A Peek Into Buddhism

A baby was born to a powerful and wealthy mother and father. This child was raised in a big home with every material need met and then some. Some might even say he was born into the 1%.

But advisers to his father warned that although this boy was on track to becoming a great and powerful political leader, if he was ever exposed to oldness or death he would choose the path of a monk instead. Desperately wanting his son to become a great political leader, the father raised his son in a gated community where no poor or old people were allowed to enter.

But despite his father’s best attempts to shield his gaze, this boy began to notice suffering. He saw how the animals around the property suffer when some neighborhood kids tantalized them, and he also began to notice how some of the people within the gated community suffer.

His father tried to distract his son - who at this point had become a young man - with gifts and parties and even persuaded him to go out on a date with a woman from the neighborhood. They ended up marrying and his father invited only young and beautiful people to the wedding so that his son would not see aging and death.

Eventually he too had a son and he was happy. But sometimes, late at night or on quieter days, he would think about suffering. Eventually, he insisted on leaving the gated community and seeing the outside world. 

And that’s when things really shifted for this man, who, as you’ve maybe realized by now is the Buddha. Born Siddhartha Gautama.

When Siddhartha went out into the world he was overwhelmed by the level of suffering he confronted. He met an elderly, frail and helpless man on the side of the road, he saw a woman nearby suffering from an advanced disease, he saw a family grieving and carrying the remains of their loved one to a cremation site.

His journey in the world also lead him to encounter a mendicant, a monk who had taken a vow of poverty and who lived an ascetic lifestyle. In those days it was somewhat acceptable for men to leave their families to live the life of an ascetic, and for Siddhartha - plagued by the question of suffering - this is what he did.

He became a homeless monk for years learning about meditation and practices of denying the needs and desires of the flesh. In practicing this asceticism he punished and starved himself to try to find enlightenment, or the cessation of suffering. One day he fainted from fatigue and starvation and nearly died. A Shepard boy found him and fed him some milk.

Siddhartha woke up and realized that neither the extreme of over-consumption and pure pleasure seeking of his youth nor the extreme of mortification of the flesh was the path to truth or enlightenment. He decided to pursue a “Middle Way” - a path of moderation and meditation. 

He made his way to a beautiful Bodhi tree. He sat under that tree and meditated constantly. He began to experience connections, the connections between his current life and past lives, the connections between all beings and all things and all lives of all beings and all things - past, present, and future.

This expanded consciousness of connection, which lead to a cessation of suffering, is what many refer to as nirvana or enlightenment and is the moment when Siddhartha became the Buddha. He spread these teachings he discovered, known as the dharma, for the rest of his days. 



The Buddha lived between the sixth and fourth centuries BCE and since then hundreds of Buddhist schools have come into being. Much like Christianity or Islam - Buddhism is not a monolith. There are many Buddhisms with distinct teachings, practices, rituals, and versions of history. 


There’s just one little morsel of Buddhism that I want to offer to you today. A morsel, which shows up in most schools of Buddhism and might offer a balm for our sore and broken hearts in the midst of these challenging and fractured times.

In order to share this morsel I have to tell you another story. And it’s the story of the cloud and the water. 


The story of the cloud and the water is one I learned from Thich Nhat Hanh, the writer of the poem we opened our time with today. Many of you are familiar with this Vietnamese Zen Buddhist monk. He was banned from his home country and community in 1966 at the age of 40 for working against the war and for peace. He famously met with Dr. Martin Luther King hoping to persuade him to publicly oppose the war in Vietnam, which he did. The following year King nominated Thich Nhat Hanh for the Nobel Peace Prize.

In this story about the cloud and the water, Thich Nhat Hanh begins by holding up a steaming cup of tea. (pour water)

“When you look into the tea, what do you see?” he asks his group of attentive guests. After a few moments of silence he answers his own question with a smile: “I see a cloud. I see a cloud floating in the tea.”


“Yesterday the tea was a cloud up in the sky, but today it has become the tea in my glass,” he continues. “Today when you look up at the cloudless blue sky you might say, ‘Oh, my cloud has died.’ But in fact it has not died, it has become the tea in your cup.”

“The cloud has a good time traveling” he says, “when it falls down it does not die, it becomes the rain or snow that falls into the river that then flows into the sea. And then as the sun shines onto the sea it evaporates and becomes a cloud again. The cloud has a good time traveling wearing all kinds of forms or appearances.”

