The First Teaching

 “Burying the lede” is a journalism term for when the most important idea is buried
deep within an article. (They invented a new spelling to differentiate it from the lead used to make typeface for the printing process.)

            A quick look at the first teachings of Jesus and Buddha reveals one thing: They most definitely did not bury the lede. Instead, their first teachings conveyed the central theme of what would become their life’s work.

            The gospels tell us that after Jesus was baptized in the Jordan River, he went into the wilderness for forty days. When he returned the first thing he said was, “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near.” (Matthew 3:2) Repent is an awkward rendering of metanoia, meaning “change of mind.”

On the heels of his own profound transformation, Jesus begins his teaching career not with a demand for obedience, nor with a call to obsess shamefully about our mistakes, but with the suggestion that we simply let go of our old ways of thinking—our prejudices, our conditioning, and our second-hand explanations. What’s the point of learning new information, no matter how true and insightful that information, if the very cognitive routes by which we process that information are clogged with distorting, structural errors? It is not a new world we need, but new eyes and a new mind with which to see and understand the world.

            In India 500 years earlier a young seeker named Siddartha Gautama had his own spiritual transformation in the wilderness. After a long period of study, practice, and meditation, Siddhartha shifted, seeing through the fog of conditioned consciousness, glimpsing the essential nature of things, and thereby earning the nickname Buddha—“the one who woke up.”

            After his enlightenment Buddha walked out of the woods and met with a few old friends in a deer park near Benares. There he gave his first teaching—the Deer Park Sermon—the two core themes being the Middle Path and the Four Noble Truths.

            Born from his own experience, Buddha suggested avoiding the twin extremes of over-indulgence and self-mortification. Both paths are equally self-obsessed and lead nowhere. Instead, walk the middle path of moderation and follow the Four Noble Truths.

            The first three of the Four Noble Truths are, simply put: life is characterized by suffering and dissatisfaction, suffering and dissatisfaction are primarily caused by attachments and cravings, and reducing attachments and cravings would reduce suffering and dissatisfaction. The Fourth Noble Truth is a list of action items called the Eightfold Path.

The first three Noble Truths are the diagnosis and prognosis. The Eightfold Path is the prescription, the behavioral and thought-level changes that would reduce selfish attachments, which would in turn release us from the wheel of suffering and dissatisfaction. Many of the eight suggestions have to do with learning how to think differently. In a word, Buddha is counseling metanoia. As he said in The Dhammapada, “All that we are is the result of what we have thought: we are formed and molded by our thoughts.”

            Our mind is the tool with which we grip and hold the world. Before we can change the world, we must change our minds. And the work begins not with second-hand explanations but with the immediacy of self-examination, courageous purging, and loving transformation. As we suspected all along, wisdom is an inside job. 

[This piece was first published in my A to Zen column in the July/August issue of Unity Magazine, and is reproduced here with permission.]

Love is the Mystery

There is a higher reality that words, concepts, and sermons can’t reach. We try to
point to this reality with carefully wrought language, theology, and doctrine, but the finger pointing at the moon is not the moon. The map is not the place. The menu is not the food.

For those of us who teach, preach, and write this news is somewhat deflating. We thought we were getting close to naming the mystery. But in the end, all we can do is cultivate in others a willingness to deepen into the mystery that wells up through the cracks of their own lives. This is why Buddha simply held up a flower and didn’t say a word. This is why Lao Tzu wrote that “Those who say don’t know, and those who know don’t say.” Even Jesus seemed exasperated as he chastised his disciples in chapter thirteen of the Gospel of Thomas. “I am not your teacher,” he said. “Because you have drunk, you have become intoxicated from the bubbling spring I have tended.”

If the teacher is not the message, and if the message cannot be received second-hand, then why do we gather in spiritual community to hear sermons about how to better ourselves and draw closer to the sacred source? As a guy who often gives those sermons, this strikes me as a particularly urgent question. What, in the end, are spiritual teachings for? Why do we need any of this?

You might as well ask a tree why it leans toward the sun. We love language, talking, and teaching because concepts are what we know. They’re how we know. In a way, they feed us.

