Category Archives: Buddhism

Jan29

Karma Lottery

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It is my view that life is not about grand gestures, but rather a multitude of small acts; individually almost unnoticeable. Out of the innumerable beings that exist, only a relative few accumulate positive karma toward a precious human birth via a great act—martyrdom, or saving another’s life, for instance. Heck, precious few receive a precious human birth, period.

At any rate, one plays a dangerous game if one depends upon such an eventuality to ensure rebirth in the human realm. One may reach the end of this life still waiting on that opportunity, having squandered countless chances to build positive karma along the way. It would be like deciding not to work and earn income because you expect to win the lottery.

Nor should one seek out a bold act, perhaps by putting oneself in harm’s way, in the hope of hitting the karma jackpot. Even if successful, your store of positive karma may still not be sufficient and, depending upon the outcome, you may no longer be able to accumulate karma of any kind in this lifetime.

We may, in fact, do great things with our lives. My point is not to say we are not destined for such. To the contrary, I believe we are. But I don’t believe we are called to live life saving up for the big moment. I believe we are called to spend every moment like a big moment, in search of opportunities to commit acts of compassion and love of all sizes, to give of ourselves, to make others’ lives better.

The big things may indeed come along, and if we have lived this life of daily compassion we will be well prepared to act.

I think of compassion like a particular muscle that requires daily exercise to remain strong, and which otherwise atrophies rapidly. Using that muscle daily to show love in myriad ways makes it strong, supple, and conditioned for endurance, for the long haul. Occasional heavy lifting with that muscle will not build it up as well, and certainly will not give it the responsiveness and endurance it will require when the big need, the opportunity for a major contribution, does indeed come along.

Jan23

Snowshoeing Meditation

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Thich Nhat Hanh has his niche, walking meditation. (Okay, his “niche” is as wide as the Grand Canyon, but humor me.) Now I’ve found my niche, snowshoeing meditation.

I went snowshoeing for the first time today, on a crisp, sunny morning. (By crisp, I mean cold enough that exposed fingers could be snapped off like icicles hanging from your gutter.) The snow was nearly pristine, save for a handful of human and dog footprints (and the occasional patch of yellow snow) and a couple of bicycle grooves. The sun was bright, if not warm. There was nary another soul to be seen.

Perfect conditions for meditation. Snowshoeing meditation is going to take off. Get in on the front end before the meditation trails fill up with meditators. Because they will, when people hear about the rare insights that I found while trudging through the powder.

Humility

Mortal embarrassment is a reasonable approximation of humility. I was no more than a tenth of a mile into my first snowshoe journey when I stepped on one snowshoe with the other snowshoe and tumbled head first, ass second. Laying on my stomach, snowshoes tangled behind me, snow in my face, I benefited from the unique perspective of looking up at the rest of the world. Lest I think the experience a fluke, I repeated it misstep for misstep a mere five minutes later. No mistaking the message: This is the way I ought to look at the world.

Impermanence

Barely a day ago, this path along the Tarrytown reservoir was bare, perhaps sporting the occasional dead leaf. Late yesterday it was a pristine boulevard of unmarked snow. With the passage of each hiker, dog walker, squirrel, deer, child on a mountain bike, and other wild animals, the path changed. Sometimes slightly, imperceptibly; sometimes significantly, unmistakably. No doubt, as the day progressed, more and more beings passed through, experiencing a different path from the one I did, and altering the path again. Tomorrow it promises to be warmer, there may even be some rain, and the path will change again.

Attachment

Fresh snow resting atop tree branches is a lovely, peaceful sight. There was plenty of evidence of the damage last year’s major snowstorms did, however, with the woods populated by jagged stumps of trees that had snapped in two from the weight of the snow. Occasionally, as I passed a younger tree bending under its snow coat, I would poke a branch with one of my walking poles. Freed of its burden, the tree would snap upright again. The things that we attach ourselves to, or that attach to us, can weigh us down as well, bending us over under their accumulation. Meditation, acts of compassion, and other practices are needed to shake those attachments off and free us to walk the path uprightly.

