Understanding excitation and stimulation in practiceI'm writing this on the penultimate day of a jhana retreat that my teacher Leigh Brasington and I have been running through Gaia House. Over the course of the retreat I've been noticing patterns in the challenges that come up in regard to settling the mind sufficiently for the jhanas to become available, and so I'm going to share a model that I use to understand what's going on here.
(While the article will be focusing on concentration/samadhi practice, I think the model actually works for any form of practice, or even any activity in general - I first started to notice this phenomenon in another context entirely. So even if samadhi isn't your bag, it might still be worth a read.) Excitation and stimulation There are two key aspects which come together in any meditation practice. For want of a better term (if you can think of better words, please suggest them!) I'm going to call them 'excitation' and 'stimulation'. Excitation is a measure of how 'activated' we're feeling at the time. If you're having a stressful time at work, your level of excitation is likely to be pretty high. If you're several days into a relaxing holiday, your level of excitation is going to be much lower. In a nutshell, excitation is a measure of how 'shaken up' we are inside (in the sense of shaking up a Coke bottle). In other words, excitation relates to you, the meditator, and the inner condition that you're bringing to the present moment. It runs on a continuum from 'peaceful' (low excitation) to 'excited' or 'stressed' (high excitation, depending on whether positive or negative in nature). Stimulation is a measure of how 'interesting' the current external situation is - whether that's the meditation object you're working with, or anything else. Going to a rock concert is very stimulating, sitting silently in an empty room facing a blank wall is not at all stimulating. Stimulation thus also runs on a continuum from 'subtle' (low stimulation) to 'intense' (high stimulation). So excitation represents your inner condition, while stimulation represents the outer condition. The coming together of the two is the present moment. Why does this matter? Because it's much easier for the mind to engage with something that's stimulating enough but not too much. If you're in a highly excited state and you try to move straight into a very subtle practice, it'll feel 'boring', and the mind won't want to stay there. By comparison, if you're in a very quiet, peaceful state, you may find a rock concert to be overwhelming - just too much to handle right now. Compensating for a mismatch of excitation and stimulation with effort It's very common for people to come on a jhana retreat and have a hard time at first. They're arriving from jobs, families, travel, all sorts of highly stimulating things, and so they're showing up with a fairly high level of excitation. Then we tell them to pay attention to the sensations of the breath, and do nothing else until the mind stops wandering, at which point they might be able to start trying to get into the jhanas. So they're coming from a place of high excitation, being offered something that sounds very cool (these altered states of consciousness called jhanas) - and then being asked to do something which, relative to the moment, is extremely boring, yet somehow they have to find a way to get through it to get to the cool thing on the other side that they're here to learn. Needless to say, this can be a recipe for frustration. A very common response to that sense of frustration is to apply more effort. 'OK, my mind is wandering, but I can't get into the first jhana until it calms down, so I'm damn well going to make sure it stays put!' Sometimes this is even consciously expressed, more often it's an unconscious manifestation of the practitioner's sincere wish to enter the jhana. (As an aside, this is why the jhanas get a bad rap sometimes, because detractors will say 'Oh, that's just craving, it's unhelpful, don't do it.' But the jhanas are a powerful asset on the spiritual path, and in my view there's nothing wrong with wanting to learn a skill which will help someone in their practice. Yes, any craving that's present will need to be addressed, but the 'nice' thing about the jhanas is that you can't get in if you're craving too much, so that has a way of working itself out through practice.) So does it work? Can we 'nail our attention to the breath'? The answer is... kinda, but you probably shouldn't, and if you overdo it, it won't work at all. Using a totally unscientific numbering scheme for effort, where 5 is maximum effort and 0 means you didn't even sign up for the retreat, we see this sort of thing: 5: Tight mind, no possibility of progress Just as the body has a stretch reflex that kicks in when it feels it's in danger of being over-stretched to the point of injury (which is why we generally have to stretch gently if we want the body to open up), it seems that there comes a point where the mind is being pushed too far and it refuses to cooperate any longer. The mind becomes very tight, useless for concentration or meditation of any kind, and it generally feels pretty crappy to boot. When the mind has reached this stage, the only thing to do is to step away from the practice for a while. Go for a walk, take a break, do something else for a bit until you can relax internally. 4: Unpleasant glass ceiling A lot of effort actually can take you some of the way - but usually it only goes so far. A lot of people find that they can get 'kinda concentrated', but not enough so to get into the jhanas. They'll arrive at a place of indistractibility, maybe even feel a sense of the body's energy (piti, see this page for more details) starting to gather, but it never really takes off. This is a really frustrating place to be, and it's very natural to feel that just a little more effort will surely tip it over the edge - but just a little more effort is going in exactly the wrong direction. 3: Workable concentration with unpleasant side effects At the next stage, the mind is loose and mobile enough that it's possible to get concentrated and even enter the jhanas. However, it's unlikely to be the uncomplicated experience of bodily bliss and emotional joy that's described in the suttas. Instead, people will report strange muscle tensions, headaches and other unpleasant side effects. I can relate to this very much. Historically, I've never been much of a 'middle ground' kind of person. Fortunately I wasn't at effort level 5 when I went on my first jhana retreat (that would come later, but that's a story for another day!), but I started out squarely at level 4. Fortunately I was able to chill out enough to get down to level 3, at which point jhanas started to happen - and so I stayed at that level for many years, basically doing my best to ignore the unpleasant side effects for as long as I could. These days the overall tone of my practice is much gentler, but because of the way I learnt the jhanas, I still find that doing a lot of jhana practice can trigger that more effortful mode of practising quite easily, so I have to keep an eye out for that. 2: Balance. Concentration develops in its own time, without being forced This is where we want to be - just enough effort to keep the practice moving forward, not enough to cause ourselves problems. My sense is that 'level 2' is actually a pretty broad category, with some people more at the 'just let it happen' end of the scale while others are more 'on it'. Essentially what we're looking for here is the balance that Leigh calls 'relaxed diligence'. 1: Wandering, drifting, practice not firmly established I'm mainly focusing on too much effort in this article, but of course the equal and opposite error is not to bring enough effort to the practice. You've got to do the work - it isn't enough to come on retreat and then spend the time 'goofing off', as Leigh would put it. If the retreat is turning into more of a holiday, the 'diligence' part might be lacking. It's always a shame when this happens, because clearly the person was interested enough to sign up for the retreat in the first place (and take a space away from someone else!). (In case anyone from the present retreat is reading this, I'm not talking about anyone in particular here! I don't think anyone on this retreat has been goofing off - on the contrary, you've all done really well in the circumstances you've been working with, and it's been a pleasure to practise with you all.) So if more effort isn't the answer, what is? Coming back to the 'excitation' and 'stimulation' model, we still have this problem that you may be coming into your practice in a highly 'excited' state, relative to which a meditation practice like noticing the breath is much too subtle to hold your interest - as a result, the practice is boring, your mind wanders, and nothing much happens. What can we do about this? In a retreat context, the problem will actually often 'solve itself' after a few days. When you're on retreat (particularly a residential retreat), you've removed yourself from most of the sources of stimulation that are present in your daily life. Just like a snow-globe is busy right after you've shaken it up but gradually settles down if you just leave it alone, your mind and body will gradually settle (i.e. your excitation level will decrease), and eventually you'll arrive at a place where the breath is a more accessible object. The breath hasn't become any more stimulating than it was, but because you're now less excited, the breath appears more interesting than it did. This solution has some appealing qualities, particularly if you're prone to over-efforting. Going on a retreat knowing that your first few days will be spent settling down, and all you have to do is to allow that process to happen, can really help to create an attitude of openness rather than one of forcing. The drawback is that you're still working with a 'too boring' object for those first few days, which can potentially trigger frustration and restlessness, slowing down that process of settling. An alternative is to vary the meditation practice over time. Leigh and I will offer a variety of 'aids' to settling the mind for people who have chosen to work with the breath as a means of settling the mind - for example, counting the breaths, visualising an ocean wave coming in and out with the breath, using a mantra in time with the breath, noticing the parts of the breath (beginning, middle, end, gap) or noticing the lengths of each breath (shorter than average, longer than average? shorter than the last, longer than the last?). Other teachers have suggested a wide range of similar approaches - imagining that you're breathing in a pleasant scent, feeling the movement of breath as a pleasurable sensation, relating to the breath as the breath of Buddha, all sorts of different ideas. What all of these have in common is that the breath goes from the very subtle, very unstimulating 'in, out, in, out' to an experience which is richer and more engaging. As a result, people generally find it easier to rest the mind on this more highly stimulating object. The drawback is that, because the object is now more stimulating, it may limit how calm the mind can become. What was initially perceived as interesting can start to become irritating, noisy, 'too busy'. At this point, if the meditator moves to a less stimulating version of the object - for example, if they've been counting each in-breath and out-breath, shifting to just counting out-breaths, or even dropping the count entirely - then the mind can settle even more deeply. There's sometimes a moment of instability and disorientation, because some of the landmarks of the previous stage of practice have now gone away, but the mind typically settles down again and now goes deeper. Developing sensitivity to excitation and stimulation Perhaps the trickiest aspect of all this is that our excitation levels can be unpredictable, even on a retreat. While the overall trend on a retreat for most people is towards gradually decreasing excitation of mind and thus gradually deepening subtlety of object, it can vary day by day, or according to time of day (my mind is busier in the mornings and quieter in the afternoons), or even from one sit to the next (a 'good' sit will often lead to a more distracted next sit because the excitation level has risen). While I have a deep appreciation for the simplicity and profundity of the 'just let it happen' approach to practice, I do think that there's great benefit to be had from developing an awareness of our internal condition and a sensitivity to how that condition is interfacing with the stimulation offered by the practice we're working with, and learning how to tweak the practice to meet ourselves where we are rather than where we'd like to be. Over time this will start to happen intuitively, and will need less and less conscious attention and intervention - you'll just start to feel 'Oh, needs a few more details right now to stay with it' or 'Ahh, mind getting settled - relax, simplify'. I hope these reflections prove helpful in your meditation practice.
0 Comments
The Eightfold Path, part 4
This article is the fourth in an eight-part series on the Eightfold Path, a core teaching from early Buddhism. I introduced the Eightfold Path in the first article in the series, so go back and check that out if you haven't heard of it before. (You can find links to all the articles in this series on the index page in the 'Buddhist theory' section.)
