MINDSPACE

WELCOME TO MINDSPACE

MINDSPACE is administered by Sidney Burris for the meditation group that meets with Geshe Dorjee in Fayetteville, Arkansas. Over the several years of its existence, MINDSPACE has taken on a couple of projects, but none more pleasurable to me than the project I am currently undertaking —talking about Atisha's Seven-Point Mind Training. I have no special qualifications for this task, and I can think of many who are far more qualified than I am to provide such commentary. Let me, at least, cite a traditional weakness as a kind of strength: I don't know Tibetan, I'm not a monk (nor have I ever been one), and I don't make my living teaching the fine points of Tibetan philosophy. I'm an English teacher who has read and used Atisha's little book many times, and still find it fresh and powerful and convincing every time I go through it. Maybe I can share with you why I believe this to be the case and maybe I can do it from my own perspective. That is, at least, my hope.

And by the way—the picture to the right is of a sign I found on an overhanging staircase in a hotel in Dharamsala a stone's throw from His Holiness's compound and main temple. I read it allegorically.

TIME OUT FROM ATISHA

I've seen it happen countless numbers of times in class with Geshe la: our discussion goes back and forth over a particularly engaging idea—reincarnation or nonviolence or vegetarianism—and Geshe la's response and the student's response stumble over the simple fact that each party in the discussion proceeds from an unexamined, unarticulated, and very different assumption about the subject at hand. A real-time example of East meets West. There are, in fact, fundamental epistemological differences.

As I've read through the literature, I've stumbled on examples of these assumptions in Tibetan or Buddhist thought, and when I find them, I'm generally glad I did because to understand someone's assumptions about reality often goes a long way in explaining their reality. 

So what I propose to do is periodically take a break from Atisha and the 7-Point Mind Training and provide one of these eye-openers. I'll call these postings Time Out From Atisha.'

Today, I want to talk about reincarnation. No matter how logical it may seem to us, it is still not a part of our cultural inheritance, and it often does very little to address the Western fear of dying. We have trouble moving the idea from the head, where it registers logically, to our hearts where it directs our very perceptions, our emotions, our way of living, our way of fearing, our way of loving.

B. Alan Wallace mentions that we need to familiarize ourselves, through various discursive meditations, with the continuity of our lives beyond the current one, and he has suggestions for accomplishing this, but they seem at times very cerebral. It's important, though, to give it a try because it has a direct impact on our understanding of the 4 preliminaries, particularly as it impacts the preciousness of this human life and its place in the process death and dying. If we can ever get to the place where we make our decisions and judgments based on the notion that our central energy is not confined to this particular time and place, we will begin to make decisions that have long-term effects and benefits for all concerned.

But how to do that? Many of you have read Thich Nhat Hanh, and I find his approach to this issue
very helpful. He addresses it, among other places, in his wonderful little book, No Death, No Fear.

On pages 7-8, he writes:

Our true nature is the nature of no birth and no death. Only when we touch our true nature can we transcend the fear of non-being, the fear of annihilation.  The Buddha said that when conditions are sufficient something manifests and we say it exists. When one or two conditions fail and the thing does not manifest in the same way, we then say it does not exist. According to the Buddha, to qualify something as existing or not existing is wrong. In reality, there is no such thing as totally existing or totally not.

Of course the great strength of any teacher resides in his or her ability to find the analogy that will open up one of these mysterious truths. We're looking for the analogy that will lead us into a fruitful meditation on the idea, so that the idea is gradually transformed into a livable reality, one that will quietly condition the ways we react to the constantly changing world around us. Thich Nhat Hanh's analogy is the television or radio:

We may be in a room that has no television or radio. And while we are in that room, we may think that television programs and radio programs do not exist in that room. But all of us know that the space in the room is full of signals . . . We need only one more condition, a radio or a television set, and many forms, colors, and sounds will appear. It would have been wrong to say that the signals do not exist because we did not have a radio or television to receive and manifest them. They only seemed not to exist because the causes and conditions were not enough to make the television program manifest . . . It is our notion of being and non-being that makes us think something exists or something doesn't exist.

The point, of course, is that our bodies are simply televisions or radios, playing host to these life-signals that manifest in each of us until the conditions are no longer sufficient for us to broadcast the signal. It's a profound analogy because our personalities, our preferences, our tastes, our loves, our hatreds, these are simply elements of the broadcast, but not the signals themselves. When the elements of our personalities vanish, the signals remain. 

So there is no birth, there is no death. There is only manifestation of the signal, and we can, our teachers assure us, become aware of the signal, and nurture that awareness even after the personality fades away.

At any rate, that's one of the ways Thich Nhat Hanh talks about death and dying, and I've found it worthwhile to spend some time pondering it when death and dying is what I'm working on.

