ZEN BUDDHISM, UNITARIAN UNIVERSALISM, AND FINDING A LIFE THAT MATTERS

Zen Buddhism, Unitarian Universalism, and Finding a Life that Matters,

Or, Like Someone in the Middle of the Night Reaching Behind Her Head for the Pillow

A Sermon by
James Ishmael Ford

7 February 2016

Unitarian Universalist Church of Long Beach
Long Beach, California

Text

Yunyan asked Daowu, ‘How does the Bodhisattva Guanyin use those many hands and eyes?’ Daowu answered, ‘It is like someone in the middle of the night reaching behind her head for the pillow.’ Yunyan said, ‘I understand.’ Daowu asked, ‘How do you understand it?’ Yunyan said, ‘All over the body are hands and eyes.’ Daowu said, ‘That is very well expressed, but it is only eight-tenths of the answer.’ Yunyan said, ‘How would you say it, Elder Brother?’ Daowu said, ‘Throughout the body are hands and eyes.’

Blue Cliff Record, Case 89

Of the Unitarian Universalist clergy who are also Buddhists, and I’m not quite as rare a bird as that combination might seem, the majority of us appear to have come to Buddhism some time after entering the ministry. A few of us, however, came to Unitarian Universalism as Buddhists. And I’m one of those. So, naturally, my story begins with that Buddhist encounter.

The shortest of versions: After leaving my childhood fundamentalist Baptist faith (we were independents, thinking the Southern Baptists were dangerously liberal, and pretty sure American Baptists weren’t actually Christians) I looked at pretty much the full range of spiritual possibilities to be found in the San Francisco Bay Area in the late nineteen sixties. And let me tell you, there were a lot of options. However, I quickly discovered Zen practice, and found it made all the sense in the world. I’ll return to that in a bit. The upshot is before I was twenty I entered a Buddhist monastery throwing myself full into the discipline.

I stayed just shy of three years at that monastery, which itself moved a couple of times before ending up in Mt Shasta. I ordained and was eventually made a full Zen priest. But, eventually I left. The reasons were many. Perhaps I’ll tell you about them some time. But for our purposes here among my concerns was that Zen Buddhism in the west in all its variations, as best I could tell, lacked a broad sense of community as we understand church or synagogue and with that lacked attention to the needs of children and families as well as giving scant attention to any manifestation within our larger world. Over the years things have improved, at least a little, at least in a few Zen communities. But by then, I’d moved on.

Once again I was at a loss for a spiritual community. And again, I looked around at what was possible. For ages friends directed me toward Unitarian Universalism. “Try it, you’ll like it,” they would say. At first I resisted, but eventually after finding and reading a nineteenth century pamphlet reprint of William Ellery Channing’s renowned Baltimore Sermon, “On Unitarian Christianity,” I thought this really isn’t my mother’s Christianity, and finally, I girded up my loins and attended a UU Sunday service.

During the sermon, well, I fell asleep. Still, I felt there really was something there. I could sense something going on among the people at that church, even if what exactly that was wasn’t immediately obvious. So I kept returning. And I found things happening in my heart and in my life. Over time I realized Zen Buddhism and Unitarian Universalism bring substantial gifts to each other, correcting shortcomings, and deepening possibilities.

What I found in Unitarian Universalism was a powerful sense of community, a place to bring children and to help them find a spiritual sense in this world, a place simply to be together in all those times of life when we so need each other. Of course, for those big things, like births, marriages, and deaths. But also small things like potlucks and finding congenial friends. It was also a place from which to engage my intuition a person should reach out and help in this world together with people whose values I found I share.

I’m not alone in this; a lot of Western Buddhists have found a home within Unitarian Universalism. Now the various published studies of our differing faith stances within our liberal tradition seem to me all to be flawed. Still, between what these studies have suggested and my own best guestimate, leads me to believe somewhere between ten and twenty percent of Unitarian Universalists today consider Buddhism a major current in their theological thinking and identity. For perhaps a majority that means they read a lot of books (we are the people who believe in salvation by bibliography, after all), for some, however, it means taking on specific disciplines. For our denomination, for the sake of argument let’s say ten percent take Buddhism seriously enough to call oneself Buddhist. That would mean about twenty thousand people – which if true makes UU Buddhists the single largest convert Buddhist community in the West. And maybe it’s actually twice that number.

I have a sense of why this has happened. In fact it is this sense that informs me, and has informed what became my twenty-five years as a UU parish minister. My Buddhism, or more accurately my Zen Buddhism, or most accurately my liberal Zen Buddhism brings three things to my life as a Unitarian Universalist and as a UU minister. These are a coherent spiritual discipline, a philosophical ground upon which I can and do stand, and beyond that a spiritual experience, which informs how I try to engage people and the world.

First, that spiritual practice. I frequently summarize Zen’s meditation discipline as “sit down, shut up, and pay attention.” There are postures that support this discipline, which are sufficiently helpful some teachers in my tradition think they’re what its all about. And in a very important sense they’re right. To get inside this practice one needs to deeply understand the term “just this.” If one engages this just this, if one surrenders all the ifs, ands, buts and on the other hands, and instead just drops into the moment, just for a moment, then the sages of the Zen way suggest heaven and earth can reconcile, and even this suffering world can be healed. And I’ve found there’s much truth in this assertion.

Beyond that all I’m going to say here about this discipline is that it is a practice of clarification. It is a relentless watching, particularly a relentless watching of body and mind which opens us up in very interesting ways. Specifically it leads us to a place where our ideas of body and mind fall away. Through this encounter, through this miracle of human consciousness new and more useful perspectives are then revealed.

