ApresZen

31 May 2008
Philadelphia, PA

Recently, I have taken to listening to dharma talks via podcasts. [In fact I am listening to one right now, as I write this. OK, I stopped now...] To a large extent this is due to my inability to spend as much time at PZI as I would like participating in talks given there by John Tarrant. Hopefully, PZI will soon post some of his talks, and I'll be able to listen to them on iTunes, but until then...

One more aside, and I promise that I'll get to the buckets. More often these days I seem to be paying attention to those "Oracles of Everyday Living" that my listening teacher, Dr Mark Brady, spoke about during the Deep Listening training at UC Santa Cruz way back when. These are the gems of wisdom - both large and small ¬- that seem to come out of the blue. They are the snippets of overheard conversation you might hear in a café, or an ad you might see that speaks to something deeper than the consumer message on its surface, or even a dharma talk podcast.

So, this one evening a few weeks ago I found myself at one of those choice points that I seem to come upon several times a day: Do I choose to look at my present condition [whatever it happens to be in this moment] from a perspective of scarcity or abundance? I've long ago put aside any effort to understand why it is so easy for me to notice scarcity. It just is. As I was thinking about all this abundance/scarcity business, I happened upon a talk that spoke to me in that way of oracles.

The dharma teacher was referencing another old Japanese master, who may have been one of her teachers. He told of the first steamship that traveled to the Amazon region. A very long way from home, these sailors began to run out of drinking water. Their situation was dire when a British steamship happened upon them as it was heading downriver. The Japanese ship signaled the other asking them for help, telling them of their urgent need for drinking water. The response they got dumbfounded them. The response from the British ship was "Put down your buckets". They thought this was either some kind of code or a problem wit language. They sent the same message, and again the same response - essentially "Drop your buckets!"

Then one of the Japanese sailors had an epiphany. He dropped a bucket into the river and pulled it up. He tasted the water and found that it was in fact fresh water more than suitable for drinking.

In Japan all the rivers are very narrow and not at all like the mighty Amazon. The Japanese assumed that any body of water that large must be comprised of seawater. They just could not imagine so much fresh water in such abundance.

Hearing this story stopped me dead in my tracks. What caught my attention most was not the lesson about unseen abundance clouded by an illusion of scarcity. There are many such tales in our collective folk memory. Rather, I was particularly moved by the realization that they were in (or on) the very abundance they were seeking. The water was not "over there" on the British ship.

Also, this story spoke to me about the power of "effortless effort" that has been on my mind of late. In this situation the empty buckets were much heavier than ones full of water. How many times have I - with considerable effort - dragged my empty bucket around with the certainty that the reason I could not fill it was that I was not trying hard enough. That sailor showed me another way. When I am paying attention to the true nature of abundance, and not to the illusion that abundance is just a lot of stuff (or more stuff than I need), then the simplest act can shift an entire universe of presuppositions, and self-fulfilling prophesies.

How strange it is to me in this moment that I find the story to be about the river, and not about the sailors on the ship, or even the buckets. Before encountering this wonderful story about the river, I suspect that I thought of abundance as an oddly fixed amount. Perhaps I held "abundance" to be one more whatever than I needed. Or maybe it was/is way more whatevers than I need. Would a small lottery jackpot suffice, or would I need one of those megazillion ones before I experienced abundance? In any event I realize now that I held abundance as some static "thing", some fixed amount - a good harvest safely tucked into the storage bins, be they the storage bins in the refrigerator, or the ones in the bank vault.

The story now serves to remind me that abundance is a constantly flowing current, and that I am in this current, and I am of this current. The challenge for me is to pay attention, to stay awake to those moments when I am so thirsty that I think I am never going to taste clean, freshwater again, or so lonely that I am never going to feel the soothing touch of another again, or so frightened...

It is at just such moments that I need to be aware of others who are even more thirsty, or lonely, or frightened. At least I can be with them, if even for a moment, and let them see my own empty bucket, and encourage them to drop their buckets alongside mine.

What act can be more simple than putting down a bucket into a flowing river?

Podcast from the Windhorse Zen Community.
Here is a piece John wrote, The Gift of Giving, that I found recently on the Internets.