The Sky Above, the Mud Below

Posted on February 5, 2012 by Seth Segall

We all possess behavioral potentials that are consonant with our sense of self — and potentials that are buried, rejected, submerged, or disowned. The energy of those submerged or disowned potentials is cut off and unavailable to our personality. The more potentials we disown, the more narrow our range of adaptation and the more enervated and weakened we become. The more we attempt to perfect ourselves and live according to some idealized image, the more cut off and depleted we become due to the loss of rejected potentials that fail to fit the image. Attempting to live up to some sort of Buddhist ideal of perfection — serene, non-grasping, imperturbable, endlessly compassionate — is one way to choke off our sources of vitality. We cut ourselves off from a wide range of human potentials — ferocity, passion, lust, and ambition, just to name a few. An inherent tension exists between Buddhist teachings of perfecting ourselves by striving to live up to a Bodhisattva or Arhat ideal and the contemporary Western Zen notion of being present for all of life.

When we examine the ideal of non-grasping serenity, the first thing we notice is how far we are from it. Most of our thoughts are centered on ourselves and the things we want or don’t want, and selfish thoughts and impulses vastly outnumber generous ones. Ambition, greed, desire, jealousy, resentment, irritation, and anger are frequent companions. The Pali Canon says if we follow the eight-fold path we can reach a state where all of that simply ceases — where desire, aversion, and delusion stop arising — the original meaning of the word “nirvana”. When we observe the gap between the way we are and this imagined end-state, we’re as far from that end-state as we can possibly be. We may also wonder just how desirable that imagined end-state actually is. Do we really want to be that seemingly bloodless, endlessly calm, desire-less being? Or do we just want to be more human, vulnerable, open, and alive?

Compare the Nirvana ideal to the life Jelaluddin Rumi (1207-1273) recommends in his poem “The Guest House”:

This being human is a guest house.

Every morning a new arrival.

A joy, a depression, a meanness,

Some momentary awareness comes

As an unexpected visitor.

Welcome and entertain them all!

Even if they’re a crowd of sorrows,

who violently sweep your house

empty of its furniture,

Still, treat each guest honorably.

He may be clearing you out for a new delight.

The dark thought, the shame, the malice,

meet them at the door laughing,

and invite them in.

Be grateful for whoever comes,

Because each has been sent

As a guide from beyond.

(Translation by Coleman Barks)

Rumi’s Guest House metaphor offers a Sufi parallel to the contemporary Western Zen ideal of Zen as a continual opening, widening, and acceptance of life as it is. As we sit we create a space for our full human being – no cutting off, suppression, or delusion about who or what we are in this moment.

How does the Zen ideal of fullness of being square with the aspirational aspects of Buddhism — the Bodhisattva vows — the widening of compassion, lovingkindness, and equanimity? Because a part of us would truly like to be more compassionate and kind — to the extent this cruel and capricious life allows us to be. Buddhism contains a variety of techniques like Theravada lovingkindness meditations and Tibetan tonglen meditations to help us develop our capacity for compassion and lovingkindness. Can one widen one’s capacity for care for others without choking off the sources of one’s vitality?

We can if we stop pretending to live up to an ideal.

One can water the seeds of compassion without pretending to be more compassionate than one actually is. One can hope over time that compassion will grow without denying that ambitious, competitive, and aggressive parts of ourselves exist and are an important part of who we are right now. We can also do more than ruefully accept their continued existence, but develop a friendly ongoing relationship with them. We are not trying to eliminate them, but to integrate them in with the other parts of ourselves — to, in essence, tame them and harness their energy for higher purposes — much like the fierce Tibetan protective deities were tamed by Padmasambhava and enlisted to serve the Dharma. We have this idea in the West as well — Freud called it “sublimation,” Jung called it “individuation,” and Perls called it “being whole.”

On one of my early ten-day meditation retreats, I had the following experience: The more calm, serene, and peaceful I became during the day, the more violent my dreams became at night. Not only were the dreams violent, but I was the perpetrator and I was enjoying it. It was if a part of me was reminding me “I’m still here, don’t forget me.” On yet another meditation retreat I became paranoid about a fellow yogi — fearful he was a serial killer and I was his next intended victim. I’ve written elsewhere about how I overcame that fear, but it occurs to me now that this was another message about how I was disowning a part of myself – this other yogi was the container for my own projected aggressive capacity. Two retreats, the same message.

American Buddhist teachers have a name for aspiring to be “spiritual” without really working through and integrating all of oneself to achieve a genuine reorganization of the personality at a higher level. They call it “spiritual bypassing” — the attempt to take a short cut on the Enlightenment Superhighway. It’s a good word. We live in a world with the sky above and the mud below. While we may reach for the stars, we’re grounded in the earth. Like Prospero in Shakespeare’s Tempest, our inner world contains both Ariel and Caliban — the airy sprite and the chthonic mooncalf. We move forward by integrating opposites, not by embodying one while denying the other. We must honor not only the Sky God, but the Earth Mother as well.

This is an aspiration to a wholeness in which nothing is left out. We move forward in the world with all our capacities, all of our energy, all of our engagement, and all of our complexities and contradictions.

As we practice Buddhism, let’s take care. Let’s not put ourselves on a Procrustean bed. We don’t need to kill our egos or deny our true being. We don’t need to magically become the epitome of an imagined perfect Buddhist — calm, selfless, inhuman. We bring our whole selves to practice. It’s our gift to the Dharma. It’s the way we transform ourselves by becoming who we more truly are — only a better, deeper, more whole version of that self we imagine ourselves to be.

Technorati Tags: Nirvana, Rumi, Zen

Faith and Service

Posted on November 17, 2011 by Seth Segall

I represented Buddhism at an interfaith dialogue on Faith and Service at the University of Connecticut earlier this month. The event was an opportunity to think through the role service plays in Buddhism — and how it might be different from the role of service in other faiths.

