Saving All Sentient Beings

“The best way,” Brian said, “is to just squash them between your thumb and your index finger.” I grimaced, he grinned. “Or you can throw them into your bucket of soapy water. I’ll burn them on the bonfire later.” This was twelve years ago when I first apprenticed at a farm, Flickerville Mountain Farm and Groundhog Ranch (a joke about their perennial crop of one pest in particular), started by former Washington Post reporters Cass Peterson and Ward Sinclair, and in 1998 run by Cass and Brian Cramer in the wake of Ward’s passing. Brian and I were standing in the middle of several rows of potatoes holding fluorescent yellow and blue kiddies’ sand pails filled with soapy water, incongruous tools for our grim task: killing Colorado potato beetle larvae. One by one the larvae filled my pail and those of the other apprentices, quarts and quarts of wriggling life, anaesthetized and drowned in the soapy water. Although one of the high school students we worked with, a local kid in this most rural part of Pennsylvania, left the field that day expressionless and unfazed with his hands covered in orange goo.

Twelve years later, as the Farm Manager of the George Jones Farm in Oberlin, OH, I walk through our fields and smile at the treasure trove of Stellaria (aka the chickweed that most people try in vain to eradicate from their gardens) I’ve just spotted. Late May and warm, but the recent rains have meant a resurgence of fresh growth on this cool season wild green. It’s bright green leaves and tiny white flowers (it’s in the carnation family) are mild and fresh.

Next to this unexpected find is the large patch of crowded Lamb’s Quarters growing in a dense colony of varying shades of blue, silver, and gray. Ooh, and there’s a patch with dusty rose coloring similar to the special variety (Chenopodium giganteum) I just got seed for from a recent visit to Stonecrop Gardens, where I had lived and worked while training as a horticulturist in the Hudson Valley. Caroline and Michael kindly allowed me to dig up a few plants of a very special Lamb’s Quarter whose new leaves are a fiery magenta and then mellow out to a peaceful silvery aqua. In Spring, Stonecrop’s English-style flower garden erupts with bulbs followed by spring perennials and these stunning little magenta and aqua plants pepper the blank spaces of the beds. Soon enough they’ll be pulled to make room for summer plantings, leaving only one or two to self-seed next year’ crop, but in the meantime this little “weed” shares its beauty. My own interest in it is that Lamb’s Quarters, a relative of spinach in the goosefoot family, is also an excellent and nutritious edible wild green. Packed with vitamins, the leaves can be steamed or sautéed like spinach, or the tender tops can be eaten raw in salads. For the past two weeks or so, we’ve been harvesting these tender tops at the farm and adding them to our salad mix. Now, with this little magenta and aqua gift from Stonecrop Gardens, the salad mixes at George Jones Farm will shine.

I think I’ve missed my chance at picking the deliciously sour wild sorrel leaves of Spring but maybe they’ll be back in the Fall when the weather cools. However there’s always purslane to hunt for in the heat of summer. Each season brings forth a new wild addition to our palettes. Stellaria, Lamb’s Quarters, Sorrel, Dandelion, Dock, Purslane: weeds gardeners spend so much time trying to remove from their lives, which all the while might satisfy our hunger and nourish us.

Most of the rye and vetch cover cropping we sowed last Fall has already been mowed down just before flowering. It is mass death on the one hand (I send a thought to the literally tens of thousands of lives I’ve just killed just at their fullest potential), but their “corpses” will add valuable biomass and nitrogen to the soil as the churned tops and the invisible but massive root systems below decompose and build topsoil on this land that had been mined mercilessly with corn and soy of its riches for decades. This is a patient work of life through death, a participation in the process (which I will join in too. So will you.) that started with lichens growing directly on primeval rock eons ago and in dying provided life to mosses which in turn in dying gave life to small plants which in turn in dying gave rise to forests, all growing from an ever-increasing placenta of soil (see Wes Jackson’s preface in New Roots for Agriculture for a compelling discussion of how all agriculture as we know it degrades this “placenta” of topsoil).

