Seeds of Contemplation and Compassion - Exploring the Lives of Jesus and Buddha

It was still dark and I could see a few stars in the sky as I walked down the hill. There were others around me but the only sound was the occasional stone on the road that our step disturbed or the night sounds of birds and wind through leaves and grasses. I slipped off my shoes by the door and entered the great hall, taking my place with the women on one side facing the men. Many of the people around and across from me seated on low cushions wore brown robes and had their heads shaved. They were monks and nuns of Buddhist teacher and leader Thich Nhat Hanh who had gathered for the winter months at Deer Park Monastery in the mountains outside of San Diego. I had arrived by airplane and shuttle that had taken many more hours than I planned or expected. My first lesson in serenity occurred when the van we were traveling in had engine trouble at the base of the mountain. The driver had already dropped off six people and I was the last person. It was growing dark. He eased the van to the side of the road and turned the engine off. We looked at each other and he said: “It’s too far for you to walk from here. We will need to go back to the gas station.” It took us another two hours before I finally arrived at the monastery. I was met by a monk with a gentle smile who assured me that there was still dinner being served, and pointed the way down a long set of stairs. I had finally arrived.

I spent seven days at Deer Park where much of the time was spent in silence. Thich Nhat Hanh’s practice is embodied in all that we did there. When we walked, we were invited to engage in “walking meditation.” And whenever we heard a bell sound, we stopped whatever we were doing, and brought ourselves into mindfulness. Bells would ring throughout our days. Each ring, a reminder to stop and remember. Each ring, a seed of contemplation, a reminder to be compassionate and mindful.

There were over three hundred of us there – two hundred monks and nuns and about 100 lay people. We would wake at 5:30am and dress silently, walking the dark road down to the big meditation hall under the stars, and have morning meditation and prayer. Then we would walk to the dining hall and have our breakfast in silence, we would check the board to see what time our daily work shift would be, and then would spend most of the day in silence. As someone who does quite a bit of talking and doing, this was a very good experience for me. This was the longest retreat I had been on; before this week at Deer Park, I had done three-day solo retreats at a Catholic convent in Maine, but they had been unstructured. I had chosen not to enter into the daily schedule of the nuns that lived there and had wandered freely, always on the move, always moving. But even though my time at Deer Park was quite structured, with the day being divided into meals, meditation, work and time for rest or reflection, I entered into a life of contemplation. I spent time walking on winding paths through tall fields of grasses; through the garden with its Buddhist sculptures, offerings of stones and flowers at their feet; the small pond of peaceful orange fish swimming slowly by and rabbits hopping through silently at night. Throughout the week, I was continually reminded of how important it is to simply be in my body, to be in the present moment. I had believed that this retreat was a way for me to deepen my knowledge and practice of Buddhism, and it was. But something much more important took place for me there. I accepted the seeds of contemplation and compassion – true contemplation, and complete compassion for all those around me. Ways of being that I could embody. Thich Nhat Hanh has created and offered a unique form of Buddhism to the Western world; one that combines aspects of Mahayana, Pure Land and Zen into a philosophy and practice, a way of being that allows people to be agents of transformation in the world. A form that embodies both action and contemplation. He has been an advocate for peace since the Vietnam War and received the Nobel Peace prize for his work. Thich Nhat Hanh embodies peace – to see him walking up that dirt road in his brown robes, it is almost as if he is fused with the land around him. He led us on walking meditations, and it was quite profound to walk in silence, slowly down the road as a group of three hundred people. He might stop to look or listen, to notice a flower or stone along the road, to breathe. We would all stop with him as if we were one body moving together. I had never felt so peaceful, so at home inside myself.

One morning, he led us on a walking meditation down into a sun-dappled grove with tall, green grasses and oak trees, their thick branches almost touching the ground. He sank to the ground and we sat with him. What followed was quite simple and quite profound. A nun sitting near him offered him a steaming glass of tea. And he proceeded to sit and drink his tea and we sat with him. A small child played near him, and at one point he smiled and spoke to her. Another time he looked around at us with a face that was so peaceful, so accepting. I felt I was in the presence of a Holy person. I felt that this was how the disciples and followers of Jesus may have felt as they sat with him, awed by his peace, his ability to pray in the face of insurmountable struggle; his endless compassion for those who had been forgotten, despised or shunned. And the disciples had to be ready to go and do whatever was needed, to allow their lives to be completely transformed in a moment when they decided to surrender. There were undoubtedly times when Jesus was not teaching, when he simply sat with them in silence. When what he offered was his embodied faith, his sense that there was a larger ground of being that all of humanity was contained in. I had this experience in the grove with Thich Nhat Hanh and the monks and nuns. Buddha and Jesus were there as “living” teachers offering seeds of contemplation and compassion. I believe that one of the biggest challenges we face today in the modern society most of us live in – is to embody compassion and to practice contemplation all the time. Not just during our morning meditations; not just at our church services on Sunday but in every moment.

