Gasshō

“With the ideal comes the actual.”
I heard that phrase for the first time from Jiyu Kennett more than thirty years ago. At the time I understood it as I understood it then. I heard it, and it settled into my worldview. Yes, that makes sense. There’s the ideal we can imagine in our minds, and there is what actually is. A very important teaching. But I didn’t believe it. Or, perhaps it’s more accurate to say I didn’t accept it.

Not only could I not see what she was pointing at, I didn’t yet have an experience that would make clear for me the magnitude of what she was clarifying. I did not know then that what is is always far, far superior, better, more real, and happier than what we can imagine. At that time I thought what I could imagine as perfection was the highest perfection imaginable! Such is the nature of ego.

As we go along in life, we have a growing sense that what we know is not the whole picture. We may even have a sense that there’s a whole lot we don’t know that could make a big difference for us, but the fact that it is unknown is often a source of frustration rather than comfort. The comfort comes only when we realize that we don’t know not because we are lacking something but because there is nothing to know, and, what’s more, there is no one to know it. The comfort comes when we realize there is only the actual,and we cannot know the actual. We can be it, but we cannot know it. One of the ways I recall Jiyu Kennett phrasing that realization: “I am not it; it is all of me.” A distinction that moves us from hell to heaven.

The ideal that is easy to believe in a privileged society —people can get ahead if they work hard, poor health is the result of poor dietary choices, etc.—is quickly seen to be absurd in poverty-stricken, disease-ridden sub-Saharan Africa. People work very hard all day every day just to put enough edible matter in their bodies to stay alive; nutrition is not even a consideration.

We had a conversation with visitors from the U.S. about the construction blocks made from recycled plastic that we are so excited about. “But it’s been discovered that plastic leaches carcinogens. We should find a building material that is sustainable.” After some discussion, we realized that we all agree that in an ideal world a building material that doesn’t leach carcinogens would be our first choice. But people here are up to their ankles in plastic bags, plastic bottles, plastic packaging materials. Their houses fall down around them during each rainy season because the roofing material (cardboard and plastic) can’t keep the water off the mud brick walls, and the walls disintegrate. Most of the people are living with hunger, malnutrition, dehydration, polluted water, malaria, tuberculosis, and HIV/AIDs. Without immediate, wholesale change, they won’t live long enough to die from those carcinogens!

I’ve been a vegetarian for almost thirty-five years. It’s an easy thing for a privileged person to do in the U.S. When I travel, I carry organic soy nut butter with me. There’s always cheese and eggs and often soy based protein “meat” products available. As with many people in my part of the world, my relationship with food consists of trying to choose what is the healthiest to eat; not eating too much; dealing with the burden of figuring out what I want to eat; deciding if I should cook something or eat out; and, if eating out, determining which restaurant to visit.

While in Zambia, I spend a large part of each day with people who will not eat that day. If they do have something to eat, the odds are good it will be a plate of nshima, mealy-meal, which they adore, and which is very filling, but has almost no nutritional value on its own. In fact, talking with medical people here, we suspect that the nearly 100% carbohydrate diet of nshima is setting up the next health crisis: diabetes.

When my little dog Toughie was dying of congestive heart failure, I decided to ask her vet to come to the Zen Center where we lived to give her a shot that would end her life. It was one of the most difficult decisions I’ve ever made. People at the time asked me how I could reconcile that action with the precept “Not to lead a harmful life.” My response was that I had been interfering with that creature’s life for thirteen years. Without my interference, she would have been dead years before. She was abused and neglected when I found her; she had a delicate constitution that required a lot of medical care. I began imposing my better ideas onto her life from the first moment I laid eyes on her! The one thing I knew for sure was that I was willing to accept the karma of that final interference.

A couple of days ago we had a community meeting in Kantolomba to learn from the residents how they would like to move forward with education and employment to make the current work we’re all doing together sustainable. Living Compassion cannot go on paying people’s wages and providing their education and health care indefinitely. We must start now preparing for our departure. So, with Theresa Kapenda as translator, we asked them, “What do you want to do to support yourself?” A woman called out, “Raise chickens!” Everyone else called out that, yes, they too would like to raise chickens.

Now, if you think a Buddhist with an ant infestation is a pitiful sight, let me tell you it is nothing compared to being faced with a whole community of starving people who want chickens to raise, kill, and eat.

Somewhere in the back of our conscious awareness, all of us knew it was going to come to this. How could it not? But, you see, in our ideal world they would have called out, “Raise soy beans!”

This is a very painful and difficult place. During a Precepts Retreat, we are constantly coming back to: the Precepts are not a set of rules; this is not about right and wrong; we are attempting to awaken and end suffering. And while I know it can seem demented at first glance, I don’t see anything different when I look into the eyes of a hungry child or a hungry mother who can’t feed her children, or a hungry, skinny dog scrounging through a pile of trash, or a chicken being carried off to be slaughtered to feed them. I can’t find a place in my heart or in my mind that can say, “That life matters; your life doesn’t matter.”

And so as I prepare to say, “Yes, we will help buy the chickens. We will assist them to start this micro-business that will allow them to eat and to feed their children and perhaps extend their lives long enough to have a chance to fulfill at least some of their dreams,” my heart breaks for those who will be sacrificed.

My only comfort is the comfort of knowing that I don’t know. I don’t know what’s right or best. I don’t know the answer or even if there is one. I only know that this is what seems to be the thing to do now. This is the next step, and it will be taken with the understanding that whatever teaching there is from this action will be gratefully accepted and whatever karma willingly borne.

As we recite in the Daily Recollection:
“I am born of karma; I am heir to karma. I abide in karma and I am supported by karma. Whatever I do creates karma and I shall sure experience this karma.
The merit for all good acts I do freely offer to all beings.
Again, and yet again, may it be so.”

 

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