I recently saw a nice Youtube video by Ajarn Brahm on Buddhism and Tea, of course partly about that topic. He started explaining some traditional story references, about ancient monks drinking tea, and the Japanese tea ceremony, and moved on to a story about a British army group taking a tea break during a battle. The point of the last story was that sometimes in the midst of struggle it's best to stop struggling and take a break, to just pause and get your broader perspective back.
Good advice. But is it Buddhism? In a sense it doesn't matter if it was something the Buddha said or not, or a close equivalent. It's the role of modern teachers--monks, and whoever else teaches--to interpret the ideas to the modern context, to make it available to people, even if expressed quite differently. But again, is this equivalent to Buddhist ideas? To me, not really. It's folk wisdom, related to ideas found in Buddhism, but not Buddhism, not really a direct part of the same set of teachings.
The closest tie-in amongst traditional concepts might be found in mindfulness, which really is a core concept in Buddhism. It's one that ends up expressed in lots of different ways in lots of contexts. The main idea is that as part of the process of increasing self-awareness one becomes more aware of the nature of immediate experience. I guess that states the causal flow backwards, because usually it is described as a tool for supporting development, not an outcome. It's not so much just related to the experience of external surroundings, although that's part of it, but really how experience itself is experienced, mental states and all that, self-nature, a lack of self, etc.
I'm not blaming Ajarn Brahm in saying this. It's a great idea, and really we need approachable methods to really do much with the relatively abstract ideas like mindfulness. He has surely interpreted core teachings more directly in other talks focused on that, and this type of weekly chat is about something else, insights into how to put them into practice, essentially folk wisdom. Separate from the rest of the context of Buddhist ideas there isn't such a close tie between taking a break or letting a struggle go temporarily and Buddhism, but it could relate directly enough, in one limited sense.
More folk wisdom: like water off a duck's back
It's really a completely different thing, but I'm reminded of something my grandmother used to say about dealing with conflict, about how to her the best approach is to not get caught up in it mentally. She would say "it's like water off a duck's back to me." By this she meant there was a lot of conflict and unhappiness going on around her, usually in the form of my grandfather shouting about something, and she was best off to not make too much of that. It really seemed to work. I've struggled with staying actively involved in helping my wife resolve her perceived issues on one level and more or less just ignoring her on another. Oddly this does tie directly to a suggestion by a monk to just at least pretend to listen. My grandfather was pretty vocal, easy
Of course my grandmother was not Buddhist, but this practical folk wisdom also overlapped with the core concepts of Buddhism. I guess one could say she was talking about non-attachment, not mindfulness. To me there is a closer link in this advice than Ajarn Brahm's because it deals with a change in immediate awareness, not just a habit or strategy for how to deal with one set of circumstances. Keeping mental distance from conflict that doesn't need to be taken personally is not really an insignificant thing.
You might wonder if that really does translate to a more functional perspective, since I seem to just be talking about tuning people out. What she did was much more than that, how she applied what I would consider "non-attachment," in a very positive sense.
This year I visited home and my grandmother for the purpose of seeing her one last time before she died. During my visit, over two weeks, I saw her go through the loss of one core function after the other. A stroke had taken her ability to walk and use of one arm, but she lost vision and the ability to digest as well, and then the energy to maintain normal functions. She took it in stride. It's unimaginable that someone could suffer like that with such patience and positive outlook, still enjoying the last days with family, still talking about old times or current changes as if dying were just a normal thing. In a sense it is, but how many of us could experience it as such?
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in memory of a very pure spirit |
I keep considering this general point of non-attachment lately related to internet comments. I don't need to become offended every time someone makes a political statement that makes no sense, or posts something objectionable, "flaming" someone else for no reason, or shows something graphic and offensive. I seemingly could interpret that as not related to me, not about me so nothing to get upset about. A humorous reference to this idea is found in a "fake" guided meditation video I saw recently: F*ck that, a Guided Meditation, by Jason Headely (funny to me, anyway).
Of course there are Pali expressions for these concepts I've brought up (mindfulness, non-attachment), and there was a time when I could cite one after another from memory, but I've been away from the formal study for a good number of years now, so I can't. I'm onto worldly concerns and learning Information Technology related concepts, and studying tea, and learning a foreign language (Thai). Wikipedia articles are easy to click around to get a start, and from there one could read dozens or hundreds of other books as references, as I did.
One should keep in mind that the core concepts, modern interpretations of related concepts, and the general purpose and approach to Buddhism are all different things. For some Buddhism is a religion, all about ritual, the main effect of which is to adjust karma and apply positively to events in this life and also to re-birth related concerns. For someone else that's not the point at all, maybe about meditation and mental / spiritual states of attainment and awareness, or for someone else quite like psychology, an explanation, or even conventional self-help. It's hard to say any of them are clearly right or wrong.
It might be easy to go too far related to relaxing interpretation concerns, and say it doesn't really matter at all if the ideas are presented similarly to how they are in Buddhism, that if the general principle is the same the meaning is the same. It's partly true, but to me there was a point to the Buddha explaining what he did in a number of different ways, based on somewhat complicated structures of related ideas. Of course I can't say for sure what that intention was (likely more than one goal), but to me the ideas change to a different sort of potential function when they are taken together. As I see it that only works if the ideas and practices are informed by introspection, application within one's own particular experience.
But then what do I know, right? It might seem I'm starting to claim to know Buddhism as well as Ajarn Brahm, or perhaps even the Buddha, and I'm implying no such comparison. I just talk around the ideas a bit, share my impression--that's it. I'm no authority on what Buddhism is, and that's not a well-defined or limited thing, it's different for different people.
It might seem I'm also implying one needs to commit to some minimum level of application of the other core ideas, to embrace some version of a moral code, to practice meditation, etc. I'm not. To me the ideas make more sense taken as a set, and possibly even the practices make more sense taken as a set as well. It may even be possible to embrace one set or aspect without really doing much with the others, the idea that there are different paths for people of different temperaments or with differing perspectives.
It seems to me as if some basic awareness of concepts--the teachings--could support any form of the practice of Buddhism; issues of self, mindfulness, and non-attachment, and potential self-improvement. Of course given the subject "self-improvement" isn't the most natural way to express that general goal of progress and change, of course, but "spiritual progress" sounds too New Age, and self-actualization too modern, and it still dips back into the concept of self.
I've found a lot of value in these ideas, in these teachings. They are hard to clearly summarize so what one ends up getting is translations of very old core teachings (eg. the Dhammapada), or teachings by a monk, or someone rambling on in a blog or something such. If someone is very lucky they might see an example of someone living out these principles, but they wouldn't necessarily need to know the core teachings to do that, a lot of it relates to normal personal development.
