Letting go of resentment: a how-to guideThis week we're going to continue our recent explorations of heart-opening practices by looking at another heart practice which is perhaps less stressed than the four main Brahmaviharas, but which in my view is equally important - forgiveness. Along the way, we'll also dip a toe into the complex, murky waters of karma. So without further ado, let's get into it!
Karma and the cosmic scales of justice Karma (that's the Sanskrit spelling; the Pali, which you'll encounter more in early Buddhist circles, is kamma) is a tricky beast. It's a word that means different things to different people - sometimes multiple different things to the same person, depending on the context. For most people today, the word 'karma' conjures up a sense of a kind of 'divine retribution'. If you do something bad, it'll come back to bite you! A casual YouTube search will reveal many 'instant karma' videos, in which someone does something unkind or unpleasant and then promptly has some kind of accident, injury or humiliation. On a certain level, these can be quite satisfying to watch - one of the great questions that's troubled people throughout the ages is why good things happen to bad people, like being able to do crummy things and get away with it, so it can produce a slightly unsavoury kind of thrill to see someone get their comeuppance. This 'what you do comes back to haunt you' idea of karma is sometimes associated with the idea of rebirth - the view that, rather than living only a single life, we die and are reborn as another person, with another family, another name, another social situation and so on. Most people don't remember their past lives, but some people do claim to, and some meditation teachers offer practices which promise to reveal our past lives to us. In this context, karma is something that can extend across multiple lifetimes - so if something awful happens to you, seemingly for no reason, you're encouraged to see it as negative karma from a previous life coming back to haunt you. This is actually quite a helpful way of looking at things if you're able to do so, because it provides us with a means of understanding why an otherwise seemingly inexplicable disaster has singled us out for torment. Like everything, however, this view of karma also has a dark side. Born disabled? Must be your negative past life karma. Having a difficult time? Well, that's just your karma to work through, I'm not going to help you with it. These sorts of attitudes unfortunately do crop up from time to time. Personally, I tend to regard anything which obstructs the heart's natural compassion in the face of suffering to be a kind of mistake, so any view of karma which says that you should turn your back on someone else's suffering - whatever the reason for it - is not what I would consider very useful. In the time of the historical Buddha, 2,500 years ago, the concept of karma had been effectively weaponised by the priestly (Brahmin) class, who generously offered to intervene in your karma by performing various rituals - for a modest donation, of course. Combined with a world view that suggested that time was basically cyclical rather than linear, and the material world was a prison of suffering into which we were inescapably reborn over and over, you can see why it would be of great benefit to pay the priests to try to ensure a slightly more comfortable experience this time around, to make the best of a bad situation. As he often did, however, the Buddha chose to redefine the term karma within the context of his teachings. In (e.g.) Anguttara Nikaya 6.63, the Buddha says 'Intention, I tell you, is kamma. Intending, one does kamma [literally, 'actions' or 'deeds'] by way of body, speech and intellect.' The point that the Buddha is making here is that our intentional actions have significant consequences. We get good at what we practise - and so, if we regularly practise reacting to difficult situations with anger, we'll find ourselves slipping into anger more easily each time. Conversely, if we practise the cultivation of loving kindness, compassion, appreciative joy or equanimity, those qualities are more likely to be our default responses to situations as they arise. Over time, our intentions have the power to change our character - and so it's important that we're mindful of those intentions, and that they're pointing us in a direction we want to be going, rather than pushing us toward a slippery slope of negativity. The Buddha's view of karma wasn't solely limited to one's personal intentions - elsewhere he does talk about the external consequences of our intentional actions as well. It can be interesting to consider the knock-on effects of our actions - but I already wrote about that quite recently, in the last part of my recent article on equanimity, so check that out if you're interested. For our purposes today, the crucial point is the shift from a focus on karma as an external force of 'cosmic justice' to a focus on one's own subjective experience, and how to work with the contents of one's mind to lead us in a more helpful, constructive direction. Forgiveness, debt and resentment When I run meditation courses for beginners, I'll always include a segment on the importance of forgiveness. Scientific studies suggest that people who practise forgiveness on a regular basis live longer, happier, healthier lives than people who don't - so it ought to be easy to persuade people to give it a go, right? Actually, though, many people find forgiveness very difficult. The major objection I encounter is 'Why should I?' If you've been hurt by someone else, you may well ask why on earth you should forgive them? What have they done to deserve your magnanimity? Maybe nothing! This kind of reaction to forgiveness is quite natural. Going back to the karma discussion, it feels like the cosmic scales of justice are currently slanted away from you. That person did something crappy - they deserve to suffer for what they did, not to be offered your kindness, further imbalancing the scales! We often relate to misdeeds as a kind of 'debt' that has been incurred by the offender - indeed, we talk about prison sentences as 'paying off their debt to society'. From this perspective, giving someone 'free' forgiveness could even seem irrational, like writing off a financial debt rather than trying to recover the money you're owed. From this view, surely forgiveness is tantamount to letting them get away with it! But let's make the same shift of perspective that the Buddha did when talking about karma. Leaving aside the cosmic scales of justice, what is the situation here from your point of view? Something bad happened, and you got hurt, and now - after the event, perhaps even long after - you're continuing to feel some sense of resentment (or anger, or hostility, or...) in relation to what happened. Here's the thing. That resentment is causing pain to you, not to the person who hurt you. The other person might not have any idea that you're still holding on to the pain of what happened - and if they really had it in for you, they might even be pleased to know that their actions continue to cause you pain. It's often said that 'Resentment is like drinking poison and waiting for your enemy to die.' In the words of Tony Stark, not a great plan. So when we talk about 'forgiveness', what we really mean is 'letting go of resentment', as opposed to 'giving someone a free pass and allowing the cosmic scales of justice to remain imbalanced'. When we let go of resentment, we're not saying that what happened was actually OK, or that the other person should be free to do it again - we're not erasing the negative action or its consequences. We're simply letting go of the hot coal that's burning our hand. A second objection that can surface at this point is a feeling that it's somehow useful to continue holding on to the resentment - particularly if we've been feeling that way for a long time. (A kind of emotional sunk cost fallacy, if you will.) We may feel that the resentment helps us to remember not to let something like that happen again. Or it may simply be that it's a little bit embarrassing to admit to ourselves that we've been holding on to something as unhelpful as resentment for a long time. (I've certainly had a great many rather embarrassing insights like that along the way - and no, I'm not going to give you any examples!) What we can do here is to disentangle the two points. On one hand, we have what we might call 'the lesson' - what did we take away from this experience? Perhaps I now know that I never again want to work for a micromanaging bully of a boss, and I'll take active steps to avoid it in the future. Perhaps I know that when someone is very tired, they'll sometimes say extremely hurtful things, and I'm better off just keeping my distance when they're in that kind of mood rather than trying to engage with them. Perhaps it takes a little longer to figure out if there's anything to learn from what happened - in which case this can be an interesting inquiry in its own right, digging into exactly what it is within yourself that reacted so strongly to what happened. (It's worth reflecting on the point that whatever we experience is, in a certain sense, only a reflection of ourselves - our values, beliefs and feelings, being played back at us through the medium of other people. This too can be a profound investigation in its own right!) And on the other hand, we have 'the resentment' - that hot coal of burning pain that we continue to carry. As it turns out, the lesson can be separated from the resentment, and we can (and should!) consciously recognise and absorb the lesson, whilst letting go of the resentment. A practice of forgiveness Supposing you're on board with the 'why' of forgiveness, the next question is 'How do I do it?' Maybe you already have an intuitive sense of this - if so, that's great - but that isn't the case for everyone. The first time one of my students asked me 'How do you forgive someone, then?', I blue-screened. At the time, the question felt a bit like 'How do you know you're in love?' - I don't know, you just do! But since then I've spent some time thinking about the practical mechanisms of forgiveness, and have cobbled together a formal practice with a few discrete steps intended to lead us to a place where we can let go of our resentments. Here's how it goes. Step 1: Bring a situation to mind which triggers some kind of resentment (anger, hostility, ...), and sit with it for a while. I strongly suggest that you start with something easy, and work your way up, rather than jumping straight in to a profoundly tortured relationship with a lifelong nemesis. Like the other heart-opening practices, we want to start where it's easy and then gradually build up - otherwise we risk shutting the heart down completely, like forcibly over-stretching a muscle that then tenses up to protect itself. In particular, please don't try this with something deeply traumatic - if you find yourself experiencing flashbacks, sweating, palpitations etc. then come out of the practice immediately, and I strongly recommend talking to a professional about the situation. Please be kind to yourself. Once you've chosen something, bring it to mind. If you're a visual person, you might like to replay the situation in your mind's eye. Recall as clearly as you can what happened, and notice the reactions that it triggers within you. Spend a few minutes just feeling what's going on within you. (A major barrier to letting go is the instinct to suppress unpleasant feelings. Often, simply allowing ourselves to feel fully is enough to start the process of letting go. It's worth the short-term discomfort of feeling the pain fully in order to get to the long-term benefit of letting it go entirely. Or, as my Zen teacher likes to say, 'Better out than in...') It can also help to try to understand the other person's point of view. Again, it isn't about agreeing with them or approving of what they did, but if you can find a way to understand where they were coming from, it can help. Most people don't set out to do something with the intention of causing evil in the world - generally speaking, everything we do is in the service of making things better somehow, it's just that our ideas of what 'makes things better' can become extremely screwed up, for a whole host of reasons. So if what happened still seems totally inexplicable and cruel to you, it may be worth trying to understand things from another perspective - if you can. If you can't, don't worry about it, just move on to the next step. It's also worth saying that sometimes the person you need to forgive is yourself. In many cases this can be the most important kind of forgiveness - and also the most difficult. Step 2: What is the lesson here? Now take a few minutes to identify what you can learn from the experience. Make sure that you understand what happened - why it had the impact on you that it did. Was one of your personal values or principles violated in some way? Are there other situations that produce the same kind of reaction? What could you do to approach similar situations differently in the future, if they can't be avoided? Don't skimp on this step, particularly if part of your reason for holding onto the pain is because of the lesson wrapped up in it. In this step we're consciously identifying that lesson and taking it on board. Once that's done, the pain has served its purpose, and we can let it go. Step 3: Resolve to let go of the pain. Form the conscious intention to let go of the resentment, and then simply sit with it for a few minutes and see what happens. You may find it helpful to use some phrases to connect with the intention of forgiveness, like the phrases we use in the other Brahmaviharas (e.g. 'may you be happy'). Here are some suggestions:
Sometimes, the pain releases almost immediately, while other times it's a much slower process. In all likelihood, some things won't drop away the first time you practise with them - but that's OK, you can come back to it again. If it's very painful, leave it a few weeks or even months before coming back to it. Don't try to force anything - the heart has its own timetable, so just let the process unfold. There's no rush. May your burden be a little lighter each day.
