I’ve been getting back into jazz again, jazz guitar. It’s opening up whole new realms for me. I think that’s because my whole attitude towards the dharma has changed as well.
I just discovered the great vibraphone player, Cal Tjader, a master of Latin jazz who wasn’t Latin (he was Swedish), but he always had great Cuban musicians in his band. Listen to Cal’s jazz and you’ll get the sense of what I am trying to say here.
First and most importantly, I stopped obeying what I call the system imperative, which is to become a perfectly enlightened Buddha. I’m not going to ever be that, not in this lifetime—perhaps in other lifetimes, but then, it won’t be ‘me’ that is enlightened, so I won’t care. Whoever is enlightened then will become so without knowing anything about ‘me’, and ‘I’ in this lifetime won’t know anything about it.
That’s why I’ve always said that enlightenment (and karma and rebirth) is more like evolution than anything else. The ‘future beings’ who are enlightened are somehow connected to me, as evolutionary descendants, though not through my genetic DNA because I have no offspring. Rather they are the inheritors of whatever good I am able to bring about in this life. They benefit from a whole culture, a whole species that has learned something new and creative and adaptive. That is why ‘ultimate enlightenment’ is a collective process, not an individual one. I am able to achieve some aspect of enlightenment because of all those who have gone before me who showed the way—my dharma ancestors— and left that to me as my inheritance. So I can let go of the system imperative to achieve perfect enlightenment in this lifetime, and entrust that to the ‘future beings’, just as my dharma ancestors entrusted it to me and my generation.
And now that I have let go of that system imperative, I have been released from all the anxiety and striving, all the existential angst. Pursuing ‘perfect and complete enlightenment’, what I call Chasing the Dragon, is just another version of samsara. I call it ‘hamster Buddhism’. In traditional Buddhist practice, I see lots of hamsters on the wheel, people chasing enlightenment round-and-round who will never achieve it because all they are doing is chasing samsara disguised as Buddhism. They are hamsters on the wheel of samsara, frantically chasing this ever-elusive state called ‘enlightenment’. Enlightenment is not a state of mind—it can’t be because the mind changes all the time. Enlightenment is a state of letting go completely, letting go of all system imperatives, all ultimate aims. It is flowing with and responding to the contingencies as they appear in the now. It is letting go of any end result, because that must be left to future dharma generations. We will all get there together.
So if there are no ultimate aims or system imperatives, then I am totally free to pursue anything in the present that brings wholeness and joy. Letting go of ultimate enlightenment means that I interpret dharma in a whole new way. It has become jazz improvisation, jazz dharma. It is improvisation with the dharma, like music. I can create anything I want with the dharma, because it doesn’t have to all add up to that One Result. It doesn’t have to result in anything but the joy of the moment. For the first time in the ten years that I have been practicing Buddhism, I finally feel freedom, I finally feel joy. Follow your bliss! yes, because it leads to the same place that dharma does, which is nowhere in particular. But right here, right now, forever.
But this is not a permanent state because nothing is. Rather it is a practice—jazz dharma is a practice of constantly improvising with life, improvising with experience, improvising with dharma, improvising with what works and what doesn’t, what creates beauty and truth, or not, and constantly transforming my fixed ideas about what makes for beauty and truth. It is a state of constant creation in the moment. It’s not just “paying attention” to the present moment, like a closed-ciruit tv monitor watching what comes through the door of the lobby in your apartment building. That’s robotic mindfulness. It is constantly creating in the present moment, really improvising, jazz dharma.
Meditation enhances our capacity to play jazz dharma, to improvise with life, because it enhances our ability to immerse ourselves and stay with what is happening in the present moment, to investigate it, vibe with it, grok it, play with it, groove with it, make something of it, get jiggy with it.
There are no rules in jazz dharma except to ‘do no harm’ (the five precepts), and to do as much good as you can. I wake up every day and I say to myself, “do something good today.” Every day I make an effort to bring about some good in the world. It’s a small thing: be kind to my wife, treat my dogs well, give a smile to someone in the market, create something beautiful—small things like that, but it makes life worthwhile.
So I am free to do as I please and to enjoy life, to create in the present moment, to make stuff that is really beautiful, sad, crazy, clever, goofy, angry, wise, whatever I choose to make in the present moment. There is no finished product, just like there is no ultimate aim or system imperative. It’s all in process and it never ends. Not in this life anyway.
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