The Hermitage Manzanita Village Retreat in Southern California, co-founded by Catriona Reed. Under the Milky Way. (Photo: Ian Castro)
Buddhist Practice, Natural Practice
Caitriona Reed
Caitriona Reed is a teacher in the lineage of Zen Master Thich Nhat Hanh. Together with her partner Michele Benzamin-Miki she co-founded Manzanita Village Retreat in 1993, in the Cahuilla Hills of Southern California, where they have been teaching a fusion of Zen Practice, Social Engaged Buddhism, Family Systems Constellation work, along with elements of indigenous wisdom and Whiteheadian philosophy.
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Without helping us to awaken to the structures that sustain systemic violence and oppression in the world, any spiritual practice becomes little more than a soothing palliative, a private search for personal salvation. How would religious discourse change if we came to embody the understanding that the essence of spiritual practice was a response — both directly and by inherent implication — to all the social, political, and intellectual structures that sustain themselves through systematic exploitation? What if our shared common priority was to protect all living systems, all living beings, and the fragile, resilient, and beautiful matrix that is life on Planet Earth?
Praxis becomes prayer; prayer becomes action.
In all Buddhist traditions, practice begins with the impossible -- the Five Precepts, for example, or the Bodhisattva vow. The first of the five precepts is the undertaking to refrain from harming any living being.
Aware of the violence in the world
and of the power of non-violent resistance,
I stand in the presence of the ancestors, the earth,
and future generations,
and open to my natural ability to embody
the compassion that seeks to protect each living being.1
And the Bodhisattva vow: “Beings are numberless, I vow to save them all” — a simple undertaking to save all living beings from suffering, delusion, and alienation, a determination to achieve the impossible, not a quixotic gesture, but the recognition that the miraculous is within reach.
When I first met my teacher, Thich Nhat Hanh, we spoke together about ‘graduating’ from Buddhism. Any identity becomes a self-defined limitation. So, what if, instead of relying on a singular identity, we could simply adopt the promise of freedom from fixed identity and fly with it? True freedom is inherently unconditional. Obviously, the Buddha was not a Buddhist. So why would he wish anyone to become one? It would be better to become a Buddha — a word drawn from Sanskrit and meaning simply “awake”.
Better that we all awaken to the inherently interconnected nature of everything.
Thich Nhat Hanh often said that meditation is just a natural way to enjoy your life. He did not distinguish formal meditation from the numerous other activities of living. “When you wash the dishes, imagine you are washing the baby Buddha.”
Washing the baby Buddha is an annual ritual across much of the Buddhist world to celebrate the Buddha’s birthday. Scented water is poured over a statue of the Buddha, flowers are offered, and vows renewed.
Thich Nhat Hanh, or Thây, as we called him, meaning teacher in Vietnamese, in the spirit of integration and informality, would sometimes ask an apparently mundane question.
Coming into the kitchen, he would inquire, “What are you doing?”
You might reply, “I’m cutting carrots.” But that was not necessarily the best answer. Accepting the question, posed so innocuously, at face value in the midst of kitchen work, it was easy to miss that what was being offered was a koan, a dharma challenge. Koan practice is a classic form of training in many East Asian Buddhist meditation traditions. A question is asked that has no logical answer, no officially “correct” answer. It is intended to elicit an immediate response, through words or actions, that express an authenticity beyond thought or contrivance, a moment of expression that is both totally free and totally on point. Typically, answering a single koan can take days, months, or longer; and sometimes, of course, it can be instantaneous.
A possible response to Thây’s question might have been, “I am bringing Bodhidharma back to the West.”
Bodhidharma was the South Asian teacher who introduced the Buddhist teachings that came to be known as Chan, or Zen, into East Asia in the 5th century C.E.
Woven through Buddhist thought and teaching is the understanding of a complementary distinction between absolute truth and relative truth. You can both chop carrots as well as bring Bodhidharma to the West. In fact, to imagine that you were engaging in only one of those two activities would be a misunderstanding of the teaching, an abnegation of your responsibility as a student of the Dharma. In the same way, to imagine you were only washing the baby Buddha and not also washing your own heart would be a misunderstanding of the annual ritual. The intention is to hold a big-picture view while also taking care of the smaller details. Thây would often say that you can’t be fully mindful of your breath without also knowing, with each breath, the destruction of forests and oceans.
