April 25, 2013 full moon

New rivers, new rafts

A conference of scholar-teachers
on the unavoidable reimagination of Buddhadharma

by Chris Talbott

A discussion at the recent conference on secular Buddhism.

Here some clansmen learn the Dhamma–discourses, stanzas, expositions, verses, exclamations, sayings, birth stories, marvels, and answers to questions–and having learned the Dhamma, they examine the meaning of those teachings with wisdom. Examining the meaning of those teachings with wisdom, they gain a reflective acceptance of them. They do not learn the Dhamma for the sake of criticising others and for winning in debates, and they experience the good for the sake of which they learned the Dhamma. Those teachings, being rightly grasped by them, conduce to their welfare and happiness for a long time. Why is that? Because of the right grasp of those teachings….

Suppose a man in the course of a journey saw a great expanse of water, whose near shore was dangerous and fearful and whose further shore was safe and free from fear, but there was no ferryboat or bridge for going to the far shore. So the man collected grass, twigs, branches, and leaves and bound them together into a raft, and supported by the raft and making an effort with his hands and feet, he got safely across to the far shore. When that man got across and had arrived at the far shore, he might think thus: ‘This raft has been very helpful to me, since supported by it and making an effort with my hands and feet, I got safely across to the far shore. Suppose I were to haul it onto the dry land or set it adrift in the water, and then go wherever I want.’ It is by so doing that that man would be doing what should be done with that raft. So too I have shown you how the Dhamma is similar to a raft, being for the purpose of crossing over, not for the purpose of grasping.

–transl. Bhikkhu Bodhi

A conference on secular Buddhism at BCBS

Last month, some 30 people with long and deep interest in Buddhist thought and practice met at Barre Center for Buddhist Studies. All of them have taught Buddhism in one form or another for  decades–some as academics, some as former monastics, all as scholar-practitioners. Together they represent all three “turnings of the wheel,” from the Theravāda through Mahāyāna and Vajrayana, and thus the three largest groups of practitioners in the West: Theravadan, Zen and Tibetan. They came from as far as Australia and Israel, bringing formal training in linguistics, neuroscience, philosophy, psychology or religious studies. More than half are published authors. Most of them already knew several of their fellow conferees, but knew others only by reputation. Needless to say, there was no shortage of interesting conversation.

No one needed convincing about the importance of the issues under the working title, “secular Buddhism.” As one participant noted, just as we need to keep redefining “democracy” we need to do the same with Buddhism. They pursued that definition through twenty-two formal presentations, about a dozen topical discussion groups, and much informal but fruitful talk over the course of three days. They wrestled with the reality that the Buddhist traditions from which we have drawn our practices, ethics and philosophies are not automatically compatible–as  traditionally understood and practiced–with  science, rationality, and twenty-first century culture.

Gay Watson, Nona Olivia, Willoughby Britton

New rafts: How did the need arise?

When the nineteenth-century German philosopher Nietzsche declared “God is dead,” he was not exulting, but rather warning us that science and pure rationality had removed the focal point, the perspective, that religion had been providing, and that we had not found a suitable replacement.

A similar realization is now front and center for some Western Buddhists. They are attracted by what they see, inherent in the Dharma, as the potential for an atheistic or “post-theistic” solution to the human existential problem. They believe it can provide the focal point for a human life without seeking to remove science from authority over its domain. They want to throw out the metaphysical, dogmatic bathwater without losing the sacred baby. They hope to retain the kind of whole-life role Buddhism has had in its traditional cultures, without insistence on fundamentalist dogma, the limitations of monastic hierarchy, or negative cultural practices such as gender discrimination. In other words, there is a lot of work to do–but they see no alternative.

Before the nineteenth century, Buddhist teachings moved slowly, over generations, travelling to new countries and kingdoms in the minds and the rucksacks of wandering teachers crossing mountains on foot. Today, science, technology, and the increasingly global changes in culture that spring from them, have created radically new environments, new rivers for Buddhist teachings to cross.

March 27, 2013 full moon

Wheels of Fire: The Buddha’s Radical Teaching on Process

By Kate Lila Wheeler

Ādittapariyāya Sutta: The Fire Sermon, SN 35.28

“Monks, the All is aflame. What All is aflame? The eye is aflame. Forms are aflame. Consciousness at the eye is aflame. Contact at the eye is aflame. And whatever there is that arises in dependence on contact at the eye–experienced as pleasure, pain or neither-pleasure-nor-pain–that too is aflame. Aflame with what? Aflame with the fire of passion, the fire of aversion, the fire of delusion. Aflame, I tell you, with birth, aging & death, with sorrows, lamentations, pains, distresses, & despairs.

“The ear is aflame. Sounds are aflame…

“The nose is aflame. Aromas are aflame…

“The tongue is aflame. Flavors are aflame…

“The body is aflame. Tactile sensations are aflame…

“The intellect is aflame. Ideas are aflame. Consciousness at the intellect is aflame. Contact at the intellect is aflame. And whatever there is that arises in dependence on contact at the intellect–experienced as pleasure, pain or neither-pleasure-nor-pain–that too is aflame. Aflame with what? Aflame with the fire of passion, the fire of aversion, the fire of delusion. Aflame, I say, with birth, aging & death, with sorrows, lamentations, pains, distresses, & despairs.

“Seeing thus, the well-instructed disciple of the noble ones grows disenchanted with the eye, disenchanted with forms, disenchanted with consciousness at the eye, disenchanted with contact at the eye. And whatever there is that arises in dependence on contact at the eye, experienced as pleasure, pain or neither-pleasure-nor-pain: With that, too, he grows disenchanted.”

–Trans.: Thanissaro

Just after his book When You’re Falling, Dive: Lessons in the Art of Living, came out in 2008, Mark Matousek said on Beliefnet, “When you’ve walked through whatever your fire is, it connects you to the human condition, in a way that you’ve probably spent most of your life avoiding and denying.” In more modern, Western terms, this is similar to what the Buddha is saying: “All is burning.” To see how our suffering in the moment reflects the human condition is a huge, wonderful insight. It deepens you as a person, humbles you, opens your heart, makes you grateful. People may think that is corny, but it changes everything. Life isn’t just blueberries, nor would you want a constant diet of blueberries. Almost everything that grows you is something you would have avoided if you could.

Learning from crisis

There’s something in us that wants everything to be easy, pleasant and sweet. But that keeps us from accepting that sometimes our life might be hard, and people we care about can have things happen to them. Within the reality of that, we discover the possibility of being more balanced. It’s an attitude of acknowledgement, so that “when you’re falling, dive,” is also allowing the feeling you’re having to be there.

Really opening our hearts to the fire of change means disenchantment from the idea that we can always make sense of it, and make everything work out–even the idea that spiritual practice might make you a totally peaceful human being. That idea can be the most refined level of grasping, to think you’re going to meditate and everything is going to become the way you wish it could be. The path is much different than that; we find peace, but we find it by going into the cauldron.

All-terrain meditation

The sense of the First Noble Truth of suffering, or this idea of fire, is not only to sensitize us to suffering but also a pumped-up, neon way of reminding us that it’s all in our experience; it’s not worshipping a fire outside ourselves. It’s really being very centered in our own moment-to-moment, real-time life. This is all-terrain meditation: meditation as my friend Josh Summers says, good for when it’s all smooth and going down hill, and for when there’s no pavement. That’s what presence of mind and heart is for.  This is what we are developing, this is what we call Dharma practice.

There is an instruction in the Tibetan tradition that closely echoes the second half of the Fire Sermon.  It is “Do this toward all that you see”–all that you see outside, all that you see inside, the environment, and living beings. All things, while seeing them, without grasping them, simply remain. This is freedom from the trap of duality. This is the body of enlightenment.

