Just Add Buddha!: Simple Buddhist Solutions for Everyday Life - Softcover

Metcalf, Franz

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1569754098 ISBN 13: 9781569754092

Publisher: Ulysses Press, 2004

Synopsis

Written for spiritual seekers who deal with unenlightened coworkers and inconsiderate bank tellers more often than Zen masters and Tibetan monks, this book demonstrates the practical side of Buddhism. Author Franz Metcalf shows how to weave simple vows, quick rethinks, instant relaxations, fast visualizations, and many other stripped-down Buddhist practices into every area of life. Individually, Metcalf's techniques work as quick fixes for specific dilemmas, but woven together, they gradually strengthen one's spiritual base when one day a habitual way of being has been quietly transformed. While not written to impress pure Buddhists, this book takes Buddhism seriously. Approachable sections on Buddhism's rich tradition and a sprinkling of quotes from ancient scripture and contemporary teachers connect the book's practices to the deeper wisdom underlying them. Always, Just Add Buddha remains squarely focused on daily life, drawing out the most practical aspects of Buddhism.

About this title

About the Author

Franz Metcalf did his Masters work at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, CA, and received a doctorate from the University of Chicago with a dissertation on the question, "Why Do Americans Practice Zen Buddhism?" He continues to study psychological development and American Buddhism, and is a contributor to Buddhist Spirituality as well as several scholarly journals. He currently works with the Forge Institute for Spirituality and Social Change, serves on the steering committee of the person, culture and religion group of the American Academy of Religion, and teaches at California State University Los Angeles.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Dealing with Troublesome Types
(a.k.a., All Sentient Beings)
Some people really get my goat. (Note: the origin of that expression is unknown, lost in time. Things arise and they pass away; we must not hold on too tightly. Still, it sounds great, doesn’t it?) These are the troublesome types we encounter nearly every day. If they were rarer they wouldn’t bug us so much because they’d be interesting curiosities. If they were even more common, they again wouldn’t bug us so much because we’d be used to them. As it is, there are just enough of them to keep us in a state of maximum irritation.
On another level, the title of this chapter also reminds us that each and every one of us can be such a person. Just as all sentient beings can be bodhisattvas or even Buddhas, if we just live up to our potential, so can we all be colossal jerks if we just live down to our baseness. Guess which happens more often.
In this chapter I’ll give you some quick techniques to solve both sides of the problem: to nullify the effect of jerks on you by helping you act like a bodhisattva. In fact, it’s in dealing with exactly these troublesome people that we have our best chances to make progress.
I know it sounds strange, but our adversaries, even our enemies, are our most consistent teachers. They are the folks we can count on to keep on showing us exactly where we’re failing, where we’re stuck, where we need work. And they give us that work, bless their tiny, twisted hearts. One of my favorite Buddhist texts, the Bodhicharyavatara ("Guide to the Bodhisattva Life") puts a great deal of effort into teaching us how this works. It says
And so, just like a treasure that arrives
Without my having striven to attain it,
I should be deeply happy with my enemies
For they support my long awakening.
Because they let me practice patience,
They are worthy of my giving them
The flower of that patience: my compassion,
For they have been the very cause of it.
6.107-6.108
The author, Shantideva, is pointing out something really obvious but which we tend to ignore. Our enemies deserve our thanks and our compassion precisely because we gain that compassion through having to deal with the likes of them! It’s so difficult we should be extra grateful they keep on giving us opportunities to improve. They are the cause of our progress. You can’t get that from friends; they’re too darn nice. No, only enemies can help you out here.
Alright then, our enemies are our friends. Good for them. But they’re also still our enemies; we’ve got to marshal our inner resources to be open to learning from them. It’s tough and we can all use help. That’s why I’ve put this chapter together, to share some tricks I use to create that openness.
I start us off with people we don’t know: unknowns who tick us off, telemarketers, politicians, bums, terrorists. And these are just examples; as you know, there are plenty of others we could add to the list. But the tricks that work with these folks will work with others.
