When I think
About the misery
Of those in this world
Their sadness
Becomes mine.
Oh, that my monk’s robe
Were wide enough
To gather up all
The suffering people
In this floating world.
Nothing makes me
More happy than Amida Buddha’s
Vow To save
Everyone.
--Ryokan
Buddhism speaks a lot about suffering, its causes and solutions. It speaks eloquently about how universal and interdependent suffering is, yet also about its transience, and how it is transformed into compassion and insights into the human condition that one might not have realized otherwise. Buddhism helps us make sense of suffering at its conceptual level. However, Buddhism might be hopelessly philosophical were it not rooted, unflinchingly, in personal experience. The Buddha invited us to test his teaching against our own stories, the pudding is always proved or flushed.
I’ve spent the last five months rolling with a serious infection that sent me to the ER in its acute phase, and sleeping for days after chugging enhanced cough syrup. I have had a master class in testing my practice, my ability to navigate suffering, and to report anything worthwhile.
A raw dry cough has been the most constant symptom. I whispered a lot, wrote things down on really bad days, and spent a whole lot of time in silence. Silence is the core of the life of the mediation, ritual, and service thar I have chosen. It revealed itself in my life this summer through imposition and force, rather than chosen.
Silence is the language of meditation, of being centered, of presence; in silence there are no answers or questions. It is where the mind shuts up long enough to listen to sound that is beyond itself, where you become historically displaced, not attaching to the various thoughts and inner narratives that have helped you create a fairly solid self, where you hear the sounds of the suffering in the world to which we can respond with that compassion we’ve been cultivating.
In the ER as I lay in Silence on the gurney, in fever, shivers, unrelenting cough, aches all over, I had no experiences or well-worn inner stories to tell me about myself and I was not silent by choice, unattached to my ego due to any attainment. My true ground of being was that gurney, only that. My only attachment was to what my body was erupting to share with me.
For a few minutes here and there, lying on a gurney, I did rest, truly, in that Silence. I sensed that Enlightenment, among other things, is just knowing where you are, and Silence is that “where” you are. There you see that it is possible to recognize everyone, including yourself.
That Now is limited by your capacity, how much breath you bring to the table.
I lost my sense of smell years ago from other conditions and other infections and in the ER other senses also slowly became estranged. Severe earaches , painful light sensitivity coupled with enlarged and sinking eyelids, and a cough that has caused me to use text or handwritten notes to communicate with my wife. But in the sound of that sharpie was truth we had tested and come to believe would help us still talk without talking.
My mind was not reminding me, flattering me, damning me, deifying me, there was nothing but the sheer acute shit of life, its occasional respite from pain; I couldn’t think or sort or construct even if I wanted to. But after awhile, it became more and more ok not to be able to process anything, just to react without making good or bad. When scraps of thought did leak in, they paled in comparison to the experience I was having which suggested to me it would be ok if I never went home.
I was left without any familiar relative ideas of me, nor of any familiar fears of death. I needed nothing and wasn’t needed. And that was ok. I was needed by family and friends, of course, but in this version of silence I was left without thoughts for them. In a a real sense a health crisis is freedom, an odd, raw moment beyond possessions, beloved inner dialogues, the nicknames we give to the things that will only belong to me for a brief time anyway, where we sit and forget what our faces look like and what masks we’ve used to hide it. It is also a freedom that separates us from anything reliable, or loved. It is not so much a silence that is a share of the Great Silence, so much as a strange intimate piece of a visceral present from which there may be no chance to recoup our safety nets or our bullshit.
Even with that world of only the ER, only the body talking itself into staying around as it judges the use of the new things being injected into it, as a monk I can see, in retrospect, in that silence, or a limbo that is cruel and unnerving, a bit of compassionate luck. In the context of my monastic and Bodhisattva vows, I was entering a dharma gate, an unwanted one which will give me the information to be of use to another person who might use this same gurney.
Such understanding can never be learned in books or rituals; it is never handwritten or spoken; it is embodied.
When the need for answers is marginalized, there is room to witness interdependence, of Being, examples of all the words we chant or meditate on—impermanence, no fixed self—manifest without my needing to participate or narrate.
So yes: Silence. Sit in Silence, let meditation be where you learn exactly who you are, and attain enlightenment which helps you realize what needs to be done for others, NOW, without any inner preambles. Place. Ground of being. Knowing precisely your place in that place. But what about silence when is forced upon you? The IV drip silence, the post- projectile vomiting silence, the silence in between the incessant throat cough that you’re sure is loosening your teeth?
With or without answers, my bed was the most important in the ER but only in the sense that every other bed was just as unique and vital. Such understanding can never be learned in books or rituals; it is never handwritten or spoken; it is embodied.