Pagan Dharma 2
The second part of the Pagan Dharma essays, continuing the Buddhist–Pagan synthesis.
The essay opens with the story of the crow who tries to put out a forest fire by carrying beakfuls of water from a lake, and offers itself as one such beakful thrown at the fire of destruction. Sam's argument is that magicians carry an added responsibility in an era of profound change: in the Hermetic reading, we are the means by which the Living World acts upon itself — its neural plexus, its eyes, ears and hands. The Being we arise from provides everything needed to succeed and will also allow us to fail, up to and including the death of everything living on this planet. The choice, he says, is ours.
What follows is practical. Travelling among magical folk of many traditions in his office as a priest of Hermes, Sam found that the Tibetan Buddhists had already solved problems Pagans keep running into — and, as a priest of the god of thieves, he says he stole their methods as medicine for his own people. He offers three: Taking Refuge, Generating Bodhichitta, and Dedicating Merit, corresponding to what the Tibetans call good at the beginning, good in the middle, and good at the end. These are not theoretical; they are what he and his Pagan community have used in ritual for years, and guests unfamiliar with them have still received the benefit.
Taking Refuge he presents as a variant of Pagan grounding with two crucial differences. It invokes the Enlightened Teacher — not the physical person but the fully realised being projected onto them, which is why the tradition warns that you attain at the level you regard your teacher (view them as a Buddha and you attain as a Buddha; view them as a small dog and that is your attainment). And union with that projected nature is possible only because the same nature is already in us: Buddha-nature is not an isolable quality but is inherent in Being itself, the drive in all things to live, love, learn, grow and wake up, so that Buddhas of past, present and future are only three positions on one continuum. Refuge, then, is grounding not to the planet but to what the planet itself grounds to. The method is three sounded Ah's with a white letter A visualised at the heart: the first calls out and asks for aid, the second receives light back from every being that answers, dissolving obstacles, and the third sends a wave out to all beings everywhere. Sam describes his own version — small Buddhas appearing in the heart of everything around him, including the molecules of air; prismatic light dissolving his form into bliss; and, on the third, everyone he knows who is hurting, and everyone in the news at war, being relieved.
Generating Bodhichitta makes explicit something usually left implicit in Pagan ritual — that the rite is meant to advance us — and then binds that motive to the benefit of all beings, so that enlightenment is sought not as private escape but as the capacity to bring others to the same state. Sam recommends the Dzogchen form as best suited to Pagans, a short verse repeated three or more times after Refuge: that all is pure and present and has always been so, and to that realisation one commits. Saying it, he notes, immediately shows practitioners how far they are from actually perceiving things that way, and that contrast is itself the engine of the practice.
Dedicating the Merit closes the rite, and Sam is blunt about the problem it solves. Good invocation exalts consciousness and may bring union with a deity — but the ego comes along for the ride and gets puffed up at having been, however briefly, the God or the Goddess. Left alone, that surplus discharges through the petty conflicts available in any group, or through elation and play, which is pleasanter but still wastes the energy; and the residue of self-importance dulls compassion and produces exactly the witch wars, feuds and snits the community knows too well and has historically been made vulnerable by. Dedicating the benefit instead ties the work to the general momentum of evolution — like putting money in a bank where it cannot be lost, and, since we are each part of all beings, giving it away includes giving it to ourselves. His community does this two ways: the Great Ball of Merit method learned from Joanna Macy, where the good done is gathered into a ball in the centre of the circle, raised on a rising tone and flung skyward to rain down on everyone; and the spoken dedication verses, whose closing Ah is the same Ah that ended the Refuge.
Originally published at samwebstermage.com →