Look for the Buddhas

When bad things happen -- as they do with blinding regularity these days -- along with the  news of the latest atrocity, a quote from Fred Rogers comes up often on social media: "When I was a boy and I would see scary things in the news, my mother would say to me, 'Look for the helpers. You will always find people who are helping.'"

It's good advice. It takes our focus off the pain and suffering, the blame and sadness. It reminds us that while bad things happen, good things also happen. As the Zen saying goes, life contains 10,000 joys and 10,000 sorrows. Maybe, these days, the number of sorrows seems larger, seems infinite. But that also raises the number of joys. They may be small joys -- wildflowers growing in a random spot, a sunset that stops you in your tracks, rocks on a beach, a kiss from a child, a smile from a stranger, strong coffee -- but they are there. Make your own list of what brings you joy. Please do. It's important to remember that those things, those people exist.

To put it in Buddhist terms, look for the bodhisattvas, the helpers, the ones who've vowed not to attain enlightenment until everyone can come with them. Look for Buddhas, the awakened beings.

You never know where there might  be a bodhisattva ... so just consider anyone who arouses bodhicitta in you as being a real Buddha, whether a deity, teacher, spiritual companion, or any else. -- Patrul Rinpoche

 Examples of bodhisattvas -- helpers -- and Buddhas, or awakened beings, don't exist only in texts and stories. They are all around. Do you know Naomi Shabib Nye's poem "Gate A-4"? It is a lovely story of how a tense, miserable four-hour flight delay became a veritable party, a event celebrating our shared condition.

Maybe that story resonates with me because I had my own experience of finding an unlikely bodhisattva during what turned out to be an overnight flight delay. There was one woman -- who I'd dismissed early on as an aging sweetheart of Sigma Chi due to her impeccable hair, matching outfit, and sorority luggage tag -- who kept the crowd from turning surly, who turned the energy in a positive direction. After the first announced delay, she learned the gate agents' names, and with each subsequent announcement, as people started to groan, she would loudly thank them, by name, for sharing the information they had. When the delay dragged on and the airline bought pizza for the passengers to share in the gate area, she pronounced it lovely. And when we were told we were being bused to a hotel an hour away and would fly out the next day, she made it seem like an adventure. Yes, it was frustrating and inconvenient. But her attitude kept the crowd from falling into the pit of despair, kept reminding us of our resiliency, our own choice to be miserable or cheerful. Sometimes that's what a situation needs -- an outlier to remind us there's another way to see things.

That's what the Buddhas do -- they help us to see our own enlightened nature, the joy of our interdependence. They remind us that everyone loves something, even if it's cookies (or tortillas). And we can build on that.

As Shahib Nye writes:

And I looked around that gate of late and weary ones and I thought, Thisis the world I want to live in. The shared world. Not a single person in thatgate—once the crying of confusion stopped—seemed apprehensive aboutany other person. They took the cookies. I wanted to hug all those other women, too.
This can still happen anywhere. Not everything is lost.

While the world seems dire, look around. Look for the buddhas. Be a buddha. Do what you can to help others see their true compassionate nature instead of condemning them and shutting them out.

That is for you

One of my first encounters with Tibetan Buddhism was a weekend program with a lovely lama from Ohio. She was wise and funny and relatable. It was spring, and she brought in a chocolate Easter bunny to put on the shrine. I liked the idea of the chocolate bunny up there -- the gold foil made it fit in -- but I wasn't so sure about some of the other items. Relics? Really? The Buddha's fingernails or some such thing? C'mon.

I left the dharma center with a 10-page handout on how to set up an altar, what to put on each of the many levels and so on. It seemed overwhelming and suspiciously similar to Roman Catholicism, the altar and the gold and the relics and all that. As a former Catholic, I preferred the simplicity of Japanese Zen settings.

In another moment that tickled the dusty back realms of my brain, she recommended a practice of offering everything to the buddhas and bodhisattvas -- the beautiful day, the new grass, the chocolate bunny.

It was an interesting practice of noticing things to offer up, finding beauty in the world, but who was offering and what was the offered and who was it being offered to? How was this different from giving all glory to God because I was unworthy of it?

On the surface, not much. But, oh, there is so much below the surface. There is no offerer or offering or offered to. Nothing is permanent, you can't hold onto it, and you can't really give it away.

