So I said last time that I would say a bit about the nondual consciousness cultivated in, and as, Buddhist practice, and its relationship to the matter of idolatry.
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I grew up worshiping an idol.
That’s opaque. Let me explain.
Without belaboring detail, the climate of my (mostly) non-traumatic childhood was one in which the prevailing weather was a view that life would really begin with the next thing. This was the general atmosphere in my home. I know how that climate was “set” and who set it but that does not matter much to my purpose here.
Life was life-deferred.
In the peculiar way we fleshy material beings develop, that way of being in the world got fused to my body as a child who spent most of the days of summer on a 10-speed bicycle (tells you how old I am) traveling miles on my own, back when we thought it was safe for a child to do such a thing. I grew into adulthood moving, on those wheels, looking for life to begin at the point of arrival, the next place, the next thing, the next event, the next accomplishment, that stop up the road.
We all, seems to me, whether you like Freud or not, run the tapes of our childhood for good and for ill. A big part of maturing is, of course, identifying and then choosing which tapes serve as a good soundtrack to your life and which don’t. Though you never really retire them, you can differentiate from them, which is usually a lifelong process. I’m gonna guess you know what I’m talking about.
Anyway, the tape of life-as-always-deferred was the soundtrack to my life for almost four decades.
There’s more: that orientation to life-deferred that I picked up in my childhood household got solidified intellectually in a completely happenstance way, because I came up in the discipline of theology during a time when eschatology was revolutionizing everything theological. Everything was about looking to the coming kingdom, the basileia tou theou, as the measure of Christian life in this moment. Life coming from the future. Living in the already/not yet. I didn’t have the already, but I sure had the not-yet.
Along the way to all that, there was a quiet but repetitive message I heard when I made a turn away from a life of professional music-making and toward a life as a priest that this was somehow a loss, somehow not what I was really supposed to be doing.
So I ended up with a partly psychodynamic, partly theological concoction for a mindset – a sense I just lived with that, as my psychiatrist once put it, I was somehow “not in my right life.”
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Life-deferred never came. I oriented my life around it. I worshiped it in every breath and hour and day, sometimes actively, sometimes in the background. But my right life never arrived, or I never arrived in it.
It was an idol.
It was, as Paul Tillich might put it, a false ultimate concern. Like all idols, it was empty of power.
And it was Buddhist practice that made me sensitive to the personal and interpersonal damage that my idol-worship was doing.
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The genius of Buddhism in its early development – every spiritual movement has its genius – was to recognize that the cause of the distress, anomie, suffering, out-of-placeness, dissatisfaction (dūkkha) that touches all human beings is not in the failure to attain what we seek, but is the pattern of the seeking itself – or, more precisely, in a structural illusion that underlies the seeking.
Briefly….
We are all wrapped up in a pattern of attachment and aversion. I seek those other things I believe will build up, protect, enhance, satisfy the self; and I avoid those other things that will undermine or threaten the self. I work at it until I center on the right attachments and right aversions to protect, fulfill, and defend the self.
But that pattern rests on an illusion: that there is an independent, solid, stable, separate ME that can be fulfilled or undermined by stable separate OTHERS – whatever and whoever those others are. In fact, I am, as a self, always dynamic, permeable, changing, both here and beyond, both I and not-I, interdependently always arising and falling with all other things, all other people. I cannot stabilize my “self” beyond suffering, change, and death.
So the problem, it turns out, is not that I haven’t found that one thing that satisfies. The problem is the search for the one thing or the next thing that satisfies; and the faulty essentialism of self and world, the faulty binary that underpins that search. To put it too simply:
we think the problem is we haven’t found the right thing to make us whole;
but what is breaking us is the constant search for something else that will make us whole.
To end this suffering requires a life of practice and practice-based thought that unlearns that false essentialism, that false binary, a practice that reflects the world and the self as they really are and shapes us to inhabit that true reality.
(By the way, the preceding is a simple version of the Buddha’s “Four Noble Truths.” It’ll do for now.)
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Now, Buddhism talks about the ill-founded pattern of attachment-and-aversion, not about idols, but over time Buddhist practice has made me more attentive to the problem of our idolatry and gave me more insight into what idols are to us. Sure, “idols” is a more Abrahamic sort of term. But the Buddha’s concern seems to me to rhyme with the Abrahamic concern about idols.
