World Without End

I just had a vivid insight while I was scrolling through Facebook and marveling at how people get so deeply invested in creating discontent. It looks to me as if they go deliberately looking for things that upset them; opinions they disagree with; or events that reveal injustice or discrimination. People seem irresistibly drawn to faulty logic and semantically-empty-but-emotion-laden slogans, and once they’ve adopted some reckless, thoughtless ideology, they proceed to self-righteously blame everyone and anyone who doesn’t agree with them for everything that is wrong with this world.

Enough about that though, and on to my little realization. I have to explain a little background first though.

A while back I took Buddhist vows in a ceremony called “receiving jukai.” If you want to read the principles I vowed to practice and uphold, they are posted in a page on this blog called “New Seeds Priory Zen Precepts.” Since the very beginning of my effort to study and practice in a community of other practitioners, and seek out a teacher, I’ve been troubled by a style of Zen teaching I call “self-help Zen.” This is the brand of Zen that sells itself as a personal coping method; advertises itself as a way in which a practitioner can achieve “enlightenment” and an end to their own personal suffering. I’ve always felt on an intuitive level that this approach is a deadly perversion of Zen. My discernment of Buddha’s insight into suffering, and the causes of suffering, is based on my understanding that he wanted to end the suffering of other people, and not merely relieve his own misery and discontent. It was their unhappiness which made him feel such compassion that he vowed to become enlightened or die trying. He wanted to save the whole world from the consequences of humankind’s rage, misery, discontent, and inconsolable grief.

So, because I am a Christian as well as a Buddhist, I wanted to declare my intention in both contexts. “To seek and serve Christ in all persons” gets lived out in the Four Vows that all Zen practitioners recite, as a declaration of the essence of their practice: 

Sentient beings are numberless, I vow to save them.

Desires are inexhaustible, I vow to put an end to them.

The dharmas are boundless, I vow to master them.

The Buddha way is unsurpassable, I vow to attain it.

It’s quite clear from the sentence construction that these intentions are literally impossible to achieve. That is exactly the understanding that the framers of these vows intended. They wanted us to understand that there is no end to the practice. I thought of adjusting the language to read “I vow to keep on— saving beings, ending desires; mastering wisdom; attaining the Way—'world without end’.” (I love the phrase, “world without end.” It’s only in the King James and the Geneva Bibles, but the language in both of them is so beautiful that I often turn to them by preference.)

Isaiah 45:16-18 1599 Geneva Bible— ¹⁷ But Israel shall be saved in the Lord, with an everlasting salvation: ye shall not be ashamed nor confounded world without end.

That gets us back to my insight this morning:

Buddha saw deeply into the causes of suffering, and he saw how to end it. My suddenly shifting perspective made me see something new. The reason for ending our own suffering is not for our own sake, it’s so that we can stop inflicting our suffering on everyone else!

I felt like I’d taken a leap off a cliff and suddenly found myself flying—and laughing.

I do think I need to unpack it a bit more, though. Going back to my displeasure at all of the petty temper-tantrums on Facebook:  My  disgruntlement prompted the thought process that in turn led to my little moment of realization. As I read the cantankerous posts, my internal thought process looked a bit like this:

“This is so annoying and upsetting.”

“Why are people so mean?”

“I wish that they wouldn’t spread all this misery around and infect everyone else with it!”

“Hold on a minute!”

“If other people can infect me with wretchedness and discontent, then I can also infect them with wretchedness and discontent!”

“Oh boy, that means that if I get wound up in it, then between us we can achieve a magnification of misery— ‘world without end’!”

“Oops, that would be a definite abuse of my promise to end suffering.”

“Well, now what?”

“Wait! I get it!”

“In order to stop contaminating other people with my wretchedness and discontent, I have to abolish my own discontent.”

“Aha! That’s the reason for the practice!”

“It’s not to increase my own happiness; it’s not to give me the benefit of enlightenment; it’s not to improve my happiness and serenity; and it’s not in the least about me ‘getting woke’!”

“Crap, it’s simple isn’t it?”

“What a laugh! Isn’t there a thing in the Bible about taking the log out of your own eye before you try to take a splinter out of someone else’s eye?”

“Oh. Duh.”

 (This is the passage I remembered, as it’s interpreted in a Bible called The Message:  “Don’t pick on people, jump on their failures, criticize their faults— unless, of course, you want the same treatment. That critical spirit has a way of boomeranging. It’s easy to see a smudge on your neighbor’s face and be oblivious to the ugly sneer on your own. Do you have the nerve to say, ‘Let me wash your face for you,’ when your own face is distorted by contempt? It’s this whole traveling road-show mentality all over again, playing a holier-than-thou part instead of just living your part. Wipe that ugly sneer off your own face, and you might be fit to offer a washcloth to your neighbor.”)

“Misery loves company.”

“If you can’t beat ’em, join ’em!”

Not beating; not joining—

Not starting; not finishing—

It all ends right here!

I’ll plop

my bottom

down

on my cushion,

and keep on

sitting on it

until

our bottomless misery

pops

like bubble wrap

from an empty package.