One obvious difference is the role of duty, obligation, and commandment in other religions. In Judaism, “charitable giving” and “not standing idly by when someone is endangered” are two of six hundred-and-thirteen mitzvot, commandments from God. In Hinduism, Swami Nirliptananda writes:

“Interdependence is when each of us fulfills our duties as a father, a mother, a daughter, a son, and so on, as a part of society…. When we perform duties with the attitude of not thinking of any selfish rewards, but as an obligation, as a contribution to life — that spirit will develop an inner detachment.”

In Confucianism, rulers and ruled, parents and children, spouses, siblings, and friends are linked together by a web of mutual duties and obligations in order to promote social harmony.

In Christianity, ethics are based on the Bible as an infalible source of revelation, on believers’ personal relationships with Christ, and on human understanding through reason of God’s Eternal Law.

In Islam, ethics are based on the Qur’an as an infalible source of revelation, and believers have a duty to submit to God’s will.

In comparison, Buddhism seems relatively free of deontological rules that stress duty and obligation. The Five Lay Precepts, for example, are not divine commandments, but commitments freely undertaken for the sake of progress on the path and as fields of investigation. One may also chose to commit to the Vinaya rules or take Bodhisattva vows or tantric oaths as part of one’s path. Those commitments are “skillful” and “wholesome,” but are only obligatory after one has voluntarily assumed them. Buddhism has no Deity who ordains the rules we ought to follow or punishes us for failure to follow them.

In Theravada Buddhism one may withdraw to the forest and meditate and, as long as one acts harmlessly towards others, one can reach nibbana. Arhats abstain from causing harm and are filled (one imagines!) with benevolent and compassionate mind states — but there seems to be no obligation for Arhats to actually do something to relieve the suffering of others or change the systemic social, political, and economic causes of suffering.

Mahayana Buddhism, on the other hand, has a Bodhisattva vow to “save all beings.” While some might interpret “saving beings” narrowly to mean “bringing beings to an enlightened state,” others might interpret it more broadly to include all compassionate acts to relieve suffering. Shantideva certainly interpreted it that way when he wrote:

May I be the doctor and the medicine
And may I be the nurse
For all sick beings in the world
Until everyone is healed.

May a rain of food and drink descend
To clear away the pain of thirst and hunger
And during the aeon of famine
May I myself change into food and drink.

May I become an inexhaustible treasure
For those who are poor and destitute;
May I turn into all things they could need
And may these be placed close beside them….

May I be protector for those without one,
A guide for all travelers on the way;
May I be a bridge, a boat and a ship
For all who wish to cross the water.

May I be an island for those who seek one,
And a lamp for those desiring light,
May I be a bed for all who wish to rest
And a slave for all who want a slave.
(Bodhisattvacharyavatara, Stephen Batchelor, trans.)

In Buddhism, compassion is both an effect and a cause. It’s an “effect” because the more clearly we see the reality of interbeing and the more we free ourselves from the power of avarice and aversion, the more naturally and spontaneously compassion arises in response to suffering. In addition, the more we free ourselves from delusion, the greater awareness we have of the suffering of others. But it’s a “cause” as well because the more we practice acts of compassion, the more we become aware of the feelings of well-being and the beneficial states of affairs that flow as consequences. Compassionate acts are recursive: they initiate positive feedback loops that reinforce their reoccurrence.

Compassion has many faces — giving loved ones our time and attention, teaching the Dharma, donating to charity, volunteering in civic organizations, working in soup kitchens, caring for the sick, and working to change the political, economic, and social conditions that give rise to suffering. The “right way” will be different for each of us, depending on the situations we find ourselves in, our unique talents and dispositions, and our stage of life.

Acts of service are natural expressions of awakening that spring from our perception of what’s needed and our aspiration to reduce suffering. There are no hard-and-fast rules about how much service is enough or what’s the proper balance between giving and self-care. Instead, there is moment-to-moment living with an open question: “What’s possible right now?” We bring all our wisdom and compassion to each moment — and live at the shifting edge of possibility. We are responsible for all of our choices, and the most meaningful choices are ones that express care and concern for whatever falls into the small circles of our lives.

Technorati Tags: Buddhist Ethics, compassion, Shantideva

Love Letter

Posted on August 11, 2011 by Seth Segall

“Form is emptiness, emptiness is form” — Heart Sutra

“Form is nothing but form, emptiness is nothing but emptiness” — Dogen

Is it all right to be in love with form?

I love the form — the formalities and order of our Zen sittings. It’s the beautiful container that holds the essence of the practice within: Bowing to one’s cushion, one’s neighbor, and the Buddha, lighting the incense, chanting the Gatha of Atonement and Enmei Jukku Kannon Gyo, the posture of sitting, walking kinin between sittings, chanting the Four Vows, listening to the jikido intone his closing gatha, the final bows. Molded by centuries of practice, it’s like a piece of driftwood sculpted by the elements until nothing remains but an inner grace revealed through the wear of time itself.

There’s nothing in the form itself that will get you enlightened, make you a Buddha. Chanting obscure words in a foreign tongue creates no insight, improves no character. Walking in circles around a room is just walking around in circles around a room — it’s not even particularly good exercise. Bowing to others does not, in and of itself, create respect. Vows to save beings are just words.

One can go through all the motions, and it can all be empty — not the Buddhist “empty,” but the existential one.

One can bristle and rebel: Why am I doing any of this? What has this got to do with anything? Bow to the Buddha? Isn’t that idol worship? Save all beings? Isn’t that claptrap? Keep my mind on Kannon day and night? What’s up with that?

