The original Buddhist teacher, Shakyamuni, called it the middle way, to steer a course to peace by avoiding extremes. My teacher, Bernie Glassman, called it “the balanced life” and introduced me to the Five Buddha Families – spirituality, livelihood, social action, study, and community – the aspects of life to be held in balance. When I met Bernie, I was searching for Inner Peace. I had my mantra. “Without inner peace, nothing else matters; with inner peace, nothing else matters.” I was torn between my lifelong commitment to social activism and my still-new zazen practice. When I heard Bernie say that first morning that “social action and zazen are both part of a balanced life,” an enormous weight was lifted.
Although Jishu would give me a way to look at my life through the Buddha Family lens – coloring a week-at-a-glance calendar with magic markers – each Buddha family had its own color – it is always Bernie I picture when I think about a balanced life, Bernie embodying the practice as he talked about it, holding a Buddha Family in each hand, feeling the weight in each, finding the balance. I have always worked with the five aspects of the balanced life in pairs.
If you’d asked me, I would have told you that finding the balance between social action and spiritual practice was the central koan of my life. One way or another, I worked with that koan for 30 years. I would have told you that somewhere during the years of building our charter school network, I finally found my balance: the charter school work was my spiritual practice. There was no separation.
I could just as well have told you that I was searching for the balance between livelihood and social action, that I’d begun working with this pair long before I met Bernie. I could have told you that was the central koan of my life. That was my father’s koan, the “red-hot iron ball,” the Zen masters call it, that gets stuck in your throat. You can’t swallow it, and you can’t spit it out. I inherited it from him: You can’t do good and do well at the same time.
Recently, talking with an ICS survivor about livelihood and social action (doing good), I realized that koan was there too during the charter school years, and there too I finally reached some peace. But it took time. I’m still proud that it was my sweat equity that got us to our first charter – Dee and her job paid the family bills – and I was proud that I took a 10% cut in my very modest salary in order to balance the school budget even before our first school opened. I was proud to be doing good. It was years before our board chairs Paco Lugovina and and Bill Henri convinced me to ask for and accept a salary comparable to that of other charter school CEO’s. I was able in my last years at ICS to finally enjoy what Paco called, “Doing good and doing well.” I am able to enjoy retirement with only a minimum of guilt.
I have benefitted so much over the years from Bernie’s teaching about the Five Buddha Families. And yet, this morning, I am jolted awake. With all that I have gained through my practice – I am without question a much more peaceful person than I was when I met Bernie – my view of balance has been so deluded. I love this feeling of waking from a delusion.
All this time, I have been imagining balance as something to be achieved, a place to be reached in life. Remember that I’m picturing Bernie adjusting weights in his hands, finding the balance between social activism and zazen. I’d found a way in my life to bring my Zen practice and social activism together. Between livelihood and social action, I’d found a compromise that felt good. I was enjoying retirement with time for family and reading and writing (study). I am very fortunate.
This morning a veil of delusion lifts. All these years, without even realizing it, I’ve been laboring with the idea of a balance point, of a place of equilibrium, where I could rest. I’m recalling my favorite parable from The Lotus Sutra. I love the story of the golden city, of the pilgrims, exhausted, discouraged, on the verge of giving up. Their guide points ahead. Off in the distance, they can just barely glimpse a golden city. Heartened, they gather their belongings, pushing on until they reach the city of gold, and there they collapse so happy to have arrived. Until a few days later. A few days later, their guide tells the pilgrims, “Pack up. It’s time to go.”
“Go where? We’re here. We’ve arrived.”
“No,” their guide informs them. “When you were at the point of exhaustion, I invented the story of the Golden City to give you courage. This is not the place of peace which you are seeking.”
I can’t blame Bernie for my delusion. I invented my golden city, my dream of equilibrium, of a resting place. This morning I’m seeing something different. This morning I’m picturing Bernie atop a large, inflated, blue, plastic ball, balancing, again and again almost falling. He’s in his clown outfit and he’s wearing his rubber nose. He’s at the refugee camp in Chiapas with Mr. Yoohoo (Moshe Cohen), his clown teacher, and the children are rolling in the dust, laughing. Life is a balancing act.
Why didn’t I see this sooner? So many mornings, I wake up with worries. So many mornings, worries bubble up on my cushion. Inner peace is a process not a place. It is a practice not a compromise. If you stop balancing, you fall off the ball. I’ve been clinging to my balance-point delusion all my life. In my mid-20’s, exhausted by my early career challenges, I asked my analyst, Erika, “Why can’t I just be an assistant camp director forever?” Assistant camp director was a position I could reach, a place I could stay without any more striving, without any more danger of losing my balance. “There is no resting place,” Erika told me. “You go forward or you go back.”
Intellectually, I understood what Erika was saying, but I didn’t get it in my bones, in my marrow, as the old Zen masters say. This morning, there is no resting place, no assistant camp directorship, no golden city. Life is a balancing act. Life is a circus. Bernie is a clown. Even in retirement, I am still balancing a bucket list of barely articulated dreams – I’ve been carrying Heidegger and Wittgenstein around now for 30 years, waiting for retirement, and I still haven’t gotten to them. These days, I picture Bernie with study in one hand and livelihood in the other, but these days livelihood is about getting my walking in and getting to doctors’ appointments and getting enough rest.
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