Self and Other

Monday dawned warm and sunny, with a new moon rising ahead of the sun; ordinarily I would have been itching to get out on my bike to enjoy the early morning quiet, but I had ridden the previous three mornings, and had decided to give myself a rest. Those had varied between sunny, and grey and damp; I hadn’t ridden that far, mostly being in maintenance mode, but those hours, together with a sunny roam on Sunday afternoon (which also involved riding across the city to get there and back) had left me tired enough.

Without the midday sitting anchoring the day, it felt spacious enough to do some studying, which I always enjoy when I give myself the time and space to do it.

Two quotes jumped out at me from my reading: the first, from a New Yorker article about Liszt, proclaimed:

‘The Lisztian virtuoso “stood for freedom, for Faustian man, for the individual in search of self-realization – free, isolated, striving, desiring.”‘

I was immediately struck by the difference between this Western avatar and that proposed by Buddhism, which was neatly encapsulated in a piece on monasticism by John Daido Loori that I read a little later:

‘The vow of selflessness is the practice of forgetting the self and realizing the ten thousand things. It is a vow of intimacy, a whole body and mind combustion of this life, a vow of realization and actualization of the Buddha way’

What is this life for? Since I also read some reviews of the new biography of Elon Musk, I feel that the Western urge for accumulation and “freedom” (for the individual) is a less mature answer than the way of the Bodhisattva. I would not claim to have forgotten the self, but I was a monastic long enough to understand the deeper virtues of compassion and interconnection. I hope that the quotes I share here (not just today’s) point to the value of that way of being.