22. Zen Buddhism and the Soul of Lifeworlding
SYNOPSIS:
Today’s episode brings us into the heart and philosophy of Zen Buddhism, as practiced by the Plum Village monastic community that was founded in 1982 by the Vietnamese peace activist, monk, poet, and teacher Thich Nhat Hanh. Today it has grown into Europe’s largest Buddhist monastery, with over 200 resident monks and nuns, and known as one of the most actively engaged Buddhist communities offering insight on the modern world, and on the climate and ecological crises.
We’ve spoken on the show about fragmented consciousness, a mind that sees parts and not the whole. Meditation and other Buddhist practices are one of the core ways of how we can heal minds and views. And so we will hear from two Plum Village monks: Sister True Dedication and Brother Spirit. Before entering the monastery, Sister True Dedication studied History & Political Thought at Cambridge University and worked as a journalist for BBC News. In the early years of her monastic training, she assisted Thich Nhat Hanh in their engaged Buddhist actions for human rights, religious freedom, applied ethics, and ecology. Brother Spirit began his monastic training in Plum Village in 2008, and before ordaining he studied mathematics at Cambridge and worked professionally as a composer, and as such has since composed many of the community’s beloved chants. They both helped to found the international Wake Up Movement, a community of young meditators finding new ways to combine mindfulness and engaged Buddhism.
We talk about:
the fragmentation of consciousness;
how to hold the perspective of non duality and interbeing within unlikely contexts, and how doing grant us agency and transformation;
dehumanization, de animation, and what Buddhism teaches about our relationship to other life and other intelligences;
the Mayahana Diamond Sutra (the world’s earliest printed text) and its invitation for us to reconsider four key notions of existance (those of being separate, being human, being a living being, and life spans);
how to find and make peace with one’s activism;
the seeds of wisdom that lie dormant in 4000-year-old magnolia trees;
how to hold the suffering of the world and call upon our ancestors for support;
spiritual bypassing, instrumentalising, and get out of jail free cards… How do we not consume and abstract the practice make it into something that just makes us “feel good”.
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Zen Buddhism and the Soul of Lifeworlding
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QUOTES:
Notice the ways in which language has conditioned us to think in terms of separation. The fact that we have a name, and that we name other things, that most of our language is nouns…
The spiritual path in our kind of Zen Buddhism is to become familiar with all the ways in which we're completely porous. We're made of what we're eating, what we're watching, what we're consuming, what we're feeling, we're made of the atmosphere around us, the people we're spending time with.
There's this other great term in Buddhism that many of your listeners will be aware of — emptiness. We see it as being empty of a separate self. Another way we can see it is being full of the whole cosmos. So we're full of everything and then we're empty of only one thin — a separate self.
As soon as we acknowledge our co being with all of those aspects of reality that we obviously don't condone and those that give us great pain — that's what gives us agency again, because when we are connected to the darkness, we can start to transform it.
I think a lot of spiritual practice is about identifying our true zone of agency, because if we're not connected to those dark and difficult and terrible things, the injustices, then what can we do?
The front line of action is right in my heart.
We can have a tendency to vilify or dehumanise the other side. So by being able to keep the “perpetrators” human, it keeps our compassion alive. It allows that really heart stretching vastness.
The Diamond Sutra takes us further. The next notion that we're invited to remove is the notion of a human being. That allows us to discover our interbeing with the more than human world. The idea is not to trap ourselves in the box called human. In fact, we don't make a distinction, we don't draw a line between us and the rocks, us and the planet, us and the water.
There's a beautiful line that our teacher once said when he was describing this thing about animism. He was saying that everything in the cosmos has its own way of knowing. He would say, this bamboo has its own intelligence. It has its way of knowing. Even an electron has its way of knowing. Respecting these mysterious ways of knowing of the living world around us is such a key to unlocking our own consciousness, our own openness of mind.
We have a responsibility of course, but our responsibility is also a ripening, a fruition of a lot of generations before. We see we're part of a river of life. Removing the pressure of the “I” means that we can sink back into these timelines, into these generations, into these ancestries. And that helps us act with a certain lightness.
We can put ourselves under huge pressure because we think it must happen in our lifetime. We've even allowed ideas like everything must be productive and impactful and and must bring great benefit. We've allowed that to kind of colonize even our rights to enjoy nature in silence, doing nothing.
I can allow for the possibility that there are seeds of wisdom in my lineage, that may be just waiting for the right conditions to germinate, and they may be very patient. They may be able to wait a long time.
The right action in one place is right action everywhere. That action contains within it all space, all time.
Wherever you are, just be a Buddha in that place. And that is already complete. That is already enough.
Spiritual bypassing is also coming from a kind of exploitation of spiritual traditions in a kind of individualistic way. It has only recently occurred to me that for many people meditation is an entirely individual pursuit. And it's weird for me because, confession, I was never able to meditate alone before coming to the monastery.
I don't want my happiness to exclude the suffering, because then it wouldn't be real happiness. It would be superficial, fake. I wouldn't be satisfied with it.
The kind of happiness I want is a happiness that might have space for tears. That has space for my pain and for the pain of this moment. The more we can be in joy and vitality and the sense of life moving through us and the wonder of that, the more capacity we have to be with the pain and to hold it.