The Errant Abbot

Fundamentally, Zen is a renunciate tradition. What this means in practice is that it is a tradition which seeks to doff excess, to set down distractions, and to thereby peer through to the marrow of our being, to the patterns of our thoughts, and to the uncertainties on our hearts which we’re prone to concealing with consumption, obfuscation, and avoidance.

Humans have a fundamental disposition to seek pleasure and to avoid dissatisfaction (be it incarnate as pain, sadness, separation, or myriad other states). In our avoidance, however, we seldom inquire into the nature of dissatisfaction, and what it is exactly that we’re looking to outwit via our hedonic pathways through life.

Having not really come to know or understand what it is we’re running from, we rarely do so well, and we thus tend to run into that very thing, time and time again, head on, via those very paths that we think were blazing opposite its direction.

The reality, though, is that there isn’t really a direction toward or away from suffering and dissatisfaction. It’s not something that exists somewhere “out there.” Suffering is a function of mind, and dissatisfaction is forged by our ignorance, by our blind grasping for consequence-less fulfillment and shadowless distraction.

The Zen way can seem austere in its demands, but little other than genuine attentive pause is required- this is the true ask of renunciation. It’s the scarcity of such pausing to our experience, and thereby its unfamiliarity, that casts a vision of austerity.

Interestingly, it is sufficiency and enoughness (which Zen tends to champion as a deeply meaningful vantage) that we tend to color as austere, craving ever for more and more, and thus stoking our capacity for suffering.

~JRP

Zen Master Seung Sahn frequently instructed that the developmental trajectory of the Zen practitioner is to “first wake up,” and then “help save all beings.”

When the latter Bodhisattvic evolution is not taken up utterly prematurely, it stands not only as the natural expression of the awakened mind, but as a continual unfolding of the project of awakening itself.

The experiential seeds of dissatisfaction are unavoidable. They appear continuously in our lives, and whether or not they are nurtured into full blown suffering depends on whether or not they find supportive conditions within our fields of consciousness.

For the awakening Zen cultivar, these seeds of dissatisfaction are engaged not as mere practice points, but as invaluable seats of wisdom, that can be approached with gratitude for the vantage that they provide, allowing for the development of an ever fuller body of experience and insight to draw upon in the service of sentient beings.

In this way “my” suffering and “your” suffering are truly realized as inseparable, and the privilege of navigating these potentials is realized with gratitude and ease. This is the maturational trajectory of Zen practice.

~JRP

Sadness, melancholy, grief, anxiety, uncertainty, boredom, and even occasional hopelessness are all normative, and even recurrent experiences in the human condition. When we resist their occasional forays into our conscious experience, they tend to increase their amplitude.

These things do not always need to be understood, processed, or worked with in any particular way beyond experiencing them for what, when, and where they are. They don’t need to be chased away, or fended off, and prevented against. Most often they simply need to be noticed.

The common rhetoric of the mental health field at present is that there’s a pill for almost everything, and that neutral to elated states of being are the only acceptable states of being. That is absurdity.

Life is difficult, challenging, and tenuous. Consciousness within the human station is marked by the fundamental wound of knowing that just as we have mysteriously come into being, someday we will mysteriously go out of being, at least in the way that we have come to know it. We don’t know what, if anything awaits.

What we do know is that while life has joy, elation, ease, and pleasure, it tends to yield in equal measure seemingly opposing experiences. “Seemingly” because these are not actual oppositional but rather complementary, mutual experiences and states, that establish the ground for one another to bound into experience from, cyclically.

These matters comprise the fundamental tension of human being that must be grappled with, and while they’re never fully resolved, they can be fully accepted, with their underpinning mysteries leaned into, and this tension, then, can be harmoniously traversed, and the noticing required of our suffering (and elation) can be tolerated, and even appreciated.

Life demands examination. Meaning isn’t found in hedonic extremes, but rather balance, which itself is realized in the holistic beholding of our experiences, and the relationality of those experiences. Wellness requires cultivating a worldview of sufficient breadth to hold and situate the totality of our experience, neglecting and negating nothing. This development and maintenance of this aware experiential field is the very stuff of maturity and wisdom.

