zen food prayer & social justice (with a six realm sideliner)

[aside: Hi. Been a while. I've missed writing about things - sometimes helps me develop worldview about a particular thing. Not that thinking and worldview are everything...but occasionally it's nice to have practiced language about a thing.]

I first came across this particular chant at sesshin with Richard Clarke that my instructor Steve Kaufmann invited me to. I took a liking to it immediately, and have been running through it at all my meals for the last few months:

This food comes from the labors of beings past and present.

From it our body-mind is nourished, our practice sustained.

Gratefully we accept this meal.
We take this food to attain the Buddha-way.

Our meal is offered to Buddha, Dharma and Sangha.

With teachers and family, with nations and all life let us equally share.

To beings throughout the six realms we offer this meal.

All hungry ghosts! All tortured spirits!

Now we give you this Dharma-food.

May it fill the ten directions and satisfy hunger in realms of darkness.

All hungry ghosts! All tortured spirits!

Abandon greed and rouse the desire for enlightenment.

I thought I'd pass on and clarify for myself my particular practice with this chant at this point. I suppose this is a "commentary," but I think of it more like a snapshot of a practice at a particulra point with a particular person. Commentary shmomentary.

As I chant the lines, I try to "fill them" with a certain emotional and conceptual relevancy to real life. So I'm not just chanting away - I'm trying to work with certain visualizations and emotions. Here's the run down at this point, though it's a bit different every time and a work in progress.

This food comes from the labors of beings past and present.

I think of farm-laborers first and particular injustices. I generally flash on images of migrant, often undocumented workers picking in fields, the "concept" of social injustice in that area, food insecurity with those who provide the rest of us with food, and similar images. My mind flashes to non-human beings and processes in the food flow, animals macro and micro-scopic that provide manure and sustain the life cycle of grown food. In the span of just about that sentence, it's enough to quickly acknowledge the infinite beings that have produced the food. If I know where the food comes from (my garden, local farms, my partner Margo's place), I make those visualizations and emotions more specific - appreciating her and her farm help, or appreciating the mentors and friends that have supported me in producing my first year's garden crop. This is a line to bring up appreciation, acknowledge a debt to beings, and rouse the desire (used to motivate action!) for social justice around food.

From it our body-mind is nourished, our practice sustained.

Here I remember that in the zen worldview, body and mind are one...or at least not discretely "two," separate. I notice that I am not eating food for purely pleasurable reasons, and definitely not to take away stress as a place to "run to"... I am eating to sustain my practice. And while I've had many a sitting trying to find "practice" and not being able to - I often seem to conceptualize my self through the lens of a boundaried, "known" (vs. lived) practice - it's still the case that I *am* participating in a practice here. I'm trying to make my efforts toward the "good." Yeah, that bodhisattva ideal can turn dangerous, heady, etc... but it certainly seems to me, in my life, for me it's important to maintain that direction towards the ideal with a big heaping of a self-critical eye and waryness of the tendency to hide from life by having "life direction." All those admonitions aside, this food is for practice. I have a feeling of practicing acknowledgement that body and mind are not two and a feeling of offering the food to my practice...and reaffirming my (ha!) intention (empty skanda without essence, but still!) to the bodhisattva vow.

Gratefully we accept this meal.

Time to double check my gratefulness, in case I didn't arouse the emotion beforehand and was too conceptual. Emotion of gratefulness...

We take this food to attain the Buddha-way.

Again, a nice double-check on the buddha way. Usually my mind goes to the place of "attain" vs. "realize" - that Buddhahood isn't a state at a distance on attains like getting first place in a race or something you find burried... it's a state that (rumor seems to have it) I've always been and may find benefit in discovering it is so. I remind myself again that food is for practice - though can be appreciated "independent" of my practice... or really, appreciated from my practice instead of just appreciated for my practice. I remind myself that buddhahood doesn't exist as a external concept on the word "attain."

Our meal is offered to Buddha, Dharma and Sangha.

Time to remember the treasures. I bring appreciation for teachers and the buddha's particular teaching of liberation from suffering; appreciation of the dharma as a common, "natural law" governing cause and effect (particular what brings suffering and dissatisfaction and what brings pleasure) discoverable by anyone who pays enough attention; and to the community of practitioners (including very much so my social justice community/family of activists pursuing ideals of ending injustice and sufferings of marginalized groups). These three points happen as specific emotional flashes attached to a jumble of images - they're fast, not "stories"... more like memories I arouse or create at the time.

With teachers and family, with nations and all life let us equally share.

I hold a feeling of ever-widening appreciation here. Here's where generic well-wishing that builds and motivates action goes for far away places - developing countries with food insecurity and war, identification of the first-world's unjust practice of gathering profits while outsourcing costs to other coutries, unequal pay... So I have this feeling of moving out of circles of appreciation and need for care from those close to me whom I feel direct appreciation for to those I don't know or I wouldn't "like" (stereotyped categories of those with seemingly uncaring political or personal sensibilities) that I feel sympathy for. Incidentally, there's something about the foursome of "teachers and family, with nations and all life" that's often tricky for my tongue. Sometimes I start with family instead of teachers and get mealy-mouthed.

