A Snail's Life?

I saw a snail on the small road just beside my apartment, getting dryer in the morning sun. Seeing that it might get stepped on or run over, I gently curled my thumb and index finger to pick up the snail’s shell.  I expected the snail to struggle or stay stuck on the concrete, due to its sticky pseudopod. Instead, the snail retracted into its shell. I looked for a place to deposit the snail. I gingerly planted the snail in a bed of moist grass. But later, as I left the spot, I wondered if perhaps it would have been better to nestle it somewhere on an old tree. It was too late, and someone was coming up behind me on a bicycle. I figured that I would look strange going into a grassy area in search of a missing snail. I kept on my journey to work instead.

The snail’s life is so much different from my own. And I have to wonder, did I do the right thing, to save the snail from what I felt to be a poor fate? Wouldn’t this creature be vulnerable to birds and other animals once it is placed on a grassy spot or area? The dilemma of compassion is that sometimes I am motivated by pity or some feeling of foreboding of what could happen to the snail’s life. But there are also times when that feeling can cloud my judgment, and thus lead me to end up doing something that ends up being destructive. In this way, feelings of wanting to help need to be supplemented by the wisdom that comes from helping in a sound way.

The lesson that I can learn from this creature’s life is that I need to look at it closely from its own perspective to understand what the snail’s best interests really are. What kinds of foods would it eat? What conditions allow it to thrive? What kinds of predators does it need to avoid? These kinds of questions require me to suspend my feelings or personal preferences and consider that not all beings have the same conditions as me or as my thoughts lead me to think. To enter into support of a being is to acknowledge a deep difference between the being itself and how I see that being. And quite often all I can really and truly know is how the being appears to me at a given time. The rest is a very tentative mystery which can be framed as a hypothesis about how beings are.

Of course, when I reflect on this example as applied to human life, the dimensions change quite a bit. I cannot pretend, in the case of other people, that I am not able to see what could make another person happy or have a better life. There are many obvious cases where it is easy to tell what kinds of needs a person has. And I think that in most cases, it seems that when I greet a person, I operate from a view that this is how I would wish to be treated by others. In that sense, I can gauge my behavior by how I might feel in the same situation. This seems to make sense, and it seems to be a good basis for fundamental ethics. But on the other hand, I begin to see that ethics cannot start and end purely in my own subjective frame of reference. If it stays within this frame, I end up becoming less tolerant of others’ frames of references, because I am locked into a view of how I might react in a similar circumstance. Unless I am able to reflect on situations where another person’s help did not match my own needs, I probably might end up assuming that others want what I would want in the same situation. This is hardly a model of empathy! It is only a kind of projecting of my own desires onto someone else.

It again seems to go back to this recurring idea in Buddhism that we tend to see others from the perspective of aggregated conditioning. I often don’t see the real person with her complex motives. Instead, I “experience” my own expectations and conditioning projected on the other in front of me, as well as past memories and conditioning. For me to break out of that conditioning requires that I see things as they are behaving in the present, rather than seeing the reflections of my past thoughts superimposed onto the unfolding moment.

Practicing some kinds of meditation such as huatou, I am able to shatter this loop of conditioning, at least temporarily, for a sustained period of time. And I think the way it works is that it puts me in a state of the intrinsic experience of doubt. This doubt operates as a kind of ‘not knowing’: I don’t know where “I” begins and the object world around me begins. And in this not knowing, I start to lose the self-reference that I have about situations happening. For example, this pain that I experience in my legs is not ‘my pain’, and it is not ‘an issue’ for my consideration. When I start to wonder who is sitting and who is having pain, I am asking, what is the real source of all the pressing thoughts and emotions? By getting into this question and letting go of the conceptual answers (all answers, for that matter), I start to engage in a mystery. There is simply no place for the mind to roost anymore.  And over time, the sense of preferring and trying to adjust starts to fade a bit as well. I am more able to see things from a less self-involved and much calmer perspective.

   Given this experience, would it perhaps make me in a better position to help a snail? It might be best to find out from the snail itself.

Sheng Yen, (2009), Shattering the Great Doubt : the Chan Practice of Huatou. Boston, MA: Shambhala