despite all the jewishness, I'm a buddhist boy and contagiated as I am it is hardly impossible not to make the connection (I'm about to make). And now I turn all self-explanatory. The nomadic image evoked in me the ceremony of taking refuge, the formal entrance in the sangha or buddhist community. Despite being a moment of committment which could be construed as the beginning of some sense of belonging, Trungpa describes it in these terms:
"By taking refuge, in some sense we become homeless refugees. Taking refuge does not mean saying that we are helpless and then handing all our problems to somebody or something else. There will be no refugee rations, nor all kinds of security and dedicated help. The point of becoming a refugee is to give up our attachment to basic security. We have to give up our home ground, which is illusory anyway. We might have a sense of a home ground as where we were born and the way we look, but we don't actually have any home, fundamentally speaking. There is actually no solid basis of security in one's life.
[...]
Relating to being lost and confused, we are more open. We begin to see that in seeking security we can't grasp onto anything; everything continually washes out and becomes shaky, constantly, all the time. And that is what is called life.
So becoming a refugee is acknowledging that we are homeless and groundless, and it is acknowledging that there is really no need for home, or ground. Taking refuge is an expression of freedom, because as refugees we are no longer bounded by the need for security. We are suspended in a no-man's land in which the only thing to do is to relate with the teachings and with ourselves"
Chogyam Trungpa. The Heart of the Buddha. Shambhala South Asia Editions: Boston, 1999 p.87-88
2 comments:
you might wonder why do I always quote the same guy, and apart from laziness there is a reason for it. within a sampradaya, or living teaching tradition, there is very little concern about who said what within that same tradition. all knowledge is imagined as embodied by the current living teacher, and the tradition, as if were, is thought to speak through him/her. so, the notion of the author is pretty irrelevant, and it all lies in the creativity of a particular teacher who has absorbed a set of text(ual traditions)s and has been given the task to reformulate them in a way that speaks to his/her audience. Trungpa Rinpoche, who is now dead, was incredibly creative in his approach to the whole process, though...
Fan-fucking-tastic, frogo, from "beginning" to "end" (go on, allow me to use these terms incorrectly and loosely!)
So the formal entrance in the community is actually an acknowledgment/enactment/celebration of one's uprootedness, rooflessness, safetynetless. I see it as the feeling you get when you reach the mountain top, a form of entry that represents an exit, an instability that encapsulates the instability of life, when there is actually no wall you can lean on. And then there's the lesson of knowledge speaking through the living teacher -is there a greater form of humility, of ex-centricity?
Frogo, I thank you long time ;-)
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