If You Meet the Buddha...

"You can get help from teachers, but you are going to have to learn a lot by yourself..."
-- Dr. Seuss

Meditation:  a poem by Greg Kuzma

I begin my life

over.  It’s easy.

You take a deep breath,

close your eyes,

open them, and

there it is,

all the familiar things.

Nobody has to get up.

It’s drawing the chairs 

closer to the fire,

opening the window

louder on the sound

of people walking by 

outside, taking 

another sip of coffee.

It’s habit, too easily

broken by dreams

and regrets.  My 

mind’s a blank, my

heart stirs, my eyes

take on their gentle 

obligation.  My hand 

is steady as a baby’s sleep.

Reading: by the author and professor of English at Ohio University, Dinty Moore, from Between Panic and Desire, a piece entitled: The Koan. (p. 89)  

Two Buddhist monks from differing traditions agree to a meeting, planning to appraise the cultural disparity in their practice and see what can be learned from one another. A small audience waits expectantly to hear what the men will say.

One, a Tibetan lama, sits very quietly on his cushion, fingering his wooden beads while murmering, “Om mani padme om.” The second monk, of Korean descent, is well known for hurling rapid-fire questions at his students until they are forced to admit how little of the world they truly understand. At such moments he will often shout, “Yes! Yes! Keep that don’t know mind!”

At one point during the meeting with the Tibetan, the Zen monk reaches inside his robes and pulls out an orange. “What is this?”

The Zen monk stands ready to dispute whatever answer the Tibetan offers. In his tradition, every preconception is instantly challenged, and open-mindedness is the swiftest path to enlightenment.

The Tibetan just sits, however, quietly fingering his beads.

“What is this?” the Zen master insists, holding the orange up to the Tibetans nose, turning it over and over in his fingers. “Tell me, what is this?”

No answer.

The Tibetan finally leans over to the translator who is assisting in the encounter, and the two men whisper back and forth for several moments.

Eventually the translator addresses the room:

“Rinpoche asks, ‘What is the matter with him? Don’t they have oranges where he comes from?” 

Reading: by the Unitarian author, lecturer, and former Unitarian minister, Ralph Waldo Emerson, from his essay “Self-Reliance”

[We are] timid and apologetic… [we dare] not say 'I think,' 'I am,' but [quote] some saint or sage. … These roses under my window make no reference to former roses or to better ones; they are… what they are; they exist with God today. There is no time to them. There is simply the rose; it is perfect in every moment of its existence. 

Reading: by Sheldon Kopp from If You Meet the Buddha on the Road, Kill Him! The Pilgrimage of Psychotherapy Patients (p. 3-4) 

In every age, men [and women] have set out on pilgrimages, on spiritual journeys, on personal quests. Driven by pain, drawn by longing, lifted by hope, singly and in groups, they come in search of relief, enlightenment, peace, power, joy or they know not what. Wishing to learn, and confusing being taught with learning, they often seek out helpers, healers and guides, spiritual teachers whose disciples they would become.

The emotionally troubled [person] of today, the contemporary pilgrim, wants to be the disciple of the psychotherapist… People seek the guidance of a [therapist] when their usual, self-limited, risk-avoiding ways of operating are not paying off…

…Though the patient enters therapy insisting that he wants to change, more often than not, what he really wants is to remain the same and to get the therapist to make him feel better. His goal is to become a more effective neurotic…. He prefers the security of known misery to the misery of unfamiliar insecurity.

Given this all too human failing, the beginning pilgrim-patient may approach the therapist like a small child going to a good parent whom he insists must take care of him. It is as if he comes to the office saying, “My world is broken, and you have to fix it.”…

If You Meet the Buddha…

A Sermon Delivered on April 12, 2015

By

The Rev. Axel H. Gehrmann

This week the U.S. Postal service released a new commemorative stamp honoring the late poet Maya Angelou. Maybe you heard about it. The stamp has a picture of Angelou’s smiling face, and her famous quote: “A bird doesn’t sing because it has an answer, it sings because it has a song.”

What a beautiful, fitting tribute to a great American author. Except, Maya Angelou isn’t the author of this particular quote. This quote is by the children’s book author Joan Walsh Anglund. The quote is reminiscent of lines from Angelou’s poem “Caged Bird”: 

The caged bird sings 

with a fearful trill   

of things unknown   

but longed for still   

and his tune is heard   

on the distant hill   

for the caged bird   

sings of freedom.

