by Om Swami
You are a flower and you have a beautiful life. Believe that. Compare your lifestyle to those of billions of people, who can’t even afford to live a basic life. Most people don’t just order anything they like when they go to a restaurant. They look at the prices on the menu and then decide what they can afford. Not everybody enjoys the luxuries of life, but you do. Remember where you are in your life and what you are blessed with already. If this is not enough, if this still seems inadequate for you to experience happiness in life, then tell me, what would make you happy? Nothing else.
Zen teaches us that happiness is not a pursuit. It’s not something we have to seek. Yes, we should have a zeal, zest and passion for life, but passion should not be taken as recklessness or an immoderate effort. This thing about passion, where you are constantly told you must have a ‘passion’ in life, is a very new, very American phenomenon. Billions of people lived before this came into vogue, and they had no ‘passions’ in their lives. But they were happy, quiet and content nonetheless.
Zen says, just let me be in the present moment, that even breathing is a blessing. If I can’t be happy with what I have now, I can never be happy with whatever I may have in the future. It is all but apparent that every time and under any circumstances, you will have at least one difficult person in your life. You will face at least one big challenge. And you will have to deal with at least one adversity, whether that is mental, physical, emotional, psychical, psychological or spiritual. This is very much a part of life. But in all this, to be able to flow is Zen.
In the thousand years after Buddha passed away, Zen did not really catch on. This is because people need anchors; people, they need rituals. When I say to people, ‘Just sit and be aware; you don’t have to do anything,’ they think it isn’t sufficient. As if they have already mastered the art of sitting still! If I give them a mantra – and it is very rare for me to give someone one – they will chant it for a few weeks, maybe months, and then come back to me and say, ‘Okay, what’s the next step?’
This is very material thinking. There is no next step. If you can’t become one with yourself using any given path, there is no ‘next step’ that will ever get you there. There are stages in meditation, not steps, but you don’t get to those stages by doing different things. You don’t experience those stages by going further. In fact, they are more like states than stages.
You just do what you do. You keep perfecting it; you keep championing it and then you reach that stage. As a certain martial arts master said to his student, ‘Don’t worry about learning ten thousand moves. You are not going to perfect that many. I am not interested in teaching ten thousand moves that you may do only once or twice. I am only interested in teaching you that one, winning move that you will practice ten thousand times. That will become your perfect move.’
For 1000 years, people did not pay much attention to the Zen system of meditation partly because different sects had sprung out of the Buddhist thought and they were busy proving their supremacy over each other and busy fighting amongst themselves. Look at the development of any religion that granted leniency and encouraged liberality of thought. Even the stricter religions with central authority could not restrict the formation of new sects within their belief system. That is the way of the world.
There was a Zen monk who had a cat and he loved it dearly. But one doesn’t keep a cat, it keeps you! Sometimes, when he would leave his cat behind to conduct a meditation session, the cat would run amok. The monk would go back to his hut to find the cat’s clawmarks on his furniture and his pillow torn to shreds. So he decided it was best to keep his cat with him at all times, even during his discourses and meditations. Subsequently, he would take his cat to each meditation session. One of the disciples even said, ‘Hmm, the only difference between this guy and us is, he has a cat. Clearly, the cat is doing something.’ His master would stroke the cat while meditating or while conducting a session. The disciples were convinced that he was drawing his energies from the cat.
Eventually, the master died which truly upset them all.
After some time, they said to each other, ‘Well, we still have the cat. Our master is gone, but who cares? We know everything he said. He was just repeating the same old stuff anyway. But the cat is new, and the cat is alive. So, to honour our master, to really understand what he meant, we are going to make a seat for the cat. It will sit in place of our master.’
The disciples made every effort to please the cat. They would offer him cream and yogurt, and gave it whatever it wanted to eat. It soon became their idol. They said, ‘The cat is doing all these beautiful things.’ Some people meditating there would swear that they indeed experienced a deeper, more satisfying meditation in the cat’s presence. They would say, ‘Oh, I was deep in meditation, and I had this amazing experience: I saw the cat become very large before me, and the whole universe was the cat,’ and so on. People have all kinds of experiences, of course.
A few years went by, and the cat passed away too. There was also a severe drought. ‘How can we meditate now?’ The disciples asked themselves. ‘The cat is gone, and the master too.’ And then they figured, ‘Simple. We’ll get a new cat.’
Their monastery became the cat monastery; the cat became their religion and central to their meditation. Many books were written on how the cat’s hair does this and its tongue signifies that; the cat’s skin possesses some qualities. People came up with a whole lot of esoteric interpretations – all retrofitted into something that had no meaning. People wrote huge pieces on how the cat was essential to proper meditation; on which days you should bring a cat and on which days it should be bathed. Rituals were established on how a cat should be cleaned and cared for.
Nearly five centuries later, one day, the new master who gained the seat after the latest cat had died said, ‘I am not going to replace that cat with another. I don’t think a cat could have such a great impact on meditation.’
