Post #117: My Diamond Sutra (Tension)

19 June 2024

     Perhaps you too have experienced moments in life when you felt so tense that the thought crossed your mind whether, if you were to eat any coal now (to treat your tension-induced diarrhea for example), it might not come out the other end as diamonds and cut you right open. An altogether objectionable metaphor, you may say, on all kinds of levels—not least because diamonds do not come into the world sharp-edged, charcoal pills are too small for the feat in question, and mixing the purity of the real Diamond Sutra (#103) with such vulgar nonsense is disgraceful. In a word, I should be ashamed of myself and my dirty mind.

     All right, all right, but give me a minute to extricate myself a little from this morass of my own making, because I am not being quite as frivolous as I may sound. As it happens, I am going through just such an episode myself at the moment, diarrhea and all, and it’s far from entertaining. So severe is the strain for a variety of reasons I could name, and perhaps a few others that are less readily communicable, that I am scheduled for getting my insides scoped first thing Monday morning, something that does not fill me with jesting thoughts at all, but with dread—not so much on account of the intrusiveness of the procedure, as because I am scared of what it might turn up.

     There is also a reason I would like to make the Buddhist connection, because on the face of it such tense states seem to run so very contrary to the spirit of the practice, which we commonly associate with relaxation above all. The pervasiveness of such myths notwithstanding, any veteran of serious meditation retreats will have some cautionary remarks to make about the Path being no spa you seek out to get pampered, but a demanding obstacle course with heavy and tense moments aplenty. Readers may recall one of my favorite stories from the Pali Canon (which does not actually include the Diamond Sutra, just for the record), in which the Buddha reminds a former lute player (a certain Sona, who was given to overdoing his meditative exercises, see #2) that he used to know quite well how to tighten the strings of his instrument just enough to be in tune, but not so much that they might sound too sharp, or snap. Nonetheless, the thought that tension too might have its place in serious practice may sound a little jarring to sensitive Buddhist ears.

     I mentioned in my last post how much I sometimes wish I could walk the line with the profound serenity and relaxed balance that I imagine a Taoist master to have perfected, or with the inner calm of a samurai whose equanimity is not perturbed even as he is cutting his opponents to pieces with perfect aim and a pure heart into which no thought of ill-will could ever intrude. We probably all have heroic fantasies of this kind, though they may take different forms, depending on a complex mix of our own strengths and weaknesses. I wonder, though: is it possible that we imbue our imagined heroes with such unruffled calm (the Buddha too, needless to say, but let’s set him aside for a moment and focus on more ordinary human beings, not prototypes of enlightenment and liberation) precisely because we know only too well how unattainable inner tranquility usually is when the winds start howling and the waves get rough around us?

     Let me take the thought another step further. Do we not get tense precisely because we are facing a threatening situation (the raging winds, the heaving waters), and is this agitated state of body and mind not a mechanism for keeping us alive in a dangerous world (#8)? Granted, our automated fight-or-flight responses may end up getting misdirected in many situations, since they are so ancient and have never been properly updated and fine-tuned for modern circumstances. Even so, such physiological setting, unpleasant as they are, prepare us for meeting challenges. As I discovered in my days as a teenage actor, a night without nerves (or outright stage-fright even) did not usually mean a particularly good performance, but rather the contrary, a lack of focus and energy.

     It is not that I wish to sing the praises of tension here as if it were an unqualified good. That would be going to the other extreme. Stress, when it gets severe enough and cannot be adequately worked off in appropriate ways—at least in somehow shaking the tension out of your feathers in the manner of some birds who perform strange dances immediately after their confrontations with each other—stress can kill. It builds up into ulcers, it messes with the digestive tract, or leads the way to other horrible diseases. The point surely needs no belaboring; it is on account of these very dangers that I will make my not-very-equanimous trek to the hospital on Monday morning.

     Still I ask myself whether there is not another level to the Path, a kind of second-order practice, that reveals itself around this business of feeling tense as the string on a crossbow. Of course I am far from delighted with being so high-strung; that’s why the Taoist master I imagine, or the samurai, or the Buddhist saint, fills me with such admiration and yearning. But my physical constitution is what it is, whether I like it or not. Even after twenty years of yoga and meditation, and therapy, and whatnot else, I remain a comparatively tense fellow, noticeably unbending, prone to worry, and often enough outright scared of what lies ahead—on Monday morning, for example, even when I have no reason to expect anything overly terrible. One never knows; that is quite enough for me. Go in with a slight discomfort in the belly, come out with six months to live, is not a joke to me, but gallows humor of the kind that has nothing to do with making light, everything with terrors that one cannot handle by more straight-faced means.