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Connecting with our intuition
This week we're looking at case 34 in the Gateless Barrier - and if you think it looks a lot like the previous koan, case 33, you'd be right! So this week we'll go in a slightly different direction and look at intuition and the Zen ideal of how a person should be put together. I've even made pictures! So without further ado, let's get into it. Knowledge is not the Way? In the previous case, we saw Zen master Mazu rejecting his earlier saying, 'The very mind itself is Buddha', and instead taking the more contrarian stance 'Not mind, not Buddha'. This week Nanquan cranks the handle even further, telling us not only that 'mind is not Buddha', but furthermore that 'knowledge is not the Way'. I've also seen the second phrase translated as 'wisdom is not the Way', which is even more subversive. If we've been hanging around in Zen circles for a while, we might have got the idea that intellectual, scholarly 'knowledge' is not what Zen is all about - rather, we're supposed to do Zen meditation practices, like koan study and Silent Illumination, in order to have insights and cultivate... wisdom... right? Isn't wisdom the point of all this? Wisdom, after all, is one of the six Mahayana virtues (paramitas, along with generosity, ethical conduct, patience/forbearance/endurance, energy and concentration/focus). And yet here's Nanquan, telling us that even wisdom isn't the way to the Way? So what the heck are we supposed to do, then? Zen's view of the ideal person Before we answer that directly, let's take a moment to look at Zen's idea of a well-put-together person. This is something I've heard my Zen teacher Daizan talk about many times, although it's taken a while to sink in to my thick skull, for reasons that will become apparent as we get into the details! This way of looking at a person divides the body into three sections - head, heart and hara (lower abdomen) - corresponding to the three major energetic centres of the body (upper, middle and lower tanden/dantien). Let's take each one in turn, look at the attributes associated with each section, and see what happens when that aspect of the person is overdeveloped and hence too dominant.
I care for you, but I cannot guarantee your happinessThis week we're continuing our series of articles on heart-opening practices ('Brahmaviharas') by taking another look at equanimity, a quality which is vitally important and yet easily misunderstood. Along the way, we'll take a look at how these heart-opening practices actually make a real difference in our lives, both for ourselves and for others.
So let's get into it! What the heck is equanimity, and how does it fit with the other heart-opening practices? I've previously written about equanimity in some detail, so for today's purposes I'll keep things brief - do check out that previous article if you want a deeper dive. In short, equanimity is the quality of emotional stability - balance, peace of mind. In modern terms, we might say that someone who is equanimous doesn't get 'triggered'. At first sight, this is perhaps a bit of a strange quality to find in the category of 'heart-opening practices'. We may find it easier to see how cultivating qualities like love, compassion and appreciation can open the heart, but equanimity? Maybe equanimity even sounds like the opposite of those things - an absence of emotion. If we see it this way, we might find equanimity not particularly appealing - who wants to live an emotionless, robotic life, without joy or laughter? Actually, though, this is a critical misunderstanding of equanimity. What we find when we do the practice is actually the opposite - that equanimity allows us to experience our emotions more deeply, not less. Equanimity as a stable foundation for a rich emotional life In some of our recent articles, we've looked at practices like the cultivation of loving kindness ('may you be happy'), compassion ('may you be free from suffering') and appreciative joy ('may your good fortune continue'). These are beautiful qualities when we truly connect with them - but they also have a lurking shadow. I've talked about some of the more obvious manifestations of heart-opening practices going slightly off-piste before - loving kindness can turn into a sickly sweet, ostentatious 'kindness', compassion can turn into pity, and appreciative joy can become insincere or a way to gain an advantage through praise and flattery. A subtler issue, though, is when we start trying to use the practice as a way of saying 'This is how things should be.' This can show up as a kind of 'corrective' version of the practice - so we send 'loving kindness' to someone who cuts us up on the road by saying 'May you learn to drive!' It's phrased a little like a Brahmavihara meditation, but in practice it's more of a passive-aggressive way of saying 'Your driving sucks!' Or maybe you find yourself wishing 'May you be free from suffering... and stop hanging out with that no-good partner of yours, they're a bad influence!' The implication here is that we know best, and if the universe would only bend to our will, everything would be better. Equanimity stands in contrast to this 'Can we fix it? Yes we can!' attitude of the mind. In equanimity practice, we attempt to take the stance that everything is fine just the way it is - that nothing needs to be changed, or improved, or fixed. No matter what arises, we choose not to act on any impulse that arises, no matter how obvious it is to us that the situation would be better if only xyz would happen. Instead, we simply let it all come and go. (If you're thinking that this sounds a lot like Silent Illumination practice, you'd be absolutely right! Silent Illumination is indeed one way to cultivate equanimity. The version of equanimity we find the heart-opening practices of early Buddhism is rather different, but we'll get to that later.) Equanimity, then, actually helps us to connect more directly with the 'pure', no-strings-attached version of the other Brahmavihara qualities. Equanimity allows us to say 'May you be happy!', without tacking '...and you'd be happier if...' onto the end. It allows us to recognise and wish for the relief of someone else's suffering without a subtle judgement of the choices they may have made which landed them in that situation. And it allows us to recognise and celebrate others' good fortune without secretly wondering why they get it so good when we don't have such nice things happening to us. More generally, equanimity allows everything to be just the way it is - and that includes the full range of our other emotions too. For all sorts of reasons, there may be emotions that we won't allow ourselves to feel. Perhaps you were told off as a child for 'getting too excited' when something good happened - and since then you've been careful never to let yourself feel too much happiness all at once. Or perhaps you were punished for getting angry when things didn't go your way, and so now you bury your anger deep in your heart, never allowing it to be felt directly, instead leaking out in unexpected moments of resentment or bitterness. Taking the brakes off our emotions can be a pretty scary thing to do. After all, we locked them down in the first place for good reasons! But in the context of a meditation session with a solid foundation of equanimity, it turns out that we very often can allow ourselves to feel more than we usually do, and gradually reclaim the full breadth and depth of our emotional lives. Recognising the limits of our influence, and understanding how the Brahmavihara practice actually helps others I mentioned above that, while Silent Illumination is one way of cultivating equanimity, the practice that we find in the Brahmaviharas of the early Buddhist tradition is quite different - and it may, at first, strike us as rather cold. The emphasis in the Brahmavihara equanimity practice is on recognising the limits of our own influence. Whereas loving kindness says 'may you be happy', equanimity says 'I care for you, but I cannot guarantee your happiness'. It's an acknowledgement that, while we may wish for people to be happy, fortunate and free from suffering, we can't make that happen. Most of the time we can't even manage it for ourselves, let alone others! Actually, the phrases I recommend on my Brahmavihara page are pretty mild compared to the contemplation you find in the Visuddhimagga, which offers this: 'Beings are owners of their deeds. Whose, if not theirs, is the choice by which they will become happy, or will get free from suffering, or will not fall away from the success they have reached?' There's a very strong emphasis here on recognising that other people are autonomous individuals in their own right - while we can wish the best for them, we can't ultimately make their decisions for them, nor should we try to. It's important to realise that nobody is going to become happy simply because we sit on a cushion and wish that it were so. Meditators coming off retreat often have a rude awakening in this respect - they've just spent a week cultivating boundless love for all beings everywhere, but as soon as they get to the train station to head home, it turns out that all beings everywhere didn't get the memo, and are just as awkward, rude and unruly as they ever were. That doesn't mean that Brahmavihara practice is a waste of time, however - far from it. Heart-opening practices help in two ways. First, heart-opening practice benefits the person doing it, in several ways. By cultivating one of these qualities, we tend to move towards more positive, enjoyable mind states - we feel calmer, happier, more joyful. And by doing that over and over, we condition ourselves to feel that way more often. Over time, our default reaction to a minor upset may shift from irritation to self-compassion, for example. As we practise generating kindness, we gradually become kinder people. We also come to see the world differently. Maybe you've noticed that when you're in a rush, obstacles and hold-ups seem to be everywhere - every traffic light turns red, people have chosen today of all days to drive especially slowly, and so on. By comparison, when we're feeling relaxed and peaceful, the world is a much calmer place. If we do meet someone who is giving off a frenetic vibe, we're more likely to experience compassion for them than for their frazzled energy to infect us and get us feeling stressed too. And so, by doing these Brahmavihara practices, we are essentially training ourselves to see the world as kinder, more compassionate, better, than we previously did. (It's important to say at this point that I'm not describing a kind of brainwashing, or a process of pretending that things are better than they are. We're simply placing a different emphasis on what's going on - highlighting the good points rather than focusing on the bad ones. An understanding of emptiness can really help here, as we learn that there really isn't any one way that things 'really' are, just an infinite variety of ways of looking at what's going on.) The second benefit of heart-opening practices is in how they affect others. But wait, didn't I already say that doing these practices doesn't help others? Bear with me as I explain. I tend to believe that the simple act of my wishing that someone else be happy does not automatically make them happier. Maybe it does, but if so, the effect must be pretty small, because I've never noticed it! I don't think that loving kindness practice has a 'spooky action at a distance'-type effect where the universe instantaneously realigns itself just because I want it to. Remember equanimity - part of the point of this practice is to reflect on the limits of our personal power, not to suggest that we can mould the universe however we choose to. However, as I noted above, doing the practice most certainly does have an effect on me. And that means that, after I've done my loving kindness (or equanimity) practice, I'm in a better place than when I started. Now, I don't live in a cave - I go out into the world, go to work, hang out with my friends, meet people in public places, the whole bit. And when I meet other people, we interact. The way I am in that interaction leaves a bit of an imprint on the other person, and conversely how they are leaves a mark on me. Most of the time it's a very small effect, to be sure. (Although not always!) So let's say I meet Person A, and I'm in a good mood when I do it - and a little bit of that good mood rubs off on Person A. Person A then goes on to meet Person B - and Person A is now bringing a slightly more positive mood to that interaction than they would have done otherwise, and so maybe a little bit of that rubs off on Person B, and so on. And as we know, it only takes seven people (that's Person G) to reach Kevin Bacon. To put it another way, my presence in the world sends ripples out in all directions. Those ripples might only go a short distance, or they might travel much further than we expect. For all I know, a chance negative encounter with Person A, insignificant to me, could be the straw that breaks the camel's back, kicking off a chain of negativity that ends up touching hundreds of lives, or even more. Each of my actions has an unlimited number of consequences, both seen and unseen, most of which I will probably never know. It could even be the case that the loving kindness practice I did in the morning genuinely does end up having a positive impact on the very person I brought to mind when I was doing it - through a long chain of secondary interactions, slowly working its way through the world until finally arriving at the person in question. Personally, I think this is a pretty beautiful way to look at the world. Seeing the rich, vast web of interconnections that joins us all together can be a very effective way to step out of those self-centric patterns of thought which are often characteristic of our darker moments, giving us a fresh perspective and some distance from our problems, so that they don't seem so all-consuming. In order to get to the point where we can take that expanded perspective, though, we need to be coming from a fairly stable, grounded place - in other words, we need a basis of equanimity. So whether you're more of a Silent Illumination person, or whether you prefer the Brahmavihara approach, I hope that you find your way to the peaceful quiet stillness of equanimity, and the emotional riches that lie beyond it. To arrive where we started and know the place for the first time
This week, we're taking a look at case 33 in the Gateless Barrier. For those of you who like cross-references to other koans, you'll want to compare this one with case 30, and also case 27. (We'll also see a striking similarity next time, with case 34.)
