Who Keeps Feeding These Fish?

 

 

We often hear our teachers tell us to "cut off all thinking." This does not mean to suppress thinking or strive for a quiet mind. Rather, it means to stop paying attention to your thoughts.

Recently on a canal tour in Bangkok, I saw, from a distance, some tourists on a dock throwing food to the fish that live in the canal. The water around the dock was alive with the thrashing, hungry fish. I thought, " That is exactly how my mind looks sometimes No wonder it is so hard to meditate."

A bit later that day, walking along another canal, I took some pictures of the fish to share with you. You can see so clearly what happens when the children offer food and what happens when there is no more food.

So the next time you think, “my mind is too busy to meditate today” ask yourself, “who keeps feeding these fish”?  

 

The Three Marks of Existence—or is it four?

According to the Buddha, there are three marks of existence: suffering, impermanence and anatman (no self).

Suffering (dukkha)

When most of us think about suffering we think about great trauma and affliction: people starving to death in Darfur, the victims of suicide bombers, suspected terrorists under torture, battered women. But suffering (dukka) is a lot more subtle and pervasive that that. It’s more like “dissatisfaction.” Life is not inherently satisfying. We eat—and then a few hours later we become hungry again. The best food in the world cannot give us lasting satisfaction. The same is true for all aspects of our lives. We lose what we have and that grieves us. We reach for something better and when we get it, we worry that we’ll lose it. We grow dissatisfied with our life—our job, our car, our spouse. We reach for something better.

Impermanence (annica)

It’s a very interesting fact that food ultimately turns into shit.

Properly applied, shit turns into fertilizer and that way becomes food.

The whole entire universe is exactly like this. Nothing lasts forever.

Some things have a longer life span. Some insects live for a day. Human beings live up to about one hundred and twenty years. Civilizations last a few thousand years. Our sun is has a predicted life span of about 9.5 billion years.

So food turns into shit turns into food.

So joy turns into grief turns into joy.

No self (annata)

If everything under the sun must die, so must the self. And not only the body, but the psyche, the ego, the “I.”

Actually, the self was never born so the self can never die.

The greatest cause of human suffering lies in our refusal to see that the self is nothing more than a collection of feelings and perceptions and memories and opinions with no more substance than a spider web. We cling so desperately to something that we know we cannot keep, something that is already a ghost.

Enlightenment

Some later commentators view enlightenment as the fourth mark of existence. For a long time this puzzled me. Wasn’t the Buddha’s teaching already complete?

Now I think, why not? Enlightenment is our natural state. It is who and what we are even when we refuse to see it. But when we relax, even a little, we see that it’s always appearing disappearing appearing.

It’s the the spider and the web

the living fly and the corpse of the fly

the anchoring tree and the pull of the wind

the wind and all the time and all the space within which

a child watches a spider spin a web and turns around and dies

and the light that follows

Paying Attention

Yesterday and today were easy work days in the garden, watering, weeding, tying up and pinching. And this forms my first commentary on the post of a couple of days ago: while it's true that if you want to harvest, say, carrots, you must plant carrots and not lettuce. But if you want to harvest carrots it's not enough simply to plant them: you must also attend to their needs on a daily basis. This means keeping the little seeds moist enough for them to germinate (and carrots can take a long time to germinate), keeping the seedlings with their shallow little roots moist, weeding around the carrots so they have room to grow, thinning the carrots so they don't crowd each other out. So it is with our minds. It's not enough to plant a seed -- think a kind thought or perform a compassionate deed. We must pay attention to our minds, moment by moment, cultivating awareness of the living complex of thoughts and feelings that comprise our karma, learning when to keep it all to ourselves and when to share.

Planting Seeds

I don’t remember the context for this story but it’s one of my favorites:

A man approached the Buddha and asked him for help resolving some difficulty. The Buddha asked, “You are a farmer, aren’t you?” The man said, yes. The Buddha then asked, “Tell me something. If I plant pomegranate seeds can I harvest coriander?” The man smiled. “Oh, no, Buddha, if you plant pomegranate seeds you can only harvest pomegranate.” “Oh,” the Buddha replied. “Well, then, if I plant pepper seeds, can I harvest spinach?” Again the man smiled. “Oh, no. The same principle applies. If you plant pepper seeds you can only harvest pepper. If you want to harvest spinach you must plant spinach seed.” The Buddha became a little stern. “This is what I have told you and told you and yet you do not heed my words. If you plant the seeds of anger and greed you will harvest anger and greed. If you plant the seeds of wisdom and compassion, you will harvest wisdom and compassion. Whatever difficulties you are now experiencing are the fruit of the seed you planted in the past. If you want to avoid these difficulties in the future you must now plant a different seed.”

