Nothing More, Nothing Less, Nothing Else

"Pure is only form; there is, then, nothing more than this."

-The Scripture of Great Wisdom

There is nothing more than this.

You can confirm this yourself, using your eyes and ears, your body and mind. Whatever is happening now is all that there is. Even if you're remembering the past or planning for the future, the planning and the remembering is happening now.

There is nothing more than this.

There is also nothing LESS than this. You might not notice the sound of the fan in the background, but it's still there and you are still hearing it. The feelings you don't want or are trying to deny are happening whether you like it or not. You don't have to be aware of your your blood circulating oxygen to your lungs or your liver processing toxins to reap the benefits

There is also nothing BUT this. You can never know what is happening at this moment in some far off place or even in the mind of someone very close. There is no alternative present you can leap to where this happened instead of that, where you made that decision instead of this one. Whatever is going on in your life right now, a lottery won, a car stolen, a dream fulfilled, a heart broken, or the unimaginable boredom of no change at all...Yes, this is really happening.

There's nothing more than this. There's nothing less than this. There's nothing else but this.

There's only this.

Isn't that cool?

I Think I Might Suck At Buddhism

I don‘t want to alarm anyone, but I think I suck at Buddhism.

That’s not going to be a problem, is it? I suck at lots of things--math, jump shooting, training dolphins--and my life has gone okay. The only reason I mention this particular shortcoming is because, well, because I want to be a Buddhist monk.

Suck is a broad term. Many of us say we suck at things without taking a look at what that means. We write ourselves off as failures instead of exploring the specific ways we fall short, possible strategies to improve, or even examining how realistic the expectations we have of ourselves are in the first place.

The first way I suck is technical. I’m trying to learn our scriptures by heart but my memory’s save slots are filled with 80s music lyrics, movie quotes, pro wrestling trivia, and comedy bits.

Granted, Tettsu Gikai is far less memorable a name than Macho Man Randy Savage or Ricky The Dragon Steamboat, but can my teacher really be expected to ordain someone who knows more about the history of the Intercontinental Championship than he does the ancestral line?

And let’s talk about The Scripture of Great Wisdom. Thousands of words of scholarly and spiritual commentary have been written on this sutra, one of Mahayana Buddhism’s richest and most foundational texts. My addition to this centuries-long dialogue is, “needs more jokes.”

This will change as I keep working at it. What scares me is that I don’t entirely want to change.

So that’s a thing. Here’s another:

I already miss what I‘m going to leave behind.

I miss my friends. I miss my family. I miss dancing at the bar. I miss sex and hamburgers and watching sports, and I miss endless streams of comments on the internet. I miss the library. I miss the streets of Edmonton and St. Albert, some of which I have walked since I was five years old. I know these streets well; each step carries with it a thousand memories and sense impressions.

I miss my nephews.

But I don’t miss any of these things enough to stay…and as a consequence I have the vague feeling that I am the most Abandoning Abandoner that ever abandoned.

My koan over these last few months has been this: How can I say I want to be a monk when I love my current life and the people in it? How can I claim to love my life and the people in it if I want to leave them and become a monk?

I don’t have an answer to that question. I’m surprised to notice in myself I don’t particularly feel I need one. On the contrary, the times I've tried to explain anything about my desire to be a monk, whether to myself or others are the times I have most felt like I was full of shit.

I do know that wanting to be a monk has nothing to do with me being unhappy with lay life or any of the people in it. If anything, I strongly believe that I wouldn’t have been happy as a monk until I learned to be happy and fulfilled in lay life and relationships.

We don’t talk about faith much in our society. We live in a secular age, so for many of us, admitting to setting aside meticulous planning and research or evidence-based solutions and rational explanations to trust in the unknown feels faintly embarrassing.

I’m not even talking about religious faith. I’ve heard the same tone in people talking about changing jobs or moving to another part of the country to be with a romantic partner. No matter how strongly they believe in what they are doing, the fact that they cannot rationally explain their decision feels somehow…shameful. We make decisions that we know in our hearts are right for us and we worry about being judged--perhaps not even so much for the decision itself but the WAY we made it, with no carefully collected facts and figures to support our choice.

A choice made out of faith is not an impulse decision. We’ve all felt the difference, whether we can explain that difference or not.

And Faith > Fear.

It trumps fear of loss. It trumps fear of judgement. It triumphs over the fear of abandonment or the fear of abandoning. Even the fear of sucking is nothing in the face of faith. And it’s also important to remember that while faith is stronger than fear, it will not necessarily make that fear go away.

This is true of all things: Work. Parenting. Friendship. Love.      

It’s also true of ourselves. We can be afraid and still have faith in ourselves.

Besides, what choice do we really have? We all have the thing in front of us--the screaming baby, the snow covered sidewalk, the Scripture of Avalokiteshwara Bodhisatva to be recited even if one verse makes me giggle because it reminds me of a line from Ghostbusters where Rick Moranis is talking to a horse.

We do what we need to do as best as we can because it is what we are called to do. Sucking is beside the point.

A Hell Of A Thing

"That was a hell of a thing." - Fred Kwan, Galaxy Quest

When I first learned about Zen, I didn’t know monk still existed as a vocational choice. I figured it had died out with feudal Japan. I considered ‘monk’ as likely a career path as ‘knight’ or ‘court astrologer.’

Now I’m looking to be one. Isn’t that weird? To me, it sure seems that way.