What matters is the spirit in which it is done. Can it all be done with constant presence, with undivided attention and intention, with one’s full being? If so, then form is no longer form but something inhabited and alive — a vehicle that carries you beyond itself. Form becomes content. It becomes a window into emptiness.

You could have been doing something else with your undivided presence — chopping wood, carrying water, making music, making love. You could have been at home, in the woods, by the sea. The zendo is just a building. There was nothing special about the form itself that awakened you.

But the form itself is beautiful.

Is it all right to be in love with form itself?

Enmei Jukko Kannon Gyo

Kanzeon!
Namu Butsu!
Yo Butsu u in;
Yo Butsu u en;
Bu po so en;
Jo raku ga jo.
Cho nen Kanzeon;
Bo nen Kankeon.
Nen nen ju shin ki.
Nen nen fu ri shin.

Kanzeon!
Veneration to the Buddha!
With Buddha I have origin;
With Buddha I have affinity;
Affinity with Buddha, Dharma, Sangha;
Constancy, joy, self, and purity.
Mornings, my thought is Kanzeon;
Evenings, my thought is Kanzeon.
Thought after thought arises in mind.
Thought after thought is not separate from mind.

(trans. Robert Aitken Roshi)

The Meaning of Meaning

Posted on August 4, 2011 by Seth Segall

Words have meaning. They point to external referents — things that exist outside themselves in the real world: agents, actions, and objects. It is their “about-ness,” their correspondence to something lying beyond a system of signs, that allows them to mean something.

Actions can have meaning, too. We can ask “What did you mean by that?” Human actions have underlying motives. There is something beyond the action itself, an intention that lies behind the action. We can look at actions and infer, or inquire into, the purpose that generated it.

Does the universe have meaning? The universe includes everything — it cannot point to or refer to something that lies outside itself — it cannot signify anything. The universe is also not a purposeful agent — it doesn’t possess intentionality.

I once heard Wolf Singer, the Director of the Max Plank Institute for Brain Research, explore this topic at a Mind and Life Conference hosted by H.H. The Dalai Lama. He suggested that if there was a larger purpose to the universe, our brains hadn’t evolved in a way that would allow us to discern it. He gave the example of a single neuron hanging out near a synapse. If we could personify that neuron, we might ask it what role it played in the generation of thought and creativity. The neuron might reply, “I don’t know anything about that. I just hang out here, and every once in a while I get real excited, and then I let go!” It’s the same with us. We just hang out here, earn a living, and take care of our families. If there’s some larger purpose, who knows?

In any case, Zen doesn’t posit any purpose for the universe. It (we) just always is (was)/(will be), in constant transformation. Its “meaning” (in this case “meaning” is a meaningless term) is its existence.

Science fiction writers have had fun playing with this type of meaning. In Douglas Adams’s The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, a group of pan-dimensional beings create a supercomputer called Deep Thought to answer the question of the meaning of everything. After computing for over seven million years, the computer spits out the answer: “Forty-two.” The pan-dimensional beings then realize that while they now have the answer, they didn’t really understand the question. On to building a new and bigger supercomputer!

In Kurt Vonnegut’s Sirens of Titan, humans exist so they can evolve to the point where they can invent the humble beer can opener. As it turns out, the “beer can opener” is really a replacement part for a stranded alien spaceship. Our existence is meaningful for the aliens. For ourselves, not so much.

One way to give life meaning is to believe in some superordinate external meaning-giving source. If one believes in a God, one can believe that the God imbues the universe and our lives with purpose. After all, God lies outside the universe giving it something to refer to, and he possesses intentionality. That’s two kinds of meaning in one! If one doesn’t believe in God, however, one is out of luck.

Existentialists believe that while the universe has no purpose, we can imbue our own lives with purpose. Meaning is something human beings create. As authors of our own existence, we ourselves can endow our lives with meaning. In Existentialism, meaning isn’t there to be found — it’s up to us to create it. This is both liberating and burdensome at the same time. Liberating, because we are not bound to accept meaning from an external authority. Burdensome, because if we fail to define a purpose, our lives are left meaningless.

In Zen, we take on a meaning and try it on for size. We are here to live our lives wisely and compassionately for the sake of all beings.

We have our Four Vows:

Shu jo mu hen sei gan do

Bon no mu jin sei gan dan

Ho mon mu ryo sei gan gaku

Butsu do mu jo sei gan jo

I vow to liberate all beings, without number

I vow to uproot endless blind passions

I vow to penetrate dharma gates beyond measure

I vow to attain the way of the Buddha

We can spend our entire lives exploring what these vows mean — they exist as both intention and koan — but both the intentions — liberation, uprooting, penetration, and attainment — and the emerging understanding we derive from wrestling with their outlandish impossibility – gives our lives meaning, direction, and purpose.

This is the (no) meaning of Zen.

Technorati Tags: Doug Adams, Kurt Vonnegut, meaning, vows, Wolf Singer

On The Existential Buddhist’s One Year Anniversary

Posted on July 27, 2011 by Seth Segall

This week marks the one year anniversary of The Existential Buddhist. Over the past year, The Existential Buddhist has published sixty articles, posted over four hundred comments, and had over 30,000 visits from over 22,000 readers who hail from 128 countries and all fifty states. Recently Elephant Journal, with a readership of 600,000, has taken to republishing some of my posts, giving them a potentially wider audience. All and all, it’s been a gratifying first year.

Most readers don’t post comments, but I hear from regular readers via Facebook, Google +, and Twitter, and its nice to know that what one writes makes a difference to others. That’s one of the benefits of blogging. When one publishes a book one gets the initial reviews and Amazon stats, but one doen’t get the degree of reader participation and involvement that lies at the heart of blogging.

