Vinati DeVane's Ordination

Over 40 Sangha members, friends, and family came together Sunday, Feb. 3, to affirm the transformation of Caroline DeVane, long a resident of the CZC, into Vinati DeVane. (Vinati means humility, service, bowing in Pali and Sanskrit; it is pronounced vin-NA-tee.) The ceremony was moving, and the potluck wonderful. The party raged on for hours. Thank yous go out to all who pitched in, most especially Kathy, Gerrie, Jim, Elie, and Deena. Nine bows to all.

Precept #8

“I resolve not to withhold spiritual or material aid, but to give them freely where needed.”
by Jon Laux

One of the great challenges of Zen is to integrate practice with daily life. Even if we do daily zazen and attend sesshin, most of our opportunities for practice will be “off the mat”. And daily life certainly slings its share of opportunities. That we call it “zen practice” is a gentle reminder that this work is never finished, never perfect; in each instant we do the best we can, that’s all.

Not long ago, I responded to a situation in a way that immediately disappointed me. On a Sunday afternoon last fall, I was driving home after several hours spent studying for an upcoming exam. The sun was going down and I was tired. As I headed east on Wacker toward the Lake Shore Drive entrance, traffic was backed up. An SUV had stalled in the left lane, and cars were merging to drive around it. A woman – presumably the SUV owner – was trying to talk to the drivers as they passed. Several drivers exchanged some words with her then drove on.

Finally, it was my turn. The woman asked for help: she was out of gas, and she and her nephew were trying to get back to Elgin. I believed her. I could have pulled over in front of her – I almost did. But I didn’t. Maybe I was nervous because of the line of cars stuck behind me, impatient and honking. Maybe I was anxious to get home and enjoy a warm meal. But mainly, the reason I didn’t pull over is that I just wasn’t there.

Most Chicagoans are well acquainted with the Panhandler Ritual: someone shakes a cup or asks for money, and you respond with whatever combination of fear, mistrust, calculation, judgment and compassion that you muster at that moment. Most of us have performed this ritual enough that it becomes an abstraction, like the half-hearted rolling stops that we make at stop signs. It’s easy to build up a callous so as to avoid looking directly at the situation before us. We’ve all heard numerous reasons not to give money to panhandlers, and most of them are no doubt justified in some circumstances. But these reasons can so easily accrete into rules that help demarcate the boundaries of self. Can we still abandon the rules when we see a need? Can we avoid switching into autopilot?

I drove on. Almost instantly I was filled with remorse. She just needed some money. Not five minutes earlier, I had paid $13 just for parking my car! Even though I drove on, thus solving “my problem”, that woman was still stuck there. Her problem had not been solved. And sitting in that SUV with an empty tank was a boy who was learning firsthand how Americans respond to the problems of their neighbors. I feel low.

As Sensei said during the last Jukai, we need to keep taking the precepts because we keep breaking the precepts. There is value in this. When I was 16 and wanted a driver’s license, I had to digest (and regurgitate) the DMV’s rules of the road. I’ve forgotten most of those rules. (Should you stop your car when a schoolbus is unloading on the other side of the street? Does the answer change if the street is divided?) Jukai gives us a periodic reminder of rules to live by. But it goes deeper. There are the rules of the road, and then there is driving safely. The precepts too can be seen as rules, but as another Sangha member wrote, the precepts actually describe mindful living. And they provide a feedback amplifier that can show us our mind at a given instant – usually when we’re out of step in some way.

When I was in high school, a popular yearbook quotation went as follows: “The trouble with life is that you get the test before the lesson.” The quotation really tells us more about the mindstate fostered by our schools than it does about life. If I had to do that day over again, I would have acted differently. But of course, that day is gone. We handle each moment in life with the karma that has brought us up to that exact moment. In hindsight you can earmark moments in your life that have been “pivotal”, what your motivations were, why you did what you did and why you are where you are now. But you cannot identify when the next pivotal moment will come or what it will look like. Hence the need for continued practice.

