That's Funny, You Don't Look Buddhist by Sylvia Boorstein

Author:Sylvia Boorstein
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9780062031280
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 1997-01-01T10:00:00+00:00

Abounding Love

SOME MONTHS AGO A FRIEND REMARKED, “JUDAISM AS a religious path is limited because, at its very best, it develops a loving heart. It doesn’t take the step of seeing through separateness to ultimate emptiness as the source of all form.” I don’t recall my exact response, but it doesn’t matter because I have a more up-to-date response now. My current response also addresses a related remark I heard twenty years ago: “Metta (lovingkindness) practice is helpful as a concentration practice to steady the mind for insight practice, which is the only true path to enlightenment. With metta alone the practitioner is always trapped in the illusion that there is someone separate wishing well to someone else.” I don’t believe it. It’s not my experience.

Recently, I was one of twenty people praying Shacharit (morning service) outdoors on the top of a hill, at Rose Mountain Retreat Center in New Mexico on the last day of a mindfulness retreat I was co-leading with my friend Rabbi Shefa Gold. We were chanting Ahavah Rabah Ahavtanu (With abounding love You have loved us), just those three words over and over. We stood in a circle, shoulders and arms touching, but not hands. That was important. I felt alone in my space, not holding on, but completely supported. I looked around at the people with me, now familiar to me because in my teaching role I’d met with each of them individually during the week and knew something of their stories. As always, because I have stylistic affinities and preferences, some of the people had seemed more on my wavelength than others.

I looked around at everyone in the circle and knew, happily, that I felt the same benevolence toward all of them. Plain benevolence. There aren’t degrees of benevolence. Benevolence is impartial. A peaceful heart notices, and recognizes, and remembers, and stays peaceful. Once again, I discovered that a benevolent heart is the ultimate refuge and the ultimate support. Sylvia’s memory was there, but Sylvia’s ego-based flutterings of the heart toward and away from people weren’t happening. “I am being God, loving abundantly,” was my first thought. Then I realized, “No, God is loving these people abundantly through me because I’m not in the way. I am not here.” My body and my perception and my memory were certainly operative but the sense of myself as separate—separate from any person or separate from God—had disappeared.

This is not a new discovery. I’ve known it for many years, unforgettably, since I put my foot down on a walking path in the middle of a mindfulness retreat in Yucca Valley, California, and knew for certain that no one was walking. What I enjoyed discovering (probably rediscovering) is “This is how Jews discover emptiness!” And I thought about the chant we had done earlier, “God, the soul You gave me is pure,” and thought, “I could say that as, ‘The space through which consciousness appears to register on a personal level is absolutely boundless. All seemingly separating veils are illusions, shadows that block the light.

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