Inversely proportional

Yes, it’s  an odd title, but one that seems to fit.  I am taking aim at those who hope to travel their way to Buddha wisdom, for example, going to Japan or to Nepal.  I can understand the necessity for this if you are a graduate student and need to check out some collections first hand.  But expecting to find Buddha wisdom? no way.  The more we travel from one country to another in the search of Buddha wisdom the less likely we are to find it by this means.

A wiser course of action might be to earn enough money to go into retreat for a couple of years.  It could be in Canada or in Oregon.  But the point I am trying to get across is this: be free from all obligations except to awaken, that is, catch a glimpse of pure Mind.  We can call this vertical traveling: going deeper and deeper within.

Such a retreat is more like a fast from our old habits, many of which are cultural.  In my case, it was a retreat from electric lights, running water, gas fired furnaces and paved roads just to name a few things.  I cut firewood with a hand saw, and carried water from the well using a bucket.  My nearest neighbor was about seven miles away.  It’s not bad once you get used to it.  

One day a new world opens up because the sounds and energies of nature are finally having an influence upon your psyche.  Nature is much quieter.  It is much easier to study the Sutras as a result.  But also you sense, more, the loneliness of life.  Meditating at night, all alone, with the full moon shining through a window pane is much different than sitting in an urban Zendo next to someone.  The overwhelming sense is one of suffering insofar as there is no real refuge in this world.

In retreat, one cannot help but learn that life is to be transcended because that is where the real refuge lies.  The finitude of life is in your face, more so than in a city where we have learned to wall off nature creating in her place a kind of sophisticated Disneyland.  The need to travel to find Buddha wisdom comes from the city.  It is just another diversion from really looking within.  Most such travels end up with us coming home, getting married and having a family.  Our spiritual pan global journey is over.  Our child’s ear infection is the new priority. 

Comments

[N. Yeti]

With children one learns to meditate with many distractions. For some people the best lesson in compassion they will receive is caring for children or elderly and I do not realize an eternal vow of homeleaving is necessary for awakening to occur; I do think dedication to mindful practice is essential as is skillfully managing one's life so there are minimal distractions. But I think it is not so that only in monastic retreat does one awaken. Through the contemplation of dependent origination, even the most complex and chaotic doings of samsara can be contextualized as both real and unreal. The awakening the occurs on the city bus is no less valid than that under a haystack. The important thing in my opinion is a posture of mental release -- not the time one practices renouncement, but the sincerity of faith behind it. Finding this spiritual strength amid so many material distractions can be difficult, especially when we are confronted at every billboard and storefront with the immediacy of our desires, and so easily we construct physical, legal, and barricades of ettiquete, to shield us from the horror that permeates all things.

Beautiful or scenic natural surroundings can be auspicious toward awakening, but let us make no mistake: one can find enlightenment even after a lifetime of futile pursuits and sins, even in a prison cell, if we are willing to confront the very origin of our experience in consciousness and are dedicated enough to negate the influences of mental dross and defilements through sublime transcendent consciousness and right actions.

One way this is realized is through selfless interaction with others and complete immersion, so to speak, in society. In this sense, I equate homeleaving with a spiritual trek, in my case extending over a decade, and it was not mere tourism. Great mystics throughout the ages have taken peregrination practice as a sincere path, and though destinationless wandering is not of the same character as monastic reclusion, there is nothing which excludes such practices as lengthy expatriate sojourns or pilgrimages as helpful toward enlightenment, as far as I am aware.

[Thezennist]

Methexis: Sure, if you are awakened already. But without first awakening (this needs underscoring) such practice is the practice of delusion. This is why modern Zen, for the most part is a dismal failure. Shên-hui said:

"All those who want to learn the Way must achieve Sudden Enlightenment to be followed by Gradual Cultivation."

This advice appears to follow the bodhisattva-yana which commences with bodhicitta followed by the bhumis.

[Methexis]

Zen masters who wrote advice to lay Zen practitioners such as Dahui and Foyan never advised this. Not even once! How come?

They say: practice exactly when children have ear infections. If not then, then when? Surely it can be beneficial to retreat into solitude, but if it was essential, it would be in every single one of Dahui's letters. Instead, he advises something more interesting. To bring up a saying at the very moment of the ear infection of your child.

You can retreat in your own room. Nature is delusion. You're retrograding into Hinayana mentality.

For what is nature, if not exactly Disneyland? Birds singing songs, Sun and Moon elbowing each other in the sky, photosynthesis - I can hardly imagne anything more cartoonish than that!

Forget cutting wood and carrying water: hier ist die Rose, hier tanze.

[Thezennist]

Dave St.Germain: Hopefully one awakens before the retreat ends.

[Dave St.Germain]

Then what, the retreat ends, and one goes back to get married and live in suburbia?

Or does the transformation never end?