« Magical Thinking (or: what happens when you talk to rivers) | Main | The joys of apartment living » |
|
|
September 30, 2008 Why this witch would make a lousy buddhist 
One buddhist parable has stuck in my mind since I first read it, perhaps a couple of years ago. In it, a mother loses her only child and is stricken with immense grief. She goes door to door, begging someone, anyone, to restore her child to her. One door is answered by a buddhist monk, a Master or Enlightened One, who tells her that if she can bring him mustard seeds from a household where no one has died he can bring her child back to life. Gratefully she runs again door to door, asking whoever answers whether someone in that house had died. At every door the answer of course is yes, and she is unable to get the mustard seeds. Eventually she sees the monk's point: that everyone has lost someone to death and grief is the universal human condition. She gives up her search and buries her child. In one version, the story does not end there. In this version she went back to the Master, who said to her:
She was so struck by the wisdom of the verse that she became a buddhist nun.* I read that story with a kind of horror. I imagine myself as the grieving mother, unable to accept the reality of my child's death, desperately going door to door, begging anyone and everyone to help me bring my daughter back to me. I imagine the Enlightened One telling me that my grief is not special, that it does not make me special; that I should let my child go into death and reconcile myself to it. I imagine myself slapping him across the face. The basic message I get from my (admittedly limited) readings in buddhism is that suffering comes into your life through desire. I agree with this: the more you want something, the more it is going to hurt when you don't get it. Where I disagree is in what to do about it. To me, giving up desire to free myself from suffering is too high a price. Desire--attachment, love, passion, clinging--is the point of life and what makes it worth living. Wiccans too--at least, some of them, though not me--believe in reincarnation. But the reincarnation of a witch doesn't lead anywhere. You don't "progress" through the evolutionary chain, earning your way into successively "higher" states of being until you can free yourself of the chain of life into permanent enlightenment. There is only the wheel of life. This is it. You are born, you live, you die, you are born again, time without end. You don't "earn" your way from a bug to a snake or from a girl to a boy or from human to "free." Life is it. And if you don't believe in reincarnation, then life is really it. There's nothing else. The point of being alive is to live, fully. How do you do that if you don't allow yourself to want things, to love selfishly? Grief is the price of joy. Buddhism is a trendy subject right now in positive psychology, where study after study has proved that meditation can alter the structure of the brain in such ways as make positive thoughts and emotions more prevalent. I believe this, but I can't help but notice that other religions and their meditative practices are not being studied. What about a christian nun's contemplative prayers? The daily prayers of a devout muslim? Dare I say it, the rituals of a practicing witch? I suspect the international popularity of the Dalai Lama and his work in this area has had some influence on the direction and biases of this research, which seems like an odd thing for the leader of an occupied nation to be doing with his time; this highlights what is for me the central problem with buddhism: the Dalai Lama is unquestionably an amazing human being, a great spiritual teacher, and a very successful person, but he is a lousy leader. Being an effective leader means loving the people you are leading more than you love other people so that you can represent their interests effectively; but this goes contrary to buddhism, as I understand it. Canadian readers will have no trouble remembering how Canadians feel about prime ministers who spend more time cultivating relationships and golfing with the leaders of our more populous and wealthier neighbours than they do representing Canada's interests. Imagine how at least some of the Tibetans must feel, watching their leader-in-exile give talks to sold-out stadiums in the west about how to be happy while the Chinese continue to oppress them. Back from the digression: I am sitting right now on my sofa. On the wall above my head are seven photos of Frances; on the tv cabinet opposite me are the photos of her I brought home from work on my last day, along with a picture of Greg. On the bookcase beside the tv cabinet is a watercolour picture of his and a hallowe'en bag that Frances decorated with monster stickers, a book I made her of pictures from our old backyard, and the many many photo albums and scrapbooks--mostly of Frances, but also of my friends and life. On top of the bookcase is the Frances art basket. Right now she is at school. They have recently finished the "All About Me" unit and will be beginning "Fall Is Here." She will love this, I know, since it will give her a pretext to flood the apartment with leaf collections. I'm already planning where we can find some good ones and how we can store and display them. I'm also planning out a haunted house project with an old cardboard box and some foam stickers, construction paper