THE CREATIVE BUDDHIST NEWSLETTER

Dear Subscriber First Name,

I’m finally home, back in Stockholm after 3.5 weeks on the road and 7 different beds! When I left it was snowing and now, it’s summer sunshine.

Looking through my various notebooks, the theme that emerges is a multi-faith one; I’ve led a retreat and an order weekend on the Ten Fetters, classic Buddhist teaching; illustrated the teaching with poems from the Sufi poet Rumi. Sufism is a mystic school within Islam; then in my spare time I’ve been reading about Christianity, visiting churches and graveyards.

I’ve never felt drawn to the culture of Buddhism, be it Indian, Tibetan, Chinese or Japanese. Although the Zen traditions of Japan hold some attraction, mostly it feels nothing to do with me. It’s been the universal nature of the teachings themselves that have hooked me in.

Recently I’ve been reading more about Christianity (see below) and of course the culture I grew up in is based on those teachings. My parents got married in church. I was christened in that same church, and we held both their funerals there. On our holidays in Norfolk, we silently entered various empty churches with a natural sense of awe. And in reading about the book of Genesis, I recognise the stories from childhood; Adam and Eve in the garden of Eden; Noah and the flood. I’m sure I had an ark with little toy animals!

I feel drawn to exploring those teachings more, finding the parallels with Buddhism and seeing if I can find what I consider ‘the Dharma’, universal truth teachings, in my own culture. You’ll find more on this theme in ‘On my radar’ below.

The Dharma Bundle

This being, that becomes

This week’s theme is the 3 Kinds of Conditionality

We explore them in an audio walking meditation. I often find things become clearer on a walk so this week we are taking the teaching out with us as we wander our neighbourhood and hopefully come back with a clearer and deeper understanding of the three kinds of conditionality.

The Dharma Bundle is a ‘bundle’ of dharma resources, thoughtfully made and beautifully packaged. Short, illustrated Dharma videos and audio talks. Audio meditations and reflections. Creative assignments.

On my radar this week

Book: Reading Genesis - My wife read a review of this and grabbed a copy on our way to a brief holiday on the North Norfolk coast. We started reading Marilynne Robinson’s ‘Reading Genesis’ together, carrying it on our walks. I didn’t grow up in a religious family, but grew up with stories from the Bible. Warning, it’s a hard read! So much meaning seems to be condensed into each sentence. We’d read a page and spend half an hour working out what it was all about. If that sounds a bit much for you, listen instead to the podcast below!

Podcast: Marilynne Robinson on Reading Genesis - This episode of Ezra Klein’s Podcast is subtitled ‘on biblical beauty, human evil and the idea of Israel’. Here’s a few things I jotted down while listening; beauty is God’s signature, beauty comes before utility in the old testament, beauty is a mode of understanding; find things that are beautiful, expose yourself to them at length, give them preferential attention; every moment, every experience, is a question being posed to you by God. What is wanted out of this moment? It’s full of gold.

Article: The Dali Lama reflects on Faith in Buddhism and Christianity - This article is an extract from the book The Good Heart: A Buddhist Perspective on the Teachings of Jesus by the Dalai Lama. The World Community for Christian Meditation invited the Dalai Lama to lead their seminar in 1994. They asked him to comment on the Gospels. He immediately accepted the invitation, humbly admitting that he knew little about the Gospels. It turns into a wonderful experience of interfaith dialogue and friendship.

Book: Small Things Like These - I’m not a great novel reader but have just discovered Claire Keegan and I find her writing captivating. Simple stories, beautifully observed. Something happens to my breathing when I’m reading her. Bated breath, perhaps? I want to slow down time. Small Things Like These is about the dark side of the church, the Magdalene laundries in Ireland where underaged mothers were sent. Disturbing, yes. But more is left unsaid than said, which is perhaps the power of her prose.

Film: Lucky - Just in case you think I’ve converted to Christianity, I’m including my favourite film of all time, Lucky. It’s a film about faith, a faith that comes from living a life and learning from it. Lucky is facing the prospect of his own death and beautifully reflects on the meaning of life. More Buddhist than Christian, it defies being pinned down.

Diary extracts

What if the day of your death is written?

I invite you to try out a brief thought experiment. Somewhere in my explorations of Christianity, I came across the idea that the ‘day of our death is written’. That God knows when we will die, that our death is predestined. It’s the kind of idea I would normally reject straight away as not only un-Buddhist but unattractive. That is until you think about it more deeply. 

So let’s try a thought experiment. Let’s put ourselves in shoes of a traditional Christian living, say, 200 years ago. They believe in God, as their parents and grandparents did, and part of that belief is that the day of their death is written. Not just their death, but that of everyone around them. Can you imagine that? How would it affect the way you lived? How would it affect the way you faced death, your own, or the death of those you loved? 

Here’s how it could be a helpful view; there would be a sense that whatever was happening was meant to be and couldn’t really be any other way. There would be less struggle with the reality of death, no sense that death shouldn’t happen or that we are in some way to blame.  

I think not believing in God and having the teaching of conditionality instead can make us veer towards an exaggerated sense of being in control of our own destiny. I looked up the synonyms and antonyms for ‘predestined’. The synonyms are words like definite, fated and inevitable, while the antonyms, the opposites, are avoidable, preventable, unlikely. 

So while I don’t think the day of my death is written, I’m working on not believing that it is in some way avoidable, preventable or unlikely! 

Experience is enough

On retreat recently we were talking about the difference between direct experience, what is actually happening, and the stories we create on top of that. Would life be boring without the stories? We are meaning making animals after all. Perhaps, as the poet Wallace Stevens says of life, ‘The exquisite truth is to know that it is a fiction and that you believe it willingly.’ And yet, what if experience is enough? 

That evening, in a little ritual, we gather around a bonfire by the woods. It’s dusk. As we stand around, I start to wonder, aren’t we going to do something? Sing a song, chant a mantra? Doesn’t seem like it. We’re just there by the fire in silence. 

Then, suddenly, the birds start. It’s like being in a concert hall treated to an avant garde performance. I don’t think I’ve ever heard anything like it. Am I dreaming this? I look around and others too are looking confused, amazed. We start to laugh. Is this really happening? But it goes on and on until, as suddenly as it started, it stops. 

If we’d been singing or chanting, we would have missed the birds, not noticed how extraordinary they were. Sometimes experience is enough.

A quote I’m thinking about:

“The job of the artist is to be themselves at any cost.”

― Sinead O’Conner