From the Cemetery to the Forest

I’m trying a slightly different approach for this chapter ("Forest Ascetic"), because it’s so chock-full of major Buddhist precepts. I’ve pulled out a number of key passages from the text that I’ve reproduced in full, and then I’ll reflect on each one briefly, without attempting to provide resolution or interpretive closure. And I won’t say too much here, because every one of these ideas is going to return in my longer writing post today: the closing arc of the GPT/Mirrors/Thresholds series. So these quotes will form the theoretical scaffolding, the ideological spine, as it were, of the bigger writing project I’m working on today. 

PASSAGE 1: “And then one day, while practicing sitting meditation in a cemetery, Siddhartha realized with a jolt how wrong the path of self-mortification was. The sun had set and a cool breeze gently caressed his skin. After sitting all day beneath the blazing sun, the breeze was delightfully refreshing, and Siddhartha experienced an ease in his mind unlike anything he had felt during the day. He realized mind and body formed one reality which could not be separated. The peace and comfort of the body were directly related to the peace and comfort of the mind. To abuse the body was to abuse the mind” (104). 

“Self-mortification” : killing, putting to death, starving off, cutting parts of the body out of circulation, a sealing off of the body from nourishment, a rigidly upheld self-disciplining through severe asceticism that believes, implicitly or explicitly, that the body’s needs, pleasures, and perceptions must be transcended to reach higher understanding, spiritual growth, and so on. Siddhartha sitting in a cemetery while quietly annihilating his body is the perfect paradox. And then—the Real hits Siddhartha’s mind with a jolt as his body experiences a cool breeze. Something enters the supposedly self-sealing architecture of self-mortification—a direct experience of sensual, perceptible reality caresses the skin-envelope, and voila! That porosity between skin and ether, the registration of sensation between mind and body, fuel the emerging insight re: the interdependence of mind and body. Something lives in the cemetery scene: another womb-tomb? 

PASSAGE 2: “Always the goal had been to find a means to escape the world of feeling and thought, the world of sensation and perception. He asked himself, ‘Why follow only the traditions laid down in scripture? Why fear the joyful ease that meditation brings? Such joys have nothing in common with the five categories of desire which obscure awareness. To the contrary, the joys of meditation can nourish body and mind and provide the strength needed to pursue the path to enlightenment” (105). 

Here Siddhartha names the ethos undergirding so many spiritual and religious traditions: that following a spiritual path requires severance from the physical/sensual/material/libidinal world—in short, leaving the body behind. (As any feminist-oriented reader may already be intuiting, and correctly so, this has led to the calcification of many a misogynist frame over the years, to put it mildly). Siddhartha questions this foundational asceticism/severity/rigidity doctrine and inverts the frame by describing the experience of meditation as “joyful ease,” linking the decompression and expansion of mind to that of the body. Both relax together, both receive insight/teachings together, they’re not separable. There’s also an embedded comparison developing between meditation as a daily practice of mind/body nourishment, and, actually, a kind of strength training. I find this comparison extremely generative in thinking about, on the one hand, reasons to develop a daily meditation practice; and on the other hand, ways to increase my meditative or mindful (?) awareness in daily activities, such as writing, working out, knitting, reading, cooking, gardening, driving (much needed!). 

“He abandoned all reliance on tradition and scripture in order to find the Way on his own. He returned to himself to learn from his own successes and failures. He did not hesitate to let meditation nourish his mind and body, and a sense of peace and ease grew within him. He did not distance himself or try to escape his feelings and perceptions, but maintained mindfulness in order to observe them as they arose” (107-8). 

I don’t think this passage is a directive to stop reading, to stop learning or seeking information in favor of some annoying chauvinistic bullshit about self-reliance, or whatever, so let’s get that out there right away. More subtly and precisely, I think the key to the sentence is “abandoned all reliance on” these hegemonic texts and dogmas—not “sealed himself off to all future book learning”, but stopped using them as a crutch, or a defense against thinking, learning from what he has directly experienced. Letting phenomenology and ontology be teachers; rather than hiding behind epistemology, or, I guess more accurately, onto-epistemology. I placed emphasis on the entire last sentence because it crystallizes what I’ve learned, experientially, from navigating grief in relative isolation over the last several weeks: letting everything move through, stepping back from the need for narrativizing or reframing, observing what’s coming through without rushing in to resolve it. As a language person, I’ve always been trained to find frames, to translate from the abyss. But in order to do any of that translating, I’ve also learned over the years, and certainly over these last few months, I have to sit still long enough to be changed by what I’m experiencing. 

“He began to see that the path to liberation lay in each breath, each step, each small pebble along the path” (108).

This seems straightforward, not needing much further explanation—but I’d like to have it saved for use as a mantra, maybe during a walking meditation? 

“Every cell of the body contained all the wisdom of the universe. He saw that he needed only to look deeply into a speck of dust to see the entire true face of the universe, that the speck of dust was itself the universe and if it did not exist, the universe could not exist either” (108).

This right here rhymes directly with the work of one of my formative mentors, Professor Avital Ronell, who trained me to read for the speck over the spectacular. 

“The monk Gautama went beyond the idea of a separate self, of atman… in reality, all things were without a separate self. Non-self, or anatman, was the nature of all existence. Anatman was not a term to describe some new entity. It was a thunderbolt that destroyed all wrong views. Taking hold of non-self, Siddhartha was like a general raising his sharp sword of insight on the battlefield of meditation practice. Day and night he sat beneath the pippala tree, as new levels of awareness awoke in him like bright flashes of lightning” (108). 

Atman and anatman, probably key concepts. I immediately would relate these to the ego, given my interest in psychoanalytic theory. Ego is the beating psychic heart of the stable, bounded, self (or subject): differentiated, autonomous, separate from all other beings. Siddhartha begins to see this separateness, this walling off of the self from others, from the sensible world, is at the root of his suffering. The antithesis of ego, anatman seems to describe the process of thinking, of channeling and wielding insight, of mental clarity, intellectual acuity. So it’s not: step outside your ego and become a mere puddle of nonbeing, but rather, step outside your ego in order to produce insight. The “flashes of lightning” imagery is especially resonant for me—that’s usually HOW a real insight feels when it arrives! —and it’s also irrefutably true that the only times i’m able to have that “lightning bolt/lightbulb” moment are when I enter a writing/thinking flow outside the sputtering of my ego (and the yammering of my superego). 

“He knew that the door of complete enlightenment would soon open wide. He knew he held the wondrous key—the truth of the interdependent and non-self nature of all things” (109). 

More soon. The final arc of the GPT series is in progress! Most likely will be published TONIGHT.

--Dianna