Grace
from
The Practice of the Wild
by
Gary Snyder
There is a verse chanted by Zen Buddhists called the
"Four Great Vows." The first line goes: "Sentient beings are
numberless, I vow to save them." Shujo
muhen seigando. It's a bit daunting to announce this intention — aloud — to
the universe daily. This vow stalked me for several years and finally pounced:
I realized that I had vowed to let the sentient beings save me. In a similar way, the precept
against taking life, against causing harm, doesn't stop in the negative. It is
urging us to give life, to undo harm.
Those who attain some ultimate understanding of these
things are called "Buddhas," which means "awakened ones."
The word is connected to the English verb "to bud." I once wrote a
little parable:
Who
the Buddhas Are
All the beings of the universe are already realized.
That is, with the exception of one or two beings. In those rare cases the
cities, villages, meadows, and forests, with their birds, flowers, animals,
rivers, trees, and humans, that surround such a person, all collaborate to
educate, serve, challenge, and instruct such a one, until that person also
becomes a New Beginner Enlightened Being. Recently realized beings are
enthusiastic to teach and train and start schools and practices. Being able to
do this develops their confidence and insight up to the point that they are
fully ready to join the seamless world of interdependent play. Such new
enlightened beginners are called "Buddhas" and they like to say
things like "I am enlightened together with the whole universe" and
so forth. Boat in a Storm, 1987
Good luck! One might say. The test of the pudding is in
the eating. It narrows down to a look
at the conduct that is entwined with food. At mealtime (seated on the floor in
lines) the Zen monks chant:
Porridge is effective in ten ways
To aid the student of Zen
No limit to the good result
Consummating eternal happiness
and
Oh, all you demons and spirits
We now offer this food to you
May all of you everywhere
Share it with us together
and
We wash our bowls in this water
It has the flavor of ambrosial dew
We offer it to all demons and spirits
May all be filled and satisfied
Om
makula sai svaha
And several other verses. These superstitious-sounding
old ritual formulas are never mentioned in lectures, but they are at the heart
of the teaching. Their import is older than Buddhism or any of the world
religions. They are part of the first and last practice of the wild: Grace.
Everyone who ever lived took the lives of other animals,
pulled plants, plucked fruit, and ate. Primary people have had their own ways
of trying to understand the precept of nonharming. They knew that taking life
required gratitude and care. There is no death that is not somebody's food, no
life that is not somebody's death. Some would take this as a sign that the
universe is fundamentally flawed. This leads to a disgust with self, with
humanity, and with nature. Otherworldly philosophies end up doing more damage
to the planet (and human psyches) than the pain and suffering that is in the
existential conditions they seek to transcend...
The shimmering food-chain, the food web, is the scary,
beautiful condition of the biosphere. Subsistence people live without excuses.
The blood is on your own hands as you divide the liver from the gallbladder.
You have watched the color fade on the glimmer of the trout. A subsistence
economy is a sacramental economy because it has faced up to one of the critical
problems of life and death: the taking of life for food. Contemporary people do
not need to hunt, many cannot even afford meat, and in the developed world the
variety of food available to us makes the avoidance of meat an easy choice.
Forests in the tropics are cut to make pasture to raise beef for the American
market. Our distance from the source of our food enables us to be superficially
more comfortable, and distinctly more ignorant.
Eating is a sacrament. The grace we say clears our
hearts and guides the children and welcomes the guest, all at the same time. We
look at eggs, apples, and stew. They are evidence of plentitude, excess, a
great reproductive exuberance. Millions of grains of grass-seed that will
become rice or flour, millions of codfish fry that will never, and must never,
grow to maturity. Innumerable little seeds are sacrifices to the food-chain. A
parsnip in the ground is a marvel of living chemistry, making sugars and
flavors from earth, air, and water. And if we do eat meat it is the life, the
bounce, the swish, of a great alert being with keen ears and lovely eyes, with
foursquare feet and a huge beating heart that we eat, let us not deceive
ourselves.
We too will be offerings — we are all edible. And if we
are not devoured quickly, we are big enough (like old down trees) to provide a
long slow meal to the smaller critters. Whale carcasses that sink several miles
deep in the ocean feed organisms in the dark for fifteen years. (It seems to
take about two thousand to exhaust the nutrients in a high civilization.)
At our house we say a Buddhist grace
We venerate the Three Treasures [teachers, the wild, and
friends]
And are thankful for this meal
The work of many people
And the sharing of other forms of life.
Anyone can use a grace from their own tradition (and
really give it meaning) — or make up their own. Saying some sort of grace is
never inappropriate, and speeches and announcements can be tacked onto it. It
is a plain, ordinary, old-fashioned little thing to do that connects us with
all our ancestors.
A monk asked Dong-shan: "Is there a practice for
people to follow?" Dong-shan answered: "When you become a real
person, there is such a practice."
Sarvamangalam, Good Luck to All
