I was talking with my daughter this morning about the Koel (Eudynamys orientalis). We watched two of them pass overhead, making their distinctive call. In the Spring they arrive in Sydney, from New Guinea, Indonesia and from even further north.
Many Sydney residents hate the Koel, for a few reasons, but in particular because it is very noisy at night. Many a person has been kept awake by the Koel. I said to my daughter, “It’s just living its dhamma.” This word has many meanings, but here I meant its ‘nature’ or its ‘constitution.’ The Koel species belongs here, and has been here for tens of thousands of years, doing its thing.
Dhamma, in the sense of the nature of things, is just so – just so in its suchness. We can’t be bigger than dhamma, or outside dhamma, because dhamma is doing us, so to speak. Yet, we humans are making war on dhamma. We continue to destroy what holds or supports us. (The origin of ‘dhamma’ is from dhṛ: to hold, support; that which forms a foundation and upholds.)
We are at war with that which upholds and supports us. Gary Snyder, in his essay, Writers and the War Against Nature
probes the word ‘nature.’ He points out: The English word “nature” is from Latin natura, “birth, constitution, character, course of things,” and ultimately from nasci, to be born. It connects with the root nat, which is connected with birth, so we have nation, natal, and native. The Chinese word for nature is zi-ran, meaning “self-thus.”
The way things are. Buddha’s are buddhas because they are in alignment with how things are. Buddhas are nature: “If you see dhamma, you see me.”
In the war, Snyder has committed himself to the side of nature. We say we love nature, but we are making war on it. Why are we not speaking, every day, about this war? Why are we, except for the few prophets like Snyder, not calling it for what it is? This has puzzled many writers. In her 2002 book Love of Nature and the end of the World: the Unspoken Dimensions of Environmental Concern Shierry Weber Nicholsen wrote:
“Experience that is unbearably painful is impossibly difficult to communicate, and one falls mute. As Susan Griffin remarks, “a certain kind of silence is a common effect of catastrophe.” The very fact of not being heard gives rise to a shame that is further silencing. The more violently painful the experience, the more abusive and traumatic the lack of reception, the greater the muteness and the shame. This is why war leads to so much muteness. War uses up words, as Henry James said. What happens then to the experience? It is as though the not-hearing is taken back into the self and becomes a barrier of silencing turned inward, shutting away and even erasing the experience itself. Men return silent from the battlefield, poorer in themselves.”
This has been happening, too, since Rachel Carson’s 1962 Silent Spring. I notice that neuro-psychologist Sharon Begley, in the December 2015 edition of Mindful magazine, asks: “Why do so many of us persist in doing nothing about global warming?” and she attempts to tie this silence and inertia to the brain’s functioning. Hers is a painful presentation. You’ll find the article here.
She doesn’t suggest what we can do to change the human mental preference for destroying the matrix that holds us, gives us birth, and maintains us. To me, the answer lies in experientially learning that we and Dhamma are not two. Nature is not there for us, it’s simply so. We, too, are this suchness.
In the Garava Sutta, in the Samyutta Nikāya, there is this significant story. (Quotes are from Thanissaro Bhikkhu’s translation). After the Nikāya Buddha’s enlightenment, he resides at Uruvela on the bank of the Nerañjara River, dwelling peacefully at the foot of the Goatherd’s Banyan Tree. And, this thought comes to him: “One suffers if dwelling without reverence or deference. Now on what brahman or contemplative can I dwell in dependence, honoring and respecting him?”
Notice, he – the fully-enlightened one – being human, still needs to dwell in reverence or deference. Yet, who shall he defer to? We place ourselves, he observes, under others, so as to develop and perfect the qualities of: virtue; self-possession (samādhi); discernment; release; and knowledge and vision of release.
The difficulty is, though, now there are no contemplatives or brahmins more consummate than himself in these states. Who can he place himself under now? No-One. Realising this, he ask, “What if I were to dwell in dependence on this very Dhamma to which I have fully awakened, honouring and respecting it?”
At this, the great god Brahma Sahampati disappears from the Brahma-world and reappears in front of the flourishing one, and with his hands cupped before his heart, he says:
“So it is, Blessed One! So it is, One-Well-Gone! Those who were Arahants, Rightly Self-awakened Ones in the past — they, too, dwelled in dependence on the very Dhamma itself, honoring and respecting it. Those who will be Arahants, Rightly Self-awakened Ones in the future — they, too, will dwell in dependence on the very Dhamma itself, honoring and respecting it. And let the Blessed One, who is at present the Arahant, the Rightly Self-awakened One, dwell in dependence on the very Dhamma itself, honoring and respecting it.”
That is what Brahma Sahampati said. Having said that, he further said this:
Past Buddhas,
future Buddhas,
& he who is the Buddha now,
removing the sorrow of many —
all have dwelt,
will dwell, he dwells,
revering the true Dhamma.
This, for Buddhas, is a natural law.
Therefore one who desires his own good,
aspiring for greatness,
should respect the true Dhamma,
recollecting the Buddhas’ Teaching.
I don’t use the phrase Buddha-Nature much, because it is so easily misunderstood, and provides a false refuge. But I do think we need to see this ‘dhamma’ – that which is to be honoured and respected, and which we should place ourselves under – not as a mere ‘teaching,’ no matter how wonderful – even a teaching like The Four Noble Truths. This dhamma which he re-discovered is something much, much bigger and more fundamental than a cultural creation. It is that which holds us, while it is us; it is that which gives birth to the teaching called the Four Noble Truths.
The Nikāya Buddha, in my interpretation, sees his place in the pattern of what supports him or holds him. He places himself under that. He is saying, “Now that I’ve realised how things are, what can I depend on, in my daily life?” The only answer to that is: “The way things are.”
We say we love nature, but we are making war on it, and it is our thought-created support (false-‘I’) that leads to this raging war on dhamma. We can relinquish the causes of this war, by turning to our non-conceptual nature (dhamma).
I’m joining the artists who, like Gary Snyder, fight this war on dhamma’s side, and who speak for the ones who don’t have human language. I may not have long to live, but this is what I’ll do until I die.