~JRP

Ash Wednesday and the Lenten Season are, I believe, among the most important observances and practices in the life of a Christian. These enshrine the best of what the Christian Way has to offer.

Today, adherents of liturgically oriented churches gathered to have their foreheads marked with blessed ashes while the words “remember that you are dust, and to dust you will return,” were intoned.

From dust, and to dust, with but a flash of animation in between.

And what are we to do about it? Wail? Wallow? Consume our way into a veritable numbness?

How about remembering, that is, simplifying our lives, getting rid of the analgesic of excess, be it in food and drink, in material comfort otherwise, and even in attitude or disposition when such things come to distract us from the realities of our human lot, and to come to then behave in accord with the same.

The Gospel reading that accompanies this day (Matthew 6:1-6, 16-18) warns against performative piety and religiosity, alongside self-indulgent sulking alike. Rather, the task is re-membering. Putting ourselves back in order, and finding right belonging and relationship to the body of our being that transcends our small narratives, our brief, animate flashes in the cosmic frying pan upon which those narratives seemingly play out.

For roughly six weeks the church calls its members to stillness, to simplicity, to humility, and to honesty. To join Christ in the desert, doing battle with the could be, should be, and would be’s of our imaginations, and to build our resolve to meet the actual calls upon our lives with renewed vigor and clarity.

What a challenge, and, if we rise to meet it, what a gift!

~JRP

When the cadre of Buddhist monks set out on their “peace walk” back in October I honestly paid it little mind. In fact I probably regarded it with a slightly rolled set of eyes. I don’t really have much use for grand displays of religious piety and absurd hope. After all, the great lineage master of my root tradition, Seung Sahn, famously once noted “world peace isn’t possible, it’s also not necessary!”

That said, I grew to have some fondness for these sramana, and the integrity that they seemed to display. Without getting wrapped up in lofty proclamations or absurdities, they bore witness with sufficient gravity to the longings common to many of our hearts so as to really serve as a source of inspiration for a great many people around our country. And to this I can only say “Sadhu, Sadhu, Sadhu.”

I often have observed that the greatest tangible sign of spiritual maturity that I can readily make note of is the spontaneous transmutation of anger and hatred into sadness, and not just any sadness, but the sadness that softens one’s heart, and indeed opens it up so as to release its contents freely into the world. This is the notion of Buddhist compassion: great love + great sadness (daeja daebi). If we all could be so stricken, our world might indeed approach something akin to peace.

~JRP

A Teisho on the Embodiment of True Self

In the Zen tradition, we frequently intone the Bodhisattva Vows, the first of which promises that “sentient beings are numberless, I vow to save them all.”

In his famed Compass of Zen teaching, the Korean Zen Master Seung Sahn opens with the following dictate: “first wake up, then help save all beings.”

Interestingly, salvation isn’t a word that most Buddhists easily own. Indeed, the wrestling with the language of the Bodhisattva Vows is something that has found its way into just about every English-speaking sangha. Afterall, salvation is really something that belongs more to those Abrahamic types, isn’t it? Along those lines, I can recall the elderly Vietnamese nun with whom I served as co-Abbot of a temple for about a decade frequently admonishing “Buddhism means no one can do for you, only you can do!”

And yet, if we’re honest, what we’re all looking for, if we peek behind the blinds of mere life optimization is something perhaps best described as salvation…perhaps not the salvation that some other worldly figure delivers unto us at the moment of death, but salvation, nonetheless.

The Merriam-Webster dictionary provides three primary definitions of the word salvation, namely:

Deliverance from the power and effects of sin

Liberation from ignorance or illusion

Preservation from destruction or failure: deliverance from danger or difficulty

While the first definition certainly reifies somewhat a Judeo-Christian ethos, it’s not a far stretch to understand sin as a metaphor for all of the ways in which we find ourselves separated from the real- stuck in the ignorance and illusion that the second definition so clearly spells out, seeking then deliverance from the woes appendant to such ignorance, and the dangers and difficulties that acting from its place elicits.

