Who do you want to be?In the early Buddhist tradition, meditation (and spiritual practice more broadly) is often described using the word 'bhavana', which means something like 'cultivation'.
It's a good metaphor. When you cultivate a garden, you decide what you want to grow, select and plant the seeds, ensure that the conditions are good for growth, weed out unwanted invaders that are taking resources away from your plants, and - most of all - you understand that it's a long-term project. While you can absolutely work to improve the conditions of your garden, you can't force your flowers into bloom overnight by watering them extra-hard. So if we view spiritual practice in terms of cultivation, we might ask what's available - what varieties of seeds could we plant, how should they be cultivated, and what's it going to look like when things are coming into bloom? Four dimensions of spiritual cultivation For convenience, I've broken down spiritual work into four categories. This is my own invention rather than a traditional scheme of practice, and I'm sure it has some holes in it, but it'll do for now. In some ways it's a bit artificial to break things out like this - many forms of practice aim to cultivate multiple dimensions simultaneously, as we'll see below - but it may be helpful in terms of exposing the range of possibilities for a meditation practice. The four categories I've chosen are: samadhi; wisdom; heart opening; and energy work. Let's take each of those in turn.
We all have the ability to pay attention - that is, to choose to focus on some aspect of our experience, at the expense of whatever else is going on. As I'm writing these words, I'm paying quite a bit of attention to the writing itself, while some portion of my attention is on the music I've got playing in the background (which acts mainly as a screen against other noises that might snag my attention). As a result, I'm not particularly aware of the room around me, or sounds from outside my house, or the precise alignment of my body, or any of the many, many other things going on right now that I could have chosen to focus on instead. It turns out that this faculty of attention is very trainable - that is, we can practise it and get better at it. We're prone to distraction, particularly in the information-rich environment of modern urban life. We often find our minds wandering when we'd prefer them not to, and at times we can find ourselves beset by unwanted, intrusive thoughts, or caught in a negative spiral of anxiety or obsession, unable to break free. So what can we do about this? That's where samadhi practice comes in. Samadhi training is fundamentally very simple: it's about putting your attention on an object, noticing when your mind has wandered, and coming back to that object. That's it! But if you do it over and over and over, you start to develop some serious concentration power. Your mind becomes more flexible and responsive, better able to stay with something for extended periods. In the traditional language, your mind can become 'purified, bright, unblemished, rid of imperfections, malleable, wieldy, steady, and attained to imperturbability.' Sounds pretty good, right? Different traditions go about the cultivation of samadhi in different ways. Early Buddhism has dedicated samadhi practices - namely the jhanas - whereas Zen prefers to build samadhi alongside wisdom, using techniques like Silent Illumination and koan practice. Speaking of wisdom...
This dimension of practice is about exploring who and what we really are and what's going on in the world around us. As meditators, we explore these questions from a first-person perspective, looking at our direct experience, as opposed to the third-person perspective that a scientist might take. In other words, we examine ourselves from the 'inside' rather than the 'outside'. People are often drawn to spiritual practice because of the promise of wisdom. Perhaps they've suffered greatly in their lives and want to know if there's a solution; or perhaps they're simply curious to know what else is out there beyond the rat race. (Personally, I was attracted to meditation because of all the weird, incomprehensible, almost magical things that people would say about the results of spiritual practice - it sounded so far out there that I wanted to try it for myself to see what all the fuss was about. I haven't been disappointed!) Early Buddhism has dedicated insight practices specifically for the cultivation of wisdom. These typically revolve around investigating some aspect of our experience very closely, perhaps exploring the impermanent nature of sensory phenomena, or studying dependent origination. As noted above, Zen's main practices (Silent Illumination and koans) tend to cultivate wisdom and samadhi simultaneously. (So which is the better approach? Whichever one you prefer! Early Buddhism has a clarity and precision that I really enjoy, and I've found the combination of jhana practice to sharpen the mind followed by insight practice to investigate reality to be immensely effective. On the other hand, early Buddhism can come across as quite technical and fiddly at times, whereas Zen is fundamentally very simple indeed - but just as effective. Zen also tends to have more of an air of mystery and beauty, whereas early Buddhism is comparatively clinical. Personally I love both styles, which is why I continue to practise and teach them both, but to each their own!)
A third dimension of spiritual practice relates to the heart, and our emotional life. Meditation can allow us to connect with and cultivate some beautiful qualities within ourselves, such as loving kindness, compassion, joy and peace. Some people are immediately drawn to this side of practice because, more than any other, it tends to make us feel good. It's nice to be happy! For others, opening the heart may be a slower process - perhaps we've been hurt, perhaps we have good reason to want to protect ourselves from the world around us. The great power of heart-opening practice is that it shows us that we already have everything we need to be happy. If we find ourselves habitually craving the love and kindness of others (and maybe not receiving it reliably enough!), we can learn to meet our own needs by cultivating a deep well of love and kindness within ourselves. As my teacher's teacher, Ayya Khema, put it, if you feel cold, become a radiator - then you'll never be cold again. Early Buddhism really shines where heart-opening is concerned - the Brahmaviharas are my go-to set of practices for cultivating these qualities. I've found them to be hugely helpful, and wouldn't trade them for anything. By comparison, Zen doesn't place so much emphasis on the heart, preferring to allow it to open organically as a consequence of other practices; that can work well for some people, and tends to result in a more down-to-earth, practical kindness and compassion rather than the more ostentatious 'spiritual kindness' that you'll sometimes find in other traditions.
We've looked at cultivation of the mind (samadhi, wisdom) and heart - what about the body? Is spiritual practice purely something that happens from the chest upwards? Well, for some people the answer is yes - the phrase 'disembodied meditators' refers to people who have spent years cultivating their minds, but their bodies haven't really come along for the ride. And in early Buddhism you'll often find a fairly negative slant toward the body, which is seen as the source of sensual cravings which are to be overcome through diligent practice. In Zen, it's a different story. Perhaps influenced by the Daoist tradition, where longevity and good health are very highly regarded, Zen places great emphasis on having an embodied practice. Within Rinzai Zen in particular, we find a whole set of energy practices, which aim to cultivate our bodies' natural vitality, grounding and energising us. This is a big topic in its own right, and I've written previously about how to go about getting into energy practices in a safe way, so check out that article if you're interested. How cultivation unfolds On a practical level, how do we achieve this cultivation?
The first (and, in many ways, most important) step is to clarify your intention. What are you hoping to achieve? What are you drawn to? To be blunt, what do you want? My Zen teacher Daizan likes to say that people tend to get what they want out of their practice. If you have a clear intention, you'll gradually move in that direction even if your technique is far from perfect. If your intention is vague and muddled, you can spend decades sitting without really getting anywhere - and that's a sad state of affairs. So be clear! Maybe the menu of options I've presented above can help with that; maybe you'll find another system you prefer. But, whatever you do, don't skimp on this step!
OK, so you know what you're trying to do. Next, you need a practice. There are literally squillions of meditation techniques out there, and each and every one will have its fierce, ardent defenders, who are convinced from their own personal experience that their favourite technique is the One True Way to enlightenment. In truth, there's no 'best' technique, and you can waste a lot of time looking for it. People tend to be big fans of what worked well for them, and if a technique brought about enough of a pivotal shift for someone, they can get very passionate about it. I was pretty obnoxious about the importance of jhana practice for quite a long time, and I probably still am to some extent! The key is to find one or more techniques that you like well enough to be willing to spend a lot of time with them. Spiritual cultivation is more of a marathon than a sprint, and most people will need to log some serious hours to get where they want to go. So find something you don't hate, and stay with it long enough to see where it takes you. That means getting past the initial hump, where sitting is uncomfortable and nothing seems to be happening - having a group to sit with can really help here, providing social support and normalising your experiences of discomfort and mind-wandering. If you can stick with it, though, soon enough you'll start to see changes in your life, and you'll know the value of the practice.
When we first start practising, having a specific technique is very helpful. We need to know what to do! Being clear about the mechanics of what we're doing can be very helpful, particularly for those of us in the West who like to understand things rather than simply blindly following along with what a teacher says even though nothing seems to be happening. However, I said above that there's no 'best' technique, and that's true. Over time, you may encounter other techniques which point at the same target as the ones you're using. Maybe you've been working with the Brahmaviharas and then you encounter tonglen; maybe you've been using the breath to develop jhana and then you get into the fire kasina. Or maybe you simply start to wonder why other people seem to be getting similar results to you despite doing such different practices. To quote the late, great Bruce Lee, 'It is like a finger pointing away to the moon. Don't concentrate on the finger or you will miss all that heavenly glory!' Each technique simply points us toward an underlying principle. For example, in samadhi practice, the underlying principle is steadying the mind on an object. We can do that with many techniques - by focusing on the breath, or using a candle flame, or reciting a mantra - but all techniques point to the same principle. And, once we recognise the principle, we can start to see how it shows up in many other techniques, including techniques which ostensibly serve another purpose - continuing the samadhi example, we may begin to notice more clearly how working with a koan or an energy practice can build samadhi, for example. This is a very liberating stage of practice, because it frees us from our dependency on any particular method, and opens the door to a lot of creativity. The danger is that we then fall into doing just whatever we fancy at the time, which can turn into a subtle avoidance strategy. Hopefully, this is the point where a good teacher will keep us honest.
We can sometimes get to a point where our formal meditation practice feels like it's going very well, especially if we have the opportunity to go on retreat, but the benefits don't seem to extend much into daily life. And, indeed, it may be that our practice needs to evolve, to break down the barrier between 'practice time' and 'everything else'. Nevertheless, in the long run 'practice' and 'life' ultimately become inseparable. Particularly once we've reached the principle that the technique was pointing to, we can start to see and apply that principle more and more widely. Continuing the samadhi example some more, maybe we can begin to approach simple tasks in daily life with the focused attitude of our samadhi practice, rather than allowing our minds to wander as they usually do. Gradually, we come to use our mental sharpness in more and more aspects of life, until it becomes fully integrated - an effortless, natural part of our being. Our garden is in bloom; we have fully become what we sought. May you become what you seek.
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How our subjective experience comes to be
This week we're looking at case 30 in the famous koan collection The Gateless Barrier. (Case 30 is, rather unimaginatively, titled 'The very mind itself is Buddha'. I guess they weren't careful about spoilers in those days...)
