Religion 23 Dec 2006 08:03 pm
A letter to Tricycle
I don’t often write letters to the editor. I’ve been reading Tricycle off and on for a long time. I had unsubscribed during my time in seminary, but I have re-upped, and got the first issue in the mail a few days ago. Somehow, I’m looking at those articles with very different eyes. Tricycle covers quite a broad range of Buddhist traditions in the US, and often engages in interesting and sometimes difficult conversations about the practice of Buddhism in the West.
I wrote this letter to the editor in response to an article in the current issue by Cynthia Thatcher. It was a good article, but it spurred me to write this letter:
Dear Tricycle,
I do appreciate the myth-busting that Cynthia Thatcher engaged in when she spoke about the present moment in her article “What’s so Great About Now?” I definitely agree with her assertion that being aware of the present moment doesn’t mean that we all of a sudden will see some amazing hidden beauty in that moment, and it is that beauty that makes us happy. The present moment can be unsatisfactory (although it is most often because we are caught up in things that are not occurring at the present moment), and our awareness of the unsatisfactoriness of the coming and passing away of things is an incredibly important teaching. But her idea that all there is as one becomes aware in the present moment is being aware of the unsatisfactoriness of that moment is not one that I can relate to.
I speak not as a Buddhist scholar - this is from my own experience. Her point of view is a reflection of an especially arid form of Buddhist thought that I find common, but, to my mind unfortunate. It has been my experience that some times when I am most aware in the moment - I become aware of my connection to what is greater than myself. For me, I think of that as my connection to the Divine - but there are all sorts of other ways people express it. To assert that “bare attention doesn’t expose some hidden core of radiance in the empty vibrations; no such core exists” is to, in my opinion, strip the numinous from the mundane. No, I don’t meditate to find happiness in hidden beauty in the mundane moment - I meditate to become aware of everything in the moment - the unsatisfactory and the numinous.
Metta,
Michelle Murrain
Technorati Tags: buddhism, meditation
on 14 Jan 2007 at 10:39 pm 1.Mike Doyle said …
I’m glad I wasn’t the only one given pause by that article. I think you hit my unease on the head when you said, “I meditate to become aware of everything in the moment - the unsatisfactory and the numinous.” Me too, because they are both there in the moment.
For Thatcher to claim the primacy of the numinous over the everyday, refute any hint of enlightenment in the everyday, to bluntly opine “the truth of the matter is” about anything, seems to me utterly dualistic. So every teaching of Pema Chodron, Thich Nhat Hanh, Shunryu Suzuki, or even Nagarjuna (as detailed in the same issue) regarding the use of the mundane as a springboard to glimpse enlightenment in the present moment was nothing more than mistaken myth-making? Come now.
There is an unexplored assumption that pervades Thatcher’s article: the assumption that the mundane world is unsatisfactory in the first place. Her assumption leads her explicitly to a nihilistic outcome: the mundane is to be transcended, to fall away, as the practitioner reaches deep enough that form no longer matters. Oddly enough, in the same issue it’s noted that positions such as Thatcher’s that confuse the mere concept of the numinous with the sublime, itself, would have earned the scorn of Nagarjuna.
When the mundane is seen as something to be rejected, where, exactly, is room for compassion for your fellow sentient beings left to arise–or to be expressed, for that matter? I wouldn’t call that arid Buddhism, or Buddhism at all. I’d just call that selfishness.