THE FIRST UNITARIAN CHURCH OF HONOLULU
A Unitarian Universalist Congregation
ANOTHER PATH TO BUDDHA
Sermon by Rev. Mike Young
Preached October 10, 1999,
at the First Unitarian Church of Honolulu.Most of you have heard some version of the basic story of the enlightenment of the Buddha. However, there is a piece of that basic story that is almost always left out of the tale. It is that piece that's left out on which I'll end up focusing.
The basic story begins with Siddhartha Gautama, raised in the lap of luxury. He is the son of a king. He has everything that any kid could ever want. As a young adult he is surrounded by all of the vast luxury of being a prince in a major kingdom in what we now call India. Quite by accident, because he has been protected from all of this very carefully, he is out one day and stumbles across suffering. For the first time in his life he sees people who are sick, old, dying. He is struck by the contrast between what he sees and what he has experienced. Even though he has a beautiful wife and a lovely son, he abandons princedom, sneaks away and becomes a wandering seeker.
He tries all of the answers that the teachers of wisdom out there have to offer. He tries asceticism and he tries excess. He tries the differing kinds of meditation and spiritual disciplines. He becomes an adept in each of them and still is not satisfied. Finally, having tried asceticism to its extremity , he is weak, virtually dying, sitting under a bush. He decides that he will give it one more chance. He goes and sits under the bodhi tree and will sit there until he becomes enlightened. You know the story -- miraculously, in the process of his deep meditation during the night, he battles all of the evil and demons. In the morning he comes out of the trance and understands. He "gets it" and goes on to teach it to others.
But there is one piece in there that is usually left out. That usual story ends up with the conclusion that Buddhism is first and primarily a philosophy of life designed to help you stop desiring, for it is desire that causes suffering. Indeed, in theological school I was taught in my Comparative Religions class that Buddhism, while an admirable religious philosophy, was ultimately quite life-denying. Its aim, in fact, to get away from, to escape "real life."
I accepted that until I ran into Shinryu Suzuki Roshi. Suzuki was for years the abbot at San Francisco's Zen center and, while I was in the San Francisco area, he became Roshi of Tassahara Monastery. Tassahara is primarily famous for its incredible book of recipes for making bread. But Shinryu Suzuki Roshi was one of the least life-denying people I ever met. To run into a Zen master who actually, if anything, lived life to the absolute fullest, full of spit and ginger and joy and delight, forced me to take another look.
The standard story has it that the compassionate Buddha teaches us, first of all, to let go of, get away from, suppress, deny, stop having desires, so that we, too, can escape suffering.
What's the left-out piece? The left-out piece is the event that happened just before Buddha goes to sit under the bodhi tree. He's sitting there by the edge of the river, gaunt, weak, unable to move. A milkmaid comes along, stumbles across him. She gives him a little milk and curds to eat, dresses his wounds -- and he has a lot of them. She cares for him over a period of several days, nurturing him back to at least some minimal strength and the beginnings of health.
Why does she do it? This is before the religions of India provided any merit for doing good deeds. She apparently didn't tell anybody about him. She got no credit for this. She just did it. What happened to Buddha under the bodhi tree was not that he, smart, logical, disciplined fellow that he may well have been, figured it all out. In the fuller story, it was a milkmaid who didn't have to--who was empathic, compassionate--gave him the key to the Way. The key that unlocked the Way of the Buddha was the experience of receiving compassion.
Now, unfortunately, we are nurtured in the great ways of our Puritan forefathers. As Buddhism arrives in the West, we clearly understand that when Buddhism says you ought to act compassionately, that's an order, that's a rule. You should do it not to get into heaven, you should do it not to get into nirvana, you should do it not to get any merit or to get "stuff". You should just do it.
The "stuff" part quite fascinates me. There was one Buddhist group in Santa Monica, when I was in Los Angeles years ago ministering then to the Unitarian Society of West Los Angeles. This particular sect of Buddhism had people get together and chant together. This was the Santa Claus version of Buddhism. If you got your Nam Yoho Renge Kyo right. Did it reliably and did it seriously enough. You could chant for a Cadillac, a better husband, or anything and you'd get it. The payoff for religious propriety was "stuff," which is not significantly different from the Calvinism many of us were raised with. If you are indeed one of the elect, and you'd better behave like you were one, anyway, you will be industrious, hardworking, and good things including lots of money will come to you.
But hidden back there in virtually all of the great teachers of the human religious experience is the interesting insistence that you should do it for nothing. In fact, those who do it in order to get into heaven don't get to go. Those who think they can fool God or fool the system by being nice only because they wish the goodies, don't get the goodies. One of the interesting facets here is that those who really do behave compassionately, ethically, morally, concernedly toward one another, for nothing, do it because they had an experience that we usually refer to as "empathy." To those who have empathy, it comes naturally.
The word "empath" means "to feel with." Not that everybody else out there must feel exactly what I feel. That too often is mere projection. We human beings do have this nasty habit of assuming that, of course, everybody else out there must have the same emotional responses to everything just the way we have. We are often horribly shocked and dismayed to find that there are people out there who don't.
