A few weeks ago I was talking with one of the temple residents who has recently moved out. He told me a story about his father that I think is very instructive. Apparently his father had some trouble with anger and resentment, and found himself blaming others thinking that his anger was constantly caused by external events, words, or people. I think we all have experience with this. The kids are too noisy, too whiny, spouse isn't happy enough, other people want too much from us, we have too much to do, we don't have enough money, we don't have enough time, or we can't ever seem to get where we want to go. Such are some of the ways in which we want reality to conform to our wishes. As it goes, his father found himself angry enough to sequester himself in a cabin for 6 months by himself thinking that everything and everyone else were the reason for his suffering. In that six months, he still found himself suffering from anger.  His anger was his own. It turns out that suffering is often the result of mistaken views about events, ourselves, about others, and the false intentions we assume them to have. Suffering is partly a relationship of mind to what is in the mind, and what the mind thinks that it perceives.

This was a timely spontaneous teaching. It came just before a decision to increase my daily meditation sitting practice to 45min to 1hr every morning. I had been up to this point causing a great deal of suffering for myself not in altogether different ways from the man in the above story. I struggled with figuring out where my life was going thinking that it had to go somewhere and be of some importance. I struggled with this because I kept blaming external events or people for the reasons why I had to abandon pursuits like getting a Ph.D. or farming. I thought of myself as constantly being a victim of other people's decisions and life pursuits or simply circumstance. I had evidence for this, of course, because it wasn't this way for me before a certain point in my personal narrative. Therefore, it must be these other things. I hadn't changed. Or, so I thought. I found myself dealing with depression, lacking direction or motivation, sometimes angry or resentful, tired all the time, and generally dragging through the day. It wasn't completely constant, but it was getting worse and worse up until about 3 weeks ago. Everything changed when I started to do longer meditation sittings.

It was an entirely wordless transition, but as a consequence of increased sitting, I stopped chasing after something. I came out of it realizing to what extent my actions and decisions were conditioned by what I perceived others to want from me. This especially came in the form of perceived authority. Naturally, we want to be seen as competent at something and so we can sometimes unwittingly get attached to the idea of pleasing authority figures (or people we respect). Every time we find a new authority, we try to shift to a new identity that we assume would be more pleasing to this person(s). I woke up to how many decisions in my life were based on this paradigm. I was consistently being haunted by the specter of my future self. This future self kept shifting as I found myself in different relationships to perceived authorities. I even started doing this with my Zen teacher. My ordination as a Dharma teacher is impending, and I was scrambling to figure out what this meant. In our organization you can be ordained as a full time priest or as a part-time Dharma teacher. I am being ordained as a Dharma teacher, but I kept thinking that I needed to take it as far as possible because that is what I do with everything it seems. What I really needed to do was be a full-time temple priest to show how committed and how good of student I was. Once again, I couldn't pursue this because my life just wasn't currently set up to handle such a move and so I struggled once again with what I'm supposed to be doing. Up came the habitual pattern of thinking that I was constantly being prevented from achieving what I could clearly see my life was about. The trouble was, it took a long time to see (to really see beyond intellect) that this entire narrative was all right here inside the mind. I kept trying to define myself according to what I thought others wanted and according to a made up image of a future self. It was just me, just mind.

So, without actively changing, this process began to transform and my relationship to the future self simply dissolved. I just stopped. I can't say exactly how. As my teacher often says, "words fall short". The narrative just didn't fit anymore once I could see it more clearly and once I accepted fully ordination as a Dharma teacher. In fact, it started to become clear that I might be more effective as a Dharma teacher. My relationship to my work life, to my family, and to my future has transformed. When we try so hard to make others own our habit patterns, we start to see others as the reason that they exist that they are somehow preventing us from getting somewhere or somehow in the way. I feel like I have been sleeping for several years and have only now woken up with so much energy I have a hard time sleeping some nights.  As I have been investigating patterns over many months, this one must have been sitting at the hub of one of the turning wheels since others have become less operative as this one begins to dissolve. This has led me to contemplating the difference between trying to be in the moment, and simple embodied presence. When more fully present, nothing divides one moment from the next leaving nothing but continuous presence. Ultimately it is pretty ordinary and simple groundedness, but it is, perhaps, profoundly ordinary. Sometimes I think the path to awakening is just really actually growing up.