To beings throughout the six realms we offer this meal.

The six realms are sometimes seen as different planes of existence, almost like how heaven and hell exist and have an external reality in the pop-Christian sense (angels and harps! fire and pitchforks!). Instead of vertical, they're more circular...and unlike pop-Christianity where heaven is better than hell, only this plane is sort of "privileged" above others, including heaven. That is, it's no better (though it feels better) to be in heaven than to be in hell (the animal realm, for instance). In the human realm we have just the right balance of pleasure and pain, dissatisfaction and awareness to generate the notice true dharma and drive a little wedge in the system so we can get out of the cycle of dissatisfaction caused by our own actions (personal and collective) causing consequences. Now, a lot of that seems to happen through a process of karmic, habitual thinking (not what most folks think, in my mind) and consequent conceptualization of events from a certain point-of-view that generates dissatisfaction...but I'm not going to get into that. Anyway, here I'm mindful of how I am in a position of privilege to bumble through something close to practice - when many other states aren't. I specifically conceptualize of the six realms in a human, social justice context instead of a purely mythical context:

Deva/God Realm: The realm of bliss. It's "immaterial" or not one of the "sense" realms, which I conceptualize to parallel a purely conceptual bliss independent from reality you'd actually experience if you related meaningfully to the rest of existence. In the human context, I see this as anyone either too blissed out on false, feel-good-all-the-time spirituality... or the phenomenon of someone having a lot of privilege (money or wealth, race privilege, straight privilege, etc.) that believes life is just so wonderful... but never really gets to know other people's experiences. In the human Buddha story, this is the state Siddhartha Gautama was in before his tour of the city and the four signs that lead him to realize his perception of reality was blinded by his father (and his willingness!). So, stereotypically, some rich, white, male, capitalism-lovin' Republican that thinks life's pretty damn great and just and that working class folks should just work harder and be more ethical (or that we'd a-ok in this environmental crisis) is in this realm. If they came down the real world and spent time deeply listening to the stories of working class people they (after a probably long emotional process) might feel a bit less blissful. This is a realm to have sympathy for, since they can't really develop relationships on our plane - it's all ideas within their own head... but they lose all the real texture of life because of their blinders, necessary to maintain a blissful worldview.

Asura/Demi-God Realm: This is the realm of privilege, but drama and jealousy. A parallel in our human realm, to me, is the upper/owning class experience. Fights about family money and crazy relationship stresses are real for beings in this realm... Watch most episodes of reality TV and the interpersonal drama is 99% composed of (so I hear, anyway; like I have a TV!). Whenever things are really, really good overall but drama seems to pervade we're talking about this realm. Within myself, I find this realm's presence when I lose perspective on practice and start stressing and feeling sorry for myself in some area...whenever relationship stresses get cyclic from too much attention or I start to get too materialistic, I'm rockin' the Deva realm. Check Louis CK's "Everythink's amazing, nobody's happy" skit for a perfect description of this realm. This realm should be sympathized with, as beings can't appreciate what they have or find meaning and peace in relationships...with everything swirling around them in a stress-causing mess.

Animal Realm: This realm symbolizes stupidity, prejudice and knee-jerk reactions. Now, here's where comparison to humans is going to be rough: I think the application of this realm to human existence is as a label for "acting like an animal." Racist violence and hate crimes are symbols of this. In the less "intense" versions in my own mind, my own stereotyping habits and group-think (like cultural brainwashing I'm still trying to shake off) are symbols of me habitually acting like an animal. I also extend this realm to situations where, due to injustice, beings are short on basic needs and driven to compete, often desperately, for those basics. If we could act like a more united humanity, or more united life, we could certainly do away with this - the myth that there is just isn't enough isn't true (according to some engineers doing bigtime conversions and analysis: per person, if we could subsist on the material and energy resources within 4 acres of arable land, all humans on earth could be sustained). There is enough for every man's need, but not everyone's greed, Matatma Ghandhi said. This realm should be sympathized with, as acting like an animal keeps beings from joyfully deriving meaning from our connection to true, wide community - with other humans of diverse backgrounds, with animals and our living earth, etc.

