Age, Eh!

For the past couple days I’ve worn a squinched-up look of perplexity and consternation on my face, ignoring my mother’s voice in my head warning me it’ll freeze like that. Is it because of our Great Debate about impartial love? The awesome responsibility of participating in a nation’s Buddhist renaissance? Fretting about whether Moojie’ll cotton to his little sister whom I’m bringing home tonight?

Nope.

It’s cuz I cracked open my email one morning and sat there blinking at a note from a college friend, My-tien. Within she offered a cheerful reminder that – can you believe it? – our 20th College Reunion was coming up this spring! Hu…wha? Twenty what? Twenty? I pulled off my socks and did some quick figuring. Got to the last little piggy and there was no denying. My baldness is no longer a youthful fluke. I’m a-gittin’ old, just like the Buddha promised.

But. I heartily agree with the Mongolian view that one does not attain the fullness of human life until age 40. Seriously. In retrospect, I see that by that age, whatever youthful talents (and/or dopiness) one possessed have been augmented and mitigated by experience, allowing for a more mature and robust approach to life.

At this point, I expect that all those 40 and older reading this are sagely nodding their heads, while those under 40 are going, “Pffft! Yeah right, ya geezer.”

Anyway, let’s ignore those whippersnappers and move on. I had wanted to discuss more about Dostoevsky, especially in relation to Father Zosima’s assessment of the worth of monks, but there’s so much happening and there’s just no time. Let’s say a couple words, though, to wrap up our talk about impartial love.

All of you were so eloquent in the comments that I have little to add except to clarify the Buddhist view of how such a nearly unimaginable thing as impartial love is possible. And, since she threw down the gauntlet, let’s use my Cuzzin Ryan’s comments as a springboard. She said:

“Love, by its very definition, means a lack of impartiality. Impartiality, by its very definition, means no one thing is more important--more loved, or less loved, more hated, less hated--than another. Impartiality, by its very definition, means objectivity.”

The Buddha agrees with sentence two, but we’re going to have to deal with one and three.

The very definition of love, within the Buddha’s teachings, is the wish for, and the actions which bring about, the happiness of others. This includes both relative happiness, and the ultimate happiness of enlightenment. Its mirror image is compassion, which seeks to alleviate the suffering of others, relatively and ultimately.

How can one apply this equally toward all sentient beings, since “sentient beings” contains both Desmond Tutu and Dick Cheney, the Moojie Woojies and deer ticks, your beloved mama and that relative who always ruins Thanksgiving dinner with his raving about the Second Amendment no matter how much you try to tease him out of it with jokes about “the right to arm bears”?

The key lies in seeing how we establish partiality, our attachment to some things and aversion to others. The Buddha points out that this is because we divide our world into “I” and “other”. Well, so what? That’s what everyone does. Well, there’s one teeny problem that has, you know, just been the root cause of every suffering we or any other being has ever experienced, ever. That “I” that we assume has on ongoing, solid existence – and in contrast to which we conceive of “other” – if we look just a liiiiitle closer, actually has no basis in reality whatsoever.

What’s the basis for thinking, “I”? Our bodies and minds, of course. But in Buddhist meditation, we break down our bodies and minds into their finest elements and find there is nothing permanent at all that we can point to and say, “Well, see? There it is. There’s ‘I’ right there.” And as we check around further, there doesn’t seem to be any findable “I” separate from our bodies and minds, either, pervading the body and mind, or elsewhere, or nuttin’ like that. It seems there are really just spaciousness and the play of appearances indivisible from that spaciousness. For a pithy summary, you can’t do better than the Heart Sutra.

This realization of egolessness as the ultimate truth of our being is one crucial aspect of Buddhist wisdom and the basis for impartial love. Why? Well, we’ve realized that the very thing by which we define partiality – ego – has no ultimate reality whatsoever and, astoundingly, never did. In this wisdom, “I” and “other” can no longer be sustained as fixed, erroneous concepts. Our attachment to ego burns off like the morning mist.