In the introduction to Thich Nhat Hanh’s book, Living Buddha, Living Christ, writer Elaine Pagels speaks of the connection and resonance between the teachings contained in the Gnostic Gospels and the lessons of Buddhism. She writes that “…the sources discovered at Nag Hammadi, like Buddhist sources, direct the disciple toward loving compassion for others….” (xxvi) I believe that Thich Nhat Hanh’s exploration of these connections is a gift for Unitarian Universalists, for we are committed to the search for gnosis or knowledge and the use of compassion in human relations. In his book, Thich Nhat Hanh shares that accepting Jesus as one of his spiritual ancestors was challenging given the colonization and disruption that Christian missionaries and powers had wrought on Vietnam over the centuries. He writes that “it was only later, through friendships with Christian men and women who truly embody the spirit of understanding and compassion of Jesus, that I have been able to touch the depths of Christianity. The moment I met Martin Luther King, Jr., I knew I was in the presence of a holy person. Not just his good work but his very being was a source of great inspiration for me.” (p. 5-6)

Every day of the retreat we would have a working meditation task to do, whether it was dishes or cleaning or chopping vegetables. There were continual reminders to be mindful, to have gratitude, to remember that each day and moment is there to be appreciated. To be in an environment of mindfulness and intention as someone whose mind is often racing ahead thinking about and planning for the future, was very important. It was a chance for me to work with the “doing” part of myself, and to encourage that aspect to loosen and relax. Living at Deer Park Monastery for seven days was an important experience for me in many ways. To be in the presence of a spiritual leader such as Thich Nhat Hanh felt like a rare opportunity to witness someone whose life is dedicated to promoting peaceful interchange and transformation in the world through meditation and practice. Deer Park is a living example of a community where this is visible. I felt at home there, and managed to retain my own sense of inner peace for quite some time after returning; there are scenes like the one in the oak grove that I call to mind when I need to be reminded. One of the reasons I wanted to spend a week on retreat at Deer Park was to be surrounded by people who are living their faith, and to witness and participate in a community committed to principles I believe in. I re-discovered my own passion and commitment to bridging faiths and bringing people together. The first time I met monks and nuns of Thich Nhat Hanh’s order was at a meeting focused on global peace the year before. We were a group of community members, seminary students and ministers, artists, monks and nuns who had in common a strong desire to promote peace in whatever way we could. My time at Deer Park reinforced both my commitment to my meditation/ prayer practice as a way to find peace and balance in my life, and my commitment to my Unitarian Universalist faith as a way I can live and be compassionate. We are a tradition that bridges faiths.

The first Noble Truth of the Buddha is the awareness of suffering. To be aware of the presence of suffering causes one to be compassionate, to want to alleviate the suffering. This compassion encourages the will to want to follow the Way. This process is paralleled in the teachings of Jesus. Through his compassion towards those who were suffering, toward those who were cast out members of his society, he offered his life as an example of one who was not bound by external laws but by an internal compass of love. Jesus sowed seeds of contemplation and radical compassion.
In his book Meeting Jesus, Italian writer Luigi Santucci writes: “Jesus, bent over a bowl of water, removed the dirt from the feet of his friends….” On the night before he died, Jesus washed the feet of his disciples. Santucci offers us a beautiful description of how he would use this example in his own life: “If I had to choose some relic of the passion, I wouldn’t pick up a scourge or a spear but that round bowl of dirty water. To go round the world with that receptacle under my arm, looking only at people’s feet; and for each one I’d tie a towel round me, bend down, and never raise my eyes higher than their ankles, so as not to distinguish friends from enemies….” In his book Meeting Jesus, Santucci presents stories with such intimacy; it was as if Santucci actually knew Jesus as a friend, teacher, prophet and revolutionary, and was not afraid to present both his humanness and divinity.

With the Unitarian Universalist commitment to social justice, religious freedom and equality, I feel that we need to reclaim Jesus as a model of dissent – a compassionate teacher and radical leader. Biblical scholar John Dominic Crossan says “to remove, however, that which is radically subversive, socially revolutionary, and politically dangerous from Jesus’ actions is to leave his life meaningless and his death inexplicable.” I would put forth that it might be that Jesus offers a challenging example of resistance and surrender and a model of embodied justice, compassionate action and religious leadership.

Turning back in time to the mid-1800’s, we can see that Jesus was a central figure in both Unitarian and Universalism, and a growing number within both faiths proposed living by the example of social justice and compassion that Jesus emulated, rather than simply accepting what was written in the Bible or the doctrines of hierarchical religious institutions. Reverend William Ellery Channing describes the character of Jesus in a discourse on the “Evidences of Revealed Religion”: He writes “…We discover in Jesus Christ an unparalleled dignity of character, a consciousness of greatness, never discovered or approached by any other individual in history; and yet this was blended with a condescension, lowliness, an unostentatious simplicity, which had never before been thought consistent with greatness.”

