Friday Night Zen #17
What to write in this post-election Brave New World (just like the old world), when the weekend beckons to a pummeled mind like a red-headed Siren? The events of the last week have repeatedly brought to mind a sort-of parable from Steve Hagen's book, Buddhism: Plain and Simple. He illustrated the human condition in his opening chapter:
Imagine that you see people seated at a sumptuous banquet. Long tables piled high with delicacies are spread out before them. A dazzling and mouth-watering array of foods, perfectly prepared, is steaming and glistening and sizzling right in from of their eyes, easily within reach.
But the people seated at this feast are not eating. In fact, their plates are empty. They haven't helped themselves to so much as a crumb. They've been seated at this banquet for a long time now. And they're slowly and steadily starving to death.
They're starving not because they cannot partake of the wonderful feast, or because eating is forbidden, or difficult, or harmful. They're starving because they don't realize that food is what they need. They don't recognize the sharp, urgent pains in their stomachs as hunger.. They don't see that what they need to do, all they need to do, is enjoy the feast that's right in front of them.
Haven't you felt, at one time or another, to be missing something? Hasn't life sometimes left you unfulfilled? We all have. It's not that life is incomplete, but that we cannot discern it's perfection. Perhaps the problem is not with our lives or with how we live them, but with our unacknowledged expectations. We may have formed the common habit of expecting life to be more than it really is and, by extension, expecting more of ourselves than we can fulfil.
We are what we are. Buddhism is to accept that what we have, and what we are capable of, is all we need. We are inherently perfect. I've always thought this a novel concept, coming as I have from a Christian culture of Original Sin. We have all we need to become happy, to better our world, to create joy in the lives of those around us if only we see through our cultural baggage as the psychological bondage it truly is.
The feast is before us. If we listen to our stomachs and not to outside sources, we can be free to reach forward and eat. It takes a brave person to be the first to make the move at our banquet. Soon the others will follow suit. Bon appetit!