<Class notes from Dharma Salons with Michelle and Joel
ESSENTIAL ADVICE ON MEDITATION
excerpts from Teachings by Sogyal Rinpoche
When you read books about meditation, or often when meditation is is presented by different groups, much of the emphasis falls on the techniques. In the West, people tend to be very interested in the “technology” of meditation. However, by far the most important feature of meditation is not technique, but the way of being, the spirit, which is called the “posture”, a posture which is not so much physical, but more to do with spirit or attitude.
It is well to recognize that when you start on a meditation practice, you are entering a totally different dimension of reality. Normally in life we put a great deal of effort into achieving things, and there is a lot of struggle involved, whereas meditation is just the opposite, it is a break from how we normally operate.
Meditation is simply a question of being, of melting, like a piece of butter left in the sun. It has nothing to do with whether or not you “know” anything about it, in fact, each time you practice meditation it should be fresh, as if it were happening for the very first time. You just quietly sit, your body still, your speech silent, your mind at ease, and allow thoughts to come and go, without letting them play havoc on you.
If you need something to do, then watch the breathing. This is a very simple process. When you are breathing out, know that you are breathing out. When you breath in, know that you are breathing in, without supplying any kind of extra commentary or internalized mental gossip, but just identifying with the breath. That very simple process of mindfulness processes your thoughts and emotions, and then, like an old skin being shed, something is peeled off and freed.
Usually people tend to relax the body by concentrating on different parts. Real relaxation comes when you relax from within, for then everything else will ease itself out quite naturally.
When you begin to practice, you center yourself, in touch with your “soft spot”, and just remain there. You need not focus on anything in particular to begin with. Just be spacious, and allow thoughts and emotions to settle. If you do so, then later, when you use a method such as watching the breath, your attention will more easily be on your breathing. There is no particular point on the breath on which you need to focus, it is simply the process of breathing. Twenty-five percent of your attention is on the breath, and seventy-five percent is relaxed. Try to actually identify with the breathing, rather than just watching it. You may choose an object, like a flower, for example, to focus upon.
Sometimes you are taught to visualize a light on the forehead, or in the heart. Sometimes a sound or a mantra can be used. But at the beginning it is best to simply be spacious, like the sky. Think of yourself as the sky, holding the whole universe. When you sit, let things settle and allow all your discordant self with its ungenuineness and unnaturalness to dissolve, out of that rises your real being. You experience an aspect of yourself which is more genuine and more authentic-the “real” you. As you go deeper, you begin to discover and connect with your fundamental goodness.
The whole point of meditation is to get used to the that aspect which you have forgotten. In Tibetan “meditation” means “getting used to”. Getting used to what? to your true nature, your Buddha nature. This is why, in the highest teaching of Buddhism, Dzogchen, you are told to “rest in the nature of mind”. You just quietly sit and let all thoughts and concepts dissolve. It is like when the clouds dissolve or the mist evaporates, to reveal the clear sky and the sun shining down. When everything dissolves like this, you begin to experience your true nature, to “live”. Then you know it, and at that moment, you feel really good. It is unlike any other feeling of well being that you might have experienced. This is a real and genuine goodness, in which you feel a deep sense of peace, contentment and confidence about yourself.
It is good to meditate when you feel inspired. Early mornings can bring that inspiration, as the best moments of the mind are early in the day, when the mind is calmer and fresher (the time traditionally recommended is before dawn). It is more appropriate to sit when you are inspired, for not only is it easier then as you are in a better frame of mind for meditation, but you will also be more encouraged by the very practice that you do. This in turn will bring more confidence in the practice, and later on you will be able to practice when you are not inspired. There is no need to meditate for a long time: just remain quietly until you are a little open and able to connect with your heart essence. That is the main point.
After that, some integration, or meditation in action. Once your mindfulness has been awakened by your meditation, your mind is calm and your perception a little more coherent. Then, whatever you do, you are present, right there. As in the famous Zen master’s saying: “When I eat, I eat; when I sleep, I sleep”. Whatever you do, you are fully present in the act. Even washing dishes, if it is done one-pointedly, can be very energizing, freeing, cleansing. You are more peaceful, so you are more “you”. You assume the “Universal You”.
One of the fundamental points of the spiritual journey is to persevere along the path. Though one’s meditation may be good one day and and not so good the next, like changes in scenery, essentially it is not the experiences, good or bad which count so much, but rather that when you persevere, the real practice rubs off on you and comes through both good and bad. Good and bad are simply apparitions, just as there may be good or bad weather, yet the sky is always unchanging. If you persevere and have that sky like attitude of spaciousness, without being perturbed by emotions and experiences, you will develop stability and the real profoundness of meditation will take effect. You will find that gradually and almost unnoticed, your attitude begins to change. You do not hold on to things as solidly as before, or grasp at them so strongly, and though crisis will still happen, you can handle them a bit better with more humor and ease. You will even be able to laugh at difficulties a little, since there is more space between you and them, and you are freer of yourself. Things become less solid, slightly ridiculous, and you become more light-hearted.
Prayer, Awareness, and Choosing Enlightenment
An Interview with ANAM THUBTEN from No Self, No Problem
http://www.snowlionpub.com/pages/N91.html
Jeff Cox: Sometimes when I’m troubled, I’m moved to pray. But as a Buddhist I don’t think of it as asking God for something. What is your view on the purpose of prayer?
Anam Thubten: There are many ways to understand prayer. It means something different from person to person—and even for the same person, it might be different at different times.
To me, prayer is an act of devotion, and a non-conceptual, powerful method of dropping the ego mind of control, fear, doubt, and anger—right in the moment— and realizing the Buddhamind or bodhicitta. It is an act of surrendering everything to that great work of the universe—beyond anyone’s control—and trusting in the grand play of the universe. When you trust in it, you feel re- leased from the fear and insecurity and accept—not acceptance like we are trying painfully to accept something we don’t appreciate, but true acceptance with trust. The object of prayer is not so important in Buddhism, even though there are lots of deities and benevolent spirits. Buddhism teaches that deities such as Avalokiteshvara or Tara are not outside of oneself—they are an expression of one’s true nature, the emptiness, the source of all things, the absolute truth.