There's quite a lot packed into a pretty terse koan, so without further ado let's jump in and start unpacking it. Necessary context First, we should compare this koan with case 30. In that story, Damei asks the same question ('What is Buddha?'), but there Mazu gives the answer 'The very mind itself is Buddha.' Here, however, Mazu pulls a switcheroo, and says 'Not mind, not Buddha.' What the heck? Are these Zen teachers inconsistent, or what? First, it's worth saying that Zen, and spirituality in general, is positively overflowing with seemingly contradictory statements. This can be for (at least) two reasons. On one level, if a teacher is tailoring the instruction to the audience (as a good teacher should), sometimes the advice will vary wildly. Thai Forest teacher Ajahn Chah once commented that a student is like a person walking blindfolded through a forest, and the teacher is trying to keep them on the narrow forest path. If the student strays too far to the left, the teacher will say 'Go right, go right.' If the student veers off too far to the right, the teacher will say 'Go left, go left.' So sometimes an apparent 'contradiction' can be for a quite mundane reason - it's just what that person needs to hear then and there, as opposed to an absolute commandment to be followed at all times. At a deeper level, my teacher Leigh likes to say that the opposite of a conventional truth is a falsehood, but the opposite of a profound truth is another profound truth. Try to wrap your head around that one! And, actually, that's what's going on in this koan, at least on one level. Damei gains independence in the Dharma The last couple of koans we've looked at (case 31 and case 32) have been developing a bit of a theme of 'independence in the Dharma'. In case 31, an otherwise obedient monk is scolded for following instructions mindlessly rather than exploring for him; in case 32, students who think for themselves are regarded as 'excellent horses', while those who need to be spoon-fed are at best 'good horses', if not mediocre or worse. I talked a lot about the process of becoming 'independent' (and what it does and doesn't mean) in the article on case 31, so I'm not going to repeat all that. In brief, though, the idea is that, while it's immensely helpful to have a strong relationship with a teacher at all stages in practice, we also want to own our practice - to take responsibility for exploring spiritual questions for ourselves, rather than relying on someone else to solve all our problems. Sometimes, a Zen teacher will test a student to see if the student is still dependent on the teacher's approval. (This can be a painful process for the student if they're still attached!) And, in fact, we have an example of this kind of test in the Zen literature. In case 30, a monk named Damei goes to Mazu to ask for instruction - 'What is Buddha?' Mazu answers 'The very mind itself is Buddha.' Damei takes that away, practises deeply, and comes to a profound realisation. Eventually, he moves away from Mazu's temple to set up his own practice place. Later, around the time of case 33, Mazu changes his teaching method, and starts to say 'Not mind, not Buddha' - contradicting his previous teaching, which had perhaps become a bit of a cliche by that point. Hearing of this, a monk goes to find Damei, and says 'Hey, I heard you trained with Mazu. What did he teach you?' Damei says 'The very mind itself is Buddha.' The monk smirks, and says 'Oh yeah? Well, these days it's different!' Damei politely says 'Oh, what does he say now?' The monk says 'Not mind, not Buddha!' Perhaps he's feeling pleased with himself, for having heard the advanced teaching, whereas Damei still has the beginner's stuff. But Damei isn't impressed - he says 'Well, the old fool can keep it. As far as I'm concerned, the very mind itself is Buddha!' That's independence in the Dharma - a realisation that you know for yourself beyond any doubt, that nobody gave you and nobody can take away from you. When you arrive at this place, it doesn't matter what anyone says, they won't convince you that you've misunderstood, any more than someone can persuade you that you don't actually like your favourite food, or your favourite music. It's just totally obvious to you - not as a matter of blind faith, but as a matter of fact. OK, but why 'Not mind, not Buddha'? There's more to Mazu's new slogan than an elaborate way of trolling his former students, however - and we can see this in another story about Mazu. A monk asked, 'Master, why do you say that mind is Buddha?' Mazu said, 'To stop babies from crying.' The monk said, 'What do you say when they stop crying?' Mazu said, 'Not mind, not Buddha.' The monk asked, 'Without using either of these teachings, how would you instruct someone?' Mazu said, 'I would say to them that it's not a thing.' The monk asked, 'How about when someone comes who has finished all of these?' Mazu said, 'I would teach them to experience the Great Way.' And what is the Great Way? 'The very mind itself is Buddha.' Practising with all this craziness Believe it or not, we can actually turn the story above into a concrete practice exercise. It's in several parts, and you may find that you need to spend a long time at a particular stage before moving on to the next part. That's fine - as you've already seen, it's ultimately a circular investigation, so wherever you are right now is fine. (Actually, it might be better to think of it as a spiral - each time around, you go a little deeper. Or, if you're mathematically inclined, you might prefer the image of a fractal, like the one shown above. As you zoom in to any part of a fractal, sooner or later you find yourself back where you started - a fractal contains infinitely many 'copies' of itself at deeper and deeper levels of 'zoom', just like Zen practice.) So here's one suggestion for how to work with this second story in a practice. Set yourself up in a meditation position, maybe take some time to get settled and focused, and then turn your attention to the practice themes given below. 1. Mind is Buddha Notice the sensations in your body, coming and going. Notice the sounds around you, coming and going. Notice the thoughts moving through your consciousness, coming and going. Notice the visual impressions - either what you see through open eyes, or the flickering behind closed eyelids, both are equally fine - coming and going. Now, notice that you are aware of each of these phenomena arising and passing. By definition, you must be - if you weren't aware of a sound, it wouldn't be there for you to notice it. By the time you notice it, you're already aware of it. So now ask yourself: what is it that is aware? What is it that 'knows' these impermanent phenomena? Who or what is 'witnessing' these momentary experiences? What is this 'awareness', which seems to be always present? Notice further that, while a particular experience may be disturbing or unpleasant on some level, the awareness itself is not disturbed - the disturbance is another, separate, arising within awareness. Awareness itself accepts whatever arises, calmly and freely letting it pass through. Our awareness actually already possesses the very qualities we might associate with awakening - clarity, equanimity, acceptance, even love. As we become more familiar with this awareness, we may find that we can come to 'rest in awareness' - panoramically aware of whatever comes and goes, but not pulled into the details of what's going on, not disturbed by whatever arises in your experience. You can simply abide as awareness, at peace. This is one meaning of 'mind is Buddha'. You have it already - all you have to do is to learn to rest in it. 2. Not mind, not Buddha However, we don't stop there. There's a subtle trap - we can turn 'awareness' into something special, something 'apart' from reality, something transcendent or other-worldly. Our practice can become an escape from the world, rather than a way of being in the world more freely and effectively. So, once you've established a clear sense of 'mind is Buddha', we then turn our attention to investigating what this 'awareness' actually is. Where is it? Is it a physical thing, and if so, does it have a shape, or a colour, or a size? How much does it weigh? Or is it something more like a thought, and if so, which thought is it, out of the multitude of thoughts arising and passing every minute? Can we, in fact, find anything which is truly separate from the phenomena of our experience - the sights, sounds, thoughts and feelings? This is a strange investigation, because ultimately there's nothing to find - and yet that's an unsatisfying answer, and one which must be seen many times before it really sinks in. Seek and don't find, seek and don't find, over and over, until ultimately we are forced to acknowledge that the 'mind' in which we were taking refuge in step 1 doesn't really seem to exist. 3. It is not a thing Once we have a sense of the unfindability of the mind, we can then go even further, and extend the same kind of investigation to everything else. We tend to regard ourselves as inhabiting a world of things - solid, fixed objects with dependable properties. But what do we actually experience? A momentary stream of sights, sounds, tactile sensations and thoughts, here today and gone tomorrow. From those experiences we form a kind of belief in the 'things in themselves' - but is this something we actually experience, or just an inference? The purpose of this stage of practice is not to refute the material existence of the world, but to explore more deeply how we experience the world, to see how we create something that isn't actually there by weaving together the information from our senses into something which is more than the sum of its parts. We come to see how the mind creates the sense of separation that leads us to believe that we are individual, disconnected things in a world of things - and we find that we can let that sense of separation soften and dissolve, until we arrive at a new way of seeing in which we're not separate at all. 4. Entering the Great Way - mind is Buddha Where do we go from here? The third step can be a bit unnerving, as the seeming solidity of the world we've inhabited for our whole lives starts to dissolve in front of our very eyes. At this point it's possible to miss the mark, and go down a rather nihilistic path - 'nothing really exists, everything is illusion, there's no point to anything.' At this point, one of the old Zen teachers might well whack you with a stick - does that sudden sharp pain exist, or not? If not, why are you glaring at me and rubbing your arm? But if so, then what happened to 'nothing really exists'? In fact, the aim of Zen is far from nihilistic. I'm not trying to convince you that nothing exists - I'm trying to show you how it really exists. Our experience of the world isn't nothing - it's this, here, happening right now. It's spring flowers, warm summer days, the chill of autumn, the frost of winter. It's the countless joys and sorrows of a human life, making our way through the world moment by moment, dealing with whatever life is throwing at us right now. It's what it always was - the only difference is how we relate to it. Do we spend our days fighting against a cold, hard, inflexible world of things which are never quite arranged to our liking, or can we flow with the unfolding of the universe, playing our own unique melody amidst a vast orchestra of sound all around us? The point is not that the world doesn't exist - the point is that our experience of the world is inseparable from the world itself. The way we relate to the world is the world, from our own subjective standpoint. To see this clearly - in effect, to recognise that the very mind itself is Buddha - is to be awake, to enter the Great Way. May you enter the Great Way soon - the world needs more people who see it through the eyes of a Buddha. The hidden gem among the BrahmaviharasImage courtesy of ReijiYamashina, CC BY-SA 3.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0>, via Wikimedia Commons.