I would add a little to this teaching and say that anger and greed are like weeds. They grow willy-nilly (like dandelions or bindweed) and can be very hard to eradicate. But wisdom and compassion need to be nurtured more carefully. In my experience, one word of anger can destroy an acre of love. Over time, wisdom and compassion can grow to towering heights, like the cottonwood tree, casting such a long and deep shadow that anger and greed whither and die from a lack of sun and water. But all those qualities--anger, greed, wisdom, compassion-- are part of our human karma and can never be fully eradicated. Even the most bitter and hardened person is capable of love. And the most loving person can burn with anger. 

What seed are you planting right now?

It's Alive!

I've been gardening a lot this year and thinking that I should blog about it, if only to have a record of the slow transformation of our backyard. I decided to resurrect this blog rather than start a new one. So here goes:

My Zen teacher, Linc Rhodes, was here last weekend to lead a retreat. We had some free time and spent part of it in the garden. Linc staked up my two healthy tomato heirloom tomato plants ( a Lemon Drop & a Speckled Roman, both from Seed Savers Exchange) and reminded me to pinch the new growth that appears exactly in the joint between two stems. This is to encourage the plants to produce fruit rather than leaves. He also reminded me to give the peppers some sulfur by burying match sticks upside down in the ground near them. Yesterday morning, I gave him the first of the tomato harvest, a single hybrid cherry tomato. This is the smallest possible token of my gratitude to him for all his teaching and help.

This morning I watered everything except the tomatoes, which had two good soaks over the weekend, one due to a storm, the other due to my efforts. I also gave two of the tomato plants a little extra support (the Lemon Drop & one of the hybrids), pinched some unwelcome growth, pulled grasses out of the summer squash / cucumber / winter squash bed, and planted a little 1' x 2' patch of Miner's Lettuce (Bountiful Gardens) and a nearly four foot row of Painted Pony Beans (Seedsavers) along side the most pathetic tomato plant in my garden, a hybrid Margaret picked up at the TCF's spring plant sale. I plan to put in two more rows over the next few weeks. These beans can be eaten green; left on the plant they'll dry into cooking beans. Sixty and eighty days to harvest, respectively.

I did a bit more rigorous work, moving a barrowful of compost into the tomato / bean bed and weeding out some tall grasses that were a) encroaching on a path and b) harboring chiggers. It is hard for me to want to save those sentient beings. Perhaps they too are my great teachers? If so, I must admit that I am a reluctant, even hostile student!

What's Real?

I've been sick for a few days now. At first I thought it was a bad cold, but now I think it's the flu, maybe even the dreaded H1N1, aka "swine flu."

I had a hard time falling asleep last night because I felt so hot and feverish. I kept running a damp wash cloth over my forehead and cheeks--ahhh, cool. But the intense heat soon returned.

I don't remember falling asleep. But I do remember waking up with a very small, very intense pain in my gut. Uh oh, I thought, diarrhea. So I got out of bed and sat on the toilet in the dark and tried to relax while the pain twisted its way through my bowels. But nothing came out, not even a fart. I went back to bed. When the next cramp came, I got up again and sat on the toilet in the dark. I did this several times because I really did not want to release a pint or more of liquid shit onto our bed or the hardwood floors. Finally, sitting on the toilet, with my head between my knees, half-asleep, I felt my bowels began to release. Ahh.

It wasn't what I'd call diarrhea though it was nasty enough in its own way and took its own sweet time easing out of my feverish body. I remembered reading about a woman, my age, in good health, who died of swine flu. I thought, I don't care, let me die now. Then I looked out the window and saw by the light of the just waning moon, the maple tree in our back yard. Ah, that's real, I thought. And went back to bed.

ALL Beings?

The other night, as I was brushing my teeth, I leaned over the basin and let a dollop of toothpaste infused saliva fall from my mouth. Too late I saw the tiny green bug upon which--plop--the white glob fell.

I felt bad.

At first, I tried removing the mess with my finger but my spit was so sticky and the bug was so small. Then I got the idea of gently using an ear swab to pick the whole conglomeration, bug and all, up with one deft swirl. I put it into a small bowl and rinsed the bug clean and then, using the other end of the swab, picked it up and put it on a dry spot on the counter.

When I got up in the morning the bug was not where I left so I thought, "maybe I saved it."

That night, sitting with Margaret on out patio eating supper, I felt a mosquito bite. One slap and it was dead.

What kind of mind is this?