A Clearly Enlightened Person Falls Into a Well, Part 2 (Jan 13, 2005)

Falling into a Well, Part 2

The fact is there is no escape from the pain of losing what we love and inevitably become attached to. No escape from the fear, confusion, anger and broken heartedness that comes with the territory of human relationship or simply being Life in the form of a human body. There is no escape from the fall, no escape from the hard landing and no escape from that dark bottom of the well where we find ourselves at these times. When the outcomes of these encounters are painful or even “disastrous”, is it possible to see them not as failures but rather potential dharma gates of deeper compassion, understanding, forgiveness and loving kindness? Is it possible to really meet these times, no matter how agonizing, with an open heart? To meet even the heart that shrinks in pain and fear with gentle attention even when it seems that every fiber in our body and mind want to just get away?  This is the heart of our practice and unless we want some artificial, dualistic, imaginary practice we must learn to work with them as such; facing all of this on and off the cushion and meeting these moments that at some times seem to stretch on endlessly with an awareness that allows whatever is there to simply be there. If there is sadness, be there with it as long as it needs your presence. The same with fear, worry, anger, rage, feelings of rejection and failure, broken heartedness and loneliness. This is not about thinking our way out, but rather about learning our way into these seemingly awful times through the power of attention. This is a fierce practice that requires a fiercely loving heart; a loving heart that can hold and contain even the heart that’s broken.

Two ancients comment on this experience of finding oneself at the bottom of the well. Case 10, from the Mumonkan has a student pleading to his teacher saying, “I am Ching Shui, solitary and destitute. Please give me alms.” (teacher) “Ching Shui!!” “Yes.” He answers. “You have already drunk three cups of the finest wine in China and yet you say your lips are not yet moist.” This is a koan that deserves it own exclusive commentary, but for our situation it is useful in the following way: How is it for you when you find yourself like our ancient monk; solitary and destitute? When you figuratively find yourself at the bottom of the pit of your agonizing life situation and you are alone? You are destitute. You are deeply grieved and grieving. At these moments even though we may have people who care for us, we are cut off, unreachable, solitary and destitute. And how can it be otherwise? It can be helpful to talk with friends, a therapist or teacher, but can anyone really reach us when we have lost a child, a partner, a loved one, received a devastating medical diagnosis? When we find that our mind or body is not the immortal and invulnerable something we had thought it was? When we suddenly realize that we are “old”? When we realize that we may not see old age? May not see our children grow up? When the self-image that we hold onto so tightly and identify with so completely or the future we envisage and so desperately hope for is completely shattered or called deeply into question? We want so desperately to be comforted. We want so desperately to be held in a way that just makes it go away; makes it somehow all ok, as though simply because it is painful and frightening it is not ok. And in a certain way it really is not ok. How could anything that so completely throws us down the well be ok? Life makes no mistakes and at some point if we are to truly be alive and free regardless of our life situation, we simply must learn to live beyond the limited images and hopes to which we so desperately cling. As Joko Beck once said, “The one thing in life we can truly count on is Life being exactly how it is.” For some losses, disappointments, betrayals, devastating life changes there is nothing that will make the pain go away and nothing that will mend the rupture that we find ourselves to in fact be. We are that pain, and trying to get rid of it creates a conflict in the mind between what is and what should be that only makes the fire burn more searingly. There is, however, a second part to this koan that indicates what is possible for us in such extreme conditions. But first, here is Ikkyu’s take on the matter:

Frogs at the bottom of a well
Like you idiot
Thrashing in the mud so laughable
So very right

There we are face down in the muddy-yuk of our life, thrashing around solitary and destitute, looking maybe even quite ridiculous to onlookers, feeling sorry for ourselves and angry that this happened to “me.” Who’s to say that this is wrong or should be some other way? So very right!! Just this mess, this pain, this confusion, this longing! And when someone calls out “Susan!”, “Bob!” “Doug!” do we not lift our face up out of the mud, look up and answer “yes!”? At that moment, who answers? Is the one who answers solitary and destitute, still thrashing around in the mud in the agony of self-pity, fear or judgment? At that moment who are you?!

The key to working with our “having tumbled down condition” is to see that even at the moment of impact things have changed already and that this moment is not what we think it is. In fact, it is not what we “think” at all!  Thinking is always “old”; just a bit behind the curve of life, if you will. Have you looked closely enough, deeply enough? Have you let your situation speak to you its’ complete truth without your assumptions, presuppositions and images of how it should or could be? How will you know if and when this situation and what it stirs up is finished with you, rather than when you are finished with it? Can you see that thinking about whatever is present in your life right now is quite different from what is actually here right now? Have you really become so completely attentive that there is no “you” there observing and hence no separation at all? Are you willing to not feel better too quickly and to follow this pain right down to its roots? This is demanding and austere practice, but if you have not done it then there is more work to do; if you have done it, there is probably still more work to do. And there is no one, absolutely no one, who can do it but you. It is important to have companions on the Way and someone who can encourage you onward with the confidence of having walked this Way before, but only you can do the work of your life. To go so completely into this moment that “you” disappear: What is that? Then, who are you? Are you the one who suffers, or are you the One who knows?

Where is your True Home? Where and how do you really want to live the precious moments you have?

The Buddha points us this way,

Do not cling to the past. Do not lose yourself in the future. The past no longer is. The future has not yet come. Looking deeply at life as it is in the very here and now, the yogi dwells in stability and freedom.
— Bhaddekaratta Sutta

In this way, even the very bottom of the deepest well becomes the most correct place of our practice. Whatever this moment is, we can learn to dwell here in stability and freedom, not mourning a past that no longer exists nor jumping into a future which we fear or hope for. And if grief and fear are a part of this present moment we can meet them with kind attention, allowing them their rightful place without encouraging them to stay any longer than they need to. In this way we may find ourselves suddenly out of our imprisoned condition in the well and free once again. Until the next time.

A Clearly Enlightened Person Falls Into a Well, Part 1 (Jan 6, 2005)

Falling into a Well, Part 1

If someone knows a simple, easily learned and applied method to reduce the power of expectations, ideas and images on our daily life I wish they would step forward now and safe us an enormous amount of suffering. One of the facts of our normal, mundane daily experience is that we do have expectations, hopes and dreams and when these are significantly rearranged or shattered, the results often feel devastating. And yet, these disappointments can be both extraordinarily painful and wonderful, if fierce, dharma gates to further awakening and freedom. The following koan presents the dilemma for those practitioners with a bit of understanding and those mature in the practice who have realized more deeply:

A clearly enlightened person falls into a well. How is this possible?

This very brief challenge raises a host of possible questions beyond the accepted traditional answer. Is awakening once and for all? If someone accomplished in the Way, including oneself, disappoints or fails us does this mean he or she is somehow not really accomplished, wise, compassionate or skillful? Do we have some idealized view of enlightenment and the freedom it purports to bring? What does it mean to be “awake?” How is it that regardless of how “awake” we might be, we can suddenly find ourselves tumbling into something unforeseen, when a moment ago we thought that we really were watching where we were going?

Hui Neng, the 6th patriarch of Zen in China, offers the following rather direct hint: “As far as Buddha Nature is concerned, there is no difference between a sinner and a sage….One enlightened thought and one is a Buddha, one foolish thought and one is again an ordinary person.” The fact is that our life is lived on a very slippery, constantly shifting slope and there is nothing, no experience of awakening no matter how deep, that will place us outside the Law of Impermanence and the inevitable pain and suffering that we experience when what we so naively refer to as “my” life inevitably and inexorably changes. The most significant of these changes are often sudden, unpredictable and can leave us frightened, confused and disoriented. Our life swings between gain and loss, whether we like it or not. We may feel that if we practice enough, gain stream entry, pass koans, master the jhanas and have deep insight that somehow we will be immune from or vaccinated against the fundamental truths of life. Here’s the real news: There is no security… NONE…and while there is freedom from suffering, there is no escape from it. No matter how continuous our mindfulness or how dedicated our practice in daily life, sooner or later because of conditioning or simply because of the unpredictability of the human condition, the ground beneath shifts or we will look away and suddenly Aiiiiieeeeeeeeee!!! Down we go! One moment we are a clearly enlightened person; the next moment we are falling uncontrollably, or simply flattened by some unforeseen something that stunningly blind-sides us. This is not some aberration or failure in you or your practice. Indeed, these moments constitute the very heart of practice, even though we may tend to beat ourselves up and feel like a failure if that particular reaction is part of our conditioning. And to add to our discomfort, others may see us as failures as they watch us take the tumble. It’s always easier to pass judgment on the tumbler when you’re not taking the tumble yourself.

There are at least two, not mutually exclusive ways that we may be led, pushed or stumble over the well’s edge. The first, as my youngest daughter is fond of saying simply is, “It happens.” It just happens. No warning, just BOOM! Some tectonic plate at the bottom of the ocean moves and suddenly there are 150,000 less people on the planet. It just happened. We become ill and then get better; or not. We survive our cancer diagnosis or our heart attack, or we don’t. We put our child on the bus for a school trip to Canada and get an early morning call about a crash and our kid’s not coming home—ever. We say or doing something unskillful and set off a series of events that we could not have imagined. People’s lives get rearranged in ways they do not ask for. Life comes along, turns us upside down and shakes us until everything in our pockets falls out. Then it drops on our head and waits to see what will happen. The fall down the well can last a long time or the ground comes up to meet us literally in a heartbeat. The result is the same; bruised, bloody and in agony at the very bottom of a very deep dark place. This is not about whether there is a loving God or not and it is not about whether Life is fair or not. This is simply how things are; how life operates, and not a single one of us is immune from these movements of Life nor separate from them. Indeed, they and we are Life itself and it is only because of how thinking constructs all of this that it seems otherwise.

The second way this falling can occur is a bit more complicated. It concerns those moments when we know or at least have some inkling that we are balanced precariously on the edge but refuse to step back. There is a small but clear voice of wisdom that says, “Better not say or do that.” And we choose not to listen. Because of the strength of the wanting, aversive or confused and ignorant mind we go against what we know to be right and true. We act counter to the call of natural wisdom and wonder as we are falling head over heels down the well, “How did this happen?!” The answer is no real mystery; we go against our natural wisdom because the voice of our conditioning is louder and more compelling in the face of the desire to gratify whatever seems to be pressing on us at the time. We practice in the way we do to increase the capacity of the spacious mind to contain virtually everything that appears within it, without the reactivity of choosing for or against. We learn to refrain from acting out of the reactivity of the confused, aversive, desiring mind and to adhere more and more closely to the natural wisdom inherent in simple knowing. And we inevitably find that more practice is required. We are never finished, fully accomplished, completely enlightened beings and there is always some new, never-before-met challenge to test and deepen our understanding of ourselves. This testing happens both through “success” and “failure.”

Are these moments of failure to listen to our own true wisdom mistakes that can be avoided with enough practice, whatever that may mean? I don’t think so. Remember, this practice makes us neither bullet-proof nor immortal.  You cut me, I bleed and vice versa. And it hurts. We can become increasingly skilled, loving, wise and kind. But to think that we will not at some point fall or be knocked into the well is a hubris that is at once laughable and dangerous. It is often part of what sets us up for the fall.

One of my favorite poems by the 15th century zen master Ikkyu goes as follows:

Wife, daughters, friends.
This is for you.
Enlightenment is
Mistake after mistake.

Each moment of failure, each moment of falling over the edge, each loss, each gain, each disappointment, each joy, each moment of darkness or light…..we are so often just a little bit off the way and in that moment of seeing, really seeing just this much, our feet are once again on the Path.  Even if we are a bit wobbly. One of the great gifts of the practice life is to realize ever more deeply that Life makes no “mistakes”. And as soon as we see this, the wound begins to heal and what was thought to be a “mistake” or “failure” can become the beginning of wisdom, compassion, understanding and a more expansive life, even when what occasions this can be so very painful or deeply sad. It is what Soen Roshi referred to as transforming our “miserable karma into our wonderful dharma.”

So, the clearly enlightened person has fallen into the well. His/her falls comes to an abrupt stop at the bottom where they lie broken and bleeding.  We can see how this happens, but what now? Stay tuned for part 2.