So, in contrast to Dear Cuz’s sentence three, true impartiality transcends limiting concepts of subjectivity or objectivity (“I” and “other” respectively). And when we apply this wisdom to love and the wish for happiness, it’s seen that we also can’t maintain divisive thoughts of “my” happiness and “your” happiness or, conversely, “my” suffering or “your” suffering.

Taking ego out of the equation, there is just undifferentiated suffering to be dispelled, and happiness and liberation to be gained. All sentient beings are exactly equal in this regard, in fact indivisible.

But who possesses such wisdom, and such exalted qualities of love and compassion? Lamentably, as the Buddhists texts say, such beings are like the number of stars one can see during the day compared with those one can see on a clear night. Thus the dogged persistence of all our rotten problems. It’s rare to even believe in the possibility of impartial love because we almost never see it in action.

OK, enough of that. Let’s talk about beings I love more than most others. That’s right, birds.

It’s been downright warm here, real spring. And you know what’s the most exciting part of early spring, right? Um, whatever you just thought or said, that’s not it. It’s waterfowl migration, of course! Garganey! Smew! Pochard!

So this weekend I trooped out to the gravel ponds both days. Saturday I enjoyed the company of my young ornithologist buddy Uugan and his somewhat bewildered, non-birding little brother, and Sunday Uugan and I finally nailed down the ever-busy Axel Bräunlich and another young German named Conrad, who usually birds around his home base of Tsetserleg, the capital of Arkhangai province. Here are the three of them posed in classic birding tableaux:

Axel will provide details of this and his other area birding adventures during his visit this week at Birding Mongolia soon I'm sure, but suffice to say that over the two days, I saw a lot of lovely avifauna and managed to scare up three lifers – Bean Goose (the Taiga subspecies for those of you keeping score at home), Mew Gull, and Naumann’s Thrush (it hardly needs saying, I know, but this is one of the subspecies of Dusky Thrush) – and one new bird for my Mongolia list, that great North American pest, the Common Starling (great Latin name: Sturnus Vulgaris).

BTW, this post’s title is one of the few puns on the Mongolian language I’ve managed. The Mongol word for mother is eej pronounced just like “age.” And if a Mongolian cries out to his or her mother in distress, they shout, “Eej ee!” This is said just like the title and is like yelling, “Mama!”

Oh! Speaking of puns (this one’s for you, Norma), here’s my latest favorite passage from The Brothers K, the play between a “grocery order” and the “cosmic order” undoubtedly making more sense in the original Russian, but I’ve been chuckling over the last line for days:

“ ‘No time for oysters,’ Mitya remarked, ‘and besides, I’m not hungry. You know what, Perkhotin?’ he said suddenly. ‘I really hate this lack of order…’

“ ‘Who likes it? Why, it’s ridiculous – three dozen bottles of champagne wasted on uncouth peasants…It’s enough to make anyone sick.’

“ ‘I didn’t mean that. I was talking about a higher order. There’s no order in me, you see. And so everything is hell. My life has been one continual mess and disorder, but now I’m going to try and put some order into it. Do you think I’m making puns?’

“ ‘That’s not punning – it’s raving.’”

OK, off to cut The Mooj’s claws. I’m hoping for détente when the new kitty’s introduced this evening, but just in case…and yes there’ll be pix and tales in a day or so.

Comments

[rho1640]

so sentient beings include ticks (that gave me Lyme disease and babeosis) and the ants that have invaded my bathroom... I don't think I can make that stretch to love them -- I guess it is a good thing I am a Presbyterian huh?

On aging - I know what you mean though I finally had to realize that my grey hair NOW has to do with being 53 instead of being the odd thing it was when it began in High School. And how the heck does time go so fast?

[Ryan]

Glad I could be of service, dear Cuzz. ;-)

[sarah]

Well. Smew you!

[Jae-Min Lee]

Help! I have been assigned to represent Mongolia at the model U.N! Our school was notified at the last second and I now have less than 24 hours to prepare myself!

[Konchog]

Now worries, Jae-Min. It's a small country. With an inscrutably complex 800-year history. You'll do fine.

[kmkat]

I'm so glad you explained that "Age, eh" pun. I got it, of course, but there are others who aren't as conversant in Mongolian as you and I ;-)