December 8, 2014

Bodhi Day Events today

Happy Bodhi Day! Celebrate with the Air Force Academy cadets, or with SMS at Shove Chapel

And we are pleased to announce that Springs Mountain Sangha now has a facebook page. Andrew and Sarah have both posted there about Bodhi Day.
For those who don’t go to facebook, Andrew’s piece is available on his blog, Bow and Roar.  And Sarah’s is copied at the foot of this letter.
events of the day:
Monday, December 8: A Bodhi Day Service
with the
Vast Refuge Sangha and Andrew Palmer, Sensei
at the Cadet Chapel, USAFA, 6-8 pm

You can still go to this!  Just need to be through the North Gate of the Academy by 4:45, and go right on up to the Cadet Chapel.
The service will consist of meditation, sharing and exploring the Buddha’s story together, then having time to connect with one another while enjoying refreshments. Everyone is welcome and encouraged to attend.

And at Shove Chapel,  our 5:15 discussion will focus on the story of Buddha’s enlightenment.  There will be orientation at 5:40 in the side chapel, and then after meditation, we’ll have tea and cookies, and celebrate with sharing of our own discoveries of this Bodhi Day.

Our ancient Buddhist origin story goes something like this: that after having left the protected life of a prince, determined to discover the cause and cure for human suffering, Siddhartha Gautama spent years studying and practicing under the most revered teachers of his time, embracing increasing austerity that brought him to the brink of death. Lying on the river bank in this extremity, realizing his death was not the solution to this puzzle, he had dreams, and a vision of the simple sufficiency of a childhood afternoon. He turned back towards life. A young woman brought him sweet milky rice, and he received this gift. It was after this that he sat down in the generous shade and friendly strength of a great tree, facing the east on a pillow of sweet grass offered by a boy nearby; and knew that it was time. No longer pushing anything away, he sat and opened the pupil of his inner eye. Visions of his own countless lives landed next to visions of many many other lives; temptations of all the classical sorts appeared and were met with that calm, unwavering gaze. The capacious darkness of his inquiry, the unshakeable stillness of his vow to save all beings met the vastness and stillness of that night and they became one. And when, near the dawn, he raised his gaze, the brilliance of the morning star met the brilliance of that eye, and they, too, were one. In that moment, it is said, Siddhartha awakened. He knew that all beings are already made of this awakening; that, while each rising and falling in its own place uniquely, we are the indivisible stuff of awakening which is the very nature of life/death. Something like that, I think. (and now I will go wash my mouth with soap, as it always seems so foolishly presumptuous to try to express something like this).

It took a while, it is said, days, for the Buddha to get up from there. He knew that what he had realized couldn’t really be said. But eventually he was persuaded to try to teach it, and spent more than 40 years meeting people eye to eye and heart to heart, offering the teachings of the Middle Way: a way of clearing the heart-mind so that this awakening could find its unique expression in each of us, bringing joy and easing suffering in our dear world.

Well, that’s the way it seems to me this morning, Bodhi Day. At this time each year I feel a swelling of gratitude for all of those women and men who, like Siddhartha, have gone all the way, deep, deep into the darkness and light of being with such dedication—with such lack of regard for their own comfort—to bring back to us teachings about how it is and how to realize our full humanness. It’s not that they have something that I don’t have; but that they remind me that, at every moment, if I just relax my stranglehold on what I think I need—at the very moment when I open my hand, my presence, that vast dark sky before the dawn, that bright morning star, are right here.