Living beautifully † Cutting hard

The vow to cut un-seeing

Suffering is never special ࿇ Opening your heart without an anesthetic ࿇ The Buddhist warrior’s path ࿇ Life in a charnel ground ࿇ The point is to cut the enemy: un-seeing ࿇ Gendered Buddhism ࿇ Are you ready to take a vow?

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I’m amazed and inspired by the book Living Beautifully: with Uncertainty and Change, by Pema Chödrön. It’s extraordinarily radical; extraordinarily untraditional.

Notionally, it is about three levels of religious vows in Buddhism. But in the preface, the author says:

I have chosen to teach these vows in a more general way, presenting them as three commitments that anyone of any religion—or no religion—can make as a way of relating to the impermanent, ever-shifting nature of our life experience, as a way of using our everyday experience to wake up, perk up, lighten up, and be more loving and conscious of other beings.

At the same time it is nearly non-Buddhist, Living Beautifully is completely traditional. It reveals, accurately and uncompromisingly, the concentrated essence of each of three ways of practicing Buddhism.

We’ve been reading it in the Evolving Ground book club. Its combination of devotion to the essence of tradition, with disregard for its shibboleths, is also the Evolving Ground approach. I’m not sure I’ve come across anyone else taking it as far as the author did here.

Pema Chödrön

Pema Chödrön is a white American woman, the first to become a Vajrayana Buddhist nun, in 1981. During the 1990s, she became a hugely popular teacher.

Her style and point of view in teaching is quite unusual. She teaches mainly Bodhisattvayana, but from the point of view of Dzogchen.

“Bodhisattvayana” is the path of dedicating your life to the benefit of others. That might sound a bit nice. A bit kitsch, in fact. I think that was part of her appeal! Her style is warm, friendly, plainspoken, down-to-earth, and radiates compassion. It appealed to people, particularly middle-aged women, who felt put upon and were looking for relief. Pema Chödrön’s background, of two failed marriages and major female-coded health issues, were relatable too.

So, many people mistook her as presenting generic “Nice Buddhism,” what I’ve called “American Consensus Buddhism.” That’s feel-good New Age platitudes with some Asian-language words added for decoration. I suspect that her publishers cannily chose the title of this book, “Living Beautifully,” to appeal to that demographic.

And, I think that’s great! Ideally, Buddhism would benefit everyone. Different sorts of people, in different sorts of situations, need different Buddhisms. For most of its history, Buddhism was mostly taught for men. Presenting it in a way that speaks specifically to middle-aged divorced women was a very valuable innovation. It did speak to me, too, in the 1990s—when I was still young, mostly male, and never married. I found her early books inspiring and practical guides.

But, it’s easy to mistake her writing as saccharine Sunday school stuff for beginners, people who want reassuring kindergarten pablum because they can’t handle the harshness of reality. Spiritual kitsch, in other words. That would be a mistake!

Her kindness is genuine, I can say from personal experience of her. But, the packaging is also deceptive—whether intentionally or not, I cannot say. Because this book, from 2019, goes for the jugular!

And, I have found that the same superficial qualities that make Pema Chödrön’s teachings initially attractive to a certain sort of person, disproportionately women, can repel other sorts of people, disproportionately men. And I think that’s a great pity, because this is the good stuff. If you dismiss it as weak sauce, you are missing out.

So, one thing I will do here is reframe her teaching in a way that may make it understandable and attractive for hard-driving young men.

Bodhisattvayana

As I said, this book is notionally about three levels of religious vows in Buddhism. First, there’s five lay vows, of abstaining from particular sorts of actions. In Pema’s presentation, these mainly work to restrain you from hurting yourself by doing tempting but harmful things. Second, there’s the Bodhisattva vow: to dedicate your life to helping to free other people from suffering. And then there are Vajrayana vows.

The book accelerates as it goes along. The discussion of the lay vows might sound nice. The Bodhisattva vow, already not so much!