For me, this has been another lesson in great faith and trusting in the practice. In trying to overcome patterns by investigating them and trying to change behaviors, I found that I was trying to penetrate the knowing mind with the knowing mind. It is like trying to penetrate the narrative with that which makes the narrative. In an important moment of deep frustration with the way things were going, I gave up, in a sense, and just plunged myself into sitting practice. I just kept sitting and concentrating come what may, and just like walking in a misty fog, at some point we find ourselves completely wet. Such is the nature of sitting with unknowing mind. If we return to constant practice on and off the cushion, unknowing mind begins to soak our daily activities. Like grass after a cool rain, it just grows all by itself.

So, after I just posted an article accusing beliefs of being inert propositional furniture of the mind, I thought I would have a look at one of the most frequent questions posed by newcomers to temples or folks off the street, so to speak. What do Buddhists believe? It seems like a sensible question because many people are increasingly defining themselves according to what they believe. I have noticed an increased usage of the phrase "I believe" to cover a variety of subjects down to scientific theories and laws. For instance, I hear "I don't believe in evolution" pretty often, or most recently I overheard a heated discussion about why gravity only affects us because we believe in its presence and limiting force. It is remarkably easy to say "I believe" or "I don't believe" and I can't help but feel like the increased frequency of tossing "I believe" at the beginning of most of our statements somehow indicates that reality is increasingly thought of as optional.

Nonetheless, this article is really about why asking what someone believes is simply a misdirected question. We are used to thinking in this way so it is a natural question to ask, but it isn't the most interesting one. I could tell you that I believe in dependent origination, the 5 skandha's, the four noble truths, etc., but that wouldn't really matter much. However, I think there is a difference between saying I follow a teaching and saying I have a belief. There is a sense in which I sometimes even feel hesitant to say "I am a Buddhist" because it is just another way in which we can go around trying to compartmentalize and categorize everything. "What are your beliefs?", turns into "what neat little box can I fit you into to store on my mental shelf?" This appears to be useful because if we want to argue with someone then we can presuppose what we think is their entire belief system, construct arguments that we already know the conclusion to, feel good, and go on about our merry way confirmed in the veracity of our thinking. If we want to find identity with them, we can presuppose a body of belief, agree with what we already agreed with anyhow, and feel like we have community. The only thing we seemed to have left out in this process is the dynamically conscious human being which we have conveniently represented as a series of propositions stitched together on stone.

For this same reason even the term Buddhism is problematic as it tends to take a series of practices and teachings that attempts to embody a dynamic and fluid reality and place it into a chapter in a book that lies there on the table, or a blog post for that matter. Buddhadharma maintains this fluidity through the practice of skillful means. If we don't understand skillful means, we won't quite understand the context of the teachings. The Buddha's teachings are very contextual. They were often given in response to questions from monks or laypeople, so that the teachings represent answers to questions that were tailored to the capacities of those present, for those present, at a particular time out of compassion to help them see clearly for themselves. For instance, dependent origination teaches us about the relativity and impermanence of existing things, but it would be a mistake to understand dependent origination as a metaphysical claim about the nature of reality as being impermanent and relative. If we treat it this way, we start running into contradictions right away as we see nirvana described as "unconditioned". Buddhadharma is the practice of waking up, as Sunim often says, and all teachings serve this expedient end. It is probably trite to say it at this point, but enlightenment, or awakening, is the practice rather than what practice seeks to accomplish. Maintaining an understanding of skillful means helps keep us from setting up hardened philosophies that carve up reality into what it is and what it isn't arguing endlessly over what we cannot prove. Such a hardening of views creates and sustains contradiction.

I realized at some point that I was boxing myself in with the belief that I had to fit into some kind of mold in order to be "a Buddhist" or even a Buddhist teacher. I realized that this is partly due to what I thought others' expectations were of me as a Buddhist according to what a Buddhist is supposed to be.  The most common questions I would get from others were, "are you a vegetarian?", "are you enlightened?", "do you have psychic powers?", or others starting with "aren't you supposed to .....?". I remember resenting almost all of them. Somewhere in there I may have projected this need to fit onto my teachers thinking that I had to impress them, show them something, or prove something to them. I took my high achieving academic mind, and brought it into the temple waiting for confirmation that I was a "good student" looking for validation and approval. I ultimately ended up doing this with all the people asking me questions.

