Letter from Bodhgaya

Sick World, Sick Bodhisattvas

Your versatile correspondent, age 49, spent June in Goa with father, age 84, enjoying monsoon rain and winds while Bodhgaya and fellow mother sentient beings reeled under a severe heat wave that took many lives in north India. Dad indulges in a favorite pastime – reading newspapers. He receives four daily. It helps him to keep sane, and his mind alert enough to keep on writing me the invaluable odd check. I’m in on the act, guzzling local and international articles between six-session Guru Yogas and custard, the latter deliciously prepared by kind pater, the former by kind Lama Pabongka. A New York Times item catches the eye: “A sound mind remains an elusive idea.” According to it, “borderline” is one of the most popular diagnoses in current psychiatry, and means a person somewhere between neurotic and psychotic, with a needy, scattered, uncertain self or personality. Hold on, that’s almost me in a nutshell. Father sometimes says he doesn’t know how they accepted me into the sangha. I really should’ve explained it real clear: “Dad, I’m an emergency case, that’s why I wear maroon. Lama Zopa says we’re all sick anyway and our centers are hospitals”. Foundation for the protection of the mentally troubled: It’s a hunch I’ve harbored for a long time.

The courageous bodhisattva mahasattvas of this time of dregs have vowed to create their buddhafields out of the raw manure of indescribable human sickness and insanity, the sicker the better it seems. And if our kind Gurus show sickness, the question why is clarified by Vimalakirti, who famously said, “You ask me, Manjushri, whence comes my sickness; the sicknesses of the bodhisattvas arise from great compassion.”

Meanwhile, another item jumps out from the page, as if from an incorrigible heart of hellish darkness. The story of a man in Uganda who does not realize that the woman he is raping in the dark is his own mother, and who hangs himself when he finds out. A photo further on of two drug dealers in China, arms tied behind their backs, somehow smoking their last cigarettes together before their execution. They appear strangely calm, perhaps unaware of what awaits on the portals of the unknown.

The sick bodhisattva, “recognizing in his own suffering the infinite sufferings of these living beings … correctly contemplates these living beings and resolves to cure all sicknesses. The bodhisattva loves all living beings as if each were his only child. He becomes sick when they are sick and is cured when they are cured.”

Another contribution from the New York Times entitled “When Good Becomes Evil” has the reassuring statement that it’ll be difficult to make designer babies because personhood is so affected by factors like peer influence and chance, which science cannot control. Furthermore this scientist, whose name, Gazzaniga, rivals some of my countrymen’s in its unusual zing and lovability, goes on to say that we must commit ourselves to the view that a universal ethics is possible – bravo, laddie! – and that neuroscience will never find the brain correlate of responsibility because that is something we ascribe to humans, to people, not to brains (I feel myself on the verge of applause), though it is a peculiar experience to go through whole articles on mind and ethics in which there is no mention whatsoever of those wholesome words that I’m so used to reading: Wisdom, Compassion, Awareness, Mindfulness.

Fortunately, great human qualities also shine out in some of what I picked up at random, and read at dad’s. I open a book I’d bought in 1986 in Golders Green, London, called Letters and Papers from Prison by Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a German pastor hanged by the Gestapo in April 1945. He writes in January of 1944 that “despite all my privations I have come to love solitude…anything in the nature of chatter or gossip I just cannot stand.” The integrity and courage shines through when he says that “to renounce a full life and all its joys in order to escape pain is neither Christian nor human”. Bonhoeffer seems to have dredged up many pearls of great price from the mud of painful circumstances, and thus nourished his friends and mother with a rich harvest of letters born from that place where human patience and good heart meet adversity and moral corruption. But it seems to be a rare individual who is able to make life truly meaningful like this in the midst of all the uncertainty, the despair, the attrition of monotony, fear and the magnetism exerted by the ways of the flesh. It seems, for example that Mr. G.C. Umesh from Bangalore in south India has as yet been unable to fully rise to the challenge of being human.

Motivated by Swami Vivekananda, a great religious personality who attended the 1893 World Congress of Religions in Chicago, and who said that one should not imitate others but do something original, the above-mentioned Umesh was inspired by the example of a Tary (perhaps they mean Terry, but no matter) Cole of England who holds the Guinness Record for performing 59 finger push-ups in 30 seconds. Umesh thereupon hit upon the quite revolutionary idea of also doing push-ups, 59 in 30 seconds, while doing a handstand, but with breathing completely suspended. Beat that, yer pommie ….Excuse me, I forgot I was writing in Mandala for a moment there, and I’m surrounded by Australasians at the workplace. “The urge to excel motivated me to do something apart from the mainstream endeavors,” says Umesh, and he has a message for his fellow Indians: “If encouraged, Indians can scale great heights and even villagers can be role models for others…” Do we laugh or cry or both at once? Oh, Vimalakirti, where art thou?

“He maintained concentration, mindfulness and meditation in order to sustain the mentally troubled. He attained decisive wisdom in order to sustain the foolish…Thus lived the Licchavi Vimalakirti in the great city of Vaisali, endowed with an infinite knowledge of skill in liberative technique.”

Back in Bodhgaya now, buoyed by a very encouraging, record turnout at our last Root Institute one-day dharma course in Hindi for locals, yet troubled by the vagaries of the local monsoon, its suffering consequences and the sheer hardship of some of my personal acquaintances, I have to push and remind myself what it means to excel, to do something out of the ordinary. As disciples of the precious Guru, recipients of bodhisattva vows so many times, what alternative is there for us but to offer the love and guidance that beings so desperately reach out for? What alternative to Shantideva’s prayer, “May I be the nurse for all sick beings in the world until everyone is healed,” or Peter Gabriel’s more recent “all you do is call me, I’ll be anything you need”? Dear friends, I’ve a strong sense that the time for alternatives ran out a long time ago, if it ever existed at all in the first place. And that jobs are still available for sick, (or if you insist, healthy), bodhisattvas to serve in sick worlds.

Ven. Kabir Saxena (Losang Tenpa) works for the Maitreya Project Universal Education School in India.

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