This week we're going to take a look at the fourth aspect of the path: right action. Like the third aspect of the path, right speech, right action is part of the section on sila, or ethics - essentially, practices relating to how to live in the world in a way which minimises the harm we do to ourselves and others. I've already talked about the value of Buddhism's ethical teachings in the article on right speech, so I won't repeat that here - check that article out if you're curious. So what is right action? I've taken the quotation at the top of this article, which defines right action in terms of three factors (refraining from killing, stealing and sexual misconduct), from Samyutta Nikaya 45.8 for consistency with the other articles in this series. However, it's more common to find right action equated with the Buddhist precepts, of which there are five for householders and many more for monks and nuns - this includes the three listed above, plus precepts concerning lying and (ab)using intoxicants. The version of the precepts that I use when teaching retreats runs as follows:
These are pretty simple, pithy and easy to remember. That said, I'm also a fan of the version of the precepts given in the Brahmajala Sutra from the Mahayana tradition, precisely because what's given there is not short, pithy and straightforward - it's actually pretty complex. I like more complex takes on the precepts because the key word in the definitions I gave above is training. The precepts are not 'Buddhist commandments' phrased as 'thou shalt not' - like every other aspect of the Eightfold Path, they're intended as practices, something that we actually explore for ourselves rather than simply memorise and then repeat on command. Indeed, one of the signs of the first stage of awakening in the traditional model is that we are no longer bound by the fetter of 'rites, rituals and righteousness' - which means that it's clear that merely behaving a certain way because someone else told us to is not the way to awakening. Rather, our relationship with the precepts becomes a living exploration, more of a dance than a rigid, legalistic submission to an arbitrary set of rules. With that in mind, I'm not going to write a huge article telling you what I think about each of the precepts. Rather, I'm going to present a contemplation practice which invites you to explore each precept for yourself. Contemplation versus meditation Contemplation is similar to meditation, but with a slightly different orientation. Contemplation can feel a bit weird the first time you try it because it seems to be 'breaking the rules' of meditation. Typically speaking, in a meditation practice we're not really that interested in the content of our thoughts - we might be focused on the physical sensations of our breath, or the visual appearance of a candle flame; if we're doing something like Zen koan practice or the Brahmaviharas, we may be using words as part of the practice, but the idea is that the words support a focus on something else (a feeling of questioning in koan practice, an emotion in Brahmavihara practice). By comparison, in contemplation, anything goes. In a contemplation practice we'll have some kind of theme that we're investigating - but how we investigate it is completely up to us. You're welcome to think about the theme as much as you like - but you're equally welcome to work with it like a koan (bringing up the theme from time to time to see what it stirs up), or simply to set the intention to explore the theme and then just sit and see what happens. I typically suggest taking some time to settle your mind through meditation, perhaps by paying attention to your breath or doing a bit of loving kindness practice. Then, when the usual whirl of everyday thoughts has settled down a little, shift over to the contemplation. I'll now suggest a contemplation on the precepts. For each of the five, I'll give the headline statement, then suggest a few 'probes' - particular lines of inquiry that you can introduce to explore different aspects of the precepts. You're entirely welcome to use these just as much or as little as you'd like. These are some 'ways in' that I've found helpful for myself, but each of us must ultimately find our own relationship to the precepts. Trigger warning, and how to approach this practice This is not lightweight stuff - exploring the precepts seriously can take you to some dark places. Please be kind to yourself. Please note also that some of the 'probes' below are deliberately provocative. I am not advocating any kind of unethical action, even as an 'experiment'. Furthermore, please don't use this as an exercise in self-judgement or criticism. The point here is not to beat yourself up for what you perceive as your ethical failings. The point is to explore the precepts to get a feel for what they mean to us on a visceral level, to encourage us to engage with the material rather than simply treating it as yet another set of 'laws' handed down through the generations. OK, without further ado, let's get into it. A contemplation on the precepts
Take at least a few minutes just to sit quietly, perhaps focusing on the breath or doing metta, in order to settle your mind before proceeding. Then, when you're ready, start moving through the contemplations below.
Take some time to explore this precept in the broadest sense. Taking life could potentially include everything from killing another human, to stepping on an insect, to taking antibiotics, to cutting down a tree. What does 'taking life' mean to you? How do you feel when you see or hear about life being taken? Does it make a difference what kind of life is being taken, by whom, or for what reason? When is the taking of life justified? What might it mean for you to undertake the training to refrain from taking life?
Take some time to explore this precept in the broadest sense. Taking what is not given could potentially include everything from armed robbery, to insider trading, to shoplifting, to taking more than your fair share, to watching copyrighted videos on YouTube, to taking up too much of someone else's time and energy. What does 'taking what is not given' mean to you? How do you feel when you see or hear about someone taking what is not given? Does it make a difference what is being taken, by whom, or for what reason? When is taking what is not given justified? What might it mean for you to undertake the training to refrain from taking what is not given?
Take some time to explore this precept in the broadest sense. Sexual misconduct could potentially include everything from rape, to inappropriate physical contact, to adultery, to using sexuality to get what you want. What does 'sexual misconduct' mean to you? How do you feel when you see or hear about someone committing sexual misconduct? Does it make a difference what kind of sexual misconduct is being committed, by whom, or for what reason? When is sexual misconduct justified? What might it mean for you to undertake the training to refrain from sexual misconduct?
Take some time to explore this precept in the broadest sense. False speech could potentially include everything from lying under oath, to committing fraud, to spreading lies about someone to damage their reputation, to misleading someone in order to manipulate them, to exaggerating your achievements to make yourself sound more impressive, to telling a little white lie for social convenience. What does 'false speech' mean to you? How do you feel when you see or hear about someone speaking falsely? Does it make a difference what kind of false speech it is, by whom, or for what reason? When is false speech justified? What might it mean for you to undertake the training to refrain from false speech?
Take some time to explore this precept in the broadest sense. Intoxicants could potentially include everything from alcohol, to recreational drugs, to risk-taking behaviour, to anything else we can get addicted to - gambling, the Internet, even our work. Heedlessness could potentially include anything from total loss of control, to a significant impairment of judgement, to a subtle lowering of inhibitions. What does 'intoxicants causing heedlessness' mean to you? How do you feel when you see or hear about someone using intoxicants leading to heedlessness? Does it make a difference what kind of intoxicant it is, or what degree of heedlessness? Does it make a difference by whom, or for what reason? When is the use of intoxicants leading to heedlessness justified? What might it mean for you to undertake the training to refrain from intoxicants causing heedlessness?
It's likely that the contemplations above have brought up quite a bit of material. I suggest closing the practice by taking a few minutes for meditation to let things settle down again - perhaps returning to the breath, or metta, or just sitting. May you be well. How to get free of the tangle
This week we're looking at case 39 in the Gateless Barrier. This is a rich koan offering many possible avenues of exploration; I won't have time to explore them all in today's article, even assuming I've noticed all the possibilities, which I probably haven't! But we'll dig into a few and see where they take us - and if you find another thread to pull on, please go right ahead (and let me know what you've found in the comments!).
The central question here is that of Zen master Sixin (pronounced something like see-shin) - where did the monk get trapped in words? Here are three possibilities, representing progressively deepening levels of realisation. The monk became trapped in words when he read Zhang Zhuo's poem Sometimes, we come across a passage in a Zen text or poem (or some other spiritual, philosophical, literary or scientific work) that stops us in our tracks. Perhaps it conjures up a picture of something that feels both deeply familiar and utterly mysterious at the same time - or perhaps it just makes no sense at all, and yet somehow we have an intuition that it isn't mere nonsense. Naturally, we want to know what it means - but we can't relate to it directly and immediately, so all we have is this mysterious set of words. From a Zen perspective, this is actually a good place to be. What we have in moments like these is a kernel of what's usually known as 'Great Doubt' in the Zen tradition, although teachers like Martine Batchelor have argued that 'Great Questioning' might be a better translation due to the negative connotations of 'Doubt' in the English language. Essentially, what we've found is something we don't understand and would like to. That is the essence of all meditative inquiry, and is the necessary condition for insight to arise. If we 'do insight practice' but have no interest in what we might find, if we already feel that we've got it all worked out and this meditation stuff can't possibly show us anything new, then it's dramatically less likely that we'll make any meaningful progress along the wisdom dimension - and if we do somehow get a breakthrough nonetheless, it's likely to be jarring, upsetting, even distressing, as the comfortable world we were clinging to is turned upside down. By comparison, if we actively choose to undertake the quest for greater wisdom, we're more likely to hang in there when the going gets tough, because on the other side of that bumpy terrain is a place we're trying to get to. Seen from this perspective, we could make the case that the entire purpose of koans is for us to get caught in words - to find one of these strange stories that intrigues us enough that we're willing to spend hours on the cushion studying them in meditation, often getting absolutely nowhere for hours, days, weeks or months on end, until one day - boom, there it is. So it could well be that this nameless monk has simply read a piece of poetry, been struck by the beautiful images it conjures up, and wants to ask his teacher something like 'What's it like to experience this for yourself? How do I get there?' In this reading, Yunmen's response is sharp but compassionate, directing the monk to put the books down and get back to practising - in essence, saying 'Don't ask me, ask yourself!' The word 'Zen' literally means 'meditation', and the essential principle behind the Zen school of Buddhism is to use meditation to find the answers we're looking for in our direct experience, rather than debating theories and philosophies in an intellectual way. It's possible to spend many years - even a lifetime - arguing about the fine scholarly points of non-duality and emptiness without ever having a personal experience of it, and so Yunmen is deeply concerned that the monk should not make this mistake. Words like these - the kind that describe the experience of someone who has broken through to the awakened perspective - are actually often more helpful after one's awakening than before; before awakening, they're at best a cryptic riddle that can inspire us to practise, but after we've had a glimpse of awakening, we can use them to confirm what we've experienced - or, more usually, to recognise that what we saw was only partial, and that there's further to go. The monk became trapped in words when asking Yunmen his question A second possible scenario is that the monk had indeed had some kind of awakening, or perhaps was right on the threshold of it, but couldn't put it into his own words. In the words of Zen master Wumen, the compiler of the Gateless Barrier, 'In a natural manner, inside and outside become one; like someone without the power of speech who has had a dream, you can know it only for yourself.' Having this kind of 'private' experience can be beautiful and thrilling, but it's also limited. One of the strengths of the Breakthrough to Zen retreats run by Zenways, the Zen sangha I belong to, is that most of the practice happens out loud, with a partner in front of you. Whatever's going on, you must try, over and over, to put it into words. In the process of doing so, it both comes out into the world and becomes more fully your own. At the very beginning of this process, it's often clumsy, and you may find yourself resorting to lines from the old masters which you feel capture the spirit of what's going on. But in the long run, the language must become your own, the awakening fully integrated into your being, not someone else's. And so perhaps that's what's happening here. The monk has had some kind of experience, but has no words for it. The best he can do is to say 'It's like radiant light was silently illuminating the whole world...' - and his teacher is challenging him to put down the books and find his own words for it. In part, this might be a test - anyone can quote one of the old masters, but it's usually very revealing to hear someone's first person experience in their own words rather than those of another. From the teacher's standpoint, this is a key 'diagnostic' technique - all sorts of interesting and wonderful things can happen in meditation, not all of which are due to insight or awakening, and so it's usually necessary to spend a bit of time talking back and forth to figure out what's going on. The monk became trapped in words when Yunmen interrupted him A third possibility is that the monk has indeed had some experience of awakening, and is now some way along the road to stabilising and integrating it. Sometimes it's thought that enlightenment happens all at once, in a flash - bam, that's it, you're enlightened now. The stories of the historical Buddha usually imply that that's how it was for him. For most of us, however, it isn't quite so simple - and even the historical Buddha went on to teach a model with four 'stages' or 'paths' of awakening, gradually deepening over time. Likewise, one of the most important Zen masters in my lineage, Hakuin, taught at great length about the importance of 'post-satori training' - that practice does not end with a meditative breakthrough, but actually that that breakthrough is simply a transition from one phase of practice to another. Now, this is a somewhat controversial subject, and there have been debates throughout the history of Zen. From a certain point of view - what we might call the standpoint of 'inherent awakening' or 'Buddha Nature' - what we wake up to is immediate, timeless, and has always been true. Nothing needs to be 'cultivated', nothing needs to be 'purified', it only needs to be recognised for what it is, in all its immediate, pristine, indestructible purity. This is the so-called 'sudden' school of awakening. From another point of view, however, practice is clearly necessary - although we may well possess the seed of awakening within ourselves, for most of us it isn't yet fully flourishing - if it were, there would be no need for Zen at all. And so we undertake this practice, meditating, cultivating mindfulness in our daily lives, exploring both inwardly and outwardly, and over time