One evening at dusk, as I was returning to my room along a narrow path through the pine forest, carrying a blue plastic bucket slopping with water that I had just collected from a nearby source, I was abruptly brought to a halt by the upsurge of an overpowering sense of the sheer strangeness of everything.
It was as though I had been lifted onto the crest of a great wave that rose from the ocean of life itself, allowing me for the first time to be struck by how mysterious it was that anything existed at all rather than nothing.
"How," I asked myself, can a person be unaware of this? How can anyone pass their life without responding to this? Why have I not noticed this until now?" I remember standing still, trembling and dumb, with tears in my eyes. Then I continued on my way before night fell.
This experience made me uncomfortably aware of a chasm between what I was studying and something that had happened to me in my own life that struck me as vitally important. The Buddhist texts with which I was familiar did not seem to speak about, let alone value, such experiences as the one that had just shuddered through me.- Stephen Batchelor, Confessions of a Buddhist Atheist
I have been reading voraciously for the past two weeks. i went through 2 novels, a bunch of magazines I had been putting off and then I started the book from which the above quote is excerpted. This passage gave me pause when I read it. How many times have I been overcome by the same feeling of doubt about the world? What is the point of it all? And why does this thought come to me at the most random of times? Batchelor was a Buddhist monk, studied under various famous leaders and still rejected it all in the end. Why? What was lacking from his teachings? There was enough certainty, that's for sure. All of the beliefs he rejected had an air-tight response to his doubts, yet never actually addressed his doubts.
Think about a great "teacher" (parent, religious leader, classroom teacher, professor. etc) you had, that you looked up to because they seemed to know everything. When you asked them about something that wasn't their forte, instead of telling you they didn't know, they instead brushed off your question as inconsequential. And perhaps, if you were younger, or less experienced, you might have believed them, and beat yourself up for being "stupid" in front of their great presence, but as it turns out, this teacher was just more like you than you thought. They were fallible. They did NOT know everything there was to know. But that's OK. Unfortunately, they were just not OK with it.
I went to a teacher workshop and the instructor was talking about this exact situation. How, we, as teachers, need to accept that we do not know everything. How the students can see that it's OK to be continually learning and shaping the mind throughout life. The teacher is not an authority, but a guide. This is something that I take pride in doing. I did not need a workshop to tell me that, though, I think it is important that others hear and embrace the uncertainty of everything, especially in regards to knowledge. When a teacher sets themselves up as an omniscient authority, s/he's not only setting themselves up for confrontation and failure, but their students as well.
Spiritually, the beauty of Jesus and Buddha as teachers were that they were open to experiences. They personally did not adhere any rigid dogma that their followers constructed in their wake. Their experiences and guidance, not commandments, are valuable tools. Similarly, one of the reasons that I am drawn to Zen Buddhism in particular is that there is an air of mystery to teachings like the koans. These logic puzzles leave breathing space for interpretation. What they ultimately mean to you is important.
Another meaning that I think Batchelor also gets at in this quote, is what I find to be one of the great mysteries of the modern world. Do people really stop and think about their existence and why they're here? Is there a larger group of people out there than the few I have disclosed the uneasiness of being aware of my mortality to? How many people suppress that uncanny feeling he's describing? By time one gets to adulthood, I would say there is a good chance that people are more and more unwilling to talk about these feelings because....well, they're set in their ways, one step closer to the inevitable end, thinking about it would get in the way of their "plans" and their "life." But that feeling IS life. All of the other stuff we create is wonderful, but it's what Buddhists call Maya (illusion), and it distracts us from the realities of our finitude.
The finite space of an art form like the haiku also works to help us get in touch with something deeper than the distractions of television, consumer products, relationship drama, etc. The master Japanese poets of yore so often encapsulated deep sentiments and experiences in carefully chosen, and placed. words. The one below appeared in one of those two novels I recently read. The narrator was discussing mono no aware, the Japanese aesthetic value of the transience of all living things - how we're filled with feelings of great awe and sadness as we view the world around us. Mono no aware is essentialized by the cherry blossom festivals in Japan. The beauty of the flowers is ephemeral, yet, to be enjoyed nonetheless.
Thinking of the morning dew, it will pass away into the dry high noon of the summer, and yet we revel in those few minutes anyway. Life is a lot like that -when we revel in being alive, we can pay no mind to the fact that we will pass beyond this world in due time.
This dewdrop world
Is a dewdrop world –
And yet — and yet
-Kobayashi Issa
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