Surrender, subservience, humility, prostrating, giving up, and other submissions

This is just a rather random topic that swirled through my mind due to an overheard conversation a few weeks ago. The comment I overheard was a woman who had lived in India for a while talking about how she had a terrible inner struggle with the custom of greeting elders by touching their feet. In the house where she was living the children greeted their father this way, and it was expected of her to greet the man of the house this way because he was an elder and a teacher. She couldn't do it. She said finally, one day, she started to see that it was not about some kind of ass-kissing submission to patriarchal authority, but a way of honoring the wisdom of a teacher. And when she touched his feet that morning, everyone in the house wept, understanding how hard it had been for her.

I heard this, and I thought about the ten years I spent in a traditional religious practice where every time you met another practitioner you greeted each other by prostrating - youngest (in terms of initiation, not biological age) prostrating to oldest. It was not, in this case, considered to be a prostration to the human person, but to the deity residing in them. One prostrated to ones own and other people's shrines, also, where the ritual items of the gods were kept. It became an extraordinary ritual at large group events with just huge amounts of time spent prostrating (and people whispering their initiation days to each other so they would organize themselves in the right order). But the fact is I always thought it was a beautiful act, and there are times now, even when I am so honored by someone's wisdom that I want to prostrate. Sometimes I want to prostrate to the whole world, and even then it wouldn't convey how deeply I feel the sense of surrender that act carries for me.

But I know it is not customary for many people, and even deeply offensive or difficult for some. But because there are so many variations and customs and feelings about it, I wondered if anyone else has had experience with "prostration cultures" or other types of submissive display and how they feel about it? I imagine because it is so deeply tied to animal behaviors of submission in the face of aggression and such, it really can bring up a lot of emotion, fear, and so on.

The one thing that everyone wants, that makes the giver and receiver feel good, that everyone can give, no one can buy or take, and it's free... is respect.

The inferior substitute that can be extracted, forced, shamed, bought, etc. from others... is "respecting authority" in whatever form: bow, avert eyes, to wear a suit, to laugh at unfunny jokes... People will devote their entire life to obtaining some kind of authority (money, power, status, the right accent or clothes, the right material possessions, intentionally being funny, intentionally being thoughtful, spiritual materialism...) so that they can obtain some measure of so-called respect. But it's only authority respect. It's really a very sad human tendency.

The word "respect" is used for both but they are totally different things.

I do Judo, and there's a lot of bowing and prostrating going on in the course of a training session, exam, or competition. I've never had any trouble with it. Maybe it's the physical aspect of the sport, the natural way a hierarchy of respect is established simply because the teachers are better at it than me, and also, I think, because it's a voluntary thing: we all come there in the evening to have fun and learn this sport together. There's nothing to be gained apart from the recognition of other people with the same interest in this sport. This clearly defined context is what makes it possible for a bunch of westerners in bathrobes to prostrate before another westerner in a bathrobe

When it comes to religious stuff - I don't know. It's difficult to tell when someone beat someone else at meditation, after all. So any hierarchy would be based on far less tangible and reproducible criteria than who can slam who to the mat. Talking the talk tends to impress people to some degree, and hence there are hierarchies of scholars and priests. But that is very tenuous authority - all it takes is someone to say the emperor is butt naked, and it all gets blown away. Here's a case in point:

The assembled clergy get all huffy because someone (a woman, too!) dismisses their authority because they are speaking no discernible sense at all. She doesn't buy into their premises, leaving them with nothing they can do to assert authority. They try with money, in the end, but you can see their hearts are not in it.

So expressing surrender to the perceived higher qualities of other people is a highly mixed bag.

On the other hand: expanding the act of surrender to everything, or the universe, or suchness, or emptiness, or god or whatever you wish to call it - that, in my experience, is a very useful and perspective-shattering activity. Maybe prostrating before religious authorities can be a gateway to this all-encompassing surrender for some people.

Oh, and then there's the gratitude aspect Ona mentioned. But I think that comes after getting the hang of surrender, not before. (or mabye not - just speaking for myself here).

Cheers,
Florian

I forgot about the bowing in Judo (I played in college) - good example. It also reminds me of how at the Japanese sangha I go to sometimes there is a lot of bowing - to the doorway before entering, to the other people in the sangha before beginning service, to the waterfall where we walked one day, and so on. Technically one should/could equally bow to the Buddha Nature in a pebble, a car, a blade of grass, the dog, etc.

One thing that was interesting about the prostration in Santeria was that priests/initiates were rarely professional priests. Most people had lay lives, and so the prostration to the priest might easily go against the "mundane" aspects of a person's rank. For example a person who was an elder priest to me might be younger than me biologically (even a child), might be poorer or of lower social status by worldly standards, might be less educated, and so on. So it could function as an interesting exercise in that regard, to break down ones tendency to defer to people based on those more common conditions of social hierarchy.

Oh, you also made me think we need more/better words in English maybe, because "respect" can range from fear to gratitude, and that's a wide range.

