Years ago, a Japanese steamship for the first time went up the great Amazon river in South America. It was a long voyage, and they ran out of drinking water. Fortunately a British ship came by. The Japanese ship asked them by signal, “Have you drinking water to spare?” They signaled back, “Put your buckets down into the water, if you please.” The surprised Japanese crew did as instructed, and sure enough, it was drinking water. For the Japanese crew who were used to seeing small rivers in Japan, the River Amazon was too big for them to recognize as a river. They thought they were still in the ocean. Aren’t we, without realizing it, making such mistakes every day?
—A Flower Does Not Talk: Zen Essays by Abbot Zenkei Shibayama, 93-94.
This
story reminds me of an exchange between the journalist Bill Moyers and the
mythologist Joseph Campbell in The Power of
Myth. After Campbell confirms his experience of “hidden hands” helping him
when he is “following [his] bliss,” Moyers asks, “Have you ever had sympathy
for the man who has no invisible means of support?”
Campbell
replies, “Who has no invisible means? Yes, he is the one that evokes
compassion, the poor chap. To see him stumbling around when all the waters of
life are right there really evokes one’s pity.”
“The
waters of eternal life are right there? Where?” Moyers asks.
“Wherever
you are—if you are following your bliss, you are enjoying that refreshment,
that life within you, all the time,” Campbell answers.
In
both stories, that of the ship’s crew and that of the person who has no
invisible means of support, the waters of life are right under their noses—the
first in potable water and the second in metaphorical waters of life, both
potentially salvific. Both needed guides to help them see this.
The
Moyers-Campbell exchange occurs in their conversation about the idea of bliss
in Sanskrit, which Campbell regarded as “the great spiritual language of the
world.” He explains:
There are three terms that represent the brink, the jumping-off place to the ocean of transcendence: Sat, Chit, Ananda. The word “Sat” means being. “Chit” means consciousness. “Ananda” means bliss or rapture. I thought, “I don’t know whether my consciousness is proper consciousness or not; I don’t know whether what I know of my being is my proper being or not; but I do know where my rapture is. So let me hang on to rapture, and that will bring me both my consciousness and my being” (p 120, The Power of Myth).
Shibayama
writes that Zen Master Hakuin taught that we mistakenly try to look outside
ourselves for Enlightenment, for Buddhahood:
Like water and ice,
There is no ice apart from water;
There are no Buddhas apart from beings.
Shibayama
explains further, “If it is really like the relationship of ice and water, then
we are Buddhas as we are. So he goes on to say, ‘It is like those who, being in
water, cry out for water, feeling thirst.’” What follows is the story about the
Japanese ship on the Amazon.
The
organizing pastor of Ormewood Church, the Rev. Jenelle Holmes, gave an
intriguing sermon during Eastertide about Simon Peter plunging into the Sea of
Galilee when he realized a risen Jesus had just told them where to drop their
nets for their big and only catch of the day, and awaited them on the shore with
a meal prepared.
As
I was still anxious about plunging into co-leading a weeklong contemplative
retreat, I told Jenelle that her sermon really helped me. I needed to just
plunge in the waters and trust that I would find Jesus on the shore, in the
midst of those attending, in the silence that would surround us. After all, we
had titled the retreat, “Beside Still Waters.”
I
didn’t realize it at the time, but I was following my bliss and relying on my
invisible means of support, as were all who came on the retreat.
Frederick
Buechner clarifies the nature of bliss for many of us: “The place God calls you to is the
place where your deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet.”
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