In Whom Shall We Trust?
Part one
Hello everyone,
While “A letter from Crete” is still in the pipeline, I want to share a recent experience in Tennessee where I was stuck on the I-75 freeway for one hour. I was on my way to take some lunch to my sister who was recovering from a broken hip in a hospital in Knoxville. Needless to say (as we do say in the south) being stuck on a freeway for one hour got on my last nerve. Who decided to call these things "free way?” Fire trucks and patrol cars were racing past on the side of the road, and there was no patrolman to direct the south bound traffic past whatever the disaster was that had occurred. My sister’s lunch was getting cold (what a loving brother I thought myself to be), drivers had finally turned off their car engines, and some folks were standing outside, straining to see what had happened up ahead.
As I sat, getting increasingly frustrated, I recalled a saying supposedly uttered by Bodhidharma, the Buddhist monk who traveled from India to China in the fifth century, and once again, as I have done a number of times in my life, repeating his mantra got me off my high horse. Only fragments of his teaching are extant, and even the fact of his historical existence is not entirely settled by scholars. What is settled, at least in Zen Buddhism, is that Bodhidharma is accepted as its founder and first Patriarch.
Those of you who sat with me during the years when I was a teacher at Long Beach Meditation, heard many references to Bodhidharma in the Sunday dharma talks, and my favorite LBM tee shirt slogan, written in English, but with a faux Pali script, said, “It’s Your Mind, Stupid.”
While most people found my saying humorous, it was clearly politically incorrect, and more than one person was offended by the word “stupid.” I was always impatient with their sensitivity, patience never being my strongest suit. We aren’t stupid? God only knows that I am.
The point of my saying, it’s your mind stupid” is that it is quintessentially the bottom line of what Bodhidharma taught. It is shocking and direct. Zen students know that when he traveled to China approximately one thousand years after the Buddha walked the dusty roads of India, Boddhidharma taught one thing: the reality that in every experience there is a mind.
A disciple once asked Bodhidharma to define what he meant by mind:
““You ask. That’s your mind. I answer. That’s my mind.
If I had no mind, how could I answer? if you had no mind
how could you ask? That which asks is your mind. Through
endless kalpas without beginning, whatever you do,
wherever you are, that’s your mind, that’s your real
Buddha. This mind is the buddha says the same thing.””
In other words: It’s your mind, stupid. Bodhidharma also said:
““The mind’s capacity is limitless, and its manifestations are
inexhaustible. Seeing forms with your eyes, hearing
sounds with your ears,
smelling odors with your nose, tasting flavors with your
tongue, every movement or state is all your mind. At every
moment, where language can’t go, that’s your mind.””
“Where language can’t go, that’s your mind,’ certainly beats my slogan! In this essay, I want to investigate the saying attributed to Bodhidharma: “Trust in mind, not in self.” As I mentioned, it’s something of a mantra for me, and one that I have pondered for many years, usually forgetting it most of the time, until remembering it such as the moment when I sat on the freeway a few weeks ago. Like a zen koan, it feels counterintuitive. In fact, when I try to remember it, I’m amazed at how frequently I completely reverse its six words. This suggests the presence of a powerful unconscious resistance to its meaning. I suspect that I am not the Lone Ranger in this regard, and share his mantra with you in hopes that you will also ponder it. Perhaps your mind will open to its profound meaning if only for a moment, when you most need its message. Perhaps you will find it possible to stand momentarily on the ground, alongside but not on, your high horse.
First, let’s begin with one of VB’s stories:
It was before dawn in Lumbini, Nepal, March 2010, and the last morning of a two month silent Vipassana retreat. Waking at 3 am with the excitement, dread and anticipation of my long journey home, I packed to one flickering candle, doing its best to offer a little light in the pitch dark. This happened to be one of the “no electricity” eight-hour periods, which were announced weekly in the Kathmandu newspapers. Then I walked to meet with U Vivekanda and the nuns, who were all patiently waiting. I learned that, once again, there was another taxi strike, which seemed to come nearly as frequently as the no electricity periods. At first, Vivekananda had toyed with the idea of calling one of the ever-present guys who ride the little bicycle vehicles for hire throughout the Lumbini sacred compound of Buddhist temples and monasteries. Those vehicles can carry two or three passengers on a wide back seat, but we are talking a ride of at least twenty miles to the Bhairahawa airport. Vivekananda mused that this might be physically challenging for me. Although the idea was a little exciting, I also thought about a guy having to haul me and my heavy baggage for twenty miles on a bicycle.
Fortunately, Vivekananda had decided to call someone in Lumbini village to drive me to the airport. The only catch being that the guy had to return to Lumbini immediately after dropping me off, because he had to go straight to work. This meant that we had to leave without delay. There was no time for goodbyes, no time even to absorb this abrupt change in plans or double check what I had packed and not packed (always a complete mystery given my attention deficit mentality). The cook had prepared a care package, and the dear, sweet nuns all lined up along with U Vivekananda to wave a sad (for me) goodbye.