An interesting occurrence
A friend of mine once told me about a meditation experience he'd had one evening. He sat down to do his usual practice, and then a spontaneous memory came to mind of his two daughters playing together. Like any sisters, their relationship is turbulent at times, but they get on pretty well, and sometimes they'll get into a groove and have a really good time together. Remembering one such occasion that had happened recently, my friend found that the memory brought up a very sweet, enjoyable feeling - a kind of combination of relaxation, enjoyment and peace of mind. And as he stayed with that feeling, it gradually built up, taking him into an experience of great joy and tranquillity. The emotion my friend was tapping into is called mudita in Pali - it's a word that doesn't translate directly into English, but something like 'appreciative joy' captures it pretty well. It's the feeling we get when something good happens, either for ourselves or someone else, and we take a moment to appreciate the good thing that's happened - to celebrate a moment of good fortune. If you've ever seen something and thought 'Ahh, that's nice', that's mudita. Mudita is one of the Brahmaviharas - the heart-opening practices found in early Buddhism. Of the four, mudita is probably the least well known, which is a bit of a shame - it's a really nice quality, and it's a powerful antidote to the rather cynical modern culture in the West, which would typically rather cut down people who are doing well than celebrate their good fortune. For many people, mudita is an easier 'way in' to the Brahmaviharas than any of the others. Loving kindness is the most popular, but it can seem fake, cheesy or a bit wet to some people. Compassion, on the other hand, may have the issue that it invites us to recognise the suffering all around us - that isn't always the most appealing thing to do! And equanimity is a bit of an odd one - we typically associate the idea of an open heart with feeling good, whereas equanimity has a neutral sound to it. But we all feel happy when something good happens to us, and so we have the raw material of mudita readily available, if only we know what we're looking for. My friend's experience also illustrates one of the less well-known aspects of the Brahmaviharas - if one of the four emotions can be generated, stabilised and focused on, it can lead us into jhana, the deep concentration states taught by the Buddha throughout the early discourses. Mudita is a particularly good way in to jhana, because the jhanas are essentially states of enhanced well-being - so if we start out with a practice that makes us feel good, we're halfway there already. This can be a much easier road into jhana than trying to find our way there with a more neutral object like the breath. Appreciative joy in Zen The Brahmaviharas are typically not taught directly in the Zen tradition (my Zen sangha, Zenways, being a notable exception). However, I would argue that the quality of appreciating what's present finds other expressions in east Asian culture, including Zen. The image at the top of this article is one of the sculptures of the wandering mountain ascetic Enku. After being orphaned when his mother was washed away in a flood when Enku was just seven years old, he took up spiritual practice, becoming a yamabushi, a term which literally means a 'mountain warrior'. Enku's practice blended Buddhism (of the Tendai school, rather than Zen), Daoism and Shinto. Amongst other things, Enku made a vow to carve 120,000 Buddha statues in his lifetime, and was thus almost always at work, giving freshly carved Buddhas to whoever he met. Many of his carvings survive to the present day, including the one pictured above. They can often be identified by their beautiful smile. Enku was also a poet - the poem at the beginning of the article is one of his. My Zen teacher has translated a collection of Enku's poems (which you can find here if you're interested). One might imagine that a spiritual practitioner's poems would all be concerned with lofty matters of enlightenment and meditation, but actually we find a wide (and very human) range of emotions on display. It's hard not to read a sense of longing into one of the poems written later in Enku's life: With time Maybe I could still mount the path And master Fukube Mountain Once again. And there's a definite chill in the air reading these words: Monk's Robe Mountain peak Dividing The stormy clouds; I think on Your coldness. Brr. But in a great many of Enku's works, his love and appreciation for the natural world shines through. As I heard Kurai Mountain's Greenfresh sacred sakaki trees Wherever you look- Beautiful as flowers. Or this: Monk's Robe Mountain Covered with mist. Spring is far But the wind carries the fragrance Of flowers. Sometimes, we may choose to practise and cultivate a quality like mudita explicitly. At other times, our practice may be more open and unstructured - and yet, as the heart opens naturally, the same qualities shine through, expressing themselves through our thoughts, words and deeds. I'll give the last word to Enku. Made for posterity, This Benzaiten goddess. Over long years and countless generations, Please celebrate happiness, Protect the people. Which kind of horse are you?
This week we're looking at case 32 in the Gateless Barrier, 'An Outsider Questions Buddha'. At first reading, we might well relate to Ananda's confusion regarding the encounter between the Buddha and the unnamed outsider! But let's dig into the story and see what we can make of it.
Who is the mysterious stranger? In the context of Chinese Buddhism (where Zen originated), an 'outsider' refers to someone following a non-Buddhist path. Sometimes, outsiders are looked down upon - people like to come up with schemes which 'rank' different spiritual paths against each other (mysteriously, the author's own path always comes out on top), and even Zen has one of these, the 'five kinds of Zen'. The paths are ranked as follows, from lowest to highest:
Note that the poor old outsider only scores two Zens out of five on this list, whereas of course I, being a big fan of Silent Illumination, score a perfect five Zens out of five. Good for me! As you can probably tell, I don't take this kind of ranking terribly seriously. Multiple paths have evolved because different people respond to different teachings and practices. In my view (and the view of the Lotus Sutra, if you want scriptural authority), they're all valid approaches, none 'better' or 'worse' than any other. Nevertheless, in this koan, the 'outsider' - who we might reasonably assume doesn't know the first thing about Buddhism - is seen to have a profound awakening, while Ananda, the Buddha's lifelong attendant and enough of an expert on the Buddha's teachings that he was able to recite them all after the Buddha's death, doesn't have a clue what just happened. So this koan performs a similarly subversive function to case 31, where the unnamed woman at the side of the road is revealed to have a profound understanding surpassing that of an obedient Zen monk. The bottom line is the same - wisdom can show up anywhere. So be alert! The spoken and the unspoken OK, so we realise that the koan is telling us to take the outsider seriously - but when we try to do so, we hit another barrier. What the heck does the outsider's question mean? As is fairly common with these things, the three commentaries I consulted all explain this line differently, so I'll give you my take on it, for whatever it's worth. In the realm of Zen (and contemplative practice more generally), there are certain matters which can usefully be discussed - 'the spoken'. If you want to practise meditation, it's helpful to have a technique, and it's useful to discuss your practice with a teacher to confirm that you're doing it right. (You probably are, but it's still good to check.) A good meditation teacher should be able to offer one or more methods of practice clearly enough that you can figure out what you're meant to be doing, and should be willing to discuss your practice with you. Beyond the nuts and bolts of practice, there's also quite a bit more to Buddhism which can usefully be discussed - core teachings like the Four Noble Truths, the Eightfold Path, the ethical precepts and so on. All of this is amenable to description and discussion, and it's worthwhile to learn about it. At the same time, however, there's a limit to what can be reached through words. Words originate from, and relate to, the world of concepts - thoughts, descriptions, ideas, theories. No matter how nifty it is, a concept can never exactly replicate an experience - it can only point to it. If I say 'this tea I'm drinking is warm and minty', that description does not give you the experience of drinking my tea - it only allows you to imagine how my tea might taste, based on tea you may have tasted yourself at some point in the past. To put it in more Zen terms, a painting of a rice cake cannot satisfy hunger. In Zen practice, we're interested in exploring reality in an experiential way, not just a conceptual one - and so, at some point, we have to accept that what we're looking for can't be found in words. And so there's a dimension of practice which cannot be discussed - 'the unspoken'. Now, the outsider is no dummy. He clearly gets both of these points - and yet he hasn't broken through to awakening yet. This is a frustrating time! Your teacher says you're doing the right thing, everything seems to be lined up properly... and yet nothing happens in your practice. What gives? This is the outsider's question: he isn't asking about either the spoken or the unspoken, and yet he's reached an impasse. Help! Four kinds of student, or four attitudes in practice After the outsider has gone, Ananda goes to the Buddha and essentially says 'What the heck just happened?' Poor old Ananda - he's always the butt of the joke in these stories, despite being a wonderfully diligent attendant to the Buddha for his whole life, and a famously nice guy to boot. Honestly, I think we could all do with a bit more Ananda in our lives. But I digress. The Buddha's answer is one of those references where you just have to know the context for it to make any sense. The business with the horse and the whip is a reference to a story from early Buddhism about 'four kinds of horses', a metaphor for four kinds of students. (The full story can be found in AN4.113.) The 'best' horse is the one from the koan - it goes as soon as it sees the mere shadow of the whip. It's well trained, it understands what it needs to do, and so the slightest suggestion is enough to get it moving. This represents the committed, intuitive, inquisitive meditation student, who only needs a hint from a teacher in order to go off and explore for themselves. The Buddha is saying that the outsider is someone like this - even the subtlest of responses was enough to open things up for him. The second-best horse is one which needs to feel the brush of the whip against its mane before it'll get moving. This represents a student who is diligent enough but rather unimaginative, and needs to be given step-by-step instructions. If they encounter something new, they're likely to come back for further instructions rather than explore themselves, or say something like 'Well you didn't tell me to do that!' The third-best horse is one which needs to feel the whip against its body. This represents a student who needs to be reminded over and over what to do, and will very easily wander off and start doing something else entirely if the teacher isn't careful. This type of student will often ask basically the same question over and over - perhaps because they're unwilling to accept the answer. The fourth-best horse is one which, rather grimly, needs to be whipped to the bone in order to get a response. (Caveat: this is not an article about how to work with actual horses. Nor do I recommend whipping actual meditation students to the bone.) This represents someone who is holding so tightly to their current world view that it's almost impossible to get through to them - whatever the teacher says is filtered through their existing set of ideas about how the world works, and most of it ends up on the floor. (Chan teacher Guo Gu has joked that there's also a fifth kind of student, the 'dead horse', who doesn't respond at all no matter how much you flog them.) Now, the trouble with a list like this is that we immediately start wondering which kind of horse we are. 'Oh, I'm no good, I'm clearly the rubbish horse.' 'I've always been the top horse, don't you know.' 