Post #13: Tripping over Pebbles on the Path

16 May 2023

Three days ago I did one of the regular yoga classes that I need, several times a week, to keep mind and body together; there was nothing special about it, no accident, no very remarkable incidents except some peculiar cracking noises from my hips at some point. I thought nothing of it, went home without anything feeling different, did that night’s sitting, rose to my feet afterwards with the usual soreness in the knees for a bit, then went to sleep—only to get up in the morning and discover, to my consternation, that I could not move my right knee without extreme pain. Nothing unusual in the hip, that was the most ironic part—that and the tragicomedy of managing to injure myself with what is intended to be a protective and remedial measure.

What with the knee practically out of use, sitting in my approximately straight-backed posture on the mat was now out of the question; add to this that on account of the excitement of starting this blog—though a karmically wholesome thing, one would hope, another dash of irony—my sittings have been taking a marked turn for the worse lately, and so I’ve been finding my practice reduced these past couple of days, for the umpteenth time, to a shambles. Yes, I can still sit a bit in a makeshift position, but it’s not very conducive to concentration or mindfulness or equanimity or anything else, and it reminds me once again of how much the practice—or my practice anyway—depends on factors that are as seemingly trifling as they are necessary in all their precariousness.

We generally imagine a robust practice as lifting someone above such mundane concerns, and there are heroic tales told about the Buddha meditating through major thunderstorms, the cattle beside him felled by lightning, without batting an eyelid or even noticing. Embellishments, perhaps, but of a tendency that one might be willing to credit—in dealing with a liberated being, anyway, if not with respect to one’s own life. Then again, it might also be remembered that the Buddha’s breakthrough was fueled not only by the years of intense effort leading up to the famous night, and even less by the self-torturing turn he took in the final months preceding, but by the bowl of rice-pudding that I have mentioned before.

In a more sweeping sense too, the Buddha stressed, in the Cakkavatti-Sihanada Sutta for example (Digha Nikaya 26), how much depends on external conditions: where misgovernment and the four horsemen of the Apocalypse rule the land, where famine and pestilence and warfare abound as they have so often done in human history, conditions for practice will not be ideal for anyone, to say the least. Heartrending stories are told in the Pali canon about some very seasoned monks who, rather than bearing up under illnesses, found their concentration and their composure quite undone and who regained a measure of serenity only when they were consoled and reassured by the Buddha himself, who reminded them to observe the reality of the moment, whatever it may be, concentration and composure or not. Others killed themselves to escape the pain.

It’s nice to imagine that one really could rise, one day, above the limitations of the body, of physical circumstances, of unhelpful mind-states and mental conditions altogether—and perhaps such a day will come at last, though probably not in my lifetime. But the main gist of the practice points in a very different direction, towards just how embedded we really are in a web of infinitely complex causal relations, of dependent origination whereby the next moment arises not from some ethereal realm, but from our position in a world where the mind and the body and the environment flow together, upon closer inspection, almost indistinguishably and in ways that are very puzzling from the perspective of the supposedly autonomous self. Exactly what this self is supposed to be if the autonomy is merely imagined, what room there is for freedom in a world without self-agency as we normally understand it, remains a great mystery, to me at least. I may be able to piece together the doctrine, but that hardly amounts to liberating insight as the Buddha taught it, which is an experience, not an intellectual exercise.

It adds a peculiar urgency to the Buddhist perspective that even death, which in other systems of faith or disbelief might bring relief from our often miserable dependency and embeddedness, does no such thing from a karmic perspective (on which I plead agnosticism), but merely stands as a gateway to another round of much the same thing—unless we seize the golden moment, whenever it may arise for a little while, to steer things in a different direction. That steering as of a giant tanker on the high seas, one degree at a time, that pushing back against a whole lifetime of habits (and perhaps a much longer period of background conditioning that may reach almost unimaginably far back either in evolutionary or in karmic time), must be a very gradual and often painfully slow process that will require patience and persistence above all. As Joseph Goldstein says with a smirk in one of his talks, meditation surely works, but it is very inefficient.

Such an outlook is bound to look increasingly untimely, even outright anachronistic, in a world governed on all sides by information flowing through the ether at the speed of light—where the reply to an e-mail can arrive before the original message was sent, as the dear father, a physicist, of my first great love recently pointed out to me with delight, though I’m still not sure I understand what Einstein’s puzzling discoveries are supposed to mean in human terms. But then following the lead of a Teaching that is 2500 years old cannot be other than untimely to begin with, and starting a writer’s blog twenty-five years after it was cutting-edge is not much better, arrived as we now are in an age of programmatic unbookishness where reading itself (to say nothing of the faith in the power of books that used to define the humanistic understanding of culture) has gone out of fashion to such an extent that it can seem to be on the very brink of extinction sometimes.

Slow, uncertain cultivation that can potentially be upset by the tiniest obstacles—even if one’s feet get a little hardier with time and one manages to build up a bit of muscle—is no one’s ideal, I don’t think. Who would not rather run, or put the foot on the pedal, than trip and stumble along his mortal way? But then nobody asked us what conditions might be ideal for us, and we must practice the Dhamma as we must deal with life in general—as it finds us, not just as we find it—pebbles and blisters and scraped knees and all. That is why so much is riding on walking briskly whenever we do get a chance, mindful as we should be of all that can so easily get in our way, twist our ankles, break our bones, or even end it all in the snap of a finger. It may not sound very cheery to say so, but the Dhamma is not a course in making dreams come true or a way of precipitating miracles as if our lives were largely a matter of wishing for things—it is a staff and a rod for an often rough journey through life as it is, not as we would like it to be. If that sounds like a tired old refrain to you by now, I don’t blame you; I would much prefer the alternative as well, living in a world designed after my own fancy. It is one thing to have such yearnings, however, another to mistake them for reality.

(PS: I am thrilled to report that after three days as a meditation invalid, I was finally able to return to the floor for a full sitting again this morning. The posture still had to be modified a little, and the sitting was by itself nothing special, no fireworks or anything; but the sense of relief is amazing and reminds me just how important this practice is to me, every single day, even when it can give me so much trouble too. It scares me that it takes so very little, a mere pebble, to trip me up so thoroughly. If such a minor injury is enough to undo me, what will happen when fortune starts handling me with its real claws, not just its playful kitty paws? I am aware, but no point in getting preoccupied with it. Take it as a timely reminder to sit whenever I can, even if the discipline feels a little rigid. It’s much better than a rigid knee. And I can imagine so much worse, Buddha help us all…)