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My Body, the Buddhist. Wesleyan University Press, October 2000.
Introduction.
Alone in candlelight one evening several years ago I made a list of the most valued teachings learned from my teacher, my body. I wanted to itemize, to see a written account of the practical wisdom I have discovered while experimenting with my teacher as guide. Each of the eighteen lessons is a chapter title in My Body, The Buddhist .
When the inventory was complete it spanned twenty-six years. I also noticed a parallel with Buddhist thought, although I am not a practicing Buddhist. For as long as I can remember there has been a soft spot in my heart for Buddhism. Non-resistance, seen in the bodies of many Buddhists, always had much in it to draw my attention. Even as a child, I appreciated the politics of non-violence. And action, through non-action, at least as I perceived it on the surface, was secretly attractive given my middle class upbringing.
In the early 1970's, when I was living at Mad Brook Farm in Vermont, the books I was reading, in particular, Be Here Now by Baba Ram Dass, and Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism by Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche, advocated a spiritual path that was analogous to my experiences dancing. I was inspired to construct a verbal dance vocabulary that merged personal and universal images. I wanted it to include the sensual experiences of perception. With the help of language, I wanted to simplify access to dancing while expanding the territory from which a dancer could draw immediate kinesthetic experience.
The proliferation of books and articles concerning Buddhist philosophy may equal the number written about the body. Yet I am certain that no two people in western culture would define in the same way either body or Buddhism. How we describe the body even changes several times a day for some of us. I have come to understand that the body's form and content are not what they appear to be - my dances are not about any one thing.
" ...once you have that experience of the presence of life, don't hang onto it. Just touch and go. Touch that presence of life being lived, then go. You do not have to ignore it. "Go" does not mean that we have to turn our back on the experience and shut ourselves off from it; it means just being in it without further analysis and without further reinforcement. Holding onto life, or trying to reassure oneself that it is so, has the sense of death rather than life. "
Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche, The Heart of the Buddha, Shambala, 1991My Body, as in the title of the manuscript, refers to a prescribed set of conditions organized around my work as a practicing performer, choreographer, and teacher. These imagined conditions, changed periodically, are necessary for me to even begin dancing.
"There has to be a certain discipline so that we are neither lost in daydream nor missing the freshness and openness that come from not holding our attention too tightly. This balance is a state of wakefulness, mindfulness."
Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche, The Heart of the Buddha, Shambala, 1991
My Body, dancing, is formed and sustained imaginatively. I re-configure the three-dimensional body into an immeasurable fifty-three trillions cells perceived perceiving, all of them, at once. Impossibly whole and ridiculous to presume, I remain, in awe of the feedback. At such times Deborah Hay assumes the devotion of a dog to its master; reading the simplest signs of life, noticing every nuance my teacher produces. When the greater part of the Buddhist world find its strength, solace, and wisdom through a practiced devotion to a guru, or Rinpoche, please imagine my hesitancy in admitting to twenty-eight years of devotion to an imagined 53-trillion-celled teacher.
My Body is unfixed. Its boundaries extend to the limits of what is visible and not visible in my practice of seeing. A field of unlimited resources is deliberately imagined because by participating in such an environment I cannot preconceive My Body's experience of the moment. My Body is deliberately not a collector.
The book's form grew from the list of chapter headings described in the first paragraph of the Introduction. I did not write the material to fit the chapter heading. I wrote the text to get a clearer picture, a wider perspective on how dancing impacts my life and how my life impacts my dance. When a story was complete, I would go through the list until an unusually obvious or unusually subtle link to a chapter heading was made. Either way, the parallel became more experiential than didactic.
My Body, The Buddhist is the work of dancer/choreographer, not schooled in theory, analysis, poetry, or criticism. I study riddles that disclose themselves when I am dancing - one every few years. Dance is the field trip I conduct in search of understanding a riddle. The manner in which jokes, riddles or games can thrill and annihilate the body's reasoning process with so much self-reflection, is similar to the experience of beginner's mind in Zen Buddhism.
It would have been antithetical to my process of inquiry to research Buddhist theory in order to substantiate my thesis. Long ago I stopped sitting at a desk, surrounded by books, gathering information. My research happens in the experiential realm dancing - standing on my two feet and moving, listening, seeing. I do not think people are going to be reading this text in order to learn about Buddhism.
I am not a practicing Buddhist. Nor am I a practiced poet, librettist, or archivist. The literary forms used in this book are liberties I have taken in order to unravel the coding between movement and perception. The libretto, poem, score, short story, were co-opted by a flag-bearer in pursuit of the study, transmission, and intelligence born in the dancing body. I will try anything to help bring some attention to the truth born here.
My Body, The Buddhist describes innate skills and basic wisdom that bodies possess but which remain untranslated because as a culture we tend to hide in our clothes. Unrecognized is the altar that rises with us in the morning and leads us to rest at night. The book's intent is to open some trapped doors that prevent awareness of the body's daringly ordinary perspicacity.
Eighteen artists, of varied disciplines, were invited to illustrate a chapter heading with either a drawing, photo, or up to a paragraph of text. None of them knew the chapter content beforehand. It was positively uncanny to observe how the submissions received corresponded to the content in the chapter heading they chose. The result of their collective participation led me to believe that My Body, The Buddhist could as well have been titled My Body, The Artist. I find this parallel very interesting.
Deborah Hay, Whidbey Island, 1998
[_writings and notes]