Life is an art. The way we live our lives is an expression of our deepest understanding and our whole being. Many years ago, I met a young American named Jim Forest. Jim is an intelligent man, and he asked me to teach him about the practice of mindfulness. One time when we were together, I offered him a tangerine. Jim accepted the tangerine, but continued talking about the many projects he was involved in — his work for peace, social justice, and so on. He was eating, but, at the same time, he was thinking and talking. I was there with him. I was really there; that is why I was aware of what was going on. He peeled the tangerine and tossed the sections of it into his mouth, quickly chewing and swallowing.
I said to him, “Jim, stop!” He looked at me, and I said, “Eat your tangerine.” He understood. So he stopped talking, and began to eat much more slowly and mindfully. He separated each of the remaining sections of the tangerine carefully, smelled their beautiful fragrance, put one section at a time into his mouth, and felt the juices surrounding his tongue. Tasting and eating the tangerine this way took several minutes, but he knew that we had the time for that. When he finished eating, I said, “Good.” I knew that the tangerine had become real, the eater of the tangerine had become real, and life also had become real at that moment. What is the purpose of eating a tangerine? It is just for eating the tangerine. During the time you eat a tangerine, eating the tangerine is the most important thing in your life.
In Buddhism, there is a word, apranihita. It means wishlessness, or aimlessness. The idea is that we do not put something ahead of ourselves and run after it. When we practice sitting meditation, we sit just to enjoy the sitting. We do not sit in order to become enlightened, a buddha, or anything else. Each moment we sit brings us back to life: therefore, we sit in such a way that we enjoy our sitting the entire time. Walking meditation is the same. We do not try to arrive anywhere. We take peaceful, happy steps, and we enjoy them. If we think of the future — of what we want to realize — or of the past and our many regrets, we will lose our steps, and that would be a pity.
The next time you have a tangerine to eat, please put it in the palm of your hand and look at it in a way that makes the tangerine real. You do not need a lot of time to do it, just two or three seconds. Looking at it, you can see a beautiful blossom with sunshine and rain, and you can see a tiny fruit forming. You can see the continuation of the sunshine and the rain, and the transformation of the baby fruit into the fully developed tangerine in your hand. You can see the color change from green to orange, and you can see the tangerine sweetening. Looking at a tangerine in this way, you will see that everything in the cosmos is in it: sunshine, rain, clouds, trees, leaves — everything. Peeling the tangerine, smelling it, and tasting it, you can be very happy.
This is an exercise in the art of living. Everything we do can be like this. Whether we are planting lettuce, washing dishes, writing a poem, or adding columns of numbers, it is not different from eating a tangerine. All of these things are on equal footing. We can enjoy each task the same way we enjoy our tangerine. I myself am a poet. One day, an American scholar told me, “Don’t waste your time gardening, growing lettuce. Write more poems instead. Not many people write poems the way you do, but anyone can grow lettuce.” That is not my way of thinking. I know very well that, if I do not grow lettuce, I cannot write poems. For me, eating a tangerine, washing dishes, and growing lettuce in mindfulness are essential to writing poetry. The way someone washes the dishes reveals the quality of his or her poetry.
After one retreat in Los Angeles, a painter asked me, “What is the best way to look at the moon and the flowers so that I can use them in my art?” I said, “If you think that way, you will not be in touch with the flower or the moon. Please abandon your notions and just be with the flower, with no intention of getting anything from it.” He said, “But when I am with a friend, I want to receive the benefits of our friendship. Isn’t it the same with a flower?” Of course you can benefit from a friend, but a friend is more than a source of support, help, and advice. Just to be with him or her is enough. We are in the habit of doing things in order to get something. We call this “pragmatism.” We even say that truth is something that pays.
The practice of mindfulness is the opposite. We practice just to be with ourselves and with the world. When we learn to stop, we begin to see, and when we see, we understand. Peace and happiness are the fruit of that understanding. In order to be with our friend, a flower, or our co-workers, we need to learn the art of stopping.
How can we bring peace to a society that wants each thing to be a source of profit? How can a smile bring deep joy and not be just a diplomatic maneuver? When you smile to yourself, that smile is entirely different from a diplomatic smile. Smiling to yourself is proof that you are deeply at peace. We need to live in a way that demonstrates this. When we do, each moment of our life is a work of art. We may not think of it this way, but it is truly so. We are pregnant with joy and peace, and we make life beautiful for others.
The way we earn our living can be a source of peace, joy, and reconciliation, or it can cause a lot of suffering. When we know how to be peace, our work can be a wonderful means for us to express our deepest self, the foundation of our being. Our work will take place one way or another, but it is the being that is essential. First of all, we must go back to ourselves and make peace with our anger, fear, jealousy, and mistrust. When we do this, we are able to realize real peace and joy, and the work we do will be of great help to ourselves and the world.
