by Ajahn Brahm
The court ruled that the agarwood should be returned to Mahabodhi. I had it installed in the conference room. The agarwood had rapidly appreciated in value and was now worth millions. I have decided to give it to Dahui to sell, to raise money for the charitable work he is doing for children with cleft palates and other congenital disorders in Vietnam.
I have continued my personal practice with the bodhisattva Mahamayuri Vidyarajni, who sits atop a white peacock and freed himself from the hunters’ net, and with Ucchusma, who was “unafraid of dirt” and dragged the Spiral Hair-Knot Brahma King out of his filthy abode to bow at the Buddha’s feet.
I have come to realize that I need to be like the agarwood. Its special properties are produced when the tree’s heartwood is attacked. Life is like that. When you’re bitten, stung, or stabbed you secrete substances to protect yourself. It’s a natural response. And sometimes this can be a precious thing, if we approach this process with the right perspective. Our life experiences sculpt us and make us who we are. This is how we grow, mature, and transform. The peacock spreads his fan. He ingests poison and turns it into luminous halos: our eyes opening to the suffering of others. Falsely accused, branded with depraved behavior and broken vows, I remembered the Dharma of the agarwood. When the tree is attacked, it does not strike out. It turns the poison at its core into something fragrant, precious, and beautiful.
Flying White: Unique and Unrepeatable
I LEARNED the rudiments of calligraphy from my ordination master, Songnian, although he never let me actually draw. I mixed his ink and cut his paper and laid out his tools. He taught me the essence of the art — its spirit. He was considered a national living treasure by the government of Singapore, and his works were much sought after by collectors and connoisseurs. Perhaps if he had lived he would have actually gotten around to teaching me how to put brush to paper. As it was, he died before I made even one stroke. Yet he had planted the seed. When I began the process of rebuilding Mahabodhi in 2009, I wanted to preserve the legacy of Songnian and pass on the lineage, and I was determined to learn calligraphy and carry on the art form that Songnian had mastered and loved.
I took lessons from a calligraphy teacher who had been a good friend of Songnian’s. He was an old-fashioned, traditional teacher, strict and very Confucian in his thinking. Calligraphy represented for him a direct connection to tradition that went back thousands of years. For the first two or three years, his students wrote only their names, nothing more. “How can you do calligraphy if you can’t even sign your name?” he told them. He made an exception for me, and I was allowed more freedom of expression.
When I took on the project of rebuilding Mahabodhi, I really didn’t know what I was getting myself into. Soon I found myself chasing money, day and night, as the process required it. Since I had some practice in calligraphy under my belt, I decided that perhaps I could raise money in this way. I advertised in a fundraising campaign that I would write sutras in people’s names, and these calligraphies would be embedded in the concrete that would make up the building. The whole of Mahabodhi is thus encased with these sutras and the good, supportive energy of the people who sponsored them.
I worked on this project for two years, barely sleeping. It was a marathon. Before the end of the reconstruction, my eyes gave out. It was as though I were looking through a thickening fog that smudged everything and blocked the sun. Sometimes, out of my right eye, it was totally dark. The day before the big Buddha statue was due to be installed in the main hall, I saw an ophthalmologist. He quickly diagnosed a retinal detachment and said I was already three-quarters blind in my right eye. He wanted to operate immediately. I told him he would have to wait until the statue was installed.
He was aghast. “What if you lose the eye?”
“I’ve waited ten days to see you. I can wait one more. Besides, if I lose the eye, I still have the other,” I replied.
While I was doing the calligraphy, copying the mantras and sutras, I realized that each word and every character, even as I repeated them, were not the same. They were always a little bit different. And they were always flawed, always imperfect. As I drew and drew and drew, my writing became smoother. It flowed, but this sense of never quite attaining perfection was always there; it never left. In fact, it became ever more evident. I realized that all the uniqueness and flaws in the characters were actually what made them beautiful, and that connected me to beauty in the uniqueness and imperfections of all the people who were making the donations. Mahabodhi is wrapped in the wisdom of the Dharma, and that Dharma is most powerfully expressed in our fragile and flawed humanity.
This insight into who we are is expressed in a term in calligraphy called flying white. It is a deliberate embrace of the imperfection that occurs when the brush does not hold enough ink or pressure and is applied in uneven ways, and there are white areas inside the stroke or at its tailing end. The strokes in calligraphy are a lot like flying — you set out through the air and in one fluid motion come to ground. Flying white is a relatively recent development in calligraphy’s evolution — it could be thought of as a Romantic school of writing that embraces a kind of spontaneity and emotional force that the classical schools would find too individually expressive.
Flying white points to both our limitations and aspirations. It suggests the ineffable, the transcendent. It is about what is missing. It allows an openness of interpretation, an interaction and connection between the artist and the viewer of the art. It is something that you can’t predict — it just happens. It has a kind of freedom. It cannot be practiced. It is like stripes on a tiger’s tail. They are never exactly even, never exactly the same. They are the imprint of creation, which always expresses itself in its various forms as something unique and unrepeatable. Those stripes are both dazzling and incomprehensible. I have learned that there’s a lot of flying white in both our relationships and our lives.