Although dawn was slowly breaking, the drive was a nightmare. I had just finished two months of silent sitting in the monastery (noted in a rather hilarious but serious journal description which I hope to post here eventually). From the moment the guy peeled rubber, leaving the smiling nuns behind, and no matter how desperately I tried to grasp and fasten the seat belt, I was flat out of luck. We bounced up and down and careened side to side at break-neck speed. We sped through the early morning on a ridiculously narrow two-lane highway, dodging a few random cows ambling down the road, and dodging school children walking so early along the road to schools in Bhairahawa, plus huge trucks from India or Kathmandu, hogging both lanes, while barreling down upon us like bright-eyed monsters suddenly appearing out of the dark. The driver, skillfully swerved off the paved road with the greatest of ease as each potential disaster appeared, and then steered his Toyota back onto the road, thank you! He should have been a Nascar driver. Actually, this is rather similar to the way my dad, Elmer Byrd, drove, with my mother tightly closing her eyes, while we children sat in the back seat, thrilled at his expertise.
The driver dropped me off by a long, closed, chain-link fence blocking cars from entering the drive into the airport, and sped away with a quick “goodbye,” but not before collecting a premium fee. I sat down on my suitcase, like a stranger in the middle of a strange land, somehow still alive, but traumatized and entirely pissed. There was one lonely, empty sentry hut nearby, which I thought might shield me from the morning cold, and at least provide a place to store my heavy suitcase. My mind was one jumbled mess: “This is the way to end two months of a meditation retreat?” My thoughts about how “life” was treating me were not exactly kind. By then it was probably 6 am, the dark was surrendering its power over night, but the shuttered airport was not to open for at least three more hours. I looked around and saw across the way, perhaps one hundred yards from where I sat, a long street of dilapidated, shops with wooden slats covering their fronts. None of them looked safe to enter, from the standpoint of contacting some unknown, deadly virus.
“What do I do now? Meditate on this f—g suitcase?” At that moment, Bodhidharma’s enigmatic sentence about trust came into my mind like a soft whisper, and, in the midst of my rage at feeling like a victim, my mind opened to its meaning:
trust in things, not in self.
My anger vanished like a snowflake falling on a hot iron. It’s important to note that the anger did not gradually dissipate as the mind slowly calmed down. Instead, the experience was as sudden as a bolt of lighting, which is precisely what an insight is. The insight may not last, as most of us have sadly learned over the course of our lives; only when the lightening has struck to the very depths of the unconscious is an insight longer lasting. But for one shining moment I felt an amazing breeze of freedom.
Five hours later, as I was sitting on a plane, flying back to Kathmandu while noticing the odd anomaly of two beautiful stewardess with rather high slits in their long maroon skirts working for an airline called “Buddha Air,” I had completely forgotten “trust in things, not in self.” In fact, as I have unconsciously done for most of my life, I switched the mantra to “trust in self not in things.”
As I said, I don’t believe that I am the Lone Ranger when it comes to reversing Bodhidharma’s mantra. In fact (and I promise this is true) just as I glanced at the enlarged font in bold letters above (now corrected), I see that I had written:
trust in self not in things.
Oh my! That, dear readers, came courtesy of the unconscious! It is not an exaggeration to suggest that all of us in the West have been unconsciously programed to a belief in self, (not in things) for well over twenty five hundred years. It’s our bottom line, and it feels completely “natural,” to believe that my “self” must control “things.” In one form or another, the belief in self as something substantial inside our head is the bedrock of Western psychology, whether cognitive-behavioral or the depth psychology of Freud and Jung. We have spent days, weeks, months years and untold millions of dollars trying to make this self healthy if not happy. And, relentlessly, we have obdurately reversed Bodhidharma’s mantra.
The idea that this essay on trust will pry our belief in self out of its socket is hubris times infinity. The Buddha called it atta vada, the belief in self, and he spent his entire teaching career trying to help us experience an alternative to the inevitable suffering that comes from clinging to a fiction, (as James Hillman calls it), or the absurdity of trying to grasp space as Bodhidharma described it. With this in mind, I suppose I can lower my ambition just slightly.
In order to approach the meaning of “trust in things” so seemingly counterintuitive to the way we think, and to open our minds to another perspective, we need to explore what my favorite Buddhist teacher, Nanavira Thera, called the Fundamental Triad. It is the very core of what the Buddha saw when his mind completely opened to Reality. Talk about a bolt of lightening! The Fundamental Triad is like a code, key or overlay that can open the enigma of Bodhidharma’s mantra. But this is not easy going! We will continue with this question of whom we shall trust in Part Two. I will end part two by sharing the one thing I have trusted since the first days that I began working with clients in 1991. I am convinced that that Buddha’s profound teaching, which is marvelously distilled into Bodhidharma’s concise mantra, remains like a mile high barrier for us in the west. May it one day become a bridge.
