The Golden Cage

I have been thinking about the experience of receiving a Buddhist teaching - particularly one that is full of alien and complex details such as the five Buddha Families or Nine Vehicles that are familiar concerns of Buddhist tantrism. I guess one way is to listen long enough until all the words and ideas become familiar and one can parrot them accurately. Not wanting to entirely dismiss this, this way does not work for someone like me who wants to know why something is as it is and how this came to be so. Having the ideas just given to me, handed down by a teacher in much the same way as they were handed to him or her, somehow is not enough. We could call this the ‘facade’ of the teaching - how it initially appears, its top level. For me being able to familiarise myself with the facade and indeed come to know my way round the facade in detail does not add up to penetrating through it to the meaning behind. This is what knowing the why and how of things does. It pushes through all the fantastical cultural accretions and reaches into essential meanings. How this teaching describes what I experience now and how this experience may be understood and changed.

There have been Buddhist teachers that understood this and worked hard to push through the facade to the essential living and naked meaning. I suspect - I know - that being with such teachers is hard. One name for an experience of Buddhism that is only about taking on the trappings of the facade is the ‘golden cage’. We know all the right words, understand the ideas and behave in an appropriately Buddhisty way but actually we have just taken on a whole load more of imprisoning stuff even though it is very attractive. Breaking out of the cage, through the facade, requires we really engage with the teachings. Not just listen but think, question, test. It’s active, engaged, participatory. We reach in and shake things up. It’s not about hiding in comfort and ease, it’s about a powerful wind of knowing.

Well, something like that!

NW. Written in a high wind on the Isle of Arran 4.5.23