and popsicle sticks. In a few hours I'll head to the daycare, and when she sees me she will jump up and down and run straight into my arms, and I'll bend down so I can scoop her up into a big hug, and we'll tell each other how much we missed each other. I'll give her a kiss and we'll walk home through the rain holding hands, and I'll squeeze her fingers and tell her how much I love them. I'll make us salmon for supper which she probably won't eat, and potatoes which she probably will, and we'll have minor arguments about television and putting the toys away. And I'll be struck now and then by how beautiful her big blue eyes are, how thick her hair is, the solemnity and concentration on her little face, her slight back, the unbounded joy when she skip-leaps across the room. I'll think that I am the luckiest woman who ever lived, to have such a daughter. There it is, you see: I want to find delight in my flocks and my child. I want to cling. I want to hold as tight as I can with both hands and remember every second. I want to believe that Frances is special, that I am justified in loving her more than I love other people's children. I want to believe that the work I do is important and better than other work I could be doing. I want to be attached. The price you pay for that is the agony when you lose it; but that's ok, because it will mean that I'll fight harder not to lose it, I'll hold on to it longer. And even then, when it's finally lost, it's still ok. The grief is worth the joy that precedes it. George Orwell once wrote in an essay on Gandhi: "To an ordinary human being, love means nothing if it does not mean loving some people more than others.... The essence of being human is that one does not seek perfection, that one is sometimes willing to commit sins for the sake of loyalty, that one does not push asceticism to the point where it makes friendly intercourse impossible, and that one is prepared in the end to be defeated and broken up by life, which is the inevitable price of fastening one's love upon other human individuals." ** I don't want to be a saint. I want to be human. I want to be a mother. And if the choice to be a mother, to have children, is not the ultimate decision to be attached to this world with everything that entails, both good and bad, I don't know what is. ~~~~~ *And the story goes even beyond this. "The compassion of the Buddha, the most noble friend of all, had saved her from all suffering experienced in this and former lives. She used as her model, the heartrending example of the nun Patacara who had also been afflicted with temporary insanity after the death of not only husband and two sons, but also parents and brothers. Because women's longing for men is so deeply ingrained, the Buddha said, "For a man does the woman strive." (A VI.52) From this attachment is born the torture of jealousy, the lack of self-reliance, and the despair of loneliness." Hmm.... Or, from further down the page, "She also understood that she was still held fast by her womanly limitations. It was not enough that her weaknesses were abhorrent to her, and that she was longing for more masculine traits. She also had to know what to do to effect the change. She accepted the fact that she had to make tremendous efforts, not only because she was already advanced in years, but also because until now she had only cultivated female virtues. The masculine characteristics which she was lacking were energy and circumspection." But the sexism inherent in these passages is a sidebar: it is the attitude towards "earthly" things that I have a problem with. **The whole essay is worth reading for its discussion of the difference between human beings and saints, and the claim that it is not that human beings are failed saints, but that saints are failed human beings--something that I would not have understood and might not have agreed with before Frances, but is all too clear now. Posted by Andrea at September 30, 2008 10:06 AM under Witch EMAIL this entry (comments fields are below this section) Comments I've often been given Budhist advice for pain control - never from anyone with chronic pain and, well, it's difficult to differentiate Budhism proper from the kind of Budhism-lite that is often adopted in the West. And there seems a central contradiction; these kinds of messages suggest that it is possible to have a life without pain and suffering, by removing desire. But one would not pursue such a life unless one has that desire. And like yourself, I'm not sure I have such a desire. Life without loss is a life without love. It may be possible to accept that loss, to come to terms with it, but a general anaesthetic for life? That having said, letting go of the idea that there's a certain way my body ought to feel, trying to reduce pain to electrical and chemical activity as opposed to regarding it as some great injustice being dealt me, this is useful. And that kind of idea seems to be present in Budhism. Posted by: The Goldfish at September 30, 2008 3:10 PM
I agree with the Goldfish that we give up on our desires only because we desire something else. A life without suffering doesn't seem to me to be quite the thing to desire - certainly not the thing to desire more than our flocks and our children. Giving up desire is the topic of my post today too, and I think it, too, was about exchanging one desire for another: my daughter wanted Smarties, but she wanted self-determination more. I was using her desire for Smarties to reward/manipulate her, so she decided to switch that desire off, and free herself. I think I'm leaning towards the interpretation that she made the right choice. (Though potty training would be easier for me if she hadn't!) Posted by: bea at September 30, 2008 3:41 PM