After the retina surgery, I had two cataract operations. My vision is distorted and blurry. I can’t do calligraphy anymore because of my compromised sight. But what I do see is beautiful.
Heheyana: Going beyond Expectations
NOT ONLY are we creatures of habit, we are creatures of expectation. We always have ideas about the way we want life to go. It’s the same with spiritual practice. If we want to become enlightened during our practice, enlightenment will inevitably elude us. Our practice will be about the expectation rather than the reality of what is happening in the present moment.
When life does not match our expectations, it’s always because we aren’t doing what’s needed. When we’re filled with expectations, positive or negative, it’s impossible to be in the here and now and respond appropriately. It’s the same with relationships. When we have expectations — projections — in a relationship, we are not really interacting. We are not in the moment, responding to what’s being offered, and the situation is compounded if the other person is also operating from a place of expectation! These interactions will be empty of real intimacy, and our expectations will cloud our minds.
And it is the same with our practice. When we live with expectations we are not in the present moment; we are not living Chan. If you ask a Chan master: “Were you expecting it when you awakened?” the answer will always be “No!” It is always, always, always a complete, total surprise.
To illustrate this point, I tell my students the story of a Chan master who practiced what Ajahn Brahm calls Hahayana and I’ll call Heheyana. This master was very short and a little bit fat, with a big round head and sloping shoulders and bushy black eyebrows. He enjoyed making his disciples laugh. He had a thin, high voice, like the whistle of a tea kettle, and his humor was of a very special and disarming type. He was completely deadpan. He never let on when he slipped a joke into his Dharma talks. He would launch into one in the same cadence and tone — and with the same serious, almost hangdog expression — that he used to comment on the sutras, discuss meditation, or talk about anything else that happened to pop into his head.
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sp; His jokes were actually funnier because of his stern, foreboding expression. They took his students by surprise, and even when he cracked a joke, it was often unclear to them that it actually was a joke — because after the punch line their master’s face would still be as expressionless as a stone.
The students, therefore, could not prepare for the jokes. They could not have that expectation. The jokes came out of nowhere, materializing unexpectedly, almost miraculously. There was never any signal they were coming. But, oh, they were sharp, and their deadpan delivery made them even more devastating.
The students could not contain themselves. They rolled around on the floor. They waved their hands in the air. They tried helplessly to fend off their hilarity. But they could not stop laughing. One burst of laughter led to another and then another, and then when they had finally quieted down someone wouldn’t be able to help himself, and he would snicker or snort and then the whole cycle would begin again. And during all of this the master stood pugnaciously at the head of the class, firm on his little feet with his belly sticking out and his foreboding hangdog expression, without even cracking the shadow of a smile. All they needed to do was look at him and they convulsed.
One day, after the master had not cracked a joke for a good long while, he slipped one slyly into his talk about the Sixth Patriarch. Everyone was laughing and laughing — haha, hehe — it was so very, very funny, particularly their little master with his stern, hangdog expression.
Suddenly, while they were laughing, the master shouted, “Who is laughing?!”
In that moment the whole class awakened.
Nothing Special
“WHAT HAPPENS when you become a buddha?” one of my students asked me during a recent retreat in Chan Forest, our meditation center in the mountains of Java.
The question took me by surprise, and I laughed. How to respond?
“Nothing special,” I finally replied. “Very ordinary. Like you and me.”
My students were shocked. So much Buddhism in the East turns Buddha into a deity and places our clergy in a privileged intermediary position between the Buddha’s divinity and our flawed humanity. This is not at all the way we understand buddhahood in Chan.
When Buddha awakened under the Bodhi tree, at that moment he realized everyone is Buddha. Buddhahood is nothing special. We are all the same, with the same buddha nature and the same capacity for awakening. It’s very ordinary.
My student was quite touched when he heard this answer. He said that I had given him hope. He had felt that as an ordinary person — no one special — it was impossible to achieve the exalted buddha state. It seemed out of reach. Infinitely distant. Like a star.
“The Buddha is a human being,” I told him. “Just like you. No difference. There is nothing special about him, nothing supernatural. What he shows us is that through the practice of Chan, all of us, every single one, can awaken. It doesn’t matter what race we are, what ethnicity, what gender. Our level of education doesn’t matter. How we look — our appearance. Our age. All irrelevant. Attaining buddhahood is all about what we do with our mind, and how we go about living our daily life.”
During my court case, I was reminded of my student’s question. When I took my seat in the witness stand I felt like I had entered a time machine. Singapore’s high court is located downtown, in an ultramodern building. The judge and lawyers wore black robes. The scene looked like something out of a Harry Potter book. People watched the proceedings from behind a glass partition way in the back of the room. As the questioning began, I could feel a very heavy vibe in that room — a thick residue of so many people’s anger, frustration, despair, regret, grievance, triumph, vindication, and revenge.
