In Eight Steps to Happiness Geshe-la says "'Self' and 'other' are relative terms, rather like 'this mountain' and 'that mountain ... 'This' and 'that' therefore depend upon our point of reference. This is also true of self and other. By climbing down the mountain of self, it is possible to ascend the mountain of other, and thereby cherish others as much as we presently cherish ourself."

Sunday, August 5, 2012

Carpe Diem

This common phrase (usually translated as "seize the day") might seem a bit out of place on a Buddhist blog, as it's commonly associated with hedonism, but I heard an echo in the Stages of the Path prayer:
This human life with all its freedoms,
Extremely rare, with so much meaning;
O Bless me with this understanding
All day and night to seize its essence.
Seize the day, seize the moment, seize your life - make it meaningful, by putting Dharma into practice as you go through your usual routine.

Annie Dillard, my favorite non-Buddhist writer, in her piece "Living Like Weasels" in the collection called Teaching a Stone to Talk, describes an eagle with the skull of a dead weasel still attached to its neck; the mammal probably attacked the bird and never let go. She uses this as an analogy to "stalk your calling":
I think it would be well, and proper, and obedient, and pure, to grasp your one necessity and not let it go, to dangle from it limp wherever it takes you. Then even death, where you're going no matter how you live, cannot you part. Seize it and let it seize you up aloft even ...
This idea has been giving energy to my meditation on our Precious Human Life. Of course, all life is precious. Buddhists try to practice non-harmfulness by not killing animals, even small ones, like mosquitoes, and ones we tend to abhor, like rats (I'll confess I'm still working on loving them). We try to learn how to help and protect them - for example, by fishing drowning fruit flies out of drinks (you'd be surprised how often they survive!) or by reciting mantras to them.

But "precious" in the context of this meditation means the spiritual potential that is only available when you're a human being. We think that once-in-a-lifetime opportunities shouldn't be missed - but what about this once-in-a-lifetimes opportunity? It's so big, we can't see it. Buddha is always encouraging us to have a bigger mind: thinking beyond this life, beyond ourselves, etc. Usually we think of thoughts inside our mind like objects within a room, and sometimes it seems like these Buddhist objects are bigger than the little space of our room. We need a bigger room. We need to push back the walls of our mind in order to expand.

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