The disciples there said, ‘This man is crazy! He is going to destroy our tradition. He does not know why our master was doing this five hundred years ago.’
The new master said, ‘I am the abbot; I am the decision-maker here.’
So, after some time, monks in the monastery started meditating without a cat. And then they realized, ‘Oh, we can meditate without a cat after all.’ Then they wrote books on how to meditate effectively without a cat, and how to realize your dreams in the absence of a cat. And so on and so forth. It sounds funny, but this is how most schools of thought and cults have come about. And then it passed. So suddenly, they were without a system.
The same thing happened with Zen. For 1000 years, Buddhists fought amongst themselves with each group saying, ‘We are better, you are wrong,’ and they formed Hinayana, Mahayana and Vajrayana Buddhism. Yana means ‘vehicle’ – the vehicle of using mantras: the diamond vehicle, the superior vehicle and so on. Everyone divided Buddha’s teachings. Can you imagine? The man who stood for no dogmas; his teachings were divided with their own sets of rituals.
1000 years passed and in the south of India, in a place called Kanchipuram, in present-day Tamil Nadu, a child was born into a royal family. Deeply influenced by the Buddhist teachings, he set out on a remarkable path that not only revived the Zen thought but took it far and wide…
‘O monk!’ said the emperor, ‘I have built numerous temples, monasteries and stupas. I have sponsored transcriptions of scriptures. What merit must have I gained from these religious acts?’
‘None whatsoever,’ Bodhidharma replied.
The Legend of Bodhidharma
That young boy from south India grew up to be an erudite scholar and an exceptional meditator. He was given the name Bodhidharma. At the beckoning of his inner voice, he went to China to spread the message. Since he was from a royal lineage, and even though now a monk, his manner of speaking, thinking, acting still had royalty written all over. He had his own way of operating. Bodhidharma was not in awe of anybody and he wasn’t intimidated by power. He soug
ht and received a direct audience with the emperor of China.
The emperor said to him, ‘O monk, I have built six Buddhist temples and I have founded at least 100 monasteries and built more than 500 stupas. I have sponsored countless transcriptions of Buddhist scriptures. What merit do you think I must have gained from all these religious acts?’
Bodhidharma said, ‘None whatsoever.’
The king said, ‘What do you mean? All these things that I did, the money I spent. Are you are telling me this has no spiritual merit?’
‘If you do a spiritual act with an expectation,’ Bodhidharma replied,’ it becomes worldly. It becomes a material act. It may no longer be noble or spiritual.’
‘And what is a spiritual noble act, then?’
Bodhidharma gave an answer – and Buddha probably would have said something similar some 1000 years earlier.
With the piercing gaze of a monk’s, free and indifferent, Bodhidharma said calmly, ‘There is nothing called spiritual or noble, or anything. It’s all just empty. It’s emptiness.’
‘If it’s all empty,’ the emperor contended, ‘then who’s standing in front of me right now?’
One of the hallmarks of truly enlightened people is that they never walk into an argument. There is no record of Buddha ever arguing with anyone or even justifying his position. He spoke from a position of his own understanding and left it to the listener to make sense based on what they could fathom. Bodhidharma did something similar for he perceived the king’s question as not a curious enquiry of an eager seeker, but a dry polemic intending to extend the argument and defend his own position. The king persisted, ‘If all is empty, then who are you and who am I?’
‘I don’t know, your majesty.’ These are Bodhidharma’s documented words: ‘I don’t know who’s standing here. I have said all I wanted to say.’
This annoyed the king and had Bodhidharma not been a monk, he would perhaps have been executed for his bold answers. The king asked him to leave.
Not surprisingly, Bodhidharma never became a favourite of the king and was never fully accepted in China. He left that place because he cared not about the riches of the world not about impressing anybody. He just knew the truth that he had gained from his master, the originator of which was the Buddha.
Bodhidharma took a small place on the outskirts of the kingdom, where he sat in one room and introduced a form of meditation called ‘wall gazing’. I have shared with you the history and origin of Zen, for I believe this has a definitive bearing on your own practice of meditation. Because we soon discover that meditation is about silence and stillness. That’s all. Everything else is just noise in every sense of the word.
Bodhidharma gazed at a wall for nine long years. That was his meditation. And, of course, as it happens in meditation, you sometimes feel sleepy and at times you feel lazy. Many times, he would fall asleep. Legend has it that Bodhidharma cut off his eyelids so he would not fall asleep. He said, ‘If I don’t have eyelids, I will not have that problem.’
Gradually, over centuries, Zen wisdom reached Japan where it found its true home. The school emptiness and impermanence found a full and permanent uptake in the glorious land of Japan where already established traditions of an ancient culture, kindness and hospitality were the perfect match for Zen. The practices of kinhin (walking meditation) and chado (the tea ritual) were introduced to this system of meditation. The Sanskrit word dhyana became Zazen and Zen got its name. Until then, not known as Zen but only a Buddhist system of meditation. But now Zen took its own form, disassociating itself of numerous rituals and precepts enumerated in the original discourses of Buddha.
