28/11
“Matter is emptiness. Emptiness is matter. Matter is not other than emptiness, nor is emptiness other than Matter.” This is from Khenpo Migmar Tsering’s translation of the Heart Sutra, switching the word ‘form’ for matter. It seemed immediately more intuitive than ‘form’ as the Abhidharma and the Avatamsaka Sutra both speak of matter as particles and atoms. In the sutra’s seventh collection of books, The Universal Hall of Lights, “Samantabhadra describes ten aspects of Buddahood in detail and affirms that Buddhahood is present in every particle in the physical universe, as well as in the body and mind of every living being.” Even in karmically negative situations Buddhahood, the Buddha’s mind, is there, but best imagined as ‘antimatter.’ Metaphorically, the real enemy and plague to heavily negative karma is antimatter which is matter composed of negative particles: “These have the same mass as particles of ordinary matter but have opposite charge and properties, such as lepton and baryon numbers. Encounters between a particle and an antiparticle [lead] to both of them being destroyed.” In analyzing a difficult situation, one could further extrapolate that antimatter, with its antiparticles, are likened to negatives energies exacerbating myriad personal obstacles. Or even just the obstacles of every day physics Like when Milarepa was trying to hold onto his pecha to continue his recitation, keep the blanket around his shoulders for warmth, eat a little something because he was starving, and fan a dwindling fire he’d have trouble restarting. His answer: he threw everything up into the air at once. In an act of total rebellion and renunciation, he experienced an end to his frustration with the contentious particularities of materiality. Or again, as a Roshi of the New York City Zen Center, caught up in a maelstrom of scandals, used to say, “it doesn’t matter.”
29/11
During a rather bizarre meeting with a lawyer at a Brown Coffee near the Mekong River in Phnom Penh, my K’mai life-partner blew up the proceedings with tears and recriminations, leading me to now understand why wills are suppose to be secret with lawyers, in all due discretion, only ‘highlighting’ to concerned others its content. Otherwise, heirs begin to jockey for the goods and money immediately. As an expat however, one often becomes part of a family, either business or living, or a mix of both, and then whatever is amassed may well be assumed to remain in that family, as noncitizens can’t own property. If one has intended heirs from a former family then their inheritance has to be willed by law for them to receive it. Which is possible. But the delivery is problematic as one needs a Cambodian executor who would be a lawyer if one’s present K’mai family is resistant. Because trust is assumed within families here, being bound through Buddhist customs, using a lawyer as an executor of one’s estate, is seen as removing oneself from the family circle. It’s a hostile move.
Naively, I now just want to make everyone not resent me when I’m dying or dead. But the karma determining that when the time comes is, for the most part, already in place for whatever is to happen or not. So seeing everything as antimatter with a negative valuation is one way to cope with the problem. Stuff does not make people happy for very long. H.H. Dali Lama pronounced early on that material wealth is the major cause of dissatisfaction. However, wealth is a stopgap for cravings as it’s the lack of certain things that make life continually miserable. So the unthinking repeatedly prioritize material wealth. “The almighty dollar,” as my dad characterized it. While owning goods and property appears an obvious answer to lack, it’s full of problems: the suffering of getting, the suffering of keeping, and the anguished suffering of losing. The last one, in the present discussion, particularly comes into play. Thinking by giving all one’s possessions to this one or that after death is going to give anyone even a hair’s width of lasting happiness is folly.
I’ve heard a good Buddhist gives half of his or her wealth to the temple and robed sangha. Sure, it’s a better bet than lay family members who are possessed by more worldly habits, uncurbed by the Vinaya Pitaka. But wealth is easily abused; extorted, misappropriated, or outright stolen by any human as negative causes and conditions are bound to arise. So that too is an uncertain answer. Antimatter, seeing all the matter as possessing within itself the possibility to destroy the illusion of its own substantiveness, therefore also the nature of one’s concern, is the only certainly. A one hundred percent renunciation of worldly possessions including one’s body and what will happen to it after one’s continuum drops it. This is why the Tibetans chop you up for the vultures and the Cambodians of no means leave their dead alone in the forest for wild beasts to consume. These are curative images and ideally lead to the advanced practices and realization of one’s continuum being reunited, like a child to its mother, with the Clear Light. Failing that, it might manifest in an in-between state in the bardo vision, with all its horrific meanderings, in search of a new body. Forty-nine days later, or perhaps much longer, one experiences one of four modes of rebirth: apparitional (as a deity, demigod, hungry ghost, or hell being), womb, egg, or heat and moisture (in the human and animal realms). Antimatter also characterizes the last thought before the mind enters samadhi. So the state of one’s mind, its transcendent development or lack thereof, at the time of death, is the all important matter and as such is best as an antimatter.
