This is a useful opportunity for anyone interested in deepening their roots into the soil of Buddha Dharma, including beginners to practice or to Tendai generally. The course is taught by a priest in Denmark who speaks and writes English beautifully, and is someone I respect very much as a teacher and as a practitioner.
Online course in Tendai Buddhism, free of charge and available to all.
11 August 2010
10 August 2010
Contemplation: Cutting Through Appearances
Settle the mind. Review the method for practicing contemplation with care, and with the intention to practice for the benefit of all beings without exception, take the following as your object of contemplation:
Endeavor to carry this contemplation through your everyday life, in all that you see or hear or touch.
(from the Diamond Sutra, chap. 32, trans. A.F. Price and Wong Mou-Lan)
Thus shall ye think of all this fleeting world:
A star at dawn, a bubble in a stream;
A flash of lightning in a summer cloud,
A flickering lamp, a phantom, and a dream.
Endeavor to carry this contemplation through your everyday life, in all that you see or hear or touch.
(from the Diamond Sutra, chap. 32, trans. A.F. Price and Wong Mou-Lan)
09 August 2010
A Bit More on Samadhi
I once participated in a guided meditation led by a contemporary Buddhist teacher I know and respect very much. I'll summarize it and let you work it out as a thought experiment:
And that was it. This picture of samadhi was presented as a kind of celebration of solitary repose, as an escape from the prison planet of distress and the hell of other people. I experienced it instead as a terror scenario: trapped in a bubble of my own making on the bottom of the ocean, by myself, far from any opportunity to fulfill my vows as a Buddhist, soon to run out of air in the company of silent octopi.
Our form of Buddhism demands that you learn how to work with the flotsam, the garbage and pollution, the stormy world of surfaces in a wise and compassionate way. It is not about making for oneself a cocoon of safety and then hiding in it 20,000 leagues below. Remember, form is emptiness and emptiness is form; form is also form, and emptiness, emptiness. Your nature is the same as that of the sea, storm, and sunlight (emptiness), but your function differs from those things if you are committed to the Mahayana project.
In that spirit, I would like to invite you to consider how the meditation I described above should conclude. Once you have made your bubble and attained a measure of control and stability of mind, how do you break out of that bubble? Your nature is no different from that of the sea, the storm, the tide, the trash; how do you dissolve those "mind forg'd manacles" and move on to avoid becoming trash, to avoid losing your function? Is there another approach to take? What is your function?
A related point: let us not bind ourselves with our samadhi, with our views, with anything at all (including "nothing").
First, visualize yourself on the surface of a choppy sea, with no land in sight and no rescue coming by air by boat. You are bombarded by flotsam and debris from a shipwreck, and pollution and garbage from ordinary people like yourself; you have reason to believe there are hungry sharks nuzzling your Nikes. You are in deep trouble.
And that was it. This picture of samadhi was presented as a kind of celebration of solitary repose, as an escape from the prison planet of distress and the hell of other people. I experienced it instead as a terror scenario: trapped in a bubble of my own making on the bottom of the ocean, by myself, far from any opportunity to fulfill my vows as a Buddhist, soon to run out of air in the company of silent octopi.
Our form of Buddhism demands that you learn how to work with the flotsam, the garbage and pollution, the stormy world of surfaces in a wise and compassionate way. It is not about making for oneself a cocoon of safety and then hiding in it 20,000 leagues below. Remember, form is emptiness and emptiness is form; form is also form, and emptiness, emptiness. Your nature is the same as that of the sea, storm, and sunlight (emptiness), but your function differs from those things if you are committed to the Mahayana project.
In that spirit, I would like to invite you to consider how the meditation I described above should conclude. Once you have made your bubble and attained a measure of control and stability of mind, how do you break out of that bubble? Your nature is no different from that of the sea, the storm, the tide, the trash; how do you dissolve those "mind forg'd manacles" and move on to avoid becoming trash, to avoid losing your function? Is there another approach to take? What is your function?
A related point: let us not bind ourselves with our samadhi, with our views, with anything at all (including "nothing").
