So Many Ways to Say Anatta
With no direct flights from Tokyo to Miami, Eric and I decided to fly through San Francisco, taking a few days to see folks, on our way home. I made an appointment for us to stop by the temple and visit with Mae Yo and Mae Neecha.
During our conversation, something Mae Neecha shared about karma really hit me. At the time, I wasn’t fully able to fully digest it, but retrospectively her example had a deep impact on my contemplations about karma and anatta over the years since. As the example was so clarifying, I do want to go ahead and share it here –through it wasn’t my own contemplation – so that this context has been established as I continue to share my own ongoing practice and contemplations.
Mae Neecha explained how at the end of Game of Thrones, one of the characters, Theon, went out to face the Dark King (villain), sacrificing himself to protect his adopted brother Bran, and buy the family more time to survive and fight back. Mae Neecha said that she got a little teary eyed from the scene and reflected that this idea, of self-sacrifice, always gets her. She felt it was brave, but also a little unfair that Theon had to be the one to die so others could live.
But then, she through more about the whole story. Theon had for much of the series been a real dick. For a while, there he had turned against the family that raised him, trying to overthrow them. From this perspective, it made sense to her that now Theon needed to be the one to sacrifice, to protect that family, it was a balancing of his previous role and actions. This was karma. When she saw it was about karma, it didn’t seem so unfair anymore. Nor did it seem so extraordinary. This was, after all, the natural order of things; cause and effect playing itself out. Then Mae Neecha said something that really blew my mind, what is karma is by definition anatta…
Later that night I got back to my hotel and considered it a little more: I had been using Mae Neecha’s technique of trying to strip situations down to their elemental basis, to see themes that I felt were unjust/unfair/troublesome – like my neighbor the obstacle – as consistent with how things play-out in nature. The power of this was already clear to me, it lessens my own ego, forces me to see that a situation that is just about nature playing itself out can’t actually be about me.
But with her story about Theon, Mae Neecha named ‘karma.’ As I thought about it more, it dawned on me – what happens in nature, the way elements behave, this is karma in its most observable form. This is absolutely everything acting according to its causes and conditions, and that is the definition of karma. Karma, nature, these are two ways to look at the same exact thing. And now, I am hearing –just starting to see the glimmer of –how these must also be not self. Karma, nature, anatta, different faces of the same dice.
Fast forward a bit, over the next few weeks I started considering another way to frame this same idea. Over and over my practice had kept coming back to (and, spoiler alert, will for years continue to get back to) the idea that what is conditional is not self. Afterall, where is a self in something that arises bases on conditions, subsists based on conditions, ends based on conditions; conditions that are not owned or controlled or tied to any one thing, conditions for conditions that are conditional in and of themselves. And Isn’t what is ‘natural’, the flow of nature, just the arising of circumstances based on conditions, cessation based on conditions?
A tree that blossoms and grows because the conditions –water, sun, soil are there –which dies in drought, or when overshadowed by another bigger tree, or uprooted from soil? A riverbank shaped by the flow of water, which changes and fills back up with soil again when the water dries-out? An island born from volcanic magma, only to be swallowed by rising oceans? What is in nature, this is not special, it is not self, there is nothing self-determined or unconditional about it. To say everything is natural, is to say that everything is subject to karma, it is to say it is conditional. So many ways to say –to see – this final, most elusive of the 3 common conditions: Everything is anatta. And, suddenly I had so many more places to look for the evidence to really prove this to myself.
