New beginnings

Okay, nam-myoho-renge-kyo. It's really lovely to be here and to have the joining of sangha in the temple and sangha around the world, around the UK. So I wanted to start by summoning the spirit of one of my heroes, the DJ John Peel. When I was 13, 14, 15, I used to lie in bed in my bedroom and listen in the dark to John Peel on the radio late at night, and I fell in love with him. Because of some quality that he embodied. And that quality that I felt he embodied, and I was young, so I saw him as ancient at that point. He was probably in his mid-50s maybe, but I saw him as really, really old. The quality that he embodied was having an open heart and open ears and being excited by new music. So the music that he played ranged from world music to rap to The Fall to some things that were more classical. He played drum and bass when it came in, and it was as if the music that I'd been listening to so far was like kind of, you know, in the range of orange to red to maybe slightly darker red, suddenly like there was like a rainbow of music that was available. And what I was inspired by in him was this kind of willingness to be open to new, to things that were new, and to be excited by those things. And when I got my tattoo when I was 17, without anyone knowing. It was inspired by John Peel, and I wanted to remind myself to never lose that, never lose that capacity to be surprised or to have my mind changed. So now that we've got the spirit of John Peel with us— he died far too young, and I still miss him. I get to listen to his son on the radio now, which is almost as good but not quite the same. Sorry, Tom. Now that we've summoned the spirit of John Peel, I want to name the elephant in the room to make it not an elephant but just a part of the landscape of this talk, which is that me and Caspar left the Ahmadiyya order as priests after more than a decade alongside our dear colleagues about 3 weeks ago now, 2 weeks ago, 2 weeks ago. So when we chose the title for this talk, it felt a little bit what's the word, audacious, because beginnings, really, I thought maybe really we should have called it endings, and then the more I think about it the more inextricable beginnings and endings seem to be. So yeah, so here I am offering my first dharma talk as a non-priest, or certainly a non-Amida Order priest. So what does that mean, and how can John Peel help me? So the next thing I think I want to talk about is, is being lost. That there is something about beginnings that calls for something that is fresh and unique. And in my experience, what comes before that is a kind of a composting of the old, a processing, a digesting, a reflecting, a sorting through, a grieving, a relieve, a relieving, and in that process it feels to me that it's essential that we allow ourselves to become lost for a little while, because becoming lost is a prerequisite to finding a new path. If we tread the paths that we've always trod, we end up where we've always ended up. There's that 12-step saying, if you— I can't remember it now— but if you do the things that you've always done, then you'll get what you've always got before. So first, I want to speak up for the value in being lost. And I've got a— when I was thinking about beginnings and endings, I felt drawn to poetry, which I had a real love affair with in my early adulthood, I guess, and I've kind of lost a little bit, so I'm also wanting to find my way back to that inspiration. And I went to my— I've got on my computer, I have maybe 30 poems that have been sort of place markers for me, or what's that word? There's a stone, anchor, stone, like a stone that anchors you. I can't remember what the word is. Lodestones? Lodestones. So two called to me, and this was the first one, and this one is called Lost. It's by David Wagoner. Stand still. The trees ahead and bushes beside you are not lost. Wherever you are is called here, and you must treat it as a powerful stranger, must ask permission to know it and be known. The forest breathes. Listen. It answers, 'I have made this place around you. If you leave it, you may come back again, saying here.' No two trees are the same to raven. No two branches are the same to wren. If what a tree or a bush does is lost on you, You are surely lost. Stand still. The forest knows where you are. You must let it find you. So what I really love about this poem is, apart from it being set in the forest, in the outside, which feels really important, is that it encourages us to dwell in that place of being lost. To welcome it, to not run crazily through the paths trying to find our way out or panic, but to be still and to wait and to allow the forest to speak to us. And so this being lost feels like it, it's in a relationship with beginning because unless we can allow ourselves to rest in that place of not knowing, we can't know the new. How would we know the new if we stay with the old, which is safe? This is a Buddhist dharma talk. I always have to remember that I'm a Buddhist, so I need to put in some Buddhist bits. So here's a Buddhist bit. Because of course the Buddha speaks with many voices, and I think, you know, the forest is the Buddha. But just to be explicit, as Buddhists, we can remember to be held by the Buddha in these times, these times of not knowing, these times of change and uncertainty. The Buddha can hold us and allow us to be germinated for long enough for something new to emerge. And we're not in control of how long that takes. We'd like to be, I'd like to be anyway, but it can take, it can take a day, it can take 10 years. But we need to allow that to come from outside as we stand protected by our refuge. So that's the bit about being lost and not knowing. I'm just thinking, okay, I've got about 7 minutes left. I know where I'm heading. I'm just wondering if there's anything else in the middle between here and there. And as I pause, I'm allowing that process to happen of just seeing if there's anything new that wants to be said. And what I'm thinking as I'm sitting here is it's actually quite an exciting place. It's a little bit scary, but it's exciting. I'm remembering Now, what's his name? Buddhafield monk talk, not a monk anymore.

Amarinatho.