we come to see the truth of our Buddha Nature more and more clearly, in a wider and wider range of circumstances. That last part is important. It's very common for people to reach a point where they can have a nice experience in meditation, reach a place of great stillness and oneness and so forth, but then it disintegrates the moment the meditation ends and they have to deal with other people again. (People, ugh.) And so the next challenge is to learn not just to visit that place but to live from that place. And so maybe that's what's going on here. The monk has established himself to some degree in his awakening, he's doing his best to speak from that place, along the way he mentions a line from a poem because it's an authentic description of his experience - but then Yunmen abruptly interrupts, jarring the monk out of his place of awakening, throwing him straight back into the whirring machinations of his discriminating mind by asking him a challenging question. And so Yunmen's reply is not in fact a criticism of the monk's use of Zhang Zhou's words, but really more of a way of saying 'Gotcha! You fell right out of it again, didn't you?' One might imagine the poor monk sighing, rolling his eyes, muttering something like 'Ugh, not again...' and then going back to his practice. I read a book recently where the author was describing his experience of Zen archery. He'd spent several years working to reach a point where he could shoot an arrow in perfect mental stillness and clarity, and he had come before his master to demonstrate his attainment. Halfway through, the teacher suddenly barked at him to stop, which he found rather irritating since he'd been in mid-flow at that moment. Then the teacher asked him to re-tie his bow string in a certain way that made it immensely harder to draw the bow. He felt tremendous sadness at this turn of events - this was supposed to be a crowning moment of his practice, but instead his teacher had pulled the rug out from under him and made things more difficult again. Evidently seeing his distress, his teacher gently explained that there had been no need for the demonstration - it was evident to the teacher from the moment the man picked up his bow that his training on that level was complete, and that he was ready for a fresh challenge, to take his art deeper still. Very often, our teachers will say and do things we don't like. This can seem strange and hurtful - perhaps we've come to this practice to feel better, and mostly it does make us feel better, so how come our teachers are being mean to us? But - at least if you have a good teacher, rather than one who is genuinely abusive - your teacher is most likely pointing out a place where you're still stuck, where there's still work to do. This hurts, because nobody likes to have their flaws pointed out, but what's the alternative - that our teachers smile and nod and say 'Yup, you're super-enlightened, well done you' when it isn't true? Don't be afraid of getting trapped in words In this article I've outlined three ways in which we might get trapped in words. Note, however, that none of them are actually bad. It's easy to read this koan in a superficial way and say 'Oh, master Yunmen says we shouldn't get trapped in words - right, I'll throw away all my books and avoid learning anything at all, that'll fix it!' But I would argue that that's a mistake. For me, at least, most of the mysteries that have really fuelled my own practice came first from reading them in books, getting 'trapped in words' in the first sense above, and then pursuing my practice like a rabid dog, sometimes for years on end, until I found some measure of what I was looking for. Even at the second stage, when we're trying to find our own words for what's going on, I'd argue that it isn't actually a bad thing to try out the phrases of the old masters. It gives you a place to start, and as you start to feel into which phrases work for you better than others, you'll start to find your own language. And as for the third kind of trap, I'd argue that that's absolutely essential on the spiritual path - other people can see our blind spots far more easily than we can, pretty much by definition - if we could see them, they wouldn't be blind spots! So, by all means, read, study, get confused, get in a mess, get so thoroughly trapped in words that you can't bear it any longer and have no choice but to meditate your way out of your entanglement. You'll be glad you did. The Eightfold Path, part 3
This article is the third in an eight-part series on the Eightfold Path, a core teaching from early Buddhism. I introduced the Eightfold Path in the first article in the series, so go back and check that out if you haven't heard of it before. (You can find links to all the articles in this series on the index page in the 'Buddhist theory' section.)
This week we're going to take a look at the third aspect of the path: right speech. Sometimes the Eightfold Path is divided into three subsections - sīla (ethics, morality), samādhi (meditation) and pañña (wisdom). We've already covered the wisdom section - right view and right intention. Right speech is the first of three aspects which make up the ethical component of the path, along with right action and right livelihood. We can look at these as offering suggestions for how to put into practice the intention of harmlessness, as discussed in the article on right intention. Why should we be concerned with Buddhist ethics? Before we go any further, I should say that my intention in writing these articles is not to 'preach Buddhism' or to tell you how to live your life, and I'm sorry if it comes across that way at any point. I regard each aspect of the Eightfold Path as something to explore for myself, in my own way and in my own life. Personally, I've found each of the eight aspects to be very rewarding both to contemplate and to put into practice, so I'd like to offer these to you as possibilities for you to do the same. Even if your primary interest is meditation practice, however, there can be great value in taking the ethical teachings on board. On one level, as I noted above, Buddhist ethics is about the intention of harmlessness - living a life which minimises the suffering that we cause to others and to ourselves. The various aspects of the ethical teachings thus give us lenses to examine our behaviour and relationships. As we examine these closely, we may find more than just the obvious sources of suffering - we may start to notice ways in which we have unintentionally been causing harm, for example. We may also start to appreciate more the wider ramifications of our actions, and ultimately the interconnected nature of all things, which can open up perspectives on dependent origination. On a practical level, we may also notice that taking the ethical teachings on board actually helps our meditation practice. Intentionally causing harm often weighs on our minds and bubbles back to the surface when we sit in meditation, causing us great discomfort. By comparison, leading a blameless life tends to leave us with fewer regrets and worries, provided we have a relaxed attitude to it rather than a puritanical, self-punishing one. So now let's take a look at each of the four aspects of right speech mentioned by the Buddha above. Speech is immensely powerful, and we can cause great harm if we aren't careful - in a moment of careless, hurtful speech we can severely damage a relationship that took months or years to build up. So it's in our interest to wield its power carefully! Lying ('false speech') First in the Buddha's list is lying, often translated as 'false speech'. Lies come on a spectrum, from large, malicious falsehoods intended to deceive and manipulate for significant personal gain (we might think of certain politicians, Ponzi schemes and so on), all the way down to 'little white lies' intended to smooth over a social situation. Most of us have a sense that some lies are worse than others, and we each have a degree of tolerance for where we draw the line and start to feel like we're doing something wrong, or at least risky, when we tell a lie. There's a lot to be said for telling the truth. As Mark Twain said, 'If you tell the truth, you don't have to remember anything.' And studies have shown that people who lie a lot actually have more memory problems in the long run, presumably because their heads are full of so many different versions of events that they can't keep track of them all any more. Personally, I don't like the feeling that telling an overt lie gives me, so I tend not to do it that much, but I've noticed that I'll often bend the truth to present myself a certain way in social situations, especially if I'm meeting someone new - it's surprisingly common that someone will say 'You've heard of X, right?', and if their tone of voice suggests that of course I should have heard of it because everyone who's anyone has heard of it, I'll almost certainly smile, nod and say 'yup', generally while making a mental note to look it up later and hoping that the conversation isn't going to get too much into the fine details of whatever the heck it is. Routinely telling the truth has the advantage that people are likely to come to trust your word - when you say something, you'll be taken seriously, because you have a proven track record of speaking the truth. You also don't need to worry about being 'found out'. Conversely, if do tell lies then you have to live with the fear of the truth coming to light (which is the sort of thing that can easily disturb your meditation sessions!), and if you're caught out in a lie even a few times, other people will rapidly lose respect for you, and you'll have a harder time persuading people of something unlikely even when it really is true, because they've grown used to taking your words with a pinch of salt. Divisive speech Next we have divisive speech - back-biting, gossip, propaganda, pitting 'us' against 'them'. This kind of speech is pretty horrible to be on the wrong end of, but it can exert a strong appeal if we have the chance to be the ones in control. Humans are social animals, and our brains have a hard-wired sense of our 'in-group' - so if we can use our speech to define that in-group, we have a lot of social power. However, it comes at a cost. Even 'harmless' gossip can upset someone if they subsequently find out that you were talking about them behind their back. Betraying a confidence or exposing someone's embarrassing secret can cause severe or even irreparable damage to a relationship. Plus, it's not cool. Another dark side to this kind of speech is that, although it may make us feel powerful in the moment as we casually demonise someone on the fringes of a social group, in the long run it may actually undermine your relationships with the people who you're gossiping or complaining to, since they may begin to wonder if you similarly talk about them when they're not around. Yet another potential issue with this kind of situation is that you might not be the only one engaging in divisive speech - if it’s normal within your social group to do this, then others might be talking about you behind your back, as well. Again, this is the kind of thing that could easily lead to disturbance in the mind when you’re trying to meditate, worrying what other people might be saying about you in your absence. Harsh speech As with lying, harsh speech is something where we each have our own threshold for what’s OK. I have friends who won’t tolerate any kind of profanity at all, and I have other friends who use profanity as naturally as breathing. For me personally, intent is more important than the words themselves, but if I notice that someone else is more careful with their language then I’ll try to do the same in their presence. Harsh speech isn’t just about swearing, though - it’s about how we speak to people more generally. In the era of the Internet we’ve all seen seemingly minor disagreements blow up into angry screaming matches with apparently very little provocation. I’ve heard a variety of arguments in favour of anger. In particular, I’m aware that, for people who have been raised and socialised in such a way as to deny or suppress their anger, learning to reclaim and express that anger can be a necessary and even healthy part of overcoming their conditioning. As a day-to-day strategy, though, my observation is that yelling at someone rarely achieves the outcome you want - and even if it does, the other person doesn’t comply because their mind has changed or because they suddenly want to do it, but simply to make your anger go away. Anger - like many other negative emotions - can also have a self-reinforcing quality. As we spend more and more time feeling anger, our world view changes, becoming harder and more critical - and giving us more causes for anger. Needless to say, quite apart from making you a more challenging person to be around, an excess of anger can also have a profoundly destabilising quality on your meditation practice. That’s not to say that we should try to suppress it when it arises - it’s better to let it come and go without getting caught up in it - but in the context of right speech it’s certainly worth inquiring as to whether yelling at people when they’ve annoyed us is really having the effect we want it to. Talking nonsense ('idle chatter') The final category is nonsense, also known as idle chatter. This is the kind of speech where people are speaking just to hear their own voice. It isn’t necessarily harmful but it isn’t meaningful either. The Buddha cautioned his followers against this kind of speech as being a waste of energy that could more usefully be applied in other directions. In modern life, I think we need a bit of balance here. Sometimes the function of conversation is about connecting with people, maintaining our relationship without necessarily communicating important information. For me, that’s still worthwhile. But there’s a balance to be found. The more we talk just to fill the silence, the more people grow accustomed to the idea that usually we aren’t saying anything worth listening to. And if we feel compiled to fill social silences with noise, we’re likely to do the same with our mental silences in meditation too. Practice methods One very powerful off-cushion practice that we can use to explore our speech is to look at the intention behind what we're saying. What are we trying to achieve? Are we imparting useful, timely information? Are we connecting with a friend? Are we trying to make someone like us? Are we trying to persuade someone to do what we want? Are we exaggerating for effect, and does the other person know that? And so on. I won't say too much more about this because I'd rather you explored for yourself rather than having me tell you what to look for, but I will say that closely examining the intentions behind your speech can tell you a great deal about yourself. Going in a totally different direction, a meditation practice which can help if we experience a lot of harsh self-talk (or just a lot of internal idle chatter) is the use of a mantra. A mantra is a word or phrase which we deliberately repeat, over and over. My teacher Leigh Brasington first introduced me to the use of the mantra 'Buddho' (which means 'knowing') as an aid to concentration practice - you silently say the first syllable, 'bud', on the in-breath, and the second syllable, 'dho', on the out-breath. I've also sat a retreat with another teacher, Jason Bartlett, who suggested using it differently - beginning by speaking the mantra aloud if you like, and going quickly enough that there's no gap for other thoughts to sneak in. As the practice stabilises, you may find that you intuitively shift to saying the mantra silently rather than aloud, and you might find that the speed changes. Go with it - trust the practice to take you where you need to go. The use of a mantra can be a great help in settling the mind because it fills up the mental 'channel' which would otherwise be open for wandering thoughts and internal chatter to come along. As the mind settles, the mantra can also turn into an insight practice - we can turn our attention to whatever it is which is silently saying the mantra in our own mind, and study that, while simply allowing the mantra to continue in the background. Give these practices a go and see how you get on! I hope that you find some value in the principles and practices of right speech in your own life. Why we have it all back-to-front
This week we're looking at case 38 in the Gateless Barrier, 'The ox passing through the window screen'. It's typically regarded as one of the more difficult koans in the collection, although as we'll see, there are more accessible layers to it as well. Even if you're totally new to the practice, there's something to take away here - so keep reading!
