I think American Buddhists are missing in action.
I think they really are.
At least in one particular.
They are missing in action in relation to an almost overwhelming contradiction with their teaching that exists in common public culture today.
I am talking about the notion of “narrative”.
“Narrative” is the word for a “story” — the usual term for it in mindfulness therapy — that collects the different realities in your life into one basket. Story, or narrative, is an attempt to understand as a single whole the different experiences you have in life. It is almost invariably imposed, or deduced, rather than discovered, and induced. According to many today, your life has to have a narrative (i.e., imposed upon it by your mind, or by someone else’s mind) in order for it to have meaning. You almost become one with your narrative.
Buddhism teaches something different.
It teaches that the narratives or stories you employ to categorize your experience are arbitrary, or “arbitrary conceptions”, which the mind has forced on the facts in order to assign a unity, or appearance of unity, to them. But, said the Teacher, narratives are only partially true, at best. This is because reality of life is so various and so dependent on perception that no one “field theory” is sufficient to explain it, let alone explain it to yourself.
I wish that Buddhists, who are pretty popular in a lot of circles by comparison with Christians, of whom I am one, would “come out” on this subject. Recently, I asked a Buddhist teacher whom I admire, “Why doesn’t anyone from your community ever challenge the prevailing ‘narrative’ about narratives? You disappoint me.” The teacher hung his head, literally.
“I know, I know,” he said. “We just don’t want to go there, at least in a public way.”
This cast draws on two R & B ‘Soul’ ballads that, were they recorded today, would probably invoke a “narrative” to explain the voice — and problem — of the singer. But they weren’t recorded today. They understand the suffering they relate, and the deliverance from that suffering which both songs celebrate, in a different way.