Out of a living silence

A while back I was inteviewed (in English) on a Dutch Buddhist radio station. The interviewer, Fred Gales, had done his homework well and was interested in asking questions about my dual religious membership in a Quaker meeting and in a Buddhist organization. His questions provoked me into thinking more carefully about just how I manage to balance and reconcile these two approaches to religious practice, and about why I don’t experience any conflicts on account of pursuing two paths at the same time. Thinking about all these things has made me review pretty much my entire life (yet again) in a search for clues that might help solve this mystery.

Sometime in the 1980s, during my Zen years, there was an open house event at the temple I belonged to. An outsider observed that our Zen group seemed to be a very happy bunch of people who were very quick to smile and laugh. The Zen master, Samu Sunim, replied by saying “We don’t have much fun around here. And because we don’t, we make the most of the small opportunies to do so.” That statement, I have realized many times, could be used as a fairly accurate description of my whole orientation to life. Growing up in a post-Protestant family with no religious affiliations exposed me to a culture of general skepticism about all religious claims but with a cluster of attitudes that bore all the marks of Protestant influence. Doing things just for fun was not encouraged, but at the same time I was led to believe that if one enjoys one’s work, then one does not really need to play very much. Work itself is recreation enough. I have no idea whether that is what my parents intended for me to get out of my childhood, but that is what I did in fact get out of it.

The emphasis on work and on constant self-criticism (which Socrates called the examined life, and which Buddhists call being mindful) led me naturally into an abiding love of Stoicism; my first philosophical love was an anthology of writings by the Stoics. If there had been a guild of Stoics in my neigbhorhood, I surely would have joined it. A time went by, the closest I could find was a community of Quakers, and, a few years later, a community of Buddhists. Both communities reinforced childhood patterns of preferring plain utility to ornamentation and frills, tools to toys, of gravitating to simplicity in clothing, fewness of possessions (except books, and those always educational in nature) and a ferocious selectivity in friends and companions. Neither community demanded adherence to creeds or dogmas or doctrines. Both placed an emphasis on thinking carefully before speaking and acting, on living a life of service, on self-reliance and on open-mindedness, pluralism and relativism. One of my Buddhist mentors, Sangharakshita, once said words to the effect that a dedicated Buddhist never takes a holiday; a Buddhist’s principal work is being a Buddhist, and from that work one can never take a day off. Very much the same can be said of a Quaker (and, I believe, any spiritual tradition.) If one is not leading the examined life every hour of every day of one’s life, then one is not leading the examined life. This does not mean that one never stumbles or fails; it means that one is rarely unaware of one’s shortcomings and never complacent. In all these practical ways, being a convinced Quaker is indistinguishable from being a practicing Buddhist.

Despite an overall similarity in attitudes and spiritual practice, there are differences between Buddhists and Quakers in community structure. And on this score I have to say I am much more attuned to the the community of Quakers than to any Buddhist community I have known. Among Quakers all people, in principle, are clergy; there is no laity. There is no concentration of authority or of power. Everyone is a teacher, and everyone is a disciple. No one is considered more authoritative than another simply because of gender, age, ethnicity, education, economic status, or familial prestige. There are no masters, gurus, lamas, swamis, cardinals, bishops, or priests to be reckoned with in a Quaker community, no one to prostrate before or bow to. (In early days, many a Quaker spent time in prison for refusing to remove his hat or to scrape and bow before a man considered to be of higher station.) Because everyone is to be honored and revered, no one is to be treated with special veneration. That attitude is so deeply ingrained in me that I have never felt perfectly at home in Buddhist communities that have people (nearly always males) who hold exalted offices and whose words are held to be especially sacred. In community structure (or lack therefore) the Quakers speak to my condition, and the Buddhists are always slightly off-putting.

In the language in which they express their teachings, on the other hand, I feel perfectly at home with Buddhists. I can speak Quakerese, but I am aware that I speak that language with a detectable accent. I can use all the usual Quaker words and expressions, but in my heart I know I mean something else when I use them than most Quakers mean when they use them. I translate every Quakerism into Buddhist idiom, whereas I rarely need to translate Buddhism into any other idiom (except when the topic of conversation comes to rebirth, in which case I find myself translating that into the unrepentant materialism of my scientific upbringing).