One faces similar challenges in the business world. I work in the insurance industry, where the annual performance of companies oscillates between pretty good and spectacularly awful. Insurance is predicated on the idea that similar-looking risks will behave similarly, and thus if you insure enough of them the group as a whole will behave somewhat predictably. This is true most of the time, but then there are the catastrophic events that nobody can foresee, the ones that can completely wipe out a company – think of 9/11, Katrina or asbestos lawsuits. The companies that lost money a few years ago will all tell you, “We’re a much better company than we were a few years ago.” But the only response I can find is this: wait until the next Big Thing happens. Then we’ll see. Until then, just keep working.

So... this article was supposed to be about spiritual and material aid. I wish I could say that after my experience last fall I began volunteering at a homeless shelter, or that I started a relief fund for people who run out of gas, or that I’m now in the habit of randomly dropping $20 bills on major roadways in case someone needs them. None of these things has happened. And yet, things are different. The experience was a flash point for me to examine the mind in daily life: how busy the days are, what’s important, what needs to be done but can wait five minutes, what to let slide. Having seen myself fail, I identify less with success.

Zen training is an ongoing process, and in many cases our efforts will be horrible blunders, ill-conceived in theory (if we have the time to theorize) and botched in execution. But if we pay attention along the way, each blunder can be a lesson, and the next effort might be a little less botched, a little more compassionate.

Precept #1

by Laurel Ross

I RESOLVE NOT TO KILL, BUT TO CHERISH ALL LIFE is the first cardinal precept. I sometimes think that in directing us to “cherish all life” this precept encompasses all of the other precepts and the rest are details of how to accomplish this. I like to imagine a world where all people follow this guidance. No war, no homicide or suicide, no slaughterhouses or gallows—massive changes resulting in less pain and suffering for trillions of sentient beings.

Following this precept means adopting a vegetarian diet and most of us understand this to mean that animals will not be killed, a worthy outcome. The benefits to the world are far greater than that however and worth thinking about.

Hardly a day goes by that literate Americans do not hear about impending environmental catastrophe, usually accompanied by a plea to make personal choices that will help.

• The global supply of clean fresh water is shrinking and the poor suffer most. Women and children all over the world spend a large percentage of their time seeking clean water. We are asked to be responsible--stop watering a useless lawn; shower with a friend; turn off the tap while brushing our teeth.
  
  
• Climate change is upon us. Some recommendations are to turn down the thermostat, change to efficient light bulbs and install a green roof.
  
• Fossil fuel supplies are dwindling. We try to take public transportation, dump that gas-fueled lawn mower, snow blower and leaf blower, ride a bike, or drive a hybrid. Recycle and reuse of course.
  
  
• Species of plants and animals are becoming extinct at an unprecedented rate. We can send a check to the World Wildlife Fund.
  

These are serious issues and these good ideas for conservation and many more are promoted by well-meaning people (like me). What is not being promoted much in the mainstream media though is one simple change in behavior that would result in enormous environmental benefit: STOP EATING MEAT.

Consider the issues raised above.

Water: Sometimes described as “the new oil,” potable drinking water is increasingly scarce because of depleted aquifers, droughts, and pollution. In the face of this more than half of the US water supply goes to livestock production. It takes 25 gallons of water to produce a pound of wheat, and 2,500 gallons for a pound of beef. Water used in livestock production is not for direct consumption, but for the corn, roughage, and other crops that are grown as feed. There is also considerable water pollution from nitrogen fertilizers, pesticides and “manure lagoons.”

Fossil fuels: Raising animals for food in the horrific factory conditions now common in the US accounts for more than one-third of all the fossil fuels used in our country. The creation of a single hamburger patty (potentially containing the flesh of up to 100 different cows) uses enough fossil fuel to drive an average American car 20 miles and enough water for 17 warm showers.

According to one source (see below—John Robbins) if people in the United States chose to give up eating meat, our oil reserves would be extended from current estimates of 10-30 years to up to 260 years. This is because vast amounts of petroleum products are used to produce feed, which comes from corn and soybeans that are raised using huge machines and immense amounts of chemical fertilizers and pesticides. The feed has to be transported to the animals. The animals have to be transported to the “processing” plants. The flesh has to be transported to the markets, etc.

How many real solutions to the oil shortage have been proposed? Not many that I know of. A mass switch to a vegetarian diet might buy us some time to find viable alternatives.