JC: So praying to Chenrezig is a way of calling on your own inner strength to help make circumstances go in a better way?
AT: Absolutely. In the Tibetan tradition, we have these three buddhas (or bodhisattvas), Manjushri, Avalokitesvara, and Vajrapani. Manjushri symbolizes intelligence and wisdom, Avalokiteshvara symbolizes love and compassion, and Vajrapani symbolizes strength, courage and power. They are all expressions of what we truly are; each of these principles is an inherent property of our basic nature. So when we pray to them, it is an act of invoking those inherent enlightened qualities present in all of us. In the ultimate sense, there is no object that is being prayed to—there is no separation between the object being prayed to and the person praying.
JC: In your book No Self, No Problem you discuss how acceptance is a key to waking up to your true nature. Does this mean that one should go along with whatever is happening?
AT: Part of Mahayana teaching is about bringing all things onto the path to enlightenment. This means that whatever happens, you accept it as a way to develop the enlightened qualities inside you—courage, love, forgiveness, compassion. From another perspective, the concept of acceptance is tricky because it has a connotation that you have to deliberately try to convince your self to accept everything. The big question is who is it that is trying to accept and reject in the first place—the ego is present as the one trying to accept. The ego is running this whole game.
JC: So the acceptance you are speaking of is not the opposite of rejection?
AT: No, it is not the opposite. The enlightened mind (Rigpa or Buddhamind) goes beyond both accepting and rejecting—there is nothing to accept or reject— because Buddhamind is in perfect relation with the nature of all things. In this realm there is no conflict. So the idea of accepting and rejecting is really transcended. It doesn’t exist there; it only exists in the ego’s mind. In the Dzogchen tradition, the notion of accepting is regarded as a subtle effort of ego that has to be dropped in order realize the great peace or nature of all things.
Each moment is a tipping point—each moment we decide whether or not to be enlightened and free!
JC: In your book, you use the term “non-doing awareness.” Can a per- son maintain non-doing awareness even while action is going on?
AT: Absolutely. Non-doing awareness is not about whether you are doing something or not. The art of maintaining non-doing awareness is a rich practice.
JC: Is the opposite of non-doing awareness the thinking of oneself as the doer?
AT:The non-doing awareness can have different meanings. On one level we can speak of awareness as not doing anything. Awareness transcends all notions of ef- fort. It doesn’t try to reject or ac- quire. It is already enlightened, so there is nothing to purify, nothing to abandon, nothing to achieve. It itself is non-doing, it doesn’t involve any effort or strategies in itself.
JC: It is aware of the content of experience.
AT: Absolutely. When one re- sides in that, it is totally different from any ordinary state of mind. It is different from trance states or samadhi which many people regard as spiritual. When one experiences pure awareness, there is no doing because there is nothing to be done. There is no act of trying to purify. There is nothing to acquire. It is in perfect harmony and relation with ultimate truth. The ordinary mind is very engaged in some kind of effort to dismantle the empire of the ego delusion and in trying to acquire something. It is very involved with doing.
JC: Awareness is present in all states but we don’t notice it.
AT: Exactly. It is insight, knowing the nature of all things, the pro- found absolute truth of all things. In Tibetan, awareness is called Rigpa or Yeshe. “Ye” means primordial—it is already in each of us—that innate wisdom is not some conception or knowledge that we can acquire from reading, thinking or lectures. It is inherent in each of us. “She” means knowing the inconceivable, transcendent, and yet simple truth of all things. We can call it emptiness, dharmata. The rational mind can- not comprehend it. Awareness in this sense is insight (prajna). It is not that we are just enjoying some kind of stillness or some beautiful state of mind. Whenever we can reside in this—this is the highest form of practice—in that moment our mind is no longer different than the mind of Bud- dha Shakyamuni.
JC: Does this awareness have the three qualities of the three buddhas you spoke of earlier?
AT: Absolutely. This awareness doesn’t happen with a big pro- cession. It happens in a quiet and subtle manner. It is unfathomable like the ocean whose depth we cannot see. Awareness is the Buddhamind, a reservoir of enlightened radiance of wisdom, joy, compassion, love—they just hap- pen on their own. Like the brilliant sun in the sky, it is the source of all the enlightened qualities that radiate from it. They are innate and are an expression of that awareness.
JC: So for someone with this awareness the qualities of intelligence, love, compassion naturally radiate into their environment and spontaneously change things.
AT: Yes. There are stories of the Buddha traveling into towns and cities; he brought his amazing benevolent presence. When someone is fully immersed in this awareness, what he or she naturally does is express that enlightened nature. There was a lama named Mani Lama from Golok. When he was a young boy, he had a sudden awakening. He left his ordinary life, and traveled around eastern Tibet. Because he was not educated in a monastery, he didn’t know how to teach in a traditional way, but people felt a tremendous peace around him. So wherever he went, people would gather around him. Be- cause he didn’t know what to teach, his teachings were short. People would come and sit with him. Sometimes he gave spontaneous talks or would sing with them. Often he would sing the Mani or six-syllable mantra, and so people called him the Mani Lama. This is a great example of how, when someone lives in awareness, then his or her being becomes a radiance of compassion and love.
JC: Since awareness is present in each of us, what does it mean to practice being aware?
AT: Awareness is the nature of our mind and is not deceived by the world of illusion or display. When mind is deceived, we are deluded, ignorant of our true nature; this is the foundation of samsara, of conflict and suffer- ing. The other side is the awareness or enlightened mind which sounds very grand but is very simple. Each moment is a tipping point—each moment we decide whether or not to be enlightened and free! There is a verse in one of the spiritual songs: “There is only one ground (the dharmadhatu or source or underlying truth of all things), only two paths and only two fruitions.” This is one of my favorite verses, because it says there are not three paths, only two paths, the path of awareness and the path of unawareness. Ev- ery moment we either choose to be on the path of awareness or on the path of non-awareness. So in each moment we are enlightened or not. When we really contemplate this verse, it shocks our minds. It is easy for many practitioners to think that even though they are not actually residing in awareness that somehow so long as they are doing the various practices they are making some kind of progress according to some in- visible scale or record—because they are doing all the right practices they are going in the right direction. When you contemplate this teaching, it shocks your mind because you realize you are making the enlightenment choice in every moment.
