Winter Notes

Happy New Year and Happy Sesshin Season. The Buddhist Women’s Conference is quickly approaching, and is now open for registration. Information can be found in flyers at the ZC or by visiting DharmaWomen.org.

In this issue, we begin to explore some approaches to inter-faith dialogue, particularly with the Muslim community. This is an important topic and we hope it will appear again in subsequent issues. Your comments, criticisms, and of course your articles are welcome. Among the articles we’ve also included some pictures from the recent New Year’s Ceremonies (thanks Kasia), along with a picture of snow, in case you've forgotten what it looks like.

Sit well,
J&J

There's that Gateless Gate Again

A Report from a Buddhist/Muslim Dialog by Jim Graham

I admit that I have some reservations about the kind of inter-faith networking that has become so fashionable of late. These are not reservations of principle. Arguably the need for understanding across religious borders has never been more important or urgent. And yes, of course the Great Way sees right through the illusion of labels. People who can shelve their doctrines and work whole-heartedly together for the benefit of others are bodhisattvas regardless of their religious pedigree. Much good work is being done by the inter-faith community. This is all true.

My uneasiness arises from the pan-spiritual flavor that suffuses many such undertakings. In the well-intentioned effort to foster understanding and cooperation, the commonalities of the religious traditions are celebrated, while the inevitable prickly points of variance are politely sidestepped, or even dismissed as inconsequential. What has emerged from innumerable repetitions of this exercise is a tepid form of “spirituality” which, while inoffensive in pretty much any company, also lacks the abrasive grit that forces transformation.

When I was invited to attend a Buddhist/Muslim dialog to be held at a mosque in the basement of an Episcopal church in Batavia, my flags went up. When I learned that the theme was to be “The Rains Retreats and Ramadan”, the flags started waving. Here, to all appearances, an attempt had been made to find a topic that everyone could nicely agree on: the benefit of retreat and renunciation in spiritual practice. What, I wondered, could possibly come of this?

These misgivings began to dissipate when our little Buddhist contingent stepped, shoeless, into the makeshift mosque. At just a few minutes before the scheduled start time, the sparsely decorated hall was occupied only by a middle-aged gentleman with a warm smile who introduced himself as Hamid Ahmed, the president of the mosque. Mazher, his wife, then appeared in the door laden with food and an equal measure of warmth. “Ah well,” she said, looking around the nearly empty room, “if nobody shows up we can just sit around and eat and talk”. My heart leapt at the prospect.

As it turned out, more people did drift in sporadically over the next hour or so, but by then an atmosphere of intimacy had taken root which, while undermining the formality of our gathering, opened the door to a deeper level of communication that had nothing to do with Ramadan or the Rains Retreats. The Muslims took such pleasure in talking about their faith, and seemed so genuinely pleased that we non-Muslims were interested enough to come to the mosque and ask questions, that the subject of Buddhism rarely came up. Had we come with the intention of expounding on the Dharma, we would have been sorely disappointed.

It became clear that many of our hosts were speaking under the assumption that we Buddhists have our own notion of God, but that we perhaps just imagine Him differently. As some described how, in the rapture of prayer, “there is only me and God”, I felt how sharply different the Buddhist experience is. And here is where I encountered the inter-faith conundrum: for me to have said “in my experience there is no such Other with whom to have the kind of dialog you’re describing, nor, for that matter, a ‘me’ to hold up my end of the conversation”, would have threatened the bonhomie that we were all enjoying. But in feeling that I couldn’t say it, wasn’t I basically denying that this discussion was, in any real sense, inter-faith? Wouldn’t a true inter-faith moment require such complete trust on all sides that statements like that could just tumble out, without disastrous consequences? And, of course, it would require that the Buddhists of the group not smugly discount this “unenlightened” talk of God.