Most Buddhists are at least comfortable with the Four Noble Truths, that is, the Buddha Shakyamuni’s original teaching on the nature of existence as being wrapped up in suffering and dissatisfaction, which itself arises from an inappropriate, uncalibrated relationship to reality, wherein we treat and regard things in any way other than that which befits the station that they actually occupy. Indeed, this supposition is the very foundation for all Buddhist thought and practice. The latter half of this teaching, however, gets tricky, where the Buddha notes that this uncalibrated relationship to the real is both elective and optional, and that through recalibration itself we can find salvation- deliverance from the woes of suffering and dissatisfaction, both on the psychological microcosm, and the ontological macrocosm.

Unfortunately, there’s a lot of interpretation and commentary on this matter that isn’t clear, which had led to a proliferation of blurry practice and spiritual cultivation, often to uncertain ends.

In the west psychological and sociological optimization tends to lead the charge of dharmic investigation, with notions such as pratityasamutpada (interdependent origination) being taken seriously only so much as they can poetically point toward social movements and dispositions that fit the fancies of our already errant minds and politics, noble as they might be in intent. Case-in-point the doctrine of pratityasamutpada (often preferably cast as “interbeing”) doesn’t mostly, or even thereabouts, pertain to calls for social or environmental justice work and activism as a spiritual practice- enlightenment certainly doesn’t hinge on the construction of some special world where the salvation from suffering can the ethically exist.

In the east, dharmic practice tends to take on a character of devotional hope, wherein the serious investigation into the nature of reality is abandoned (often alongside any so-called “engaged” dharmic work) for surrender to the mythopoetic archetypes of the Buddhist pantheon, whose function cannot easily be parsed in that context from the Abrahamic devotion to various saints, angels, prophets, and deities in its own context.

The Zen tradition can clear this up, when honestly engaged in any context, be it eastern or western.

Among the various poetic endeavors and devotions that one might engage as flourish to one’s practice, the actual practice of Zen is one of recalibrating one’s perception and disposition to reality as it is, and in that it is about surrender. Everything consists of only this.

The first teaching of the Eightfold Path that the Buddha laid out as the steps (marga) to bringing about the cessation (nirodha) of suffering and dissatisfaction (dukkha) is the cultivation of Samyak Drishti, or “right view,” which gives rise to the capacity for being with things as they are, which is in and of itself salvific (and arguably, on both the mirco- and macro-cosmic scales).

The Zen tradition prizes especially the so-called Prajnaparamita literature, those scriptures which point to the perfected wisdom that bounds from the very heart of reality itself. Of this literary genre, the most famed examples are the Heart Sutra, and the Diamond Sutra.

While the Heart Sutra is perhaps the most frequently recited bit of Buddhist scripture in the world, I find that often it is just amorphous enough (in its poetic condensation of all of the Prajnaparamita literature) to be regarded little more than a Psalm proceeding a Gospel reading in a liturgical Christian church, familiar, well-esteemed, but functionally ignored.

Conversely, the Diamond Sutra is more regarded as a pseudo-apocryphal text, esteemed and nodded to, but little engaged. And yet, its full title points toward its potency- Vajracchedika Prajna Paramita Sutra- the Diamond Sword Which Cleaves Through to the Very Heart of Reality, Connecting Us Thereto. And as we beg the question what it is exactly that saves us, I find that this thread (sutra) is essential.

It might be simply understood that the primary message of the Heart Sutra is that form IS emptiness, and emptiness IS form. Not as a mirror or metaphor, but precisely- in the same time and space, all conceptual dichotomies are collapsed, and the unshorn fabric of reality emerges and unfurls, furls and submerges, moment-by-moment, contiguously.

The Diamond Sutra clarifies this. In the succinct summation of Seung Sahn:

All things that have tangible characteristics are delusion. If you see that all aspects are not tangible aspects, then you will see your True Self.

You should not abide in an object and give rise to thoughts. If you see physical matter as the [self], if you search out the [self] with your own voice, you are practicing the wrong path, and you cannot see your True Self.

All compounded things are like a dream, a phantom, a bubble, or a reflection. They are like dew or lightening. Thus should you view them.

