The Real Work of Life

photo by David Harris

From the final interview in Amongst White Clouds: beings in this world live in ignorance… they summon heaven and they summon hell…

Reading in Joanna Macy’s “World as Lover, World as Self”, there is a discussion of systems theory and how it relates to the Buddhist definition of karma. Macy quotes Karl Deutsch: “Each step on the road to ‘Heaven’ or to ‘Hell,’ to harmonious autonomy or to disintegration, was marked by a free decision…” Macy goes on to say that in life’s evanescence, “lies hope and promise. For in the flow of decisions and deeds, choices can be made that open broader vistas to perceive and know, wider opportunities to love and act.”

I feel this is hopeful.  In any given moment, we have the capacity to move one direction or another.  In this sense, I feel we are truly empowered.

The Lens of Engaged Buddhism

Lately I am having conversations about development work, and development filmmaking and I reflect on the Buddha’s definitions of violence, unethical behavior, injustice in the world as the actions of people who are suffering and acting out of that suffering. It sometimes shakes us up to sense that Buddhists can be more concerned with the cause of those terrible things than the terrible things themselves. But where is the line drawn? In the film Crazy Wisdom, when a student asks Chogyam Trungpa what he thinks about the aggression in our world, Trungpa Rinpoche responds, “I want to talk about the aggression in this room!” (quoted from my memory) Is reflection, inward journey and confronting our own demons the starting point for confronting social issues?

Reflecting on the Mahayana concepts of Sunyata and the Bodhisattva ideal, self-cultivation happens in and through suffering in the world. Sometimes this happens in a quiet room sitting on a cushion. Sometimes it means holding steady and confronting something terrible in our world. There must be chances to practice every day at home or in the office or in the street.

I am learning about socially engaged Buddhism and how it brings our practice out into the world. It’s a messy world. And there’s a lot of dust in the air. But as a young Chan monk once told me, quoting his teacher, “we can only see a beam of light by the dust that floats in it.”

I’m reading an amazingly lucid book on Engaged Buddhism by a scholar named Ken Jones, entitled The New Social Face of Buddhism. It is inspiring me to think through my values as a filmmaker. In development filmmaking for example, like the films I make for NGOs here in Vietnam, I believe a film is as much for the beneficiary as it is for the audience. The issues calling for our attention in this world, the “problems” we need to fix, are as much the problems of the beneficiaries as they are ours. Because this world we live in is created by us all. Sometimes in ways so subtle we cannot see, we put into play actions that affect innumerable beings, creatures and landscapes of our world. I draw great inspiration from the writings of Joanna Macy who eloquently draws the complexities of our suffering planet, our suffering economies, our suffering societies… to the truth of Dependent Co-arising.

My films are only successful if they speak to the issue in a way that engages both the viewer and the viewed and sheds light on the universality of suffering. That’s why I say that film can be a bridge between us. That it is a platform for mutual respect and dignity.

Why Buddhists Tell Stories

Story-telling and Buddhist life: not just how we tell them or live them but where we find them in the very being of things.  The sunyata of all things is a kind of story itself, as I see it – a narrative that tells us where something comes from and where it’s going to. Looking deeply into a sheet of paper, for example, we see wood from a tree that grew from soil and rain and sun and time (soil takes time, the sun took some time too, oh yes and the universe…) and space and chemical reactions… and that’s not even the folks who cut the tree down, work in the mill, the paper factor, who buy and sell the stuff on telephones and with computers made by who? What a story. The Story.

I’ll begin with this quote from Shunryo Suzuki:

A wonderful painting is the result of feeling in your fingers. If you have the feeling of the thickness of the ink in your brush, the painting is already there before you paint. When you dip your brush into the ink you already know the result of your drawing, or else you cannot paint. So before you do something, being is there, the result is there. Even though you look as if you were sitting quietly, all your activity, past and present, is included; and the result of your sitting is also already there. You are not resting at all. All the activity is included within you. That is your being. So all results of your practice are included in your sitting. This is our practice, our zazen.

 

Mistaking a symptom of suffering for the cause of suffering

I recently re-listened to an amazing episode of one of my favorite radio show/podcasts, All in the Mind, from Australian National Radio. This episode we listened to a talk given by a dynamic child psychologist on suffering, the layers of suffering, and how we can so easily mistake a symptom of suffering for the cause of suffering. He says we throw medicine at symptoms and often miss the true root and source of our suffering. Why not go straight for the root?

He suggests it is an interesting result of many decades of scientific habits and commercial culture. How does commercial culture affect the way I see my psychological suffering? Wow, there’s something to chew on. I found some very insightful ideas in this talk. Download it: Sick, Screwed Up or Just Lazy