What about techniques? Each endeavor and craft has its own techniques, but techniques are not enough. Once, a young man in Vietnam who wanted to learn how to draw lotus flowers went to apprentice with a master. The master just took him to a lotus pond and instructed him to sit there and look at the lotus flowers all day, without doing anything else. The young man watched one flower bloom when the sun was high, and he watched the flower return into a bud when night fell. The next morning, he practiced in the same way. When one flower wilted and its petals fell into the water, he just looked at what was left of the flower, and then he moved on to another lotus.
He did that for ten days and then went back to the master. The master asked him, “Are you ready?” and he answered, “I will try.” Then the master gave him a brush, and he painted like a child. But the lotus he drew was very beautiful. He had become a lotus, and the painting just came forth. You could see his naiveté concerning technique, but real beauty was there.
The way we live our daily lives, whether we are mindful or not, has everything to do with peace. Bringing our awareness to every moment, we try to have a vocation that helps us realize our ideal of compassion. We try our best to have a job that is beneficial to humans, animals, plants, and the earth, or at least minimally harmful. We live in a society where jobs are hard to find, but if it happens that our work entails harming life, we should try our best to find another job. Our vocation can nourish our understanding and compassion, or it can erode them. We should try not to drown in forgetfulness. So many modern industries, even the production of food, are harmful to humans and nature. The chemical poisons used by most modern farms do a lot of harm to the environment. Practicing right livelihood is difficult for farmers. If they do not use chemical pesticides, it may be hard for them to compete commercially, so not many farmers practice organic farming. This is just one example.
Right livelihood has ceased to be a purely personal matter. It is our collective karma. Suppose I am a schoolteacher and I believe that nurturing love and understanding in children is a beautiful occupation. I would object if someone were to ask me to stop teaching and become, for example, a butcher. But when I meditate on the interrelatedness of all things, I can see that the butcher is not the only person responsible for killing animals. He does his work for all of us who eat meat. We are co-responsible for his act of killing. We may think the butcher’s livelihood is wrong and ours is right, but, if we didn’t eat meat, he wouldn’t have to kill, or he would kill less. Right livelihood is a collective matter. The livelihood of each person affects us all, and vice versa. The butcher’s children may benefit from my teaching, while my children, because they eat meat, share responsibility for the butcher’s livelihood.
Any look at right livelihood entails more than just examining the situation in which we earn our paycheck. Our whole life and our whole society are intimately involved. Everything we do contributes to our effort to practice right livelihood, and we can never succeed 100 percent. But we can resolve to go in the direction of compassion, in the direction of reducing the suffering. And we can resolve to work for a society in which there is more right livelihood and less wrong livelihood.
Millions of people, for example, make their living in the arms industry, helping directly or indirectly to manufacture both “conventional” and nuclear weapons. The U.S., Russia, France, Britain, China, and Germany are the primary suppliers of these weapons. So-called conventional weapons are then sold to Third World countries, where the people do not need guns, tanks, or bombs; they need food. To manufacture and sell weapons is not right livelihood, but the responsibility for this situation lies with all of us: politicians, economists, and consumers. We all share responsibility for the death and destruction that these weapons cause. We do not speak out. We have not organized a national debate on this problem. We have to examine and discuss this issue more, and we have to help create new jobs so that no one has to live on profits from weapons manufacture. If you are able to work in a profession that helps realize your ideal of compassion, please be grateful. And please try to help create proper jobs for others by living mindfully, simply, and sanely. Please use all your energy to try to improve the situation.
To practice right livelihood means to use the practice of mindfulness to address social and political problems, and also the problems of daily life. Telephone meditation, for example, is a very important practice. Every time the telephone rings, hear it as a bell of mindfulness, stop what you are doing, and breathe in and out consciously three times before proceeding to the telephone. That is the practice of right livelihood. I know a man who practices walking meditation between business appointments. He walks mindfully between office buildings in downtown Denver. Passersby smile at him, and his meetings, even with difficult people, are very pleasant, and usually successful. We need to discuss among ourselves how to practice mindfulness in the workplace and how to practice right livelihood. Do you breathe before answering telephone calls? Do you practice smiling while cutting carrots? Do you relax after hours of hard work? Do you live in a way that encourages everyone to have a job that is in the direction of peace and compassion? These questions are very practical and very important. If we can work in a way that encourages this kind of thinking and acting, a future will be possible for us, for our children, and for their children.
“The Art of Living” is excerpted from Mindfulness and Meaningful Work: Explorations of Right Livelihood, edited by Claude Whitmyer. © 1994 by Claude Whitmyer. It appears here by permission of Parallax Press, P.O. Box 7355, Berkeley, CA 94707.
— Ed.
