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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 I have intuitively preferred the politics of nonviolence. Nonresistance, seen in the bodies of many Buddhists, has always drawn my attention. And action through nonaction, at least as I perceived it on the surface, secretly appealed to my middle-class upbringing.

In the early 1970s, 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.

Books and articles concerning Buddhist philosophy have proliferated in comparable measure to those written about the body. Yet I am certain that no two people living in a 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; likewise, my dances do not coalesce around specific subject matter.

… 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)

My Body in the title of this book refers to a prescribed set of what ifs organized around my work as a practicing performer, choreographer, and teacher: What if alignment is everywhere? What if your teacher (your 53 trillion cells) inspires mine? Such imagined conditions, changed periodically, are necessary for me even to 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)

My Body, dancing, is formed and sustained imaginatively. I reconfigure the three-dimensional body into an immeasurable fifty-three trillion cells perceived perceiving, all of them, at once. Impossibly whole and ridiculous to presume, I remain, in attendance to the feedback. At such times Deborah Hay assumes the devotion of a dog to its master; reading the simplest signs of life, lapping up whatever nuance my teacher produces. When the greater part of the Buddhist world finds 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.

The book grew from the list of eighteen statements that form its chapter headings. But I did not write the material to fit the headings. Several pieces had already been written when I began. Others I wrote to help me understand and gain a wider perspective on how dancing impacts my life and how life impacts my dance. With each story, or score, I would scan the table of contents until an unusually obvious or uncanny link to a chapter heading was made. The parallels were more experiential than didactic.

My Body, The Buddhist is the work of a dancer/choreographer not schooled in theory, analysis, poetry, or criticism. I study riddles, some of which are what ifs that arise when I am dancing. For example, what if where I am is what I need? As a dancer, I will notice what occurs when I imagine every cell in my body at once is getting what it needs moment by moment. The manner in which these what ifs can thrill and annihilate the body’s reasoning process, overwhelming it with self-reflection, is similar to the experience of beginner’s mind in Zen Buddhism. Dance is the field trip I conduct in order to interface with this experience.

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 two feet, moving, listening, and seeing. I do not think people are going to read 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 to help me unravel a piece of the plot between movement and perception. The libretto, poem, score, short story, were co-opted by a flag-bearer in pursuit of the study of 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 that 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.

Sixteen artists, of varied disciplines, were invited to illustrate a chapter heading with a drawing, a 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 of the chapter whose 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 intriguing.