On Return - and Meat

The essence of mystical experience is a sense that there was nothing learned, nothing gained, that was. Our ascent was merely another representation of the greater exaltation, of material reality, the clay to which the angels bow. Our biologies seem to us during these experiences advanced apertures invented by the cosmos for it to view itself, but not necessarily to solve itself. Our cogitating machinations are only repeats of what it has already done. Our highest machines pale in comparison to the subtlety of human thought, and of the identical subtlety of our capacity to observe.

I've heard it said that we only exist in relation to one another, meaning that my karma is impossible without your karma and the doings of everyone in the world. That is to say, had the past, almost anything in the past, happened differently I as I am would not exist. There would be consciousness, and there would be karma, but not exactly what we have here. So while I think that esoteric knowledge can bring a feeling of the equality of all things, that there is no 'need to,' 'should have,' and that all experience is equal in being an illusion, uniqueness not only remains but is enhanced by knowledge of how that uniqueness is rooted in everything else. There's a phrase many teachers bring up that came out of zen, the sentiment goes "Before I set out on the path trees were trees and mountains were mountains, after initiation trees were no longer trees, the mountains no longer just mountains. Now that I have returned the trees are again trees, the mountains are just mountains." The point all those teachers seem to be making is that the other shore is where you are, that the terms emptiness and liberation are more descriptors for reality as it is rather than how it could be. If we work with this particular idea that is possible in Buddhist thinking, we will find that nirvana is not so much a state of total disengagement that one attains as it is something much harder to put into words that has echoed silently through every experience we have ever had. We have never been disengaged from reality nor perhaps can there be any absolute stop to experience, rather this basic emptiness of all phenomena frees us, gives us a license for limitless engagement with life.

We search for nirvana because we’re in trouble; we seek to be free from the world. In the realization that we’re already there and that there was no place to look for it we find the freedom to live in the world.

One thing that really astonished me in my readings was precisely how Tibetan Buddhists dealt with the problem of meat consumption. Rather than bending philosophy into a more convenient form, getting rid of the bad karma from eating animals, as perhaps I too cynically supposed upon realizing how flexible a philosophy like Buddhism is in the hands of culture, Tibetans held to the Buddhist moral code very strictly, choosing instead to develop a karmic gutter, a place of low standing, in this case the butcher, who receives all of the negative karma diverted from almost everyone else's diets. Geoff Childs reveals how big of a problem this is for the butcher, and just how large this underclass of butchers must have been, writing "Tibetans depend on livestock for survival in their arid, high altitude environment...they engage the service of butchers, a stigmatized underclass...who accrue the sin" (Childs 229). This situation puts the moral problem into sharp definition, illuminated by the cultural, environmental need for livestock. Childs also describes the process through which bad karma is conducted to the butcher, "The rationale boils down to 'I didn't kill it, and it wasn't killed for me, but since it is dead I will eat it" (Childs 229). I recognize the etymologies of the terms used academically here, 'stigmatized' people 'accruing sin,' it is very interesting to see how religious terms that are familiar to western scholars of religion throughout history have been mapped onto equivalent terms in the east, or to see these terms used to dissect the moral logic of another culture. It is a reminder both of the limitations of language and of the wonderfully creative ways it can be used to bridge cultural gaps. I wonder, thinking this, how the term 'Buddhism' breaks down grammatically and culturally in the eyes of its practitioners in the many other ethnolinguistic traditions of the world, do they see it exactly the way we do? How do we see it? 'Buddhism' in English puts it in the category of ideological or some other kind of philosophical 'ism,' but given the doctrine of emptiness what would an advanced practitioner call it? Would it involve categorizing 'Buddhism' at all?

In wider Tibetan culture, the doctrine of emptiness is not universal, but I wonder if the longstanding influence of Buddhism on the region has somehow supplied a lexicon more appropriate to what we call Buddhism than we have in our unexamined definitions of it as a collection of ideas disseminated verbally and in sutras that influenced wider Tibetan culture? Surely we're leaving out the world of experiential reality, which can never be captured in books, and which, whatever it is, must be the focal point of truth. However, I dare anyone to find where books begin and experiential reality ends. Books, like our eyes, are a medium for conveying experience, which is never free from a medium. The background of space, the air, the eyes, the occipital lobe, the neocortex are all, like books, adulterants of the experience of the thing in itself but the experience of the thing in itself is, like Buddhism, impossible to convey without some adulteration. I think because of just how many facets and depths to the experiential reality there are it is best, since we as students tend to be particularly good with books, prepare ourselves with incorrect but helpful sketches of the whole so that once we encounter the thing in itself there can be immediate dialogue, there will be more impact for every expectation blown away.

It began as a search for truth, to the end of some road; I tracked the mysteries to their mysteries and the road fractal and infinite. I discovered the endless present, the source, substance and end of all things subtler than a moment’s breath of spectral blip. We develop our infinite calculus in celebration, not frustration. The irrational becomes an eternal fountain of the rational, an endless tangle of weeds from which to wrestle crowns of thorns and olive branches. Sisyphus comes to delight in his futility and the frightened child peace with his impermanence. What began as something of solipsism has dissolved into plaeroma.