Welcome
Prelude
Opening words by Thich Nhat Hanh
The greatest blessing is not the one that falls down from the sky and is handed to us. The greatest blessing is the happiness that each of us can generate for ourselves.
Unison words A Special Introduction Not for Children Only Song #183 Winds of Change Meditation Joys and Sorrows OfferingWesak
Today is the last in a year long series exploring holidays and holy days of other religions. Why, you ask? Because as Unitarian Universalists we draw our own tradition partly from the wealth and wisdom of other traditions. Because respecting, learning about, and understanding the faith and customs of other peoples promotes peace. Because in them we can probably find nuggets of universal meaning and truth which we can take to heart and mind. So we explore. We look. Not to take those religious customs and holy days and use them for our own purposes or entertainment, but to seek to know them in their own context, as best we can accomplish that.
During the full moon in the month of May Buddhists all over the world celebrate Wesak, a holiday that marks the birth of the Buddha, his enlightenment and, in some traditions, his death. You perhaps have heard the story of the miraculous birth of the Buddha. It was foretold by a dream that his mother had, of a snow white elephant holding a brilliant pink lotus flower in its trunk descending from the heavens toward her. The elephant gently placed the lotus flower in her body and then the elephant itself entered her body and the the queen was filled with deep ease and joy. When she awoke and told the king, he summoned his advisors and the wisest among them declared that the queen would give birth to a mighty leader who would either become a great emperor or a great teacher who would show the way to all beings. And indeed, the queen became pregnant. When the time came for her to deliver the baby, she set out for her parents’ home, as custom mandated. On the way she stopped to rest in a garden full of singing birds, brilliant peacocks, and fragrant flowers. All of a sudden she felt faint and reached for a tree branch to steady herself. In an instant she gave birth to the baby under the tree. They named him Siddhartha Gautama. Only later in his life did he gain the name Buddha. Actually, Buddha is less a name than a term. The word Buddha means the awakened one, and people began to call Siddhartha Buddha after his enlightenment. My friends at Blue Cliff Monastery are celebrating Wesak today with a ceremony to wash the baby Buddha. Celebrating the birth of Buddha by washing signifies washing oneself clean of hatred, greed and ignorance. Offerings of fruit and other gifts are placed before statues of the Buddha. Once, a number of years ago, knowing that I liked both chocolate and Buddha, Betsy Tuel gave me a solid chocolate Buddha, about 4” tall. I loved it but I didn’t quite know what to do with it. I mean, does one just bite into it? Hack it to pieces? How does a person approach a chocolate Buddha? It sat on my shelf for a while, but then, one Wesak, I brought it to my Buddhist sangha as an offering. As a part of our celebration that year, we melted the Buddha and made fondue.
But the birth of the Buddha is not all that is marked by Wesak. His enlightenment is also a part of this holiday. It is the idea, and the approach to the experience of enlightenment that I want to focus on today. I have called this sermon Everything I Don’t Know About Enlightenment. I am told that one is enlightened or one is not. Unless I missed it, I have to confess that I am not. Nevertheless, and this is the universal teaching in Wesak, there are ways we can live that allow us to glimpse what Buddhists call enlightenment: feel it, even come close to it, though for the shortest of times. It is this very approach, this coming slightly closer to enlightenment that can enrich our lives in practical, significant and deep ways.
Siddhartha Gautama lived in the royal palace, brought up in luxury. His father, aware of the prophecy, tried to shield him from sickness, old age, and death. He could not, though, and when Siddhartha encountered them, he left his palace, his wife and young son and went first to a hermitage to become a monk and study Hindu doctrine. He became known as Shakyamuni, the sage of the Shakya clan, his people by birth. But although he learned to reach deep states of meditation, he did not find inner peace or insight. So he went to the forest to live as an ascetic. There he almost died, yet did not find the wisdom he sought. From these two extremes: his life of luxury followed by one of deprivation, Shakyamuni developed his teaching of the Middle Way as a way to live. Not too loose, not too tight. Finally, he entered a deer park and resolved to sit beneath the Bodhi tree, (bodhi means wisdom in Sanskrit), until he attained wisdom.