A Zen Koan for a Vipassana Retreat: The Buddha and the Outsider. Fall Retreat (Oct 05, 2004)

A Zen Koan for a Vipassana retreat — by Doug Phillips

The talk tonight begins with a case from the Mumonkan, or Gateless Barrier, a compendium of encounters between ancient Chinese zen teachers and their students which has been used by zen practitioners right up until the present day to both break through to realization of the Truth of this moment, and to present and refine that understanding in the context of the teaching relationship and in daily living. One might wonder why base a talk during a vipassana retreat on a zen text, but the somewhat idiosyncratic form of insight meditation that is taught here has been deeply influenced by the zen tradition as well as the teachings of J. Krishnamurti and Vimala Thakar. The spirit of Koan practice has something to offer any student of the Way in that it can offer not only a different language which is both colorful and immediate, but also a challenge to come forth in the present with a personal presentation of the spontaneous, non-clinging, non-conceptual empty mind. In all of these encounters, both then and now, the answer to the problem is never found in the realm of the thinking mind because, just as in our deepest and most important encounters with Life, we can never really think our way out of these situations. The most important, even agonizing, life dilemmas we confront, by their very nature, thrust us into the position of “nothing we do will do”. The answer or solution always is beyond the grasp of the limited, conditioned thinking mind. Remember those times, those moments of extreme stuckness in grief or confusion or fear, when no matter what we did, it did not break up the problem. When nothing you do will do, what do you do? This is the dynamic tension of the koan and of the practice  life that we are invited to enter. 

In this case an outsider, someone who is not of the Buddhist persuasion, comes to the Buddha and says,” I ask neither for the spoken nor for the unspoken.” The Buddha responds by sitting still in dynamic silence. The outsider bows deeply to the Buddha and thanks him for opening his mind, clearing his confusion and setting him on the Way. He leaves and then Ananda, who is the Buddha’s close disciple and attendant and who is deeply gifted, asks the Buddha “What did that man realize that made him praise you so?” And the Buddha said, “It’s like a fine horse that runs at the shadow of the whip.”

Along with each of these cases there is an accompanying verse, which serves as a kind of commentary on the case itself. Here the verse is:

“Walking along the edge of a sword,
Running along an ice ridge,
No steps, no ladders,
Jumping from the cliff with open hands.”

In a traditional zen interview you enter the room, make your bows, recite the case and then demonstrate your understanding. It’s somewhat similar in its immediacy to when you come to see me during retreat and start to tell about something that has happened and rather than doing some technical problem solving I ask you to tell me what is it like for you right now. Go into that and speak from that place. Come forth with who you are right now, not in some stale past or imagined future but in the immediacy of this encounter between you and me. So for the next few minutes I’ll present my practice by reflecting a bit on this story, and you can present your practice of total listening. Together,in this way, we can nudge each other along the Great Way together. 

So who was this “outsider” who presented himself so directly to the Buddha? And maybe more to the point, what is an “outsider” exactly? In this case the outsider was probably someone who was not a Buddhist, maybe a Jain or a Hindu or simply a wandering ascetic. Already we have an example of a quality of the awakened mind: open availability. The Buddha was willing to meet with whoever showed up. When we hang out our sign as teacher we say we are willing to engage with whoever honestly presents themselves for encounter. As vipassana practitioners we make ourselves available to encounter whatever shows up in our mind and body with alert, interested awareness. And by extension, we commit ourselves to extending that willing availability into the world of relationships, using those relationships as a mirror to further deepen our self understanding, reveal our clinging, aversion and confusion and in turn making us increasingly available for deeper encounters with self and other.

The Buddha, or the awakened mind, makes itself available to the “outsider.” Most of us have known at some point in our lives what it feels like to be an outsider; times in childhood when we were chosen last or not at all for a playground game, not invited to a party, or even feeling like an outsider in our own family. The pain of having our nose figuratively pressed to the frosted glass looking in from the cold on everyone else enjoying the warmth of togetherness. Beyond these painful experiences, we can create “outsiderness” through the thinking mind; the mind that chooses for or against, that honors more what it likes or dislikes than being able to hold such differentiation in the context of the great spaciousness of the wholeness of Life. This is the thinking aspect of the mind that operates from the defended center of “me” and “mine”. This thinking aspect of the mind creates the split of insider and outsider internally when it seizes on a sensation in the body and spins out a story about it; the twinge in the back, the slightly elevated heart rate, the tingling in the foot or dizziness when we stand up too quickly. The cascade of thoughts that results from this simple diversion from just seeing sensation as sensation can lead us into all sorts of unwise behaviors and individually created hell-realms and is a direct and immediate source of suffering. Having thoughts is not the problem. Clinging to, believing in and hence setting up a split between the “me” having the thoughts and the thoughts themselves, however is. There is a world of difference between direct seeing of what we call fear or anger, and identifying with and being carried away by our identification with that thinking. It is the difference between freedom and bondage.

Can we watch on the cushion, during our work period and at each moment throughout the day how the mind creates inside and outside, good and bad, me and other? How it takes a sensation and by thinking about that sensation creates separation and suffering? What happens when there is “just” seeing of this process without a “see-er”? Is there an inside and an outside? What happens to the sense of conflict in this seeing? Maybe you can try it right now. When in the seeing or hearing there is just the seen or heard, what happens? Is there a “you” and a “that”? Can there be pain, discomfort, the energy called fear without suffering created by separation? What happening to the suffering when there is just seeing, hearing or sensing? If there are no words, just awareness, what is that? So can we enter into this moment, whatever it is, with an awareness that isn’t encumbered with trying to change anything at all; just simple seeing and the seeing of what happens next. This calms the mind of the conflict of one aspect of the mind trying to get rid of or eliminate another part of the mind. This is the seeing and ending of conflict.

“I ask for neither the spoken nor the unspoken.” Often when something in our life confronts us with the limits of our ability to rationally and logically think our way out of that something, our reaction is to push it away, avoid or kill it off, literally or figuratively. We feel a threat to our integrity and security and our conditioned, and often somewhat primitive, reaction is to eliminate the imagined source of our discomfort. We don’t understand why our new baby won’t stop crying and rather than dealing with our own helplessness and fear we just want him to shut up. A relationship is falling apart, or our body is falling apart, despite our best efforts, and we behave in ways to try and reduce our fear or loneliness, but find that those actions actually only serve to worsen everything.

What we are essentially running from, trying to escape from, is our own mind. And what is so obviously flawed in this is that it simply doesn’t work; whenever the mind tries to escape from itself, that from which it flees is simply there waiting for us to return. Not unlike running from one’s own shadow. So, when we are confronted with a life challenge or something challenging in our sitting practice, our job is to see what escapes we create out of reactivity and not take them. To sit still right in the face of the strong bodily sensation and the urge to move, the loneliness or fear and the urge to flee through some kind of behavior; to meet this with alert, passive attention; with dynamic and rooted “sitting.” This is what Lin Chi meant when he told his students to “Take it easy and do Nothing!” This is the dynamic stillness of the Buddha’s response to the outsider. This is how the stable, alert, awakened mind meets the demand for a response that defies the rational, discursive mind that makes distinctions and separation.

While we can suddenly discover this strong, flexible, unmovable mind, (or it finds us) there is a process of learning our way into it. This learning is found in the activity of falling down and getting up in our formal practice and in daily living; drifting away from the breath and coming back, over and over, noticing more and more how suddenly after being lost in something we are completely without effort or intention, suddenly awake right in the middle of it. This is happening all the time, both on and off the cushion. It’s very helpful to begin to notice this; to experience the mind that spontaneously wakes itself up and to really get to know the mind at that moment.  Regardless of how deeply we are mired in fear, anger or confusion, when awareness suddenly reasserts itself, that is when we take up our practice of knowing this moment exactly as we find it.  Can we take up our practice of sitting without moving right at that moment? Present, alert, receptive to whatever this is.

In answer to Ananda, the Buddha replies, “It’s like a fine horse that runs at the shadow of the whip.” The fuller rendering of this metaphor is found in the Anguttara Nikaya, and is actually related to death awareness practice and the transient and unpredictable nature of human existence. How close does death have to visit us before we are energized and motivated to not waste a single precious moment of a life in which the next breath is promised to no one? What is the ripened condition of mind that really understands the implications of the law of impermanence for living the life we have right now? When the mind is naturally alert and sensitive, not clouded by the toxins of greed, aversion and confusion, perception and action are simultaneous. This is both an extraordinary and completely ordinary occurrence. If you step off the curbing and suddenly notice that there is a car bearing down on you that you did not notice before, you don’t pause to wonder about who has the right of way or whether or not it’s environmentally responsible to drive an SUV; you immediately step out of the way. You may then react to the driver or your own prior inattention in some way or other, but at that moment perception and action are immediate, simultaneous and “you” know exactly the correct action to take. More accurately, correct action springs forth seamlessly from the clear mind when it is empty of reactivity and that which makes for separation. In fact, we always know what is correct action in any situation if the mind is clear, free of the kileasas and hindrances. There is an innate intelligence at work that increasingly is free to function both on and off the cushion. It’s not something that we can strive for or grasp, because it is truly ungraspable and its’ functioning is impeded when there is the narrowing of mind that occurs when we operate out of the restricted center of “me” and “mine”. So, we train ourselves in this way, sitting with the breath, knowing its’ nature as freely functioning, selfless and impermanent, or simply being alert to whatever occurs in the field of awareness — receptive, alert — knowing with increasing intimacy the knowing and the known which occurs without effort, without self, moment after moment, time without end. This is the edge where life and practice become the practice-life; nothing excluded, everything welcome, host and guest in complete harmony.

Lastly, we come to this wonderful verse at the end of the case.

Walking along the edge of a sword,
Running along an ice ridge,
No steps, no ladder
Jumping from the cliff with open hands.

I was out for a walk this afternoon and was coming back down the mountain, which was quite slippery and glistening after last nights’ downpour. My attention went off to something about this talk and as the mind went off ,so, suddenly did my feet. In that timeless pause when the mind is completely still, not really yet aware of the potential for disaster that awaits the body but knowing quite well that something interesting is about to occur, in that moment the body caught itself. Of course, “I” had nothing to do with all of this. Attention had separated itself from the task of paying attention to the trail, the feet had momentarily lost their way, the sudden slip brought mind and body back together just in time for the appropriate correction to be made. Having accepted nature’s invitation to rejoin my body, and very grateful for the body protecting itself, I thought, “So this is how it happens.” A moment of inattention and something happens. We‘re driving, are momentarily distracted and if we’re lucky that day, no problem. Or, there is a more disturbing outcome. We’re here, then we’re gone and when we come back our life has been slightly or dramatically changed in our absence. This life is like walking along the edge of a sword or running along an ice ridge.  At any moment slippage is possible. Pay attention! And yet the other side of this truth is that no matter how dedicated we are to our practice on and off the cushion, these slips are inevitable. Completely continuous attention is impossible. Remember the law of impermanence? Indeed, our practice can assume a compulsive, anxiety ridden quality when we try to use it as a security system to ward off the uncertain, fragile and unpredictable nature of our existence.

One of the interesting insights of our practice is that while slipping from the ice ridge happens in a discontinuous and timeless moment, so does awakening. They are often closely related. When we are separated, lost, angry, confused or fearful there is also the infinite possibility for mind and body to be re-united in the timeless moment of just seeing; simple, direct awareness. This is timeless, spontaneous, effortless and completely intimate, without any separation whatsoever. Here are actualized compassion and wisdom, though we need not call it anything at all. So, you cannot, not slip from the ice ridge or not cut your foot on the sword of life.  And yet what we discover is that in that moment of knowing the cut, the slip, the fall, we are caught again and at least momentarily held by a completely awakened mind. Do you see any steps here? Is there a need for some tool to climb back into our life, or at the moment of seeing are we already there?

Having this experience over and over can lead us to an appreciation of “jumping from the cliff with hands wide open.” As we trust this process more and more, which is really just learning to trust life itself, we can begin to step more and more into this moment of life with less and less fear and hesitation. We begin to love life and to live it without holding back. Do you remember that scene in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, when they are chased to the cliff edge with a roaring river hundreds of feet below?  Sundance wants to fight in out in spite of the hopelessness of success and Butch finally figures out why he won’t jump off the cliff and into the river below to escape. “Why Sundance, you’re afraid.” says Butch. “I am not afraid”, replies Sundance. “I can’t swim!” Says Butch, “Why, hell, Sundance, the fall’ll probably kill ya!” And with a great yell of liberation, off into space they leap. We are conditioned to believe that really letting go into our life is just too dangerous. And it is. Really living is risky, unpredictable. But the alternative is to live a kind of half life, or shadow life.

So, this is our practice and this is our life. Completely letting go of past and future, meeting the unanswerable questions on and off the cushion. Practicing that which cannot be practiced; bearing the unbearable; loving the unlovable; living the unlivable. When nothing we do will do can we let go with hands wide open and jump right into the midst of This. This moment, this life, in what ever form it takes. 

Reflections on Ikkyu

A friend once described Ikkyu as “a little bit racy.” My response to her was that life is a little bit racy; the point being that this 15th century Japanese Zen master and poet exemplifies the life of moment-to-moment awakening in all of its wildly naked, touching, sad and joyful rawness. If we blush a bit, as did his contemporaries, then that is our “problem”, not Ikkyu’s. His wonderful, lived example of “crazy wisdom” has provided solace and inspiration for me and countless others and reaches out over the centuries to continue to invite us to “lock eyebrows” with not only him, but with the very guts of being truly alive right where we are. 

