On my sitting cushion, sunlight from the window behind me casts the shadow of the wavering spruce boughs on the far wall. This morning I see even the shadow of a squirrel jumping from branch to branch. Plato warned that all of our knowing was a mere seeing of shadows on the cave wall. But from where I sit it’s pretty okay. I have no intention to chase after that shadow squirrel. The shadows on the wall only make me smile in recognition of what is real, allowing me to enjoy this play as an expression of the sun itself.
Who am I that I should be here to see these things at all? That I get to enjoy this theater of beauty and tenderness? Out the window in front of me, on that same wall, I watch as the wind playfully lifts the line of prayer flags into my view. The bare March maples are like a filigree, making a mosaic pattern of the sky. But the sky does not complain to appear this way; it does not complain that for a moment it is made to appear as fractured glass, that its vastness is framed as discrete shapes. The infinite does not hesitate to appear as a fraction of itself; to be subject to our perspective. In reality it is still everywhere. And as I relax my focus and my perspective I see that, of course, I am sitting in the sky right now.
Like this lovely spring wind, like the prayer flags lifting and dancing, one awareness dances and never congeals. The trees move in the wind and the mosaic of sky constantly shape-shifts. The mosaic of my life, the rise and fall of phenomena, shifts as continually as these branches in the sky. They are also shadows on the cave wall. And I would be most foolish to think that I could orchestrate this dance of phenomena according to some plan; or if I were to protest this dancing of trees in the wind.
The teaching of The Four Noble Truths is right here. When I protest, whatever form it takes, it generates suffering. Reality is not impressed by it. When I recognize the true nature of phenomena and the true nature of protest, the need for protest dissipates, and the way of affirmation may naturally arise. That way is to start again, each moment, with the simple embrace of being, undiminished by the instinctive need to grasp or to protest. That way is to persist as love, which is the ultimate mature capacity of our species. Unentranced with phenomena, we learn that the only thing there is to grasp after is being, which is ungraspable and already here. The only thing there is to protest is being, which is absurd. What we are left with, then, is a fundamental friendship with phenomena, an awareness full of friendliness. This way of friendship is as old as the earth; and older than empires.
Empires come and go across the face of the earth, forged of our protest and of our grasping. We create empires of the mind and then empires of nations. There is something intrinsic to a certain historical stage of our personal and cultural development that tricks us out of our indigenous and equitable community of life by our own mental or technological ingenuity. We are adept at innovation for survival and for enhanced comfort, but addicted in the end to projections of power and wealth. Complexity leads to political and economic hierarchy and then to rigidity. Both hierarchy and rigidity lead to disregard of others and of the communities of life. This has long been the challenge of our cultural evolution, demanding a genuine, radical, and earth-including spiritual counterweight. It is hard to sustain a universal and harmonious point of view that balances collective well-being with personal advancement. Thus do such teachers as Tsongkhapa, the teacher of the first Dalai Lama, plead for us to distinguish in all things between those actions that negate the preciousness of others and those actions that affirm and judiciously care for others. The failure to do so, he maintained, is the fundamental source of suffering in creation—and the undermining of any “civilization.”
And what is that consciousness in matter that allows for such an understanding—that awake, loving presence, that openness of the Tao, whose energy assumes form and eventually fixation? That same awakeness, the Tao itself, must come to recognize and surrender fixation so that energy may return to spirit, and spirit to awake openness. This is always the work of individuals within the context of the fixations of ego and of empire. Within ourselves as individuals, and weakly reflected at the greater communal level, there have always been awakening impulses of consciousness; and they must continually test themselves against the great inconscient inertia, the juggernaut of corrupt institutional power and the old habits of fear, anger, ignorance, and greed.
Developmental forces continue to shift in a mosaic pattern across the earth and across history, beyond our myopic predictions. Wisdom and foolishness, humanity and its degradation, continue to rise and fall in each new configuration. Of course, we in our empire believe, as have all the others, that we are especially ennobled. With our self-centered disregard, with our technological hubris and entrancement, and with our (inevitably hypocritical) ideals, we believe that we have at last transcended the fate of every empire that has come before. We believe in our own mudballs on this path of sand.
We have now witnessed the spectacular rise and decline of the “American century”—a blink as empires go—and the next century may well be China’s again, or who knows. New patterns and paradigms will emerge with new worldwide population and climate pressures, the end of the petroleum age, the destruction of our soil and land base, and our continued violation and blaspheming of the Water Goddess. In fact, we have succeeded in denial long enough that the whole eco-structure may be coming down on our heads like Pompeii. (Or perhaps it is fairer to say that we are coming down on the heads of everything else.) The devastation caused by the arrogant business of empire may cause the earth to appear fragile. In the end, it is empires that are fragile. The earth is old. It feeds the rise of empires, but in the end makes all empires its food. Its cycles are greater than ours.