Extinction crisis and climate change: Livestock production has resulted in the destruction of millions of square miles of habitat all over the globe. In Latin America massive areas of rain forest and other tropical habitats have been cleared to raise soy beans and corn for cattle feed and to directly graze animals. The carbon released into the atmosphere by this landscape-scale deforestation is a major contributor to the serious situation that is at last becoming understood by the general public in our country. We are living on a warming planet that in the foreseeable future may no longer be able to sustain life as we know it. Deforestation also means the loss of habitat for millions of plant and animal species that can live nowhere else—hence the rapidly rising rate of extinctions. Not insignificant, although rarely talked about, is the loss of livelihood for millions of indigenous people who have subsisted in those forests for thousands of years, resulting in the rapid growth of urban poverty.

Eating meat is a choice, and one which currently contributes substantially to the overall excessive consumption patterns in our culture. We can make better choices and a good place to start is by following the first precept.

I have consulted three books for this short essay. Michael Pollan’s recent best seller, Omnivore’s Dilemma, Barbara Kingsolver’s personal and charming memoir, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, and John Robbins’ provocative and occasionally hyperbolic Diet for America. I am happy to lend them to anyone interested in learning more.

Precept #4

“I resolve not to lie but to speak the truth.”
by Jody Wilson

Seemingly straightforward, the Fourth Precept goes deeper than just a George-and-the-cherry-tree goody-goody resolve not to tell lies, although it certainly encompasses that kind of simple honesty.

This precept, like all of our practice, brings us relentlessly back to that pesky question — what IS truth? Since that is a question I’m not qualified to answer, maybe it’s best to start with what is not truth. I’ve made a handy list:

Story: “. . .and they all lived happily ever after.”
Literature: “In a hole in the ground, there lived a hobbit.”
Poetry: “I hear America singing . . .”
Myth: “In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.”
Social grease: “What an interesting dress!”
Exaggeration: “If I’ve said it once, I’ve said it a million times!”
Excuses: “The dog ate it.”
Ego protection: “The check is in the mail.”
Blatant: “Simply stated, there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction.” *
Dangerously delusional: “And we'll find more weapons as time goes on. But for those who say we haven't found the banned manufacturing devices or banned weapons, they're wrong, we found them.” **

Then there are the filters through which we see and experience our lives and the world around us. We’re so used to these distortions and take them so much for granted that we don’t even notice that they’re there. It’s the way we think about things, the unconscious way in which we interpret the events of lives, even our expectations of outcomes. In scientific terms, it’s called “the observer effect.” More mundanely, we see what we expect to see.

So how do we come to see things as they are, including ourselves, our exaggerations, our fictions, our opinions, our delusions, our ego protections and preferences, regardless of consequences?

I have no idea. Except to sit. Except to keep on with the hard questions. Except to be willing to have a cherished “truth” exposed as an ordinary opinion. And, to be willing to not speak at all.

That is, frankly, the hardest for me. I’ve got a million ideas, not to mention opinions, thoughts and – above all – feelings about all sorts of people, places and things. A friend once said that if I didn’t feel something — anything — I’d cut off my arm and beat myself with it until I did. I feel too strongly about too many things. And although it may make for interesting conversation, it’s a real burden in the search for truth. And can lead to unintended consequences.

In 1995, I traveled to Tibet. Feeling strongly about the Chinese occupation of that country and having personal connections with both local Tibetan refugees and staff at the International Campaign for Tibet, I brought along a slew of Tibetan language pamphlets, from a “Free Tibet” point-of-view, of course. I was warned not to actively distribute the pamphlets, but to leave them behind in hotel rooms and rest stops where the locals could pick them up. About six weeks after I returned, I read that a couple of French tourists had been arrested for doing exactly the same thing I had done. I realized that I had risked the safety of everyone with whom I was traveling. Plus, I didn’t always follow the advice I was given and had actually visited family members of a Tibetan friend living in Chicago, where I included these pamphlets with the family letters and photos I had been asked to deliver. With the clear resolve “Not to lie but to speak the truth” and with all “good” intentions, I had thoughtlessly jeopardized the lives of many. I still shudder at the possible consequences.

And I still muck around in the muddy ground between truth and propaganda, between facts and my opinions, between my ideas about what’s happening and what is actually happening.

I cannot tell a lie — some days I long for a cherry tree and a little hatchet!

* Cheney: 8/26/2002
** Bush: 5/29/2003