Ejo McMullen's Articles on Lions Roar

Venerable Pannavati, Anne Klein, and Ejo McMullen on the possibilities and challenges of the bodhisattva path. Introduction by Taigen Dan Leighton. Bodhisattvas are beings dedicated to helping relieve suffering for all, realizing universal awakening, and leading all beings to that same awakening. Such practice cannot be merely about self-help or personal salvation. Bodhisattva practitioners are those who realize their deep interconnectedness with all beings. Such realization might start from hearing teachings but then becomes viscerally affirmed through meditative or devotional practices. Bodhisattva practitioners do not see all the suffering beings as “other” or separate. We are all in this together. What are the implications of this for modern practitioners amid the many challenges we now face? Among many other traditional lists of bodhisattva practices, we have the classic four vows: to free or save all the innumerable beings; to destroy all the numberless delusions, deeply ingrained in ourselves and our society; to enter all the boundless gateways to reality and teaching, to see all situations as opportunities for learning and practice; and to realize and express the way to buddhahood. Such vows are inconceivable. They might seem abstract or even irrelevant compared to the practical problems involved in our everyday lives, not to mention all the issues in the world around us. Even as we take on pragmatic everyday projects, including noble helpful ones, what could such inconceivable aims have to offer us? How could they be applicable to our lives? Bodhisattvas commit to staying open to the suffering in the surrounding world, but they must include themselves among the beings worthy of care. As individuals, we are beset with the personal problems from our habits of grasping and craving, anger and frustration, fear and confusion. How does one practically balance self-care with a deep commitment to be helpful rather than harmful? Everyone has aspects of their lives worthy of gratitude. To do this work, we must somehow sustain a practice of caring for suffering beings while also finding the joy and contentment to celebrate all that is wondrous in our lives. Our world also includes multitudes of systemic sources of suffering. We face the challenges of climate damage seriously imperiling our habitat, the deep karmic legacy of racism, and the rampant injustice and inequality destroying many lives. Although these issues can seem overwhelming, Buddhism and history show that change does happen; we do not know the outcomes. Just in the United States, popular movements going back to abolitionists before the Civil War, women’s suffrage a century ago, the civil rights movement, and more recently Occupy, the gay rights movement, the climate movement, and Black Lives Matter, human beings have made a real difference in the world again and again. We have the ability to respond, and we have bodhisattva responsibility. In the dialogue that follows, three teachers from different traditions explore the ideal of the bodhisattva, the path that it offers us, and the challenges and possibilities we might meet along the way. Forum. Buddhadharma: We often speak of bodhisattvas and the bodhisattva path as being outside of Theravada practice and tradition. We pit bodhisattvas against arhats and leave it at that. How do you understand the notion of the bodhisattva in terms of the Theravada? Venerable Pannavati: We shouldn’t think in terms of Theravada versus Mahayana or Vajrayana, or arhat versus bodhisattva. When we start dividing in this way, we get into dogma. But the Buddha was talking about actual organic experience. He said, how do we know a baker? A baker bakes. How do we recognize a bodhisattva? A bodhisattva shows concern for the world and responds to that concern with powerful words and actions. Throughout the Theravada teachings, the Buddha is showing us how he responds to suffering in the world. He asks his disciples, “For what reason do you leave your home and go into the homeless life?” Then he answers his own question: to be a refuge. You’re a bodhisattva when you embark upon the bodhisattva path; that’s what the Buddha taught. There’s no way to be enlightened without recognizing our universal nature, our interconnectedness with everything. In that interconnectedness, we experience the pain, confusion, and neediness of others, and as we develop our skillfulness, we automatically respond to that suffering as we would respond to our own, with compassion and with power. Buddhadharma: How would you define a bodhisattva? Anne Klein: A bodhisattva is someone whose purpose is to benefit others in every possible way, especially to free them from ignorance and from bondage to a sense of self. In the early Buddhist tradition, the arhat known as Gautama Buddha was of course a bodhisattva, so Mahayana absolutely recognized that bodhisattvas are very important in the early foundational Buddhist traditions. The four immeasurables, the boundless