Two nights ago an ex and I made supper together and watched Galaxy Quest. In less than a month, I’ll be sitting around chanting in a cabin in the mountains.

Does that seem strange to you? I can’t wrap my head around it.

A few months ago, I knew the Story of Me. I had a sense of who I was and how the different parts of my life fit together. Now, thanks to a single decision, it feels like a central piece of my identity has been pulled away and the pages of My Story are flying around me like a blizzard. The scenes are unchanged, but I can‘t seem to assemble them into a coherent narrative anymore. I don’t have a context for my own; I am not who I thought I am.

Isn’t that a hell of a thing?

Opening Hands

“Nothing is expected of you except ‘to be.’ That sounds great until you have to do it.” - Brother Benjamin, ex-Cistercian monk

Some years ago, I dated a woman I described as someone who gave and received with closed hands. She would ask for something, and then refuse to accept it. She’d offer something else, and when I went to take it she wouldn’t let go.

She’s in good company. A lot of us do this, in our relationships with others or in our own personal development. We ask for help, support or advice, but refuse to accept it.

We want to be different, but we resist changing. Or we accept change, but only if we’re in control of how, when, and how much of it happens.

This is fine…so long as it works. Sometimes though, it breaks down. People tell us things we don’t want to hear. We aren’t able to force change through our strength of will. No matter how hard we try, we’re still losing our temper or eating too much of the wrong thing. Or the pain of holding on starts to outweigh the fear of letting go.

We extend our arms to ask for help and when others are unable to pry open our fists, complain no one is helping. We extend our arms to give but refuse to open our hands when others reach to take what we say we’re offering. We push things away from us…and then refuse to let them go.

We have to learn to open our hands.

This doesn’t mean we’ll get what we want. We may also notice that problems don’t necessarily go away just because we stop holding on to them; sometimes they like to remain in our palms testing their wings for awhile before flying away. We need to let go without any expectation that things will change, even as we remind ourselves that change is inevitable.

A burlesque dancer of my acquaintance was fond of a quote she found on the internet: “Sometimes the hardest decision in life is whether to hold on or let go.” It feels like that sometimes.

My experience is there is no real choice. There is only letting go. Again and again, in thousands of ways in thousands of moments in thousands of situations.

The prospect seems too big. Perhaps even overwhelming. We fear what will happen if we give up control? If we don’t hold our selves together, surely we will fall apart. It’s too much to take on faith.

Faith will come. Fear will go. But those things will happen on their own. We don’t need to make them happen. We don’t even need to expect them to happen or know whether or not they are happening.

Keep the focus where it belong. Keep it on this small, but vast thing.

Focus on opening your hands.

Precious Things

“There are things you can’t reach. But

You can reach out to them, and all day long.”

-Mary Oliver

The most precious things are the hardest to hold onto because they’re moments.

I’m experiencing this a lot lately. I’m in a weird no-man’s land between excitement for a future that hasn’t arrived and grieving a life I haven’t yet left behind. I’m left with a Now that is almost painfully sharp and breathtakingly clear.

Last night, for example, I went for dinner with the guys from the band I used to play in back in the nineties. It’s been years since we’ve all been in the same room at the same time.

It was a heck of a thing.

I want to write everything about it. About the way these men still seem so familiar to me in the way they talk and act and move their hands. In the easiness of the conversation. In the sound of the pizza place around us, clinking silverware and raised voices.

And none of it seems write-able. I can write around it. I can write about it. But I can’t write it.

There have been many moments like this over the past weeks. Watching football with my dad and cheering for opposite teams. Watching Mixed Martial Arts with a group of friends in a basement with the taste of Dr Pepper on my tongue. Moments with my nephews and family. Moments at work. Moments on my futon with someone I care about snuggled tight against my chest.

Each moment feels meaningful. Each moment feels like it deserves to be written down, documented somehow.

I want to write these things down on this blog so I can share them. I want to write them on my heart so I can keep them forever. I want them written in the stars so I can look up and read them on cold monastery nights.

Other writers have said things like this better than me. I’ll let them.

The most important things are the hardest to say. They are the things you get ashamed of, because words diminish them -- words shrink things that seemed limitless when they were in your head to no more than living size when they're brought out. But it's more than that, isn't it? The most important things lie too close to wherever your secret heart is buried, like landmarks to a treasure your enemies would love to steal away. And you may make revelations that cost you dearly only to have people look at you in a funny way, not understanding what you've said at all, or why you thought it was so important that you almost cried while you were saying it. That's the worst, I think. When the secret stays locked within not for want of a teller but for want of an understanding ear.

-Stephen King

Where Does The Temple Begin, Where Does It End

-Mary Oliver

There are things you can’t reach. But

you can reach out to them, and all day long.

The wind, the bird flying away. The idea of God.

And it can keep you as busy as anything else, and happier.

The snake slides away; the fish jumps, like a little lily,

out of the water and back in; the goldfinches sing

from the unreachable top of the tree.

I look; morning to night I am never done with looking.

Looking I mean not just standing around, but standing around

as though with your arms open.

And thinking: maybe something will come, some

shining coil of wind,

or a few leaves from any old tree--

they are all in this too.

And now I will tell you the truth.

Everything in the world

comes.

At least, closer.

And, cordially.

Like the nibbling, tinsel-eyed fish; the unlooping snake.

Like goldfinches, little dolls of goldfluttering around the corner of the sky

of God, the blue air.

Meeting Expectations

Sunday the meditation group I’ve been attending had an impromptu meeting on revising how we give meditation instruction.

