This will be my second attempt to write this meditation. The first ill fated attempt was when my lung collapsed while on the plane in route to visit my brother.
It is Sunday morning now and I’ve been here since Wednesday night.
OK, you can sort of catch up on more details elsewhere in the writing. For now let me get going with the theme so there are no other interruptions.
My motivation for writing this was reading from Michelle Obama’s book Becoming where she talks about how she broke protocol an touched the
Queen of England on the shoulder during a state visit in public. You can imagine all the cows folks were having especially the ones who live and breath protocol, ritual, ceremony and such.
What Michelle communicated and the
Queen reciprocated by hugging Michelle back and drawing her in closer was ‘here we are two tired ladies standing in these dreadful uncomfortable high heeled shoes..’ a moment of shared humanity.
Working in the hospital I’ve been with patients who craved a more intimate experience with their holy one. The wanted an experience that could include anger at God, or physical contact with Goddess.
I’ ve had patients ask me if it alright to ber angry at Dog/God/Goddess. Here’s my logic, if Dog already knows everything, when you’ve been bad and when you’ve been good, she knows what your thinking so….
If you deity knows everything then I would think it is safe to assume they know you are angry. That deity knows just how angry you are. So what could be so harmful at yelling?
I’ve had people say it was very cathartic to let out that emotion.
In Buddhism we make offering of bowing to the Buddha. There are several procedures for performing what is considered to be a proper bow. And there are, as one might have figured various different kinds of bows depending upon the circumstance.
Here is what I got to thinking about, that none of them are culturally sensitive to any culture other than the culture of origin, and that’s pretty darn insensitive actually and could actually be argued as NVB, Not Very Buddhist.
Why would I say something is NVB? If we think about Buddhism as being about people to people, heart to heart, deep communication and deep connection, and also consider the Buddha’s injunction that the Sutra not be written in any fancy language then why would we imagine that there would only be one official proper way to bow.
All the robes and uniforms of Buddhist priests are nothing like what the Buddha wore, they are NVB.
My point here is not to rail against the hypocrisy, it wouldn’t be effective and who cares? Rather what I would like to do is try to create some space for people to liberate their own practice and next time you greet the Buddha give him a high five or a fist bump or whatever is your most comfortable and most intimate greeting.
You know when I encounter someone I care deeply about I don’t want the greeting to be something that prohibits a deep expression of my joy. So I might grab them by the full arm and shoulder and then pull them into my body and hug them and gush. Well maybe not the gush.
The point is learning to share your joy as you are as the human being you are with your most intimate spiritual buddy the Buddha or the Gohonzon.
On the obverse when you can share your joys then you will be more likely to be able to stay connected through your obstacles as well.
The image that most strongly comes to my mind would be a young black man growing up with hip-hop, or rap, or it could as easily be a young white kid and all this Buddhist formality being so off-putting. Yes it is learnable and it can be taught but I think the first thing and most important thing is to teach the joy of our practice. Who knows maybe that child can invent a new way to express joy to the Buddha.