First we perceive the world, then shape those perceptions into thoughts. As Adam named the animals, we name the concepts taking up residency in our consciousness, even going so far as to order them into hierarchies, because with naming comes judgment, prejudice, and bias. There is no such thing as value-neutral thought. We fall asleep and forget that we do not know the world as it is—we know only our thoughts about the world. This dynamic leaves us vulnerable to self-aggrandizing narratives that lionize us while diminishing the other. Prejudice seems baked into cognition itself.

Our innate need to discriminate and ascribe hierarchies must be deliberately disrupted and discarded. The good news is that the deeper part of us already knows this. Beneath the conceptual realm there is a concept-free field of awareness unbound by the limitations of thought. The world’s wisdom traditions call it by many names—Atman, Buddha-mind, spirit, inner Christ—and it is our essential nature. We have our being there. The conceptual mind is ill-equipped to experience this deeper reality. Realizing one’s sacred nature is more a process of  unlearning, of getting out of our own way. No matter how Herculean the effort, how can you become what you already are?

One of the most notable hallmarks of awakening is humility. Less and less do you need to prove that you are right. You recognize that every religion is true—that they all work, like maps, to show the way home. You stop straining and start softening. Freedom replaces fear and anxiety. You no longer argue about the meanings of words. All of the names of God are fine. Or none at all. In the end, only one word—love—serves us best as the name of the nameless mystery that we are. 

[This piece was first published in my A to Zen column in the March/April 2023 issue of Unity Magazine, and is reproduced here with permission.]

The Wordless Sermon

Zen Buddhism traces its origin to a single afternoon in the life of the Buddha.
One day Buddha gathered his followers for a dharma talk as he had done many times before. But on this day he simply held up a flower and didn’t say a word. How would you feel if your minister tried that this Sunday in church? Awkward rustling sweeping through the congregation. Sideways glances turning to outright confusion. But on that long-ago afternoon, one man, Kashyapa, met eyes with Buddha and smiled.

When the Indian Buddhist teacher Bodhidharma brought Zen Buddhism to China in the fifth century CE he penned the famous mission statement of this nascent movement: “A special tradition outside the scriptures, not dependent on words or letters, directly pointing to the mind, and seeing into one’s true nature and attaining Buddhahood.”

As a movement, Zen Buddhism replaced all of the normal trappings of religion—scriptures and beliefs, devotion to deities, dependence on authorities—with the direct experience of life as it is, pulled into sharper focus through the practice of meditation. In fact, the Japanese word Zen is a rendering of the Chinese word Chan, which is a rendering of the Sanskrit word dhyana meaning “meditation.” At the heart of the entire Zen project is the claim that we already are what we seek. We just have to empty out enough to realize it.

Another hallmark of Zen is its refreshing dearth of boundaries. “Your entire life is Zen,” said Bodhidharma. Our natural proclivity for compartmentalization is gently (and sometimes not so gently) shaken loose in the practice of Zen.

After a recent talk on Zen Buddhism, a woman raised her hand and said, “I came here looking for something tangible, but this was all very abstract.” She was right. I felt her disappointment. She was looking for guidance. An old Zen story popped into my mind. Maybe this will help I thought.

A young man went to stay in a Zen monastery. They graciously took him in and he was invited to participate in all the activities of the community, primarily meditation and chores—lots and lots of chores. One week passed, then another, then another. But nobody was talking to him about Zen. His frustration grew. Finally, he worked up the courage to go see the master. 

“I came here to learn about Zen,” he exclaimed. “I have been here a whole month now and no one has said one word to me about Zen!”

“Have you eaten?” asked the master.

“Yes.”

“The go wash your bowl.”

Stories like this drive us into the immediacy of this moment, reminding us that true religion is not in books, beliefs, ministers, or rituals. All of those things are the plates we eat off of—they are not the food. Lived experience is the food. Every lunch is as sacred as a Eucharist. Washing your bowl sanctifies this moment as powerfully as any prayer. The mind asks for answers and explanations. But when the Buddha held up that flower, he was gently rebuking our tendency to build conceptual barriers between us and the here and now. 

Kashyapa understood what the congregation did not—that something sacred passes between us in every moment as if there are no barriers at all. Because there aren’t. Kashyapa passed the test, becoming the second patriarch after the Buddha. He understood the wordless sermon.

