The following might be a bit obscure. I am groping for something not yet clear, and I hope it is beneficial to set out my thinking, in the context of clearing one’s heart of its burden, before dying. It’s what some people call ‘making amends.’ And, I am attempting to decipher the signs of my changes.
I am going through an interesting change. Soon, I will change my name. Changing your name – as women can testify, more readily than men – changes how you feel about yourself. Changes you in unpredictable ways. I have explored this, since the late eighties. It won’t be my first name change. In a Tibetan ceremony in 1988, I received my first Buddhist name, which was modified by another teacher very soon after. I respect this name, though I make it public only occasionally. All over the world, spiritual names are given to initiates. In some cultures, spiritual names co-exist alongside the birth name, but in others they replace the birth name. I was surprised by the effect that receiving a Buddhist name had on me. It had never occurred to me that a name-change could make me feel different about myself; but the change was clear. I felt re-vitalised, renewed.
So, six years later – 1994 -at a time when I was making significant changes in direction, and feeling that I needed some sense of renewal to support the changes, I decided to change my Western name – I dropped my middle name (John), and made a switch in my last name – from the patrilineal to the matrilineal; from the Anglo “Ash” of my birth, to the Celtic “McLean.”
In the case of Buddhist names, there is some sense that the name says something about you, and this probably helps with the change in feeling about your power to undertake the deeper, inner transformation. Also, the name is given by your spiritual ancestors. I am sure that the identification with the Scottish side of the family made a difference to the ‘feel’ of being myself. The day after I changed my Western name, I rang a friend to tell her something. She wasn’t home and I left a message. She told me later that she knew something had happened, because she could hear a new person. She identified the qualitative change in my voice as the change from “Ash” to “McLean.”
Then, in a Zen Buddhist ceremony, in 1996, I received another Buddhist name, with a very similar meaning to the first. At the time, I said in a public gathering that you are not your name. This is still true, for me. (And, there’s something in the encounter group exercise I did in the early seventies, where we were asked to repeat, “I am my name.” This, too, brings something that has to be felt.)
So, where am I going with this? I’m fishing for something. I know it has to do with how we are heirs to our actions. It has something to do with the Tibetan chant that says, “Unalterable are the laws of karma.” And, I think of Stanley Kunitz’ poem, The Layers*:
When I look behind,
as I am compelled to look
before I can gather strength
to proceed on my journey,
I see the milestones dwindling
toward the horizon
and the slow fires trailing
from the abandoned camp-sites,
over which scavenger angels
wheel on heavy wings.
I’m conscious as I write this that I chose to change myself by changing my name in 1994. I didn’t realise it then, but I now understand that I was moving away from my inner inheritance – that is, I was not reconciled to my own mind. In short, I didn’t like who I was. It worked, to an extent. I was able to explore ways of being, as Christopher McLean, that I might have found difficult to enter, as Christopher John Ash. But, I still hadn’t cleaned up the darkest corners of my psyche.
Slowly, though, that work has been undertaken. Undertaken to the extent that, recently, something else has been occurring. It feels as though, to be fully here, I am compelled from a deeper source to return to my birth name. Instead of changing my name to achieve a state of being, some state of being is moving me to change my name. It’s a move to bring myself into alignment with what is (though what is isn’t nameable.) And, with the willingness to revert to my birth name, emotional issues long avoided are surfacing. I know now that the 1994 change had something to do with how negative I was feeling about myself, and about my father. It came out of my ignorance. I was unaware of the degree to which I was not accepting my past; and how much I was still at war with my father. It has taken me a long time to truly forgive both my father and myself for the violence that flowed between us, during our brief time together on this little, fragile planet. So long, to reconcile myself to my own rejecting ways. Stanley Kunitz, from The Layers:
Oh, I have made myself a tribe
out of my true affections,
and my tribe is scattered!
I feel I have to come back to my birth name, to own my hard-hearted past honestly, despite my affection for the matrilineal clan name. It’s about an integrated life, of form with boundlessness.
Along the way, in my aspiration to be a true human being, I have been powerfully affected by three teachings, which I experience as pointing to the same territory in human experience. They are from three precious lineages: from Dzogchen, from the lineages descended from the Nikayas, and from Zen.
From Dzogchen, comes this teaching. I can’t verify the origin of this quotation. However, the Dalai Lama is said to have said something like this when being asked about spiritual teachers acting out, sexually and in other ways. And I heard the quote from a Dzogchen teacher. I can verify its origin, though, as arising in the human heart. Padmasambhava said, “My view of emptiness is as vast as the sky, but my understanding of karma is as fine as the grains of barley flour.”
The teaching from the Nikayas is what is known as the Fifth Remembrance: “I am the owner of my actions, heir to my actions. They are my matrix. I am related through them. They are my mediator. I become the heir of whatever actions I do, good or bad.” The Buddha is, here, touching on a profound point, and one related to another thing he said, in the Bhara Sutta. There he said that it is a burden to cling to the five sentient processes of form, feeling-tones, perception, fashioning tendencies of mind, and consciousness.
Then he said: “And which is the carrier of the burden? ‘The person,’ it should be said. This venerable one with such a name, such a clan-name. This is called the carrier of the burden.” This is profound, because it is also the ‘person of such a name, and such a clan,’ who gets free of the burden; who puts the burden of clinging down.
The third teaching, the Zen teaching, is one I love, but it would take too much space to tell the whole story, here. For the curious, I point you to some notes at Wikipedia on the second case of the Mumonkan; Pai-Chang’s Fox. My favourite translation is Aitken Roshi’s, and the lines that have stayed with me are as follows. The Ch’an master Pai-chang was asked:
“Does an enlightened person fall under the law of cause and effect, or not?”
Pai-chang said: “Such a person does not evade the law of cause and effect.”
I spend much of my life inviting people to be themselves. My name is Christopher McLean. A change is in train. I will soon be named Christopher John Ash. The second name and the family name are from the patrilineal descent. They are living signs of the dead. I walk in their shoes, whatever their faults, while following my own thread.
The opening lines of The Layers are:
I have walked through many lives,
some of them my own,
and I am not who I was,
though some principle of being
abides, from which I struggle
not to stray.
____________________
* You’ll find the full poem here.