 

HOW TO FEEL IMPERMANENT . . . FOREVER

The first thing you're told as you begin lo-jong is to train in the preliminaries. There are four of them. I'll talk about the first two here: this precious human life, and death and impermanence. As we'll see, they're closely related.

But the overall purpose of these four ideas is pretty clear: to help you recreate on a daily basis the kind of feeling you have when you come out of a long illness and regain your health, or when you see a loved one you haven't seen for a long while, or you wake up after a cold winter to that first, warm spring day . . . the four preliminaries are designed to make you aware of how fortunate you are to be precisely where you are now, with all of the resources that lie at your fingertips.  And ultimately, these preliminaries, if you focus on them, will  give you access to the same energy when you are ill, when you are alone and lonely, and when you are staring out the window in the middle of winter, feeling that spring will never come. They are simply that powerful, and they're the fuel that drives the daily practice.

The first preliminary is often written as 'this rare and precious human life of leisure and opportunity,' and the four qualifiers are important. 'Rare' because of all the forms of life that inhabit our world, the human form is a tiny percentage, and you're lucky to have landed here; 'precious' because our human life is the form of life that is most amenable to removing our suffering (dogs don't have our capacity to do it, and in the Tibetan cosmos, the gods don't see the reason for doing it); 'leisure' because having found this teaching, you probably have the time to pursue it, even if you do have to reorder your daily schedule a bit (people living in abject poverty, for example, require even more discipline and will to pursue it); and 'opportunity' because it's pretty clear when you look around you that there are an awful lot of people that don't have the opportunity, or the interest, to receive this instruction. In other words: the fact that you're reading a manual of mind training is very rare.

So you sit down every day, and you find fresh ways to remind yourself of this rare, precious, leisured, and opportunity-filled life that you've stumbled upon, and you take the energy and enthusiasm that rise from this insight directly into your practice. Some days it's easier to do it than others—habit is the culprit because habit keeps you from seeing things freshly—but if you keep at it, the energy matures, and becomes more and more accessible on a daily basis.

The meditation on death and impermanence is, in one sense, obvious enough—you never know when your time is coming; or if you have the opportunity now to practice, who knows about tomorrow; and all the other cliches you've heard.

Somehow these never really did it for me. Or if they did, they only got my attention for an hour or so, and then I'd be back assuming that I had x number of years to live because that was my average on the life insurance actuarial tables. I mean, an asteroid might collide with us tomorrow, but the odds are it won't, so I'm not concerned about it today.

But what did wake me up years ago was this, and I don't remember which teacher I got it from:  our own death is only the grossest, most obvious, and obviously tangible form of impermanence that we know. Don't linger so much on that. Anybody can get worked up about their death, but the commitment from that insight usually doesn't last. Realize instead that the ceaseless change we observe at the atomic level, at the emotional level, even at simplest level of thought, this ceaseless transforming of one thing into another, surrounds us, informs us, and in fact . . . is us! So if we are meant to observe what we might perceive as our physical death, and get some energy from that perception, we ought at least to consider the idea that this so-called death is nothing more than a transformation masked as a final ending because our perceptive apparatus isn't currently sharp enough to see its continuity beyond this life.

As I worked with this idea over the long haul, really looking at how everything is ceaselessly abandoning what it just was as it moves on to a new form that it just as quickly sheds for the newer one it embraces, I began to feel, intuit, dimly perceive—English probably doesn't have the verb—that I too was comfortably a part of this transformational stream and that ending just wasn't a part of it, although continuing in the traditional forms that I carry to school and into the classroom weren't a part of it either.

The result of all this was simply that I felt I had to get busy now because everything I did was causing a ripple in this transformational and changing stream (which gets into the third preliminary, 'actions and their results'), but that the old scythe-bearing grim reaper we know in the West wasn't casting that depressing shadow over my life. A kind of lightness of being ensued . . . an impermanence forever!

Sidney Burris

 

 

SEVEN POINTS ABOUT THE 7-POINT MIND TRAINING

It helps to know something about where you're going before you go there, right? With that in mind, let me offer a couple of general observations about the 7-Point Mind Training that are more concerned with the nature of the overall trip than they are with the individual hardships and pleasures you might encounter along the way. I've got seven points to make.