There’s an appealing sort of spirituality that tells you that your suffering is valid, that it’s important and significant, that it makes you special, that you are so good and brave and noble to bear your unique and special suffering with only a moderate amount of complaining. This is a message we often want to hear, and it sells extremely well.

Bodhisattvayana starts from the recognition that your suffering is not significant. Your suffering doesn’t make you special. Your suffering is exactly the same as everyone else’s suffering. Your story about the awful thing that happened to you, blah blah blah, might be unique, but the suffering itself is universal. It has no particular meaning. Suffering is just a thing that happens. It happens to everyone.

That recognition comes from opening your heart to others’ suffering. Then you find that it’s the same as yours.

“Opening your heart” may sound nice, but it can feel like open-heart surgery without an anesthetic. “Opening your heart” is not about sharing good feelings with safe friends. Or it is not just that! It’s feeling the fear and pain and rage of people we don’t like, people we hate even; or have contempt for, or whose pain is so extreme that even imagining it is intolerable at first.

And so, Pema Chödrön follows tradition in describing Bodhisattvayana as a “warrior’s path.” Its practices develop warrior virtues. In her words, we “discover inner strength and courage we never knew we had.” We learn to “smile at our own fear, self-righteousness, and vulnerability.”

A warrior path might seem irrelevant or repellent when we’re wallowing in self-pity. “How is that going to help me get over the failure of my marriage?” It is probably the last thing we want when we pick up a book with a comforting title like Living Beautifully! And, it could be exactly what we need when stuck into depression.

Conversely, “The Way of the Warrior” might sound highly attractive to men who are frustrated because they can’t get laid, or aren’t moving fast enough in their careers. And then, some way along that path, we may discover that, in Pema Chödrön’s words, “the bodhisattva is a warrior whose weapons are clarity, gentleness, and openness.” “We develop confidence in our ability to open our hearts to all.” And whereas we might have rejected such sentiments as womanly weakness in the beginning, it may be exactly what we need to learn.

Vajrayana

And now, the third level of vow.

The second level, the courageous bodhisattva vow of the compassionate warrior, is to save all sentient beings from suffering.

That is impossible.

Suffering is not going to go away. It’s part of being human. There is no sort of enlightenment you can get that will make your suffering stop. Or anyone else’s. For mainstream Buddhism, this is a radical, heretical claim. It is a foundational truth for some threads in Vajrayana Buddhism, notably Dzogchen.

Pema Chödrön uses the traditional metaphor of taking the entire universe as a charnel ground. Charnel grounds, in Medieval India, were places unclaimed human corpses were dumped to rot, or be eaten. That provides a delightful buffet for the local carrion-eaters: hyenas, tigers, bears.

Charnel grounds are horrifying, chaotic, dangerous places. Hyenas are not picky about whether you are dead. They are happy to eat living visitors. Unburied corpses also attract demons, ghosts, and zombies.

We can take the same attitude to the actual world as to a charnel ground. We were born in a horrifying, chaotic, dangerous place. No one gets out of here alive.

So instead you stop caring so much about that. Your pain and insecurity remain as practical, everyday concerns, but you no longer ascribe spiritual meaning to them. You stop trying to escape the everyday world into some sort of fairyland like “enlightenment” or “nirvana.”

I said at the beginning that I found Living Beautifully inspiring. Among other things, this Vajrayana section inspired me a week ago to record the sermonette “This is it!”. Many people seemed to like that.

The Vajrayana vow, in Pema Chödrön’s radical reinterpretation, is to accept that you are inextricably bound to reality; and so you surrender to life, not rejecting anything. She writes, “we can’t experience profound well-being without working with, not against, the gritty reality of life.”

This is the place of just being. It’s not an otherworldly, ethereal place. You haven’t transcended the ordinary details of your life. Quite the opposite. You’ve finally contacted them 100%, and they’ve become a doorway to what in the Vajrayana tradition is called sacred world. Sacred not in the sense of religious or holy, but in the sense of precious, rare, fleeting, fundamentally genuine and good.