'Well, I think I'm a reasonable horse, but maybe I'm actually the bad one after all?' Personally, I find it more helpful to approach this teaching in terms of four attitudes, any of which we might be holding at any given moment. One of the things we discover through practice is that we aren't fixed entities, which means that it simply can't ever be true to say 'Oh, I'm this kind of horse, and that's just how it is - I'll never change.' On the other hand, when I look at my own practice, I can definitely see times when I've been able to take a fragment of a clue from one of my teachers and pull on that thread until something interesting happens. On the other hand, as I was writing the paragraph above about the student who says 'Well you didn't tell me to do that!', I could imagine it in my own voice - so, yeah, I find myself in that position a lot of the time, being rather literal-minded and prone to a lack of imagination at times. The third category is a bit more embarrassing, but I've had plenty of those moments as well - I'll have some kind of insight into my conditioning, then briefly wonder why nobody has ever pointed it out to me before, and then turn bright red as I remember the hundreds of times over the years that my friends have done exactly that. I can even see aspects of the fourth horse in myself, usually showing up as beliefs I didn't even realise I was holding until something challenges them strongly enough to shatter them outright. Very often, when I've been 'stuck' in practice - in that same holding pattern described by the outsider in the koan, seemingly doing all the right things but not going anywhere - it's been because I'm subtly holding onto something, and change is impossible until I'm willing and able to let go of it. Perhaps, then, rather than looking at this as a kind of personality test with a fixed answer, we can instead turn it into a question. What's going on in your practice right now? Are you exploring, are you snug in your comfort zone, or are you stuck in the desert of 'nothing happening at all'? Is there anything your teacher says on a regular basis that gets a 'yeah, yeah, I know all that' reaction from you - and, if so, what would happen if, purely as an experiment, you supposed that actually you don't already know 'all that', and instead approached it with fresh eyes? How would it be to bring a genuine question mark into your practice, right now? What might you find if you could let it all go, even for a moment? I hope you find out! What's Brahma got to do with Buddhism?Recently I wrote about four dimensions of cultivation in meditation practice. Someone in my Wednesday night class expressed an interest in more on heart-opening practices, and so a couple of weeks ago we took another look at loving kindness practice, aka metta. In this week's class we'll be revisiting the second of the so-called Brahmaviharas, compassion practice, and looking at the role of compassion in early Buddhism.
Before we get to that, though, why are these practices called 'Brahmaviharas' anyway? A 'vihara' is an 'abode' or 'dwelling place' - Buddhist monasteries are sometimes called 'viharas' - so 'Brahmavihara' means 'Abode of Brahma'. But isn't Brahma a Hindu god? What does that have to do with Buddhism? Let's find out! The relationship between Buddhism and other Indian religions Buddhism didn't come into being in isolation. Like everything else, it arose partly in response to its environment. In fact, scholars who've really done their homework have found quite a few places where Buddhist teaching is clearly a direct response to something else which was being taught at the time. On many occasions in the Pali canon (the earliest record of the life and teachings of the historical Buddha), we see a follower of another tradition come to speak to the Buddha, and it's obvious from the Buddha's response that he was well versed in that person's tradition as well as his own. So when he disagreed with something put forth by another teacher, he wouldn't just say 'No, it isn't like that, here's my teaching instead.' Instead, he'll very often reply in the language of the questioner, but putting a subtle spin on the discussion to reveal the weaknesses in the other person's position. Then, when the other person admitted defeat, the Buddha was well placed to give his own teachings. We can see one example of this in Majjhima Nikaya 99 (I've included the link so you can read the whole thing if you want, but I'll cite the relevant excerpts below), and in the process we'll find out what Brahma has to do with Buddhist heart-opening practices. The story begins Thus have I heard. At one time the Buddha was staying near Sāvatthī in Jeta's Grove, Anāthapiṇḍika's monastery. Now at that time the brahmin student Subha, Todeyya's son, was residing in Sāvatthī at a certain householder's home on some business. Then Subha said to that householder, "Householder, I have heard that Sāvatthī does not lack for perfected ones. What ascetic or brahmin might we pay homage to today?" "Sir, the Buddha is staying near Sāvatthī in Jeta's Grove, Anāthapiṇḍika's monastery. You can pay homage to him." Acknowledging that householder, Subha went to the Buddha and exchanged greetings with him. As usual, the discourse begins with 'thus have I heard'. These discourses were preserved in oral tradition for hundreds of years before ever being written down. So they start with an acknowledgement that this is the version of the story received from whoever had previously memorised it, generation after generation. (Remember this - we'll come back to it later!) The story begins with Subha, a 'brahmin student'. Brahminism was a major religion prevalent at the time of the Buddha, based on the Vedas, the very earliest Indian texts (the oldest of which are thought to date back to 1400 BCE). Brahminism can be thought of as a precursor to classical Hinduism. One of the core ideas in Brahminism is a supreme being, Brahma, who created everything, including living beings; each of us, according to Brahminism, possesses an atta (Pali) or atman (Sanskrit), a kind of fixed, immortal, perfect 'divine nature' which transmigrates from life to life. Conversely, one of the core tenets of early Buddhism is anatta, or anatman - the Buddha said on many occasions that whatever we examine in our experience, through any of the senses, we cannot find this unchanging, utterly reliable 'essence' of selfhood. Here already we can see a way in which Buddhism was reacting to its environment. Brahmins promoted the atman, but Buddhism was saying 'Nope, ain't no atman to be found, look for yourself.' When modern teachers talk about anatta or anatman, we tend to explain it rather differently, because it's time-consuming to have to explain the classical Indian world view which probably means nothing to our listeners today, only to challenge something that people didn't believe in anyway. But when we go back to the early texts to try to figure out what's going on, it's helpful to know some of this stuff - otherwise it just doesn't really make any sense. Anyway, Subha, the brahmin student, hears about the Buddha and decides to go and visit him. Subha is pretty confident that Brahminism is the real deal, and so he opens strong, telling the Buddha that the brahmins say that renunciates like the Buddha don't know what they're talking about - which the Buddha effortlessly shoots down, of course. But Subha isn't done - he keeps challenging the Buddha, again and again. This part of the discourse is really, really long, so I've omitted it, but it's worth a read if you like that kind of thing. Eventually, though, Subha finally cracks. "Master Gotama, I have heard that the ascetic Gotama teaches a path to companionship with Brahmā. Please teach me that path." "Well then, student, listen and pay close attention, I will speak." "Yes, sir," replied Subha. ('Master Gotama' here refers to the Buddha, 'Gotama' being his family name.) Subha has admitted defeat - he's tried every strategy he can think of to find a flaw in the Buddha, and none of it's worked. And so, as he starts to realise that he's actually in the presence of a pretty wise person, he decides to ask a real question for the first time - a question which is about his own spiritual practice, rather than one intended to expose a weakness in the Buddha. Now, at least as far as we can see from the Pali canon, the Buddha didn't spend his days talking about hanging out with Brahma. Famously, the Buddha focused instead on one central matter: suffering, and what could be done to alleviate it. Nevertheless, here Subha is showing the first sign of a genuine openness to what the Buddha has to teach, and so rather than shoot him down, the Buddha instead goes with it, and says that yes, he does know a path to companionship with Brahma. And what is that path? Seeing the world as Brahma does “And what is a path to companionship with Brahmā? Firstly, a mendicant meditates spreading a heart full of loving kindness to one direction, and to the second, and to the third, and to the fourth. In the same way above, below, across, everywhere, all around, they spread a heart full of loving kindness to the whole world—abundant, expansive, limitless, free of enmity and ill will. When the heart's release by loving kindness has been developed like this, any limited deeds they've done don't remain or persist there. Suppose there was a powerful horn blower. They'd easily make themselves heard in the four quarters. In the same way, when the heart's release by loving kindness has been developed like this, any limited deeds they've done don't remain or persist there. This is a path to companionship with Brahmā. Furthermore, a mendicant meditates spreading a heart full of compassion … They meditate spreading a heart full of appreciative joy … They meditate spreading a heart full of equanimity to one direction, and to the second, and to the third, and to the fourth. In the same way above, below, across, everywhere, all around, they spread a heart full of equanimity to the whole world—abundant, expansive, limitless, free of enmity and ill will. When the heart's release by equanimity has been developed and cultivated like this, any limited deeds they've done don't remain or persist there. Suppose there was a powerful horn blower. They'd easily make themselves heard in the four quarters. In the same way, when the heart's release by equanimity has been developed and cultivated like this, any limited deeds they've done don't remain or persist there. This too is a path to companionship with Brahmā." These are our familiar heart-opening practices - loving kindness, compassion, appreciative joy, equanimity. But whereas in other places they're called the 'heart's release through loving kindess' (etc.), here the Buddha presents them as a 'path to companionship with Brahma'. Isn't this deceitful? Is this really a 'path to companionship with Brahma'? The Buddha was a big fan of upaya, 'skilful means'. He believed that there was no one-size-fits-all teaching, but instead each person had their own unique obstacles in spiritual practice, and thus a range of techniques and presentations were required to reach everyone. Sometimes this meant giving one practice instead of another, and sometimes it meant dressing up the Dharma in different language. This kind of 'Trojan horse' approach could perhaps be seen as deceitful. On the other hand, when we're deceitful, it's usually because we're looking to get something out of it. Perhaps you could make the case that the Buddha's looking to get a new student out of it, but the Buddha would most likely have countered that he was simply intending to help as many people as he could to find the end of suffering. This is a big topic, and one which I'm not going to resolve in this article - maybe I'll come back to it in the future. For now, though, we might consider how it would be to dwell with Brahma, to see the world as an omnipotent being like Brahma might. Because if we can learn to see the world the way Brahma does, that's a form of companionship - right? An omnipotent being would have no need for hatred, cruelty, jealousy or agitation - no need to protect 'me and mine' from threats, because when you're omnipotent, nothing can threaten you. So we might imagine that a being like Brahma would instead see the world through a lens tinted with the opposites of those qualities - loving kindness, compassion, appreciative joy, and equanimity. By dwelling in these states ourselves, then, we too can come to see the world as Brahma might. And if you want to know what it's like to see the world that way - well, head over to the Audio page and try the guided meditations! So how does Subha respond to this bait-and-switch? When he had spoken, Subha said to him, "Excellent, Master Gotama! Excellent! As if he were righting the overturned, or revealing the hidden, or pointing out the path to the lost, or lighting a lamp in the dark so people with good eyes can see what's there, Master Gotama has made the teaching clear in many ways. I go for refuge to Master Gotama, to the teaching, and