Regarding what both florian and ona are saying here about bowing/prostation.. I attend a school for Chinese Kung Fu and we bow in before crossing the training floor, at the beginning and end of class, before practicing forms, gi gong and any other sort of formal practices as well as bowing to sparing partners and other classmates when just working together in any kind of way. It occured to me after reading what you both have said here in conjunction with what kategowen said on another thread about "unconditional high regard" that it might be useful and a powerful practice to appraoch social encounters or situations with a internal mental prostration or "mental bow" as I'm calling it in my mind to really start to take that on a responsibility and to enter these situations with the appropriate sort of openness and respect. It seems to me that if we could treat each other as if we were all masters with both a lesson to teach and a lesson to learn in every encounter that could be a very powerful thing.

Duane - this is so spot-on, and I am still really thrilled with this term "unconditional high regard" that is being discussed on the other thread.

I recall an evening many months ago where I was in a deep state of equanimity and went to the local sangha. I walked in late and they were in the middle of a discussion. I sat listening to the people talking, and I was blown away at the feeling I had that every one of them was speaking in God's own voice, somehow. At the time I thought "but of course, how else could it be?" We all have Buddha Nature, we all are manifest of the same source, and so on. The state faded later that evening, but there was a lesson in that that stuck with me for a long time. If you do face everything with unconditional high regard, everything is a teacher, every word, every sound, every sight, is a lesson, a message, etc. It doesn't have to be literal, like the crazy old man in a movie who whispers some secret to the main character. But to really open your heart to people and events and things and listen to what they are "saying" (not always in literal words) is a really lovely practice.

Thanks for your post, which reminded me of this.

Yeah, manifestations of pure, raw interconnected reality sharing expressions of the experience of pure, raw interconnected reality! HA! It's like every single particle of reality is a tiny Kwisatz Haderach. I almost just blew up my own head thinking about how awesome that is:)

This thought just wafted in: maybe the bowing/prostrating is a kind of sign or signal between 'those who know'. Not an acknowledgement of some kind of socially constructed hierarchy, but an acknowledgement of the Awesome Reality-- 'Do you see it? Yeah, I see it!'

In other words, what Duane said!

Totally!
That's exactly what it's like at my KF school.
We bow to each other not to show obedience to a higher rank but more like a nod to the joke we're all in on.
Our mutual knowledge and understanding.
The advantage to giving that nod to strangers (or whoever) is that one is then already primed to deal with whatever may arise with as much skill as one is capable of.
Personal stuff is left aside for the benefit of intimate communication and openness... And clear seeing!

Once I start bowing, I can't stop! Nothing unworthy of a bow

Bowing on a meditation retreat always seemed a little contrived because we weren't bowing to each other, we were mostly bowing to a statue. I like the zen idea of bowing to your sitting cushion.

Bowing in martial arts makes more sense, bow to the practice space and step into it, bow to the teacher, bow to your training partner, and at the end, bow to your partner, bow to the teacher, step out of the practice space and bow to it.

In the good martial art schools I've been to, bowing was a sign of mutual "holy sh*t we might hurt each other practicing this, let's look out for each other!" . Life is a lot like that, too.

Once I start bowing, I can't stop! Nothing unworthy of a bow


-shargrol

If anyone hasn't tried this, try it - mentally, if not physically, pause and bow to everything, all day long. The cooking pot, the cat, the door, the ant, your clothing, the soap, etc. etc. It's a powerful attitude to bring to daily experience.

This showed up on my FaceBook page today:

This is the remarkable moment when a tiger bowed its head and placed a paw up to the hand of a small girl.


Photographer Dyrk Daniels noticed the 370lb Golden Bengal Tiger had
taken an interest in the child, who was leaning against his glass
enclosure.


As the tiger, called Taj, headed over to her, Mr
Daniels got his camera ready, expecting him to snarl and bang against
the glass.


‘I noticed that Taj had taken an interest in the girl and was heading towards her.


‘I thought for certain that the little girl would need therapy after the encounter and fear cats for the rest of her life.


‘I could not believe my eyes when Taj approached the girl, bowed
his head and then placed his huge right paw exactly in front of where
the little girl’s left hand was.


‘It was incredible to
watch. Taj let down his right paw, rubbed his cheek against the glass
where the little girl’s face was and moved off.’


Far from
being scared, the little girl was so excited that she started clapping
as she walked back afterwards towards her mother.


‘I have never seen such tenderness from such a large predator,’ Mr Daniels said.

This reminds me of a time in my teens when I had just really let someone down. My neighbors/landlords were going away for a trip and offered me the use of their house while they were away so I could have a little independence and a little time/space to myself. Of course I did the cliched thing

Cleaning up after the party there were a few things that were gonna require actual fixing... and I felt really stupid! After making amends with my neighbors when they returned, fixing what had been broken, and apologizing sincerely, I found myself reflecting on what had happened.

My neighbor had taken the whole thing in such graceful stride that I had a sort of breathing room to reflect, guilt free, on my actions and their consequences. As I reflected that night I suddenly had a deep sense of interconnection and harmony, and an image in my mind's eye of myself bowing to my neighbor, and her reciprocating. In that moment of bowing a whole vista of interrelationship and deepest respect opened up before me, and I wondered: maybe what makes a buddha a buddha, is that buddha is always bowing to everyone and everything buddha meets... The image has really stuck with me. Thanks for the reminder guys!