So what's this all about? Well, there are really two important words here, 'mind' and 'Buddha', so let's take them in turn, and see what happens. Along the way we'll also take a brief look at some cutting-edge ideas in the scientific community about what our conscious experience actually is and how it comes about. What is 'mind'? First, we have to be clear about what we mean by the word 'mind' in this context, because it can mean several different things. In fact, if you've been following this blog for at least a few weeks, you might remember an article just before Christmas on this very topic - appropriately titled 'What is the mind?' (The relevant sections for today's purposes are 'Mind as a synonym for awareness' and 'Whoah, excellent!') Rather than repeat that material again so soon, today I'll come at it from a slightly different angle. The short version is that 'mind' in this case is synonymous with 'awareness', and is also synonymous with 'our subjective conscious experience'. The second of these synonyms might not be quite so easy to accept at face value, so let's dig into that a little bit. There's a school of Buddhism which is very influential in the Zen tradition called Yogacara, and is sometimes known as the 'mind-only' school of Buddhism. Amongst other things, the Yogacara way of understanding things attempts to dissect our experience into eight layers, or 'consciousnesses', which together represent the totality of our experience. The eight are:
The first six are the six sense consciousnesses found in early Buddhism, and represent the simple elements of our conscious experience - what we see and hear, think and feel. But the Yogacarans were interested in another couple of aspects of experience: the sense of self, and the source of habitual reactions and patterns. These were assigned to the seventh and eighth consciousnesses respectively. The seventh consciousness is important because, when we look closely at our experience, we find that we tend to relate everything that's going on back to ourselves in some way. There's a sound - is it attractive (in which case I want it), is it repulsive (in which case I don't want it), or is it neutral (in which case I don't care and can ignore it)? This self-referential layer of experience significantly colours our experience of the world and leads us into trying to arrange the external world to our personal satisfaction and resenting it when that doesn't work out. Much of Buddhist practice is aimed at investigating this sense of self and trying to loosen its grip on our experience - not so that we forget who we are, but so that we find a smoother, gentler way to be in the world. (We'll come back to this point later when we move on to talking about 'Buddha'.) The eighth consciousness is also important, because it recognises that we are not simply a blank slate meeting every moment completely afresh. (And, actually, that's a good thing - having a memory is useful!) The idea is that we have a 'storehouse' which contains the 'seeds' that we plant in each moment - over time, those seeds ripen, and we experience the result. So if we routinely react to difficult situations with anger, we plant a lot of angry seeds, and anger will become more and more a go-to state of being when faced with something difficult. If we instead start to plant seeds of kindness and compassion, e.g. by practising the Brahmaviharas, then as those seeds ripen our disposition will shift in a more open-hearted direction. The storehouse makes us who we are as distinct individuals. Each of us has a unique history, a unique body, unique interests and capabilities, and so forth. That stuff is important - it's not OK for you to withdraw money from my bank account. But if we grasp that stuff too tightly, and it becomes all about me and mine - which is the role of the seventh consciousness - then we become cut off from our wider environment, a tiny, fragile being alienated from a big bad world, and we set ourselves up for suffering. That's why it's called 'deluded awareness' - because it leads to a view of the world which is both not entirely accurate and quite unhelpful on a practical level. The main thrust of Zen practice is to undo that alienation and reunite ourselves with the universe. Speaking of which, perhaps it's time to switch gears and talk about 'Buddha'! What is 'Buddha'? Well, according to master Mazu in the koan, the very mind itself is Buddha! But maybe just repeating the koan isn't the most useful commentary, so let's dig a bit. When someone asks 'What is Buddha?' in a koan, they're not typically asking for a story about Siddhartha Gautama, aka Shakyamuni Buddha, the historical figure who lived about 2,500 years ago in what we now call India. Rather, 'What is Buddha?' is a shorthand way of asking for a teaching on awakening. Equivalent questions include 'Who am I?', 'What is my true nature?', and 'What is this?' The fundamental point of Zen practice is to investigate this very moment, right here, right now, and to 'awaken' to its true nature. What does that mean? Well, the best way to find out is to take one of those questions ('Who am I?' is a good starting point) and work with it as a koan. (You'll find a guided 'Who am I?' practice on my Audio page.) Until you've experienced it for yourself, any attempt to describe it is just words. Nevertheless, we might say that the process of awakening is a matter of changing our relationship to what's going on. In the language of the Yogacara, we might talk about loosening the grip of the seventh consciousness - the 'deluded awareness' - and rediscovering our connection to the universe as a whole. We work with 'Who am I?' because it invites us to question the apparent separation between 'me' and 'not me', 'mine' and 'not mine'. As we see deeper and deeper into the question, we begin to let go of the fixed ways in which we typically understand ourselves and our surroundings, and ultimately we come to a different relationship with our experience, one which is much freer. Now, this can be where Zen might start to sound like a con, like something that would actually increase delusion rather than lessening it. Surely it's perfectly obvious that we're each separate individuals, totally disconnected from the wider universe; is Zen basically a process of brainwashing ourselves to believe something that isn't true, against the evidence of our senses? But that's where it gets interesting. What does the evidence of our senses really tell us? When we start to investigate this, we rapidly find that what we perceive through the senses is intimately intertwined with thoughts and memories. If all we had to go on was our eye consciousness, we would only experience coloured shapes - but we don't. We experience computer monitor, tea cup, fingers, keyboard and so forth. Those labels aren't coming from our eyes! The sensory information we receive is interpreted and woven together by our brains to produce an overall 3D 'picture' of what's going on - and that's our subjective experience. Although it may seem like our eyes are windows looking out onto an objectively real world, what we actually experience is the product of our minds - hence, 'mind-only'. Actually, it's even worse than that! At the cutting edge of current scientific thinking is the idea that our brains are actually 'prediction engines'. Rather than meticulously build up a complete picture of what's going on by weaving together every piece of sensory information every moment, our brains actually start with a kind of 'guess' as to what's going on - a 'model' about what we expect to be experiencing, based on past experience. Then the information coming in through the senses is checked against that model - and if the model is wrong enough to be concerning, it's updated based on the sense data. But if things are ticking along pretty much as expected, then the sense data is simply checked and dropped. This is a little bit mind-blowing, at least to me! It does explain a lot of oddities about our experience, though. For example, you may be aware that our eyes are actually constantly making tiny movements, called saccades - but our visual field usually appears to be stable, rather than jiggling around all over the place. Previously I'd assumed that the brain had some kind of 'image stabilisation' feature, like the camera in my phone, but actually it makes a whole lot more sense if the role of the eyes is to dart around all over the place checking to see if the mental model of my surroundings is accurate. Anyway, the upshot of all this is that, no matter how obvious it seems that we're simply experiencing things exactly as they are, what's really going on is the product of a complex process, and one of the inputs to that process is what we expect to experience. We've grown up surrounded by people who believe themselves to be separate, and we've picked up and internalised that world view - so that's what we see, because it's what we expect to see. But if you spend long enough hanging out with Zen people (at least those with some degree of realisation), it soon becomes apparent that that way of seeing things isn't the only game in town. Back to the koan So, what is Buddha? The very mind itself is Buddha. Our subjective consciousness experience is a projection of our minds - and that projection can be self-centred, alienated, painful and riddled with grasping, in which case we call it samsara; or it can be liberated, free from grasping, flowing freely in each moment, bright, clear and seamlessly unified. It isn't that the external world changes when we wake up - we aren't transported to a heavenly realm, perhaps somewhere in the Himalayas. It's our own minds that change - transforming from the habitual mind of suffering to the wide-awake mind of a Buddha. May you awaken swiftly. Be like water, my friendOn Sunday January 22nd, I'll be running a Silent Illumination practice day. (We still have some spaces left, so sign up if you're local!)
Silent Illumination - variously known as shikantaza (just sitting), resting in the Unborn, or simply zazen (sitting meditation) - is perhaps Zen's most iconic practice. It's deceptively simple: you just sit there, right? But that simplicity belies an incredible depth and power. How does Silent Illumination work? In a nutshell, the practice involves sitting (or standing, or walking, or lying down) and simply paying attention to the experience of sitting. What does that mean, the 'experience of sitting'? Well, that's what you find out when you do Silent Illumination! Many styles of meditation use a particular 'object' - something specific to focus on during your meditation. You might be invited to count your breaths, or observe a candle flame, or feel the physical sensations throughout your whole body, or focus on reciting a mantra. This way of practising uses our faculty of attention - our ability to pay attention to this as opposed to that - as a kind of spotlight. We place a bright light on whatever object we're using, and that bright light casts correspondingly deep shadows on whatever else is in our experience. Over time, our object becomes more and more prominent - eventually, the object is all that we're aware of, and everything else falls away. That's a good way to practise. It's very helpful for training the mind, for developing focus and mindfulness, for learning to discern exactly what's going on in your mind moment to moment, noticing when you're paying attention to your object and when the mind has wandered. The core skills developed through this kind of practice are very important, and are absolutely necessary for most people before true Silent Illumination is really accessible. Because Silent Illumination is different. In Silent Illumination practice, we don't focus on anything in particular - and, as a result, we can be aware of the totality of our experience. Zen master Takuan Soho put it this way: "When facing a single tree, if you look at a single one of its red leaves, you will not see all the others. When the eye is not set on one leaf, and you face the tree with nothing at all in mind, any number of leaves are visible to the eye without limit. But if a single leaf holds the eye, it will be as if the remaining leaves were not there." In Silent Illumination, the idea is to face the tree without allowing any particular leaf to catch our attention. But why would you want to do that? The mind can be likened to a hand, picking things up and putting them down. When the spotlight of attention falls on an object, we pick it up. Then, in order to pick up the next thing, we have to put down what we're currently holding. Except, as we all know, sometimes it isn't as easy as that. Maybe you've experienced intrusive thoughts - repetitive patterns of thinking that just won't go away no matter how much you try to focus on something else. I remember lying awake the night before one of my GCSE exams, listening to a short snippet of incredibly loud music looping over and over in my head. I'd been writing a song on my guitar earlier in the day, as a way of blowing off a bit of steam before the exam, and that riff lodged hard in my head. That was not a fun night! Actually, long before I was wrestling with catchy guitar music, the historical Buddha was studying the problem of human suffering, trying to understand how it is that we come to struggle against what's going on in our lives with such disappointing frequency. In what's traditionally considered to be his first teaching, he said this: Now this, monks, is the noble truth of dukkha [suffering/unsatisfactoriness]: birth is dukkha, aging is dukkha, illness is dukkha, death is dukkha; union with what is displeasing is dukkha; separation from what is pleasing is dukkha; not to get what one wants is dukkha; in brief, the five aggregates [i.e. everything we experience] subject to clinging are dukkha. In short: whenever we cling to something, we're setting ourselves up for pain when that thing doesn't go exactly the way we want it to. The only solution is to learn to let go, to allow our experience to be just the way it is. And that's what Silent Illumination is - a training in letting go. Because what you'll find when you start doing it is that the mind is fundamentally not used to resting openly in this way. Instead, it jumps onto every little thing that comes along - particularly thoughts, which are especially 'sticky' for most of us. You've probably heard the term 'the monkey mind', so called because, when monkeys swing through the trees, they grab one branch, then another, then another, then another... See if your mind is like this too! Well, if that's what my mind wants to do, why fight it? It's a fair question. Our minds do seem to want to be constantly grabbing everything that comes along - so why try to go against that 'natural' tendency? Well, it turns out that there's a big difference between 'natural' and 'habitual'. We have learnt certain mental habits, which keep us jumping from one thing to the next, filling our heads with a seemingly never-ending stream of thoughts and emotions which our monkey minds eagerly grab. But it doesn't have to be that way. Through a practice like Silent Illumination, we can allow our minds to relax. It might sound like that would result in a kind of passive oblivion, in which we're unresponsive to what's going on around us. But, actually, it's quite the opposite. Returning to Zen master Takuan Soho, here's how he describes it: "The basic mind is the mind that does not stay in a particular place but pervades the whole body and whole being. The errant mind is the mind that congeals in one place brooding about something; so when the basic mind congeals, focused on one point, it becomes the so-called errant mind. "When your mind congeals in one place, resting on one thing, it is like ice that cannot be used freely because it is solid — you can't wash your hands and feet with ice. Melting the mind to use it throughout the body like water, you can apply it wherever you wish. This is called the basic mind." The monkey mind is at the mercy of whatever happens to come along. The 'basic mind' that Takuan describes is free to flow with conditions, picking up whatever it wishes at any time, responding immediately and effortlessly to whatever comes along, rather than simply reacting in a knee-jerk manner. When we touch into this for the first time, we discover that the 'basic mind' that Takuan is describing feels much more 'natural' - and much more enjoyable! - than the frenetic energy of the monkey mind. OK, so how do we do it? It's simple, really.
How do you know when you're ready for step 6? You might set a timer, or you might stay with the body sensations until you notice that your mind has settled and isn't wandering nearly as much as when you started. Or you might find that it happens automatically - when the mind gets really settled, the effort required to maintain the focus on the body starts to feel a bit onerous, and the mind may spontaneously let go. It's a tricky one, though - it takes some practice to learn to distinguish between a genuine letting-go of this sort, versus the mind simply getting bored and wanting to wander. It's very important not to kid ourselves in this practice - Silent Illumination is not the same as Silent Mind-Wandering or Silent Zoning Out! In an ideal world, you'll have a balance of calmness (the Silent part) and clarity (the Illumination part). Things won't always be that way, of course - another part of Silent Illumination is seeing your mind lurching around from bright clarity to foggy dullness and back again and learning not to take it personally when the practice isn't going the way we want it to. In the long run, Silent Illumination isn't any particular 'state' or 'experience' - it's a way of relating to all of our experiences, a kind of subtle intimacy with the present moment which allows it to be completely as it is, without any part of ourselves held back from what's going on. In Silent Illumination, we allow the ice at the heart of our being to melt into life's river, and see where the flow takes us next. May your practice take you where you need to go! And another lame Christmas tie-in
This week we're looking at a Christmassy twist on case 29 in the Gateless Barrier, a classic collection of Zen koans. (In the original, the two monks are arguing about the wind whipping the banner of a temple - is it the banner that moves, or the wind? Hopefully you'll agree that my mangling above is close to the spirit of the original whilst ticking the Christmas box.)
