All Sentient Beings Have Been Grandpa
Grandson: Grandpa, you read that wrong!… It wouldn’t be fair.
Grandpa: Who said life was fair? Where is that written?
Instantly and forever, the moment he arrives on-screen, Peter Falk will remind me of Grandpa Sol.
There is a moment you recognize, intuitively and viscerally, that the stories we tell each other are always just the story within the story. The real story has to do with the people who pass their stories along. The real story happens when you observe a tale’s transmission. This act of passing narratives down across generations is what creates a human lineage. The Princess Bride knows this, so it includes within its plot, like food served in an edible package, the story’s telling, an encounter between a grandfather and his grandson on a sick day home from school in the “real” world. Director Rob Reiner agreed that this relationship was the purpose of the entire movie.
The story that became the book that became the movie was created by William Goldman, a bedtime “as you wish” for his two young daughters. One daughter wanted a story about a princess; the other wanted a story about a bride—hence the title. Even in the book version, Goldman insists on not being perceived as the author, instead crediting “S. Morgenstern.” Also, he claims to have been read the story himself by his father, and asserts he has chosen to relay to the reader only the “good parts.”1
Thus, the most crucial interaction of The Princess Bride—the relationship between grandfather and grandson—is the one that receives by far the least screen time. Every single time the real story begins, every single time Peter Falk arrives on-screen somewhere in Evanston, Illinois, to visit his grandson, I think of Grandpa Sol visiting me, when I was almost exactly the same age as the Grandson, in Manhattan. As I have been grandfatherless for the last twenty-nine years of loving this movie, you will forgive me for visualizing Peter Falk entering my bedroom and telling me some kind of story, any kind of story.
By June 1988, at the end of fourth grade, I had lost all my own grandfathers and was just beginning my love affair with The Princess Bride. (I think I had seen it only once or twice by then.) That’s right. I said “all my own grandfathers.” Depending on the strictness of your accounting method, I have had either two or three grandfathers. My mother’s father, a fairly legendary patriarch in small-town Arkansas, died the year before I was born. Everybody says we would’ve gotten along famously, if only the space-time continuum could fold like origami paper to bring us together as grown men. I imagine him as some supporting character in a Faulkner novel.
Second, my father always says that Chögyam Trungpa (who died the previous spring of 1987, at the tender age of forty-seven) was a spiritual father to him. This would make him a sort of spiritual grandfather to me. I met Trungpa Rinpoche a variety of times as a young boy but don’t have many strong memories of him, other than of his general kind presence. It was truly impressive how a partially paralyzed Tibetan man donning a three-piece suit could speak confidently, in a mildly effeminate British accent, no less, while hundreds of Westerners waited upon his every word.
At Trungpa Rinpoche’s cremation ceremony on an unseasonably hot day in the Northeast Kingdom of Vermont in early June 1987, the assembled adults were somber. Their loss was palpable and hovering. I didn’t recognize it then, but I was watching several thousand grown-ups grieving a hybrid of best friend, father, and guru. They’d all lost him before anyone was ready to let go, even though that was exactly what their Buddhist practices had trained them to do. But we children were oddly playful, almost celebratory, unsure how to properly arrange our behavior for the spiritual bon voyage of our parents’ unlikely Tibetan hero. Most of us had no rule book for how to be at the cremation of a Tibetan lama. For us kids, the ceremony almost felt like a picnic. When multiple rainbows and seemingly supernatural cloud formations appeared during the day’s events, it felt perfectly normal.
Perhaps calling Chögyam Trungpa a grandfather is too poetic, an unlicensed stretch, but there is something about the figures who receded before you came of age that hold the same place a grandparent holds, that mysterious archive beneath a trap door, that treasure chest of wisdom waiting to be unlocked through the transmission of stories that come to you little by little as you age, the collected insights of a life whose glory years ended before your own prime began.
With those two already gone by 1988, Grandpa Sol remained the only grandfather I knew well, the one whose bushy eyebrows and musky grandpa scent fill my awareness whenever Peter Falk enters his disinterested and spoiled grandson’s bedroom in The Princess Bride to read Morgenstern’s fairy tale.