Somehow, despite the potential confusions of being both a Quaker and a Buddhist, I never find myself wondering which I am, or whether I am more one than the other. When I do feel confusion (and I do feel it plenty), it is when I ask myself whether I should be anything at all other than a human being who was given a name by his parents. Why wear any other label at all? Why have a name brand? Why belong to a Quaker meeting? Why be a member of a Buddhist sangha? Asking myself these questions makes me aware of a decided lack of authenticity, a recognition that I am not yet following the advice that Polonius gave to Laertes in words my mother encouraged me to memorize, and which she spoke to me on many occasions during my adolescence and my adulthood:

This above all: to thine ownself be true,
And it must follow, as the night the day,
Thou canst not then be false to any man.

In this both the inner Buddhist and the inner Quaker knows I have fallen short. But why?

For those of us who grew up in nominally Christian countries, the Christmas season is an annual time that evokes memories of every previous year of our lives. Christmas is like a string on which the beads of all our years are strung together into a more or less coherent whole. Having lived through the better part of sixty-five years and gone through just about enough transitions, I find my thoughts and emotions around Christmas are pretty complex. Let me try to tease some of them apart.

• Silent night, secular night. I grew up in a pretty secular family. We celebrated Christmas by putting up decorations, sending out cards, exchanging gifts and drinking eggnog and eating turkey. As a child I was always moved by the story of Joseph and Mary trying to find a place to spend the night, and I loved the idea of a baby being born in a pile of straw in a barn, surrounded by gently lowing cows and bleating sheep. It seemed a perfect start to life. And of course I also knew how the story ended with the tragic execution by Romans of the man who had once been an innocent babe in the manger. The story moves me no less now than it did when I was a child. In fact, it probably moves me much more now, because I am much more aware than I was then of the kinds of suffering people can go through between the time of their birth and the time of their death. The birth of Jesus symbolizes for me the birth of every innocent child who will someday face challenges and trials that shatter innocence and leave wounds that never quite heal. So Christmas has been, and continues to be, a time of joy mingled with profound sadness. It is a time to reflect on what it means to be human.
• All is calm, all is light. As a young man living and worshiping with Quakers, I developed a deeper appreciation of Jesus the rebel who listened to his own inner voice and followed his own light. The Quaker conviction that we are all in possession of the same inward light of the holy spirit that inspired Jesus made me look to Jesus as a model of uncompromising and fearless integrity, a man who did what was to be done and was never intimidated by the reactions of those in positions of power and authority. As a young man who saw the fullest realization of the teachings and actions of Jesus in the writings of Karl Marx, and especially in the advocacy for the poor, the weak, the oppressed and the downtrodden, I saw Jesus as an angry and persistent champion of those who were being held down by social, political and economic forces, and Christmas was a time for reflecting on all that. Reflecting on all that had the effect of turning me more and more against the commercialism and consumerism of modern Christmas. Nothing was a better symbol of the enemy of all the Marxist-Quaker Jesus had stood for than the modern image of Santa Claus, which had been fashioned by the advertising companies that promoted Coca-Cola, a company at the vanguard of the shameless commercialization of the Christmas spirit.
• Christ the bodhisatva is born. My discovery of Buddhism, which in an odd way was a by-product of my explorations of Quakerism and Marxism, was a discovery of the teachings and practices that became the beacon of my adult life and led me to see the limitations of angry rebellion against the powerful classes. Buddhism gradually turned my personal picture of Jesus into a bodhisattva who selflessly healed the sick and injured, who rescued women from angry mobs bent on stoning them to death for adultery, who enabled the blind to see (which I always took as a figurative expression for enabling the foolish to become wise). For others Christ might be a savior, but for the Quakerly Buddhist that I had become, Christ was still the model of a life well lived, the Socratic examined life, the Buddhist life of wisdom and compassion.

Everything I have ever been, I still am, although in transformed ways. At Christmas time all those images of Jesus from Christmases past come fully to life. I walk around with tears in my eyes. Tears of joy, tears of rage, tears of hope, tears of despair. Secular, humanist, Marxist, Quaker, Buddhist tears. Human tears. Complicated tears. Wonderful tears.

Huge cathedrals and basilicas always plunge me into a complex web of conflicting feelings. On the one hand, I almost always find myself feeling peaceful and serene in the vast spaces under the vaulted ceilings, and I usually feel appropriately inspired by the iconography. If a cathedral is very old, I invariably feel a connection with the dozens or scores of generations of worshipers who have been there before me. All those feelings are just what magnificent cathedrals are meant to evoke.