1. This is a life-time practice, and you ought to approach it in that spirit. Keep your expectations in check, and focus on doing a little bit on a daily basis over the long haul. The seven points have been designed so that, day-by-day, they reveal new facets, deeper insights, and ongoing challenges. But to appreciate the depth and breadth of these teachings you'll need patience, the third of the six paramitas. Cultivate patience, and these teachings will blossom.
2. The seven points are basically seven thematic categories under which a number of instructional statements appear. While it is important to understand the purpose of each of the seven categories, they aren't difficult. The supporting slogans for each of the seven points will challenge you enough; don't get hung up on the seven points.
3. Don't be intimidated by the seven points. Here's a summary of them; have a look at them, and you'll see that they are really nothing more than a kind of cosmic common sense.
   1. The Preliminaries—The first point encourages you to appreciate the immense opportunity you have now for spiritual progress. It is always important to remember this, but particularly when your motivation is low. 
   2. Training in the Two Bodhichittas—Simple enough, right? Go get yourself a direct perception of emptiness and then learn how to stop self-cherishing (which that direct perception of emptiness will facilitate) and start considering others' welfare more important than your own. Here's the point: the ideas are not complex at all; but the realization of them is difficult. And if you look at the statements that are organized under this second point, you'll see that they are basically training tips to help you fully develop the two bodhichittas. That's all they are, training tips, and they're good for a lifetime (or two . . . or three . . . )
   3. Using Unfavorable Circumstances as Aids to Awakening—From my perspective, this is the big one. Because one of the main tasks of lojong is to flush out and eliminate self-cherishing, you have to identify the circumstances or conditions in which self-cheerishing is most obvious before you can accurately take aim at it. There's a paradox at work here. As long as we are healthy, prosperous, and satisfied, self-cherishing is often camouflaged behind all that health, prosperity, and satisfaction, and for the life of you, you can't really see it. Everything is going along swimmingly for you, so your concern for others, while still present, is probably dependent upon having first made yourself comfortable, even though you don't know it. So your concern for others depends upon an initial concern for your own well being, which means your concern for others is available only on a part-time basis. Because none of us is happy and satisfied all the time, and part-time compassion is not the Bodhichitta ideal, right? But suffer a loss are two, get an ear-ache, have a friend insult you, and all of a sudden self-cherishing steps right out of the brambles and demands to be assuaged. It is at this moment, if you can lift yourself from your own internal dramas, and just for a moment, that you have an unrivaled view of self-cherishing, and so you have an unrivaled opportunity to take it apart. If we practice long enough this kind of mindfulness-while-suffering, we will understand what His Holiness means when he says, 'My enemy, my teacher!'
   4. A Synthesis of Practice for One Life—You have here five qualities or practices that are central to making progress on this path. I can't resist the athletic analogy. If jumping, running, passing, dribbling, and rebounding are five skills essential to master to become better at basketball, then resolution, familiarization, the white seed, abandonment, and prayer are going to help you improve at taking apart self-cherishing, understanding emptiness, and developing concern for others. It's that simple. And that demanding!
   5. The Measure of Having Trained the Mind—Having gotten this far, having undertaken what you've undertaken, you need to know how you're doing, right? Problem is there's no exam you can take, and finally, no master, no teacher, no guru can undertake the assessment that you want. You have to do it yourself, and this section tells you how to do it, what to look out for, and what to avoid. You need to do this regularly, but you need not—must not!—become obsessed with it.
   6. The Pledges of Mind Training—Wallace urges us to think of the sayings or principles gathered here as prescriptions given to us by a compassionate doctor, and that works well enough. But I've always thought of them as a set of qualities that you will find in those who are devoted to this path. One of the greatest teachers I see in India, Geshe Wangchen, embodies all of these characteristics—he is very natural in his speech, never maligns anything, seems utterly satisfied wherever he is, looks no further than the massive enjoyments folded into the present moment, seems always focused on those who are currently in his company, and most of all, seems completely comfortable at all times with who he is in the world—a highly accomplished practitioner living in relative obscurity in south India! These pledges, then, to me, are rather characteristics that will manifest if we've undertaken Points 1-5 with seriousness and integrity.
   7. The Practices of Mind Training—So many points, so little time to master them! Not to worry. This is the final grouping of things to keep in mind, and I use them as a kind of refresher course for lojong in general. But remember: everything returns to three things: 1) developing absolute bodhichitta (understanding emptiness as best we can); 2) practicing relative bodhichitta (understanding the place of compassion in our own lives); 3) and slowly, gradually, steadily, and as a result of becoming familiar with the first two, dismantling self-cherishing, the root of every single hardship that we encounter.
4. You have to take control of your own practice, your own lo-jong. Remember this: Atisha was not dealing with a text; he was dealing with a set of oral recommendations that he had received in Sumatra from a revered master, and his students later codified them, set them down in language, which gave them a sense of fixity and inflexibility they probably did not originally possess. The take-home message? You need to figure out where you need the most work, and you do this by considering these teachings honestly, and over time, against your own spirit, and make the right call about the ideas and practices that are the most difficult for you, or the ones that you most need. And then work on those.
5. Always return to the two bodhichittas, and to the notion of self-cherishing. How are these realities unfolding for you?
6. For every single moment of your day, there is a relevant point under one of the seven categories of lojong that will open that moment and turn it toward your general understanding of reality—take that rather lofty statement on faith until you have grounds to accept it or reject it.
7. Always remember how fortunate you are to have stumbled on this set of instructions. If you do this on a daily basis, you will find yourself protecting these instructions by embodying them and acting on them in a responsible fashion so that future generations will have access to a worthy representation of them. This is how they move; this is how they grow; this is how they prosper. You will seek help in understanding these teachings when the need arises, but finally you do this alone, point by point, in your own time, and according to your own, examined talents and capabilities.