I can be impatient at meetings. I get frustrated because it often feels to me that people are far more generous with their opinions and ideas as to how things should be done than they are with the time and energy it would take to make those ideas a reality.

This phenomenon isn’t exclusive to the meditation group. The world seems filled with those who--whether the subject is the outside world or their inner lives--would choose talking about the mess for thirty minutes over cleaning for three. As a quieter person, I find it baffling, and yet enough people do it that I sometimes feel as though maybe I’m the crazy one.

That’s what I tell myself, anyways.

In this specific case, I’m also annoyed at the meditation group’s steadfast refusal to quit their jibber-jabber, read my mind, and then do what I want them to do the way I want them to do it.

This isn’t something I’m going to have to worry about much longer.

I’ve bought my bus ticket west; I’m leaving for the priory in just under a month. I’ve been helping with meditation instruction for six years, but the next session or the one after that will probably be my last.

Meanwhile, the group is going ahead and working out new ideas for doing instruction. Don’t they realize I’m going away? Haven’t they noticed that I’m feeling guilty about leaving and wondering how instruction is going to go without my being there to help? Here I am, renouncing the world to save all beings, moving to a cabin in the mountains to Not Have Sex and be eaten by mosquitoes and they’re just going to keep going on and be fine.

Unbelievable.

 Can you believe they’re abandoning me like that?

Body and Mind

In our group, when giving meditation instruction, we typically split it into two parts, the physical posture and what to do with the mind.

For the longest time I tended to devalue the physical part. I used to think it was just to give bodies something to do. I thought enlightenment happened between the ears so when it came to sitting meditation, I always prioritized the ‘meditating’ over the ‘sitting.’ When I sat, I arranged myself in position, gave my attention to my brain, and let my body dangle.

Sitting meditation might not be exercise in any meaningful sense of the word, but it is a physical act. Furthermore, it is a continuous process. Remember that pesky -ing at the end of the word ‘sitting.’ It’s not ‘sit meditation’ You don’t put your body in position and then stop. The sitting is an ongoing thing. It doesn’t need to be forced, but just as you are aware of the ebb and flow of the voices in your mind, you can also notice the ongoing conversation between your muscles and skeleton as they subtly work to keep you balanced. You can pay the same attention to your weight on your sitbones and the expansion and contraction of your lungs, as you can to the arising of greed, fear, compassion, or equanimity.

Our bodies are also more than just a way of experiencing. They are also the way we touch the world. Our senses are the only way we can interact with it. Eyes see; ears hear; brain interprets; hands reach out. The body is the gateway to reality.

And that gateway flows in two directions.

In other words, our bodies experience, and they also express.

Our body is built to communicate with other beings. It’s in the sound of our voice, the shuffle of our feet, the raising of our shoulders. From head to foot, our bodies are broadcasting messages to the beings around us. I was introduced this idea in comedy, had it reinforced in pro wrestling, but I only really started to understand it when I became involved in the burlesque dancing scene.

Burlesque is to sex what pro wrestling is to violence or stand-up comedy is to risqué speech. It takes a source of ambivalence and anxiety and transforms it into public entertainment. Burlesque, wrestling, and comedy are all arts of making the unsafe safe, of giving us a way to experiencing the consequential without experiencing consequences.

The lesson I learned again and again watching and being taught by these performers was the importance of expression. You can tell an entire story about yourself, what you want, and what you’re looking to get in the way you raise an arm, an eyebrow, or a steel chair.

I like the idea of bringing that into my practice, that I am expressing something of myself in every movement, whether it’s offering incense, closing a door behind me, or simply sitting still.

I like the idea and it also troubles me. I feel like by wanting to express my training physically I am posing or cheapening it into a kind performance art.

When I breathe into this troubled feeling, I realize the obstacle is wanting to possess the experience or to make my expression of it something to about me…MY understanding, MY depth of practice.

In truth, none of this belongs to me. I am not experiencing MY anxiety. I am not expressing MY truth. There is anxiety. There is truth. They are visitors passing through; I have no ownership of them.

We often speak about mind, body and speech as though they were ours. It helps distinguish our experience from that of others. But those things are not mine. I didn’t invent this language or how to speak it. Many of my most personal thoughts and ideas are things I learned from watching others. I’ve absorbed my values from my parents, from my culture, from my class so completely that they feel as though they are a part of my being.

Yet they are not mine.

This body doesn‘t belong to me. I didn’t invent the heart or will my bones, blood, and lungs into existence. I can’t take credit for the genes I was born with that have kept me healthy, not  I can I prevent my hair from greying or my hands from shaking as I age.

This extends beyond my body. We often think of our feelings as our own, but even they are not things we possess. Many times, I‘m surprised by my emotions. I didn‘t choose this feeling and I have limited control over how it started or how quickly it goes away. How then can it be mine?

I am just as easily fooled by my thoughts, opinions, and beliefs, seeing them as belonging to me when they are just as often things I read or picked up from family, friends, or the culture around me.

When I make things that are not mine about me, I put my self between experience and expression. I create an artificial and arbitrary division just like when I split meditation instruction into the physical and mental. It makes for easier explaining at the expense of reality.

Precepts For Beginners (Part 3): The Three Treasures

1. I Take Refuge in the Buddha.
2. I Take Refuge in the Dharma.
3. I Take Refuge in the Sangha.

I’m told the three treasures are the core of Buddhism, so I’m embarrassed to admit I don’t understand them all that well. The Great Precepts are specific enough to be understandable. The Pure Precepts are vague enough to find my own understanding. The Three treasures…I don‘t know.

