“Care for the environment is like noblesse oblige, You don’t do it because it has to be done. You do it because it’s beautiful. That’s the bodhisattva spirit. The bodhisattva is not anxious to do good, or feels obligation or anything like that. In Jodo-shin Buddhism, which my wife was raised in, the bodhisattva just says, ‘I picked up the tab for everybody. Goodnight folks…’
“One of the models I use now is how an ecosystem resembles a mandala,” he explains. “A big Tibetan mandala has many small figures as well as central figures, and each of them has a key role in the picture: they’re all essential. The whole thing is an educational tool for understanding-that’s where the ecosystem analogy comes in. Every creature, even the little worms and insects, has value. Everything is valuable—that’s the measure of the system.”
“You know, I want to say something else, In the past months and years Carole my wife has been amazing. I do my teaching and my work with the Yuba Watershed Institute, but she’s incredible; she puts out so much energy. One of the things that makes it possible for us and our neighbors to do all this is that the husbands and wives really are partners; they help out and trade off. They develop different areas of expertise and they help keep each other from burning out. It’s a great part of being a family and having a marriage-becoming fellow warriors, side to side.
Thirteenth-century master Dogen Zenji is a classical Asian voice which Snyder has discussed frequently in recent years. “There are several levels of meaning in what Dogen says. There’s the literal meaning, as in when you settle down somewhere. This means finding the right teaching, the right temple, the right village. Then you can get serious about your practice.
“Underneath, there’s another level of implication: you have to understand that there are such things as places. That’s where Americans have yet to get to. They don’t understand that there are places. So I quote Dogen and people say, ‘What do you mean, you have to find your place? Anywhere is okay for dharma practice because it’s spiritual.’ Well, yes, but not just any place. It has to be a place that you’ve found yourself. It’s never abstract, always concrete.”
“It means self-organizing,” he says. “It means elegantly self-disciplined, self-regulating, self-maintained. That’s what wilderness is. Nobody has to do the management plan for it. So I say to people, “let’s trust in the self-disciplined elegance of wild mind”. Practically speaking, a life that is vowed to simplicity, appropriate boldness, good humor, gratitude, unstinting work and play, and lots of walking, brings us close to the actually existing world and its wholeness.”
“There’s a big tendency right now in western Buddhism to psychologize it-to try and take the superstition, the magic, the irrationality out of it and make it into a kind of therapy. You see that a lot,” he says. “Let me say that I’m grateful for the fact that I lived in Asia for so long and hung out with Asian Buddhists. I appreciate that Buddhism is a whole practice and isn’t just limited to the lecture side of it; that it has stories and superstition and ritual and goofiness like that. I love that aspect of it more and more.”
“We are all indigenous. So it is appropriate that in relearning the lessons of fox and bluejay, or city crows and squirrels-“all members present at the assembly”-that we are promised neither too little, nor too much for our perseverance."
~ Gary Synder (born May 8, 1930, today is his 87th birthday)
No comments:
Post a Comment