To apply the logic of the Buddha’s four noble truths in Abrahamic language:
We are always making idols. But the idols we make do not satisfy, not because we haven’t found the right idols but because making idols doesn’t satisfy. The whole affair is bankrupt.
Mahayana streams of Buddhism develop an extremely radical and incisive version of this sensitivity to idols. A Buddhist in this tradition recognizes that our capacity for attachment, for idol-making, is persistent and insidious – so insidious that, for a Buddhist, seeking the Buddha is the last and most difficult attachment to let go. One can think one has cut the legs from underneath the attachment-aversion pattern by turning instead to the Buddha. And NOW what has one done? Become attached to the Buddha! Made an idol of the Buddha. And deepened the dualist illusion you were trying to let go to begin with.
Having, getting, becoming Buddha-nature…. The last, most exquisitely sneaky object of attachment to be let go is attachment to the Buddha himself. Because you already have, already are, Buddha-nature.
Remember Dōgen’s statement:
“Just understand that birth-and-death is itself nirvana. There is nothing such as birth and death to be avoided; there is nothing such as nirvana to be sought. Only when you realize this are you free from birth and death.” (Shōji)
Dōgen speaks of “leaping clear of the many and the one,” and that this practice is a “going beyond Buddha.” (Bendōwa) This very Buddhist tells us, “Have no designs on becoming a Buddha.” (Fukanzazengi) And there is that old Zen saying: “if you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him.”
Talk about sensitivity to idols!
Could it be, with a chord change, that this nondualist sensitivity to idols is precisely the insight present in something like Meister Eckhart’s prayer: “O God, deliver me from God?”
Could it be that this nondual awareness is at work in John of the Cross’s contention that in the search for communion with God, even the desire for communion with God must be let go?
Could it be there in Barth’s contention that Christian religion is just another effort-based system to which the true gospel of Jesus means to free us?
Could it be there in Shusaku Endo’s Fr. Rodrigues, who discovers in trampling the fumie (the image of Christ venerated by the Japanese Christians) that he joins himself to the very one he was seeking to serve, who gave himself to be trampled?
Now, I do not equate each of these figures across age and context – Juan de la Cruz, Meister Eckhart, Karl Barth, Shusaku Endo. They are writing different kinds of literature: mystical theology, dogmatic theology, historical fiction. Each deserves its nuance and particularity. But they are, it seems to me, cousins in their finely attuned recognition that, like “seeking to become the Buddha” in the Zen tradition, we can become attached to God, Church, Christ, so that the last and most insidious idol we must let go is “God,” “Church,” and “Christ” as we understand them.
This of course returns me to the theme with which I began some weeks ago. All of life is given. All of life is already divine grace. Practice does not attain blessedness because we are already blessed. But we do need to awaken to it. We need, as Dōgen says, to realize it.
The practice is a process of recognition, a growth into awareness of the grace always-already present in all the interdependent creation. A journey, to be sure, but a journey to the place where are.
Practice, in this way, is absolutely essential and completely unnecessary. Absolutely essential – the idols have to go. Completely unnecessary – the true God is already closer than your own breath, no idols needed.
For me, this means unlearning life-as-deferred. That became an idol for me, and my long practice as a Christian, deepened and sharpened by my practice of zazen, means ceasing my worship of that idol. Just this very life is my right life. It is here, now. So I really should open my hands to it – in zazen, and in the body of Christ given for me.
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In prayer we start from what we already have. You start from where you are and you deepen what you already have, and you realize you are already there…. Everything has been given us in Christ. All we need is to experience what we already possess. ~ Thomas Merton
The Dharma is amply present in every person, but without practice it is not manifested; without realization, it is not attained. It is not a question of one or many; let loose of it and it fills your hands. ~ Dōgen
And that kingdom that is coming? That kingdom of Jesus that lies ahead somewhere?
Once Jesus was asked by the Pharisees when the kingdom of God was coming, and he answered, “The Kingdom of God is not coming with things that can be observed, nor will they say ‘Look, here it is!’ or ‘There it is!’ For in fact the kingdom of God is among you. ~ Luke 17:20
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More to come.
To quote the ad for an AI service, your comments on Meister Eckhart and John of the Cross “make the invisible into the obvious.” Thank you!
Thanks for this! You say all the muddled things moiling about in my brain in such a concisely crafted way. Helpful! And a joy to read... You are a gift!