What I find particularly inspiring about the life of Jesus and why I find him such an important model for our work in the world today as Unitarian Universalists, is that he offers this model of revolutionary compassion. And I see how far away the term “Christian” and the vast and complicated structures and hierarchies of many Christian churches have moved from true contemplation and all-embracing compassion. I have been brought to my knees by people who write of Jesus’ life and teachings as if they really knew him. He is someone that they speak with on a daily basis; he is someone they ask advice of, turn to for comfort and reminders of how to be in the world. People like Dr. Howard Thurman who felt that Jesus was a close and intimate companion that he walked and talked with at the shores of the Atlantic ocean. Writer Luige Santucci. There are many scholarly works out there on Jesus and believe me, being in seminary I encountered many of these texts. There are also many books on Buddhism that do not breath life into that tradition. These texts did not bring me closer to who Jesus and Buddha really were, to the work they were really doing, to what they were ultimately asking people to do. Part of that could be that the lives they lived seem impossible for us as mere ordinary people to actually embody. No, I picked up the book Meeting Jesus because of the cover – a stone sculpture of Jesus face with eyes closed in deep and peaceful prayer. It was a beautiful image and I wanted to know what the author who had chosen that image was going to say. Santucci wrote in a way that I had never encountered before. He wrote in intimate, poetic and real terms about a man that has had so many, multiple texts and thousands upon thousands of pages written about him, it is almost unfathomable to imagine that there is anything new to say. But Santucci succeeds. For he writes as if he is describing a friend. A Holy person, yes but someone he cares about, someone who is human and has feelings, is touched and pained deeply by the world in need of healing, hoping desperately for salvation. Luigi Santucci describes his own relationship to the Lord’s prayer and to Jesus himself. He writes: “It’s stretching myself out in Christ’s company. I despair of my life and he tells me ancient stories about myself, he pours into my soul wonderful hours I’d forgotten. He never converts me, but now and again he sets me straight. Even when he says, ‘this isn’t a sin, my friend: it’s a mistaken way of reaching a better understanding of each other’." (p. 143)

Justice, equity and compassion in human relations. We proclaim our principle but what does it really mean to live it out in our daily lives? I believe that it starts with the prayer that Thich Nhat Hanh evoked in the reading: “Let us be aware of the source of being, common to us all and to all living things.” This source of being, this ultimate mystery, energy that surrounds and envelops everything, is a source that we can draw from in being compassionate, in exercising true justice. Buddha and Jesus were founders of two great traditions of faith and I would dare to say that neither would perhaps recognize what Buddhism and Christianity have become today. Their lives and actions, though they lived in very different societies of two thousand and twenty-five hundred years ago, charge us to embody and live our values today. To be what we believe. If we believe in justice and compassion in human relations, what does that really mean? For me, it means responding when the homeless person on the street asks me a question. By responding to her words, I am acknowledging that she is another human being I am encountering on the path. She is worthy of compassion. She causes me to contemplate my own actions, why I might need to hurry by and not respond. My own fear of difference, of the “other.”
The compassion that Jesus exhibited for all people – those of the lowest social status, women, and criminals, people who were deemed the “untouchables” of Mediterranean society - formed the central core of his teaching. He presented compassion and the healing of people’s suffering as the response that overrode all laws and morality codes. Biblical scholar Marcus Borg describes that “For Jesus, compassion was more than a quality of God and an individual virtue: it was a social paradigm, the core value of life in community. To put it boldly: compassion for Jesus was political. He directly and repeatedly challenged the dominant sociopolitical paradigm of his social world and advocated instead what might be called a politics of compassion.” The concept of taking compassion as far as it will go; there is no one who is not deserving of compassion, is still a radical stance today. In connecting a politics of compassion to the shaping of our UU social justice programs, congregational life and presence in the larger world, it means asserting boldly that this is a way of life, a way of being in the world every day. Through knowing that love is a powerful force, and by allowing true compassion to drive our actions, we are making a political statement and creating truly beloved communities.

Jesus and Buddha created relationships with people that transcended the bounds of their societies, and encouraged their followers to do the same. They presented models for relationship that allowed people to experience a sense of eternal peace, and emphasized the importance of faith grounded in compassion. Jesus offers a radical example of someone who defied authority and ignored social constraints to promote justice and equality he did this work from a place of compassion. And Buddha provides a model for contemplation that can transcend difference and promote peace.
May we embody the contemplation and true peace that Buddha offers, allowing ourselves to simply be and knowing that our peaceful presence is a powerful gift. May we embody compassionate action and leadership that is so needed in our communities, on our streets, in the world today. May we look to these living models for inspiration, guidance and strength as we go forth to offer ourselves to the world.

Thich Nhat Hanh wrote a small book called The Long Road Turns To Joy where he offers insight into walking meditation as a practice. I want to end with his words that remind me of what is truly important, what I need to remember that will allow me to be a transformative force in the world. He writes:

I have arrived
I am home
in the here
in the now
I am solid
I am free
in the Ultimate I dwell