“Two Buddhas,” photo by Eve Marko at Bread Loaf Mountain Zen Center in Vermont.
In Switzerland I co-led a Zen retreat with Sensei Franziska Schneider at the most gorgeous retreat center I’ve been to (and I’ve been to several in Switzerland), two-thirds of the way up a tall mountain which she negotiated in her ancient Volvo through one hairpin turn after another.
During breaks in the schedule I walked up some more, the road leaving me behind while continuing its ascent, and I wondered at the isolated farmhouses located up and down the mountain, with children using a “postbus” to go down to school in the valley every morning and coming back up in the afternoon, meadows rising and falling, cows everywhere. The neighbors knew each other, of course, enough to spare them from going all the way down just for a half-cup of sugar or a loaf of bread, and once again I shook my head at the many different ways people live.
During the retreat I thought again of the photo above that I took last July of the zendo altar of Bread Loaf Mountain Zen Center in Vermont, and specifically the two Buddhas facing one another. The typical icon of the Buddha, of an enlightened life, showing him sitting or standing, a relaxed smile on his face, was created a few hundred years after he died (he didn’t want any images made of him) and, like all artistic creations, reflected the specific culture of India at that time. Buddhist images created in Tibet, Sri Lanka, Thailand, and Vietnam are different and naturally reflect their respective cultures, too.
What icon do we need now, in our present culture of indignation, cynicism, and distrust? What icon do we need in a culture of Zoom, email, and social media? Is AI the current great bodhisattva, who sees and knows all, and can tell you what to do, such as when I asked it the other day where to do currency exchange?
As Thich Nhat Hanh asked many years ago: Who or what is the American Buddha?
Could it be not one, but two Buddhas facing each other? The ones in the photo are fairly alike, but imagine one wearing a fez and one wearing a cowboy hat? Imagine one a man and the other a woman or trans? One an elder and the other a child. Or just imagine two sisters facing each other, or two brothers contemplating one another across minefields of different opinions, memories, and lives.
My siblings and I were together for 6 days in the Italian-speaking Ticino area of Switzerland, in an apartment lent for our use high above Lake Maggiore. One flew from Tel Aviv, one from Belgrade, and one from Massachusetts, USA. So different from each other, building such different lives across three-quarters of a century. We had a blast, especially on the day we drove over the border into Italy and specifically Lake Como, where we got lost among the towns dotting the shore, almost got on the ferry heading to Bellagio rather than Menaggio, while I searched for any face remotely resembling George Clooney.
But one night a discussion on religion and politics turned into a shouting match, fueled by ancient disappointments and rivalry. I remember looking around me, down below at the lights surrounding the Lake and up at the neighboring homes, expecting any moment for someone to yell Pscht! or Syg still! I think the Swiss are too courteous to do that.
What is the Buddha that we need for now? Two people face to face, looking at each other’s eyes, searching the confusion lasered by flashes of joy, listening to words they don’t want to hear but will listen to anyway, hearing what’s said and, even more important, what’s not said, noting the thinning lips, receding chin, silver hair, the woman hiding half her face behind hands with white-polished fingernails, the memory of a joke we once shared, a trip we failed to take, searching for communion with a fellow creature whose DNA I mostly share and yet who often feels like a completely different creature from me. Seeing the other—not to persuade or convert, not to change, not even to understand (though that’s not bad)—but simply to see with open curiosity, and in fellowship.
The Jewish theologian Abraham Heschel wrote that perhaps God created the world, with its infinitely diverse characteristics, because that was the only way She, hostage to nondiscriminating, undifferentiating awareness, could finally look at and identify Her infinite aspects and attributes. Perhaps we have to copy Her, and see one Buddha after another, face to face rather than as pixels or 0s and 1s, in order to finally see what’s on the other side of the mirror.
It was a rich 16 days. First retreat, then train to Bern to see friends, train back to Zurich to see more friends and talk for a long time about the Zen Peacemaker Order (which gave me lots of homework to do back home), followed by 6 days with brother and sister in the ever-forgiving ether above Lake Maggiore, ending with a talk on Zoom to a Buddhist conference in Germany in our last night in Zurich.
So much to take in and think about. When Franziska drove at the end of a wonderful retreat through those hairpin turns down the mountain, I felt pretty sure that my time for leading or co-leading retreats was over. There are terrific teachers in Europe and here in the US, no need for me to continue to take up that space. There will probably be other hills for me to climb, but I’m not going up that mountain again.
About the Author:
Eve Marko is a Founding Teacher of the Zen Peacemaker Order and head teacher at the Green River Zen Center in Massachusetts. She received Dharma Transmission and inka from Bernie Glassman. She is also a writer and editor of fiction and nonfiction. Eve has trained spiritually-based social activists and peacemakers in the US, Europe, and the Middle East, and has been a Spiritholder at retreats bearing witness to genocide at Auschwitz-Birkenau, Rwanda, and the Black Hills in South Dakota. Before that, she worked at the Greyston Mandala, which provides housing, child care, jobs, and AIDS-related medical services in Yonkers, New York. Eve’s articles on social activists have appeared in the magazines Tricycle, Shambhala Sun, and Tikkun. Her collection of Zen koans for modern Zen practitioners in collaboration with Roshi Wendy Egyoku Nakao,he Book of Householder Koans: Waking Up In the Land of Attachments, came out in February 2020.More on her website.
