HAPPY BIRTHDAY, BABY BUDDHA A Unitarian Universalist Buddhist Sermon
James Ishmael Ford
26 March 2006

Text
One tree is like another tree, but not too much. One tulip is like the next tulip, but not altogether. More or less like people - a general outline, then the stunning individual strokes. In the beginning I was so young and such a stranger to myself I hardly existed. I had to go out into the world and see it and hear it and react to it before I knew at all who I was, what I was, what I wanted to be. Wordsworth studied himself and found the subject astonishing. Actually what he studied was his relationship to the harmonies and also the discords of the natural world. That's what created the excitement.

Do you think there is anything not attached by an unbreakable cord to everything else? When the chesty, fierce-haired bear becomes sick he travels the mountainsides and the fields, searching for certain grasses, flowers, leaves, and herbs that hold within themselves the power of healing.

Teach the children. We don't matter so much, but the children do. Teach them the taste of sassafras and wintergreen. Give them peppermint to put in their pockets as they go to school. Give them the fields and the woods and the possibility of the world salvaged from the lords of profit. Stand them in the stream, head them upstream, rejoice as they learn to love this green space they live in, its sticks and leaves and then the silent, beautiful blossoms. Attention is the beginning of devotion.

“Upstream” by Mary Oliver

Last year several members of the Board and I were talking about how best to serve our community. It was a free ranging conversation touching on many different aspects of our life here at FUSN. Then, one of them asked why I didn’t seem to address Buddhism very much? I was caught a bit off guard with that question. After all I allude to Buddhism regularly in sermons and newsletters; it’s such an important part of my life that to not mention Buddhism is almost impossible.

But I knew what was being asked. My Buddhist references from the pulpit tend to be more on the order of “while I was on my way to the Zen retreat this or that happened” than actually exploring one Buddhist theme or another. I said I feel responsible to the larger community here, and only a few of us identify in any significant way with Buddhism. As the conversation continued it was suggested that perhaps I’ve gotten a bit carried away with my scruples. If this is such an important thing for me, I should be a little more forthright about why and how.

Now, don’t worry, I don’t plan on putting on Buddhist robes and chanting sutras, Buddhist sacred texts, here. But, I’m going to try, every once in a while, a little more regularly than I have been, to address some theme or another I’ve encountered in Buddhism and reflect on how it might be useful to us as Unitarian Universalists. And today, being near the traditional East Asian date commemorating Buddha’s birth, seems a good time to do so.

Today I want to explore a little my own methodology. And from that to suggest how we UUs might engage Buddhism, just one way of many possibles. In addition to having spent decades engaged in Buddhist practices, specifically Zen meditation, living for a few years as a monk in a Zen monastery in California, and for some time now, leading meditation groups nested within UU congregations; I’ve struggled with how this ancient tradition might be helpful for Westerners seeking meaning in our lives. And I’ve come up with some thoughts.

Now I believe a number here have heard my little physiological confession of faith. I like to say I have a Buddhist brain, a Christian heart and a Humanist stomach. That is I am firmly convinced the basic analysis of Buddhism (more on that anon) is accurate. But, also, I am deeply marked by the Christian tradition. I learned to read from the King James Bible, and the content of my dreams is peopled with Moses and Miriam, Jesus and the Mary’s. But, all of this, every bit of it, washes through my rationalist, naturalistic, even materialistic, disposition.

This has led me down a path toward and within Unitarian Universalism. Inexorably, I suspect. Now, I’m not alone in this particular religious style. One of my major heroes is Stephen Batchelor. When the renowned Western Buddhist John Blofeld wrote his introduction to Batchelor’s 1983 book Alone with Others: An Existential Approach to Buddhism, Blofeld described the book as “magnificent” and “inspiring.” He then added, “The exposition is not intended to be exhaustive, as too much and too varied detail might mar its impact. Hence there are some important omissions such as the operation of karma and the concept of rebirth, both of which are crucial components of the Buddha Dharma.” (That is traditional Buddhist teachings.)

Fourteen years later Batchelor published his reflections on karma and rebirth in his controversial broadside Buddhism without Beliefs. John Blofeld had died a decade before, so we will never know what he would have thought of this analysis which was, in fact, a radical departure from traditional expositions of the Buddha’s Way. It’s unlikely the old Buddhist scholar and practitioner would have been happy about it.

Batchelor asserts rebirth is a best understood as a metaphor for psychological processes, not something literal. Developing and expanding this argument, Batchelor presents a modern, rational vision of Buddhist teachings. I don’t agree with everything he says, but at least in broad strokes what you find in Buddhism Without Beliefs is my Buddhism. Now a detailed consideration of his understanding of Buddhist teachings is beyond the scope of this sermon. But I find this, how can I name it, “liberal Buddhism” something very helpful in my life.