What is included here are a number of selections from the translations of John Stevens’ “Wild Ways: Zen Poems of Ikkyu (White Pine Press, 2003) and Stephen Berg’s “Crow With No Mouth” (Copper Canyon Press, 1989). I first thought of adding some brief comments of my own, but it is always a dangerous venture to try and add to something that stands alone and complete by itself; sometimes referred to as putting another head on top of the one you already have! Mostly I just want to share with you this wonderful teacher who saw literally every single event in daily life as a true dharma gate to complete freedom and full and vibrant life and challengingly invites us all to enter fully into our own life with the same daring and vigor. He speaks to the entire human condition; the broken hearted lover, the hungry child, the lonely wife, the defeated and desperate husband, the “accomplished one” who suddenly finds him or herself face down in the muck of failure wondering how or even if he should get up again. He speaks also to those moments when we know completely that Life makes no mistakes, when we find ourselves perfectly complete changing diapers, watching squirrels run across snow or seeing the old man on the corner lighting his cigarette. Ikkyu represents life lived with absolutely nothing held back. 

The selections here do not include Ikkyu’s more “racy” endeavors. For those of you who are more than a little adventuresome, you can consult Stevens and Berg. In any case, I hope you enjoy this little taste of a truly great awakened being and draw inspiration from his complete commitment to the ten thousand joys and the ten thousand sorrows of our everyday life as human beings.

Translations by John Stevens:

One short pause between
The leaky-road here and
The never-leaking Way there:
If it rains, let it rain!
If it storms, let it storm!

–

Every day priests minutely examine the Dharma
And endlessly chant complicated sutras.
Before doing that, though, they should learn
How to read the love letters sent by the wind
And rain, the snow and moon.

–

Studying texts and stiff meditation can make
You lose our Original Mind.
A solitary tune by a fisherman, though, can be
An invaluable treasure.

–

Dusk rain on the river, the moon peeking in
And out of clouds;
Elegant beyond words, he chants his songs
Night after night.

–

My real dwelling
Has no pillars
And no roof either
So rain cannot soak it
And wind cannot blow it down!

–

Coming alone,
Departing alone,
Both are delusion:
Let me teach you how
Not to come, not to go!

–

I’d like to
Offer something
To help you
But in the Zen School
We don’t have a single thing!

–

The world before my eyes is wan and wasted,
Just like me.
The earth is decrepit, the sky stormy, all the
Grass withered.
No spring breeze even at this late date,
Just winter clouds swallowing up my tiny reed hut.

–

Typhoons and floods make everyone suffer
And tonight there will be no singing and
Dancing.
The Dharma flourishes and decays, ages come
And go:
So right yet so sad---the bright moon sets
Behind the Western Pavilion.

–

Lots of arms, just like Kannon the Goddess;
Sacrificed for me, garnished with citron, I
Revere it so!
The taste of the sea, just divine!
Sorry, Buddha, this is another precept I just
Cannot keep.

–

A wonder autumn night, fresh and bright;
Over the echo of music and drums from a
Distant village
The single clear tone of a shakuhachi brings a
Flood of tears—
Startling me from a deep, melancholy dream.

Versions by Stephen Berg:

If there’s nowhere to rest at the end
How can I get lost on the way?

–

Nobody told the flowers to come up nobody
Will ask them to leave when spring’s gone

–

I won’t die I won’t go away I’ll always be here
No good asking me I won’t speak

–

I’m in it everywhere.
What a miracle trees lakes clouds even dust

–

My mind can’t answer when you call
If it did I’d be stealing your life from you

–

Pleasure pain are equal in a clear heart
No mountain hides the moon

–

I try to be a good man but all that comes
Of trying is I feel more guilty

–

Don’t worry please please how many times do I have to say it
There’s no way not to be who you are  and where.

–

It’s logical: if you’re not going anywhere
Any road is the right one

–

Suddenly nothing but grief
So I put on my father’s old ripped raincoat

–

I’m up here in the hills starving myself
But I’ll come down for you

–

It takes horseshit to grow bamboo
And it too longs forever weeps begs to the wind

–

Something in us always wants to cry out
Someone we love knows she hears

–

Watching my four-year-old daughter dance
I can’t break free of her

–

I think of your death I think of our touching
My head quiet in your lap

–

This hungry monk chanting by lamplight is Buddha
And he still thinks of you

–

Nobody understands why we do what we do
This cup of sake does

–

Age eighty weak
I shit and offer it to Buddha

–

This donkey stumbles blind over stones into walls, ditches
No words for grief or joy no words for his ruined heart

–

No words sitting alone night in my hut eyes closed hands open
Wisps of an unknown face

–

Rain drips from the roof lip
Loneliness sounds like that

–

No masters only you the master is you.
Wonderful, no?

–

Only one koan matters
You

Krishnamurti on Awareness

Krishnamurti on Awareness

You can’t be totally aware if you are choosing. If you say “This is right and that is wrong,” the right and the wrong depend on your conditioning. What is right to you may be wrong in the Far East. You believe in a savior, in the Christ, but they don’t, and you think they will go to hell unless they believe as you do. …To be aware is to be conscious of all this, choicelessly, it is to be aware totally of all your conscious and unconscious reactions. And you can’t be aware totally if you are condemning, if you are judging, if you are justifying, or if you say, “I will keep my beliefs, my experiences, my knowledge.” Then you are only partially aware, and partial awareness is really blindness. 

Seeing or understanding is not a matter of time, it is not a matter of gradations. Either you see or you don’t see. And you can’t see if you are not deeply aware of your own reactions, of your own conditioning. Being aware of your conditioning, you must watch it choicelessly; you must see the fact and not give an opinion or judgment about the fact. In other words, you must look at the fact without thought. Then there is an awareness, a state of attention without a center, without frontiers, where the known doesn’t interfere…

(London, 4th Public Talk, June 12, 1962 Collected Works, Vol.XIII, p.188)

So, through awareness I begin to see myself as I actually am, the totality of myself. Being watchful from moment to moment of all its thoughts, feelings, its reactions, unconscious as well as conscious, the mind is constantly discovering the significance of its own activities, which is self-knowledge….

All relationship is a mirror in which the mind can discover its own operations. Relationship is between oneself and other human beings, between oneself and things or property, between oneself and ideas, and between oneself and nature. And, in that mirror of relationship, one can see oneself as one actually is, but only if one is capable of looking without judging, without evaluating, condemning, justifying. When one has a fixed point from which one observes, there is no understanding in one’s observation.

So, being fully conscious of one’s whole process of thinking, and being able to go beyond that process, is awareness. You may say it is very difficult to be so constantly aware. Of course it is very difficult—it is almost impossible. You cannot keep a mechanism working at full speed all the time; it would break up; it must slow down, have rest. Similarly, we cannot maintain total awareness all the time. How can we? To be aware from moment to moment is enough. If one is totally aware for a minute or two and then relaxes, and in that relaxation spontaneously observes the operations of one’s own mind, one will discover much more in that spontaneity than in the effort to watch continuously. You can observe yourself effortlessly, easily—when you are walking, talking, reading—at every moment. Only then will you find out that the mind is capable of freeing itself from all the things it has known and experienced, and it is in freedom alone that it can discover what is true.

(Brussels,Belgium, 4th Public Talk, June 23, 1956 Collected Works, Vol.X, pp.53-4)

Understanding comes with the awareness of what is. There can be no understanding if there is condemnation of or identification with what is. If you condemn a child or identify yourself with him, then you cease to understand him. So, being aware of a thought or a feeling as it arises, without condemning it or identifying with it, you will find that it unfolds ever more widely and deeply, and thereby discover the whole content of what is.  To understand the process of what is there must be choiceless awareness, a freedom from condemnation, justification, and identification. When you are vitally interested in fully understanding something, you give your mind and heart, withholding nothing. But unfortunately you are conditioned, educated, disciplined through religious and social environment to condemn or to identify, and not to understand. To condemn is stupid and easy, but to understand is arduous, requiring pliability and intelligence. Condemnation, as identification, is a form of self-protection. Condemnation or identification is a barrier to understanding. To understand the confusion, the misery in which one is, and so of the world, you must observe its total process. To be aware and pursue and pursue all its implications requires patience, to follow swiftly, and to be still.

There is understanding only when there is stillness, when there is silent observation, passive awareness. Then only the problem yields its full significance. The awareness of which I speak is of what is from moment to moment, of the activities of thought and its subtle deceptions, fears and hopes. Choiceless awareness wholly dissolves our conflicts and miseries.

(Madras, 11th Public Talk, December 28, 1947 Collected Works, Vol. IV, pp. 143-4)

I wonder if you have ever walked along a crowded street, or a lonely road, and just looked at things without thought? There is a state of observation without the interference of thought. Though you are aware of everything about you, and you recognize the person, the mountain, the tree, or the oncoming car, yet the mind is not functioning in the usual pattern of thought. I don’t know if this has ever happened to you. Do try it sometime when you are out driving or walking. Just look without thought; observe without the reaction which breeds thought. Though you recognize color and form, though you see the stream, the car, the goat, the bus, there is no reaction, but merely negative observation; and that very state of so-called negative observation is action. Such a mind can utilize knowledge in carrying out what it has to do, but it is free of thought in the sense that it is not functioning in terms of reaction. With such a mind—a mind that is attentive without reaction—you can go to the office, and all the rest of it.

(Saanen, 7th Public Talk, July 26, 1964 Collected Works, Vol.XIV, p. 20)

Questions to Ponder. (Dec 2004)

How can we fully appreciate the incredible preciousness of our life in whatever moment we find ourselves? Is it possible to live a moment completely, with sensitivity, freshness and care and what does this mean?  Do we really want to find out?

Can we learn to listen with alert sensitivity to each arising and passing moment in this incredibly, miraculously, unexplainably and persistently uncertain and unpredictable life we have been gifted? Can we learn to reject none of our moments; embrace them all? What are the consequences of such a way of living? Does it scare you? Seem impossible or absurd and undesirable? 

This life is not a rehearsal for something to come. Practice does not mean getting ready for something in the future, it means learning to meet our life as it appears with an ever deepening allowing for it to be just as it is. There can be no peace when the mind is wanting or desiring things to be other than they are. This wanting mind is forever in conflict with itself and there is no end to this self-created suffering. 

Can we bring full and complete attention to this wanting activity of the mind? How does it feel in mind and body when we do this? How does this activity of non-judgmental attention impact our ability to be fully alive in the life we have right now? Can we examine and learn to leave alone these desires that seem to drive us unremittingly and mercilessly, seeing really seeing when attachment and wanting come together? What happens when there is total attention to this?

Can we learn to bring this sensitivity of observing without the observer into every aspect of our life; in this room, at home or work in relationship, in conflict and when there is no conflict? Watch your self; watch your children; watch your partner; watch your hand move to pick something up; watch the whole movement of life and living when it is painful and when it is not; watch the joy and the sorrow, the love and the hate, the confusion and the clarity. Do this with real devotion and love and see what happens.

And learn to be simple with it.

Anapanasati — A Brief Introduction by Larry Rosenberg

Anapanasati is the meditation system expressly taught by the Buddha in which mindful breathing is used to develop both samatha (a serene and concentrated mind), and vipassana (insightful seeing). This practice, said to be the form of meditation used to bring the Buddha to full awakening, is based on the Anapanasati Sutta. 

In this clear and detailed teaching, the Buddha presents us with a meditation practice that uses conscious breathing to calm and stabilize the mind so that it is fit to see into itself, to let go into freedom. The first step is to take up our breathing as an exclusive object of attention. We focus our attention on the sensations produced as the lungs quite naturally and without interruption fill up and empty themselves. We can pick up these sensations by stationing our attention at, e.g. the nostrils, chest or abdomen. As our breath awareness practice matures, this attention can be expanded to the body a as whole.

In the Buddha’s words: “Being sensitive to the whole body, the yogi breathes in, being sensitive to the whole body, the yogi breathes out.” It is important to note that what is being talked about are the raw sensations that come about through breathing, free of conceptualization or imagery of any kind.  For those of you who have done some hatha yoga and pranayama—can you see that your training has been excellent preparation for this?

Of course, when you direct your attention to the breath, you may find that the mind prefers to be anywhere else. The practice is to keep returning to the breath each time you are distracted. Little by little the mind learns to settle down; it feels very steady, calm and peaceful. At this early stage in the training we are also strongly encouraged to be mindful in all the activities that make up our day. To help us accomplish this we learn to keep the breath in mind in the midst of these activities. Turning to the breathing from time to time can help ground us in the activities we are engaged in.  The breath is always with us, helping to cut down on the unnecessary thinking that so often distracts us from the here and now. We continue this practice of mindfulness for the rest of our life!

