"The Sun Also Rises"

Years ago, I wrote a play that centered on a fictional encounter between Tennessee Williams and Ernest Hemingway that might have taken place at Hemingway's Key West compound in 1955. The play was structured somewhat like a bullfight, and like a bullfight, there was tragedy, particularly the tragedy of Ernest Hemingway that would result in his suicide a half dozen years later.

My use of the bullfighting metaphor and structure for the play was based largely in Hemingway's "Death in the Afternoon"(1932) and "The Dangerous Summer" (1985, written in 1959 and 1960) together with Williams' interest in and admiration for bullfighters that Hemingway shared -- particularly Antonio Ordóñez. 

I did not read Hemingway's first novel "The Sun Also Rises," which is in part a bullfight novel featuring the running of the bulls and bullfights in Pamplona and a romantic and beautiful young bullfighter character, Pedro Romero and those who love him. I didn't read it because I had seen the movie version of the book many years ago, long before I even thought of the play, and thought the movie was terrible. Perhaps one of the worst film adaptations of a Hemingway novel ever.

The other day, I watched it again on the YouTube. It was worse than I remembered it. It was utterly dreadful. 

The movie posits the Hemingway character (Jake Barnes) as a curmudgeonly middle aged man played by Tyrone Power, though the story (according to the film's opening narration) takes place in 1922 (the novel says 1924-25). Hemingway was born in 1899. He was a young man, a very young man in Paris and Pamploma during the period of the novel (creative non-fiction or roman a clef). 

Well, the last week or so, I've been reading a copy of "The Sun Also Rises" that I brought back from California last month and I finished it yesterday. It's much better, worlds better than the movie. It, however, reads like a first novel by a very young man who hadn't actually lived much but who was coming to believe he was or soon would be King of the World.

Hemingway has fascinated me for most of my life, and I have enjoyed practically everything of his that's come my way. Perhaps I feel some kinship with him, though the adventures of my life are nothing like his. Practically nothing in my life has been like his.

And yet... there may be kinship of some sort, maybe it's that Midwestern origin we share, an origin we left behind early and never really reconnected with.

While "The Sun Also Rises" is very much the work of a novice novelist, it's not a bad book. In fact, I found it fascinating. Hemingway's descriptions of his (character's) lives, loves and longings are sometimes superficial, yet it wasn't difficult for me to find compassion for them, even when they behaved badly -- as they very often did.

They were young -- Barnes and Romero particularly so -- and wild and the world had recently been turned upside down by the War to End Wars.

Barnes had been wounded and made impotent in that war. Hemingway had been wounded as an 18 year old ambulance driver in Italy. He may well have been made temporarily impotent, but he got over it and fathered the first of his children in 1923 a couple of years before he started writing "The Sun Also Rises." 

The play I wrote deals with desire. And my interest in exploring these characters' desire stemmed from my Buddhist studies. Neither Williams nor Hemingway were Buddhist practitioners as far as I know, and both were clearly driven by desire throughout their lives. Desire for attention and fame, desire for love and devotion, desire for wealth and glamour. Desire for drink and drugs as well.

Their drive and desire led them to gain what they sought, yet it also ensured their demise, Hemingway much sooner than Williams, but both in the end driven to death by their demons of desire.

"The Sun Also Rises" deals with desire too, but formlessly, as if Hemingway hadn't yet discovered what was driving him. And I think that's true. He didn't know, and he wouldn't find out for years. When he did, when he saw and confronted his own desires, I think it tore him apart -- and led to his suicide.

I appreciated the book -- whereas I didn't appreciate the movie -- in part because it was formless, searching. Whether it was the definitive novel of the Lost Generation I'll leave to the critics to decide. 

Attachments

On the last day of our Fall Practice Period. I became very much attuned to the ideas of Attachment that pervade the study and practice of Buddhism, that are a big part of the Vimalakirti Sutra, and that shape the Ox Through the Window Koan I was given at my first practice interview of this period. 