Why does everybody always want to win? I wondered as I sat in the witness stand. Why did that urge seem to overwhelm every other consideration? I thought of my teacher Yin Shun and the institute in Taiwan where I had studied as a young monk. Yin Shun — a pioneer of critical, engaged, leftist, activist, humanistic Buddhism, and one of the foremost scholars of Buddhism of his generation — had helped me see that the Buddha was a man rather than a god. Buddha was born a human being in the human world, and everything he accomplished was in this world, including his passage into nirvana.
We humans are imperfect. The Buddha too! He kept amending his teachings. Even after awakening he needed to try out the teachings and adjust and revise them. It was the spirit of the teachings that remained constant. Yin Shun taught us that the Buddha was simply a human being who had reached his full potential. Perhaps most importantly, he made us feel that if the Buddha could do that, we could do it too!
The lawyers spun their web of words, droning on and on. I sat in the hot seat, trying to answer each question as truthfully as I could. There was a sense of unreality. Win or lose — it was only a game, and in the end, I realized, it didn’t matter. It was about how you live when you win, or how you live when you lose. How we use our experiences. It is as Ajahn Brahm says: it is not about whether you choose this or that. It’s about making that choice right.
Win or lose? Relax. It’s nothing special. Very simple; very ordinary.
Let It Come, Let It Go
ALTHOUGH SINGAPORE has over five million people, it is actually a very small island country. The Buddhist community in Singapore is even smaller, tight-knit and gossipy. Everybody is in everybody else’s business, and even a whiff of scandal that has to do with a prominent religious figure travels like wildfire.
When the newspapers published innuendo that I was gay, I thought, Sure, why not? The following week maybe there would be an innuendo that I liked old women — that I was a lounge lizard — or that I liked young women. Then all women. Doesn’t matter, I thought, it’s merely words. Heterosexual, homosexual, bisexual. Whatever sexual. It’s okay. No problem. Let it come; let it go.
My students, as you might imagine, did not have quite the same attitude. They were outraged. They felt the lies and innuendos were tarnishing my reputation and undermining the work that I had been doing with their steadfast help and support. I was touched by their loyalty and the strong desire to protect me, although I knew there were limitations to what we could do to. During a retreat in Indonesia, I told them the following story.
There was once a famous Chan master. One day a young woman of aristocratic bearing and appearance brought a baby to the monastery where he was abbot and demanded the monks let her come in.
“Summon the abbot,” she ordered. When he appeared before her, she held up the baby. “This is your child,” she cried, turning slowly in a circle so that all the other monks who had gathered could see.
It was big monastery, and many monks witnessed this scene. “You have to be responsible,” she insisted. The abbot didn’t say anything in response. He was very quiet and calm. She thrust the baby toward him. His fellow monks clamored and sought to restrain her.
“Let the child stay,” said the abbot. He took the baby in his arms.
The mother turned and fled through the monastery’s gate and disappeared.
During the next years, the monk looked after the child, caring for him. The countryside far and wide was rife with gossip about this fledgling who was now being raised in the monastery by an abbot of high repute. The abbot was an object of endless speculation and derision. But he never said anything refuting the claim that the child was his or the multiplying rumors — which had started the moment he accepted the child — that he had many more children scattered throughout the countryside. He looked after the child and went about his work.
The child grew up, well looked after by the abbot and the monks of the monastery, who educated him and taught the Buddhist values of ahimsa (nonviolence) and loving-kindness. The child would fall asleep during meditation and services. The monks didn’t mind. They just let him be.
Then one day, when the child was seven years old, the monastery was in a state of great alarm. Outside its gates were a thousand soldiers in ranks, bloodstained from a recent battle.
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nbsp; Their leader, a tall young general in full regalia, rode forward from their ranks and commanded the terrified monks to summon the abbot. When the abbot appeared, the general dismounted. Then the woman who all those years ago had left the baby with the abbot came and stood by the general’s side. The monks had no idea what was going to happen. Was the abbot going to be beheaded? That seemed the most likely outcome.
Instead, the general and the woman prostrated themselves in front of the abbot, their faces in the dirt. They wept and begged forgiveness. She confessed that the child was not actually the abbot’s — it was the young general’s. It came out that she and the abbot had been childhood playmates. She was the daughter of a high general who had been a good friend of the monastery’s former abbot, and she had grown up playing with that abbot’s most gifted and favored monk. The young monk and the girl were very close, very good friends, and the old general had often remarked to the girl that he wished the young man was not a monk so that he could become his son-in-law.
The young woman had fallen in love with her father’s aide-de-camp and become pregnant. The couple thought of running away, but they knew the old general would find them and kill them and probably kill the child as well. The old general said he did not want to see the child ever again after it was born.
By this time the old abbot, who was the old general’s friend and confidante, had died. The favored disciple and playmate of the young woman became the new abbot. The couple knew the old general would dare not touch the abbot of such an established and highly regarded monastery, particularly because he was so fond of him. So they hatched a plan to leave the child at the monastery for safekeeping.
Now, they said through their tears, the old general had died in battle and the child’s father had been promoted to the supreme rank by the emperor. They had come to reclaim their child.