Logs:Sangha

Sangha
Dramatis Personae Bruce, Hive
In Absentia	2019-05-19 << I'm flying blind, and I'm making this up as I go. >>
Location NYC - Mahayana Temple - Chinatown
The facade of the Mahayana Temple overlooks a busy three-way intersection on Canal Street in the heart of Chinatown Manhattan. It looks disconcertingly like a dynastic period Chinese building embedded in a modern western one. Sweeping green tiled roof, cinnabar red pillars, and a white railing protrude incongruously from a bland yellow concrete block. The visitors, numerous and mostly Chinese, do not seem much put off by its bizarre construction, forming a steady stream both coming and going. Inside, the temple looks more decidedly eastern. A towering gold Buddha statue overlooks the capacious main hall, which is flanked by shrines to the Bodhisattvas Guan-yin, Manjushri, Di-tsang, and Pu-shian. It's later in the evening, and though /Chinatown/ is bustling it's fairly quiet in here. Some come just to light incense or candles and leave, though there are a few people who are lingering. Some in meditation -- one pair of very tiny children mostly just fidgeting with their prayer beads, occasionally reaching out to try and steal each others'. At the Manjushri shrine, one skinny young man is just kneeling, bowing, tucking in a stick of incense. Hive is dressed kind of blandly -- plain blue jeans, workboots, a black corduroy shirt buttoned up over a crimson tee that can just barely be seen underneath it. His shaggy-floppy hair falls down over his eyes as he rises, though he doesn't bother to push it back again. Just stands, hands still pressed together and his posture kind of a slouch. Bruce has been out in the main shrine, drawing a few odd looks from other temple-goers. He wears a orchid dress shirt with a green paisley tie, charcoal trousers, and square-toed black dress shoes. His wavy hair is a little mussed, falling across his thick-framed glasses as he bows to the great statue of the Buddha and leaves an offering of tall incense sticks. This done, he walks quietly into the shrine of Manjushri and kneels beside where Hive is standing, clasping the incense sticks between his joined palms as he bows his head. In his mind, streams of thought weave and overlap in chaotic yet elegant harmony, like the improvised movements of skills dancers. Here a sedate estimation of the current time, there a snatch of song (<< Does anybody have a a map? >>), the careening shape of a molecular structural diagram briefly interrupting before folding /into/ an equation not rendered in mathematical symbols but bursts of pitch and color and texture, all while the arapacana drones behind it. He stands up and carefully tucks his incense sticks into the urn, bowing again. << ...anybody maybe happen to know how the hell to do this? >> Dear Evan Hansen twines and braids with Manjushri's mantra, the equation still resolving itself in a fugue of sensations while in the front of his mind he focuses on the statue before him. The Bodhisattva holds a lotus in one hand and a sword in the other, his face serene despite the fierceness of the lion on which he rides. << Wisdom and discernment. Maybe the Mahayana have a slightly easier road, after all. >> Hive shifts slightly to the side when another person enters the shrine, somewhat reflexive without really much looking at Bruce. His fingers tap lightly against each other. He hums softly along with the melody running through Bruce's head, catching himself after a few seconds and exhaling deeply as he falls back into quiet. A /brief/ quiet. A few moments of slow steady breathing before he breaks the stillness. His voice is quiet, rough, some sort of accent marking him as Not From Around Here, though it's hard to place. "What makes a road easier?" He shakes his hair back from his eyes, hands dropping into his pockets. His eyes have fixed on the statue, too. "And not just -- differently bumpy?" Bruce notices Hive humming, but his mind just incorporates the music into its own convoluted processes, filing it in alongside the song playing out of his memory. Even the question, at first, registers as logical. << Largely subjective, >> his mind answers between verses. << I don't know if you can tell, but... >> Aloud, he says, "I guess the guidance just feels a bit more--" He nods at the statue of Manjushri before them. "--personal." His voice is low and soft. << ...but this is me just pretending to know. >> He withdraws a mala made of polished lotus seeds from one of his pockets, loops it over both hands raised and bows again. Several of his thought streams start to lose coordination with the abrupt addition of a new one, << I didn't say that aloud. /Did/ I say that aloud? >> His memory unspools, just far enough back to check his own experience of the last minute or so. The song