Siddhartha Gautama

Siddhartha Gautama’s father, King Śuddhodana, tried to shelter his son from any experience of suffering or loss.  He was said to have had everyone who got sick or reached a certain age removed from any part of the kingdom where his son might run into them.  At age 29, Siddhartha left his palace to meet his subjects and met an old and sickly man.  In that moment, the veil blissful ignorance was removed and Siddhartha was faced with the reality of suffering, sickness and death.  It changed his path forever.

Well, I’m no Buddha and no prince in a kingdom.  However, every once in a while my eyes are opened to the way that we play King Śuddhodana to ourselves, despite the world’s attempts to play the old man.  Most of us don’t have the ability to have the unfortunate experiences of the world removed from our sight, so instead we develop the ability to adjust what we see.  How many of us walk by the suffering old man panhandling on the corner and after a momentary internal cringe, turn our attention to our grande nonfat mocha and within forty seconds forget that he even existed?  I do.  When we walk away, he’s still there.  Still in his reality. 

When I think about it, it’s not the rich guy walking by with his Starbuck’s that is the heartbreaking part.  It’s the five minutes after he’s gone, when the old man is still there, unnoticed. 

Every once in a while the old man gets through your filter and you see him.  He takes many forms.  Tonight he took the form of a yellow labrador, sitting on a street corner with a cardboard sign in his mouth in an attempt to attract money to some drug kids.  One of the kids whacked him on the haunch and he scurried, cowering, but never dropped the sign.  In the grand scheme of things – the suffering we see every day in a big city, the news from Haiti – this was relatively nothing.  But now it’s four in the morning, and it’s pouring rain outside and I can’t find sleep.  And somewhere out there is that dog.  And that old man I walked by this morning on the way to get coffee.

Some of these filters seem to be necessary just to live in the world.  I think if I threw them all off and let everything in I’d end up curled in the corner, catatonic.  I can’t save every person from their suffering, and more likely I can’t save any of them.  But if you listen to people who have lived on the streets, they say that it’s not the jerk who walks by and says “get a job” that bothers them.  It’s the hundreds who walk by trying desperately to filter this person from their experience.  I should have stopped and petted that dog.  I should have bought that guy a warm drink, or at least looked at him and said hello. 

Yoga is a way to practice removing filters, and to build your capacity to let more of the world in without losing yourself to it.  But it’s not what you can do when you’re in class, or even when you walk out and re-encounter the world that matters the most.  It’s the next day on the way to work in the rain.  It’s walking down a busy street with a friend on your way home.  It’s not enough to take the filters down for a 90-minute class.  We’ve got to be able to keep them down. 

It’s still hours until daylight, and the house is quiet.  There is only the clicking of the keyboard and the sound of the rain outside.  Before long, though, we’ll be back at it.  I’ll be in front of my Saturday morning yoga class talking to them about openness and compassion and love.  I’ll try to connect with each and every person in that room, even if it’s only for a moment.  But then I’ll probably go and get a coffee, and all I can hope is that I see Siddhartha’s old man, whatever form he decides to take this morning.