It is easier for a tortoise
to put its neck into the hole of a yoke
tossed about in the middle of the ocean
than to find a human existence
- the teacher of gods and humans has said.
How much more difficult it is
to find a precious human body
that is a unique occasion and the right juncture!
Therefore, from today onwards
you just have to make efforts.
-Longchenpa, Sems-nyid-ngal-gso
from Kindly Bent to Ease Us
Herbert V. Guenther, translator
I turned eighteen while tolerating the rigors of Navy boot camp in San Diego. On the day they made us dog tags they asked what religion to stamp on mine and I said "none." When I got the tags they identified me as Mormon. As it happened, I grew up knowing church as an imposing building in which no one I knew had any business, excepting at the end of great grandma Agnes's life; the choir sang beautifully that day. I joined the Navy thinking the world and everything in it was set in solid concrete and soft, vulnerable skin. Little did I know I was a tortoise in search of a yoke….
Out of boot camp and living aboard a destroyer in San Diego harbor, there was nothing but the boredom of heavy labor and an occasional trip downtown. That's where I found Ken Kesey-strength LSD-25 before ever in life catching a whiff of ganja. I mention the LSD because it opened up a cosmos I could not at the time have imagined, where the existence of concrete was made a myth and skin was revealed as merely an apparent boundary that could not hold the essential me after all. In my newfound, expanded perspective I learned that, far from having to jam myself like an ill-fitting piece into a rigid existing puzzle, in fact every step on life's way I held the awesome responsibility to create and refine the puzzle for myself. My resentment that the world was pushing me around gradually fell away as I realized human nature is defined by its ability to paint the world anew. I learned that you don't try to cover the world in leather to save your feet. Instead, cover your feet with leather: If you want to change the world change your mind. The acid could have melted a conservative's skullcap and brought tears of compassion to his eyes. Oh, that showed me alright; and then occurred a unique occasion and the right juncture!
Back home in Montana, a friend handed me a volume by W.Y. Evans-Wentz, who after World War I compiled the material for his many books, including The Tibetan Book of the Great Liberation. Here I discovered the wonder of footnotes (my reading before this had rarely gone beyond Father's Tom Swift novels and Spiderman). Footnotes form paths for mental wanderers; paths to infinity, if the mental toes and heels of aspiration and wonderment can hold out, avoid bogging down along the way in the quicksand of despair.
In short, stepping on Evans-Wentz's path I found confirmation and clarification of what I'd experienced firsthand through suffering, adventurism, and psychedelics (coined by Humphrey Osmond, meaning "mind-manifesting" substances). One book led to many, and eventually the snowballing footnotes rewarded my persistence with the likes of D.T. Suzuki, Alan Watts, and Nagarjuna. In Calming the Mind and Discerning the Real (14th century) I found Tson-kha-pa, one of what I like to call my dead-author best friends. Such dispellers of ignorance and dispensers of wisdom are among the most valuable jewels in this world. Kindly Bent to Ease Us was written by Herbert V. Guenther, a live one who taught at the University of Saskatchewan, but by the time I wrote to tell him I wanted to study under him, he had retired. His body is dust now, but in his work I found a kindred spirit whose experience paralleled mine. He let me know at minimum that I was not the only crazed person in this world, or better, that I was perhaps on an especially useful journey. His work is alive and may, like Shantideva's, impact human perspective for centuries. Such is the destiny of a writer who can make words matter.
I have chosen to feature the Bodhicharyavatara, a Mahāyāna (Great Vehicle) Buddhist text written around the beginning of the 8th century AD in Sanskrit verse by Shantideva, a Buddhist monk at Nālandā Monastic University in India. This book has been translated countless times and there are several English renderings of the title. The Way of the Bodhisattva is one.
For any among you who might smell preaching or proselytizing coming on, rest easy. I will tell you just a bit, starting with the fact that Buddhism is not in the business of pitching itself. It simply IS; a phenomenon, an atom of existence, that makes an appearance to those whose karma includes a vision of it. To me it is a central focus; for most it is peripheral or nonexistent. And that is just fine with Buddhism.
A few terms are useful to understanding the importance of the book. Of course anyone who's listened to Steely Dan has likely heard of "bodhisattva." Bodhi is "awake," sattva is "being." A bodhisattva is therefore, in its broadest definition, anyone who considers herself striving to attain a glide path moving from ignorance toward wisdom, and for whom compassion has become a driving force. An awakened or enlightened or absolutely clear mind is the goal—the terms are interchangeable. Complete perfect clarity refers to "nirvana." We have all achieved moments of such clarity, in spurts of orgasm, in realizing the life-changing nature of certain milestone revelations, in coming to appreciate true love. We lose this insight when distracted by irritants and trivialities and dual thinking gone wild. A bodhisattva takes flight on the wings of wisdom and compassion: both are required in equal measure to gain the altitude of a Buddha. When the past is recognized as memory and the future as hopes and fears, then focus (samadhi, i.e., non-dualistic concentration) on the immediate Path (Tao, Way, Dharma) can take precedence. Don't look back; each moment press on! The ever-present is where the rubber meets the road.
