I’m not in the habit of quoting Trungpa but I’ll make an exception in this case because I believe it was he who said, If you think you’re enlightened, try going home to your family for the holidays. Many of us may have had a chance to put that into practice this week. Of course, going back to our family is a good way to see that practice has not allowed us to totally transcend all our history and reactivity no matter how we might feel when we are comfortably ensconced in sesshin, and it’s a good lesson in humility, in our basic humanity.
Big Thanksgiving family dinners often, in my time, were characterized by people dividing into groups, one that was going to stand around and talk about the recipes that went into the meal and another that went into the other room to watch the football game. And while for a long time I thought that this was a rather shallow kind of practice, in a way I’ve come to respect it more and more as families in the country are so often bitterly divided, and I see it in a way as an attempt that people have to find common ground, to find a conflict-free area where they can share their experience without having it fracture into all sorts of good guys and bad guys and political arguments. Football fulfills William James’ characterization of being the moral equivalent of politics, where we can argue about the Giants versus the Cowboys rather than the Democrats versus the Republicans. There’s something to be said for finding neutral ground or common ground among people who otherwise have a lot of trouble doing it.
The one thing from practice that I sometimes try to offer on these occasions is that if there’s going to be a grace before the meal, I offer to recite our meal chants which I think serve the purpose of Thanksgiving very well. I’d like to talk about those chants today, and I thought I’d begin by reciting them for you. If you’ve memorized them, you can chant along with me.
First, seventy-two laborers brought us this food. We should know how it comes to us.
Second, as we receive this offering we should seek to understand its true nature.
Third, as we desire the natural order of our minds to be free from clinging, we must be aware of our greed.
Fourth, to enjoy our life we take this food.
Fifth, to attain the way we take this food.
The first portion is for the three treasures,
The second for our teachers and parents,
The third for all nations and all beings.
Thus we enjoy this food with everyone.
We eat to to stop all harming,
To practice serving,
And to accomplish the awakened way.
I always thought the first line was the most important. Seventy-two laborers brought us this food and we should know how it comes to us. It’s very unlikely that we’re able to actually name seventy-two laborers, but it’s a reminder of the kind of endless nexus of cause and effect that we’re part of and how everything that we think we’re doing or making on our own is actually dependent not only on other people but all sorts of other conditions in the world that make our individual efforts possible, that really there can be no such thing as autonomous- individual-sufficient effort. We may be preparing a meal for sixteen people and we may be thinking we’re doing all this complicated work to make it happen, but behind all our efforts are the efforts of all the farmers and store-keepers and truck-drivers and people in all the communities that grow the produce and bring it to us and make our efforts possible. So everything we do is dependent on something that someone else has done, and that is the basic reminder of this chant.
As we receive this offering, we should seek to understand its true nature. What is its true nature? It’s the same as our true nature: impermanent, and most importantly here, interdependent, interconnected. Who we are, what we receive, altogether are part of a bigger picture, a bigger interlocking network of cause and effect that makes us who and what we are.
As we desire the natural order of our minds to be free of clinging, we must be aware of our greed. Inevitably we lose track of all that interconnection, all that interdependence. We fall back into separation. Separation, clinging, in a sense, is always born of fear and a lack of trust. We don’t trust that the network of relation is going to hold and support us, take care of us. Instead of relying on that network of interconnection, we think we have to hold on to what we can grab for ourselves, as much as we can, out of safety. We imagine that life is a zero-sum game and only one can live, there are only winners and losers. We lose sight of: We’re all in this together, and greed is that expression There’s not enough to go around. I’ve got to grab as much as I can. It may be that one of the things we see on Thanksgiving is that there’s always not only enough but too much. There’s plenty to go around when we put all our efforts together. We can relax. We’re going to have enough to eat. We’re going to have too much to eat.
