Everything I Learned About Labels, I Learned from My Dog
Cannon
One of the teachings in Buddhism that used to leave me scratching my head was that labels are concepts that limit us. What?
As I got deeper into my studies and mindfulness practice, understanding began to emerge through continuous interaction with my dog Cannon. He was really not the one who I expected would clarify this matter for me, but he has.
The first label Cannon wears without having asked for it is that of Dog. Now, Buddhism does not deny that labels have a conventional use in our language for identifying objects. The problem, the teachings state, is that we mistake the label for the object.
While it’s true the label Dog applies to Cannon, I don’t think of Cannon in terms of Dog, except when I have to clean up the yard after him. The rest of the time, he acts as a companion, a house guard, a hiking buddy, foot warmer, crumb picker-upper, and lump on the couch, among many other labels I could apply.
When a friend was visiting, my daughter and I were appalled that he had referred to his dog as it. Not he or she, but it. If you see your dog as more than a Dog as I do, you may react the same way we did. On the other hand, if Dog is nothing but a label for a type of animal, then you may think nothing of what he said.
All of this made me realize that Dog is a label is a label. It is definitely not the thing it’s identifying for conversation sake. Cannon is not the labels we apply to him. He is ever changing in form and behavior is often adorable, well-behaved, friendly, sometimes not so friendly, affectionate, sleepy, sometimes incredibly active, and the list goes on. Labels don’t do Cannon justice.
What really taught me about how meaningless labels are, though, except in the context of communication, is that Cannon completely disregards them. He will respond to me, or ignore me if he so chooses, no matter if I call him Dog, Cannon, sweetie pie, love bug, Booglies, Boo, honey bun, my love, and the list goes on. I can call him by any label, and I’ll either get an eager greeting, or just a glance that says I’m busy being an inert lump.
Time, another weighty concept we place on ourselves, is also ignored by Cannon. When I come home after having been gone all day, Cannon greets me at the door, ears down, sitting like a good boy, with his tail wagging and thumping the carpet. Later, I realize I forgot to grab the mail, so I fetch it, taking all of 30 seconds, and when I come back in Cannon greets me just as enthusiastically as he did when I got home. Either his memory is really bad and he thinks I’ve been gone all day again, or in his mind, any time I come in from outside is worthy of an enthusiastic greeting . If only husbands acted that way!
So, my wonderful pet has taught me about the Buddhist view of labels, and why they are so limiting and conceptual, why they are useful only in terms of identification in conversation. Now, I look at the way I have mindlessly apply variious labels to people I know, how those labels limit my views of them, and how I can see beyond the labels others apply to the world around them.
September 18th, 2009 at 9:50 am
Thanks for this! I’ve actually been looking into neurofeedback for a while, do you know of any good consumer style products?
June 10th, 2010 at 4:12 am
[...] exist . . . an unchanging, central self. I wrote about some of my exploration of labels in Everything I Learned About Labels, I Learned from my Dog. And as I dug more deeply into how I use labels in reference to myself, and explored how subtle [...]