The Existential Buddhist has provided me with the opportunity to clarify and develop my own thoughts on a variety of issues pertaining to Buddhist philosophy, ethics, meditation, art, and history. It’s allowed me to participate, in my own small way, in the ongoing dialogue between traditionalists and modernizers, believers and skeptics, universalists and sectarians. Listening in, contributing, and receiving feedback has helped me to cultivate my own path more deeply.

If anything is clearer now than it was a year ago, it’s that the Buddhist way is not a set of abstract propositions which can be successfully analyzed for theoretical coherence. It’s a set of pointers to a way of life which can only be evaluated through lived experience. It’s a path of embodiment, intimacy, engagement, discernment, and decency. It’s something we practice in all of our encounters with ourselves, others, and the world. The only valid evaluation of Buddhist tenets is whether they guide us towards a life that’s richer, more meaningful, more aware, more connected, more present, more compassionate, and less harm-inflicting than the life we were living before. It’s this very idea of validation from lived experience rather than from texts, argument, or authority that makes this Buddhism existential.

I want to thank you, dear reader, for being part of the The Existential Buddhist’s first year. I hope you have found it interesting and helpful, and that whatever disagreements we may have had along the way, we remain spiritual friends along the path together.

Here’s to our next year together!

Technorati Tags: Anniversary

Existential Buddhism: Authentically Buddhist?

Posted on July 23, 2011 by Seth Segall

Every now and again I find myself investigating the relationship between my Buddhist practice — what I’ve been labeling, for better or worse, Existential Buddhism — and what I suspect the Buddha actually taught. My personal path values presence, relationship, compassion, authenticity, flourishing, and living a fully-realized life. There are significant elements in Buddhism, however, which lean in a somewhat different direction — towards celibacy, monasticism, asceticism, non-attachment, and the extinguishing of desire. Is my Buddhist practice really Buddhism at all, or is it some hodgepodge of Buddhist, Existentialist, Scientific Rationalist, and Perennial Philosophic ideas that have gone through some sort of intellectual blender to create (at best!) a kind of neo-or quasi-Buddhism?

In thinking about this question, I revisited a piece I wrote almost a decade ago ^[1], and found the questions and answers I struggled with then still meaningful today. I presented the issues in a dialogue between two imaginary characters — Bertie, who represented my rationalist side, and Ananda, my Buddhist side. Their dialogue went something like this:

Bertie: I think you’re being dishonest with yourself. I want to return to an earlier question as to whether what you’re espousing is really Buddhism or not. I think what you’re doing is adopting some Buddhist ideas about mindfulness, emptiness, impermanence, and non-self that happen to dovetail with Western ecological insights, quantum physics, cognitive science, phenomenology and existentialism. I think you’re melding them together, however, into a philosophy that’s no longer authentically Buddhist at its core. The aim of your philosophy seems fundamentally different from the aim of the Buddha’s philosophy: Your philosophy is about engagement with life and living one’s life in a philosophically justified way. The Buddha was interested in disengagement from life and the ending of rebirth, not about finding a meaningful life in the world. In many ways your belief system seems more Jewish than Buddhist: it celebrates and blesses creation and places the highest value on ethical life. In contrast, Buddhism seems disenchanted with creation and seeks annihilation.

Ananda: And I think you’re mistaken in thinking there’s this thing called “Pure Buddhism,” and that I’m adulterating it with Western ideas. There’s no such thing as Pure Buddhism. Buddhism has always been a philosophy in active dialogue with pre-existing cultures and philosophies. Tibetan Buddhism is the end product of a dialogue between Indian Mahāyāna and Tantra, Chinese Ch’an, and Pre-Buddhist Tibetan Bön beliefs and practices. Zen is a distillation of the dialogue between Indian Mahāyāna and Chinese Taoism filtered through the lens of Japanese culture. What could be more different than the spare aesthetic of Japanese Zen and the colorful profusion of Tibetan Vajrayāna? Which is more truly Buddhist? The Buddha’s original teachings, to the extent that we can discern what they were, arose as a protestant-like response to Brahmānic practice, and incorporated much of the pre-existing Vedic cosmology and prescientific understanding of the natural world into itself. Western Buddhism is just the latest version of an ongoing philosophical and historical dialogue, and it’s only natural that it be a dialogue with the Judeo-Christian tradition, as well as with Scientific Rationalism and Existentialism.

Bertie: Perhaps, but I still think you’re evading my main point: Your philosophy is a philosophy of full engagement with the world and Buddhism is a philosophy of withdrawal from the world. You’ve turned Buddhism on its head to suit your own purposes.

Ananda: I don’t think so. I think the real Buddhist message is mindfulness in each moment, non-identification with the perceptions, sensations, thoughts, cravings and aversions that arise in each moment, and the realization in each moment of the transience and interdependence of all phenomena. This mindfulness and insight leads to a life in which one no longer pursues self-aggrandizement, permanence, the accumulation of goods, or the pursuit of transitory pleasures; as a consequence, one lives compassionately and wisely in harmony with the world doing what each situation requires. It doesn’t require withdrawal from the world, but the release of one’s grasp on it. That’s Buddhism.

Many cultures of awakening derive from the Buddha’s teachings — diverging from them in some places, incorporating new elements in others – all of them deserving to be designated as a “Buddhism.” Existential Buddhism is one of many authentic branches on the Buddhist tree.

Ananda thinks so, too.

Bertie, on the other hand, still wonders.

^[1] Segall, S. (2003). “On Being a Non-Buddhist Buddhist.” In Segall, S. (2003). Encountering Buddhism: Western Psychology and Buddhist Teachings. Albany: SUNY Press. ↩

The Constant Gardener

Posted on June 4, 2011 by Seth Segall

Have I mentioned that we have a beautiful garden? Right now the irises, roses, poppies, clematis, and peonies are in full flower. The wisteria, lilac, daffodil and tulip blooms of the spring still linger in loving memory. Along with these beautiful flowers, our arch enemy, bishop’s weed, aegopodium podagraria (also known as gout weed, ground elder, goat’s foot, and Jack Jumpabout) has made its nefarious return. Bishop’s weed is a formidable foe. It defies almost every method of eradication, and the more countless hours my wife and I spend rooting it out, the more vigorously it returns.

