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.
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