Eastern Sun

Back from a week at the Shambhala Mountain Center. I guess you would call it a volunteer vacation, the best kind really, where you feel you are being of use and getting some needed re-creation. It was good to work out of doors in the mountains every day, taking down tents and moving supplies. And that was really all I thought I was going to get out of it, and that would have been enough. But it seems I was sent there for other reasons. (And I truly do have the sense of being sent there. For in fact because of the Peace Corps medical clearance I had written the Shambhala Center and told them I would be unable to come. But a week or so ago I received a call from someone up there wondering why I wasn't there, and when I told them I had this Peace Corps thing and could not make my three week commitment, they said I could still come up for part of it. Now, it seems the person calling did not receive my original email. But if she had not called me one day while I was working on my netbook at Burger King, I never would have gone up there. So I do feel there was something calling me there, something that caused me to make the plan in the first place and that would not so easily let me abandon it.)

And that other reason was to get me to reconnect me to something that I think will be very important on this journey, and this is Buddhism.

Buddhism is fundamentally about waking up (the Buddha, recall, is the awakened one) to a realization of the nature of reality, which is impermanence and groundlessness, and then learning how to live one’s life in full recognition of this fact. That is, we think things are solid, permanent and that everything will remain as it is and then we are surprised when something major happens: a lover leaves, a parent dies, an illness strikes us. Buddhism is about getting us to live joyfully with the recognition of impermanence and to embrace it so that we can be more fully alive. The last thing Buddhism is about is renunciation of the world.

So what does all this have to do with my leaving my job? Well, nothing can make you realize the nature of impermanence and groundless more quickly, I think, then a move like this one. I mean, these were teachings I have known and even taught. But right now, they really begin to mean something. And I found myself drawn back to them. Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche is the founder of the Shambhala Tradition in the West and of the Shambhala Mountain Center. One of his students, Pema Chodron, is probably the most widely read Buddhst today. In an article of the recent issue of the Shambhala Sun magazine, Pema Chodron talks about her current teacher who had declared that in America it seemed that Buddhist teachings were just a pastime for students, something to dabble in or use for relaxation, but when their lives fell apart, the teachings and practices became as essential as food and medicine.

While at SMC, I reread one of Trungpa Rinpoche’s book, Shambhala: The Sacred Path of the Warrior. In it he distinguishes between the Eastern sun and the setting sun. The Eastern sun is the spirit of life. It is the spirit of being open to life and alive to the present moment. It is the spirit of hope and optimism. He contrasts this to the spirit of the Western, setting sun. This is the spirit of fear, the spirit of death. I will quote “When we follow the path of the setting sun we enclose ourselves in a world in which we can hide or go to sleep. ..It is as though we wish to re-enter our mother’s womb and avoid being born…When we are afraid of waking up and afraid of experiencing our own fear, we build a cocoon we guild ourselves a cocoon in order to shield ourselves from the vision of the eastern sun. We prefer to hide in our personal jungles and caves. When we hide from the world in this way, we feel secure. We may think we have quieted our fear but we are actually becoming numb with our fear. ..The way of cowardice is to embed ourselves in this cocoon, in which we perpetuate our habitual patterns. When we are constantly recreating our basic patterns of behavior and thought, we never have to leap onto fresh air or fresh ground. In the cocoon there is no dance…it is comfortable and sleepy: an intense and very familiar home. In the world of the cocoon, such things as spring cleaning have never taken place. We feel that it is too much work, too much trouble, to clean it up. We would prefer to go back to sleep.”

What I can say is that I went up to the SMC in the spirit of the Western setting sun and left imbued, however slightly, with the spirit of the Eastern sun.