So we have this debate between the two monks, a sudden pivotal intervention by the sixth ancestral master of Zen (Huineng, who was also the subject of case 23), and the delightful reaction of the two monks. (I like to think that they turned to each other, Bill and Ted style, and said 'Whoah, excellent!', but maybe that's just me.) The 'punchline' of the koan is Huineng's declaration that all the monks are seeing is the movement of their own minds. But what does this mean? Let's find out! Some different meanings of 'mind' One of the confusing things about the world of meditation is the way that the same word can often mean several different things depending on the context. So let's take a look at three meanings of 'mind', and figure out which one is meant here.
In some places, particularly in early Buddhism, a distinction is sometimes made between 'mind' and 'body' (aka 'mentality' and 'materiality' if you want to sound fancy), very much like we make the same distinction in the modern world. The 'body' is this physical vehicle of ours, the thing that moves around the physical world and bumps into it from time to time. Physical things have size, shape, solidity, weight and so forth. By comparison, the 'mind' is the domain of the 'other stuff' - thoughts, emotions, memories and so on. Mental things don't have physical properties like size or shape, we can't say how much a thought weighs (although some thoughts can be pretty heavy...), but they're 'real' nevertheless, in as much as we experience them and they can be every bit as impactful as physical things. Early Buddhism actually has several models of experience, including the Five Aggregates, which feature this mind/body distinction. In the Five Aggregates, for example, the first aggregate is the body, while the other four (the categorisation of experience as pleasant or unpleasant, our concepts/perceptions, our intentions and impulses, and our consciousness) are 'mind' in this sense. There are also insight techniques which revolve around exploring the interplay between mind and body - what actually happens when you decide to move your body in a certain way? What comes first, mind or body? Is it always that way? It seems pretty clear, though, that this kind of 'mind' isn't what's meant in the koan. While I suppose you could argue that Santa's sleigh and eight tiny reindeer are actually figments of our imagination (at least if you want to ruin Christmas for everyone), the same can't be said for the wind or the banner of the temple. Those are physical phenomena, no doubt about it.
Another oddity in Buddhism that can sometimes trip people up is the reference to 'six senses'. No, nothing to do with Bruce Willis. Another of early Buddhism's ways of carving up experience into buckets is into the six 'sense spheres' (aka ayatanas, the same word used for the higher jhanas in last week's article). These comprise the usual five senses of vision, hearing, touch, taste and smell, plus the 'sixth sense' of thinking. These six are sometimes broken out into three parts for each sense: the sense object, the sense organ, and the sense 'sphere', or sensory faculty. So, for vision, a sense object would be something you can see, like the coffee cup on the table in front of me as I'm writing this; the sense organ is the eye; and the sensory faculty is vision, i.e. my ability to have a visual experience. When all three (object, organ and sensory faculty) come together, we have a conscious experience. So in this model, it's relatively obvious what the 'sense organ' and 'sense object' are for the first five senses - the eye and sights, the ear and sounds, the body and tactile sensations, the tongue and flavours, the nose and scents. But what about the sixth sense? Generally, we would say that the 'sense objects' here are 'thoughts' (or memories, mental images, etc.), while the 'sense organ' is the 'mind'. I've sometimes toyed with saying 'brain' instead of 'mind' for the corresponding sense organ, because the brain is something physical whereas 'mind' is a bit more ephemeral and ungraspable, but haven't really settled on a preferred way to say it. Again, it seems like this use of 'mind' isn't really what's meant in the koan. Even if we interpret Huineng's statement as saying that the monks are just arguing because their minds are agitated, he would really be saying that their thoughts are agitated, not that their minds are agitated. Just because we can see a lot of movement doesn't mean that the eye is agitated - it means that the eye is looking at a turbulent, chaotic scene. (You could probably argue the toss on this one, and doing so would probably be quite an interesting insight practice if you approach it experientially rather than intellectually/philosophically, so give it a go and let me know how you get on!)
Yet another usage for the word 'mind' is to mean basically the same thing as 'awareness'. But what exactly is awareness anyway? Well, that's where things get interesting - and where the koan comes to life. Stop reading for a moment and take a look around. Notice what you can hear, what you can feel, what thoughts you might be experiencing. Then notice that all of these things are happening within your awareness. That is, the only way you know that anything at all is happening is because you're aware of it - and so your awareness must somehow 'contain' absolutely everything that's going on. An interesting meditation practice is to try to pay attention to your awareness itself - not any of the specific phenomena arising and passing away within awareness, but to awareness itself, to the 'container' of those experiences. (This approach can be one way in to the practice of Silent Illumination.) If we're patient, we can find ourselves somehow arriving at a 'broad' perspective which contains everything without being quite so attached to anything in particular, and this can be very restful and enjoyable. Cultivating this experience is a great thing to do, and if you take nothing else away from today's article, this is plenty. After you've been doing this for a while, though, there's another step we can take, which is to investigate the nature of this 'awareness'. What exactly is it? Is it a sight, or a sound, or a feeling, or a thought? Presumably not, because all of those things are contained within it. So what exactly is it? Is it any kind of thing at all? I can't answer that question for you - you have to do it for yourself. Of course I can say more about it, but being 'told the answer' won't change anything for you on an experiential level. Really, it's better to stop reading now and go practise until you've got it. Nevertheless, this article will feel a bit incomplete if I stop here, so I'll go on, and you can maybe come back after you've found the answer for yourself to see if you arrived at the same understanding that I'm going to present. (Maybe you won't! That's part of the fun...) As it turns out, the answer is that, no, awareness isn't any kind of 'thing' at all. Actually, awareness can't be found as anything separate from the sights, sounds, thoughts and feelings that we previously described as arising 'within' it. It turns out that 'awareness' and 'the objects of awareness' are not separate in any meaningful sense at the experiential level (although, oddly enough, it can often be useful to separate them conceptually when we're trying to get to that 'awareness as container' experience described above, because it can help us to let go of some of our habitual attachment to the 'things' coming and going from moment to moment). This is quite a big deal, because it means that 'awareness' (or 'mind') and 'phenomena' are not separate ('not two', i.e. non-dual). In other words, everything we ever experience is the movement of our own minds, as opposed to an objectively real experience of something 'out there'. That's not to say that there isn't anything 'out there' (I tend to believe that there is), just that what we actually experience is always and only our own minds, rather than anything else. That's what Huineng is pointing to in today's koan, I think. The two monks are having a philosophical debate about the causality of sleighs and reindeer, and Huineng is stepping in to say 'Look, forget about all that - haven't you realised yet that all of this is your own mind?' Whoah, excellent! The consequences of a deep realisation of this truth can be pretty far-reaching, providing a clear insight into the Buddhist concept of emptiness - the idea that nothing we experience exists in some objective way, but actually everything is a kind of mental projection. You know that person who you find really annoying? (You know the one.) How would it be if the annoyance wasn't coming from them at all, but was actually coming from your own mind? You know when you had high expectations for something and then you were really disappointed when those expectations weren't met? Guess where those expectations came from - and guess where the disappointment comes from too. As we become more familiar on the experiential level with the emptiness of absolutely everything we ever experience, we tend to find that our attitudes become much more flexible and accepting of unexpected change; it becomes easier (although maybe not 'easy') to get past frustrations, disappointments and other unfortunate episodes when the universe doesn't unfold the way we wanted it to. We get better at seeing, more and more quickly, that whenever we feel a sense of friction in our lives, a sense that 'it wasn't supposed to happen like this!', that's just us putting our own hopes and dreams onto a universe that unfortunately didn't get the memo and didn't realise it was supposed to obey our every whim. Going deeper, we begin to realise that we can't plan and strategise our way through life, at least not with any reasonable expectation of success. Actually, the future is unknown. At times that can be scary, but at other times it can be tremendously exciting. Imagine how dull it would be if you knew everything that was going to happen for the rest of your life, like a movie you've already watched a hundred times. As we open ourselves to the mystery of our lives, the world can at times seem almost magical. Experience takes on a quality of freshness and newness, and we can come to see even the most mundane details of our lives the way we once did when we were very young, or sometimes still do when we're on holiday in an unfamiliar place and everything is new and interesting. All we have to do to step into this semi-magical world is to let go of our fixed views about what's going on. And a great way to do that is to explore this thing that we call 'mind', or 'awareness', and see that, far from being a passive observer of objectively real 'things out there', it's actually the very fabric of experience itself. All of this is the movement of your mind. Whoah. The far reaches of human experienceA few weeks ago we took a look at the jhanas, four altered states of consciousness which can arise through deep meditation practice, particularly when we emphasise the samadhi (focus/stillness/concentration) aspect of practice as taught in the early Buddhist approach to practice.
In that article, we followed the progression of deepening concentration as far as the fourth jhana, then shifted gears and moved into the world of insight practice. However, it turns out that, if we stay in the realm of samadhi, we can go deeper still - and that's what we're going to do this week. We'll start with a brief recap of the first four jhanas, and reframe them as a process of successive letting go. Then we'll go further down the rabbit hole and see where we end up! The first four jhanas, redux Samadhi practice is really very simple at its core. Find a quiet place where you won't be disturbed, and set yourself up in a comfortable-enough position that you can be physically still for quite a while. Then pick an object - any object will do, there are pros and cons to each choice - and place your attention on it. When you notice your mind has wandered, let go of the distraction, relax the body, and come back to your object. Do nothing else! Concentration is not something we force to happen - it's something that happens by itself, when we set up sufficiently supportive conditions. The instructions in the paragraph above get the job done for me. There's more that can be said about the process of getting concentrated - Leigh and I offer a variety of 'aids' to getting concentrated when we teach jhana retreats, like the one we're offering in June 2023 through Gaia House - but the core of it is simply allowing your mind to settle down around its object. At a certain point, the mind-wandering diminishes, and, by shifting the attention to a pleasant sensation somewhere in the body, we can enter the first jhana, described in the early suttas thus: Quite secluded from sense pleasures, secluded from unwholesome states, one enters and dwells in the first jhana, which is accompanied by thought and examination, with rapture and happiness born of seclusion. Now, the experience of the first jhana tends to be quite dramatic and striking for most people when they first encounter it. The 'rapture and happiness' mentioned in the old texts is often experienced as an energetic sensation, perhaps as strong heat or an electrical buzz throughout the body. Earlier in this article, I said that we could treat the jhanas as a process of 'letting go' - so maybe it seems weird that 'letting go' would lead to this kind of highly energised, 'up'-type experience! Apparently, though, there's a physiological basis for this experience. I don't know all the details, but apparently there's a mechanism in the body which essentially generates the experience of bodily pleasure, and it's 'always on'. The reason that we don't experience bodily pleasure all the time is because there's another mechanism which acts as a kind of 'damper', suppressing the pleasure that we would otherwise be feeling. So it seems like what's actually going on as we enter the first jhana is that the suppression mechanism is shutting off while the pleasure-generator is still active, and so we get this very strong jhanic experience. Pretty interesting! Anyway, from here onward the 'letting go' is much easier to see. As we move into the second jhana, the texts give us this: With the subsiding of thought and examination, one enters and dwells in the second jhana, which has internal confidence and unification of mind, is without thought and examination, and has rapture and happiness born of concentration. The second jhana is experientially much 'quieter' than the first jhana - the turbulence and mental activity of the first jhana passes away as the experience of bodily pleasure quietens down, and a gentler, subtler emotional happiness becomes predominant. When you get good at the jhanas, you'll start to notice that the emotional happiness was present in the first jhana too, but way in the background, because your experience was dominated by the energy stuff. As the energy recedes (and presumably that pleasure-generating mechanism starts to dial down), the emotional joy comes more to the forefront of consciousness. Continuing the arc of quietening down and letting go, we enter the third jhana: With the fading away as well of rapture, one dwells equanimous and, mindful and clearly comprehending, one experiences happiness with the body; one enters and dwells in the third jhana of which the noble ones declare: ‘That one is equanimous, mindful, one who dwells happily.’ The energy is gone at this point, and the joy has mellowed out into a quiet contentment. There's a very clear sense of progressively letting things settle down more and more - for many people there's even a somatic sense of things 'descending', like the first two jhanas are somehow centred in the upper body whereas the third is down in the abdomen. And as we continue down that slope, eventually we reach the end of the road for embodied experience: With the abandoning of pleasure and pain, and with the previous passing away of joy and displeasure, one enters and dwells in the fourth jhana, which is neither painful nor pleasant and includes the purification of mindfulness by equanimity. The fourth jhana is subjectively neutral, deeply peaceful, very stable and settled. That stable quality, combined with the profound level of concentration that's been developed to get to this point, makes it a great place to start doing insight practice, and that's exactly what the discourse we were following last time recommends. But other discourses invite us to go further still - so let's see what happens if we do! Going deeper: the arupas (aka jhanas 5-8) Sometimes you'll hear teachers (me included) talking about eight 'jhanas'. Strictly speaking, there are only four 'material jhanas' (the four 'rupa jhanas' described above), followed by four 'immaterial states' ('arupa ayatanas'), but all eight are concentration states and it works well to go from the fourth rupa jhana into the first arupa ayatana, so it seems reasonable enough to talk about what comes next as the fifth, sixth, seventh and eighth jhana unless we're trying to be sticklers for textual accuracy. Anyway, in order to enter the arupas, we continue that process of letting go that we've already been following. But what does that look like? With the complete transcending of perceptions of [physical] form, with the disappearance of perceptions of resistance, and not heeding perceptions of diversity, [perceiving,] 'Infinite space,' one enters and dwells in the dimension of infinite space. People who spend a lot of time in the fourth jhana often start to notice that the awareness of their own body is getting kinda vague, or even that the body seems to vanish entirely. Actually, the perception of the body can get weird well before the fourth jhana - as the mind begins to settle and the body remains still, little by little our brains may stop doing some the stuff they usually do because it isn't needed right at that moment. Proprioception (the sense of where the body is in space) can get a bit weird - people may feel very light or very heavy, or that their hands have become huge, that sort of thing. Continuing this process still further, after a while the mind simply stops 'painting in' the body into experience. This is a really interesting thing to observe, because it's a first-hand insight into emptiness - or at least it can be, if we're paying attention! Most of the time, our experience feels like it's a perfect 1:1 representation of an objectively real external world, as if our eyes are windows looking out onto a world which is obviously just the way we see it. But actually everything we ever experience is a kind of mental projection, our mind's best attempt to render what's going on around us in a way we can understand. So when we get very concentrated, our experience gets very 'weird' because we're actually starting to change the way that mental projection is being constructed - we can, in effect, see its constructed nature for ourselves. Very cool! Anyway, the transition from the fourth jhana to the fifth - which is probably the trickiest of the whole lot - requires us to let go of material existence itself. Not just the body, but actually all perception of physical form, boundary or resistance. (One way to do this is to introduce a sense of 'expansion' into your experience and then simply follow the expansion, bigger and bigger, until eventually all perception of limitation and boundary drops away and boom, there's the limitless space of the fifth jhana.) Interestingly, in the fifth jhana we still have the sense of space itself - it's just that there aren't any objects in the space any more. There's a subtle sense of an observer who is aware of the space, but otherwise the space is devoid of objects of any sort. It's just a really, really big space. Personally, I find this really cool, because under ordinary circumstances it's actually really hard to notice the space in a room rather than being drawn to the things in the room - the keyboard, the screen, the windows and so forth. But, in the same way that the happiness of the second jhana is present in the first jhana too but buried under all that the energetic pleasure, it seems like the space is present but buried under all of those things - so when the things empty out, the space becomes apparent. A big empty space is cool enough, but we can let go further still: With the complete transcending of the dimension of infinite space, [perceiving,] 'Infinite consciousness,' one enters and dwells in the dimension of infinite consciousness. The shift here is a pretty subtle one - a kind of 'turning back'. We've already let go of all the stuff in the space - next, the mind lets go of the sense of space itself. So what's left? The knowing of the space - the 'consciousness' of the space. The space was limitless, so the consciousness of the space is limitless too. We 'watch the watcher' - we become consciousness of the limitless consciousness itself. If that sounds weird, well, come on a retreat with me and learn how to do it, then see if you can describe it any better! At this point we've let go of pretty much everything, right? No body, no things, no space - just pure consciousness, knowing itself. Surely this must be the end of the road! But no: With the complete transcending of the dimension of infinite consciousness, [perceiving,] 'There is nothing,' one enters and dwells in the dimension of nothingness. Sometimes, translators will render 'nothingness' as 'no-thing-ness' in an attempt to help the reader understand what's going on. Honestly, though, it's a tough one - like most things, until you've experienced it, it's hard to get a sense of what it's like. Whatever you're imagining, it probably isn't that. The best I can do is to say that, when I open the fridge to get a bottle of milk, and the milk isn't there (usually because my partner has taken it and not yet put it back), there's a moment of 'nothingness' - I was expecting something (the bottle of milk), instead of which I'm confronted by absence. There's nothing there. It isn't any kind of 'something' - I'm not seeing the space where the milk should be, or even the consciousness of the missing milk. In that moment I'm simply touching into no-thing-ness - I was expecting a thing to be there, but there ain't no thing. There's nothing. Well, it turns out that this experience of nothingness/no-thing-ness can actually be sustained, and the mind can learn to rest there for extended periods. And that's the 'seventh jhana' - the 'dimension of nothingness', as the translation above puts it. Now we really have reached the end of the road as far as perception is concerned. Nothingness seems to be the subtlest (non-)object that we can experience whilst clearly knowing that that's what's going on. And yet we aren't done with the arupas yet - there's still one more: With the complete transcending of the dimension of nothingness, one enters and dwells in the dimension of neither-perception-nor-non-perception. Oh boy. So first, notice that the previous arupas all included a phrase like '[perceiving,] "Space/Consciousness/etc. is infinite,"' - in other words, there's still a clear knowing of what specifically is going on, it's just a pretty strange, rarefied thing that's happening. In the eighth jhana we don't get that clarity - we simply enter and dwell in the dimension of neither-perception-nor-non-perception. This is a nightmare to describe because, by definition, any concrete description of it refers to a specific perception, and there isn't a specific perception in the eighth jhana - we've let go of perception now. At the same time, though, we're not unconscious - there's something going on, it's just that it's nothing in particular (not even 'nothing'!). The best I can do is to say it's like that moment where you see something unfamiliar out of the corner of your eye and your mind scrabbles around trying to figure out what the heck it is. Usually that process only takes a fraction of a second before your mind either latches on to something specific and says 'Oh, it's this!' (even when it's wrong) or gives up altogether and says 'Not important, forget about it'. Well, the eighth jhana is like taking that in-between state where it hasn't landed on anything at all and staying there. (It's a bit like the joke about learning to fly - all you have to do is fall over and miss the ground.) Deeper still - cessations of consciousness The eighth jhana is as far as we can go with conscious experience - but some intrepid meditators have gone further still, developing a whole taxonomy of types of cessation of consciousness. By their very nature, these are not really experiences that you have, so much as 'gaps' in experience, where you realise that time has passed and you weren't there to experience it. The simplest kind of cessation of consciousness happens to most of us every day, when we fall asleep. (I'm told that it's possible to train oneself to remain conscious in deep dreamless sleep, but I haven't done that. I like my sleep just fine the way it is!) Perhaps more interesting from a meditation standpoint, some teachers offer a take on the jhanas which is so deep that consciousness appears to shut off while the practitioner is in the jhana. It's only after emerging from the jhana (often after several hours) that the practitioner can 'look back' to see what just happened. It's difficult to reconcile that approach with the descriptions of the rupa jhanas in the early texts (e.g. the description of the third jhana talks about experiencing happiness in the body, which is hard to do when you're not having any experience at all), but nevertheless it's a fascinating practice that shows just how far these practices can be taken. Cessation of consciousness can also happen through insight practice. At certain moments, we can go through a kind of 'reboot', in which consciousness momentarily seems to shut off and then come back online, generally feeling greatly relaxed and refreshed. These moments can sometimes be profoundly significant and herald a shift in our practice, or at other times they can simply be something that happens and leaves us feeling pretty good for a while. (These types of experiences are explored in vastly more detail in the Mahasi tradition. It's not a style I've worked with myself to any great extent, and I have some reservations about the approach, but if you want to know more, check out Mahasi's Practical Insight Meditation.) The creme-de-la-creme of cessation experiences is 'the cessation of perception and feeling', sometimes called 'nirodha samapatti' (the attainment of cessation). Purists will argue that the cessations I've listed above are only 'apparent' cessations, and that, when examined closely enough, a subtle object of consciousness can still be found (deep dreamless sleep in the first case, the nimitta and/or jhana factors in the second case, nibbana in the third case), whereas in nirodha there's nothing at all - zero, zip, zilch. I don't believe I've ever experienced nirodha samapatti myself so I can't speak from (non-)experience here, but you can find living teachers who claim to have done it, and I find it interesting to read their accounts and see what lines up and what doesn't between them. If you're interested in this stuff, good luck to you, and let me know how you get on! I just came here for some stress relief, why are you talking about all this weird stuff? If your interest in meditation is limited to doing a bit of practice every now and again to help you chill out, then sure, this kind of material is probably not going to be terribly relevant to you. Hit up my Audio page, try some of the guided meditations, and maybe take a look at my book, Pathways of Meditation. That said, I do make a deliberate effort to expose the 'deeper' end of the meditation world as well. I first got interested in actually doing the practice rather than just reading about it when I came across a book which did talk very explicitly about the deep end of the swimming pool and gave clear, detailed instructions for how to approach it. I figure that if people don't know what's possible, there's a real risk of missing out on something that could otherwise have been incredibly valuable to them - so it's my duty to shine a light into the darker corners of the meditation world and do my very best to let people know what's lurking in there. If it isn't your cup of tea, that's cool, but at least you've had the option and chosen to take a different path. For me, it's also inspiring (and frequently humbling) to hear about the farthest reaches of the human experience. Any time I start to think I'm pretty hot stuff, I can remind myself that I'm still in the foothills of a vast mountain range stretching on to the horizon. There's so much to explore, so many wonderful practitioners with astonishing skills, and so much kindness and compassion in every generation of teachers going back thousands of years in their willingness to preserve and disseminate what they've found. If I can be a part of that tradition, even in a small way, then I believe my life will have been well lived. May your own explorations bring you joy, wonder and peace. Cultivating the seed of Buddha NatureThis week we're going to take another look at a fundamental teaching of Mahayana Buddhism, the idea of 'Buddha Nature'.