stops playing. << Recollection indicates no. Confabulation possible. >> Other potential explanations start sprouting from the main trunk of his reasoning. The arapacana derails to make mental bandwidth. << Coincidence? Hard to assess. Bodhisattva? Given location, highly probable. >> There's a kind of wry amusement in this despite his mounting anxiety. << Hallucination? New alter ego? /Old/ alter ego? >> He glances at Hive, pushing up his glasses by the bridge. << Telepathy? No, no, I must have just said it out loud. >> He turns back to the statue, letting the lotus prayer beads run between his fingers in a soft whisper of soothing. "Maybe that's hard, too," he concedes, "in its own way?" Hive's fingers curl tighter in his pocket. He exhales softly, withdrawing one hand with a quiet rattle -- looking downward, to the very similar lotus seed mala nestled in his own palm. "Personal." His eyes close, and he rocks back on his heels, head shaking. "Huh. Funny, I've always..." He hesitates, the beads rattling again as his fingers flex and then curl back inward. "Felt kind of the opposite tension. The personal has always felt more --" He stops, presses his lips together, continues kind of wryly, "-- tangible to me in Theravada. But I feel like no matter how you receive the dharma, turning it into meaningful practice has been a complicated question for everyone." Bruce lets out a slow breath, and with it the grasping vigilance about how it was Hive answered him, the entire train of thought falling away with the confidence if not /ease/ of long practice. Not gone altogether, it has merely receded into the background as the cacophony of his mind slowly finds its harmony again. It's still present enough, however, to matter-of-factly decrease his estimated probability that the other man is a bodhisattva when he realizes--with mild but pleasant surprise--that he is speaking to another Theravadin. He smiles, looks down at his prayer beads. The song picks back up where it left off in his head, << So where's the map? I need a clue... >> "I received it from books I didn't understand, written by men who didn't understand much better." << 'It's a /philosophy/, not a religion,' >> whispers the voice of a much younger Bruce, << 'You must strip away the mantras and incense and superstition to find the starkest expression of Truth.' >> He dismisses the memory with some embarrassment, some amusement, and not a small amount of gratitude. "So this path started out kind of abstract for me. There were several points along the way I could have used a good slap upside the head with a sandal." << ...'cause the scary truth is, I'm flying blind, and I'm making this up as I go. >> A quick smile pulls at Hive's lips, and he chuffs a quite laugh. "I learned from my family. Don't think I read a single /book/ about it till I moved here, and then I read lots." His eyes turn up towards the ceiling thoughtfully. "I'm still not sure how much it helped my understanding, but you all seem to swear by them. Whatever gets you there, I guess." He rolls a bead slowly between forefinger and thumb, looking down at the lion on which Manjushri sits. "Is it less abstract these days? How do you --" He stops, shakes his head, a slow brief clench to his jaw that starts to creak his teeth together before he stops it, blinks, watches the smoke rise from the sticks of incense. Lets his shoulders relax. "Just does sometimes feel like. We're /always/ flying blind. I don't know how much that should be scary, or just. A truth of life." "I certainly don't think they're any substitute for living tradition, and honestly I'm not sure if the books actually helped me understand, per se," Bruce admits. << Try telling /that/ to eighteen-year-old me... >> "But they gave me language and ideas that I might never encountered otherwise, that allowed me to putting my own experiences and observations into the context of dharma, and to eventually find my own way to sangha." His fingers pass over the prayer beads with easy familiarity until his thumb settles on the first bead beside the meru. A deep sense of grounding suffuses him, though the spinning streams of his thoughts do not fade or unravel. "I like to think my practice has gotten a /bit/ less abstract." Here he turns to look at Hive, puzzled by the other man's apparent discomfort. His dense black eyebrows rise up. << I /definitely/ was not singing that aloud. >> Somehow the stream of rampant speculation about how Hive could know this does not come back to dominate his mindscape, though it does re-order itself a little in the background--"telepath" is now his leading conjecture, followed closely by "new alter ego." It's hard to say which one is causing him more anxiety. The pad of his thumb traces a spiral on the bead beneath it, but the Heart Mantra rises up in his