my occasional blog posts….
“None of us is ourselves.” Caste (2020) Isabel Wilkerson
For me, the nature of professional, modern life has been dissociation from my own mind/body. Exercise is necessary but not sufficient to move breath and chi. Zazen is not for everyone. But in my case, its been helpful. In what way? To be oneself, it is helpful to see things as they are… in this body this moment… and outside this body this moment.
All of us would like to be ourselves.
For me, zen practice has been about ceremony of the self—zazen, service, relationships with others.
There is some talk these days about how Buddhism may play a role in the societal change. “Be the change you want to see in the world” is oft heard. Yes. Well sort of. This is a quote, misquoted and mis-attributed to Ghandi.*
But let’s just ask the general question, does our collective sitting practice change the world? And the question before that, is, does sitting practice change us? I have questions about this. That’s Dana speak for “I have my doubts.”
My first question is really two questions: um, i wonder if there is substantive support for this claim from the texts? Or, is this a modernist claim?
One, where does it say in the texts that zen will change us? I know the part that say, “brush off the dust on body and mind,” “all those who live with you and speak with you will obtain endless Buddha virtue,” and “this is the noble truth of the way leading to the cessation of suffering…” and countless other blurbs from sutras. And two, I thought practice was to recognize oneself (can’t pick up or drop that which you do not see), i.e. to become more of oneself. The promise of individual transformation may be an overreach? Sure, maybe one is less likely to act out, default to a habitual pattern. But, is that transformation? Should we call this change?
Two, about the general idea that if we all change, the world changes. I must raise a basic sociological objection here. How much and in what ways does society change because individuals change? As a sociologist a) society exists sui generis (meaning it is not simply the sum of its elements), and b). the very point of what we call systemic or structural forms of inequality, is that the ‘structure’ is relatively independent of individuals who occupy positions or play roles in the structure of economy, polity, and culture. Sure there are some degrees of freedom for individuals.
A little bit of digging on this. I’ve found a couple of suggestions that Ghandi’s words were: “We but mirror the world. All the tendencies present in the outer world are to be found in the world of our body. If we could change ourselves, the tendencies in the world would also change. As a man changes his own nature, so does the attitude of the world change towards him. This is the divine mystery supreme. A wonderful thing it is and the source of our happiness. We need not wait to see what others do.” See the link belo