Category: basic Buddhism

  • Compassion in Buddhism: Why does Kuan Yin have so many hands? 

    Compassion in Buddhism: Why does Kuan Yin have so many hands? 

    Kuan Yin is an archetype of compassion in Buddhism. Sometimes portrayed as female, or male, or androgynously, they manifest the impulse to help suffering beings.

    In his celebrated Four Quartets, T. S. Eliot observed:

    Human kind cannot bear very much reality.

    Reality is a lot to take sometimes. One teacher says this practice builds our “reality tolerance.”

    Ours is a sobering practice

    The bare bones of it is to appreciate the “three inconvenient truths”, as the American nun Pema Chodron calls the “three marks of existence” the Buddha taught are intrinsic to reality: impermanence, stress, and interconnectedness.

    It’s inconvenient for us that everything changes.

    For example, just when I’m feeling settled as I sit to meditate, there’s this pain, or that song going through my head and ricocheting off my inner cranium walls, telling me I have been overdoing it with Spotify.

    Deep down we much prefer convenience

    From a Buddhist perspective, the habit energies called delusion come along to satisfy our preference for convenience, controlling the internal narrative, spinning reality in a distorted way, supporting our insupportable preferences for stability and constancy.

    Mostly, we fall for this over and over, until we grasp that our practice is about seeing these delusive habit energies arise in the mind in their many guises and to work through them.

    A milestone in practce …

    is seeing how our conditioned patterns distort our perceptions of reality in real time.

    This practice is sobering because we get intimate with our personal experience of stress and frustration- one of the three aspects of reality the Buddha called dukkha.

    If we don’t clearly see the mechanisms of our own stress and frustration, it’s hard to be happy. 

    When we see this clearly, there is such a relief.

    In the Pali language of early Buddhism, the meditation we practice is called vipassana. “Passana” means to see, and the prefix vi means “in a particular way.”

    As we adapt to regular sitting practice, there’s a deepening sense of calm and inner composure, which helps us see things more clearly.

    A calmer mind is less inclined to fall for the delusive habit energies of desire, aversion or agitation. We can see our stuff more clearly, our hidden motivation and agendas, for example.

    Tranquility allows a healing to happen, a gathering together of all our broken parts, the unfinished business, the parts we have disowned.

    But the practice doesn’t end here, it’s just getting started.

    Kuan Yin: archetype of compassion in Buddhism
    Kuan Yin: archetype of compassion in Buddhism

    We notice that just as we have work to do, so does everyone else.

    We realize we’re all in this mess together. Even when we do not know what to do next, we feel we should at least try to be kind.

    The late Zen master Bernie Glassman tells us “I define realization as the depth to which one sees the interconnectedness of life.”

    Then he adds a corollary, which emphasizes compassion in Buddhism:

    And the degree of your enlightenment can be measured by your actions.

    Here is a Zen koan- a kind of teaching story- from ancient Zen lore about compassion in Buddhism as the the fruit of our sobering practice, of living our interconnected-ness.

    How Does Kuan Yin Use Those Many Hands & Eyes

    Yunyan asks the more realized monk Daowu:
    “Why is it that the Bodhisattva Guanyin has so many hands and eyes?”
    Daowu responds, “It is like someone sleeping, in the night, reaching behind her head for her pillow.”
    To these words Yunyan said, “I understand.”
    When asked what precisely was his understanding he answered, “Our bodies are covered with eyes and hands.”
    Daowu replied, “Almost. You’re eight tenths of the way.”
    Then, when asked what is the more complete response, was told,
    “There are only eyes and hands.”

    This conversation between two monks is preserved in the twelfth century anthology of Zen stories called the Blue Cliff Record. Both monks, Yunyan and Daowu, were students of the same teacher and would themselves each become famous teachers.

    They both deeply realized this interconnectedness. Daowu, it seems, had a deeper understanding than the younger monk Yunyan, who asked why the bodhisattva Kwan Yin has so many hands and eyes.

    In my mind, Yunyan was really asking “What’s the deal with this deity we all talk so much about, who has a thousand hands and a thousand eyes? What’s up with that?”

    Kwan Yin is an archetype of compassion in Buddhism.

    Sometimes portrayed as a man, sometimes as a woman, and sometimes androgynously, Kwan Yin manifests the altruistic impulse to reach out and help suffering beings.

    Daowu says this altruistic impulse comes deeply from the heart without a second thought- like someone turning in her sleep and reaching a hand behind her head to adjust her pillow. 

    He says this natural impulse of compassion in Buddhism is like having eyes and hands all over our body. True, true, says his companion Yunyan. But he adds- that’s only 80% of the answer. 

    The full answer, he says, is realizing “There are only eyes and hands.” I appreciate the writer James Ishmael Ford take on the full answer here:

    Just this. Ends and means, one thing; our interdependence and you and I, one thing.

  • why I meditate

    why I meditate

    I am often asked why I meditate, what am I trying to accomplish by sitting on a cushion?

    Depending on who asks, I answer something like – To clearly see why I suffer, and with that understanding to cultivate peace of mind and a kind heart.

    why I meditate

    I have personally found mindfulness practice does just that. The Buddha taught mindfulness as one part of a comprehensive life program to make this goal a lived reality for regular folks like you and I.