In a nutshell this stripped down Buddhism says our human consciousness is something amazing. We can look at the world, divide it, order it, and out of that make sense. This ability makes us like gods. It certainly puts us in the cat bird seat as regards the rest of life on this planet. But this ability to separate, isolate, and distinguish also has lots and lots of problems. Not the least of which is that the division of the world, while practical, isn’t actually true. As one pulls back a bit, we discover everything in the world, absolutely everything is connected. We are woven out of the world and are one with the world. This ability to separate in order to make sense leads us to think we are separate, and in one small but devastating step from that sense of separate, we come to believe we’re permanent.

This is the great cognitive disorder of the human condition. The ills that follow this are almost endless. They’re both what I’d call psycho/spiritual and social. Batchelor’s book is concerned mostly with the personal psycho/spiritual. Another book I adore is Ken Jones’ New Social Face of Buddhism, where he takes the same fundamental insights and applies them to a social analysis. I consider the New Social Face of Buddhism a text book for social justice work in today’s world.

But today I want to show how even this stripped down form of Buddhism can be of enormous help in our lives. As some, at least, here know, in addition to my work as our minister I’m deeply involved in an experiment to create a Zen community consonant with Unitarian Universalist principles. To my mind in theory this isn’t a difficult enterprise. In practice it has its, how can I say, creative moments. Anyway out of this enterprise I’m part of a project that has developed something called Boundless Way Zen. We’re a network of Zen groups meeting at UU congregations. Currently we have sitting groups here, at the First Church in the Back Bay and at the UU congregation in Medford. We also have a sister community in Worcester.

Yesterday I was at the meditation group in Medford, conducting spiritual direction interviews. A woman came in for an interview who I didn’t know. She was, as is often the case a UU. She’d suffered some terrible losses and seeking some solace she was googling using terms like Zen and Unitarian. She found our Zen group’s website, and in its liturgical section she stumbled upon an old Buddhist text called the “Five Remembrances.” Because of that there she was. She said, reading it made her realize she wasn’t crazy, she was just experiencing an extreme case of being human.

The “Five Remembrances” come from a sacred text called the Anguttara Nikaya. It is core Buddhism.

I am of the nature to grow old./There is no way to escape growing old./I am of the nature to have ill health./There is no way to escape having ill health./I am of the nature to die./There is no way to escape death./All that is dear to me and everyone I love/are of the nature of change./There is no way to escape being separated from them./My deeds are my closest companions./I am the beneficiary of my deeds./My deeds are the ground on which I stand.

It’s a powerful and compelling document. At least for me. And for that woman seeking solace in her suffering. Now some people read it or hear it and are aghast. After all, from my perspective, much of religion seems to be about denial. While here we’re invited to take up the matter face on.

This also brings up another point I’d like to address today. In that earlier book by Stephen Mitchell, Alone With Others, he points out that if he’d run across Christian Existentialism earlier in his life, possibly he wouldn’t have needed to enter a Buddhist monastery. It’s here I’d like to state unequivocally my belief everything one needs to find depth and meaning and purpose can be found within Unitarian Universalism without a single hyphen, without being a UU Buddhist or a UU whatever. Our tradition has what we need.

For instance Mary Oliver (who will be the Ware lecturer at our upcoming UU General Assembly in Saint Louis) is often listed as a UU, although I don’t know if that’s so or if we think she should be, and any way lives in Provincetown which is pretty much the same thing as being Unitarian Universalist. She is, without a doubt, a singularly accepted voice within our UU communities articulating a clear vision of what many of us see as the spiritual life. So, recalling the “Five Remembrances” what resonances do you hear in this?

To live in this world/you must be able/to do three things://To love what is mortal;/to hold it/against your bones knowing/your own life depends on it;//And, when the time comes to let/it go,/to let it go.

All that said I want to end this reflection with one more thought. I’m not sure Batchelor would have been able to sift through the Existentialist literature with quite as sure an eye if he had not first spent years reflecting on Buddhism. I’m not sure I’d know what to do with Oliver’s poem, or that lovely essay “Upstream” that we used for today’s text, if I’d not spent years reflecting on Buddhism and engaging its meditative practices.

What is so lovely in our tradition is a willingness to be open to possibility. Ours is a wisdom tradition, and therefore needs to be open to wisdom wherever it might be found. We learn from each person who comes within our walls even as we have a healing message to share. I know in my own life, and from that bare witness to you all, that by engaging in the practices of presence taught in classical Buddhism and coming to a fairly clear understanding of the mysterious truth that we are one even as we are separate, I have been gifted with a deep appreciation of what Mary Oliver points to when she says “Attention is the beginning of devotion.”

For this gift of insight provided by our ancestor Gautama Siddhartha, the Buddha, the awakened one – given to us, moderns and westerners – how can I say anything, but thank you! I find doors thrown wide for me. I’ve seen doors thrown wide for others.

There is hope for the world.

Isn’t it wonderful?

Amen.