Sidney Burris

THE 7-POINT MIND TRAINING . . . WOW.

It has been been some time since this site was active, but Geshe la told me that he was beginning Atisha's Seven-Point Mind Training in the Sunday meditation class, and he asked me if I might supply some occasional commentary. I leapt at the opportunity.

Atisha's book is one of the central texts that has helped me to understand what little of Buddhism I do understand, and I have come to feel over the years that it is ideally suited to Americans--the only group of people for whom I feel comfortable speaking.

I say "over the years"--every time I believe I can remember when I first read Atisha, I find another book on the shelf, another edition of the 7-Point Training, from further back in my past, and there in the margins are my annotations. So I don't really know when I first encountered these teachings, but they have become a mainstay in my own daily practice. I can't imagine ever exhausting them.

But I envy all of you this—you're beginning these teachings for the first time under the skillful direction of Geshe Dorjee! How fortunate you are!

First things first, though--before we begin any teaching like this one, it is good to know a little of the history behind the teacher. First, B. Alan Wallace. He was one of the first Westerners to go to Dharamsala in pursuit of the Tibetan teachings, and it nearly killed him (literally). But he stayed, he learned Tibetan, became a monk (for fourteen years), translated for the Dalai Lama, and has since been a major force in Tibetan Buddhism's presence in America and the West in general. He's written scores of things on Tibetan Buddhism, and this book that you're using is one of two he's done on the 7-point mind training. The other one is Buddhism with an Attitude. 

Second, Atisa. He was probably born around 980 CE and died in 1054 CE. Very much like the Buddha, Atisha was born into royalty, and early on exhibited great facility with learning in many fields. Deciding to pursue the spiritual life, he relinquished his kingdom and went through a succession of teachers, even traveling, it's recorded, for thirteen months on a ship, until he landed in Sumatra, where he found his principal teacher, Serlingpa, and from whom he learned the 7-point mind training. All biographies of Atisa state that whenever he mentioned the name 'Serlingpa,' tears filled his eyes.

As far as the actual text is concerned, I'd like to note a couple of things.

Make sure to read Wallace's introduction to your text. His commentary is superb, not only because he is a talented writer, but also because he speaks from experience, from the perspective of a Westerner who has grappled long, hard,and successfully with these powerful ideas and potent practices. His instruction is both theoretical and practical, and that is why he is an important force in American Buddhism.

The 7-point mind training (lo-jong in Tibetan) was originally conceived and transmitted orally as a series of sayings, or pith instructions, as they're sometimes called, with each saying meant to suggest and call to mind a fairly extensive set of perceptions, ideas, and practices. Since these were originally oral transmissions, and still are in many instances, the saying or statement would have been explained by the teacher as it was introduced. Helpfully, Wallace has given us his own commentary here, and it is a compilation from several sources. 

We are first told to train in the preliminaries. There are four of them here: 1) the preciousness of human life; 2) death and impermanence; 3) actions and their results; 4) the unsatisfactory nature of the cycle of human existence. 

These preliminaries are fundamental to many Buddhist teachings; they are not unique to lo-jong, and you will occasionally see only three of them, or as many as six. But they are, in effect, the Tibetan version of a motivational speech, and it would not be difficult to spend a lifetime considering each one of them, slowly and thoroughly, observing how extensive their implications actually are.

Taken one by one, considered at length, each of these preliminaries can gradually effect long-term changes in the way you view your life, your loved ones, your friends, your enemies, and the world at large. Ideally, the preliminaries bring to your life two things: 1) a sense of urgency, the real knowledge that you have an indeterminate amount of time left to make progress along this path; 2) a conviction that you currently have the necessary advantages that allow you to make the very most of the time that does remain to you in this life.

And with these two forces working within you and through you, your motivation to practice becomes stronger. Most of us need this reenforcement on a daily basis.

So take your time with each of the four. Read Wallace's commentary on each one, then settle your mind, and gently turn your attention to the first one, "the preciousness of human life." First of all, make certain that you understand what Wallace is saying. And then determine if you agree with him. If not, why not? If so, why? And then begin to explore your own relationship to this idea. What can you add to it? Just how far can you logically extend this idea of the preciousness of human life? Just how precious is this human life, after all? And not just your life, of course. It is essential to realize that however deeply you feel or locate the preciousness of your own life, so too does this preciousness reside in everyone else's life. Consider this at length. Focus on this idea, and be aware of the subtle transformations within you that this awareness occasions.