Concentrating on breathing in such a one pointed manner enables the mind to gather together all its scattered energies. The mind is now much more steady and clear. We are then encouraged to modify the scope of awareness so that it gradually becomes more comprehensive. With awareness anchored in the breathing we begin to include all bodily movements, the pleasant, unpleasant and neutral sensation that make up sensory experience and the wide variety of mind states that compose so much of our consciousness.  We become increasingly familiar and at home with bodily life, emotions and the thought process itself. We are learning the art of self-observation, all along being in touch with the fact that we are breathing in and out. The skill being developed is the ability to widen and deepen the capacity to receive our own experience with intimacy and a lack of bias. The breath becomes like a good friend, accompanying us every step along the way.

We are now in a position to practice pure vipassana meditation. The mind is more able to bring the fullness of mental and physical life into focus. One of the primary meanings of vipassana is insight—insight into the impermanent nature of all mental and physical formations. In the words of the Buddha:  “Focusing on the impermanent nature of all formations, the yogi breathes in: focusing on the impermanent nature of all formations, the yogi breathes out.” As we sit and breathe, we observe the arising and passing away of all mental and physical events. The mind empties itself of all its content; the body discloses its transparent and constantly changing nature. Deep penetration into the law of impermanence can profoundly facilitate our ability to let go of the attachments that produce so much unnecessary anguish. A new dimension of living opens up for us, as we learn to let go into freedom.

Exploring Effort (June 22, 2008)

Exploring EffortThe custom here at IMS, is to take whatever posture is comfortable for you. As you do that, see if this can become just a continuous part of your practice. We stress continuity in practice; that's what really brings this work alive. And it gives us something to inquire into a little bit―so how does this form become practice for us as well? Can listening also be our practice?

 What I am going to talk about this evening is “right effort.” And, if you can kind of go into this yourselves with me, then we'll be doing this a little bit together. Speaking like this is a form of communication that has rather severe limitations: it's an inefficient form of communication, I think. So, to include your own interest and your own inquiry can liven it up a little bit.

We're going to begin talking about right effort and wrong effort and maybe get to the point where we ask the question, “Is any effort at all, right effort?” Effort is something that has been talked about for years and years. It's quite prominent; in terms of the Buddha's teachings, it occupies a place, a step, on the Noble Eightfold Path; it's found as one of the Five Spiritual Faculties; and it shows up as one of the Seven Factors of Enlightenment.

It's a burning question that almost all of us have at one time or another. How shall I practice? What effort do I put into this that facilitates my own growth and journey on this path?

“ ORDINARY MIND IS THE WAY” - Mumonkan, Case 18

Around the year 796 or so, in China, a young man of about eighteen wandered off into the mountains and came to a monastery of a very well known teacher named Nanchuan. This eighteen year-old's name was Chao Chou and he would stay with his teacher for forty years until his teacher died. His teacher was probably in his late forties when Chao Chou entered the monastery. Chao Chou then traveled around China with the attitude of “If I come across someone who is quite well along the path and has questions, I'll do my best to answer them. If I find a child who seems to have something to offer, I'll immediately become his or her ardent student.” And this he did for about twenty years. He finally settled down at the age of eighty and taught for another forty years. He is revered as one of the best-loved teachers in Chinese history.

 This conversation took place shortly after Chao Chou entered the monastery. The living arrangement was such that teachers and students mingled together; they lived together and worked together; and it was quite acceptable to walk up to a teacher at any time and ask him a question. So Chao Chou approached Nanchuan and asked, “What is the Tao?” To which Nonchuan replied, “Ordinary mind is the Tao.” Chao Chou then asked, “Shall I try to direct myself towards it?” Nanchuan replied, “If you try to direct yourself, you betray your practice.” To which Chao Chou said, “Well, if I don't direct myself, how shall I know it?” Nanchuan replied, “The Tao is not subject to knowing or not knowing. Knowing is delusion; not knowing is blankness. When you truly come upon the genuine Tao, you will find it vast  and boundless like outer space. How can this be talked about in terms of affirmation or denial?” And at this, Chao Chou had a profound awakening, and then spent another forty years with his teacher developing and deepening his understanding.

Chinese Buddhism, as many of you probably know, incorporated much of Taoist terminology. And the word tao came to mean bodhi, enlightenment, wisdom, buddhadharma, the Buddha way. So Chao Chou is asking essentially, “What's the most fundamental truth? What is most real?” And Nanchuan replies in a way that was probably quite unexpected by Chao Chou. He says, “Ordinary mind is the way.”

Now, “ordinary mind” has several meanings. One is just your usual, common, day-to-day mind. The other meaning of ordinary is, constant or eternal. So it's pointing to something pretty interesting. Something that is ordinary, that's quite common, and yet is fundamentally true, eternal, constant. And then we get to what Chao Chou's real agenda is, which is, “So, how do I get there?”

I would guess that most of us have a similar question at one time or another. Probably no one in this room...I'll speak for myself...I didn't come to this practice because my life was just great; my relationships were wonderful, I was happy, everything was going swimmingly. I came to this practice, as I think most of you probably have, because something hurt; something felt unsatisfactory. We're deeply troubled in some fundamental way; something about our life presents a question that we can't answer. And it sticks in our craw and it eats at us. It could be something that manifests itself behaviorally―Why can't I ever have a good relationship with a partner? Why can't I hold a job? Why does it seem like I'm always getting myself into hassles with people? How come I'm so scared all the time?

 So these questions come up for all of us and we don't come to this practice lightly. For most of us, this is not a game. This is, in some ways, a matter of life and death. This is the only life we've got as far as we can tell; whether you believe in reincarnation, in other lives or not, right now this is it. And so, this is the one that we have to make count. And we know that it will end. We don't know where or how or when. It's one of the great mysteries that this could end at any moment.

So Chao Chou wants to know, “How do I work with this? How do I practice? What sort of effort should I make?” And Nanchuan says, (and imagine for yourselves that if you approached one of us and you've said, “Well how should I practice? What effort should I make?” and we say to you,) “Any effort you make misses the mark. There's no such thing as right effort.” Where do you go from there? Well, Chao Chou went pursuing and pushing his teacher, “Well, if I don't practice it, if I don't direct myself, what am I to do? How am I to find freedom from this condition that is so deeply troubling to me?” And that takes us into the realm of effort.

 In some ways it can be useful to look at what right effort is not, because as we begin to identify that, we can be alert to when we're off the mark and much of this work is about that. It's about seeing where we're off the mark and, in that moment of seeing, we're back on the mark. It's in the seeing that we are re-anchored. And it's in the seeing that there's a potential for real freedom. The Buddha in the Bahiya Sutta, which is a favorite of all three of us [teaching the retreat], gives a very, very brief summation of his Dharma to a man named Bahiya. And he says, “Bahiya, when in the seeing there's only the seen, in the hearing only the heard, in the touching only the touched, in the smelling only the smelled, and so on, then you are neither here nor there nor in between. And if you're neither here nor there nor in between, there is no 'you' and there is no suffering.” That's the kind of intimacy that is possible when we're seeing when we're not clear and present in the moment.

WRONG EFFORT

So, wrong effort―wrong effort is fairly easily identified by certain looks on the face. In Zen, they say three things are required: great faith, great doubt and great effort. In most of the pictures and paintings that you see of Japanese Zen teachers and monastics in the Thai Forest tradition, folks are looking pretty grim. There's a series of pictures of Thai Forest masters, and the first impression you get is, they've not had their prunes in a long time; and yet, from what I've heard, they often have a wonderful sense of humor. So, what you see is not necessarily what you get!

 But, in this great effort, this tremendous striving, we can hurt ourselves. It's not only uncomfortable, but we can actually damage ourselves, and if we're working already with some sort of physical injury―a back a hip or a neck problem, or just the simple aches and pains that come from putting the body in a position and keeping it there for long periods of time, and gravity doing its work―the striving against that can only make it worse. It just adds tension to the body, tension to the mind and, tension added to pain and discomfort―at least in my experience―doesn't seem to help much. So, the hard muscular effort―that's one pretty clear give-away to when we're off the mark.

 Effort can become just more “selfing”. One of the things that Nanchuan is saying to Chao Chou is, “You're setting up an artificial distinction. You think there's some place to get to and you think that if you just do it right, you'll get there.” Common? Yes? I think if we all took a lie detector test, we'd have a certain blip on that screen. None of us come into this without wanting something out of it; that's what gets us on the path and it can keep us on the path but at some point it becomes a major obstruction. “I want...” and that's just more selfing.

As we've been teaching, a certain ability to focus the mind and allow body and mind to begin to settle around the breath is really important. Otherwise, sitting, many of us would just run screaming from the hall and be done with it. So, a certain amount of focused practic is important. We can develop great powers of concentration, which helps the mind be stable; we can also develop natural concentration. Those of you who are using sharp objects in the kitchen, without a certain amount of focus and concentration you might unwittingly add a little extra protein to the salad. Not a good idea―for you or the salad!

 So, this natural concentration is also important. However, concentration and deep samadhi states are not wisdom, and those states don't teach us how to live. These states are quite dependent on certain controlled conditions. You know, we've all experienced what we would call a “good sitting”, a wonderful sitting, calm, clear. And the car goes by or the lawnmower starts up, or somebody walks in the hall and the whole thing comes down like a house of cards. And then we're grumbling about it, “oh, why did this go away? Why do they come late to the sitting?” I'm not singling anyone out here―but, we ask, “Why did they come late to the sitting?” and we get all revved up about it. Well, where did our calmness go?

 How many of us have had a nice sitting in the morning, go get in the car, and in five minutes we're a raging demon behind the steering wheel? If you live in the Boston area, this is a common experience-I've had it frequently. But, if learning how to live is of high value to us, then we must wonder how or if deep concentration contributes to that. Concentration can begin to help the mind be fit, be toned a bit, to bear up under the rigors of bare attention―because bare attention is a rigorous practice. And in some ways it is a very austere practice; it's a beautiful practice that has great joy in it and we develop an appreciation of things as they are that is quite lovely, and it's quite austere and quite rigorous. Facing ourselves in this bare way, moment-to-moment, over the course of a seven-day retreat, and being willing to do that at home, in the care, everywhere―that's a steep practice.

Concentration practice can also create division between the object of concentration and the mind that's concentrating (the concentrator), and it is fertile ground for more judgmental selfing: good concentrator, bad concentrator; good meditator, bad meditator. “Well, if I'm able to get to these deep states of calm, I must be doing it right.”―more selfing. The Buddha said at one point that, “Under no circumstances cling to anything as me or mine. If you've heard that, you've heard the whole teaching. If you've practiced that, you've practiced the whole teaching. If you've understood that and actualized it, you've understood and actualized the whole teaching.”

 It's very easy to cling to concentration states as me and mine; just as easy as it is to cling to anything else as me and mine. Because they are often very pleasant, the mind is a little more tenacious, and doesn't want to come to terms with how things are, which is impermanent, fragile, falls apart, and is ultimately unsatisfactory. I'm trying to think of other areas that will let us know if we're sort of tilting toward a less useful direction in terms of effort. If you can think of some yourself, I hope you're keeping them in mind throughout the talk.

RIGHT EFFORT

 So what is right effort? For me, it gets a little slippery. I prefer to think of right effort in terms of interest and, if you will, in terms of love. If we're really interested in something, is there effort there? Sure, we may have to look at not wanting to get to our writing tablet every day; we may have to meet the resistance to that. We may have a certain form of exercise that we just love, and there will be days―you know, where “I don't want to do it” and that has to be met. But, for the most part, if we love it and we're interested in it, there's an ease and there's a natural interest. That becomes our “effort”.

 If we're with someone we love―there are times that it can be difficult, the practice of relationship stirs things up invariably, but, if we're with someone we love or if we're doing something we love, there's often an ease, an effortlessness, a rightness that just simply flows. Now, the “me” will get in the way of that. The “me” is jealous; it's very possessive. It does not want freedom. Fundamentally, it doesn't want ease―real ease. It's powerfully conditioned to maintain its own separate, “unique” status. It's somehow hard-wired for survival. You look at the body, the body's hard-wired for survival. The body will do what it needs to do to survive. It knows what it needs in terms of water, in terms of exercise, food, etc., whatever it needs to do to protect itself, the body will do that. You would think that the mind, the thinking, the “I” would also get it, since its dependent on the body for its survival. If the body's gone, then, where's the “I”? The “I” will do things that profoundly damage the body. Right? We've all had intimate experience with that. So, the “I”―when it works its way into what we love, it creates that kind of separation and things can begin to go off the track.