So “do this toward all that you see” is the same instruction, cultivating disenchantment. The Tibetans say, in addition to seeing the fire of suffering as a direct encouragement to disenchantment, we can also practice equanimity, being present without grasping. If we can’t get all the way there, it may mean we’re not fully present. We’re trying to get out of the frustration. Or maybe we’re caught in a desire.   “Do this toward all that you hear, all sounds, grasped as sweet or harsh. Whilst hearing them, without afterthought, remain. This empty sound, with no beginning or end, is the sound of enlightenment.”  When we open to what is, whether it’s easy or relatively difficult, the experience is liberated.

Can we be present with everything that stirs the mind-thoughts or emotions, inner poisons or sense of imbalance–without carrying the imbalance further? That’s the trick. Simply allowing it to settle in the face of its own arising is liberation.

Fire metaphors in the time of the Buddha

The book, The Mind Like Fire Unbound, by Ajahn Thanissaro, includes a lot about how fire was understood in the culture of the Buddha. For example, they believed that when a fire was on fire that it was dependent on the fuel, that it was clinging, unstable, and dependent–not separate from the burning piece of wood. They thought that that’s what we’re like when we’re dependent on the idea of something happening to make us happy. The body-mind process was viewed as the fuel. The word “clinging,” upadāna, has a pun in it: the word also means “fuel.” When people heard the Buddha say “clinging” they also would be hearing the words “firewood” and “fuel.” So when the body-mind process is no longer the fuel, when it’s no longer clung to, that’s liberation.

But they felt that when the fire went out, it doesn’t become extinct, but is released to go back and permeate and pervade all of existence. When consciousness ceases to cling, it moves into an unbounded sense of connection, recognizing the level of simply being, not locked into “I am here and that is there.”

The Buddha was, of course, embedded in his own culture and time. He would reverse metaphors, like the metaphor of the fire, which was a life-force worshipped by his contemporaries, the Brahmans. In another metaphor from the Brahman analysis, they would talk about the human life being like a chariot. Consciousness was the driver. There was a charioteer, and that was your inner essential soul. The Buddha said, no, there is not that one driver, there’s only a chariot, made of different parts. We put it together. We think there’s a charioteer, but that doesn’t really serve us. In fact, it becomes destructive; it causes pain.

It is worth contemplating and wondering how the Buddha felt.  He talked about his own experience of still living in a body but being liberated. He was living his life from a radically different point of view, where mind and body were no longer fuel for craving. Perhaps we can experience something similar.  For instance, when we notice our breathing, we can inquire, “Am I a man or a woman? Is breath male or female?”  I was asking one of my Tibetan teachers some questions about gender in Buddhism. He made a gesture [drawing a sexual organ] and said “Does your mind have one of these? Or does you mind have this [another gesture]?” I said, my mind doesn’t have either one, and he laughed, and said “See? Problem solved!”

It sounds glib but there’s real truth in the “beyond labels” thing. Quoting from the Buddha: “Where water, earth, fire and wind, have no footing, the stars do not shine, the sun is not visible. The moon does not appear, yet there’s no darkness found, either. When a sage knows this for himself, then from form and formlessness, pleasure and pain, he or she is freed.” [See Udāna 1.10]

Within experience there’s just this “is-ness,” and I think that is also part of the fire metaphor. When you see a fire, the flames–at least, within our perception–are there, but not there. We could feel the heat if we put our finger in the flames, but it’s an insubstantiality metaphor too. The flames are transparent, just as being extremely present and conscious creates a transparency in experience. You realize you’re making a fabrication, like “I really need to dip my comb in ammonia and get all this stuff off it.” You see “Yeah, my mind is telling me that, but I can do it later.” You can witness what’s going on in your body-mind process.

February 25, 2013 full moon

True & False: Dharma After the Western Enlightenment

Talking with Rita Gross

Insight Journal: How do Western Buddhists, in spite of our many modern views, take their forms too literally?

Rita Gross: Since I often teach in a Mahāyāna setting, let me use an example from that tradition. According to Mahāyāna legend, the Buddha hid his Mahāyāna teachings in the realm of the nāgas, serpent-like creatures who dwell under the sea, because his students were not yet ready to receive them. Eventually these teachings were retrieved by the great 2nd-century master Nāgārjuna. This account has been passed down as if it were factual history, but of course it isn’t. What historical research tells us is that the Mahāyāna scriptures gradually emerged after the Buddha’s lifetime over the course of centuries.

The Heart Sutra is the charter text for many Mahāyānists, who view it as an accurate account of the words of the historical Buddha. But it cannot be considered historical if by “history” we mean, as we usually do, a factual narrative about things that happened empirically, events that a camcorder could have recorded had it existed at that time, something that could be included in a documentary. The Heart Sutra is not that but something else, which I shall simply call a story. “Story” is thus a more encompassing category than “history.” Both are types of narrative, but historical narratives are constituted from the facts as best we know them; stories are not constrained by the demands of factual accuracy. Novels, films, plays–these can be entirely fictional, yet we all know they can, nevertheless, communicate values and meaning.

Religious orthodoxy resists this perspective. Every religion, at least sometimes, claims that its forms–its literature, its doctrines, its practices–derive from a source of unimpeachable authority. This includes Buddhism. Tradition tells us that the Buddha was the World Teacher, whose realization was complete and unsurpassed and whose skillful means were perfect. Every Buddhist tradition has staked its authority on its claim to a direct link with the Buddha’s true teaching. Therefore, in Buddhism, tradition itself becomes that unimpeachable source. Many times, I have heard teachers say that since masters of the past were more accomplished than we are and knew what they were doing, we can’t tamper with established forms. That even a non-theistic religion like Buddhism tends so often to rely on an inflexible source for its forms indicates how desperately many humans long to deflect responsibility for shaping their religious life.

IJ: Your course talks about a middle way between taking stories in Buddhist texts that have supernatural elements literally, on the one hand, and dismissing them completely, on the other. Do we have to accept them as facts for them to have value for us?

RG: Religious stories do not have to be empirical history to have spiritual value. Once, when I was discussing this point at shedra (university-like school in the Tibetan tradition), one of the other senior teachers objected heatedly. She argued that since I had physically stood at the spot where it is said that the Heart Sutra was first spoken, how could I doubt the historical accuracy of the narrative? Furthermore, she said it was improper even to bring academic methods into a shrine room and that I should desist completely from teaching the history course.

I have discovered, to my shock, that Western practitioners of Buddhism can be as naively literalist in their readings of traditional Buddhist narratives as any Christian fundamentalists can be in theirs. I realized there was a need to reconcile students’ unconscious and inevitable immersion in the style of thinking engendered by the European Enlightenment with their commitments to Buddhism. This reconciliation must involve a way for Buddhists to value traditional narratives without following many adherents of Western religions into fundamentalism and literalism.

Is Buddhism harmed by giving up claims that its teachings transcend human time and space? I think not. In fact, I would claim that such a view is more in accord with foundational buddhadharma than its alternative. I say this for two reasons. First, basic Buddhist teachings, such as impermanence and interdependent origination, do not accord well with the supposition that there are eternal verities capturable in words and concepts. All things, including doctrines and rituals, should be expected to change, and those changes come about because of changing constellations of causes and conditions. In his famous work the Mulamadhyamakakārikā, Nāgārjuna says that even the appearance of a buddha occurs only by the workings of interdependent origination, by the working of the same processes that govern everything else in our human world, not as the result of something transcendent to that world.

My second reason is that in demonstrating that all religious forms–such as words, concepts, practices, and rituals–are culturally relative human constructions, the modern historical study of religion is deeply compatible with Buddhist teachings. I am always very careful in my wording of this point. I am not claiming that there is no ultimate, ineffable, transcendent dimension in human experience. What I am saying is that all the words and concepts and methods used to point to it are human constructions and should be held lightly. The great failing of any religion is always to take its own forms too seriously, to claim that they have ultimate rather than relative significance.

