A Dharma Talk
14 September 2002
The Wedding of
Katya Tsaioun & Doug Bates
Today Katya and Doug are marrying each other. This is an ancient human endeavor, hallowed by religious rites across the globe. Today Katya and Doug are making promises to each other that can be the foundation for a lifetime of mutual support, for mutual care and loving intimacy. It also can be the initiation of a deeper commitment to the liberation of all beings, the great Buddha way. In these next few minutes, I'd like to reflect on how this might be.
Now in its history Buddhism has not devoted a lot of attention to marriage. As with anything not given much attention there have been both good and bad consequences. On the one hand Buddhists have been willing to bless any number of configurations of human relationship, including monogamous, polygamous and polyandrous. On balance this seems to have been a good thing. It allows our human potential to be explored fully, and there is no immediate rejection of the dignity of human beings or of the ways in which we discover love.
On the other hand the general assumption has been that the best thing would be to enter the monastic life and to devote one's life energy to the ways of enlightenment. The tendency has been to see marriage as a concession to our human weaknesses. The inclination to body rejection of some monastic commentators has been a shadow cast over the Buddhist way for anyone except monks or nuns. Here we see the laity pitied, and perhaps despised as people who have not given themselves to the true way as fully as they could.
However, as Buddhism has come west we've seen a number of shifts in attitude touching on structures of authority as well as points of doctrine. This is, perhaps, as it should be. Certainly as the Dharma becomes native in our soil we are seeing what could be striking changes in emphasis in various areas of concern. Among these shifts has been a re-examination of what lay life might mean as an authentic path of liberation in itself; one of the many ways of enlightenment.
While there has been this shift in focus within the west, this emerging emphasis the value of lay life is not without precedent. For instance we have the Vimalakirti Sutra, with its core story of an enlightened layman. And in our Zen tradition we occasionally hear of enlightened lay practitioners such as Layman Pang and his family.
But it goes farther back. In the collected teachings attributed to Gautama Siddhartha, the living Buddha of history, we also can glean some attitudes that support this more open acceptance of married life we have in the west. So, for instance in the Sigiloydda Sutta we find the following.
"In five ways should a wife, be ministered to by her husband: by respect, by courtesy, by faithfulness, by handing over authority to her, by providing her with ornaments. In these five ways does the wife minister to her husband: her duties are well performed by hospitality to the kin of both, by faithfulness, by watching over the goods he brings and by skill and industry in discharging all business."
It is an archaic text containing assumptions about divisions of labor that are m eaningless for us, but there is at least one striking element to it. You might notice in a document that contains elements that may date back to the fifth century before the Common Era, that it calls for fundamental equality between the sexes.
This, in and of itself, opens the way. As we consider the nature of fundamental equality, we begin to allow ourselves to experience the mystery of authentic relationship, and out of that, I have no doubt, allow ourselves each of us, to genuinely walk the way of liberation. When we open ourselves to equality we open ourselves to awakening.
So, Katya and Doug, how should you approach your lives as a loving couple as well as practitioners of the Buddha way? What should you be looking for, and how should you be relating to each other, beyond knowing your fundamental equality? Mark Epstein, the author of Thoughts Without a Thinker gives some good advice in this regard.
First he underscores the point, "Like everything else in Buddhist tradition, the purpose of love and marriage is to be a vehicle for awakening." Then he suggests how we can engage our intimate relationships. "Buddhism is about investigating all the different self-experiences with the ultimate goal of knowing true reality, knowing self and other - and in an intense emotional relationship like marriage the experience of the self is stretched.
"When the self and the other get intermingled, it challenges our sense that our identity is fixed, and when we get hurt it makes the illusion of the self very visible. We can have all of these experiences of the self because love and marriage are the intermingling of emptiness and bliss." So, the practice is the same as always: remain open, allow the range of your feelings, let them play out. And in this process always notice.
The American Zen master Robert Aitken writes from this perspective as well. He even goes so far as see such formal relationships that we can find as the very heart of our practice. So he writes that "The word Zen means 'exacting meditation,' descriptive of the formal practice which is central for the Zen Buddhist. It is a demanding practice, from which certain realizations emerge that can then be applied in daily life. These are realizations that each of us is a boundless container, a hologram, so to speak, that includes all other beings." Here our intimate relationships become the teaching, showing us who we are from before the creation of the stars and planets. Specifically this practice of attending to our most intimate relationships can reveal the whole way, every blessed thing.
