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The Not-So-Evident Nature of Simplicity:

or, What Falls Away?


The Shaker song Simple Gifts (set in the Sydney Carter adaptation) is one that every so often rises into my consciousness:

'Tis the gift to be simple, 'tis the gift to be free
'Tis the gift to come down where you ought to be
And when we find ourselves in the place just right
'Twill be in the valley of love and delight

When true simplicity is gained
To bow and to bend we shan't be ashamed
To turn, turn will be our delight
Til by turning, turning we come round right

I don't always share the ecumenical view, often put particularly in the present new age of New Age, that all religions are basically pointing to the same truth (though I do have a great deal of sympathy with Shaker forebears, Quakers). Nor, for myself at least, is 'religion' the best definition of Buddhism - my own practice I'd describe as a practice and a Weltanschauung - though at the same time there's a particularly Western(ised) problematic around denying that traditionally Buddhism is clearly a religion replete with worship, priests and prayer, supernatural beliefs and holy texts.

But having said that, the abovementioned song speaks to some crucial themes:

• the paring back of life to simplicity and the shedding of the burden of attachment on the path to liberation;
  
• the fact that in finding our original nature (I recognise this as a Mahayanist perspective) we find, or are given (by no-one but ourselves), an inherent joy and compassion;
• and the need to give away the self, to take it down from its pedestal, which in itself is a joyful act (in saying this I by no means refer to the problematic practice of hierarchical submission of one's own self to that of the teacher - I can't think of a more harmful practice for ego than to have people prostrating to you all day, even if this is supposedly to what 'you' represent, or even to human representations like statues - better, I think, to bow to cushions and to rooms - but this is a subject for a different time).

Even the image of turning (incidentally, reminiscent of diminishing arcs on the zafu) is one which says that each moment our action is not predestined - we can turn into or become, something beyond the dictatorial confines of the past.

To return to the theme of simplicity, though, it may sound very obvious that simplicity is a virtue; but this is the kind of truism which, for myself at least, is apt to disappear in the moment. My own change of mind came when I first started reading the work of Thich Nhat Hanh, which in the past I'm sure I would have dismissed as overly 'self-helpy' (a genre of which I'm not inordinately fond, even when I agree with the premises in question, which is not particularly often). But thinking about the concept of upaya I came to see how necessary it is to frame complicated ideas in accessible ways, to make them available to those in need. One of the many things I admire about TNH is his skill in doing this.

Another work which I've just finished which frames complex ideas in simple ways (though one in which I find some problematics as regards dualistic understandings of the biophysical mind of the right brain=peace left brain=war variety) which was both moving and useful to read for me as a Buddhist practitioner is Jill Bolte Taylor's 'My Stroke of Insight' (though, unfortunately, doesn't give any practical suggestions about how to actualise the diminishment of harmful conceptual cognition).

I mention simplicity in introducing two songs which for me encompass Buddhist teachings in quite simple, straightforward ways, but which - or perhaps for this very reason - I often find in my field of consciousness.

The first is Toots & the Maytals' reggae classic Don't Trouble Trouble, which is something that often occurs to me when I'm thinking about meditation as a process - there's so much trouble going on in the mind - don't pick it up or push it away, just leave it alone! A simple lesson, but a very difficult practice...

The second is Joe Higgs' beautiful Wake Up And Live (a similar theme was put to music by the better known Bob Marley).

Like the Shaker song with which I introduced this post, roots reggae is often devotional music. While this has its downside (a lot of exclusionary rhetoric about 'sinners' being 'judged' with 'brimstone and fire,' tropes which would develop in the murderous homophobia of later Jamaican music) in general I've been listening to a fair amount of devotional music, particularly vintage Christian music, and also devotional chants and mantras from the tradition that we might loosely term 'Yogic.'

Again, there is a danger here of straying far into the realm of nebulous and saccharine New Age-ism. But despite this, a refreshing quality about devotional music is that when looking for popular music which expresses joy, dedication, and the turning of attention away from the self, more or less the sole theme is romantic love; whereas devotional music turns this energy in a different direction. In this relationship-focussed aspect of popular music we see a manifestation of the common modern obsession with romantic relationship as the ultimate provider of existential meaning (along with that common outcome of a relationship - and not only heterosexual relationships - childrearing). In other words, the continual reinforcement of romantic love as a secular religion.

This need to be in a relationship - enforced by a society in which a monogamous relationship, like childrearing, is just 'what you do,' thoughtlessly, but without previous social constructions of a relationship as a functionalised economic and childrearing partnership - is one of the last taboos for Western Buddhism.