06 August 2010
Six Paramitas: Prajna or Wisdom (7 of 7)
The perfection of wisdom or prajna paramita is traditionally summed up as follows in The Heart Sutra (this is the version we use in our sangha):
You can put this into practice by reciting it in a steady and purposeful rhythm, by committing it to memory, by studying commentaries and other teachings on it, by repeating the mantra aloud or with "the tongue of the mind," by copying the sutra carefully and mindfully into a notebook, by taking it as an object of contemplation, and by returning to it again and again.
You will likely notice that this sutra is written in a very compressed and paradoxical style. If form is emptiness and emptiness is form, what might these terms mean? If this is indeed "the truth," then what kind of truth is this?
This mode of expression reflects the difficulty of the subject matter. In Mayahana Buddhism, we understand truth in two ways (the doctrine of the "two truths"). The first kind of truth is called provisional or contingent truth. It includes statements that apply to our world of unenlightened beings: when you stub your toe you feel pain, and that pain is real to you, as is the toe, your person, and the table you beat it against. But this kind of truth is never taken for granted here. If you really drill down into the toe, for instance, you see it is not at all a simple and unchanging or eternal item: it is a composite of other things, reducible to elements and space and energy, and changing all the time. The pain, too, comes and goes in waves: is the pain you feel at first the same as the pain you feel twenty seconds later? Is it the same information passing through the nervous system? Not really.
Your toe is a form, a "dharma," a thing. That is one kind of truth: you see it right there in front of you, and when you smack it into a table, the pain is very convincing. But your toe is also emptiness: it is not what it seems to be. Absolute truth sees provisional truth for what it is, provisional.
Any discussion of absolute truth can become very complicated very quickly. As the diffuse language of the Heart Sutra suggests, absolute truth is very resistant to conceptualization. You just can't describe it adequately in words, but you can gesture to it and you can set up different kinds of tricks (upaya, skillful means) to help people experience it. For now I want to suggest that prajna paramita or perfection of wisdom means coming to terms with the provisional, penetrating into it or cutting through it, in order to gain some insight into the absolute. From this, one's training in the other paramitas is radically transformed, recontextualized.
Avalokiteshvara Bodhisattva, doing deep prajna paramita, clearly saw emptiness of all five conditions, thus completely relieving misfortune and pain.
O Shariputra, form is no other than emptiness, emptiness no other than form; form is exactly emptiness, emptiness exactly form. Sensation, conception, discrimination, awareness are likewise like this.
O Shariputra, all dharmas are forms of emptiness: not born, not destroyed, not stained, not pure, without loss, without gain. So in emptiness there is no form, no sensation, conception, discrimination, awareness; no eye, ear, nose, tongue, body, mind; no color, sound, smell, taste, touch, phenomena; no realm of sight, no realm of consciousness, no ignorance and no end of ignorance, no old age and death, no end to old age and death, no suffering, no cause of suffering, no extinguishing, no path, no wisdom and no gain.
No gain and thus the bodhisattva lives prajna paramita with no hindrance in the mind, no hindrance therefore no fear. Far beyond deluded thoughts, this is nirvana. All past, present, and future Buddhas live prajna paramita and therefore attain anuttara samyak sambodhi.
Therefore know: prajna paramita is the great mantra, the vivid mantra, the best mantra, the unsurpassed mantra. It completely clears all pain. This is the truth, not a lie. So, set forth the prajna paramita mantra. Set forth this mantra and say:
GATE GATE PARAGATE PARASAMGATE BODHI SVAHA
You can put this into practice by reciting it in a steady and purposeful rhythm, by committing it to memory, by studying commentaries and other teachings on it, by repeating the mantra aloud or with "the tongue of the mind," by copying the sutra carefully and mindfully into a notebook, by taking it as an object of contemplation, and by returning to it again and again.
You will likely notice that this sutra is written in a very compressed and paradoxical style. If form is emptiness and emptiness is form, what might these terms mean? If this is indeed "the truth," then what kind of truth is this?
This mode of expression reflects the difficulty of the subject matter. In Mayahana Buddhism, we understand truth in two ways (the doctrine of the "two truths"). The first kind of truth is called provisional or contingent truth. It includes statements that apply to our world of unenlightened beings: when you stub your toe you feel pain, and that pain is real to you, as is the toe, your person, and the table you beat it against. But this kind of truth is never taken for granted here. If you really drill down into the toe, for instance, you see it is not at all a simple and unchanging or eternal item: it is a composite of other things, reducible to elements and space and energy, and changing all the time. The pain, too, comes and goes in waves: is the pain you feel at first the same as the pain you feel twenty seconds later? Is it the same information passing through the nervous system? Not really.
