The Best Buddhist Writing 2010 - Melvin McLeod [34]
I recall hearing, for the first time, the legend of the young mother rushing with her dead son in her arms to plead with the Buddha, who was known to have miraculous powers to restore her child to life. I knew at once, as you will too if you are new to this story, that when the Buddha responded, “I will do it if you bring me a mustard seed from a household in which no one has ever died,” the boy would not live. The mother, disconsolate, returns from her quest knowing that everyone dies and that the heart can survive grief. To me, the instruction “bring me a mustard seed” means: “Look around you. You are supported by everyone else in the world.” I understand the end of the legend, the mother bowing to the Buddha and becoming his disciple, as her miraculous healing.
I feel myself supported by the awareness that everyone struggles. At Spirit Rock on Wednesday mornings, when I hear someone whose voice I don’t recognize say, “My Aunt Claire, who has Parkinson’s disease . . . ” I remember my friend Claire, who doesn’t have Parkinson’s disease but has something else, and Phyllis, who does have Parkinson’s disease, and my aunt Miriam who, until her recent death, was the only person left in my family older than I am. A woman’s voice saying, “I’m thinking of my son Jacob in his second tour of duty in Iraq,” reminds me of my cousins, whose son Jonathan is back in Iraq for his third tour, and I think about everyone with sons and daughters in wars all over the world. When I say, in the final dedication of merit at the end of the class, “May all beings be peaceful and happy and come to the end of suffering,” I mean it with all my heart.
On one particular Wednesday morning when the list of special circumstances had been especially diverse and the kinship connections unusually wide-ranging, someone said, “Everything happens to everybody.” I thought, at the time, that the remark was a response to the vast numbers of complex situations, sorrows, and joys that happen to people. What feels more true to me now is that when I am paying enough attention I realize that everything is happening to everyone collectively, and I feel appreciation and compassion for us all.
Dawn Light
Diane Ackerman
There’s a lot of debate these days about religion versus science. Diane Ackerman, the best-selling author of The Natural History of the Senses, shows one way that they are reconciled. As she contemplates the dawn light one early morning, her deep knowledge of the natural world becomes not a materialist straitjacket but a gateway to the mysterious, beautiful, and ineffable.
Waiting for dawn, much is sensible, if not visible. To us, anyway. Some other creatures—bats, moths, fireflies, owls, raccoons, cicadas, spiders, mountain lions—get by just fine. For me, dawn begins before the sun and below the soil, and extends up through sky and weather to the canopy of stars. The visible stars that is. So much surrounds us that we can’t see. Life on other planets, but also the missing matter in the universe. Computations show that stars, planets, galaxies, and all the rest of the visible matter make up only four percent of what actually exists. Where is the rest, the so-called dark matter and, even stranger, dark energy? A yard or street is partly full of the invisible weight of the universe.
At the doorway of the senses, the self chances upon the world. Yet, for the most part, we live a life of surfaces; otherwise we’d buckle under an avalanche of sensations. When we turn on the radio in the morning and hear static or interference as we switch between channels, do we need to know we’re divining lightning strikes on other continents and the hissing death throes of galaxies? Probably not. But, when we do, the aperture of the mind widens as it travels to distant continents