Empathy is not the projection of my feelings onto everybody else, good or ill. It is the recognition that the other out there feels just as I do; the fact of feeling, not the content of the feeling. Indeed, the core of empathy is not to see the boundaries of the ego as ultimate. It is not that they are not real. Those boundaries are simply not ultimate. Those who are empathetic are those who are able to imagine themselves over there, or at least to recognize that this is something it is possible to do; maybe even appropriate to do.
"Don't judge anyone until you have walked a mile in their moccasins." The wisdom is there in our society although it gets a bit trivialized. There are many of us who are unable to imagine ourselves the member of a minority group. Indeed, one of the things that drives much racism is the inability to make the leap of imagination of what it must feel like to wake up every morning and know that you are going to be immediately seen as and treated as somebody who is "other."
I have commented previously about the letter writer who wrote me about the same sex marriage issue. The leap of imagination he had great difficulty making was that he would ever be in the situation of being victimized by the majority's religious opinions. Yet, he was a Mormon !
Some people cannot imagine themselves as having strong conservative or fundamentalist religious opinions, of being deeply convinced that they are so, and committed to trying to live their lives out of those values.
Some find it almost impossible to imagine themselves poor or homeless. Back in the 70's there was an interesting program done by religious communities in the Chicago area. Clergy and lay folk who were involved in social justice advocacy and public policy issues paid money to have their clothes and wallets taken away. They were given a pair of "grubbies," no money, no ID, and were turned loose on the streets of Chicago. At any time they could say, "Oops! mistake" and come get their stuff back. They had the opportunity, at least, to experience what it feels like to live out there on the street without "proper" identity and means.
Some of us have a great deal of difficulty imagining what it feels like to have had one more thing happen than you can, by God, handle and become so enraged that you entirely lose control of your own behavior. Anybody who could possibly do that must be essentially a bad, evil person. We have a hard time empathizing with the chain of events that could lead to that. Or addicted. How from no particular evil intent it is possible to end up with something else in control of my life besides me. Each of us have our own particular empathy blind spots. We have areas that we have no way of projecting our imagination into and acknowledging that "there, but for the grace of God, could go I."
Let me tell you about two non-empaths that I have known. They were both clients of mine when I was working for the Juvenile Court. The first I'll call "Jimmy." Jimmy was quite fascinating because you could stick him in a Baptist Sunday School class and he would memorize every verse. He would be able to quote every verse back to you. When he went home he would testify to all of the neighbors about the great things that the Lord Jesus Christ had done for his soul. He would become the most incredible, excellent Sunday School kid you could ever ask for. If you stuck him in a group of Hell's Angels, he would be the meanest, most vicious, bad-ass Hell's Angel you ever saw. Jimmy was a total mirror. Whatever expectations occurred around him, he did his best to meet. If there was ever anybody I ever met in my life who had virtually no ego, it was Jimmy. He was scary. He could save your soul one day and "off" you the next. And not note any great contradiction between those behaviors.
The second I'll call "Charlie the Con." Charlie the Con had lots of ego; in fact, in some ways all there was to Charlie the Con was ego. He assumed that the rest of you were put here for his benefit. In fact, I often fantasized that he thought there was probably only about two or three hundred of you anyway, and you were all playing various roles from time to time, scripted for his benefit. Wherever he happened to go, you were there reliably, and you could reliably be hustled and conned so that he would be able to have anything and everything he wanted. Whenever he didn't have anything and everything he wanted it was quite appropriate to pull some stunt on you and separate you from the two or three thousand or two or three hundred or five or ten dollars that you had. Whatever it took for him to get whatever it was that he wanted on that day. Talking to Charlie, I sat there in awe because the experience of imagining that somebody else had the same kinds of feelings on their insides that he had never occurred to Charlie. He didn't know what the hell I was talking about. Charlie was the center of the universe, all ego and the only ego.
For whatever the reasons one might speculate, for those who are able to make that leap of imagination of empathy, it is not that ego, self-interest, etc., do not exist. It is only that they not ultimate. What is at the heart of what our religious teachers have been pushing at us for lo, these many ions ? It is that really weird experience Buddha had before he went to sit under the tree. Someone who doesn't have to refusing to acknowledge the barriers, the lines, the walls that we build between ourselves and other people. For them, the lines that the mind draws, that our cultures have historically drawn, can be crossed. They aren't even barbed wired.
So I suggest to you the following discipline: Pay attention to your own experience of empathy and of being empathed. Notice when you "other." "Other" here is a verb. It's what you do when you assume that a person is somehow significantly "other" than you; when the barrier between you approaches ultimacy. As I catch myself drawing that line, and maybe only as I catch myself drawing the line, can I blur it. Or at the very least own it as a line that "I" drew. In that moment of refusing to consider the lines that we draw ultimate an interesting thing tends to happen. The first is that all the rules disappear. The presumptions about how one is "supposed" to behave, all of the things that the culture has told you in your maturation process about what is right and wrong blur with the line. It may be that only in that moment of transcending the line can you do rightly, simply as a human response to another human like yourself, without having to calculate whether you're going to get credit for it or whether it falls within the correct rules and regs, or even whether the other person will one day thank you deeply for it. For it is in that moment of transcending the boundaries we are so in the habit unconsciously of drawing between ourselves and others that the possibility of Buddha's insight under the bodhi tree became possible.
Another path to the Buddha; not by way of suffering but by way of awe at that incredible human ability to escape the boundaries of our own mind.