Oh yes, it's all about Attachment and how and why we put off Enlightenment. Buddha made many comments about Attachments, Desires, Suffering, and Enlightenment, and Buddhist practitioners are supposed to be training to let go of all that, somehow, some way, and in the Mahayana Zen tradition, become Lights Unto the World, vowing to free all sentient beings from their traps of Suffering, Futility and Attachments.

Right now, of course, I'm attached to those ideas, to the thought processes of contemplation and meditation on Attachments, and there will be no Enlightenment while that process goes on. But that's OK. 

In fact, the more I consider Attachments, the more I realize that :letting go: of Attachments is not something I need to strive for; Attachments. like Desires, are Life (as one of my Zen teachers puts it), you need neither to let go of them nor hold on to them. The useful thing is to notice and acknowledge them.

For example, yes, I am attached to my home, my wife, and many of our cats. I'm attached to my chair, my laptop, my smart-ish phone, my car, my van. I can go on and on and on, listing attachments, and as I go through the day, I notice and acknowledge attachments to various things, people, places, thoughts and ideas, memories and dreams.

They are all part of my life; some are not healthy, others are necessary for right -- or any -- living.

We don't have to judge them, but just notice them, recognize them, acknowledge them. Yes, I am attached to this action of journalizing parts of my days, my thoughts, opinions, joys and disappointments. 

Attachments fall away. They come and they go, much like thoughts and emotions during zazen. The trick is to let them. Let them come; let them go. For most of us, an attachment doesn't last forever or even for  a particularly long time. We may be engaged with our attachments for only a moment or two, or for months or years, or in a few cases for a lifetime. But, like ourselves, attachments are impermanent, transitory, and something like the clouds of the sky. There and then not, growing, diminishing, vanishing, or suddenly re-appearing.

A cloud is real but evanescent. 

Just so with attachments.

And if we can acknowledge them as they arise, greet them even with a bow, then we might be on our way to liberation from hold over us.

Buddhism in essence is very simple. The commentaries on the Sutras are far longer and more complicated than the Sutras themselves in part, I think, because the teachings are almost too simple and direct for many individuals to grasp. A Truth so simple must be bogus, right?

The basics are that we live in the World of Perception -- which is in fact an illusion, in some aspects a delusion. This World of Perception-Illusion doesn't have any corporeal existence. There is ultimately nothing there, that is to say nothing we can perceive. 

This Great Nothingness or Void is the ground state of being. Everything that "is" -- including ourselves -- arises from it, and thus, everything that "is" is ultimately the same thing. Our perception of separateness is an illusion. We can't shake that illusion, and in reality, we don't have to. A better approach is to accept the alternative and apparently actual reality along with the illusion. To understand they are intertwined and cannot be separated, don't need to be separated, and by accepting both, simultaneously, one approaches the nonduality that is the energy of Buddhist thought and practice. 

In essence, this is the process the Buddha went through during his years of fasting, contemplation, meditation, study and struggle to grasp what's really going on. 

And then he shared it with his disciples who then shared it with the rest of us and whose descendants do so today.

"The Dharma is vast and subtle..." Well, yeah, but it is also very simple. 

Vimalakirti's insight -- which he shared with gods and goddesses, Buddhas and bodhisattvas, monks and laypeople, anyone who would listen -- was that having grasped this subtle simplicity, a whole new universe, indeed an inter-nested series of Universes -- opens up within us. What we can perceive is just a tiny, tiny, infinitesimal corner of the "vast and subtle", inconceivable and incomprehensible reality/unreality that we are part of. Our languages can't adequately express it. We just have to accept it. 

The commentary that came with my version of Vimalakirti's Teaching Sutra (211 page pdf) by a well-known rinpoche is longer than the sutra itself and is centered on how stupid the commentator is and how little he understands the arguments and dialogues of the various gods, goddesses, and so on, with Vimalakirti. 

Well, OK.

He describes the appearance of things as they are presented in the sutra and then states his utter ignorance and inability to grasp any meaning from it.

The Teachings are so far beyond him.

OK. 

