IMAGE ID: A Buddha statue. Also, do you want to hear a joke? A tourist asked a New Yorker how to get to Carnegie Hall. And the New Yorker said, โPractice. Practice. Practice.โ
Hello you โ Adreanna here with this weekโs dispatch of The Laundry,
You will rarely, if ever, hear me call myself a Buddhist. This is solely a personal choice, a stylistic proclivity, not a matter of whatโs right or wrong. Iโve taken my vows and have a Sanskrit name and a lineage affiliation. I can rattle off the Four Noble Truths, the Eightfold Path, the Three Marks of Existence and the difference between the yanas. I am, by all definitions, as much of a card carrying Buddhist as they come. Iโve just found that it keeps me more honest when I remind myself that Iโm not so much of a Buddhist as I am a Buddhist practitioner.ย
The identifying feature is that as a practitioner, Buddhism is something that I pick up and do (sometimes more successfully than others) on a daily basis. Thereโs no leaning back into the warm comfort of self-referencing labels, in the way that I might when I say that Iโm a foodie or a mother or a redhead (once vibrantly natural, now in my forties with help). I know myself well enough to know that this would be a trap; a permission slip of sorts to practice meditation when it suits me, and otherwise just rest on my laurels as a Buddhist.ย
The same thing would likely happen if I called myself a writer. Knowing myself as a writing practitioner keeps me honest to the pivotal piece that writing (and Buddhism) requires: itโs something that I do, often ingloriously, rather than something that I passively AM.ย
For me, this emphasis on active participation isnโt about reaching to do all of the Buddhism, all of the time, like an extreme philosophical sport or something. Iโve long felt that any single teaching taken to heart and practiced consistently with sincerity has the potential to change oneโs life by changing oneโs outlook. And this is if one even identifies with Buddhism or not.
Buddhism doesnโt own the key concepts that it points to. Thereโs very little thatโs shocking or mystical or even unique in Buddhist principles. Just speaking for myself, this is a part of what draws me to it. Many of these teachings sound obvious, like common sense. I imagine thatโs why these teachings are called the โdharma,โ which means โthe way of things.โ Itโs a guide for squaring ourselves with reality.ย
Take the very first teaching on the First Noble Truth, for instance. Itโs a very plain acknowledgement that being a human means that we will experience discomfort on a broad-range spectrum: everything from from dissatisfaction and annoyance to full blown trauma and suffering. This is unavoidable; itโs a packaged deal with joy and pleasure. And itโs not just you; every single person on this planet experiences suffering too.ย
This teaching doesnโt necessarily have WOW factor. It isnโt proprietarily โBuddhist.โ If anything, to say that people experience discomfort names something almost numbingly obvious: most of us experience low grade annoyance on the best of days, and you donโt need to look far to find examples of full blown human suffering.
But what if we actually took the fact of discomfort to heart, as a practice, to the point that it informed our daily life?ย
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