Blooming in the Bardo

05.08.2020 BLOOMING IN THE BARDO As I write this, I’m in week seven of “self-isolation” with my husband and teenage son, doing my part to slow the spread of the coronavirus. Just over two weeks ago, a gunman was shot down thirty minutes from my home, after a killing spree that left twenty-two people dead, the worst mass shooting in Canadian history. Yesterday, it snowed, covering the green grass and spring flowers.  Nothing is as it should be. The world has been turned upside down.   Like you, perhaps, I’m trying to make sense of this moment. In my search for answers, I’ve turned to the teachings we’ve published in Buddhadharma over the past eighteen years, eager to find the missing pieces of what feels like a challenging puzzle. As I comb through back issues, I find myself gravitating to one word in particular: “bardo.”   In her article “Breaking Open in the Bardo,” Pema Khandro Rinpoche describes the bardo as “that state in which we have lost our old reality” and don’t yet know what our new reality might be. It arises from a disruption, or rupture, in our old way of seeing and being, and brings with it a sense of groundlessness and uncertainty. Our instinct is to fill in the story as quickly as we can so that we can hold on to some sense of self and continuity in our lives. But when the rupture is big, we’re unable to.   In “Koans for Troubled Times,” Joan Sutherland talks about the things that come to “fetch us” — “the cook coughs or the morning star rises, and we fall open.” It doesn’t matter whether we consider these moments good, bad or indifferent. Everything, Sutherland, reminds us, is the Way: “There are no detours from the Way; we can’t lose our Way. To engage and entangle ourselves with whomever and whatever we meet, to care about them, to throw our lot in with them — that is the Way.”   Whether you’ve been broken open or fetched, chances are you too feel the ground trembling beneath you. What if we were to meet this moment fully?   In “Steadfast in the Midst of Samsara,” Shinshu Roberts points out that bodhisattvas grow strong in the midst of difficulty, and we are no different: “We are the very same bodhisattvas; we too bloom in fire. Without the fire, blooming cannot happen — without difficulty, we cannot respond with realized action.”   Is it possible that collectively we might emerge from this bardo with a sense of blooming?   Time will tell. Likely it will depend at least in part on how we choose to engage with this uncertain time. If we rail against it and cling to the vestiges of what we’ve previously known, we may miss an opportunity to find solutions to some of the pernicious social and environmental problems we’ve contributed to. If we shore up our sense of self and resist the gap that this bardo affords, we may never know what we’re truly capable of. Yet if we choose to be brave and allow grief, fear, and love to tenderize and expand our hearts and minds, we might come closer to understanding and integrating the Buddha’s teachings.   Whatever response we choose, we won’t be alone, even when we might think we are. As Shinshu Roberts explains, “We are dependent on the effort of every being and thing, and in this way are supported in ways we cannot see or know. All around us, the world is making its effort to meet ours, just as we meet its effort. We are in this together with all beings throughout time and space, making the world.” —Tynette Deveaux, editor, Buddhadharma

Breaking Open in the Bardo Pema Khandro Rinpoche explains four essential points for understanding what it means to let go, and what is born when we do. When things fall apart, we can only be as we are. Pretense and striving fall away, and life becomes starkly simple. The value of such moments is this: we are shown that the game can be given up and that when it is, the emptiness we feared, emptiness of the void, is not what’s there. What is there is the bare fact of being. Simple presence remains.

Koans for Troubled Times How do we as Buddhists meet the challenges of our time? Joan Sutherland shares the history of koans, which were created to deal with a difficult period in Chinese history. Anyone who claims to have an explanation for what’s going on probably doesn’t, whether it’s from a political or metaphysical or conspiratorial or any other perspective. It’s a good time to be asking questions, to appreciate the grounding of the ordinary mind in its impulses to make a warm breakfast on a cold day and to research what it would take to become carbon-neutral. In other words, there is a unity between our inner lives and the outer world, a continuum that only appears to be separated into pieces that are sometimes in conflict. Turn too far toward your own heart/mind and you become self-obsessed; turn too far in the other direction and you burn out. Bring an attitude of warmth and curiosity to both and the Way begins to open on its own.

Steadfast in the Midst of Samsara Shinshu Roberts examines the suffering inherent in the bodhisattva path, what Dogen referred to as being “the blue lotus in the flame.” We can only enter nirvana through the gate called birth and death, our life of problems. We think the way out of our problems is to squash them, ignore them, or run away from them, but Dogen says it doesn’t work that way. The only way our problems can be transformed from suffering to realization is by engaging the problem itself. We have to stay and stay until we understand. As our understanding deepens, staying is not a problem. We continue to stay because we are the blue lotus awakened, now blooming in the fire of this samsaric world. Now there is birth-and-death-nirvana. We meet our life and we are affirmed by our life. We enact this process over and over again because each situation or encounter is always new. Each time, we become a little more skillful.

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