The Best Buddhist Writing 2010 - Melvin McLeod [101]
I was able to see the magic that is Caryn instead of the preconceptions, resistance, and habitual patterns I was bringing to our relationship. This event has been like a bookmark in my life with her. I often return to it. It is also a practice, an ongoing way of developing my appreciation for our relationship and my relationship to others.
We are here today. A good number of us don’t have to worry about where our next meal is coming from; and the weather is beautiful. If we can get a few things out of our way, then every day can be a good day; even a day when something bad happens. If we can really see this wonderful, mixed up life that we get to be in, with all of the suffering and pleasure, then we can accept that we are in Wonderland, and even possibly enjoy the trip. Most of us are like Alice, trying to get others to make sense (by our definition) and to do things that make us happy. Yet they won’t. I know I need to remind myself of this daily: The point of everybody else’s life is not to make me happy. What would your relationships be like if you accepted the people around you exactly as they are? There is nothing as transformative as being OK with everything. The craving to transform, to change, to make rules, to push people into shapes we like, isn’t effective. It doesn’t make us feel closer with our friends and family. Instead of trying to change others, maybe we can accept them as they are. Maybe we can even try to make them happy. They’d like that, since they likely think the point of everybody else’s life is to make them happy!
When Alice wants to have a normal conversation with the Dormouse, she’s quite sure it’s time to start making sense.
“Once upon a time there were three little sisters,” the Dormouse began, in a great hurry; “and their names were Elsie, Lacie, and Tillie; and they lived at the bottom of a well—”
“What did they live on?” asked Alice, who always took a great interest in questions of eating and drinking.
“They lived on treacle,” said the Dormouse, after thinking a minute or two.
“They couldn’t have done that, you know,” Alice gently remarked. “They’d have been ill.”
“So they were,” said the Dormouse, “very ill.”
“But they were in the well,” Alice said to the Dormouse, not choosing to notice his last remark.
“Of course they were,” said the Dormouse, “well in.”
This answer so confused poor Alice that she let the Dormouse go on for some time without interrupting it.
“They were learning to draw,” the Dormouse went on, yawning and rubbing its eyes, for it was getting very sleepy, “and they drew all manner of things—everything that begins with an M—”
“Why with an M?” said Alice.
“Why not?” said the March Hare.
Koans are a device used in Zen training. They are questions that need to be answered experientially, using insight, not intellect. They are usually drawn from the recording of conversations with the old Zen masters. The word koan translates roughly as “public case,” like a law. It refers to something about which there is a level of common understanding.
Koans are questions that provide an opportunity to leave the intellect behind. They are like chances to fly. When done with the right spirit they provide a practice of forgetting the intellectual construct of self and joining the larger self the koan is pointing at. In time, life can become a koan practice in which we can learn to abandon our point of view and accept people and events that we might have resisted due to our conditioning, our story. Although koans are presented in many types of dialogues, or poetic phrases, the heart of koans is one question. What is the self? Who are you? Each koan is an opportunity to wake up to