Your toe is a form, a "dharma," a thing. That is one kind of truth: you see it right there in front of you, and when you smack it into a table, the pain is very convincing. But your toe is also emptiness: it is not what it seems to be. Absolute truth sees provisional truth for what it is, provisional.
Any discussion of absolute truth can become very complicated very quickly. As the diffuse language of the Heart Sutra suggests, absolute truth is very resistant to conceptualization. You just can't describe it adequately in words, but you can gesture to it and you can set up different kinds of tricks (upaya, skillful means) to help people experience it. For now I want to suggest that prajna paramita or perfection of wisdom means coming to terms with the provisional, penetrating into it or cutting through it, in order to gain some insight into the absolute. From this, one's training in the other paramitas is radically transformed, recontextualized.
05 August 2010
Six Paramitas: Dhyana or Concentration (6 of 7)
For present purposes, it makes sense to distinguish actions that are mechanical from those that are conscious.
The term mechanical actions are the patterns of behavior that you or I can do without devoting any attention to it. With enough repetition, nearly any complex task can become automatic to someone. An example might be learning how to drive a car: at first it feels like you are doing eight or ten different things all at once and you feel very very alert ("beginner's mind" in a new context!); as time passes, you may find yourself driving from Idaho to Iowa in a state of deep sleep. (Do not do that.)
We have other patterns of behavior that are just as automatic, however. It is easy to find these patterns in other people, especially people you know well: you can predict when your dad is going to exaggerate about his success as a fisherman, or you notice that your mother is forcing herself to laugh very loudly after everything she says when she gets nervous, or the way your father-in-law eats his dinner with his mouth open and face smacking around with each bite may drive you to the bottle. In each example, human behavior is totally out of control and the people involved are totally unaware of it.
This constitutes a serious problem if you intend to make a break with all that old karmic conditioning and start again on more responsible grounds. (It is hard to take responsibility for your actions when you don't even know what you're doing or why.) If you are a liar, but you don't want to be a liar anymore; if you can't stop yourself from kicking the cat when you get angry about a football game, even when you know it's wrong; if you want to stop being so damned selfish and start being useful to others, you need to do something that is not at all automatic in order to break in. I'll call this conscious action: intentionally doing things in a way that is not automatic but is instead mindful, aware, conscious.
Dhyana or concentration is the sixth paramita. When you develop dhyana you develop samadhi, which is to say you develop the stability of mind needed to Say No: to notice in yourself, objectively, those tendencies that make you behave like a crazy person, without being tricked into identifying with those tendencies.
Concentration is one-pointedness of mind. To cultivate it, you focus the mind on one object. It may be the sensation of your breathing coming in and out through the nose, or your belly moving in and out with the rhythm of your breath. That is very effective, but arbitrary. Also effective and arbitrary: counting your breaths, gazing at a lit candle or a flower, gazing deeply into a source of physical pain (if you are already in pain that is). One-pointedness of mind is usually quite pleasurable, and most pleasurable experiences usually involve one-pointedness of mind. Most Buddhist practices, even the ones that seem most divorced from formal seated meditation, involve or rather require cultivating this kind of concentration, especially devotional practices such as nembutsu.
Dhyana also involves relaxation. The mind broadens and tension falls away. This can work in two directions: If you want to relax, cultivate concentration. If you find yourself struggling to concentrate, relax the body a bit.
Finally, it should be said that deepening one's samadhi makes a person more free. You are less constricted by your constipated beliefs about who you think you are or ought to be, just less hung up and more self-trusting in a positive sense, less closed-minded. So that when your teacher suggests to you that you might benefit from, say, reciting a section of a sutra or practicing nembutsu in addition to seated meditation, you are much more inclined to give it an honest and joyful effort--and to get good results from it.
So much of Dharma is just being game. Just being willing to try, to have a gentle sense of humor about it, to throw yourself into it. Practice with dhyana can help you find the courage to be simple and easy in this way, to be game.