That one disobedient duck On one level, this koan speaks to a frustrating experience that we've all had at one time or another. We've been working away at something, trying to get it all straightened out, doing our very best to get our proverbial ducks in a row... but there's one little detail that isn't quite right, a small crease in an otherwise immaculate tablecloth, one chair leg that's just a little shorter than the others, one disobedient duck that's out of line with the others. It may even be a detail that nobody else notices, but we can see it, plain as day. More generally, it's fairly common to have a sense that life would be going OK if it weren't for that one thing. If we could only get past that... Oh, but then something else comes up. There's always something, isn't there? Sometimes it's something big, but often it's a relatively minor irritation in the grand scheme of things, and yet it spoils what would surely otherwise be total perfection and lasting happiness - right? The fact is that we're good at spotting flaws, and often not so good at appreciating things as they are, warts and all. We are, in general, biased towards the negative - it takes roughly five positive experiences to make up for one negative one. This makes sense as a survival mechanism - if you miss out on a pleasant experience, it isn't the end of the world, but if you don't notice a hungry sabre-toothed cat waiting in the long grass, you aren't going to be passing on your genes to your descendants. But what's optimal for survival doesn't necessarily make for a happy life, or a fulfilled one - it's more a case of 'survival at all costs'. The good news is that we don't have to worry so much about sabre-toothed cats any more; the bad news is that that negativity bias is still hard-wired into our systems, and is free to latch on to the toxic boss, the irritating colleague, the noisy neighbour and so on. The really good news is that there's something we can do about this. We can't always force our ducks to stand to attention like a well-trained avian platoon - but we can train ourselves to look at the world differently. Harvard happiness researchers ran an experiment where they installed an app on the phones of their study participants; the app would periodically ping and ask a series of questions, including 'What are you doing?', 'How focused are you on what you're doing?', and 'How do you feel right now?' What they discovered is fascinating. First, people reported higher scores of subjective wellbeing (i.e. they felt better) when they were more focused on whatever they were doing. That's great news for meditators, because a key part of meditation is training the mind to go where we want it to go, and to notice when it's wandering so we can come back again. This 'mind training' is a core part of all meditation techniques, so it doesn't even really matter what technique we're practising; whatever we do, we're building the skills we need to lead a happier life, simply by paying more attention to what we're doing. Second, the degree of focus on the task at hand had significantly more impact on how people were feeling than the nature of the task itself. I find that pretty remarkable - it means that if you're doing something fairly unpleasant, but you're totally focused and absorbed into the activity, you're more likely to feel good than if you're relaxing at home with a cup of tea and something on the TV - conditions we would typically regard as pleasant - but your mind is going six different directions at once, worrying about this and that. The takeaway here is that we don't have to get every last duck to line up in order to be happy. There will always be something going on - and if there isn't, you'll find a way to notice some small, previously covered-over source of irritation to get worked up about, because that's just what our brains do when they're left to their own devices. But if, instead, we can turn our full attention to whatever is right in front of us, we can find a form of happiness which is not dependent on having external circumstances arranged in a particular way. How would it be to bring your full attention to what's right in front of you, not looking for flaws or potential improvements, but simply allowing it to be as it is? Turning the koan on its head Coming back to the koan, there's an odd little detail. The ox is passing through a window, and it's gotten stuck - but how did it manage to get its tail stuck? You'd have thought that if it were going to have trouble getting through the window, it might be because its head is too big, or its horns would get caught on the frame. Instead, though, it's managed to get almost all the way through - head, horns and even all four hooves. So how come its tail, the smallest and most flexible part, is the bit that got stuck? There's an 'upside-down' or 'back-to-front' quality here (which might remind regular readers of case 14; we explored one kind of back-to-front situation in that article, so we're going in a different direction today). The same kind of language actually also shows up in early Buddhism, where discourses will often end with someone praising the Buddha by saying 'Excellent, sir, excellent! You have made the Dhamma clear in many ways, as though turning upright what had been turned upside down, revealing what had been concealed, showing the way to one who was lost, or holding up a lamp in the dark.' (Emphasis mine.) One way to understand this upside-down quality is to look at what's sometimes called the 'ground of being' - the fundamental nature of our experience - and contrasting it with the perspective of the so-called 'small self', i.e. 'me, in here'. Typically speaking, we experience a world centred on ourselves. I occupy a certain point in a space which is much larger than myself, and a certain moment in a time which goes back billions of years of history and extends forwards into the unknown future. I am the 'primary' thing in my experience, the bit that's always here no matter what else is going on, and the world consists of my relationships with the people and things around me. As we meditate, however, we may come to see the world differently. As the mind settles, our experience can begin to simplify. Our wandering thoughts settle down. The sense of a hard, solid boundary between 'me in here' and 'everything else out there' softens, and may even fall away entirely. We begin to see that the sharp divisions between 'this' and 'that' are not fundamentally 'true', in the sense of being an unavoidable part of reality - they're just something that our minds are doing, a way of labelling parts of our experience to help us think about it. Over time, it may come to seem like it isn't 'me' that's primary after all, but rather something like 'awareness'. As we shift into the perspective of awareness, we may experience various 'figure-ground reversals' - in other words, we may find that many of our previous ideas now seem back to front, or upside down.
There are many ways to explore the ground of being in practice. One approach is to investigate - to test what I've said above, not by thinking and reasoning about it, but by examining your own direct experience in meditation. Take some time to settle the mind first, then explore, and see what you might find. Another approach is simply to bear the above in mind and trust that it will reveal itself to you in the course of your practice, and then just sit and see what happens. The last little bit Making the shift from the perspective of 'me' to the perspective of the ground of being - touching into it for the first time, and then subsequently stabilising our recognition of it - is a key part of the path, but it isn't the end of the story. There's actually a subtle trap which can ensnare the unwary - which, fortunately, won't be you by the time you finish this article! The possible pitfall of the 'ground of being' approach is that we come to think of 'awareness' as being a kind of 'thing' in its own right, a transcendent, pure entity which is perfect and lovely in every way, and thus separate from whatever is arising within it, i.e. the messy, unpleasant phenomena of the material world. Practice can then become skewed, all about leaving the nasty relative world behind and hanging out in pure awareness all the time, and as a result one's life and relationships can become neglected. We may think that we understand non-duality very well, having found a perspective ('awareness') from which we can see the entire relative world as non-separate ('the contents of awareness'), but we're still creating a duality between awareness and its contents. So a crucial step in the practice is to dissolve that last little split, that final sense of separation, until ultimately all that's left is the unfolding moment - nothing transcendent, nothing separate, just this. Again, as with the previous step, you might choose to investigate, searching for any remaining sense of separation in your experience, really examining in closely in your direct experience until it melts away. Or you can simply trust that it, too, will melt away in time, provided only that you don't continue to reinforce it by clinging to a separate, transcendent awareness as being the ultimate goal of your practice. Meanwhile, if you see an ox caught in a window, help it to get free. It probably had no business climbing through the window in the first place, but now it's in trouble and needs your help. May all beings (humans, oxen and all the rest) be well. The Eightfold Path, part 2
This article is the second in an eight-part series on the Eightfold Path, a core teaching from early Buddhism. I introduced the Eightfold Path in the first article in the series, so go back and check that out if you haven't heard of it before. (You can find links to all the articles in this series on the index page in the 'Buddhist theory' section.)
