The Wisdom of No Escape: How to Love Yourself and Your World (10 page)

Taking refuge in the dharma is, traditionally, taking refuge in the teachings of the Buddha. Well, the teachings of the Buddha are: Let go and open to your world. Realize that trying to protect your territory, trying to keep your territory enclosed and safe, is
fraught with misery and suffering. It keeps you in a very small, dank, smelly, introverted world that gets more and more claustrophobic and more and more misery-producing as you get older. As you get older, it is harder and harder to find the doorways out. When I was about twelve I read a
Life
magazine series, ‘Religions of the World.’ The article on Confucius said something like: ‘By the time you’re fifty, if you’ve spent your life up until then taking the armor off [Confucius expressed this in his own language], then you’ve established a pattern of mind that for the rest of your life, you won’t be able to stop. You’ll just keep taking the armor off. But if by the time you’re fifty you’ve become really good at keeping that armor on, keeping your zipper zipped up at any cost, keeping those boots on at any cost, then no matter what, you might be in the middle of an earthquake shattering into pieces, and if somehow you get it back together, then after that it’s going to be very hard to change.’ Whether that’s true or not, it scared me to death when I was twelve years old. It became a prime motivation for my life. I was determined somehow to grow rather than to become stuck.

So taking refuge in the dharma – teachings of the Buddha – is what it’s all about. From a broader perspective, the dharma also means your whole life. The teachings of the Buddha are about letting go and opening: you do that in how you relate to the people in your life, how you relate to the situations you’re
in, how you relate with your thoughts, how you relate with your emotions. The purpose of your whole life is not to make a lot of money, it’s not to find the perfect marriage, it’s not to build Gampo Abbey. It’s not to do any of these things. You have a certain life, and whatever life you’re in is a vehicle for waking up. If you’re a mother raising your children, that’s the vehicle for waking up. If you’re an actress, that’s the vehicle for waking up. If you’re a construction worker, that’s the vehicle for waking up. If you’re a retired person facing old age, that’s the vehicle for waking up. If you’re alone and you feel lonely and you wish you had a mate, that’s the vehicle for waking up. If you have a huge family around you and wish you had a little more free time, that’s the vehicle for waking up. Whatever you have, that’s it. There’s no better situation than the one you have. It’s made for you. It’ll show you everything you need to know about where your zipper’s stuck and where you can leap. So that’s what it means to take refuge in the dharma. It has to do with finding open space, not being covered in armor.

Taking refuge in the sangha is very much the same thing. It does not mean that we join a club where we’re all good friends, talk about Buddhism together, nod sagely, and criticize the people who don’t believe the way we do. Taking refuge in the sangha means taking refuge in the brotherhood and sisterhood of people who are committed to taking off their armor. If we live in a family where all the members are
committed to taking off their armor, then one of the most powerful vehicles of learning how to do it is the feedback that we give one another, the kindness that we show to one another. Normally when somebody is feeling sorry for herself and beginning to wallow in it, people pat her on the back and say, ‘Oh, you poor thing,’ or ‘For Pete’s sake, get off it.’ But if you yourself are committed to taking off your armor and you know that the other person is too, there is a way that you can actually give them the gift of dharma. With great kindness and love, out of your own experience of what’s possible, you give them the wisdom that somebody else probably gave you the day before when
you
were miserable. You encourage them not to buy into their self-pity but to realize that it’s an opportunity to grow, and that everybody goes through this experience. In other words, the sangha are people committed to helping one another to take off their armor, by not encouraging their weakness or their tendency to keep their armor on. When we see each other collapsing or stubbornly saying, ‘No, I like this armor,’ there’s an opportunity to say something about the fact that underneath all that armor are a lot of festering sores, and a little bit of sunlight wouldn’t hurt a bit. That’s the notion of taking refuge in the sangha.

Taking refuge in the three jewels is no refuge at all from the conventional point of view. It’s like finding a desert island in the middle of the ocean after a shipwreck – ‘Whew! Land!’ – and then standing there
and watching it being eaten away, day by day, by the ocean. That’s what taking refuge in the buddha, the dharma, and the sangha is like.

