- Sensei Sevan Ross
Thursday evening. Famine Relief Ceremony. The staff are all sitting, and there are also several other local Sangha members who have made the trip to the Center for the ceremony. Many of them and all the residents have fasted today. A taste of hunger, so to speak. We sit, then we begin the service. Chanting; lights go low during the circumambulation, a starving child is pictured on the altar. We offer prostrations, money, incense. We leave the Zendo in silence. We go home. Why do we do this? What is it in the act itself that is not articulated in our stated purpose, that is not present in our daily lives?
A member has died. We again have a picture on the altar. We light incense and chant. We chant almost every chant we know. In the funeral service that first marks the death, we read the "Flowers" poem to the deceased. In the other services following a death we simply chant, and offer a prayer to Bodhisattvas to aid the deceased in the bardo. Why do we come together to ask the help of Bodhisattvas? Why do we speak as a group to the deceased now that he or she is gone? How many of us have expressed the feelings for the dead that are in the "Flowers" poem when the person was alive and could have heard us, could have smiled back at us in thanks and recognition?
A member is ill. She is about to undergo a medical procedure that is as life- threatening as her disease. At the hour of the procedure we again find ourselves in the Zendo, chanting, possibly circumambulating, offering incense, perhaps appealing to Bodhisattvas. Do we do these things only to "cure" her, or is there something in ceremony itself, something beyond bonding with other like-minded people in our mutual hour of need?
It is my own ordination ceremony. Practically everyone I know in the local Sangha is here. Why have all these people come to see me take the precepts and exchange one robe for another? I find that I am not nervous. I have few enough lines, and the biggest technical worry is around my slipping into the kesa when the time comes. I feel warm and happy and thrilled to be here. All questions about all ceremonies are here.
In this one ceremony I am the focus of the coming together. All public declarations are made by me. All have come, it would appear, to watch me do something. Really, all have come to affirm my actions and declarations. No, really, all have come here today to affirm that they are me, to touch through ceremony the unity that we all are. All of us put on the robes, all of us make the declarations. All of us empower the ceremony through our actions, through the creation of an environment unique to ceremony that focuses attention on silent moments of activity that all share, on bare moments when time is stopped and the true nature of everything is accessible through specific physical acts. These moments are the heart of every ceremony, in every tradition.
Ceremony not empowered by the individual in her complete involvement in the moment tends to become mere ritual. Ritual in turn, upon enough repetitions, can become reduced to habit. At the end of the evening sitting there is ceremony, ritual, and habit in the recitation of the Four Vows. Each level of empowerment and involvement is available to each participant. Few people remain consistently at the level of ceremony. In sesshin one can witness the growing number of people involved in true ceremony as the sesshin wears on. Typically, the Four Vows and the chanting services in sesshin become more powerful as the sesshin goes on. This is evidence of the rise to ceremony happening for each person, albeit at different rates and levels. Chanting itself becomes more corporeal, less cerebral, the closer one gets to true ceremony.
It is not so important that ceremony attempt the difficult. Healing the sick, saving the dead, making a couple into a marriage, making a priest out of a layman these are all places where we may find true ceremony, the movement from the verbal to the silent, from individuals to unification in This. The apex of these progressions is what may be called singularity, or nexus. But even in less ambitious ceremonies we find these elements. Who would argue that their New Student Ceremony did not have a profound effect, was not very memorable? Consider even a Rakusu Ceremony. Remember that moment of silence when you put it on. There are no Buddha Halls filled with people in these ceremonies. Mountains are not moved here. But we can still find in them these moments of singularity, when time stops, words are absent, and all observers disappear.
These moments are watersheds, hinge moments; they are moments when it is clear to us, even the less sensitive of us, that we have passed through some gateway and entered a new universe. They are not awakenings, but there is realization in them. They are doors to the next world for us. We come upon them with intention, with our eyes wide open, with expectation of deliverance from our current mindstates, the current state of affairs. We are aware that, if we put the proper attention on the ceremony, if we get beneath the level of mere observation, we will find ourselves in one or more of these magic freeze-frame moments of transformation. All ceremonies are designed as vehicles for these moments.
We should be clear here that these singularities only transform us if we drop the observer. There are what we can call companion moments in all ceremonies when we are indeed arrested by events before us and even catch ourselves commenting silently to ourselves about them. "Wow, I'm getting married here!" "Jack is really dead!" "Here I am! I can't believe I'm doing this!" But precious as these moments are, and memorable as they may be, they fall short of singularity in that they are defined by an observer who is separated from events. While they may be important moments, they do not have the power of fundamental transformation.