[This piece was originally published in my A to Zen column in the January/February 2023 issue of Unity Magazine and is reproduced here with permission.]

The Three Temptations of Buddha

 

When Siddhartha Gautama (563-483 BCE) left his childhood palace to find wisdom in the forest he was desperate and willing to try anything. Like many spiritual seekers, Siddhartha had grown convinced that his liberation lay in finding the right teacher, the right practice, and the right theory-of-everything to sooth his addled mind. He studied with every guru in the forest and they helped a little, but each time, their teachings collapsed under the weight of their own beautifully ornamented contradictions.

In his deepening despair Siddhartha fell into an extreme form of asceticism that nearly killed him. None of it worked so he quit searching. He let it all drop. He found his way back to the middle path, sat down in the forest, and began to meditate.

According to legend, a demon named Mara came to see him, for it is the job of demons to interfere with the progress of spiritual aspirants. To this end, Mara offered Siddhartha three temptations.

The first temptation was lust. Mara ordered his two daughters to perform an elicit dance, sure that this would divert the young man from his meditation. But instead of arousal, Siddhartha felt only compassion for these young women so clearly caught in a hell of their own, trapped by their father into a rather, shall we say, disreputable profession.

The second temptation was power. Mara offered to make Siddhartha king of the world—the same temptation, incidentally, that Satan offered Jesus in the wilderness 500 years later. The stories are essentially the same: demons attempting to lure our heroes off their respective paths toward transcendent illumination. But worldly power held no allure for Siddhartha (as it also would not for Jesus).

The third temptation was one of personal paradise—to leave the embodied realm and vanish into Nirvana, a celestial realm of bliss far above this world of woe. But Siddhartha said no. It was never his own liberation he was after, but the liberation of the world. With the defeat of Mara, Siddhartha attained enlightenment and became the Buddha, the Awakened One.

Thus the bodhisattva ideal was born. In Mahayana Buddhism the bodhisattva (bodhi: illumined, sattva: being) is the spiritual ideal—an illumined being with one foot in Nirvana and one foot in the world. In a significant way, Jesus plays this role for many Christians—the presence of the eternal formless sacred source here in the world of temporal forms.

In both of these figures—Jesus and Buddha—we see the polarities of divine and secular, formless and formed, sacred and profane unified in a living mystery. And in both the Christian and Buddhist traditions we are likewise called to be the presence of this unified paradox by manifesting our inner Christ and embodying the bodhisattva vow—working for the alleviation of the suffering of all sentient beings. As Jesus said in Matthew 25:40, “Whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me.”

Pedagogical parables, legends, and metaphors like the three temptations story appear throughout the world’s wisdom literature. When we take these evocative tales into our contemplation what do they mean for us? These stories lead us into an increasingly nuanced, skillful, and disciplined mastery of the always delicate task of self-actualization. They help us give birth to the sacred potential locked inside us since the universe was born. There are so many ways to get it wrong, and only a few ways to get it right. 

 

[This piece was originally published in the July/August 2022 issue of Unity Magazine, and is reproduced here with permission.]

The Open Heart

When the eyes open, the heart opens. The more you see, the more you feel. Even an ordinary walk through the neighborhood breaks you open – the desiccated skull of a hummingbird, an out of season flower, a discarded condom wrapper – everywhere you look the poignancy and insistence of life, death, and everything in between. It’s as if the whole world – scattered for a while in disparate embodiments – is longing for reunion.

            Being born means initiation into the world of death. Instead of seeing this as bad news or some sort of cosmic unfairness, we shift into acceptance and a door opens, and if we’re brave, naïve, and crazy enough to walk through that door the world begins to shimmer with unspeakable beauty. The only thing left is love.

            The world’s spiritual traditions are rife with paradox: it is only when we give that we receive, it is only when we release that we attain, it is only when we let go that we make contact, it is only when we surrender that we win. Grasping, clinging, craving, attachment, ego-demands, and self-obsession lead only to suffering. All bliss needs are unclenched hands and an open heart. Give bliss a chance. Let go.

            There is nothing to grasp, and there is no one to do the grasping – this is the great secret. A confluence of factors tricked us into thinking we were separate from everything else, and spiritual practice – any spiritual practice – is the long, slow process of undoing that trickery.

