The seeds were planted long ago by my father, the poor man. I couldn’t tell whether I meant it, whether it was real, where it came from, and how it got there. But I couldn’t admit to the violence that had just erupted from within me. There was a long stretch of silence, wherein I should have begged for his forgiveness. I can still hear the thwack of my open palm against his belly. Only it clearly did not come out of nowhere, and it was not light. It came out of nowhere and was meant to be light. We got into a fight about something, and I smacked him. But what if the seeds at the root of your behavior are the seeds of hate and anger?Ī year ago I was walking down a bustling city street with my mentor, whom I love. Or as that great metaphysician Tom “Jerry Maguire” Cruise put it: “You complete me.” “To see the world in a grain of sand,” William Blake wrote. Buddhists call this codependent origination: all things arise together in a mutually interconnected and interpenetrating web of being. Conversely, when something arises within you, some inner experience, a notion, emotion, or dream, then the seeds of this inner event are disseminated on the outside, in the world, through your words and actions. Similarly, when something happens to you on the outside, in “the world,” the seeds of this experience take root within you, becoming sensations, thoughts, memories–your inner life. In Zen we learn that human consciousness is an eminently natural operation. And with these juices come seeds–the seeds of your behavior, your character, your anger, all flushed out into the open for you to see. A lot of stuff comes up when you do this practice. It squeezes that deep red heart-pulp, pushing up emotions from way down inside you. So if I’m looking around the zendo and I can’t find him–guess who the asshole is!” I said “they” all wind up here, but I guess I mean “we.” I recently had one of those moments when, upon the much-anticipated departure of an enemy who, as a Buddhist, I could never quite admit was an enemy, I found myself peering around the zendo and thinking, “Wow, there are no assholes living here anymore.” Whereupon came a sinking feeling: “Wait a minute, there’s always at least one. They all wind up here, sold on the promise that Buddhism can alleviate suffering. Her marriage tanked, he’s got an itch in his brain he just can’t scratch, she’s 45 and smells of cabbage and lives in a small studio apartment and nobody ever calls her back. This place has a tractor beam like the Death Star in Star Wars that pulls in everyone within a thousand-mile radius with four-letter words on the tips of their tongues. Randall Enos / A lot of pissed-off people wind up at our monastery.
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