30/11
Seen from a more interior angle, the above meeting—ostensibly for my expat funeral arrangements and estate dispersal—blew up when my partner asked the lawyer what we’d been discussing in English. That’s when he mentioned wills are made in secret. But then he ‘highlighted it’ to her anyway. Afterward, she immediately objected and became very emotional. She said she was not going to sell her apartments so I could leave my children and the Preah sangh large amounts of money. So he translated back what she said, which I already knew, by just saying, “She refuses. She wants to keep it all.”
For some reason the lawyer and my condo managing agent brought an entourage. There was six off eight of them in total, all males, and they gave me a collective look like, Are you going to let her get away with that? It reminded me of the ‘battle of the sexes’ mindset that prevailed throughout most America in the ‘50s. Or the popular TV show ‘Divorce Court.’
Through the tears she then stated her position that if I didn’t delete (null and void) the contract which states I owned the building upon the land she owned she would end our relationship. Since my greed and material insecurities had been substantially pacified in the last five years, and my new intention was to always try to make beings free from sufferings and its causes, have happiness and it’s causes, achieve great bliss through Equanimity, and so forth, I agreed to delete. At that, I’m not sure what else the men, beyond the thought I was being robbed, thought. That I even had an audience or chorus of strangers for planning my will was, by civilized standards, a travesty. My property managing agent, to whose family my ownership of a roof top condo would revert, had botched this meeting. So in front of eight witnesses, I relinquished all my profit-sharing wealth by submitting to my partner’s wishes, while she would not submit to mine contractually. Verbally, we had already discussed matters to both our satisfaction. But as her mother had lost all her property—the home place in Kampong Cham—to ‘men at the bank’ with written contracts, she was wary and intractable.
1/12
Still in Phenom Penh, mentally, I patched things up with my partner then they fell apart again when she told me the lawyer said I could’ve bought a condo with a citizen-foreigner trust in Phenom Penh and it’d be worth a million plus today. Then she said she didn’t know why he told her that. Truth is I’d heard this kind of messaging before from her and the point was always the same, to make me regret I didn’t invest more money with her. Of course, I didn’t do that for many sound reasons, as demonstrated above. As well, I needed the condo in Siem Reap to do long closed retreats of which I ended up doing three. The end result of this discussion was me getting really angry for the first in years. If I think back, which I don’t want to, it was similar to years earlier with her in some of our initial travels in Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam. Again, like a few times before, I walked away from her. This time I told her today what she did, all of it, has now made me angry. Further, by disturbing the peace of a consistent samadhi practitioner, she was killing the Buddha and becoming Mara.This kind of talk makes everything worse as it’s nothing but a cover for my negative karmic actions that were tit-for-tat with hers. As Phenom Penh is dangerous, we returned to the hotel together. But she stayed outside the room in the open garden terrace and I went to the spa for my problem left foot. Since I was pretty much out of my body already, the experience of anger being not quite the same as it used to be, the massage felt like a strange manipulation of some one else’s body.
Earlier during the day when she was not around, I had two pure visions, one of a glorious unidentifiable deity sitting in the royal posture with right leg extended, and another vision of a small dump truck filled with glowing golden wheels. I chose one for myself and that seemed the right thing to do. Later, I thought these might be different sets of the 84,000 articles of the Dharma and I was choosing the most important for me. When my partner returned to the room, having gone out with Phnom Penh friends and gotten drunk, she laid down beside me and we started to communicate. Our feelings were deeper than ever for each other and their was fear on both sides of great human loss. As things quieted down on her side, I began to drift off. Then I became aware she had her phone pressed to the back of my head and I got curious what she was watching. I turned and saw on her screen a grainy sixteen millimeter film that was reminiscent of the ‘Titicut Follies’, a disturbing ‘80s film about the infamous mental institution for the criminally insane. There were two female figures in plain gowns with one of them doing something to the other. At first, I thought it was pornography. But when the active figure backed away, she revealed the other one dangling by her neck. It had to be a mafia snuff film out of the eighties. Horrified, I blurted out, “Why would you do that to me?” (I.e., To someone who tries avoiding all such mental pollution.) And then I added, “Why would you do that to yourself?” Meaning, saturate your mind with pure negativity. She answered drunkenly that all of a sudden this film just appeared on her phone. This is the very definition of ignorant behavior: not taking responsibility for anything and thinking that things just happen to you.
