The sustaining sea and the need to take even strokes in these very uneven times

A short “thought for the day” offered to the Cambridge Unitarian Church as part of the Sunday Service of Mindful Meditation

(A recorded version of the following piece can be heard at this link)

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Today’s short thought for the day aims, like last week, to offer a practical way by which we may navigate the increasingly discombobulating and uneven nature of the world in 2024, both at home and abroad.

I’m going to try to do this by answering the question of why come to a service of Mindful Meditation, Music and Conversation on a Sunday morning, or engage with the Thursday Kiitsu Kyōkai meetings, both of which, in slightly different ways, centre upon a time of meditation and a time of thoughtful conversation.

And my answer to this question is that they teach us to swim.

Let me try to explain what I mean with the help of an insight found in Henry Bugbee’s (1915-1999) extraordinary and unique book called “The Inward Morning: A Philosophical Exploration in Journal Form” that was published in 1958. In it Bugbee suggests that the help available to all sentient beings is something akin to “the sea that carries us all alike; a sea of which trough or crest are but undulations” (see pp. 121-123). And I hope that regular attenders of this service will immediately realise that this is the same “sustaining sea” to which I allude at a key moment in our morning mindful meditation.

So how does Bugbee, the philosopher, teacher, writer, angler, rower and erstwhile captain of a minesweeper during the brutal Pacific War, envisage this sustaining sea that carries us all alike? Well, let me unfold for you something of his train of thought.

Firstly, Bugbee notes that we humans are great insisters; we are creatures who feel that the only way to get things done, and properly to be getting on with life, is always to be insisting we “see to it!” Now, obviously, there are many things we must genuinely be “seeing to” in our daily lives, but the general, extremely choppy and increasingly stormy background to our daily lives means that our “seeing to” this or that all too often quickly turns “into anxiety and effort” as we try “to take charge” of things. As Bugbee says, this anxious and exhausting way of “seeing to it” — of creating the feeling that we are assuredly in charge — although it is sometimes “learned” and even “profitable,” it is not graceful, and it is precisely this graceless, and I would add exhausting, way of proceeding which serves to hide something very important from our view.

The image Bugbee chooses to explore this state of affairs is that of a swimmer who is “flailing the water to keep from going down.” As he notes, the flailing swimmer, in their desperate attempt not to “go down like lead,” mistakes any kind of relaxation for inaction, and they find themselves thinking that if they are not to drown they must really “see to” the business of swimming. The result of this way of going on is, inevitably, a frantic and exhausting flailing of the water.

However, sometimes, whilst we are flailing away, we have all experienced “times when waves overtake us from behind, lifting us up and along” and from these moments, Bugbee says “we may take courage and be thankful.” But our new-found courage and thankfulness can all too easily and quickly morph into the delusional thought that, somehow, “in the exhilaration of swift swimming” we can now “claim as our own the power of the wave.” This is what Bugbee calls “demonic swimming”, a state in which we suffer the illusion that we have “not fallen into flailing” but have, instead, “become the masters of our element” and are now fully in control.

Naturally, however, after the crest of the wave comes the trough, and so there inevitably also come those moments when we begin to drop and this movement throws us into depression and despair and leads us to think that there’s nothing that can be done, except either to go down like lead or to start our frantic flailing once again. 

This foregrounding of the crest and the trough, the elation and despair and the associated feeling that we are either in control and powerful, or not in control and powerless is, inevitably, unsustainably exhausting and cuts against any possibility of experiencing any steadiness and steadfastness in our going on.

Given this, Bugbee is concerned to point out that any genuine sense of steadiness and steadfastness is only available to those who can see beyond the immediate passing crests and toughs of the waves to the constancy of our being sustained by the sea itself, and it is this sense of the sustaining sea that he thinks guards “against the illusions of elation and depression.”

When we are able to recognise this and are able to identify that demonic swimming or simply giving up and going down like lead are illusions then, suddenly, there can emerge for us the possibility of taking “the even stroke informed by the sea that carries us all alike; a sea of which trough or crest are but undulations.” At this point, Bugbee comfortingly observes that, “Now and then we swim a few even strokes and know where we are.”

Now my experience in talking to people who seek me out in my role as a minister, strongly suggests that Bugbee is right in saying that, many, many people have been wholly seduced by the claim made by our dominant, neoliberal culture that “the undulations” in our lives — i.e. crests and troughs, the ups and downs, the joys and sorrows — should only be taken “at face value” and “that when we are up our position is good, and when we are down, our position is bad.” But Bugbee’s work strongly encourages us to resist this exhausting and destructive world-view by helping us to become swimmers who have learnt to take even strokes and who can now see clearly “that our position is not necessarily good when we are up and not necessarily bad when we are down.”

Now my strong claim today is that together, conversation and meditation — whether of the mindful kind we practise on a Sunday morning, or Seiza, the quiet sitting kind we practise on a Thursday — that together are truly life-saving and life-enhancing disciplines that have been proven to help us relax and take a few even strokes and so avoid engaging in either demonic swimming or in going down like lead. They are vital practices that continually help us more properly and realistically to evaluate our life beyond the measures provided by any “face value” understandings of passing undulations, and so come to know our “true position” in the world as creatures “bound up with the sense of communion with all the creatures swimming or floundering in it, as may be.”