As I put my shoes back on, mindful not to park my copy of the Qur’an (a gift from Hamid) anywhere inappropriate, I would have been hard-pressed to point to any new insights I had acquired into Islam. I’m certain that our interlocutors felt no more informed about Buddhism. But I found that somehow, in the midst of the simple acts of humanity that had transpired that afternoon- eating, smiling, giving, receiving- I had come to actually love several people whom I hadn’t even met a few hours before, like the retiree from the paint factory who, in a spontaneous gesture of generosity and intimacy, dog-eared a page of my Qur’an at a passage he especially loves. We had indeed found commonality, but not of ideas or practices.

In bed that night, before turning out the light, I opened the Qur’an to the dog-eared page, curious to see what had so enchanted this beautiful man. From the florid prose of the page, of a tone familiar to anyone who has read the Old Testament, what jumped out at me was the unrelenting imagery of duality- two gardens, each with two fountains, each with two pairs of every fruit, two other gardens, each with two springs- and this verse, which made me pause: “He has made the two seas to flow freely (so that) they meet together: Between them is a barrier which they cannot pass.”

Reading Sam Harris’s End of Faith

by Jonathan Laux

First, let me say right away that this is not a “Buddhist” book, though its themes will be of interest to many Buddhists. Second, this is a controversial book, and although the author’s arguments are compelling, reasonable people may well disagree with his conclusions. This is the book’s challenge, and perhaps its value.

Sam Harris has written an astonishingly caustic book, entitled End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason, published in 2004. From the title alone, one would guess that Harris has no love for religion, but this book is not an attack on theism per se (philosophers have been having this argument for millennia). Rather, it is an attack on the ethics that result from religious belief: what people will do (or refrain from doing) in the name of God. He discusses numerous examples, ranging from the Inquisition to the Holocaust, from suicide bombing to Americans’ discomfort around homosexuality, prostitution and marijuana use.

The elephant-in-the-room issue that Harris presents is this: unlike race and gender (for example), a person’s religion is a choice, so we should be able to evaluate that choice – its rationale, its consequences. Yet religion is one area where we’re likely to give a free pass to all but the wildest ideas. As Harris says, “On this subject, liberals and conservatives have reached a rare consensus: religious beliefs are simply beyond the scope of rational discourse. Criticizing a person’s ideas about God and the afterlife is thought to be impolitic in a way that criticizing his ideas about physics or history is not.” (p. 13)

Harris claims it is imperative that we change this. Specifically, he argues that in a world with weapons capable of mass destruction, certain beliefs about the world are now too dangerous to tolerate. Within this category of “intolerable beliefs”, Harris includes the doctrines that are central to Judaism, Islam, Christianity and essentially any other religious doctrine that claims divine authority. For evidence, Harris points to numerous passages in the Bible and the Qur’an that implore devotees to punish or kill nonbelievers, and he points to the cultural climate in countries where the tenets of dogma have been faithfully observed, such as Afghanistan under the Taliban.

But wait, we say, my next-door neighbors are Christian and they’re kind, loving people. How can you say they believe I deserve death? It’s true that in the West, especially in America, we’re surrounded by religious moderates who look and act very much alike, regardless of faith. But this is where Harris drops the other shoe: tolerance is a virtue that comes not from the sacred world, but from the secular one. He observes, “it is only because the church has been politically hobbled in the West that anyone can afford to think this way. In places where scholars can still be stoned to death for doubting the veracity of the Koran, [the] notion of a ‘loving concordat’ between faith and reason would be perfectly delusional.” (16)

The problem with religious moderates, Harris argues, is that they don’t read their own sacred books very well. In the interest of living in the modern world, moderates may argue for a loose interpretation of unpleasant or difficult passages – if they’re aware of them at all. Most Christians I know would be unaware of the passage from Deuteronomy cited by Harris, in which God instructs that people who worship foreign gods must be stoned to death. For these and similar reasons, moderates are ill-equipped to “tame” their extremist brethren, because in matters of doctrine the extremists usually outperform them. This has consequences in America, but even more so in the parts of the world where religious extremism is far more prevalent.