The “True Self” is an enduring Zen motif. Most plainly we understand that the True Self is the true body of all phenomena, and in this it is synonymous with salvation, realization, and liberation- call deliverance what you wish. It is the conscious recalibration with the only real identity, which has no outside and no inside, no beginning and no end. Or as the Heart Sutra invokes “no old age, no sickness, or death, and also no extinction of them.”

But how, really and practically, do we arrive at this realization? With what grace does such salvation befall us?

Well on one hand, this reality really is inescapable- it’s the only one! Even the ignorance thereof and proactive writhing against it fits snuggly within its vest- talk about grace! And, on the other hand, that’s exactly what it is we need to experientially verify, so as to relate to any such thing called “salvation.”

The classical prescription in Zen Buddhism is to sit down, shut up, and to pay attention. In other words, to practice Zazen, or seated meditation. And to be sure, zazen is a good and important practice, although I might argue that this prescription is best emphasized in its reverse order, pay attention, shut up, and when you can sit down doing just those things.

Seated meditation is undoubtedly important, but it can amount to little more than perseveration and rumination about, and mindfulness of, one’s seemingly unique vantage and lot as somehow distinct and special from everything else- in other words a reification of the false self, rather than an embodiment of the True Self – even if they are the same side of the same coin (indistinguishable from the purse, or the pocket in which such things tend to find themselves) when push comes to shove.

Rinzai Zen teachers are rightly fond of noting that the central discipline of Zen is not in fact seated meditation,  but rather the relationship to, and guiding dialectic with, a realized teacher. In other words, sanzen > zazen. And there’s a lot of weight to this.

Zen isn’t theory, but experience, it’s not hope but doubt, and it’s not even really practice but training- all of which point the way to reality: training our way through our outlandish presuppositions, doubting our arrival at some other shore (especially with deference for as long as there is any space for doubt at all), and experiencing what is, unmitigated by any preoccupations with what might otherwise be.

The balm of Buddhism is that amidst all of the seeming arising and falling of various forms and happenings (i.e. phenomena) , no-thing has ever happened.

Indra’s Net stretches from infinite expanse to infinite expanse, comprised of, holding, and yielding forth nothing but quantum soup, seemingly pulsating, in and out, up and down, light and dark, but having only itself has reference, container, and potential, moves in fact never even an iota, never darkening nor lightening, birthing nor receiving.

Again the Diamond Sutra recalls:

All things that have tangible characteristics are delusion. If you see that all aspects are not tangible aspects, then you will see your True Self.

The concept of pratityasamutpada (interdependent origination) is possessed of a certain gravity, that beckons it to the center of practice-imagination, if even only to subjugate it to the whims of our egoic fancies, which seek to shield us from a true experiential awareness of the reality, which is the only reality, to which this concept and teaching points.

Things inter-are, and inseparably so. There is no becoming apart from being. Tangible reality is tentative reality- one passing perspective amidst infinite multitudes of possibility, in which array no single perspective, possibility, or thing can actually be identified as distinct or real. Again the Diamond Sutra reminds us:

All compounded things are like a dream, a phantom, a bubble, or a reflection. They are like dew or lightening. Thus should you view them.

And how do we view them thus?

With no other eyes, than with those now perusing, star dust incarnate: black letters on a white page the universe unfurled.

~JRP

I’ve been talking a lot about vocational calling in the context of ministry these days. After a couple decades of personal wrestling, both as an individual and as a religious teacher, it’s become clear to me that transcendent of the details of faith context, a calling essentially comes down to one simple formula: interest + ability + opportunity.

All of that said, there’s substantial room for poetry, nuance, and experiential variegation within the elements of this formula, but its topical simplicity holds water, for sure.

Interest might be best understood as an enduring attraction, as longing, and as gravity toward a vocation. This is usually the whole of what most people talk about when they speak of a “calling-“ often poeticized as a direct summons from the sacred or divine; it can be both a mere passing fancy as well as a firm gripping by the archetype of a cleric itself. What’s most important here is its consistency. Religious vocations tend to not suffer fits of fancy with much dignity or grace.