Mindfulness

As I neared the end of my snowshoe trip, I was beginning to draft this blog post. That’s the way I generally write. By the time I sit down to type, much of what I intend to write is already in my head. That’s neither good nor bad, but it’s definitely not conducive to snowshoeing. I guess I had already forgotten the lesson of face planche-induced humility. My snowshoes tangled again, nearly dumping me on my melon once more. I literally heard the words in mind, Pay attention! I had stopped being mindful of the main task at hand, putting one snowshoed foot in front of the other, rather than on top of the other. I was grateful for the lesson, and thankful that it didn’t take another face full of snow to learn.

So, am I right? Snowshoeing meditation is going to be all the rage, right? Hello?

Jan13

Happily Heathen

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Heathens. Godless ones. Terms that didn’t so much scare me when I was a Christian but saddened me. My God was such an important, constant presence in my life that I could not imagine how one could live without God, any god. I knew that God was always with me, beside me, inside me. I could speak with God any time I wished. I could listen for God speaking to me. Wouldn’t people who didn’t believe in God be completely lost, alone, forsaken?

When I stopped going to church several years ago, and even after I recognized that I had become Buddhist, that sense of Presence didn’t just go away. Though I wasn’t quite sure what it was anymore, I still felt it, and was glad, comforted, safe. I had ceased praying to this lifetime companion—well, let me rephrase that. Intercessory prayer, seeking the intervention of that Presence in my life and others, had ceased. But I was still enjoying it, benefiting from having the Presence around me. In other ways, I was still speaking to it, still praying as I understood it, which was a vastly more multifaceted form of communication than simply asking for things. And I was still offering prayers for those in needs, for guidance in my own life, though I no longer had any idea who I was sending those prayers to.

I can’t say for certain that I’ve figured out what is going on with me in this regard, but I have had a hunch lately. I think that what I am sensing, what I previously referred to as God, is the universal interconnectedness of all beings. The constant Presence is the sense of my connection with everyone, of being one with all and leaving me and them behind. I believe that when I am feeling down, solitary, that I am slipping into dualism and sensing a disconnection from the universal whole. And the prayers that I offer now are not seeking an omnipotent being to swoop in on a fiery chariot and act on my behalf or for another’s sake. They are a sharing of concern, of need, of a particular kind of energy that resonates with the universal whole and calls on it to heal, aid, support its constituent parts.

Clearly, I have a lot more thinking and meditating to do on this subject, but I put these newborn thoughts out there in the hope that it will help lead me further along the path. Thanks for reading and walking with me for the past few minutes. Peace and love and wholeness be yours.

P.S. If “trading in” god for the new-agey universe thingy makes me a heathen, then light a bonfire so I can strip down and start dancing. I embrace it.

Dec14

Exchanging Holiday Bliss for Blues

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Growing up as a Christian, Christmas was always more than gifts and decorations and sugar cookies. There was a deeply spiritual aspect of it as well, one that grew in importance as I matured. The season of Advent led me steadily toward a solemn contemplation of the extraordinariness of God being born as a defenseless infant, in a stinky hay-filled stall no less.

The activities of church competed with the activities of the “season”—the joyous camaraderie of the “greening” of the sanctuary and polishing of the brass; the celebratory hubbub of the packed pews at midnight mass on Christmas Eve; the quiet contemplative air of the sparsely populated pews on Christmas morning. These continued to be cherished memories and colored my experience of the month of December after I stopped attending church a couple of years ago.

It was one year ago that I realized I had become a Buddhist, shortly after Christmas. Perhaps then I was unwittingly feeling what I am quite aware of now, and what is making me wonder what this holiday is all about for someone who is not Christian.

When the Christmas displays began popping up in stores and the carols started playing on the radio, something felt off. It took me a couple of weeks of puzzling over why I wasn’t being caught up in the Christmas spirit before I realized that the something missing was that deep spiritual aspect of Christmas. Feelings related to beliefs and a faith no longer central to my spiritual life were gone, and I keenly felt the loss. And the feeling was heightened by a greater awareness of what was left—the singularly spirit-devoid secular aspects of the holiday season.

Don’t get me wrong: the holidays are certainly spirited. But the mass consumerism of the season seems soulless to me and leaves me sad at feeling divided from the majority of those around me who are bright and bubbly and full of Christmas cheer. I’m not being judgmental. This is not about the behavior of other persons, it’s about feeling unanchored in a maelstrom of materialism.