He also said, quoting Nagarjuna, the 3rd century originator of Madhyamika philosophy, that a view rooted in an understanding of emptiness, Śūnyata, can save you from being caught in any rigid view or belief system, but that if you get caught in the view of emptiness, nothing can save you! In other words, holding only a big-picture view will distort your understanding of, and your obligation towards, the details. All spiritual traditions are fraught with the dangers of disassociation and spiritual bypass, with notions of transcendence, and the avoidance of personal, social, and ecological responsibility. We prioritize our own salvation over the material world, thinking of it only as a context for our own self-important human activity, forgetting that each part of it, each detail, is precious beyond measure.
A defining characteristic of what we can call Engaged Spiritual Practice is that it considers all the details. Having coined the term Engaged Buddhism, Thây often said that there is no such thing; Buddhism is by its very nature engaged.
What if your spiritual practice, whatever form it takes, leads you to a precise, integrated openness? What if it liberated you from subjective ideas of “true” and “false,” oppressor and oppressed, and provided instead the great spaciousness that allows you to proceed in your life, informed by grace, gratitude, a great unknowing, and the boundless creativity and good humor that flows naturally when your heart and mind are free? What if, watching a raven gliding over the meadow, you simply become the raven?
“Truth is what is useful.”
William James
What if you were to ask yourself WHY you believe the things that you do? It is not a question we are in the habit of asking. Mostly, we are busy sorting out WHAT we believe and hardly have time for exploring our reasons for holding those views and beliefs. We hear so much about fake news in the media. But are we not full of our own internal versions of fake news? Most of the things we believe about ourselves and the world are based on hearsay, habit, inheritance, bias, fantasy, and hope. Happiness, creativity, and well-being elude us as long as we remain on a quest for beliefs that will verify our experience of them.
But what if you were to dive more deeply into yourself and start asking harder questions? How much would that lessen the disappointment and uncertainty that is continually reinforced by arbitrary conditions of your own making? How much could you transform shame, regret, anger, resentment, obsession, and inertia into joy?
Most of us have learned to function okay in the world. But what if there was something more than “okay”?
Original Practice
When people ask me to describe Buddhist teaching and practice, I often say something like, “Everything is connected, everything is alive, everything matters, everything has choice.” Śūnyata can also be understood as fullness.
It has been suggested that the historical Buddha recreated elements of our ancient collective Paleolithic past, both in the creation of the community (which excluded no one) as well as in the teachings themselves. Everything is connected, everything is alive, everything matters, everything has choice. That same description could be applied to almost any traditional or indigenous spiritual path.
In my years of practice and teaching, I have instinctively stripped away many of the conceptual trappings often associated with modern Western Buddhist practice. His Holiness the Dalai Lama famously remarked, “My religion is very simple, my religion is kindness.” It would of course be possible to elaborate on how kindness is rooted in the Bodhisattva vow, or in the understanding that all things are connected and empty of anything that could distinguish them as separate. But in the end it is the simple act of kindness, the visceral response to a sense of the miraculous, tender presence of the other.
If everything, every being, every object, throughout time and space, is part of the web of existence, intimately connected to you, we have all been on a very long journey together. Sometimes it may be useful to make a distinction between self and other, but to make an absolute distinction between yourself and the object of your perception is like burning the bridge that will take you home to your place in the great family of beings.
Everything within the realm of your experience, as well as everything that appears to be outside you, is equally deserving of your kindness.
Consider also being open to the structures of oppression that are inside each one of us, whether learned or imposed from the outside. Kindness here is at the very heart of transformational practice. The list of internal states we have tried to be rid of is long. Shame, perfectionism, self-judgement, obsession, anger, fear, impatience, regret, resentment, grief, forgetfulness, illness.
If everything is alive, if everything is conscious in some way, then we must include them all. When they possess us, they are real, no less so than joy, kindness, humility, curiosity, creativity, vitality, love.
Imagine that everything inside you, as well as everything apparently outside you, is real, alive. Why not give it the respect you would give a fellow being, unique and significant, the outcome of a journey of several billion years. Imagine that there are many forms of knowing. What does your anger or fear offer you as a teacher, as a gift? Thây would say, “Hold it in your arms as you would hold a baby.”
Or, as Paul Reps said in a tea ceremony many years ago, “With this tea I stop the war.”
[1] The Manzanita Village-Five Changes rendering of the tradition five Buddhist Precepts. http://www.fivechanges.com/five-precepts