When sensei Ken first asked me to speak today I got really nervous and told him, "no." It wasn’t that I was so anxious about speaking in public. I had done that before. I was anxious about the topic, "Mothers Day." I didn’t have the "Leave it to Beaver," "Ozzie and Harriet," or "Brady Bunch" kind of childhood you see on TV, so I thought, what am I going to say about Mother’s Day? But then I thought about it for a while and came to the conclusion that television caricatures are not what Mother's Day is really all about, so I changed my mind and said, "Yes."
My favorite story about a mother is from Nobel Prize winning author Toni Morrison’s novel, The Bluest Eye. The story is about a little girl named Claudia who is growing up in the same small Ohio town Toni Morrison grew up in. I’m guessing some of it is autobiographical. Claudia’s mother scolds her a lot and is really pretty harsh. One day Claudia comes home coughing, with a cold, and her mother yells at her for not having worn something on her head and tells her "you must be the biggest fool in this town." She then sends Claudia to bed. After some time passes, her mother comes and rubs Vicks, a kind of a balm, all over Claudia’s chest and ties flannel rags around her neck and covers her with thick quilts and tells her to sweat. Claudia does.
Later that night Claudia throws up on the quilts and her mother gets angry again. She tells her, "What did you puke on the bed clothes for? Don’t you have sense enough to hold your head out of the bed? Now, look what you did. You think I got time for nothing but washing up your puke?" Claudia falls asleep crying and feeling guilty that she got sick. But later that night when she coughs, she hears her mother walk in. Her mother’s hands readjust the rags around her neck, and the quilt, and she rests one hand on her forehead to check for fever. Claudia feels her mother’s concern. And later when she remembers that time, she remembers someone with hands who did not want her to die.
That knowledge that someone cares about your life, that they do not want you to die, is a powerful thing and is expressed by mothers in many ways. The feeling of love Claudia got from her mother was not from her mother’s words, but from her mother’s hands. I think that might be true for many of us. I know it was true for me. The love I felt from my mother didn’t come so much from her words, but from her hands. When I think about warm times with my mother, I think about what she did, not what she said, and in some ways that may be more important.
Like Claudia I can remember my mother scolding me. I remember coming home once bleeding because I cut my hand at a construction site I was playing at. My mom yelled at me! It felt so unfair at the time. I was hurt, and bleeding, and she was yelling at me. But importantly, she also bandaged my hand, and I know now that her anger, like Claudia’s mother’s, came from her fear, her fear that I was in danger and that I would be again if she didn’t try to stop it.
Still, that is not all I remember about my mother. I remember my mother sewing my clothes and how important that was for me. It was the late sixties and sewn up and patched jeans were the style. This turned out to be a lucky break for me because I would have to wear them anyway, style or not. I remember standing by the sewing machine and watching my mother patch my jeans with such skill and care that I was proud. I remember feeling so fortunate to have a mother like that, a mother who cared about me enough to sew my pants with such skill and precision. I also remember my mother making me food. I remember being in the kitchen and watching her bake banana bread. She used to bake it in empty soup cans that she carefully placed in the oven. I loved that bread. It smelled wonderful, and when my mother baked it, I use to feel like she baking it just for me.
I have seen this same love in action expressed by my own wife Yoshiko. She is a great cook, but never baked anything until our children got to be a little older. Then her first attempts at baking were far from perfect. First, she tried to make some cookies. She set them too close together on the pan and they melted together into one big block. When she was done it was kind of hard and dry, and not very sweet. But that didn’t matter to our children. They loved those cookies, and I would like to think it was because their mother made them with her own hands. It must have been that. It couldn’t have been the taste. You should have tried those cookies! Certainly, Yoshiko’s baking has gotten better over the years. But the important thing about her cookies is not the taste. It is that she makes those cookies for the children. She doesn’t make them for me, and she doesn’t make them for herself, and that is the precious thing. So when your mother is making you food, or fixing your clothes, or helping you with your homework, you should know that she is doing it because she cares about you and that is really important. Like sensei Ken said last week, "your mother wants you to be happy."
The relationship between a mother and a child is a special thing that embodies many aspects of Buddhism. Western developmental psychology tells us that initially there is no separation between mother and child. When the child is developing inside the womb, mother and child are one. There is no separation; they are physically connected. So when the child is born, they do not really have any sense of themselves as being separate from their mother, or the world around them. Still, everything is connected. Our sense of separateness and individual identity is not something we are born with. It is something we construct over time through a process psychologists call separation and individuation. Margaret Mahler called this process "the psychological birth of the human infant." First, there is the physical birth where we separate physically from our mother in a dramatic and observable way. Next, there is the psychological birth, a more subtle birth that occurs slowly over an extended period of time. Here we establish a sense of separateness from our mother and the world around us and develop an individual identity. It is here, with separation and individuation and the establishment of individual identity, that much of Western psychology ends. But Buddhism tells us we need to go further.