Maybe it’s the language. The treasures have a jargon-ish, religious-y aspect to them. They sound like the sort of thing you need to be a professional to understand and explain, which doesn’t gibe with the way this practice--particularly the Soto version of it--is supposed to work. After all, the thing with Buddhism is that it is do-able by anyone. We can all realize the truth.

I don’t understand the Three Treasures. I’ll do my best to explain them anyways.

Let’s start at the beginning with the idea of taking refuge. When I first heard the phrase, it sounded suspiciously like running and hiding. But Buddhism is about responsibility. Surrender is a part of taking refuge, but we aren’t talking about hiding behind the skirts of some Celestial Being or throwing ourselves on the mercy of some Cosmic Court. Instead, as I understand it, we are talking about trust.

1. I’m learning to trust the Buddha
2. I’m teaching myself to trust the Dharma
3. I’m learning to have faith in the Sangha.

I. I have faith in Buddha

What does it mean to trust the Buddha? Well, on one level, it can mean the life and teachings of Shakyamuni Buddha. That’s self-explanatory, and also uncomfortable. The guy lived twenty five centuries ago in a world we’d scarcely recognize? How can we have faith in something we know so little about?

But let‘s explore that question a little deeper. How different was he from us, really? How well do we need to know the facts of what he said and did not say, what he did and did not do to see the sameness between his life and ours? Is it possible that we can look at others and recognize that even though we might be separated by time, culture, socioeconomic status, or race, we all have in common the ability to suffer and the ability to find freedom from that suffering?

Sometimes we talk about taking refuge in the Buddha as  trusting our Buddha-nature. That approach raises the question: What is Buddha-nature?

So what’s Buddha-nature? Great question. I had been hearing the term for years, and it has only recently occurred to me, I don‘t actually know what that is. From the context, I interpreted it as a sort of a  universal inner goodness, and that works pretty good, I guess, even if it sidesteps the question. The idea that we are, at heart, good, that there is something wonderful in us and rather than building it, all we have to do is call it forth is quite wonderful.

We can accept this on faith. But for those of us who have trouble finding the line between faith and blind belief, we can perhaps go back to those questions I asked about the historical Buddha. Are there thing we have in common with him? If so, is it possible we have those same things in common with all people, or even all beings?

If the answer is yes, what does it mean for the way we relate to ourselves and others? If we have the same qualities as someone as esteemed as the Buddha, does it make any sense to ignore those qualities, to put ourselves down, to make decisions that hurt us? If we realize that we share those qualities, not just with the Buddha, but with all other beings, what does that tell us about the way we should treat the people around us?

Lately I‘ve been coming at taking refuge in the Buddha from another angle. Technically, Buddha means awakened one. So what do we get when we stop conceiving of Buddha-hood as a rank or a type of person and start thinking of it as a state of being?

Taking refuge in the Buddha then becomes trusting awake-ness. This is having faith in the moment, that everything we need is being supplied to us at this very moment. Rather than figure things out or filter them through ours and others‘ interpretation, we can reach out with our heart and our senses and touch what is there.

II. I trust the Dharma

Dharma seems to have a few meanings. We often understand it to mean things like ‘laws’ or ‘teachings,’ but for me, it has been easiest to use it to mean the truth.

I am learning to trust the truth.

This seems so obvious on the surface that we often don‘t realize how strongly we resist it. We say we want the truth, and there is often a disparity between our words and our behaviour.

We comfort ourselves with reasons and explanations. We make up stories about what things that happen to us mean. When something conflicts with our beliefs we say the truth. Reality is wrong.

This is normal. There something in us that seeks the comfort of stories. Whether its our personal life or the history of the world, there is a pull to bring everything together as part of some grand narrative.

Notice that these stories aren’t all positive. We often act on things we fear are true. But we would still rather have answers than nothing, especially if those answers confirm what we already believe.

Letting go of these stories scares us.

Trusting the truth is a leap into the dark that is difficult to make. We don’t want to make decisions until we know how things will turn out.  When something goes wrong, we tell ourselves we need to know why so we don’t make that mistake again.

Once we get used to it though, we can find refuge in trusting the truth. Because it means we don’t have to know everything. We don’t have to be right. We don’t even have to understand what’s going on. We no longer have to make decisions on what we want to be true or what we fear is true

Our stories are sometimes inaccurate. Our explanations are sometimes incomplete. We often don’t have enough information to know whether or not we are right.

The truth, though…the truth will stay true no matter what we say, what we think, what we do, or what we believe.

We can relax, knowing the truth will sort everything out. All we need to do is trust.

III.I have faith in the Sangha

Sangha often refers to a group of Buddhists. Sometimes we use it to refer to a specific group of Buddhists. The sangha of the Edmonton Buddhist Meditation Group.

In a larger context we can refer to all who practice. We can even extend it to all of humanity.

The short, simple version though is the sangha is about people.

It took me a long time to admit I understood this better in theory than in practice. In my mind, I imagined a perfect sangha. One day all the annoying people in my life would be gone and I’d be surrounded by only people I liked. Or I would join the perfect community for me, a place where we all understood and connected with each other in a magical, collective unity.

I forgot one thing. The sangha is the people around us right now. Our sangha, our community, is made up of the people in it, not the people we wish were in it.

