The stories we live

Last updated on: December 29, 2008 at 5:39 am by Justin Whitaker

The stories we live 2008-12-29T05:39:00-07:00 Justin Whitaker

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“Our narrative approach to ethics is founded on the assumption that our understanding of good and evil is primarily shaped by the kind of story we think we are in and the role we see ourselves playing in that story.”

– Fasching and Dechant, Comparative Religious Ethics: A Narrative Approach p.6

What is the story we think we are in? For me – here – it is that of an American Buddhist. But how American I consider myself is certainly debatable. A friend of mine asked me a year or so ago, when I was living in London, how it felt to be an American in such ugly times for our country (or something to that effect – how difficult it must be to be an American these days…). I was a bit sick, and slightly puzzled by the question, so I didn’t have much of an answer.

My thought at the time was that American applies to such a diverse slice of humanity. So we had a terrible leader for eight years, one who stepped all over the constitution, alienated our nation from much of the world and – oh yea – ordered wars killing countless tens of thousands of civilians and soldiers. And we all – American and otherwise – no doubt felt a certain helplessness about it. Of course that is with the caveat that yes, 53% or so of the voting Americans elected him in 2004, after the first four years of terrible policy (not to mention his hilariously fumbling verbiage).

And yet I look at the British leader of the time, Tony Blair, a man I deeply admired until he somehow transformed into Bush’s lapdog – and the many other governments itching to support our American foolishness. In a re-telling of the story of Kisa Gotami, I could have urged my friend to find me a single mustard seed from a country in which no person had blindly followed Bush’s doctrines – or any others that proved equally disastrous.

I am afraid that for me being American has little to do with my government; which I think is really not all that different from most industrialized states. For me American is more about the tradition of bucking traditions, of eclecticism, of sometimes charging into utterly foolish situations, and yet also of communities and family. Nothing is a given in America (save death and taxes); we are forced to choose – our jobs, our cities, our traditions. And yet we are also wealthy with resources so we can be lazy and not choose, but merely free-ride or follow blindly.

Being Buddhist is an even more complicated story: practicing meditation for just over eight years now, becoming a vegetarian, trying to live a life somewhere between that ideal of Gandhian simplicity and the materialist excess of so much of our culture. One of my teachers in England had a young son and a classmate of mine asked the boy, “are you a Buddhist?” The boy nodded unhesitatingly. The teacher, a great scholar of Buddhism and practitioner in his own right, remarked, “yes, it’s easy when you ask a child.”

For us foolish grown-ups, the whole idea of labels gets sticky. It can be so much baggage – both your own (oh, look at me, I’m a buuuuuuddhist) and that of others. An elderly gentleman in England once asked me, “are you a church-goer, young man?” I thought for a moment and responded, simply, “I’m a Buddhist.” “oh,” he responded. And then, thinking for a moment he continued, “well at least your not a Mooslim.”

Yep.

There is also something elusive about describing “the Buddhist story” as I know it. The Buddhist story seems to be something like: sit down, shut up, meditate, watch your stories evaporate (oooh, we can make that a rhyme). We stop being Buddhist and simply be. Right? Or perhaps that’s just a story too: a “meta-narrative” of self-deception (oh, christ, now we’re post-modernists). Or nagarjunians? I’d prefer Sunyatavadins. But I digress.

But as far as there is a story of Being Buddhist, and there must be, it is the story of the path from suffering to awakening. The story, the path, the suffering, and the awakening are all as unique and individual (and yet connected) as the patterns of our fingers.

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