There are many questions that come up from today’s readings in the Old Testament and the Gospel (Exodus 16:12-15 and Matthew 20:1-16), especially around the idea of fairness, and our own discontentment. In the Old Testament lesson, the Israelites complain about Moses and Aaron having brought them out of Egypt and how they have nothing to eat, and that God then provides quail and Manna. In the G
ospel lesson, Jesus teaches a parable about workers in the vineyard, where some workers arrive first thing in the morning, others arrive at noon, and finally others arrive just a couple of hours before the end of the day, and yet, at the end the Lord of the vineyard pays each worker the usual days wage, regardless of whether they worked a full day or not.
Both of these stories pointed me to thinking about the First Noble Truth of Buddhism, and that is the Noble Truth of duhkha. Duhkha is a funny word. In English, it is often translated as “suffering”, but it’s easy to misconceive this as just the gross suffering of physical pain or discomfort (although this is one main way in which we do suffer). I prefer the translation of duhkha as “discontentment”. This is more accurate. It’s a sense of something not being right, of wanting more, of just not being content with where one finds oneself in a particular moment. Both in the Old Testament and in the Gospel lesson, we see the tradition pointing us towards looking at our own discontentment, to looking at our own wanting. In the Old Testament lesson, the Israelites complain about their lot, voicing that it would be better that they had died at the hands of the Egyptians than have to endure the lack of food in the desert. In the Gospel lessons, the hard workers who worked all day in the Vineyard complain at the fact that those who only worked a couple of short hours got paid the same thing they did.
How many times do we find ourselves in this situation? Where we find ourselves wronged? That is a symptom of our own day-to-day discontentment. This isn’t to say that we should merely become, as Chögyam Trungpa put it, “doormats”. To be content is not to be a doormat. But, we notice the grasping in the complaints that we hear in these two biblical lessons. We notice how in the Israelites and the laborers in the proverbial vineyard grasp at their own inherent self, at a solid, independent, substantial self, and apprehends it as truly existent. Buddhist philosophy tells us that this perception of self is exactly what drives us to act in self-serving, self-grasping ways instead of behaving in a compassionate way towards others with a motivation to benefit and love others.
Here, we find an intersection of Dharma and Gospel. The Gospel is an expansive makes chosen those who would otherwise be undeserving in the eyes of the culture of the day; that is, it absorbs into the royal, priestly lineage of God’s chosen people, all people who would choose to enter into the community. Similarly, in the Buddhist tradition, those who enter the Bodhisattva path are considered sons and daughters of the Buddha, heirs of the Enlightened one. The heart 
teaching of these lessons is that discontentment, that duhkha (suffering) is at the root of our unsettled feeling, at our feeling insecure. That is, in our grasping at a self that does not in fact exist, is what drives us into cycles of hatred, anger, self-righteousness; all of these are behaviors that both in the Buddhist and Christian traditions carry significant negative connotations. It is said in the Bodhisattvacharyavatara: “Whatever wholesome deeds such as venerating the Buddhas, and generosity that have been amassed over a thousand aeons will all be destroyed in a moment of anger (6:1).
We are pointed now to a mirror that shows us our own self-grasping and self-cherishing. Do we see ourselves in the laborer who feels “wronged”? Or perhaps in the sojourner, having just been liberated from a brutally oppressive ruler complains about not having garlic? What may seemingly be insignificant feelings of a sense of “justice” or “righteousness” can sprout into self-righteousness, which in turn will mutate into anger, which can destroy an eternity of good works in the blink of an eye. The expansiveness of God’s love, or perhaps in more humanistic terms, the expansiveness of Existence, goes far broader than the cherishing of a solid self.
The Buddhist Middle Way stakes out a position on the razor sharp edge that is exactly at the mid-point between Nihilism and Absolutism. This teaching tells us that everything exists in dependence on other factors, that is, everything that we perceive is interdependent, and that our world is interdependent. We are called to enter into a spacious way of existing, we are called to exist in a way that is interdependent, that acknowledges, in the words of the Baptismal vow, the “inherent dignity of every human being”, but I would go even further, the “inherent dignity of all existence”. The scripture lessons today are not calling the Christian to merely be a doormat that merely accepts what the great administrator on high would hand down to us. Rather, these lessons are calling to transcend our view with blinders on, it calls us instead to an expansive view, an expansive view that accepts and honors the radical equality of all people, that all are loved, that all have the potential for enlightenment and salvation, and, believing that in the culmination of Christian thought, and indeed Buddhist thought, that all people are part of a royal, priestly lineage, and that all are on the same path.
Honor one another, love one another, accept one another. Practice in a radically open, expansive way. What would our churches, our Dharma centers looked like if we practice in this way? Of being content, disciplined, but at the same time radically present and compassionate?
Phos Zoe 