states that are a key means of cultivating bodhicitta in the Mahayana, were deeply practiced in the early Buddhist traditions and are part of Theravada to this day. About five hundred years after the Buddha’s time, two seemingly contradictory ideas of buddhahood developed. The Buddha becomes a more mythological figure with powers of extraordinary perception and the ability to appear in many different places at once. At the same time, the belief that anyone—male or female, monastic or layperson—could attain buddhahood arose. This democratized the potential for practitioners in relationship to these increasingly superhuman depictions of the Buddha. The Mahayana idea that everyone can become that kind of buddha—or a bodhisattva, someone who is capable of benefitting all beings—is a different idea about what human beings actually are and what consciousness actually is. You’re a bodhisattva when you never waiver from your powerful aspiration to be of benefit to everyone, not just in meditation but throughout daily life, whether walking, standing, sleeping, or lying down, and that aspiration is not vitiated by people’s bad behavior toward you or others. There are levels, or bhumis, of realization; you can be a bodhisattva who hasn’t yet understood the ultimate. But even as you know you are not yet a full-on bodhisattva, everything in your life and in your practice is motivated by this aspiration: you want buddhahood for everyone. And—importantly—you believe it’s possible for you. Ejo McMullen: The classical definition of a bodhisattva is a being who is on the path to awakening and who dedicates that path to the welfare of all beings. But how do we carry that textbook definition into day-to-day life? The power that an image can hold for spiritual practitioners, as a sacred carrier of our intention or a place where the path can be realized, is so crucial. Bodhisattvas are both archetypal and actual beings beyond our grasp. They offer an image that not only inspires us but also mirrors our life back to us. This is kanno-doko, or sympathetic resonance. We are moved by the image of the bodhisattva, and in being moved, we respond. Their way of walking becomes our way of walking. We live out the bodhisattva life in which all beings participate; the suffering of beings calls forth the response from bodhisattvas. Is meditation about trying to get our lives together? Or is it the practice of awakening every being inside and outside of us? Every image, every idea in meditation can be considered a being that is also on the path. Our path is to be liberated with them. In this way, the profundity of the bodhisattva path is alive within the practice of meditation. Bodhisattvas don’t practice alone; not practicing alone is the definition of practicing together with all beings. The whole world is constantly ablaze with the suffering of impermanence and no-self. As we grab it, we are burnt by it. But if we can open our hand and recognize that the fire is us, the vitality of life can come through without that suffering. Unless we’re fully invested in the welfare of the beings of this world, we’re not going to be able to have that insight; otherwise, the desire to escape the world will always remain. You're a bodhisattva when you never waiver from your powerful aspiration to be of benefit to everyone, not just in meditation but throughout daily life. —Anne Klein. Buddhadharma: Most of us enter practice hoping for some kind of improvement to our own lives. How do we make the shift from practicing for ourselves to practicing for others? Venerable Pannavati: We don’t really make that shift from me to other; the shift is made for us in the cultivation of practice. It’s like being on the shore and entering the ocean. As you wade into the water, the action of the waves begins to take over, and soon your feet aren’t even touching the bottom as the current begins to lift you. The qualities that begin to arise as a result of practice are what take us to the path of hearing the cries of others and having the courage and desire to respond. You come to realize that when you’re serving others, you are in fact serving yourself. But there’s no thought of I am serving or I am doing; there is just the doing that is the fruit of right cultivation. Anne Klein: The main method of the Mahayana is compassion. And the very essence of wisdom is compassion. This compassion has a dissolving effect on our overly ramped-up sense of “me-ness”; once we finally see that we are not the center of the universe—and that’s a relief—we simply don’t focus on ourselves in the same way. Indeed, all our practices in all Buddhist traditions—wisdom, compassion, attention—are oriented toward dissolving the sense of self that obstructs us from benefiting others. The Tibetan traditions also emphasize that this same exaggerated idea of me-ness prevents us from recognizing our potential to become full-on buddhas. With this in mind, it’s important also to recognize...

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