MEDITATION
Delight seems to me to
reference simplicity and
newness, what Buddhists
call ‘beginner’s mind’.
When we are mired in
book learning, we can become jaded; the world no
longer seems fresh or exciting. Everything needs
naming, identifying and
cataloguing. We reduce
the world to its components and think we have
mastered it but perhaps
something gets lost in the
transaction.
I was fortunate to have
a mother who turned us
out of doors each summer in the country to explore
unencumbered
without any duty to learn
anything. What we did
in our play, however, was
run free in the fields and
ponds and barns of the
neighbourhood looking,
smelling, touching and
tasting nature in all its unnamed glory. What arose
in me w as a deep appreciation for the wonder of
the world and a sense of
awe at its majesty. Hours
passed watching bubbles
come from the mud in the
ponds when you pushed
a stick into it. The world
stood still when the dragonflies hummed over the
marsh marigolds in the
early summer sun. Mother
would wake us up with a
thrill in her voice to hear
the ‘spring chorus’ or to
see a Luna moth stretched
out on the screen door.
Delight was always present in my connection
to the natural world and
from that came a curiosity to understand how
things worked, how they
meshed, how they interacted. Learning through
naming and cataloguing
those things came later.
Within early or Nikaya
Buddhism, the world, the
passions, the body were
all seen as hindrances
to spiritual unfoldment.
Inherently, they were
bad and should be constrained and abandoned
in order to awaken to the
spiritual world. This idea is
echoed in many places in
the Christian, Muslim and
Jain world view.
Within the Buddhist traditions, the rise of Vajrayana took a different tack.
It embraced the idea
of the bodhisattva who
vows to continue to return life after life in order
to help all beings emerge
from suffering. Vajrayana
is deeply life affirming. Delight in all the activities of
the world becomes part
of the recognition that
Enlightenment is present
inherently in all things, at
all times. We are asked
to shift our preoccupation with self-reference to
care and concern for others.
Once compassion
predominates our world
view, there is no reason
to reject any of life. All
becomes potentially sacred. That does not preclude wholesome moral
conduct nor respect for
the vows you and others
have taken but it significantly allows us to participate fully in a meaningful
life. Delight becomes part
of this path, as we learn
to celebrate the accomplishment of others, the
beauty of the world and
the incredible opportunity of this precious human
birth.
Catherine Rathbun received her traditional teaching name, Lama Jetsun
Yeshe, from Ven. Karma Thinley Rinpoche, a lineage master of the Sakya
and Kagyu traditions of Tibetan Buddhism, in 2002. She taught meditation at
York University (1989 to 1997) and is the founding teacher at Friends of the
Heart, a meditation centre in Toronto. With a background in dance — she
was a member of the National Ballet Company of Canada from 1962 to
1963 — and a modern dance career in England (1967-69). She is the author
of Developing the World Mind and Clear Heart, Open Mind, and is currently
working on a new book called Waiting for Truffles: Meditations for Daily
www.friendsoftheheart.com.
Living. For more on Catherine, please visit www.friendsoftheheart.com.