On a recent trip to Virginia, to inaugurate the establishment of our most recent Affiliate Zen group, performing Initiation (Jukai) ceremonies for three members who form the basis of the new community, I had been thinking of Zen as what the world needs now. This recalls the popular song first released in 1965, sung by Jackie DeShannon. The lyrics begin:

What the world needs now is love, sweet love


It's the only thing that there's just too little of


What the world needs now is love, sweet love,


No not just for some but for everyone.

As I settled into my room and turned on the television, suddenly this familiar melody began wafting through the room, as if someone was reading my mind. It was a much more recent version, but still had basically the same, somewhat insipid message. Turned out to be the theme this hotel ran throughout their corporate messaging. But this coincidence made me think that maybe I am on to something.

What the world needs now is not love, in my opinion, depending on what we mean by “love.” There are few instances of this term appearing in English translations of Buddhist texts. One that stands out for me is in what is usually referred to as the “Loving Kindness Sutra” or Metta Sutta, attributed to Buddha. Following the stanza which states the overall theme, “May all beings be happy,” it continues:

Let no one deceive another nor despise any being in any state
Let none by anger or hatred wish harm to another
Even as a mother at the risk of her life watches over and protects her only child
So with a boundless mind should one cherish all living things
suffusing love over the entire world above below and all around without limit
So let one cultivate an infinite good will toward the whole world

Well, good luck with that, you might say, though no one would object to the sentiment. It is survival of the fittest, after all; there have to be losers and winners. But the Buddha was not being sentimental. He was simply pointing out the interconnectedness of all beings, on both biological and social levels. But this teaching included all of sentient life within its embrace, not exclusively humanity. This may be the first ecological sermon ever preached (the back story is that so many followers had come together in this area that the trees of the forest were “unhappy”). He was also suggesting that all beings be happy with reality as it is.

During Rohatsu retreat this year I took several turns as time-keeper (Doan) for the morning sit at 6:00 am, in order to lead the sangha in the morning service, as a training example to those attending who are not as familiar with the chanting protocols, accompanied by drum and gong.

At one point, as happens every morning, my sinuses started to drain, and I realized that I had forgotten to tuck a tissue into my sleeve as I usually do to accommodate this daily ritual. While sniffling as silently as I could until the opportunity arose to leave the zendo to retrieve a napkin, it occurred to me that at some point Buddha would have had a similar problem. While he taught about the accumulation of merit, and warned against the accumulation of possessions and too much wealth, he surely experienced the accumulation of mucus in his sinuses as well. In fact, his descriptions of the true nature of our physiological being are near scathing in their directness and unflinching honesty about the various fluids and organic matter, including waste material, that make up what we fondly refer to as “me” or “myself.”

So I began to wonder just how Buddha would have handled a runny nose, sitting, as he was, in front of hundreds or thousands (myriad kotis, etc.) of his ardent followers, hanging on his every word. We can be pretty sure that the culture of that time had long since figured this out, and had a customary way of dealing with such exigencies. But they apparently did not have paper, certainly not a handy box of Kleenex tissues, and the cloth that they did have was not only hand-woven, but hand-everything, and so would have been relatively expensive to use as a hanky. We are told that they reused scraps of fabric recovered, laundered (in the local stream) and stained with dye to hide the uneven coloration, for their patchwork robes (J. Okesa).

Naturally my curiosity turned to other, more extreme matters, such as the delicate issues of defecation and urination, so I turned, as we moderns do in matters such as this, to Google. I found to my delight and amazement that indeed the ancient precursors in India to Buddha’s time, a civilization that once held forth in the Indus valley, had, not indoor plumbing, but a kind of outdoor plumbing. That is, archeologists have discovered, and you can see the photos online, that they had crafted toilets of stone, which were positioned over streams, a kind of continuously-flushing toilet. They look much like my grandparents’ outhouses in my childhood. This basic technology was also a characteristic of other civilizations, such as that of early Greece, but in India had been lost to history by the time of Buddha, so the practice of going on the ground, or directly into the river, had re-arisen; and is in fact still common in many of the less developed locales in the world today.