 So, the effort that this practice requires, in some ways, has great ease to it. As you're listening right now, you have no difficulty distinguishing between the sound of the voice, the sound of somebody moving, the sound of a bird. That takes no effort at all. There's a direct, immediate, intimate, non-separated knowing that's neither easy nor difficult. It just is. If I were to ask you, “What's your name?”―right before that, were you conscious of your name? No. I wouldn't think you'd be sitting there thinking, “I'm Bob. I'm Susan. I'm Doug.” There's a stimulus that calls forth that conditioned  response. Prior to that, there was no sense of a Doug, a “me”. There's just listening. Were you aware before I ask you right now, “Are you male or female?” I'm not sitting here saying, “I'm a man!” And you're probably not sitting there thinking, “I'm a woman.” Those distinctions are useful; they're important. But they are not fundamentally true. What's fundamentally true, who we most fundamentally are, is that presence of awareness that knows immediately. How can that be practiced? We can begin to recognize it. And, as we recognize it,  it seems to appear with greater frequency. What's there all the time, we begin to know more and more.

When Nanchuan commented on Chao Chou's question, “Well, if I don't direct myself, how can I know it?” In addition to saying that you are creating an unnecessary and misleading separation based in delusion, he's also alluding to something vast and boundless that's not subject to the mind's discrimination, the choosing, the for or against.

How can what is vast and boundless like outer space be talked about at all? I mean, if we're really interested in having some direct knowing of what's most fundamentally true, interested in finding if there really is something beyond thought, deeply interested in knowing who we really are, interested in directly knowing the deathless, the unborn, buddha-nature―as more than just concepts, if we're interested in freedom, then thinking has profound and clear limits; thought cannot go there. Can thought take in vast, boundless space? Can thought know God? Can the conditioned have a relationship with the unconditioned? I personally don't see how that's possible.

 So, we watch Nanchuan walk through this really wonderful teaching, not answering Chao Chou in the way the student expects to be answered, continuously pointing to something that is literally under Chao Chou's feet. What is ordinary mind? Vast and boundless―how do these two connect? Vast and boundless exclude nothing, it's vast and boundless because it includes everything. Awareness itself dos not discriminate, it just simply knows. It doesn't choose for or against anything. There's an intelligence in that awareness that immediately knows; there's a clarity in that intelligence, which, if it's not clouded by the mind's toxins, results in clear action, what could be called right action. Ordinary mind: vast and boundless.

 Nanchuan's saying, “What you are looking for is right here. Don't look any further.” Don't think you have come to become somebody through great effort. Or that somehow, you're not already complete as you are. It's what each of us, as teachers of the Dharma, is pointing to. You don't need anything. Complete and perfect exactly as we are―and maybe each of us needs a little work. There's a balance there always. But, as Nanchuan points to what's most fundamental―this is what we need. This moment is complete exactly as it is; it holds everything we need to be free, and if we're not going to be free now, when is it going to happen?

 I had the good fortune to speak with Vimala Thakar, a woman of about eighty-six, this past summer, and she really got my attention in a very fierce but wonderfully loving way. She made it very clear that any effort at all was off the mark, and she made it clear in a way that absolutely stopped me in my tracks. “You've been doing this for 30 years, why are you not yet free?” It's a good question, isn't it? What is it that's holding us back? Why is it that we don't trust the completeness, the wholeness of this present moment? Why are we looking always for something else? Because it's a fool's errand; there is nothing else. And yet, the “I” is always looking to confirm itself. And, if it gets that it's work is done in a deep and complete way, that it has no other service to render―this is a fundamental insult to the thinking mind. But it's a question that each of us can ask ourselves. It's a wonderful inquiry: ”Why am I not free right now?” What is it that gets in the way? How am I not living the understanding that I've already got, that in and of itself is freeing? This inquiry holds us up against an edge of interest that has energy, and the right effort to meet that will be there.

So we're working with this balance depending on where we are in our journey, and no one, no one can tell us what is most wise or skillful for us in this moment. We can make suggestions; we can all make suggestions to one another. We can point, but it's a wisdom that cannot be learned by way of someone else's authority. It's learned by confronting those fundamental questions, one of which is: “Why am I not free now?”

At the end of Chao Chou's conversation he had a deep realization. He worked on that for another forty years. Beautiful, huh?

I'll end with a poem that's attached to this story:

Spring comes with flowers,
Summer with the breeze,
Autumn with the moon,
Winter with snow.
When idle concerns
    don't hang in the mind,
This is your best season.

Having No Idea, CIMC (May 25, 2005)

Having No Idea — a Cambridge Insight Meditation Center dharma talk by Doug Phillips

Choosing topics for these talks is always an interesting experience for me as the folks who do the planning want talk titles months in advance. I personally find this next to impossible to do because if I pick a topic for that far into the future I’m either done with it, bored with it or it wasn’t a good topic to begin with by the time to do it comes around. So the way this title came about was that as the organizer and I danced around his need for a title and my need to resist same, I said with a hopeful feeling of finality, “Tom, I have no idea! Why don’t you just call it that.” He said, “Really? That’s a cool topic!” I then muttered something and left it at that. He later did a little bit of editing to make it sound like a real topic and thus we have, “Having No Idea.” 

Now, this was really true: I really had no idea. But as I played around with this and let it play with me a bit it did seem like there might be a good dharma talk in here. What does it mean to have no idea? What does it mean to be without thought or image? Is such a state possible, desirable? Is it something that arises or emerges spontaneously, or something that results from a certain practice? Why would we even want such a state of mind and towards what end if any? Does it mean that the brain stops producing thoughts or does it have something to do with how relate to those thoughts?  And who would be experiencing all of this anyway? Maybe this is somehow related to that famous line in the ancient Chinese poem, “The great Way is not difficult for those who do not cling to their preferences.”  For many years this was mistranslated as, “…not difficult for those who have no preferences.” I don’t know how it is for you, but I’m not sure that I would want to live a life in which I had no preferences. I imagine this might be somewhat akin to being colorblind. I rather like my preferences and some I experience as quite wonderful, like freshly baked chocolate chip cookies or listening to Allison Krauss or hanging out with certain people I care about.  However, it is also pretty clear that often I can’t have what I prefer and it is also true that the more I want those preferences when I can’t have them the greater is my suffering. But it’s not the preferences themselves that are the problem; it is how I relate to them that creates either suffering or allows natural freedom to be present and experienced. The same applies to thinking.  What is useful, skillful or necessary thinking? How much thinking is really necessary to move safely and skillfully through my day? How much thinking is necessary to have right view and to enter into this practice in a thoughtful way? So, there seemed to me to be some real energy in this for a talk and I began to put it together.

However, at the same time there seemed to be another stream of interest running that competed for my attention. I do a three week self-retreat each year in England and while I was there in March my wife sent me a poem by Mary Oliver, called “Wild Geese.” During this retreat I was sitting with a tremendous amount of sadness around some particular life events and when I began to read this poem I found that initially I could only get through the first couple of lines before the sadness and grief came welling up. So I would stay with that until it receded and then go back to it later in the day or the next day working my way down through the sadness literally line by line; watching it, honoring it and seeing when and how I was making something out of it that it did not want to be. And even after many days when I could actually read the whole poem aloud, I would still return to it periodically to stay in touch with that energy and to see if it still needed my attention; my love, really. So Mary Oliver’s “Wild Geese” and I kept company with each other for about half of my retreat until, for the most part, the sadness and loss pretty much revealed itself fully, openly and intimately.

When I returned in late March a student gave me another Mary Oliver poem about letting go. Let me see if I can find it… You know, I thought about making this an evening of just reading Mary Oliver to you, us sitting quietly together and then going home, but I was not sure how that would go over with the administration, so…let me read you the last few paragraphs of this:                       

Every year everything I have ever
Learned in my lifetime comes back to this;
The fire and the black river of loss
Whose other side is salvation.
Whose meaning none of us will ever know.

To live in this world you must
Be able to do three things:
To love what is mortal,
To hold it against your own bones knowing
Your whole life depends on it.
And when the time comes to let it go
To let it go.”

I’ll have more to say about this particular poem later, but I was book ended by these two poems and they continued to work on me over the intervening weeks. And then a few weeks ago I came across a short article in the journal “Buddhadharma” by Joan Sutherland, a wonderful zen teacher in California.  So, I’m reading this article and get to the last two lines which are a quote from Mary Oliver’s “The Summer Day.” These lines are key to the rest of this talk and if you go away with nothing else, I hope you will at least go away with this: “So tell me, what do you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?” Joan talks about this being much in the spirit of Rinzai Zen.

One could actually consider this to be a truly contemporary American koan, a study point, an opportunity for the mind to stop and inquire into itself with the possibility of discovering spontaneously a new perspective on life and living. In vipassana we have the natural koan of “Who is breathing?” or “Who is the breather?” which is a variation on the theme of the most fundamental of all spiritual inquiry: Who or What am I? These questions create a structure and an opportunity for thinking to stop and turn in on itself; to see the mind, the self, our life in all its naked and startling freshness exactly as it is. Of course one of the ways the mind frees itself from the way it makes separation through thinking, and thus lots and lots of suffering, is that thought sees its own radical limitation when it confronts the vast unknowableness (if that’s a word) of life and it just kind of throws up its hands, so to speak, and simply stops. At this point there is no time, no struggle, no effort of any kind to change or do anything. Thinking just stops, sometimes for a little while and sometimes a bit longer. So when we see this enough, and no one can ever say how much is enough, when the mind confronts a piece of reality that is either pleasant or unpleasant in whatever degree, thinking does not so readily create a story about that reality.  Maybe the mind becomes more willing to rest in that space between the breaths, to trust in moving more slowly and with out making conclusions so quickly. It becomes a bit less fearful and more able to tolerate life sequences as punctuated with commas and semi-colons, rather than periods. Awareness just meets what’s there and clear seeing knows exactly what to do. Seeing and acting are one thing when the flow is not interrupted by all of that out-of-date mind chatter. That quality of wanting things to be other than they are, which is the seemingly endless source of suffering, when this is not fed by thinking it tends to get more and more quiet, less and less energetic and problematic.

I think here of the Bahiya Sutta which is a fairly well known and I think quite wonderfully concise and direct teaching of the Buddha, where the Buddha offers as a summation of practice/realization the following: “When in the hearing there is only what is heard; when in the seeing, touching, tasting, thinking there is only what is directly experienced by these senses, that is the end of suffering.” Why is that the end of suffering? Because in that complete intimacy of hearing, seeing, etc. there is no one there to suffer. There is no separation created by thinking and so what is happening? Life is hearing itself; seeing itself; touching, tasting, feeling itself. This is what we call “intimacy.” And this is the heart of our practice, whether we call it anapanasatti, choiceless awareness, koan or shikantaza. Our practice is the practice and realization of an intimacy that does not come from seeking, but rather is the true state of what is .. what we are.. when all seeking, all thinking, everything that supports the illusion of separation falls spontaneously into abeyance. We may have to practice very hard for many years before the thinking mind realizes that truly there is nothing that it can do to be free except stop and it seems that it usually does that when it has exhausted every other possibility and at last simply surrenders; gives up any idea or thought that it needs something or can do something to complete itself. 

So back to Mary Oliver. “So tell me what you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?” I carried this around with me for a few weeks and then several nights ago I’m reading in my newly arrived copy of Shambala Sun an article by the zen teacher Blanche Hartman and turning the page find in its entirety “The Summer Day” from which these lines I just read to you come from. And I thought “Well I guess I’d better talk about this, since it seems to be following me around rather closely.” So, that is the talk you’re getting tonight. So, I’m going to read you the poem and just talk about it for a little bit. As you listen to this, see if you can do it from a place of practice; of just listening. Maybe staying with your breath and not trying to understand what is being read but rather just letting the words come to you.  Don’t go out to the words. Let them come to you.

The Summer Day

Who made the world?
Who made the swan, and the black bear?
Who made the grasshopper?
This grasshopper, I mean---
the one who has flung herself out of the grass,
the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,
who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down---
who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.
Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes face.
Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.
I don’t know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn’t everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?

So that is something you can carry around with you as a practice, all the time. We could stop right now, spend the rest of the time sitting and you could go home. What is it that you plan to do with your one wild and precious life? How do you come forth as wild and precious life? Right now, how do you manifest your one wild and precious life? Do you think that you have to do something? I look across the room and I see wild and precious life just glowing, beaming back at me. Can you feel its movement in you right now?  Completely one, completely fulfilled, completely precious and unique and dynamically alive, functioning freely as you, right now with this breath, this sound? Right now is there anything at all that you need? Anything that needs to be added or taken away?

Much of our practice in working with the breath, working with the kileasas (greed, hatred and delusion), the very activity of sitting, is about creating space and quiet for this wild and precious life to reveal itself. Or more accurately, for us to see what has always been ours, is us, from the very beginning. Over the past few days there have been articles in the news about how the weather has been so awful and how people are becoming depressed and irritable by this period of overcast, windy, rainy, Seattle-like weather. This is wild and precious life! Right now the wind is blowing and rain is hitting the roof and windows calling out to us; life calling out to itself.  This, and how our hearts respond is the very best dharma talk! When we sit right in the middle of this with welcoming emptiness, it blows right through us and there is absolutely no difference between the wind that blows out there and the wind-sound-sensation that blows around and through us in here. No inside or outside. It is the same wind and mysteriously we are that! Only thinking leads us to believe otherwise. As my buddy Ikkyu said: Never mind the sutras; first learn the love letters sent by the wind and the rain!

