A Stolen Buddha is a Lesson

With palms together,
Good Morning Sangha,

There was a story in the local newspaper this morning about a statue of the Buddha being recovered after it was stolen. The last paragraph reads "...Buddhists also believe in karma, which says a person's actions in this life determine the quality of their existence in the next."

Yes and no.

This is an example of how language and culturally infused meanings become problematic. Buddhists also "believe" that there is no soul, no substance, that transmigrates from one life to another. Thus, a contradiction.

Buddhists also "believe" there is no birth and no death. Therefore no this life, no next life. Another contradiction.

What are we to do? A Zen Teacher would shout:

Practice Zazen. See your true nature for yourself. Look deeply into the heart of the matter!

We Americans hate this sort of thing! We want to *know* and we want to know NOW!

Otherwise the Teacher is not teaching and the whole thing is just tooooo mysterious! (Or better still, *esoteric*)

To borrow a short, but succinct word from another tradition, "Oy!"

Here's the thing. Lives are constant, there are no breaks between them. I am "born" from cells developed in my mother's uterus, my cells merge with another's cells to form another being that individuates and is "born" and so on. There is no point where I am or was not. We get stuck when we use "I" as a point of reference rather than the universe at large. When seen from the larger, universal perspective, life is organically rising and falling and rising again: always at all times. In this process of rising and falling, the parts have roles to play.

As parts of this universal process we can make our universe a better place or a worse place for all of the other parts. Since we are all constant parts of this one vast universal process, parts past and parts present, we are rendering karma.

We are way too egocentric to see this without much practice. Those living in the Far East on the other hand have grown up with a more universal and collective understanding of their existence with much less emphasis on the individual "part."

Isn't life interesting?

Be well.