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Dana
Paramita
presented
by Ven. Shikai Zuiko osho-ajari
(
An article from Absolute Zero 18)
We see or hear the word “dana” and alms or money might pop
into mind. This is our usual frame of reference. We see the word as the
“suggested” dana for a workshop or for this occasion as being
so many dollars. Let’s pick up this word and turn it this way and
that. Let us look beyond the obvious and accepted. As we look at other
aspects of this word, originally Pali and then Sanskrit, we see a concept
people have been discussing for at least 2600 years. We see that it speaks
of the voluntary giving of material, energy, and wisdom. In the “Paramita”
series from a 1994 O-sesshin, Anzan Hoshin roshi says that dana is “a
recognition of the fundamental richness of experiencing.” The only
self-describing species, we are human centric beings. We erroneously limit
the idea of “voluntary giving” along with many other activities
and qualities, as something only possible for humans. When that narrow,
exclusive meaning is opened to include the world that arises as us and
as all beings we are able to apply this understanding to our moment-to-moment
experience.
When experience is viewed openly inevitably more and more angles and perspectives
are exposed and the reality of a sharper, deeper, richer experience is
known. We see, hear, taste, touch, feel, smell, and think, with more depth.
The basic richness and luminosity of reality is revealed.
Investigation through practice continues to uncover meanings far more
interesting in their inclusiveness than the handing over of money. Dana
means generosity and richness. We understand this more and more completely
as we practise the Dharma, the Teachings of Reality.
The richness of the experiencing of the bodymind is vast and generous.
Why would we choose to fixate on only one aspect of our experiencing?
Usually this one aspect is, paradoxically, of poverty or lack or suffering.
The only possible reason is ignorance.
We don’t know we have a choice. We fixate on only certain aspects
of experiencing and ignore the rest. We literally rob ourselves of our
own lives by ignoring our actual experiencing. As we learn to notice the
richness which presents itself in, around, and as us we find ourselves
more capable, more able to live as the Treasure House of which Dogen zenji
spoke in the “Fukanzazengi”. It is then that we start to glimpse
our indebtedness to the Lineage of Teachers who have been the vehicles
for this priceless teaching for 2600 years. It is then that some of us
decide to dedicate our marrow and bones and everything else to the preservation
and continuation of this Dharma treasure.
The earth, our planet, our precious blue pearl, our home, is a sometimes
decadently generous place. Humans do nothing and yet buds and leaves and
flowers burst forth in cycles appropriate to their growth. In northern
climes tiny flowers will bloom and carpet the tundra when the warmth of
the sun increases intensity with the revolutions of the planet. At the
equator lush tropical growth relentlessly reclaims land that has been
stripped, burned, and leached by human misjudgment and misuse.
Huge pieces of equipment provided by ill-informed aid agencies are abandoned
for reasons ranging from no hard currency with which to buy gas to civil
war. Overnight, creepers and vines start to grow around these artefacts
of the machinery of greed. Over time this evidence of not caring, not
paying attention, will be reduced to rust and dust and reintegrated into
the soil. As a species bound by the contractions and playing out the views
of self-image we live with stark evidence of the imbalance in our economics,
our ecology, our basic housekeeping. For example, estimates are that 8
billion dollars would provide a basic education for peoples of the planet.
We can’t or aren’t willing to do this and yet we find 12 billion
dollars for perfume, 400 billion for illegal drugs and 700 billion for
arms. These figures are by no means accurate. How could they be? But they
are indicative of incredible imbalance.
The basic generosity of life is presented moment-after-moment in our own
experiencing. All we need do is look. Each moment of experiencing presents
seeing, hearing, tasting, touching, thinking, and feeling. All “we”
ever have to do is notice. The bodymind adapts to the tiniest changes
in environment, regulating temperature, renewing cells, and putting in
place emergency programs and procedures to deal with too much, too little,
or bad food, not enough, too much, or bad water. Bacteria and virus and
parasites occupy and colonize the bodymind and it adapts. The skin is
cut, a bone is broken, a baby is conceived, and the bodymind adapts. The
generosity of the bodymind is so vast that when someone stops smoking
after even forty or fifty years the cells that make up the bodymind start
to cleanse and repair. The moments of life tick by unfolding the fabric
of old age, sickness, and, inevitably, death. Even then the generosity
of the bodymind would continue to present itself as food for beings if
the process is not stopped by human intervention.
Film and video, radio, television, cameras, audio recorders, and print
media have penetrated areas of life and behaviours of which our ancestors
could never have even dreamed. Daily, the generosity of beings is broadcast
and printed. An African lioness adopted three baby antelope, one died,
one was eaten by another member of the pride, but she is still caring
for one of the orphans. A dog in Belgium nursed three baby tigers after
their mother died. A captive gorilla, Koko, adopted and even invented
a name for a kitten. She called it “All ball”. A troop of
Vervet monkeys in Namibia looked after a young human for several years
showing him where to find food and how to be a monkey. He is learning
now to “be” a human through the generosity of other humans
and the adaptability of the bodymind.
In spite of a day-to-day diet of stories showing greed, violence, and
general bad behaviour generosity is still being manifested by human beings.
Over a decade ago in Liberia, West Africa, during a civil war, a newly
postpartum mother, Hilda, traveled 125 miles on foot carrying her infant
to a village in the interior. This village was the home of her girlfriend
who had gone to America, and as was the custom, had left her newborn at
home with her parents. Hilda walked back to the capital on the coast,
still carrying her own infant, and alternately carrying and leading her
friend’s child. Both women are now in the United States. The toddler
is a teenager. In another instance in West Africa, a man carried a letter
over 200 miles to the town where my friend, a refugee from that same civil
war, had traveled. Why did he do it for someone he didn’t even know
very well? He knew a letter from Canada must be important during that
time of strife.
Self-image is pervasive in every area of human experience. We have come
to accept its creations and concepts such as the nation state, governments,
economies, religions, and social roles as inevitable, natural, and “right”.
We don’t even think of them as inventions or fabrications. The strands
that have been woven out of unexamined assumptions and beliefs wrap each
and every one of us in a cocoon of misunderstanding. The strands are choking
us. When and if we are fortunate enough to find this practice of Zen we
are given the priceless opportunity to look into and open these traps.
The elegant and radical opportunity to know your own experience rather
than to “know yourself” is unique to this practice. Every
aspect of practice reveals the richness and inherent generosity of our
experience. The experienced reality of the prose of practice, such as
“Wrong action does not arise. There is only the arising of benefit.
There is only the benefit of all beings” continuously unfolds our
understanding. True, realized, and lived generosity is the basis of practice.
Our usualness is so entangling that we can get lost over and over again.
The quicksand of misunderstanding and the misguided efforts we make of
trying to figure it out or of trying to make meaning out of events pulls
us under time and time again. Each time we notice anything at all about
how we are and make the choice to practise the richness and generosity
of this moment we are making a choice for freedom and the liberation all
beings.
Be generous. Accept the generosity that is the life that is lived as you.
Take responsibility for this generosity. The most generous act, the act
of a Bodhisattva, one who is opening to openness, is the commitment to
practise and teach beyond convenience.
 
© 1999-2000
White Wind Zen Community. All rights reserved.
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