Buddhist vows

Last weekend my friend Mercedes Bahleda led a class at Trinity Cathedral on Bodhisattva vows.  One of the aspects of Mahayana Buddhism, which is the strand of Buddhism in Tibet, is its focus on compassion.  The goal of reaching enlightenment is not to reach enlightenment for one’s own benefit, but rather to serve all other beings.  Bodhisattva vows are vows that are dedicated to the service of all other beings.   I did not attend the class.  At the end of the class, there was a service in which some people took lifetime lay vows (no killing a human, lying, stealing, adultery and taking intoxicants.)  Others were taking their Bodhisattva vows.  Mercedes asked if I would participate in the service and offer Holy Communion.  It was a lovely and gracious offer and I was happy to participate.  Perhaps the best gift I have to offer as a priest is the gift of Holy Communion and I was honored to be asked to offer this precious gift to these friends making these significant commitments.   The Buddhist aspect of the service, where folks were committing themselves to such lofty disciplines, was very, very moving.  The vows, which were quite lengthy were read three times.  It was somewhat like an ordination service, except there was more explicit emphasis on the vows that were being taken.  As always, I was inspired by this encounter with my Buddhist friends to take my own vows and disciplines more seriously.

Building Resilience Video

On April 4, 2009 Tibetan Buddhist Khen Rinpoche Geshe Kachen Lobzang Tsetan, psychologist Phyllis Watts and I held a forum on building resilience. We  each spoke briefly from our different perspectives, then opened it up for questions. I recorded the program in 4 20 minute segments. You can see them all on my webpage HERE.

If the link above doesn’t work, copy this into your browser:

http://www1.deanbaker.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=66:building-resilience&catid=41:buddhism&Itemid=55

Teaching w/ Lama Marut: Slideshow

Teaching with Lama Marut: Audio Recording

HERE’s an audio recording of the teaching I did with Lama Marut on February 1, 2009 at Trinity Cathedral in Sacramento.  We had a dialogue about Buddhist and Christian scriptures.  Here’s the handout with the texts we used.

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Reflections on Buddhism

In the past week I went to Tucson to study with a group of Tibetan Buddhists, later I taught w/ Lama Marut at Trinity Cathedral and then met with folks working to bring the Dalai Lama to Sacramento.  These brushes with Buddhism comes in waves for me.  And it has me thinking about life, the universe and everything.  Here are some of my rambling musings:

PIETY: My Buddhists friends are the most devout people I know.  They always inspire me to be a holier Christian.  They take their prayers as well as their ethical behavior very, very seriously.  I am such a slacker.  They also show me how casual we are around God.  Through Jesus we have become friends with God and lost some reverence and awe.

GOD:  So technically God, as the Creator, does not exist in Buddhism.  And yet these friends of mine are far more devout than most Christians I know.   In talking about “God” I realize how useless language is.  In a sense, I don’t believe in ‘God,’ at least I don’t believe the image that comes to mind when most people hear the word ‘god’ is adequate.  Which makes the use of the word tricky.   For me, God is not an unmoved being who at the beginning of human time created all that is and now sits back (or gets somewhat involved from time to time) while we muddle through.  While there is some benefit in seeing God as a being with which I can relate, this image is too small for God.  For me, God is not so much a being, but is rather being itself.  God is not aholy being, God is holy being itself.    And rather than a God creating all that is, like I might create a house (if I could build one) or a ham sandwich for that matter, I have the sense that Creation emanates from Godself, like light emanates from the sun.  I also believe that this Creation that emanates from God is somehow conspiring to bring all of us to wholeness.  Anyway, this is how the notion of God fits into my little carbon brain.   But my little carbon brain is clearly not big enough to understand the reality of God.  And when I talk with my Buddhist friends about the experiences they have in the midst of their practice, the experiences seem similar – they have a sense of reverence for holiness, they have angels, they pray (alot.)  While the details of god language might be different, those details seem less important when I consider how much I don’t understand about the vastness of God.

VIA NEGATIVA: Which brings me to the Via Negativa.  Christian mystics have long asserted that language about God is inadequate and that God may be better encountered in silence.  It is not the language about God that draws us closer, but rather silence in the presence of God.  We encounter God through abiding, not understanding. The Via Negativa (the negative way) doesn’t focus on what we think we can know about God, but rather on the vast unknowability of God. 

EMPTINESS:  Which might be a bridge to the Buddhist concept of emptiness.  Emptiness is a very important, and very challenging, concept in Buddhism.  Basically emptiness negates the essential character (or ‘beingness’) of everything.  Nothing has existence.  Everything we see and experience is a projection of our own mind.   On one level, I get this.  I understand that “we don’t see the world as it is, we see the world as we are.” (This line is from the Jewish Talmud.)   But to extrapolate that out to see that all of reality is a projection of our mind, shaped by our karma, is challenging.   It doesn’t quite resonate with me.  That doesn’t mean it isn’t true.  It just isn’t true for me right now.  Perhaps I don’t have the right karma   For me, the Truth (notice the capital T) at the center of reality is Holy Being (aka God), but for Buddhists, the Truth at the center of reality is Emptiness.  But since God is really beyond language and is ineffable, and much of what I imagine about God is a projection from my small carbon brain, I’m not quite sure how to discuss the relationship, if there is one, between God and Emptiness.  One thing that is intriguing for me is that there seems to be a similarity between accounts of Christian mystics directly experiencing God through the via negativa (silence and contemplation) and Tibetan Buddhists directly experiencing emptiness.  Hmmm.