What is left for me in the December holidays? Putting up a tree and decorations feels…weird, for lack of a more precise word. Why are we exchanging gifts? Why are schools and businesses closing? What’s the point? It all seems empty and meaningless to me now. I am going through the motions without independent thought as to why.

I haven’t yet resolved this quandary to any great extent, and welcome anyone’s thoughts. In the meantime, I am focusing on making this an occasion to act on compassion, to seek out opportunities to support causes and activities devoted to helping the needy and disadvantaged. It seems like a good time to invigorate what should be a daily practice as a new year fast approaches. Hit the compassion ground running (giving?), so to speak.

Aug20

For a Dear Departed Friend

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I lost a very dear friend recently. He was a tremendous comfort to me in a time of deep sorrow. His companionship, willingness to show and receive affection, warmth, and mischievously twinkling eyes buoyed my spirits innumerable times. I will miss him terribly. This blog post his about him.

I first met him at the Elmsford Animal Shelter in 2008. My daughter asked if I would take her to play with the cats. Just a month before, I had had to put down my cat, Dakota, after a prolonged illness. I received Dakota when she was just 6 weeks old and had lived with her for over 17 years. At the end, I held Dakota in my arms while the vet administered the dosage that relieved her pain and suffering and concluded this lifetime for her. Left alone with Dakota, I literally wailed and howled with my own pain and hurt. When I finally departed, carrying my heart-breakingly light pet carrier, the waiting room was packed with humans and their animal companions. Who knows what they thought my wailing and howling was—some poor, distressed animal, scared out of its mind, probably. Indeed, it was. I was.

I was not interested in getting a new cat, not for a long time anyway, and I told my daughter this. But I agreed to bring her, because I thought it was darling that she wanted to spend a Saturday afternoon showing affection to these poor animals in the shelter. We spent about two hours at the shelter, peering into cages, reading biographical statements about the adoptable critters, and occasionally asking for one to be removed so we could hold it. Among the darling animals we cuddled that day was a middle-aged blind cat, absolutely adorable and affectionate. Another was a juvenile tabby mix with splayed legs, sweetness personified. So like my daughter to be drawn to shower love on cats with physical problems (she’s very much like her mom in that regard).

As I was beginning to feel the urge to leave, I stopped before a large cage with three cats inside. As I read the laminated feline bios hanging from the cage door, an orange tabby paw stretched out between the bars and knocked all but one of the laminated cards out of my hand. The remaining card was for a cat the shelter had named Angel Buff. I looked up into the eyes of the owner of the offending paw, and what eyes they were. Golden. Not yellow. Golden. I’d never seen eyes that color before. I looked down at the card, and back at the cat, and once again at the card. It had been Angel Buff’s paw. I stared at him, he stared at me. Neither of us said a word until I asked a shelter volunteer to take him out of the cage.

To paraphrase J.K. Rowling, “The cat chooses the human.” This cat literally reached out and grabbed me. I accepted him from the volunteer and he immediately curled up in my arms, against my chest, purring like a jackhammer, closing his eyes. I didn’t know then that this would become a routine, this curling up on my chest, this immediate contentedness, this going to sleep almost uncomfortably close to my neck. But I knew I liked it. A lot. I didn’t want to let him go, even when I needed my hands to complete the paperwork.

Cat, medical and adoption forms, carrying box, food samples—everything came home with us, except the name. Cats deserve a good name, one with personality, one they can wear proudly. Angel Buff became Deuteronomy. But, like every pet I’ve ever had, he was never called by his full name. We called our new companion Dude, for short, and it fit him like a glove. “Dude, get off the dining room table.” “Dude, what have you been doing all day?” “Dude, stop clawing the carpet.” “Are you hungry, Dude?”

Dude was a mix of Siamese and domestic shorthair. He had the coloring of an orange tabby, but his body and head were pure Siamese. Small round head with overlarge ears and big round eyes. His whiskers protruded at odd angles, a bit like Salvador Dali’s moustache. Large, powerful hind legs and a short, thick tail. When he tried to saunter, as felines will do, he waddled instead. It was endearing.