In a New York Times editorial this week Erin McKean writes about this unfortunate error, and how misattributing quotes to famous people is not at all uncommon. Citizens of Great Britain, for instance, “tend to attribute anything vaguely political to Churchill; Americans like to credit anything folksy to Mark Twain, and before Twain, Benjamin Franklin,” she writes. 

A metajoke about this kind of things has made the rounds on the world wide web in the shape of a MIME that shows the picture of Abraham Lincoln, next to a quote attributed to him that reads: “Don’t believe everything you read on the Internet just because there’s a picture with a quote next to it.” – Abraham Lincoln

This is exactly what Ralph Waldo Emerson was getting at, when he said, we are “timid.” We don’t dare say what we ourselves think, but instead quote “some saint or sage.”

I know exactly what Emerson is talking about. And I can’t help but ask myself why I feel compelled to quote our great Unitarian sage, about the folly of quoting great sages.

This is one of the great Catch-22s of the religious enterprise. And I was bumping up against it, again and again, last week as I was re-reading Emerson’s essay. Emerson’s language is a bit dated, and his writing style a bit stilted, but once I got beyond these distractions, and into the spirit of his writing, I couldn’t help but get excited about the ideas Emerson expresses so eloquently. “Trust thyself,” he says, “every heart vibrates to that iron string.” And I think, yes, of course. We must trust our own experience, or own thoughts, our own authority. We can’t live our lives by replicating what others have said and done. We shouldn’t settle for second-hand wisdom. We need to find our own path. We need to learn our own lessons. We need to discover our own truths. That's what I believe.

And yet there I was, re-reading the truths of someone who lived two hundred years ago.

* * *

Zen Buddhism is known for its attempts to help us break our habit of looking to ancient scriptures for clues on how to attain enlightenment. We rely far too much on hear-say. We are far too content to live within the confines of convention. We too easily settle for simply going through the motions of what society considers the hallmarks of a “good,” “respectable” and “successful” life. And so we spend our lives trying to conform to images and assumptions that, little by little, rob us of any sense of immediacy, authenticity and originality. Our thoughts grow shallow. Our senses are clouded. Our feelings are numbed. 

The two Buddhist monks, both in their own ways, try to help us snap out of it. The Zen Buddhist holds up an orange – not the idea of orange, not the memory orange, but a real orange – and asks “What is this?” hoping to touch on the truth of immediate, first-hand experience. 

I am not sure whether he is successful.

* * *

Buddhism has many helpful teachings. But rather than sharing the words of ancient saints and sages, let me offer you the story of a modern day American Buddhist named Brad Warner. 

Brad Warner was born in Hamilton, Ohio. As a teenager he got seriously involved in hardcore punk music, and played bass guitar in a punk band called Zero Defex. But he was always interested in Buddhism, and later became a Soto Zen priest. He shares some of his unique insights in a book entitled Sit Down and Shut Up: Punk Rock Commentaries on Buddha, God, Truth, Sex, Death & Dogen’s Treasury of the Right Dharma Eye.

As some of you may know, Dogen is the founder of the Soto school of Zen. Though he lived in 13^th century Japan long ago, Dogen’s life and teachings struck a chord for Brad Warner. He writes: 

“[Dogen] was born…to an aristocratic family back in the days when all Japan looked like the sets in The Last Samurai. His father died when he was just three years old, and his mother died five years later. Having lost the people children believe to be the most reliable, stable things in the world – parents – at such an early age, he started searching for something that was perfectly reliable. That’s what got him into Buddhism.” (p. 4)

Warner could relate this. Though his parents were still alive at the time, several of his close family members suffered from a congenital disease, and died young. He saw this as a child, and knew this particular disease runs in families. 

“So there was the chance,” he writes, 

“that I would suffer from the same illness and linger for years in a pretty miserable condition until the sickness did me in, as had happened to my grandmother and a couple of my aunts. So I started looking into religious and philosophical matters at a very early age. … The first religion I encountered was Christianity. And, although I was very intrigued with Christian ideas, they didn’t really address my concerns.”

When Dogen was a child, he had similar concerns. He was deeply troubled by his experiences of loneliness and loss, and also turned to mainline religion. In Japan at the time, that was Buddhism. But the Buddhist masters he met couldn’t adequately address his concerns. He needed to find his own approach, and ended up starting his own school.