Zen in particular has been convenient for Westerners inasmuch as Japanese Zen priests, as a result of the historical subversion of buddhism by nationalism in the Meiji era, are no longer celibate (and indeed, all of the major scandals that have broken out involving Western teachers, most notably Richard Baker, Taizan Maezumi, Eido Shimano, Chogyam Trungpa and Osel Tendzin, have involved sexual exploitation of students by non-celibate teachers). The tradition has been equally convenient inasmuch as it places a heavy and convenient emphasis on nonattachment among worldly pleasures, rather than a path to nonattachment to worldly pleasures through removing them from one's life (indeed, most Western Buddhist priests haven't renounced or left anything - and such a renunciation may also be considered to demonstrate a commitment to the dharma, though of course this is far from the only way that such a commitment is made) .

The difficulty here is that in making the meditative practices of Buddhism available to a lay community, and thus making an important aspect of the reduction of suffering a non-exclusive enterprise, there's been a need to de-emphasise some of the renunciant aspects of the Middle Way, in a world in which the monastic lifestyle doesn't seem quite so 'middle' as it would have when it was a path between the householder life and 'one grain of rice a day' ascetiscism (incidentally, in Sakyamuni's time the householder life which was such a disincentive to practice consisted of very similar activities to those idealised in the Chan or Zen monastery, that is, chop wood and carry water - in other words, agriculturalism, which in the modern West seems so deeply authentic). How then to draw a line between not dissuading those who might be helped by the practice, while at the same time remaining true to the teachings?

However much we (and I very much include myself as someone grappling with this problematic) like to dismiss some practices (those which we don't follow) as cultural accretions or as relevant only to older worldviews, and valorise others as essential elements of Buddhism, it's hard to get past Sakyamuni's rather unambiguous statement:

Haven't I taught the Dhamma in many ways for the fading of passion, the sobering of intoxication, the subduing of thirst, the destruction of attachment, the severing of the round, the ending of craving, dispassion, cessation, unbinding? Haven't I in many ways advocated abandoning sensual pleasures, comprehending sensual perceptions, subduing sensual thirst, destroying sensual thoughts, calming sensual fevers? Worthless man, it would be better that your penis be stuck into the mouth of a poisonous snake than into a woman's vagina. It would be better that your penis be stuck into the mouth of a black viper than into a woman's vagina. It would be better that your penis be stuck into a pit of burning embers, blazing and glowing, than into a woman's vagina ...

Worthless man, this neither inspires faith in the faithless nor increases the faithful. Rather, it inspires lack of faith in the faithless and wavering in some of the faithful.

A romantic relationship, it seems to me, is perhaps the most attached form of attachment there is, particularly when freighted with the weight of existential meaning which it carries in today's society (this is not to say that those in a relationship who discover the dharma would do better to break it off - for precisely the reason of the web of attachment and possibility for harmful action which a relationship creates). I wouldn't advocate condemning romantic relationships, but rather clearly recognising them for what they are - so, for example, a teacher who is in a romantic relationship is a teacher who is strongly attached to (at least some) worldly things.

One of the things about a relationship is that it gives us a constant audience - and an audience which is, if we're in a healthy relationship, assumed to be supportive (at least on issues not relating to the nature of the relationship itself) - similar to the little audience of one in front of which we're constantly playing out mental dialogues. Every narrative is then addressed from a 'self' to a 'you,' to an Other. perhaps one of the deepest pleasures of the relationship is the exstatic uniting of the self with the other - which, however, is premised upon the reality of the original duality for the pleasure thus provided (and this is why, to my mind, there's a problematic at the heart of the dialectical approach whereby the meeting of opposites resolves duality; even at the level of the 'everyday,' there are more than two possibilities - in terms of gender and sexuality, say, just to take the example of the subject at hand).

Devotional practice, and cultural expression, often displaces this ecstatic existential meaningfulness onto a supernatural being or even a guru (a thing hardly unknown in Buddhist tradition, though most strongly emphasised in the same Tibetan tradition which sees some forms of sexual activity as useful for liberation); but, for me at least, it's when it doesn't do so that it carries the strongest charge. For this reason, Simple Gifts speaks particularly strongly: it is not by the agency of the supernatural that we will find liberation, but through our own efforts.

Mind Your X's and Y's: Laurie Anderson, 'Let X=X'

I met this guy - and he looked like he might have been a hat-check clerk at an ice rink.
Which, in fact, he turned out to be. And I said: Oh boy. Right again.

Let X=X. You know, it could be you. It's a sky-blue sky. Satellites are out tonight. Let X=X.