A few days before the end of the fourth grade, I came home from school to my early childhood apartment on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. I don’t have many fond memories of that place during this period, but it’s not the apartment’s fault. It was the sort of apartment on which New York real estate legends of the 1970s and ’80s are based: a prewar rent-stabilized fortress. Shadowy and sprawling, it was the kind of residence you cannot find in Manhattan anymore without being a multimillionaire. But the place was emotionally darkened by the long-coming collapse of my parents’ marriage. (Two months later, they would finally separate for good, ironically enough, while we were staying at the home of Christopher Guest’s parents.) This afternoon may be the last memory I have of my parents together. My afternoon hours were usually a lull, a hidden space after the drudgery of another day at fourth grade as a nerdy outcast, before the pain of homebound evenings bearing witness to another of my very Buddhist parents’ seemingly very “un-Buddhist” arguments. I was an only child, without any siblings to absorb the impact of their war of attrition. My afternoons were a private limbo in which to hide, when I’d flee into either Riverside Park or my bedroom.
Today was different, though. Everybody was home early, sitting in the living room, the furniture washed in the presolstice light of early June. There were Mom, Dad, and a mysterious guest who never came to our apartment: Grandpa Sol. I saw Grandpa Sol at least once a week, but we would always bring ourselves to the apartment he shared with his second wife, Edith, across Manhattan, most often for Sunday brunch. We normally went to him because his mobility was compromised. He was only sixty-eight, but his advancing Parkinson’s disease left him hobbled. Now he was here, on our couch, smiling a fluid smile under his thick eyebrows, having made the journey across the island on a random weekday afternoon, sitting pleasantly with both my parents. The idea of both my parents being home simultaneously, facing each other and smiling, was one huge surprise. Grandpa Sol’s presence was a whole ’nother level of happy coincidence. I brightened quickly.
We all walked to the park together, and I didn’t mind how slowly the usually three-minute journey to the playground unfolded today. Grandpa moved uneasily, his arms caught in tremors at his sides, as if he were trapped inside a looping GIF image, the individual frames of his movement muted by pain. When we got to the park, Grandpa Sol didn’t read me any fairy tales; I think we just sat on a bench together. In earlier days, when Grandpa’s illness was less an obstacle, he would tell me a story, or help me cheat and find the hidden afikomen matzo at his Passover seders before any of the other kids, who were not his bloodline, could make the discovery and pawn their unleavened bread for cash. I felt both honored by and ashamed of his spiritual nepotism.
On the bench, he asked about my summer plans. I shrugged as I spoke, unexcited about the time ahead. Grandpa didn’t return my dissatisfied frown. Instead, he smiled. He must have known that things were going to get better for me. He wasn’t clairvoyant, but he had what all grandparents have: the context of life’s full arc. So he knew that impermanence always has a plus side: he knew that fourth grade would end in a few days, and fifth grade would begin. And when the fall arrived, things would indeed improve for me. In fifth grade, a new best friend would emerge. The wounds from my two surgeries would finish healing. I would get used to living in two households, and would even find a sense of freedom in the weekly back-and-forth across the city. Grandpa Sol did not look worried about me at all.
I’m pretty sure we both said “I love you” when he left. I’m sure I said it the way we humans too often say “I love you,” as if the syllables and the inconceivable devotion they signify are just passing each other in a gaggle of distracted thoughts. I’m pretty sure I forgot to ask Dad why Grandpa had come to our apartment anyway, even though I instinctively knew that the surprise visit wasn’t something I should get used to. The whole afternoon was a mini fairy tale, set in a vanishing kingdom called Nichtern.
A few days later, my father came into my room to tell me that Grandpa Sol and Edith, my stepgrandmother, had died together in their apartment. I don’t believe he used the exact word when he told me they were gone, but no one hid the fact that their death had been a double suicide. I remember even then feeling some understanding about why they had done it. To this day, their deaths make considerably more sense to me than Trungpa Rinpoche’s did the year before. The New York Times obituary page recorded their deaths publicly as suicide, the result of a calculated overdose of sleeping pills. Later I learned that Sol and Edith’s weekly cleaning lady had discovered them Monday, about thirty-six hours after their passing. They had put on their finest, she in an evening dress and he in a suit, and had a wonderful last Saturday-night date together in their apartment. The cleaning lady discovered them in their bed, dressed to the nines, a sexagenarian Romeo with a septuagenarian Juliet. I have always imagined them spooning each other as their breaths finally ceased, but who knows?