            As white light scatters through a prism into colors, so too the oneness of Being scatters into multiplicity as it passes through the prism of the human mind. Our crude perceptions and conceptual thinking distort and imprison Oneness into paradoxical categories of our own making. Then we become warehouse workers, taking inventory, and cataloging conceptual boxes into hierarchies. We call this “knowledge.” We squander our lives arguing about doctrines, theologies, definitions, and labels. Meanwhile, the real world – the unquantifiable world right outside the doors of our carefully organized warehouses – flows by like a lazy river.

            Water doesn’t ask, “Am I a stream, a river, an ocean, a cloud, or a drop of rain?” It rests in its waterness. It allows individual transformation and evolution of purpose to take its natural course. We, on the other hand, insist on our labels and hierarchies – at great cost.

            We have become addicted to explanation. Like drunks lurching for the bottle, we stumble into the arms of any decent argument or self-serving emotional appeal – anything to assuage the uncertainty of not knowing.

            Not knowing is the doorway to unity and reconciliation. Not knowing is the embodiment of courage. Not knowing is an act of love.

            The simplicity, the clarity, the unmediated symphony of this present moment eludes us when we remain enamored and caught by our thoughts about this present moment. Somewhere along the way we became convinced that our true life, our real life, existed in the realm of thought. That was the most destructive thought of all.

            When you wake up in the morning say thank you. Say thank you as you drift off to sleep. Say thank you between tasks. Say thank you in the middle of everything. Make thank you your mantra. It doesn’t matter who you’re saying it to. Simply be in the consciousness of thank you. We do not say thank you to appease or acknowledge some higher power – the higher power isn’t a needy parent. We say thank you to open our hearts and minds to the truth that we did not create this – we receive this – our lives, these hands, this passion, this beauty, this support, the air we breathe, the water we drink, the food we eat, the love we rely on. We live in the holy thank you. When you do this, you turn the key that unlocks wisdom, wellness, and bliss.

            A nearby star floods our planet with light. Through photosynthesis plants utilize this celestial energy to replicate the cells of their own bodies. Plants are starlight storage systems. Then animals eat the plants, and each other. Then we eat the animals and the plants. In this way all life forms are embodied starlight, feeding on one another in an endless energy exchange. Individual forms come and go, but energy doesn’t die – it just keeps changing address. Life is not a possession. No one owns the energy. The water does not belong to the sea – it just holds it for a while. We do not live life. Life lives us. As Eckhart Tolle wrote in Stillness Speaks, “The opposite of life is not death. The opposite of death is birth. Life has no opposite.” That’s why the only sane response to any of this is thank you.

            When it is our time to navigate death, other’s or our own, we are forced to let go. The pain of the loss is directly proportional to our grasping. The tighter we cling, the more acute our trauma.

            A young mother came to the Buddha carrying her dead child. She’d heard the Buddha had powerful magic that might restore her child to life. She asked the Buddha, “Is there anything you can do to help me?”

            “Yes,” he said. “But first you must go into the village and find three mustard seeds, and they must be from a house that has been untouched by death.”

            She went door to door through the village carrying her dead child. At the first house she asked, “Do you have any mustard seeds?”

            “Yes.”

            “But has anyone died here?”
            “Yes, we lost our father last year.”

            She went to the next house and knocked on the door.

            “Do you have any mustard seeds?”

            “Yes.”

            “But has anyone died here?”

            “Yes, we lost our mother last month.”

            She went to the next house and knocked on the door.

            “Do you have any mustard seeds?”
            “Yes.”

            “But has anyone died here?”

            “Yes, we lost our child just last week.”

            Many hours passed. Twilight faded to darkness. She had knocked on every door in the village. Not one house was untouched by death.

            She walked out into the forest and looked up at the stars arrayed in thick fields of light above her. “The living are few, and the dead are many,” she whispered. “They outnumber even these stars.” She buried her child and went to the Buddha and thanked him. She joined the order and devoted her life to compassionate action and service. Knowing the universality of death, and the impermanence of all forms, she now understood that none of us owns any of this, we only get to love it for a while. This is the wisdom of the open heart.