Rude Awakenings - Forest Sangha Publications

^0 G I F T S 06defending its right to be rational, wary of any feelings of devotion, notwanting to be overawed. Yet, unreasonably, the heart rises to the senseof the occasion, rises so that all that brain reality disappears—and thesacred is born. There was a descent down stone steps ... and a reluctanceto look up at the towering temple. We were in a garden of devotion. Stupasblossomed around the temple like heavenly flowers, and in theirmidst were Tibetan pilgrims—bowing, releasing thousands of prostrationsinto the world like seeds of a timeless aspiration—pilgrims, devoteesprocessing around the temple in robes and rags and jeans,mumbling mantras, whirling prayer wheels. Silently magnetized ontotheir footsteps, I was in there somewhere. There it was very peaceful,no frenzy, no press of bodies, no voices; butter lamps and their generationsof grease on the forgiving stone, the cascades of wax marking thebutts of expired candles; our half-formed prayers, our tattered memories,our gifts accepted as they were.There was the Bodhi Tree and the Buddha’s Great Listening. Underneaththe tree sat the stone slab representing the seat of enlightenment.Between it and the overhanging branches, the space attended. Thestream of my heart poured out ... this long lifetime journey ... here wasthe world, the struggle, the burden and the need to put it down. Withinme and around me, the whole world was bowing, and had been for solong: Ashoka, the Chinese pilgrims, the Tibetans, the Sri Lankans, theBurmese, the Thais, the Americans. All this stuff born out of eternity,trying to find its origin.On that night of Awakening, Siddhattha had seen through the pictureshow of identity. In profound meditation, he had witnessed thelong passage of his many births: now being this, now being that—adozen births, a hundred births—and the road all those beings had travelledon, weeping and laughing, aspiring and forgetting, the selfperpetuatingroad of kamma. What you do defines you; what youbecome determines how you see the world and yourself; how thatworld and self appears determines how you act. To reject the process,2 6 9