Grandpa Sol had engaged his own existential calculus, within his own understanding of the truth of suffering, deciding that the pain of his condition was too great to justify going on. His slightly older, but healthier wife, Edith, in the ultimate “as you wish” gesture, had decided to go with him. In preparation, Grandpa had spent the final week of his life surprise-visiting everybody who was important to him (without revealing his intentions). And that was why he had come to us that afternoon, instead of our going to see him.
Perhaps more than any physical disintegration, the nature of memory itself is the greatest exploration of impermanence we can undertake. According to neuroscience, each explicit memory is far less solidly etched than we believe. Each time we recall an old memory, we re-encode it based on current circumstances, mood, and environment. As Dr. Daniel Siegel says, “Memory is not a static thing, but an active set of processes. Even the most ‘concrete’ experiences … are actually dynamic representational processes.”2 Each time we actively consider an explicit memory, we rewrite the file. Each time we recollect a moment, we are tracing our way further from the light, sound, and textural perceptions of the actual event in question. It’s like each memory is a Xerox of a Xerox of a Xerox, a reprint which we then use like a coloring book, and then copy again. Each time we remember, we are not remembering the moment in question. The moment in question is gone. We are simply remembering the last time we recalled the moment, the environment and attitude we experienced during its previous recollections.
It’s probable that my memory of the last time Grandpa Sol came to visit is a file corrupted by Hollywood, altered each and every time I’ve seen The Princess Bride. It is possible that each viewing of the film rewrites and reshapes the memory of my own grandpa, making the Dr. Sol Nichtern I know far more story line than story. Regardless, I was more or less the same age as Fred Savage’s grandson character. And that’s probably why every time I see Peter Falk come on-screen, I instantly think of Grandpa Sol. And then I think of the importance of lineage, and the importance of understanding family as a spiritual practice.
Making Family Your Practice
CHÖGYAM TRUNGPA USED TO SAY it’s possible you could become enlightened everywhere except around your family. In other words, the family is perhaps the very last frontier of awakening, occurring after one has developed a healthy connection with oneself, with friends, with partnership, with work, and maybe with everyone else. With this statement in mind, it’s easier to see why so many practitioners look to leave the world behind. Never mind the difficulty of other people; maybe it was family that the great masters left society in order to escape. Given his relationship with his overbearing and narcissistic father, Siddhartha Gautama is one practitioner to whom this premise might readily apply.
If what Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche said is true, then the converse of his statement is also true: if your relationship with family becomes more awake and compassionate, you will have the skills necessary to awaken any other kind of relationship. If you can become enlightened around your family, awakening elsewhere will be a piece of cake. And if you can look to all people, perhaps all beings, as members of a family with whom you are in the process of healing, then enlightened society would be easy to achieve.
If family becomes part of your practice, it becomes much easier to engage in the irritations and disagreements of a larger society. Many of the political disagreements that dominate our world seem to stem from differing definitions of family: who gets included, who gets excluded, and how a family should be arranged in terms of patriarchy and matriarchy, competition and collaboration, structure and freedom, obedience and dissent. It’s possible that if we start to acknowledge the wisdom of our family lineages, we might be able to expand our definition of family to include more and more people. In the end, the human race is merely a family whose members are removed from one another by degrees of separation that are far more theoretical than biological.
The seed of the political struggles of society are often planted with those closest to us. Part of the difficulty in practicing with your own family is this: it is often hard to tell whose karma is whose. Let’s imagine that a very confused or even mentally ill person approaches you on the street and begins yelling at you, telling you that something you had no direct part in, like 9/11 or Pearl Harbor, was all your fault. Maybe you would be scared for your safety, but you would at least know that the other person had their own stuff going on. You might be startled, but you wouldn’t take the attack personally or begin to question your role in Pearl Harbor. After you ensured your safety, you might even be able to send the person accosting you a compassionate wish, because you would see their confusion and know that you were not to blame, at least not personally, for the difficult internal experience they are having. Within the realm of mental reactions, when you know what is yours and what is someone else’s, it makes it easier to help another human being, because you no longer take their confusion so personally.
Similarly, it’s an interesting exercise to spend time with the family of someone you know, witnessing their interactions as a friendly outsider. Perhaps you see the family members getting on each other’s nerves, their mixed reactions such as anger or defensiveness, which seem to happen a little bit more quickly than might be called for, at least from your third-party position. From your perch of relative objectivity, it’s easier to see when someone is caught up in their habitual patterns. You might even find the minor irritations of that family, that family that is not yours, adorable and endearing.
