Soooo.....

Nearly every Buddhist teacher I've ever seen or listened to starts most talks with the extended "Sooooo...." often followed by a long pause before offering something along the lines of a koan, a puzzling but universal truth, or contrary-wise, a generous welcome and asking for a count of one sort or another. "How many of you have done X, Y, or Z? Hands?" Usually all three in sequence.

This is standard. It's what you do when sitting on the raised cushion before an assembly of disciples and students. "Soooo........" Even the Dalai Lama does this. Or even especially he does it...

We've been studying the Guide to the Bodhisattva's Way of Life which I recall reading some excerpts from many years ago, but I had never read the whole thing, and now that I have, I understand why it was excerped rather than presented whole back in the day. Shantideva wrote in the 800s AD in India, and his audience was pretty clearly other privileged princelings of the region and era like his former self. He wasn't writing for the rabble in the streets -- who couldn't read anyway, so what would be the point, right?

So when we approach this work, we're approaching as if he'd written it for us -- we, the equivalent of the street rabble yet we who believe we are as high and mighty as the princelings of Old India -- when he didn't. I'm struck by how often Shantideva lards his work with line after line of praise and flattery and images of showers of gold and jewels and scented waters that would appeal to the vanity and pecuniary interest of the princes and kings of yore. For us today, this is nonsense, this is bullshit. Manjushri Bodhisattva would cut through all the not necessary bullshit, no? Yet line after line, there goes Shantideva again. What is he doing?

In a flash of insight (sometimes called satori, but maybe it wasn't) it occurred to me he was trying his best to appeal those myriad princes, kings and potentates of Old India and convince them to be better, behave better toward that rabble, themselves and one another and learn to act in the Bodhisattva Way, the way of compassion for all sentient beings (and later, for some, non-sentient and non-beings) and the way of complete dedication to bodhicitta -- bringing enlightenment and end to suffering for all beings and the whole wide world. The basis of Mahayana Buddhism of which Zen claims to be a part.

Shantideva was trying to argue, persuade, and cajole his peers to be better, show themselves as better than they had been, to learn, grow, and unselfishly give and be bodhisattvas themselves.

We are not his peers. This does not diminish his teaching or argument in any way. What it means is that our approach to the Bodhisattva Way of Life must be from a different direction. Most of us are not in charge of much of anything. Few of us have power over many others. For the most part we do not determine conditions of life or death for someone else. Therefore we do not live the lives of princes and potentates -- though our egos may tell us otherwise (smile emoji).

So how should we approach it? What does bodhicitta mean from the bottom up rather than the other way around? What does it mean to bring enlightenment and an end to suffering for all beings when you're not a prince or king or potentate -- and you don't have the power to do it?

So what do you do when you're functionally powerless even over most aspects of your own life, yet you are called upon to adopt the Bodhisattva Way and act on bodhicitta on behalf of everyone and the whole globe?

Especially what do you do when your betters, if you want to call them that, those who do have power and responsibility, act as if they don't. And in many cases behave worse than the worst of the potentates of old?

This is a consideration that I have yet to see enter into this practice period or indeed into much of Zen practice at all. Often enough, even Sakyamuni Buddha doesn't enter into it, either. The Bodhisattvas, on the other hand, are usually everywhere. Oft-times I wonder if I'm practicing Buddhism without Buddha. Or rather All-Buddhas/No-Buddha. (When someone asks me, "What is Zen?" I might say, "I don't know what Zen is. It's a contradiction.")

The class issue, I think, is important, and it runs through Buddhism and every branch of Buddhism from the outset, though often it's ignored today. Or rather it is pretended not to matter. 

After all, Sakyamuni Buddha was a prince, groomed to be king. His rivals and most of his followers were of the ruling class of his time and place as well; according to tradition, he learned from and opposed the Brahmans of his era (though others contend there was no such class in those days).  He may have wanted Enlightenment to be shared by all, and he may have sometimes been seen among the Lesser Orders, but he was not one of them, nor were most of his followers. They were aristocrats. 