Continuing to massage the wisdom of the intimate connection between the cloud and his tea, he says: “When I look mindfully into my cup of tea I see my cloud. I say, ‘Hello, my cloud, I see you.’ And when I drink my tea, I drink my cloud.”

“Seeing the cloud in my tea is very helpful,” says Thich Nhat Hanh.

Nature’s water cycle functions as a beautiful guide for this ancient Buddhist teaching. Many of our earliest science classes exposed us to the flow of the water cycle, which also teaches us that the water we pour into our cup was once a cloud and will be a cloud again.

Thich Nhat Hanh lifts up this water cycle awareness and invites us to experience the connections more deeply by seeing all the forms of water in each individual form.

Imagine holding an ice cube in your hand and watching it melt. It moves from ice to liquid. If you’re standing out in the hot sun your hand will dry quickly as the liquid then evaporates and turns to gas. Whether frozen, liquid, or gas it is all water, just water in different forms or appearances. Molecularly this is true, whether liquid, frozen or gas, it is all H20 - just in different forms.

“Seeing the cloud in my tea is very helpful,” he says. It is helpful because for Buddhists, it is a peek into the true nature of reality, which is of a radical interconnection of all things or “interbeing” in the words of Thich Nhat Hanh.

“‘Interbeing' is a word that is not in the dictionary yet,” says Thich Nhat Hanh. “But if we combine the prefix ‘inter’ with the verb ‘to be,’ we have a new verb, inter-be.” Without a cloud, we cannot have this cup of tea, so we can say that the cloud and the tea inter-are.

Interbeing speaks to a fundamental inter-are relationship of all things that is always present in each and every moment. And in a sense, the path of Buddhism is about opening up and training the mind to see and experience this interbeing.

Joanna Macy, scholar and practitioner of Buddhism, says that “The Buddha did not pour pronouncements into his followers’ heads, so much as invite them to free themselves of habitual ways of seeing.” Today, just as in the time of the Buddha, notions of separateness and division define habitual ways of seeing. One of the Buddha’s insights is that once we quiet the mind we can experience the interconnected web of all existence, all time, all space.

By helping us to see the cloud in his cup of tea Thich Nhat Hanh helps to free us of the habitual way of seeing things as separate.

In another dharma talk Thich Nhat Hanh holds up a piece of paper and says, there is a cloud floating in this paper. The cloud moves to rain and nourishes the tree, we chop down the tree and it gives us paper. “The cloud is essential for the paper, without the cloud there is no paper” he says. The cloud and the paper inter-are.

And if we stare at the paper long enough we not only see the cloud, but we begin to see the woodcutter who chopped down the tree for the paper mill and the woodcutters parents & ancestors. We can see the ax used for the chopping and on and on goes the web of connection or interbeing. Without the woodcutter there is no paper and without the paper there is no woodcutter. 


One practice we might try in our day-to-day to help bring this interconnection more deeply into awareness is to wonder and ask about these hidden connections or stories within the story of a moment. For example, as you brew your coffee in the morning - you might ask yourself - where do these beans come from? Whose hands did the harvesting? Does she have children? What makes her laugh or cry?

What about the cows who made this milk you put in your coffee? Where do they graze and who are their caretakers? And the cashier who scanned the barcode on the back of your bag of coffee beans or box of tea? What is his story? And on and on.

Opening ourselves up to seeing these stories - hidden for most of us by our habitual ways of seeing - helps to shade in the web of interconnection of which we are a part. Our moment of morning coffee is a dot within a complex and beautiful web of interbeing.

Although the insight of interbeing includes all things, perhaps the aspect most difficult for us to experience is the interdependence between and amongst humans.

Just as the cloud is in this cup of tea so too you are in me and I am in you. Our entanglement is so profound that Thich Nhat Hanh describes it as, “you are because I am, and I am because you are.”

Interbeing does not reveal that we are the same, in fact our differences are important and beautiful. Rather, interbeing reveals that the same water that runs through you runs through me and as we move through and in it we constantly change and affect each other and co-become.

Thich Nhat Hanh entered the world stage in the 1960s during the Vietnam War. Instead of retreating to a monastic life in relative isolation he walked toward the battlefields and cared for victims of the war while working tirelessly for reconciliation and peace. He was eventually evicted from his home country because he refused to take sides.

In 1966, in the midst of this acute violence of war, Thich Nhat Hanh founded the Order of Interbeing, a community of both monastics and lay people committed to living through the eyes of interbeing described as - “seeing ourselves and others as cells in one body.”