Now, let’s say that during Thanksgiving with your own family, an argument breaks out at the dinner table, an argument about your family’s own Pearl Harbor moments. Suddenly it is much harder to tell who is reacting, who is projecting onto whom. Am I the crazy person here? Are you the crazy one? Are we all crazy? In families, triggers and projections enmesh, and the jumbled wires of habitual perception often become nearly impossible to disentangle.
Something happens within a family, a kind of karmic claustrophobia, a hybrid of true love and tangled irritation. Sometimes it’s even hard for mindfulness to operate in the realm of family, much less for compassion to swoop in and save the day. Mindfulness is based on a simple but difficult premise: that you can directly witness what is arising in your own mind. Mindfulness presupposes that, upon reflection, you can note your reactivity to a sense perception or impulse, either during its immediate arising or after the fact.
This is why we often formally practice mindfulness on the meditation cushion. A practice session is sort of like a flight simulator. It’s a way to slow down the pace of external stimuli so that you can witness a perception, and feel your reactions to that perception. But in life, especially around family, mindfulness becomes far more difficult. This isn’t just due to the increased pace of stimuli. The problem is that your own reactivity becomes enmeshed with the reactivity of those family members around you. In family, due to karmic entanglements, shared biology, shared attachments, and shared experiences from a very young age, it becomes harder to clarify what is arising in your own mind and what is arising in someone else’s. It’s very hard to say whose reaction is whose, which karma is which. Sometimes it’s hard to tell which mind is which, or which thoughts are spoken by which voice.
It’s always helpful to step back and remember your intention to be kind to yourself and to others before jumping into the fray and spending time around members of your family. Many meditation techniques, especially those that focus on a compassionate intention in relationships, help you to step back and create such an intention.
Meditation on Relationships and the Benefactor
WITHIN THE TEACHINGS OF SHAMBHALA Buddhism, there is a wide variety of methods for delivering into your practice a healthier and friendlier connection with relationships, both in formal meditation and in every aspect of life. These include practices like loving-kindness meditation, tonglen (sending and receiving compassion meditation), visualization (the imaginative practice of visualizing superheroes of compassion, called bodhisattvas and yidams), and meditations on forgiveness and healing, both for oneself and for those you are in conflict with or feel wronged by.
In these meditations, you often first choose a figure from your own lineage, somebody who embodies safety, love, and wisdom. This chosen figure is generally called the “benefactor.” Your benefactor could be a hero, a teacher, or an elder. In The Princess Bride, the benefactor is precisely what the Grandfather represents to the Grandson: wisdom, strength, and unconditional love (plus much unacknowledged patience) on a sick day. In these various relationship meditations, you might first visualize this benefactor’s presence in front of you. You can even imagine that they are offering you the direction you need in order to open your heart to yourself and others.
In the various compassion and visualization techniques I’ve practiced, many beings have appeared as benefactor: my grandparents, my guru Sakyong Mipham, personal teachers and mentors such as Sharon Salzberg and Dr. Gaylon Ferguson, social heroes like Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Aung San Suu Kyi, creative heroes such as Allen Ginsberg, childhood heroes like Fezzik and Papa Smurf (welcome to my mind), and Buddhist bodhisattvas such as Tara, the archetype of compassionate and relentless action on behalf of others. More often than not, the particular meditation technique dictates which sort of benefactor you choose to imagine. In some practices, such as loving-kindness meditation, you can spontaneously choose your own benefactor at the beginning of a given session, based on whomever comes to mind.
The benefactor’s role in these meditations is simple: in order to allow your system to generate love, you have to feel love yourself. It’s that simple. You can’t bake bread unless you know what bread is, and you can’t generate compassion without feeling the positive transference of a few droplets of care onto yourself. Ancient Buddhist teachers understood implicitly, even without the theory of mirror neurons, that our minds reflect the behavior of others, and that when we imagine being supported by beings who already manifest the experience of compassion, it becomes easier to recall this quality, and eventually to embody it. Finally, we can offer love to others.
A classical Tibetan contemplation on compassion asks the meditator to consider the implications of the primary benefactor within one’s life. The contemplation takes the form of the phrase “All sentient beings have been my mother” and is based on the idea that each of our “mindstreams” proceeds through many iterations and across an unlimited period of time in which sentient beings have existed and will exist. Therefore, we each have experienced and will experience an infinite number of intimate relationships, an unlimited number of mothers. Any truth contained in this phrase is based on your ability to expand your notion of space and time beyond the confinements of just one life cycle, beyond one particular group of relationships, beyond one way of relating to the characters currently populating your own life.