Dogen was fascinated by koans. As Brad Warner explains, 

“the word koan [refers] to those weird unanswerable questions often associated with Zen, like “What’s the sound of one hand clapping?” or “If a tree falls in a forest and hits a mime, would he make a noise?” The word koan means “public case.” So the koans are public records recounting encounters between famous Zen teachers and their students… 

For Dogen, the word koan was also a synonym for dharma, the profound truth of the universe in the sense that the universe is a mystery. And by that I mean that although the universe is all around us, proclaiming its truth so loudly you’d have to be deaf to miss it, most of us manage to miss it anyhow.” (p. 17)

* * *

Each of our lives is a journey. Like women and men throughout the ages, we are each on our own pilgrimage, our own personal quest, driven by pain, drawn by longing, lifted by hope. We each have our own moments of grief and struggle, of happiness and love. We try to make sense our experiences. We try to learn the lessons life is trying to teach us. 

And so we seek out helpers, healers and gurus, who can provide us guidance, and perhaps comfort, and perhaps clarity. Or we read ancient scriptures, hoping to find pearls of wisdom that will help us on our way.

These are the natural human instincts, that have led many a patient to office of the psychotherapist Sheldon Kopp. And yet religious writings, like the Bible or the I Ching, as well as therapists and other gurus are poor oracles, Kopp writes. Seekers come hoping to find “something definite, something permanent, something unchanging upon which to depend.” But rather than providing any simple solutions, the best teachers will instead draw from “wellsprings of wisdom about the ambiguity, the insolubility, and the inevitability of the human situation.” The best spiritual teachings offer the “reflection that life is just what it seems to be, a changing, ambiguous, ephemeral mixed bag. It may often be discouraging, but it is ultimately worth it, because that’s all there is.”

In the end, the fortunate among the seekers will learn that there is nothing anyone else can teach them. Once they are willing to give up being taught, and once they realize they already know how to live, Sheldon Kopp writes, they can discover the secret of life. The secret is that there is no secret.

“Everything is just what it seems to be. This is it! There are no hidden meanings. Before [we are] enlightened, [we] get up each morning to spend the day tending [the] fields, [return] home to eat [our] supper, [go] to bed…, and [fall] asleep. But once [we have] attained enlightenment, then [we get] up each morning to spend the day tending [the] fields, [return] home to eat [our] supper, [go] to bed…, and [fall] asleep.

The Zen way to see the truth is through your everyday eyes. …[We do] not need an answer in order to find peace. [We need] only to surrender [our] existence, to cease the needless, empty questioning. The secret of enlightenment is when you are hungry, eat; and when you are tired, sleep.” (p. 187)

This is the perplexing truth the Zen master is trying to convey with the koan “If you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him!” Rather than looking outside ourselves for enlightenment, we need to embrace the Buddha nature that is already within us.

As Kopp puts it: “Killing the Buddha on the road means destroying the hope that anything outside ourselves can be our master. No one is any bigger than anyone else. There are no mothers or fathers for grown-ups, only sisters and brothers.”

* * *

We are all seekers. We all hope to find meaning in our lives. We hope to learn. But sometimes we confuse learning with being taught. We turn to others hoping they will fix the broken parts of our lives. As if we were children and they could simply make us feel better. 

When we are young, we do need parents. And we need teachers. But in the end, we are the ones who need to do the difficult work of learning. Learning means changing. It means giving up old habits, and daring to enter the unknown. 

We are the ones who must live our own lives. We are the ones who must make our own choices. We are the ones who must figure out how to make a difference in the world. We are the ones who must speak our own truth. We are the ones who must act, and then be accountable for what we have done and what we have left undone. 

“Trust thyself,” I always say. Sing your own song. Sing with a fearful trill, of things unknown but longed for still. Sing of the freedom you long to find. The freedom to move beyond the confines of convention and conformity. The freedom to live your own life.

We can do this. We can move beyond our fears. We can learn and change. We can begin life over. It’s easy. All we need to do is take a deep breath, close our eyes, open them, and there it is, all the familiar things. 

The mystery of the universe is right here. The secret is that there is no secret. 

May we open our minds and hearts

To this mystery and this secret.

May we dare to trust ourselves, 

and be fearless masters 

of our own lives.

Amen.