They are teaching us with their strengths and weaknesses, in the ways they fall short of our expectations as well as they ways in which they surprise us. They help us by giving us opportunities to be our best selves and they help us by bringing out parts of us we don’t want to see.

They teach us not to be deceived--we learn to trust people to be themselves instead of who we expect them to be.

We don’t need to understand every person in our sangha. We don’t even need to like them all that much. But we need to put our faith in them, not because they are perfect, but because they are the people who are there. By learning to trust them, we learn to trust ourselves.

The Three treasures are the heart of Buddhism, maybe the reason they’re difficult to see is not because they are so far away, but because they are so close. They are so true, it’s easy to overlook them. They aren’t about doing something, or believing something, or even understanding something. They are always there with us.

Precepts For Beginners (Part 2): The Three Pure Precepts

“The first bite is to discard all evil; the second bite is so that we may train in perfection; the third bite is to help all beings.” -OBC mealtime ceremonial

“Shit don’t change until you get up and wash your ass” -Kendrick Lamar


Sometimes we run into situations that aren’t covered by the Ten Great Precepts or we end up in a moral dilemma where we are faced with breaking a precept to avert something worse.

For help navigating these stormy waters, we turn to the Three Pure Precepts.

1.Cease from evil.
2. Do good.
3. Do good for others.

A review is in order: Precepts are not for punishing ourselves or judging others. They’re a way to see how things are going. We can use them as a preventative measure. We can look back when things have gone wrong and seen if we may have broken or misapplied a precept.

We need to be careful when we talk of ‘good’ and ‘evil’; it’s easy to let those words trip us up. Often when we use them, we allow judgement to creep in. Remember, we aren’t talking about good or evil people; we’re talking about good and evil behaviours.

On another level, even the behaviours are not good or evil, at least not in the sense that some need to be condemned and others sanctified. Instead of seeing actions as worthy of blame or worthy of praise, maybe it’s more important to look at them in terms of how helpful they are in reducing suffering for ourselves and others.

We can also look at the skill in which we execute those behaviours and the intentions behind them. After all, none of us is perfect and none of us can ever know what will happen. All we can do is make choices, accept consequences, and adjust as necessary.

I also wanted to take a moment to talk about the order of the three precepts. I’ve found it helpful to check my behaviours against each of the Pure Precepts in that order without skipping any. After all, it’s very easy to convince ourselves that we are doing something for the good of others without taking a look as to whether it is actually a good action.

Something to think about, anyway.

Like the Ten Great Precepts, the Three Pure Precepts feel overwhelming. I have to do all this stuff forever? I can’t even remember them all.

We don’t have to keep them forever.

We only have to keep them now. For this breath, we keep them, because this breath is all we have. We can do nothing about the mistakes we’ve already made in the past. The future is ahead of us and unknowable in the dark.

But we have now.

We always do.

Precepts For Beginners: The Ten Great Precepts

When people talk about Buddhism in popular culture these days, the focus is usually meditation, compassion, or mindfulness. What doesn’t get talked about so much are the precepts.

In that spirit, I offer this primer.

The Buddhist precepts are a guide to living a life free from suffering, not just for ourselves, but for those around us. The number of precepts varies from tradition to tradition; Soto Zen has sixteen. There are the Three Treasures, the Three Pure Precepts, and the Ten Great Precepts.

Today we’ll talk about the Ten Great Precepts. We see them worded in a number of different ways. Here is my version.

1. I’m learning not to kill.

2. I’m teaching myself not to steal

3. I’m learning to tell the truth.

4. I’m learning to be sexually responsible.

5. I’m learning not to delude myself.

6. I’m teaching myself not to be proud of myself and devalue others.

7. I’m learning not to gossip.

8. I’m teaching myself to handle my anger.

9. I’m learning generosity.

10. I’m teaching myself to trust my own heart.

Those of us who come to zen believing it is a ‘do your own thing’ religion (or philosophy, if the word ‘religion‘ doesn‘t fit with our perception of ourselves of Buddhism) bristle at the idea of precepts. They sound suspiciously like rules or commandments. We like to think we’re beyond such things. Like ceremonies, they feel uncomfortable, like they are meant to constrain us in some way. My first response upon hearing them was, Oh yeah? You can’t tell me what to do.

Which is entirely the point. We are completely free to make our own choices. The precepts are guidelines towards making decisions that don’t hurt us or others. The precepts are intended to help.

We aren‘t used to looking at lists in this way. Whatever we call them--rules, commandments, recommended directions for use--our tendency is to see them as restrictions on our fun or someone trying to boss us around. We see them as strangling our individuality or freedom of expression.

In other cases, we might swing in the opposite direction. We can enslave ourselves to them, surrendering our own judgement in favor of blind obedience. We might see them as ways of measuring how we’re doing or as a way to judge ourselves or someone else as though the precepts were a moral report card.  Or we experience them as things we must follow or risk getting into trouble from a higher authority whether that authority is God or the court system.

We forget they are there to be helpful. What would happen if we looked at these Precepts and other limitations placed on our behaviour as ways to make our lives safer and easier? How would our perception shift if we looked at them as ways of reducing suffering for ourselves and those around us?

This leads me to a point we find easy to understand intellectually but difficult to put into practice: choices have consequences.

Furthermore, those consequences are often a direct result of that choice.

Imagine, for example, I make the decision to sleep in one morning, which leads me to rush out the door without breakfast. As the day goes on, I get hungry, but my job has taken me to a place where the only food is available is vending machine candy bars. Even worse, instead of dispensing a nutritious snack of Mars Bar, the machine takes my money. Because my blood sugar is low, I lose my temper and punch the side of the machine--a choice the lands me in the emergency room being treated for a broken hand instead of dancing to 80s music with my friends.