To illustrate how this worked practically, I was vegetarian for around 7 years and it was completely coincidental that I started eating some meat again when I started practicing at the temple. This change was precipitated partly due to health and partly due to deep involvement with community farmers and learning how to farm myself. It was a result from deep involvement with how food is produced. However, I felt bad about switching back to animal foods. I didn't want to tell anyone. I ate as little as possible so I could still say that I was mostly vegetarian. I eventually understood that I felt badly about it because I was pretty attached to the holiness I felt about my vegetarianism. I didn't even know that I had created this until it was gone. The other reason I struggled with this for a while was more subtly buried in my mind. I believed that a Buddhist was someone who didn't eat meat and that's what others generally expected Buddhists to be as evidenced by the questions I receive. That is, I only felt bad because I thought I was a Buddhist. Otherwise, I really don't have a serious problem with people eating animal foods. I don't really have a problem with vegetarianism either. Vegetarianism can be a wonderful expedient practice for ethical purification, but if we are getting attached and arrogant, as I was, we are losing the practice. Fasting is also a wonderful practice for breaking attachments. Ethical superiority connected to any kind of diet is not a very strong foundation for any practice. Diets are practices suited to people, places, times, needs, and food availability. If we harden diets into philosophies it is just another ideology to argue about between people with grocery stores and a choice. Maybe I'm just using skillful means as a shoddy justification for doing what I want to do. Maybe. Only time will tell.  As of right now, everything seems fine just the way it is.

In the end, I find it more interesting to ask someone what they practice rather than what they believe. It orients us to looking at whether what they are doing is working instead of being overly focused on who is in possession of the truth. I can help or be helped with a set of practices, but the same is not necessarily true when dealing with a mind confirmed in what it thinks is right and true. Looking at skillful means in the way I have treated it thus far doesn't mean we can't gain anything from reading what was eventually the recorded teachings of the Buddha, but it does stress the importance of having teachers who are a living embodiment of the Dharma right now living in this time with us because this is a living practice. The all important question would appear to be, how do I wake up right here, in this culture, in this time, in this body? I'm not going to arrive at the answer by figuring out what to believe unless those beliefs are an expedient way of directing the mind and contextualizing a practice. I have to figure out what to do and how to do it. But, in the meantime, what do I believe? Everyday ordinary life is the way of a Buddha.

Inevitably when facilitating discussions in my philosophy courses, the subject of faith comes up long before we ever reach discussions about the philosophy of religion. It has made some rounds of commentary this last week in discussions pertaining to theories of knowledge and how it is we come to have knowledge or even truth if we are so bold. When we start getting hesitant to apply the word truth to anything, faith usually starts getting tossed around because people get uncomfortable with the idea that they might not know anything for sure. They discover that truth might be another way of saying, "I really value this". So, instead, we make the deceptively small leap from "I believe this", to "I know this to be so" often riding on the wings of faith. When we use the term this way it starts to look rather more like Mark Twain's definition I saw on a bumper sticker once, "Faith is believing what you know ain't so." That's still pretty funny even a century later.

Faith probably deserves to be mocked if this is how we truly understand it. If faith is just a filler for knowledge gaps, then it will remain pretty superficial. Many intellectuals, including myself at one time, simply believe that this is all there is to faith. It was believing either against or in absence of evidence. That would more or less just be the mark of poor reasoning and a potential call for reliance on unquestioned authority. On the contrary, faith should actually be a form of evidence rather than a space filler. As a space filler, it is like filling a lack with a lack. Beliefs can be piled up like mental furniture, but to what end? We can end up acquiring beliefs like we acquire other consumer products, and like most consumer products they are designed for the dump and have limited use. I can say, "I believe in God", or I can say, "I believe Buddhas are reborn from the Tusita heaven", but anyone might rightly answer, "so what"? So what, indeed.

I'm going to confess an assumption, here. Spirituality should be something that is useful. Beliefs can be useful as an expression or explanation if they are resting on something but they are pretty lifeless all by themselves and uninteresting actually. In my current understanding, I would say that beliefs should rest on faith and practice. Spirituality fundamentally works with the human personality in the attempt to understand itself and its relationship to the totality of things. So, we must have a practice that allows us to investigate this. It is difficult to comprehend something so profound and subtle as the mind if it is filled up with other refuse from the consumer landfill. For those following Buddhadharma, meditation is the primary practice by which one begins to see clearly and reduce the amount of refuse, as it were, but there are other practices available as well. Other traditions use body movement, prayer, contemplative prayer, mantras, breathing, singing, ritual, etc. But what about faith?