Ability is an amalgam of innate dispositions and traits, meeting the aptitude to acquire requisite knowledge and skills, in addition to the capacity for cultivating the particulars of priestly presence- chiefly through persisting in self-deconstructing awareness and analysis, through which genuine wisdom can arise. This domain seems at first more obvious and tangible than that of “interest,” but I find that it tends to actually be far more subtle, and it is in this arena that many a calling finds its answer as negation rather than affirmation. There are many intangibles that comprise ability, that while difficult to pin down (and sometimes impossible to cultivate) are nonetheless plainly recognizable.

Finally there is opportunity. Opportunity in essence means the coming together of the causes and conditions that support a vocation, with some emphasis on communal life- do others want to do religious life with you, and/or, do they want you to exercise your calling for and among them? This can be painful, and it almost invariably is, both when it is affirmed and negated alike. If you proceed, you’re heart will break (despite all of the graces and blessings of a call recognized and lived out), and if you pause or recede, you’re heart will also tend toward breaking, be it for shattered dreams, time seemingly lost, self-concepts undone, or mere disappointment in the face of the realities one has come to face (despite all of the graces and blessings of such intimate awareness). This is often terribly messy, blessed work.

The final aspect of all of this can be summed up in one word, namely, discernment. When it comes to religious life, discernment is always relational. This is to say it’s bigger than one’s feelings, and it can be quite difficult to make legitimate space for feelings and perceptions beyond your own in the conversations that allow one to genuinely examine their sense of calling, through the whims of seeming certainty, indignation, and self-righteousness that all seek so very strongly to find affirmation.

The discernment of a religious calling is best engaged patiently if not persistently, with both honesty and humility. The discernment process properly engaged is not simply about coming out the other side in (or as) some place (or someone) new. Rather, it’s about finding where and who one is. In this, where one might now be, may be revealed as exactly where one is to be, if not with new eyes, appreciation, and agency in situ.

~JRP

a thousand tracks left behind

fresh snow ‘lone recalls

~jrp

Compassion arises like an itch, spontaneously and without effort. It requires no special tending or intention beyond the practice of being with what is.

In the cultivation of awareness, one naturally takes note of (and accord with) the implications of one’s glimpsing of one’s true self. Namely, that its limits are boundless, and that every variety of experience is natal to one’s being.

From this experiential vantage, a universal sense and flow of compassion emerges as the very act of according with reality.

This compassion isn’t tropic, and it often doesn’t fit the performative mold of attempts at the cultivation of compassion for compassion’s sake.

Rather this compassion is more dispositional in nature- transmuting anger with sadness, and through the great gate of sadness reaching through to touch the heart of all beings, beneath the play of greed, anger, and ignorance, to what those things give rise to shield- namely, the self unknown.

~JRP

There’s no doubt that allopathic medicine is deeply rooted in the knowable facts of physiology. It’s a deeply miraculous domain of knowledge and skill. And yet, it misses so much.

Various so called traditional, holistic, alternative, complementary, and integrative modalities and systems have the market cornered on relatability and accessibility. Through employing highly personalized (relational) metaphor, imagery, and symbolism, these systems enjoy high rates of regard and even compliance, often despite their rooting somewhat (and even entirely) outside of the knowable facts of physiology.

Humans need personalization. As meaning making, ego-driven creatures, they thrive on grand imagery that relates to the construct of the self, rather than on dry, impersonal jargon. It is these very things that make these systems attractive, accessible, and indeed relatable. It’s these things that create buy-in and that elicit adherence.

People spend trillions of dollars each year on alternative medical interventions, many of which have no more efficacy than mere sham interventions, because they are rooted in paradigms of personalization and metaphor, in relationship, and endeavor. The things allopathic paradigms tend to miss, even when nestled amidst nonprofit milieus.

Allopathic medicine could employ such devices, but like science more generally, it tends to lose for setting itself up in diametrical opposition (à la science vis-a-vis religion), rather than in sympathetic humility, with an eye turned toward functionality.

Of course, too, there are those moments when allopathic knowledge reaches its limits, and its lack of humility tends to shine forth when the miraculous cures outside of its domain work their miracles, which of course can only then be relegated to “anecdotal” accounts at best.

