4. The New Buddhism Meredith Garmon 2006 August 13 Invitation of the Bell Body, speech, and mind in perfect oneness, We send our heart along with the sound of the bell. May the hearers awaken from forgetfulness And transcend all anxiety and sorrow. Reading: David Brazier, The New Buddhism (2001) “The world today is in the grip of an orgy of greed. The rich become richer and the poor get poorer, and this is not new. The scale of it is new, however…. [T]he gap between rich and poor has never been so great in the whole of history.... Buddhism predicts that greed and hate follow one another. The periods of greed are long and the periods of hate are short, sharp and vicious. The current surge of greed contains within it the makings of war. The greater the greed, the more devastating the war to follow.... The Buddhist solution to this is the creation and growth of Sukhavati [the Pure Land] in our midst. To create a country without territory, however, means to create a community of values. To hold a community of values together requires steadfastness on the part of those who participate. The pressure to rejoin the greed system is considerable.... The citizens of the Buddhist community of values ... need to be steadfast and that means that our training has to be thorough…. The purpose of Buddhist training is to make [the Pure Land] a reality.” ©2006 Rev. Meredith Garmon 1 Sermon: The New Buddhism It was over five years ago. I had just completed my first year of seminary at United Theological Seminary in Minneapolis. I had driven over to Chicago, where I sat in a conference room in a hotel. I was meeting with the Unitarian Universalist Midwest Subcommittee on Candidacy -- a subcommittee of the Ministerial Fellowship Committee. The path to professional ministry is gaily strewn with committees. "Do you have a spiritual practice?" one of the members of this committee asked me. Before starting seminary, I had spent two years as the congregational facilitator and preacher for the Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of Clarksville, Tennessee. Before that, I'd served as a president of our Fellowship in Waco, Texas, as Vice President of our church in Charlottesville, Virginia and had worked as the church secretary for a year at our Nashville, Tennessee church. But did I have a spiritual practice? I was a born-and-raised Unitarian Universalist. I had a Ph.D. I'd been a university professor of philosophy for four years. I could debate about metaphysics, metaethics, metatheology, poststructuralism, postindustrialism, and postmodernism. If it was meta-, or post-, I was there. But did I have a spiritual practice? Well, no, I didn't really. Nothing I regularly did was centering or cleansing, or put me much in touch with myself, or interconnected me with all beings, or produced a luminous sense of joy and peace flowing throughout the world, or made me feel lighter as I went about subsequent tasks -- or even inclined me to smile more. So I decided to get a spiritual practice. In my reading and teaching about world religions, I had found I agreed with Buddhist philosophy. So I gave a try to Buddhist practice. I got a book that told me one way to meditate, and I began doing it. Fifteen minutes at first, gradually up to 30 minutes each morning of sitting meditation. I started going to weekly meditation group meetings and insight meditation classes. Then I started exploring Zen. I visited with, and meditated with, and chanted with, and absorbed the dharma talks of Zen masters in Las Cruces, and Tucson, and Albuquerque, and Austin, before finally settling on a teacher in Dallas. Now I sit every morning, and go to sesshin -- intensive Zen meditation retreats of 5 to 7 days each – in Dallas three or four times a year. The message of spiritual practice -- Sufi or Wiccan, Christian or Buddhist -- is that it is possible for our souls to be happy. This is a radical message. Life can be really sweet. This may not seem like a radical notion since, after all, every advertisement and TV commercial tells us that supreme happiness comes with this toothpaste, this car, this vacation package. But we have tried buying the product. Maybe we feel good temporarily. Maybe there’s a “consumer’s high.” It doesn't last, and really we know it won't. In the process of many repetitions of this cycle, we internalize the idea that the best life has to offer is continual grasping after more and more, that whoever dies with the most toys wins, that there is no escape from the misery. We implicitly accept that all there is to life is trying to win the toy -- or the status symbol -- accumulation game. The single-minded devotion to producing and consuming held up to us as happiness, leaves us with loneliness and alienation. The very counter- cultural idea that real soul happiness is possible truly is radical. I was an academic once -- the status symbols were lengthy publication lists and endowed chairs. It was easy to get sucked into the idea that, while this continual grasping after more wasn't very happy, it was the best that life could offer. Seriously, ©2006 Rev. Meredith Garmon 2 during the time I was a professor, I used to say to myself periodically: there are more important things than happiness. That's what I used to have to tell myself to keep me going. Maybe sometimes you tell yourself that, too. Of course, yes, if the only picture of happiness held out to you is what TV offers, then there are more important things than that self-defeating consumer pursuit. But real happiness, allowing our wisdom and compassion to flow freely, is our true heart’s dearest desire. If I could appear in a dream to the self that I was twelve years ago, at the midpoint of my years as a professor, I'd say: … well, I think I'd say what the Midwest Regional Subcommittee on Candidacy said to me: Get a spiritual practice. I wouldn't have listened. I was ready to hear that message five years ago, not twelve years ago. Still, the case I'd make, if I could, would be that whatever cause it is that we think is so important we'll sacrifice our happiness to it, is a cause that really is much better served if we bring our whole selves. It is a cause better served if we are aware of our feelings and of our interconnections within ourselves and without ourselves to all the beauty and the tragedy of the universe. It is a cause better served if we are mindfully dwelling in the present instant, calm and steadfast. It is, in short, a cause better served if we are happy, in the non-grasping, non-status-acquisition or consumption-based way that spiritual discipline, Buddhist or otherwise, fosters. That feeling of well-being of soul reinforces and is reinforced by a caring, kind way of being toward others we meet around us. We're all in favor of being nice to each other. And we're in favor of happiness of the soul. The thing is, one cannot simply say to oneself one day, "OK, I'm going to be a nice guy to everyone, and I'm going to be happy now." You can't get there in one simple moment of decision, and that's because old habits will sneak back in on you. Being nice to one another, being happy ourselves, is a skill. We haven’t learned that skill very well. We all heard the lecture -- from parents and kindergarten teachers, “Play nice.” We heard the lecture, but we skipped the lab part of the course. We haven't honed the skills. So despite the moment of resolve that might come from hearing -- or reminding ourselves of -- the words "be nice to one another," we lack the skills to keep it up. Old habits return: resentments, envy, insecurity, fears, a sense of scarcity rather than abundance, a felt need to guard or promote our status in the face of feelings of being slighted. If we don't have the skills for handling these -- for recognizing our demons and embracing them -- then when we hear, and resolve to, "be nice to one another," our only strategy for maintaining that resolve is . repression. Be nice -- repress that anger. Be nice -- repress that resentment. Be nice -- repress that hurt. But the repressed inevitably returns. And that's why we can't just be nice to one another, can’t simply decide to be happy. We can't, that is, unless we show up for the lab sections, practice a spiritual discipline, and hone the skills for sustaining wise compassion. There’s a way to handle that anger, that resentment, that hurt, that isn’t repression, and isn’t indulgence either. It’s a practice of bringing the light of awareness on what is in us. Buddhism, in its socially engaged form – what David Brazier has dubbed the “New Buddhism,” -- says go farther. Enlightenment is not merely private. Being more widely engaged, will help you be more spiritually healthy, whole, happy. The motto of this “New Buddhism” might be: “Enlightenment for justice, and justice for enlightenment.” ©2006 Rev. Meredith Garmon 3 Not all forms of Buddhism are socially engaged. In this regard, Buddhism and Christianity parallel. As movements, both Buddhism and Christianity include strands of engagement with the world, and strands of withdrawal into private salvation.