Buddhists are not immune to this, of course. Still, in my view, all schools of Buddhism claim that while teachings and views are necessary and helpful tools to be used on the path, ultimately they will be left behind with the dawning of true insight. Or, as many Buddhists like to say, silence is the ultimate truth–not an uninformed, unpracticed silence, but the silence born of deep contemplation. The silence of not being so attached to words, views, rituals, practices, or any religious forms is ultimately and intensely liberating. Strangely, though, for many practitioners, even very experienced ones, this understanding does not always cut one’s attachment to traditional miracle stories. Indeed, I have found it is not uncommon for some to regard themselves as much better students for not evaluating such stories critically.

IJ: You say in the course description that you will take these stories “seriously without taking them at face value.” Can you say more about what that might mean?

RG: We can distinguish between ‘story’ and ‘history.’ One of our most urgent tasks as modern dharma practitioners is to learn how to take traditional stories seriously without taking them literally. That is to say, we need to learn how to live in the frameworks of both the European Enlightenment and Buddhism, without one negating or subjugating the other. One of the wisest statements about history and story that I have ever encountered was spoken by Black Elk, a holy man of the Lakota nation during the 19th and 20th centuries. In Black Elk Speaks, he narrates one of the Lakota’s most important stories, a story about how the sacred pipe first came to the people. This story is filled with events that are difficult to take literally, such as women turning into buffaloes. At the story’s conclusion, Black Elk said, “This they tell and whether it happened so or not, I do not know; but if you think about it you can see that it is true.”

The main point made in this simple statement is that, contrary to literalist suppositions, truth is not always about observable facts or events. Truth can also reveal itself in deep contemplation of stories and symbols. The truth of a story does not depend on whether it could have been captured by a camcorder. Its truth is found in realms of imagination and contemplation, in its symbolic meanings. Even though much of his spiritual life is based on the symbolism and rituals associated with the sacred pipe, Black Elk himself is skeptical about his narrative as a factual account of its origins. Thus the same story can be regarded as both true and false: false as a factual account of an empirical event and true as the symbolic charter for one’s spirituality. But in the wake of the European Enlightenment, with its according of sole prestige and validity to facts, people have come to see things otherwise.

IJ: How has the triumph of empirical truth affected other kinds of truth?

RG: Few Western students of Buddhism, in my estimation, realize how thoroughly they have imbibed the values and outlook of the European Enlightenment, especially its definition of truth as something that is empirically verifiable. This is a materialist understanding of truth, not a Buddhist one. Nevertheless, because such students have decided that Buddhism is “true,” they conclude that anything narrated in traditional Buddhist stories must be true in the only way they understand–as something that happened in space and time just as the texts describe it. The idea that the story instead takes place in the realm of imagination and symbol challenges their notion of truth. It means to them that the story is false and is without validity. People who do not take seriously biblical stories about talking serpents offering apples are quite comfortable with a Buddhist story about texts hidden in the undersea realm of the half-human, half-serpentnāgas. If one’s sole avenue for assessing whether something is relevant and worthy of consideration is empiricism, with its reliance on facts as being alone trustworthy and valuable, literalism is the only kind of truth.

While empiricism, scientific materialism, and systematic reason–ways of thinking that characterized the European Enlightenment and thus the modern worldview–have greatly improved our way of life in many respects, the great loser in this process has been any ability to appreciate symbols, metaphors, and allegories. The assumption in this way of thinking is that symbols are much less convincing than empirically verifiable facts, and so anything valuable in a religion must be factual, not “merely” symbolic. The motto here seems to be “Either it’s a fact or it’s meaningless.” But such allegiance to fact alone as true and valuable eventually results in many people losing confidence in their faith tradition when they are no longer able to take its stories literally, when they can no longer believe that Jesus literally rose from the dead or that the historical Buddha himself taught what their tradition claims he did. Literalism and fundamentalism are toxic to a deep and profound religious life, at least among those who also live by the paradigm engendered by the European Enlightenment. For a long time, that meant those living under the cultural umbrella of the modern West, but with the modern outlook being adopted and adapted throughout the world, that view is now of global scope.

IJ: The most common way of seeing the cultural conflict with religion these days is by contrast with science. But you point out that it might be history rather than science that poses the greatest threat to literal interpretations of texts. Why is that?

RG: Religions have had a very hard time adjusting to the paradigm shift engendered by the European Enlightenment. In the West, this difficulty has most often been seen as a conflict between religion and science. In the U.S., it is repeatedly and vividly played out in the controversies about evolution versus creationism that regularly plague our school policies and politics. For various reasons, Buddhism has had fewer problems with science than have the Abrahamic religions. Many Buddhists intuitively feel that science and Buddhism can easily get along. But what about the modern study of history and Buddhism? Questions about the compatibility or conflict between traditional Buddhist narratives and modern historical studies are something that, in my view, needs far more discussion. In fact, I would suggest that, for Buddhism, and perhaps for all religions, the implications of modern methods of historical study are far more serious than is modern science.

There are at least two ways in which modern historical methods create doubt about some claims commonly made in traditional religious narratives. Obviously, historical consciousness creates skepticism about the miracle stories that one finds so frequently in religion. This is a fairly superficial level of doubt. More seriously, historical studies demonstrate, or at least claim, that religious texts, practices, and beliefs are the result of human cultural creativity. In other words, religious forms do not drop into the world, finished and complete, from some other realm; rather, they are products of historical development.

IJ: Why do miracle stories have such persistence in human culture?

RG: Historical and comparative studies of religion make it difficult to deny the conclusion that all religious forms, without exception, are human attempts to articulate and relate to our existential situations. It is impossible to adjudicate, on any rational and universal basis, among the many competing claims to the authenticity of revelations from beyond the human realm. In a situation of relative religious and cultural homogeneity–the situation that prevailed in most of the world until the age of global exploration began in earnest in the 16th century–people were much less aware of these competing claims. It is now all but impossible for any sophisticated person to avoid awareness of religious diversity and the theological adjustments that all religions need to make in light of that diversity. This knowledge and the adjustments it requires are among the great benefits of the contemporary world.

It is easy for us today, when thinking about the religious beliefs of others, to see them as products of human aspirations and foibles, and it is egotistical and perverse to exempt one’s own religion from that process. Yet, as is all too clear, religious people, like other people who are strongly invested ideologically, often do just that. I used to see this type of thinking in some of my university students. For one assignment, I asked the students to apply the statement by Black Elk that I have cited above to two traditional stories, one familiar and the other unfamiliar. One student wrote: “The Greeks had very illogical stories that they obviously made up, such as that a mare could become pregnant by turning her hindquarters to the wind. Everyone knows that’s impossible. Christians have sensible sacred stories which we didn’t make up, such as that Jesus was conceived by the Holy Spirit, had no human father, and rose from the dead.” While this type of thinking might still be common, it is based on ignoring much of our basic knowledge of the world.

IJ: Scientific discoveries these days seem to border on the miraculous themselves; how then can we rule out miracles?

RG: Buddhist texts are filled with narratives that are as unlikely as stories of mares becoming pregnant by turning their hindquarters to the wind or of a human child being conceived without a human father or of women turning into buffaloes. Miracle stories are very appealing to many religious people, and this includes many Buddhists. They seem to offer proof of the truth of their own religion, whatever that religion might be.

Recently, I attended a program on the teachings of the 7th-century sage Chandrakīrti (one of the foremost commentators on Nāgārjuna’s teachings on emptiness), led by a well-known and highly regarded dharma teacher. Time after time, after summarizing the philosophical, rational demonstrations for the cogency of Nāgārjuna’s teachings, this teacher would then try to clinch his arguments by citing a story of how Chandrakirti once extracted milk from a painting of a cow. It was hard for me to see how a story about milking a painted cow could be seen as so strongly persuasive, especially since I grew up on a farm and have milked more than my share of nonpainted cows. What’s more, if belief in the story of milking a painted cow were a requirement, I would be less likely, not more likely, to give credence to the teachings. Fortunately, the teachings on emptiness were themselves so cogent that the story of the painted cow was irrelevant.

