Dear friends,

On the final day of Encountering the Buddha as Teacher, we’re sent home with a “goody bag” in the form of a few printed sheets of paper—readings we won’t get to before the end of the retreat. Like Sujātā’s milk rice, these pages are no ordinary nourishment. Back in Michigan after the retreat in Massachusetts, I dip into one of them:

It should be known that stories which clarify dharma, and which are written in one’s own language, have eight benefits for the world. . . . 

–from Pujavaliya (A Garland of Offerings) by Ven. Mayurapada, translated from the Sinhala by Charles Hallisey

How was the retreat, a friend who recently moved to the Monterey Bay coast asks. I fumble for a pithy answer, my words inadequate to the magnitude of the question.

“I don’t often hear people talk of transformative experiences at this age,” she responds. “What a gift!”

“I’d love to hear more (or read your newsletter if you write about it :))” she adds. 

🦭
I’ve been to Elephant Seal Overlook at Chimney Rock countless times, but this past March was the first time I encountered a docent there. It was the tail end of pupping season, and I’d come with a friend who’d never been to this eastern spur of the Point Reyes Headlands. 

We listen with rapt attention as the volunteer tells us about the travails of mother elephant seals, pointing to a laminated album of infographics as she speaks. The mothers swim out to sea, traversing thousands of miles. (Map of migration routes: a tangle of red and blue squiggles covers a huge swath off the Pacific coast.) The moms plunge to depths of 1,000 to 2,000 feet, and can hold their breaths for over an hour. (On the “Dive Depths Comparisons” chart, Elephant Seal beats out Scuba Diver, Nuclear Submarine, Sea Otter, Killer Whale, Sea Lion, Harbor Seal, and even White Shark, coming in second only to Sperm Whale.) 

After nine months away, each mother navigates back to this beach, clambers over the rocky shore to fight for a protected spot in the harem, and gives birth to a pup within days of arriving. Twins aren’t possible, because the mother will spend the next four weeks nursing her single offspring without eating or drinking anything herself. Her milk is toothpaste-thick and 50% fat (versus a cow’s meager 3.5%). Drinking five liters of this milk a day, her pup will balloon from 75 to 300 pounds.

These pups have it made. Life is an uninterrupted idyll, a never-ending feast. 

🍹
The beginning of our Encountering the Buddha as Teacher retreat feels like the bliss of the (newborn elephant seal’s) beach. Tarrah, Zach, and Sarah prepare delicious vegetarian meals for us. During introductions, our colony of Buddhist teachers, chaplains, editors, and students—nearly three dozen strong—sings the praises of Charlie/Charles/Dr. Hallisey. (Co-teacher William Edelglass, orchestrator of this six-day retreat and substitute teacher when Charlie has to leave us to teach at HDS, is a good sport about this.) Introductions complete, the subject of our accolades responds. Many of you made mention of a person who happens to share my name, he comments. If you ever meet this name-twin, could you introduce us, so that I can warn this other Charlie he’s at risk of becoming a sinner, what with all these ego-bloating compliments coming his way?

Laughter fills the room. 

And laughter keeps filling the room, as we marvel at Charlie’s ability to bring the Pali suttas to life, to digress into hilarious and poignant and ultimately non-digressive stories about his three children, to turn a desert of dry texts into a land of (seventh-generation milch cow) milk and honey.

We are like the monks at the beginning of the Acchariya-abbhūta Sutta (MN 123), extolling the Buddha’s powers with the breathless awe of diehard fans:

It is wonderful, friends, it is marvelous … !

🦈
Alas, as the docent at Chimney Rock reminded us, no utopia lasts forever. One day, the emaciated elephant seal mother must depart. She’ll be impregnated by a bull before she leaves. After her monthlong fast, she’ll need to fend off beta males on land, then swim past a wall of hungry sharks in the waters just offshore. She’ll never see her pup again. The weaners will have to figure out swimming and diving and shark-dodging—not to mention mating and, for the females, birthing and nursing—all on their own.

You’ll usually hear elephant seals before you see them. Their vocalizations originate in the throat; each colony has its own dialect. Once, walking the loop trail east of Chimney Rock Overlook, I heard a cacophony from a sandy cove below: Sixty-odd weaners and not a mother in sight. It sounded like they were screaming bloody murder. I could practically see the speech bubble emanating from the affronted collective of blubbery, blubbering youngsters: WTFFFFF?!!!!!!

🍎
Going into this retreat, none of us have a clue as to what, or how, we’ll be learning. Before we’re even asked to share our names, we are posed with an intriguing question: 

Imagine you’re walking down the street with a friend one day and run into the Buddha. How would you introduce the Buddha to your friend?

The first text we read together as a group, using a havruta-inspired reading method (fittingly, the Aramaic root ḥāḇruṯā means “friend” or “companionship”) is not from the Pali canon but from a 12th-century prose classic on the life of the Buddha: Gurulugomi’s Amāvatura (The Flood of the Deathless), translated from the Sinhala by Udaya Meddegama. 

Who knew that these four pages could inspire hours of conversation and contemplation? That it would feel as if we were right there with the brahmin ascetic Bāvari, sending out his sixteen disciples to meet the newly enlightened Buddha? That we’d spend the rest of the retreat talking about Mogharāja, twice-rebuked by the Buddha—”You, wait, let someone else ask questions” before becoming an arahant on his third attempt—and Piṅgiya, the 120-year-old, slow-to-enlightenment but quick-to-devotion hero of our story, as fondly as we would speak of our favorite family members?