Aegopodium Podagraria

The other night, in his teisho, Sensei Paul Seiko Schubert discussed how meditation was like gardening. It seemed a fitting metaphor. After all, the Pali word for meditation is bhavana, which literally means “cultivation,” a word with clear horticultural roots. Professor Glen Wallis has written:

“I imagine that when Gotama, the Buddha, chose this word to talk about meditation, he had in mind the ubiquitous farms and fields of his native India. Unlike our words ‘meditation’ or ‘contemplation,’ Gotama’s term is musty, rich, and verdant. It smells of the earth. The commonness of his chosen term suggests naturalness, everydayness, ordinariness. The term also suggests hope: no matter how fallow it has become, or damaged it may be, a field can always be cultivated — endlessly enhanced, enriched, developed — to produce a favorable and nourishing harvest.”

Buddhism also employs another horticultural metaphor — the metaphor of “seeds” (bija) to describe how past thoughts and actions lay down karmic traces in the unconscious which affect our future thoughts and actions.

But Sensei had a different horticultural metaphor in mind. He was pointing out that in gardening, no matter how hard one works at it, the weeds always return. Weeding is a constant practice, whether in gardening or meditation.

Of course there are many different kinds of mind-weeds — a practically infinite variety of desires, fears, concerns, and aversions in never-ending succession. Sensei had one particular sort in mind, however: one that relates specifically to Buddhist practice. These are the perennial questions of “what next?” and “what else?”

I had brought these very questions to Sensei in dokusan that evening. “I’m wondering if I should be doing anything more with my practice?” I asked.

“What did you have in mind?” Sensei replied. I confessed I wasn’t sure, and Sensei responded with “Just sit.” “If there’s something else you need to do,” he added, “it will emerge from your sitting — no one else can tell you what your practice needs.”

Sensei was pointing out that in both beginning and mature practice the same questions arise, but the answer is always the same: just return to awareness, sit quietly with the question, and allow what’s needed to emerge. In Zen there is no beginning practice and no advanced practice. There is just returning to awareness. Nothing is missing. Nothing needs to be added. There is no “next” or “else.”

I heard a charming gardening fable when I was interning at the Center for Mindfulness, Medicine, and Society in 1996. It’s one that’s made the rounds over the years in various forms. Marsha Linehan incorporated one version into her Dialectical Behavioral Therapy workbook for patients. The fable tells of a gardener who’s tried everything to rid his garden of weeds. In exasperation, he contacts a famous expert who inquires whether he’s attempted a variety of remedies. When the gardner replies he’s tried all of them, the expert pauses and reflects, and finally replies “all I can suggest is that you learn to love the weeds.”

We shouldn’t be distressed or disturbed when mind weeds that we thought we uprooted long ago return once again. We should treat them like old friends. It’s not that we are doing our practice wrong. It’s just the nature of things. The weeds come back. We must be constant gardeners. The path of practice is unending. We return to it again and again.

Be diligent and light of heart.

Apologies to John le Carré for appropriating his title for this post!

Technorati Tags: awareness, Paul Schubert, Zen

Finding The Right Teacher, Finding the Right Practice

Posted on May 26, 2011 by Seth Segall

Lama Yeshe and Jan Willis, 1974

Wesleyan University Professor Jan Willis tells a beautiful story ^[1] about finding her teacher, Lama Yeshe. The first time she heard his name mentioned:

“I began to experience a strange, though pleasant, sensation. It was unlike any sensation I had ever experienced before: a sort of warm tingling feeling that began at the nape of my neck and then radiated downward and outward to encircle my whole body. Then, as though I had suddenly stepped into an invisible field of static electricity, I noticed that the hairs on my skin stood up erect.”

Before meeting her future teacher, Willis had a near death experience in a terrible automobile accident while hitchhiking from Paris to Lyon. After Willis’s first meeting with Lama Yeshe in Nepal, his parting words were:

“Lama is so happy you… have come, especially after… you know… that bad thing in France.”

She had never discussed her accident or traveling in Europe with him. How could he have possibly known?

Their’s was a magical connection from the very first.

If you have a story like that to tell, then you too have met your teacher.

If you don’t have a story like that, how do you find your teacher? How do you discover which tradition to practice with? One of the Tibetan schools? Zen? Pure Land? Theravada?

There are so many choices — 84,000 Dharma doors.

For most of us, our journey begins from the time we first learned about the Dharma. It seems pure happenstance, how and when we first learn of something. Of course, some would say it’s no accident — that our opportunities to learn the Dharma are a function of our karma.

I’ve written before about my first exposure to Zen at a series of Alan Watts lectures at my college. Those lectures kindled my interest in Buddhism, but didn’t lead to my finding a teacher. At least, not immediately. Think of it as a seed that had been planted, but the conditions were not yet ripe for it to come to fruition. Some of my contemporaries did find teachers. One friend went to Rochester and became a Zen priest under the guidance of Philip Kapleau Roshi. I, on the other hand, had just graduated college, was looking for work, was thinking about a career, was getting married. Running off to Rochester – never mind Katmandu! — was not in my plans.

