Finding The Sacred In The Everyday: The Bodhisattva Path In Social Responsibility

For years I was beset by the question; ‘What is serious practice?’ This was a sincere question, for my Buddhism was important to me, I had seen the impact that it had had on me and knew that somehow it had altered my life and the way I felt that I should live it. I wanted to pursue this path, it felt right and I wanted to get it right.

I threw myself into the practice; by which I mean that I went on retreats of various sorts, I went to Teachings with various Teachers, I practised and I read voraciously. I read people’s stories, of how they were enlightened, of their lives, of how the Dharma moved across the world and I read of Bodhisattvas; real and mythical operating in the world. I read of people devoting their life to the Dharma; teachers, renunciates, Bhikkus and Bhikkunis, wandering ascetics and I met modern day monks and nuns of various Orders and various nationalities. These people seemed to be ‘doing it for real’; by which I mean that they were living out the Dharma in their daily lives and the Dharma was present or uppermost in their existence in the world.

As is the way with these things, I developed, over time, a number of spiritual heroes. Hakuin, because when I read Hakuin, I heard a Geordie accent coming through those words; meaning that I heard a very direct approach, no mincing of words, a tone of ‘This is how it is – get on with it.’ Shabkar because he wandered over present day Tibet living the Dharma life singing spontaneous songs, sometimes to crowds of thousands who wanted to listen. This was reinforced when I went with one of John’s parties to Qinghai Lake 30-odd miles long and home to Bird Island where Shabkar would hang out for months at a time. In the winters, the lake would freeze and villagers would walk across the ice to the island to speak with him and listen to his teachings. He described them as lines of ants stretching out across the horizon coming in hordes to visit. Layman Pang and his daughter were another two; giving up everything and travelling China making a living by weaving baskets and with those two, the final denouement of dying in a Zen way, aware and prepared. Even in the days before I called myself a Buddhist, there was Yeshe Tsogyal and her exploits in mythical and historical Tibet.

These heroes were not limited to historical figures. They included Maura ‘Soshin’ O’Halloran; an Irish woman who went to Japan, joined a Zen monastery and had her Enlightenment experience there. She was beloved by the Japanese people around her and after dying en-route to another country was described as a Saint and had a memorial erected to her memory. Another was Jiyu Kennet Roshi, another adventurer going to Japan and struggling heroically with culture and circumstance until ‘the bottom fell out’, just when she thought she had had enough. Another was Charlotte Joko Beck whose books on Zen were the first that made any sense to me and who translated ‘Chop wood and carry water’ into ‘Make love and drive freeway’.

There were also the people that I met who inspired me, or whom I wished to emulate. I’ll refrain from name dropping here, but one was an old Tibetan monk who had escaped from China across the Himalayas on foot, after being incarcerated and tortured in prison and who made me weep by joyously showing us his new false teeth, since his own had fallen and been knocked out. Another was an American woman who ran a city Zen Centre and who had a personal centre as pliable and flexible as bamboo. They also included our own John and Simon and Shifu. These people had a way of looking at and into one with what seemed like openness and clarity. They were also ‘serious’ about practice, whatever that meant.

Inevitably, my own internal search was on. The usual questions; ‘Who am I’ ‘What is love/another/this/it?’ How does compassion feel? How to live my life? What does it mean to keep the precepts? What is my suffering? Where are the friction points in my life? How do I deal with my friction points? Where do the six perfections fit in? What are the ‘shoulds’ that drive me?

There were the moments of clarity and brief insight into my internal workings and mental meanderings. There were occasional blissful experiences, emotional dam breaking, senses of unity and glances of the transcendent. But was I serious enough? What was devotion to practice? Where did practice and life end and overlap?

Buddhism ‘worked’ for me. It took my questions and gave me a way to work with them. It allowed me to ‘be’ with the transcendent without feeling as though I was out of ‘synch’ with society. I took refuge, took the five lay precepts and started trying to live my life as a Buddhist. What did that mean? Was it living from an aspiration? Was it following a set of rules? Was it living outside of myself? What might it mean to live without a ‘Self’? What needed to be given up? What was renunciation? Who was renouncing what? What was ‘being good’? What was avoiding bad deeds, words and thoughts? Were there people that I should avoid, or choose not to spend time with? How did this match with the Zen poet who spent his time at the brothels and bars?