The question that then arises is: ‘Why Zen, why now and why meditation?’
That’s where Zen is unique because it is not about sitting down and engaging your mind in any form of one-pointed concentration, which almost everyone finds challenging and tiring, even unrewarding. Zen says just do whatever you are doing with mindfulness. Practising Zazen (sitting-down meditation) will help you be more aware while doing all the other activities from bathing to washing dishes, but mostly the focus is to just enjoy everything we do or have to do in our lives. For if I’m doing anything in my life out of choice, there’s no reason to complain and if I don’t have a choice then there’s no sense in complaining.
Zen meditation is taught in a disciplic succession: from a guru to a disciple, and so on. As you become more mindful, one of the incredible things to happen with meditation is that you slow down. Your mind slows down, but it becomes far more effective. You get lot more done and you become more thorough.
I am paraphrasing a joke I once heard in one of the talks of Ajahn Brahm.
There was a man who attended a Zen retreat and he got a good hold over the techniques of meditation. Gradually, as he practised more, he became quite slow in his actions. Like the mindfulness in eating a tangerine. You can imagine, if you are enjoying each morsel of the fruit – savouring its taste, its fragrance and aroma, just as Buddha did – it would take more time than usual.
This man worked in a zoo where he oversaw the tortoise enclosure. When he went back to work, his co-workers thought he was unusually calm. In the afternoon, his supervisor came to check up on him and found there were no tortoises – the enclosure was empty.
‘What is going on?’ he asked him.‘Where are all the tortoises?’
The man replied very slowly, stuttering and stumbling at every word, ‘You…won’t…believe… what…happened in…the morning…I had… barely…opened the door…and whoosh! All…the… tortoises…ran out, fast as Ferraris. What was…I supposed…to do? I…just couldn’t…catch hold…of…them.’
With meditation, the pace of things change. It’s as if you have discovered a method to the madness around you. Your appetite decreases, along with your anger and aggression. You eat less, but are more nourished. You even age slower. This is what mindful living does to you. You use fewer words and you express yourself more effectively. With fewer words, your chances of hurting others lessens too.
Mindfulness makes you calm and that calmness makes you more mindful. They fuel each other, going hand in hand.
To be calm and mindful, in your daily lives, it is important to understand the impermanent nature of everything that exists, everything that is perceivable. And for that, I have a beautiful and a very simple exercise to share with you.
My life is like a flower. I was sowed at some point in time; I became a bud, was born, and bloomed like a flower. It doesn’t matter how much I protect myself, how fragrant I am, how alive I may be – one day, I am going to wither away.
Life Is a Flower
The exercise is very simple. Keep a fresh flower on your car’s dashboard when you drive to work in the morning or when you drive back in the evening. Just keep that flower or another one at your work desk or with you. Whenever you feel low, sad or depressed – which can be a daily occurrence in most of our lives – just look at the flower. Remind yourself this: my life is a flower. I am a flower myself. That this is a blessing.
Whatever I have now, if I don’t take care of it or value it, if I am not grateful for it, it will be taken away from me. This is the unfailing law of the universe. If you don’t value what you have, one day you will lose access to that thing. Caring for something is valuing it. More than 80 per cent of lottery winners eventually go back to being poor because they spend their winnings recklessly. Whatever we don’t value, we lose eventually. If you don’t value the life that you have, it will start to feel like a burden. You’ll say ‘I don’t want to live anymore. I’m tired of living and I’m tired of life’, and so on... Taking anything for granted is not valuing it.
And often we fail to value because we forget or lose sight of what we have been blessed with. All it takes to rectify it at times is a gentle reminder. That flower will act as yours.
Looking at the flower will make you aware of the transient nature of everything around you. You may say, ‘My life is like this flower. I was sowed a
t some point in time; I became a bud, an embryo. Then I was born and I bloomed like a flower. And it doesn’t matter how much I protect myself, how fragrant I am, how alive I may be – one day, I am going to wither away.
‘All my kaleshas (afflictions), all my dukhas (sorrows), my complaints, grudges, negativity, feelings: good, bad or ugly, my acquisitions – all will be left behind. And if I don’t live this moment, I will not have the chance to live the next either. Moment by moment, life is flitting away from me.’
Additionally, maybe the screen saver on your phone could be just these two scribbles: ‘Be grateful, be mindful’. Or it could be the wallpaper on your computer. Perhaps you could replace what you have with something more apt; something that reminds you to be mindful. And maybe next to the names of people in your phone book who give you grief, you could just write, ‘Smile, smile, xyz calling…etc.’
There was this man who had a rather strange habit. He would visit a pub and get drunk, and every few minutes he would take a photograph out of his pocket, look at it for a while and then put it back. This would happen on most days and one day, the bartender’s curiosity got the better of him.
‘Whose photo do you keep looking at, buddy? If I may ask?’
‘That’s my wife’s photo,’ he replied nonchalantly.
‘You must love her very much.’