The firm ground of emptiness

 Monday is a tiring day. Apart from a short time in McDonalds it is mainly all go from 7am to 7pm. Responsibilties for others, younger and older. At 74 things take their toll. Today, a bit more time. A coffee and a burger with fries in McDonalds before heading for Oxfam for 4 hours on the till. Which is not work at all, but time to listen to music, read and chat with the occasional customer!

I've explained all this before, but repetition can help things morph into new combinations. Whatever, when young I always had the yearning to travel. Born in the UK, it was the exotic that lured me and appealed to my sense of adventure. Deserts, palm trees, pagodas. Eventually I did travel, three years in Australia then an overland trip home, taking in Nepal and Myanmar (Burma)

All very exotic at times. But arriving back home, one day I found myself on the local rail station platform, built above my home town. It was one of those dull, rainy days and I looked out over the skyline. "I'm really back home now" I thought with a touch of despondency. But then it struck me - not some great vision, the earth did not tremble - to actually see what was "exotic" or what was not. What was normalcy, and what was alien and strange?

An oak tree or a palm tree? A cow or a camel? A church spire or a pagoda? Desert or grass? I won't labour the point - the actual point is to see this in our bones. That our own normalcy, bred into us and accepted as the "norm" has a great degree of relativity. To truly see this is to come alive, perhaps to gain the new eyes that Proust once spoke of:-

The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.

Then we can in fact become as "strange" to ourselves as any stranger, any "other" we meet. And seek communion with. As one Buddhist wag once said, we can find ourselves standing upon the firm ground of emptiness. Or as said by the Christian mystic St John of the Cross:-

If we wish to be sure of the ground that we walk on then we should close our eyes and walk in the dark.

Which comes close to true Faith, or is true Faith. Which is vastly different to "belief". Faith can unite us, beliefs will always divide us.

Much the same happened in my own exploration of our World's Faith Traditions. A Eurocentric Christianity was the norm. The given. The foundation. Beyond it was the exotic. The Bible was the "Word" of the "true" God and all other books laying claim to be revelation of the divine was some sort of exotic trick, beyond the norm, the given. The heathen who "bow down to wood and stone" as the old Christian hymn goes!

Once again I had my moment of insight when I read "The Vision of Dhamma" by Nyanaponika Thera. A series of essays which I found to be quite profound, written by a guy who had been born Sigmund Feniger, European, and therefore knew how to write for Westerners. The reading was life-changing, once again because it shifted the firm ground of a Christian "truth", accepted as an obvious norm, onto less firm ground. The Dharma, a Buddhist cosmology, could well be as true, if not truer.

But the real point is not to argue for one or the other, but more to take away from under our feet the certainties we inherit purely by having been born here in this place rather than over there, in that place. It can bring vertigo, but also it can give the first taste of freedom. The truth that sets us free. Which to me is pure Faith, trust in Reality. Not a "belief" to cling to, to "justify" myself. It is Reality itself that justifies us, a Living Truth that is ever new, that blows where it will.

Then we can be like the Japanese zen master Dogen who had his very own life questions, who sought answers in China, and who did eventually find his very own path, time and place, back home in Japan. Which is never anyone elses answer, but is unique to ourselves.

Therefore, if there are fish that would swim or birds that would fly only after investigating the entire ocean or sky, they would find neither path nor place. When we make this very place our own, our practice becomes the actualization of reality (genjōkōan). When we make this path our own, our activity naturally becomes actualized reality (genjōkōan). This path, this place, is neither big nor small, neither self nor others. It has not existed before this moment nor has it come into existence now. Therefore the reality of all things is thus.

(Dogen, words from "Genjokoan")