You know, I could write a book. And this book would be thick enough to stun an ox. 'Cause I can see the future, and it's a place about seventy miles east of here, where it's lighter. Linger on over here. Got the time? Let X=X.

I got this postcard, and it read, it said:
Dear amigo, dear partner. Listen, uh - I just want to say thanks. So thanks. Thanks for all the presents. Thanks for introducing me to the chief. Thanks for putting on the feedbag. Thanks for going all out. Thanks for showing me your swiss army knife. Oh and uh - thanks for letting me autograph your cast.
Love and kisses XXXXOOOO.
Oh yeah, P.S. - I feel like I am in a burning building - and I gotta go.

As Buddhists, one of the things we’re constantly aiming for – or, more precisely, trying not to try to achieve – is to let X=X, to let the object of consciousness or attention be itself and not something constructed through a lens of conceptual thinking. But the phraseology of ‘let X=X’ captures something else; the fact that, when dealing with X, X itself is an abstraction (the sky is 'sky-blue'). X is an abstraction not only in the sense that there are ultimately no separate ‘things,’ but also in the sense that all experience is available only through consciousness, through mind. This is something which, it seems from my perspective, often gets lost in claims that conceptual thinking is the problem, that without it we can experience reality completely unmediated, or ‘things as they (really) are.’

In Zen, at least, this view ties in both with a common, and, to my mind, regrettable anti-intellectual strain (which in itself seems aversive rather than accepting, inasmuch as it chops off a part of experience as ‘intellectual’ and rejecting it); and with a strong emphasis on attaining ‘enlightened’ states as altered states of mind.

Let X=X begins with a playful example in which how things seem to be to the individual, are exactly how they ‘really’ are. In a nicely paradoxical way, though this image on the one hand perturbs the fundamental Buddhist concept that a commonsense understanding of reality is not what’s really going on, on the other speaks to the argument that there can be no ‘objective’ or ‘unmediated access to reality,’ but rather that the nature of ‘how things really are’ is that they are always viewed from the standpoint of mind. The idea of ‘objective’ access to reality says something about the way in which this conception of 'the enlightened mind' idealises objectification. Even though ‘mind,’ far from being fundamentally real, is as empty as any other noun, it is the inescapable medium through which experience comes to be known.

Conceptual thought can then be seen not as an enemy or something to be stopped – aversion is, after all, a form of attachment – but rather as a tool, where the problem is not its existence and usage, but the fact that it is mistaken for something more existentially important (to whit, the totality, the essence of individualhood, or a self). To make a comparison (despite my suspicion of metaphors given that every thing and event is ultimately unique), my hand is a useful tool that I use constantly, but if I decided that my hand was ‘me’ I’d be in trouble – I’d spend every moment watching for wrinkles, protecting it from minor cuts and bruises and agonising over scars. But the best solution to such a problem would not be to cut off my hand, but to understand what my hand is and what part it plays in my experience of subjectivity.

All this is contained in Let X=X. I’m always excited when I come across Buddhist themes in Western artwork, particularly give that it’s so hard to translate religious themes into vocal music in a lyrically-original way, and that doing so in terms of Buddhism has such a new history in the West. I wonder whether Anderson’s 'book thick enough to stun an ox' might be compared to the classic taming of the bull – ‘the whip and the rope are necessary' (though the problematics of the oft-used image of the subjugation of or violence toward an animal for the training of the mind is one for another day, the words of another Buddhist come to mind - namely Leonard Cohen, in his 'Ballad of the Absent Mare'– no need for the whip ... no need for the rein' ). I also very much appreciate Anderson’s melding of that which is usually considered ‘natural’ with the ‘unnatural.’ So often in modern Zen rhetoric there’s a tendency to praise ‘nature’ in a way which overlooks the fact that concrete is as natural and as beautiful (or as ugly) as flowers, the car horn as natural as birdsong – or, in this case, satellites as stars. As many have noted, everything that is, is natural. And this is where we who are city-dwellers live – we can only hurt ourselves by rejecting it or idealising some imagined other category of things.

One of the troublesome issues about artwork and the intellect, though, is that sometimes the anti-intellectual parameters, previously discussed, which are so familiar as artistic tropes – that explanation is not only insufficient, but pernicious, and should be set up in opposition to intuition and emotion – can also come through in music. I listen often to Akron/Family’s track ‘Gone Beyond’ from Meek Warrior, a gentle guitar song in which the lyrics consist of a ‘translation’ of the Prajnaparamita Mantra found in the Heart Sutra: ‘Gone, gone, gone beyond, gone completely beyond’ (according to Wikipedia, Akron/Family’s Ryan Vanderhoof left the band in 2007 ‘to live in a Buddhist Dharma center in the Midwest.’) But when I came to the song ‘Suchness,’ from their first album, I was troubled, from a philosophical perspective, by the lyrics: ‘I want to see the thing in itself, I don’t want to think no more.’