So we really have nothing to do, and yet it’s not really doing nothing. This doing is dynamic, but it doesn’t mean with have to do something extra, something that thinking tells us to do. In most situations, the being is the doing and will manifest itself as right action when the mind is not clouded by the dust storm of thinking. Sitting upright, fully engaged with the breath moment by moment, is dynamic doing. It is doing in the form of sitting, in the form of attention to the breathing. And we take this practice of full, direct and intimate engagement out into the world and practice with it all the time.

And here is the real challenge: To see those moments when thinking creates separation, really see it, because in that seeing something mysteriously shifts. That shift may be quickly covered over again, but as we learn to remain with those moments of open clarity the mind naturally tends to tilt in the direction of freedom and liberation and away from its self-manufactured delusions. This doesn’t happen because we are doing something to change something else. That is practice gone askew and that is always sewing the seeds of present and future conflict as the mind is simply trying to change or cure itself. Thinking cannot cure itself because it is itself the disease!  Whatever doing is happening, is right in the moment of intimate meeting; seeing clearly and staying with how and why we hold back from deep intimacy with life as wild and precious. Vimala Thakar, who I know some of you are familiar with, talks about how frightened we are of living. So our practice is really meeting that fear, keeping company with that fear because when that non-judgemental completely accepting energy we call attention and which is really love, contacts the energy we call fear, there is transformation and release. Our relationship to the energy of fear and of life changes. Again, while we usually have to “practice” this, fundamentally it is not something “I” do. Something happens, but there really is no one doing it.

So our koan unfolds. What do you plan to do….. This may suggest that we need to plot a course, develop a “game plan.” And while planning does have a place in skillful daily living, I think that for our purposes at least, this is not the important point. We plan, execute our plans, live our life in the moment; not a moment tomorrow or yesterday, but in this moment. So we might change this question a bit to ask, “What do you plan to do right now with your one wild and precious life?” “How am I living my one wild and precious life right now and how am I holding back from living that life right now. This is a question that we can carry with us continuously, touching and being touched by it off and on throughout the day and night until we may notice that we become the question itself and there is just life living itself as whatever form it is assuming in this eternal now.

There is so very much in this directly challenging and yet starkly simple question: How am I living right now? Am I really willing to examine this continuously when getting up in the morning, showering, going to the cushion, fixing breakfast, helping get the kids ready for school, relating to my partner and to whatever reactivity arises from how she or he relates to me, when life presents me with what I want and when it offers up what I most definitely do not want, and so on. What do I plan to do with this? How am I meeting, living this?

And then we move to this word “your,” as in “your wild and precious life.”  Is this a life that we own, possess, control? If we think so, then in what way is this true? Life expresses itself in this unique form that very early on in its’ manifestation was called Doug, or Sue or Bob or Liz. Clearly there is a sense of ownership, of identification with the body which leads to certain further questions that, I think, are relevant and important: How do “I” relate to and care for this body? What does it mean to be responsible and responsive to its needs and wants and to the needs and wants of other body/minds that I encounter? And yet as dharma practitioners we must also question exactly what we mean when we say “my life.” Is not such an idea just more of the kind of thinking that creates separation and eventually sets human beings not only against one another, but against other non-human beings as well?  We live with this interesting tension of simultaneously acknowledging a “me” and yet intuiting something vast and empty of which we are the wonderful and wavelike expression. 

“Wild and precious.” Have you noticed that those aspects of life which seem to be the most precious, the most valuable, are also the most wild; the most uncontrollable. The word “wild” is a wonderful synonym for “impermanence.” What do we encounter that upon penetrating examination does not reveal itself as changing, unpredictable, uncertain…wild and uncontrollable? This can put us right on the edge of our practice and can be an occasion for meeting some fear, especially when we begin to work with our bodies in this way or realize the true nature of the breath. Because sooner or later, and sometimes this can happen through illness or some other dramatic physical change, when we observe long enough we see that that which we depend upon for the sustaining of “my” life is in fact completely unreliable. It grows older, it gets sick and eventually it dies and it does not seem to care one whit about what “I” think or feel about it. It is an interesting study point:  This body, or any relationship really, requires my care and attention and yet it will remain true to its most basic nature no matter what I want and no matter how well I care for it. The challenge of course is to care for it anyway and not to make it an enemy out of fear or clinging. It is both completely wild and completely precious and, you know, I think somewhere in all of this is a lesson about what it really means to love; both oneself and others.    

And, of course, what is most wild and most precious in what the poet Issa referred to as our dew-drop world, is love. Some of you may know the lines from the song, “Lookin’ for love in all the wrong places. Lookin’ for love in too many faces.” One might say that looking for love at all is looking for it in the wrong places, because behind that there is the idea that we can do something to make love happen or create it or somehow through a serious search, discover it or lure it out of hiding. This very activity of looking with a result in mind is somehow off the mark. In this there is something a bit too controlled or contrived; too much of “me”; that “me” that is the source of separation. And of course we all know that real love is not about separation; not about a “me” as apart from a “you.” The wildness and unpredictability of love; how it finds us, never on our schedule and often not in the form we could have possibly imagined; or how it finds us when we really don’t want to be found; or how it does not find us when we most want it to. And then suddenly we turn and bump right into it as though it had been there, unseen, all the time, which of course it was. No one at all in their right mind would consider themselves an expert in this area, but experience does seem to suggest some truth to this. Quite mysterious.

What is not mysterious, however, is how to kill or at least seriously disable this thing we call love. This is accomplished with relative ease simply by trying to control it and take away its essentially wild nature; put it in a cage like any wild thing, tame it and cool it down. This is the poisonous exercise of the “me.” As Krishnamurti said, “When “I” am, love is not. When “I” am not, love is.” The same with beauty: When “I” am not, beauty is. It is in this intimacy that the distinction between self and other falls away, and there is love. Actually, we only know real love after the fact because when love is there, there is no observer recording the action. It is only in retrospect that we say, “Oh, I felt love” or “I was in love.” And this can be a problem because we are then living in the past and making love an object to be re-experienced or re-created and again we are back to the problem of control.  Love really does not like to be controlled! So, interestingly enough we loop back to wild and uncontrollable, uncertain and impermanent. And one could accuse love of being “unsatisfactory” as well, but only if we misunderstand the nature and terms of its appearance and existence. But please be clear here:  Its nature and terms are exactly what makes it, just like the rest of life, so very, very precious and its discovery as rare a seeing a unicorn…and as common as a field daisy. (More on unicorn hunting some other time!)

In Mary Oliver’s powerful poem, “When Death Comes,” she refers to each person as being “as common as a field daisy, and as precious.” How often do we have the experience of being truly precious, unique and unrepeatable, fragile and lovely? How often do we allow ourselves to see those beings around us with the same soft clarity? Can we even entertain that as a possibility, or is there some deep conditioning in us that makes us shy away, turn away from this when it comes. We might be able to see some others around us in this way, but often when it comes to ourselves that crowd of dissonant voices starts to raise a ruckus; “Oh no! Not me. There is this long list of aspects about me that completely disqualify me from the designation of “precious.” Besides, it even feels a little yucky.” I strongly urge you to carry this with you as a practice and examine the ways in which the thinking mind denies itself the experience of knowing its singular and precious being.  There is so very much about this ephemeral and fragile expression of the eternal that is so inexpressibly valuable; this wild and uncontrollable phenomenon we call breathing; all the ways life knows itself through seeing, hearing, touching, tasting, sensing and smelling. Life’s completely free and loving gift to itself is to be able to recognize itself in this complete and timeless moment. How could each of us as the expression of that, not be precious. How is it that we are so often blind to this? This in itself is worthy of deep and penetrating inquiry.

We can never control this one wild and precious life no matter how we try.  We can, however, bring loving attention to it, see how we create and maintain the illusion of separation through unskillful thinking and allow those moments of intimacy to grow and increasingly inform our life and how we live it. We cultivate this by learning how to meet those places where we hold back out of fear, aversion, clinging and so on and in that attention we redeem those lost and suffering parts of ourselves, the life that we have denied or rejected.  Working on this edge of our life we transform what we initially may have thought of as a problem into the gift it is; the gift of opportunity to live our way into a larger more spacious and more loving existence. This very edge of living is the wild and precious nature of life itself.  And once we are able to relate to it as such, our life transforms.

One final thing that I want to circle back to and then we’ll stop;  Mary Oliver’s lines, “When it’s time to let it go/ let it go.”  I’m sure that there is no one in here who has not heard the instruction to let things go.  Just let them go; let them be as they are; just allow yourself to be who you are.  The Thai forest master Ajahn Chah puts it most clearly when he says; let go a little and have a little happiness; let go a lot and have a lot of happiness; let go completely and have complete happiness.

But, you know, sometimes there are things that we are just unwilling or unable to let go of no matter how much awareness and intention we may bring to it. And these things that we hold onto can really hurt a lot. We may have a preference for something to be in a certain way and we know with utter certainty that it is not going to be the way we want it. And still we will not let it go. Each of us has something and maybe several somethings that fit into this; past angers, insults, hurts, losses, relationships that we want to be a certain way and yet know quite clearly that they will never be that way. And we will not let them go.

It is easy to believe that there is something wrong with us or inadequate with our practice when this happens, and I would like to say as clearly and as strongly as I can that there is absolutely nothing wrong with you when you find yourself in this place. There is a way to work with this, however, because often we don’t really understand why we won’t let something go and I don’t believe that anyone actually chooses suffering over freedom.  Human beings do not freely choose to be miserable. For whatever inexplicable reason we find ourselves simply not able or not willing to let go.  Why? We just don’t know.

Practice is to hold ourselves, our attention, up against that unwillingness to let go and to let this become the edge of our practice. Maybe some fear is there, or some deep sadness or maybe there is a wisdom about the holding on that we don’t yet comprehend. So don’t worry about not being able to let go, just stay with the holding on and let what’s there gradually reveal itself.  Stay with it with loving attention. Always stay with just what’s there, because this is our one wild and precious life. Stay with the wind and the rain and the thunder and lightening of all of this which make up the tapestry of life and our place in it.    

Ok. I’m done. Any questions?

The Sutta About Bahiya, Part 2 (Feb 12, 2005)

The Sutta About Bahiya, Part 2 (Ud. I.10)

So we continue on with Bahiya’s meeting with the Buddha and the Buddha’s response to Bahiya’s urgent pleading to teach him how to truly enter the Great Way of freedom and happiness. Remember that although Bahiya has sought out the Buddha as a result of deep doubt and the realization that he is neither free nor practicing in a manner that will lead to freedom, he is nonetheless completely ripe to receive a teaching that will utterly transform him. He has dropped literally everything, emptied himself of everything except his completely focused urgency for awakening. The Buddha meets his simple openness with a simple and powerful response: 

“Bahiya, this is how you should train yourself: Whenever you see a form, simply see; whenever you hear a sound, simply hear; whenever you taste a flavor, simply taste; whenever you feel a sensation, simply feel; whenever a thought arises, let it be simply a thought. Then “you” will not exist; whenever “you” do not exist, you will not be found in this world, another world or in between. That is the end of suffering.”

There are at least two approaches to understanding this teaching. The first is to follow closely just what the Buddha says; that this is an approach to training the mind and training one’s life; a teaching to be practiced and worked with as a process. Bahiya gets it in one deep jolt which he swallows whole, digests instantly and is fully awakened.

Most of us have to work at this as a practice for a very long time, and yet we don’t know how long Bahiya worked at his in order to come to this place, available for this encounter. And it doesn’t really matter whether we have gradual cultivation and sudden awakening, or sudden awakening followed by gradual cultivation. In fact both are not only true, together they encompass the whole of the life of practice-realization.

So the Buddha speaks to Bahiya, but he is also speaking directly to us. Each of us is Bahiya being told, “Please train yourself like this.” What does this mean and how are we to do it? First we have to understand what it means to just hear, just see, simply taste, simply feel, just sense. The key, of course, is in the word “simply” or “just.” For example, we could look at the tree outside the window. Maybe we look over and see the tree and think, “That’s an oak tree.” Or we look at the sky and wonder if it’s going to snow, and how much and will I be able to get out of here at the end of retreat. We smell the aromas coming from the kitchen and wonder about lunch and how much longer until we eat and won’t it be great to have a break. Seeing, hearing, sensing, tasting, smelling is followed quickly by the felt sense of pleasant or unpleasant which is following by thinking which often involves some form of aversion, desire or confusion and then the mind takes off with its own story about all of this. We are suddenly far away from the present moment and the substance of our real life. This is often the recipe for suffering rather than freedom and joy. This is the act of separation and not, I suspect, what the Buddha meant when using the word “just.” “Just” means what is there when there is no image, thought or memory between us and our immediate, direct experience of the content of this present moment. The Buddha is inviting us to encounter the moment-to-moment content of our life exactly as we find it, which is just like this. Our life in this moment is not necessarily how we want it to be, think it should be or imagine how it might be. It is always, just exactly the way it is. Always just this. The sensation in the back, the rustling sound of someone moving has its own life, its own quality, its own definition that is not what we think about it or imagine it to be. When there is the absence of all of the mind-stuff that conditioning, memory and experience put between the observer and what is observed; when there is just the seeing, hearing and so on without separation, then there is intimacy. There is no “you” or “me”, there is just THIS! Then, drop the “just” and drop the “This” and what do you have?