Shantideva's situation parallels the Buddha's. He lived many hundreds of years after the Buddha and in a different part of India, but he, too, was a prince groomed to be king who renounced his titles and temporal authority to become a mendicant monk like the Buddha. He wrote extensively, which the Buddha (apparently) did not. He wrote what look like appeals to his aristocratic peers to become Bodhisattvas, Awakened Minds and Hearts, compassionate toward all beings. On the way to Buddhahood.

"All equally empty; all equally to be loved; all equally come a Buddha." The prayer given by Jack Kerouac to Gary Snyder as recorded fictionally in "Dharma Bums" (1958).

That is as concise a distillation of the Bodhisattva Way as I've seen. 

Sakyamuni and Shantideva were arguing strenuously for their aristocratic class to be better, to become bodhisattvas and act with humility and compassion toward "all sentient beings" which includes the rabble in the streets, but except in the abstract, do not become "of" them. The abstract being the realization that all are equal because all are One-NotOne.

And I look around at the others I am among in the Zoom practice period and I see that the vast majority are professional women of a certain age, mostly in the helping/caring professions, and, from what I've seen over time, that is the class (if you will) that this center focuses on. They are the ones to be reached and persuaded to be like bodhisattvas. To follow the Bodhisattva Way and become Buddhas.

They aren't aristocrats in the sense of having much temporal power in the political sense. But actually, they do have a lot of power, indeed power of life and death if they want to use it, in their capacity as healthcare professionals. 

And as I have listened to them talk in Enso meetings, oh, do I hear the same arguments over and over, the same woe is me, the same lack of understanding or rather lack of Enlightenment when they argue with themselves and their beliefs too much. Roshi advises "Don't overthink it..." but I'm not sure that's heard. Or if it's heard, it's not understood, not yet. For the rational argument is often a refuge when the Three Gems aren't enough. 

In my early practice days, I was instructed those precepts ("Buddam saranam gacchami, Dhanam saranam gacchami, Sangam saranam gacchami," or "I take refuge in the Buddha, I take refuge in the dharma, I take refuge in the sangha") could be interpreted this way: "The Buddha is within you, the Dharma is you, the Sangha is with anyone you find on the Dharma Path, even if they don't know it."

For me, much of this is old hat. I learned a great deal -- sometimes unknowingly -- as a wandering bhikkhu for so many years. Some of the people in this practice period have long experience practicing zazen -- one of the teachers said she was taught zazen practice at the Berkeley Zen Center in 1971 when she was 19. And she's been doing it ever since. 

Another has talked about her experience at the San Francisco Zen Center beginning shortly after Suzuki Roshi died, also in 1971 I believe.

I go back before that, 1964-65, also through contact with the San Francisco Zen Center, but not through physical presence at the SFZC. No. Even when I lived in San Francisco, I chose not to visit the Center, in fact, I consciously stayed away, though I continued to practice. It had become a very fashionable and "hip" religious institution in the city, as had at the time the People's Temple and other New Age, New Consciousness institutions of Spiritual Growth and Perpetual Development (yada yada.) I saw them all as money-making businesses, some of them outright scams. Cynical, I know. But something had really changed from the early days, pre-hippie, pre-New Age, etc. of Zen in San Francisco and what it became and what it was by the mid-70s when I lived there. It had become so fashionable that people jockeyed to sit zazen at the new location because, you know what, they might be sitting next to someone famous! Damn, at the time, I was working with famous people every day, and I was not inclined to sit with them in the zendo.

So I continued regular practice on my own until I left San Francisco just before the People's Temple disaster.

Then I continued wandering and intermittent practice. Satori. Another instance of sudden "enlightenment:" I realized why I stopped regular practice once I moved out of San Francisco and went roaming all over the country. A long strange trip.

Which is off track and not the subject of these posts... (wide grin emoji)