The goal here is gradually, through this kind of discursive meditation, to move the idea of the 'preciousness of human life' from the realm of attractive ideas to a place in your heart from which intuitive action springs forth naturally. You are moving an idea from the head to the heart, so to speak, so that it can become the basis of meaningful action.

It is a gradual process, but if we consider this first proposition thoroughly, we will gradually find ourselves living more and more with the conviction that our human life is, in fact, precious. And our behavior will reflect this conviction because the idea that we once found to be simply logical and compelling has now informed our spirits like oxygen, and we act according to its principles naturally and unaffectedly. We live in a new way.

We have gradually broken the mistaken habit we had of living as if human life is, in fact, not precious.

This is the purpose of lo-jong, to give us the tools we need to break the bad habits of thought that we have cultivated for unending lifetimes.

But it is important to consider the four preliminaries on a daily basis, preferably before beginning your meditation session. You will find them to be inexhaustible, growing in importance and implication as your own understanding of them grows and matures.

They can also become part of your hourly awareness, and at this level, they are most effective. Bring them to mind, consciously, before you watch a movie, during a meal, while talking to a friend, while driving in the car. Do this long enough, and you will begin to notice small changes occurring within you.

This is the fundamental and operative principle of lo-jong—if we remind ourselves often of these four preliminaries, we will gradually transform our habits of perception to reflect more accurately the way the world is truly constituted. 

And with our perceptions reflecting more accurately the nature of reality, our lives will find a more peaceful rhythm.

 

Sidney Burris

DRINK HIMALAYAN TEAS . . . AND HELP THE TIBETANS TOO

I don't typically endorse products of this sort on our website, but I thought that our readers who are also tea-drinkers might want to know about Choice Organic Teas.  They are fair-trade and organic, and if you purchase the Himalayan Green Tea, a portion of the proceeds goes to supporting the non-profit organization, Save the Himalayan Kingdom.  Read more about this project at the website.

Although I'm no connoisseur of tea, the Himalayan Green we received at The Tibetan Cultural Institute of Arkansas seemed very good, and we're happy to offer this company our support.  Give them a try if you're so inclined.

A TASTE OF CHAH

I have at times read too much.  Too many books, too many magazines, too many cereal boxes . . . anything, it seemed, to keep me from . . . not reading.  Of course, there were always benefits to being seen reading. My friends thought I was "smart," my teachers called me "dedicated," but all the while, I was just reading. . . .  I still do read, although not as much as I did in the past, and I have noticed this falling off as any addict might notice, with anxiety, the gradual disappearance of his drug of choice. 

So it's not surprising that certain dharma books have served as empowerments to me.  Given the right book at the right time, I have reaped enormous benefit from simply sitting and reading, quietly, intensely.  When I find one of these books, and when I am absorbed by it, I feel an essential and undisturbed stillness of mind, the closest I ever get to this quality of mind that experienced meditators are always talking about; this quality of mind seems to hover around the book's subject, and it seems to be a quality that the book has uncovered for me. Having discovered it through the book, I'm better able to find it again while sitting on the cushion without the book.

In an earlier posting, I mentioned a book by Ajahn Chah, Food for the Heart: The Collected Teachings of Ajahn Chah, and as I indicated there, this book has been for me one of those books . . . an empowerment, a light, an inspiration.  Not every word, surely, nor every essay in it, but certainly enough power and light scattered between its covers to justify my typing out for you the first chapter in its entirety. It's only three paragraphs, but I reread them continually, and I have found them deeply useful:

About this mind--in truth there is nothing really wrong with it.  It is intrinsically pure. Within itself it's already peaceful.  If the mind is not peaceful these days, it's because it follows moods.  The real mind doesn't have anything to it; it is simply an aspect of nature. It becomes peaceful or agitated because moods deceive it.  The untrained mind is stupid. Sense impressions come and trick it into happiness, suffering, gladness, and sorrow, but the mind's true nature is none of those things.  That gladness or sadness is not the mind, but only a mood coming to deceive us.  The untrained mind gets lost and follows these things; it forgets itself.  Then we think that it is we who are upset or at ease or whatever.

But really this mind of ours is already unmoving and peaceful--really peaceful!  Just like a leaf which remains still so long as the wind doesn't blow.  If a wind comes up, the leaf flutters.  The fluttering is due to the wind--the fluttering of the mind is due to those sense impressions; the mind follows them.  If it doesn't follow them, it doesn't flutter.  If we know fully the true nature of sense impressions, we will be unmoved.