thoughts instead of the arapacana, quieting the other streams and pulling them into orbit around it. "It's just a song," he says finally. Then, at a delay, cautiously, "You have a point. Not sure that makes the fear go away, though." "I know it is. Things still tend to stick with you for a reason." Hive flexes his fingers again, drapes the string of beads loosely around his knuckles. His teeth start to grind once more; once more he catches himself with a slow exhale. "Telepath," he finally volunteers, eyes dropping to the beads he holds. "It's not that I think learning through books is --" He hesitates, brows drawing together; eventually his head shakes, slowly. "It just seems hard sometimes. Figuring out how to take what we've learned and put it into some kind of practice. Whether we start out learning it from books or from family." Slowly, he rolls one bead between thumb and forefinger. "Growing up this all just felt so much more comfortable. Had my family, my community, it was all very immediate. Personal. Didn't need to think much about whether -- if -- I knew how to fit into the larger world. Then moving over here where community is so much different, having to learn all over again what sangha means." Bruce turns aside and looks directly at Hive. His speculation thread about Hive resolves (<< Confirmed: telepath >>) and dissolves for a moment into unfocused fear. But the Heart Mantra remains at the front of his mind, and the drone of the ancient Sanskrit words coaxes the fear into its own stream, to weave and dance with the others. He draws a deep breath, his eyes dropping back to the beads passing rhythmically between his fingers. << ...I'm flying blind... >> "That sounds difficult. And lonely," he says, at length. "I think..." The equation resolves into an error, but that doesn't seem to bother Bruce much. "...at least for me, it took a leap of faith." << ...I'm flying blind... >> He shakes his head, almost smiles. "Not just /one/. Every time." The calculation starts over in the same stream it ended, though with the variable of the organic molecule included from the beginning this time. << ...I'm flying blind... >> "Maybe sometimes, sangha is talking dharma with a random white guy at temple who has /Dear Evan Hansen/ stuck in his head." He /does/ finally smile. The fear never actually goes away. Hive's slouchy posture hadn't looked particularly tense before, but when Bruce continues speaking the relaxation that softens his shoulders, eases his breathing, is immediately visible. "Can be lonely," he agrees. A smile crosses his face -- fleeting, but warm. "But sometimes you run into a random white guy at temple who has /Dear Evan Hansen/ stuck in his head, and he talks dharma with you even once you let him know you're hearing it." He shakes hair back from his eyes -- only now turns his head to look at Bruce. "Every time. That sounds about right. I guess," this sounds a little sheepish, "that's why it's a path and not a destination." Bruce nods, his glasses beginning to slide down the bridge of his nose again. << All the more so for the telepathy, I imagine. >> "I admit, I..." He tilts his head minutely. "Well. You can probably tell. I do find it intimidating. But I'd never learn or do anything if I always let being afraid stop me. Besides..." He looks up at the statue of Manjushri again. << Wisdom and discernment. >> "...you /did/ let me know." << I'm flying blind, and I'm making this up as I go. >> "That's a leap of faith, all in itself." Hive dips his head, eyes lowering as he turns his hand over, looking down at the beads pressed against his palm. His fingers roll at them again. "I can tell. But you're still here talking to me, and maybe that's one, too. It's a little terrifying every time I tell someone, but --" He lifts a shoulder in a small shrug. "I'm not sure I'd ever have a genuine conversation let alone relationship if I didn't let people. Make that choice." More quietly, as he slips his mala back into his pocket: "Thank you." Bruce blinks, pushing his glasses back up with his free hand. "Huh. I guess it is. Every conversation, every relationship." << It's hardly the same, but... >> This thought looses verbal coherence and seems to inexplicably fold into the synesthetic calculation still spinning in the background of his thoughts. His fingers clamp down for a moment on the beads in his hand, but loosen again to let them slide along when he's finished chanting on the current bead. "It's like you said--we're always flying blind. I appreciate you taking the chance, and if you feel so inclined, I'd love to talk dharma a /bit/ less randomly sometime." Hive's eyes widen just slightly -- his smile returns a brief moment later, small and quick. His head bobs, his eyes skating back to the lotus in Manjushri's hand. "Yeah. Yeah. I'd like that."