Buddy Dharma

Late April, Kyoto was visited by Dzigar Kongtrul Rimpoche. He has set up a small Sangha here, superimposed on the local Shambala community, many members being former Boulder residents and old students of Trungpa Rimpoche. It was through their introduction that I attended the talks, held in a beautiful machiya at the foot of Hiei-zan.

The whole thing brought me back to the ashram again, spending long days cross-legged, trying to ignore the pain in your knees and back and focus instead on your breath or on the teacher's words. The latter was a challenge in itself. Not being a student of Vajrayana, it was hard to follow at times. I felt as if I'd stepped into a theater where a film is already in progress and in a different dialect. One interesting part of this split was a simultaneous Japanese translation of Rimpoche reading a sutra in Tibetan, and us reading along in English. The overlap of time was also in play, as he chanted an ancient text from his Mac. As we chanted along to our English translation, I once again wondered why English speakers tend to chant in an approximation of the original Asian language, devoid of beauty and decaying into a monotonal, Borg-like drone. Like a paint-by-numbers version of a masterpiece.

The talks themselves were great. I wrinkled my nose at the stuff I didn't get, bobbed my head to those pieces that mirror the Japanese mikkyo folded into my brain. Then I heard this:

"Just as all the buddhas of the past
Embraced the awakened attitude of mind,
And in the precepts of the bodhisattvas
Step by step abode and trained,

Just so, and for the benefit of beings,
I will also have this attitude of mind,
And in those precepts, step by step,
I will abide and train myself."

And suddenly I'm taken back a decade to out in front of a used bookstore on a quiet Wellington, NZ street. A friend had asked about the Boddhisattva vow, and I'd explained that if a person glimpses satori, recognizing the interconnectedness of us all, that person would naturally try to bring it all into the fold much the way that Humpty Dumpty would grab at all the shattered pieces of himself. But I'd been wrong.
My view had been ego-driven. The wish for enlightenment is much more altruistic. You want to bring everyone over. It's not a means of gathering all the pieces of the puzzle as much as recognizing that the puzzle's completion requires the proper placement of that first piece, to which all the other's relate. And it starts where you sit. With those painful knees.


On the turntable: Operation Ivy, "Energy"
On the nighttable: Takei & Keane, "Sakuteiki"