“…a moment of enlightenment is a moment when we realize the blessings that are always pouring forth.” Nyoshul Khenpo
7 AM. The morning traffic races past; the markets are bustling. Days literally burst forth loud and early in Bali. Birds sing; roosters crow; loose dogs scrabble. Shop awnings creak open; vendors push and call. I walk, weaving among screeching cars, motorbikes, bicycles and buses, school children already in soccer field gym classes, women offering me fruits or teas or spices, taxi drivers out and eager for work. At this hour, the morning air is still cool; in just a bit it will be stifling, sauna-like, and it will become a chore to even move.
It would be easy for the senses to be overwhelmed. So many sights and sounds and smells and human encounters. One can move only a few feet before being warmly greeted, engaged in conversation, or asked to buy something. How to have ease, freedom from suffering – joy, even – with all of this knotted and tangled data?
The Buddha speaks of so very many ways of working with this. There is mindfulness, attention: not to abstractions but to the present moment: “It’s like this now.” There is attention to stress: its impersonal nature, its causes, the ending, the path. One practices discernment, restraint, avoidance, patient tolerance.
Still, I wonder: practically, how do I navigate? With This? This? This: the impermanent, out-of-personal control, messy and ever flowing river of life. Asking this in my morning Bali walk is not so different from the questions of any life, anywhere. I am invited to develop wise and skillful attention – both internally and externally – as daily life bombards my senses, my body ages, emotions erupt, mind spins.
From a strictly biological perspective, I can so easily fall out of balance. I can attend unwisely to so many things that my nervous system becomes overloaded and depleted as coherence is lost. I can become caught in biological responses of fight or flight or freeze and lose the capacity for wholesome attention.
That’s not unlike, I think, the state that Siddhartha found himself in when, having practiced extremes of asceticism, he found that he was near death and was no longer able to even attend wisely. He recognized that, and he then chose to break the rules of his ascetic practice as he accepted Sujata’s offer of ordinary rice milk. Once nourished and more balanced, his ability to bring appropriate attention returned.
I too can struggle with wise attention if my heart and body and mind get out of balance and if I forget to receive ordinary goodness. Anagarika Munindra, when asked why he meditated, is said to have replied “So that when I walk from here to the town square, I’ll notice the purple flowers that bloom along the way.” He wasn’t proposing that the wise attention of meditation would bring only happy sensual pleasures to which he could cling and which would then last. I think that he was proposing that appropriate attention and wise care would bring about an ease, a gladness and tranquility of heart, which, in turn, would allow ever deeper untangling of the causes of suffering and, ultimately, to its end.
These teachings on attention to goodness can confuse me when I encounter other classical teachings on indulgence and on the very real limitations of reliance on sensory pleasure. Misunderstood, they can seem to imply that delight in the beauty and wonder of life is to be shunned. The issue, however, is whether or not any contact, any movement, any thought or word or action leads to continued suffering or to its end. Is this delight leading to an increase in clinging? A landing in solidity and greed and holding on? Or is it – even a bit – a turning toward the mystery and wholesome goodness of non-separation, kindness, compassion and joy?
“…appropriate attention means seeing things in terms of their function…the test for appropriate attention is that it actually works in helping to put an end to suffering…”
Thanissaro
So, it is important that I not neglect the Buddha’s teachings on goodness, on joy and blessings. In the Mangala Sutta, he invites all of us to contemplate dozens of ”highest blessings,” including honorable friends, wholesome occupation, and our own virtues. Remember these, he instructs; open to know and receive all goodness, even the mundane goodness of everyday life: any wisdom and balance that inclines us toward freedom. He invites a contemplation: is this delight one that leads to the further suffering of clinging and self-absorption, or is it inclining the mind and heart toward vastness, toward mystery, toward release?
When I go out in the morning in Bali, even in the midst of all of the chaos, I practice simply opening to receive this very precious kind of happiness. Beauty, joy, human kindness and gladness are everywhere. I laugh as I hear the funny croaking of that little baby rooster; I make happy conversation with a dozen taxi drivers; I greet my neighborhood vendors with delight, even as I assure them, yet again, that I really, really, really do have plenty of mangoes for today.
There are the ordinary flowers that have fallen from the lush trees through the night onto
the roads and walkways. I gather them into my arms in piles before the shopkeepers sweep them away. Their soft loveliness brings an ease to my heart. It is a good way to nourish and orient my day. I carry them back to my residence. Though they quickly are gone forever, their momentary beauty reminds me and feeds me. It is good. This, too, is appropriate attention.