to the mendicant Saṅgha. From this day forth, may Master Gotama remember me as a lay follower who has gone for refuge for life." He seems pretty satisfied with what he's heard. The discourse ends with Subha going home, meeting people along the way and telling them how great the Buddha is. A closing note on compassion Compassion can be a surprisingly slippery notion. I've written about it previously, so I won't go into too much detail here, but to recap briefly, compassion is the recognition of suffering in oneself or another, coupled with the earnest desire to alleviate that suffering. It is not the same as pity (which distances us from 'that poor person over there'), nor an excessive empathy for others (which leaves us overwhelmed with their emotions), and it doesn't always mean 'being nice to people' (which in some cases may actually perpetuate their suffering rather than alleviating it). Compassion is a very big deal in Mahayana Buddhism, the later tradition of which Zen is a part. Sometimes, though, it can seem like compassion is not such a big deal in the early teachings. Later writers have portrayed the early Buddhist path as one leading only to personal liberation from suffering - and to hell with everyone else. I don't see it that way, though. Starting right at the beginning, we have the example of the Buddha. According to the Pali canon, in the immediate aftermath of his enlightenment, he briefly considered cutting himself off from the noisy, troublesome world of people and simply enjoying the bliss of enlightenment for the rest of his life. But he didn't - clearly not, otherwise we wouldn't have a 2,500-year-old Buddhist tradition today. In fact, the Buddha devoted the rest of his life to sharing his path, trying to help people find an end to their own suffering, devising numerous practices and skilful means in an attempt to reach as many people as possible. Furthermore, if his followers really had only been interested in dealing with their own suffering and didn't care about anyone else, there would have been no reason to preserve the tradition. Remember I said that these discourses were preserved in oral tradition for hundreds of years - that's many generations of people dedicating themselves to memorising inconceivably vast amounts of information by modern standards, and finding enough people in the next generation to ensure the continued survival of the teachings. This is also a form of compassion - it might not look like exactly the compassion of a charity aid worker flying into a conflict zone, or whatever might come to mind when you think of 'compassion', but these are people dedicating their lives to a path leading to the end of suffering, and I personally feel immense gratitude toward them for doing so. May you be free from suffering and the causes of suffering. The primacy of direct experience in Buddhist practice
This week we're looking at case 31 in the Gateless Barrier, 'Zhaozhou investigates a woman.' (For those of you who like details, I've slightly tweaked Thomas Cleary's translation to sound better to modern ears, at least in my opinion. Sorry, Dr Cleary.)
This koan makes me chuckle every time I read it. The trolling game is strong here, both from the unnamed old woman, and from Zen master Zhaozhou, who we've previously seen in quite a few koans now (case 1, case 7, case 11, case 14 and case 19). As usual, though, there's more going on here than meets the eye - both teachers are making the same point, in slightly different ways, and even the title of the koan itself is a similar tactic. So let's take a look at the koan and see what's going on. Encounter 1: A monk meets a woman We start with a monk on a pilgrimage, heading to the sacred mountain Taishan. Mount Tai is a real mountain in China (the highest point in Shandong province according to Wikipedia), but in a Zen context it also represents enlightenment, or certain transformational peak experiences along the spiritual path. Koans are usually more symbolic than literal, so we can interpret this as a monk who is figuratively searching for enlightenment and asking for someone to point him in the right direction. The nameless woman is an interesting character. In Zen koans, women often represent intuitive wisdom, as contrasted with the more scholarly, intellectual learning of men, and the woman generally 'wins' the exchange - the man's head is too clouded with received ideas about what's 'supposed' to be going on, whereas the woman is unburdened and thus freer to see clearly what's actually there. (You find a similar dynamic between 'northerners' and 'southerners' - again, the north of China was associated with a scholarly approach to the Dharma, whereas the south was considered rough and uneducated - and as a result southerners often have an easier time with Zen. See, for example, the story of the sixth ancestral master of Zen, Huineng.) In any case, here we have a chance encounter with someone who remains nameless, but who is in touch with some kind of deep, intuitive wisdom. If we look at our own lives, we may start to notice that we have these kinds of experiences too - little interactions which disclose wisdom from unexpected sources. If we limit ourselves to learning only from 'my teacher', and look down on everyone else, we close ourselves off to a powerful source of insight in the midst of daily life. So one implication of this koan is that we should stay alert - who knows when we'll meet a Buddha in disguise? Getting back to the story, the monk asks the woman which is the way to the mountain. Her answer is also pretty interesting - 'go straight ahead'. There's no funny business here, no seventeen-stage process to enlightenment - just go straight. Some of the Buddhist traditions offer complex systems with many levels, stages and moving parts, but Zen tends to offer a simpler approach. Just sit; or just ask one question, over and over. Ultimately, all of spiritual practice is about letting go, not accumulating more and more, and although Zen's stark simplicity can sometimes come across as austere, it's all in the service of reminding us of this basic truth. Just go straight ahead. Keep it simple. So the monk carries on down the path, following the woman's instructions - so far, so good. But here's where the koan has a sudden plot twist. As the monk walks away, suddenly the woman says - in what we can imagine to be a pretty disdainful tone of voice - 'A fine monk - and so he goes!' In other words, 'There he goes, just like all the rest - hopeless!' Clearly this dismissive statement had an impact on the monk, because it would appear that he repeated the story to one of the other monks at the temple, who felt strongly enough about it to take the matter to his teacher, in the second 'chapter' of the koan. Encounter 2: Another monk goes to Zhaozhou I can relate to this (presumably) second monk's confusion. What did the first guy do wrong? He asked for advice, he took it - and then the advice-giver had a go at him! What's up with that? As a person who tends to be very keen on following rules, I can easily imagine myself in the position of either of these two monks, confused and a bit distressed to see someone criticised for doing what they were told to do. Surely doing what you're told (provided what you're told is ethical, of course!) is the one guaranteed strategy to avoid blame? So the second monk goes to his teacher, and asks him what's going on here. Zhaozhou says 'OK, leave it with me, I'll go and check it out.' And he's true to his word - he goes and meets the woman, and has the same interaction with her that the monk did. But then we get our next and final plot twist. Zhaozhou comes back to his group, who have been waiting expectantly to hear what happened when he met the woman - and he merely says 'Yep, I've investigated that for you.' Mic drop, end of koan. What? The importance of direct personal experience Changing the subject for a moment, I don't have a driver's licence. I had maybe two driving lessons with my Dad about 25 years ago, which didn't go enormously well - Dad's knowledge of driving was sufficiently intuitive to him that he didn't really know how to explain what he was doing, and so his advice for how to operate the clutch wasn't actually particularly accurate, and I kept stalling. Eventually a couple of local lads came and stood outside the car, making fun of me for not being able to drive off. Good times. Anyway, the point is that I have not undergone any particular training to drive a car, nor spent very much time doing so - roughly an hour of practice across two sessions two and a half decades ago. But how important is that, actually? I mean, I've seen people drive cars. I've sat in the passenger seat many times, in all kinds of different weather conditions. I know the rules of the road, I know what the pedals do, and my granddad taught me quite a bit about how the engine works, so I probably know more about cars than many drivers. I have tons of knowledge about driving, really. That should be good enough, right? So you'd be happy to jump in a car with me and let me drive you down the motorway, at night, in the rain? (This is not a real offer of transportation.) Hopefully this example makes clear that there's a huge difference between first-hand practical experience and second-hand knowledge. I might know a great deal about pistons and whatnot, but that doesn't translate into the practical skill of being able to change lanes on a motorway in a blizzard. In the same way, meditation is, first and foremost, something that you do. Reading books and articles, listening to talks, absorbing and debating Buddhist theory and so on can be a very enjoyable and interesting way to spend one's time if you're so inclined (which I am) - but it's not the same thing as practice. Indeed, this distinction is so important that you'll often find Zen teachers (who are prone to taking things to extremes to make a point) saying that if you actually do Zen practice, you'll gain all the understanding of the sutras without having to read them, and if you don't do Zen practice, the sutras are totally worthless. Personally I wouldn't go quite that far, but there's definitely a valid point behind the hyperbole. Coming back to the koan In the koan, then, we see two different attempts to point this out. First, we have a monk who wants to know the way to enlightenment, and asks a random stranger for advice, then blindly does what she says. That isn't always a good plan - and so the woman decides to needle him a bit, criticising him for his blind willingness to follow the lead of someone he doesn't even know. Just like all the other monks - following what someone else says, like a herd of sheep! Again, here's that Zen tendency toward exaggeration to make a point. Of course we need to take advice from other people, ideally those who are wiser than us. It's important to have access to a teacher when we're getting started, so that we learn good, time-tested practices and don't fall into bad habits that will only get harder to train ourselves out of as time goes on. After a while, we find that we start to develop a kind of 'spiritual intuition' about how our practice is unfolding and what we might need at any given point in time, and so we can become a bit more independent. (One of the criteria that the Buddha sometimes gave for a stream enterer, someone who had reached the first stage of awakening, was that they had become 'independent in the Dharma'.) However, it's still really important to have a relationship with a teacher! Our capacity for self-deception is vast, and it's very often the case that someone else can see things in us that we're totally blind to ourselves. Our teachers won't always get it right, won't always understand where we're coming from and won't always give us the right advice, but it's still much, much better than not having that input at all. We've seen many spiritual 'guru' figures who've gone completely off the rails, and they're almost always operating in a context without any challenging feedback, either from their own teacher or from a peer. Not a great idea. So we have this first encounter, where the woman is essentially teasing the monk for being too willing to follow someone else's lead blindly, rather than working things out for himself. But the koan isn't done yet - we have a second part. What happens next is that another monk becomes concerned. 