Amarinatho, thank you, husband. Amarinatho, who's not actually a monk anymore, but when I heard him speak, was a monk. We were in a tent in Buddhafield, which is a big festival for Buddhists and Buddhist curious people, and there were maybe a few hundred people in the tent, and he was sat with his saffron robes, and he had maybe an hour or whatever to speak to all these people, and he had no idea what he was going to speak about. The tradition in Theravada is that you kind of, you know your stuff, you get to know all the sutras and the wisdom, and then you just sit and you just see what emerges. I was so inspired by watching him sat there. He kind of, you know, he was still digesting his lunch and there were long pauses, but he just spoke the Dharma, it just came out of him, and what he said was what was needed to be heard because he allowed that unknown to bring something out of him. So this is also what I'm speaking about, I guess. And it was exciting to listen to him because I guess it's like watching a comedian that sort of starts to go off script and they're kind of, you know, interacting with the crowds and you're never quite sure what's going to happen and there's that little bit of danger maybe because you're never quite sure what's going to happen, but it's alive. So that was the bit that I was going to say that I didn't know I was going to say and I will move towards my Conclusion, which is an anti-conclusion. This is another poem that I've had with me for— I'm very old now— 25 years probably, and it's called Anniversary by Elaine Feinstein, Feinstein, and I always imagined that it might be her writing to some stuffy man that she knew very well, maybe someone who was close to her, and I looked up this morning on the internet who she wrote it for, and it was her husband, who's a molecular biologist, and so she was the kind of arty one and he was the real sort of, you know, scientific— I imagine him as staid and, you know, kind of quite, quite science, quite clinical maybe, and she wrote this for him on their anniversary and he hated it, so she stopped reading it to him. When you're a poet, you get to write poems like that about your partners that they maybe don't like. But she said it's one of her most popular poems, other people love it. So I'm going to read it to you. Anniversary. Suppose I took out a slender catch from under the spokes of Palace Pier tonight to catch a seagoing fish for you, or dressed in antique goggles and wings and flew down through sycamore leaves into the park, or luminescent through some planetary strike put one delicate flamingo leg over the sill of your lab. Could I surprise you, or would you insist on keeping a pattern to link every transfiguration? Listen, I shall have to whisper it into your heart directly. We are all supernatural. Every day we rise new creatures. Cannot be predicted. So I really love how this poem's been enhanced now by my imagining her reading it to her husband as he kind of sits there, and apparently he really didn't like that she used the word pattern to link every transfiguration because he said, no, it's evidence, it's not patterns. They're both dead now, but they're— I think she died. Their patterns live on, yeah. I hope, if she's still with us then I'm very pleased, but I think he— anyway, so I will pause there and I am, yeah, I'm very grateful to have your ears and your hearts and I'm interested to hear what Caspita is going to say because we don't know We haven't planned this.

Well, I've picked two poems.

One's called 'Lost' and one's called 'Undergrowth.' So would you like to sit here, or should we turn it round? What's the easiest thing?

I will bring my seat there.

Okay, namomi to be, namomi to be.