When there is no “me” and “mine,” no “you” which fractures the natural wholeness of Life then we have cut to the root in a very direct way of that which divides and separates; the inherent tendency of thinking to identify with itself and break things apart. Someone once said that the most fatal of human delusions is to believe our own thinking. So when in the hearing there is only what is heard, just complete intimacy with hearing, then there is no place for thinking to arise and if it does there is no-one to identify with it.

But please do understand that the gateway to the wonderful simplicity and wholeness of Life in this moment is through what stands before us right now. If there is fear, judgment, irritation, a fogginess in the mind… whatever is here now, it is also just THIS!

And things get really interesting when we begin to apply this to living relationships in our daily living. Sitting here in these really quite simplified conditions which are carefully constructed to limit complexity is a very different environment than getting up at 3am with a sick or frightened young child; or being criticized by a partner, or being stuck in traffic and running late for an important appointment. And yet the practice is exactly the same. How we train our selves in exactly the same. Life, wherever and however we find it, is just like this, and our work is to increasingly meet it fully and directly. Meeting fear, loneliness, grief and despair with full and complete attention. This is the work of learning to love Life as it is, rather than as I want it to be. This is a steep practice.

Now during our sitting practice, especially on retreat, this comes up for us with great frequency and can be the occasion to refine our skill in wholeheartedly attentive. For example, when we’re sitting for extended periods like this the body has lots of sensations that it produces, many of them registering as unpleasant. Rather than meeting them directly as just sensation and leaving them alone, we often allow thoughts to arise which then can become a story which can often resemble a Stephen King novel in terms of its potential to disturb us. This is the “practice” of suffering not liberation. When we do this in our daily lives when we are not held by the rules and structure of retreat practice, we typically then come up with ways to escape from these self-created mini-hells. Most of these escapes are not very helpful and usually result in their own form of suffering. Eating late at night avoids the feeling of loneliness, but may result in later self recrimination, and so on. The mind generates a story in reaction to something unpleasant, doesn’t like the story and then tries to find ways to escape from itself. And we wonder why we feel a bit off and out of focus and in conflict so much of the time! 

The way of practice, the way to train ourselves, is simply by learning to be with what is, exactly as-it-is, allowing this moment to express itself fully and completely in this vast and spacious field of awareness and then to flow back from whence it came; endlessly arising and passing away, time without end; clouds coming and going through a vast and empty sky. One could say that seeing is our true and natural state. Hearing is our true and natural state. Seeing, hearing is awakening. We awake to the moment of the breath, the sound of the fan. This awakening is an active, dynamic, moving condition. When in the seeing there is only the seen, that split between self and other is gone and there is no room for suffering to arise. “We” don’t do anything, because in that timeless moment of no-thought and complete union there is “no-one” to do. There is no past, present or future because when there is just this, there is no time which is the creation of thought.  You are not found in the future, the past or the present because in this place of no separation, no coming and no going, there is no “you” created by the thinking mind. The moment might hurt like hell, but there is no one there to make a problem out of it.

Now, of course, this too is not a static state but one in which “we” are always moving in and out of. Life is always calling us to wake up to “just this” because “this” is always new, unique, fresh. Life is continuously asking us if we will meet It now, in this form of anger, fear, betrayal, sorrow, joy, happiness; always presented in a slightly different expression. This is why we call this work the “practice” of awakening. We may have significant “experiences” of this where there is deep clarity and letting go which may seem momentary or which may seem to last “a long time.” A dear friend of mine says that she is becoming increasingly distrustful of “awakening” experiences, and in a way she is completely correct. Because one of the dangers in these openings is that we turn them into trophies we collect and experiences reified in memory that support the ego in ways that increase self-centeredness and the self that acquires, strives and separates. On the other hand, they are important as an indication of what is possible and they do over time deepen and enhance our capacity for freedom and love by re-defining who “we” are. The balance here is the observation of Hui-neng, the 6th ancestor of Zen in China: “As far as Buddha Nature is concerned, there is no difference between a sinner and a saint. One moment of awakening and an ordinary person is a Buddha. One moment of delusion and a Buddha is once again an ordinary person.” And so it goes.

Let me try to give you an example of how this works. I had started my drive down here yesterday and was listening to a CD by Allison Kraus. For those of you not familiar with her, she’s a wonderful singer backed up by some very talented musicians, but she can sing some really, really sad songs. So I was driving along starting to be affected by the music, feeling sadder and having some pretty sad thoughts, (which as we all know is just really helpful!) and there was a simple awareness that my body had begun to slump a bit. You know how we begin to kind of collapse into our selves physically when we are sad, and the breathing began to feel short and constricted. But in that simple awareness, without “me” doing anything at all, the breath lengthened a bit, the body expanded a bit, my vision opened up a bit and suddenly into seeing came the sight of so many trees covered with ice from the recent storm and absolutely ablaze with the reflected sunlight. Through all of this there was no thinking. There was just sensing, just seeing and in that timeless moment the mind was completely awake and suddenly out of intimacy with sadness and into complete intimacy with the next THIS. It didn’t last long, I suppose, but mind and body were in a different condition as a result, and I decided to turn off Allison and just drive for awhile. Note that the dharma gate for this was the awareness of sadness and the simple meeting of it with no attempt to make it different in any way. Also note that there is nothing particularly extraordinary about any of this. It is just about attention to the ordinary mind states, feeling, sensing, seeing that make up what we call living. We don’t have to go looking somewhere else for this.  We just have to begin to appreciate the fact that we have all we need right here and now for waking up and being free.

This takes us to another way to understand the Buddha’s teaching to Bahiya and to us and it is as an invitation to spacious and choiceless awareness.  We can practice with each of the sense doors, we can work with the hindrances and so on in this direct, simple and intimate way, and we can also open up everything at once. See, hear, sense, touch, taste; everything happening all at once with no discrimination, preference or choice. Every sense door completely open, welcoming, receptive, alert, completely alive.  So that listening is with the whole body/mind; every pore of our skin, every hair on the body, one whole receptive, alive field of listening. In this there is no “who”, is there? No “me” listening, is there? Check it out for yourself. It may be a little slippery to catch, because when “you” are only hearing, seeing, touching, tasting, smelling; there may not be anyone there to record or reflect on the experience; no “you” there! See what happens when you notice there is separation from what is; when the mind is wanting this to be some other way than just how it is. What happens in that moment of just seeing separation? What happens when you’ve traveled down the mind road and there is a sudden seeing of that? Was there a “you” in that moment of awareness? What if seeing is awakening? What is hearing is awakening? What if it is just as simple and as obvious as that? Then you might wonder what you are doing here on this retreat! What happens if there is just awareness of that thought? This is the practice of awakening, but it might be more accurate to say that it is really awakening which is practicing us!

In any case, we have a wonderful opportunity during the rest of this retreat to continue this ongoing practice of awakening and self-knowing. Being called back to our true self, to simple awareness, by sound, sight, smell, touch, mood, sensation, by the fresh unique call of each moment of our life as it unfolds in what ever way it does. When “you” are not there, then the call and response are happening in complete harmony and with complete ease. And when there is struggle, conflict or suffering then that too is happening and can also be known simply as, just this. Nothing excluded; a place at the table for each of these many beings which show up. Fear sits beside hope which sits beside sadness which sits across from joy which is next to anger which is next to love and so on. They come, hang around for as long as they do and are then back on their way, if “we” are not there to block their journey. When there is just this, then the host of awareness and the guest of whatever is visiting are in complete harmony.

The Sutta About Bahiya, Part 1(Feb 4, 2005)

he Sutta About Bahiya, Part 1 (Ud. I.10)

This talk may end up being several talks because it is about one of my favorite suttas in the Pali canon. Part of my training involved becoming deeply familiar with some of the better know sermons of the Buddha, and this literature contains a wealth of wonderful teachings. But because I find much of the Pali literature to be descriptively and emotionally a bit dry, my favorites list is short; the Bahiya Sutta is one of them.

I’m going to read the sutta in its entirety to give you an overall sense of the dramatic narrative. (And by the way, the words “dramatic narrative” are words I would not use to describe most suttas.) Then I’ll go over the parts that I have found most interesting and useful. So the sutta goes like this:

I have heard that on one occasion the Blessed One was staying near Savatthi, in Jeta’s Grove, Anathapindika’s monastery. At that time Bahiya of the Bark-cloth was living in Supparaka by the seashore. He was worshipped, revered, honored, venerated and given homage—a recipient of robes, almsfood, lodgings and medical requisites for the sick. While he was alone in seclusion he began to have the following thoughts: “Of those who in this world are arahants or have entered the path of arahantship, am I one of those?” (An arahant is one who has “dropped the burden” and is liberated from suffering.)

Then a devata who had once been a blood relative of Bahiya and who was compassionate, desiring his welfare and knowing with her own awareness the line of thinking that had arisen within his awareness, went to where he was staying and on arrival said to him “You, Bahiya, are neither an arahant nor have you entered into the path of arahantship. You don’t even have the practice whereby you would ever become an arahant or enter that path.

Bahiya questioned her without hesitation asking, “But who in this world with all its devas is actually an arahant or has entered that path?”

She said, “Bahiya, in the northern city of Savatthi the Blessed One, a rightly self-awakened arahant, is living there now.  His is truly an arahant and teaches the Dhamma that leads to arahantship.”

Then Bahiya, deeply chastened by the devata, left Supparaka right then and in the space of one day and night went all the way to where the Buddha was staying. He found there a number of monks doing walking meditation outside and went directly up to them and asked, “Where, venerable sirs, is the Blessed one staying? I must see him immediately.” He was told that the Buddha had gone into town for alms.

Bahyia hurried immediately to the city where he found the Buddha on alms round moving with great calm, his mind at peace, tranquil and poised with the restrained senses of a Great One. He approached the Buddha, threw himself to the ground before him with his head to His feet and said, “Teach me the Dhamma, O Blessed One! Teach me the Dhamma, O Holy One, so that it will be for my long-term welfare and bliss.”

The Buddha then said to him, “This is not the time, Bahiya. We have entered the town for alms.”

A second time Bahiya pleaded with the Buddha, “But Holy One it is hard to know for sure what dangers there may be for the Buddha’s life, or what dangers there may be for mine. Please teach me the Dhamma, O Blessed One, so that I may be happy and free.” And again the Buddha tried to put Bahyia off saying that this was not the right time for they were on alms round. And for a third time Bahyia pleaded his case with urgency again citing the uncertainty of the future for both he and the Buddha and begging to be taught the Dhamma that would free him from his suffering.

This time the Buddha relented and said, “Well then Bahyia, you should train yourself like this: Whenever you see a form, simply see; whenever you hear a sound, simply hear; whenever you smell an aroma, simply smell; whenever you taste a flavor, simply taste; whenever you feel a sensation, simply feel; whenever a thought arises, let it just be a thought. Then “you” will not exist; whenever “you” do not exist, you will not be found in this world, another world or in between. That is the end of suffering.”

In that moment of hearing this brief explanation of the Dhamma from the Buddha, Bahiya was immediately released from all forms of suffering generated by clinging, desiring, aversion and ignorance. The Buddha then went on his way.

Not long after this encounter, Bahiya was attacked by a cow protecting her calf and was killed. Later as the Buddha was returning from his meal following the alms round he saw Bahiya’s torn and broken body. His instructed his monks to take the body away for cremation and to build him a memorial, saying “Your companion in the holy life has died.”

Later after carrying out the Buddha’s instructions the monks returned to join him. As they were sitting there one of them said, “Bahiya’s body has been cremated and the memorial built. What is his destination and his future state?”

“Monks,” the Buddha said, “Bahiya of the Bark-cloth was wise. He practiced the Dhamma in accordance with the Dhamma and he did not pester me with issues related to the Dhamma. Monks, Bahiya of the Bark-cloth is totally unbound and free.”

Realizing the significance of this the Buddha exclaimed:

Where water, earth, fire & wind have no footing,
There the stars do not shine,
the sun is not visible,
the moon does not appear
darkness is not found.
And when a sage through wisdom and insight
has known this for her/himself,
then from form and formless,
from bliss and pain,
she is freed.

Ok, this may not be Oscar quality stuff, but as Pali scriptures go it’s not too bad. Let’s start with Bahiya.