There’s a couple things to notice in this story. Firstly, there is no moral component to what happened. I am not a bad person for skipping breakfast. Punching the machine does not make me a monster. It might have been an unwise choice, but it is not a referendum on my worth as a human being.

We extend this non-judgement to the way we relate to the precepts. Lying or stealing or abusing alcohol does not make you irredeemably bad. It is not something you need to feel ashamed about. But it can be helpful to look at what lying and stealing and abusing alcohol is doing to your life.

A second thing in the story worth noting is that each consequence arose from the action that preceded it. I chose to sleep in so I didn’t have time for breakfast. I chose not to eat, so my blood sugar was low. I lost my temper and struck the machine and thus I broke my hand.

We often don’t see consequences in this way. We view them instead as a system of rewards and punishments. I helped the homesless guy, therefore I have earned something great that will happen to me in the future--such as this pint of ice cream that happens to be on sale. My neighbour snapped at his wife and therefore he deserves to fall down an open manhole.

It doesn’t work like that. There is no magic scorekeeper doling out demerits and gold stars. The consequences I’m talking about here are ones that are the natural and direct result of choices we‘ve made.

What it important to make this distinction? Because we need to understand that our external circumstances are not rewards or punishments for who we are or what we‘ve done.  If you were born into privilege and wealth, that does not mean you are somehow better than others. Perhaps more importantly, it means that if you have found yourself the victim of violence or suffering through an illness, you did not necessarily do something to deserve it. If something terrible was done to you by another, it is not your fault.

In other words, it is not my fault if my partner abuses me. It is my choice whether or not I stay in that relationship. Sometimes that choice is not as easy or obvious as it might appear to someone on the outside, but whatever my decision is, I need to make it with full acceptance of the consequences that might occur.

Which brings us to the tricky thing about choices and consequences--WE CAN”T KNOW WHAT IS GOING TO HAPPEN. We know there will be consequences. But we don’t know what those consequences will be.

This is where the helpfulness of the precepts becomes something to cling to in the waves when we can’t see through the storm.

Although we can’t see the future, we DO know from experience that choices that turn away from the precepts tend to result in misery more frequently than when we accept them as guides. Following the precepts doesn’t guarantee a pain-free existence, but in general, avoiding malicious gossip, handling anger properly, and keeping a clear head has better results more often than doing the opposite.

Our relationship with the precepts deepens the more we examine them and the role they play in our lives. Sometimes a precept that seems obvious and straightforward at the start can surprise us. I’ll give a couple of examples.

Take the precept ‘I’m learning not to be proud of myself and devalue others.‘ The obvious way to read this precept is as an admonishment not to brag or to put ourselves above other people. It reminds us not to see ourselves as more valuable than others, to expect special treatment for ourselves.

But there is another type of pride. That pride is thinking that we are worse than other people. Our delusional belief is that our badness is such that the paths to success that work for others cannot possibly work for us. We are worthless and un-saveable and there is nothing we or anyone else can do about it. We are destined to be the lowest of the low, looking up on others who have so much more than us.

It might not be the sort of pride as we‘re used to defining it, but it’s still a form of pride. It doesn‘t matter if we see ourselves as better than others or worse. In both cases, we are buying into the illusion of being different or special. We are isolating ourselves by cutting ourselves off from the things we share with others.

A second example is the precept that cautions against anger. We’ve seen the danger people acting out of anger can do with their words, thoughts, and actions. But some people take this precept to mean “don’t get angry.” As a result, we suppress resentment or pretend to ourselves and others that we aren’t angry when we actually are.

Lying to ourselves or others is not handling anger appropriately. That’s trying to pretend anger doesn’t exist. And while the harm it causes might not be as loud or visible as screaming matches and slamming doors, that invisible anger is no less damaging, corroding away our relationships and hearts from the inside.

The precepts are not exhaustive. Depending on our lives, we may find it helpful to add more. In keeping with the spirit of helpfulness, I have added a precept which sounds silly, but has helped me a lot: I am training myself to use text messaging responsibly.

I want to think before I post my hilarious social media update. I want to be careful about making assumptions around ambiguous messages. I want to be careful responding to texts--or lack of texts--when I’m angry or fearful and apt to interpret things in the worst possible light. I want to be careful who I reach out to when I’m lonely.

It’s a small precept for a small thing. But it has been helpful. And small reductions in suffering still count. They add up over time.

With all of this said, there are times when the Great Precepts--or the smaller ones we’ve added don’t seem to apply. There are also times we are faced with the possibility of breaking a precept to avert a greater harm. And there are moments when their seems to be no good choice or worse, that we have no choice.

In such cases, we turn to the three Pure Precepts and/or the Three Treasures.

We’ll tackle them in a future installment.

Pilgrims

Yesterday, after cake, our family went for a walk in the woods.

My oldest nephew and his dog led the way, pulling my mother along in their wake.  Four-year old nephew is eager to show his aunt the woods and the park near my grandmother’s house. The dog just wants to chase something.

My father is next with his hands in the pockets of his denim jacket. My former sister-in-law and her husband follow. It’s been a weekend of visiting relatives in the city and they have a long drive home ahead of them.

After that comes my sister and her husband. They are walking arm in arm, gently bickering about the logistics of their upcoming week.