This leads to what I called the philosophical ground, the great insight. Through some wonderful cosmic play, we Unitarian Universalists while trying to formulate a statement of care for the world in which we live somehow, and I think mostly by accident, formulated what I believe is the secret truth of how we exist. The seventh Principle of Unitarian Universalism is a call to respect for “the interdependent web of all existence of which we are a part.”

Actually UUs didn’t invent this idea of interconnectedness, just discovered it. Like many have before. For instance, just one possible example, in the Avatamsaka Sutra, a Buddhist text which dates from about the dawn of the Common Era, and which has long association with the Zen schools, contains a strikingly similar image. The Buddhist scholar Francis Cook describes it: “Far away in the heavenly abode of the great god Indra, there is a wonderful net which has been hung by some cunning artificer in such a manner that it stretches out infinitely in all directions. In accordance with the extravagant tastes of deities, the artificer has hung a single glittering jewel in each ‘eye’ of the net, and since the net itself is infinite in dimension, the jewels are infinite in number. There hang the jewels, glittering like stars of the first magnitude, a wonderful sight to behold.”

Professor Cook continues. “If we now arbitrarily select one of these jewels for inspection and look closely at it, we will discover that in its polished surface there are reflected all the other jewels in the net, infinite in number. Not only that, but each of the jewels reflected in this one jewel is also reflecting all the other jewels, so that there is an infinite reflecting process occurring.”

This image is, of course, meant to be a metaphor, like our interdependent web. It points to living truths. So, we can engage this image and play out the various consequences of what it can mean. And there is power in such philosophical reflections. Or, we can see it as a kind of creed, “this I believe.” I think this idea can be particularly helpful when I am most confused. There are times for simple plain rules, and this one is straight ahead: we’re all in this mess together. From that, even when I have no idea what to do next, I at least feel I should try to be kind. If there were nothing more to it than this, it is a great gift.

But, in fact it is more than a high philosophical assertion about reality, or, even a “belief,” as some rock to cling to in the storm of confusion and hurt. And I believe it is this “more” that is the greatest gift the Buddhist perspective brings to us here in the West. The Zen master Bernie Glassman tells us “I define enlightenment as the depth to which one sees the oneness of life, the interconnectedness of life.” Then joined with that statement is a corollary. Bernie adds, intriguingly, tantalizingly, “And the degree of your enlightenment can be measured by your actions.”

Now the practice of presence, the practice of shutting up and paying attention, the practice of observing body and mind until the ideas of body and mind fall away, leads directly to a personal knowing of this world of intimacy, of our deepest interconnectedness, what Bernie calls our enlightenment, and which I prefer to call our awakening. As one Zen worthy put it, this is like taking a drink of water and knowing for yourself whether it is cool or warm.

And, this takes us to that last thing I spoke of; of those gifts Buddhism brings to Unitarian Universalism, and which we find in Bernie’s corollary to awakening – action. To explore that, let’s turn to that conversation between Yunyan and Daowu. This anecdote is preserved in the twelfth century Chinese anthology of Zen stories called the Blue Cliff Record, one of my favorite Zen documents.

Both Yunyan and Daowu were students of the same teacher and would themselves each become famous teachers. According to some traditions they were actually brothers, but for various reasons this seems unlikely. More interesting to me is how Zen is organized in lineages; that is my teacher had a teacher who had a teacher, in a line that historically goes to early medieval China and mythically all the way back to the Buddha. For me a really interesting thing is how Yunyan is actually my teacher’s teacher’s teacher in an unbroken line running from my life back to the beginning of the ninth century. So, we’re talking at least in spiritual terms of a story about my great great to a pretty large number grandfather.

But the really important thing for us is that both these monks had their ideas of self and other collapse and saw deeply into authentic interconnectedness. At the time this story takes place Daowu perhaps sees a bit deeper than his dharma brother. Although perhaps not. In the great way we play a lot, each of us taking different parts in turn, and play is in fact one of the primary spiritual disciplines. That noted, in this conversation we get a sense of what it means to move from the interdependent web as a really good idea, to where it describes who we actually are.

Now Guanyin is the archetype of compassion. Sometimes portrayed as a man, sometimes as a woman, occasionally in an androgynous form: but always as the deeply, profoundly felt impulse to reach out. This reaching out is the body of awakening. And Daowu says of this need to act, that it comes not through an interpretation of the image of the interdependent web, not through reading the Wealth of Nations, not through solid Marxist analysis, not through an investigation of Mary’s hymn in the Gospel According to Luke (although I suggest Mary is Guanyin. As do the monks at that Buddhist monastery on Ocean Blvd at Redondo who tend that lovely Mary shrine you can visit any time you wish…), not through righteousness of any sort, certainly not righteous anger, a dreadful seducer beckoning us to a confusion of ends and means: but rather like someone turning in her sleep and reaching a hand behind her head to adjust her pillow.

Just this. Ends and means are one thing. Our interdependence and you and I are one thing.

Now an old Zen saying has it that even the Buddha is continuing to practice. And understanding the relationship between our separate identities and the web itself is complex. So, Yunyan’s eighty percent is that this realization is like having eyes and hands all over our bodies. True, true, says his brother. But one hundred percent is that those eyes and hands are our body. No separation, however slight and the universal comes to be known the only place it can be known, in each particular instance, in each particular person.

So, this practice of refinement continues, and continues. And the path becomes one of ever greater intimacy. Each of us coming to know the other as we all walk the great way together constantly transformed and transforming.

So, this is my Unitarian Universalist Buddhist faith. It is the north star of my life, to which I’ve given my life. And, very much, it is as it has been, my ministry.

And, one more thing, I believe, with all my heart, by many names, and none, this is our ministry as Unitarian Universalists, reaching into our own hearts and minds, seeing who we truly are, and then without a second thought reaching out to the world.

Nothing less. Nothing less.

Amen.