And so Aitken suggests, "The application of this kind of ultimate intimacy can be framed in the classic Buddhist teaching of the Four Noble Abodes: loving kindness, compassion, joy in the attainment of others, and equanimity." I would like to expand upon this by briefly reflecting on three aspects of Buddhist teachings that can help transform our committed lives in marriage into genuine expressions of the Buddha way, of the life of liberation.
We need to keep in mind the basic insights of our fundamental openness, the perspectives of the four noble truths, and the nature of those four abodes that Aitken Roshi listed. If we do this, our marriages can indeed be the cradle of enlightenment. In fact our marriages can be the palace of attainment.
The first thing we need to understand is how we are open. The technical Buddhist term is sunyatta. Sunyatta is often translated as emptiness. Kaz Tanahashi and Joan Halifax suggest another translation of sunyatta with "boundless." and I've found in my teaching translating sunyatta with "open" very helpful. While empty is not a bad term; both "boundless" and "open" expand the nuances of what our ground genuinely is.
That profound teacher of the Great Way, Nagarjuna pointed out how the traditional marks of existence, impermanence, non-essence and mutual co-creation are the marks of sunyatta. That is we are impermanent, we are of the dust of the world, beautiful, but passing. We have no special part of us that is separate from this world. And as part of this world, we are spun out of each other and all things, and so dust motes and the stars are all our family.
And this, all taken together, is our true nature, wild, extravagant, precious, boundless, always open. Much of the Buddha way, certainly the focus of most of the Zen way is finding our path from an intellectual understanding of this reality that is our heritage to a deep body knowing, our knowing, your knowing, my knowing.
And we need to bring this understanding into our relationships as the foundation, the boundless, open and empty ground upon which we stand. In our relationships we need to hold with open hands, understanding that all things are in flux, and nothing remains the same forever. But as we apply this boundlessness, this openness to our seeing each other, and caring for each other, we quickly discover how powerful and transformative it can be.
Then there are the four noble truths. In summary they are an observation that there is a great sadness in our human condition. That sadness comes from our trying to cling to things, to hold on so tightly to that which, as we already know, is essentially open. In this clinging we crush the joy and the beauty of what is. However we don't have to do this. Instead we can follow the path of wisdom, of harmonious relationship, and of attention.
As we do these things, as we find these statements our living truth expressed within our relationships and particularly those closest covenants we can make, then out of these relationships, our of our marriages, we can discover ourselves walking the path of liberation, of awakening. No doubt. So, Katya and Doug, I counsel you to remember your openness and to be guided by those four insights. They are the substance of your being and the truth of your marriage. If you remember them, you walk a path of grace.
Which brings us to the Four Abodes, that last thing, those attitudes of loving kindness, compassion, joy in the attainment of others and equanimity. As we explore these things within our relationships, and particularly in how we attend to each other within our marriages, something is revealed. Perhaps it is then forgotten. But if we persist, we discover it again. And again. And again.
After a while we discover the rhythms to this path. So, for instance, sometimes loving-kindness is something we cultivate through practices of concentration and imagination. Sometimes we find loving-kindness is the very air we breathe. As our practice together matures we discover we can't tell when we're trying, when it follows our acts of will, our concentration, and when it just rises from deep within the soil of the earth, as natural as a green shoot in the spring.
At that point we are practicing the great way of equanimity, of joyful abiding. Then our spouse is our principle teacher, and our household is the sangha, the community of wisdom. So small wonder that the Zen teacher Joshu Sasaki once said, "The best monastery for Americans might in fact be marriage." It can happen, it does happen. And as we come to this place of integration, where our joy in each other is our practice, and our practice is the work of the world, then we have fallen into the great way, and our actions with each other are the saving of the world.
And that, Katya and Doug, is my wish for you in this wonderful commitment you're making to each other.
Useful links regarding Buddhism and Marriage:
Text copyright 2002 by Rev. James Ishmael Ford, Roshi, used by permission.
Interlocking Enso image copyright 2002 by Katya Tsaioun and Douglas BatesWebhosting courtesy of Lifestyle Nutrition Management,
a Boston area nutritionist area.