The Eight Worldly Dharmas

It just struck me that I've never posted on these before. Which is remarkable, since they're central to my practice, and indeed my life.

Also, since August is "Suicide Month" on Rusty Ring – the time when, for arbitrary reasons, I've ended up addressing that phenomenon most years – this is a good time to bring up the subject. Because suicide is the result of alienation, even though, as the Dharmas demonstrate, we're not alien.

Just dumb.

The Eight Worldly Dharmas (also called Preoccupations, Distractions, Desires, Concerns, Conditions, Winds, or Things I Do Instead of Zen) is a catalogue of 8 human constants that obscure the Path. (Or 4, to be precise, and their equally unproductive opposites – which together represent subsidiary principles of the Middle Way.)

I've had no luck determining the origin of this teaching. Today it passes for Buddhist, but feels like insight that predates us. I don't suppose it matters, but if we've jumped someone else's copyright… deep bow.

Anyway, here, for the first time on our stage, are the Eight Worldly Dharmas:

Wanting to get things
Not wanting to lose things

Wanting to be happy
Not wanting to be unhappy

Wanting acknowledgement
Not wanting to be overlooked

Wanting approval
Not wanting blame

That's my personal stock. Ask in a year and some wording may have changed.

There are other inventories on the Enlightenment Superpath:

1).
getting things you want/avoiding things you do not want
wanting happiness/not wanting misery
wanting fame/not wanting to be unknown
wanting praise/not wanting blame

2).
acquiring material things or not acquiring them
interesting or uninteresting sounds
praise or criticism
happiness or unhappiness

3).
benefit and decrease
ill repute and good repute
blame and praise
suffering and happiness

As you can see there is considerable variation in tone and imagery, but the thrust is consistent. (By the way, "interesting or uninteresting sounds" may sound like a weird phobia, but there's a lot of this sort of thing in the basal Buddhist texts. Random draughts, unethically-high beds, off-putting smells… not the stuff of existential angst, but you're supposed to meditate on it until you grasp the root of the problem. In this case, the writer is saying that we obsess over contextual conditions beyond our control – hot or cold, loved or alone, putting up with rude jerks or being left in peace. Your neighbours playing the Beatles on their stereo, or Slim Whitman. Pick your hell.)

And to be perfectly pedantic, when it comes right down to it, there are really only 2 Worldly Dharmas (split in half, as before):

Getting stuff you like
Not getting stuff you like

Avoiding stuff you don't like
Getting stuff you don't like

But I guess the Ancestors figured you couldn't get a self-help book out of that. For starters, it's too easily memorised.

Any road, this practice is explosive for me. The attitudes of others have played an inordinate role in my sense of self and worth, and if you study the Dharmas carefully, you'll see that they're mostly about that: stuff others give or withhold. The remainder – natural phenomena, like cold in your room or the infirmity of age – is similarly not the fundamental problem.

Not that any of these are trivial, mind you. Irrelevant and unimportant are not the same. But being aware of what originates in your skull restores a whopping measure of control.

Because suffering is actually two emergencies: suffering, and fear of suffering. And of the two, the second causes the most pain.

Doesn't mean the first isn't unpleasant, too. Just that it's not what manipulates you.

But you have influence over that second one.

And that's what the Eight Worldly Dharmas encapsulate: that stuff going on outside you, beyond your control, twangs your desires, and that's what plays you. Stop caring, and the monster is defanged.

And you get to that place by looking deeply. Doesn't happen instantly, but keep at it and you'll be amazed how far not striving will take you. And the more you observe the results, the dumber your desires look.

And the dumber they look, the smarter you become.

And there's not a damn thing anything outside you can do about it.

So that's why I meditate – or just reflect – on one or all of the Eight Worldly Dharmas on a regular basis. Maybe change things up from time to time and contemplate a different inventory.

Because it's about time my demons caught a few worldly dharmas of their own.


(Photo of Narcissus var. 'Slim Whitman' [yes, really] courtesy of Wikimedia Commons and a generous photographer.)

Good Book: Two Shores of Zen - An American Monk's Japan

I hold the word on my tongue, bullshit, so he'll know that I'm serious about this. I'm not just complaining. He needs to meet me, to understand that I'm tired of this American Buddhist 'Upper Middle Way'. I'm tired of the sexual dramas, the talk of 'income streams' and 'personnel costs'. […] It is not that I'm averse to problems; I understand that they are the stones that lay the path. I am tired, though, of these corporate problems, 'Are we making enough?' and these hippie commune problems, 'Who's fucking who?'

Jiryu Mark Rutschman-Byler is nose to nose with his teacher. He's done with the nonsense. He's determined to pursue the Way. The true Way. The authentic Way, goddamit!

The fact that he stalks off in precisely the opposite direction from mine only intensifies my sense of kinship with him.

Two Shores of Zen: An American Monk's Japan chronicles one seeker's attempt to resolve the central contradiction of our religion: a philosophy of transcendence, patrolled in two disparate cultures by a careerist administration.

