Mary Rose Meets Thay
Continuing my reading of Mary Rose O’Reilley’s The Barn at the End of the World, it seems to me that the radiant core of the book is this meeting she had with “Thay,” Thich Nhat Hanh, the head teacher at Plum Village, and the author of several books that have shaped me, including Being Peace .
O’Reilley writes, “I went to dinner and sat with a woman I like a lot, a tiny Vietnamese-German nurse named Chee….Thich Nhat Hanh came through the kitchen. I was aware of him, though not especially interested. In fact, I had kept my back to him. He stopped to greet Chee, who was leaving the next day. They bowed to each other and then Thay put his arms around her and embraced her long and gently.
“The wave of love hit me like a percussive force, as though the gas stove had quietly exploded. I burst into tears. Love itself entered my cramped and constricted being, with something, I guess, of the voltage Christian mystics in ecstasy record. My bones seemed to melt, jell, and finally harden again. If I had felt sick, I would have said I was healed of what I didn’t know I was sick of” (135-6).
She continues in the next chapter, “The encounter I had with Thay has changed my inner weather, maybe my DNA. I feel less guarded and more accepting of life here. Still, I do not apologize for my armor, which keeps me from entering into the more cultic aspects of life at Plum Village. When Thay asks us to have unquestioning confidence in the teacher, for example, I consider the prospect with horror. But I want to take in what is useful, leave aside what is not, and respect practices that I have no intention of bringing home” (139).
I think one of the difficulties, for westerners, of Vietnamese Zen practice, or perhaps any Zen practice taken from Asian sources, is language. Thay Nhat Hanh’s English comes off as sickeningly sweet sometimes; in fact the philosophy is bare, spare, and profoundly un-sentimental. The important thing in the passages I just quoted is that there is something that transcends language–a force field, call it. A quality of presence. I have experienced that force field in other people, and sometimes I experience it in myself, in meditation. Something happens, like a downward shifting of my molecules. I really do come home to my body, my breath, my bones, in this moment. Stillness settles in, and even though thoughts skitter over the surface of the stillness, I can see that they don’t much matter. They arise and fall away, like the breath, like everything.
Or as Shakespeare put it,
“In me thou seest the glowing of such fire
That on the ashes of his youth doth lie,
As the death bed whereon it must expire,
Consumed with that which it was nourished by.”
Sometimes I shift into yet another gear, a field of being that is without boundaries; and other times I just observe myself, the feelings and thoughts that arise and fall away, the kneejerk reactions that kick in. Habits. Blaming, self-blaming, judgment, self-judgment, desiring, striving, doubt: all those old hoary friends.
A story I once heard Jack Kornfield tell stays with me: a woman was on a foggy lake in a canoe, alone. She saw, dimly, another canoe approaching her, recklessly careening straight toward her. She shouted at the other canoer, “Hey! Stop!” He kept on coming. She felt herself become infuriated, she turned red, she trembled with rage. What kind of idiot was this, and why was he so careless? In seconds she imagined taking him to court, suing him for all he was worth. He was putting her life at risk! Then the other canoe collided with hers. She struggled to right herself, nearly apoplectic with rage. And then she saw that there was no one in the other canoe. It had somehow broken loose from its mooring and was just floating aimlessly in the lake. No one to blame. Suddenly her anger just vanished. She laughed. Where did her anger go?
Zen stories often leave me in awe.
Got this, in an email from Tai: “A sense of awe. I discovered that the word awe is related to the Greek word ochos that means pain; and experiencing awe can be painful. I think we need to be open to experiencing all the aspects of awe…awesome, aweful, awe-inspiring. It means opening the heart to take it all in. The awe-full brings about compassion, and the awesome brings gratitude. Zen is good at this.” I am grateful for those words.
My quest for a new way of life is not about finding the most aesthetically pleasing place, nor the best weather, nor the most agreeable community with, as Jane Ellen Harrison once wrote, “the most beautiful rule and order”. Nor is the most important thing finding the perfect teacher, or the most effective English translation of whatever the founder of the lineage once said, or the best macrobiotic menu. I admit I’m not immune to those considerations, but what I’m looking for is a home for these bones, a place to slow down, stay awake, and pay attention; a place to live with the awe I was born with, to polish the stone I am, to look squarely and honestly at myself; to hold whatever others bring to me; to pay complete attention to whoever or whatever appears in this moment. And then, if possible, I’d like to be of use and to do no harm. In community. Like a tree.
Stephen says his only aim in life is to live as pleasurably as possible, and I think yes, sure. But what is pleasure? For me, pleasure is living in awe, as Tai says. Awe–compassion–gratitude. I could do that right here, right now, without traveling another step or quitting my job. And yet…that “shimmering attraction” calls to me. The sirens sing, “Quit grading papers. Strip down to the essentials. Go somewhere new. Start over. Chop carrots, polish floors. Look out to the mountains or the sea. Among people who also want to change the weather in themselves.” Will it come to be? Don’t know.
Tags: Books and Movies, Buddhism, Mary Rose O'Reilley, What does it mean?, Where to plant myself
Kendall
As far as I’m concerned, ‘pleasure’ is having entirely one’s own way as far as possible without too much trampling on anyone else’s, which of course takes some fairly fancy footwork; to avoid monstrousness it also takes some careful consideration of what one really wants and cutting away too many motives of sheer vanity or greed. Our little difference here is perhaps only that you’ve been obliged by circumstances to endure more superfluous compromises, like working at a distasteful job, and to get away from that a greater urgency is evidently necessary…nrnrI’m a shade lost with ‘awe’ (which owes more to Burke, doesn’t it, than to anything else?), but gratitude and compassion are the only two human emotions I value, because they’re not ‘natural’, they have to be learned. And getting back to the first point above, language is indeed a serious trap in communication, even when languages are similar. If compassion and gratitude sound noble and cultivated, that’s true only in English and German (I think) and to some extent in French; in Portuguese for example, they’re not at all, and it would be slightly insulting to use such words to anyone whose good opinion one wished to have. A faint knowledge of Arabic is more than enough to inhibit venturing any further East, and that’s partly why I’m very wary of glib interpretations of Oriental ‘philosophies’, especially when attempted by persons whose grasp of their own language leaves something to be desired. It’s true also that I’m too simple-minded or ignorant ever to have had any ‘mystical’ leanings or revelations, the hard ‘facts’ of material existence and commonplace human nature have always had to suffice ….nrnrBasta, as you would say…