But here is a patch that got missed, and in the late evening twilight, as I am (im)patiently waiting for the chickens in our chicken tractor to finally decide it’s time to roost so I can close the coops, I wander up to this beautiful and subtle island of blues, violets, and silvers in a sea of freshly turned earth. The rye is just coming into flower, its long stately bearded heads swaying in the breeze. These will make an excellent accompaniment to the creamy yellow and aqua blue of the spikes of overwintered collard flowers I will pick for bouquets to sell at market. Yes there are lupines and valerian flowers and later we will have zinnias and marigolds. But there will also be rye (and other grasses), dock seed heads, chive and sage blossoms, collard flowers and seed pods, cress seed stalks, and many many other unbidden gifts from the fields.

I’ve just taken a small break from the farm and gotten away to New York for a few days before returning for the summer. I went back primarily to spend time at my home temple, the Village Zendo, with my teacher Roshi Enkyo O’Hara, and my sangha. My time there began with a wonderful workshop led by Roshi on the Four Bodhisattva Vows that are chanted each evening in Zen temples around the world. At the Village Zendo they are translated as:

Sentient beings are numberless, I vow to save them.

Desires are inexhaustible, I vow to put an end to them.

The Dharmas are boundless, I vow to master them.

The

Four impossible tasks that Zen students commit themselves to each day.

The workshop looked at various English translations of these vows and at the original Chinese characters, to try and tease out for ourselves just what these vows mean. For me, as a farmer who daily engages in cultivating life that in turn enlivens the people in my small community while also simultaneously engaging in daily killing (whether its Colorado potato beetles, countless rye and vetch plants, or beheading broccoli or ripping carrots from the earth), the first vow has always been a lesson in partiality and accommodation, a lesson in acceptance of failure. There is no way to “save” all beings. The fact of my own life and all the actions that support its continued existence mean the death of other beings. I have come to think of this vow as one that forces me into an understanding and acceptance of my interconnectedness, that as I am intimately connected to all beings, so by “saving” my own life and taking care of others I save all beings. But still there is still this dark side of beetles drowning in buckets and rye falling beneath the scythe.

The Chinese original of this vow and the workshop’s discussion of it, however, revealed other dimensions of it for me. The original of “sentient beings” is more literally “all birth” or “all that which has been born;” “numberless” is “without boundary;” and “save” is “to take over to the other shore.” So, one might say: “All that is born (i.e., subject to birth and death, or that I perceive as being born and dying), I vow to transform.” What is this transformation? Hui Neng, the sixth patriarch of the Zen tradition, expressed this vow as “The beings in my own mind are infinite, I vow to liberate them.” Who are these beings “in my own mind?” Dogen Zenji, the founder of the Soto Zen tradition in Japan, writing about the Buddhist precept, “Do not kill,” said “Promoting life is not killing.” The other day at the Farmers’ Market a woman came to buy a head of romaine lettuce for a housebound friend of hers. “I need one that absolutely doesn’t have any slugs on it. My friend can’t handle slugs,” she said. We looked for a nice head and poked about among the leaves, inspecting for slugs. No slugs but the leaves did have holes here and there, and yes in the evenings when I close the greenhouses where these lettuces have grown I have seen the odd slug slowly strolling along the edge of a leaf. Watching slugs do their own walking meditation is immediately calming. I tell the woman at the market that she should tell her friend not to be too unforgiving of slugs. After all, they have to eat too, and in opting for the head of lettuce with a hole here or a hole there, she has in fact shared a meal with another being. We all get hungry.

Of course we have also lain down slug bait and when I’ve seen slugs I usually pick them off and throw them far away. So who are these “beings in my own mind” and how do I not kill by “promoting life?” What arose from me at this workshop was that in absolute reality nothing is born and nothing dies, there is just a great circulation of energy, but in my mind I give birth to countless beings. Here is valuable food, here is a pest. Here is the plant that I will coddle, here is the weed I will uproot. Here is the person I get along with, here is the person who is difficult. In reality none of them exist, but I spend my whole life constructing them out of thin air, worrying about the survival of some on the one hand and killing others over and over again on the other hand.

I think that fulfilling this first of the Bodhisattva Vows is at its core accomplished through loving observation. To look about oneself carefully and with an open mind and heart means seeing bouquets in collard blossoms and rye, food in chickweed and cattails and lamb’s quarters, partners and teachers in the people who drive us crazy. “Saving” is “transforming.” Slugs and potato beetles still need to be removed, but hopefully they’ve enjoyed the meals they’ve managed to have, just as the chickens will surely enjoy the slugs and the beetles, and I will surely enjoy the eggs they offer up each morning.

Buddha Way

is unattainable, I vow to attain it.