This week we're going to take a look at the second aspect of the path: right intention. The Pali term here is samma sankappa - the Sanskrit equivalent of the second word is sankalpa, which readers with a yoga practice may recognise. Intention is critically important in a meditation practice. Meditation can be used for many different purposes - calming the mind, opening the heart, developing insight, promoting health and vitality - and often the techniques involved can seem very similar. For example, a very common form of meditation is to place one's attention on the breathing, coming back each time the mind wanders away. If that technique is practised with the intention of developing exclusive focus on the breath, it tends to have the effect of calming and concentrating the mind. If it's practised with an emphasis on noticing the moment-to-moment arising and passing of the sensations which make up our experience of the breath, it becomes an insight practice. If we imagine ourselves drawing in the suffering of the world with an in-breath and sending out peace and compassion on the out-breath, it becomes a heart-opening practice. If we emphasise the exhalation and our contact with the earth, it becomes energetically grounding. And so on. So it's quite natural to find intention as one of the aspects of the Eightfold Path. In particular, the early Buddhist teachings suggest certain intentions which are thought to be supportive for anyone who is interested in the stated goal of early Buddhism - liberation from suffering. Those three are the intention of renunciation, the intention of non-ill will, and the intention of harmlessness. In today's article, we'll be focusing on the first of these, the intention of renunciation. The second one, the intention of non-ill will, has a bit of a confusing name as it's given in the quotation above, but this kind of negation often indicates that the opposite of the named quality is what's to be practised. So what's meant here is the opposite of non-ill will, which is good will, also known as loving kindness, or metta. I've written about loving kindness a couple of times before (here and here), so check out those articles if you're interested. As for the third, the intention of harmlessness, that intention is really the principle underlying sila, the ethical dimension of the early Buddhist path. The Eightfold Path breaks sila down into three aspects - right speech, right action and right livelihood - so we'll be exploring the intention of harmlessness in much more detail over the next three articles in this series. So without further ado, let's get into the thorny topic of renunciation! Renunciation, asceticism and the Buddha Renunciation is a bit of a Marmite concept - you either love it or hate it. For many modern readers it has connotations of self-denial, perhaps even self-punishment. And it can sometimes be used as a justification for why the monastic life is the best way to practise Buddhism - because people in lay life are inextricably entangled in the pesky, icky things of the world, while monastic communities live at one remove. I'm going to suggest a different way of looking at renunciation which is more compatible with a life in the world, both because that's how I live myself and how I assume the vast majority of my readers live too. First of all, it's worth noting that the Buddha himself actually rejected extreme asceticism. According to the discourses in the Pali canon, he came to the realisation that a life of material luxury and sensual indulgence was ultimately hollow and unsatisfying, and so set off in search of a better way. He tried all of the ascetic practices that were popular at the time, including (but by no means limited to) holding his breath for as long as possible (which apparently results in terrible headaches), and eating as little as possible - eventually, down to a single grain of rice per day, at which point he became so weak that he collapsed and had to be nursed back to health by a compassionate woman named Sujata. After that particular incident, he realised that he'd taken the path of self-denial to the very brink of death and it still hadn't brought him what he was looking for. Then he remembered a time when, as a boy, he had spontaneously entered a deep meditation state known as jhana. The jhana states are pleasant, but it's a form of pleasure that comes from within, rather than a pleasure that's dependent on external factors like fine wines or chocolates. He noticed that material pleasures typically have an addictive quality - no sooner have you finished one chocolate than you're reaching for another - whereas practising jhana leads toward contentment, desirelessness and peace of mind. This seemed like a much better approach than either stuffing his face with food or starving himself to death - and so meditation, and this idea of spiritual happiness, became central to the Buddha's path of enlightenment. (We'll come back to jhana when we get to the end of the Eightfold Path - so stay tuned!) What should we renounce, and why? The Buddha's story can be interpreted in a couple of different ways. We could say: 'Aha, so material pleasures are evil, while spiritual pleasures are good. Renunciation therefore means to cut off all material pleasures and practise only spiritual pleasures.' That's certainly the approach taken by many monastic communities, which aim to cut off as much worldly pleasure as possible, resulting in a pretty hard life which nevertheless frees up space for spiritual practice. With my Zen hat on, however, I'm a little sceptical of making hard dualities between 'good pleasures' and 'evil pleasures'. Echoing last week's article and the discussion of fetters arising in response to sense contacts, I think we can take a more nuanced approach, and ask whether a particular source of pleasure (be it material, spiritual or something else entirely) is actually a problem or not. For example, from time to time I drink alcohol. I know that many people suffer terribly with alcohol addiction, but it's never been a problem for me. Sometimes I go a few months without drinking, just because it doesn't occur to me to drink. Sometimes I'll be a bit more socially active and have a bit more. It just doesn't make that much difference to me. On the other hand, when I drink a single Coke or Pepsi, the next day I will experience a very strong urge to have another Coke or Pepsi at about the same time, and before you know it I'll be drinking two a day, then three, then four. Then the headaches will start, and my teeth will get sensitive, and my sleep gets messed up, and it's clear that something has to be done. So then I'll go through the long, painful process of detox, experiencing withdrawal headaches and all sorts. Then I'll be clean for a while - generally, until I go on a business trip or have some other kind of stress spike, when I'm called on to be alert and sharp at a time when I'm totally exhausted, and I'll grab a Coke or Pepsi to perk myself up, and the cycle begins again. For me, drinking Coke or Pepsi leads to an addictive cycle of suffering in a way that drinking alcohol simply doesn't. So when it comes to the renunciation aspect of right intention, it's perhaps more interesting not to look at it in terms of a blanket rule to cut off all material pleasures, but rather as an investigation of our attachments, fixations and dependencies. There are some things we're clearly better off without - addiction to crack cocaine, for instance - but many of the things in our lives are not so clear-cut, like the Coke/Pepsi example above. A rule of thumb that I've found to be useful is to ask myself 'Do I need this? Or could I be without it?' If the answer is 'hell yes, I need it!' then, if nothing else, that's a setup for suffering - because life is impermanent, and in the long run we're separated from everything dear and delightful to us. But if the answer is 'no, it's not that big a deal' then we probably don't need to worry too much about it, at least right now - we almost certainly have bigger spiritual fish to fry. If we're living the life of a householder, it isn't really practical to observe the kind of self-denial practised by monastic communities. We have family, friends, colleagues, jobs, obligations. We typically won't be able to cut ourselves off from the world of sense pleasures, and so it isn't really useful to think of renunciation in those terms. But if we can instead look at it as a way of exploring our lives, identifying problematic relationships that lead to a lot of suffering, and finding ways to hold those relationships differently - which might mean avoiding something entirely, but doesn't necessarily have to - then renunciation suddenly becomes a more relevant concept. Living with the intention of renunciation It's important to say that renunciation isn't a 'once and done' kind of exercise - scan through your life, identify the trouble spots, cut those off and that's it, you're good forever. Life is a dynamic process in which the only constant is change. What's completely fine today might not always be that way, and what's a really big deal requiring a great deal of care today might not always be like that. For example, I go through cycles (pretty well correlated with my stress levels) where I start to overeat chocolate compulsively and have to be very careful, then things calm down and a bit of chocolate now and then is no big deal, and actually quite enjoyable. Personally, I would suggest that we're looking for balance - steering clear of addictions where possible, but at the same time allowing ourselves to relax and have fun from time to time. (One of the drawbacks with taking the ascetic approach to renunciation is that no sooner have you cut off your sources of evil worldly pleasure, thereby 'purifying' yourself, than you start to notice smaller, previously unnoticed sources of worldly pleasure, which must then be cut off, only to reveal even smaller, subtler sources of pleasure, and on and on it goes. We're really good at finding faults in things - especially ourselves - when it's our intention to do so.) Seen in this way, renunciation becomes both an on-going practice of inquiry, and a kind of guard-rail for our lives. We learn to see the warning signs when a healthy interest is becoming an unhealthy obsession, and adjust accordingly - steering away from known danger spots, but also allowing our lives to flex and breathe as necessary, rather than cramming ourselves into a straitjacket. It's also important to say that living with this intention doesn't somehow make us better than other people. We all have our sticking points - and we tend to be able to see the sticking points of other people much more easily than we can see our own! Furthermore, just because something is a problem for me doesn't mean it's automatically a problem for someone else - I have no real grounds to pass judgement on others just because I've adopted a lofty Buddhist lifestyle. If anything, as we start to become more sensitive to our own sticking points as well as those of others, we start to see the incredible diversity of life - each person's individual way of making their way through the world, sometimes so different to our own that we struggle even to imagine how their life could possibly work, and yet it does. So please give renunciation some consideration - not as a stick to beat yourself or others with, but as a way of exploring our relationships with the people and things in our lives, identifying potentially troublesome spots, and figuring out how we can live in such a way that we suffer a little less. May all beings be happy. Rediscovering your experience
This week we're looking at case 37 in the Gateless Barrier, 'The Cypress Tree in the Garden'. (Sometimes the cypress tree is said to be in the (monastery) courtyard; Thomas Cleary translates it as 'yard', which I've rendered as 'garden' because I live in the UK. It really doesn't matter where the cypress tree is, though!)
This koan is especially memorable to me because I once complained to my teacher Daizan about it! I'd recently been reading a book about the Tibetan Mahamudra tradition; the insight practices in that tradition tend to be written in very straightforward, technical language, so they're right up my street and something I can get my head around very quickly. In comparison, Zen presents us with the cypress tree in the garden. I mean, come on! Daizan just smiled, as he usually does, and said 'What are you supposed to do with that, eh?' And maybe that's a sign that I should stop this article right now and just leave you to chew on it. But that isn't my style, so let's take a closer look and see what's going on here. Seeing the world through jade-tinted glasses When we're young, everything is interesting. Everywhere we go is a new place, or has something new to offer - a new experience, a new person. Sometimes that can be a bit daunting (like getting lost in a busy shopping centre), but most of the time it's pretty great - a seemingly endless banquet of new experiences, things to explore and try out. As we grow older, we become more defined as individuals. We learn the kinds of things that we like and dislike - maybe I discover that I enjoy heavy guitar music but can't abide jazz, for example. We may regard ourselves as becoming more sophisticated in our tastes as we develop more and more refined tastes - not just classical music, but Beethoven; not just Beethoven, but his string quartets; not just any string quartets, but specifically the late ones; not just any old performance, but this particular set of players at this venue on this date. Along the way, more and more of the world becomes familiar to us - and, if we have sophisticated tastes, we'll probably find that more and more of it leaves us cold, while it takes more and more specific conditions to truly delight us. In other words, as we grow older, we become jaded. There's a famous poem written by the third Zen ancestor in China, Sengcan, the name of which translates to something like 'Faith in Mind'. It begins as follows: The Great Way is not difficult If only you do not pick and choose Neither love nor hate And you will clearly understand. Be off by a hair, And you are as far from it as heaven from earth. If you want the Way to appear, Be neither for nor against. For and against opposing each other This is the mind's disease. Without recognising the mysterious principle It is useless to practise quietude. That last line is a kicker - he's saying that if you don't understand this bit about not picking and choosing, it's a waste of time to meditate at all. Bit harsh! There's a fun passage in one of Brad Warner's early books (I think it's Sit Down and Shut Up, although I can't find the reference and now I'm starting to wonder if I dreamt the whole thing) where he comments that Sengcan doesn't actually mean that, in order to be a Zen master, you're not allowed to have a favourite flavour of ice cream. (Daizan often says that if you preferred vanilla ice cream to chocolate ice cream before awakening then you'll still prefer it after awakening, although how anyone could prefer vanilla ice cream to chocolate is the deepest mystery of all to me.) So if Sengcan isn't suggesting that we need to systematically eradicate all our preferences and become equally comfortable with Metallica and Miles Davis, what actually is he getting at? The Satipatthana Sutta and the fetters arising dependent on the senses One of the key discourses in the early Buddhist tradition is the Satipatthana Sutta, which means something like 'the discourse on cultivating mindfulness'. (I have a series of articles on this discourse, so check those out if you're interested.) The discourse is a big anthology of insight practices, one of which involves examining our experience through the lens of the 'six senses' - seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, touching and thinking. The instructions take each of the senses in turn and say the same thing for each one: Here [one] knows the eye, [one] knows forms, and [one] knows the fetter that arises dependent on both, and [one] also knows how an unarisen fetter can arise, how an arisen fetter can be removed, and how a future arising of the removed fetter can be prevented. (Emphasis mine.) The instruction here is to examine our visual experience in order to discover the 'fetter' that arises dependent on it - in other words, to see how our visual experience can lead us into suffering. On a simple level, it might go something like this: we see someone holding the latest iPhone, and suddenly we want it, we've got to have it, how come that person has it and we don't? Life is so unfair! On a more sophisticated level, perhaps it's something like 'Oh, it's a Picasso. I'm really more of a Rothko person, it's a shame they don't have any of those here.' In both cases, the visual