Back in Nov. 2013 my temple took a group trip to visit the Buddhist holy sites in India and Nepal. In the next few entries I will relate some of my notes and observations from the trip. I will go ahead and copy these directly from my notebook and make edits only for the sake of context and understandability.

More Trash

There is trash in the tour bus, empty water bottles on the floor, food wrappers stuffed in seat pockets. It makes me feel disgusted  (clearly a pretty prevalent emotion for me around this time). A part of me realizes it’s what everything becomes — even what I will become — expired, dead and done, something disgusting in my eyes. I know these wrappers used to keep food, something I enjoy and desire, safe and fresh. These wrappers lived a good life, served a helpful function, and still, in the end, it becomes trash. Trash that requires effort to clean, that impacts the environment, that causes me discomfort. And really, it stays trash for so much longer than it was a ‘useful good’.

But, I still eat the snacks on the bus, even if I’m not hungry I’ll eat it for the taste, even knowing they will produce empty wrappers, trash that disgusts me. Why do I do this? If I know the trash is built-into the experience, if I know I will be disgusted, why eat the snacks?

I prefer to ignore the bus trash, look away, look out a window. It’s a pattern I have, look away from the decay as it makes me uncomfortable. I prefer clean places, well designed indoors, nature outdoors, places I associate with beauty and safety and  life. I prefer looking pretty, well dressed, well groomed, I’ll do it even to the point of hurting myself, starvation, over exercise, expense,  so that I can feel beautiful and safe and full of life.

But the decay, the trash state, it is natural, unavoidable. Everything I find desirable, like snacks and pretty places and my own beauty will erode, it will die and decay. I look out the window, I look away from decay, pretending that if I ignore it I can escape it. But I can’t. And Dharma practice is the process of learning to stop looking away. To see the decay, the trash, is built into the system.

Dead Flowers

I observe at the holy sites folks come and leave beautiful fresh flower offerings. After the flowers begin to wither and die, workers gather them up to throw away. It’s the cycle of the world. But I am disgusted by it, by the bus trash, by the dead flowers. How can it be that even these beautiful flowers, offered to the Buddha, die, decay. My disgust is a mechanism to keep me from accepting the impermanent nature of things (Alana’s present day note:  my disgust is actually a result of my failure to believe in my heart the impermanent nature of things…but this took a bit longer to clarify). I am disgusted because in my heart I believe the decay is an aberration, a broken bit of this world, not the norm. I am disgusted because I don’t want to be reminded of impermanence. I still want to believe it’s beatable somehow. That I will beat it myself. But all flowers, even the beautiful ones, even the useful ones, even the ones offered to the Buddha,  die.

So I look away from the parts I don’t like. That is my habit, what I am used to. If I do that though, how can I ever break free from this world? I need to habituate myself to seeing both sides, the beauty and the disgusting bits. This is why Mae Yo gave me the homework to see the percent of joy versus suffering.

Notes From Mae Yo

I shared some of these contemplations with Mae Yo. And her advice was to look at the energy it took to grow the flower compared to the 3 or 4 days in which the flower is fresh and beautiful.  And to know the conditions I set, flowers must be fresh, beautiful, cause me the suffering of continuing to try to meet them over and over again, having to keep buying these flowers when they are at their prime and tossing them when they wither.  Finally, that is looking at my decay is too hard, zoom-out and use external stuff, bigger patterns to avoid just looking out the bus window and ignoring the trash all together.