Post #9: There Is a Crack in Everything…

7 May 2023

Sometimes in life one cannot help feeling cracked and damaged. For some of us it may be a more common occurrence, especially as the years go by and the bruised and battered parts accumulate, and for others it may be hard to admit as much to themselves (let alone to others), but I suspect that the little voice that tells you that you are not good enough is probably familiar to everyone, even if it is only a passing acquaintance for the happy and the lucky.

How would the practice help, one might ask. The answer could take two directions. On the one hand, one might hope to be healed and made whole, for the cracks to be filled and the damage to be repaired. That can probably happen on the Path too, but I wonder whether a second possibility is not more relevant on the whole, namely that one might learn to live with the cracks a little better even as they persist. Or perhaps, even more than that, the very cracks may have a role to play in letting the light in, as Leonard Cohen (for many years a Zen monk) mused in one of his songs, “Anthem”:

Ring the bells that still can ring

Forget your perfect offering

There is a crack, a crack in everything

That's how the light gets in

The first noble truth would suggest, after all, that dissatisfaction is no incidental feature of our lives, but the very baseline of sentient existence; it may not always rise to the level of outright suffering (perhaps not even usually), but it always remains, the Teaching would insist, as a subtle undercurrent beneath our supposed satisfactions, even if it is no more than the faint worry about how long our presently blissful state can possibly last. We cannot get rid of it directly, only change our habits such that the fundamental source of the problem, craving and clinging to what cannot persist, is gradually and gently dried up.

We think we can take our self-ownership for granted and invest ourselves in nothing so much in our sense of what makes us who we are and sets us apart from others. With respect to freedom from coercion and undue interference from others, that’s a pretty sensible stance; but how far, or rather how deep, that self-ownership really goes when one looks a little more closely is another matter. What we own in the fullest sense of the word should be subject to our control, but even our thoughts and bodies do not obey us nearly to the extent that we would like, to say nothing of the outside influences that we cannot elude.

The idea that we could lead incomparably lighter and more joyful lives if only we found a way to adopt more of a well-meaning observer’s perspective on our own doings, makes a lot of sense to me, and it is by no means unique to Buddhism. It would not mean caring for ourselves any less, only doing so in a less clinging and clutching manner, with less defensiveness and its correlate, habitual frustration and lashing out. In principle, as many New Age devotees proclaim with genuine conviction, all it should take is the throwing a switch, which can be done more or less at will, from one moment to the next: decide to be happy, and that is what you will be. Only in practice it does not look quite so simple to me, not by a long stretch.

It seems a lot more plausible to me that habits built up for a lifetime, and necessarily so in a world that threatens one’s survival on all sides, would also need to be unwound and peeled off gradually, one by one, until the old skin falls off like that of a molting snake—rather than trying to tear it off by force and making a bloody mess when it is still attached (an image I am taking from the Sutta Nipata). The Buddha, as always, took a reassuringly moderate line: “Just as the great ocean slants, slopes, and inclines gradually, not dropping off abruptly, so too, in this Dhamma and discipline, penetration to final knowledge occurs by gradual training, gradual activity, and gradual practice, not abruptly.” In this the Dhamma looks not so very different from many other arts and disciplines—the Pali scriptures mention architecture, archery, and even accounting (Majjhima Nikaya 107.2)—as opposed to the magical thinking whereby we all, at one time or another, yearn for a wizard’s wand that can fix our troubles all at once by a quick and miraculous wave of the hand.

Not that very rapid progress is not sometimes possible as well, including dramatic breakthroughs and flashes of profound insight, all the way up to witnessing Nibbana itself. Yet even stream-enterers (sotapanna in the lingo) who are said to have glimpsed the ultimate reality are said to retain, despite the supposed irreversibility of their karmic course, enough impurities to fuel several rebirths yet. Which means, for the rest of us, that we must expect to “keep buggering on,” as Churchill liked to say (no stranger he to the black dog), in the Dhamma as in everything else, perhaps for a lot longer than our more enthusiastic moments might lead us to expect. Along the winding, often arduous path of life, it is no mean accomplishment to be able to say, as Seneca quotes Hecato in one of his Epistles (the sixth) that one has at last begun to be a real friend to oneself.

Readings: Anguttara Nikaya 8:20 (gradual training)