The Buddha once asked a student, “If a person is struck by an arrow, is it painful?” The student replied, “It is.” The Buddha then asked, “If the person is struck by a second arrow, is that even more painful?” The student replied again, “It is.” The Buddha then explained, “In life, we cannot always control the first arrow. However, the second arrow is our reaction to the first. And with this second arrow comes the possibility of choice.”
After I’ve been awake for a while in the morning, usually before the sun rises, I read Buddhist teachings and philosophy because it sets the tone for my day. I am fascinated by the paradoxical and often poetic wisdom of accepting life as it is with all of its beauty and its ugliness. This morning I read a tribute by Eido Frances Carney about the life of Ryokan, (1758–1831), a beloved priest, poet, and Japanese calligrapher. When he stood facing the mirror he asked the most knotty and challenging questions of himself and recognized that Buddha’s teachings offered him a way to humbly move forward in the world: how to do “as little harm as possible”, how to not only “recognize suffering”, but understand how he “contributed to suffering” and how to not run from, but rather address his contribution to suffering.
Coincidentally, I also read a New York Times article by Michael Kimmelman. In it he wrote about “compassion fatigue”, and I furrowed my brow, thinking, really? How can anyone suffer from compassion fatigue? He said the world has been made numb toward unspeakable inhumanity because the scale of suffering is too tremendous to grasp. But history is a very long and tragic tale. Can we really be choosing a narrative wherein we are tired of feeling sympathy and sorrow for others who are stricken by misfortune?
We are all connected by the web of life, inescapably woven together. If one suffers we all suffer. To think otherwise is to abandon all common sense. However, until we know ourselves and the contours of our own suffering we cannot possibly understand nor empathize with anyone else’s. Until we realize that we are visitors on this planet who have been given a once in a lifetime chance to be here now, we will never completely understand nor fully appreciate the ephemeral nature of our lives.
Most of the questions we ought to ask can only be answered as we fumble forward in the world we have created. We will never move beyond the hypocrisies of our culture unless we see that suffering is a part of life. By understanding that all things are impermanent and change is constant we can end our own suffering and ease others. The more truthful we are when looking in the mirror, the less we will suffer and make others suffer.The Buddha’s teachings can show us that we don’t have to be attached to how awful everything is. We can instead recognize and be grateful for how precious life can be. Awakening is a stage of maturity that anyone can reach.
I am living in the middle of nowhere, in the most rural region of France, in the tiny village of Ayzieu with a population of 147, learning to love my life just as it is. There is no way to separate the light in the sky from the space it illuminates.
