The Best Buddhist Writing 2010 - Melvin McLeod [15]
The institutions of Buddhism can, wittingly or unwittingly, reinforce this split. Most of the Buddhism that first came to the West in the twentieth century had a strong monastic cast, even when it was being practiced by laypeople. Over time many established centers have actively encouraged the development of householder practice, while new ways of practice have emerged that don’t make the monastic assumption at all. But there’s still a pretty strong, often unconscious bias toward cloistered practice, with householder practice seen as an adaptation of it. When inner conflict meets institutional authority, it can create an inertia that’s difficult even to see clearly, let alone question.
Let’s do it anyway.
Why do many of us assume that this split is inevitable? Why, in point of fact, do many of us experience it that way? What is the nature of longing? Is it just that humans are wired to yearn for the thing that isn’t there? Is it instead a deep desire for wholeness? Is it the symptom of something not yet resolved or out of balance in the ways we practice—a symptom that, if we paid attention to it, might lead to greater health? Are we unwilling to accept that true apprenticeship offers a great deal and also asks for sacrifice? How does longing relate to aspiration and to bodhichitta, the desire for enlightenment so that one can be helpful to others? What about when the longing, the feeling that something is missing, eventually drops away, because, whatever the circumstances, nothing seems to be missing anymore?
The more we don’t take the split between the cloistered and the daily for granted, the more a rich field of inquiry opens up, as many have discovered. Individuals and practice communities can respond to these questions in lots of different ways and come to very different conclusions. The important thing is that we keep holding the questions, keep examining our assumptions and conclusions, because all of this is still very much a work in progress. It’s alive, it’s exciting, and this exploration might end up being one of the West’s great contributions to the onflowing Way.
. . . the love that is enlightenment because it is the unity of experience.
—VIMALAKIRTI
Over time, someone in apprenticeship to awakening is not so buffeted by the movement from cloistered practice to daily life. She becomes aware that there’s really only one practice going on, and its location at any given time becomes less and less critical. The pure lands on either side of the boundary are receding, while the border town grows. This unified practice gets at once simpler and more pervading; it’s like breathing. Inhale and exhale. Turning away and turning toward. Down and deep, out and wide. Wells and acequias.
What once seemed like two activities or focuses of attention are now aspects of one. You can’t hold your breath forever, and you can’t breathe out forever, either. We don’t call this inhale-and-exhale; we call it breathing. In the same way, the apprentice begins to experience a one whole practice, a one whole path, under her feet wherever she is.
Awakening is the unity, the breathing that is made of inhale and exhale. It’s the through line and the base note of our lives. If at the start the apprentice has a sense that the continuity in her life is provided by the self, a profound shift of allegiance eventually occurs. She sees that the self rises and falls; she climbs into the self when she needs it, and sometimes when she’s deeply absorbed in meditation or art or physical exertion it disappears altogether. Underneath it all, awakening unfolds with each new experience, and it won’t be complete in this lifetime until she draws her last breath.
This awakening isn’t thicker or more accessible in some places than others. Awakening happens in the meditation hall, and it also happens on the freeway and in the sickbed. In any moment of any day, awakening is already