Welcome back, thanks for coming! Before we begin, this man and his dog have found some tadpoles in the Hannacroix Creek, a small mountain stream in Upstate NY.
The Hannacroix creek is one I'm especially grateful to, as it feeds one of the town reservoirs, thus offering a significant portion of the water I drink every day I'm in town (yes, there are modern water treatment systems between the doggies and the tap). I'd appreciate it if you join me for more discussion on gratitude after the flip...
Background
The dictionary tells me that "grateful" comes from the latin gratus, "pleasant, agreeable", but gratefulness in Buddhism, like the etymology of the word, goes far deeper than that. The earlier Indo-European root carries a meaning of "welcome, praise", that's more like it.
Gratitude is an important thread running through Buddhist teachings. It plays a role in all schools of Buddhism, but I'm more familiar with (my own view of) Zen, Mahayana Buddhism, so forgive me if what I have to share here isn't completely accurate for everyone; I offer here merely my own understanding of gratitude, and my incomplete understanding of Buddhist teachings on gratitude.
Dharma Chat — Feeling Gratitude
Gratitude begins with mindfulness, you cannot fully welcome something into your life, praise its role in your life, until you're aware of it, attend to it, begin to understand how it connects with you. However, not only does gratitude depend on mindfulness, but it expands and deepens our mindfulness of the world around us. Let me try to elaborate.
I sense a wall near me, that's a tiny bit of mindfulness; through my perception, I start to become more aware of the details, the form of the wall, a little more mindful. I start to identify how the wall is connected to other structures, how it functions as a part of the house I'm in, the house that shelters me; that's a little more mindful, becoming aware of interconnectedness, but we're still only examining the wall on a shallow, intellectual level.
That whole "shelters me" thing, I find that pretty important right now; if I didn't have shelter, I would have even more suffering, more difficulty. The wall doesn't know it's helping to keep the wind and rain off of me and my stuff; as far as I can tell, it expects no reward for doing so. Regardless, that wall selflessly offers some release from suffering to me. and I owe it a debt of gratitude. As I open my heart to feel that gratitude, both myself and the wall are stronger for it.
By experiencing the gratitude surrounding the interconnectedness that joins me and the wall, mindfulness deepens; Buddha cannot be found, we can never experience complete enlightenment, until we understand, until we feel, how important these connections are to us, until we are truly grateful for these gifts bestowed upon us.
Dharma Chat — Expressing Gratitude
In the grind of life that feeling of gratitude can be ephemeral, gone in an instant as we face the demands upon us. To deepen gratitude we must not only feel grateful, but act from that gratitude, express my gratitude. Occasionally the action is direct: if I observe a threat to that wall (eg. someone swinging a metal pipe near it), I can express my gratitude by helping to protect the wall from harm; usually we don't have such opportunities.
So Buddhism teaches us to deepen our experience with a practice of formal expressions of gratitude. We do this by facing (as best we can) what we are grateful to, and practice Anjali, placing the palms of our hands together, and Namaskar, bowing to the Buddha that lies within.
Anjali (Gassho in Japanese, Wai in Thai), placing the palms together, is often called "hands in prayer" by Western Christians, but neither Buddhism nor Christianity can lay claim to originating it. The gesture is far older than Buddhism (which is older than Christianity). It probably dates back at least through the ancient Central Asian religion that eventually split into Zoroastrianism and Vedic Hinduism: Buddhism got it from the ancient Vedic Hindus; some speculate that Christianity got it from Judaism (though it's not a common in modern Judaism, it was common back in the day), which in turn could easily have received it from Zoroastrianism during the Jews' extended stay in Babylon.
The gesture is an expression of respect and lack of threat (it's tough to hold or use a weapon like that). The more mindfully we form the mudra (hand gesture), and the higher we hold it, the greater the offering of respect and gratitude. Generally, I've been taught to hold the mudra so that my fingertips are level with my nose, but sometimes the gesture is held at chest level to specifically express "good health to you".
Namaskar is done by bowing. The deeper the bow, the greater the offering of respect and gratitude. Bows can range from a casual dipping of the head, through deeply bending at the waist, all the way to a full prostration. In Zen, the full prostration is where the person kneels on the floor, touches their forehead to the ground, and lifts their hands up (to represent lifting Buddha up above our head); in Tibetan Buddhism, a full prostration is laying completely prone, face down on the ground; other schools surely have other forms for their prostration, but they are all low to the ground and physically, viscerally, humbling. During services, bows and prostrations are often done in threes, for the three treasures (Buddha, Dharma and Sangha).
Incidentally, the name for the full prostration in Chinese is 磕頭 / 叩头, Kòutóu (knock head) from which we get the English word kowtow: to act very subserviently.
Zen finds it skillful to avoid needless words (not that you can tell that from my writing), and so such bows are often silent. Sometimes, like over the phone or in a letter, words are necessary. To express this verbally, the word "Namaskar" would be traditional in Sanskrit, many American Buddhists and Hindus use "Namasté" likewise (almost the same meaning, but less formal), "Gassho" (ie "palms together") is often used within American Zen circles (I don't know whether or not Japanese Zen uses it this way), I find "thank you" also works pretty well, or "I bow to the Buddha within You" if you want to verbally express a degree of respect that's probably beyond most Westerners' comfort zone.
If, when we feel gratitude, we express gratitude, than we are practicing gratitude. Whether we're Buddhist or not, a strong practice of gratitude makes it easier to find gratefulness, encourages gratitude to be more deeply felt, and helps us all.
Dharma Chat — Debt
Earlier, I used the phrase "owe a debt of gratitude", this was not just me casually using a common idiom. As the people around us, the world around us, act to sustain us and our practice, we owe those people, the world, the mindful recognition and heartfelt appreciation of that sustainance.
Failure to repay that debt is literally a form of attachment. When we take the food we eat, the air we breathe, the people we count on for granted, we cultivate the three toxins. We find ourselves greedily grasping at what we feel we're entitled to, what we imagine are our rights (do we really have a right to kill other life to clean our water, make our dinner, build our homes, dress ourselves?) We find that we delude ourselves with the idea that we're self-made individuals, responsible to nobody for our successes. We find that we grow angry when the things we counted on are no longer accessible to us, we blame others and lash out.
Gratitude, practiced deeply and mindfully, offers a way of short circuiting that process, releasing those attachments, moving through life with less suffering for all of us.
So it behooves us to express our gratitude and move on, I'm grateful to my chair for supporting me, here and now, while I type this. My chair, however, is quite impermanent, perhaps it will be here to support me tomorrow (when, again, I would be grateful), perhaps it will not (and I would figure something else out).
So, thank you for reading, I'd like to share some tea and conversation below, perhaps we can chat about gratitude, perhaps whatever else is on your mind. Gassho...