In Such Hard Times

An exploration of the challenges and possibilities we encounter as modern lay yogis trying to make progress and have impact outside of intensive retreat.

Transcript

A poem by Wei Yingwu.

East of town,

Stuck in an office all year,

I left the city for the wide open dawn,

Where willow catkins soothed the wind,

And blue mountains stilled my cares,

Where everything green put me at ease,

Where I followed a stream and followed it back,

Where light rain covered a flowering plain,

And spring doves were calling unseen.

I keep suppressing my love of seclusion,

I'm invariably busy at work,

But someday I'll retire and build a hut here,

To be like old Tao would be sweet.

Old Tao was a poet from an earlier time in China who kind of was that quintessential hermit poet and really had renounced the world and really did live up in the mountains.

In this era,

So many of these poets that,

As some I've read and will read a few more this evening,

Really wrestled with that tension and that longing on one hand to go up to the mountains and live this quiet life of seclusion,

Contemplation,

Wrestled with that longing and also the responsibilities that they had in the world,

Responsibilities they felt to the world.

And there's something,

I think,

Very beautiful about hearing some of these from about 1200 years ago,

Right?

Stuck in an office all year.

And I keep suppressing my love of seclusion.

Someday I'll retire and build a hut here.

And how do we make those deals every day in our lives,

Right?

Where do we commit to the quiet,

The solitude,

The contemplation?

Where do we make commitments,

Even if we don't call them that,

To the world,

To our responsibilities out there?

Where are we honest with that in ourselves?

This is another by the same poet,

Lendling Hermitage.

Up high to a cloister of rock walls,

I pushed aside clouds and climbed a fine hike.

The fine hike was what I hoped for,

Ignoring the dangers I reached my prize.

But as light on the escarpment faded and streams branched out like the lines in my hand and the forest held nothing but loneliness and the pinnacles disappeared into space,

A man of the way,

After reaching such heights,

Descended alone in the stillness of night.

The mountain turned dark after sunset.

A hundred springs echoed across the fall sky.

My lamentable burdens reappeared intact.

Why can't I stay free of cares?

It's like,

Oh,

You know,

I mean,

Who hasn't had that here?

It's like these incredible moments of purity and just relief that can come from just the simplest quiet and the simplicity of our lives here.

Sometimes very powerful experiences of deep calm,

Equanimity,

New kind of exciting ways of experiencing our bodies and then it's like,

Yeah,

This coming back to the deepest entanglements that we have,

The deepest care.

I think one of the valuable,

Really beautiful things about this poet and some of these others in this era,

It was at this time where things had been going pretty well for a couple hundred years and then they just started to fall apart.

It would be right at this time,

This kind of several hundred years of real hardship in China in terms of civil wars and famine and displacement,

Real social upheaval and uncertainty that these very powerful,

Beautiful human longings of the heart kind of playing out in the backdrop of a society in crisis and them wrestling with that sense of responsibility and powerlessness or capacity,

Trying to find places of connection and care where they could,

You know,

Their families,

With their communities,

With strangers they would meet that were these beautiful relationships but amidst a lot of hardship,

A lot of alienation,

A lot of strife.

And so we face some of those ourselves.

And that can be these very powerful,

There are so many powerful forces calling upon us and even in the Buddhist time,

Right,

It was very similar things.

The Buddha himself was from a very established family.

He was expected to grow up into responsibility around worldly affairs and he renounced that.

He decided that he realized it took so much effort to untangle the entanglement here that he couldn't serve two masters,

Right,

He couldn't also be attending to the entanglements of the world at the same time.

Of course,

His journey to do that,

His commitment to that provided a disentanglement and a freedom and experience and not just the experience that's so important but the method and the teaching and what he offered,

You know,

Ultimately ended up being of great fruit to the world,

Though not in the way that perhaps his family understood,

Perhaps the powers that be understood in the world that he was living in.

So we all,

You know,

We wrestle with these and I think that we are in this interesting dance where for the most part that notion of total renunciation,

It's of course possible,

You know,

You can go be a monk or a nun but it's not as available an option,

You know,

It's not just right there,

You know,

Outside the city limits wherever you are,

You know,

That there are monasteries,

There are nunneries,

There are places even in this country and of course elsewhere but there's a very different cultural reality.

We find ourselves in here to the old days and we're negotiating that,

You know,

And to give ourselves some credit,

You know,

We're negotiating it the best we can and also just that sense of being careful and being honest about what are the choices we make,

You know,

Because we also have a lot of cultural delusion about what's possible,

Right,

These messages of it's like we want the degree and we want the job and we want the family and the house and the vacations and,

You know,

The community and we want to get enlightened,

You know,

And it's totally just offered as one of these things you can just like add to the list of things you're going to,

You know,

Include and you can see just from here our experience is that these conditions and this place and this type of experience are very particular,

Right,

They're very unique,

They're not always in accord with the society way of life,

With the decisions we make,

With the responsibilities we have,

How hard it is to come here for 14 days,

Right,

Never mind longer,

Never mind more than once a year,

It's just like it's really hard,

You know,

We have a lot of responsibilities and that sense of are we honest about what we're committing to when we make these choices in our lives and being careful about the inevitability of certain repercussions.

There's a great,

I think this happens in a few places,

But there's this short sutta where Mara,

Right,

The evil one,

Comes and has this little sort of exchange of the Buddha and it goes something like,

You know,

People who have cattle just love their cattle and people who have children love their children,

You know,

Surely having lots of cattle is like the greatest happiness and surely having lots of children is the greatest happiness,

You know,

And the Buddha says people who have cattle worry about their cattle,

People who have children worry about their children,

Surely having cattle,

Having children is the greatest stress,

You know,

And it's like of course we see both sides of that,

You know,

It doesn't have to be just the despondent side of it,

Right,

But there is something that's true about the responsibility around the things that we create and set in motion in this world,

Right,

Whether they're living beings or an organization or what have you,

You know,

You can have that beautiful inspiration to create something and then the persistence of that beautiful commitment is required,

You know,

It's not just always an easy thing to have to wrestle with and it can be a beautiful thing and that it creates conditions that can sometimes make it harder.

This is a great,

I love this poem,

Pochu I,

Similar era,

The Tang dynasty on his daughter's birthday.

Finally,

After almost 40 years of life,

I have a girl.

We named her Golden Bells and it's been a year since she was born.

Saying nothing,

She studies sitting now,

But it seems I'm no sage master at heart.

I can't get free of this trifling affection.

I know it's only a tangle of appearance,

But however empty,

It's bliss to see her.

I'll worry about her dying.

Spared that,

I'll worry about her finding a good husband.

All those plans to find a mountain home.

I guess they'll wait another 15 years.

And so whatever the choices are that we make,

We're trying,

Right?

We're trying this.

It's like we have our commitments in life.

We have.

.

.

Reviews

Excellent talk on balancing practice with the realities of daily life. I will keep going. Thank you 🙏