Then there was the Bodhisattva ideal. The impossible Bodhisattva Vows; to deliver every being of sentience, to remove all vexations, to get to grips with uncountable methods of working with the Dharma and to reach each and every aspect of the Buddhas and abide with that. This gave an awful lot of scope for striving, for achievement, for goals. It also seemed like a lot of work. How could I do that and carry on with ordinary life? Did it mean that I had to become a nun? Was living the Dharma full-time the only way to do it? I had a couple of friends who did make that choice, who chose to take robes and vows and for whom that was a valid expression of how they wanted to live life. But I chose not to take that route. I considered it, carefully and seriously, but chose not to go down that path.

What does this leave me with? On a simple level, it leaves me living life as a lay Buddhist. Is this the same as living life as any other Joanne Bloggs? Well, no, it doesn’t because I still have a framework of refuges and precepts and vows. That doesn’t preclude me doing any of the things that Joanne Bloggs may do; good or bad. I can help my neighbour, be kind to a stray dog, smile at the person behind the checkout till in the supermarket, reduce my carbon footprint and pay my taxes. I can drop out of society, spend my time reading Nagarjuna and wander round India. I can be pious and devotional and goody-two shoes. I can be holier than thou or so much less worthy than others. I can stop buying capitalist consumables and transfer my economic energy to Dharma knick-knacks. I can fill my house with Buddhist books instead of crime fiction or literary masterpieces. I can buy antique thanka paintings rather than Damien Hirsts. I can decorate myself with malas rather than jewels. Are any of these things wrong? No. Are any of them Buddhist? Well, yes, actually, since all of human existence is Buddhist. The Dharma exists within the dharma of the everyday. I have long wanted to write about ‘the drama of the dharma’. And at the same time, no, of the above lists they are not Buddhist since they mostly emanate from the ‘I’. These things are not wrong, but nor are they right. The philosophers might say that right and wrong themselves are incorrect. Given all of this, how do I know what to do, how to behave, how to conduct myself since I do operate in the real or relative world? Simplistically, this is clearly the point at which the Eightfold Path comes into play; right meditation, right livelihood, right speech and so on. But how do I know what is ‘right’? I have friends who will not make a major decision without consulting a Lama. Maybe there is nothing wrong with that, but ultimately we have to make the final decision ourselves. We decide to go along with our Lama or not. And then we live with the consequences. The simple side of cause and effect.

A lot of life’s decisions are even simpler than the things that we might take to the Lama. Do I drink this, eat that, drive there, go on a plane, apply for that job, shout at the kids, resent the partner, do what I feel like, sit on my cushion, watch the telly, and buy new boots? Do I compare any possible action with the Bodhisattva ideal and make a decision based on that? Do I try to see where it fits in terms of being ‘right’ and decide from there? Can I ‘insert reflection before I speak or act’ as John would say? Can I even wait that millisecond before doing something on automatic pilot? Do my emotions carry me away so that I am into self-justification and a next step in my own narrative even before the action is complete? ‘Well, it’s only a beer and it’s been a hell of a week with the kids and their exams and I’m so tired and I’m the only one that ever does anything around here anyway. I’m sick of it. It’s always the same – Joanne will do it – my name should be ‘Mugs’, not Bloggs’.

Seen in this way, Buddhism can become a complicated system of hoop jumping and fence negotiating. Comparison against an ideal brings one up against a comparison of oneself. The ego will always revert to type. ‘I must try harder’. ‘I must please John/Simon/Shifu/the Buddha’. ‘I must get it right’. ‘It/I must be perfect’. ‘I must be in charge’. ‘I must control it’. ‘I can’t’. ‘I never’. ‘We don’t’. ‘I should’. Psychologists may talk about ‘Self 1 and Self 2’, where Self 2 is a freer, more intuitive point from which to act, more childlike, in terms of simplicity rather than naivety and less driven by accumulated scripts and personal history – in Buddhists terms; samskaras. Self 2 is a nice concept and one that is permissive, but still comes from the ‘I’. What would it be to live from the point of nowhere to go and no rules or map to get there? What would it be to truly live as a woman or man of no rank – a true person of Zen?

Increasingly, I feel that this is the question. At least, for me, this is the question for now.

The difficulty is that it is very easy to fall into mistaken views here. According to Zen, there is no name, no rank and no fortune, apart perhaps from the 3 Jewels. So maybe there is no need to ‘engage’ in conventional terms. I can take myself off to the mountains and live as a hermit. Of course, there is a two thousand year old tradition of doing this that still exists. I can devote myself to the Dharma, perhaps becoming a nun or monk. Of course, that option also still exists. One can join a Western style monastic sangha or an oriental one. But rest assured that this is no easy option. Confined communities can be hellholes of division and strife as well as being centres of devotion and practice. I can carry on doing the type of thing that I have done before but with a new layer of consciousness; raising a family, holding down a job, contributing to my community. How does engagement apply? Need I engage in some way in order simply to ‘Do Dharma’? Can I live from a Dharma perspective?