When we realize the need to take off our armor, we can take refuge in our awakeness and our aspiration not to cover it over any longer by taking refuge in the buddha. We can take refuge in the teachings of the Buddha and we can take refuge in the sangha, our family, those people committed to following the Buddha’s teachings, with whom we can share support and inspiration.

Trungpa Rinpoche gave a definition of taking refuge that was pinned up on our bulletin board the other day. It begins with an absolute statement: ‘Since all things are naked, clear from obscurations, there is nothing to attain or realize.’ But then Rinpoche goes further and makes it very practical. ‘The everyday practice is simply to develop a complete acceptance and openness to all situations and emotions and all people. A complete acceptance and openness to all situations and emotions and to all people, experiencing everything totally without reservations or blockages, so that one never withdraws or centralizes into oneself.’ That is why we practice.

fourteen
not preferring samsara or nirvana

T
his morning I’d like to talk about not preferring samsara or nirvana.
^*
Many of the
mahamudra
^†
teachings on the nature of mind talk about stillness and occurrence. If you wanted to pare phenomena down, all there would be are stillness and occurrence: space, and that which is continually born out of space, and returns into space – stillness and occurrence. Sometimes it’s called the background and the foreground. In any case, what I’d like to talk about is not preferring stillness or occurrence, or, you could say, not preferring the busyness of samsara or the stillness of nirvana.

Usually there is some kind of bias. There are two common forms of human neurosis. One is getting all caught up in worry and fear and hope, in wanting
and not wanting, and things: jobs, families, romances, houses, cars, money, vacations, entertainment, the mountains, the desert, Europe, Mexico, Jamaica, the Black Hole of Calcutta, prison, war or peace, and so on. So many of us are caught in all that occurs, somehow captured by occurrence as if we were caught in a whirlpool. In samsara we continually try to get away from the pain by seeking pleasure, and in doing so, we just keep going around and around and around. I’m so hot I open all the windows, and then I’m so cold I put on a sweater. Then it itches, so I put cream on my arms, and then that’s sticky, so I go take a bath. Then I’m cold, so I close the window, and on and on and on. I’m lonely, so I get married, and then I’m always fighting with my husband or my wife, so I start another love affair, and then my wife or husband threatens to leave me and I’m caught in the confusion of what to do next, and on and on and on. We are always trying to get out of the boiling pot into some kind of coolness, always trying to escape and therefore never really fully settling down and appreciating. That’s called samsara. In other words, somehow we have this preference for occurrence, so we’re always working in that framework of trying to get comfortable through political beliefs and philosophies and religions and everything, trying to gain pleasure in all that occurs.

The other neurosis – which is just as common – is to get caught by peace and quiet, or liberation, or
freedom. When I was traveling, I met some people who had formed a group based on their belief that a flying saucer was going to come and take them away from all of this. They were waiting for the flying saucers to come and liberate them from the grossness of this earth. They talked about transcending the awfulness of life, getting into the space and the clarity and the blissfulness of not being hindered in any way, just completely free. When the spaceship took them away, they were going to a place where there weren’t going to be any problems. This is what we all do in a subtle way. If we have an experience of clarity or bliss, we want to keep it going. That’s what a lot of addiction is about, wanting to feel good forever, but it usually ends up not working out. However, it’s a very common neurosis, being caught by this wanting to stay out there. wanting to stay in the space, like some friends of mine in the seventies who decided to take LSD every day so they could just stay out there, Sometimes that’s expressed by arranging your life in such a way that it’s very quiet, very smooth, very simplified; you become so attached to it that you just want to keep it like that. You resist and resent any kind of noisy situation like a lot of children or dogs coming in and messing everything up. There are some people who have tremendous insight into the nature of reality as vast and wonderful – what is sometimes called sacred outlook – but then they become completely dissatisfied with ordinary life. Rather than that glimpse of sacred outlook actually enriching their life,
it makes them feel more poverty-stricken all the time. Often the reason that people go from neurosis into psychosis is that they see that spaciousness and synchronistic situation and how vast things are and how the world actually works, but then they cling to their insight and they become completely caught there. It has been said, quite accurately, that a psychotic person is drowning in the very same things that a mystic swims in.