Fourth, to enjoy our life, we take this food. This is a line that I rewrote some years ago. Maybe more traditionally it used to say something like, To support our life we take this food. But I’ve been around too many Buddhist institutions where there’s a lot of ambivalence about whether we’re supposed to enjoy our food or whether we’re just taking it sort of medicinally, especially in sesshin. It’s just fuel for our practice. I think that’s a terrible attitude to have about our food. Like other parts of our life, it ought to be a source of our full engagement, of pleasure. It ought to be something we can allow ourselves to appreciate with gusto, not just a kind of reluctance. Yes, well, I have to do this because my real life is all about sitting with Mu. I think that becomes not just silly but dishonest. We practice in order to enjoy our life, which really means to live our life fully. Non-separation is vitalizing, a lively engagement with our own bodies and minds and the world around us. We want to enjoy our food. We want to enjoy our life.
Then fifth, to attain the way we take this food. I always thought it funny that this comes last, almost as an afterthought, but in a sense, if you’ve attended to the first four, you’ve attained the way, you’ve embodied the way. If you’re aware of the whole interconnected world that you’re part of as you receive and enjoy your food, that is being on the way, that is participating in your own life. The last verses reiterate that: The first portion is for the three treasures. The second is for our teachers and parents, and the third is for all nations and all beings. Thus we enjoy this food with everyone, wrapping it all together, reaffirming the interconnection of practice, teachers, parents, life, tradition,
We eat to stop all harming, to practice service, to accomplish the awakened way. When I chant this, almost inevitably it puts me in mind of Wendell Berry, the Kentucky writer, farmer, conservationist. Particularly seventy-laborers brought us this food. Berry has spent his life dedicated to raising awareness about the life of farmers in his native Kentucky, and if you don’t know his work, his essays, novels, poetry, they all point to this kind of interconnectedness and the meaning that is found in a life grounded in work and community and relationship and land.
He’s one of the early voices of the environmental movement, going back to the 60s. I guess I’ve been reading him close to fifty years now. He said that he’s developed this great following among the liberal elites living in big cities who romanticize the life of the farmer, and he says some of these people would be surprised how conservative he is. He means that not just in the sense of conservative going back to the root of conservation, but in the Burkean sense of conservative being someone who deeply values tradition and community and feels that the values that we inherit are the ones that have to be respected, sometimes challenged, sometimes developed, but not to be swept away in a kind of – we know better, we’re going to wipe the slate clean and start from scratch. One of the ways that manifests is that he’s written with deep affection about the community life in Kentucky where he grew up, which was based on tobacco farming, and tobacco harvest was something that knitted the whole community together and provided livelihood for generation after generation, a shared purpose, shared effort, and a deep sense of interdependency where everybody worked alongside one another.
Even as you recognize that the tobacco crop was something that might have very terrible health consequences for people, still, Berry would not say, Well, we better just rip this all out and get rid of it and start over with something else. He said, You can’t do that. You have to build on what you have. You have to give something time to evolve. This same thing was true of raising animals for meat, whether it’s butchering hogs or raising calves for meat, not just for their milk. This is part of how a whole community felt its relationship with the natural world, and rather than being exploitative, it also included a sense of We’re part of this. We’re responsible for this. Their life is our life. Even as people want to give up smoking tobacco or give up eating meat, there’s some way in which you respect the history that has brought us here,
This is, if I dare say, a deeply Hegelian idea, an idea that we must always pass through the stages of our own history. We can’t ever wipe the slate clean and say we’re going to start from scratch. We are that history. We only can build on what's come before. For Hegel, for Burke, the great example was the French Revolution, born of wonderfully noble ideals that completely crashed and burned and led Europe into horrible warfare from this idea that we’re going to completely start over, start from year one, make everything new. But we can’t live that way.
What we’re doing in this very minor way in the zendo is building on and developing a tradition that we inherit. We hold on to a lot of old forms that come from the Japanese. I don’t want to start all over from scratch. In a sense, we see some of that happening in the mindfulness movement, where people want to extract out mindfulness and make it a medical technique that is good for your blood pressure and good for your stress. Maybe in a small way that’s good and useful, but by and large what we’re trying to do here is build on the traditions we’ve inherited, that we’re thankful for, and as we inherit them, we’ll very slowly adapt them. We’ll gradually make them new, and we’ll then be in a position to pass them on to the next generation.