On the other hand, there is a part of me that rebels against the possibility of being dependent on externals for any kind of religious feeling. After all, I come from a long line of Protestants who were so wary of external symbols that they sometimes physically destroyed them. The actions of those iconoclasts, of course, betrayed a deep attachment to abstract ideals that was every bit as pernicious as the dependence on concrete externals they so feared. I am fully aware of that, and that awareness blunts the the edge of the sword of my instinctive rebellion against institutional structures.

Less easy to moderate is the sense of uneasiness I always feel around anything grand. Huge buildings, highly ornamented vestments, well-crafted religious artifacts, magnificent thrones, bejeweled scepters and crowns and rings are invariably costly and therefore sponsored by the exceptionally wealthy and powerful. It is impossible for me to see such things without being reminded of all the poor who have borne the heavy burden of providing goods and services for the powerful. Even when the wealthy are generous, the very possibility of their being generous is almost always bought at the expense of those who come to be in need of generous aid. I have a difficult time escaping the conviction that there is something indecent about some people amassing as much wealth as several thousand ordinary people could amass by putting all their fortunes together. Using that wealth to sponsor the building of magnificent cathedrals and temples and splendid vestments for priests and the monarchs they bless does not offset the indecency of acquiring such an imbalance of wealth in the first place.

A few days ago I sat in Notre Dame de Paris cathedral. Despite trying my best to get in touch with the inward light that my Quaker practice is based upon, I simply could not get past the distraction of the flashes of the cameras of thousands of tourists who ignored the many signs requesting them not to use a flash if they took photographs. There was hardly any sense of the sacred remaining in the cathedral. But perhaps one cannot expect much of the sacred to dwell in a cathedral in which kings and emperors were once crowned; the secular has always been a persistently invasive presence in that particular cathedral.

My own inability to get beyond external distractions to make contact with my internal guide distressed me and made me feel shallow and somehow inadequate. I found myself longing for the quiet and simple Quaker meetinghouse where my wife and I normally worship when we are in our home town. The Zen Buddhist side of my mentality brought forth images of masters tearing up sutras and burning wooden Buddha statues, not out of contempt but to show that in the end we have only our own inner resources to draw upon and cannot rely on anything else. My Zen background also delivered a sense of being ashamed for being so dualistic in seeing the sacred and the secular as antogonistic opposites.

Outside the cathedral, after my unsuccessful essay at meditating, I blended into the crowds of curiosity-seeking tourists from all over the world and the local pickpockets honoring a long tradition of striving to make a dishonest living. For a moment I felt like a character in a Victor Hugo novel. A brief fantasy of swinging from the belfry like Quasimodo passed through my consciousness. My wife became in my eyes the lovely Esmeralda with whom the unfortunate hunchback of Notre-Dame was enamored.

We went across the street together, Esmeralda and I, and there we ate baguettes with cheese.

The Chinese philosopher Zhu Xi (1130–1200) recommended in an essay on reading that a young person should read widely to gain a broad education, but an older person should select a few works to read again and again. He recommended reading slowly and carefully, word by word, reflecting on each phrase. This practice of slow and careful reading is akin to what medieval Christians called lectio divina.

The Christian contemplative classic called The Cloud of Unknowing recommends inspirational reading. Anyone seeking an intimate familiarity with higher things (by whatever name one wishes to call them) does well to recall that few of us have within ourselves all the resources necessary to succeed fully in our pursuits. We benefit by being exposed to the wisdom of others. But blindly following others as authorities is no less a folly than ignoring the good that others have to offer. To make the wisdom of others fully our own, we must ingest it very slowly. Having taken a small helping, it is best to digest it well before taking more.

The kind of reading one does as part of one’s prayer and meditation practice is almost exactly the opposite of how one reads as a student. Students are usually assigned absurdly large numbers of pages to read. They are forced to skim rapidly, with the result that not much sinks in. Modern education breeds superficiality. It takes most students the better part of a lifetime to break all the poor reading habits they are forced to acquire on their way to getting a degree. It takes some effort to become properly uneducated so that, after getting a diploma, one can finally become properly educated.

The works I find myself reading again and again in my older years are The Cloud of Unknowing itself, the inner chapters of Zhuangzi, the essays of Xunzi and Mengzi, the Suttanipāta, the Bodhicaryāvatāra and a selection of essays by William James, especially “The will to believe.” Recently I have come across some early Quaker writings that, if breath keeps pouring into my lungs, I am inclined to read over many times in the future.

The particular list of what is read is of interest mostly to myself. How it is read should be of much wider interest. Read slowly. Read with an open heart. Let the words work their way into the core of your being, and let them do there whatever they will do. The results are bound to be as surprising as they are wholesome.