Bodhi Playoffs

So I watched that PBS documentary “The Buddha” the other day. It had its ups and downs. One of my favorite parts was when Jane Hirshfield spoke. My previous blog entry was a quote from her, with a graphic image I thought á propos. Maybe when I post this entry, that previous entry will be right under it. We’ll see.

Anyway, one of my favorite parts of my favorite parts was when Jane talked about us all being Buddhas, were we but to realize it. She talked about walking down the street and looking at each of the people one passes or encounters: “Buddha? Buddha? Buddha! Ah, Buddha!”

What does this have to do with hockey? Everything, dude.

In the intensity of the most focused moments of a high-speed sport, the skillful player is utterly unencumbered by self. This becomes especially interesting and evident when it is a high-speed team sport. And there is no higher speed team sport than hockey.

A digression: In barbershop quartet, there is a phenomenon that happens when the harmony, the blending of the four voices, is just right. It’s called the “fifth voice.” It’s an acoustical phenomenon that is well understood scientifically (you can look it up) but is nonetheless magical: It absolutely sounds like there are five voices, but there are only four singers.

Years ago, it struck me that an analogous phenomenon can occur in a hockey game. Something happens to a team and they start to play as if they were a single organism. The passes are so crisp, the movements so in unison, it’s as if they all have eyes in the backs of their heads; they utterly know where each other is, and they are no longer a collection of highly skilled individuals, but a single being that divides its body into parts and occupies the entire rink that way.

The opposing team is “back on its heels” as the hockey announcers say. If you came upon the game on your TV at that moment, you’d think there was a power play going on. But when you look at the info field at the top of the screen, no power play is indicated. How is that team getting away with having six players on the ice, plus net minder? And then you realize that it’s just the regular number of guys, but they’ve hit that harmony so it’s like there’s a “sixth guy,” like the “fifth voice” in barbershop quartet.

In many fields of endeavour, when a skilled master is fully engaged in that endeavour (singing, gardening, programming, bathing an infant, hitting a golf ball, installing a door, etc.), he or she is Buddha. It might be momentary, fleeting, interspersed with intrusions of self-concern, but those moments of self-concern are interspersed with intense, awake moments of utter dissolution of self and the absence of distance of any kind between mind and everything else. “Between” becomes meaningless.

And then it changes, and the difference between self and everything else blurts out rudely and he ain’t Buddha no more, or at least there’s a bunch of noise going on over top of Buddha. That’s ok. It’s the way of being a human, I reckon. Even Buddha wasn’t Buddha sometimes, I would guess.

But there are sublime moments, quite extended moments, when Roberto Luongo is Buddha. The sublime presence of the high-level hockey goalie in the playoffs is a wondrous thing to behold. And out in mid-ice, there is the speed and flow of that intricate web of coordinated activity: A good hockey game is like the nice flow of meal practice in a zazenkai of skilled practitioners. Everyone just dissolves into a solution of mutual activity and intention. Despite how it may appear to the casual, unengaged observer, there is no ice, no goal, no stick, no puck, no fight, no penalty, and no hockey game. The skillful hockey player relies on prajna paramita with no hindrance in the mind, no hindrance and therefore no fear. Gate gate para gate para sam gate he shoots he scores! Hands raised, he skates for a moment in sublime light, and then breathes in, and he’s the guy who scored, and self arises. But then the play begins again, and as the intensity builds, self dissolves, and even the fans in the arena dissolve into selflessness and their dancing and songs are the voice of the Dharma.