'This weird, unpleasant thing happened - what's up with that? I'd better ask my teacher.' And so he goes to Zhaozhou and asks him to check it out. And Zhaozhou does - but when he comes back, his report is spectacularly unhelpful. How come? Actually, this second monk is making a variation of the same mistake. Something has come up which has troubled the monk - but, rather than figure it out for himself, his first instinct is to run to the teacher. That's an instinct which runs directly counter to developing that 'independence in the Dharma' that the Buddha spoke about, a self-reliance based on personal experience. To make matters worse, the monk is trading a first-hand, personal exploration of the issue for a second-hand report of what's going on. Rather than learning to drive for himself, he's reading a book about cars. Zhaozhou's deliberately minimalist reply underscores the point that personal experience is, ultimately, a private affair. Zhaozhou went and had his own encounter with the woman at the side of the road - and that was his experience. No amount of description can give someone else that experience. If you want to meet the woman at the side of the road, you have to go there yourself, not look at someone else's Instagram photos. Go and have your own adventures The final sting in the tail is the title of the koan itself: 'Zhaozhou investigates a woman'. This title prepares us to hear a story about Zhaozhou's latest wacky adventure - who's he going to meet this time, what crazy Zen thing is he going to say? We know Zhaozhou by now, so we're sure it's going to be good. Let's grab some popcorn and see what happens! But that very instinct that arises within us at the sight of the title is basically the same 'mistake' made by both monks in the koan. Rather than doing our own practice - having our own adventures - we instead sit back and consume someone else's experiences second-hand. Like I said before, I do believe there's value in this kind of second-hand Zen. (If I didn't, I wouldn't be writing these articles. Sometimes I wonder if I shouldn't, actually!) Personally, I love reading about this stuff - it's interesting, it's inspiring, and when I'm actually doing my practice I'll often find that something I read will slot into place and become clear. My teacher's teacher on the Theravada side, the venerable Ayya Khema, used to say that insight is an 'understood experience' - there's no point having an experience if you don't understand it sufficiently for it to impact the way you see the world, and learning some of the 'theory' stuff can help with that understanding. The point is rather that intellectual understanding is no substitute for practical experience - and, actually, without the practical experience, we may think that we've understood something when really we haven't. I can't tell you how many times I had some kind of insight or experience which I only realised many days later was actually pointing to something that I thought I'd understood previously. (Actually, that's happened often enough that these days I reserve a healthy scepticism toward everything I think I really have now understood! For all I know, another insight is just around the corner, waiting to turn the whole thing on its head all over again.) So how do we do this - how do we explore these things for ourselves? It's actually pretty simple. 1. Get a teacher. You don't have to like everything about them, but it helps if you can tolerate them and they don't appear to be totally crazy. 2. Get one or more practice methods. Maybe that's Silent Illumination, or working with a koan. Or maybe you prefer early Buddhism, with their concentration, insight and heart-opening methods. It doesn't really matter, but you'll need something that you can tolerate well enough that you're willing to keep doing it. 3. Do the practice. Use your methods. Keep going, day after day, week after week, year after year. The methods might appear to do nothing at first. Give them time to work. Check in with a teacher if you're not sure, but don't be surprised if the teacher says 'Yep, sounds fine, just keep going.' 4. Keep a question mark in mind. Buddhist practice is designed to change the way we see the world - and that means letting go of the way we currently see it. We have to be willing to question our experience. Different methods will approach this in different ways - the question mark may be quite subtle in Silent Illumination, whereas it's right there in a koan like 'Who am I?' Either way, though, it's important to maintain a sense of investigation in your practice - looking to see what's really going on, rather than allowing yourself to assume that you already know. That's it - like I said, simple. Of course, 'simple' and 'easy' are not the same thing, and this path can be pretty challenging at times. Again, teachers can be a great support when we're going through a rough patch. And despite what the koan says, don't be afraid to ask for help. A good teacher will ultimately help you to become independent in the Dharma, rather than making you dependent on them - but we all have to start somewhere. May you have many wonderful Dharma adventures of your own! Letting the light of your heart shine forthA few weeks ago I published an article setting out four possible dimensions of cultivation in a meditation practice: samadhi (focusing the mind), wisdom (investigating who and what we really are), energy practices (promoting good health and longevity), and heart-opening practices. Over the next few weeks we'll take a closer look at this last category of practices.
I've previously written about the Big Four heart opening practices in early Buddhism (most commonly known as the Brahmaviharas) - loving kindness (metta), compassion (karuna), sympathetic joy (mudita), and equanimity (upekkha) - so, rather than repeat what I've already said in those articles, I'll see if I can find something fresh to say. Let's see how I get on! Why bother with heart opening - isn't Buddhism all about enlightenment? In the Buddha's earliest recorded discourses, those of the Pali Canon, he says over and over that he teaches one thing and one thing only - suffering and the end of suffering. (If you wanted to nitpick, you might say that's two things.) Indeed, what seems to have been the Buddha's primary 'curriculum' for his monastic students, the so-called 'gradual training', is very much focused on the alleviation of personal suffering, starting with ethical behaviour (to live a wholesome life and remove the immediate causes of suffering both for oneself and others), to focus the mind with the jhanas (providing a mind which is well suited to insight practice), and then the cultivation of wisdom aimed at uprooting the Three Poisons of greed, hatred and delusion which give rise to suffering. Opening the heart doesn't usually feature in that scheme at all - in fact, my teacher Leigh has a chart on his website showing the various presentations of the Gradual Training, and the Brahmaviharas only feature once in 32 discussions of the path. So can we infer from this that heart-opening practices are not really a big deal, not really favoured by the Buddha, not really something of interest? Nope! Because when the Buddha does talk about heart-opening practices - and he mentions them frequently - it's invariably in glowing terms. Here's one example, taken from (appropriately enough) the Discourse on the Cultivation of Loving Kindness (Iti 27): Mendicants, of all the grounds for making worldly merit, none are worth a sixteenth part of the heart’s release by love. Surpassing them, the heart’s release by love shines and glows and radiates. It’s like how the radiance of all the stars is not worth a sixteenth part of the moon’s radiance. Surpassing them, the moon’s radiance shines and glows and radiates. In the same way, of all the grounds for making worldly merit, none are worth a sixteenth part of the heart’s release by love. Surpassing them, the heart’s release by love shines and glows and radiates. It’s like the time after the rainy season when the sky is clear and cloudless. And when the sun rises, it dispels all the darkness from the sky as it shines and glows and radiates. In the same way, of all the grounds for making worldly merit, none are worth a sixteenth part of the heart’s release by love. Surpassing them, the heart’s release by love shines and glows and radiates. Wow! OK OK, but I still don't like metta meditation - I don't like the phrases, they're stupid! It's true, the traditional formulation of loving kindness practice is a barrier for many people. The instructions for metta in the early discourses are pretty sparse - essentially, the Buddha just says 'meditate spreading love in all directions', which is all well and good if you can just do that, but if not, it doesn't give you a lot to go on. So when a later generation of Buddhist commentators came along and tried to expand and explain the Buddha's sometimes cryptic teachings, they developed a more systematic way of generating loving kindness, based around the repetition of certain phrases, such as 'May you be happy', 'May you be well', 'May you be at peace' and so on. The basic idea (as detailed on my Brahmaviharas page) is that you work with a series of people, starting with those you already feel warmly towards, then gradually increasing the difficulty until you can send loving kindness even to your enemies, using the phrases to evoke the feelings. The trouble is that many people find that the phrases don't evoke the feelings! If anything, they can have the opposite effect, coming across as a bit cheesy, a bit artificial, a bit make-believe, with the result that the heart actually ends up more contracted. Oops. So many teachers (including my teacher Leigh, and his teacher, the venerable Ayya Khema) instead teach metta using visualisations. For example, you might imagine a golden light shining in your heart, and as that golden light touches the people around you, it transmits loving kindness. Or you might imagine a flower garden in your heart, and each person you bring to mind gets a bouquet of your heart's flowers. (For a big list of visualisations, complete with full written instructions and, in most cases, guided audio by Ayya Khema, check out this page on Leigh's website.) That's no good either, I can't visualise! Tough customer, huh? Actually, I can relate - while most people seem to be naturally fairly skilled at visualisation, a small minority of us, myself included, are much less visual. Personally, I find that I can get a brief flash of a mental image, but I can't sustain it for any length of time - certainly not long enough to do some of the very elaborate mental image-based meditations I've sometimes attempted. However, a tip that's really helped me with these kinds of meditations is that you don't actually have to see what's going on in your mind's eye. If you're able to imagine something, whether or not you 'see' it, that actually works well enough in the vast majority of cases. So although I can't necessarily 'visualise' the flower garden in my heart, I can 'imagine' what it would be like to have a flower garden in my heart, and how it might be to give flowers to people, one after another. And when I'm calm and focused on keeping this imaginary scenario going, I find that it will often help to spark a feeling of loving kindness - which is, after all, the point! The phrases and visualisations in metta meditation are really just a means to an end, the end being to get in touch with the emotional quality of loving kindness - so anything you can do which gets the feeling going is good enough. For me, I'll often skip the more elaborate phrases and visualisations entirely and instead just call to mind a memory involving a positive interaction with someone dear to me - that's usually enough to light the flame of metta in my heart, after which I can simply stay with that feeling for the rest of the meditation session. Sometimes I'll bring in people one after another, sometimes I'll rest directly in a non-specific, universal sense of metta - both are beautiful practices. OK, I'm convinced, I'll give it a try - do you have a guided meditation I can use? As it happens, I do - check out my Audio page, where you'll find a whole host of metta/loving kindness guided meditations. There are two ten-minute recordings in the shorter practices section - one using phrases, the other using a golden light visualisation - and two fifteen-minute recordings in the heart-opening practices section which are slightly more elaborate. Give them all a try and see how you get on - and maybe you'll find out why the Buddha said that of all the grounds for making worldly merit, none are worth even a sixteenth part of a well-cultivated loving kindness practice. May all beings be happy! Or: how come I keep getting into arguments in the supermarket?Most of the time, the approach taken in early Buddhism is pretty straightforward. Want to learn to focus your mind? Practise paying attention - and here's how you do that. Want to learn more about who and what you really are? Investigate your sense of self and how you relate to the world - and here's a technique for that. Want to open your heart? Practise generating emotions like love and compassion - and here's the method. And so on.
