No State of Emergency

Events this week have me thinking about my favourite Zen teaching story. (I say that about all of them, though my very favourites are the ones I take the piss out of in this journal.)

The gist goes like this:

A bandit army descended on a town, causing all the monks in the local monastery to abandon it, except the master.

Bursting into the zendo, the pirate general was enraged to find the old monk calmly dusting the altar, not even deigning to bow.

“Do you not realise,” he shouted, “that I would run you through without a second thought?”

“And do you not realise,” said the master, “that I would be run through without a second thought?”

At this the general bowed and left.

This is one of those tales we Zenners like to exchange with pious smiles, certain of its allegory, and that we'll never be held to the conviction it implies.

And now here we are.

The plague our species is currently facing puts me in a surrealistic place. Whenever I've imagined myself in an apocalyptic scenario – which is frequently, given my culture's obsession with it – I've seen myself meeting the aftermath of war, natural disaster, or economic crisis beside my neighbours, pooling our skills, standing firm against the selfish and the predatory, guiding our community to peace, promise, and security.

But in an epidemic, you have to board yourself up in your house, see to your own needs, and avoid catching or communicating the sickness to others.

And so stillness and acceptance must be the discipline, in full knowledge that very bad things might happen. And you must not go out and do combat with them, or call for help from others, or even, God forbid, open the door to curse at them.

Instead you must remain heroically immobile. To borrow an image from Thich Nhat Hanh, you must be "lake-still, mountain-solid".

In other words, I am now living the worst nightmare of all religiosos: actually having to practice what I preach.

The death and mortal-threat fables that abound in our religion distinguish it from other faiths. (Some may quibble that traditional Christianity, with its endless recitations of gruesome martyrdom, takes this laurel, but I would counter that those are journalism, placing the listener outside of events. Our tales make him or her inhabit the dying character.)

Such stories as The Tiger and the Strawberry, or The Mother and the Mustard Seed, exist for a pedagogical purpose. They remind us of the knife-edge we walk, that we must walk, and the impermanence of all things, including ourselves. The intent is to jangle us out of the chains of our dread, and into the freedom that acknowledgement confers.

We are not the universe. We are not the most important thing in the universe. It was just fine before we got here, and it will be just fine after we leave.

And so will we.

Because this life is not the goal of this life.

Understanding that, and practicing it, is the origin of strength.

There is no "state of emergency" in Buddhism, aside from the one we were born into and can't resolve without practice. There's no Buddhist constitution that can be suspended when it becomes inconvenient. The law is immutable.

And that's a gift.

So now is the time to do all that stuff we've been saying we do.

Now is the time to practice Zen.

In taking the cushion, let us cleave to our humanity, care for our fellow Earthlings, and maintain our grasp of reality.

Because we have no alternative.


(Photo courtesy of Unsplash.com and a generous photographer.)