by Jaimal Yogis
This shift is visceral but can also be subtle. The wave is still a wave and has to pay taxes. The sea is still the sea. Our interdependence doesn’t negate individual responsibility. But when the oceanic perspective—the view of an enlightened being—is lived from, the wave is more compassionate to all beings because all beings are part of her body. Though she may still have daily anxieties of workaday life, she has no more deep existential fear or worry for her own future. What is death when water simply turns to water?
This view is often called oneness or nonduality, but Buddhists more often say nonduality because oneness can conjure a flat ocean where every drop is alike. That misses the point. Every being and thing is unique in infinite ways. No snowflake or ocean bubble is identical, and that must be celebrated while acknowledging that every bubble is the sea and every flake is snow. This is “nondual philosophy” and nonduality itself is simply what we are—what all things are—at our very essence: our collective soul of souls.
Nonduality is part of Buddhism, Yoga, and other mystical and philosophical paths too, in which it’s often called a name you may recognize: God.
We will get to that. But for now, in Zen, it’s worth noting that to experience this state of fluid nonduality, you have to work hard with your meditation practice, be extremely diligent. But you also have to relax and quit trying so hard—a paradox that makes a kind of sense. The experience of the nondual is an actual experience, a destination that infuses one’s life with freedom and wisdom. But in each step toward that experience, the nondual is always there inside the very effort being used to experience it. The journey is always the destination. All waves are water, even before those waves break.
This is radical when you think about it. It challenges us not to see liberation or enlightenment as somewhere out there on the horizon, something we might attain someday somehow if we’re lucky and pious. It challenges us to see the muck we’re in right now—the stack of dishes, the political fires, the stress, the insecurity—as containing everything we need.
There’s an ancient text I often read before bed to remind myself of this. It’s called the Vimalakirti Sutra, and it’s an homage to a famous student of the Buddha named Licchavi Vimalakirti.
Being a monk is a wonderful thing. But it’s not for everyone. And instead of wandering about in a bark-dyed robe, shaving his head, and refusing sex and money, Vimalakirti was a yogi who got involved in politics, social fads, and family life. He even spent time at casinos, the text says, to teach people who weren’t usually exposed to spiritual teachings that they too—the profane, the poor, the addicted, the greedy—had an enlightened nature.
I like to think of Vimalakirti as something of a cross between Jeff Bridges’s “the Dude,” Gandhi, and Leonardo da Vinci. Vimalakirti not only hung out in all the raucous Indian haunts; he also became highly skilled in worldly affairs. “He was honored as the businessman among businessmen,” the text says, “because he demonstrated the priority of the Dharma. He was honored as the landlord among landlords because he renounced the aggressiveness of ownership. He was honored as the warrior among warriors because he cultivated endurance, determination, and fortitude. He was honored as the aristocrat among aristocrats because he suppressed pride, vanity, and arrogance.”
And the list goes on. Vimalakirti was basically a really kind, talented person. But he balanced his worldly pursuits with the wisdom of nonduality.
The Vimalakirti Sutra first caught my eye when I was leaving Mexico and arriving in New York for graduate school (yes, I finally got in!). Now that I’d found an inkling of equanimity in the wild Mexican waves, it seemed like a good time to give urban life—what my Aussie surfer friends called “the Big Smoke”—another go. It also seemed appropriate to make Vimalakirti my official coach.
I had no illusions that I was bringing enlightenment into the trenches like Vimalakirti. But getting exposed to those trenches made me feel that I was headed in the right direction. New York, bring it on.
From day one of journalism school we were reporters on the beat: police ride-alongs, Robert Moses–esque arguments at city hall, murder scenes in the Bronx, happy hour with our professors. Off the beat, I was losing too much sleep and drinking too many double espressos, losing that balanced California life I’d built an identity around. But that was also part of the plan. “In New York, you can forget, forget how to sit still,” Bono sings. And I was so busy now, taking time for zazen and yoga every morning seemed both quaint and impossible. I let my practice dwindle. And my other sanity regulator, surfing, wasn’t easy to come by on 125th and Riverside.
Not to worry. While interviewing gangsters and crackheads, police officers, and struggling artists, I tried to see that the extreme waves of grad school life were in a sea that was ever still in the depths. Along these lines, I thought I could get a little looser on the ethics too. There are many Buddhist and yogic schools, and they range from conservative to wild. But they all agree that even though our human ideas of right and wrong may break down in nonduality, in order to build an enlightened society, we need ethics. We can’t go around lying, killing, stealing, wrecking our brains with drugs and alcohol, or hurting people with unbridled lust.
These are the five precepts. I always tried my best to adhere to them. But having lived in a Buddhist monastery where the emphasis on rules could get really intense, where you couldn’t eat a piece of rice after the noon hour without feeling that you should repent for a week, I thought New York was a good opportunity to chill out. Siri and I had broken up amicably after Mexico (neither of us was keen on long distance). I knew I wouldn’t be twenty-five in New York for long. While I was, I didn’t want to be an overrepressed Zen guy who went around judging everyone. I wanted to be cool like Vimalakirti. Kind. But also, you know, able to show up at the club every now and then.