In Buddhism, the term we translate as faith is sraddha. Since many people are coming to Buddhism because of dissatisfaction with another tradition (Christianity or Judaism in this country usually), everyone is quick to define sraddha as confidence or trust because they don't want it associated with that Twainish kind of faith. Confidence and trust is about as accurate as we can get for that term. Faith isn't such a bad term, but I'm not so sure other groups would really define faith on the superficial understanding above. We likely have more in common than we think. Even the Greek term pi'stis from Christian texts contains some similar resonances to the Sanskrit term even with one possible translation as proof. How can such a thing be proof or evidence? Faith is rooted in direct experience and direct experience is probably the basis on which many of our beliefs rest on. A belief is the mental content used to express or explain that direct experience. The difference between the two is like a fresh loaf and stale bread. You can only have a direct experience if you have a practice of some kind unless some life experience throws you into a spiritual experience accidentally, perhaps. For the rest of us regular people, we need a practice. Usually that means we also need a teacher because it's hard to practice something if you have no idea how to do it.

I have been learning mindfulness. Mindfulness is a primary Buddhist practice which requires the cultivation of deep concentration or attention. We can do things attentively or we can do them inattentively with some degrees in between. Mindfulness is like a sensitivity training to gain ever more subtle awareness of what is arising in consciousness and what is associated with what arises. So, the more deeply one engages a spiritual practice, the more deep the faith will become. Out of this deepening experience, one gains greater confidence that they are following a path that is appropriate for them. For me, faith is confidence that arises right out of mindfulness. The more I practice it, the deeper the experience becomes and the more the depth of that experience is carried through my daily life instead of only being encased within the beginnings and endings of formal morning and evening rituals. Have I found the truth? I'm not so sure that the application of this word matters all that much to me at this point. Ultimately, if your spiritual practice is not providing any tangible results like greater peace of mind, contentment, or whatever it promises, perhaps you don't have a teacher, you have a not-so-good teacher, or the discipline just isn't working for you in which case you should consider other options.

Nonetheless, in the age of the expert, the experiencing subject is in ill repute. We seem to socially distrust direct personal experience because it is not measurable and observable, and is not the informational result of a "study".  While I submit faith as a kind of evidence based on direct experience, it is largely discounted as evidence currently because we seem to be more apt to trust organizations than individuals. We are starting to trust organizations more than we trust ourselves, which is sometimes legitimate, and oftentimes dangerous as a habit. Direct experience is difficult to verify except by the experiencer him/herself, or with a community of other experiencers. We can trust an organization to tell us what we are experiencing or not experiencing, or we can learn to trust ourselves. Over the last several years as organizations have given me more reasons to doubt their legitimacy, I've been learning to be more self-reliant by choice, but mostly by necessity. Self-reliance requires confidence in oneself to carry out the task and to figure out how to do it by any means necessary. Self-reliance requires creativity and adaptation, and playful experimentation. As with any practice, even outside of spiritual disciplines, the more we do it, the more we understand it. The more we understand it, the more creative we can be in order to produce results. When I'm growing plants year after year, I don't just keep doing what my books tell me to do. I use them as a reference, observe what is happening in the field, and innovate according to local circumstances. My ability to grow things efficiently is based on my direct experience with growing rather than an accumulation of ideas. Those ideas inspire, for sure, but if they don't work, there is no reason to keep using them. The tricky part is knowing when something just isn't working and when you just don't quite understand well enough to apply the ideas correctly. That's when we consult teachers, mentors, and others more experienced than us.

I approached Zen practice 5 years ago because what I had been doing up to that point wasn't working. I was reading and thinking, reading and thinking some more, and I was growing unhappier as I began reaching what I saw as some serious limitations with intellectual thought. This is hardly a call for anti-intellectualism, though, since my road has been one that went through intellectual pursuits rather than away in avoidance of them. My approach has been scientific in a loose sense. I read some Buddhist literature, was intrigued by what was expressed and decided that if I wanted to really know what they were saying, I had to take up the practice they were doing. Seems like a pretty natural conclusion. If you want to know something, perform the methods necessary for knowing as prescribed by those who have performed them successfully. It's that simple. If someone says you can gain great peace of mind through meditation and mindfulness, then you practice meditation and mindfulness to see if that is what it produces. If someone says you gain peace through faith in Jesus Christ, practice it to see if it works. We have to give it a fair and sincere chance. At first, there is some superficial faith that what a teacher is telling us will work. The personal example of how that spiritual teacher embodies the teaching is also a place to find faith initially, which in this case manifests as trust. However,  basic teachings of a discipline will often resonate with something in us which keeps our interest long enough to actually experience them.  We would not survive very long on a faith of mental filler for long. As the experience deepens over time, faith expresses itself as devotion and becomes more self-sufficient. I am only just beginning to understand this, but the road ahead is becoming clearer. I have been asked a few times how someone who appears to be a thoughtful intellectual can bother with spiritual disciplines as if they were assumed to be obviously false. I answered once, "I studied philosophy to free myself from the tyranny of the opinions of others, and I practice Zen to free myself from the tyranny of my own." Such is my offering of stale bread for today.