After dealing with people we don’t know, we move to people we do know. This is a more mixed bag, not so awful, but sometimes highly annoying. (By the way: I’m saving the really maddening people―your loved ones―for later. They deserve their own chapter.) You’re probably stuck with these people, so you need responses to them that work with your relationship. These responses you can repeat over and over, deepen, and make vital parts of your relationships.
We begin with the rawest and most ignorant of emotions: hatred.
I hate that #$%!
First, we need to admit hatred is exciting. People hate because on one level it feels good. It divides the world so simply. It psyches us up as "good guys" and reassures us there’s a profound difference between us and the "evildoers." The fact that this is a load of crap does not enter into the equation; too messy. Hatred really does solve troubles. Unfortunately, it also creates a bunch of new ones.
Do I need to tell you how hating traps you, brings you down to the level of the person you hate (or lower), steeps you in anger and bad emotions, repels everyone but other hateful people? No. You know all this already. You are the sort of person who buys this book. You are beyond hatred.
Okay, so you’re not beyond hatred, but you want to be. Good enough, I’m there with you. How to get there? It’s very quick, but, honestly, it does require effort.
Let’s say you hate a coworker. This is not tough to imagine. We’ve all hated coworkers at one time or another. It’s part of the job description. Take me. I hated the guy they hired for the full-time religion professorship at the university where I teach. I hated him for the obvious reason that he got the promotion and I didn’t. So I just knew he was an idiot hired solely for the luck of having the same specialty as the retiring department chair. That ticked me off. Then he got more of my hatred by not single-handedly revamping the entire religious studies program as I would easilyyyyyy have done had they hired me, the bastards. (You know I’m being ironic, right?) This was a perfectly detestable person.
Then I met him. End of hatred.
So this is my simple practice to end hatred: meet people. It’s surprisingly hard to hate someone you’ve met, a fellow human being. In fact, you’ll find it’s too difficult and you’ll give it up. This is my favorite form of spiritual practice: making it so hard to do the wrong thing that you just give in and do the right one out of laziness. I love it when that happens, when we can use our own feeble human nature to improve ourselves.
Now of course this doesn’t work perfectly. Not everyone you hate turns out to be hip, humane, funny, and fearless in the face of bigotry the way my colleague did. Sometimes they turn out to be jerks. Fine. But we are not talking about getting rid of annoyance here, we are talking about getting rid of hatred. Annoyance is life, hatred is a poison. You have to let it go. And the fact is that you often can let go of your burden of hating a guy even if he’s a jerk when you see he’s just stupid and frightened. It’s genuinely difficult to hate frightened people, as it should be. When we find that jerks are jerks because they’re afraid and don’t have a better way of hiding it, then we can let go of our hatred of them. It’s such a relief. Then we can move on to the long-term practice of dealing with them as flawed people.
Hey, I was even able to do this with the President!
[Note: I’m writing this in 2003, but it’s pretty much always necessary, no matter who’s president. See them as fellow living beings, just as doomed as yourself. Then even their smugness doesn’t seem so bad.]
One key in several of these tricks is humanizing the troublesome person. Most of us are decent people and when we see the humanity of another person we relax, we open up to them, we might even begin to care about them. In any case, we let go of our reactive, negative mindsets about them. Here’s a place almost all of us create an immediate negative mindset and need quick help:
How to Hang up on Telemarketers (Nicely)
You are just sitting down to dinner or you’re at the computer and the perfect solution to your problem at work has floated into your mind―and the phone rings. Never confident enough to ignore such things (it could be Ed McMahon!), you answer and a voice calls you by name (probably mispronouncing it) and asks you how you are. You make the error of answering. Now you’re in for it and you can’t get a word in as you listen to a spiel for refinancing or vacation destinations or maybe, I don’t know, hair polish, for the next two precious, irreplaceable minutes of your life. Your food or your brilliant ideas grow cold as your frustration heats up. You can’t seem to get away without being mean. What would Buddha do?
I’ve recently starting a new practice and I think

Edition details

• Publisher: Ulysses Press
• Publication date: 2004
• ISBN 10: 1569754098
• ISBN 13: 9781569754092
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 216