Being convalescent from such major surgery, I find myself (re-)discovering and mulling over very simple truths and ideas.
For example:
Q: How can you know when your nap is finished?
A: You wake up.
I have been reading a book by the Vietnamese monk, Thich Nhat Hanh, The Heart of the Buddha’s Teaching. It’s not as “mainstream” nor as syncretistic as many of his books – it’s a genuine introduction to Buddhist practice and goes into some detail on the doctrines and dogmas that embellish the history of the tradition.
He’s doing a very good job of addressing one of my primary complaints (or frustrations) with how Buddhist practice is often presented, which is that it seems “obsessed” with suffering, and my feeling that all that dwelling on suffering can’t be good. It was one of the things I least liked about my 10 days as a Buddhist practitioner at the Vipassana retreat in Northern Illinois in December of 2009.
The monk writes, “Our suffering is holy if we embrace it and look deeply into it. If we don’t, it isn’t holy at all. We just drown in the ocean of our suffering.” (p. 9). Later he elaborates: “It is true that the Buddha taught the truth of suffering, but he also taught the truth of ‘dwelling happily in things as they are’ (drishta dharma sukha viharin). To succeed in the practice, we must stop trying to prove that everything is suffering.” (p. 23).
Nhat Hanh goes on to use the metaphor of a mother with a crying baby. What does a good mother do with a crying baby? She holds and soothes and comforts it, while carefully analyzing and solving the possible causes of the crying: hunger, discomfort, frustration, insomnia, disease, etc. Likewise, our suffering is to be recognized and then held and soothed but also analyzed, like a mother with her crying baby.