Yesterday, there was a patch of sun that lasted through the early afternoon, the wind was blowing steady, and it was above 30 degrees. So, naturally, it was a good day to do laundry. About 3 years ago, we had a regular washer and dryer. The washing machine broke, and as always, we had very little money so buying a new one was out of the question. At the time, our youngest was still in cloth diapers so having some way of washing was something that needed a quick resolution. We were already making our own washing soap, but we hadn't really considered doing laundry by hand.. Putting our stuff in machines and walking away was just the way it was done.

Probably the most common question in our household over the years has been, "well, what did people do before they had (fill in the blank)". That often came up when we were considering buying something or if something broke because it was often easier to just stop using it instead of replacing it. So, what did people do before they had washing machines in their homes? They did the washing however they could with what was available to them. Off I went to junk shops and happened upon a wash basin for $25. It took a little work to figure out how to use it most efficiently in terms of time spent, water used, and how to get clothes washed, but we have done it long enough now that it is part of the regular routine of life. Washing by hand actually isn't really so much extra work when you get used to it because the clothes are left to soak in soap and water for up to an hour and plunged to release all the dirt which takes maybe 10 minutes. Drain, fill again for rinsing, plunge again briefly to get soap and excess dirt out, and then wring clothes out. We eventually invested in a wringer because hand wringing is not efficient and is pretty physically taxing.

When neighbors come out offering up their washing machines to me, it is hard to explain my refusal of their kind offers and to explain why I just like doing my laundry by hand. I enjoy it because I get to do it outside for most of the year, and I enjoy it because I get to be involved. I have found that it isn't that I need to have as many different experiences in life as possible before I die (which feels rather more like racing toward death like the feeling you have when you're on "vacation"), it's that I need to actually be present for the experiences I have every day. Despite all the ways we try to make life convenient, we end up regarding activities like laundry as inconvenient stops on the way to the important things in life. But, in the attempt to race on to all the important stuff, we have really just been training ourselves how to not pay too close of attention to anything. It is funny that our great quest for convenience has actually made most life events seem more inconvenient. Or, at least, it would be funny if it didn't make life feel somehow unsatisfactory. Really, I guess I just do laundry by hand because I like being involved. I like showing up for it. It's invigorating and enlivening to plunge my hands in cold water even when its 50 degrees outside. Sometimes I believe I feel more alive when I am doing laundry on a mild winter day than if I were to go scaring myself back into inhabiting my body by jumping out of airplanes.

More importantly, all life decisions have consequences that set up conditions. So, what does it mean to commit to doing laundry by hand? It means realizing to what extent the fashion/clothing world is built upon the creation of artificial needs and is supported by our ability to toss things into a machine and forget about it (socio-political matters aside). I learned really fast that having a lot of clothes doesn't go well with this choice because, while I like doing it, I still have other things to get done. I don't want to do nothing but wash clothes all day every day. It's fun, but its not that fun. I also came to accept that it's okay if all my clothes don't look absolutely perfect. Clothes can be worn more than once. Just wait until they are actually dirty before sending them to the wash pile.

We are increasingly living in a sanitized society (in many senses of the word) that has gone overboard. We wear things once and toss them even though all we did was sit around in front of a computer all day. Although, when we're gardening in summer, clothes get washed more often, but if I relegate certain clothes for that I can wear them a few times before it really needs to get done. So, I have pants that are pretty much always used to work on the car or in the garden. I have one nice pair of pants and one or two nice shirts if I absolutely have to go somewhere semi-formal. I have about 4 sweaters to wear in the winter, two pairs of jeans (one with patches), and my meditation robes. The most important items are probably simple t-shirts which I have the most of, though I could probably have a little less. One of my more recent decisions was to wear my meditation robes around 80% of the time or more. As Suseon continues to improve her sewing skills, we would like to increase the percentage of handmade clothes in our closet. This translates to less washing, less decision making about how to look, less closet space, and freedom to think about other things besides my wardrobe. It also means I hardly ever spend money on clothing. Of course, one need not jettison the washing machine, necessarily, in order to decrease the amount of clothing that owns them. But, it helps.