Thich Nhat Hanh, in his book Old Path White Clouds, describes the Buddha’s enlightenment this way. “After deeply entering meditation, be began to discern the presence of countless other beings in his own body right in the present moment. Organic and inorganic beings, minerals, mosses and grasses, insects, animals and people were all within him. He saw that other beings were himself right in the present moment. . . . He felt all the joys and sorrows of every living being . . . He saw that every cell of his body contained all of heaven and earth. . . . Gautama entered even more deeply into meditation . . . He saw how countless beings pass through countless births and deaths. He saw that these births and deaths were but outward appearances . . . just as millions of waves rise and fall incessantly on the surface of the sea while the sea itself is beyond birth and death. If the waves understood that they themselves were water, they would transcend birth and death and arrive at true inner peace, overcoming all fear. . . . At that moment thunder crashed and great bolts of lightning flashed across the sky.”
So what is enlightenment? Buddhism has many adherents and they do not all understand enlightenment the same way. My thoughts today are derived from the Vietnamese Zen Buddhism of Thich Nhat Hanh, which is influenced by Chinese Zen, or Chan, Buddhism. Enlightenment is living in the experience of understanding. Living in the experience of understanding.
This is not an intellectual understanding. It is a lived understanding. Do you remember the story of Helen Keller in The Miracle Worker? Annie Sullivan keeps spelling words into Helen’s palm in order to teach her the relationship between language and experience but Helen cannot make the connection. Then, seemingly all of a sudden, Helen gets it. She connects the water she can feel pouring out of the pump to the different touches that her teacher spelled into her palms. She gets it that that particular constellation of touches relates to the substance she could feel pouring over her. And that moment of getting it changed everything for Helen Keller. And that moment of getting it did not arise out of the blue. It arose from the effects of a long, if unseen, preparation. I daresay many of us have had such moments of “getting it,” of coming to an understanding that changed things in a significant way, be it emotional, physical, cognitive, spiritual. Enlightenment is that kind of “getting it” on all of those levels.
Getting what, you say? Getting that the nature of life is interdependent and that no one of us is alone or even separate, however much it might appear so. This is what Unitarian Universalists call the interconnected web of all existence. Most of us probably would agree that the nature of life is interconnection, yet it remains primarily an idea. Has that idea of interconnection changed our life? The difference here is that Buddhism would suggest that we can experience interconnection, not just agree that it exists. It is the experience of it which will change our lives.
Again, from Thich Nhat Hanh: “(Gautama) saw that living beings suffer because they do not understand that they share one common ground with all beings. (This) ignorance gives rise to a multitude of sorrows, confusions and troubles. Greed, anger, arrogance, doubt, jealousy, and fear all have their roots in (this) ignorance. When we learn to calm our minds in order to look deeply at the true nature of things, we can arrive at full understanding which dissolves every sorrow and anxiety and gives rise to acceptance and love.”
Do you watch Grey’s Anatomy? In the season finale last Thursday, a man came into the hospital with a gun and tried to kill a good number of the doctors. One of them, Charles, seriously wounded, is attended to by another doctor, Miranda, and a patient because the three of them were caught in a room together. Miranda patches Charles up as best she can and rigs up a way to drag him to the operating room. If he can have surgery, he can live. They get as far as the elevators when Miranda discovers that the SWAT teams have shut down all the elevators. Without anyone saying it, you know that she and the patient cannot transport Charles any further and you know that he will die. Miranda screams, then cries, then collects herself and sits down on the floor beside Charles. She takes his hand and gives his other hand to the patient. He asks her if he is going to die. She nods and says yes. But, she says, we will be here with you. We will not go away. You will not be alone. And so it is. All three lives were touched, and changed. That’s the difference between the idea of interconnection and the experience of it. Has it happened to you? Is that a moment of enlightenment? I don’t know.
The first message of this holiday, Wesak, is that enlightenment is the lived experience of interconnection. The second message is a question: how do we do that? What can we do to open to our experiences so that we can live them? And the third message is that if we do, anxieties and fears decrease, while acceptance, love and justice increase.