It is no surprise that our lives and the lives of empires are characterized by foolish decisions and acts. We are still barking at phenomena under the sway of fixation. We are still “missing the nectar for the lees.” We are still running our show like ignorant and poorly parented children, unavailable to our own wisdom traditions. If we are not awake to the uncontrived, spontaneously present, original spaciousness of our own existence, we will always be chasing shadows on the cave wall. If we are not awake to the greater cycles of mystery and regeneration that we serve, we will create our own dead ends. If we are not awake to our own bodies as the body of the earth and the body of one another, we will continue to hack off our own hands and feet. But the awakening of consciousness only occurs in the eternal context of trial and error. And though we are foolish, we are the face of great love. If we have sincerity of heart, our own errors may awaken us. If the heart has been left behind, true learning is impossible. I am always moved by the zen master who, on his deathbed, surrounded by ardent disciples waiting to catch his last words, said, “My whole life has just been one mistake after another.” What a generous teaching.
Empires rise and fall in the illusion of time. But because time is an illusion, it can never truly separate us. We can reach across the centuries for our best friends. We can share a laugh and a cup of tea with our fellow humans, who are also our fellow poets. The poet is the one in us who sometimes can’t help falling back into the original and spontaneous space of being; and for a moment we are capable of living the poem, or we bring it back braided into the mane of our winged horse—as proof of the journey. The poem shines in our eyes, sparkling through the tears of both laughter and grief. We sit together on a veranda, at a cave mouth, around a camp fire, at a tea table or at a tavern outside of time. And we are praise-singers.
On my office wall sits a marvelous painting that I found in China by a contemporary artist unknown to me. It is an intriguing abstract, a magical splash and calligraphy of paint, and it can be enjoyed at that level. But as one gazes at the painting, a clear and beautiful image suddenly emerges. It is of a very courtly woman who, with great formality, is serving tea to a fox. As the mists of time clear, I too find myself gratefully extending my cup to be served by several courtly twelfth-century Chinese women. They are like spirits of the earth who offer their tea across time and the vagaries of empires, as Sun Bu-er says, “plain heart seeing into plain heart.”
Sun Bu-er, wife, mother, Taoist adept, poetess, immortal, sits with me on the earth and offers me the first generous cup:
Always waiting in the clearing,
the simple image of light.
The day you see this,
that day you will become it.
She is encouraging us to let the pixie dust fall from our eyes; to see our true reflection. Beside her in the clearing is Zhou Xuanjing. Her eyes lowered, she also declares herself to be my sister as she stirs in the sugar with gentle invocation:
Under motionless waves,
Fish and dragons freely leap.
In the sky without limits
only the moonlight stays.
Yes, yes! Great space does not contain this moonlight. And dragons freely leap across the moon. I am moved beyond words by this magical convocation more real than time. Li Qingzhao looks at me squarely as she passes the server of cream with sympathetic understanding:
Hard to find words in poems to carry amazement!
On its ninety-thousand-mile wind,
the huge inner bird is soaring.
These real women and their wake-up calls are clearly not restrained or intimidated by the rise and fall of foolery or empire.
“Open the blinds” calls Cui Shaoxuan:
“the first apricot blossoms have opened—
Hurry! The spring days are now.”
The spring days are now. This magical scene and its visiting poets dissolve, and the wind is again blowing the prayer flags across my window. It is our good fortune to be called back to spring as the dizzying panorama of all things becomes an invitation back into our own hearts; as the dizzying dramas of the world resolve to invitations of friendship. This is our great awake community of the spirit, now and across centuries. “If you want a friend,” writes ninth-century hermit Shih-Te, “just come by my mountain. Sitting deep among the crags, we’ll talk about what’s what.”
As for Han Shan, he’ll dart behind a tree or into a cave mouth before he lets me find him. But, with Shih-Te, he leaves his poems carved on cliff walls. And there are a lot more hidden poets laughing in these hills. As we turn from shadow to sunlight, from fixation to the Tao, our luck changes. Spring does not hang on the human story, and awakening does not hang on the fortunes of empire. We watch with affection the way things grow on this path made of sand. And whether we are people or empires, our mudballs are laughable.