Flowers Fall

A Mean Animal Practices the Hard Way

by Bethany Saltman, September 28, 2009

People often ask if we are raising Azalea as a Buddhist, and, if so, what that means. It’s true that we have Buddhas in the house; we sit, we chant, do services, light incense, spend a lot of time at a monastery, and have many shaven-headed monk friends. So there is all that. But Buddhism is a little different from the Judeo-Christian tradition, where there are certain doctrines we could teach a three-year-old; for instance, that God exists, and He loves you. It’s not that Buddhism has no core beliefs, but the heart of our practice is based on some fundamentals that are a bit trickier to translate in a Sunday school setting. And they are meant to be realized by each individual in their own lives, not accepted as true.

So while Azalea is not asked to memorize any basic principles like Form is emptiness and emptiness is form; form is exactly emptiness and emptiness is exactly form, catchy though it may be, we hope that by growing up with practitioners—her parents and the larger sangha—she’ll get the gist, perhaps some merit, or at least benefit from our effort. But the bottom line is that in order to raise a Buddhist, we need to actually practice Buddhism. What exactly does that mean for a family, beyond carrying on in some Buddhist fashion? There is, of course, no one answer, or the perfect Buddhist-family style, but one thing is for sure: As the late Tibetan teacher, Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche wrote, “Inasmuch as no one is going to save us, to the extent that no one is going magically to enlighten us, the path we are discussing is called ‘the hard way.’”

For instance, take the other day. It was the first day back to preschool, and there was indeed a crispness, a certain bustle in the air, which got me into my favorite feeling-state of happy melancholia, filled with a longing to wear cable-knit tights. But instead, being the parent now, I packed Azalea’s ham with mayo on pita bread with back-to-school delight. I even tied up a butter cookie in waxed paper, with a note written on a heart I cut out from a yellow post-it note: Happy first day of school, Azalea! I love you, Mommy.

Okay, I confess. The little heart thing got me feeling pretty darn good about myself. Kind of puffed up, even. Like the only mom in the world who added a little extra touch to her kid’s lunch that day.

So when Azalea strolled in to the kitchen from where she was eating her breakfast and leaned against the fridge, staring up at me, and said, “Mommy, I wish I could be just like you,” I was kind of not totally surprised. I mean, really, who wouldn’t want to be just like me, right? And then I asked in an almost rhetorical way,
“Why’s that, honey?” To which Azalea replied, “Because then I could be angry all the time.”

Wow!

“Do you really think I’m angry a lot?” I asked.

“Um-hmm,” she answered, nodding.

And then I figured if I kept asking questions about the specifics of this…interesting…statement, I might be able to crack the witness and get her to confess that she was making the whole thing up!
So I asked, “What do I look like when I’m angry?”

“A mean animal.”