The Poetry of Nirvana

 Nirvana is one of those words like heaven, freedom, or God—it means so many different things to so many different people that it ends up meaning almost nothing. Let’s go back to the beginning and see if we can restore the essence of nirvana to its rightful clarity.

In Sanskrit, nirvana literally means “no wind.” Nir is a negating prefix (like unintentional or impossible), and vana in this context means breath or air that is moving. In its original sense then nirvana was a one-word poem connoting stillness, serenity, and the absence of agitation.

It certainly wasn’t a celestial realm reserved for the most devout—that idea would take shape much later.

As Buddha traveled and taught throughout India in the sixth century B.C.E., he used the word nirvana to describe the enlightened, awakened state. In this context, nirvana means “to extinguish” or “to blow out,” as in to blow out a candle. It’s a potent metaphor. When you blow out a candle, where does the flame go? I don’t know, but the conflagration is over. So too in the consciousness of nirvana no longer are we driven by the agitation of craving and fear. Not only is there nothing left to crave—there’s no one left to do the craving. In the state of nirvana we have transcended our ordinary egoic consciousness and entered a calmer state characterized by selfless compassion (karuna).

Would anyone around you even know if you had tasted nirvana? It’s not like you begin glowing, levitating, or spouting wisdom aphorisms. In fact, you probably just get back to work. As the Zen saying goes: “Before enlightenment I chopped wood and carried water. After enlightenment, I chopped wood and carried water.”

But something happened as Buddhism evolved. In some of the devotional branches of Mahayana Buddhism nirvana came to be understood (especially in the minds of the laity) as an afterlife realm reserved only for the most devout Buddhists. While the original Buddha told his students “don’t follow me,” and “be lamps unto yourselves,” Buddha 2.0 required our purity, devotion, and adoration. How does this happen?

I guess we need gods, and in their absence, we create them. This impulse to devotion runs throughout the world’s religions. In mainline Christianity for example, it’s so much easier to worship Jesus than to follow him—to live as he lived. Setting celebrities, political leaders, and wisdom teachers up on celestial pedestals serves us in two paradoxical ways—it creates an aspirational ideal while releasing us from the arduous work of transformation.

But in original Buddhism, and arguably in the early Jesus movement as well, the emphasis was not on right belief (orthodoxy) or even on devotion, but on right action (orthopraxy). Nirvana was understood not as a reward for obsequiousness, but as an inner condition revealed only after the interfering impediments of egotism had sloughed off. The practice of renunciation, humility, meditation, and service untied all the knots and unlocked all the doors. The truth indeed will set you free.

Imagine a pond on a windy day, the surface choppy and silt from the bottom roiling up and muddying the water. Then imagine no wind—the pond’s surface returning to glass as the silt settles back to the bottom. Now, every cloud in the sky is reflected on its mirrored surface, and every pebble below a speckled jewel. From stillness comes clarity and depth. This is the poetry of nirvana.  

 

[This piece originally appeared in my "A to Zen" column in the September/October 2022 issue of Unity Magazine and is reproduced here with permission.]

In The Presence

Standing in the darkness of Notre Dame Cathedral on a rainy Paris morning, the faint light pouring through the stained glass windows all rose red and indigo, a mixed men and boys choir began to sing a choral arrangement of Samuel Barber's Adagio for Strings, their voices soaring between the towering stone walls. The tourists, already in whisper mode, fell silent. Every soul in the room unfurled. Then softly, another sound – people all around me quietly weeping. So I wasn't the only one.

In moments like that, seared into your memory forever, you feel the presence of something bigger, something more vast and real and beautiful and true than the ordinary world. You feel it in every fiber of your mind-body. It startles you. But deep inside you recognize it, and you know that this presence is always near, hidden just behind the veil of ordinary consciousness. You don’t need to fly to Paris to feel it (but it doesn’t hurt). You can experience it right now, wherever you are, if you learn how to grow quiet and still and open enough. Presence isn’t achieved, it’s allowed.

Call it the Kingdom of Heaven, nirvana, awakening, or simply the presence – whatever it is is beyond all of our pretty names and concepts. Still, the mind hungers to understand. So we struggle to identify and describe the sacred presence. And that’s when the trouble starts.

This isn’t easy for me to say as a philosophy professor, but when considering the mystical realm, for once it is true – feelings are more valid than facts. Facts have to do with the mind, conceptual thought, discursive reasoning, logical structures, careful definitions of words, and – shudder – empirical evidence.  But in the realm of pure, trans-conceptual experience mere empirical evidence shimmers and shifts like a mirage revealing still deeper and truer forms of knowing. This is what every meditator knows – that in the depths beneath the thought-stream there rests in immense field of boundless, content-free stillness. And the wordless knowing that we are that stillness.

Once your meditation practice reveals this depth authenticity you realize that you can endure anything – that you carry within you the solution to every problem. You shift from human perspective to holy perspective. You see the big picture, and you are filled with a peace that surpasses all understanding. “Welcome all appearances with benevolent indifference,” writes Rupert Spira. “This leads to spontaneous meditation that is our true nature and the experience of causeless peace.” When we let go, we are always meditating.

When we realize the spiritual presence that we are, every room becomes a church, every thought a prayer, every conversation a benediction, and every action a ritual. Our sacred work is the transformative alchemy of our life. It is how we strip away the veneer that hides presence from us. As Soren Kierkegaard wrote, “Prayer does not change God, but it changes him who prays.” And as Meister Eckhart put it, “Our bodily food is changed into us, but our spiritual food changes us into itself.” Our spiritual practice does not improve us, it reveals us.

The presence never leaves us because it is us. The question is not How can we enter the presence? It is What made you think that you were anything other than the presence? 

[This piece was originally published in my "A to Zen" column in the July/August 2019 issue of Unity Magazine, and is reproduced here with permission.]

Wielding the Sword

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.