There’s a significant gap in the procession after that.

Birds sing. The sun shines. The bare trees reach for the cloudless blue sky.

Finally, my youngest nephew and I appear. We are not moving quickly. Perhaps it’s because at three months shy of his second birthday, my nephew is still adapting to walking in snow. Or maybe it’s because of everybody in the family, my nephew and I are the only two with no particular inclination to be anywhere other than here.

My nephew walks slowly, but his slowness doesn’t come from hesitancy. Instead, his movements are filled with a deep completeness, as though the only thing that needs doing is the thing he is doing right now.  Face forward, he makes his way through the trees and snow, taking the world in anew with each step. When the hills get too steep or the ground under the snow becomes too uneven he reaches out with one navy mitten for my hand.

When I breathe in, my lungs fill with sun and snow and sky. Is this what I sit around in darkened meditation halls waiting for?

I emerge from the trees and my family is waiting at the top of a hill. Mom is sitting on a toboggan and bursts down the hill in a cloud of white while my oldest nephew shrieks in delight.

Side by side, my nephew and I walk towards them, making new tracks through a fresh filed of snow.

Quote

From Caitlin Moran's novel "How to Build A Girl"

"The plane starts to taxi along the runway. I had no idea they went so fast. This is the fastest I have ever gone. We are already going too fast--and then we accelerate...This speed is inhuman, and unholy. It's angry. Planes have to become furious before they can fly. They kick the ground away, and punch into the clouds, screaming. We are fighting our way into the sky."

"The windows go pale grey--we've flown into the clouds. Rainclouds are dirty, and wet--looking out the window at them makes you feel like you have temporarily gone blind. The inside of a raincloud is a bubble of night. And then the plane pulls up higher...and we suddenly burst out into the bright, bright brilliant sunshine.

     And in the same way my first does of adrenaline anxiety blasted through me, like black floodwater two years ago, this is now the opposite.

     Sitting in seat 14A, in the sun, I float on a full-moon, tidal joy unlike anything I have ever experienced. I am getting incredibly high on a single, astounding fact: that it's always sunny above the clouds. Always. That every day on earth--every day I have ever had--was secretly sunny after all. However shitty and rainy it is in Wolverhampton--on the days where the clouds feel low like a lid, and the swarf bubbles and the gutters churn to digest--it's always been sunny up here.

     I feel like I've flown 600 miles an hour head-on into the most beautiful metaphor of my life: If you fly high enough, if you get above the clouds, it's never-ending summer."

"I resolve that for the rest of my life, at least once a day, I will remember this. I think it the most cheering thought I've ever had. When we finally land in Dublin, and I go off to meet John Kite, I am essentially drunk on the sky."

V is For...

There are a lot of female monks in this order whose name starts with V: Vera, Vivian, Veronica, Valora (not to be confused with Valeria), Valeria (not to be confused with Valora).

I'm now imagining them running about in their robes and Guy Fawkes masks like the climax of V for Vendetta.

That was in  V for Vendetta, right? Or have I confused it with Three Amigos?

These are the things that go through my mind when I meditate.

People Are Sad

I’ve been telling people I’m leaving for the monastery. Many of them are sad about it.

I’m surprised about that, and I’m also surprised that I’m surprised.  I knew they might be sad...and I also never expected them to be sad.

I also feel guilty. The whole point of Mahayana Buddhism is to end the suffering of all beings. In the bodhisattva vows we take every couple weeks, we promise to remain in the world until all beings are saved. Being a source of sadness to those I care about most by leaving for the mountains seems like a step in the wrong direction.

That‘s the scary thing about impermanence. There truly is nothing to stand on.  It’s not just that that I’m subject to loss and change and grief, but so are the people I care about. They are also going to experience these things, and however much I might want to, there’s nothing I can do to change that.

Except that’s not true in this particular case, is it? There is indeed something I could do: I could stay. I might not be able to spare the people I love the experience of loss, but by remaining here I could spare them from this specific loss at this specific time.

Saving all beings, right? That’s the bodhisattva way. And what better beings to start with than the ones I love and will miss the most?

The answer, when I search my heart, is this: Because that is not the kind of saving any of us need.

On the surface the bodhisattva commitment to saving all beings in all times and all places for eternity appears like an impossible task. It probably would be impossible except for one small thing bodhisattvas have working in their favor: all beings are saved already.

In other words, we’re all doing okay. We just don’t know it, and as a consequence, we create suffering for ourselves trying to solve problems we don‘t actually have.

My loved ones don’t need me to make choices to stop them from feeling sad. Furthermore, I do not need to make choices to shield myself from feeling guilty. Sadness, guilt, second-guessing, worry…these are normal parts of the process. It might be more cause for concern if some of those feelings WEREN’T there.

I don’t like that people are sad. I don’t like that I am also sad. I also don’t like that I feel guilty that people are sad, and I don’t like that I’m also happy people are sad because it means they will miss me, and I don’t like that I am worrying about many many many things. It’s uncomfortable.

It’s uncomfortable and it is also where things are.

And none of us need saving from that.

The C-Word

Becoming a monk involves giving up big things and little things. Big things include my job, my condo, my independence, the clothes I wear, even my name.

It's the little impending losses I feel more sharply. Moving away from my friends and family is too abstract to wrap my head around right now. The realization that I might never know how Game Of Thrones ends, on the other hand….that gets me. I’ve been reading those books since the late-nineties.

The elephant in the renunciation room though, is celibacy. It’s subject about which people are both deeply curious and ashamed to ask.