Namomi to be, thank you. Morning everybody. What, my little crib sheet? Thank you, thank you, speaking very eloquently about getting lost. And endings and beginnings. When Satya said this word beginnings, it was beginner's mind that came to mind, this phrase by Suzuki Roshi that describes one aspect of awakening, that he encourages us to approach every moment in that kind of childlike wonder and holding our assumptions and knowledge very lightly so we can rediscover everything for the first time. So I was thinking about that, and I was reflecting that for me, that's only one half of the spiritual life. It's only one half of awakening, or maybe a third. This is— I'm just kind of working out as I go along. A year or so ago, I was in the basement of a church room in Bristol on the edge of the Downs, and we were invited to investigate the room as if it was the first time we'd ever seen it. It was the first time we'd ever seen it, so in some ways that was quite easy, but almost as if the first time we'd ever seen a room at all, and to find one thing and come into a deep relationship to it, whether it was the corner of the skirting board and the edge of the door, or a window, or the noisy fan heater that sounded like a braying donkey. And it really supported us to go into that place of beginners mind. And I think this quality is part of what the Buddha discovered on the night of enlightenment that I spoke about earlier. This is the open space, this is emptiness where anything is possible. And the quality of attention is one of loving kindness. It's a curiosity, but it's a loving curiosity. It's one that welcomes everything just as it is. And this made me think about my work as a counselor and my work as a supervisor supporting other counselors and therapists, and how particularly in person-centered training, it is that quality of attention that is described as the most important thing, the quality of relationship. Can you bring that kind of mind to the person that's in front of you? Can you hold them in that kind of loving space? And that's really important, but it's not the only thing that's important, because actually, if you're working with somebody who's really got a history of trauma even holding them in that space of loving kindness, it can be easy to make a mistake unintentionally and end up re-traumatizing the person in front of you because you get curious about the wrong thing too quickly and it takes them into a place that's just too painful too soon. So as well as this open-heartedness. We also need wisdom, insight, a particular knowing about the situation that we're in that guides us to make the right comment at the right time. I was thinking another way this plays out in the world is when artists are painting. Satya Robyn watching the 'Portrait Artist of the Year' on Sky Arts, which is now available on Freeview, so we can see that. And in the really good ones, in the really good portraits, you see that the artists have two qualities. The first is they understand how the form of a person really works, where the eyes are supposed to go and the nose and the relationship between the, you know, the skull and the muscles and how the flesh sits on top of that. If that was all they had, they'd be producing photographs, but they also have something that is alive and curious and a particular point of view that is, for me, in the good ones at least, is affectionate of the sitter that they love the image that's in front of them, that allows them to draw out some particular quality in the person that you can't see from a photograph alone. And it might be an almost photorealistic portrait, or it might be something quite surreal, but there's still that extra quality that is the open heart the compassion of the artist for the sitter, as well as that technical side. When I went to the— years ago, when I went to the Dali Museum, which I think is on South Bank, the thing that impressed me the most were the sketches of anatomically correct people that preceded all the strange kind of dripping clocks and distorted shapes like, oh, the reason his surrealist work is so good is because there is this foundation of actual knowledge underpinning it. So as Satya said, this is a Buddhist talk, so let me think about some Buddhist examples. When the Buddha was in his last days and his community knew that he was dying, somebody said to him, 'Which precepts should we keep after you're gone?' You know, how— essentially they're asking, 'What's— how do we maintain the community? What do you want the community to look like after you've gone?' And the Buddha replied, 'Just keep the important ones.' And the monk bowed and said, 'Thank you very much,' and went on his way. And then after the Buddha died, realized that he hadn't said, "How do I know which the important ones are?" So this led to the first council after the Buddha, where they were really trying to work out which the important precepts were, and led to one of the first early splits actually between Buddhists who wanted to keep all of the precepts because they were all important, Buddhists who wanted to be creative and thought that the precepts were— site-specific is the word that comes to mind, which is a sort of a theater word— but they applied in a particular place in a particular time. And when we look at the precepts, we can see that they're a mix. Some are clearly about good qualities that are sort of eternally good to have, like the 10 things that we heard in the ceremony this morning. Not killing, not taking what isn't ours, refraining from sexual misconduct and lascivious thoughts, not becoming intoxicated so that you lose your capacity for mindfulness and compassion. And some of the early precepts are very specific to the community and the time and the place. So the precept that nuns shouldn't go on alms round on their own is about the fact that they were more likely to be assaulted than monks when they traveled on their own. And the fact that everybody went— I'm not saying that's the right response. Yeah, it's still partly true. Yeah, depending on— in Malvern you're probably fine, but you know, in some cities after dark it's wise not to go on your on your own. So the precept depends on the context. The reason that in Theravāda, monks and nuns eat before noon is for the same reason, actually, that they were encouraged to go begging in the morning when the cities and villages were calm, rather than later in the day where there was the potential for things to get rowdy when these strange people came around with their begging bowls. And of course, there's the precept that says a nun shouldn't flash her genitals at a monk while she's washing her robe in the river. Maybe that is an eternal one, I don't know. But you can see that many of these were particular to the time and the place, and many of them were eternal. And so when we're beginning something, it's really important to know that there's these two kinds of ways of being and that they're both equally valuable. The way of being that is about these eternal qualities, this beginner's mind, this openheartedness, and the way of being that says, what do I need to learn about this particular situation? And how do I learn it? And as I say that, I think of people in the Black community who are tired of explaining racism over and over again. It's very easy as a privileged white person when you suddenly make a Black friend to go, 'Oh, now you can tell me all and answer all these questions that I've got for you,' without realizing that that in itself is an act of a powerful, you know, somebody who's more powerful in society speaking to somebody who's less powerful and traditionally less powerful, and potentially that the way that conversation plays out is also coloured and infected by our internalised racist attitudes and can be quite painful to be on the receiving end of. So we're invited there to do our work in other places and bring a specific, you know, and learn a specific contextual knowledge that is about structural racism. In this case, and we can get better at that. And that is a particular sort of wisdom where the quality of beginner's mind and being open-hearted and being loving is the foundation for that, but we also need these things that sit on top of that, that teach us how to treat people, different people, well. Moment to moment, and that different people have different needs and different times have different needs. Let me just look at my crib sheets for a moment. I've said everything that's on it, but I'm still looking at it just to give me a moment to collect myself. So what does that mean for us going forward? It means that we should continue to inhabit beginner's mind and to continue to find the place in us that is loving and kind and open-hearted through being in relationship with the Buddha's compassionate heart. But also that we shouldn't neglect to study and investigate and discover what this particular time needs and calls for. And I suppose in saying that everything calls for something different, you can hear that, well, that's also beginner's mind in a sense. Often in spiritual practice, sometimes you hear this, uh, the intention is to return to a childlike state. And that isn't quite right. I guess that's what I'm saying. That's a really important quality, the childlike wonder, but actually the mature spiritual practitioner is more like the grandfather who comes back to having that quality of childlike wonder, but also contains all the years of experience and all that wealth of knowledge and understanding. So that's the place that we're aiming for. Namo Amitabha.