Journal of a Sabbatical

November 2, 2000

meditation

Today's Reading: Circling the Sacred Mountain by Robert Thurman and Tad Wise

I wonder how I can be both too serious and too funny at the same time. I am way too serious.

This entry was going to be about meditation. Hence the title. I used to meditate regularly, then irregularly, then hardly ever ... now lately I've been missing it. A lot of it has to do with my resistance to certain aspects of the dharma as taught by the Tibetan Buddhists (as opposed to Zen or Vipassana traditions).

Zen does not make such a big deal about hell realms. Tibetan Buddhism does.

Basically, after my experience with Joan-west, who is a student in the Gelugpa lineage of Tibetan Buddhism, perceiving Watchemoket Cove as a hell realm full of beings who eat each other (actually the swans pretty much eat plant material and a lot of the ducks mainly eat plant material too - and though the ducks eat fish, shellfish, and beings like that they don't eat each other - I've never seen a duck eat another species of duck) I've had a hard time reconciling interbeing (in the Zen tradition) with animals with viewing their lives as something I'm supposed to be afraid of experiencing in a future life.

I know my understanding of the Tibetan teachings is not very good because I haven't studied them. However, I am attached to the notion that it does more good for everybody - people and ducks - if I keep the Corps of Engineers and the dredging spoils out of the cove than if I sit every day visualizing all the ducks being transformed into Vajrayogini. That's partly my gospel according to Matthew Catholic upbringing (when did I see you as a duck, Lord, and not save you from polluted spoils?) and partly just the fix-it mentality I inherited from my parents. Visualization didn't enter into it.

I guess until I started writing this, I didn't realize how much the animals as hell realm thing has been bothering me. I also don't know where I got the idea that to continue Buddhist practice I have to follow the Tibetan path. There are 84,000 dharma doors, surely the Zen door is one of them.

Well, this didn't turn out to be at all the entry I meant to write when I started, but here it is.