Dude loved affection, craved having his ears rubbed, and eventually learned to enjoy exposing his belly for a prolonged scratching. He was curious, mischievous, naughty, adorable, hilarious, sensitive, and devoted nearly to the point of dog-hood (a point of embarrassment in the feline community, I’m sure).

Dude healed the raw place in my heart left behind by Dakota’s passing. Unsought, unbidden, he pawed his way into my life and took over. He insinuated himself into my heart, much the way he would insinuate himself between me and my body pillow every night at bedtime.

He was with us for too short a time, by a wide margin. He was but 9 years old when he passed from this life. I don’t know how or why he died, but he was peaceful and unruffled when I found him, so much so that I thought he was merely asleep at first. We shared a home for just three-and-a-half years, during which we shared a lifetime of love.

I am sad with loss at his death, but the memory of his life fills me with happiness and gratitude, turning tears of pain into tears of joy. He was a good boy, a good friend, a good being.

In this brief life, he amassed a wealth of positive karma as he tended to me and my family. I believe that a precious human birth and the possibility of enlightenment await him in his next life. I hope I get to meet him again soon.

Hey, Dude. See ya later. I love you.

Jul23

Kalachakra, July 14 & 15, 2011

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It has taken me a week to process just the merest fraction of my experiences in Washington, DC, attending the Dalai Lama’s Kalachakra for World Peace. I suspect events like these are called “life experiences” because it takes a lifetime to fully experience them. The Kalachakra, though an event itself, was just the beginning of a life guided by the vows taken over the three days.

So, I don’t exactly have anything earth shattering to share at the moment, other than a few more general impressions. For the first of these, I thank Taylor McKenney, a member of this blog’s companion virtual sangha on Facebook, also called Dharma Beginner. Taylor posted, “the Kalachakra was amazing! totally missing being surrounded by like minded people!” She marvelously summed up my feelings over the past week, a mood I couldn’t myself translate into words. Turns out, I was suffering from sangha withdrawal!

The best antidote, I have found, has been sharing the Kalachakra experience with the brothers and sisters of my virtual sangha. The response to the news, links, and photos I shared has been overwhelming. It didn’t occur to me how much such a small act on my part would be appreciated. I feel very blessed to have vicariously included so many people who couldn’t be there in person.

I continue to marvel at the holiness and presence of His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama. I have been fortunate to have met some very holy and spiritual people, including Archbishop Desmond Tutu, Bishop Paul Moore, and Bishop Walter Dennis. Each possessed qualities that served to draw you in and painlessly imbue in you their morality and values and prayerfulness, quite without your realizing what was happening. Each was supremely human as well, people who could be cranky, tired, impatient. People who loved to laugh, to spend time with friends, to do many things that everyday folks like to do. People who could be deep and meaningful at one moment, and childlike and playful the next, yet exude spirit and love and grounding in both moments.

The Dalai Lama is very much like this—to the power of 10. I hung on nearly every word he spoke, though half of them were in Tibetan, and I don’t speak Tibetan. I might not have understood all of the words, but I keenly felt their meaning—when they were serious, when they were instructive, cautionary, joking. His facial expressions spoke volumes. He often seemed to walk a fine line between solemnity and hilarity, many times leaping headfirst into the latter. He was particularly quick to laugh at himself, such as when he described his cough as sounding like someone blowing through a conch shell.

A scene at the end of the Kalachakra epitomized how he simultaneously planted one foot in the somber and one in the silly. Shortly after His Holiness began the concluding chants, a man staggered to the front of the stage, waving a red, white, and blue top hat in the direction of the Dalai Lama. Security swooped in and began to lead him away, but not before the Dalai Lama saw the man and, particularly, his hat, and beckoned him to the stage. The chanting continued, but the Dalai Lama seemed to have just one thing on his mind now—the Uncle Sam hat. When the hat was finally brought to His Holiness, he promptly plopped it on his head. An immensely silly thing, one might think, for so holy a man to do. Yet, it did not seem out of character for him in the least. No, it is exactly the kind of thing that makes me love him so much.

The Bodhisattva and tantric vows taken during the Kalachakra can seem daunting. There are so many of them, for one thing. But taken in the presence of the Dalai Lama, they appeared light and simple and effortless. I felt that, for him, I could do anything. I expressed the feeling to a friend by paraphrasing Jack Nicholson in As Good As It Gets: He makes me want to be a better person. No, she said, he makes you want to be yourself.