How do I apply these thoughts to the institutional settings to which I belong, or with which I have some association in a Buddhist context? There are Pali scriptures aplenty that say the Dharma should be freely given and not given for monetary gain. How does this fit with Western Capitalism? There is the question of how do we run Centres and make the Dharma available without finance, which some might say is neither possible in the West nor the East. There is no tradition of ‘Dana’ in the West still extant. People donate regularly to charities but more rarely, these days to religious institutions. Where is my engagement with such established forms of custom? Is the WCF such an organisation? Frankly, I hope so. Institutions have a regulatory function that can keep individuals in check, by monitoring and directing. Perhaps a ‘true person of no rank’ has no need of such restriction, but how many of us operate from that position on a regular basis, let alone consistently? I wonder if the rampant individualism prevalent in the West makes this one of the hardest lessons to learn for us Westerners. There are plenty of cases of people left to their own devices going ‘off the rails’ in the move of Buddhism to the West to illustrate this point. So can one live from Dharma, quite alone, without the support of peers and others with greater experience than oneself and is this a form of non-engagement in society and its mores? Why would one even choose such a path?

My personal thought is that engagement is a requirement of Buddhism. Even the hermit has seekers arriving at his cave, asking questions; looking for answers. We all need to go off and spend time with ourselves, whether in community on retreat or in solitary self-chosen isolation. But we also need to return to general life in order to test out what we think we may have learnt. And even when there is no more to learn – and I am not sure that I believe that point exists, we need to share our learning with others. The original ox-herding pictures may have ended with ‘Mu’ a bright, dynamic circle of no-thing, but later editions have the man riding the ox, back to the market-place, back to engagement with the world, clearly at ease and often playing a flute, legs a-dangling with no harness or rein on the ox-mind and yet with the ox going where the rider needs to be taken. Perhaps it is more accurate to say that Bodhisattvaoriented Buddhism needs engagement, since the liberation of sentient beings needs engagement. Ksitigharba goes to the hell realms to speak to beings there and to offer to lead them to another state.

Moreover, the Bodhisattva needs those other sentient beings to fulfil their role. This is not to imply codependency, however, since once the job is done; a Bodhisattva has no need to return to the samsaric cycle. This consideration of the role of Bodhisattva can be seen not merely as engagement but also as responsibility. You take the vows: you have work to engage with. This bodhi-work is not something apart from the world; apart from the everyday hum-drum of life in the workplace. It is the workplace itself and all that goes on there. All the office politics and all the interpersonal wrangling; these all need the influence of a Bodhisattva. Indeed, in order not to be swamped by these conditions, one may need to invoke the Bodhisattva within. I have taken to having Mahakala on my desk at work. An occasional glimpse next to my computer screen reminds me that wrathful forms exist that are more effective than my own personal rage against the machine.

So how might this engagement manifest? There is no need to look for new options and ways of being. There are opportunities aplenty in daily life. Family, friends, work, communities all exist giving activities of daily living that can be and must be shared. Our highly mutually dependent society is a very clear example of co-dependent arising. These very areas that give rise to conditions of suffering are also the areas of opportunity. It is naïve and simplistic to say that these are opportunities for practice, for we need help to see through our attachment, hatred and desires on a minute to minute basis, but they are the proving ground. They are the places where we cannot live as persons of no rank, because we are assigned rank within them, rank and roles and tasks. Can we fulfil those duties and not get carried away by praise and blame? Can we be a ‘Heart Buddhist’ and not just a surface Buddhist? Can we engage and make our mistakes and live with them, without destroying ourselves and others?

If we can, then we too can plant a grass stem in the ground and say ‘The Temple has been built’. We too will be people who look into another’s eyes and know them as ourselves. We too will be able to face whatever comes and bend and not break, be solid and yet soft, be both human and humane. The everyday will have transcendence and the sacred will be mundane and common. We will know and forgive ourselves and others. We will take all that we are, wherever we go, and continue.

Onwards, then with our journeys. We have no on-going need for spiritual heroes. There is no need to be someone else, someone special. Life will present us with hard enough lessons. Perhaps the learning is the finding of the internal compass that is everywhere; that points not to North, but to Right.