In a nutshell, the idea is that we each possess a kind of seed within our hearts, the seed of enlightenment or awakening, and if that seed is cultivated appropriately, it will grow and flourish until we ultimately become living Buddhas. This 'seed' imagery conveys two important messages. One, enlightenment is not something that we need to 'get' from outside ourselves - it isn't something that someone can give us. It's already inside us. Whereas Catholicism has a doctrine of 'original sin', Mahayana Buddhism instead suggests 'original enlightenment'. However, that doesn't mean that there's no need to practise! For most of us, it needs some help to come forth fully into the world, in the same way that we might cultivate a garden. (We can probably all think of people whose seed of Buddha Nature is pretty well hidden.) But what actually is it? Why should we believe in something that we can't see or touch? Isn't this just another kind of empty religious promise of 'cake tomorrow'? Well, I'm going to make a few observations, based both on the classical teachings and my own experiences. I may be wrong about some of this (that's always true!). But if you're on the fence about the whole Buddha Nature thing, then consider what follows to be something that you can explore for yourself in your own practice, to see what you make of it. Life is positively oriented Whatever form it takes, life seems to have an instinctive sense of 'good' and 'bad', and an urge to move toward the good. Even an amoeba, the simplest form of life we know about, will move toward a food source and away from acid. Flowers turn toward the sun. Some birds and animals seem to do things simply because they're fun, not because they have any kind of survival function. And, given the choice, I will choose chocolate over aniseed ten times out of ten. From this we can see two key aspects of life - awareness and responsiveness. I must say I'm not up on the current scientific consensus on what constitutes life, so maybe there are some exceptions to this (let me know in the comments if that's the case, I'd be interested!), but it seems to me that a key quality of life is to be in some way sensitive to what's going on nearby - to have some kind of receptive mechanism which can detect incoming signals and then adapt accordingly. In our case, we have our sense organs (in the classical Buddhist analysis, the six senses of sight, sound, smell, taste, touch and thought; modern science has identified a few more), but as we know, different creatures have different ranges and types of sensitivity (bats can echolocate, dogs have very sensitive noses and so on). So living things have the capacity to receive information, but that wouldn't be much use unless they were also able to respond to it - and so I consider responsiveness to be another defining feature of life. And, as I commented above, that responsiveness seems to be basically oriented toward what's positive, and away from what's negative. Here, we can see the raw material for wisdom and compassion, which we might say are the two defining qualities of Buddha Nature. Awareness, when suitably refined, can become wisdom - a deep knowing of what's going on which sees clearly and without delusion; and responsiveness, when purified of self-centred motivation and oriented toward the universal good, can manifest as compassion. We can see both of these qualities, in embryonic form, even in an amoeba - how much more so in ourselves? Moment by moment, every living thing is doing its very best to sense what's going on around it and act accordingly, in a way which improves the situation. In fact, viewed that way, it doesn't even seem like so much of a stretch to acknowledge what mystics have been saying for thousands of years - that we live in the best of all possible worlds, a world which is the product of everything that exists trying its hardest to make this the best it can be. Wait a second - this is the best of all possible worlds? Are you being serious right now? I know this is a lot to swallow. Honestly, if it's true, in some ways it's a bit upsetting that the best we can collectively do is to create a world of injustice, war, plague, famine, climate change and all the rest of it. Bad things happen every single day, and I'm not trying to airbrush any of that away, or to say that we shouldn't work to address our collective problems but instead just throw in the towel and say 'Well, this is as good as it gets.' I'm sure we could do better in the future if we put our minds to it. But rather than simply throwing out the ideas above because the supposedly 'best possible' reality is pretty awful at times, I'm going to suggest that it's worth looking a bit more closely at how the bad stuff comes into the world. And - unless you have developed the siddhis to the point that you can know the minds of others - it's probably easiest for us to start by examining our own less-than-spotless actions. (Believe it or not, I do have some myself. One or two.) When I look at my own experience of life, it's clear that my mind/body system has the capacity to learn from experience. Things happen, and I remember at least some of them; when something really bad happens, it leaves a strong memory with a big flashing neon sign saying 'Don't do that again!' - especially when the memory is laid down early in life, when we're at our most impressionable. In my own case, I wasn't a particularly socially astute child, and made a lot of mistakes which caused others to make fun of me - and so my system learnt that, basically, 'people are scary'. In adult life, this manifests as a mild social anxiety, a dislike of large groups, and a kind of clumsiness when dealing with unfamiliar people. On a pretty primal level, something in me doesn't want to take the risk of getting hurt again, and so tries to steer me away from the kinds of situations where I used to get hurt a lot as a kid. Now, unfortunately the experience of the anxiety is actually pretty unpleasant for me, and it has negative consequences for my life as well, making it harder to meet new people and establish friendships. But it's still coming from a basically good place - from the desire to protect myself from what seems like the worse emotional pain that would result from yet another unsuccessful social encounter. Another part of the developmental process also contributes to the twisting of our basically good nature into something less desirable. When we're born, we're totally dependent on others for support. It takes time to learn how to function independently, and part of that process is learning to focus our attention on this particular mind and body, separating it out from the rest of the world at large. That sense of separation comes to feel very strong and real, and as a result the needs of 'me' may become considerably more important than the needs of 'not me'. This isn't the case for everyone - if you grew up in a family situation where you always came last, you may feel the opposite, that everyone else is more important than you. But hopefully you get the broader point - that this journey toward independence sets up a situation where our initial impulse toward 'good' becomes strongly funnelled toward 'good for a particular person or group of people', rather than 'good for everyone'. Basically, we learn how to be selfish. So what I see when I look at my worst moments is a situation where some kind of stress, pressure or pain had become so unbearable that something had to be done to try to escape the situation, and a kind of tunnel vision had developed in which my needs were all that mattered. In a situation like that, our actions can't help but be coming from a place of ignorance (because the tunnel vision cuts off the broader context of the needs of the people around us), and it's an easy setup for greed and/or hatred to be in the mix as well (to get the pleasant thing that we think will ease our pain, or to destroy the hated thing that we regard as the source of our pain). Thus, injustice of all sorts - my group is much more important than your group, and so it's OK for my group to subjugate, exploit or kill yours, and so on. Unclogging the hose pipe I've done a couple of retreats at the beautiful Cloud Mountain retreat centre in the U.S., and one time I had a job which involved using a hose pipe to wash out the compost buckets each day. The trouble was, the retreat was in February, and it was incredibly cold, so most days the hose would be frozen solid when I came to take out the compost. I could turn on the tap as much as I liked, but no water came out. What I would have to do was work my way painstakingly along the length of the hose, flexing it back and forth in my hands to break up the ice into small pieces. This was a pretty painful process - it took a long time, and like I said it was really cold - but eventually I'd get to the point where the ice was broken up enough that I could turn on the tap, and little bits of ice would start to spit out of the end of the hose pipe. After a while, more and more ice would start to flood out of the hose, until finally the last of the ice would come rocketing out, and finally the water would flow freely. Cultivating the seed of our Buddha Nature is a bit like unclogging that frozen hose pipe. The water is that pure, benevolent impulse at the very heart of life - and the ice is all of those twisted, frozen coping mechanisms and self-centred habits that we've learnt over the course of our lives, so tightly packed into the hose that the water doesn't seem to flow at all at first. But as we practise, we begin to break up the ice, and little by little, drip by drip, the water starts to make its way out of the hose. That process of purification can be pretty uncomfortable at times, but as the hose gets more and more cleared out, the water can flow more and more freely. In actual practice, we find a couple of things starting to happen. One is a gradual 'broadening' of our awareness - we become more sensitive to the big picture, more aware of what's going on in the whole present moment rather than just the bits that affect us most. And, over time, we confront and release our defence mechanisms - as we sit with difficult emotions and memories, allowing them to be fully experienced without either suppressing them or allowing ourselves to be overwhelmed by reactivity, they gradually work themselves out and let go of their icy grip on our hearts. (In many cases, we find that those defence mechanisms were trying to protect us from something which may well have been totally overwhelming when we were children, but which we can now handle as adults, even if we still don't enjoy the feeling much.) And so, little by little, the ice begins to melt, and our Buddha Nature can flow forth freely. Why so many great movies have a training montage
This week we're looking at case 28 in the Gateless Barrier, ‘Long Have I Heard’, and using it as a vehicle to take another look at Silent Illumination, spurred partly by a discussion at the end of last week's Wednesday class about the difference between Silent Illumination and concentration practices like jhana. So we'll start there, and use that as a jumping off point to dig into how Silent Illumination works, and what is (and is not) required of us in order to practise it, and as we go through we’ll link back to the central point of the koan - ‘even if you hit him with a stick, he won’t turn his head.’
Let’s get into it! Silent Illumination versus body-based samadhi If you've been to any of my Wednesday night classes in the last couple of years, you'll be familiar with Silent Illumination - it's the practice that opens each class, providing a bit of consistency week-to-week in a class which otherwise bounces around quite a bit from topic to topic. If you haven't come to one of those sessions (please do, you're most welcome and can attend for free via Zoom), you can get an idea of what we do from the Silent Illumination page on my website. We start by setting up the posture, then take a couple of deep breaths, and relax the body on each exhalation. Then we scan slowly down through the body, from the top of the head to the soles of the feet, gradually feeling into each body part in turn and then allowing any unnecessary tension to relax and release. After that, we open up the awareness to take in the whole body, and drop the intention to relax. Then we simply sit, aware of the body as it sits and breathes. Sometimes, we'll go a step further and open up the awareness completely, becoming equally aware of our body, our surroundings, and our mental activity - but I get a lot of new people coming through the class, and that last step can be tricky, so we'll often simply stay with the body awareness for that first (relatively short) sit. Last week I was talking about early Buddhist concentration practice, and at the end of the class we did a body-based samadhi practice, focusing on the sensations of the body with the intention of cultivating mental stability and (maybe, eventually) finding a way in to jhana through that portal. (If that means nothing to you, it wouldn't hurt to skim last week's article, because I'm about to contrast that practice with Silent Illumination.) At the end, someone asked how that body-based samadhi practice was different to Silent Illumination. Both involve awareness of the total field of body sensations, after all - so what's the difference? I'd made a big deal about how early Buddhism separates out samadhi and insight practices whereas Zen cultivates both at once, and yet here's this iconic Zen practice that looks a lot like the samadhi one. What gives? This is a great question (thanks, Alex!). To answer it, let's first unpack what we mean by 'meditation' a bit. In any meditation practice, we have two elements: an object, and an intention. The object is the 'focus' of the practice, or (somewhat crudely) 'what you're paying attention to'. The intention is how you relate to that object, or (very crudely) 'what you're doing with it'. Most of the time, any object can be used with any intention. Some example objects (not an exhaustive list!):
Some example intentions:
The first of these intentions is the cultivation of samadhi, aka 'concentration practice'. The second of these intentions is one way of cultivating wisdom, aka 'insight practice'. Either of these intentions can be pursued with any of the example objects given above, or plenty more besides. So, for last week's practice, the object we were using was the body sensations, and the intention was the cultivation of samadhi. In Silent Illumination, the object is either the body sensations or the total field of awareness - but what's the intention? 'Just sitting' - the intention of doing nothing Silent Illumination is also known as shikantaza, which literally means 'just sitting'. The 'just' is a very strong, emphatic JUST - in other words, 'sitting AND ONLY SITTING, not doing anything else!', as opposed to the kind of 'just sitting' that you might do on the sofa on a lazy Sunday afternoon when it's raining outside and you can't be bothered to get up. Many meditation practices involve trying to cultivate something in an active way - developing attentional stability in samadhi practice, or nurturing a positive emotion in Brahmavihara practice, for example. Silent Illumination goes in the other direction, aiming at non-doing. Sometimes we describe it as 'being aware of the body', but awareness isn't something we actually do - awareness happens all by itself, spontaneously. Check it out! You don't require the slightest effort in order to hear sounds around you. All that is required for you to hear the sounds from your surroundings is that you are not so focused on something else that the sounds drop away. When we focus on something in particular, we shine a spotlight on that particular object, and the act of shining that light casts a shadow on everything else in our experience. The more focused we are on one thing, the less consciously aware we are of everything else - and, in the extreme case of samadhi practice, we become totally focused on the object, to the exclusion of everything else. In contrast, in Silent Illumination, we aim to focus on nothing, to do nothing in particular, so that we can be effortlessly aware of everything that happens. The problem is, doing nothing is really hard! As it turns out, our minds have many, many habits, and in particular will invent things to do when there's nothing going on. Neuroscientists study the brain's 'Default Mode Network', which is a circuit that lights up when we aren't engaged in a particular activity, and results in mind-wandering and self-referential thought. In Silent Illumination we effectively train ourselves to replace that 'default mind-wandering' with a kind of 'default present-moment awareness'. This is why many Zen teachers will use the body as a focus in Silent Illumination/shikantaza. At first, the habit-energy of mind wandering is incredibly strong, and having no specific object of focus at all is too ungrounded - 'just sitting' becomes 'just mind-wandering', and the practice loses its value. By inviting the mind to rest on a specific object, we engage a bit of the 'Task-Positive Network', which counteracts the Default Mode Network and allows the mind to settle more easily. At a certain point, the mind has settled enough that the focus on the body is no longer needed (and, indeed, starts to feel a bit onerous), and the mind naturally relaxes and opens up to the total experience. In effect, we use the body focus as a kind of 'training wheels' to get us to where we want to go a little more easily than trying to jump directly there without any support at all. Even when we're using the body, however, the intention is still different to how we used the body in our samadhi practice. In samadhi, the focus is exclusively on the