Geri Larkin - The Still Point Dhammapada: Living the Buddhas Essential Teachings

For Ananda
This book is dedicated to
Robbie Flowers and Art Gabhart.
They bring the words to life every Sunday.

To Koho Vince Anila because he read the renderings over and over without complaint, editing and making suggestions throughout. To Andrea Pedolsky because she is our guardian angel. To Renee Sedliar because she is a poet-editor with a big heart and a steady hand. To the Still Point sangha and especially the dharma students, who make this work gratifying. Twice in my life Ive decided to give away everything I own, telling myself its the Zen wayonly to stall out at the bookcase. Twice in my life Ive decided to give away everything I own, telling myself its the Zen wayonly to stall out at the bookcase.

Both times Ive been able to let go of everything except the books and, okay, a couple of picturespaintings my mother has made for me and photographs of my family. Everything else goes. Even Buddha statues and birthday cards from my best friends. For the cards I just cross out my name and put in the name of whoever has a birthday coming up and/or could use a card with all the love it implies. Most recently that was my dharma brother Joe Sulak. Attachments die hard.

A few days ago I said to myself, Okay, Parang, this is it. You get to keep only one book. Thats it. If you keep two you will end up in a hell realm. The worst one, the one where they burn people in boiling oil while cutting out eyes, and cutting off ears, nose, tongue, and brain. Okay. Okay.

I choose the Dhammapada. Ill keep it because it has never ever let me down. Its true north. Ill keep the Dhammapada because it makes me laugh at myself or sob at some karmic mess Ive created. The Dhammapada oozes wisdom and compassion and reminds me that life is tough, that we all suffer, and that we do so because we insist on yearning for external stuff that wont ever make us permanently happy. It reminds me that enlightenment really is an inside job, one that includes letting go of the whole wildly entertaining melodrama I call my life.

The Dhammapada is a collection of more than four hundred Pali verses that Buddha is said to have spoken on over three hundred different occasions. Its first translation into a European language was by a Danish scholar, Victor Fausboll, in 1855. He translated it into Latin first, then German. In 1908 another scholar, Max Mueller, translated it into English. Between then and now dozens of versions, maybe more, have surfaced around the world. Because the eight or nine versions Ive read have felt cumbersome for our inner-city sangha, about two years ago I decided to come up with a rendering just for us.

Still Point is located smack in the middle of rough-and-tumble downtown Detroit, a city of 140 acres and fewer people every year. Even with political pressure to increase the numbers, census-takers say that there are fewer than a million of us now. According to the 2000 Census, [Detroit] has 6,855 residents per square mile, compared to 12,750 in Chicago, 26,403 in New York and 7,877 in sprawling Los Angeles. On the other hand, we have a new $300 million baseball stadium right downtown, and rumors of further development keep increasing the value of the citys property. Still Point is on the corner of a pockmarked block, snuggled up against a street where people care for their buildings. Blight is the disease we watch.

Its like a heart murmur that could kill us if we arent really careful, if we dont change the way we live, if we dont take better care of each other. We started the temple in September 2000, with yours truly as its first guiding teacher. I was coming off of five years as a dharma teacher in Ann Arbor, Michigan, where I had been sitting and training since 1988. Ordained in 1995, I fully expected to spend at least a few more years in Ann Arbor. But I parted ways with my teacher following a painful pilgrimage in Korea. Happily, he had managed to instill in me a deep love for the Korean Buddhist tradition by then.

Our lineage is an earthy, colorful Zen with meditation at its core. Chanting, prostrations, and sutra study flesh out our spiritual practice. What emerges is a spontaneous, direct, and self-reliant style thats been in play since the fourteenth century, when a monk named Taego formally unified all of the various Korean Zen sects under one roof. Days start early and end early, relative to Western standards. Every minute is a minute to awaken, and manual labor is encouraged, as are generosity and a big helping of humility. When I decided it was time to leave Ann Arbor, I mentioned my decision to two friends who had started an organic bakery in the Cass Corridor of Detroit.

In spite of many predictions of failure, they were thriving there. Their bakery, Avalon International Breads, is now a Detroit hotspot, and I can only imagine the number of visionary awards Jackie and Ann have hanging on their walls by now. Anyway, they invited me to move to the corridor. After a business meeting in early spring of 2000, I went to see their new house, one of two brownstones still left standing in the neighborhood. On the top floor was a beautiful octagonal-shaped room. For your sangha, Jackie said.

I said yes to their suggestion and have never looked back. (Okay, maybe once, but thats because the neighborhood still doesnt have a decent bookstore.) Instead of the brownstone, we moved into the yoga room of the First Unitarian Universalist Church. Its been a wonderful home, even with no air-conditioning and eratic heat. The people who come to Still Point are artists, entrepreneurs, students, health-care workers. Unemployed, homeless, homemakers. Were not a fancy crowd.

As far as I can tell there isnt a millionaire in the bunch. Most weeks there isnt even a thou-sandaire. Its a group that wants solid spiritual advice. Forget esoteric; they want to know how to stop being furious with a boss who has an entire tree stuck up her butt. When I decided that we needed a modernized version of the Dhammapada, Still Points senior dharma student, Koho Vince Anila, said hed help me come up with a rendering that would ring true to Detroit. For one thing, all the pronouns in all the versions I knew were masculine, and that just didnt work for contemporary life.

And some of the metaphors used made me squint in concentration as I tried to understand their teaching. The version that we used as our starting pointour baseline Dhammapada, if you willis The Illustrated Dhammapada, by Venerable Weragoda Sarada Maha Thero, published in Singa-pore and intentionally not copyrighted so that it could be available to a wide audience. Its a sweet, straightforward rendering of the verses. After over a year of playing with the lines, rewriting them, and reading them every Sunday at Still Point to make sure they made sense to people, we now offer them to you. I eat all blame for any hiccups and bumpy parts in our rendering and bow to the ground in gratitude to whoever carved the first version on a leaf so that the rest of us would have Buddhas words as a refuge thousands of years later. Each chapter of The Still Point Dhammapada starts with a series of verses and then moves into a story relating to those verses.

The stories underline at least one of the key teachings of the chapter, demonstrating the pertinence of Buddhas wisdom even today. The purpose of the stories is to offer an opening, one way to think about how to reflect Buddhas teachings in our own lives. There are countless other ways, though. Mostly the stories are about people who make up the Still Point sangha. How lucky I am that theyre in my life! Parang Geri Larkin September 1, 2002

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