experience has triggered an idea of how the present situation could have been better than it in fact is, and as a result our experience of the present moment is just that little bit more disappointing. This is what Sengcan is getting at. It doesn't have to be a problem to prefer Rothko to Picasso (or Metallica to Miles Davis) - but if our wellbeing is dependent on getting the Rothko, we're in trouble. It's a wonderful ability to be able to imagine something other than what's here right now - it allows us to make plans, figure out solutions to problems and do all sorts of clever things - but if that faculty gets out of hand and taints every moment of our lives with a twinge of unhappiness, our minds can truly be said to be 'diseased', to use Sengcan's metaphor. Emptiness and freshness So what's the solution? In Zen practice, we make a big deal about emptiness. In a nutshell, 'emptiness' is the idea that the way we experience things is the product of our own minds, rather than how things 'really' are in themselves. What we experience starts with the information from our senses, but then it's filtered through our lifetime of experiences, preferences and prejudices, so that the end product has a distinctly jaded quality to it a lot of the time. While this might all sound a bit abstract and theoretical, the practical result of exploring emptiness is that we can start to rediscover a sense of freshness in experience. (The Zen teacher Guo Gu actually uses the word 'freshness' rather than 'emptiness' for this reason, emphasising the practical effect rather than the theoretical underpinnings.) As we do our meditation practice - whether it's a Zen practice like Silent Illumination or working with a koan, or an early Buddhist insight practice like the 'six senses' one I mentioned above - we start to discover a dynamic quality to our experience, a moment-by-moment transience, an ungraspability. As we look around the familiar room where we've meditated hundreds or thousands of times before, we begin to see not the boring old stuff that we've long since learnt how to ignore as our minds wander in search of something more interesting to distract us, but instead a new world, each moment sparkling with freshness. The experience can be something akin to being on holiday in an unfamiliar place, where buildings, people and cars are suddenly interesting again, simply by virtue of being not the same old stuff we're used to. Actually, nothing in the world is ever really 'same old, same old' - but we have to learn how to take off our jade-coloured glasses before we can see the freshness all around us. Direct contemplation One approach to experiencing this freshness is to use the method of 'direct contemplation', which I first encountered on retreat with the Western Chan Fellowship, and which you can find described in more detail in Guo Gu's excellent book Silent Illumination. To do this practice, you'll need either something to look at or something to listen to. (I suggest using something from the natural world, and I strongly suggest not listening to music, at least until you've had a lot of practice with this technique.) Ordinarily, our perceptions are totally bound up with our thoughts - we see or hear something, and a cluster of thoughts, opinions, preferences, memories and so forth arise too. As a minimum, it isn't just the sound of a babbling brook, it's also 'the sound of a babbling brook', i.e. we have some mental activity labelling it, maybe identifying particular sub-sounds within it, or remembering another time you heard a babbling brook... and so on. So the practice is very simple. Anytime you notice yourself caught up in thought, or indeed doing anything other than simply hearing the sound or seeing the sight, let go of that, and come back to the hearing or seeing. And that's it. Don't try to measure your progress, don't start to wonder if you're experiencing this 'freshness' thing yet, don't start making a mental list of the next few things you're going to try to contemplate directly because this one isn't really doing it for you. Put all of that stuff down, over and over. If you think you've got it - well, now you're thinking about how you've got it, so put that down too. If you experience yourself melting away into the universe and becoming one with the object and everything else - well, now you're thinking about melting into the universe, so put that down too. If you're seeing a visual object, just see. If you're hearing a sound, just hear. That's it. Now, in case you're at all concerned - and sometimes people do worry about this - doing this practice is not going to break your ability to think thoughts or interact with the world. We're not trying to train ourselves out of ever having another discriminating thought - that would be far worse than where we are now in many ways, because we'd become incapable of looking after ourselves. That's not where we're going. All we're doing here is a very simple exercise intended to loosen the tyranny of our discriminating mind, to give us a taste of the freshness that is available in every moment of experience. As we become more skilled in this practice, we tend to find that it actually integrates well into our lives, allowing us to be more receptive to simple pleasures when they're available to us, but without interfering with our ability to be focused, analytical and, yes, even sophisticated in our tastes when we need to be. So give it a go, and see how you get on. How would it be for you to take off your jade-coloured glasses, even for a few seconds? How might the world look then? Find out! The Eightfold Path, part 1
This article is the first in an eight-part series taking a look at the famous Eightfold Path, a teaching found at the core of early Buddhism.
As the name suggests, the path consists of eight factors. Note, however, that it's an 'eightfold' path rather than an 'eight-step' path - the eight factors, or 'folds', are intended to be practised together, rather than one after the other. We can even see this in the language used for each of the eight factors: samma ditthi ('right view'), samma sankappa ('right intention') and so on. The 'sam-' prefix is the same one used in samadhi, which means something like 'bringing together' or unifying. So these eight 'folds' are intended to be brought together and practised as eight aspects of a single path, rather than being a series of stages that you pass through and graduate from. Indeed, one of the criticisms of the modern mindfulness movement is that it essentially extracts two of the eight folds (samma sati, 'right mindfulness', and samma samadhi, 'right concentration') and attempts to offer them without their wider context - particularly including the ethical aspects of the path, which we'll come to in a few weeks' time. Now, personally, I think that modern secular mindfulness can be offered in a way which does include an ethical component, but equally there's a lot to be said for engaging with the whole Eightfold Path - whether you think of yourself as a Buddhist or not. If nothing else, each of these eight factors can be contemplated in the context of your own life, to see what meaning they might hold for you and how you might be able to work them into your meditation practice and your wider day-to-day activities. It's also worth noting that the English word 'right' isn't necessarily the best translation of the Pali word 'samma' - for example, 'right' doesn't have anything like that connotation of 'togetherness' that I mentioned above. It can also come across as judgemental, like 'this is the right thing to do and everyone else is wrong'. For this reason, some teachers today suggest 'wise' or 'appropriate' instead of 'right'. Personally, I don't really like any of these! So I tend just to say 'right', because it's the most common one you'll encounter, and thus hopefully the least confusing for people who don't already know enough about the subject that they don't need this paragraph of explanation! Enough with the preamble - let's jump in to the first of the eight folds, samma ditthi - right view. What is right view? In Digha Nikaya 22, the longer discourse on mindfulness practice, the Buddha defines right view simply as 'Knowing about suffering, the origin of suffering, the cessation of suffering, and the practice that leads to the cessation of suffering.' Astute readers will recognise these as the Four Noble Truths, another central pillar of early Buddhism. (There's a nice self-referential detail here: the fourth of the Four Noble Truths is the path of practice, which is typically equated with the Eightfold Path - and the first aspect of the Eightfold Path is right view, which is here equated with the Four Noble Truths. I like that kind of stuff.) Now, I've written before about the Four Noble Truths, so go and check out that article if you're totally new to the idea. In a nutshell, though, the Four Noble Truths is a kind of tweetable version of the whole Buddhist path.
(OK, that's too many characters for a single tweet. I'm not really a Twitter person.) In a nutshell, then, the Buddhist path is about studying our first-person subjective experience and learning to understand its cause and effect - how our experience comes to be, how our suffering arises, and how that suffering can cease. The good news is that other people have been through the same thing, and mapped out a path for us to follow to get through it ourselves. A more detailed elaboration of right view There's actually a whole discourse on right view, Majjhima Nikaya 9, which unpacks right view in more detail, and in particular delves more into the cause-and-effect aspect I mentioned above. The discourse starts with Sariputta, one of the Buddha's chief disciples, giving a teaching on right view. He starts by saying that 'right view' is a matter of understanding 'the unskilful and its root, and the skilful and its root'. 'Skilful' is one of those Buddhist jargon words that means anything which is helpful in our practice - so having a daily meditation practice would be regarded as skilful, while setting fire to people's houses for fun would fall into the 'unskilful' category. (Why? We'll talk more about that in a few weeks, when we get to the fourth factor of the Eightfold Path, 'right action'!) Sariputta goes on to say that the 'unskilful' is 'killing living creatures, stealing and sexual misconduct; speech that's false, divisive, harsh or nonsensical; and covetousness, ill will and wrong view.' All of these factors develop out of the 'root' of unskilful behaviour: 'greed, hatred and delusion'. Similarly, 'skilful' behaviour is basically avoiding unskilful behaviour, and traces back to the root of 'contentment, good will and right view'. You'll note that the roots of skilful behaviour are the opposite of the roots of unskilful behaviour - so 'right view' is here being defined as the opposite of 'delusion'. The monks then ask Sariputta to define right view in another way, and so he offers a few alternatives. One is simply the Four Noble Truths that we've already seen. Another is an examination of 'fuel' - that is, the things that give rise to greed, hatred and delusion; Sariputta says that when these are fully understood, the roots of the unskilful can be abandoned, and one's suffering left behind. Finally, Sariputta defines right view in terms of a thorough understanding of Dependent Origination. Again, I've written previously about Dependent Origination, so check out that article if you're new to it. The simplest form of Dependent Origination is the observation that every aspect of our experience - every object we encounter, every thought or feeling we have, etc. - arises dependent on other things. Nothing whatsoever within our experience is outside the web of causality - absolutely everything is dependent on other things, and has no existence independent of that. I recently heard the meditation teacher Michael Taft comment that this dependently originated nature of all things can be compared to the words in a dictionary. When you look up a word, you find that it's defined in terms of other words. If you look up those words, they're also defined in terms of other words - maybe even including the first word you started with. There's no 'ultimate word' that exists independently of all the others and from which all the others derive their essential meaning. And yet despite the contingent, unstable, mutually dependent nature of the words in a language, the words are still really useful! It isn't that they don't exist just because they depend on other words. The point is rather that there's no particular 'special word' that is the source of everything else. And, in just the same way, no matter what aspect of our phenomenal experience we examine - sights, sounds, thoughts, feelings, intentions, impulses, memories and so forth - all we ever find is phenomena that depend on other phenomena. In particular, it can be very helpful to apply this examination to ourselves. Who are you, really? For most of us, it feels like there's a definable 'me' here, perhaps sitting behind the eyeballs pulling the levers that move the arms and legs around. But can you actually find such a thing in your experience? Can you find anything truly independent, anything that's 'in charge' of everything else? Right view as emptiness Perhaps the fullest expression of this approach to right view that's found in the early discourses is in Samyutta Nikaya 12.15, where Kaccanagotta asks the Buddha about right view, and the Buddha says 'This world, Kaccana, for the most part depends upon a duality — upon the notion of existence and the notion of nonexistence. But for one who sees the origin of the world as it really is with correct wisdom, there is no notion of nonexistence in regard to the world. And for one who sees the cessation of the world as it really is with correct wisdom, there is no notion of existence in regard to the world.' The language is tricky, but the Buddha is making a version of the 'dictionary' point above. We tend to believe that things either exist in a definite way or don't exist at all, but actually what we find is more like a web of things all dependent on each other, neither existing 100% in their own right, nor not existing at all. As time went on, this idea was developed much further, and became more commonly known as 'emptiness'. Again, I've written previously about emptiness (e.g. here), so I won't do a deep dive now. For today, it's enough to say that a key aspect of right view is to understand this web of interconnected dependency very deeply. Much of our confusion and suffering comes from seeing the world in fixed terms, hanging on to a frozen idea of a person or situation and then being surprised and dismayed when the living, breathing, dynamic reality moves in another direction. A big part of practice is relaxing our fixed views of what's going on, and correspondingly suffering less. The key point about all of this is that right view, like each of the other aspects of the Eightfold Path, is something to be practised. It isn't enough to think about it and come up with a logical argument in favour of or against the ideas of emptiness, dependent origination and the cause-and-effect relationships of our suffering. Rather, we are to see and experience these things for ourselves, directly - like biting into a piece of mango rather than reading a scholarly essay about the nature of mangoes. Right view as the first of the eight 'folds' Earlier I commented that the eight aspects of the path are intended to be practised together rather than sequentially. Nevertheless, we can also look at them in sequence - each one provides support for the one that follows it, and in particular it makes sense to start with right view. If we don't know where we're going, how will we know if we're getting any closer? Having a sense of the over-arching view of the Buddhist project helps us to orient ourselves within the sometimes confusing multitude of practices, traditions and teachers. Fundamentally, Buddhism is concerned with the alleviation of suffering - enabling us and those around us to live happier, more fulfilled lives. If your practice is making you hostile, judgemental and uptight, something has gone a little off track somewhere along the way. But if you find more gratitude, love and joy in your life, especially in relation to the simplest things, you're moving in the right direction. May you be happy and free from suffering. Stillness and motion in Zen practice
This week we're looking at case 36 in the Gateless Barrier, a classic collection of Zen stories, or koans, compiled in the early 13th century. Once again we find ourselves dealing with Zen master Wuzu, who we met for the first time last week in case 35. In that case, he asked a monk a question about a well-known Chinese folk tale. This week, he seems to have more practical matters on his mind.