My introduction to practice came years later when Ferris Urbanowski, one of Jon Kabat-Zinn’s MBSR teachers, came to Connecticut to give a talk. I’d seen Jon’s work on a PBS Bill Moyer’s series called The Healing of the Mind and was immediately hooked. Watching the filmed images of Jon teaching meditation to chronic pain patients awakened the seed planted years earlier by Alan Watts. As a psychologist, I’d treated chronic pain patients with biofeedback and hypnosis with limited success. I was intrigued by the possibility of using meditation to ease their suffering. When I attended Ferris’s workshop, I thought I was acquiring a skill to help my patients. Instead, as I meditated for the first time under her guidance, I discovered something of vital importance for myself. At the end of the workshop I asked Ferris if I could train at the Center for Mindfulness. She told me I’d first need to cultivate my own meditation practice and then complete at least one ten-day retreat before applying. I began sitting daily, did my first ten-day retreat at IMS with Ruth Denison, and did my internship at the Center for Mindfulness. I was off and running.

Ferris, Jon and Ruth were fabulous first teachers, but neither Ferris nor Jon billed themselves as Buddhist teachers, and Ruth, who was authorized to teach, was on the other side of the continent. I began searching for local teachers I could learn more from. I attended the Buddhism in America conference in Boston in 1997 where I heard Dharma talks from a variety of teachers from different traditions. Two of them “clicked” for me: Larry Rosenberg and Toni Packer. I then went on a number of retreats with both of them and am deeply grateful for what I learned.

What made Larry and Toni “right” for me? For one thing, they didn’t have inflated egos. They didn’t call themselves “Enlightened.” They didn’t surround themselves with admirers. They didn’t project themselves as charismatic leaders. They didn’t ask for submission, obedience, agreement, or belief.

The first thing I felt with both of them was “safe.” I didn’t have to surrender my intelligence or my independence. For better or worse, that’s what I needed. You might argue that I overvalue intellect and independence — that these are attachments I need to work on — but I could never have gotten started by surrendering them.

Another thing that attracted me to Toni and Larry is that they didn’t push aspects of the teachings that would have been too much of a stretch for my analytical-empirical mind. I could explore everything Toni and Larry talked about on my own to see if it was true for me. Teachers who might have stressed rebirth, celestial beings, special powers, etc. would have lost me at “hello.”

Finally, as I spent more time observing Larry and Toni I could see that they were trustworthy and that they embodied the Dharma in their own lives. Who they were was consistent with how they presented themselves and what they were teaching.

To summarize, I started with them because they were 1) nearby, 2) non-threatening, 3) trustworthy, and 4) allowed me to absorb the Dharma with my analytical-empirical approach to things 5) without surrendering my independence. That’s what I needed to start out. As I’ve continued my journey I’ve met many wonderful teachers. It may be that as I go on in the Dharma I may need teachers who offer something different — something more challenging — something less compatible with my natural approach to the world and my view of myself. We’ll see.

Over the years I’ve been exposed to a variety of traditions. I started out in the Insight Meditation tradition, which has sometimes been described as Theravada practice with a Mahayana frame. I’ve practiced with non-teacher Toni Packer in her non-tradition. I’ve received pointing-out instructions for Dzogchen practice from a Tibetan lama. I currently practice with Zen’s White Plum Asanga tradition. All of these traditions stress the cultivation of awareness.

What brought me to my current practice community? It’s nearby. I like the leadership and the teachers. I like the sangha members. It stresses the practices, values and teachings that are important to me: awareness, compassion, and non-clinging. There isn’t a lot of talk about reincarnation or celestial beings. It’s a congenial practice home.

Is it the “right” place for me? Is it the “best” practice for me? Where is the all-knowing Celestial Judge who could possibly answer that question? It’s the one my karma has led me to, and I’ll continue to follow it as long as it continues to be of benefit. Or until my karma brings me to the teacher who makes my hair stand on end.

Here’s my advice on how to find a tradition and a teacher. Try a few out. See what’s a good fit — a place where you can practice with sincerity and without giving up what you value in yourself. See if you seem to be benefiting. See if the teacher is genuinely there to benefit others and isn’t simply on an ego-trip. There isn’t one true school of Buddhism. There are 84,000 Dharma doors. You only need to find one that works for you.

When you find one that’s congenial, try sticking with it. Don’t keep looking for the perfect place, the perfect practice — the one that will magically make you enlightened within a year. The perfect place is wherever you happen to be. The perfect practice is your own awareness here and now, and compassion for the people you encounter every day.

Thanks to Terry Sherwood for suggesting I write on this topic.

Technorati Tags: Jan Willis, Larry Rosenberg, Toni Packer

^[1] Willis, Jan (2001). Dreaming Me: An African-American Woman’s Spiritual Journey. Riverhead Books: New York. ↩

How to Listen to a Dharma Talk

Posted on May 12, 2011 by Seth Segall

I once heard filmmaker Stan Brakhage tell a story about a movie theater that opened in some unnamed African country. The theater opened with King Kong and the moviegoers loved it. A few weeks later the owners tried a new movie, but this time the audience rebelled. They wanted King Kong again. And so it went. The theater showed King Kong for years.

If you have young children, you know what it’s like for a child to latch onto a story and want to hear it over and over again. There’s something sweet and reassuring about old favorites, even after the excitement of newness is gone.

Dharma talks are a lot like that. They’re always the same: suffering, attachment, mindfulness, letting go, loving-kindness, compassion, wisdom, awakening.

The Buddha said I teach one thing and one thing only: suffering and the release from suffering. I guess the Buddha couldn’t count very well, because that’s actually two things. But the Buddha said it over and over, thousands of times in long discourses, medium length discourses, short discourses, numbered discourses, and miscellaneous discourses – the whole Sutta Pitaka.

I’ve listened to nearly one thousand Dharma talks over the past fifteen years.