So occasionally I did. And sometimes that was kind of lame because shouting at people in the dark while paying twenty bucks for a drink generally is. But sometimes I ended up with friends at some little dive bar in Brooklyn, dancing like goofballs and feeling alive. A few flings were even had—a tinge of drama.
I was sampling the modern urban way I’d been away from since nearly ending up in jail in high school. Work hard, play hard. And since I was also consuming more news and books than ever before—for once I knew the latest football scores and the names of all the Supreme Court justices—this all felt sort of cool. Intellectual. Even sophisticated.
Sure, I was getting increasingly scattered and exhausted as the semester wore on. But for at least two, maybe three, months I still had a sense this was part of a grand experiment in the wild side of nonduality. Fresh powder covered Central Park in an early season snow, and I remember strolling beneath bare Japanese plum branches, shooting black-and-white photos for my photo documentary course. Watching each flake take its place in the blanket, I imagined myself as a writer in a Kundera novel—life revolving around politics, art museums, and the twists and turns of fleeting romance. And every now and again, seeing the low autumn sun sparkle on the gum-caked, cigarette butt–covered concrete, or watching the Times Square lights radiate over the oily puddles, it really was all light animating this film of New York.
But as fifth-century Ch’an master Hui Neng put it, “concentration is the substance of wisdom, and wisdom is the function of concentration. Where there is wisdom, concentration is in the wisdom.” In other words, lose inward stability, and you usually start making dumb choices.
As the Hudson froze over, multiple all-nighters writing about rat infestations in Harlem or the new drug courts of Brooklyn began spreading my concentration thinner. And trying to recover with more of the city’s relaxation techniques—movies, music, newspapers, dive bars, sex—was making me feel genuinely depressed for the first time in my life. The oneness of it all had flipped from a beautiful art house comedy to a depressive existential drama.
Two things resulted. I started to get sick a lot: cold, then fever, then flu. And my decision-making abilities
fogged even more than usual, an experience that culminated in going out with a group of old friends around Christmas, one of them an ex-girlfriend whom I had sort of, kind of been seeing at the start of the semester. We had agreed to just be friends, but it was one of those nebulous things. Anyway, I arrived at a hip new bar in the meatpacking district with my ex. She introduced me to her friend, who was pretty. Drinks and dancing happened. I left with the friend.
Brain like a jackhammer, still coughing from the stupid, endless cold, I got an earful the next morning about what a horrible person I was. I felt like a horrible person too. I had ignored the most important unspoken precept of all: Don’t be an asshole.
But sometimes you have to feel really awful to change—or at least to remember you can’t be flippant about any interaction in this life, big or small. All waves may be water. But all those waves that are people have minds and hearts too. And karma is exactly what they say it is.
My head continued throbbing as we ran newspaper deadline drills in class that afternoon, and all I could think was that I had taken Bono’s “New York” song a bit too literally. In the process, I’d torched some central ground rules I’d learned a long time ago. If you don’t have an internal peace practice, your stability is linked to external circumstances, which is a terrible peace plan. Also, any time nonduality becomes an excuse for letting go of being a decent human, there’s a misunderstanding of nonduality.
I needed help. Vimalakirti lived nearby.
12
The man who had done the leading English translation of the Vimalakirti Sutra, originally in Sanskrit, was a Columbia professor named Robert A. F. Thurman. Thurman was the Dalai Lama’s first Western disciple, a man who had lived for years like a Himalayan ascetic before coming back to the United States to get his doctorate at Harvard. He went on to win countless awards and letters, including being one of Time magazine’s most influential people of the year. He also ran Columbia University’s comparative religion program, maintained a nonprofit dedicated to Tibetan human rights, and published dozens of scholarly and popular books. And amid all this, he maintained a rigorous meditation and yoga practice.
But beyond the impressive résumé that is pretty common at schools like Columbia, Thurman was intriguing. With his one glass eye, disheveled silver hair, Tibetan rings on every finger, and wide six-foot-four frame, he looked part Einstein, part retired football coach, part spiritual Mick Jagger. (It also didn’t hurt that Uma Thurman was his daughter.) But Thurman’s real allure was that he always looked to be having a good time. He had that glint of wily courage in his one good eye. New Yorkers who weren’t even in Thurman’s class would fill Columbia’s largest auditorium just to hear him weave religion, science, history, metaphysics, and art like Coltrane improvisation.
I had been accepted to Thurman’s dual program in religion and journalism, which meant once I was finished with this journalism degree, Thurman would be my adviser in the religion department. And trying to do my second semester a little more wisely, I started auditing one of Thurman’s lectures to prepare for the following year.
I didn’t have time to go to every class. But the first class I walked in on was enough to change my thinking. Pacing across the stage, a crowd of some four hundred students scribbling notes, Thurman was speaking about the Axial Age—the time of Buddha and Christ and Socrates—and its importance in history. As usual, he wove in reflections from today’s news, joking about President Bush and big cars and our addiction to sixty-four-ounce sodas.