But you can let it go.

This probably was explained to me by the lama from Ohio, but I couldn't comprehend it at the time. When you give away the day, the light, the fluorescent orange maple leaves to the buddhas and bodhisattvas, you're relaxing your grasping mind, the one that wants to preserve the leaves, hang onto the day, save time in a bottle. You're seeing the impermanent, transitory nature of things, accepting that the satisfaction things bring is fleeting. And that you don't exist just as the buddhas and bodhisattvas don't exist -- but you do exist just as they do.

The deities in Buddhism are not separate from you; they are you. All beings have the same inherent, clear, compassionate nature -- buddhanature. In our human form, though, that's covered up by our humanity: Our fears, foibles, and judgments.

When you offer something to the buddhas, you're offering to your self and all beings rather than holding it in your grasp. 

“Look at the sky: that is for you. Look at each person’s face as you pass on the street: those faces are for you. And the street itself, and the ground under the street and the ball of fire underneath the ground: all these things are for you. They are as much for you as they are for other people. Remember this when you wake up in the morning and think you have nothing. Stand up and face the east. Now praise the sky and praise the light within each person under the sky. It’s okay to be unsure. But praise, praise, praise.”
-- Miranda July, No One Belongs Here More than You

Everything is dharma: Irish edition

Once Buddhist philosophy starts to get under your skin, everything becomes dharma -- books, movies, plays, news. I saw Chris Rock in "The Motherfucker with the Hat" on the Saturday night of an urban weekend retreat, and all I could think was, boy, these people are suffering; if only they meditated, there'd be a lot less drama.

That's not bad, necessarily. Open hearts are more easily touched.

I bring this up because today is St. Patrick's Day(Lá Fhéile Pádraig), a day of debauchery in the U.S., descended from a solemn religious holiday on the old sod.

While the Irish, with their strong religious heritage, aren't the most likely candidates to be explicitly Buddhist, they are so very good at being human.

In Buddhism, we practice sitting with our emotions, staying with painful feelings, and being present with whatever comes up. Well, who does that better than the Irish? They sit -- through books, memoirs, poetry, and song -- with intense emotions (even if they're sitting in a pub with a pint in front of them, to throw in a potentially offensive but not groundless stereotype). And they share. And they offer support. And do it in powerful, poetic language.

So today I bring you two bodhisattavas, courtesy of Sebastian Barry:

In "The Pride of Parnell Street," a play, Janet is describing the aftermath of a bombing on a Dublin street:

And Patty Duffy, the greatest woman that ever kept a shop, I tell you, the pride a' Parnell Street herself, a lovely big comfortable round woman, kneeling beside this poor man, like a fella in a war film, his legs blown completely off oh yeh he was, and Patty kneeling beside him, and whispering, yeh, yeh, and stroking his hand, like a mother. Oh Patty Duffy, you were a saint that day ...

I call Patty Duffy the pride of Parnell Street because it was people like her put the pride back into the place after the desolation. In the months after, people could look back and remember how all the human feeling rose up in Patty and in themselves, and that they looked after the wounded and the dying and the dead, and cried for them and stroked their suffering hands.

In "On Canaan's Side," Lily Bere, the daughter of a Dublin police officer after the first World War, moves to the United States because Republican politics create problems for her. She gets a job in the house of a wealthy Irish-American woman:

How I feared when I first worked for Mrs. Wolohan's mother that she would cast me out if she discovered who I came from. Of course like her daughter she was an Irish-American, who loved Ireland, and the idea of Irish freedom, which for her was heroic and inspiring. As it was indeed, I am sure, unless you are on the wrong side of it. And I did feel obliged to touch on that a little, because I did not want her to think me something other than I was. ...

But she showed no great surprise, no disapproval. She was interested in it. ... Her whole being lit up with interest, the hallmark of her personality. This is a person truly democratic in her thoughts. That is a merciful person. Because she knew who I was, I gradually came to see myself better. When a criminal gets out of prison, he looks for work, but must be upfront about his prison term. Whoever takes that man knows all about him, and if he is lucky enough to find such a person, he might well find a strange and unexpected happiness working for them. ... Not so much on probation as given a new lease, a new term among the living and the just. And she did that it seemed to me with her whole heart.

May all beings be happy
May all beings be healthy
May all beings be safe
May all beings know peace