This contemplation is based on belief in reincarnation, but more important, it is based on the compelling vision of a universe with far more sentient relationships than we can imagine when we are caught up in temporary dramas. The Tibetan contemplation is a kind of emotional yoga asana, a stretch toward a feeling of greater inclusivity. In the longest possible view of time, we will crisscross again with the beings we meet in some shape and form. We have already crossed paths with those we meet, depending on them as a helpless child looks to a nurturing parent. “All sentient beings have been my mother” is a gorgeous invitation to expansiveness, whether or not it contains scientific truth. Western theorists have wondered how a child might attain a secure attachment to its mother, but ancient Tibetans wondered how a person might eventually develop a secure attachment to everyone. Like much of the philosophy based on mindfulness, this contemplation moves us beyond the puppetry of our hyperreactive limbic systems. This contemplation helps us see that the roles people play in our personal universe can and will switch: a threatening adversary can become beloved, given the right time and circumstances.
Anyone who has ever gone through a difficult breakup knows the phenomenon of sudden categorical switches, that disjointed moment your heart’s regard for your lover flips from “for me” to “against me.” In separation, your former favorite person gets re-identified, often as a tyrant, overnight. This is why conflict is so painful: because it causes you to distrust that you can be certain about the way you have categorized others. Was I wrong to ever love that person? Am I wrong to love the people I love now? How would you treat this person who is angering you right now if you knew, at another time and place in karmic history, that person had been your mother and sacrificed all to care for you when you were helpless?
Of course, contemplating one’s mother can bring up tremendously complex feelings. It has been argued that this emotional complexity is a phenomenon of the Western world, and that in ancient Tibet, people generally had simpler, more unconditionally loving feelings toward their mothers. So, in Tibet, when you were instructed to open your mind to the vast possibilities of connection in the statement “All sentient beings have been my mother,” these words helped you soften your heart, enabling you to relax into the securest sense of attachment and the deepest sense of connection. The thought of your mother, Tibetans said, reminded you of your own vulnerability, opening you up to the tenderness of love, and that love could be transposed onto the person you were having problems with at the moment. If each practitioner could map the memory of the tenderness your mother showed you onto your obstacle-ridden relationships, the logic went, then you could deal more effectively with the difficulty in front of you.
I have no ability to discern whether ancient Tibetans actually experienced more secure attachment to their primary caregivers than Westerners do. However, for many people I know, mothers are the ones we have the hardest time with, so this contemplation might strike an unintended chord. If you had an absent or abusive mother and then were instructed to contemplate “All sentient beings have been my mother,” who knows what that might bring up for you? And what if you were using the contemplation to try to develop compassion for a difficult person such as Donald Trump? “You want me to imagine Trump magically appearing in my imagination as my neurotic mother?” The jumbled visualization that might follow could bring up a maelstrom of rough feelings, to say the least.
My teacher Sakyong Mipham updated the phrasing of this contemplation to consider all beings as having been one’s “personal protector,” a designation that doesn’t require you to think about a specific, and possibly very painful, person in your lineage. Instead, you get to imagine a benefactor of your choosing. When you recall them, their presence offers you that sense of protection, a feeling of belonging, knowing that things are fundamentally workable. This kind of secure attachment is what, in an enlightened society, we might get from family relations and especially from our parental figures—a confidence that propels us into the world with compassion and open-mindedness.
What if we included our grandparents in this contemplation? “All sentient beings have been my grandfather/grandmother.” For me, even in grief and absence, the contemplation of my grandparents has created a sense of genuine heart opening, a feeling of being loved and trusted to carry a lineage forward. For the sick and confused Grandson in The Princess Bride, the grandparent is personal protector, benefactor, and model of safety, a way of remembering that his lineage can be seen as a welcome harbor instead of the original problem in his universe.
My advice for preparing to practice with family is simple: take it slow. Without a doubt, there is a lot to work with that is painful, and many rich experiences to harvest. As is the case with friends and lovers, it won’t make sense to be in an active relationship with certain family members. But you may still make those people part of your loving-kindness practice. First, though, it might serve you to contemplate and acknowledge your own place in your family history.