The question remains: Why would someone think this story would be a convincing proof of anything? Clearly, miracle stories are about something other than proving the truth of religious claims, and that’s the problem. It cheapens both the philosophy and the story to try to use miracle stories to prove a philosophical or religious position. Instead, such stories must be allowed to function in their own frame of reference, as stories in which certain meanings are encoded. Then our task as practitioners is to contemplate what these stories might mean, not what they might prove.

Many of my dharma friends are troubled by this perspective. They counter by saying that many of the things we take for granted today–such as the wireless transmission of speech and documents across great distances or air travel–would surely have been seen as miraculous or magical by those who lived in earlier times. Why not assume the same about the standard Buddhist miracles, such as flying through space on one’s own power, walking through walls, milking painted cows, and the like?

But there is a big difference. Today’s technological marvels came about not by contravening the laws of the physical universe discerned by science but by working carefully within their parameters. Perhaps someday natural science will be able to account for walking through walls and the like, but to date it cannot do so. I neither affirm nor deny such stories but retain a flexible, curious mind about them. What would it take to convince me that such events occur? Repeated public demonstrations of them, such as happens whenever I use email or board an airplane.

In the Tibetan tradition, it is said that it takes advanced spiritual development to be able to perform siddhi, to have magical powers. Yet many religious traditions claim that some people can do extraordinary, unbelievable things. I think it is wiser to maintain an open mind regarding such claims than to adamantly deny that they could happen. At the same time, I think we need to be open to the possibility that such stories could be merely fabrications. A curious, questioning mind is more in accord with basic Buddhist values than either believing in such miracles in the absence of any evidence or adamantly denying their possibility on the basis of our present knowledge.

There are times and places in which stories of miracles and magic make sense to people and appeal to their deepest sensibilities. But we do not live in such a time and place, so trying to force us to take these stories as factual accounts simply makes it harder for us to take seriously the profound teachings of Buddhism or any other religious tradition. Miracle stories do not function well in the context of the modern worldview. In saying this, I am not claiming that the paradigm established by the European Enlightenment is an ultimate truth that will stand for all time. It probably will not. But we can’t help standing within it, which means we must reconcile the prevailing worldview of our culture and the teachings of Buddhism, and for this we need not try to hold onto every story and every tale of magic and miracles. I myself think that the great masters who wrote texts that include such stories would not have written them as they did if they had lived in our time and place. Today, sectarian legends or miracle stories don’t serve us as practically as I imagine they once did. I would never attempt to convince others to take up Buddhist practice because I have, say, seen it rain out of a clear blue sky at the most auspicious moment of a major Buddhist ceremony. Instead, I would rely on the Four Truths and the teachings on emptiness for that task.

~   ~   ~

Rita M. Gross is an author, dharma teacher, and professor emerita of comparative studies in religion. Her best-known books are Buddhism After Patriarchy: A Feminist History, Analysis, and Reconstruction of Buddhismand A Garland of Feminist Reflections: Forty Years of Religious Exploration. She teaches workshops on meditation and buddhadharma at many meditation centers in the United States and Canada.

If you would like to make a donation to BCBS, please use this link.

If you found this article helpful, please consider
supporting the work of BCBS…

January 26, 2013 full moon

Honoring a Life & Legacy in the Dhamma
Talking with Mirka Knaster about Munindra

photo by Arlene Bernstein

A young man in the East Bengal region of India, born in 1915 to a Buddhist family that traces its roots to the time of Siddhattha Gotama, raised in a home that respects both study and practice, reads every book he can get his hands on. Becoming fascinated with the Dhamma, he comes to work for the Mahabodhi Society, a group devoted to reawakening Buddhism in the land of its birth.

Through this work he comes to meet with everyone who is anyone among those spurring the emergence of Buddhism in the West, from Mahasi Sayadaw to the Dalai Lama. After nine years in Burma, practicing vipassanā, studying the Pāli Canon virtually non-stop for five years, and then teaching, he returns to India, to Bodh Gaya, the place of the Buddha’s enlightenment.

There he mentors most everyone who is now anyone among the Westerners prominent in the late-twentieth century manifestation of Buddhism in the West. He does all this with immense humility, scholarship, sincerity and intensity over the decades, including significant periods here in Barre, Massachusetts, including BCBS. It is probably not an exaggeration to say that his example of how the knowledge of the Pāli texts can aid meditation practice, passed along to his Western students, is one reason BCBS exists today.

In 2004, Mirka Knaster, on retreat at the Forest Refuge, wonders to herself whether anyone is documenting the depth of this influence. Consulting those who knew him and carried on his work, she learned that no one had begun such a project. So she did.

A student at BCBS as well as a yogi at IMS, Mirka has dedicated the proceeds from the book that resulted, Living This Life Fully, to a scholarship fund at BCBS to honor the life and legacy of Anāgārika Munindra. She and her husband have also added to this fund above and beyond those proceeds. The purpose of the Anāgārika Munindra Scholarship Fund is to support studies in the foundations of Theravada. It will provide assistance exclusively to those individuals who want to further their knowledge of the Pāli Canon, including the Pāli language and Abhidhamma.

Insight Journal asked Knaster to summarize what she learned in writing the book about this unique individual who so embodied the synthesis of study and practice, serving as a living example to so many people who are now familiar to those of us practicing Buddhism in the West. What follows draws on both her book and research for it that did not appear in the book per se, as well as reactions she has received since it was published.

What inspired you to write the book?

During the month of May 2004, I was on self-retreat at the Forest Refuge. Munindra had died the previous October, just before I went on a six-week retreat at IMS. I was simply sitting and minding my own breath in the beautiful meditation hall, when a thought arose out of nowhere. It was as though someone suddenly asked out loud, “Who is honoring Munindra-ji’s life and legacy in the Dhamma?” Of course, there was complete silence in the hall. Later, in my room, I jotted down this question in a little notebook and then let it go. But I was perplexed as to why this had arisen in my mind, for I had not been the kind of close student of Munindra that some others had been.

Once the month-long retreat was over, I went to Joseph Goldstein and asked whether he or anyone else was working on such a book. He knew of no one. Then, when I went home, I called Kamala Masters and asked her. Her response was the same as Joseph’s, but she added that there was someone who might have done some interviews with Munindra before he passed away. I eventually tracked down that person, who turned out to be Robert Pryor, co-founder and director of the Antioch Education Abroad Program in Buddhist Studies in Bodh Gaya, where Munindra taught from its inception. During the fall of 2000, Robert had recorded eighteen hours of interviews with Munindra in order to preserve a record of his life and teaching. Since we shared the same goals, Robert became my collaborator on the book.

I don’t know why, but I felt so compelled to work on this book that I pushed other projects to back burners and devoted myself fully to this project. I had no idea it would take six years, but it was like being on retreat with Munindra as I read interviews with him conducted by Robert and then did interviews myself with almost 200 people around the world. I got to experience Munindra more deeply through everyone’s recollections, as well as through his own words, than in the time I spent with him on Maui, when he used to visit Kamala.

So much about Munindra’s early life seems to have propelled him to his journey; was he always interested in study?

Munindra’s thirst for knowledge started in his childhood, when he read the story of the Buddha’s life and wanted to know what the Buddha knew. He was so curious that he read books from various religions, whatever he was given. That curiosity continued throughout his life. He became familiar with aspects of other traditions and even saw factors of enlightenment in different religions.

Despite his curiosity throughout life, it seems as if his time in Burma was really when he became a unique resource, when his curiosity encountered some great Buddhist intellects.

Yes. Throughout his life, Munindra read extensively, but in Burma, he did intensive practice with Mahasi Sayadaw and also engaged in equally intensive study of the Pāli Canon under the guidance of U Maung Maung, a highly respected Theravada scholar. He studied from dawn to dusk with such great enthusiasm that it took him only five years to complete all the texts. (I understand it would have taken at least 10 or more.) He told Robert Pryor that it was easy for him because he felt as though the Buddha were right there as he was studying the texts and because his prior intensive practice enabled him to deeply understand the written teachings.

With the combination of his natural curiosity and the opportunities to study, he became a unique intellectual resource.