Anderson, herself a Buddhist, has said that 'in Buddhist thought, there's the thing and there's the name for the thing and that's one thing too many.' But I’m not sure that I see that reflected in her work. How can there be one thing too many? If anything, every ‘thing’ is one ‘thing’ too many – though at the same time, in a spirit of nondualism the conventional reality where ‘ten thousand things’ exist is not ‘cancelled out’ by the ‘one suchness’ of ultimate reality. This is where I also appreciate Let X=X’s manifestation of everyday language – and the skilful representation of everyday language in the artistic and musical context is something I love about Anderson’s work – not to mention the giving of thanks, which is both to the self (in the context of the narrative of the song) and must be directed away from the self (in the context of its performance). But at the same time as giving thanks wholeheartedly, it’s equally important to realise that that for which we are thankful, inasmuch as we are thankful for it, is that to which we are attached, and constitutes part of the burning building in which we are living:

ignorant children … are not afraid nor know the purport of the word "burning" … while incessantly whirling in that mass of evils they are sporting, playing, diverting themselves; they do not fear, nor dread, nor are they seized with terror; they do not know, nor mind; they are not startled, do not try to escape, but are enjoying themselves in that triple world which is like unto a burning house, and run hither and thither. Though overwhelmed by that mass of evil, they do not conceive the idea that they must beware of it.

While an interpretation of this Lotus Sutra parable is the superiority of the One Vehicle or Teaching over the Three, of Mahayana over Hinayana, and even of the Lotus Sutra itself, to my mind, despite the materialism of the parable itself, the strongest teaching is the least sectarian: not only that skilful means are in fact vital liberatory devices, or that the reward for self-liberation is greater than what we’re capable of envisaging in our unliberated state – but is found in the most simple aspect of the parable, the fact that the great, spacious house in which we live is in fact internally rotten, subject to destruction through fire at any moment, and in fact passionately blazing even as we speak, and it’s only ignorance which keeps us unaware of this – so, once we know it, we’ve gotta go.

What Arises

‘amateur dharmatics’ consists of reflections on dharma and popular culture, with sidelines in reflections on dharma practice, and philosophy.

It’s best thought of as the ‘notes to self’ (or lack thereof) of an incurable dilettante (that’s me) with an interest in the manifestations of the dharma in so-called alternative culture, and also in the practice of intellectual inquiry.

I won’t preface everything I say with ‘it seems to me’ or ‘in my opinion’ for the sake of avoiding repetition, but please take it as read. No judgement makes any claim to be authoritative, objective, or final; all impermanent things are subject to reinterpretation (and, here, rewriting).

Where am I coming from? I’m a Zen practitioner, but with a wider interest in all Buddhist traditions; and rather than being particularly wedded to one tradition, I’m more of a sceptic than anything else, in particular regarding the claims traditions make about themselves (having said which, I also try to avoid the pitfalls of knee-jerk dismissiveness, and of unreflective ‘pick and choose’ consumerist spirituality, both of which tend only to reinforce one’s own pre-existing prejudices).

My interpretation of dharma practice includes:

• the cessation of the suffering of sentient beings as the defining aim of any belief and practice;

• practical rather than mystical-contingent ethics (that is, firstly, the precepts are best interpreted literally and personally, and in relation to social and institutional systems of injustice as well as our individual actions, rather than contingently or metaphorically; and secondly, an undifferentiated ‘ultimate’ reality can never cancel out the ‘conventional’ reality in which prejudice and violence cause suffering; rather, these realms coexist in equal mutuality);

• the rejection of power inequalities and power hierarchies (including those in Buddhist practice, and those between humans and other sentient beings), and the need to challenge institutionalised material oppression and inequality as part of the practice of compassion and of liberating sentient beings from suffering (encompassing the attempt to 'see through the self' as a qualitatively different enterprise from the abdication of the self in favour of an institution, Buddhist or otherwise, nation, or other collective body) ;

• the non-rejection of the intellectual (the intellect is a tool which is necessary for right understanding, which allows us to live every moment in a spirit of open question rather than habit and preconception, and which can be used to skilfully reduce suffering, while the conceptual/nonconceptual binary is a false duality which leads to aversion).

But enough about me…