Basically two things are happening, everything else is irrelevant— either you are enlightened in this moment or not. It is possible that I could be sitting on a beautiful meditation seat and doing all sorts of spiritual practices but I am completely unawakened. On the other hand, I might be cleaning my toilet and wearing blue jeans, but I could be residing in the awareness—this is what matters.
In the end, there is only one practice, that of maintaining awareness. And because it is uncontrived, it is not the effect of a cause—you cannot produce awareness. Whatever you can produce is “nyam,” an altered state of consciousness—it can be enticing, seductive, whatever. People can get lost in nyams and think this is rigpa, bodhicitta, or samadhi. But mind is deceiving itself. Awareness cannot be produced. Buddha was asked “What causes mindfulness?” and he said, “Mindfulness itself.” This answer is perfect—and can be non-satisfying.
There is a lama from Kham who said that the only way that you can have genuine realization is by holding 108 sessions a day. What he means is not that we must have literally 108 sessions a day but rather that we should re- member periodically throughout the day to pause. Pause and stop talking, wherever you are, as a way to get back to awareness.
JC: Getting lost in thought seems to me to be a big obstacle to being aware.
AT: Buddha spoke of attention as one of the most powerful methods to become free. Instead of going along with the mind and believing its stories—living the dream-like life—Buddha was suggesting to pause, to stop and look deeply into the nature of all things. Instead of wandering and dreaming, pause and look carefully and pay attention to everything carefully. When we do that, sometimes the perfect understanding or prajna reveals itself to us—we have the direct insight into all things, simply by paying attention to the depth of all things. We stop and pause as a way of questioning what the truth is, what freedom is.
This is an effective method for waking up. Right now in this moment. When we practice the traditional Buddhist methods we talk about mindfulness, we talk about paying attention to the breath and one’s activities. The true meaning of paying attention is more than about paying attention to the body or breath—it is a way of stopping the work of the deluded mind, stopping the wheel of suffering that the ego is spinning. Look into the depth with a sharp, keen observation so that we can see the truth right there. You will stop spinning the wheel of delusion and see that the truth of all things or emptiness is not so far from us—it is everywhere.
JC: It is empowering, and humbling, to think that each moment we make a choice to be awake or not.
AT: In that sense it is very simple but it requires a lot of dedication and discipline to break down all the habits that distract us from awareness. It takes lots of meditation practice.
JC: Thank you Rinpoche for this teaching—I really appreciate your time for this. ■
No Self, No Problem, by Anam Thubten, edited by Sharon Roe. Paper, 144 pp.
The Excellence of Bodhichitta
By Pema Chodron, excerpted from her book, The Places That Scare You.
It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye.
—Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
When I was about six years old I received the essential bodhichitta teaching from an old woman sitting in the sun. I was walking by her house one day feeling lonely, unloved, and mad, kicking anything I could find. Laughing, she said to me, “Little girl, don’t you go letting life harden your heart.”
Right there, I received this pith instruction: we can let the circumstances of our lives harden us so that we become increasingly resentful and afraid, or we can let them soften us and make us kinder and more open to what scares us. We always have this choice.
If we were to ask the Buddha, “What is bodhichitta?” he might tell us that this word is easier to understand than to translate. He might encourage us to seek out ways to find its meaning in our own lives. He might tantalize us by adding that it is only bodhichitta that heals, that bodhichitta is capable of transforming the hardest of hearts and the most prejudiced and fearful of minds.
Chitta means “mind” and also “heart” or “attitude.” Bodhi means “awake,” “enlightened,” or “completely open.” Sometimes the completely open heart and mind of bodhichitta is called the soft spot, a place as vulnerable and tender as an open wound. It is equated, in part, with our ability to love. Even the cruelest people have this soft spot. Even the most vicious animals love their off-spring. As Trungpa Rinpoche put it, “Everybody loves something, even if it’s only tortillas.”
Bodhichitta is also equated, in part, with compassion—our ability to feel the pain that we share with others. Without realizing it we continually shield ourselves from this pain because it scares us. We put up protective walls made of opinions, prejudices, and strategies, barriers that are built on a deep fear of being hurt. These walls are further fortified by emotions of all kinds: anger, craving, indifference, jealousy and envy, arrogance and pride. But fortunately for us, the soft spot—our innate ability to love and to care about things—is like a crack in these walls we erect. It’s a natural opening in the barriers we create when we’re afraid. With practice we can learn to find this opening. We can learn to seize that vulnerable moment—love, gratitude, loneliness, embarrassment, inadequacy—to awaken bodhichitta.
An analogy for bodhichitta is the rawness of a broken heart. Sometimes this broken heart gives birth to anxiety and panic, sometimes to anger, resentment, and blame. But under the hardness of that armor there is the tenderness of genuine sadness. This is our link with all those who have ever loved. This genuine heart of sadness can teach us great compassion. It can humble us when we’re arrogant and soften us when we are unkind. It awakens us when we prefer to sleep and pierces through our indifference. This continual ache of the heart is a blessing that when accepted fully can be shared with all.
The Buddha said that we are never separated from enlightenment. Even at the times we feel most stuck, we are never alienated from the awakened state. This is a revolutionary assertion. Even ordinary people like us with hang-ups and confusion have this mind of enlightenment called bodhichitta. The openness and warmth of bodhichitta is in fact our true nature and condition. Even when our neurosis feels far more basic than our wisdom, even when we’re feeling most confused and hopeless, bodhichitta—like the open sky—is always here, undiminished by the clouds that temporarily cover it.
Given that we are so familiar with the clouds, of course, we may find the Buddha’s teaching hard to believe. Yet the truth is that in the midst of our suffering, in the hardest of times, we can contact this noble heart of bodhichitta. It is always available, in pain as well as in joy.
A young woman wrote to me about finding herself in a small town in the Middle East surrounded by people jeering, yelling, and threatening to throw stones at her and her friends because they were Americans. Of course, she was terrified, and what happened to her is interesting. Suddenly she identified with every person throughout history who had ever been scorned and hated. She understood what it was like to be despised for any reason: ethnic group, racial background, sexual preference, gender. Something cracked wide open and she stood in the shoes of millions of oppressed people and saw with a new perspective. She even understood her shared humanity with those who hated her. This sense of deep connection, of belonging to the same family, is bodhichitta.