I have no idea what topic his lecture was meant to cover. But at one point he began describing the Buddhist notion of the subtle yogic body with its chakras and seventy-two thousand nadis, energetic pathways great yogis can feel just like their fingers and toes. “In the Axial Age, this was sort of basic internal science,” Thurman said, chuckling. “Now people think you’re on LSD if you even talk about it.”
Thurman then made his classic analogy. Outward exploration of the material world, mainly in the West, has resulted in impressive feats: astronauts can travel through space; we can split the atom. People often think this is progress far beyond what less technical societies like Tibet have produced. But Tibetan masters, Thurman said, simply went the other way.
“The yogis are not astronauts,” Thurman said, “but psychonauts—explorers of the mind. They mapped the subtle body and found the internal splitting of the atom—Buddhahood, full enlightenment, which is limitless positive energy.”
I liked this analogy. It fit my own theory that spiritual exploration and scientific exploration complement each other and need to work together. But when Thurman began to describe the “extremely subtle body,” he called this body “the Buddhist soul.” My jaw almost hit the floor. After a decade of hearing various Buddhist masters speak, I had never heard any of them once say the S-word or God to explain Buddhist principles. At least, not since Sonam.
The Buddha said that there is no soul and no creator God. An original creator implies a beginning. And since the Buddha taught cause and effect, how could there be a cause without one before it? A soul implies a fixed, unchanging entity or substance, which the Buddha also refuted because everything relative changes and is interdependent. (Jumping ahead, the Buddha said we each have a “mindstream,” an ever-changing energy that reincarnates through beginningless time but is also ever-connected with the substratum of all things.)
“Everything is made in the mind alone,” the Buddha also said, which almost sounds as if we individuals are God. But that’s wrong, at least in terms of the individual alone being God. What the Buddha seems to mean by “mind” in this context is not the brain. At the monastery, we chanted the Mandarin word hsin, which means both heart and mind. Hsin—as I’ve had teachers describe it—means both the thinking mind and the mind’s fundamental awareness that also connects us to other minds a bit like Jung’s collective unconscious. So, when you get down to it, the Buddhist idea of mind is similar to what the Hindu traditions, and some mystical Abrahamic traditions, call God. But Sonam was the only traditional Buddhist I knew who made this comparison often; as I listened to Thurman, I remembered a particular metaphor Sonam loved.
I recalled a Himalayan night in May, crisp and moonless. Sonam and I had been mixing the dough for momos, Tibetan dumplings, out on the monastery roof, using a sheet of plywood raised on cinder blocks for a table.
I knelt to help knead the dough, then watched as Sonam rolled out a thin sheet, carved sand dollar–size noodles, and filled each with a pinch of cabbage and cheese. Finally, as if swaddling a newborn, he folded each circular noodle into a careful momo.
“Now you,” Sonam said, pushing the bowl to me.
I tried to copy Sonam. But all my attempts ended in piles of dough, cheese, and cabbage that resembled cat vomit.
“Bery good, Ja-ma,” Sonam laughed.
I rolled my eyes, determined to better represent American dexterity. But after more failing, I found myself making little dough balls that I hoped would taste like gnocchi. A silence passed until Sonam said, “I tink dis God, Buddha mind bery same same.”
“Really?” I said.
It wasn’t that this was an uncommon topic for Sonam. When we passed a Catholic chapel in Bhagsunath, he would often say, “I tink dis Christian religion, good religion.” But equating God with Buddha mind was new. I asked Sonam for clarification, and he patted a mound of momo dough.
“Dis God,” he said.
“OK,” I said. “God.”
Sonam then chopped God into squares with a butter knife. “These Christians, Hindus, wah wah wah,” he said—wah wah wah apparently capturing the other few billion theists of the globe. The God that was left over—the stuff between the squares—Sonam gathered up, rolled into a softball-size sphere, and tossed to me.
“Dis love,” he said.
“OK,” I said.
And I had to hand it to Sonam. If there was one thing I could imagine as all-encompassing love, it was momo dough.
Sonam looked prou
d as he rolled out a new blob, calling it “Buddha mind,” before carving it into small circles too.
“Buddhists,” he said.
And again, the dough that had connected the circles, Sonam balled up.
“Com-pash-un,” he said, lobbing the ball to me.
I caught the compassion blob and squished it together with the love blob. They were, of course, identical.
“See!” Sonam beamed. “Berrry same same.”
I smiled. In theory, I agreed. When I’d lived with Baba Hari Dass, we often used the word Atman, the true self or soul, to describe the nature of God, the blissful life force that composes all reality. The Vimalakirti Sutra said “a Buddha-field is a field of pure positive thought,” which didn’t seem so different from the Judeo-Christian teaching that God is pure love.
But having spent months in India reporting on extremist Hindus and Muslims skewering each other on pitchforks in Gujarat, at the same time that I could see the beautiful momo dough of these faiths, they also made me sick. I asked Sonam why—if fundamental reality was love, and if religion was a doorway to this love—so many religious people seemed so full of hate?
Sonam nodded. “I tink some dumpling no turn out good,” he said. “Inside, dis same stuff good dumpling.”
He moved my horrid dumplings to the same plate as his pretty ones.