The Dalai Lama. Toni Packer. Thich Nhat Hanh. Henapola Gunaratana. Bhikkhu Bodhi. Tsoknyi Rinpoche. Joseph Goldstein. Sharon Salzberg. Larry Rosenberg. Sylvia Boorstein. Jon Kabat-Zinn. Lama Surya Das. Stephen Batchelor. Robert Thurman. Narayan Liebenson Grady. Michael Liebenson Grady. Dzogchen Ponlop Rinpoche. Peter Matthiesson. Grover Genro Gaunt. Claude Anshin Thomas. Gavin Harrison. Jan Willis. Sulak Sivaraksa. Myoshin Kelley. Ajahn Amaro. Rebecca Bradshaw. Christina Feldman. Michelle McDonald. Alan Wallace. Ruth Denison. Gloria Taraniya Ambrosia. Robert Kennedy Roshi. Paul Seiko Schubert. Michael Koryu Holleran. Tsultrim Allione. Annie Nugent.

I’ve even been guilty of giving a few myself.

Toni Packer sometimes begins talks by asking “is it possible to listen freshly?”

Toni Packer

What does it mean to listen freshly to something one’s heard a thousand times?

The mind is like a Greek chorus listening in and ceaselessly commenting.

“That makes sense!” “That doesn’t make sense!” “I agree!” “I disagree!”

The mind can’t help itself. Usually when teachers say something we agree with they’re brilliant, when they say something we disagree with they’re wrong.

“Listening freshly” means two things. (Let’s see if I can count better than the Buddha.)

First it means not assuming we’ve heard something before. We actually haven’t heard this particular talk before. This particular talk may say something in a way that allows something new to click, or that helps new questions to arise. Thinking you’ve already heard something before is a way of shutting down and preventing the possibility of discovery. So first and foremost, “listening freshly” is adopting an attitude of openness.

Secondly, “listening freshly” means listening to everything that’s going on. The speaker’s words. The sounds of birdsong in the background. The Greek Chorus in your mind. When thoughts like “I agree” or “I disagree” arise, can they be bracketed off and seen as conditioned responses to what’s being heard without assigning them a truth value? The speaker’s words sink in, and reactions arise. Watch the entire movie. It’s King Kong. Again. You may learn more about the Dharma from observing your reactions with genuine interest and non-attachment than you do from the speaker’s words themselves.

I’ve recently been re-learning this lesson as I’ve been listening to Dharma talks in my zendo. As my faithful readers may remember, my particular zendo has a Jesuit priest as it’s roshi and another Catholic priest as a visiting sensei. Getting used to this has not always been easy. I was raised within the Jewish faith and attended synagogue until I was fifty years old. I never set foot inside a Church until I attended a friend’s wedding in college. With a history of nearly two thousand years worth of persecution by Christians, sitting in the Episcopal Church, where my zendo is located, still carries some negative connotations. My initial entry into Buddhism was made easier by the fact that most of my earliest teachers were either Jewish or half-Jewish in origin. If my current zendo had been my first Buddhist experience, I might never have become a Buddhist practitioner. This is not a negative statement about my zendo, but a statement about the power of conditioning. We all come from somewhere and have attachments that can close us off to what is actually transpiring in the moment here and now.

What’s actually transpiring in my zendo? It’s a beautiful structure with a vaulted ceiling and stained glass windows. The building creaks and groans in the wind when the weather is stormy. Cicadas chirp outside in the summer. It’s a wonderful place to sit. It’s a friendly community, and we all sit together with inspiring sincerity and determination.

Occasionally a teacher will mention God during a Dharma talk, or even Jesus. As a Jewish agnostic, my mind goes into overdrive whenever that happens. “Buddhism is non-theistic!” As a member of an historically persecuted minority, I don’t want to hear Jesus talk. “That was a perfectly good Dharma talk until he dragged Jesus into it!” My fellow sitters, who are mostly Christian in background, are probably comforted by the reference, just as I was comforted by my early exposure to Jewish teachers. “What I’m doing here really isn’t apostasy.” All of it, the raised hackles or the comfort, conditioned response.

The hard thing is to hear what the teacher is saying behind the words. What he means by “Jesus” or “God” may be what I mean by “dharmakāya.” Or maybe not. Can I “listen freshly?” Is there something in his experience that can reverberate in mine? Something beyond conditioned responses?

It’s not for nothing that the Buddha’s first disciples were called śrāvakas, or “hearers,” those who actually heard the Buddha speak. That’s our aspiration too, to be “hearers.”

Larry Rosenberg used to say (maybe he still does) that watching our own conditioned responses over and over is like watching “Gone With the Wind” one thousand times. It’s a great movie, but (unlike the King Kong audience!) we eventually tire of it and are able to drop the story.

That’s our job in Dharma practice. Dropping the story.

Dharma talks — stories to end stories.

Technorati Tags: Larry Rosenberg, listening, Toni Packer

Is Buddhism Non-theistic?

Posted on May 6, 2011 by Seth Segall

You often see the claim made that Buddhism is a non-theistic religion. As is often the case, however, things are never quite so simple. There are ways in which the claim is true, ways in which it’s untrue, and even ways in which it’s just quasi-true. It makes my head hurt just to think about it.

The claim of Non-theism is true in the sense that there is no God in Buddhism who is a Creator, Judge, or Deity-in-Charge. In Buddhist cosmology the universe has always just existed and is continually evolving and devolving based on causes and conditions. There’s no First Cause or Prime Mover setting the machinery in motion. In addition, the fate of human beings is determined by their own actions in accord with the laws of karma. There’s no Divine Intercessor putting one’s merits and demerits onto a permanent record card that follows one around over countless lifetimes.

The claim of Non-theism is not completely true because the Buddhist suttas and sutras make reference to all sorts of supernatural beings who inhabit the universe, from ghosts, demi-gods, devas, and brahmās to celestial buddhas and bodhisattvas. The Buddha, himself, is often described as “a teacher of gods and men”. The ghosts, devas, and brahmās are reborn into their own realms, and the celestial buddhas reside in Pure Lands. As you might imagine, all of this leads to a very complicated cosmological space. At times these beings visited the Buddha in our world. At times he went to their realms to teach the Dharma.

