A Sixth Buddha Family?

The Five Buddha Families were one of Bernie’s touchstones, one of the Vajrayana teachings he was happy to incorporate into his Zen. He used the five families as a framework for organizational structure in the Greyston mandala and in the Zen Peacemakers. He used them as a framework for presentation in Instructions to the Cook. Jishu showed me how to use them as a framework for looking at the aspects of my life: Buddha – spirituality, Vajra – study, Ratna – livelihood, Padma – community, and Karma – social action. Was I leading a balanced life? The “balanced life” was a way of imagining what the Buddha called the middle way.

I laid out a week-at-a-glance on legal-size paper and, for two weeks, kept track hour by hour of my activities. At the end of the two weeks, I used markers to color my calendar pages, white for Buddha, blue for Vajra, yellow for Ratna, red for Padma, and green for Karma. I thought this would be easy, but it wasn’t easy. I wasn’t sure where everything went. Into which Buddha family should I put my hours at the gym? My recollection is that Bernie thought gym time belonged in Ratna, taking care of my body lumped in with hours at work, but it didn’t feel quite right.

Still, holding my calendars up, I could see at a glance the imbalances in my life. Just see it. Don’t necessarily make a change. Awareness. At different times in our lives, different Buddha families will predominate. It was a wonderful teaching.

And, my gym hours nagged at me, have continued to nag at me. Even then, new as I was to Zen practice and entirely new to Buddhist theory, I recognized the arbitrariness of Buddhist numerology. Shakyamuni taught before written language. His teachings were passed on orally. Calling everything by the ‘numbers’ made recall of the teachings easier. Three pure precepts, ten grave precepts, six paramitas or ten, five Buddha families. There was no magical reason, no divine determination. Why five Buddha families rather than four or six?

My discomfort with lumping gym time with time was intensified by Bernie’s cigars. We all worried about his health, his weight. He got no exercise. This didn’t look like a balanced life, but the imbalance wouldn’t show up on Bernie’s Buddha family chart if he made one. The cigars had to be implicated in Bernie’s stroke and the cancer which eventually killed him.

A couple of years ago, a very good friend of mine died quite suddenly. She was a wonderfully accomplished, creative person who’d done great good in the world, but she didn’t go for annual physicals. And she drank too much. She finally went to the ER only when she’d fallen, worried that what she thought was a broken rib wasn’t healing. Only then did she discover that she had stage-four esophageal cancer. She died months later.

Maybe Bernie was right, maybe technically, philosophically, gym time and annual physicals can be subsumed under Ratna, livelihood. But too many good people seem not to notice this major imbalance in their lives. Why not a sixth Buddha family? Can we call it “Wellness” or “Self-care”? What’s the problem? No sixth family in Vajrayana chart? No associated demon? No color? When it comes to using the Buddha families as a way of screening for imbalances in our lives, maybe it’s time for a sixth family.