The Christian Right certainly takes a beating in End of Faith, and Harris is duly critical of the “my god can beat up your god” rhetoric that has reappeared in American politics since 9/11. But he is more subtle and persuasive in his critique of American liberalism. When we speak of tolerance, we often lapse into pleasant but hollow platitudes: how we all share the same human experience regardless of faith, how God = Allah = Tao = Brahman = ... = Mu, etc. On a deep, fundamental level this must of course be true, yet we can easily allow ourselves to believe that all people superficially think like we think, want what we want, and act how we would act.

Harris’s book is a shot in the arm for this kind of cheap generalization. As with practice on the mat, the mind would love to squirm its way into a cozy little image of the world. But Harris keeps dragging us back to confront the evidence. Terrorism is borne out of poverty? No, actually terrorists tend to be middle-class and educated. The major religions do not condone violence? Actually, they do – and here’s where. He is particularly critical of the “leftist unreason” personified by Noam Chomsky and others who believe American foreign policy initiatives are the moral equivalent of terrorism and neglect such considerations as intent that would differentiate the two.

The final chapter of End of Faith discusses consciousness and the realm of spiritual experiences. Although he considers doctrine to be dangerous, Harris readily acknowledges the good things that people attribute to religion: healthy communities, morality, the erosion of self. He believes, though, that these things can be had without the baggage of unreason. As his discussion unfolds, one finds oneself thinking, “Hey, this sounds a lot like Buddhism!” And indeed, that’s where he goes. Buddhism receives little if any criticism throughout the book, and at the end it is meditation that serves as Harris’s blue print for a “rational” exploration of ultimate truth. Harris has drawn fire from other atheist writers for this section; it’s to his credit that he recognizes that while the authors of the world’s sacred texts didn’t know what happens after death, scientists do not know either.

A number of criticisms could be made of End of Faith; I’ll provide three. The first and perhaps greatest difficulty with EoF is Harris’s writing style, which is as scathing as it is logical and articulate. In the first chapter alone, he describes religious doctrine as a “scrap heap of mythology” and “mountains of life-destroying gibberish”, among other things. Although he writes eloquently and even compassionately toward the book’s conclusion, he may quickly lose his credibility with many readers.

Secondly, many of the conclusions Harris draws run counter to our liberal instincts. This does not necessarily make him wrong, and it does make him an important voice of dissent, but it will certainly give us pause. Among other things, Harris criticizes pacifism (“flagrantly immoral”) and argues in favor of judicial torture to extract information from potential terrorists. As always, his arguments here are eminently rational, yet I’m left feeling uncomfortable. If we cannot in good faith claim any kind of moral high ground, it would seem that we compromise the very things we supposedly stand for. Interestingly, Harris admits that he’s uncomfortable with his conclusion, too. But his rebuttal would be this: “Here we come upon a terrible facet of ethically asymmetric warfare: when your enemy has no scruples, your own scruples become another weapon in his hand.” (p. 202)

Finally, one might object to the academic timbre of End of Faith. In putting together this book, Harris has clearly drawn on a variety of quality sources, but nearly all of them are books. It appears that nowhere in the course of writing did he sit down with a Muslim or Christian cleric for a frank discussion. Lacking this, his assessment has the feel of someone looking in from outside. At one point, Harris argues that there can be no such thing as a “moderate” Muslim, because the teachings of Islam make it impossible. As someone who has known numerous moderate Muslims, I find this surprising. In general, Harris pays close attention to what a religion’s books say, but little attention to how the religion is actually practiced. In fact, the “end of faith” is itself a very tidy, book-worthy solution to the problems Harris discusses, but is it practical? Is it even desirable?

These and similar questions have haunted me since finishing the book. Still, the nature of these objections provides more reason to read the book twice than not to read it at all. End of Faith is a challenging, wide-ranging and insightful examination of an issue that is as relevant today as it has ever been. If you can stomach Sam Harris’s taste for virulence, this is a very worthwhile book.

