All the things and everybody are all the time instructing us the dharma, says Christian McEwen. We simply must know methods to pay attention.
Milarepa (1052–1135) and Scenes from his Life (element), Tibet, 18th century; Pigments on material; Rubin Museum of Artwork; Reward of Shelley and Donald Rubin
A bell sounded, gradual and sonorous, from a close-by church. It was early in November, the maples nonetheless ablaze towards a cloudless sky. Such rusty reds and flaming golds, such a fragile, pale vivid blue! It was as if the chimes swirled out round every separate tree, burnished and launched every leaf, caressed the grass, entranced my watching eye. Such listening is on the coronary heart of religious observe, opening (if one is lucky) into a brand new readability and serenity, a deeper realizing. “While you pay attention along with your soul, you come into rhythm and unity with the music of the universe,” wrote the Irish author John O’Donohue.
Buddhism has quite a few teachings centered on the act of listening. It’s stated that when the Buddha first taught, two deer stepped softly up, knelt down beside him, and pricked up their ears. Their picture can nonetheless be present in nearly each Buddhist temple.
We don’t must do something particular to have contact with the spirit world. It’s simply pure should you cease and pay attention. Simply there, all the time. Like your personal heartbeat.
“The Buddha is all the time instructing,” wrote the Zen grasp Thich Nhat Hanh. “Occasions are instructing, residing beings are instructing. When you have an attentive ear, you’ll be able to hear the genuine dharma on a regular basis.”
One of the crucial beloved texts within the Buddhist canon is the Lotus Sutra, composed in India within the first century. It describes a bodhisattva often called Wondrous Sound or Avalokiteshvara, who is devoted to the liberation of all beings. He’s stated to have been born from a ray of sunshine sprung from Buddha’s proper eye and is thus a manifestation of compassion, with the miraculous skill to deal with every particular person in his or her personal language. His title, within the authentic Sanskrit, interprets as “He Who Listens to the Cries of the World.”
The unique Avalokiteshvara was all the time proven as male. However beginning in China, across the eighth century, the determine started to be seen as feminine, too, within the type of Kuan Yin, or “She Who Listens to the Cries of the World.” Kuan Yin is commonly proven resting on a lotus, holding a willow sprig and vase of dew—the vase symbolizing the nectar of compassion, the willow representing her flexibility and power. Her different accoutrements embody an arrow, to attract associates towards her; a treasured mirror, signifying knowledge; and a vajra-topped bell, with which to play probably the most mellifluous music. She has additionally been depicted with a thousand arms and fingers and as an armed warrior, laden with crossbow, thunderbolt, sword, and defend. However in all her manifestations, she stays “The One Who Listens,” attentive to the sorrows of the entire lamenting world.
Christianity tends to humanize the voice of God, even when it thunders from the heavens, or seethes and crashes “just like the sound of many waters.” However once in a while, particularly within the Celtic nature poets, we glimpse a extra lyrical and capacious understanding of the sacred and of what’s value listening to. The cosmos itself turns into audible. As soon as somebody listens intently to the pure world, 100 thousand voices will start to talk.
Legend has it there was as soon as an Irish monk named Phoenix. Someday, he was studying his breviary, alone within the monastery backyard, when instantly a chicken started to sing. Phoenix turned completely absorbed. When eventually the music was completed, he picked up his guide and went again to the monastery—solely to find he knew nobody there. Centuries had handed whereas he sat listening within the backyard. His authentic group was lengthy gone, and the brand new monks had no thought who he was. However once they searched their annals, they found that a few years earlier than, a Brother Phoenix had mysteriously disappeared.
The Maidu author Marie Mason Potts, who grew up in a cedar-bark home in northern California, remembered the sounds of her girlhood with affectionate precision: “How fantastic it was mendacity awake at night time…to listen to the coyotes bark and the hoot owls uttering their calls among the many timber. Typically there could be the operating clatter of squirrels on the bark slabs above us; and in spring and summer time, simply because it grew mild…there got here the enchantment of the chicken refrain, the orchestra of the Nice Spirit throughout us.”
A Wintu girl of the identical technology harkened again to her personal childhood, describing her grandfather at his prayers. Each morning, he’d stand up early, splash his face with water, and start to wish. “He prayed to Olelbes, He-Who-Is-Above, the Wintu world creator. He additionally prayed immediately and intimately to the issues round him—to the rocks, timber, salmon, acorns, sugar pine, water, and wooden.” And, “on the finish of his life, he talked to the world—sharing his disappointment and remorse—as one would possibly speak to an previous and really trusted buddy.”
That sense of equivalence, of mutuality, reveals up many times amongst tribal peoples, from the Chukchi reindeer herders of Siberia to the indigenous Maori of New Zealand. A member of the Pawtucket tribe put it this fashion, “The Indian individuals, we’re all this…. We’re made from this, the marshes right here, the timber. No completely different, see what I imply? You don’t perceive since you look on this world as one thing that isn’t you. However Indian individuals consider that we are not any completely different from a squirrel or a bear, only a completely different kind. We’re all the identical, squirrel, bear, me.”
Or, within the phrases of the poet Linda Hogan, “We don’t must do something particular to have contact with the spirit world. It’s simply pure should you cease and pay attention. Simply there, all the time. Like your personal heartbeat.”
One of many unusual presents of the pandemic was that individuals had extra time for this, extra time to take heed to each interior and outer worlds. Listening helps us to decelerate and listen—to recollect, viscerally, that we’re interdependent, intertwined. One in every of my fashions for that is the Buddhist trainer Milarepa, who sits calmly on his cushion, one hand curved across the arch of his proper ear. Milarepa was a poet and musician, the primary atypical Tibetan to realize enlightenment. He might hear a snail because it oozed over the stony floor, a pair quarreling in a distant village, probably the most thwarted, muffled sob. Nothing was international to him. In the midst of his lengthy life, he turned “Somebody Who Listens,” alert to the thrill and sorrows of your entire surrounding world.
This text is an excerpt from Christian McEwen’s In Reward of Listening: A Gathering of Tales, which can seem with Bauhan Publishing in October 2023.