarice and covetousness.  Observe it.  And, for that you require spiritual strength.  You require that inner force, for in a systematic manner, you take the little conscious mind and gradually step by step you lead it through the highway of the subconscious… to that area of stillness which I term the ‘superconscious’.”  Gururaj Ananda Yogi.  Audio tape: “BC 83-2”.  © Canadian Meditation Society, 1983.

(I have excerpted and edited these two quotes.)

Now the woman giving satsang returned to the dinner table question from the night before.  Pointing to her heart, she asked the question, “If the Buddha were here, wouldn’t you go to see him?”  Pointing to another meditator, she continued, “If the Buddha were here, wouldn’t you go to see him?” 

My reaction to the question was a bit strange.  I remembered the old admonition, “If you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him.”  I understand that admonition to mean that one should not seek to be like the Buddha so much as to be enlightened.  Hence, sighting or fixating on the Buddha when one is on the path to enlightenment is more a distraction than an aid.

As I listened to the presenter and puzzled through my sudden memory of the much darker sounding Buddhist admonition, I wondered why such a respectful reference to the Buddha should have evoked that particular admonition in me.  It is, I think, the difference between laying Prasad at the guru’s feet in devotion or in gratitude.  A true devotee worships the guru.  A grateful seeker admires the role model.  I have always preferred a guru who was a tour guide rather than a savior.  It is my expectation that I am the one who has to walk my spiritual path and that there is no magic way to get from here to there on that path. 

The satsang speaker had gently placed prasad at the feet of Gururaj’s teachings, her feast of gratitude and her own spirituality.   And I was fortunate to be among those to partake of her Prasad before continuing along my path.