Indolence and Sloth at the Hermitage Retreat

by Jody Wilson

At first, it sounded like fun: ­ 40 or so hours of essentially self-directed, quality time spent under my second favorite roof. A sleepover at the Zen Center! Just be in the Zendo at 7:00 to go down to breakfast, at 10:30 to go down to teisho, at 5:30 for dinner and at 7:00 for formal sitting and dokusan. Samu after breakfast. Shower as you will between meals. Otherwise, lunch was at 12:30 and please do kinhin in the Buddha Hall only since the floor in the Zendo squeaks. Is that all? Oh, and no kinhin on the front porch either. Is that IT?? Yep, that’s it. Oh, one more thing: ­ you’re sleeping in the library. Alone. I wondered if I had time to run out and buy a lottery ticket.

At the start of the first evening sitting, Sensei explained that this type of “hermitage” retreat might be especially helpful to those who were at a place in their practice where “You know that the energy is draining from the present situation but you aren’t sure where it’s going.” Anyway, I think that’s what he said. I was already planning how I would spend “my” time. Would I sit all night? Could I sit all night? If I sat all night, what would I be like in the morning? How much would my knees hurt? My back was bothering me a little already. Did I have enough Ibuprofen? Should I be taking it at a sesshin? Oops, I mean, a retreat. Hey, if it’s a retreat and not a sesshin, is it okay if I after I wash my hair I condition it? Are the mirrors covered? If not, what about make-up? Moisturizer, at least.

I recall Sensei mentioning something about the possibilities of a “hinge” experience and I had a very vivid mental picture of a swinging door. If I’d been paying attention I’d have known that it was just about to hit me in the butt. But after dokusan I was totally absorbed in one single burning question: ­ will there be yaza fruit?

There’s a lot to be said for the structure, rigor and discipline of sesshin. First, there’s a printed schedule. You are expected to follow the schedule or have a darn good reason why not. There’s no wiggle room for that pesky “self” to creep in and talk you into a nap or stretch. The schedule becomes the container for all of the angst, aching knees, indigestion and doubts, just as it is the container for all the blazing joy, wonder, discovery and insight. No matter what we’re feeling or thinking, we adhere to the schedule, show up where and when we are supposed to, ready to do the job at hand. It’s hard, but essentially we want to sit and we will compose ourselves in order to sit well. Now blazing joy, now aching knees, now samu, now a shower. No time, per se, just one moment following the other in stately measure. Predictable, directed, energized and focused. Nice.

In contrast, as the realization dawned that I was expected to be the author of my own schedule as well as my own monitor, I remembered a story about the U.S. Army’s plan to use cats ­ well-known for their exceptional night vision ­ in military operations in Vietnam. Here are excerpts from the final report: “A squad, upon being ordered to move out, was led off in all directions by the cats; on many occasions the animals led their troops racing through thick brush in pursuit of field mice and birds. Troops had to force the cats to follow the direction of the patrol; the practice often led to the animals stalking and attacking the dangling pack straps of the soldiers marching directly in front of them. If the weather was inclement or even threatening inclemency, the cats were never anywhere to be found.” [1] Chuckling to myself as I was leaving the Zendo, Sensei took my elbow and whispered a reminder concerning the proper directions to face during the bows and prostrations. I thanked him. I think. There was no yaza fruit.

I took a zafu and a couple of support cushions with me to the library, intending to sit there. Earlier, I had taken a bench out of the cupboard in the Kannon room, intending to sit there. But it was still early and I thought a little rest might help me to sit longer and “better.” Looking wistfully at the books, I decided I’d stretch out for a few minutes. I woke up at about 6:15 ­, just in time to get myself together for breakfast.

I was furious. How could I have wasted an entire night? I was aware that a certain complacency had seeped into my practice ­ - I called it “fat, dumb and happy mind” ­ - but this was ridiculous. I determined to make up for it tonight. Tonight? What about today? What about NOW? Breakfast went by in a blur and I left the table hungry.

