And Actually Is

The World Could Be Otherwise: Imagination and the Bodhisattva Path by Norman Fisher.  Shambhala.  207 pp. $17.95. ****1/2

It’s an odd title for a book on Buddhism, which is supposed to devote itself to the world as it is.  When Fischer lectured on the book at the Chapel Hill Zen Center, someone asked him about that, and he said, among other things, that our imagination may show us that the world actually is otherwise, that we’re not seeing things as they are.  Meditation helps us develop this imaginative faculty, which enables us to see the world more clearly.

Actually, somewhat to my surprise, it’s a book about the six paramitas, which everybody seems to be writing about these days, the six focuses of practice that take us to the other shore: generosity, ethical conduct, patience, joyful effort, meditation, and understanding.  This is one of the many lists in Buddhism, a religion which seems obsessed with lists, perhaps because it began as an oral tradition, and learning lists was one way to pass it on.

I don’t often read books of moral exhortation, though I did read Fischer’s earlier book, Training in Compassion: Zen Teachings on Lojong, his take on a collection of slogans that come out of Tibetan Buddhism.  I’ve met people who find such things helpful, who—when describing a difficult personal encounter—mentioned how a particular Lojong slogan, for instance, helped them decide how to react.

I find that in difficult personal situations some list of slogans is the last thing that comes to my mind.  I’m not great at remembering lists anyway: if somebody held a gun to my head right now and asked me to name the six paramitas, I’m not sure I could, as many times as I’ve heard them (to say nothing of the list of precepts, our guide for ethical conduct).  That isn’t to say that such things have no effect on my life.  I’ve spent hours studying and talking about them.  But I think that, in moments of difficulty, it isn’t our rational mind that comes into play.  It’s something deeper than that.

That’s why—at least this is my understanding—Zen Buddhism focuses so much on the practice of zazen, or sitting meditation, rather than a list of rules.  What changes our conduct is not a rational explanation of what to do (I don’t think anyone would argue with the paramitas as a set of guidelines for your life, but who really needs an explanation of how to be generous, or patient?) but the long-term practice of sitting, in which, over time, all of our impulses come up, and we see them in the cold light of consciousness, knowing we’re not going to act on them (because we’ve taken a vow just to sit there.  No matter how much you want to get up and have a beer, or go to the movies, you’ve pledged to just sit there).  Our deepest impulses seem more physical than mental, or logical; when somebody cuts you off in traffic, you’ve flipped him the bird before your mind has calculated whether that’s a good idea or not (a fact which has gotten more than one driver in trouble).  And when you find those impulses deep in your body, and prove to yourself that you don’t have to act on them, that can make a major change in your life.  It doesn’t have to, but it can.

So for me, the final two paramitas are the most interesting and important, and I believe Fischer agrees.  I would say, in fact, that the book really picks up in those final two chapters, and gets to the heart of all the paramitas.  It is through meditation (the fifth paramita) that we find understanding (the sixth), and once we have some understanding we naturally start enacting the first four paramitas.  As a friend once said to me, the precepts are the mind of the Buddha.  Once you’ve seen that mind—which is in all of us—the precepts seem natural.

Fischer’s chapter on meditation is excellent; he’s studied not only in the Zen tradition, but others as well (Fischer himself was raised as a Jew, and leads a Jewish group in meditation; he also seems familiar with all the spiritual and mystical traditions), and he covers a lot of ground in that chapter.  But it is when he gets to the zazen of Zen Master Dogen, the shikantaza, or “just sitting,” that is at the heart of Soto Zen, that he becomes most eloquent, also, at the same time, spells out the mystery at the heart of this practice and of all meditation.

“Dogen is giving us the ultimate meditation object—no object.  Technically this is nondual meditation: beyond the duality of subject and object.  Just presence, ‘just this.’  It can only be done ‘immediately,’ in no time, eternal time.

“By definition, this practice is impossible.  There is literally nothing to it.  Yet we can do it.  Or rather, it can somehow occur, though we can’t do it.  When the mind becomes quiet—ceases to search for concentration, insight, or anything other than being in time, and is willing to simply sit in the midst of the impossible ineffability of being alive—then this meditation is taking place.  Body and mind drop away.  No longer ours, we don’t worry about them.  Like the sun rising in the morning, our original face, our Buddha face, dawns.  We touch it intimately with our body, breath, awareness.”

It’s the “impossible ineffability of being alive” that people have trouble with.  That’s why they run away from zazen, and seek a religion that offers concrete answers.

Yet it is in that state of sitting that understanding—the sixth paramita—arises.  Fischer offers practices for each of the paramitas as he discusses them, but when he gets to the sixth, he admits there’s no way to practice it; it arises or doesn’t.  It is like, I would say, the Christian concept of Grace.  The sixth paramita is often translated as wisdom, but Fisher is wise to call it understanding, giving it a much more fluid, evanescent feel.  Buddhism speaks of perfect wisdom, perfect understanding, and that exists theoretically, but you can’t get a handle on it.  You can’t really say what it is.  It was the evanescent nature of understanding that made the Buddha reluctant to teach in the first place.  He could see it, but couldn’t say it.  So what he taught was a way to get there.

Fischer is extremely eloquent in the chapter on understanding as well.  Here his vocation as a poet must have helped; he was a poet before he practiced Buddhism, and has published a number of volumes of poetry through the years.  This mind of meditation, the Big Mind that we find in sitting, is the place that poets and other writers have always written from.  When I’ve tried to describe meditation to my writer friends, I say: it’s just like writing, except you don’t do the writing.  It’s also the mind that ultimately leads to a better life; Fischer describes it beautifully.

“Based on the perfection of understanding, bodhisattvas don’t see practices or teachings, they don’t have goals or make effort—they are flexible, they have a sense of humor about themselves and their bodhisattva project.  They understand that everything is ironic, provisional, and fluid, especially the way they see things, the way they think and speak.  The perfection of understanding is the ultimate source of skillful means.  The whole world is nothing but skillful means.

“It’s an easy shift from here to the overarching theme of our discussion—imagination.  I hope it’s clear that all the words I have been emphasizing in this book are just labels I am clumsily trying to pin on something that defies all labels.  Emptiness, understanding, perfection, imagination, irony, skillful means, love, compassion, awakening, bodhisattva—can we really be clear about the precise definitions of these various words?  Aren’t they all just markers of our continually feeble attempt to explain something we desperately need to understand, but can’t quite understand, about our collective life on earth?  Yet we need to keep trying to understand, with a great hope that our effort will somehow help.”

Indeed we do, and I believe the effort does help.  I read the first four chapters of this book somewhat dutifully, but the last two were marvelous, and illuminated the other four.  I don’t think you should skip the early chapters.  But you’ll appreciate them more by the end.