Thich Nhat Hahn wasn’t sitting in a restful retreat house drinking his tea, he was drinking his tea in the midst of the chaos and death and violence of the global community - all words I would use to describe our current moment in time as well.

As he pens tenderly yet sharply in our opening poem, We are the frog and the grass-snake that eats the frog, We are the prisoner and the prison guard. Enough with the division and illusion of separateness, “please call me by my true names,” reads the poem’s title. Some of the references speak to the particular landscape of the time it was written and if we were to add a stanza for our time we might say:

We are Alton Sterling; father and friend who was shot and killed for being black and poor last week. And we are the police officer who shot him; father and friend threatened by difference, separated from love, and scared to die.

Each of us - cells in one body, the same blood running through it all.

*

In the early 2000s Thich Nhat Hanh lead a retreat for police officers and members of the criminal justice system in Madison, Wisconsin. It was organized by then police captain Cheri Maples, herself profoundly impacted by Thich Nhat Hanh’s mindfulness teachings and practices.

Reflecting on the accessibility and impact of Thich Nhat Hanh’s Buddhist teachings - even for people trained to kill if necessary - Cheri Maples said, “As a police officer, you're so often a victim and so often an oppressor. You really have to come to grips with both of those.”

Interbeing reveals that we are all both the victim and the oppressor. This is not to say that all struggles are equal, that all experiences of suffering are equally distributed or the same, this is to say that the practice of seeing and feeling the water and the blood that runs through us all - of living as if this interconnected web of all existence is real and true - is the practice of connecting deeply within oneself to all of its manifestations and forms, which includes the victim and the oppressor.

And by opening our hearts and minds to know and feel these connections and parts within ourselves, Thich Nhat Hanh offers that our well of compassion and love deepens and our communities transform.

Thich Nhat Hanh and other Buddhists might agree with me that the practice of leaning into interbeing encourages the practice of listening for the stories within the stories and the connections normally unseen and unspoken.

He might agree that through learning about the many stories and relationships of both Alton Sterling and the police officer we will feel more connected to both of them.But I think he would also say that a necessary additional ingredient is meditation. Straight up meditation.

Meditation comes in many shapes and sizes. From mantra meditation where you repeat a word or phrase in your mind, to visualizations, to breath-based meditations, walking meditation, and many more. Today we practiced metta, or loving-kindness meditation, which is the practice of cultivating kindness and warmth toward ourselves and all beings.

Meditation is a practice of learning to see differently on a cellular, neurological and deep level, in part to see and to feel the ways we are all so interconnected, that we “inter-are.”

Many of you in this room are familiar with the science-affirmed benefits of meditation, but perhaps a reminder is helpful. As one example of many, a study that came out of Harvard a few years ago tracked the way meditation changes the brain.


On average, participants practiced 27 minutes of mindfulness exercises, a form of meditation, per day for eight weeks. As a result participants had a measurable increase in gray matter density in the hippocampus, the part of the brain associated with self-awareness, compassion, and introspection.

We reach the limits of our understanding when we try to comprehend interbeing and meditation is there to help us go deeper.

To close this exploration today I invite you into a final brief meditation I also learned from Thich Nhat Hanh. I offer it as a way for you to catch a glimpse into a meditation style different from our opening loving-kindness meditation. It is a breath meditation and draws the attention of the mind to the inhalation and exhalation. It is also a mantra meditation. We’ll align a phrase with the breath to help quiet the mind.

We’ll use the phrase - flowing…river - to align with our breath. In general, you can choose any phrase that resonates. Perhaps if you try this at home the phrase - strong mountain - or - blooming flower - will work better for you.

I invite you to find a comfortable seat. You don’t need to sit in a particular way, just find a comfortable position and let your eyes close. I’ll open our brief meditation with the sound of the singing bowl and I will close it with the same sound.

Sound of singing bowl, three times.

Take a couple of breaths to settle in. Notice the silence or the stirrings of your mind.

As we inhale, silently to ourselves, we’ll say - flowing - and on the exhale - river. Flowing, river. Flowing, river. I invite you to sit in this mantra meditation for one minute.

If your mind wanders just notice it and bring your attention back to the breath and the mantra: flowing river.

Sound of singing bowl, three times.

May it be so.

Discussion questions for the congregation:

When do you feel most connected to other beings (human or non-human) and when do you feel most disconnected or separated from others?


How have you been influenced by the Western or American story of “individualism?”

Have you ever tried meditation? If yes, what was that like? If not, have you ever been curious about trying meditation, why or why not?

What interests you about Buddhism and what questions or curiosities do you have about Buddhism?