As a child we need to construct a separate sense of self. That is how we learn to function in the world. But then as an adult, we need to move beyond that psychological construction of separateness and see our interdependence with the world. We need to reconnect. Dogen Zenji, the founder of Soto Zen, noted that to study the Buddha Way is to study the self, and that to study the self is to forget the self in the act of uniting with something greater. To develop as Buddhists we need to experience ourselves as something more than merely our individual or ego selves. We need to rediscover our connection to something greater. Perhaps we can begin this process of rediscovering our connectedness in our own family, in that special bond between mother and child. Then we can try to move that feeling of connectedness and interdependence out into our community, and then the world as a whole. Last week Sensei Ken suggested that we do such a thing with harmony; that we cultivate harmony in our family and then move it out into the world. Perhaps we can do the same with connectedness.
I remember one experienced of connectedness that I had with my wife and son that really had a profound effect on me. It was with Leo and Yoshiko when Leo was about two years old. I was sitting on the floor of my study doing zazen with the windows open so I could experience the outdoors, the birds chirping and the wind. I had been meditating for some time so I was feeling peaceful and very open. I couldn’t see them, but Yoshiko and Leo were just outside the window doing something in the front yard, gardening I think. Leo must have done something very dangerous, maybe toddled out into the street. I am not exactly sure what he did, but whatever it was it really scared Yoshiko. She started yelling in Japanese, "Kora &%#$!" I can’t speak Japanese, but I can tell you that I jumped! And I’m certain Leo jumped too! Yoshiko got scared, and Leo and I jumped. Where was the separateness? It was clear to me then how connected we all are. From this experience I started to think that when your mother yells at you, or makes you cookies, she is expressing our connectedness, she is expressing the Dharma, and we should probably honor her for both.
Interestingly, the psychological space between mother and child varies in different cultures. In Japanese culture there is less distance between mother and child than in the Western tradition I grew up in. I first noticed this when I visited Japan a number of years ago. I was having dinner with some of my wife’s relatives and we were naturally talking about some of the similarities and differences between the United States and Japan. Since I was introduced as a student of child development, one of my Japanese dinner partners decided to ask me a question he seemed to have wondered about for some time. He turned to me somewhat embarrassed and asked, "Is it true what they say, that people in the United States are kind of hard on their children?" I must admit that I was a bit taken aback by his question. My stereotype had been that Japanese parents were stricter with their children. Wasn’t it Japanese parents who made their children study so hard and go to school after school? So, feeling somewhat surprised, I said, "What do you mean?" My Japanese dinner partner responded, "Tell me if this is true, but I heard that in the United States they take little babies and put them in rooms all by themselves and make them sleep alone?" His question was an epiphany for me. Strangely, I had never really thought about this before, but I had to acknowledge that it was true. Moreover, hearing myself say so felt kind of odd. We did take little babies and "put them in rooms all by themselves."
I see now that this pattern of child rearing, which promotes early separation between mother and child, reflects a Euro-American value system that values individualism and independence. Westerners tend to emphasize separateness and independence in children. Whereas, in more group-oriented cultures like Japan, more value is placed on connectedness and interdependence, and as a result there is generally less physical distance between mother and child. Japanese mothers traditionally sleep with their children and physically carry them around in slings for what seems like long period of time to some Westerners. This difference was illustrated to me by an older, very kind, Euro American neighbor of ours who once expressed her concern that our second son Noah would not learn to walk because Yoshiko carried him around so much! It just seemed unnatural to her. Research also shows that Japanese mothers tend to talk to their infants more about relationship than Euro American mothers, and that Euro American mothers are more likely to label individual objects and describe their attributes.
These cultural differences in the psychological distance between mothers and children, and the differing worldviews they engender and reflect, may make Buddhism a little harder for some of us in the West to understand. A colleague of mine who teaches religion once told me that Kyozan Joshu Roshi, a Japanese Zen priest, once asked him what is it about Americans’ worldview that makes Buddhism so difficult for them? It seems the Roshi was reflecting on the fact that he had trained monks in both Japan and the United States and found the task considerably harder here. I think part of the answer to the Roshi’s question may have to do with the way we are raised as children. Western parenting practices place more emphasis on separateness and independence than parenting in group-oriented cultures. As a result, it is hard for some of us as adults to give up our sense of separateness and become an interdependent part of a vast and amorphous Dharma. It feels more natural for us see ourselves as individuals, engaged in individual relationships with an individual God. Nevertheless, I know from experience that we can do it! We can begin to surrender our separateness and feel a part of the living Dharma. And to the degree that we can, perhaps we have our mothers to thank? After all, it was them who first taught us about connectedness.