Bodhichitta exists on two levels. First there is unconditional bodhichitta, an immediate experience that is refreshingly free of concept, opinion, and our usual all-caught-upness. It’s something hugely good that we are not able to pin down even slightly, like knowing at gut level that there’s absolutely nothing to lose. Second there is relative bodhichitta, our ability to keep our hearts and minds open to suffering without shutting down.
Those who train wholeheartedly in awakening unconditional and relative bodhichitta are called bodhisattvas or warriors—not warriors who kill and harm but warriors of nonaggression who hear the cries of the world. These are men and women who are will- ing to train in the middle of the fire. Training in the middle of the fire can mean that warrior-bodhisattvas enter challenging situations in order to alleviate suffering. It also refers to their willingness to cut through personal reactivity and self-deception, to their dedication to uncovering the basic undistorted energy of bodhichitta. We have many examples of master warriors—people like Mother Teresa and Martin Luther King—who recognized that the greatest harm comes from our own aggressive minds. They devoted their lives to helping others understand this truth. There are also many ordinary people who spend their lives training in opening their hearts and minds in order to help others do the same. Like them, we could learn to relate to ourselves and our world as warriors. We could train in awakening our courage and love.
There are both formal and informal methods for helping us to cultivate this bravery and kindness. There are practices for nurturing our capacity to rejoice, to let go, to love, and to shed a tear. There are those that teach us to stay open to uncertainty. There are others that help us to stay present at the times that we habitually shut down.
Wherever we are, we can train as a warrior. The practices of meditation, loving-kindness, compassion, joy, and equanimity are our tools. With the help of these practices, we can uncover the soft spot of bodhichitta. We will find that tenderness in sorrow and in gratitude. We will find it behind the hardness of rage and in the shakiness of fear. It is available in loneliness as well as in kindness.
Many of us prefer practices that will not cause discomfort, yet at the same time we want to be healed. But bodhichitta training doesn’t work that way. A warrior accepts that we can never know what will happen to us next. We can try to control the uncontrollable by looking for security and predictability, always hoping to be comfortable and safe. But the truth is that we can never avoid uncertainty. This not knowing is part of the adventure, and it’s also what makes us afraid.
Bodhichitta training offers no promise of happy endings. Rather, this “I” who wants to find security—who wants something to hold on to—can finally learn to grow up. The central question of a warrior’s training is not how we avoid uncertainty and fear but how we relate to discomfort. How do we practice with difficulty, with our emotions, with the unpredictable encounters of an ordinary day?
All too frequently we relate like timid birds who don’t dare to leave the nest. Here we sit in a nest that’s getting pretty smelly and that hasn’t served its function for a very long time. No one is arriving to feed us. No one is protecting us and keeping us warm. And yet we keep hoping mother bird will arrive.
We could do ourselves the ultimate favor and finally get out of that nest. That this takes courage is obvious. That we could use some helpful hints is also clear. We may doubt that we’re up to being a warrior-in-training. But we can ask ourselves this question: “Do I prefer to grow up and relate to life directly, or do I choose to live and die in fear?”
All beings have the capacity to feel tenderness—to experience heartbreak, pain, and uncertainty. Therefore the enlightened heart of bodhichitta is available to us all. The insight meditation teacher Jack Kornfield tells of witnessing this in Cambodia during the time of the Khmer Rouge. Fifty thousand people had become communists at gunpoint, threatened with death if they continued their Buddhist practices. In spite of the danger, a temple was established in the refugee camp, and twenty thousand people attended the opening ceremony. There were no lectures or prayers but simply continuous chanting of one of the central teachings of the Buddha:
Hatred never ceases by hatred But by love alone is healed. This is an ancient and eternal law.
Thousands of people chanted and wept, knowing that the truth in these words was even greater than their suffering.
Bodhichitta has this kind of power. It will inspire and support us in good times and bad. It is like discovering a wisdom and courage we do not even know we have. Just as alchemy changes any metal into gold, bodhichitta can, if we let it, transform any activity, word, or thought into a vehicle for awakening our compassion.
From The Places That Scare You, by Pema Chodron, ©2001 by Pema Chödrön. Reprinted by arrangement with Shambhala Publications Inc., Boston, MA. www.shambhala.com.
The Power of Peace
From Chagdud Rinpoche
“It is my wish that the spiritual power of peace will touch very person on this earth, radiating from a deep peace within our own minds, across political and religious barriers, across the barriers of ego and self-righteousness. Our first task as peacemakers is to clear away our internal conflicts caused by ignorance, anger, grasping, jealousy, and pride. With the guidance of a spiritual teacher, this purification of our own minds can teach us the very essence of peacemaking. We should seek an inner peace so pure, so stable, that we cannot be moved to anger by those who live and profit by war, or to self-grasping and fear by those who confront us with contempt and hatred.
Extraordinary patience is necessary to work toward world peace, and the source of that patience is inner peace. Such peace enables us to see clearly that war and suffering are outer reflections of the mind’s poisons. The essential difference between peacemakers and those who wage war is that peacemakers have discipline and control over egotistical anger, grasping, jealousy, and pride, whereas war makers, out of ignorance, cause these poisons to manifest in the world. If you truly understand this, you will never allow yourself to be defeated from within or without.
In Tibetan Buddhism, the peacock is a symbol for the bodhisattva, the awakened warrior who works for the enlightenment of all beings. A peacock is said to each poisonous plants, but to transform the poison into the gorgeous colors of its feathers. It does not poison itself. In the same way, we who advocate world peace must not poison ourselves with anger. Regard with equanimity the powerful, worldly men who control the war machines. Do your best to convince them of the necessity of peace, but be constantly aware of your state of mind. If you become angry, pull back. If you are able to act without anger, perhaps you will penetrate the terrible delusion that perpetrates war and its hellish suffering.
From the clear space of your own inner peace, your compassion must expand to include all who are involved in war, both the soldiers—whose intention is to benefit but who instead cause suffering and death and thus are caught by the terrible karma of killing—and the civilians who are wounded, killed, or forced into exile as refugees. True compassion is aroused by suffering of every sort, by the suffering of every being; it is not tied to right or wrong, attachment or aversion.