Chopping vegetables for salad soothed me. I finished ahead of time and went back to my room, tidied up and did some yoga. At the end of samu, I went outside for kinhin. I had no watch and found myself becoming increasingly anxious about the time. I went back inside and snuck a look at the clock in the kitchen. Just 15 minutes had passed. I decided to sit in my room. After a few minutes of settling, I decided I wanted to try the bench. I soon realized that the bench was not for me. But maybe it was this bench? Were some bigger than others? Smaller? Unbelievably, I decided to try them all. Happily, as I entered the Kannon Room, reason prevailed and I returned to my room, where I laid down “for a second” and woke up startled, just in time to get to the Buddha Hall for teisho. Afterwards, Sthaman took me aside and whispered that Sensei had asked him to tell me to stop moving during teisho. Stop moving during teisho??? That wasn’t me, ­it was the person sitting next to me. Honestly. Several people were sitting on the mats behind Sensei. Why did he think it was me? Do I normally move during teisho? The rest of the day went by in a blur of self-righteous self-talk and self-conscious body language. The only whole hearted effort I was able to make was 108 kinhin laps in the Buddha Hall without losing track of the count or bumping into anyone. I was totally blown and miserable, hijacked by my thoughts and lost in them.

Opportunities to sit in the fullness of this experience, to nod to the thoughts and keep my seat continued to present themselves and I continued to refuse them. I spent the rest of the “retreat” retreating further and further from the experience, slept deeply and often and spent the final teisho sitting like a statue in a chair at the back of the Buddha Hall, trying not to breathe. It was all so silly.

As Sensei warned, it was a hinge experience for me, demonstrating once and for all where the distractions originate, how lame it is to blame circumstances or others when our thoughts are wildly scattered, how hard it is to pull it all back in and BE.

[1] “The Indispensable Cat,” Jean-Claude Suares

Ego Storm on a Buddhist Mountain

by Cynthia Stone

As many of you know, I love to hike in the mountains. Particularly, I have this perverse desire to hike up mountains with the goal of reaching the very top. Somehow this goal has always been very important to me even though the trek to the top is itself literally and figuratively breathtaking.

It would be hard to admit that reaching the goal surpasses pleasures of the path: the fresh mountain air, the burbling streams of crashing waterfalls, the beauty of the forest, and the abundance of flowers blooming in July and August on the open slopes. Even the steep rocky paths are enjoyable, especially in retrospect as one feels a sense of pride in meeting these formidable challenges.

But my favorite part of a mountain hike is emerging out onto the tundra where practically nothing grows but tiny plants and lichens on the rocks. The amazing openness and emptiness of mountain peaks above the tree line does something to my neurotransmitters, and I enter a state of bliss that transcends the enjoyment of the pleasures of the earlier stages of the hike.

Then there is the summit itself with seemingly unending views in all directions with no sign of civilization as far as one can see. Sometimes one is above the clouds with even the snow below. Maybe it is because the air is thinner, but I never want to leave. I want to evaporate into the vastness of it all.

With this as background, you might be able to understand (though not approve) my reaction when on our recent hiking trip in Japan, I was unable to reach the summit of a sacred Buddhist mountain as I needed to accommodate my hiking companion. Or at least I decided that it wasn’t worth a major marital rift to abandon him and go the last hour to the summit myself. And he was not about to move another foot higher.

We spent the night in a mountain refuge near the top. I desperately wanted to climb to the summit in the morning which dawned sunny and clear. But that was not to be. On the way down, I was miserable. While I felt I’d probably made the right choice, I was not at all content. I longed to hike to the top, I craved the experience and my desire yielded to rage that I was not able to do so. I tried to appreciate the views and flowers on the way down, but my feelings churned inside me.

Then, all of a sudden, I remembered this was a Buddhist mountain! And I was caught in greed and anger, which are without a doubt the poisons of a personal hell. Where, I wondered, was my practice when I needed it? It seemed to get lost in the effort to attain a goal to which I seem to be addicted. The irony of the situation hit me. The more I remembered that every step I took had first been taken by a Buddhist priest in the 8th century, the more I lessened my grip on my desire and the fires of anger diminished. By the time we reached the trailhead many hours later, I was once again able to be where I was with some degree of equanimity, even though it was far from the top.