A Lone Rhinoceros at the End of the World

 

By Tim Cooper

Another wasted day in virtual Western Dharmaland.

So and so opines this, another so and so disagrees with that, and nobody loves the smart arse who has all the answers. Once again I start fumbling around for my purse so I can scurry out and do some more spiritual shopping, because my weird brand of spirituality brooks no imperfections.

So, back to yoga and elephant headed gods? How about the Kabbalah? Or should I just give up and find spiritual solace in the Six Nations rugby championship

But then Gerry Stribling pipes up with a very nice comment on lone buffalos—people like me who blunder around without a sangha—because that’s me, a man without a sangha. Some Googling takes me to the Khaggavisana Sutta, the one where you’re recommended to go it alone, not like a buffalo, but like a rhinoceros. The one that says to just keep away from bars, blonde baristas, dubious nightclubs and all manner of godless temptation, and head off alone into a nearby jungle to find the answer to the question that has no answer.

This little gem of a sutra was a personal epiphany, and it goes way back to the early days of the Pali Canon, when perhaps they had a clearer idea of what you had to do, before it all got submerged in debate, schism and nubile 16-year-olds with green skin.

You see, the problem, at least for me, is that I live at the end of the world.

Galicia (Spain) is the last region in Europe before you fall off the edge and start swimming to America. They’ve even got a village called Finisterre (World’s End), with a lighthouse and gangs of exhausted pilgrims roaming the streets and setting fire to their clothing after tramping across Spain to Santiago, which is just down the road.

My town is bigger and noisier, and here in La Coruña no one sets fire to their clothing (or at least they don’t in public). And it’s got lots of nice stuff: a lighthouse that dates back to the Roman Empire, amazing seafood, beautiful beaches. But you’d better get used to being a rhinoceros, because here there’s nothing resembling a sangha.

The funny thing is that there are Buddhist centres, but they behave a bit like the CIA—you know they exist, they know they exist, hell, they even have websites, but they don’t seem to be too keen on having you in their club.

By way of example: the local Zen centre doesn’t reply to emails. The Tibetan Buddhist “study centre” doesn’t do any studying, or they do it in secret, or perhaps they didn’t like my whining at them to get a discount on a weekend of teachings from a visiting lama that worked out to be over a 100€. They said no and I didn’t go.

There’s a Tibetan Buddhist monastery 200 km away near a town called Ourense.

They have a frightening Spanish fire-and-brimstone nun on YouTube who seems to delight in telling you about all the Buddhist hells that await you if you don’t get your shit together and start buying locally grown organic tomatoes.

To each his own, but when I emailed the monastery to ask if they were interested in participating in a Buddhist recovery group for drunks and addicts, they didn’t deign to reply. Perhaps I should have offered them money, some Vajrayana centres seem to understand money better than other more fundamental aspects of the Dharma teachings.

Oh, and there used to be a Theravada centre, but that disappeared or went undercover.

The only remotely spiritual individual I know in this damn city is a guy who runs an esoteric goods shop and has a humongous shrine dedicated to Sai Baba of Shiri. I go there and buy yet more incense that I don’t need just to be with someone who thinks that there’s more to life than hating the President and moaning about the taxes while robbing the taxman. And even he’s an out and out Hindu, respects Buddhism, but Sai Baba has all the answers for him.

So today I got to thinking. TTB has a lot of great writers and some of them have shaken me up, and that’s a good thing.

Because I’m getting tired of having to shell out lots of money that I don’t have just for the honour of genuflecting before someone I don’t even know. I’m tired of feeling that I’m doing wrong because some lazy bastard doesn’t even have the courtesy to answer an email to someone who may actually be really interested in forming part of a community, or in need of one just to feel that all this meditation is worth it.

Perhaps TTB is the sangha I was really looking for, because the people here make me feel less weird. And, funnily enough, I’m finding that I’m not alone after all: there are a lot of people out there who can’t/don’t want to be in a sangha, who don’t want to pay a fortune to travel somewhere and eat vegetarian food and be told how important it is to be generous and adore your guru.

So, I’m thinking of becoming an Indian rhinoceros, the one with just one horn.

I can’t help but identify with them: big, covered in warts, pinkish, almost hairless and very grumpy, just like me (apart from the warts). The adult males are very solitary. They carve out their life alone, go face to face with tigers and often win, and just generally do what an animal weighing 5,000 pounds can do, which is eat a lot without getting any sniffy comments about weight control and be left in peace.

The Rhinoceros Sutta says everything that a guy like me needs to hear. Because when you want to be a Buddhist, and can’t even do right by one of the Three Jewels, because no one local to you has the nuts or the goodwill to let you into their sangha (especially if you can’t pay heavy duty sums of money).

Then you have to clamp that horn to your nose, stare out the tigers in your life and go it alone.

I also want to be a Dharma rhino because it gives me the chance to keep on discovering what Buddhism really is, and do it on my own terms. Because European Buddhism is a lot like the American version. It’s littered with cozy middle class neurotics giving vent to their liberal frustrations while being utterly unaware that dana means generosity to all, not just to the beaming gentleman in the pointy yellow hat.

And generosity is not just money, man, it’s time and effort.

And because Shakyamuni Buddha spent a lot of time on his own trying to get to why we find it so damn hard to be sane and find an answer to help us poor sinners. And because for now it’s the only way to be out here at the end of the world.

 

Tim Cooper is a more or less practicing Buddhist and recovering alcoholic who’s lived in Spain for over half his life. After many years of stumbling about in the lush gardens of Buddhism, picking one flower here and another flower there, he finally settled down and is trying to make sense of it all in the Tibetan Buddhist tradition, and generally trying to be a bit nicer. He works as a translator, teacher and facilitator with fellow ex-drunks. He likes flowers, rugby, bad science fiction films and cooking. He also likes to think he writes like Hemingway, but the rejection slips tell another story.

 

Photo: Pixabay

Editor: Dana Gornall

 

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