Also, those Buddhist parables seem strikingly meaningful to me, though I'm sure I'm misinterpreting them. The universality of grief and loss COULD mean that it isn't special, isn't important - OR it could become the basis for respecting it as essentially human. As for the second saying - when death comes to find me, I hope I'm taking delight in my flocks with a heart that clings. Posted by: bea at September 30, 2008 3:43 PM
i think i could write a thesis in response, Andrea...b/c a large part of me agrees wholeheartedly with what you're saying about clinging, and yet when i lost my child the only formal philosophical/spiritual tenets that helped me at all happened to be Buddhism's four noble truths...http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Four_Noble_Truths. i think, at least in my understanding, the difference lies in clinging to what you do NOT have. i cling to my living children, cling to the memory of the child who died, but i cannot cling to him himself without destroying my self and any healing or peace i might otherwise stumble towards. interestingly, at Glow in the Woods, we're having a month-long roundtable on spirituality and loss...this would be an interesting contribution to the conversation. Posted by: Bon at October 1, 2008 8:03 AM
That is interesting, Bon--and it's one of the reasons I tried to phrase this as why it's a path that would never work for me as opposed to one that is just bad. The four noble truths in and of themselves I don't have a problem with; it's the way they get applied and interpreted in general, and this for me finds its clearest expression in the parables. When that mother achieved wisdom (i.e. learned that everyone dies, and that her child wasn't coming back) she stopped crying. She gave up her grief. And it's not the only one; there's another story about a master who loved his wife dearly and she died young and when someone told him about it he didn't react, and his response to their surprise was, "why are you surprised? I knew she was going to die one day." Which seems to me to imply a fundamental disrespect for expressions of grief and the grieving process in general, as if enlightenment=stoicism. And it bugs me. There's this idea that grief (or suffering in general) are choices, and if you make the right choices, you may still have problems and adversity but you won't suffer or have grief. (So much so that I wonder if that isn't why buddhism is so popular now--because our culture, too, does not have a lot of patience or tolerance for people experiencing prolonged or serious grief.) So that stoicism or a lack of emotional expression becomes a symbol of spiritual enlightenment; but to me, lack of emotional expression in such situations is a symbol of poor mental health. It doesn't seem reconciliable with my existing biases; and I like my existing biases, and I'm keeping them. Also I think it is specifically the things we have that we are not supposed to cling to--at least in the parables I've read the point is often made that having money or power or special people or families is not dangerous, so long as you don't cling to them. So long as you are not attached to them, expect or want them to always be there, and so long as your love for and service to the special people in your life is not based in any way on any kind of expectation that they might reciprocate. (This would require other parables.) Goldfish, that's a good point. I hadn't thought of it in those terms. I agree that buddhist perspectives are often useful. I think that meditation as a practice has a ton of benefits, especially for people given to obsessive or anxiety disorders. But there's a lot in the philosophy that surrounds it that I have a real problem with. And I wonder if you think it would have been useful or desirable to get to that point re: your own pain immediately, or if you think you needed to go through a period of hating it and feeling it was unfair first? Posted by: Andrea
Um, just in case there is any uncertainty in the matter you are one of my favourite writers and thinkers. Posted by: Mad at October 1, 2008 1:59 PM
So interesting, since I'm a Wiccan-Buddhist. :-) As I understand it, there is nothing in Buddhism that suggests we can EVER free ourselves from pain. Pain happens, because we are human. Happiness and joy happen, because we are human. Suffering, on the other hand, happens because we try to cling to happy and reject pain and in so doing we turn away from the ACTUAL things making us happy/sad and instead are responding to our own inner anxiety about what happens next. So far, I'm finding Wicca and Buddhism compatible because both are about being in the moment, being fully present, and not deferring our attention until later. They're both about being where we are, loving our crazy imperfect world. And I'm so down with that. Posted by: Pronoia at October 1, 2008 2:41 PM