So - when you're out and about, and you meet someone who is enlightened, what should you do? Master Wuzu seems to be saying that we shouldn't speak to such a person, but we shouldn't remain quiet either. So what the heck are we supposed to do? Encountering people who have attained the Way Before we go further, there's an interesting point here. The question presupposes that we have met someone who has 'attained the Way' - in other words, someone who has realised the awakening of Zen for themselves. But how are we supposed to know whether someone else is enlightened or not? Tellingly, Wuzu's question begins 'On the road' - in other words, outside the confines of the monastery, with its rigid hierarchy and small population, where everyone knows who the Roshi is, everyone's heard the gossip about how highly attained the head monk or nun is or isn't, and so on. When we're working within a community that we know very well, we automatically have a fairly clear sense of the pecking order - we know who should be treated with respect (and whether or not they've earnt it, at least in our eyes!). But once you step out of that environment, the situation is much more ambiguous. A random person walking down the street might be a Buddha in disguise - or a criminal mastermind. How can you tell? What are the signs of someone who is fully enlightened, anyway? Different traditions seem to hold different ideals - and the highly experienced teachers I respect all seem pretty different to one another. My Zen teacher Daizan, my early Buddhist teacher Leigh Brasington, Stephen Batchelor and Brad Warner are all pretty different to each other. Does that mean only one of them has 'got it'? Exploring this question can show us a lot about what we're hoping to get out of our practice, which in turn can clarify and strengthen our intention, helping us to move in that direction (assuming we still want to after we realise why we've been practising up to this point!). Another way this question is important is that it exposes the way we can treat people differently depending on our relationship to them. It's quite natural (rooted in our biology) to treat our family with greater kindness and attention than total strangers, for example. But a big part of Zen practice is about questioning the validity of the dualities we set up - in this case, between 'us' and 'them'. (My teacher Leigh Brasington likes to ask 'How big is your "us"?') In this case, Zen master Wuzu asks us how we might behave towards someone we regard as enlightened - but if I find myself thinking 'Oh, well, I should clearly be very respectful and listen carefully to what such a person would have to say,' well, does that mean that I don't feel the need to be respectful or attentive toward someone who I don't regard as enlightened? Do I have a sense of a kind of 'spiritual elite' who are worth my time and attention, as compared to a vast mass of ignorant plebs who I'm free to ignore because they haven't 'got it'? Hmm. This problem can also show up in a more insidious form as we get more into Buddhist practice, particularly if we have some significant shifts or insights. It's very easy to think 'Ahh, now I get it - not like those losers over there who talk a good game but don't know the real stuff!' When someone is a bit too impressed with their own level of insight, it's sometimes said that they 'stink of Zen' - Daizan's teacher Shinzan Roshi would sometimes hold his nose and say 'Stinky, stinky!' This is a very sneaky problem indeed, because we don't want to devalue the genuine power of insight - but equally it's very easy to start thinking of yourself as special if you've had a breakthrough. (At the end of a retreat, if there's been a bit of this kind of thing going on, Daizan will sometimes get us to turn to the person next to us and say 'Hi, I'm Matt, and I'm a bit special...') If you do fall into this trap, it isn't the end of the world, but at some point you'll come back down to earth, perhaps with a bit of a bump. Finding out that you're not so special after all is a hard lesson to learn, but learn it you must. (Went a bit Yoda at the end there, not sure what that's about.) Not speech, not silence Leaving aside for a moment the thorny problem of how to recognise someone who is enlightened, we also have Wuzu's other conundrum to deal with. He says 'You do not face them with speech, you do not face them with silence. So tell me, how do you face them?' That's a bit like saying 'You can't turn left, you can't turn right, so which way are you going to turn?' I've mentioned a few times before that Zen master Wumen, who compiled the collection of koans that this story comes from, provides both a prose and a verse comment for each case. Usually I don't include those, in general because they're just as difficult as the main case and I only have so much time on a Wednesday night to render all this stuff into an accessible enough form that we can practise with it. This time, however, Wumen takes the unusual step of giving us a direct answer to the case in his verse comment. On the road, meeting people who've attained the Way, You do not face them with speech or silence: Punch them right in the jaw; If they understand directly, they understand. As usual, we're not meant to take this entirely literally, fun as that might be. (One of my martial arts teachers used to say 'The problem with you guys is that you take things too literally', to which I was always tempted to suggest that he could just say what he meant instead... but he was a pretty scary dude, so needless to say I never said that to him.) Wuzu is cautioning us against two possible errors when approaching a situation (any situation, actually, not just an encounter with an enlightened master). Koans are often critical of an overly intellectual approach to Zen - we commonly see scholars defeated by uneducated tea sellers and the like. 'Speech' here could be seen to represent an academically wise, philosophically erudite approach, perhaps based on some kind of well-intentioned principles - in other words, an attempt to 'figure out' what to do in advance, using the powerful tool of the intellect to reason our way to success in every circumstance. Alternatively, we can simply withdraw, and hope to avoid error by not committing to any definite action, remaining silent, perhaps hanging out in the peaceful stillness of our meditation practice where we don't have to deal with the messiness of other people 'out there'. The alternative is what we might call dynamic action - a response which fits itself to the situation like a hand fits a glove (or like Wumen's fist fits my jaw). We engage, but not in a predetermined way, simply acting out a script written long ago. Rather, the focus of our practice is on bringing ourselves as fully as possible into the here and now, and trusting that an appropriate response will arise within us to meet the needs of the moment. (What is 'an appropriate response'? That's another koan in its own right - I'll leave that one as an exercise to the reader!) Form is emptiness, emptiness is form One of the most famous lines in all the Buddhist canon is 'Form is emptiness, emptiness is form'. This line, from the Heart Sutra, can be viewed as a very concise map of Zen practice. Most of us come to practice seeing the world in a certain way - a world of separate, disconnected things, like a series of billiard balls rolling across a table crashing into each other. Zen practice invites us to find a different way of seeing things which is based not on separation but rather on wholeness. That sense of wholeness can be reached through a variety of means, but very commonly through developing an orientation towards stillness, silence, nothingness, emptiness. When we're caught up in the things of the world (and in particular the thoughts that represent our discriminating mind's activity of chopping up the world into separate, individually labelled pieces), it's very difficult to see the wholeness - so we incline toward the gaps between the things, rather than the things themselves - the space in the room, rather than the furniture. When we find our way to emptiness, it's often a tremendous relief. The mind is able to let go of all its usual worries and obsessions, at least for a moment. Finally, we can rest - but rather than falling asleep, we're wide awake, perhaps more fully awake than we've ever been before. It's a lovely experience, and it's quite natural to want to hang out there as much as possible. However, as another Zen saying puts it, 'heaven is the most dangerous place'. If we become too fixated on the peaceful stillness, we become intolerant of any disturbance, allergic to the world and the day-to-day dealings of our lives, seeking only to get back to that peaceful place as soon as possible. So the next step of the practice is to recognise that emptiness is form. It turns out that the peaceful stillness is not so much an end in itself as a very helpful doorway that leads us to that sense of wholeness. Once we're more familiar with it, we can start to find it everywhere - even in the particular things of the world. Ultimately, all of our experience has the same underlying nature - the nature of mind - and if we can recognise that in any given moment then we're right back in touch with that sense of wholeness. Trying to push away form to get to emptiness (or trying to suppress thoughts or sounds to get to inner and outer silence) is fundamentally to misapprehend what's going on, setting up a false duality between stillness (good) and movement (bad) rather than recognising them to be two sides of the same coin. Instead, wholeness can become a kind of background texture throughout all of our experience, no matter what's going on. Acting effectively in the world The Zen tradition thus places a strong emphasis on continuous practice, which flows between stillness and movement and back again. We sit in meditation (zazen), of course, but we also walk, work and speak with the same attitude of mindful presence that we bring to our sitting meditation. (This 'meditation in action' is sometimes called 'do-zen'.) This is also where Zen's energy practices fit into the picture. We can see sitting meditation as a fundamentally subtractive activity - resting in stillness, letting go moment by moment, gradually becoming less in the process. By comparison, energy practices such as qigong can be seen as fundamentally additive in nature - generating and circulating energy, promoting health, refining the functioning of the body to live longer, becoming more in the process. I've written several articles on energy practices, so check those out if this is a side of Zen practice that you haven't encountered before. The bottom line is that we want to get to a place where our well-being is not dependent on the conditions of the moment, where we can see the wholeness that unites all experiences even in the midst of dealing with the particulars of a live situation in the moment. Daizan likes to say that we need both eyes open - the eye that sees emptiness and the eye that sees form. If we're fixated on one at the expense of the other, we become a 'board-carrying fellow' in the Blue Cliff Record (another famous koan collection) - like someone carrying a plank on their right shoulder who can thus only see what's to their left. While it's definitely valuable to focus on silence, stillness and emptiness in the early stages of the practice in order to break through to a clear sense of this new way of seeing things, in the long run it's all about integration. We don't need to set up a competition between form and emptiness, relative and absolute, enlightened and non-enlightened, and then try to make sure we're always on the winning team. So what's this place of integration like? Unfortunately, it can't be boiled down to a simple strategy ('just do this, this and this in every situation and you'll be fine') - 'speech' is not a viable option here. But doing nothing ('silence') isn't going to work for us either. Ultimately, we have to find out for ourselves, moment by moment, as the activity of our lives plays out. In the right circumstances, maybe that even looks like a punch to the jaw. Let's find out! Half of you is in other people
This week's koan, taken as usual from the Gateless Barrier, is case 35, called 'A woman's split soul' in the Thomas Cleary translation. This is one of those koans that needs a certain amount of cultural context before it can even begin to make sense, so we'll start there.