We open to our experiences by opening to our experiences. By paying attention, staying awake, living mindfully. Did you enjoy your breakfast this morning? Did you know you were eating it when you ate it? Do you remember what you ate? Have you looked into the faces of the people you love? Have you paid attention to what they say, think, and feel? Are you aware of what you are thinking and feeling? What’s going on inside there? Sadness? Fear? Contentment? Are you afraid to find out? How often do we make direct contact with the present moment? How often are we really here? That paying attention; that knowing we are here, at this moment, letting the next moment arrive as it will rather than rushing headlong into it, that is mindfulness. It opens us to our experiences and to living them. In order to practice mindfulness, we need to stop and ask ourselves Where am I? What am I doing? What am I thinking? What am I feeling? Who are you? When we don’t really know where we are, who we are, or what we’re doing, we are disconnected from ourselves and from each other. Of course we feel separate and alone. Of course we feel lost. That’s why the scene from Grey’s Anatomy was so powerful. Each person moved through being lost and alone in his/her own suffering to being present with each other in a coming together that offered peace and comfort to each of them, even in the face of the fear and sadness that accompany such violent death.
“Practicing mindfulness strengthens the ability to look deeply, and when we look deeply into the heart of anything, it will reveal itself. . . . Looking deeply into the heart of all beings, Siddhartha attained insight into everyone’s minds . . . And he was able to hear everyone’s cries of both suffering and joy. . . . Each person’s disposition is the result of physical, emotional, and social conditions. When we understand this, we cannot hate even a person who behaves cruelly, but we can strive to transform his physical, emotional, and social conditions. . . . Gautama now saw that understanding and love are one. . . . Understanding gives rise to compassion and love, which in turn give rise to action.” (Thich Nhat Hanh)
I’m sure you are aware of the recent immigration law in Arizona. Seeking to identify, prosecute and deport undocumented immigrants, Arizona police were given broad power to detain people suspected of being in this country without documents. Opponents say it will lead to the grossest form of ethnic profiling. Those in favor claim the situation is desperate. At our upcoming General Assembly in Minneapolis, delegates will vote on whether or not to cancel our plans to hold General Assembly in Phoenix, Arizona in 2012, because we do not want to support such legislation with our presence and the financial resources we bring to General Assembly. Practicing mindfulness, looking deeply would guide us to ask these questions. What are the physical, emotional and social conditions that give rise to people being in this country without documents? What are the physical, emotional, and social conditions that gave rise to the legislators and the governor of Arizona voting for and signing this bill into law? Is there any policy, any legislation, any action that could help to transform the suffering of both undocumented immigrants and the people already living in Arizona? Where do I fit in? What can I do? Some UU’s want to boycott. Others, especially those in our congregations in Arizona, say come down and make your voice heard and your presence felt. I would guess there are still others who support the legislation. What do you say? Personally, I will vote to withdraw from Arizona in the thought that our financial statement will have the stronger message. But I will also urge my own representatives and senators to take a comprehensive, intelligent look at all sides of immigration, to understand the motivations on all sides, and to design policies that are as fair and compassionate as possible to all of the people affected.
From the mindfulness that offers the opportunity to live in our experiences comes the lived awareness of our connections and from the lived awareness of our connections flows an ethic of interconnection that begins on the personal level and extends outward to a communal level and enables us to seek and act for fairness, compassion, and justice in society at large.
Is this enlightenment? I don’t know. But at this time when the birth and the enlightenment of the Buddha is celebrated in the festival of Wesak, I am grateful for the opportunity to remember, once again, that I want to live in the experience of understanding the interconnected nature of life. It reminds me that, although I might perceive myself as an individual wave, I also belong to and am, the great body of water in which I arose and in which I will fall. I want to “get it.” And I can, at least sometimes, if I am mindful. And when I do, I touch the springs of strength and joy and life is more peaceful and loving. May it be so.
Song #391 Voice Still and Small Closing wordsMay all sentient beings be well and enjoy the root of happiness: free from suffering and the root of suffering. May they not be separated from the joy beyond sorrow. May they dwell in spacious equanimity free from craving, fear and ignorance. May all sentient beings be well and enjoy the root of happiness: free from suffering and the root of suffering. May we not be separated from the joy beyond sorrow.