By the later years of his life, he was well known as a walking encyclopedia of Dhamma. He spent many of these later years living at a center in Igatpuri, India, run by S. N. Goenka, the renowned vipassanā teacher. In an interview with Robert in 2006, S.N. Goenka told him that because Munindra was a scholar of Pāli, they used to have little discussions that were always special. Goenka understood the meaning of certain Pāli words according to Hindi and Sanskrit. Then Munindra would say. “Yes, this is also true, but at the same time, traditionally, the meaning of this word is like this.”

Munindra and Goenka also used to have Dhamma discussions in Burma, where they first met. Coming from the Hindu tradition, Goenka said, “Till the age of thirty-one, I never heard one page of Buddha’s teaching, so it was very important for me to discuss and learn from Munindra (raised in a Buddhist family) what the Buddhist tradition is. Then, of course, by reading pariyatti, the Buddha’s words, it became clearer and clearer. And, with my practice of patipatti, it became more clear that the Buddha’s teaching is so good. So, in this way, we were friends, and [later] in Bodh Gaya, while walking, we would discuss things like this.”

As a scholar, Munindra offered an important service to students as well as to other teachers. Gita Kedia (a relative of Goenka and a vipassanā teacher in his style) recalls that whenever she arrived at Goenka’s residence at Dhamma Giri, if she had any question or confusion, Goenka would direct his secretary, “Go and find Munindra-ji.” She said, “Munindra only talked about Dhamma, nothing else. And wherever he was, he solved everybody’s doubt. People were very much attracted to him because they knew he was such a learned person.” Shyam Sunder Khaddaria was one of them. He said, “I was doing some Bengali translation and recording. Then Goenka-ji told me that I should go tell Munindra-ji what I had done. He was to listen to it and comment.” After that first meeting, Shyam began visiting Munindra in his room to talk about the Tipitaka. “Whenever I used to have any problem regarding pariyatti, he used to guide me very nicely, give me lots of advice and explanation, and tell me what to read. Any question I put to him, instantly he used to give me the reference: ‘That is in such and such piṭaka and such and such gatha.’ It was very valuable that he knew by heart all the piṭakas, gathas, and suttas. His way was quite theoretical, scholarly, plus there was his own experience; both combined, it was very authentic.”

A Westerner at Dhamma Giri, Peter Martin, received similar help. “From time to time, there would be some questions, not about the practice but about the Pāli Canon. I was working with Goenka-ji’s chanting and trying to understand more about the Pāli passages. There were some where I wasn’t sure of the reference, and Munindra helped. ‘Yes, this is the story behind that.’ And I’d ask him about a particular line: ‘What is the translation of that and what is the meaning of that?’ Munindra-ji was somebody I could rely on and somebody who, even though I didn’t know well, I trusted so much.”

What was Munindra’s day like in Bodh Gaya, when he was teaching a number of people who are now teachers of Dharma in the West?

From people who were with Munindra in the same building or center, I learned that he always woke up quite early to practice and also attend to his correspondence. I imagine he read then as well, for once he was out and about, he dealt directly with people and was engaged in various activities. He spent most of his time making himself available to anyone who wanted to learn what he knew.

In spite of the depth of the knowledge, though, it seems that he never separated study and practice in his interactions with others.

Mostly, Munindra was a practical person and a practical teacher. For example, Kamala Masters told me that when he was staying with her on Maui, often for months at a time, they’d study together in the morning. She still has the complex Abhidhamma chart he made for her. Sometimes she didn’t understand what he was explaining. Rather than declare, “This is the only way it can be, you must know it like this,” he would say, “Test it out for yourself, see for yourself.” For Munindra, the Canon was not simply a text one memorized and recited, though he did both with ease. (In conversations or dhamma talks, he would quote from the Canon in Pāli, then offer his English version of the passage.) The Dhamma was not something Munindra split hairs over; rather, it was something he lived. As Joseph Goldstein told me, “I really appreciated the depth of his knowledge. Though I never did a systematic study the way he did, I learned so much of the Pāli Canon and some of the Abhidhamma through the way he taught. I got a very broad understanding of and very good grounding of Dharma because he was such a master of the study aspects as well as the meditation aspects. Those two parts were so well integrated in him that he really gave me an appreciation for both sides, and I see how well they feed each other.” In his introduction to Joseph’s first book, Ram Dass also noted that Munindra had so thoroughly absorbed the Buddha’s teaching, after deep practice as well as learning the entire Pāli Canon, that he grokked the Dharma, he merged with it.

Detail of Munindra’s Abhidhamma notes made for Kamala Masters.

The Abhidhamma seems so difficult for many, and somewhat remote from practice, but apparently it didn’t seem that way to Munindra, and he was able to convey that to students.

One night in Bodh Gaya, Munindra’s talk to the students in the Antioch Education Abroad Program in Buddhist Studies was about Abhidhamma. This is what John D. Dunne, who taught philosophy in the program in 1994 (he’s now a tenured professor in the Department of Religion at Emory University), remembers of that exposition on the roof of the Burmese Vihar: “What Munindra essentially did was go through in very fine detail a number of the mental functions from the Pāli Abhidhamma and the way they related to meditation practice. I was really quite amazed and impressed. The only text that was remotely close was the Visuddhimagga, but I had never heard a living scholar go through on that level of precise detail and make the connections in such a fine way, and I had never heard a meditation teacher use the categories in such an almost scientific way. Of course, you could tell that he was a serious practitioner of meditation because of his bearing and his calmness…but until then I didn’t realize the depth of his scholarship. He not only had studied the texts and thought about them, but he’d really connected them to his own personal practice. What he did for me was make a bridge between my scholastic study and my meditation practice.”

When Munindra was staying with Kamala Masters in Hawai’i, she was not only deepening her practice with him but raising four children and holding down a full-time job. He gave her a list of books to read. But he also told her, “Don’t try to study so much now if you can’t, but do practice. Then, when you have time to read the texts, they’ll make sense according to what you have experienced.” He was basically giving her the kind of advice that had worked so well for him in Burma.

Often when someone becomes so deeply knowledgeable, they shut down to other points of view. But, if anything, Munindra seems to have become more open-minded.

Munindra viewed things through a wide-angle lens. It would have been out of character for him to suggest there was only one possible interpretation of texts or only one way to practice. His mind was open to seeing many sides to things and not putting down someone else’s view. Texts, books in general, were very important to Munindra. He was constantly reading the many booklets that came out of the Buddhist Publication Society in Sri Lanka and also from the Pāli Text Society in England. They were commentaries and translations of the Pāli Canon by different people. He would say, “You can learn from every side. Clinging to views and opinions is one of the causes of great suffering.” As Peter Skilling (head of the Buddhist Studies Group at the École française d’Extrême-Orient and founder of the Fragile Palm Leaves Foundation in Bangkok) commented about Munindra’s lack of rigidity in his scholarship, “He certainly wasn’t dogmatic or I wouldn’t have gone back and asked him so many questions.”

Reflecting his not being obdurate or insistent about holding certain views or clinging to certain translations, Munindra also used to say, “The Buddha said, ‘The world argues with me, I don’t argue with the world.’”

This open-mindedness extended to other Buddhist and non-Buddhist traditions, too?

Munindra was so open-hearted and broad-minded that, through reading a wide range of books, he became familiar with the teachings of other traditions. When students came to him and spoke from those other backgrounds, he was able to respond warmly, with understanding, rather than being dismissive or judgmental. For example, early on, Munindra asked Kamala, “Why are you practicing?” Raised Catholic, she answered, “Because I want to know God.” In response, he quoted from the Bible, from the Beatitudes, “Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall know God.” Then he asked her, “Is your heart pure?” “Oh, no,” she said. “Well, then you need to purify your heart, and this is how you do it through practice.” He was always able to bring the conversation back to Dhamma practice.

