Actualizing the fundamental point, you realize the great road maintained by all buddhas. “You are like this. I am like this. Keep it well,” is revealed.
Yunju, Great Master Hongjiao, was asked by an imperial minister who brought an offering, “The World-Honored One had an intimate language, and Mahakashyapa did not conceal it. What was the World- Honored One’s language?”
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Feminism is not a set of rules. It is not about taking rights away from men, as if there were a finite amount of liberty to go around. There is an abundance of liberty to be had if we have the guts to grasp it for everyone. Feminism is a social revolution, and a sexual revolution, and feminism is in no way content with a missionary position. It is about work, and about love, and about how one depends very much on the other. Feminism is about asking questions, and carrying on asking them even when the questions get uncomfortable.
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When you are alone and too tired even to turn on any of your devices, you let yourself linger in a past stacked among your pillows. Usually you are nestled under blankets and the house is empty. Sometimes the moon is missing and beyond the windows the low, gray ceiling seems approachable. Its dark light dims in degrees depending on the density of clouds and you fall back into that which gets reconstructed as metaphor.
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Having established ourselves to some degree in Right View, and having cultivated the discernment and practice of Right Thought, we can explore what the Buddha lays out as the consequences of these in how we live our lives. These are the next three steps of the Eightfold Path: Right Speech, Right Action, and Right Livelihood.
As we examine our commitment to awakening, we might notice a tendency to make these steps lesser endeavors, not quite on the same level as our meditation practice. But if we hold these steps in this way, we are fragmenting our lives and weakening essential elements of the Path. Seven of the ten unwholesome actions the Buddha said to avoid are purified by these three steps of the Path. Each one requires mindful attention, and together they become the foundation for deepening concentration and wisdom.
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Crazy Horse said we live in the shadow this technological perception of reality, this of the real world and we really do. The coherency of our future depends upon us knowing who we are—and truly understanding who we are—because our relationship to reality and our relationship to power is based upon that understanding. Today we live in an industrial society and this technological perception of reality, this shadow world, presents a serious crisis: it is a reality where we don’t remember who we are, so therefore we don’t know who we are, we speak a language we don’t understand and because of this, we don’t know where we are. We are part of an evolutionary reality but part of the purpose of this technological civilization is to erase our memories and erase our identities.
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I’ll tell you a story. Four years ago I sat at the end of my bed at 3 in the morning, in tears, furious, frightened, exhausted, as drained and hopeless as I have ever been in this bruised and blessed world, at the very end of the end of my rope, and She spoke to me. I know it was Her. I have no words with which to tell you how sure I am that it was the Mother. Trust me.
Let it go, She said.
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I have come to believe over and over again that what is most important to me must be spoken, made verbal and shared, even at the risk of having it bruised or misunderstood. That the speaking profits me, beyond any other effect. I am standing here as a Black lesbian poet, and the meaning of all that waits upon the fact that I am still alive, and might not have been. Less than two months ago I was told by two doctors, one female and one male, that I would have to have breast surgery, and that there was a 60 to 80 percent chance that the tumor was malignant. Between that telling and the actual surgery, there was a three-week period of the agony of an involuntary reorganization of my entire life. The surgery was completed, and the growth was benign.
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If you’re poor, the only way you’re likely to injure someone is the old traditional way: artisanal violence, we could call it—by hands, by knife, by club, or maybe modern hands-on violence, by gun or by car. But if you’re tremendously wealthy, you can practice industrial-scale violence with- out any manual labor on your own part. You can, say, build a sweatshop factory that will collapse in Bangladesh and kill more people than any hands-on mass murderer ever did, or you can calculate risk and benefit about putting poisons or unsafe machines into the world, as manufacturers do every day. If you’re the leader of a country, you can declare war and kill by the hundreds of thousands or millions. And the nuclear superpowers—the United States and Russia—still hold the option of destroying quite a lot of life on Earth.
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