The Best Buddhist Writing 2010 - Melvin McLeod [133]
We start by looking at the dramas in our life, not with our ordinary eyes, but with the eyes of dharma. What is drama, and what is dharma? I guess you could say drama is illusion that acts like truth, and dharma is truth itself—the way things are, the basic state of reality that does not change from day to day according to fashion or our mood or agenda. To change dharma into drama, all we need are the elements of any good play: emotion, conflict, and action—a sense that something urgent and meaningful is happening to the characters involved. Our personal dramas may begin with the “facts” about who we are and what we are doing, but fueled by our emotions and concepts, they can quickly evolve into pure imagination and become as difficult to decipher as the storylines of our dreams. Then our sense of reality becomes further and further removed from basic reality itself. We lose track of who we really are. We have no means of telling fact from fiction or developing the self-knowledge or wisdom that can free us from our illusions.
It took me a long time to see the differences between drama and dharma in my own life. Because they can look so much alike, they’re hard to sort out, whether in Asian or Western culture. Looking back from my current life as a city dweller to my early childhood in a monastery, where I received intensive training to fill the role of Rinpoche to which I was born, I realize that in certain respects these two lifestyles weren’t that different. Then, as now, the dramas of life wove together with the dharma of life. In my youth, I had a number of daunting responsibilities. It was my job, for example, to take care of the business of spirituality—to perform ceremonial functions and uphold traditional cultural ways. However, I didn’t always see the meaning in these activities or their connection to true wisdom. Though I was too young to understand those feelings, that slight disconnect started me off on an inquiry into what is real—and therefore genuinely meaningful—and what is only illusion. It was a dilemma for me, my personal drama, a first taste of rebellion that challenged my sense of identity and role as a future teacher in the tradition of my birth. Nevertheless, it also pushed me in the direction of dharma: my personal search for truth began right there, with questions, not answers.
REBEL WITHIN
In the summer of 1978, after being in the monastic educational system for eight years or so, I was studying the Vinaya literature, the Buddha’s teachings on social science, governance, and ethical conduct intended primarily for the monastic community. While I was enjoying the feast of this wisdom and was genuinely inspired by it, I still noticed that little streak of rebelliousness coming up in me again—the same sense of dissatisfaction I had felt earlier with the empty rituals and institutionalized values of all religious traditions.
Later in my studies, I came across the Buddhist notion of emptiness and felt totally clueless. I wondered what the heck the Buddha was talking about: empty this, empty that; empty table, empty self. I could feel and see the table, and my good old sense of self was still intact. Nevertheless, as I contemplated these teachings, I realized that I had never explored my mind beyond my usual thought processes. I had never encountered certain deeper dimensions of my own mind. This emptiness, it turned out, was a revolutionary discovery, full of possibilities to free me from my lifelong blind faith in realism, which suddenly seemed so naïve and simpleminded. I felt so free just from reading these teachings, and that sense of freedom only increased with my wholehearted practice of them.
How wonderful it would be, I thought, if only we could practice the teachings of the Buddha as he really taught them from his own experience—free from the clouds of religiosity that often surround them. By themselves, they are powerful tools for intensifying awareness and triggering insight. Yet it’s difficult to distinguish the tools themselves