The term mechanical actions are the patterns of behavior that you or I can do without devoting any attention to it. With enough repetition, nearly any complex task can become automatic to someone. An example might be learning how to drive a car: at first it feels like you are doing eight or ten different things all at once and you feel very very alert ("beginner's mind" in a new context!); as time passes, you may find yourself driving from Idaho to Iowa in a state of deep sleep. (Do not do that.)
We have other patterns of behavior that are just as automatic, however. It is easy to find these patterns in other people, especially people you know well: you can predict when your dad is going to exaggerate about his success as a fisherman, or you notice that your mother is forcing herself to laugh very loudly after everything she says when she gets nervous, or the way your father-in-law eats his dinner with his mouth open and face smacking around with each bite may drive you to the bottle. In each example, human behavior is totally out of control and the people involved are totally unaware of it.
This constitutes a serious problem if you intend to make a break with all that old karmic conditioning and start again on more responsible grounds. (It is hard to take responsibility for your actions when you don't even know what you're doing or why.) If you are a liar, but you don't want to be a liar anymore; if you can't stop yourself from kicking the cat when you get angry about a football game, even when you know it's wrong; if you want to stop being so damned selfish and start being useful to others, you need to do something that is not at all automatic in order to break in. I'll call this conscious action: intentionally doing things in a way that is not automatic but is instead mindful, aware, conscious.
Dhyana or concentration is the sixth paramita. When you develop dhyana you develop samadhi, which is to say you develop the stability of mind needed to Say No: to notice in yourself, objectively, those tendencies that make you behave like a crazy person, without being tricked into identifying with those tendencies.
Concentration is one-pointedness of mind. To cultivate it, you focus the mind on one object. It may be the sensation of your breathing coming in and out through the nose, or your belly moving in and out with the rhythm of your breath. That is very effective, but arbitrary. Also effective and arbitrary: counting your breaths, gazing at a lit candle or a flower, gazing deeply into a source of physical pain (if you are already in pain that is). One-pointedness of mind is usually quite pleasurable, and most pleasurable experiences usually involve one-pointedness of mind. Most Buddhist practices, even the ones that seem most divorced from formal seated meditation, involve or rather require cultivating this kind of concentration, especially devotional practices such as nembutsu.
Dhyana also involves relaxation. The mind broadens and tension falls away. This can work in two directions: If you want to relax, cultivate concentration. If you find yourself struggling to concentrate, relax the body a bit.
Finally, it should be said that deepening one's samadhi makes a person more free. You are less constricted by your constipated beliefs about who you think you are or ought to be, just less hung up and more self-trusting in a positive sense, less closed-minded. So that when your teacher suggests to you that you might benefit from, say, reciting a section of a sutra or practicing nembutsu in addition to seated meditation, you are much more inclined to give it an honest and joyful effort--and to get good results from it.
So much of Dharma is just being game. Just being willing to try, to have a gentle sense of humor about it, to throw yourself into it. Practice with dhyana can help you find the courage to be simple and easy in this way, to be game.
03 August 2010
Great River Ekayana Sangha
Our community of Tendai Buddhists and friends of the path here in the Washington, DC and Northern Virginia metro area has decided to call itself the Great River Ekayana Sangha. We used to be called Washington Tendai Sangha, but resolved on changing the name to avoid confusion with the other "Washington _____ Sanghas" in the neighborhood.
Just think of all streams returning to the source as one: that's our mission and our identity from here forward. That is who we are, Great River Ekayana Sangha.
Just think of all streams returning to the source as one: that's our mission and our identity from here forward. That is who we are, Great River Ekayana Sangha.
Contemplation: Ignorance and Wisdom
Settle the mind, review the method for practicing contemplation in our sangha, and take this teaching of Chih-i as your object of contemplation:
[quoted in Ng Yu-Kwan, TianTai Buddhism and Early Madhyamika, p. 175]
When ignorance is transformed, it will become wisdom, like ice thawing and turning into water. It is not something coming from another place. Both [ignorance and wisdom] are embraced in the mind in a single moment.
[quoted in Ng Yu-Kwan, TianTai Buddhism and Early Madhyamika, p. 175]
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