Our practice is simply to see the "Original Mind."  We must train the mind to know those sense impressions and not get lost in them, to make it peaceful.  Just this is the aim of all this difficult practice we put ourselves through.

There is much to say about this brief passage, but I'll refrain, except for this:  I find these three paragraphs particularly useful as they provide the essential focus of every other teaching or practice that we might encounter along the way.  A tantric empowerment, a disquisition on the nature of the mind, an offering to your guru, Green Tara's mantra--none of these will be as helpful as they might have been if we don't see them as somehow drawing us closer to the undisturbed mind that Ajahn Chah is talking about here.  

One more time:  "Our practice is simply to see the 'Original Mind."  

Precisely.  

We will take all the help that we can get in our attempts to see that mind--for 'help,' read:  'practices, initiations, empowerments, mantras, prostrations, etc., whatever draws us closer to it'--but the goal remains, always and everywhere, the same:  "to see the Original Mind."

The goal then is fairly simple--to see the Original Mind; the playbook, the various ways and means and practices that we deploy to achieve that goal, well, therein lies the complexity.  

THREE BOOKS TO STRENGTHEN YOUR MEDITATION PRACTICE

As I mentioned in an earlier posting, I recently completed a four-week meditation program.  I'd undertaken it partly because I'd just returned from India and hadn't meditated regularly for the three weeks that I was traveling.  But I also did it because I like programs--exercise programs, reading programs, cooking programs . . . you choose the adjective and stick the noun "program" behind it, and if I haven't already tried it, I might well give it a try.  I guess I like the feeling of progress, of gradually approaching an end point, and then beginning again with a new map, a new plan to go a little further.

The book I used to set up the four weeks, Commit to Sit, outlined a very gradual course of seated and walking meditation.  It had originally appeared in an issue of tricycle, and I had seen it then but hadn't undertaken the program.  But now it was available in  book form, and I couldn't resist trying it.  Each week was carefully described and supporting articles were included by recognized authorities on the subject at hand.  If you know little to nothing about meditation, this is the perfect place to begin.  The articles are very brief, to-the-point, and exceptionally clear and practical.  They tell you how to meditate. Period.  Most of them were helpful because they answered the very basic questions that both novice and long-term meditators continually confront. Ultimately, of course, your meditation practice is your own, but this book is one of the best ones I've encountered for helping you discover the precise dimensions of that practice.

But I read another book first, a spiritual classic, if you will, and I'd also recommend that you start with this one.  The book is by Chogyam Trungpa, one of the first Tibetan lamas to come to America.  In 1974, he gave a series of lectures that have been collected and published as The Path is the Goal: A Basic Handbook of Buddhist Meditation.  Trungpa was in short, a phenomenon:  his English was perfect, his energy level was cosmic, and he made every effort to understand how Westerners think--a daunting task for someone of his background. He died in 1987, leaving behind thousands of students, as well as hundreds of lectures, teachings, meditation centers, books, and one very talented and charismatic son, who is well on his way to becoming an equally powerful teacher and representative of the Kagyu tradition. 

The Path is the Goal outlines the simple--but profound--philosophy behind samatha meditation.  The first sentence of the book captures nicely the essence of the teachings:  "The idea of this particular seminar is to establish a fundamental understanding of the Buddhist approach toward the practice of meditation." And so it does, point by point, question by question.  If you have any interest in seeing how one very authoritative and legendary teacher describes the fundamentals of Buddhist meditation practice, you must have a look at this little book. 

And finally a book to grow with:  Food for the Heart: The Collected Teachings of Ajahn Chah. If you haven't heard of Ajahn Chah, you might want to read a little about him. He comes out of the Thai tradition, and became a recognized meditation master as well as a highly effective and revered teacher.  His teachings are simple, profound, and unwaveringly practical.  I read this book over a year ago, but it is nearly falling apart now because I have gone back to it frequently.  For those of us who have found the Gelugpa tradition to be so attractive, Ajahn Chah's teachings provide a valuable counter-weight as they are immediately accessible, yet deeply illuminating at the same time.

In the following video, you will hear one of Ajahn Chah's students talk about the nature of Chah's accomplishment--he uses the word "arhat," which roughly means "someone who has destroyed all inner obstructions," and he believes that Ajahn Chah achieved this level.  You will notice two things about this tradition that differ from the Gelugpas:  first, the reliance on the sutras, or the texts that record what the Buddha actually said (you have probably noticed that in Geshe la's classes we have focused on explanations of what the Buddha said and spent little time grappling with the actual words of the Buddha--this is entirely typical of the Gelugpa tradition as it has been transplanted in America for Americans); and second, the idea of faith, which plays a large role in the Thai tradition that Ajahn Chah came from--there are times in extended periods of sitting that faith is the only resource that salvages the meditation session.  Or so I have been told . . . At any rate, Food for the Heart amounts to a beautiful gathering of wisdom, and I wouldn't want to be without it.