It wouldn’t surprise me if a lot of our attitudes about celibacy--and sex in general--come from our culture. For example my father grew up in a Catholic neighbourhood. Priests and nuns were an active part of his community. In that era, celibacy was an accepted choice within society. Being gay or non-monogamous, on the other hand, was seen as abnormal, perhaps even a sign of mental disorder.

Over the last sixty years, it seems like there has been a societal shift. Thankfully, we are becoming more comfortable with alternative sexual lifestyles and orientations. In fact, we are so comfortable with sex--perhaps even sex-obsessed--that now celibacy is perceived as freakish, weird, unhealthy, or against the laws of man and nature.

And yet have any of these things really changed? There have always been gay people, straight people, and those who are interested in a little of both. There have always been people who have done monogamy, non-monogamy, and celibacy--admittedly with varying degrees of success. But our attitude towards these lifestyles seems to ebb and flow.

Of course, maybe these people aren’t thinking of celibacy on a cultural level. Maybe they are wondering about celibacy and me particularly. It’s a reasonable question to ask given that I spent four years giving advice on sex and dating, and much of that advice was drawn from my own experience.

All I can say is, I can be sex-positive without being celibacy-negative. At this point, I don’t see any spiritual advantage to celibacy, but I can get behind it for a lot of practical reasons. So while I don’t expect to wake up each morning and burst into song about not being allowed to feel the curve of a woman’s hip under my palm, it isn’t a deal-breaker either.

I admit, there’s irony at work. After failed relationship after failed relationship, my romantic life in the couple years before I made the decision to try monasticism has been a happy one. I’m finally at the point where I’m confident in my ability to be a good romantic partner…and now I’m seeking a vocation that asks me to give that up.

Here’s another irony though. My romantically adventurous life has actually left me more confident in my ability to maintain celibacy. I don’t have any unfinished business--I know what I’m giving up. My sex life has been rich enough that I can move on without feeling like I‘ve missed out on anything.

Over the course of those active years, I’ve learned a lot about myself. I also know what I’m attracted to, what my triggers are, and what situations are risky for me and how to avoid them. I know what might tempt me and I know what to do to prevent the situation before it gets out of hand.

So, in conclusion, celibacy will not be a problem for me, and I am not at all nervous about it. Not even a little bit. I don't know why I even brought it up.

So...how about that Game of Thrones?

The Four-Fold Sangha

I sometimes feel the term four-fold sangha is misleading.

For those of you haven’t heard the term, the four-fold sangha is something we talk about in the OBC, comprised of 1) Male monks 2) Female monks 3) Female laypeople. 4) Male laypeople.

Gender essentialism notwithstanding, I can see how that division might be useful from a monastic perspective. But from a lay person‘s point of view, I think the term can be misleading, because it implies the world is divided into monks and everybody else.

Not so. The world is not just monks and laypeople. The world is monks and electricians and stay-at-home parents and firefighters and strippers and middle management. It’s divorcees and professional wrestlers. It‘s chronically ill senior citizens and child prodigies.

As laypeople, it is tempting to compare ourselves to monks. I think its also tempting for a lot of us to project things onto the screen of their robes, of seeing, not a person, but something special to  either aspire to or to condemn ourselves for our inability to emulate.

I remember talking to a monk once and being frustrated by her inability to understand what I was saying and give me the right feedback to me. It wasn’t her fault; she was doing the best she could. But there was no way she could live up to the image of wise counselor I had built in my head. Looking back, I think that was a good thing for both of us.

We also need to remember, one monk is not the same as another. One size robes does not fit all. It is more than just monks and laypeople. It’s this monk specifically, and that one and the other one over there. It’s the most experienced master and most junior novice. It’s this layperson and that one, and, yes, even that one, the one who always shows up late and the monopolizes any conversation and makes it about themselves.

I notice another thing about us self-proclaimed ‘serious practioners,’ particularly those of us who have considered monkhood. For some of us, there is a sense of all-or-nothing…we either go all the way, or we consider ourselves failed.

And sometimes, for whatever reason, we aren’t able to do it. Our health prevents it. Or we have family responsibilities--young children, old parents, even business or financial ties that cannot easily be severed. It’s not that we fail at monasticism--it’s that we never get the opportunity to try. As a result, like spiritual failures.

To those people, I offer this: just because we can’t be monks, doesn’t mean we have to continue the way we always have.

All-acceptance trips us up sometimes. We can misinterpret it as telling us to put up with all manner of things that leave us unhealthy or unhappy. Suck it up, Buttercup.

We have choices. It is okay to make them. In fact, we have to make them.

Monks take action every day. When the chief cook arrives in the kitchen and sees breakfast has not made itself in the night, he does not accept since food has not prepared itself, the monks must all-acceptingly accede to not eating. When a sacristan arrives in a darkened meditation hall, he or she does not see the unlit candles and accept that this means there will be no ceremonies this morning.

Monks are making choices every moment of every day. Sometimes, the choice is simply not to leave. I know lay people who also know what it’s like to make that decision.

One hand, the four-fold sangha is a million-fold sangha, made up of each and every one of us. And yet, all of us, male and female, monk and insurance adjustor and washed-up sitcom star and social worker and chemical engineer, must make the same kind of decisions, make the choice to do what we can to find a life that brings happiness to ourselves and others.

Maybe the four-fold sangha is best described from a lay perspective  as a million-fold sangha. But it’s also possible splitting it into four is four too many.