When we meet him he is an accomplished and respected teacher who, as we might say, has it all. If he were around today he would probably have a fancy meditation center with lots of adoring students, have written a book or two, maybe appeared on Oprah and would definitely have full color spreads in the Kripalu and Omega program books and probably Yoga Journal. This does not make Bahyia either unique or inspirational. Neither does his doubt. It’s not just that he wonders about the depth of his understanding, the quality of his practice or the degree of his liberation; Bahiya allows this self-questioning, this doubt, to stay around a bit. He doesn’t try to rid himself of it by going deeper into concentration, nor does he dismiss it out of hand. Like the breath or a koan, Bahiya keeps company with his doubt and sincerely takes on the role of host to this troublesome guest. Then the “devata”, a spirit being which might be seen as representing the aspect of feminine wisdom and inquiry makes her appearance. She challenges him with brutal directness and essentially not only confirms Bahiya’s suspicions about his level of attainment, but tells him despite all of his so-called attainments he is not even a beginner on the path. Basically she tells him in no uncertain terms that his practice is worthless and his spiritual attainments are a sham. 

This is not something that happens only in ancient teaching stories. It happens to us and it can happen with devastating effects. Maybe we have been practicing with some real devotion; we sit regularly, eat right, maybe practice yoga asana under the guidance of a skilled teacher, maybe we get trained as teacher or have aspirations in that direction and life seems to be going pretty well. Or maybe we’re just struggling along with a minimal practice which we may or may not recognize to be minimal. Whatever our situation, life can come along with a challenge that precipitates real doubt about the worth of doing this work at all. We lose a job, fall into a depression, suffer some major blow to our self-image, lose an important relationship or our health fails and we find ourselves flailing around in the middle of fear, anger, betrayal or whatever the mixture of soupy stuff we find ourselves in. We question our worth, the worth of our practice, the worth of a teacher and the teachings. Or maybe the nagging of doubt occurs because we find that after so many months or even years of practice we still find ourselves yelling at other drivers or our children or partners.  Somehow our expectations of the results of practice don’t match up with the current realities.

Deep doubt is a crucial fork-in-the road for our work in the contemplative life. How shall we proceed? One fork in the road is the path of helplessness, resignation, self-judgment, despair and bitterness. We might call this “d” doubt. We simply run away. This is different from making a strategic retreat to re-group, let the heat diminish a bit and then re-enter the fray. And sometimes we have to travel down this road a considerable distance to realize its futility. This is the path of death, and it is not the Great Death that leads to life renewed and fully lived. It is just dead. The other fork is the path of practice in which through right effort, persistence and courage we use what seems to be an assault as an invitation to examine the ways of the self; to know the self more deeply; to know its attachments and fears and the ways it imposes arbitrary limitations, using what has happened to us and our reactions to it as a mirror to see ourselves more clearly even if this involves considerable pain. We recognize the urgency of life’s call to itself to see where we restrict ourselves to narrowness, how we hold back from living fully, vibrantly and joyfully because of unresolved fear, aversion, self-image and ignorance. Do we recognize this small but clear voice which suggests that how we are living may really be just a form of slow dying? The voice that suggests that we are often just fooling ourselves with the belief that we are living fully and courageously, when we are really not valuing the incredible gift of the moments we have? That voice that points exactly to those places we pull back in fear and challenges us to stop fooling ourselves? Are we willing to even ask ourselves the questions that Bahyia asked himself? Willing to ask and really listen to the answer?

Once Mother Theresa was asked what she said when she prayed. She answered that she didn’t say anything, she listened. When asked what God said to her, she said that God didn’t say anything; He listened back. She added that if you didn’t understand, she couldn’t explain it further. Are we willing to really listen to our life; to listen throughout the day with our whole being, alert to feeling, sensation, sight, smell, taste and sound; whatever appears in our awareness? Maybe we really don’t want to listen like that because we know that what we hear might just revolutionize our life as it did Bahiya’s. And maybe that’s just a little bit too scary. I have to tell you that it is dangerous because real freedom can upset ours and others lives. But if we don’t do this our life will be lived significantly in the shadows and the consequence to living such a life is being shadowed by both doubt and a kind of pestering discontent that somehow something is missing. If we are not careful we can live that incompleteness right into the grave. What a waste.

And this is where we come to what I consider one of the two or three most important parts of this sutta and the part that I find both inspirational and awe-inspiring: When told that his practice and his attainment are completely bogus, Bahiya does not defend, rationalize, deny or counterattack. Bahiya does two things: First he asks if there is such an enlightened person around who can teach him how to get free. And when told that there is and where he can be found, Bahiya immediately and without hesitation goes to find him. He doesn’t ask how much this new guy might charge him for lessons or whether or not there is a monthly fee to join the sangha. He doesn’t wait to collect a retinue to carry his stuff and he doesn’t wait to get things in just the right order for his departure. Bahiya drops everything and literally runs towards the Truth, towards the Enlightened One. There is an urgency, a complete and unhesitating commitment to one thing and one thing only; Bahyia desperately and urgently wants to be free. When I think of the great efforts my own teachers have made in this direction, their complete devotion to the Path of Awakening, when I read of Bahiya’s example and when I read of others who have made extraordinary sacrifices to charge headlong down this sacred path, I can experience my own efforts as small and paltry; inadequate and sham-like. I can feel humbled and almost ashamed. And yet, here too is this wonderful voice challenging me, challenging you, and we are all just like Bahiya. We can see that this practice, as the poet said, is a condition of complete simplicity which demands absolutely everything, and we can acknowledge that we still have work to do. Maybe we don’t drop everything, but maybe we can begin to wonder about the attachments we do have and so vigorously and mindlessly cultivate. Maybe we just become a bit more honest with ourselves, a little less willing to fool ourselves both in our dealings with ourselves and with others. Maybe we stop believing the rationalization that says, “I’m really sitting enough,” or “I don’t really need to go on retreats,” or whatever way in which we cheat ourselves out of living beyond fear-based, self-imposed limits and those things that inhibit ever deeper commitment to the path of awakening and freedom. Maybe we begin to wonder seriously why I’m just walking slowly towards the Truth of my being alive in this world instead of really running towards it full tilt like Bahiya. And maybe we can begin to wonder about just what this Truth really is, and what we are we willing to sacrifice for that Truth and when? Is Truth something to be “found” or discovered somewhere in an imagined future? Or is Truth something which happens right now? Look carefully; what is most true, most real for you right now? Are there not sensations, sounds, thoughts? Is all of this changing or unchanging? Does it come and go on its own, with or without your asking?  Can you predict what will appear in the next present moment? Running headlong towards the Truth of your life may not mean going somewhere or attaining something that you think you don’t already have and need. It may be about being willing to turn directly into this very moment in this very place. It may be that what is most true is very close indeed and that the journey there happens right here and now in this moment, completely out of time.

Real practice is not about setting up some ideal of practice or the spiritual life; something to strive towards and attain in some distant future. This just creates more conflict in the mind between the so-called “ideal” and the actual and leaves us living in the future rather than learning how to live fully right here and right now. This is about doing what Bahyia did; having some willingness to honestly assess our lives and how we are living them and then to act directly and immediately on that information. This means a willingness to be attentive to our actual life as it actually unfolds in this moment. Begin to take a look and see where and when there is a gap between your understanding and how you are actually living in the light of that understanding. This practice alone can revolutionize our life.

One more aspect that I find highly impressive about the attitude that Bahiya exemplifies: that is his persistence and urgency.

He is respectful, but tenacious; gentle, but unwilling to be deflected or put off until another time. There is a clear and penetrating understanding that there is no other time but now. Nothing can be put off into the future, because the future is not only uncertain, it does not exist. Now is now and that is all that there is. Krishnamurti comes back to this repeatedly; wake up now; understand now; end fear and suffering now. Now is the only time you can do what is most important for you to do. We say we’ll do it tomorrow, but tomorrow never comes. It is always today. It is this moment when transformation and freedom will occur. It is this moment when we will live, when we will love, when we will die. It will always be a present moment just like this one. 

The urgency and fire of Bahiya’s persistence is also fed by his knowledge of impermanence. We do not know what the future will hold. It is uncertain, unpredictable and we live in a body that is exquisitely fragile. A bump on the head with the right force and we are suddenly someone else. Bahiya has a clear sense that death is always close at hand and he uses this awareness with great skill in his pursuit of freedom. What is it that feeds the fire of our urgency? Death awareness practice can certainly do this. An unwelcome medical diagnosis or a close brush with death often has the effect of waking us up to the fact that the next moment is promised to no one and that we have a choice right now as to how we will live this moment. And there are other less dramatic ways that Life calls us back to the perfect completeness of the eternal present; the ringing telephone, the crying baby, holding someone we love, the golden light of late afternoon sun high up in the pines, the call of a distant crow. Life is continuously calling out to itself; we only have to listen.

So here is Bahiya and here are we. Bahiya is the ideal student. We are the actual one. Can we begin to examine how we are in pursuit of our own freedom? Begin to question the priorities regarding how we set up our day?  Begin to wonder about why we are living and look at exactly how we are doing that. Can we begin to look closely at how we are really living, moment-to-moment and day-to-day? To what extent are we willing to challenge ourselves by confronting ourselves with the worthiness of the choices we make? The first question is “how do I want to live?” The second question is “How am I actually living?” Staying with that can be very useful, if humbling, practice.

So, that’s probably more than enough for tonight. Next time we’ll take a look at the Buddha’s response to Bahiya’s heartfelt request.

On the Cushion: Q & A with Douglas Phillips (Tricycle: The Buddhist Review. Spring, 2003)

I’m sitting every day and I feel like I’m not getting anywhere. What should I do?

Ideally, teachers respond not just to the question, but also to the person asking it. We would want to know more about how long you have been sitting every day and for how long you sit. What happens during your meditation, and how have you worked with it? What motivates you to practice, and is your practice really designed to get you where you want to go? Does this question of getting somewhere arise only in regard to sitting or in other aspects of your life as well? Does it arise from an intelligence that points to something that needs to be changed, or is it indicative of a more chronic tendency toward doubt and self-judgment?

We are often attracted to the dharma because we want something—to be less angry, more relaxed, less fearful, more loving. We want to suffer less and live more expansively, with greater with greater freedom and less constriction. In other words, we quite naturally come to contemplative practice with expectations. It is important to know the difference between the desire/aspiration that gets us to practice and the desire/craving that creates suffering; that unquenchable longing for life to be other than it is.  The relationship between dukkha (suffering/unsatisfactoriness) and tanha (craving/aversion) can be understood as the difference between how my life in this moment actually is, and how I want it to be. The greater this difference, the greater the suffering. One may also see that an attachment to expectations arising from these wishes is directly correlated to suffering.

So what does “progress” on the Great Way look like? How do I generate energy for this practice without creating desire, aversion or confusion?  What should be happening when I sit day after day?

Imbedded in the question of getting somewhere is the assumption that something should be happening other than what is actually happening. Maybe I feel there should be more calmness or certain mystical experiences. I may wish that the image I have of myself as patient, nonreactive and loving would be how I act when my teenager yells at me or my boss is demeaning or threatening. After all, if I’m sitting like a Buddha, shouldn’t I behave like one? 

Our practice is to meet life exactly as it is and to notice whatever fear, anger or doubt gets in the way of direct intimate contact with this moment, bringing attention to that as well. Rather than changing something or seeking to get somewhere we imagine we should be, practice is about seeing clearly exactly how things really are and how we relate to them. Practice thus becomes an increasing intimacy with life just as it is, and there is nothing, including the ideas that we should be getting something or somewhere, that is unworthy of the clear, nonjudgmental attention we call mindfulness.

When we have developed a degree of concentration, our work is to then be fully attentive to exactly what is presenting itself in the awareness. This doesn’t require profoundly deep concentration states, but rather a genuine interest in what is happening right at this moment. There is no place to get to, no one to become, and nothing to do but bring full attention to the breathing, the tightness in the back, the nervousness in the stomach, the aversion, or whatever else arises. We often imagine that we have to solve or change what is there in our life, when the solution is found in the full attention to just what is here now at this moment. The practice of moment-to-moment allowing—bringing full attention to when we are clinging and when we are not—is the practice of liberation. It is this full attention that heals the fragmentation of our lives. Can we begin to notice what happens in moments of clear awareness when we are not so obsessed with changing something or making it go away? What happens when attention and “what is” meet?  Can we begin to learn about ourselves precisely as we are, not only on the cushion but throughout the day as well? 

Full attention is both an activity of learning and the actualization of unconditional love. It is this selfless, choiceless awareness that heals the illusion of separateness, brokenness and alienation, yielding a gratification, faith and confidence not dependent on external or internal conditions beyond our control. Practice-Life is the dynamic activity of bringing full attention to what is presenting itself most clearly in the awareness for as long as it is there, and with deepening simplicity and joy, knowing Just This Much!