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#3777 -
Friday, January 15, 2010 - Editor: Jerry Katz
The Nonduality Highlights - http://groups.yahoo.com/group/NDhighlights
The open way
of being in the world
16 Jan 2010, 0140 hrs IST, Vithal C Nadkarni, ET Bureau
Robert Thurman was changing a flat tyre when the rim flipped the
tyre iron into his eye. He went into coma for three days. When he
woke up, the renowned translator of Tibetan and Sanskrit, who was
also leading a double life as a wealthy Harvard playboy, found
that the doctors had taken the eye out.
“It was kind of a mess,” he reminisces. “But it
became a great benefit to me. Losing my eye made me realise that
everything is impermanent. As my teacher later said, I lost one
but gained a thousand more. I gained a thousand eyes into the
deep visceral value of impermanence, what we call in Tibet the
immediacy of death, meaning that death is right here with us
now.” That insight shaped all his subsequent experiences.
Giving up his life of ease, he trekked off to India, became the
first American to be ordained as a Buddhist monk, initiated by
none other than Tenzin Gyatso, the current Dalai Lama.
Four years later, he was back in America, giving up his robes and
begging bowl and putting on a coat and tie. “I decided to
follow the Bodhisattva path (although I do not consider myself a
Bodhisattva), which is to seek enlightenment for the sake of
others, to serve others,” he explains. “But being a
Buddhist monk was not a suitable position, at that time, from
which to command people’s respect, to engage them
intellectually, or teach them, because everyone thought that an
American Buddhist monk was somehow defective. There wasn’t a
real social understanding of the place of a monk in western
society. The academy is the monastery, if you will, of modern
secular society, so my return to academia was a natural
adaptation to America’s social reality.”
Shortly after his return, he was hired to translate the ancient
Tibetan text, Vimalakirti Sutra. Vimalakirti was not a monk, but
an enlightened layperson who emphasised the notion of
“non-duality,” which means that one doesn’t create
artificial distinctions between the everyday world and some
exalted state. “In other words, you try to live out your
Nirvana in the world, not in the monastery,” Thurman avers.
He was deeply moved by the Zen-like idea that Nirvana was not a
place but an open way of being in the world. “This
isn’t the same as nihilism,” he says. “The
Buddha’s teaching simply says that nothing exists
independently; that everything depends on everything else. Rather
than being a danger, it is the one hope and a cure for
today’s nihilism.”
From http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/Cosmic-Uplink/The-open-way-of-being-in-the-world/articleshow/5450562.cms