In Whom Shall We Trust? part two
From our perspective, the Fundamental Triad is quite simply awful news. What is “our” perspective? Christianity, Judaism and Islam, the three great religions of Monotheism. Also, the great Religion of Science which has become increasingly predominant over the last four hundred years, influencing (some would say, infecting) the very way we process reality. We now insist on “facts” that we can see or touch, and discredit unknown things such as an unconscious that no one can see, or an intuition that no one can touch.
Our perspective includes Western Philosophy from the Greeks to the Existentialists; Western Psychology from William James to James Hillman; Literature from Shakespeare to Mark Twain; Music from Gregorian chant to Brahms and the Beetles. That perspective! Western civilization is the mother’s milk upon which we have fed for nearly three thousand years.
A different perspective? The even older civilization stretching from India through China (including Tibet) and Japan. The Fundamental Triad may be difficult to comprehend for a person from Thailand or Cambodia, but it is certainly not alien to him or her. Even Xi Jinping, the President of the Peoples Republic of China must be vaguely familiar with Bodhidharma, who is, after all, an intrinsic part of the mosaic of Xi’s ancient culture. Perhaps “trust in things” has some tangible meaning to him, while it seems so strange to us.
However, the Fundamental Triad is not entirely alien for many thousands of meditators in America and Europe who have been practicing Zen, Tibetan and Vipassana meditation for decades. Perhaps we are prototypes of an unknown synthesis that is yet to emerge?
For most of us, the Buddha’s teaching of the Fundamental Triad is profoundly alien to our core beliefs, those golden idols that we have taken for reality for untold generations. How, then, do we attempt to look at a teaching that seems non psychological, non scientific, and for sure irreligious?
One person who read the first part of this essay wrote, ”Since you mentioned it in your blog, ‘trust in things’ hasn’t been able to let go of my soul. It’s been out of my grasp until you mentioned it, a lightbulb moment.” I responded, “Yes, it’s almost impossible to truly remember it, day by day. Maybe that’s why it’s a lightbulb moment. I’m so glad a light went on, if only for a moment.”
I ask, who am I to write about something so profound and alien to my culture? At best, I only have lightbulb moments that come when, in the midst of certainty and the conviction that “I am right!,” Bodhidharma’s mantra knocks me off my high horse and puts me on the level ground of reality. I will answer my own question with Emily Dickinson’s words, which in fact are also Bodhidharma’s: “I’m nobody, who are you? Are you nobody too?”
Here is the Fundamental Triad in Pali (the scriptural language of the Buddha):
“sabbe sankhara anicca,
sabbe sankhara dukkha,
sabbe dhamma anatta”
Sabbe is easy! I love the metta chant, “May all beings be happy.” Sabbe means “all.”
Sankhara is not easy. It literally means “formations.” Sometimes it is translated as ‘fabrications,” or “proliferations.” But the crucial qualifier to describe formations is that they are mental images or formations that arise depending on what came before and what will follow. In a sense, sankhara (formations) are precisely what therapists mean by referring to co-dependent relationships. Each depends on the other and cannot function independently. But sankhara exist. If you had a dream last night, it existed. If you have an image in your mind just now, it exists just now, even though its existence may be extremely transitory.
We know this! Thoughts, feelings, images, sensations, instinctive impulses, mental inclinations (intentions) are like ephemeral bubbles that can vanish as quickly as they appear in the mind. Those of us who are burdened with obsessive thoughts, feelings or impulses, loops that seem to go on and on, believe sometimes, that they will last forever. But in fact they vanish unnoticed once the mind is distracted by something else.
These are sankhara - formations in the mind. I prefer to call them “things.” That may be a little confusing because Buddhism has a special word for “things,” which may surprise you. The word for “things” is “dharma” (dhamma in Pali). Basically, these “things” (dharmas) are defined as phenomena, the objects of perception. Every single thing that rises in our mind is actually a formation or, if you please, a mental formation or phenomenon. If it’s in your mind it’s sankhara.
1) Sabbe sankhara anicca
So the Buddha says that “all things are anicca” (pronounced anicha). It means, “All things are impermanent.” From Stonehenge to the Pyramids we need to believe in permanence. As the lyric says in Amazing Grace, “When we’ve been there ten thousand years, Bright shining as the sun, We’ve no less days to sing God’s praise, Than when we’d first begun.” Compared to ten thousand years of bright shining as the sun, anicca is not an easy pill to swallow.
How hard this teaching of impermanence is! As a therapist I want a client to dare to love, to dare to risk the vulnerability of intimacy, which is the basic price of loving. But underlying the risk of intimacy is a deep fear of rejection, pain and loss. That fear comes from a profoundly deep instinct that already knows the second part of the Triad.
2) Sabbe sankhara dukkha.
Suffering (dukkha) is an intrinsic part of all things. To be precisely correct, one must say that suffering is the inevitable result of attachment to things. It’s not the thing that causes me to suffer, but my clinging to it, and the inevitable consequence of clinging is a sense of rejection, pain and loss. Trust in things, means that I know it cannot last. But, of course, this almost never happens. Right? Oh it may happen every once in a blue moon, when I wake up completely worried about “things” or depressed and not wanting to face the day, or stressed to the next county about all the things I have to do in spite of the fact that I am unprepared to do them, coupled with the pressure of needing to do them perfectly, or the mounting debts that I cannot pay, or this little spot on my arm that looks suspiciously like cancer, or my hemorrhoids, or my mother’s Alzheimers, or the sinking feeling of watching this body grow old and increasingly tired. But suffering? Nah!