Sometimes
You     are     obscured
    by my own clouds
Sometimes
You     are     obscured
    by your own clouds
Silouhettes
    dancing like skeletons  over  the   mountain
Sometimes
I am so full of
Some   thing 
Somehow
I can't invite you down for tea

Sometimes
If we rub our eyes together
We can see through the     cracked     hard          dust
    like dawn squinting through the shade
Sometimes
Touching shaved smooth skin   
    fingertips make shadows across an ocean of      space
    in     my     mind
Sometimes
I know it's there
    just beneath the thin covering of linen
Sometimes
I lose my thoughts
    when I see the rising sun
    through the stray hairs
    you wish you could smooth down
Sometimes
Even after several years
    I hesitate   draw back    slightly
    out     of     habit
Sometimes
Still    thinking I wish to be reborn
    innumerable times
    so that I could see     you         every              time
    living together so that we may die beautifully    alone
Sometimes
I can't believe how
    I sit here with you with the intimacy of our      breathing
    not thinking about   it

Sometimes
I can see you
Sometimes
I like to hear you
    get undressed
    in the dark     waiting    to see     if
Sometimes
You can see me too
    from behind the   face    of the    moon
Sometimes
I always love you
    because I cannot seem to love me
    the way that you do

Sometimes
    When the mountain dust  fills  all of     space
    our time    alone    just breathing
    feeling like wisps of steam
    curling from a tea cup 
    thoughts intertwining like   waves   of   light
    I wonder    if    we are both
    looking from the moon
    at the same time

    I am with you
    like this
Always
   

My wife and I have been engaged in a process of increasing the depth to which we are examining the nature of our minds, which is a fundamental part of the process of mindfulness and insight. From Samu Sunim's Song of Meditation, "Meditation is knowing yourself/Knowing yourself is setting yourself free from delusions." The word delusion, to simplify, is a way of denoting the ways in which we do not perceive reality clearly. Instead we tend to perceive it through the accumulation of habitual patterns (karma) of thinking, speaking, and acting. It is critical to understand the various ways that we construct our sense of ourselves, or our reality, and how we go about defining, confirming, and defending it. This process is supposed to remain hidden, but the constant practice of meditation reveals it and we come to understand how our own minds work. When we understand how our mind works, we can work with the mind and see our true nature as Bodhidharma is always hammering on about. When we know the mind and we know its nature, we gain greater freedom as we continue to shine the light of awareness on it. But, I think one of the more initially painful realizations that comes after one is practicing meditation for some time (could be years) is that identifying delusions and habits of mind doesn't make them go away. Your personality doesn't disappear with a new shiny "you" coming out on the other side of the spiritual car wash. What we have is what we get, and we learn to work with it skillfully. Working with delusions doesn't mean identifying them so we can avoid them more skillfully, it means we use them. Ultimately this should be good news because we aren't practicing so that we can all be calm, mild mannered, soft speaking robots. This practice requires some energy.

So, while we may hear some about Samsara and the teaching of dependent arising, we don't hear as often that there is something called Transcendental Dependent Arising, which details not the conditions for the construction of delusion, but the conditions for enlightenment. It comes from the Upanisa Sutra in the Samyutta Nikaya. It goes something like this:
1. suffering
2. faith
3. joy
4. rapture
5. tranquility
6. happiness
7. concentration
8. knowledge and vision of things as they are
9. disenchantment with worldly life
10. dispassion
11. freedom, release, emancipation
12. knowledge of destruction of the cankers

These are supposed to be the conditions that need to be present for awakening and they are each conditions of each other. I am interested in the first one. Suffering is listed first as a necessary condition for awakening. Since we suffer on account of our deluded perceptions of reality, delusions are a necessary precondition for awakening. We cannot be free from delusions unless we know what they are, unless we witness them.

Delusions become more apparent as we continue to cultivate bare awareness, or mindfulness. It is paying deep and direct attention without judgement. We have to develop concentration first before we begin to see the mind doing what is in its nature to do - thinking. I am not just a thing that thinks, the mind is a thing that thinks. This means there is no strict identity between what the mind thinks and what I think I am. I am not the sum total of all my thoughts. In fact, part of our trouble is that we think we are our thoughts. Don't be afraid to stop taking it all so seriously.