In young Jiryu's case, he's fed up with the mealy-mouthed doubletalk of Western Zen. His California sangha is flabby, bohemian, materialistic. "When are we going to get around to seeking enlightenment?" he wonders. "Are we going to get around to seeking enlightenment?"

The twentysomething monastic longs to live those legends, breathlessly recounted in the West, of merciless sitting schedules, brain-bending mental training, and utter obedience to a deific master. In his view the Ancestors' instructions have been inverted in transmission, to the point that following them is heresy. "How," he protests, "did we make the original Middle Way into an extreme to be avoided?"

Certain the hallowed Japanese couldn't be so glib, he jumps on a plane and jets off to get him some of that pure Asian practice.

We know what has to happen next. But Jiryu's account of it is fresh and honest, and his courage in telling a tale that doesn't always show his younger self to be the Stone Buddha he takes himself for inspires trust.

Certainly, the antics of a living oxymoron – a rebel cœnobite – make engaging reading. At one point the eager young pilgrim even considers cutting off a finger as a gesture of gratitude to his teacher; fortunately, common sense reins in this particular manifestation of his crush on Japan. (For their part, the Japanese would recoil in horror from such an act; most today regard monasticism itself as abusive and atavistic.)

Jiryu gamely owns a few other delusions as well – including, o shame of counter-California revolution, sexual ones – and documents the uncorrected worldliness of his peers as all swim in the obsessive patriarchy of Japanese practice. (Eremitical Perspective Break: from where I'm sitting – so to speak – both the Eastern and Western schools are culture-over-dharma models.) But the writer's Augustinian confessions are compelling and endearing, precisely because he's so gung-ho. Absent that, his openings couldn't be as revelatory, his witness as eloquent, or his trajectory as utterly human.

In short, Two Shores is the Empty Mirror of our time, enhanced and upgraded by a later generation's relative suspicion of exoticism. Which makes the fact that it was rejected by traditional publishing all the more frustrating. It's hard to avoid the conclusion that the Buddhist press has largely become irrelevant. Yes, its stable of conservative celebrity teacher-authors reaches a well-monied market. But we practicing Buddhists outside that market are quickly becoming the demographic majority. Jiryu himself calls out the self-help and "lifestyle" mill that passes for our media. The fact that he was ultimately obliged to self-publish Two Shores – a foundational text Zenners should read – is a bitter irony.

Not that the book doesn't suffer a few foibles of its own. A sea of typos – typical failing of self-published titles – distracts the reader and weakens the prestige of the work. Also, were I the editor Jiryu tried so hard to secure, I'd've ordered a short epilogue, closing storylines left open, catching us up on his life and practice (he's on the pastoral staff at Green Gulch, a fact that brings his lessons full-circle) and offering considered insight into his Asian interlude, now that several years have passed. (It's worth mentioning that publisher-released books often share this deficiency, professional oversight be damned.)

But these are minor details. I'm heartily grateful that Jiryu has made his work available at personal expense, as few POD authors recoup costs, let alone profit.

I recommend that anyone who's troubled by our all-too-mortal Zen establishment; suffers from Real Zen Disorder; is interested in Japanese practice models; or just likes a good Zen yarn, do all sentient beings a favour and buy Two Shores of Zen.

Then maybe convince someone else to do as well.

The Middle Way

I recently encountered this graphic on Facebook. Sums up the situation nicely, though I might have called the right wing of Integrity "puritanism", or maybe just "being that guy". Note that the Buddha made this principle central (no pun intended) to his teaching 2500 years ago.

These days I seem to encounter the moral right more often than the moral left. (I'm not talking about the political right and left; the moral right includes organic-insisters, McDonald's-shunners, business sceptics, and Christmas re-labellers, as much as is does Red baiters, Second Amendment Witnesses, and guru-worshipers. Interestingly, sexual conduct fetishists are equally represented on both sides, though their preferred targets differ.)

It's hard for some to grasp that decency means living with complexity. The ethically lazy skirt such heavy lifting by sidling down one of two side aisles: refusing to recognise the need for regulation -- the hippy-dippy, whatever-dude leftist response -- or shooting down challengers to one's glorious Easy Answer with a silver bullet -- the dogfaced, procrustean prejudice of the right.

Both represent ego run amok. The Buddha's programme to bring it back under control boils down to "doing my best". Doing nothing is doing nothing, and therefore not doing your best. And doing just one thing over and over is not doing most of the full spectrum of things you're capable of. And therefore not doing your best.

Moral extremists tend to reproach centrists (which includes all authentic Buddhists) as shiftless and weak-willed, but in fact, that's them. They adopt one simplistic principle and refuse to do any dead reckoning thereafter. As the Buddha pointed out, they veer immediately off-course, and will never sail straight again until they abandon the delusion of self and get back to the relentless, inescapable work of triangulation.

'Cause there ain't no here nor there in the real world. You calibrate your moral sextant every minute of every day, or you run onto the rocks. (Then there's the karma you incur convincing others to follow you onto the rocks, but that's another post.)

Anyway, the person who created the graphic gets it. If you don't cleave to the channel, you founder.