The Buddha saved his worst news for the last part of the triad.
3) Sabbe dhamma anatta.
“There is no self in things.” Not only are things impermanent, which causes us to suffer when we crave them and, worse, cling to them, but there is no real self in them? This is the line in the sand for most of us. While I may admit (with reluctance) that nothing lasts forever, it is the third part of the Fundamental Triad that literally stops me in my tracks. There is no self in my lover? No self in my dear friend whom I have known and loved for fifty years? No self in my child. friend, mother?
Essentially, anatta is the line in the sand between Buddhism and Psychology. I have read (by now) thousands of pages from Freud to Jung, whose commentary on “The Secret of the Golden Flower” attests to his profound understanding of what the Buddha meant by the term “not self.” James Hillman even had an experience of Kundalini (more of that in another essay). But to understand why Bodhidhrama tells us to trust in things not in self, one must have experienced anatta, which is decidedly not the same as “understanding” it.
I’ll explain anatta to you part twelve of never. (a little VB humor)
Perhaps, you may have begun to see how the Fundamental Triad sheds some light on Bodhidharma’s mantra. To me, trust in things means that we can trust that everything operates exactly as it should. It’s supposed to change because that is its nature; it’s supposed to cause me grief if I cannot accept (trust) that it is transitory. And how can I cling to something if there is nobody inside to whom I can cling?
Once, in winter, when zen teacher, Layman P’ang, was leaving a monastery he had visited, he pointed at the snow in the air and said, “Good snowflakes — they don’t fall in any other place.” A delightful exclamation which confused his students. “They don’t fall in any other place?” Layman P’ang trusted in things and saw that the snowflakes were falling exactly where and how they should. Spring follows winter exactly as it should. Flowers bloom, fall leaves turn into brilliant splashes of color, and death comes to all living things, exactly as it must. A Japanese poem asks us to “Simply trust. Do not petals flutter down just like that?” This is trusting in things.
Nisargadatta, one of the greatest Indian masters of the last century was pondering reports of magical events supposedly performed by contemporary gurus. Not dismissing them out of hand, he only said, “I wonder if nature allows for exceptions.” I love that! I believe Nisargadatta trusted in things, not in self. Trusting in self demands that we see an “imagined self” as an exception in nature, not unlike “exceptional” Indian gurus. I once suggested to the LBM sangha a tee shirt that read “It’s Hard to Be Special When You/re Not,” but I was already pushing my luck with “It’s Your Mind, Stupid.” No one seemed to like this slogan any more than the first one.
It is the imagined self that sees itself as an exception to things, and that rides on its high horse insisting that snowflakes should fall somewhere else, Once, while eating lunch at a meditation retreat, I got angry at the wind, because it kept blowing the napkin from my plate. This occurred approximately twenty minutes before I was to give a dharma talk. But imagine standing before your house now that it has been entirely demolished by a hurricane. Or imagine looking at the charred debris of what was once your house, but has burned to the ground by a California wildfire. Tell a friend experiencing the loss of her child “just trust in things, not in self,” or tell that to someone who in in the process of losing her life partner. This is where real meaning makes all the difference.
If, even for the slightest moment, I have a glimpse of this inner demand that things simply must go my way, if I am furious that nothing is working for me right this minute, while driving to work, and I have to be on time, but every damn light is red and everyone seems to be in a conspiracy to oppose my agenda, if I have the slightest glimpse of this little prince, or princess, ruling over his perfectly unspoiled kingdom, singing “I did it my way,” he, it, she vanishes in a puff! How can I trust in self when, for one ravishingly beautiful moment, I see that there is nobody in there, just beautiful processes working in harmony?
My favorite dharma teacher Nanavira Thera describes the Fundamental Triad as the Buddha’s marvelously conceived way to help us learn how to let go of this conviction of a personality (atta vada), an imaginary somebody inside the brain who rules my life. But why do I resist remembering this lightbulb moment with all of my strength? The Buddha gives us the answer. Earlier we noted that formations do not occur in the mind as independent events. They depend on and spring forth from one single source, a source that cannot be traced back to a beginning. The Buddha named that source, avijja. It can be defined as delusion, ignorance, unknowing or blindness.
What is avijja? Denial. Denial of what? Reality. Denial of the Fundamental Triad. Denial of the truth that nothing “no thing” lasts forever. If I deny the truth of anicca and, instead, if I cling to something (become attached to it), a cult, a religion, my lover, my mother, my family, my dog, my amazing Jungian therapist, my girlfriend, my cat, my clients, my political beliefs, my legacy as “guiding teacher and founder of Long Beach Meditation,” my belief in what the Buddha taught, I am simply begging for dukkha. Clinging causes suffering, and it always will.
I once had a tee shirt that said, “Just Call Me Cleopatra the Queen of Denial.” (What is VB’s obsession with tee shirts?) Denial is avijja. Denial that I am addicted and cling to my addiction is avijja. Denial that my addictions cause me immense suffering is avijja. Denial that I fall into the same hole every time I walk down a certain street is avijja.
Nanavira said that avijja does not, and cannot, see its own blindness. Thus it will endlessly generate the smoke that blinds until the light of awareness can sweep it away. The Buddha presented the Fundamental Triad of anicca, dukkha and anatta as a marvelous phillips screwdriver that can help us pull the nail of ignorance out of the mind, but It must be slowly unscrewed, turn by turn with each light bulb moment in our lives.
more about trust in part three
