When you take a second
look at Jesus, there are always a few surprises. Just when you think he’s the
guru of peace and love along comes a passage like this: “Do not think that I
have come to bring peace to the earth. I have not come to bring peace, but a
sword.” (Matthew 10:34) “I have not come
to bring peace.” Seriously? Just who is this sword-wielding Jesus? Now that would make a cool stained-glass window.
Throughout the world’s wisdom traditions, spiritual
teachers often resort to the image of the sword. In Vedanta philosophy, the
“sword of discrimination” refers to our ability to discern reality from
illusion, permanence from impermanence, and truth from lies. Wielding the sword
of discrimination is an essential skill for anyone seeking liberation from the
delusions of conditioned consciousness. If you have no capacity for discernment
or discrimination, you remain forever trapped in an illusory realm far from the
sanity, refuge, and beauty of the truth.
The great Buddhist bodhisattva Manjurshri is depicted
wielding a flaming sword, his eyes alight with the intensity of a warrior in
battle. In his other hand he holds a lotus flower, the symbol of prajna, the fully-realized awareness of
the enlightened state. Because you can’t have one without the other. If you
want to awaken, you must cut away all that is not real.
Manjurshri,
flaming sword and all, is not your soft, cuddly bodhisattva. He is not your
mom. He did not come to comfort you with soft words, cookies, and cocoa. He is here
to violently cut you free from the things that are holding your back – your
egoic delusions of grandeur, your debilitating self-loathing, your cravings and
attachments, and the lie that you have more time to waste. Sharp swords have a
way of conveying urgency when gentle coddling and doe-eyed ministrations fail.
It will hurt. You’re going to lose some things – things
that you thought were important. But it turns out they weren’t. And since you
were unwilling to let go of them, Manjursri came to slash them away with his
sword. You made him do this. You could have let go. But you didn’t. You chose
attachment. So he had to go to work.
Change
is hard because we always focus on what we are losing, never on what is being
born from the wreckage. As much as we say we want to be free the truth is this:
we like our cages. We feel contained by them, protected even. Safe.
Safety
is overrated. Looking back on our lives we realize that it was only when we
took enormous risk or weathered great loss that we were rewarded with the
sweetness and beauty we had been longing for.
In
Daniel Ladinsky’s translation, the Sufi poet Hafiz explains it this way in his
poem Looking for Trouble:
I once had a student
Who would sit alone in his house at
night
Shivering with worries and fears.
And come morning
He would often look as though
He had been raped by a ghost.
Then one day my pity
Crafted for him a knife
From my own divine sword
Since then
I have become very proud of this
student.
For now, come night
Not only has he lost all his fear,
Now he goes out
Just looking for trouble.
We have all seen that “raped by a ghost” look in each other’s eyes, and even in our own. Haunted by a past we cannot change, afraid to step across the threshold of our own front doors to claim what is ours, convinced that who we really are is not what the world requires, we stay frozen in a thought-cage of limited and limiting ideas that hold us back from living our own best lives.
This
is why spiritual teachers from Christianity, Hinduism, Buddhism, Islam, and
everywhere else talk so much about wielding swords. That’s how tenacious
negative thinking is. That’s how powerful lies are. They don’t undo themselves
– they must be undone with sharp, bold, decisive action.
What
happens when you run and hide from the sword of discernment? In other words,
what happens when you refuse to find the courage to relinquish all of your
attachments? What happens when you fail to see past the surface of things and
into their depths? What happens when you deny the soft and mysteriously
paradoxical nature of reality and force the fluid world into hard categories
and rigid dogma? In a word, suffering. Suffering, Buddha taught, is the
inevitable product of self-centered expectations. In fact, expectations are
just future resentments under construction. When you foolishly think that you
are in charge, the universe always has a big surprise waiting for you – the
flat tire, the sudden divorce, the devastating diagnosis. In those moments the
sword of Manjurshri comes crashing down with heartrending finality and in an
instant we realize our utter powerlessness. But on the other side of that
powerlessness is the freedom of realization, the wordless knowing that as all
the forms of the embodied world rise and fall without our consent or permission
we, in the eye of the hurricane, are stillness and peace. That there is wisdom
in letting go, in saying Thank you for
even allowing me to experience any of this. Grief and despair give way to
gratitude and reverence. Even rapture.
But
why wait? As we learn to wield the sword of discrimination ourselves, before it
is done for and to us, we claim our rightful responsibility as stewards of our
own best lives. Never stop trying to awaken. It is not new ideas we need, but
freedom from all ideas. Somewhere out past all ideologies and doctrines is the
wordless wisdom of inter-being, to be touched in our meditation practice, in
our sacred service, in our prayers, in our humble appreciation, in our careful
study, and in our sweet and innocent loving. Wisdom is not something we know,
it is something we do. In this sense, it is possible to be right without having
all of the answers, without, in fact, having any answers at all. We relinquish
even the need to understand. We face what is, and have on our lips only the
holy word yes. This is what it means
to wield the sword of discernment.
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