The work of peace is a spiritual path in itself, a means to develop the perfect qualities of mind and to test them against urgent necessity, extreme suffering, and death. Do not be afraid to give it your time, energy, and support.”
http://www.tibetantreasures.com/tthtml/ttmerch/teaching%20pages/powerofpeace.htm
Interview with Pema Chodron: O, The Oprah Magazine
Buddhism has been described as a religion, philosophy, ideology and a way of life. Pema Chödrön, one of the first Western women to become fully ordained as a Buddhist monastic and author of When Things Fall Apart, talks to Oprah about learning from pain and what it means to be a Buddhist.
Oprah: How did you end up following this path, taking this path? Were you always a Buddhist?
Pema: No, no, I was not always a Buddhist. I got involved in this path in a way that’s very appealing to a lot of people, because of the fact that their lives fall apart. And that’s what happened to me. I was about, oh, 34 years old, something like that, not a Buddhist. And my second marriage broke up. And it broke up in a way that for some reason just floored me, pulled the rug out. I was in what I would say now is quite a severe depression.
Oprah: Um hm.
Pema: But I had some kind of fundamental sanity that kept saying to myself, there’s something in this that’s trying—that will teach you something. Something very profound that will bring you to a much deeper level. And so I started looking. I looked at every therapy, I looked at, you know, anything you can imagine in that time, the 70’s, that was available. And then I came across an article by the man that became my teacher, a Tibetan Buddhist meditation master named Chogyam Trumpa. And I knew nothing about Buddhism or about him. But the article was called “Working with Negativity.” And its first line was, there’s nothing wrong basically with what you feel, like the negativity in this case; the problem is that you don’t stay with the underlying emotion. You don’t stay with the feeling, you spin off and try to escape it in some kind of way. And in that way, all the, you know, suffering for yourself and for other people comes from the spin-off. But if you could stay present, then you’d really learn something. And I don’t know, it just—everything else who kind of looked towards the higher good or something like this, and—
Oprah: Right.
Pema: —this just said, stay with your experience, very direct. And that’s how I got into the whole—
Oprah: And that’s—
Pema: —that’s how I started looking for a teacher. And that’s how it started.
Oprah: And that’s what you advise we do when things fall apart?
Pema: Get in touch with the basic feeling.
Oprah: Right.
Pema: Yeah, I mean the problem is, I think for people is that we have so little tolerance for uncomfortable feelings. I’m not even talking about unpleasant outer circumstances but for that feeling in your stomach that—or heart—that I don’t want this to be happening.
Oprah: Right.
Pema: And if somehow you could touch the rawness of the experience, touch the heart of the rawness of the experience—
Oprah: Meaning don’t run from it. Don’t run from it.
Pema: Don’t run from it, yeah.
Oprah: What should you be saying to yourself, when you say touch the rawness and feel? Feel what? I’m already feeling, I’m sure people are thinking, I’m feeling pain, I’m feeling discomfort, I’m feeling I don’t want to have to deal with this.
Pema: Well let me give you what I think is—for—seems to be for people the most accessible thing is that if you can—for instance, just go to your body at that point—
Oprah: Um hm.
Pema: and connect with the sensation.
Oprah: And the sensation—
Pema: Of what it feels like, which is always—feels really bad, and it’s usually in the throat or the heart or the solar plexus. And it feels like a tightening. If you can stay with that feeling and breathe very deeply in and very deeply out, and say to yourself, millions of people all over the world share this kind of fear, discomfort what—I don’t even have to call it anything—they share this not wanting things to be this way. And it’s my link with humanity. And why—and it gives birth to a chain reaction which causes people to strike out and hurt other people or self-destruct. In other words, not staying with the feeling cuts you off from your compassion for others, your empathy for others, and also from the largeness of your own heart and mind. So somehow it seems to me with the people that I’ve been working with, if they can connect with the idea that this moment in time is shared by—it’s sort of a shared experience all over the world. And not staying with it gives birth to a lot of pain and a lot of destruction that we see in the world today. And so then what do you do? How do you stay with it? And I think the most straightforward way is to breathe in very deeply, try to connect with the feeling. And then just relax on the out breath. And breathe in very deeply and connect with the feeling, and breathe out on the out breath. And I call it compassionate abiding. Because it’s staying with yourself when for your whole lifetime you’ve always run away at that point.
Oprah: Well yes, it’s like you say in When Things Fall Apart, that every moment is the perfect teacher.
Pema: Yeah. Yeah. That’s right.
Oprah: One of the things I’ve learned to ask, especially in difficult situations, and the bigger the crises or difficulty, the question I immediately ask always is, what is this here to teach me?
Pema: Yeah. Yeah, that’s a very helpful thing. What is this here to teach me? That’s a very powerful way to look at it. I think people—my feeling is that when people’s lives do fall apart and they’re in a tough situation, their ears are really open for looking for good medicine, you know. And spirituality often is really heard and used like medicine when someone’s hurting rather than just the latest thing to do, you know. And so then people start coming up with their own ways of expressing it, like you just did there, you know—
Oprah: Um hm.
Pema: —what is this situation trying to teach me? All the religions point to the fact that if you’re fully present, it’s the only place that you can wake up. You don’t wake up, you know, by zoning out or somehow leaving. You wake up in the present moment. And so you have to find your own simple grounded language about how to say that to yourself. And that’s a beautiful way to say it. What is this moment—or what is this situation or this person got to teach me, you know? Another thing I love, which I’ve learned from someone over the years, was, you know, this is a unique moment. This encounter, as unpleasant as I’m finding it, is unique. It’s never going to happen again in exactly this way. And maybe I’m glad of that but I don’t want to waste this moment because it’s never going to happen again, just like this. You know, this is—this is the only time I’m ever going to experience this. So let’s taste it, smell it.
Oprah: Why do Buddhists always seem so peaceful?
Pema: I don’t know that they’re always so peaceful, you know. It’s so funny, you know, like does it seem to you that Buddhists are always so peaceful?