We humans have a long way to go…

+JRP

Aside the mantle,

in this night’s last embers’ glow,

the lone June bug basks.

A Bodhisattva’s winter,

faint joy in another’s warmth.

Happy New Year everyone!

On one hand, this day represents a fresh start, and an opportunity for reflection on where we are, where we’ve been, and where we want to be, along numerous fronts.

The marking of a “new year” offers an opportunity for recalibrating our lives and values, and for adjusting our course on the basis of our temporality. Certainly as the years pass by, we tend to grow increasing aware of the reality that is life-as-liminal-space, as the connective tissue between poles of seemingly limitless non-being.

On the other hand, this day means nothing at all. It’s an arbitrary marker that we select from a sea of infinite possibility. Indeed, we tend to actually anchor little on the so-called beginnings of new years, save for false starts to different ways of being, and champagne tinged laments, all of which are soon forgotten as we return to our lives already in progress, and their myriad demands.

Of course, we don’t just go about this charade once a year- there’s always birthdays, marriage anniversaries, class reunions, and retirement calculators, a small sampling of the innumerable ways that we all attempt to track the passage of time, while promising to make it better, or more meaning filled in the coming moments-turned-months, or even to just glean the motivation to bare the seemingly unbearable for just a while longer until, at last, we can arrive at a place where we can finally let go and just be, as we think we want to be, where we imagine we’ll be fulfilled.

But it’s all just a fantasy friends.

There is only this moment, and it stretches from infinite expanse to infinite expanse- it is hung on, and comprises infinitude, and in that place, in that mode, nothing has ever happened. There is but complete stillness, seemingly pulsating- in/out, on/off, up/down, light/dark, being/non-being etc. etc. etc.

Perhaps the most important thing we can do when we’re drawn to take note of time and the seeming progression of our lives along some linear trajectory is to resolve to actually make contact with the present. That is, to inquire deeply into the nature of being, not for the sake of optimizing our experience, but for actually knowing our experience, and situating our awareness faithfully within the flow of reality, which is precisely non-different from our truest nature.

Reality requires no intervention. It takes care of itself completely. It offers no resistance, and manifests only as a harmonious flow, with no conflict to be found within its boundless body, which in actuality has no interior or exterior.

When this is realized, when it is directly and consciously known to our experience, our very need for resolutions falls away, our fear of death and decline, of somehow coming undone, fades and time itself becomes but flourish to the view (of reality’s true nature, the immaculate Dharmakaya).

Nothing needs correcting, and that which is seemingly incorrect falls ever precisely into place, optimizing with the possible, without effort or ado.

So happy new year, dear ones, happy this moment- the same as it’s ever been. May we all realize our place in and as reality- as teapots made of tea, pouring tea, into tea, to be consumed by, well, tea. Or rather something like that. Cheers!

+JRP

There’s a tendency among spiritual seekers to cultivate gratitude for, and attention to, the present moment out of an increasing awareness of its fleeting nature. In other words, to cherish reality for its temporality.

Unfortunately, this is little more than clinging and attachment by any other name- a far cry from enlightened regard. In fact, such cherishing tends to devolve into wistfulness and longing for the temporal essence of reality to be any way other than it is.

Gratitude, cherishing, and indeed particular attention are not properly objects of cultivation. Rather, they are properly subtle accompaniments and affectations to the wonder and awe that naturally arise as the only authentic response to a genuine encounter with the mystery of being, to reality itself.

Arising in this way, and from this place, these affects are naturally sustained, and devoid of grasping and craving. Thus they accompany liberation rather than birthing samsaric permutation.

+JRP

At the heart of reality is a totally ineffable mystery. Humans have sought to contend with this for millennia, chiefly through imaginative story telling, anthropomorphizing, offering, praying, hoping, and enlivening those hopes and prayers through ritual enactment.

This is essentially the stuff of religion. And it can all be quite lovely, compelling, and even effective, not only as a balm for the wounds of the heart, but as something of a tempering medium for making introduction to the great mystery that underpins all of this.

