Tricycle | Awake in the World

Judy Lief:

If the Buddhist path has to do with overcoming attachment, then it might seem odd for a Buddhist to consider adding the complications of marriage and family to her life. But in my experience it is the complications, not my neurotic attempts at smoothness, that have benefited my practice the most. These complications have been many and varied, including marriage, family obligations, motherhood, sickness, work, travel, and teaching.

My husband, Chuck, and I were married in 1975 by Ven. Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche. In his remarks, Trungpa Rinpoche talked about taking a leap and extending friendship. He emphasized that marriage was a commitment of the heart, not merely a legal obligation. The wedding ceremony consisted of making a series of offerings symbolizing our commitment to make our life together an offering to benefit others as well as ourselves. We offered a flower in order to develop exertion, incense for patience, a light for meditation, perfume for morality, food for generosity and a musical instrument for wisdom. Needless to say, it is a rather ambitious undertaking to attempt to develop such qualities, but at least we had that intention.

When you enter a relationship, you do not know if it will last. You do not know what lies ahead as you each go about your life, change, and develop. All too often the relationship falls apart with anger, bitterness, and recrimination. Even if you stay together it may be more out of habit than inspiration. Marriage can get very sticky: one moment you are holding on for dear life and the next moment want to dump everything and make your escape. Since you do not know what will happen, to get married you must be willing to take a chance.

You do not learn non-attachment by disengaging and avoiding the intensity of relationships, their joy and their pain. It is easy to disguise as non-attachment what is not non-attachment at all, but your fear of attachment. When you really care about someone and you are willing to commit to that friendship, then you have fertile ground to learn about both attachment and non-attachment. That is what makes the marriage relationship so rich.

Charles Lief:

In 1973 I fell in love through the unlikely vehicle of walking meditation practice. My circle of walkers moved near another circle that included Judy, now my wife for the past twenty-two years. The mix of folded hands, deliberate steps, and discursive minds proved fertile. Our relationship was challenged because of the intensity of our own, individual connections to our guru, which was, for me the most intimate, intense and groundless relationship I had ever had. Was I willing to share my teacher with my lover? My lover with my teacher?

Taking a leap, I found the relationship with Judy fueled more intense connection to practice. When it comes to falling in love and creating a marriage, practitioners of the buddha-dharma can experience a dilemma: How to work with the teachings of non-duality and non-attachment while committing to another who is by all appearances separate from us and very much an object of desire.

In speaking of love and non-dualism, Trungpa Rinpoche said: “People can’t fall in love unless they know they are lonely and are separate individuals. If by some strange mis-understanding, you think you are the other person already, then there’s no one for you to fall in love with.” We have spent much time learning the complications of this teaching, that 1+ 1 = 2. Joining to raise children, separating to pursue careers, back together to experience joy and pain, apart to do the same.

I confess an attachment to my marriage in the way I am attached to my teacher and the dharma. There is not a “take it or leave it” quality for me. Trungpa Rinpoche is dead, but our relationship continues to define who I am as a practitioner and a person. I experience the same quality of devotion in my marriage.

 

Judy Lief is a teacher in the Shambhala tradition, the executive editor of Vajradhatu Publications, and the editor of Shambhala Publications’ Dharma Ocean Series.

Charles Lief is the president of the Greyston Foundation, a Buddhist-inspired community development organization in Yonkers, New York, and was a student of Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche for seventeen years.