I’m sure I’ll have more to share as time goes by and what I witnessed continues to reveal itself to me. In the meantime, I hope you’ll join our little virtual sangha on Facebook or walk the path with me on Twitter @DharmaBeginner.

Jul14

Kalachakra for World Peace, 7-13-11

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Brief impressions of the preparation ceremony for the Kalachakra Initiation, July 13, 2011:

  • I was struck by the sight of robed monks, men and women of peace, stepping through the doorways of hockey rink walls that normally admit hulking players looking to drop the gloves.
  • The combination of being among so many Buddhists, and in the presence of the Dalai Lama, had my head spinning a bit at the beginning of the event. When my focus finally began to sharpen, I realized that the Dalai Lama was talking about the importance of concentration and not letting one’s mind drift. Did someone mention irony?
  • The volunteeers were doing a great job despite trying circumstances, particularly after the event when the participants were trying to collect their kusha grass and red strings. Thank goodness for the volunteers.
  • Looking over the heads of the crowd in the hallways of the Verizon Center, as the attendees held their stalks of kusha grass upright in their fists, it appeared like a field of grass swaying in a breeze. I emerged from the building to streets filled with people clutching their stalks of grass. In every direction there were clumps of kusha grass sprouting from hands. The platforms in the Metro station were awash in kusha grass. The clumps thinned as one moved further from the building, as the participants scattered to their various hotels and homes, to restaurants for dinner with friends and family, to other events. At my own Metro stop a mile or so away, I saw a couple of women holding kusha stalks. I was reminded of the way that plants seem to sprout up from nowhere, distant from where they were originally planted, their seeds carried by the wind, birds, and insects. It struck me as a perfect metaphor for the Dharma: Each of us was carrying the teachings we had received that day to far flung places, where it would take root and blossom. No matter where you looked, no matter how far you traveled, the Dharma could still be found, flourishing.
Jul13

Have Dharma, Will Travel

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I traveled to Washington, DC, yesterday evening, July 12, to participate in the Kalachakra Initiation being conducted by His Holiness, the 14th Dalai Lama. I travel quite frequently for business, and thereby have encountered just about every travel situation imaginable. On the basis of that experience, I feel safe in concluding that the true intention of the ever-prescient Dharma was to guide modern travelers.

Was there ever a thing that cried out more loudly for heaping helpings of patience, wisdom, love, compassion, and understanding than traveling by plane or train? Especially in the post-September 11 world? I rest my case.

If find that traveling is a never-ending opportunity to exercise compassion for my fellow beings. To be truthful, I used to be as angry and uptight a traveler as anyone. Every little delay, gate change, slight inconvenience I viewed as a personal affront. What did the travel gods have against me? What devious misdeed did I commit in a past life that I should have to suffer such outrageous indignities in this life? Is this ridiculously small bag of pretzels a sick joke? Imagine what I was like when flights were canceled, baggage was lost, or my aisle seat reservation was mislaid and I was re-seated between two very large, very sweaty men!

Obviously, nothing that ever happened to me while traveling was personal. My delusional view of the world, blended with my unreasonable expectations, guaranteed that I would always be disappointed with the actual turn of events. Is there anything more delusional than expecting travel to go off without a hitch?

My travel experiences began to change when I abandoned my expectations and approached each trip openly, prepared to accept whatever happened. Delays ceased to be ordeals and became opportunities. Airline employees ceased to be enemies and became fellow beings who suffer and yearn to be free of suffering and, most importantly, whose suffering I might be able to help alleviate. (A big smile and an enthusiastic “thank you” can work wonders on the mood of a gate employee. Try it out some time.) Flight crews and other passengers ceased to be objects of derision and became focal points for compassion.

My flight to Baltimore last night was delayed 90 minutes or more. The consequence? I had time to get a much-needed 30-minute back and shoulder massage. The flight arrived so late that I missed my Amtrak train to DC. The consequence? I caught a MARC train instead and saved $17.