If you choose to have a look at any of these books, I hope that you enjoy them, and most importantly, that they enrich your practice . . . they are gems, each in their own way.

GREED, VIOLENCE, AND HOW THE ONE LEADS TO THE OTHER

The New York Times on Wednesday, July 29, 2009 ran four lead articles across its front page, above the fold.  If you scanned them from left to right you saw that the first one concerned prison abuse in Iran after the elections; the second one dealt with a lucrative money-management firm and a federal agency with billions to invest; the third article analyzed the fate of one of the youngest detainees at Guantánamo Bay prison; and the last one discussed the precipitous fall in housing prices that has left many home-owners upside down in their mortgages.

In other words, two articles about prison abuse, and two articles about financial abuse; or to say it another way, two articles about violence and two articles about greed.  And the way the articles were laid out on the page, intertwined, moving left to right, from violence to greed to violence to greed, made the larger point of just how intimately connected these human, all too human, traits have become.  Violence and greed are intimately related.

I wouldn’t have noticed this had I not recently returned from India, and as a result of a noxious cocktail of medicines, fallen sick as soon as I landed stateside and stopped taking the medicine.  After a brief stay in the hospital, I returned home and began a process of recuperation that involved rest, a change in my daily schedule, and a commitment to take better care of myself—the kinds of things you typically hear from middle-aged people like myself who, for various reasons, still believe that they are a good deal younger than they actually are. 

I changed my meditation schedule and decided to undertake a four-week program that the editors of tricycle had put together in Spring 2007.  They called it the “Commit to Sit” program, and I guess the catchy phrase was designed to sell copies of their magazine.  It must have been a popular program because they later re-published it as a book, and that was what I’d purchased.  I tweaked the program a little, based on my own strengths and weaknesses, but I was due to finish the four weeks the day after I saw the front page of the Times. 

(In a later posting, I’ll list and offer a few comments on the books that I used during this period of time.  I found some very helpful things that I believe many of you who are immersed in the Gelugpa tradition would also find helpful, as a kind of counter-balance, if you will.)

Each day before beginning the meditation session, I took the Five Precepts, promising to make my best effort to keep them until the next session.  You are, of course, wondering which five precepts I took because one of the first things Westerners learn about Buddhism is that all phenomena can be numbered and that Buddhists have made an exhaustive effort to number them—from the Four Noble Truths to the 108 delusions that account for the 108 beads on the mala, numbering is a way to get a handle on chaos, which leads to confusion, which leads to ignorance, which leads to suffering.  To number something is to know, at least, how many things you’re dealing with, and to know how many things you’re dealing with is to make a small step on the path toward knowledge.  So Buddhists number things, and the Precepts are no exception.  As I said, I took five of them, twice a day, before each meditation session.

Here are the five that I took (and take): 

1.     1. Refrain from killing or physical violence.

2.     2. Refrain from stealing.

3.     3. Refrain from sexual misconduct.

4.     4. Refrain from irresponsible speech.

5.     5. Refrain from intoxicants.

But I don’t like talking about these precepts using the negative form (don’t do this, don’t do that) because they weren’t originally conceived in that manner and because whenever I’m given a list of things I shouldn’t do, I’m reminded of the Ten Commandments, and that’s not a helpful association for me. 

To my mind, Buddhists precepts are intended to describe enlightened behavior more than prohibit unenlightened behavior, and so I revise them slightly whenever I commit to them and wind up with something like this:

1.     1. It appears that highly realized spiritual people are naturally non-violent and don’t kill living beings (Precept 1);

2.     2. Also that they are satisfied deeply with whatever they have to hand that is healthy and life-giving, and therefore don’t feel the need to steal or misappropriate or envy (Precept 2);

3.     3. That they use their physical appetites and attractions responsibly and with full consideration of their partners’ well-being (Precept 3);

4.     4. That they speak with reason, gentleness, and a sense of the real power and influence of every word they utter (Precept 4);

5.     5. And that they don’t become fixed on ideas, behaviors, emotions, foods, and drinks that distort their views of themselves or the world around them; in this sense, you can become intoxicated by just about anything (Precept 5).

When viewed in this fashion, I can commit to them wholly and without reservation.

Besides, I believe that authentic spiritual realization naturally gives rise to these characteristics anyway, and so I also believe that if I cultivate these insights within myself, these very same characteristics will show up in my own life. 

In other words, it’s better to be non-violent than to practice non-violence, although I know that in most cases the practice precedes the being, if you see what I’m driving at. 

