Sitting & Walking for Others

We had completed the Initiation Walk and had just reached the high point of Pine Mountain Road between Oat Hill Road and the Bolinas-Fairfax Road. Arrayed before us were Mt. Tamalpais, Tiburon, and much of the East Bay. At the very center of the landscape, its details obscured by haze but easily identifiable, lay the prison at San Quentin.

Just two weeks before, in the course of a pilgrimage from Pema Ösel Ling to Land of Medicine Buddha, I had spoken to members of the Santa Cruz Zen Center about nourishing the intention to walk for others. I told a story about how my friend Rick Field, when he was struggling with cancer and nearing the end of his life, said to me, “I don’t have the strength to make the pilgrimage, but that’s okay. You can walk for me.” It was suddenly obvious to me that walking should never, could never be a solitary activity.

I am thinking about that moment now, and of the men locked up behind the walls of the prison at San Quentin. And I am wondering what kind of bonds there may be between me and them. When I agreed to walk for Rick, what kind of pact did I make with him? Did I make it with him alone or, through him, with all beings, human and non-human? It is my conviction that whenever I walk in consciousness of others, am I merely giving physical expression to a relationship that began billions of years ago in the fierce fires of a star.

Although I am not sure that we know what merit is, much less how it can be transferred from one person to another, I will go on reciting the dedication of merit with the resolve that my living will serve, one way or another, the true needs of those people I have not met, will never meet.. In our intention and attention there is much of unquestionable value that can touch many lives in ways we cannot forsee. 

The Who of Me, the person I am becoming, was formed in relation to others and evolves in relation to others. Although I am an organism distinct from others and from my surroundings, my boundaries are permeable. I am an open system, able to let in nourishment and expel waste. Like other organisms, I am also food; I eat others and am eaten by them. Every time I breathe in and out, some part of the world enters into this body and some part of this body goes out into the world. Through my sensory organs and nervous system I am constantly welcoming and giving hospitality to the environment even as I provide an environment for other beings. My body is host to a teeming multitude of living things. I and the world collaborate to produce this life, even this consciousness, such as it is. In our chemistry, biology, social-interpersonal relations, and sensory awareness—even in the highest-order abstract thinking—you and I are interdependent and globally connected. What could be more foolish than to believe we are separate?

All the same, we suffer because we are deeply in thrall to the illusion of independence. We have been so thoroughly schooled in the ideology of separateness and competition that it takes the concerted use of all our faculties to free ourselves from the illusion. One way of overcoming our education is to enter into the great mandala of nature and surrender ourselves to it through intellectual, imaginative, and contemplative activity. It is the path of transforming social emotions. It is the practice of just sitting. It is the rite of mantra, mudra, and visualization. It is the way of pilgrimage and mountain practice.

Perhaps we can never be sure that, by means of this work, we have done anything that directly results in benefit to the prisoners, the physically disabled, the work-obsessed, and those trapped in the maze of cultural delusion and ruinous ambition. They do not even know that we are thinking of them (though we might be able to do something about that; and think of what a contemplative hiking program for ex-offenders might be like). The limitations of our knowledge cannot diminish the strength of our connection. To practice with and for others is not only the fulfillment of vows, it is a celebration of a reality. It is our life and death and rebirth together.