    This week let’s take a look at what the Buddha discovered and how it helps us live our everyday life with ever-deepening joy and connection, “the sure heart’s release” as he once put it.

    After his own spiritual awakening, the Buddha distilled his understanding of our human predicament into three insights, traditionally known as the three marks of existence.

    Let’s just call them facts of life:

    1. Everything is temporary;
    2. We habitually react to our world with resistance, felt as tension and suffering; and
    3. Nothing is solid or solidly happens by itself, everything is contingent on causes and conditions.

    Traditionally these are expressed as impermanence, suffering and non-substantiality.

    There is a certain relief I feel when I acknowledge these facts for myself. They help me appreciate what’s truly important in this fleeting world, and helps me remember why I meditate.

    They wake me up as I move through my life in a kind of daze, checking email on my phone, going from one task and one distraction to another.

    Because everything is changing, a flower has poignancy. When I realize this I pause.

    why I meditate

    Because I suffer at times, “the sure heart’s release” is more appealing.

    I like Sylvia Boorstein’s line about the second fact:

    Life is like a continuous quiz show where the only question ever asked is, “How are you going to manage whatever is happening now without confusing yourself and creating suffering?

    The Korean monk Haemin Sunim, in his lovely book The Things You Can See Only When You Slow Down, expresses the third fact in this way:

    The whole universe is contained in an apple wedge in a lunch box. Apple tree, sunlight, cloud, rain, earth, air, farmer’s sweat are all in it. Delivery truck, gas, market, money, cashier’s smile are all in it. Refrigerator, knife, cutting board, mother’s love are all in it. Everything in the whole universe depends on one another.

    The Buddha taught that deeply experiencing these three facts with mindfulness in our daily life brings about wisdom and compassion.

    And daily life is the best place to practice releasing needless suffering and growing in love and compassion.

    Our everyday lives serve up unending opportunities that catch us, triggering our habitual reactions of liking and disliking.

    Mindfulness allows us to catch ourselves before life does.

    Drop by drop the water pot is filled

    counsels the Buddha. That’s why we need to keep coming back to the cushion.

    That’s why I meditate.

  • refuge

    refuge

    We suffer because we forget what we truly are. We take refuge to remember.

    We forget we are love and compassion; that we are hard-wired to feel and connect. We forget we are truly and profoundly good through and through.

    Yet we settle for less, much less.

    Tara Brach said in one of her talks one of her favorite Asian teaching stories is about a huge statute of the Buddha somewhere in Thailand. Since it looked like all the others in the temple, made of plaster and clay, people didn’t particularly revere it over the others.

    Then came a long period of drought, and small cracks started to appear. One of the monks had the idea to shine a flashlight to look inside the crack to see if it there was some infrastructure problem.

    In every tiny crack he looked into, a bright shining light reflected back. He called the other monks, and together they carefully removed small pieces of the cracked plaster and clay to reveal flashes of gold.

    When they removed the plaster and clay covering, they found one of the largest pure gold Buddha statues in Southeast Asia.

    tiny cracks as insights

    I like to think of the tiny cracks in the story as those little insights we get from time to time throughout our day: the light is turning red, OK, an opportunity to be aware of my body just sitting here in the car, waiting patiently.

    My favorite work shirt is wrinkled – a reminder to fold it nicely the next time it comes out of the dryer.

    Little cracks like these appear in the plaster covering of our life all day long, we just forget to look for the gold shining through each moment.

    The monks think the statue had been covered in plaster and clay to protect it from (from thieves, I imagine). But through the passage of time, people forgot what they had.

    Just like we forget what we have. We put on a covering of defenses to protect ourselves so long ago; we have forgotten what it was we are protecting: our true nature, our Buddha-nature.

    we take refuge in the depths of our true self

    We forget the gold and we start believing we’re the covering – the defensive, small, insecure self.

    The essence of the spiritual path is simply reconnecting with the inner gold, mindful moment after moment. This connection is an unassailable refuge.

    refuge in traditional Buddhism

    In traditional Buddhism the first step on the spiritual path is taking refuge in the three treasures of Buddha, Dharma and Sangha. We take refuge in the pure gold inner Buddha, the spacious freedom of our true nature.

    Sure, it begins with some desire on our part for perceived spiritual goodies, but if we hang in there it progresses into small daily revelations through those tiny cracks in the defensive self.

    Mindfulness encourages the pure gold to shine though those tiny cracks.

    With deepening experience, refuge as a religious ideal fades into the liberating immanence of our true nature. We are “at play in the fields” of aliveness and mystery.

    to find treasures of joy in the fields of the daily

    A sangha member emailed me this poem the other day; I write this week’s this email as a sort of prologue to this poem, which is a kind of prayer:

    (with many thanks to Noah for finding it)

     Empower me

     to be a bold participant,

     rather than a timid saint in waiting,

     in the difficult ordinariness of now;

     to exercise the authority of honesty;

     rather than defer to power,

     or deceive to get it;

     to influence someone for justice,

     rather than impress anyone for gain;

     and, by grace, to find treasures

     of joy, of friendship, of peace

     hidden in the fields of the daily

     you give me to plow.

    ~Ted Loder, from Wrestling the Light: Ache and Awe in the Human-Divine Struggle.

    As Noah wrote in his email to me, “treasures hidden…in the fields of the daily” speaks to the heart of this practice.