🏹
Would the pedagogical arc of a Buddhist retreat be complete without a visit from Māra’s armies? As Bāvari and Mogharāja and Piṅgiya and Ānanda and Channa and Mahākassapa take up residence in our hearts and minds, this colony of Buddhist readers begins to grapple with our doubts about faith and devotion, the abuses of power that spiritual teachers are at risk of perpetuating, how difficult it is to skillfully admonish students (“You, wait, let someone else ask questions”), our disgust with the baked-in misogyny of so many Buddhist texts… 

Charlie asks us to consider why the exclamation It is wonderful, friends, it is marvelous… ! is repeated more than once in a sutta that details the miraculous events surrounding the Buddha’s birth. Are we just underscoring the same point with repetition here? 

Or is it that the exclamation is bivalent? Upon first exclamation, Venerable Ānanda is celebrating the birth of the future Buddha. Upon second exclamation, Ānanda is lamenting that this marvelous boy’s mother will not live to see what her son will become. 

The words are the same the second time around, but the feeling is completely different.

🐌
We continue at a snail’s pace, printouts titrated a few pages at a time: Bhikkhu Sujato’s translation of The Questions of Piṅgiya (Anthology of Discourses 5.17) and Preserving the Way to the False Shore (Anthology of Discourses 5.19). A passage from Howard Thurman’s Disciplines of the Spirit. Bhikkhu Bodhi’s translation of Mahānāma (AN 8.25) and Channa (SN 22.90). A couple fragments from Bhikkhu Ñāṇamoli’s translation of The Minor Readings (Khuddakapāṭha); Six Recollections from his translation of the The Path of Purification (Visuddhimagga).

The Buddha is dying and instructs Ānanda to banish Channa, his former charioteer, from the sangha for his boastful and disruptive behavior. When the period of banishment is over, the Buddha will be dead, and it will be up to Ānanda to approach Channa. We read about the encounter and discuss it as a group. The whiteboard fills with dimensions to the story that would never have emerged if we’d read the text individually.

The reluctant teachers among us find kindred spirits in Ānanda and  Mahākassapa, persuaded into teaching by a teacher who saw their potential—and who knew he wasn’t going to stick around forever. Have you ever found yourself in a situation where you are most certainly not the best qualified person for the urgent task at hand—and you are the only person available?

The Buddha dies. Our font of infinite wisdom and compassion suddenly disappears. Mom swims back into the ocean. Our bottomless supply of nourishment is abruptly cut off. But life must continue. For future generations to know the taste of bliss, we must become the endless supply, the immeasurable font. This is the project of Buddhism, of education, of every species’ continuation.

⛲

It does not matter whether one generation applauds the previous generation or hisses it—in either event, it carries the previous generation within itself

reads the epigraph to Dr. Hallisey’s influential book chapter “Roads Taken and Not Taken in the Study of Theravāda Buddhism.” The quote is by Spanish philosopher and essayist José Ortega y Gasset.

In Becoming a Student, Remaining a Student, Never Less than a Student: A Special Issue in Honor of Charles Hallisey (Journal of Buddhist Ethics Volume 31, 2024), the festschrift’s subject recalls:

There was a strike by the faculty in the state universities of Sri Lanka a number of years ago. I was so entranced by this slogan that I internalized to make it my own: Let’s turn our inheritance into our legacy. Education is free in Sri Lanka, so people get to go to university as an inheritance of being a citizen of the country. All of us as workers in education have the responsibility to turn our inheritance into our legacy. (252)

Your inheritance must become your legacy. After the post-abandonment months of floundering on the beach, you’ll swim past the sharks of Mara’s army. You’ll swim thousands of miles and though you’ll never meet your mother again in physical form, everything she imparted will remain in you.

Steeping in the loves and losses and gratitudes and griefs of my life at this Encountering the Buddha as Teacher retreat, a voice—my own? another’s?—rose within me, clear as a temple bell on a crisp autumn day. It chimed:

honey in an ocean of tears

🍯
A few salted sweetnesses to end on:

From p251 of the JBE issue:

My little mantra in Buddhist studies is that I don’t only want to learn about Buddhism; I want to learn from Buddhism

From the newly launched website Women in the Buddha’s Life:

The Buddha is remembered as suggesting that a life well-lived stands on two legs: “focused attention” (manasikāra) and “the voice of another” (paratoghosa). The latter points to anything, including texts, that can engender a change in one’s way of seeing and engaging the world, indeed engender a change in how one lives.

And for those who would like to cultivate a sutta reading practice:

Reading Faithfully

At the start of the retreat, many of us, encountering the Buddha on the street, would have introduced our friend to the perfectly enlightened one, the refuge of all beings. By retreat’s end, we were singing a different tune. This is my teacher. This is my refuge. 

The practice of Triple Gem reading—a roomful of people touching my Buddha, my Dharma, in our newfound sangha, again and again—is a reparative one. I’m reminded of a line from Nicholson Baker’s novel Room Temperature:

in repairing the object you really ended up loving it more, because you now knew its eagerness to be reassembled, and in running a fingertip over its surface you alone could feel its many cracks—a bond stronger than mere possession (29)

As for objects, so too relationships. May we be held in cracked, loving bonds stronger than mere possession.

Til the next quarter moon,

~Chenxing

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