What I’m saying here is that ego can use anything to re-create itself, whether it’s occurrence or spaciousness, whether it’s what we call samsara or what we call nirvana. There is a bias in many religious groups toward wanting to get away from the earth and the pain of the earth and never having to experience this awfulness again – ‘Let’s just leave it behind and rest in nirvana.’ You may have noticed in our oryoki meal chant that we say the Buddha ‘does not abide in nirvana. He abides in the ultimate perfection.’ One could assume that if he does not abide in nirvana, the ultimate perfection must be some sense of completely realizing that samsara and nirvana are one, not preferring stillness or occurrence but being able to live fully with both.

Recently, in a friend’s kitchen I saw on the wall a quotation from one of Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche’s talks, which said: ‘Hold the sadness and pain of samsara in your heart and at the same time the power and vision of the Great Eastern Sun. Then the warrior can make a proper cup of tea.’ I was struck by it
because when I read it I realized that I myself have some kind of preference for stillness. The notion of holding the sadness and pain of samsara in my heart rang true, but I realized I didn’t do that; at least, I had a definite preference for the power and vision of the Great Eastern Sun. My reference point was always to be awake and to live fully, to remember the Great Eastern Sun – the quality of being continually awake. But what about holding the sadness and pain of samsara in my heart at the same time? The quotation really made an impression on me. It was completely true: if you can live with the sadness of human life (what Rinpoche often called the tender heart or genuine heart of sadness), if you can be willing to feel fully and acknowledge continually your own sadness and the sadness of life, but at the same time not be drowned in it, because you also remember the vision and power of the Great Eastern Sun, you experience balance and completeness, joining heaven and earth, joining vision and practicality. We talk about men and women joining heaven and earth, but really they are already joined. There isn’t any separation between samsara and nirvana, between the sadness and pain of samsara and the vision and power of the Great Eastern Sun. One can hold them both in one’s heart, which is actually the purpose of practice. As a result of that, one can make a proper cup of tea.

Ritual is about joining vision and practicality, heaven and earth, samsara and nirvana. When
things are properly understood, one’s whole life is like a ritual or a ceremony. Then all the gestures of life are
mudra
^*
and all the sounds of life are
mantra
^†
– sacredness is everywhere. This is what’s behind ritual, these formalized things that get carried down in the religions of different cultures. Ritual, when it’s heartfelt, is like a time capsule. It’s as if thousands of years ago somebody had a clear, unobstructed view of magic, power, and sacredness, and realized that if he went out each morning and greeted the sun in a very stylized way, perhaps by doing a special chant and making offerings and perhaps by bowing, that it connected him to that richness. Therefore he taught his children to do that, and the children taught their children, and so on. So thousands of years later, people are still doing it and connecting with exactly the same feeling. All the rituals that get handed down are like that. Someone can have an insight, and rather than its being lost, it can stay alive through ritual. For example, Rinpoche often said that the dharma, the teachings of the Buddha, are like a recipe for fresh-baked bread. Thousands of years ago someone discovered how to bake bread, and because the recipe was passed down for years
and years, you can still make fresh bread that you can eat right now.

What made me think of ritual as the joining of the sadness and pain of samsara with the vision of the Great Eastern Sun was that somehow it’s simply using ordinary things to express our appreciation for life. The sun comes up in the morning, we can use the sound of a gong to call us to the shrine room, we can put our hands together in
gassho
and bow to each other, we can hold up our oryoki bowls with three fingers in the same way that people have been doing for centuries. Through these rituals we express our appreciation for the fact that there’s food and objects and the richness of the world. You hold your bowl up, and then at the end of dathun you go home and perhaps you forget all about oryoki. Maybe you come back years later and do another program, and you find there’s something touching about doing it again. Perhaps you did it first when you were twenty years old, and then suddenly at eighty you find yourself doing it again. It’s like a thread running through your whole life, holding up your oryoki bowl with three fingers.