No, from my perspective, it's not that hard. It really isn't. And Attachment in the broadest sense is what can prevent an individual -- even a rinpoche -- from grasping the teaching of the Dharma in this (or any) sutra.

We may be attached to our ignorance, for example, or to the appearance of our ignorance, and if we acknowledge and even respect that attachment, it can begin to lose its power over us. It doesn't mean it goes away -- it may be an integral part of our identity in the material world, after all! -- but our attachment to our ignorance, say, doesn't have to be in control.

Much of what Vimalakirti is teaching is to help us (even gods and goddesses) to "let go." Not to deny but to acknowledge and recognize and then to let go of what came to be called our "hang ups." Don't fret over them. 

Don't try to get rid of them. Don't judge them. Don't fear them, but don't yield to them, either. There are myriad Universes beyond our perceptions. We are less than motes of dust in that context. Even as gods and goddesses.

And that's all right.

At the beginning of this practice period, the Dharma teacher said to me, "Desire is Life." It threw me for a loop because I had long operated on the idea (from the Buddha) that Desire or Attachment to Desire was the source of suffering, which ideally we want to end -- for ourselves and all sentient beings. Right?

Right?

In some sense, maybe. But that's what the Buddha teaches; it is the core of his teaching! 

And?

Without Life in the World of Perception, you don't and can't experience suffering nor can you do anything to end suffering for yourself or anyone else. Letting go of our Attachment to Desire and Suffering doesn't end them so long as we are alive, but it does let us see them more clearly and it can end their control over our lives. 

Once we are free of that control, we can begin to help others free themselves, though we are still experiencing Desires and the Suffering they cause. 

And that is the Dharma of Vimalakirti's teaching as I see it. 

 

Vimalakirti

The Teaching of Vimalakirti Sutra (211 pg pdf with commentary) is the text for this practice period. I'm part way into it, and I said to one of the teachers that I found it astonishing, not at all what I expected, and filled with wonder. "It's poetic, isn't it?" I pondered that for a moment. No, or possibly yes, or both at once. It's a work of art. I thought but didn't say. A work of transcendent art. Not meant to be taken literally, with tens of thousands of gods and goddesses arrayed around the householder Vimalakirti to hear his teaching and obtain enlightenment. It's a metaphor. Magical realism, maybe.

Constant drumbeat of contrasting dualities. This not that, not this not that, nor this either. You're doing it wrong. Teaching the Mahabodhisattvas what they're doing wrong and how to do it right. No matter how close they come, how far they are from perfection, even the Lord Buddha himself.

One of the topics and questions I brought up at the initial practice interview was that of Desire, and how should we approach Desire without becoming attached to it, or rather attached to what we desire. As the Buddha found and says, Desire -- or attachment to what we desire -- is the cause of and source of Suffering. 

And I thought the response was fascinating, not at all what I expected, and something I'm continuing to chew over: "Desire is life."

Oh so many levels in that one simple phrase. I won't go through those levels here right now, as I am by no means of the Wisdom of householder Vimalakirti, but... yes. 

And I brought up the Enso, the uncompleted circle, the pattern of my life. Of so many lives.

I confess, I'm not following the discipline of the practice period this time around. I sit when I sit for as long as I sit rather than formally sitting at set times for set lengths of time with the rest of the participants in sangha. This is not an act of deliberate separation from the sangha. Indeed, when I settle among them, which is every day, several times a day, I feel embraced and embracing. The point, however, is that the sangha is of the mind, much more so than of the body, and once embraced and embracing of the sangha, it never goes away. It is part of you, and you are part of it, no matter what you are doing or where you are. Just so with sitting zazen and other forms and rituals of Buddhism and Zen. And, too, the Dharma. 

The forms and rituals of sitting and practice are training aids.

Once you "get it" you don't have to practice in that way, but you certainly can. Once you "get it" ideally your life becomes Practice. Full time.

Which is part of what Vimalakirti is getting at in his teaching of the gods and bodhisattvas and buddhas. 

Your practice is your life.