So I’ll use these precepts as guidelines, as reminders of what the target looks like, because there are many times when I’m so angry or so thirsty or so fixated on something that I forget the target altogether.  Then the precepts are there to remind me.

The two that I want to talk about in reference to the New York Times article are the injunctions against violence and stealing.  And to talk about them I’d like to quote from the Buddha himself.  The passage comes from the Digha Nikaya  or the long discourses of the Buddha:

Thus, Ananda, in dependence upon feeling there is craving; in dependence upon craving there is pursuit; in dependence upon pursuit there is gain; in dependence upon gain there is decision-making; in dependence upon decision-making there is desire and lust; in dependence upon desire and lust there is attachment; in dependence upon attachment there is possessiveness; in dependence upon possessiveness, there is stinginess; in dependence upon stinginess, there is defensiveness; and because of defensiveness, various evil, unwholesome things originate—the taking up of clubs and weapons, conflicts, quarrels, and disputes, insults, slander, and falsehood.

It’s a helpful exercise to try and paraphrase this concise summary of the chain of causation—after all, it accounts for all that’s wrong with the world, and it does so in 93 words! 

 My paraphrase goes something like this:

We crave pleasurable feelings and desirable possessions, and so we pursue them.  To get what we want, though, we have to make decisions that derive from our desire and lust for these things, and when we do that, our attachment to these things increases because we have now committed ourselves to a plan of action for acquiring them.  Once we get them, of course, we become attached to them, but even before they arrive, our anticipation of their arrival is simply another form of attachment.  And once we are in possession of whatever it is we wanted, we don’t willingly give it up--we become possessive of it and stingy about keeping it to ourselves; and our stinginess leads us to become defensive about what we have acquired because we can’t imagine happiness without this acquisition.  It is at this point that we become prone to violence in order to keep our stuff whenever we feel our stuff is threatened, and we will resort to all manner of conflicts, quarrels, disputes, insults, slander, and falsehood to fight for it.

That’s 179 words, but I’m not the Buddha.  Here’s the point: you begin, innocently enough, with a craving for pleasurable feelings, and in pursuit of them, you end up with violence or war.

So when I saw the piece in The Times, I saw violence and greed and realized that the one exists in the service of the other.  I saw that the violence in Iran and Guantánamo are attempts to maintain an empire of power and possessions that has arisen, in turn, from the greed that fuels the lucrative money-management firms and the incessant quest for larger and larger homes that we can less and less afford. 

In other words, once we become attached to something, we’ll fight to keep it.

And that can be a problem.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

MONASTIC DEBATING COMES TO GIFFELS AUDITORIUM

On Thursday, 26 March at 7:00 p.m. in Giffels Auditorium on the campus of the University of Arkansas, Geshe Dorjee and Geshe Agha will provide the Fayettville community with a rare treat:  a demonstration of authentic Tibetan debating.

Formal debate, while not unique to the Tibetan tradition, is unusual in that it is still a staple of their monastic education, and participation in it begins at a very early age.  Typically, monks begin to debate at age 9-10 (or even younger if they show aptitude) when they initiate their study of the symbolic associations of the five primary colors in Tibetan iconography:  yellow, white, red, green, and blue.

The method is fairly simple.  The classic texts are first privately memorized and recited, and then pubicly debated, following traditional paths of question and answer.  As the student progresses in ability, the texts become more complex, and the debates more rigorous.

It is not unusual to see elderly monks in the monasteries still debating.  Above all, public debate gives the participants a solid command of the required information, information that is designed to have a substantial impact on the restructuring of the personality according to logical principles.  From following a small segments of one of these debates, it is easy to see why logic and reasoning have become such a staple of much Tibetan Buddhist thought.

At the very least, it is an educational principle that Americans stand to learn a great deal from, and one that is immensely entertaining to watch.  Don't miss this wonderful opportunity.

The event is sponsored by Students for a Free Tibet, Arkansas chapter, and admission is free and open to the public.

MANDALA FINISHING CEREMONY & BEYOND

As many of you know, the mandala at Mullins Library was completed on Wednesday, March 11, 2009.  The Finishing Ceremony was a great success and was well attended by a good number of friends and supporters.  Geshe, Mepham, and Agha are off to Utah now for a well-deserved Spring Break.  The mandala will be destroyed on March 29 at 3:00 p.m. in Mullins Library and bags of sand will be handed out to all in attendance.  If you've never seen a destruction ceremony, you'll want to attend this one, if possible.

In the meantime, I have uploaded the final set of photographs covering the mandala through the Finishing Ceremony to the Flickr account for the Tibetan Cultural Institute of Arkansas.

There is also a group Flickr account that has photographs by me, Megan Perez, Mark Gieringer, and Dent Gitchell.  You can see those photographs here.