That said, we all know the other things it can be. Indignant, intolerant, divisive, bigoted, and intentionally ignorant of the progressive revelation of reality, you know, of the way things actually are. Such are the risks of investing in the creative act(s) of giving form to the formless.

It strikes me that the discipline of Zen stands unique among the world’s religious and spiritual paradigms, and even of other Buddhist schools of thought.

Zen doesn’t depend on any mythos, it rejects the tempering devices common to religion, and insists on facilitating a direct introduction to the mysteries of being and nonbeing.

Zen takes for granted our existence, and doesn’t seek to explain it. Indeed, it tends to reject explanations of all sorts, preferring direct revelation and confirmation of the few suppositions it advances.

And what are those suppositions?

That we’re seemingly here, for a time, and that alone is strewn with both wonder and suffering.

Being here, amidst that wonder and suffering, is worth investigating and even confronting.

That others throughout history confronting their existence similarly have successfully laid aside their suffering, and found a way to be, free from the neuroses born of resisting the unknown, and thereby consciously partaking in the flow of form emerging from formlessness and dissipating back into the same, with confidence, with grace, and without ado.

+JRP

The heart of contemplation is about becoming aware- be it progressively or all at once- of one’s place in the fabric of reality, of the substance of one’s being, and its relationship to all (seemingly other) things.

It’s about beholding and being held- supported and supporting, sustaining and being sustained, in the fundamental unity of all phenomena.

And this union isn’t something’s that’s attained to, cultivated, or otherwise manifested- rather, it’s simply realized.

That said, realization itself is something that can be attained, cultivated, and made manifest. Indeed, it demands some tending.

But the union that is realized is a constant, and is not dependent on conscious awareness.

Though, when it does come to conscious awareness, a single glance into the absolute is often transformative, but a longheld gaze, an enduring awareness, tends to be content to leave things be, and to simply wonder.

And what else is ours to do amidst the progressive revelation of the mysterious nature of being?

Whatever we do from our respective station is sufficient, and indeed is what’s necessary. And while it’s all of cosmic significance, the cosmic is content on both its micro- and macro- planes to be as it is, without conflation or reduction.

+JRP

The transmission and growth of the Dharma in the global west has been accompanied by a profound sense of universalization, wherein the assumptions of modernity and the very notion of “world religions,” have inexplicably helped to cut through the untenable exclusionary assumptions of once siloed doctrines.

Interestingly, all of this was made possible though the otherwise problematic positions of western theologians-come-anthropologists (or “orientalists”), who so often approached the religions of the east with such a missionally informed distance that they facilitated powerful enough pattern recognition, that said patterns seeped into the very ethos of those faiths.

Cue such minds as Swami Vivekananda, Swami Ramakrishna, Swami Yogananda, Ramana Maharishi, Soyen Shaku, Daiun Sogaku, DT Suzuki, Yamada Koun, Hazrat Inayat Khan, and the like.

Unfortunately, not enough Christian thinkers (with notable exceptions- from Bede Griffiths to Thomas Merton, Richard Rohr, and the like) have been so swayed by their encounter with the east, so as to reciprocate the deference to the perennial wisdom born of contemplation, nor its patterns.

The reason for this is twofold, namely that Christianity has been, for most of its existence, a religion of empire, and one that has been formally and generally suspect of contemplation itself, preferring dry doctrinal suppositions to the organic, lived experience that is encountering the real directly. Of course this is speaking on an institutional scale, that is not reflective of the minority reports that have existed within the church from its very beginnings, and that have been preserved most meaningfully in various monastic sub-contexts.

It is as Max Muller once said they “who know only one religion, know none!”

+JRP

One of the primary ways that the Bodhisattva vow and intention supports and sustains practice is by de-centering experience.

In transmuting one’s own experience into experience for all beings, one comes to welcome even pain and adversity, and thereby transmutes suffering.

In this paradigm all experience serves to cultivate empathy and compassion, preparing one for service in responding to the cries of the world, with the broadest possible knowing (gnosis) gleaned from showing up completely to each and every facet of one’s life.

This is a feat that is nearly impossible to muster from the narrow vantage of tending only to one’s own life, but which becomes genuinely accessible when vowing to live for all beings.

+JRP