body - everything else is forgotten. In Silent Illumination, the body is in the 'foreground', but sights, sounds, thoughts etc. continue in the 'background' - we simply aren't giving them our conscious attention. And when the focus on the body is let go, all aspects of our experience have equal prominence - no foreground or background, just experience unfolding. Why does doing nothing help? But what's the big deal about doing nothing anyway? Why would we want to learn such a thing? Many people are attracted to meditation because of the advertised 'benefits' - you do this thing, and you get this reward in return. Particularly for results-oriented people (such as I was when I first took up Zen), Silent Illumination doesn't make a lot of sense - we find ourselves waiting for the next instruction, wondering when we're going to be told what to do. Now, don't get me wrong. Results-oriented practice totally has its place, and 'active' meditation techniques (samadhi/jhana, Brahmavihara, early Buddhist insight practices, koans - basically anything apart from Silent Illumination!) are great. I've used them myself to great effect - part of the reason I teach is because, after a while, I'd benefitted so much from what I'd learnt that I started to feel selfish not sharing it with others. Finding cool stuff and showing it to other people is pretty much how I make my way through the world, so teaching meditation became a natural extension of that. At the same time, though, the 'active' approach has its limitations. In particular, it can potentially reinforce the idea of a discrete 'me' living in my head somewhere, totally disconnected from the rest of the universe, which is doing all this stuff by itself. While there's some truth to this way of looking at things, we also discover as we get deeper into the practice is that there are important ways in which we're not separate from the universe at all. It can be difficult to accept that way of looking at things if we're too wedded to the idea of 'self-power'. Too much emphasis on 'me doing stuff' can also turn meditation into a self-improvement project, and even give us the idea that we can meditate our way out of every problem, every difficult situation in our lives that we don't want to face. Unfortunately, it doesn't really work like that - we still have to pay the bills, take showers and poop from time to time. People we love will die, and things that we love dearly will change and vanish. Life is unsatisfactory at times. And in the worst case, a meditation practice can turn into an avoidance strategy, a way of running away from the things we really don't want to face. This is where it can be incredibly powerful to learn to do nothing - to relax that constant subliminal urge to be in motion, and simply sit, at rest. Simultaneously, we must allow whatever arises to come into our awareness and be accepted, open-handedly and compassionately; at the same time, we must allow whatever reactivity may arise to pass away again without acting on it. In short, even if someone hits us with a stick while we’re meditating, we must not turn our heads. In order to learn to do nothing, we must figure out two 'tricks':
Language is tricky here. It's very easy for this to sound like 'here's what you have to do' - but, actually, both of these are types of stopping doing something which is already taking place. You can use active language to talk about 'relaxing a muscle', but really what's required is to stop tensing the muscle. In the same way, the first point above is about stopping feeding whatever mental process you've noticed - letting go of that train of thought, disengaging from the desire to think more about the person who wronged you, etc. - and the second, subtler, point is about letting go of a whole layer of mental processing which shapes the way we see the world. The first one is closely related to the core skill of any meditation technique - noticing when the mind has wandered, and coming back. But the key here is that we're not coming back to doing something actively (e.g. actively focusing on the cultivation of loving kindness) - we're simply dropping the mental activity, and that's it. (This is not to be confused with actively suppressing mental activity, which is just another form of doing.) This first skill can be a real game-changer. Learning to see what's coming up in your mind and simply not engage with it - without 'distracting yourself' or 'substituting a positive thought' or anything else at all - is an incredibly valuable skill, and can get you through some incredibly hard times. (Again, this is not to be confused with 'spiritual bypassing' or deliberately avoiding engagement with things that do need our attention. It's about refusing to get angry as that painful, humiliating memory comes up for the hundredth time, refusing to play the mind's games as it tries to draw you into distraction. ‘Not turning your head’ is only one side of the story - the other side is taking appropriate action in the world, as we’ve seen in other koans like case 11. But in order to have the freedom to act in that way, we need to cultivate this bedrock of acceptance and non-reactivity.) The second one relates to our salience landscape - the way we see the world in terms of what's relevant to us and our interests. We commonly look at the world through the lens of our preferences - I like this and want more of it, I don't like that and want it to go away, I don't care about that so I'll ignore it. The desire to move towards the positive and away from the negative creates a subtle sense of unease, a constant undercurrent pushing and pulling us around. It turns out that we're able to let that activity go, and let things be as they are. In Zen circles, this is sometimes called seeing the world 'objectively' rather than 'subjectively'. It isn't that you suddenly get a third-person view of the world, like your point of view floats up to the ceiling to look down on the room. Rather, you simply see the world without that extra layer of '...and this is how it relates to me'. It has to be experienced to make sense, really, but take it from me that it's pretty great to experience the world without self-concern. The need for a montage The final thing (for now!) that's so great about learning to do nothing at all is that it's a great way to build up kshanti, one of the six paramitas - virtues or qualities which are regarded as especially helpful when following the Zen path. Kshanti is usually translated as patience, tolerance or forebearance, although personally I tend to think of it as something like 'endurance'. The unfortunate truth - particularly for those of us who are used to 'efforting' our way through life - is that some things just take time. The pizza that's in my fridge is going to take 12 minutes to cook. If I turn up the heat to try to cook it faster, I'll end up with a burnt pizza, not quicker food. In the same way, while it may seem like meditation is something we 'do', it's perhaps better to think of it as setting up the conditions for changes to take place, and then waiting for those changes to happen. Training montages are less fashionable in movies than they used to be (a lot of modern Hollywood writing seems to push the idea that people should be instantly amazing at everything, which I regard as a pretty poisonous idea), but they were there for a reason. Learning a skill takes time - it isn't enough to get the information, it has to be ingrained in the body through repetition. It's easy for me to say 'oh, just notice when your mind is doing something and drop it', but it will probably take a lot of time for you to figure out how to do that, and even saying it that way is misleading - it isn't that one day you're going to wake up with the answer in your head like you've solved a mathematical equation and now know the value of x, and boom, that's your Zen practice sorted. Instead, as you sit in Silent Illumination day after day, week after week, year after year, your mind will figure out how to conform to the intention that you bring to your practice... eventually. You can't force it, and while practising more will help a bit, it's going to be a marathon rather than a sprint. It turns out that developing this 'endurance' mentality has side benefits as well. As your practice deepens, sooner or later you'll pass through periods of purification - times when buried psychological material will surface and demand to be dealt with. Sometimes this material is traumatic enough that the assistance of a therapist can be necessary (if in doubt, please play it safe), but in many cases all that's really required is to allow whatever is buried there to come up into the light of awareness and be fully felt and experienced. A thousand and one small hurts from years ago that we pushed down at the time each need to have their moment in the sun before we can really let them go. If we're not careful, we can easily prolong our misery here by pushing that stuff back down again, or by trying to 'meditate it away' with the secret intention of not having to deal with it. Ultimately, we need to arrive at a genuine place of acceptance before it will really lose its emotional charge, and it can really help us to get there if we've already developed a strong practice of sitting with whatever's going on without interfering with it - not letting ourselves get sucked into seductive trains of thought, but not pushing them away either. If we're able to do that, then we may be able to sit with whatever painful material is arising long enough to feel it fully and finally let it go. Sometimes having a specific technique ('pay attention to how it feels in the body', 'bring compassion to the memory', etc.) can provide just a bit of support to enable us to stay with the really difficult stuff, provided we're able to wield that technique without it turning into another avoidance strategy. At the end of the day, though, that pizza still needs 12 minutes to cook, whether or not I do a fancy dance in front of the oven while it's in there. Take the 100-day challenge! By nature, I tend toward restlessness and doubt in my own practice. I've lost count of how many times I've picked up a new meditation technique or qigong form, done it two or three times, and then announced 'nothing's happening, maybe I'm doing it wrong, maybe it just doesn't work'. Like sticking a pizza in the oven for five seconds and then complaining that the cheese hasn't melted yet and chucking the whole thing in the bin, this is not a recipe for success. So I've found it helpful from time to time to make a strong commitment to a particular period of practice (usually a little longer than feels entirely comfortable for me, but not ridiculously long) and really do my best to stick to it. In Zen, 100 days is a traditional length of time, as well as being comfortably above the various thresholds for habit formation and behaviour change reported by scientists. So why not take a 100-day Silent Illumination challenge? If you start on the day I post this article (Thursday 17th November), your last day will be Friday February 24th. It sounds like a long time away, but it'll come sooner than you think! And in the meantime, you'll have had 100 days to create the conditions for your mind and body to learn to 'just sit', not doing anything in particular. If you're totally new to the practice, start with the body focus; if you're more experienced, just follow your intuition. The attitude to have here is using this period of time to let your mind and body figure it out for themselves, rather than you making something happen through sheer force of will. Let the pizza cook, and enjoy your meal when it's ready! Why practise jhana?This week we're going to be looking at one of the most beautiful meditation practices I know - the practice of jhana.
I've written about jhana a couple of times before. I have an article which describes what the jhanas are and how to start learning them, and there's a page in the Early Buddhism section which describes how to move from one jhana to the next. So why am I doing another article on the subject? Well, for one thing, I'm a jhana teacher, so the subject is going to come up from time to time! But for another, it may be interesting to take a look at some different motivations for learning jhana. It can take a while to find your way into jhana for the first time (it's best learnt on a silent retreat, such as the one that Leigh Brasington and I are teaching next June on Zoom), and you could instead be spending that time doing insight practice, cultivating an open heart, chewing on a koan or doing pretty much anything else. So why bother? Jhana in context The early Buddhist path is sometimes described as consisting of three factors, or 'three trainings': sīla, samādhi, pañña. Sīla refers to ethical conduct, and includes adherence to the precepts (see the Right Action section in this article), but also living a kind, compassionate life in general. Samādhi refers to training the mind. The word 'samādhi' means something like 'gathering together' or 'collecting'; samādhi practices involve training the mind to focus, to 'gather together' with an object of attention and become stable. Pañña refers to developing wisdom - coming to see what's really going on, shedding delusion, overcoming self-deception, waking up to who and what we really are. In the early Buddhist discourses, you'll often find these three trainings unpacked into a longer format known as the 'gradual training'. See, for example, Digha Nikaya 2 - skip down to the section titled 'The More Excellent Fruits of Recluseship' for the start of the gradual training, which then goes all the way to the penultimate section - it ends immediately before 'King Ajatasattu Declares Himself a Lay Follower'. Don't feel obliged to read the whole thing now, though - it's massive, and I'm going to give an overview. A bird's eye view of the gradual training The training starts with the arising of a Tathagata - a fully awakened Buddha, who appears in the world to teach. In other words, it really helps to have a competent teacher before you start trying to get enlightened, because it's hard and it takes a long time, and without an experienced guide you're going to spend a lot of time floundering. The next step that's given in the traditional exposition of the gradual training is to become a monk or nun - shave your hair, leave home, give away all your money, and so forth. It's worth remembering that these early Buddhist discourses were preserved by, and often given to, a monastic audience, so it's very common to find a strong emphasis on the monastic lifestyle. In the 21st century, however, non-monastic but still serious forms of practice have become the dominant mode in the Western world - that's how I practise! In any case, having made the decision to practise seriously, one then 'lives restrained' - by the precepts, and by an ethical code of conduct more generally. At this point, DN2 has not one but three progressively more detailed sections on ethical conduct, which you can read if you'd like to see what was considered unethical at the time of the Buddha. I wouldn't take this too literally, but it's well worth taking some time every once in a while to reflect on ethics, and whether you are living the life that you aspire to live, as opposed to following a path of least resistance. Sorting out one's ethics is good in its own right, but it's also very helpful for the subsequent stages of the gradual training. Generally speaking, an ethical life has fewer worries and regrets than an unethical one, and so the mind will be less troubled and quicker to settle when we meditate. Training the mind is the next step - we now begin to move into the samādhi portion of the training. We're invited to live with senses restrained (not chasing after every source of pleasure that presents itself to us, which, again, has an agitating effect), to cultivate mindfulness and clear comprehension (to be present here and now, and aware of what's going on), to cultivate contentment with little, and to abandon the Hindrances. So now you're living with senses restrained, having abandoned the Hindrances, and you're developing mindfulness. At that point, you're ready for jhana practice! Quite secluded from sense pleasures, secluded from unwholesome states, one enters and dwells in the first jhana, which is accompanied by thought and examination, with rapture and happiness born of seclusion. With the subsiding of thought and examination, one enters and dwells in the second jhana, which has internal confidence and unification of mind, is without thought and examination, and has rapture and happiness born of concentration. With the fading away as well of rapture, one dwells equanimous and, mindful and clearly comprehending, one experiences happiness with the body; one enters and dwells in the third jhana of which the noble ones declare: ‘That one is equanimous, mindful, one who dwells happily.’ With the abandoning of pleasure and pain, and with the previous passing away of joy and displeasure, one enters and dwells in the fourth jhana, which is neither painful nor pleasant and includes the purification of mindfulness by equanimity. After the jhanas, we move into the pañña section, with an invitation to practise insight meditation: When one's mind is thus concentrated, pure and bright, unblemished, free from defects, malleable, wieldy, steady and attained to imperturbability, one directs and inclines it to knowledge and vision. One understands thus: ‘This is my body, having material form, composed of the four primary elements, originating from father and mother, built up out of rice and gruel, impermanent, subject to rubbing and pressing, to dissolution and dispersion. And this is my consciousness, supported by it and bound up with it.’ The section on pañña ends with the ultimate 'goal' of the early Buddhist path - awakening, and the total overcoming of suffering. The function of jhana in the gradual training As we can see from what's above, the jhanas are the Empire Strikes Back of the gradual training - the super-awesome bit in the middle, very cool in their own right, but not something intended to stand alone. Rather, the jhanas are empowered by what came before them (the training in ethics and the cultivation of basic mindfulness), and they flow into what comes next (the cultivation of wisdom through insight practice). Seen in this way, we can understand jhana as a powerful form of mind-training which takes us well beyond simple mindfulness practices, giving us a mind which is 'pure and bright, unblemished, free from defects, malleable, wieldy, steady, and attained to imperturbability'. That's a pretty powerful mind right there. Now, many modern teachers offer what's called 'dry insight' - that is, jumping straight into insight practice without having done any samādhi practice beforehand. Does it work? That wasn't my path, but it seems to. So why bother with jhana, rather than just jumping straight into insight - after all, if the point is to get enlightened, and insight practice is what does that, then why waste time on jhana? The analogy my teacher Leigh uses is this. Suppose you want to cut through a wooden table, and all you have is a butter knife. You can probably do it, but it's going to take a long time, and there will probably be many, many occasions when you start to wish you'd just left the damn table alone. Now suppose you get a whetstone and start sharpening your butter knife. Surely you're wasting your time - while you're sharpening, you're not doing any cutting! But once you've sharpened that knife and you finally start cutting the table, it's going to go much, much faster - and you'll make back all of the time you 'wasted', and then some. The cutting process will also be easier and less painful, because you have a better tool for the job. Of course, over time the knife will get blunt and will need to be sharpened again, but that's okay - you can alternate sharpening and cutting, sharpening and cutting. Meditation is like this too. Effective insight practice requires us to see very clearly what's going on in our minds, even when what there's to be seen is not what we might want it to be. That's a hard thing to do. For one, our minds wander a lot - remember the first time you tried to pay attention to your breath for ten minutes. For another, some of the stuff that will come up in insight practice is downright unsettling (as you may have discovered if you've worked with a practice such as the Five Daily Reflections) - and when it gets too much, your mind may revolt and refuse to look any further. Jhana practice (and samādhi practice in general) helps with both of these obstacles. As the mind becomes focused and unified, it wanders less - so we're better able to stay with the insight practice, and see more clearly what's coming up. And it's more stable - imperturbable, as the discourse says - which means that when difficult or unpleasant stuff does come up, we can stay the course rather than hitting the emergency stop button. My own experience was that learning the jhanas was a massive force multiplier for my insight practice. Prior to learning jhana, I'd had a few bits and pieces come up. After learning jhana, insight practice changed my whole life. And that's not just my experience - I've spoken to many others at this point who've found the same thing. So this is one reason to learn jhana - because it's the crucial 'middle bit' of the path, the mind-training which makes your insight practice (and everything else you do) much more effective. But it isn't the only reason! Jhana as an inner resource Much of our conventional lives is spent trying to arrange our external circumstances to our liking - and that's a never-ending task. No sooner than we've solved one problem, another springs up from nowhere. Usually we have several on the go at once - at least that's how my life seems to be! Basically, we want to be happy. Happiness feels good, and so we try to pursue happiness through things that make us feel good - food and drink, entertainment, sex, money, whatever it might be. But the things out there that make us feel good are unreliable, and so our happiness wavers and wobbles. When we learn jhana (or other practices in the samādhi family, like the Brahmaviharas), we find another source of good feelings - one that's internally generated. We don't need to buy anything to do jhana; we just need to sit down and return to that place within ourselves where we find the jhana waiting for us. Rapture, joy, contentment, peace - all of these things are already within us, just waiting for us to tap into them. Learning that we can tap into these qualities on demand can really help to reduce our craving for external sources of pleasure. Personally, I still enjoy my external sources of pleasure as well! But if I can't get something I wanted, it's nowhere near as big a deal as it used to be. (Jhana isn't the only aspect of practice which helps here, of course, but it's a biggie.) Healing psychological wounds through jhana There can also be a kind of healing associated with jhana practice. Many of us feel a sense of deep lack or inadequacy - a fundamental sorrow, discontent or agitation - and the jhanas can help us to address this. If you feel deeply sad, learn to sit in the second jhana for an hour or more, bathing and marinating in the sweet, pure joy of the jhana - let that joy seep into every nook and cranny of your being, filling every void until there's no more space left. If you feel inadequate or discontented, how is it to sit in the third jhana over and over, resting in pure, wishless contentment, feeling beyond doubt that everything is fine just the way it is, at least for that moment? If you always feel like you should be doing something else, something more, then what happens if you totally immerse yourself in the peace and equanimity of the fourth jhana, over and over, for longer and longer stretches until your mind finally relaxes? At this point, it's important to say that jhana practice is not a total solution to suffering and discontent - it's rightly presented as one of three aspects of practice in the gradual training precisely because it isn't a complete practice in itself. The Buddha himself found that jhana was not the answer to suffering because, when he emerged from his jhana practice, his suffering would return. Even so, I and others have found real benefits in allowing ourselves to rest in jhana for extended periods, so long as it's part of a balanced diet, so to speak. If nothing else, it really can't hurt to spend an hour or two in the second or third jhana to see what effect it has. OK, I'm convinced, I want to learn the jhanas! Great! Learning jhana at home can be done, but it's tough - I know people who've done it, but I'm not one of them. For me, I've found that a silent retreat of 10+ days is a much more supportive environment. As I mentioned above, I'll be co-teaching a jhana retreat next June, which you're welcome to attend if you meet the prerequisites. My teacher Leigh runs many jhana retreats each year, so if you can't make the one in June, take a look at his retreats page to see what he's got coming up. Other teachers I would recommend from my own experience include Mary Aubry, Jason Bartlett and Tara-Lloyd Burton. Leigh also has a book, Right Concentration, which goes into lots of detail about jhana practice - if you're at all interested in this practice, you owe it to yourself to get a copy. May your jhana practice be fruitful! Cutting through spiritual materialism
This week we're looking at case 27 in the Gateless Barrier, 'It is not mind or Buddha'. This koan is dear to my heart - Nanquan (who we've seen before in case 14 and case 19) is one of my favourite Zen masters, and this koan is one that I've spent a lot of time chewing over, and continue to do so.
Why does it resonate with me so much? Because I see myself in the monk asking the question - I'm prone to the same mistake he is. Pursuing spiritual practice through acquisition I imagine that this monk was a pretty well-read fellow. He knew the classic Zen teachings, he probably had a few good discourses and poems committed to memory, he could explain the teachings forward and backward with ease. It's easy to approach spiritual practice this way. I love to read, and I have a vast and ever-growing library of books about Buddhism and other spiritual traditions. I enjoy getting into the details of historical disputes between this school and that one over some minor point of doctrine, and seeing how traditions over time have addressed the perennial issues that come up in spiritual circles through a wide variety of ingenious philosophies, metaphysical models and approaches to practice. I'm the kind of person who, if you ask me 'What does Buddha Nature mean?', will begin my answer with 'Well, it depends,' and proceed to rattle off several of the different ways the term has been used throughout history. I tend to grind my teeth when I hear someone say 'Oh, samadhi? That just means concentration,' because it's never quite that simple. Different teachers use terms in different ways, and what they're saying doesn't make any sense if you try to apply the wrong definition of a term in that context. Personally, I've found all this learning - all this collecting of knowledge - to be both inspiring and helpful for my own practice. I love finding out new things, and so it's a great joy when I come across a text describing something that I don't understand at all, because now I have a new project with a new discovery waiting for me at the end of it. Great stuff! The downside of all this is that it's easy to fool oneself into thinking that this gradual accumulation of knowledge and experiences is the 'point' of spiritual practice. Arguably the central principle in spiritual practice is letting go, not acquiring more. If we take too much interest in our growing trophy case of spiritual trophies, we're in danger of missing the point altogether. Let's get back to the koan and see how this can manifest. A crafty monk lays a trap Let's suppose this monk is familiar with Nanquan's ways - maybe he's even heard about the teaching outlined in case 19, that 'the ordinary mind is the Way'. A major theme in Zen is the idea of 'nothing special' - we don't have to go to some far-off place or transform our minds in some deeply mystical way. Strange experiences may come and go as we practise, but in the long run, the Zen ideal is to become utterly and completely ordinary, with no trace of 'enlightenment' remaining. Sometimes you see spiritual teachers who make a very big deal about how wonderfully special their experience is all the time - this is sometimes called the 'stink of Zen'. (My teacher's teacher, Shinzan Roshi, would sometimes hold his nose and say 'Stinky, stinky!' if someone was a little too impressed with themselves.) So this monk sidles up to his teacher and says 'Hey master, do you have any secret teachings?' Now, the monk is a smart cookie - he knows (because he's heard it from someone) that 'ordinary mind is the Way', so there's no secret teaching. He's expecting the teacher to confirm what he already knows, so he can go away feeling like a smarty pants and return to his complacency. On the other hand, he's also a collector of knowledge, and so, deep down, a part of him really wants there to be some kind of secret teaching. There actually is something called 'the secret teachings of Zen', and every time my teacher Daizan Roshi uses that phrase, my ears perk up. I want the secret teachings, dammit! The regular ones are boring, but the secret ones - that must be the really good stuff. So this question is a win-win situation for the monk. If Nanquan says 'no', the monk gets an ego boost - but if he says 'yes', SECRET TEACHINGS! The trap backfires Knowing that the promise of a secret teaching will really get the attention of this tedious bookworm monk, Nanquan says 'Yep, I have a secret teaching.' And it works - the monk is now hanging on his every word. 'Tell me, tell me! What is it, what is it?' Then Nanquan drops his bomb. 'It is not mind, it is not Buddha, it is not a thing.' (If Nanquan had been holding a microphone, he would have dropped it here.) Now, the koan doesn't tell us what happened next, so we don't know whether the monk had a great awakening or was simply thrown into confusion. But, speaking as someone who's had the rug pulled out from under me by Zen masters on more than one occasion, I can imagine at least some of what might have been going through the monk's mind at this point. Before we get into that, though, we should take a look at what Nanquan's reply actually means.
As I mentioned above, in case 19 Nanquan told Zhaozhou that 'the ordinary mind is the Way'. We might conclude from that that the object of Zen practice is to understand this 'ordinary mind' fully - and when we do, we'll know how to practise the Way and be free from suffering. But now he's saying nope, it ain't that - and, by doing so, he's undercutting the monk's expectations pretty severely. It's like the monk has been learning to play tennis for the last few years and his teacher has suddenly said 'Tennis? You're never going to play tennis.'
Now Nanquan goes a step further. In the Zen context, the word 'Buddha' is typically a shorthand for the principle of awakening itself, as opposed to a reference to the historical Siddhartha Gautama. Indeed, many koans begin with a student asking 'What is Buddha?' (see e.g. case 18 or case 21). But now Nanquan is saying nope, it ain't that either. This second part of the answer doubles down on the first part - not only has Nanquan rejected the 'ordinary mind' answer, but now he appears to be rejecting a basic pillar of Buddhism!
This last one is translated in different ways by different teachers. Thomas Cleary has 'It is not a thing,' as given above. Katsuki Sekida has 'It is not things' - Chinese doesn't have true plurals like English does, so you can make a case either way. Guo Gu has 'not a single thing', which calls back to Huineng's poem which I mentioned in the discussion of case 23 (the third line of that poem is sometimes given as 'Originally there is not a single thing'). Whichever way you translate it, though the meaning is the same. Nanquan is saying that the deepest truth of Zen is, ultimately, not any 'thing' in particular. As soon as you pin it down and say 'Oh, it's this', you've gone wrong. What is it like to be enlightened? In last week's article we looked at a description of awakening from the early Buddhist tradition - disillusionment, the fading of desire, liberation. When we encounter a model like this - which promises a radical transformation of the way we experience the world - it's natural to get a little uneasy about the whole thing. People will start to ask questions like 'But what's that going to be like?', or finding interpretations of the words that sound really bad ('Wouldn't it be boring if you never felt desire? I like desire!'). The problem is that it's impossible to say what it'll be 'like' to be awake, because it isn't 'like' anything in particular. It's a bit like asking 'What is it like to be alive?' - no matter what answer you give, it doesn't really capture what's going on. (The second most annoying thing in Zen is when a teacher says something smug-sounding like 'As soon as you start to talk about it, you've already gone wrong.' The most annoying thing in Zen is when you realise that they were right.) The next temptation lurking in the shadows is to turn 'no thing' into a fixed thing. 'Oh, I know this one, there's no fixed answer to it.' This is a kind of meta-strategy, a way of dealing with the mystery by throwing up our hands and saying 'No point, it's a mystery'. But that doesn't work either - and a good teacher will call you on it if you try. There's a story I heard once (I couldn't find the reference, sorry - if you know it, please leave it in the comments) about a student who tried to deal with his teacher's questioning with a wise, lofty response - 'Oh, you can't lay hand or foot on it' - at which point his teacher grabbed him by the nose and said 'Well I can lay a hand on this!' So what the heck are we supposed to do with this? It seems like all our options are cut off at this point. We can't say it's like something, but the mean old teacher will pinch our nose if we say we can't say it's like something - what's left? Well, one thing we can take from this teaching is that any time we find ourselves landing on one particular thing - a meditation technique, a philosophy, a way of being - as 'it', we can be certain that we've gone wrong. That's not to say that those things aren't useful! Meditation techniques can be hugely useful - this website is devoted to sharing them, after all, and I wouldn't be doing that if I didn't think there was value in it. The point is rather that if you find yourself thinking something like 'Ah, when I'm enlightened, I'll never have to deal with xyz any more' or 'I need to remember to do abc every day because that's what enlightened people do', that should be a warning sign that you've started to turn your practice into just another 'thing' to attain - and in doing so, you've missed the mark. If you'd like to work with this koan in your own practice, a pithy version of it is 'Not mind, not Buddha, not things - what is it?' If you figure it out, maybe you can write a book about it... Finding peace in every situationThis article is the concluding part of our exploration of the Buddha's second discourse, which we started last week - if you'd like some context (not to mention the first half of the text), you might like to go back and check that out.