Once I began to deepen my concentration, I started to see that my mind, under certain kinds of stress would continually go back to certain patterns of thinking. Lately, I identified what seems to be a root issue around which most other delusions turn. They occur in complicated networks of relationships. Simply observe where the mind tries to go back to on a regular basis and what feelings arise with this. For me, I identified this constant feeling of being taken for granted, that I didn't really matter except for the fact that I happened to do all this stuff like cooking, cleaning, changing diapers (no longer applicable), home(un)schooling, childcare, and other general sorts of house husbandry in addition to making a living teaching online. So, there was this root feeling of being unappreciated that I thought I was interpreting out of others' actions and words. I identified this pattern by looking at a lot of other mental actions. I found when these feelings were most intense, my mind wanted to go back to places where it felt appreciated, which was somewhere outside of the home like when I was in school ("oh, why didn't I continue on with that Ph.D.?"), at the temple, or back in our old urban farm garden. These were things I did that were appreciated and that mattered, or so I thought.

All of a sudden, a floodgate opened and I realized how many other personality patterns were in place to actually perpetuate these feelings that had unwittingly become my identity. I have this what I call "nice guy routine" where most people generally think I'm just a "nice guy" and I manifest this outwardly. This is code language for letting people walk all over me and having no boundaries. My teacher, Haju Sunim, called me a "one trick pony" when she noticed this in how I was running a meditation course once where I was letting people just leave mats in a disheveled mess. One trick pony indeed. In the end, what I realized just this morning as we were discussing how our patterns were related and feed into each other (don't forget, everything and everyone is related) is that at the base of this is the fact that I fail to appreciate my own actions. I haven't been valuing the importance of my home and child care duties as if there needed to be more outside of this to stroke my constructed sense of importance. Part of this is cultural. This led to a pattern of self-doubt where I was devaluing my own contributions, abilities, and talents and then seeing it reflected back to me in my interpretations of others actions and words.

Realizing and witnessing all this fuels the continuation of this practice. This practice is the practice of nirvana, not the practice that leads to nirvana. The practice of nirvana is the constant practice of not continuing to feed the fire letting it extinguish of its own accord going beyond distinctions of being appreciated and not being appreciated. If we set out with the intention to actively change or to just get everyone to appreciate us more, it is because we believe there is something wrong to begin with. Lack of appreciation cannot be a precondition for acceptance and gratitude, but directing the mind toward acceptance and gratitude can lead to transformation. Nature doesn't change, it transforms. So it is with our own nature.

During the break between semesters in December, I usually do some kind of building project. This year I decided that I wanted to build something called a sutra desk. I made it out of some 2 x 2's from an old garden trellis system and some old pressboard I picked off a junk pile in the back of a Habitat for Humanity Restore a while ago. A sutra desk is what it sounds like, a little desk for reading sutras and doing recitation practice.  In our seminary guidelines there was a reference to one for this purpose, but I didn't know what it was and I had never seen one. I still haven't found that many examples so I made up my own. The desk is meant to sit in front of the altar according to the guidelines, but my current altar table is small so the desk overwhelms it and makes it difficult to get to.

I had nearly forgotten about the sutra desk reference until this last semester when I started reading the Avatamsaka Sutra. My academic training has led me to read in critical and evaluative ways, which has been invaluable. But, when reading this scripture, I really had to put this way of reading aside if I expected to be able to read it all the way through. It just didn't want to be read that way. When I started reading the first two chapters, which are eulogies to different aspects of awakened nature, it was very tedious and difficult to try to pick it apart and try to get at it.

I let go of this reading methodology in the following way. First I sat somewhat formally in a chair and just relaxed my body so that I could feel my whole body at once. I put both my hands on the book so that I could feel it. I decided I wasn't going to look ahead to see when the chapter was over and I would just read until my concentration seemed to be unable to sustain itself. That means bringing a kind of meditative concentration to reading and catching the mind when it does gently bringing it back to the words on the page. The object, so to speak, was to simply read the words without trying to do something to or with them. The idea was to just receive the words and experience them. I took some inspiration from numerous other old masters like Hui Neng who awakened upon hearing a line of the Diamond Sutra recited aloud. He didn't awaken because he sat and pondered it for 3 days afterward. It was immediate, spontaneous, and direct.