It isn't all plain sailing, though. There's a teaching at the heart of early Buddhism called 'dependent origination' which is considered fundamental enough that the Buddha is reported to have said 'One who sees dependent origination sees the Dhamma (the truth of the Buddhist teachings); one who sees the Dhamma sees dependent origination'. Sounds promising, but what's it all about? Well, it's often presented in the form of the 'twelve links' - a sequence of things, many of which are rather mysterious, and which don't always obviously connect to one another. It's tricky to understand, and you can find many lengthy books which attempt to unpack the subject - mostly disagreeing with each other. In this article, we'll follow the approach set out by my teacher Leigh Brasington and his free book Dependent Origination and Emptiness, which offers an unusually clear way to get started with the concept. Then we'll see why this is something we might want to explore after all! Dependent origination in a nutshell One of the simplest ways of getting into dependent origination is through a story found in one of the earliest collections of Buddhist discourses, Sutta Nipata 4.11, titled 'Quarrels and Disputes'. An unnamed student asks the Buddha 'Where do quarrels and disputes come from?' In other words, how come people are arguing and fighting all the time? (Take a look at Twitter if you don't believe me...) The Buddha replies 'Quarrels and disputes come from what we hold dear.' So why do we hold things dear? Because of desire, the Buddha replies. And where does desire come from? From pleasure and pain. And where do pleasure and pain come from? From sense contact - that is, from one or more of our sense organs (the eye, the ear etc.) encountering a sense object (a pleasing or displeasing sight, sound etc.). The discourse goes on one step further - more on that later - but this has already given us enough to get a handle on what's happening here. Suppose I walk into Tesco, and I see a bag of cookies. My eye (the sense organ) encounters the sense object (the bag of cookies) - and right away, that's a pleasant experience, because I like cookies. I mean I really like them - a little too much, to be honest. I like them enough that, having seen them, and experienced the pleasure of that, I'm pretty soon going to be desiring to eat those cookies. Those cookies are dear to me, and soon they're going to be in my belly. ...And so, if you swoop in front of me and grab the last bag just as I'm about to get there, we're doing to have a quarrel and/or dispute. Stepping back a bit, what's happened here is that we started with a question - how come I keep getting into fights in Tesco? - and walked back through a sequence of causes and conditions. At each step, we were able to identify a factor which contributed to the arising of the next step - in other words, 'because this arises, that arises'. And that's the basic principle of dependent origination - whatever we look at, no matter what it is, we discover that it depends on other things for its existence. OK, so things depend on other things - so what? Why is it interesting to know this? What difference does it make whether things depend on other things or stand alone, totally independent? These are good questions - I had these questions too when I first encountered dependent origination, and I suspect most people do, even if they don't want to admit it while the rest of the group is nodding along with wise expressions on their faces. It turns out that it's actually really, really interesting to spend some time exploring this chain of cause and effect - and, if we're willing to take the exploration far enough, it can really change the way we see the world. Going right back to our early years, many of us were raised in what's sometimes called the 'entity' model of education. (I certainly was.) This is the idea that children are 'clever' or 'stupid', 'sporty' or 'weedy', 'good at maths' or 'bad at maths' and so on. A child produces a nice piece of work, an adult says 'Ooh, aren't you clever?', and boom, we have the makings of 'a clever child'. If it happens enough times in a row, we come to expect that the child will always produce good work, because the child is clever - so if the child produces a bad piece of work, or doesn't understand something, that means that something has gone wrong - because, after all, the child is supposed to be clever, right? If this attitude is taken on board by the child, it can lead to all kinds of problems - arrogance ('I'm clever, you're stupid'), fear of failure ('if I can't do this people won't think I'm clever any more') and so on. These problems can persist well into adult life, and warp our behaviour and views for many years. It's widely recognised now that the 'process' model of education is much healthier. In this view, the outcome of a particular task is seen as the product of a process rather than a fixed attribute. In a process, many factors come together to produce the final outcome. Change one or more factors, change the outcome. If you study hard for a test, you're more likely to get a positive result than if you don't. And conversely, if you get a bad result on a test, the implication is that more work is needed in that area of your studies, rather than 'you failed because you suck at this and you always will'. The process model recognises the potential for growth and change in a way that the entity model doesn't, and so it's empowering where the entity model is fatalistic. It turns out that this 'entity view' vs 'process view' applies much more broadly than just in education. Actually, everything is like this - no exceptions. Take anything you like, explore it deeply enough, and you'll find a web of relationships, causes and conditions, with no fixed centre or 'entity' to be found. Seeing the world in this way can really help us to get past our personal sticking points in life. Have you ever found yourself in a difficult situation, wondering how it could possibly have happened - because this sort of thing isn't supposed to happen? Our minds love to make assumptions and take shortcuts, because it makes the world easier to understand, and so we freeze 'how things are' into a static entity - but then, from time to time, something will happen that violates that model, and we'll find ourselves in that unpleasant moment of frozen horror, unable to understand what just happened, caught in the gap between what's actually happening and what our understanding of the world says should be happening. Looking at these situations in terms of dependent origination can help us to identify and uproot the fixed ideas which give rise to those moments where our mental gears grind together. It can be very instructive to take an incident where we thought to ourselves 'It isn't supposed to be that way!' and dig into it - OK, what's going on there? Why do I think it isn't supposed to be that way? What assumptions am I making about how things are supposed to be, and which ones were violated here? What combination of conditions came together to give rise to this unexpected, unpleasant situation? Going through this exercise doesn't necessarily mean that we end up happy about what happened - often the situations that cause us the most pain are still unpleasant whether or not they violate our world view - but at least we don't have to deal with the additional pain of the damage to our mental gearbox. Going further into dependent origination More generally, we don't have to limit this kind of exploration just to the unpleasant stuff in life. It can be very instructive, and at times quite beautiful, to take any phenomenon and unpack it in this way. When looking at what gave rise to a situation, we can go both 'sideways' and 'backwards'. By 'sideways', I mean looking at all the different conditions which feed into this particular event. Right now, I'm writing an article for my website. That's made possible because, earlier today, it occurred to me that I hadn't done a class on dependent origination in quite some time. But it's also possible because I finished work early today so that I'd have time to write this article - I have a day retreat coming up on Sunday so I wasn't actually expecting to have time to prepare a new class for Wednesday as well. And it's also possible because my computer, monitor, keyboard and internet connection are all in good working order - if any of those were broken, I'd be out of luck. And it's also possible because enough people continue to come to my Wednesday night class that I keep teaching it, and enough people come to my website that it's worth publishing an article each week for people to read, and there are enough people interested in Buddhist meditation practices that I have an audience at all, and... By 'backwards', I mean tracking back through time step by step, much like we did in the example of quarrels and disputes at the top of the article. So, again, I'm writing an article for my website. Well, I have something to say about dependent origination because I've sat multiple retreats with my teacher Leigh Brasington and heard him speak on the subject many times. I started doing retreats with Leigh because I heard of him through another teacher, and because I was looking for a retreat with a strong focus on concentration practices, after struggling to get into Zen in the early years of my formal practice. I did that first Zen retreat because I was curious about Zen, I read a book called 'Ten Zen Questions' by Susan Blackmore, and in that book she wrote extensively about the value of going on retreat. I got into that because, when I was a kid, I was interested in martial arts, and eventually I read enough martial arts books to run into some weird stuff about the role of meditation and qigong in high-level martial arts, and... In both cases, all of these factors have combined to bring me to my home office at 5.35pm on a Friday evening, banging away at the keyboard trying to produce an article on dependent origination that might be useful to however many people read these things each week. If any factor in the chain - either sideways or backwards - had been different, who knows how my life would have played out, and what I would be doing right now? And the examples I've given above are only a tiny fraction of all of the causes and conditions which have to come together to make this moment what it is - actually, sooner or later, it turns out that it takes the whole universe coming together in each moment to make anything at all possible. But don't just take my word for it - check it out for yourself! Going back to the discourse Earlier, I mentioned that there's one more step in the discourse on quarrels and disputes that I mentioned above. So far, we've followed the chain of dependencies as follows:
The next step given in the discourse is 'name and form'. On one level, name and form represents the physical objects of the world (the 'forms') and the names we give those objects. If we didn't live in a world composed of recognisable objects, we wouldn't have sense contacts involving those objects, and so all the rest of the sequence would be impossible. OK, but again, so what - we do live in a world of objects, right? Well, if you take your exploration of dependent origination far enough, you'll find that the answer is 'er... sorta?' Once again, this is the 'entity' view of what's going on, as opposed to the 'process' view - and, like I said, if we check things out carefully enough, all we find is processes. The 'forms' of our experience are really processes temporarily coming together, rather than solid 'things', and the 'names' of our experience are actually just temporary labels attached to processes for the time being because it's convenient. When our view changes in this way, a lot of the 'sticking points' in our lives melt away - because there's nothing fixed to get stuck on any more. As we come to see ourselves as a process in a world of processes, rather than a thing in a world of things, our lives become much easier, taking on a quality of flow rather than fixation and collision. Like the Buddha said, one who sees dependent origination sees the Dhamma. If you go deeply enough into this exploration, your world will change too - for the better. Give it a try! |
SEARCHAuthorMatt teaches early Buddhist and Zen meditation practices for the benefit of all. May you be happy! Archives
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