Derek Ridler, who met Munindra during the three-month retreat at IMS: “One of the things that was very attractive to me [about Munindra] was his clarity. I would go to the small group interviews [at IMS], and I was really taken by his unassuming manner. These teachings on impermanence and suffering came from another culture, another time, yet he was able to express this wisdom in such a way that I could relate it to my own experience. I thought, ‘This makes sense to me on a personal level.’ There was also an impeccability about his teachings. I can appreciate now his background as a scholar. But that was not the thing that I found most attractive. It was really those immediate teachings that I received from him that stayed in my mindstream.” Although Ridler is a dedicated practitioner of Tibetan Buddhism, he considers the importance of those Theravada teachings. “What arises for me is a deep sense of appreciation of having had the opportunity to practice vipassanā. It really helped me to learn how to sit in a nonconceptual way. I remember how Nyoshul Khen Rinpoche spoke about the Hīnayāna as a foundational vehicle, not the lesser vehicle, and how crucial that foundation was because, without it, Vajrayana was like building a beautiful mansion on a frozen lake. And we all know what happens when the lake thaws.”

Roshi Wendy Egyoku Nakao has been following a Zen path since her mid-twenties, yet she too learned from Munindra, in Calcutta and Bodh Gaya: “He’d start explaining nāma-rupa and go on and on in this incredible detail. He was clearly a very intelligent man. I considered myself a new dharma student at the time, and suddenly being exposed to a whole other element of the tradition that I’d never been exposed to was fascinating.”

Munindra’s impact on Dharma in the West is hard to measure, since it spreads from the core group of Westerners who studied with him in the early days of that movement.

photo by Roy Bonney

Yes, there are many stories about that in the book. Munindra’s wisdom opened many doors for others to gain knowledge. Dan Goleman (author of Emotional Intelligence and many other books inspired by Buddhist practice) remembers Munindra’s unexpected and lasting contribution to his life as a psychologist: “He gave me a wonderful book by Mahasi Sayadaw on the stages of insight, which was one of the few books in those days in English about vipassanā. I was quite fascinated because it was a well-articulated phenomenology of the states of awareness, like I’d never seen in the West. Munindra helped me find sources. He told me about a book called the Visuddhimagga. On a trip to Delhi, I was lucky enough to find it and study it. I used to go and ask him questions, and he would help me clarify points that I wasn’t sure I understood. He…was extraordinarily precise and clear in his thinking and his teaching style. He was the first one to show me that there was a system of psychology that was quite cogent and robust within Buddhism, which was a shocker for me because I’d been a Harvard graduate student in psychology and I had never been told there was any psychological system outside of Europe and America. That was a major intellectual discovery for me and one that I pursued and, in some ways, continue to pursue. Today I’m involved with the Mind and Life Institute in having neuroscientists look at the outcomes of the methodologies of Abhidharma.”

Even now, the inspiration to others is continuing through the book, for those not lucky enough to know him in life.

There has been a steady stream of feedback, both from those who knew him in life and those who only encountered him through the book. I received emails from people who knew Munindra and others who never met him. Old students were happy to “relive” their memories of him and also learn a lot more about him. Some people felt encouraged to deepen their practice because of feeling re-inspired by Munindra.

Those who didn’t know him wrote that they found reading about him an inspiration. For example, one person wrote, “I am reading Living This Life Fully for the second time. As a matter of fact, it has become a source book for a deep look at how to live a life based on Buddhist principles. I particularly love the way Munindra’s life and teachings have been organized into the context of the paramis, factors of enlightenment, etc. It’s inspirational to read about this man from the first-hand experiences of the practitioners who knew him. My direct experience of the recollections combined with his own words and the pictures of him give me a sense of what it must have been like to be around him. This viscerally calms me down and opens me to the qualities of mind being discussed. This book has deepened my practice.”

Another reader commented, “How sad that I never had the chance to meet Munindra in person. Reading the poignant and detailed portrait of his life and work, through the eyes and ears of so many of his students, I felt the same way as I did when I read about Dipa Ma, Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche, and Urgyen Tulku Rinpoche. All four of these Buddhist teachers were living examples of what they taught. I read the book as slowly as I could because it has so much to teach me. Here was a man who believed that if it was possible for the Buddha to become enlightened, it was possible for any of us. And he spent every moment in that endeavor–and succeeded. What an inspiration!”

Why did you decide to set up the scholarship fund at BCBS?

I have long appreciated that BCBS exists with a separate function than that of IMS. It’s the reason why I set up the scholarship there. Munindra’s life in the Dharma was one of balance or integration between study and practice. Uno Svedin, one of Munindra’s earliest students in Bodh Gaya, felt that, in his profound knowledge, Munindra “combined in a very uncommon way the role of scholar and the role of experiencer and practitioner. This is very important for the West because we can recognize ourselves in his way of connecting the intuitive wisdom part and the scholarly part not as two disjunct domains but as a merged wholeness.”

I want to add something that Steven V. Smith said that I think would be useful for the importance of scholarship: “It is one thing to be fired up from feeling someone’s love of Dhamma and enthusiasm. It’s another for it to be backed up by an encyclopedic hold of practice, theory, instruction, and understanding of the Pāli Canon.”

~    ~    ~

The Anāgārika Munindra Scholarship Fund

The Anāgārika Munindra Scholarship Fund (AMSF) is being established to honor the life and legacy of Anāgārika Munindra, the Bengali meditation master and Theravada scholar who greatly influenced the teaching of Dharma in the West. In accordance with Munindra’s own interests, the AMSF’s purpose is to support studies in the foundations of Theravada. It will provide assistance exclusively to those individuals who want to further their knowledge of the Pāli Canon, including the Pāli language and Abhidhamma. It is not intended for meditation retreats per se.

The gift of $10,000 from Mirka Knaster will establish this fund. Yearly scholarships of $500 will be awarded to individuals interested in attending classes at the Barre Center for Buddhist Studies (BCBS) until the fund is depleted. The Senior Scholar will be given the discretion to select those individuals he deems best suited to receive a scholarship. Such individuals will be required to pay 50% of the class fee; the AMSF will contribute the other 50%.

It is hoped that the establishment of the AMSF will stimulate additional dana. If so, BCBS and Mirka Knaster may mutually agree to expand AMSF’s capacity to award scholarships or make other changes as deemed necessary.

If you would like to make a donation to BCBS, please use this link.

If you would like to make a donation specifically to the Munindra scholarship fund, please contact our office at bcbs@dharma.org or call 978-355-2347 x10.

Thank you for supporting BCBS.

The photo of Munindra seated on his bed is by Arlene Bernstein, and the one of him walking is by Roy Bonney. Our apologies to the photographers for not including this information when the article was first published. Thanks to Kamala Masters for making the notes Munindra made for her available to us for illustration.

If you found this article helpful, please consider
supporting the work of BCBS…

December 28, 2012 full moon

A Classical Future:
Interview with Insight Journal editor Chris Talbott

It was about three years ago that the Barre Center for Buddhist Studies (BCBS) first started distributing Dharma teachings by email on the full moon of each month, and about eighteen months ago the printed version of the Insight Journal became the electronically distributed full moon Insight Journal. Chris Talbott, who had been managing the production of these publications for several years, became the editor of the new offering, taking over the role from Andrew Olendzki, the BCBS senior scholar.

The transition was a quiet one, and many readers may not even have been aware of it. With the maturation of the Insight Journal in its present form, and many new and exciting developments on the way, it seems a good time for the BCBS community to become better acquainted with the person behind so many of these changes. Chris Talbott is interviewed here by Andrew Olendzki.

Chris, tell us something about your former life, and how you came both to the Dharma and to the study center.

I spent about the first three decades of my professional life in the information-technology industry, mostly in telecommunications, but I was a writer, not an engineer. I learned a lot about technology, absorbing it from the environment there.