     In sum, the kind of first-order equanimity to which I might aspire is not, sad to say, available to me very often; not at the moment, and not usually at other challenging times either. Indeed it has a way of deserting me even in situations that I would myself admit are rather unchallenging, for largely temperamental reasons, which makes it all even more humiliating and troubling. Only what should I do? Conclude that I am a failure as a meditator, give up on my unavailing efforts, and roll up the mat? It’s tempting at times, as I’ve mentioned before (see especially #11 and #86)—but how would quitting help me to be any more equanimous and unworried?

     So I ask myself whether, for my apparently slow-learning type, there may not be a more accessible side-path to take. First-order equanimity may come sometimes, even to me, as a matter of grace; but it is not to be counted on and does not therefore make for a very serviceable polestar, in my practice at least. Yet the Path as I understand it is not meant to be about how we would like things to go, but about becoming a little more accepting, step by tiny step, of how things actually unfold, whatever that may mean from moment to moment, in one life or another. For me, it seems, that means finding a way to live with my tension, not wishing for more relaxation, which would only recede further if I got frustrated by its absence (or frustrated by my frustration about its absence, and so on).

     It would be silly to pretend that I am pleased with by this state of affairs, let alone that it makes me feel a success on the Path. Obviously not. But it still gives me something to practice with: not simply yearning to leave this undesirable state of tension behind, although I surely would like to, but working on tolerating the tension a little more, when I need to. If I cannot be properly equanimous with a given situation (or more strictly, with the myriad complicated sensations it generates in my mind and nervous system), then perhaps I can be at least a little more equanimous with my lack of calm and peace and equipoise. I do not believe, as I’ve said many times (#10, #45, #115), that we can simply will ourselves into being happy, either with ourselves or with the world; at least I cannot. But what should be possible is to make ourselves a little more comfortable with that unwelcome fact, at least—that is to say, with the need to accept the lows alongside the highs, and the tense and morose moments alongside the more relaxed and cheerful ones.

     I know, I know: it all sounds terribly second-best, a much less edifying story than the heart-warming vision of ever-smiling, imperturbably serene, ever-happy Buddhists. If you can do better than I, go right ahead, and blessings on your Path; for my part, it seems that I cannot. Strange, you may say: what happened to the guy who was making grand pronouncements about no-self (#86) and the deathless (#114) only a few posts ago? Well no, he wasn’t really making grand pronouncements about anything. He was only reporting on a few precious occasions when the veil seemed to be lifting for a bit on some of the mysteries he had heard and read about. And then the curtain went down again. So it goes.

     That reporter on the veil would never doubt, whether in his earlier texts or now, that there may be a way (the Way, as the Taoists might say) to walk through the valley of the shadow of death, yet fear no evil, whether one attributes the comforting powers that be to the Lord of David, or the Lord Buddha, or any other name one might wish to give to the unnamable in order to make it more intelligible to oneself (at the price of narrowing its boundlessness to merely human, all-too human dimensions). Such higher reconciliations are not a matter of effort and attitude alone, however, or even of faith, but of grace above all. When we find ourselves thus blessed, let us say our prayers of thanksgiving and spare a compassionate, not a judgmental, thought for others not so fortunate. When we are ourselves on the less fortunate side, let us do what we can with what we’ve got, where we are—acting justly, loving mercy, and walking humbly with our guides on high, taking comfort in the staffs and rods they have furnished us with for the journey.

PS: Monday morning came and found me lying on my gurney in the operating room, feeling, rightly or wrongly, that I needed to be prepared for anything and everything. The doctor was as cheerful as could be, but his good spirits did not pass to me until he came, afterwards, to my bedside in the recovery room to tell me that he had found nothing wrong. The Reaper watched all this from his place in the corner, motionless and  inscrutable, his face hidden as always in the shadows of his hood. The he vanished, for now.