The book is especially concerned with bodhichitta. This is the "aspiration for awakening," the primary motivation that drives us to bring happiness to others and act to relieve others' suffering. Such aspiration may be seen as the opposite of materialistic despair, the nihilism which says: There is no meaning beyond this mortal existence. Nothingness is real. I die with my body like a switched off light. Yet no one has ever experienced nothingness! Such an attitude amounts to relativism that finds no lasting benefit in good works. Better eyes will see that every moment life so overflows with meaningfulness we can just begin to keep track of it. Buddhism is purely optimistic.
Attainment of bodhichitta, for author Shantideva, is no less than consciously "entering the stream" that runs downhill from the tiny, bewildered, hopeful tributaries that we are as babes to the Great Ocean from which we came and to where we are traveling, whether or not we realize it today. Attainment of the aspiration for enlightenment occurs when we find that there is no forgetting, once having experienced—not merely been urged to believe—the truth that nowhere can be found an atom of existence that stands alone. The belief in the reality of independent existences is the root of egoism, selfishness, and the lacking of sufficient compassion in this world to stifle so much unnecessary suffering. This is what the unique occasion and right juncture of LSD and footnotes instilled in me.
A brief explanation may be in order here, as I detect confusion might arise now as I speak of the detriment of believing in "independent existences." More familiar to our culture might be the suggestions that "no man is an island"; or, "it takes a village." I realize these would ring only dull wooden bells with conservatives. A cardinal doctrine of Buddhism, pratītyasamutpāda (doctrine of dependent origination), put simply, is that without good, evil is indefinable; without female, male cannot be conceived. These existents arise dependently, even as every child arises dependent upon a mother. In its universal form, this doctrine proves that none of us is separate from all the rest of us; that none of our actions affect only our little selves, but ripple outwards, vibrating the very substratum which underlies all our existences. Whew! A huge responsibility we bear; and what a joy to understand we are never alone in this rugged enterprise of living. "There is nothing external or separate from the individual. Everything that manifests in the individual's field of experience is a continuum. This is the Great Perfection that is discovered in the Dzogchen practice."
Before providing you a taste of the actual text, I will use the old appeal-to-authority trick: His Holiness the Dalai Lama has said, “If I have any understanding of compassion and the bodhisattva path, it is entirely on the basis of studying the Bodhicharyavatara that I possess it.”
I will leave you with a fair piece (8 of the book's approximately 1000 verses), once I mention something British historian Arnold Toynbee is reputed to have said, which expresses a long held belief of my own: "The coming of Buddhism to the West may well prove to be the most important event of the Twentieth Century." I would add that LSD has to be one of the greatest untapped discoveries of our time, and will have more to tell us as we evolve beyond our present childlike fear of self-discovery.
Now, from Shantideva, my great friend, his body gone for 1300 years, but not his beautiful mind:
All the Joy the world contains,
Has come through wishing happiness for others.
All the misery the world contains,
Has come through wanting pleasure for oneself.
The mind is bodiless:
By no one can it be destroyed.
And yet it grasps the body tightly,
Falling victim to the body’s pain.
There is no "body" in the limbs,
But from illusion does the idea spring,
To be affixed to a specific shape—
Just as when a scarecrow is mistaken for a man.
As long as the conditions are assembled,
A body will appear and seem to be a man.
As long as all the parts are likewise present,
It's there that we will see a body.
Likewise, since it is a group of fingers,
The hand itself is not a single entity.
And so it is with fingers, made of joints—
And joints themselves consist of many parts.
These parts themselves will break down into atoms,
And atoms will divide according to direction.
These fragments, too, will also fall to nothing.
Thus atoms are like empty space—they have no real existence.
All form, therefore, is like a dream,
And who will be attached to it, who thus investigates?
The body, in this way, has no existence;
What is male, therefore, and what is female?
If suffering itself is truly real,
Then why is joy not altogether quenched thereby?
If pleasure's real, then why will pleasant tastes
Not comfort and amuse a man in agony?
So there you have it, dear Readers and Book Lovers. I'll let a revered American author who even in his time knew a bit of Buddhism, sum up for us: "The world," said Henry David Thoreau, "is but a canvas to the imagination."