Oprah: Yes, it does. I’ve never met a Buddhist—well, all of my encounters, you know, I define myself as Christian, and I’ve met a lot of Christians who weren’t so peaceful. But I’ve never met a Buddhist who, you know, introduced themselves to me as a Buddhist or I happened to know is Buddhist and they didn’t, you know, weren’t actively seeking peace.
Pema: Yeah.
Oprah: And I’m sure not all practicing Buddhists are as good as maybe some of the Buddhists that I know. But it seems that there’s something very calming about the practice or—I don’t know, do you call—is it—it’s a religion, it’s a philosophy, it’s a way of life—
Pema: Yeah, you—when you did your introduction, you talked about it as philosophy and way of life. I think that’s, you know, a very helpful way to think of it. And if there is a reason for the calmness, I think it has to do with because you’re keeping your mind open, you’re training and keeping your mind and heart open rather than closed. So it’s like—in my own experience, my 71 years, you know, or I haven’t been practicing for 71 years, but whatever amount of years it is that I’ve been practicing, when you train in actually being curious and open and receptive to whatever is occurring, obviously less and less things throw you for a loop and provoke you. And when they do, then you’re just curious about that. You see what I’m saying?
Oprah: Yes. And what does it mean to be a Buddhist?
Pema: What does it mean to be a Buddhist?
Oprah: Yes.
Pema: Well, a lot of people might say different things about that, but in my opinion, the essence of it is trusting that the nature of your mind and heart is limitless, boundless, openness, free of prejudice, free of bias, and you could stay in that space and open your eyes and your ears and all your sense perceptions to what’s happening without narrowing down into a prejudice or a bias or a view, a kind of solid view that says, no, no, it can’t be like that, it has to be like this. So somehow that seems to lead to seeing the humanity of even the worst people and seeing—
Oprah: That’s why Buddhists are always so calm.
Pema: Maybe so.
Oprah: Yeah.
Pema: But on the other hand, how many Buddhist people who actually call themselves Buddhists really practice this, you know. You don’t really have to be a Buddhist to practice this.
Oprah: No.
Pema: That’s something I know for sure. Buddhism sort of gives a lot of time to this particular idea, you know. But definitely, if you look at all the really wise people throughout history, it seems to me this is what they’ve practiced is the unprejudiced, unbiased mind, the ability to stand in someone else’s shoes. Or like Martin Luther King, talking about the beloved community and until we’re all healed nobody is healed.
Oprah: Right.
Pema: That’s—and caring more about everybody being healed … than getting it to work out a certain way.
Oprah: Sounds like a beautiful way to live.
(Source: The Buddhist Channel, from O, the Oprah Magazine; http://www.buddhistchannel.tv/index.php?id=9,7245,0,0,1,0; accessed on October 10, 2010.)
Why We Need a Plan B – by Norman Fischer
Norman Fischer, a Soto Zen priest who has practiced and studied Buddhism for more than three decades, says that when it comes to teaching the dharma in the West, it’s important to be open and flexible—even if it means forgoing the “usual Zen stuff.”
One of my Zen teachers in the 1970s, an American who had trained fairly briefly with a Japanese Zen master, mostly in the United States, used to say that he kept checking to see that his students didn’t “backslide” into…
a Judeo-Christian Western viewpoint. This, he believed, is what would happen if we were left to our own devices. He felt it was his job to give us enough Zen input that we would learn to see the world as the masters saw it.
In the 1980s, two eminent Asian Buddhist teachers appeared on the Western dharma scene: Thich Nhat Hanh and His Holiness the Dalai Lama. Each made early visits to the San Francisco Zen Center and astounded us by delivering exactly the opposite message. They had no wish to spread Buddhism or to convert anyone. Both wrote appreciative books on Christianity, and said that Buddhism’s mission in the West was not to establish a beachhead, but rather to help Westerners return, with renewed spirit, to their own religions.
Among the early voices that introduced Buddhism to the West (people like D.T. Suzuki, Alan Watts, and Christmas Humphreys) there was a point of view that Buddhism was beyond religion. All the trappings, all the Asian cultural stuff—the chanting, the robes, the incense, the piety, the family tradition—was extra, and even a corruption of what was originally a purely rational, psychological, almost scientific, approach to the mind. Meditation was the heart of this Buddhist approach. According to this view, if you sat down in meditation, with an honest effort to investigate the mind deeply, you would eventually, given enough time and energy, achieve enlightenment, a non-conceptual transformative experience that was the basis of all religions, though most had become corrupt and had lost track of it.
So when the early American Vipassana teachers came home from their Asian sojourns in the late 1960s and early 1970s it made perfect sense to them to abstract pure meditation practice from its Asian Buddhist contexts and teach what they saw as a “secular” form of dharma that anyone could participate in, regardless of tradition or circumstances. The idea that Buddhism and Buddhist meditation was nonreligious drew many thousands of Americans to the dharma, in spite of the fact they never had any intention of joining an Asian religion.
This view of Buddhism is considered completely incorrect by most contemporary Buddhist scholars I know and have read. They maintain that there is no way to strip religion from its context, and that without its texts, rituals, customs, and traditions, it isn’t Buddhism at all. Moreover, they maintain that whatever good might come from meditation practice as a so-called secular activity is pretty superficial. It won’t last. Or, if it does last, it will be so watered down, so unmoored from any cultural ballast, from any actual substance, that it will eventually be subsumed into the general American consumerist madness (as, they feel, yoga has been).
I have been considering these various perspectives about what Buddhism is and what it has to offer in the West as I try, through no intention of my own, but because I seem to have had no choice, to apply Buddhism thoughtfully and flexibly to life in post-modern Western culture.
Recently I participated in a Buddhadharma panel discussion on the future of Buddhism in a post-baby boomer world. The moderator, an old-timer like myself, asked whether there were enough young people coming up through the ranks to sustain healthy Buddhist communities.
The other panelists were much younger. One was in her early twenties, just beginning her practice. As it turned out, I was more a listener and a learner than a wisdom-spouting elder, and my impression was that for the most part these younger practitioners were not interested in doing what I and many other boomers had done: throw ourselves into an Asian tradition, give our lives over to it, and to one extent or another live on the margins of mainstream American society.