The charnel ground, metaphorically, is also the Pure Land, a sort of Buddhist heaven. Samsara is nirvana. Pema Chödrön says “progress on this path is like having cataracts removed.” It’s terrifying and painful, and allows us to see the world clearly. We “hold pain our hearts and are simultaneously touched by the power and beauty and magic of the world.”

Dzogchen

She presents Vajrayana at the level of Dzogchen, not tantra. Traditionally, in order to practice tantra, you must take dozens of vows. They are intricate, bizarre, and elegant. This is characteristic of tantra. It is intricate and bizarre and elegant, and I love that, but it can also just be a gigantic obstacle. You can get enthralled to the details and miss the point completely.

The Book of Five Rings is a famous manual of swordsmanship.

The primary thing when you take a sword in your hands is your intention to cut the enemy, whatever the means. Whenever you parry, hit, spring, strike or touch the enemy’s cutting sword, you must cut the enemy in the same movement. If you think only of hitting, springing, striking or touching the enemy, you will not be able actually to cut him.

There’s an analogy of tantra as fancy swordwork. In deadly combat, the fancy stuff may be useful, but the point is to cut the enemy, not to execute traditional moves elegantly. This is a potential failure mode for tantra. You can get so absorbed in mastering elaborate techniques that you forget that the point is to cut the enemy.

The “enemy” is avidya, which literally means “un-seeing.” Avidya is motivated refusal to engage accurately with actuality.

Tantra is the path of esoteric methods. Dzogchen is the non-path of instantaneous liberation. “Liberation” in tantric twilight language means both enlightenment and killing. Dzogchen goes instantaneously to the point: the point of the sword.

The sword is trekchöd. Insofar as Dzogchen has any methods at all, trekchöd is a primary one. The Tibetan term literally means “hard cut.” You simply, instantaneously, cut through avidya. You cut through whatever stands between you and the rawness of reality. There is no technique to it. You just go straight for the jugular.

For Dzogchen, the only vow is to remain in the actual world: feeling its pain with your heart torn open, and seeing its beauty with your cataracts sliced off.

Gender

I said that one thing I was going to do here was to re-present this book in a way that may make it understandable and attractive for hard-driving young men. I seem to have gotten quite carried away with that, and turned it up to eleven!

Gender is not a theme of the book at all. It’s just my thing, that I’m doing here.

But, discovering that you are not essentially different from anyone else is a theme of the book, and of Vajrayana. We each have all human characteristics within ourselves. And that does include gender. Accepting, enjoying, and enhancing both feminine and masculine aspects of oneself is necessary part of Vajrayana.

This is not about finding some ideal balance or happy middle. Vajrayana doesn’t damp down masculine drives for sex, aggression, and accomplishment. It adds gentleness, intuitive clarity, and openness—traditionally feminine traits.

And vice versa.

The method is to embrace and include everything. That’s because, like all other humans, you include everything.

You, whoever you are, male or female, are both:

The ferocious compassionate conqueror, the enlightened God-Emperor Gesar; and

The one-eyed witch of self-shadow, the enlightened Demon-Goddess Ekajaṭī.¹

Vows

Notionally, this is a book about vows. Mainly, though, it offers the antidote to spirituality. The antidote is actively choosing to live here, in the actual world. Choosing not to escape into fantasies of ideal fairylands.

Here in the actual world, the warrior’s cry—Pema Chödrön says—is: “We are needed!”

We are needed, and so we may choose to be useful—and to enjoy ourselves completely.

So… are you ready to make a commitment, to that? For a lifetime, year, month, or a day?

That is frightening. Generally, we’d rather take the path of socially-appropriate niceness, an acceptable degree of self-indulgence, and pleasant normality. The safe option.

How much of a security blanket do you need?

Bearing in mind that ultimately there can be none at all. No one gets out of here alive.

“Are you ready,” Pema Chödrön asks, “to enter the path of embracing groundlessness, of falling in love with ever-shifting reality?”

1. These are quotes from the Evolving Ground invocation liturgy.