I didn’t find Buddhadhamma until I was in my forties, when my yoga-practicing wife and I were looking for a path we could share. That led us in the mid-90s to a sangha where we lived, in New Jersey, which in turn led us to Cambridge Insight Meditation Center and IMS, and later BCBS. We had been practicing regularly and attending retreats for about seven years when my wife became very ill. We had sometimes talked about going to work in a Dharma center when we retired. About a year after she died, in 2004, I decided it was time to make that aspiration real, so I quit my job and began looking for a place, starting with IMS and BCBS. As it happened, the first opportunity was as Center Manager at BCBS (later as Assistant Director, including editorial and website duties).

What is the core role of the Insight Journal, and how does it fit in with the larger vision of BCBS?

Insight Journal has always been about making the teachings that happen here at BCBS in Barre, Massachusetts, available more widely. We value working live with small groups, but also want to make what is offered here available to more than twenty or twenty-five people at a time. By sharing these teachings, first in print and now through the internet, we are able to serve a much larger community of interested students.

The organizing focus for what we do at BCBS has been what we have sometimes called “classical Buddhism.” We are very interested in the teachings of the Buddha as they are embodied in the earliest strand of Buddhist literature, the Pāli Canon. While these texts are central to the Theravada tradition of Buddhism as practiced in Southern Asia, they also serve as the basis for many of the ideas and practices of the later Buddhist traditions.

 
November 28, 2012 full moon

Unburdened With Duties
& Frugal In Our Ways:
The Personal Economy Of Right Livelihood

by Tony Bernhard

For contemporary western lay practitioners of the Buddha’s way, Right Livelihood (samma ājīva) is hardly the most compelling factor on the Eightfold Path. For us, livelihood is most often simply equated with our job, with what we do for a living, how we make our money. In the midst of our practice, we might pause for a quick mental check to confirm that we aren’t supporting ourselves through any particularly egregious line of work, but we then move right along to consider the demands of the other seven factors of the Eightfold Path.

Perhaps we give such short shrift to Right Livelihood because the Buddha himself gave it relatively little elaboration, expressing it most directly in the following formulation:

These five trades, O monks, should not be taken up by a lay follower: trading in weapons, trading in living beings, trading in meat, trading in intoxicants, trading in poisons. [AN 5:177]

Perhaps the reason the Buddha devoted so little attention to this path factor is that it is the only one with almost no application for the monastics with whom he primarily lived and for whom the parameters of lifestyle are mostly detailed in the vinaya (the collection of rules for monastics).

Looking deeply into the conditions of our livelihood, though, might prove to be an especially rich resource for those of us with lay practices. Initial difficulty might arise because the Buddha’s formulations don’t translate easily into our modern life.

October 29, 2012 full moon

The busier you are,
the slower you should go

by Martine Batchelor

When I lived in South Korea as a Zen nun, I heard about a nun called Songou Sunim and went to practice with her for three months. She was known for her simplicity and dedication to practice. Once she practiced in a hermitage for many months and decided to eat raw food to make things simpler. She sat on a zabuton (flat cushion) without a zafu (round cushion) again to make things simpler and become less dependent on external things. I tried it but I could not do it. I had to renounce this renunciation. What struck me the most was a phrase she told me once as we were having tea. She said: “the busier you are, the slower you should go.” Often I remember her suggestion when I start to feel busy and agitated.

We have the impression that the busier we are, the faster we should go and so we rush about. But if we look closely at “speeding to achieve more,” often we achieve less and sometimes things fall by the wayside or apart. We are limited by our physical, mental and emotional energy and there can be space and time constraints. Do we think that we are above these limits and constraints and can run around, accumulating projects and activities regardless? Or do we recognize and appreciate these limits and constraints and instead of fighting or hoping to transcend them, creatively engage with them? The basis for this creative engagement could be this phrase “the busier I am, the slower I should go.”

September 29, 2012 full moon

The Arrows of Thinking:

Papañca & the path to end conflict

by Ajaan Thanissaro

In a striking piece of poetry (Sn 4:15), the Buddha once described the sense of samvega–terror or dismay–that inspired him to look for an end to suffering.

I will tell
of how
I experienced
samvega.
Seeing people floundering
like fish in small puddles,
competing with one another–

as I saw this,
fear came into me.

The world was entirely
without substance.
All the directions
were knocked out of line.
Wanting a haven for myself,
I saw nothing
that wasn’t laid claim to.
Seeing nothing in the end
but competition,
I felt discontent.

Rather than trying to solve the problem by looking for a larger puddle for himself or his fellow fish, he looked inside to see why people would want to be fish in the first place. What he found was an arrow embedded in his own heart

And then I saw

an arrow here,
so very hard to see,
embedded in the heart.
Overcome by this arrow
you run in all directions.
But simply
on pulling it out

you don’t run,
you don’t sink.

This arrow has many names in the Pali Canon–the oldest extant record of the Buddha’s teachings–and one of them is papañca. Papañca is a type of thinking that causes conflict within those who think it, and leads them into conflict with people outside.

As a word, papañca is notoriously hard to translate. As one scholar has noted, the word changed meanings frequently over the centuries among Indian Buddhists, the only constant being that it was always regarded as something negative. Scholars trying to decipher what it means specifically in the Pali Canon have proposed deriving a translation from the verbal root from which the word is derived, only to run into the problem that there is no obvious root that everyone can agree on.

Some have proposed that papañca derives from the root vpad, or foot, and so should mean something like “impediment.” Some have proposed that papañca is related to the root vpac, meaning to cook, and so means something “cooked up”: imaginary and sarcastic. Others have suggested that it comes from the rootvpañc, or five, and so is a reference to the “fiving” tendency in some of the Upanishads, which see the world as evolving through a process of multiplying through categories of five. Still others, noting that the root vpañc can also mean “spreading” or “expansion,” have suggested that papañca should mean “conceptual proliferation.” It’s through this last interpretation that the wordpapañca has entered the vocabulary of modern meditation circles, to refer to the times when meditators suddenly find themselves overrun by thoughts that run riot, coming thick and fast, out of control.

Although some of these interpretations fit in with the way papañca was used in later centuries, none of them correspond to the way in which the Buddha actually uses the word in the Pali Canon. He doesn’t describe papañca as an impediment to progress; he discusses it instead as a source of conflict and pain (MN 18; DN 21). Nor does he describe papañca as sarcastic. As for “fiving,” the Upanishads employ many other numbers in addition to five to describe their various theories for the evolution of the world, and the Buddha himself makes frequent use of lists of fives, so there’s nothing inherently non-Buddhist or wrong with “fiving.” And the problem with papañca is not so much the amount or abundance of the thinking, as the type of mental labels–categories and perceptions–it employs. This is a point that the Buddha makes over and over again. The categories and perceptions ofpapañca are what cause conflict (MN 18; DN 22).

So rather than trying to understand the word papañca through etymology, it seems more useful to understand it through the types of mental labels that distinguish it from thinking in general. And on this point, the Pali Canon is very clear. The Buddha points out in Sn 4:14–the poem that the compilers of the Canon placed immediately before his explanation of his samvega–that the root of the classifications of papañca is the perception, “I am the thinker.” In other words,papañca begins when your thinking takes you, the thinker, as its object. And as we will see, this object requires other objects in order to survive. This is why “objectification” seems to be the best translation for the word. It’s from treating yourself and the world around you as objects–rather than, say, as events or processes–that the perceptions causing inner and outer conflict derive.

The Canon contains several lists of these perceptions, and in every case states that they ensnare the mind in conflict and difficulty. For instance, AN 4:199 lists 18 “craving-verbalizations” that derive from this perception, verbalizations by which craving ensnares the mind:

“There being ‘I am,’ there comes to be ‘I am here,’ there comes to be ‘I am like this’ … ‘I am otherwise’ … ‘I am bad’ … ‘I am good’ … ‘I might be’ … ‘I might be here’ … ‘I might be like this’ … ‘I might be otherwise’ … ‘May I be’ … ‘May I be here’ … ‘May I be like this’ … ‘May I be otherwise’ … ‘I will be’ … ‘I will be here’ … ‘I will be like this’ … ‘I will be otherwise.’”