But as we continue to practice, we have an openness to singularity in ceremony that actually spills over from the ceremony into our daily life. (Or, we could argue, spills into both of these arenas from the zazen mat.) An extended nexus is opened for us through practice. Everything, every moment reveals itself as singularity.
But ceremonies are carefully constructed to provide these silent, pivotal moments of awareness. While in the Famine Relief Ceremony we may offer incense and money to those suffering from hunger, the magic of the evening happens when we personally first step in front of the altar and gaze at a photo of a starving person. On every level we suddenly see ourselves. We are at once transfixed and transformed by this moment of identity. In some way we are widened, opened. Our compassion is tapped through our eyes. For one second we "see," and we can never go back to who we were. The ceremony has beckoned us to this place. The chanting has done its job it has shorted out our discriminating mind. The lights have gone low everywhere but on the picture. The circumambulation is choreographed so that we have only a precious second at the altar. This heightens our attention. The gates are ajar. All channels are open. Our universe becomes the starving child.
In a funeral or healing service, we have already invested a lot of energy focusing on the sick or deceased person before the ceremony even starts, by passing around his or her photograph. We are primed. What we need from this ceremony is focus, direction, a channel for our compassion. Someone has died. How can we do anything about this? The person is dead! On one level we are helpless, yet rare is the individual who will not attend a funeral service because he thinks the game is over, scored with a loss. We know that this is not "understandable." We trust instincts; we here involve ourselves in an activity that is unlike the rest of our lives. Praying to Bodhisattvas makes its own sense, has its very own currency. Helping the dead through the Bardo becomes as straightforward an endeavor as laying bricks, once we surrender ourselves to it and let our discursive mind flop around as it will, without paying further attention to it. I remember Roshi once saying to a member who was scoffing at the notion of help from Bodhisattvas that if one doesn't believe that Bodhisattvas can help, they can't.
In the funeral service itself one freeze-frame moment is the "Flowers" poem. Here the dead merge into us, and we into them. We hear what is said to the deceased. We become his or her living ears. We hear that all of us are red flowers, black flowers, blue flowers. In later memorial services, the second the words "Oh Bodhisattvas . . . " are spoken at the start of the prayer, we rise to the level of Bodhisattvas to look them in the eye and directly petition them. We are here on business, to aid our sister or brother, to aid ourselves, to appeal for a little light in the darkness from beings clearly capable of shedding this light. They are just like us, but being more fully realized, they can help us in ways that we cannot help ourselves. And we ask them directly to do this. No pussyfooting around here: "Forget not your ancient vows!"
In the healing service we again reach a moment of identity when we see the photograph, and thus ourselves. Can we help cure the sick through ceremony? Vimalakirti reminds us that the only real sickness to be concerned with is the sickness of delusion. However, I have personally heard from more than a few people who, having known that a healing service was being done for them, got tangible physical and psychological benefit from that knowledge. And I am reminded of the old saying that if you pray hard enough, water will run uphill. How hard do you have to pray? Hard enough for water to run uphill, of course. But aside from this, when each participant in the ceremony unites with the sick person (or more accurately recognizes at some level the unity already there), who could set limits on the healing power that we have in "ourselves?"
At my ordination there were many moments of unity, of recognition. I was the last one to enter the Buddha Hall after the Prajna Paramita was chanted. All those people, one voice! I finally understood why people cheer rockets as they go up they are all in the little space ship at the tip of the rocket. I said to myself as I got to the top of the stairs and started down the aisle, "We are all of us here to be ordained today. How wonderful!" Early on, when Sensei talked to me about the significance of the ceremony as I sat there in front of him, I had another "companion moment." "I am really being ordained here," went through my head. I had involuntary flashes of my weddings. These ceremonies had similar moments as we closed in on the "I do" part.
But when I stood at last to actually put on the Buddha's Robe, the Kesa, as Sante helped me straighten it, while I alone stood there in silence, the church bell next door tolled, and there was a true ceremonial singularity.
All true ceremony has at its heart these moments of clarity, unity, nexus. We are all aware that before the ceremony there is A, after the ceremony, B. And no one believes that it is merely the hocus pocus of the ceremony's elements that changes us. Even die-hards cry at funerals and weddings. I once attended a wedding conducted entirely in Russian. We all cried anyway. When she looked at him as she slipped the ring on his finger, we all cried. I'll never forget her smile as long as I live and I never even knew her name.