Preta/Hungry Ghost Realm: This realm is symbolized in Buddhist iconography with beings with big stomachs (and hunger!) and pin-hole mouths and represents an inability to be satisfied. The human parallel is not beings who are starving (actually, they'd be in the hell realm, unfortunately) - their hunger is physically real and physically satisfiable. This represents materialism and our run-away consumer culture, as does any sort of desire-based dissatisfaction. Got to have the newest gizmo? Knit the next scraf? Be efficient in the 30 seconds between phone calls you're making in the car? Even "when I get a better cushion, I'll be happier" can be hungry ghost-speak. The idea you'll be satisfied just around the bend is often (1) just not true and (2) symbolic of this particular area of suffering. My mental keystone for this realm is that applying some skill and being capable of being satisfied by its application are two very different skill sets. The capacity to be satisfied, I would suggest, is a single skill that can applied everywhere and practiced (though doesn't mean something won't motivate you to helpful action). Got a free minute between things? Yes, be efficient (I mean, I love GTD, I'm not knocking efficiency here...), but be capable of doing nothing, also.

Hell Realm: Psychologically, hell realm is meant to describe intense states of hatred. It's like being so angry you can't think straight (or practice, or live). In the human parallel, I further extend this realm to describe situations where you're suffering and in threat of your very life to really practice much. So soldiers in wartime, the starving, even some inner city environments seem like hell to me. If you're worrying about your next meal or not getting shot, that's likely to interrupt your ability to see how the mind works and get to deeper realizations about true satisfaction and peace. Not impossible, certainly: great beings have come out of craaaazy situations, but these environments resist that movement strongly. I mentally divide this realm from the animal realm by whether you're furiously competing for basics (animal) or primarily suffering from the absence of basic comforts/needs (hell). Beings in this realm are obviously ones to sympathize with, as their strong hatred or just their absence of food, water and shelter are roadblocks to peace.

Human Realm: Rock on. As rare a situation as a single turtle coincidentally poking its head through a single knothole of a log adrift on the entire ocean, it's said. Rebirth aside, I take this rarity to be: in this life, it seems like the circumstances that have the balance of privileges (like low-level mental and physical ability), environment, opportunity to hear teachings, with just enough experience with brainwashing culture to see the craziness without being drawn into it, able to move through teachings without being caught by their seductive nature... are so, so rare. I have no idea how I'm lucky enough to have happened on teachers (of Buddhism, of community social justice work - especially dismantling oppression work, of bodywork like Tang Soo Do, aikido and tai chi), family and community and enough leisure time to both work and practice. This circumstance certainly leaves me feeling the luckiest person the world. The human realm is characterized by a balance of dissatisfaction and sufferings with opportunities to be aware of their causes and effects, to even hear and karmicly to make some sense of teachings. It's the place where practice transforms bad circumstances into opportunities to see what the natural law is and improve our action's effectiveness and really producing lasting happiness. Older mahayana primary texts like the first volume of Tsong-Kha-Pa's "Great Tretice on the Stages of the Path to Enlightenment (the Lamrim Chenmo), identify other characteristics of our lives as humans that are conductive to practice, even things like many of us live long enough to practice but could die at any time and live not so long that we become complacent and too patient.

OK, six realms are done. :-) And ultimately as I hope I illustrated some, I think all of these states exist within each of us simultaneously...and sometimes a situation or environment might be characterized by multiple or all realms at once as well. They characterize some of our habitual "voices," they describe some of our unfortunate knee-jerk responses to experiences.

Let's move on! It's getting late and I have to teach in the morning...

All hungry ghosts! All tortured spirits!

Now we give you this Dharma-food.

May it fill the ten directions and satisfy hunger in realms of darkness.

OK, so I conceptualize the idea of beings hungry with desire who are incapable of being satisfied. At this point in the group chant we all hold up a small bit of our food - a nut or something - to place in the offering bowl that goes to the teacher to deal with. I also generate the wish to be satisfied by my food here and now, to actually not act like a hungry ghost myself with this meal. It's dharma-food, to me, in the sense that we're offering teaching as much as we are offering food... but that food, good, simple, local, just (in the sense of "justice", not "only") food is a perfect opportunity to be satisfied, is, in fact, one of the natural teachers of the specific dharma on being capable of being satisfied. Just eating something (now, in the sense of "only!") is a teacher of this truth, with an opportunity to listen to and practice and REALize those teachings a number of times a day. The "ten directions" (gosh, with the numbers... thank you oral traditions!) are the four cardinal directions, the four combos (like south east and northwest) and up and down. Basically it just means everywhere. I visualize it as a ten vectors from a point that can be combined to make all directions (cuz I'm a geek). Technically we only need six orthagonal vectors (four cardinal directions and up and down), but sometimes Buddhism exaggerates when it talks about infinites, like the 88,000 whatevers.

All hungry ghosts! All tortured spirits!

Abandon greed and rouse the desire for enlightenment.

This is a combo - I wish for other beings to be capable of being satisfied in their own particular lives...by noticing how dissatisfaction works at a basic level and then generating the wish to free themselves and other beings (of cultural baggage, of habitual thinking from greed/hate/delusion or non-human realm thinking, etc.) simultaneously through practice and good works. And I wish for myself, again, to abandon greed in general and in the eating of this meal and to renew my own vow for enlightenment.

Whew. Just describing 30 seconds of my head took waay too long. May it somehow be of benefit. Best wishes.