"What’s your name? I have seen you before. What’s your name? May I walk you to your door?” (Don & Juan, 1962)
Names of the unified mind are
Buddha-nature,
True suchness, the hidden essence,
The pure spiritual body,
The pedestal of awareness,
The innocent, universal round mirrorlike knowledge,
The open source, the ultimate truth,
And pure consciousness.
The enlightened ones of the past, present, and future,
And all of their discourses,
Are all in your fundamental nature, inherently complete.
You do not need to seek,
But you must save yourself;
No one can do it for you.
--Xuefeng (822–908) dailyzen
I’m torn between the Buddha of history or the Arhat of Pennsylvania Avenue. If I’m meant to accept what appears before me, then the wizard of woefulness is my spiritual test. Yes, he is awful; yes he is crude and impertinent, vulgar and mean-spirited -- but he is our president, the only one we have, and (somehow) occupies an office and role that demands our respect. Even if a priest has been a pedophile, we trust that the priesthood remains, somehow, more than the sexual abuser. So, too, the presidency.
Since I’ve been ABC (a buddhist catholic) for over sixty years, and AZC (a zen contemplative) for the same half-century-plus, I’ve come to appreciate the complexity of judgment and the value of judicious evaluation. I also appreciate the failure and brokenness of my resolve and practice.
I find very little about the current president to recommend him. A letter of recommendation would be filled with abhorrent details of fraud, corruption, sexual abuse, grift and graft, lies, illegal activity, sour temperament bordering on vile cruelty and obnoxious surliness.
But still, he is my brother, and were he in Maine State Prison I’d visit and invite him to meetingbrook conversations with others interested in sorting out things and deepening our lives.
We understand those final three lines:
You do not need to seek,
But you must save yourself;
No one can do it for you.
Of course I apply the same to myself, there’s no escaping (the) singularity. As someone inherently incomplete, as someone not inherent -- but irrelevant, inappropriate, extraneous, impertinent -- I understand the paradoxical nature of being-human, and sit with that complexity, looking out into penitential wholeness for dharmic/religious reincorporation.