For the last few weeks, I’ve hunkered down trying to stay out of the snow as much as possible. In Albany, over 300 cars were towed during the first snow emergency this winter. Longtime residents weren’t surprised, but Albany tends to be a city full of visitors, people who spend a few years here and move on.
Constant migration is a blessing for the city, ushering in fresh perspectives, mingling cultures, and keeping the locals from becoming insular. But this also leads to transplants being seen as outsiders, not part of the city but merely passing through, strangers who don’t remember how things have “always” been.
From a Buddhist perspective, all human beings toe the line of passing through the world yet constantly abiding within it. This may sound paradoxical, but if we reflect on our experience, we live life both ways.
The historical buddha, Shakyamuni, taught that human life is brief, like bubbles bursting on the surface of a pond or a flash of lightning in the night sky, and yet, from our subjective experience, the present stretches from the remote past to the distant future simultaneously. We move freely through past, present, and future, but we name and explain away this paradox as memories, plans, wishes, or dreams.
For example, a sense of disappointment might come from hearing Punxsutawney Phil’s prediction of a long winter. In that moment, we wish for things to be different, visiting an alternate present. Just as easily, we could say these extra weeks of winter offer an opportunity to spend more time with the snow and the cold, to get to know them and appreciate the beauty of winter’s harshness.
I’m taking the opportunity to return to the Great Perfection of Wisdom Treatise, a seminal text in Tendai Buddhism written by the 2nd-century Indian exegete Nagarjuna. Last year, I worked through the first 10 fascicles out of 100. At that rate, it should only take a decade.
The Treatise is a fascinating work that goes line by line through the Great Perfection of Wisdom Sutra, commenting on both major ideas and minutiae. The sutra itself is the source of the Heart Sutra (or Great Perfection of Wisdom Heart Sutra, if we’re being formal), which distills its essence to a short, profound prayer we can recite in a few minutes.
Fascicle 11 begins with commentary on the line, “The Buddha told Shariputra.” What follows are 18 pages of commentary discussing Shariputra’s life, his friendship with Maudgalyayana, the circumstances of his birth, the meaning of his name, why he chose to use his mother’s name instead of his given name, and why he, instead of other disciples more versed in Mahayana doctrine, was taught the Great Perfection of Wisdom Sutra.
Regular Shingi readers might remember I gave a presentation on Shariputra’s life in January, but just a month later, I found myself pulled into the story again, revisiting the details with fresh eyes. To me, repetition, returning to what we think we know with an open heart, is the essence of practice.
There’s a great temptation to skip repetition. If you were reading a textbook, listening to a podcast, or scrolling social media, I can almost guarantee you would, but there is something mysterious revealed in reading and re-reading, much like the cycles of our long winter: cold, snow, warmth, more cold, more snow!
Many elements of Shariputra’s life sound fantastic to a modern reader. Do you really believe he made vows in lifetime after lifetime to be born at the same time as Shakyamuni Buddha? Do you really believe he was an erudite philosopher by the age of eight? Or that heavenly beings visited him on his death bed in front of countless witnesses?
I do. In the same way, I listen to Thelonious Monk without feeling compelled to pause the music and explain that, though his melodies aren’t conventional, music theory can explain why they are permissible.
Our desire to explain, understand, categorize, and editorialize are often manifestations of aversion. To preserve comfort, we push away uncertainty, cocoon ourselves in rationalizing, and jettison what confuses or challenges us. This is still repetition, but without practice.
Aversion is at the root of dehumanization in American society. We hear verbal and legal designations of entire groups of people into categories. We see attempts to remove Black people from American history or to declare anyone who doesn’t conform to certain sexual or gender categories as mentally ill. We see it in the preemptive classification of migrants as criminals so they can be unjustly imprisoned. Aversion becomes generalization becomes abstraction used to veil the sacredness of human beings.
Thousands of years of Buddhist wisdom teach us that all abstractions are relative. The ways we name and think about the world are fabrications, some useful, others not. It is our duty to listen to our hearts and choose. We create opposites where there are none and place them in juxtaposition like children with toys, but by erasing the mysteries of life, we paradoxically erase our true nature.
Aversion is human, but it moves us farther away from the bodhisattva practice of Great Compassion. To truly know others, whether they are seasons, ideas, or people, we must encounter them as they are. The only way to do this is to practice seeing each other with fresh eyes.
The first step is learning to greet winter again with an open heart.
Gassho. . . Kaishin