All Souls Unitarian Community
Listening for Grace
The Journey of
the Buddha
Long,long ago, the Queen became pregnant and there was great
rejoicing in the Kingdom for the King wanted an heir. The infant was born and
named...............................................(Fill in your name) A holy man visited
the palace and asked to hold the new born. As he did, he started to cry. The King asked
him what was the matter, and he replied,"This child will be a great spiritual
teacher. He will have the enlightenment of a Buddha."
Taking a Sacred Story
The retreatants from All Souls met for a week-end of meditating on
this sacred story, and then telling their own stories to hear the echoes of their own
spiritual wisdom. Some came to "escape the chaos" to contemplate, to sort
out a time of transition in their lives, to find a new perspective, to rediscover what was
really important in their lives. All came to find a spiritual wisdom that comes from the
Buddha quest for enlightenment.
The Buddha lacked for nothing
The King was perturbed and resolved that his son assume the
throne and not become a Buddha. He reasoned that if his son only knew comfort and leisure
in his life, he would never know the call of a deeper spirit. So he ensured that as he
grew into a handsome young man, he never lacked for anything, enjoying the finest palaces,
food, women and entertainment. He even had gardeners remove all dead plants from the
palace so that his son would only see beauty. And so it was for the son who never desired
to venture outside the palace walls until he married and had a child. It was only then
that he felt stirred to see life beyond the palace.
We have all left the Palace
Each of us shared our journey from innocence to experience, recounting in various ways
those turning points in our lives when we stepped beyond the frontiers that we had gotten
used to. For some, it was adopting a disadvantaged child, or reaching out to a prisoner,
or trying "to save the world" by working in the peace corps in Africa. Others
told of their work for the environment, or their desire to parent even when they had no
children. None of us had stayed behind the palace walls. Yet, for none of us was the
journey easy or predictable.
"What is that I see before me?"
The King got news of his plans and instructed his officers to
scrub the roads and remove the beggars and the sick. But when the son set out, he
had only gone a short way when he saw a sight that he had never seen before. He asked his
guide, "What is that I see before me?" The guide answered,"That is an old
man, Sire. Everybody born is subject to old age." The Prince was so upset that he
retreated to the palace. A few days later, he ventured forth once more only to find
another scene that stopped his progress. "That is a sick person, Sire. Humans are all
subject to suffering and decay." He retreated once more to the palace, but he could
not quiet his restless desire. Again he ventured outside the palace and again he had to
stop. "That is a dead body, Sire. A corpse. We are all going to die one day."
Confronting a Suffering World
Each of us had met with suffering and death on our journeys. One person's child was in
prison, another had killed himself. One told of visiting migrant kids who had no time to
play because they had to parent their younger siblings. Some had seen the intense
suffering of parenthood and were in the dilemma of not being sure if they wanted that or
could endure it. Once we left our palace, we had been stopped in our tracks by the
human condition, and by our own limitations. That world we wanted to save didn't bend to
our will. Instead, it rebuffed us and tried to take away our hope.
Exploring paths to Enlightenment
He determined then and there to leave his family and seek the
path of enlightenment. He imitated the holy men he saw by fasting and living a life of
strict ascetical practice, but after six years of being homeless and starving, he knew he
was still not free. He was close to death when a kind soul fed him rice and milk. He felt
so revived that he determined to sit under a tree and wait for as long as he had to for
enlightenment to come. The forces of greed and delusion and aversion attacked his resolve
but he remained steadfast. Finally, he enjoyed the
enlightenment of a spiritually awakened being, appreciating his own deeper wisdom and
knowing a deeper compassion for the suffering world. He was a Buddha.
Finding our Buddha stories
We listened to the Buddha story over and over, told it to each other and let it get
inside us. Then we invited one another simply to tell a story that allowed our listeners
to get inside our skin, to experience what life felt like for us from the inside. As we
began to share, the power of the Buddha story that we had learnt started to work its
subtle but powerful chemistry. Once we trusted our hearts to share, we
witnessed the profound wisdom that comes from sharing real
stories, and being woven into a community narrative.
Wisdom sayings
"The heart unfolds with kindness. That is what kindness can
do to people locked in the prisons of their own resentment."
"What is it about life that some make it and some
don't?"
"What I didn't know in the idealism of my youth and what I
know now is that saving the world and saving yourself are one and the
same."
"I am not a parent, but I seek to make my life meaningful
in other ways, not just by adding to the genetic pool."
"As soon as we become adults, we need to become a parent to
new life in whatever way that is."
"Life for me has been about being able to have a hope and
being able to hang on to that hope. That is what has made a difference to me."
Telling a story to find a story
In this work, we never presume that the first story we share is the story most
deeply in our hearts. Invariably, we tell a story to find a story. So the
retreatants met again to share some of the Wisdom Tales of their journey.
Words of enlightenment
"I hear water from the bushes,
and I keep running believing that it must lead somewhere. There must be a river even
though I cannot see it."
"I try to make sense of what is happening in the world, but
what nurtures me is my sense of a larger mind than mine, where it all does make
sense."
"The teacher told the children who were acting out,'Boys
and girls, we don't do it that way.' I watched her and thought, if she can do it, than so
can I."
"If you are not sure, act like you know what you are
supposed to do and you become the part. That's what I learnt."
"The people I liked least at the beginning were the ones I
ended up liking the best because we had to work at it."
"The child asked her mother,"I'm really afraid to
die." The mother only laughed."
"My mother believed that women had to survive, that the
world was a cesspool that you had to get through at all costs. She built a survivor- in
me."
"India was a great teacher for me. I discovered that you
can't really straighten out the life of the world without straightening out your own
life."
"He was the kind of man with so much joie de vivre. He'd
say, 'If I have to die, I want to die doing what I want to be doing. He thought of himself
as a failure but he was never afraid of trying something new."
"I tend to think that we attach so much melodrama to things
that maybe, is questionable."
"Life is the acceptance or non-acceptance of the fact that
you can die at any second, and you have the choice of how you would like to spend that
next second."
What we learnt
The retreat ended with us re-visiting the Buddha story and placing our
journey within its frame, helping us to see that ...