When I arrived in DC, the taxi line was quite long and I was not in the mood to stand and wait in the heat (still 90 degrees at 10 pm). So I walked the mile or so to my hotel from Union Station, pulling my suitcase behind me. (In what reality is walking a mile with luggage in heat and humidity preferable to standing still? None.) The consequence? A very large blister below my left big toe. One that is likely to remind me over and over these next few days that I should have held onto my patience just a little while longer and exercised a modicum of wisdom.

Jul10

Competitive Gluttony

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This past Independence Day, I was treated to a jaw-droppingly disgusting sight. A dozen or so persons stood before a table piled high with hotdogs in buns. They proceeded to stuff, push, shove, and crunch, crush, thrust, propel, and otherwise cajole dozens of hotdogs into their ravening maws. (I’m sorry, “mouths” just didn’t seem descriptive enough.) A crowd of hundreds chanted and cheered them on. I believe the “winner” consumed 64 hotdogs in 10 minutes. All in all, the competitors together ate enough food to feed a large family for a month or more. I was appalled, to say the least.

It’s not that I was previously unaware of “competitive eating.” I’d just managed to avoid it. But while working out at the gym on an elliptical machine, Sports Center was on the TV in front of me, leaving me more or less captive as ESPN presented an extended montage of the Nathan’s 4th of July hotdog eating contest, complete with slow motion images of the face stuffing, of food tumbling from the lips of the force feeders, of hideous grimaces as they strove to inject that 39th hotdog down their gullets. Thankfully, the sound was off, so I didn’t have to hear what I imagined—based on the closed captioning—to be the mock gravitas in the announcer’s voice.

The juxtaposition of an eating competition with the dire hunger that is prevalent in so many places in the world is, of course, what sickened me. I think that even a starving person wouldn’t heedlessly scarf down food the way those competitors did. I wonder how someone with bulimia or anorexia would have felt watching them choose voluntarily to overeat, almost as if they were competing to do the best imitation of an eating disorder. I was offended just contemplating it.

I just don’t get it. How can a basic life function be the subject of a competition? Competitive breathing? (Actually, there might be competitive nonbreathing, people trying to hold their breath under water the longest.) Competitive sleeping? (I might be able to turn pro.) Competitive fingernail growing? (Ewwwww.) I’ll stop there.

Competitive eating strikes me as antithetical to compassion. Gluttony might be an antonym for compassion. Consuming far more than you need rather than sharing it with others is the opposite of what Buddha would have us do—which is, to give of what we have to those who need it. Bodhisattvas postpone their own passage into nirvana—the thing we all are working toward—in order to assist others in reaching enlightenment. It’s impossible to imagine a bodhisattva participating in an eating contest.

I am told that Nathan’s donated 100,000 hotdogs and buns to the needy. I’m glad to hear that, though it hardly compensates for the gluttonous spectacle they conducted. Let’s just hope those needy persons were given more than 10 minutes to eat the hotdogs.

Jul2

Buddhists Do Pray!

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Not long before posting a recent blog entry that asked the question, “Do Buddhists Pray?” I purchased a book called 863 Buddhist Ways to Conquer Life’s Little Challenges, by Barbara Ann Kipfer. The universe was definitely guiding my hand that day; I love when that happens. But I guess I wasn’t listening, until today.

In the interim, I received some terrific feedback here and on my Facebook page, for which I am extremely grateful. The conundrum of how prayer fit into my life as a Buddhist was a thorny matter for me, and the advice you shared with me really made a difference. Thank you.

Back to the book. When I finally got around to opening it, this is what I saw on the first page:

Situation: While you believe in many ideals of Buddhism, you also believe in the power of prayer. From your upbringing and background as a Christian, prayer has always been important in your life. You want that to continue.

Wisdom: Embrace the adage that “prayer is speaking and meditation is listening.”

This is what I saw on the second page:

Situation: Sometimes it feels as if your prayers go unanswered. Is there any point to praying?

Wisdom: A good way to pray is to ask that the person you are praying for receive what he or she needs most at this time. You can pray in this way for yourself, too.

No doubt, I was not only meant to buy this book, but to wait to read it until after I had written the blog. There may have been people who needed to read it. I may have needed (no, I definitely needed) to hear what others had to say, to know that I wasn’t alone. If I had read the book right away, I might not have written the blog, and none of that would have happened.

I’m glad that the universe was still speaking, even if I wasn’t listening yet.

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