This pressing against my head of a snuff film playing on her cell phone, in contrast to the above mentioned pure visions, was such a stark contrast that it pointed out the ultimately empty nature of both. It was Mara’s blessings of ignorance and the worst kind of evil, suicide. It was also my partner’s way of showing me what she’d contemplated. She confessed before going to drink with friends that she’d taken a five dollar tuk-tuk ride to Tonle Sap River, an offshoot of the Mekong, and contemplated jumping in to drown herself. What saved her she said was thoughts of her son. Her self image was weak, and her will weaker, and she suffered PTSD from growing up in the ‘post-construction’ Cambodia of the early nineties. Then she cried and then I, having the distinct experience she was the same as my schizophrenic mother—whom I also tried to help but couldn’t—started sobbing, which alarmed her. She said I practiced samadhi and shouldn’t cry, revealing her dependency on me as stoic sangha, a common misunderstanding of the meditator’s experience as distanced, out of touch, and uncompassionate. It was quite true however that while I wanted to appear strong for her. I couldn’t be. Also, the depth of our ignorance, the degree to which we were influenced by our collective karma was startling. In that moment, I was just like her and all other people who don’t guard or develop their minds, meditate, say mantras or dharanis, and so are constantly fed at the complete mercy of all suffering phenomena. Though we both had deep faith in the Dharma, in very different ways, at that moment we were nothing but Mara’s children.
Punctuated by a flight to India in the morning, both during and after that fateful meeting with the lawyer, our time together was heightened and depressed with the prospects of my advancing age, her thoughts of suicide, and of our relationship ending prematurely. It was like when you wait outside the ICU for a friend or relative to live or die and everything starts to feel absurd and uncanny. As such, many things seemed curious. Like why were all those people there when I was attempting to make out my last Will and Testament? Elements of the mandala of daily tantric practices began to bleed in and I began to think of everyone as Bodhisattvas, directional guardians, protectors, or other series of ‘eights’ figures, of purified perception, in a tantric mandala. It was a way of bridging back to that purer vision as well as a bridge back to each other. For I later realized, out of the whole awful experience, that I had used, once again, a romantic partner for acquiring wealth. But this time I would not be able to walk away with any of it. Nor would I be able to actively give it to someone else in an estate or so forth. It would stay entirely within my present partner’s family. But then this had been my original impulse: to share and aid these people with whom I was submerging here in the dark-starred Cambodia. That I had also intended to use my beautiful Cambodian lover as a business partner, to make money as a foreigner abroad, now seemed despicable. That, not to practice anything other than generosity, adoration, and be someone there to assist in the raising of her son, now mine as well, lending what modest resources and wisdom had come with my age, in caring for her and family, was a sin. To do anything other than offer the three supports: material, emotional, and Dharmic, was a downfall. Further, that I expected at the right time to sell our home-place and secure half the profits for myself, was a crime. I had done something like this before, but I would not do it again. I set out for Phnom Penh to make another legally binding contract with my partner. But then ended up, to her complete advantage, just deleting the old one we already had.
This kind of positive action, I believe, is what Dodrupchen Rinpoche meant by practicing tolerance toward mates and family, using the arising negativity within intimacy as an opportunity to practice loving kindness and compassion by seeing the basic condition, the unsatisfactory nature of existence in it particular manifestation coming from the other loved one’s point of view. In this way, completely giving up on one’s own interests to benefit the interest of those most near and dear—with inner presences—the reification of one’s self-inherency, is also abandoned. Now it seems certain the eight sets of tantric guardians, protectors, Bodhisattvas, and so forth, had really been there in the guise of friendly Cambodian gate-crashers, as witnesses and foils, at my Last Will and Testament in Phnom Penh. A meeting with a lawyer, and his friends and family, who absurdly said in the beginning all such meetings should be secret. In the tantric sense, I suppose it was. And those tragic, defiled figures in the grainy sixteen millimeter film? Vajrasattva Heruka and consort now blessing all depressed persons’ heads with the light and pure love of Bodhicitta.
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