"And I wonder if you think it would have been useful or desirable to get to that point re: your own pain immediately, or if you think you needed to go through a period of hating it and feeling it was unfair first?" I think there has to be a process with this stuff; from a purely practical point of view, if the moment a person started having a pain they could somehow zone it out, they would be putting themselves in constant danger. Pain exists for a reason. I wrote quite a bit about this and there was some discussion here, if anyone is interested: Posted by: The Goldfish at October 3, 2008 4:50 AM
Hello everyone...I would just like to throw in my two cents regarding the nature of Buddhist practice. If, as you said in your main entry, you simply like your existing biases and are bent on keeping them, that's fine and I wish you well on your path. God knows I've got my own biases to which I cling most tenaciously, despite the fact that some (many?) of them are actually harmful. But I just want to make the point that no one can develop any kind of meaningful understanding of Buddhist wisdom (nor can one derive any meaningful benefits from it) until he/she has actually done the practice for a while. It takes years to change deeply ingrained thought patterns and move beyond the paradigms you've been using your whole life to make sense of the world. If you do the practice with sincerity and an open heart, you will find that Buddhism is NOT about zoning out, anesthetizing yourself, forsaking joy, ceasing to adore your children, disdaining the earth, being perfect. The objective is to gain insight into the delusive nature of reality, to explore the inner workings of your own mind, and to engage more fully in life than ever before. After a while, you start to see things like the Buddhist concept of rebirth and the paradox of desiring to transcend desire in a whole new light. Insights come at the funniest times...All of a sudden one day you'll be like, "Oh, NOW I understand what they mean when they say all things are empty!" Maybe at first you had suspected it was just nihilism in disguise. Re: the death of children (God forbid)...The Buddhist approach does not entail responding to such a tragedy with cold stoicism and dry eyes. Rather it's about "comprehending the grounds from which griefs come into play" and thus honoring the lost person and yourself in a deeper way than overt, messy and prolonged expressions of emotion allow for. You might be interested in an article I read a few months ago about a Buddhist mom. I remembered it yesterday when I came upon this discussion: It's long and maybe a little bit fluffy but I think she makes a lot of sense. Anyway, thanks for the good discussion! Posted by: Robyn at October 4, 2008 11:43 AM
That is interesting, Pronoia. Especially since to me, wicca is not about being in the moment per se. It's hard to see how a tree of life meditation could be construed as such, since I have never been nor will I ever be a tree. For me, wicca is very much about creating desired futures (and appreciating where we are while we do so). Robyn, thanks for your comment, I appreciate your contribution. The thing is, there's nothing in that article that contradicts what I'm saying--i.e. I, personally, have no desire to detach from my emotions and observe them. That is just not the way I want to live my life, which is why buddhism is not a good fit for me. Nor do I want to glorify selfless service, which has often been used to keep women in subjugation. It's great if you feel it makes you a better person or your life better, but I most vehemently do not believe it would work for me. Not to mention, "overt, messy and prolonged expressions of emotion" are, in my opinion, human, and I have no wish to overcome them. For me they define part of an authentic life, and "overt, messy and prolonged expressions" of grief are just the price to pay for "overt, messy and prolonged expressions" of joy. What's wrong with overt, messy and prolonged? Who gets to say what's overt, messy and prolonged, vs. what's appropriate, and why? Posted by: Andrea
Regarding my “overt, prolonged, and messy” comments, I fear I phrased this the wrong way. I knew it as soon as I had pressed the “submit” button! Posted by: Robyn at October 6, 2008 2:57 PM
Comment |
About Me I'm a type 1 diabetic, witch, feminist, environmentalist, writer, mother, student and print addict in Toronto, Canada. The blog has seen the birth of my daughter, her many medical adventures, my divorce and return to school. The name of the game is upheaval. Subscribe
Change is God (Octavia Butler, Parable Series) "What is more mortifying than to feel you've missed the Plum for want of courage to shake the Tree?" Logan Pearsall Smith Email Frances! frances AT andreamcdowell DOT com You can email her mother too (that's me):
The Best of Beanie Baby
Recent Entries
Categories Monthly Archives The WHOYCBE Not So Secret Spoilers These links open in a new browser window. Random Writer's Quote Any writing exposes writers to judgement about the quality of their work and their thought. The closer they get to painful personal truths, the more fear mounts--not just about what they might reveal but about what they might discover should they venture too deeply inside. To write well, however, that's exactly where we must venture. -Ralph Keyes
Dwarfism Resources:
Blogs I'm Reading
Other Mom Sites: Green Family Library
The title of this blog was taken from the short story "The Language of Nna Mmoy" by Ursula le Guin in her collection, Changing Planes. I won't tell you why or how, because I want you to read the story and figure it out for yourself.
|