The story of the woman's split soul The koan is actually a reference to a traditional Chinese story which would have been well known at the time the koan was composed - the sparse text we're given was evidently enough for readers of the era to pick up the reference, in just the same way that most modern readers will know what's meant if I were to say 'use the Force, Luke!' with no further explanation. (Maybe I should substitute 'Rey' for the young'uns among you...) Anyway, rather than attempt to write my own telling of the story (which, although fun, I don't really have time for this morning), here's a version of the story that I found on the Zen Center of Syracuse website. (Note that the story uses the Japanese version of the characters' names, which is common practice in Zen lineages tracing back to Japan. In the original version of the story, of course, they would have Chinese names.) There was once an old man named Chokan, who had lost his first daughter. As you might imagine, he was very attached to his second daughter. Seijo was her name; Jo means young woman. Seijo was very beautiful, and so was her cousin, a boy named Ochu. The two of them were so cute together. The family would watch the two children playing and say, "Ah, what a great couple they make. How adorable." Chokan often said, "The two of you are so perfect together." Well, they grew older, and indeed they felt that way about each other: "You are right for me. You are my great love." But then, to their dismay, Chokan told his daughter that he had chosen a husband for her. It was not Ochu! We can't imagine that here, but this was a very common occurrence back then, and even not so long ago. Now, too, in some cultures this kind of arranged marriage is quite common. So what happened to this young loving pair? They couldn't bear it. Ochu couldn't stay and see his beloved married off to someone she didn't love. He got into a boat and began making his way up the Yangtze River. Then he noticed someone running along the shore, calling after him. He peered into the darkness-who could it be? It was Seijo! She got into the boat, and they went off together. Years passed. They had a family together. Now the mother of two children, Seijo began feeling deep regret for having run away from her father. Knowing what it's like to love a child, she could imagine his anguish. She said to Ochu, "I long to go back to my native village and see my father and beg his forgiveness." And he replied, "I, too, feel that way. Let us go." So they got into a boat again and went back down the river. When they reached the village, Seijo stayed in the boat while Ochu went to her father. Ochu bowed low and begged for forgiveness for having run off with Seijo. The old man listened with a look of incredulity on his face. "What? Who are you talking about?" Ochu said, "Your daughter, Seijo. She's in the boat." Her father replied, "No, she's not. She's lying in bed. She's been sick all these years, and we haven't known what's wrong; she's been lying there like an empty husk. She hasn't spoken since you left." "But she followed me," Ochu said. "We've been living in another country. We're married, and have two children, and she's in great health. She's here now to ask for your forgiveness." Ochu went to the boat and asked Seijo to come to the house. Meanwhile, Chokan went to tell that sick daughter of his about all this. Still not speaking, she got up out of bed and walked out of the house. Seijo coming from the boat, Seijo coming from the bed, now One. The shocked father said to his daughter, "Ever since Ochu left, you have been lying lifeless, as though your soul had fled." Seijo replied, "I didn't know I was lying sick in bed. When I heard Ochu was going away, I ran after him as if in a dream." So, which was the real Seijo - the one in the bed, or the one in the boat? An allegorical reading of the koan We can approach this koan in a variety of ways. One approach is to treat it as an allegory for a common feature of our psychology - daydreaming. When I was a kid, I loved to imagine all the cool ways my life was going to turn out - all the awesome things I'd be able to do, all the cool people I'd hang out with, all the exciting adventures I'd have. Actually, although I said 'when I was a kid', I still have some of that tendency today - it's pretty common to find myself approaching an activity (let's say learning a new Tai Chi form) with part of my mind busily caught up in imagining how awesome it will be when I'm proficient at it. It's been a hard lesson for me to learn that, while that kind of fantasy is an entertaining way to pass the time, it isn't terribly useful, and it does take up quite a bit of my time and energy if I let it. So a big part of my Zen practice these days is noticing when I'm straying into 'what if?' territory and bringing myself back to what's in front of me. (Or, continuing the Star Wars theme from above and quoting Master Yoda: 'All his life has he looked away... to the future, to the horizon. Never his mind on where he was, hmm? What he was doing.') In this reading, it's fairly clear which is the 'real' me - and it isn't the one with awesome Tai Chi skills, sadly. Taken this way, the koan is a gentle reminder that, no matter how exciting our imaginary life might be, the real one that's right in front of us is the one that really needs attention, and we're perhaps better served working to improve our actual life than imagining a better one but never taking any action to move in that direction. A relational reading of the koan A second way to explore this koan is to take a look at the concept of identity in the context of relationships, where we find another 'split'. Suppose you and I meet. You get to see certain aspects of me, and I get to see certain aspects of you - any other aspects of our personalities that don't come out in the interaction we have remain hidden, so the picture is necessarily incomplete. Finally, we part. I now have an 'idea of you' in my head, and you have an 'idea of me'. In the time we've been together, we've formed opinions about each other - I have some sense of the sort of person you are, the way you speak, the way you dress, the way you behave; and you have the same kind of information about me. The idea of you that I've formed doesn't necessarily bear any relation to what you might regard as 'who you really are'. Hopefully it's close enough to be workable, but every now and again I'll make a mistake because my model of you isn't accurate enough to predict everything about you - so maybe I'll buy you a Christmas present that you hate, or I'll inadvertently say something that upsets you because I didn't realise that topic was a hot button for you. Over time, as I get to know you better, I'll refine my idea of you and (hopefully!) make fewer mistakes, but it'll never be totally accurate, not least because you're constantly changing in small ways as you gain new life experiences, whereas my idea of you only gets updated when we interact, and is basically a frozen snapshot of how you were at a particular point in time (or rather how I thought you were at that point in time!). On a podcast once I heard someone say 'Fully half of yourself is in other people' - it's interesting to reflect that everyone we meet is relating to us through their idea of us rather than our own sense of who we are! In the story, Seijo is seen one way by her father - as a daughter, perhaps with a social obligation to be married according to the father's intentions, as was the way of things in that era in China - and another way by Ochu - as his lover, a life partner, a soul-mate, an independent individual who doesn't have to be beholden to her father's wishes for her. Which is the 'real Seijo' here - the obedient daughter or the independent lover? In the course of a day, we may find ourselves taking on many such roles. For example, right now, I'm a meditation teacher. Earlier, I was a qigong practitioner, and before that a meditator. Later on, I'll be a partner in a relationship. Tomorrow I'll be a colleague, a manager, a managee, a mentor and a researcher, amongst other roles. Sometimes I'm a son, sometimes I'm a godparent, sometimes I'm a friend - and sometimes I'm a thorn in someone's side, although usually not deliberately. In the same way, in the story we see Seijo in a variety of roles - daughter, partner, mother. (It's also noteworthy that when Seijo takes on the role of mother later in the story, it has a profound effect on her, recontextualising the 'daughter' role as she comes to understand her father's perspective better than she previously did.) Each of these roles requires a slightly different set of behaviours, language and so forth. How I speak to my own mother is not how I speak to my goddaughters. Neither mode of address would be appropriate in the workplace. (I've actually seen a senior manager speaking to their staff as if speaking to their children, and it wasn't pretty!) Even when I'm in the role of 'friend', I'm a little different depending on which set of friends I'm with, because we share different interests - Yoda references will land with some of my friends better than others, for example. These roles aren't only about other people's ideas of us - they're also something which exists within ourselves. We don't simply act a certain way in a certain situation because others compel us to do so (although at times it may feel that way!) - we select modes of behaviour which are appropriate to the circumstance, either consciously or unconsciously. It can be worthwhile to spend some time thinking about the many roles that you play in the course of a day, a week, a month or a year. Are some roles more comfortable than others? Do you feel forced into certain roles, or find it difficult to escape others once you've taken them up? Have you found, like Seijo, that taking on a new role (e.g. parent) sometimes changes the way you relate to another role (e.g. child)? Which, if any, is the 'real' you amongst all these roles? Is Seijo daughter, partner, mother, all of the above or none of the above? An existential reading of the koan Most people conclude that none of these roles really fully capture their 'true' self. Roles are more like masks which - ideally - we put on when they're helpful and take off when they're no longer needed. But then what's behind the mask? As we dig into this, we find a third reading of the koan, based on a more fundamental, existential question. We may feel that we have two aspects to ourselves - what we might call 'nature' and 'demeanour', to borrow terminology from a game I used to play at university (ironically, a 'role-playing' game). In the language of the game, the 'demeanour' of a character represented the face that that character chose to show to the world, while their 'nature' represented who they really were, deep down inside. At the time, this struck me as a nice model - I certainly felt like who I was inside wasn't necessarily what other people saw on the surface. Of course, it's not uncommon for teenagers to feel that 'nobody understands me!', but I think some degree of that sense of a split continues into adulthood for many people too. So then we can ask: what exactly is my 'nature'? What sits behind all the masks, at the centre of the web of aspects, personalities, roles and social interactions? What is the deepest, truest part of ourselves - beneath our social identities, beneath even our beliefs about ourselves? Who am I really? In fact, among the classic 'breakthrough' koans (i.e. those which lead to kensho, a first glimpse of awakening in the Zen tradition): we find two which point right to the heart of this exploration: 'Who am I?', and 'What is my true nature?' These are tremendously powerful questions to sit with - if you aren't familiar with how to work with a koan in meditation check out my page on koan study for details. It's well worth the exploration, particularly if you have the opportunity to go deep into the question, such as by going on a retreat like the Breakthrough to Zen retreats offered by Zenways, the sangha I belong to. Going deeply into these questions will change your life forever. One more for the road - a mystical reading of the koan Personally, I've always looked at this koan as being about the emptiness of self, exploring it primarily through the second and third lenses above - although the first perspective is also very helpful as a splash of cold water to the face whenever I'm getting too clever for my own good! A few years ago, though, one of my teachers mentioned another, more mystical, interpretation. Some traditions teach meditation practices which are designed quite literally to separate one's consciousness from one's body, resulting in a kind of out-of-body experience - another type of 'split'. Personally, this is something I don't have much experience of, so it's not a practice that I would ever offer myself. If you're interested, though, here's the link I was given. If you do want to explore this kind of practice, I strongly recommend finding a teacher who is appropriately qualified to guide you! Whichever of these interpretations speaks to you, I hope you get some value from the story of Seijo's split soul. I've found it very fruitful in my own practice; may it be similarly helpful for you. |
SEARCHAuthorMatt teaches early Buddhist and Zen meditation practices for the benefit of all. May you be happy! Archives
December 2023
Categories |