In the first part, we focused on anatta - the teaching on not-self, or non-self - which is the primary theme of the discourse. However, the Buddha goes on to introduce two more important concepts, anicca (impermanence/inconstancy) and dukkha (unsatisfactoriness/unreliability), and then tie those two and anatta together into a scheme that's become known as the Three Characteristics of Existence - a fundamental pillar of early Buddhist insight practice. He goes on to say what the consequences of a sufficiently deep exploration of the Three Characteristics might be - and it's pretty life-changing. So let's get into the text! Impermanence Having explained the basic idea of anatta to the monks (see last week's article for details) and invited them to explore the principle thoroughly, the Buddha then begins a question-and-answer session which he uses to introduce the other two characteristics. We begin with anicca. What do you think, mendicants? Is form permanent or impermanent?” “Impermanent, sir.” The Pali word anicca is usually translated as 'impermanence', although it also has a sense of 'inconstancy'. So this covers both things which may hang around for a while but don't ultimately last (like an ice cream melting at room temperature), and things which appear to be consistent but are prone to vanishing unexpectedly (like my internet connection). On one level, it can seem screamingly obvious that things are impermanent, no matter what scale we look at, and we may be tempted to think 'Yeah, impermanence, so what?' We know that civilisations rise and fall, friendships and governments (and prime ministers) come and go, bodily sensations change from moment to moment. And yet sometimes the impermanence of the world can really take us by surprise. I started a new job recently, having moved there from one which really wasn't working out for me, and after a settling-in period I'm really starting to enjoy it. Then I found out that there are changes coming which could potentially be really inconvenient for me. In the moment when I was given the news, I felt something akin to betrayal - I've finally got my job sorted out, how dare it go and change on me? Maybe you've experienced something similar, when you'd finally got all your ducks in a row, only for something unexpected to mess the whole thing up again. In the specific quotation above, the Buddha is essentially claiming that all form is impermanent - that is, all material things. We can look at this both in terms of ourselves, where 'form' refers to the physical body, or to the material universe in its entirety. Whatever we examine, we won't find anything which is not subject to coming and going, beginning and ending, birth and death, rise and fall. As I said last week, don't just take the Buddha's word for it (or mine)! Check it out for yourself. Find the most permanent, reliable, consistent physical things you can. Are they still going to be like that a year from now? Ten years? A hundred? A million? A billion? Some things change slower than others, but I've yet to find anything that doesn't change at all... but like I said, don't take my word for it. Unsatisfactoriness The Buddha continues: “But if it’s impermanent, is it dukkha or sukha?” “Dukkha, sir.” The Pali word dukkha is most commonly translated as 'suffering', but that's an unhelpful translation in this context. What the Buddha is getting at is better rendered as 'unreliable' or 'not a dependable source of happiness'. (Dukkha is here contrasted with sukha, which is usually translated as 'happiness' or 'joy'.) He's not saying that 'because everything changes, it all sucks'. Ice cream changes, but I still like it if I eat it quickly enough that it doesn't turn into a goopy mess (but slowly enough that it isn't frozen solid either - navigating the impermanence of ice cream is a tricky business). What the Buddha is saying is that impermanent things are not 100% reliable - precisely because they'll change on you. My job is great... until it changes in a way that I don't like. My internet connection is awesome, until it has an unplanned outage and I can't watch videos of baby goats when I want to. Again, this is something we should check out for ourselves. We can pretty easily thing of unsatisfactory things which are not sources of happiness, but most of us have go-to things which can pretty reliably brighten our day. But is that always true? If I eat some ice cream, I may feel a bit happier for a while - but if I keep eating ice cream, does it continue to produce happiness consistently? (I can assure you it does not.) Non-self Now we return to last week's theme: “But if it’s impermanent, dukkha, and perishable, is it fit to be regarded thus: ‘This is mine, I am this, this is my self’?” “No, sir.” Last week, Buddha suggested that, no matter what aspect of ourselves we examined, we wouldn't find anything which we could entirely control, so that we could have it just the way we want it all day every day - and, therefore, there was no aspect of our experience which could really be called 'me' or 'mine'. This is a high standard, but that's the point - as we discussed last time, we tend to feel that we have some 'essence', some essential 'me-ness', which really is permanent and dependable, and so the Buddha is challenging us to find anything at all in our experience which could possibly meet that high bar. Now he's backing up his previous claim that there's nothing meeting those criteria with an argument which both works on the logical level and gives us something to investigate in meditation. If we really, truly, carefully and thoroughly examine every aspect of material form in our experience, and 100% of it turns out to be subject to changing and vanishing outside of our control (anicca), then it can't possibly be a dependable source of happiness (dukkha), and as such is not fit to be regarded as 'me' or 'mine' (anatta). Boom. Of course, the material world isn't the only place where an 'essence of me' might be hiding - what about the mental world? Extending this analysis to the remaining aggregates The Buddha continues: “Is feeling permanent or impermanent?” … “Is perception permanent or impermanent?” … “Are choices permanent or impermanent?” … “Is consciousness permanent or impermanent?” “Impermanent, sir.” “But if it’s impermanent, is it suffering or happiness?” “Suffering, sir.” “But if it’s impermanent, suffering, and perishable, is it fit to be regarded thus: ‘This is mine, I am this, this is my self’?” “No, sir.” As I noted last week, I've written previously about the Five Aggregates, so check out that article if you aren't familiar with them. But in a nutshell, the remaining four aggregates represent the aspects of our experience which are purely mental - our preferences (whether we find something pleasing, displeasing or meh), our perceptions (the way we see and understand the world; our concepts), our choices (intentions, impulses and other mental activity relating to the sense of will), and our consciousness (our ability to know what's going on). Each of these, the Buddha says (of course, by now you know you've gotta check this out for yourself), is going to turn out to be impermanent and inconstant; consequently, each will turn out to be not a reliable source of happiness; and, as a result, none is a suitable hiding place for this elusive 'essence of me'. On that bombshell... This is starting to sound like bad news. For one thing, it's starting to sound like there's a good chance that I don't actually exist. But leaving aside that whole existential crisis, there's a bigger problem - if we can't find anything constant or reliable, anything that's a dependable source of happiness, then what the heck are we supposed to do? Where do we hang our hat, so to speak? Maybe Buddhism really does say that everything sucks after all! Well, let's see what the Buddha goes on to say. Maybe it'll help. (Maybe not. It's hard to tell with these old texts sometimes.) Seeing this, a learned noble disciple grows disillusioned with form, feeling, perception, choices, and consciousness. Being disillusioned, desire fades away. When desire fades away they’re freed. When they’re freed, they know they’re freed. They understand: ‘Rebirth is ended, the spiritual journey has been completed, what had to be done has been done, there is no return to any state of existence.’” This is dense, so let's take it a line at a time. Seeing this, a learned noble disciple grows disillusioned with [the aggregates]. A central idea in Buddhism is that we spend most of our time caught up in an illusion - an illusion of permanence, of dependability, of essential natures. We believe that we inhabit a solid, reliable, logical, predictable world, and if we can just arrange our affairs correctly then we'll be happy for the rest of time. And despite all the evidence to the contrary - all the bumps and bangs of life, all the unexpected let-downs and sudden upheavals - on an unconscious level we cling desperately to this comforting, but ultimately illusory, belief. When we really examine the Three Characteristics in our experience, over and over again, we gradually become convinced that the world isn't really the way we thought it was. Everything changes; nothing is totally dependable; nothing is fixed. Being disillusioned, desire fades away. As we come to this new understanding, our relationship to what's going on changes. Previously, we believed on some level that we could get lasting happiness 'out there' if we could only collect all the Pokemon (or whatever). Having seen that that kind of strategy is never going to work - not because we're not trying hard enough, but simply because that isn't what reality is actually like - the impulse to reach out and fiddle with everything until it's just to our liking fades away. No matter what's going on in our life, no matter how good our material circumstances, we know we'll always be able to find something wrong with it - so why worry? (Hopefully it goes without saying that this doesn't mean that people in extreme poverty or lacking basic human needs should just suck it up and stop complaining. But if you're agonising over whether your jacket pocket is big enough for the iPhone 14 or whether you'd be better off with the 14 mini, you can probably relax. I just bought a 13 mini, so whichever one you get you'll have a fancier phone than me.) When desire fades away they’re freed. And this, just this, is the end of our struggle. Gone is the subtle itch at the back of our minds that says 'Yes, but wouldn't it be so much better if..?' Reality simply is what it is, and it's fine - even when it sucks. It might sound paradoxical, but there's a kind of 'meta-OKness' which is available in any situation, whether that situation is pleasant or unpleasant. As our practice is developing, it's likely that we'll each find a limit beyond which we lose sight of that 'OKness', but over time, as our realisation deepens, it becomes available in a wider and wider range of circumstances. Then, as Marcus Aurelius said, it is possible to be happy even in a palace. (I have a student who reliably objects at this point that they don't just want to feel 'OK' all the time - they want to have fun! Well, I'm not saying you can't have fun, or that you'll be limited to one emotion for the rest of your life - quite the opposite, actually. What I'm saying is that, even in the most excitingly fun life imaginable, aspects of it are unavoidably going to suck if we continue to insist that the universe should line itself up to our satisfaction. If we can instead let go of the illusion that this would ever be possible, then our wellbeing is no longer dependent on things being arranged to our liking. It doesn't mean you have to give up ice cream if you like it, but if you order ice cream and they tell you there's none left, it won't spoil your evening any more.) When they’re freed, they know they’re freed. They understand: ‘Rebirth is ended, the spiritual journey has been completed, what had to be done has been done, there is no return to any state of existence.’” 'What had to be done has been done' is the standard form of words that we find in the Pali canon when a monk wants to announce to the Buddha that he or she has become an arahant - a fully awakened one. Thus, what the Buddha is saying is that if you take your exploration of these Three Characteristics far enough, you too can go all the way, and become free. And, in fact, that's exactly what happens next. The Five Guys wake up That is what the Buddha said. Satisfied, the group of five mendicants were happy with what the Buddha said. And while this discourse was being spoken, the minds of the group of five mendicants were freed from defilements by not clinging. If you saw my articles on the Buddha's first discourse (part 1, part 2), you might remember that that discourse was also given to his five ascetic friends, and at the end of the discourse one of them (Kondañña) attained stream entry, the first stage of awakening. This time around, all five guys go all the way to arahantship. Nice! (Maybe that's why they decided to go into business together.) So perhaps you've attained arahantship just by reading these articles - if you have, please leave a comment to let me know. But if not, at least you have the next best thing - the framework of the Three Characteristics, which you can use to explore your subjective experience in your meditation practice. Sooner or later you'll find your own way to 'disillusionment', freedom from desire, and ultimately a lasting peace of mind. May you, too, do what has to be done, and find freedom in this very life. |
SEARCHAuthorMatt teaches early Buddhist and Zen meditation practices for the benefit of all. May you be happy! Archives
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