I tried to keep this up everyday if possible. However, living with two children makes life quite spontaneous so my attempts to ritualize my reading habit was thwarted and then was completely lost for at least a month when my philosophy students needed papers graded. The remedy, I decided, was to bring some greater formality to my new reading process. That's where the sutra desk came back to me. We also created a more firm eating schedule for the kids who would otherwise keep me in the kitchen perpetually preparing something all morning into the early afternoon. Do not underestimate the importance of this change. If the kids eat at a certain time and they know it is all they are going to have until lunch, then they don't approach me every 20 minutes for more food. This is working very well for them as well. Scheduled eating means that when they are eating or just after, I go into the "buddha room", as they call it, and I sit down formally with a bow and begin reading at the sutra desk located across the room from the altar. Being in the Buddha room means that they know I am doing some form of practice which they can participate in, but not interrupt. The formality creates a kind of household understanding. Ultimately, further ritualizing the reading process helped to reinforce what I had already been exploring with reading as a form of practice. Ritual is an important way in which we summon the attention and create a space around it to nurture it. Reading sutras provides a further frame and direction for the content of that attention that extends also beyond the ritual space.

As part of my seminary training, I am required to study various aspects of Buddhadharma. Currently I am reading the Avatamsaka Sutra (Flower Ornament Scipture). It is grandiose in scope and language, beautiful, and poetic, but quite practical. It is one of the most unique scriptures in the tradition that I am aware of at this stage. I am not finished yet, but an important theme that constantly emerges is that everything we do matters. Everything we think, say, and do with our physical body matters. We erect mansions of thoughts and conceptions which we call our lives, our world, our selves. However, when we create these thoughts, patterns of judgement, conceptions, we create worlds that others also live in. We can adorn the world with expansive compassionate action and thought, or we can adorn it with self-centered desires which are endlessly unfulfilled and, by nature, cannot be fulfilled.

There is a famous image used to explain the outlook of the Flower Ornament tradition: Indra's Net. Indra's net is an image of the cosmos as a vast net where we find a brightly shining jewel at each place where we would find a knot holding the entire net together. When light is shone, each jewel reflects light back to each jewel and back again infinitely into, what my mind sees, as a single light. We can either reflect light or we can take it for our own. When we create karma, we create it for all, always together.

This reading has more than likely been influencing my reflections over the last few months. These reflections have become a more intensified look at my own habitual tendencies and patterns of behavior and thought. I am facing this most deeply in my parenting style. Somehow I really neglected this area of my practice and my life up until a few months ago when I started reading articles about peaceful parenting and positive parenting. The reflections on patterned behavior have become so intensified that, in conjunction with reading the above sutra, all of my experience of life seemed to be nothing more than a series of my own habitual patterns interlocking with that of others in a continual process of production and reproduction. The production of this became inescapably apparent in my parenting. I started analyzing my children's language, and heard the oldest (6) saying, "I'm not good enough, she's better than me, etc.", the outward expression of low self-esteem. The youngest (3) started saying, "I can't do anything, no one lets me do anything, I'm going away" usually accompanied by angry frustrated screaming. These are the beginnings of self-doubt.

I woke up in the middle of the night last night suddenly realizing how these patterns were simply reproduced unwittingly from the dominant patterns in both myself (self-doubt) and my wife (low self-esteem) and I could trace back many, if not all, of my life choices as a kind of response to my own inherited patterns in some way. These are transferred through the way we are parenting without realizing it and we continually enact them through language, thought, and action until we cut them off, that is, until we see them. We just bear witness to them with bare attention. There is no need to heap more unproductive judgements and conceptions. That just feeds them more energy. We just stop feeding them, and eventually they lose power over us and the fire just goes out of its own accord. One by one. We can't actively change the mind, but we can train it. Once we see the patterns, they lose some strength, and in the beginning we can simply apply energy in a different direction toward openness, toward relationship, toward understanding. Children's unpleasant and what may often seem like inconvenient emotions expressed at inconvenient times open an opportunity to repair a creaky bridge instead of stomping on it harder with sarcasm, disinterest, judgement, moralizing, or desires to appear a certain way. A hug works nicely as a good start, and sometimes just sitting with it is all we can do. I remember half-listening to a radio interview some years ago when a woman responded, "life is so difficult, how could you be anything but kind". Being kind isn't a wishy-washy permissiveness. It takes courage and energy to be kind. It takes little energy to give in. We are all the world's children, and the earth makes dreams of us all. So, everyday we just start again, moment to moment. It's incredible to think now that up until 4 months ago being a parent was simply something that naturally happened to me until I realized that I failed to ever set an intention to be a good father instead of just a father. My Dharma life now depends on it. There comes a time when we arrive in a place when turning away isn't an option. Paying attention and seeing clearly is hard work, but it is good work.