"The student of the Buddha refuses to crave pleasure even in the form of heaven."  -- The Dhammapada, Chapter 14

I used to spend weekends at the Ann Arbor temple in this training program they had where you'd live there from Friday evening to Sunday afternoon, doing work around the temple when you weren't practicing.  There was this fellow about my age -- young -- whose parents had been students of a Tibetan lama back in the Seventies or something.  So he'd been around Buddhist temples all his life, and he could be a kind of spiritual know-it-all, as I recall.

I remember one evening we were in the laundry room in the basement washing sheets or something, and he unwraps some sort of little stick and a bunch of little crystals from a cloth that he'd had them rolled up in.  The stick had all of these little stones and things stuck to it and was actually quite beautiful, really smooth and stained, and it was obvious someone had put a lot of care and attention into making it.  This fellow started washing the stick in the sink and telling me about how he'd driven all the way to Colorado to get it from a shaman who had made it for him.  There was a whole story about this shaman that I don't remember anymore.

When he put the stick down, I reached for it to take a closer look.  He got a little upset; he actually sort of barked "Don't touch that!" before explaining, "I consider that my medicine."  I was made to understand that I had tainted it somehow. 

About a minute later, Haju came out.  Haju Sunim is the temple priest in Ann Arbor and her room is right near the laundry room, so I'm guessing she'd heard our whole conversation.  Anyhow, this guy was halfway through washing all these little crystals when she came out and said, "Stop wasting water!  Enough!  And take all of your little things up to your room." 

When we spiritually fetishize anything -- whatever form heaven takes in our minds -- we disrespect everything else at least a little bit.  How about we stop looking elsewhere; stop privileging this over that; stop thinking that holiness is sitting on a mountain in Colorado.  Mundane ol' tap water is precious beyond measure. 

Two years ago, Bassara and I went to the one-hundred day memorial service of Zen Master Seung Sahn at his temple in north Seoul, Hwagyesa, where he'd passed away the previous November.  Just recently I was reading something one of his former students, Joan Halifax Roshi, had written about being at one of the memorials for ZM Seung Sahn -- I'm not sure which one, exactly, because all over the world there were services at forty-nine days and one-hundred days and now every year.

Anyhow, she was describing watching ZM Seung Sahn's monks, reading their faces during the ceremony, which is something I did, too.

Afterward, she asked one of these monks (who is also a friend of hers) how he'd felt during the ceremony.  You know what he said?

"Hungry."  Apparently he hadn't eaten all day.

As one of ZM Seung Sahn's students, he could very easily have thought, "Oh, I should express deep sadness," or maybe even a kind of monkish imperviousness to deep sadness.  But his answer is so direct, so honestly unwilling to privilege his ideas over the truth. 

When I read this, I thought of that old Zen story of the monk up in the cave trying to keep warm in the winter.  He's got a little firepit, and when he runs out of wood, he plucks the wood Buddha off his altar and feeds the fire with it, just like that.  This story has always been a little shocking because it insults whatever tendencies we have to hold even the Buddhadharma apart as something somehow lofty and special and separate.  

And what we tend to uphold as better than everything else are not just our versions of heaven -- statues and religious objects and medicine sticks, and probably most of all our ideas of who we're supposed to be as practitioners and what this should look like in any given situation. . . .   People new to the temple sometimes worry that we're bowing to "false gods" because of all the bowing we do.  We're actually not bowing to any gods here, but I always wonder, “what about the false gods of status and celebrity and wealth and fame and all these things that collectively we're obsessed with”?  There's a way in which we get worn down or sort of numb to the effects of our environment that Zen practice really very directly exposes.

Ango recently was telling me about our friend, Mark, who lives in Mexico City now.  A couple years ago, when Mark returned to Michigan and the two of them were hanging out, there was a commercial on t.v. for Joe's Crab Shack.  It showed a huge table filled to overflowing with just piles of seafood and then this slow-motion close-up of this huge lemon bursting out over everything.  And Mark was just disgusted and started sort of ranting about American gluttony and excess.

Apparently, only two or three weeks later they saw this same commercial and Mark's like, "Oh man, we need to go to Joe's Crab Shack!"

We just get worn down, y'know?  It's funny, actually, when we really look at how we're always chasing something else.  Someone recently said to me, "My life is just not going the way I want it to go."  Well where are we trying to get to, anyway? 

We read all these teachings in the Dhammapada or the other sutras, and it's important to remember that something like "not craving even heaven" always points to our moment-to-moment existence here, now, which is the only place our habit-energies, our cravings, ever exist. 

The other day I read about this study that was apparently done in 1998 at the University of Leeds in London.  Researchers asked people to choose between a healthy snack (a banana) and an unhealthy snack (chocolate) to be eaten one week from that day.  Seventy-four percent of the people picked the healthy snack.  The day the snack was to be served, though, they were asked again to choose between the healthy and unhealthy snacks.  What do you think happened when the choice no longer involved some abstract future?  Seventy percent now chose the unhealthy snack.

When our choices involve tomorrow, it's easy to be upright, isn't it?  It's easy to make New Year's resolutions; but how often do we actually keep them?  It's easy to say we're going to do more Zen practice without ever getting up for prostrations when the alarm goes off, to say nothing of paying attention to our cravings in that very moment when the thought of doing more practice strikes us.  

But right now is the only time we're ever actually seduced by our heavens and the only place we can ever actually let go of them.  And what we're really seduced by are our own ideas, no?  How about this:  "The student of the Buddha refuses to crave pleasure even in the form of her own ideas." 

The more we identify with our ideas, the more that we think we are these things floating in and out of our heads, the scarier it is to think of letting them go.  And be careful even of thinking you need to let them go -- that's just another thought, isn't it?  And that's okay, actually.  Why wouldn't it be?  Thinking is just thinking. 

But that's all it is.