These young people seemed to be insisting that Buddhism speak to them as post-modern Americans. They seemed to feel that Buddhism was going to have to be more flexible, more open, lighter on its feet, if it is to survive in the world in which they’re living. Depending on your view of what Buddhism is or should be, you will either be cheered up or discouraged by this point of view. It will seem either self-centered and naive, or refreshingly honest and expansive. It will either mean that Buddhism in the coming generation is doomed to fade away and disappear into mainstream culture, becoming nothing more than another “brand” (and some say it already has become that), or it means that Buddhism will thrive and develop in as yet undreamed of ways.
Pick one. Or both.
I have ended up participating on both sides of this argument. I am, on the one hand, a Soto Zen Buddhist priest who leads traditional Zen sesshins with all the usual bells and whistles, and ordains lay and priest disciples in traditional ceremonies, endeavoring to take them through the intricate rituals and trainings that the tradition involves. I study Zen and other Buddhist texts and lecture on them. I am connected to my Japanese dharma brothers and sisters. All of this, I tell people, is my Plan A. I appreciate it immensely and feel quite at home with it.
But there is also Plan B, which is everything else I do that doesn’t involve any of the usual Zen stuff.
In Plan B, I teach Jewish meditation in various places and in various ways. I teach a course at Google called Search Inside Yourself, which is a meditation-based class in emotional intelligence. I work with conflict resolution professionals to help them learn to use meditation practice, and the insights it can foster, as ways of improving skills for understanding and working with disputes. I work with caregivers for the dying (doctors, nurses, chaplains, social workers) to help them use meditation to increase their ability to be present, with depth and as little fear as possible, for the dying process. I work with business people to help them reframe their work as spiritual practice, and counsel them to quit whatever jobs they have that resist such reframing (there aren’t as many as you might think). I work with lawyers to explore ways to make more justice possible in a crazy legal system, and to make legal work and legal education more humane. I have also, over the years, through my poetry and essays, tried to bring my Zen practice into the contemporary literary conversation that I have been part of my whole adult life.
In essence the teaching I am working with when I apply dharma in all these contexts is reflected in my favorite Zen dialogue: A monk asks Zhaozho, What is meditation? Zhaozho answers, It’s non-meditation. Monk: How can meditation be non-meditation? Zhaozho: It’s alive!
In other words, whatever you are doing, you are always operating within a circumscribed set of concepts such as “self” (who is that?), “time” (how does time pass, or does it?), and “the world” (do we know there is anything independently out there apart from what we make of it?). And, as Zhaozho points out to the monk, we don’t realize we are doing this. This knee-jerk affiliation with unexamined conceptual setups is not anyone’s mistake; it’s simply the human condition, built into our language, thought, and culture. We all make this mistake, and suffer for it.
And if you are a caregiver for the dying you’ve got, in addition to the usual human ones, a set of concepts you’ve learned from your training in that field; if you are a lawyer you also have an additional set of concepts you are working with. As with life in general so with professional life: unexamined concepts blind you, bind you. They make your life and your work less successful and less sustainable. To have some happiness—and some creativity—with what you do, you need the capacity to understand your concepts and to be able, at least to some extent, to step outside them and just be human for a minute. “Professional” used to mean, and still does in many circles, “removed from your humanness, setting your feelings aside, being objective.” But now it is being redefined—and meditation practice really helps here—as “being a feeling human being in the context of your work life.”
In recent years, there’s been much talk and research about emotional intelligence. Following Daniel Goleman’s books on this subject, numerous studies have shown that emotional intelligence is hugely influential in outcomes of all sorts, professionally and personally. And recent research has shown that one of the best ways to develop emotional intelligence is meditation practice, because it gets at it on a deeper level than the cognitive approach. We can’t think ourselves into or out of our emotional life because our basic emotional makeup is formed in childhood, its foundations largely unconscious. So meditation, which is a somatic and visceral process, is the most effective tool we know of.
In all the work I do for Plan B, I am practicing meditation with people. We sit simply, easily. On cushions or on chairs. Without incense or Buddha statues. I have been thinking about meditation, called zazen in Soto Zen, for a long time, and I have been closely studying the literature on the topic, mostly centering on the profound writings of Dogen, since the early 1970s. In the end, it seems to me, zazen, though deep, is also pretty simple. It is sitting down with presence in the middle of your life. Feeling the actual feeling of being alive, which most of the time we don’t feel. And by virtue of this, entering into a process that seems to be, by its nature, healing.
To be sure, as my Buddhist scholar friends would assert, there is some culture, some teaching, involved here. It’s not an automatic or an unmediated process. But Buddhist teachings can be, and need to be, translated from culture to culture, as they have always been.
When asked whether his words needed to be preserved in a sacred language (as are the words of the Bible and the Koran) the Buddha said, No, just translate into whatever local language people speak. So I translate into terms that people understand and work with every day—caregiver terms, lawyer terms, business terms, literary terms. I am not an expert in any of these fields, and avoid any heavy use of technical terms. I have no interest in pretending to be an expert in areas where I’m not. Mostly I use common sense and what I know about dharma and about people who practice dharma to bring the teachings down to earth for a particular situation.
And I have found that people need to know these things for themselves. It may be that in a Zen sesshin students are willing to sit in silence and to take my word for what the teachings are. But all my Plan B work involves dialogue and conversation. People explore with one another the simple points I am trying to make. They learn from listening to each other as much as—or perhaps more than—they learn from listening to me. So we do zazen, we talk, we listen. People come back to retreats like this over and over again. And little by little their views change. Their concepts become unmasked. Their best intentions become free from the constraints of fear and self-protection. They find a way to make what they do dharma—whether they use this word or not.
It has been a source of some surprise to me that my Plan B has not been criticized (at least as far as I know) for being a “commercialization of dharma,” or a “watering down.” This could be because Plan A gives me credibility among my colleagues, but I don’t think this is the reason. I think the reason is that, as we go along in this process of transmitting Buddhism to the West, we are getting a little more nuanced in our understanding of what Buddhism is and what we are trying to do as Buddhist teachers in the West.