So, friends, please continue to practice the disciplines of meditation and good conversation, for they are the even strokes that will help us all come to know and truly to trust in the reality of the sustaining sea.

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A JŌDO SHINSHŨ RELATED POSTSCRIPT

I have explored this insight of Bugbee’s with the Cambridge Unitarian community a number of times over the last decade, but to my surprise, as my interest in, and then personal commitment, to Jōdo Shinshū Buddhism began to deepen, in 2019 I came across a story told by a Higashi-honganji minister, the Revd Dr Kenneth Kenichi Tanaka, that bears a remarkable (or is it so remarkable!?) connection with Bugbee’s story. I reproduce the story for you here and, at the end, I have posted a YouTube Video of Tanaka-sensei own telling the story. 

Ocean Parable by Kenneth Kenichi Tanaka

I remember a Dharma talk (Buddhist sermon) story about a sailor lost at sea. I can’t recall the name of the priest who gave the talk. I would like to give him proper credit for the story. Maybe it is in the nature of religious development that we are nurtured more by our unconscious impressions than by our clear memories (see note 1 below).

I have expanded the story a little so that I can use it to capture the heart of Jodo-Shinshu Buddhism—its doctrine and spirituality. Here is the story, an ocean metaphor.

At night a ship leaves the port of a tropical island. After many hours on the high seas a sailor falls overboard. No one on the ship notices that the man is missing, and the waves are choppy. It is hauntingly dark. The sailor paddles frantically to keep afloat.

He then starts to swim toward an island he saw before he fell overboard. He has lost all sense of direction. So he is not sure that he is heading the right way. Though he is a good swimmer, his arms and legs soon grow weary. His lungs are tired, and he gasps for air. The sailor feels lost and totally alone in the middle of the ocean. This could be the end for him. As despair overcomes him, his energy drains from him like sand from an hourglass. He begins to choke on the water slapping his face, and he can feel his body being dragged under.

At this instant he hears a voice from the depths of the ocean, “Let go. Let go of your striving! You’re fine just as you are! Namo Amida Butsu.”

The sailor hears the voice and stops his useless striving to swim by his own power. Instead, he turns over on his back with limbs outstretched as if he were in a backyard hammock on a lazy summer afternoon. He is overjoyed to find that the ocean holds him afloat without any effort on his part!

Now, the water feels warm and the waves are calm. The ocean that seemed ready to drag him under now caresses him. He is grateful and happy to know that he is all right. He realizes that he was fine all along. He just didn’t know it. The ocean has not changed at all. By changing his thinking, the sailor’s relationship with the ocean has changed. The sea changed from being a dangerous and frightening enemy to a friend who embraced and supported him.

The sailor knows that he cannot stay afloat forever in the middle of the ocean. If he had no worldly obligations, maybe he could afford to stay and rest in this joyful calm. But the image of his wife and small children waiting anxiously at home inspires him to try to reach the shore.

He begins to swim as before, but with one important difference. He now trusts the ocean as he would a caring and protecting loved one. He knows that whenever he becomes tired, he can let go, and the ocean will support him. More importantly, he now knows that while he swims, it is the power of the ocean, not his own power that keeps him afloat. Yes, he moves his limbs to swim, but he has learned he can stay afloat by not striving.

Now that he feels safe in the arms of the sea, the sailor can think about finding the island. He studies the positions of the stars and the moon and the direction of the wind. Using his training as a sailor, he imagines where the island might be and moves toward it. The swimmer has no guarantee that he has chosen the right direction, but he is now sure that the ocean will not let him down. Eventually he will reach the island. In appreciation for this newfound confidence and joy, the sailor hears himself uttering, “Namo Amida Butsu.”

This story, in a nutshell, captures the heart of Jodo-Shinshu spirituality. The drowning sailor symbolizes our human condition which is best explained by the Buddha’s realization, “We all experience suffering.” Our natural response is to attempt to swim out of our predicament. But no matter how strong and well-trained, we are unable to swim to the distant island. Try as we might, the effort is futile. At that very point, we are called to let go of our struggle and to trust the ocean. The result is a dramatic change, in which we experience release, joy and awareness. Within this Jodo-Shinshu spiritual transformation called “Shinjin awareness,” we are infused with an abiding sense of well-being and a spontaneous desire to assist others to reach happiness.

Shinran Shonin (1173–1263), the founder of the Jodo-Shinshu school, was extremely fond of the ocean imagery. He refers to the ocean in speaking about his own unenlightened, desperate predicament. He laments:

I know truly how grievous it is that I, Gutoku Shinran, am sinking in an immense ocean of desires and attachment and am lost in vast mountains of fame and advantage.

(Teachings, II, p. 279)

The same ocean imagery, however, expresses the joyous and liberating dimensions of his spiritual life. He speaks of the “Ocean-like Primal Vow” and “Sea of Inconceivable Virtue.” Elsewhere, he exclaims:

How joyous I am, my heart and mind being rooted in the Buddha-ground of the universal Vow, and my thoughts and feelings flowing within the inconceivable Dharma-ocean.

(Teachings, IV, p. 616)

Note 1: More recently others have written about this metaphor, for example, Dr. Alfred Bloom, Rev. Masao and Rev. Tetsuo Unno.

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And, as I mentioned above, if you’d like to see and hear Tanaka-sensei tell the story himself, then just click on the YouTube video below. The story begins at 35:18 . . .