PARADOX vs. LOGIC:  One thing I haven’t yet explored is the Christian comfort with paradox vs. the Buddhist logic.  The Buddhist worldview is profoundly based on logic.  Logic, logic, logic.  Everything is figured out.  I believe part of what is behind the notion of “no creator God” is the argument that everything changes, and if something changes it cannot have a permanent core essence (it can’t have ”beingness”) that doesn’t change, and consequently nothing really exists.  I know I am doing a poor job of explaining it.    Christianity, however, is, for the most part, not based on logic.  It is based more on experience and relationship.  I know God exists because I have experienced God in Christ Jesus.  We are also very, very comfortable with illogical paradoxes.  Jesus is fully human and fully divine and yet he has a single nature.  God is one and God is three.  I would argue that God is changeless and changing.  I know this makes no logical sense and I would certainly lose a Buddhist debate, but paradox is how we roll.  I’d like to explore this more.

Anyway, if I’m going to hang with my Buddhist buddies, I better stop writing and get to praying.

Teaching w/ Lama Marut

I taught w/ Lama Marut last night at Trinity Cathedral.   We had a great time.  He suggested Buddhist texts and I suggested Christian texts.  We then had a dialogue on the various texts.  Here’s the poster and the texts.  I’m hoping to post the audio or video soon.

HAPPINESS, GOD, AND THE GOOD LIFE

I.                  RENUNCIATION

A.      BUDDHIST

From the eighth chapter of Master Shantideva’s GUIDE TO THE BODHISATTVA’S WAY OF LIFE (ca. 700 A.D.), with commentary by Gyaltsab Je Darma Rinchen (1364-1432) entitled Entry Point for Children of the Victorious Buddhas

Once you’ve developed your practice of effort

In the way described above, then place

Your mind in single-pointedness.

A person whose mind is in a state

Of constantly wandering lives his life

In the jaws of mental affliction.

This constant wandering never occurs

With those who remain in isolation

Of body and the mind.

Now once you’ve developed your practice of effort—your joy over doing good things—in the way it was described in the explanation above, then you must learn to place your mind in single-pointed meditation. A person whose mind is in a state of constantly wandering, due to mental dullness or restlessness, lives his life in the jaws of mental affliction, which is so much like a great and dangerous wild beast. The point is that such a person is very close to being destroyed completely. “How is it,” one may ask, “that I can learn to eliminate this wandering state of mind?” The answer is that this constant wandering—the enemy of single-pointed concentration— never occurs with those who remain in isolation of body and mind; meaning with those who are able to keep themselves from the hustle and bustle of life physically, as well as from thoughts of desire and the like.

People are unable to give up the world

Because of their attachment, and craving for

Material gain and the like.

  Read more »

3 Days in Tucson

Last week I spent 3 days with this remarkable group of people:

Learning more about Tibetan Buddhism from our lama Mercedes:

Here’s a slideshow of some pictures I took at the end of our time together:

Jesus: the Way that is open to other ways

Paul Knitter is a professor at Union Theological Seminary in NYC.  He is the author of No Other Name? which I used in a lecture a couple of years ago on the relationship between Christianity and other religions.  I found a good sermon of his where he addresses this topic.  Here’s  an exerpt:

So, Jesus is the way that must learn about other ways; the truth that must engage other truths; the life that must be lived with other lives. Only by following Jesus as this kind of way, this kind of truth, this kind of life, can we come to the Father.
As Paul Tillich puts it: The particularity of Jesus’ life and message points to the universality of God’s love and presence. We Christians believe that God is defined by Jesus; but that does not mean, it cannot mean, that God is confined by Jesus. If we stress the particularity of Jesus and forget the universality of God, we make Jesus into an idol.

He goes on to talk about how his faith has been enriched by his connection with Buddhism.  You can read it all HERE.

Meditating with Mercedes – Audio

Here’s the audio from Mercede’s meditation. I apologize for the annoying noise toward the end of the recording.  It doesn’t last long.

For those who weren’t there, here’s a description of what we did.  My friend Mercedes Bahleda is a  Tibetan Buddhist teacher who was raised as a Roman Catholic.   Although she is a devout Buddhist with a very intentional practice, she has not abandoned her love of Jesus and has recently been studying the Christian mystics.

While meditation practices have always been present in Christianity, they have played a much more significant role in Buddhism.   Over many centuries Tibetan Buddhists have developed and refined their meditation techniques, focusing primarialy on spoken meditation — what I had heard referred to as “guided meditation.”  This is different from the silent meditation emphasized in Zen Buddhism and Christian Centering prayer.

Read more »

Meditating with Mercedes

Here’s what I posted for the Cathedral Blog about last night’s meditation with Mercedes:

Last night my Tibetan Buddhist friend, Mercedes Bahleda, who was visiting from her Buddhist community in Arizona, led us in a Christian-Buddhist meditation. We used an ancient Tibetan Buddhist form of guided meditation to invoke the presence of Jesus into our lives and our hearts. It was beautiful. I’m hoping to have audio of the meditation posted on my blog in the next few days.

We put this together rather quickly with little publicity. We were surprised when people kept showing up. We had over 30 people crammed in the church nursery. We were relegated to the nursery because of all the other thing going on in the Cathedral: we were hosting homeless families in our classrooms, the choir was in the cathedral, a political action group wanting to preserve the right for same-sex marriage in California was in a meeting room, a Buddhist sangha was meeting in our conference room, AA in another room. Amidst all that bustle, we managed to carve out an hour of contemplative time and space. It was absolutely lovely.