The “don’t backslide” view of my early teacher comes from a time when he and many others in the West were pretty new to all this. I doubt whether he would say the same thing today. Now I think we all appreciate that Buddhism (as Thich Nhat Hanh might say) is made of non-Buddhist elements; that is, that while we appreciate and honor Buddhism’s many cultural expressions, and recognize their importance, we know that there is no “core” Buddhism within them that can be extracted and must be protected. Buddhism is empty of any core. It is fundamentally about the honest, real, and inevitable human confrontation with suffering, and the possibility that we can, with some wisdom, understand that suffering differently, and thus overcome it. Whatever works to effect that in a lasting and authentic way is worth sharing.
For me, Plan B without Plan A would be impossible; it’s thanks to Plan A, to the twenty-five or so years that I spent living in Zen temples, practicing every day, and to the many dedicated teachers I have known, that I can offer Plan B. And, in the end, it will be thanks to Plan B that Western Buddhist teachers will be able to make possibly their greatest contribution to society at large, and, not incidentally, survive economically (since now and for the foreseeable future most Buddhist groups won’t be able to support teachers financially).
We now know there are no hermetically sealed cultures. Increasingly it becomes meaningless to speak of “Eastern” and “Western” cultures. Cultures are now merging and mixing more than ever. And every culture has its toxic elements and its noble elements. That oddly existent-non-existent vague something we call “Buddhism” has been, to my way of thinking, one of the most beautiful aspects of Eastern culture. If it disappears into Western culture it will not do so without changing Western culture, I am sure, for the better. In addition to all the many millions of people whose suffering has been and will have been alleviated by their contact with Buddhism in that long process, the whole idea of what it means in our culture to be a person, and how one goes about being a person, also will have changed. And if Buddhism doesn’t disappear (and I very much doubt that it will) then we will have a good long time to fill the empty vessel we call “Buddhism” with our own precious elixirs.
(Source: http://www.thebuddhadharma.com/issues/2009/summer/planb.php
“A wounded healer and a wounded warrior are one. We can embrace because we have been pushed away. We can heal because we’ve been torn apart. We can touch people’s minds because we have lost our own. We can speak wisdom because our tongues have been cut off and our voices have been denied. We can run like the wind because our legs have been broken.
The shaman as a warrior is you and your ability to not just heal from what you have experienced but to know that your experience is every person’s experience. That puts you in touch with every man, every woman, every wounded animal, every bent cloud. Your shaking, your fevers and your fears put you in touch with the earth. You don’t have to touch the earth to know that it is shaking because it is shaking through you. You know that it is time to heal, together your brothers, your sisters, all of our relatives. It is time to regain the power, to take more arrows into our hearts so we are stronger, to let the demons trample us so we can stand straighter, to let the freezing winds pierce our hearts so we can love more, so we can constantly purify ourselves by being the true warrior.”
- -David Chethlehe Paladin
Turning Happiness & Suffering LoJung.pdf
You Were Made For This
by Clarissa Pinkola Estes
My friends, do not lose heart. We were made for these times. I have heard from so many recently who are deeply and properly bewildered. They are concerned about the state of affairs in our world now. Ours is a time of almost daily astonishment and often righteous rage over the latest degradations of what matters most to civilized, visionary people.
You are right in your assessments. The lustre and hubris some have aspired to while endorsing acts so heinous against children, elders, everyday people, the poor, the unguarded, the helpless, is breathtaking. Yet, I urge you, ask you, gentle you, to please not spend your spirit dry by bewailing these difficult times. Especially do not lose hope. Most particularly because, the fact is that we were made for these times. Yes. For years, we have been learning, practicing, been in training for and just waiting to meet on this exact plain of engagement.
I grew up on the Great Lakes and recognize a seaworthy vessel when I see one. Regarding awakened souls, there have never been more able vessels in the waters than there are right now across the world. And they are fully provisioned and able to signal one another as never before in the history of humankind. Look out over the prow; there are millions of boats of righteous souls on the waters with you. Even though your veneers may shiver from every wave in this stormy roil, I assure you that the long timbers composing your prow and rudder come from a greater forest. That long-grained lumber is known to withstand storms, to hold together, to hold its own, and to advance, regardless.
In any dark time, there is a tendency to veer toward fainting over how much is wrong or unmended in the world. Do not focus on that. There is a tendency, too, to fall into being weakened by dwelling on what is outside your reach, by what cannot yet be. Do not focus there. That is spending the wind without raising the sails. We are needed, that is all we can know. And though we meet resistance, we more so will meet great souls who will hail us, love us and guide us, and we will know them when they appear. Didn’t you say you were a believer? Didn’t you say you pledged to listen to a voice greater? Didn’t you ask for grace? Don’t you remember that to be in grace means to submit to the voice greater?
Ours is not the task of fixing the entire world all at once, but of stretching out to mend the part of the world that is within our reach. Any small, calm thing that one soul can do to help another soul, to assist some portion of this poor suffering world, will help immensely. It is not given to us to know which acts or by whom, will cause the critical mass to tip toward an enduring good. What is needed for dramatic change is an accumulation of acts, adding, adding to, adding more, continuing. We know that it does not take everyone on Earth to bring justice and peace, but only a small, determined group who will not give up during the first, second, or hundredth gale.
One of the most calming and powerful actions you can do to intervene in a stormy world is to stand up and show your soul. Soul on deck shines like gold in dark times. The light of the soul throws sparks, can send up flares, builds signal fires, causes proper matters to catch fire. To display the lantern of soul in shadowy times like these-to be fierce and to show mercy toward others; both are acts of immense bravery and greatest necessity. Struggling souls catch light from other souls who are fully lit and willing to show it. If you would help to calm the tumult, this is one of the strongest things you can do.
There will always be times when you feel discouraged. I too have felt despair many times in my life, but I do not keep a chair for it. I will not entertain it. It is not allowed to eat from my plate. The reason is this: In my uttermost bones I know something, as do you. It is that there can be no despair when you remember why you came to Earth, who you serve, and who sent you here. The good words we say and the good deeds we do are not ours. They are the words and deeds of the One who brought us here. In that spirit, I hope you will write this on your wall: When a great ship is in harbor and moored, it is safe, there can be no doubt. But that is not what great ships are built for.
Clarissa Pinkola Estes, Ph.D
Author of the best seller Women Who Run with the Wolves
Also read: Turning Happiness & Suffering LoJung.pdf