In the Brahmajāla Sutta, the Buddha describes how a brahmā may come by the mistaken belief that he is the “Great Brahmā, the Conqueror, the Unconquered, the All-Seeing, the All-Powerful, the Lord, the Maker and Creator, Ruler, Appointer, and Orderer, Father of All that Have Been and Shall Be.” The Buddha sees this delusion as an natural consequence of the particular way the universe happens to expand after periods of contraction. During this expansionary phase one of the beings residing in the Ābhāsvara realm (which corresponds to the second jhāna) is reborn alone into the lower Brahmā realm (corresponding to the first jhāna) through exhaustion of his accumulated merit. Forgetting his former lives, he imagines having come into existence spontaneously and without cause. Brahmās are long-lived beings and over the eons this solitary brahmā becomes lonely and wishes for company. When others come to co-inhabit his space through the natural process of rebirth, the brahmā mistakenly believes his wish for company made it happen. This is the start of his delusional grandiosity. The gods within the Buddhist cosmology are not omniscient, and they apparently need Buddhas to help straighten themselves out.

Do contemporary Buddhists believe in ghosts, devas, and brahmās? It depends on whom you ask. In traditional Asian Buddhist cultures literal belief remains widespread. For example, Mirka Knaster quotes John Travis regarding Munindra’s teachings:

“I listened to him go into great detail, sometimes for two hours. There was this incredible excitement about the Buddhist cosmology. You felt like you were surrounded by devas and all kinds of unseen things, in some way. He had that twinkle in his eye about the unseen. It was not just a belief system for him.” ^[1]

Western Buddhist communities, on the other hand, are often made up of converts who have left a prior theistic belief in an Abrahamic Sky God behind. They often view celestial beings as outdated cultural vestiges which can be safely jettisoned without changing the essential meaning of the Dharma. Western Buddhists are the foremost promulgators of the idea that Buddhism is non-theistic.

There are three additional issues, however, which complicate the relationship between Buddhism and theism even further.

Deity yoga is a practice within the Tibetan Vajrayāna tradition. In deity yoga, a particular deity/bodhisattva/Buddha (the lines between these concepts get quite blurred) is taken as one’s yidam, or tutelary deity. One engages in complex mental visualizations of one’s yidam, then engages in a process of imitating and merging with one’s yidam, and finally one dissolves the merged self/yidam. The yidam is seen as having an existence within relative reality (within a Pure Land saṃbogakāya realm), but as being essentially empty in terms of absolute reality, so that it’s both real and unreal at the same time. In yet a third understanding of the yidam’s reality, the yidam is a representation of one’s own unrealized Buddha nature. Finally, the yidam is a means to exploring the reality of identity itself. We have our usual view of ourselves as limited and unable to become a Buddha. In deity yoga one practices giving up that limited self-view and tries on a different narrative in which one has the unlimited wisdom and compassion of a Buddha. In the end both narratives yield to the realization of emptiness.

Asking a celestial Buddha for assistance is a practice within Pure Land Buddhism. Pure Land Buddhism teaches that one cannot reach enlightenment through one’s own efforts, but if one recites the mantra of Amitābha Buddha one will be reborn into his Pure Land after death and will achieve enlightenment from there. Having faith in a Buddha’s divine intervention seems similar in some ways to theistic beliefs and practices in the West. Keep in mind, however, that Amitābha Buddha is neither a creator nor a judge. He offers assistance to all who recite his mantra. Prior to achieving Buddhahood, Amitābha Buddha was a simple monk who declared an intention to create an ideal realm for Buddhist practice.

There’s one final issue concerning Theism and Buddhism which is probably unique to Western Buddhism. I currently sit with a Zen group that meets in a church, has a Jesuit priest as its roshi, and a priest who’s a former Carthusian monk as a regular visiting teacher. Dharma talks sometimes include references to Jesus and/or God. I personally don’t find god-talk helpful to my Buddhist practice, and I’ll say more about my personal reactions in a future post about how to listen to Dharma talks. But it’s evidently helpful to those who are using it, and I suspect to more than a few of my fellow listener/sitters. I imagine their concept of God has evolved from a concrete, personified creator-controller-and-judge deity to something coexistant with creation itself, maybe a synonym for the ground-of-being. You can certainly find strains within the Christian mystic, Sufi, and Kabbalistic traditions to support such a view. There are those who believe in the concept of the perennial philosophy, the idea that the mystical experience has the same content regardless of religion, and that underneath the hood all religions point to the same experience. I think that many of those who are comfortable with god-talk in a Dharma talk believe there’s no fundamental contradiction between being a Theist and practicing Buddhism, or at least practicing Zen.

I recently heard Roshi Robert Kennedy, who’s both a Jesuit priest and a Zen master, talk about this issue with great subtlety. He considers himself a Zen practitioner, but not a Buddhist. He understands that the Buddhist and Christian views of the ultimate nature of reality are not really reconcilable, but he also believes that sitting zazen is a practice without theological content. You don’t have to believe in anything to sit. I suspect roshi believes that the truths (with a small “t”) that emerge from sitting are not the provenance of any religion and that sitting assists our maturation as human beings regardless of our religious beliefs. But I don’t want to put words in Roshi’s mouth.

So is Buddhism theistic or non-theistic?

As Suzuki Roshi was fond of saying, “not always so.”

Technorati Tags: brahmas, devas, Munindra, theism

^[1] Knaster, M. (2010). Living This Life Fully: Stories and Teachings of Munindra. Boston: Shambhala, p. 26. ↩

The Existential Buddhist

dharma without dogma

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