MN 2 lists 16 questions that grow out of the thought, “I am”:

“‘Was I in the past? Was I not in the past? What was I in the past? How was I in the past? Having been what, what was I in the past? Shall I be in the future? Shall I not be in the future? What shall I be in the future? How shall I be in the future? Having been what, what shall I be in the future?’ … ’Am I? Am I not? What am I? How am I? Where has this being come from? Where is it bound?’”

MN 2 goes on to list six views that derived from these questions and fetter the mind:

“The view I have a self arises in him as true & established, or the view I have no self… or the view It is precisely by means of self that I perceive self… or the view It is precisely by means of self that I perceive not-self… or the view It is precisely by means of not-self that I perceive self arises in him as true & established, or else he has a view like this: This very self of mine–the knower that is sensitive here & there to the ripening of good & bad actions–is the self of mine that is constant, everlasting, eternal, not subject to change, and will endure as long as eternity.

These ways of thinking all qualify as objectification, as they derive their categories–self/not-self, existence/non-existence, here/there–from the mental label, “I am.” The fact that the issues surrounding this mental label can multiply so quickly and spread so far gives some credence to the idea that papañca is proliferation. However, liberating insights can proliferate as well, as when an insight into one of the causes of suffering leads quickly to insights into other causes of suffering. So the question is, what is it about the thought “I am” or “I am the thinker” that leads to ways of thinking that cause inner and outer conflict?

The answer lies in the Buddha’s explanation of what it means to be a being. The act of taking on the identity of a being is primarily a mental act. In other words, it’s because you have passion, desire, delight, or craving for something that you identify with it (SN 23:2). In identifying with it, you become tied there. That’s what makes you a being. Your choice of what to desire defines the type of being you are. This process happens both on the macro level–in the events leading from death to rebirth–and also on the micro level, as one sense of identity is shed for another on a moment-to-moment basis in the mind.

For instance, before you left your last body, you identified yourself as the thinker that craved continued existence. With the demise of that body, the craving born of the root of objectification-labels led to your present birth (SN 44:9). Your continued craving to stay here is what maintains your present identity. On the micro level, in your search for pleasure, you identify with the desires for specific pleasures, as well as with the areas of your awareness that you can control–”I am this”–in the search for those pleasures.

The act of assuming an identity on either level requires looking for food–both physical and mental (SN 12:64)–for if you don’t find food for it, you can’t maintain that identity. In fact, the need to subsist on food is the one thing that characterizes all beings (AN 10:27). This fact is so central to the Buddha’s teachings that it’s the first item in the catechism memorized by novice monks and nuns. It’s also the fact that shows why the mental labels of objectification lead to conflict. As a being looking for food, you need a world to provide you with that food. Without a world to provide you with food, your identity as a being couldn’t last.

From this observation about what it means to be a being, the Buddhist notion of “becoming”–a sense of identity in a particular world of experience–derives. Your sense of who you are has to inhabit a world that can provide for the desires around which you’re defined. This applies both on the external, physical level and on the internal, psychological level. This is why the views and questions of objectification cover not only who you are, but also where you are, where you’ve come from, and where you’re going.

Externally, as a human being with human desires, you inhabit the same physical world–the same puddle–as other human beings. When you think in terms of objectification and look for food in the human puddle, you inevitably run into conflict with other beings inhabiting the same puddle looking for the same sort of food. Thinking in terms of the categories of objectification engenders the desires that see your sources of food within that puddle as dear, and anyone who blocks those sources as not-dear. From this distinction come envy and stinginess, hostility, violence, rivalry, and ill will (DN 22). These attitudes, in turn, lead to the violence of “taking up rods & bladed weapons, of arguments, quarrels, disputes, accusations, divisive tale-bearing, & false speech” (MN 18).

As for the internal conflict caused by objectification, when you focus on a particular desire, only certain parts of the external world are relevant. Your psychological world is configured around whatever will fulfill your desire, along with whatever gets in the way of that fulfillment. Everything else is either passively ignored or actively blocked out. Your corresponding sense of self is defined by its ability or inability to overcome obstacles and fulfill your desire in the world as you define it. This is why we can live in the same world physically but entirely different worlds psychologically. It’s also why we can change our inner sense of who we are and where we are from moment to moment.

If there were a world that could provide all beings with all the food they want, objectification might not be much of a problem. But our desires are so insatiable that, as the Buddha said, even if it rained gold coins, it wouldn’t be enough to fulfill our desires (Dhp 186). This is why the conflict between the fish in the Buddha’s analogy can never be resolved by finding larger puddles, for no puddle could provide all the water we want. As a result, objectification inevitably leads to external conflict.

Internal conflict also inevitably follows from the thought that “I am the thinker” because when you define yourself, you limit yourself (SN 22:36). This may seem counterintuitive, for part of your sense of who you are revolves around the abilities you develop to get past the limitations standing in the way of getting what you want. But in doing so, you ignore the limitations that come from feeling the need to have desires. To begin with, you limit yourself to the condition of having to keep finding food. That enslaves you to the conditions surrounding the type of food you want. If you want physical food, you have to submit to all the conditions required for finding physical food and fighting off those who want the same food. You have to identify with a physical body that has physical limitations. Even if you aim for more rarified forms of food, such as the pleasure and rapture that can come from refined states of concentration, you run into the fact that concentration is conditioned and inevitably ends.

If these were the only forms of happiness available, and if we couldn’t help but take on the identity of “being” in order to find happiness, we’d simply have to put up with these conflicts and to keep on fighting as best we can. But the Buddha discovered another form of happiness–nibbana–that can be experienced when the experience of the six senses stops. This happiness doesn’t require taking on an identity, is not subject to conditions, is totally free from hunger, and so is free from conflict. It’s so unobjectified that you shouldn’t even ask whether anything is left over or not–or both or neither–once it has been attained (AN 4:173), for the very concepts of “left over” or “not left over” derive from the thought, “I am the thinker” who would or would not be or have anything left over with the attainment. The person who attains nibbana no longer has passion, desire, delight, or craving for anything, and so cannot be defined even as a “person” or a “being” (SN 22:36). This is why the Buddha said that arahants, after death, can’t be described as existing, not existing, both, or neither, for whatever can’t be defined can’t properly be classified in those terms (SN 22:86). However, the unobjectified dimension can be described as the ultimate happiness (Dhp 203). In other words, not only is it totally free of suffering and stress, but after the experience of it, you can also come back to the world of the six senses and talk about it. That’s the dimension in which all conflict ends.

Obviously, touching that dimension requires that you abandon objectification, and in particular the forms of objectification that would stand in the way of following the path to the end of objectification. For instance, if you define yourself as bad, there’s no way you can help yourself out of the predicament of your suffering. You would need outside help to overcome your inherent badness. If, to avoid that problem, you choose to define yourself as inherently good, you also run into a problem: If you’re inherently good, how did that goodness allow you to succumb to pressures to behave in unskillful ways leading to suffering? And if inherent goodness is something that can be lost, what’s to prevent you from losing it again after you’ve reclaimed it?

So a necessary skill in the path to true happiness is learning step-by-step how to think in a way that avoids the categories of objectification. That requires a radical shift from the way people and religions ordinarily think. To begin with, it would mean thinking about experience without an “I am” imposed on it, without any reference to what objects might lie behind experience, either in the world “out there” or the experiencer “in here.” Instead, you would have to look directly at the processes of experience simply as processes, explaining them only in terms of other processes that can be directly experienced.

Modern philosophy has a term for thinking in this way: radical phenomenology. The term “phenomenology” is a little daunting, but you probably had your first taste of what it refers to when you were small. At some time during childhood you probably stopped to wonder whether your experience of blue is the same as another person’s experience of blue. You and other people can point to an object and agree that it’s blue, but you can’t get into their experience to see if blue looks the same to them as it does to you. Similarly, they can’t check your experience of blue to compare it with theirs. And neither of you can get outside your experience to see what the blue object “really” looks like. You simply have to accept your sense of blue as the phenomenon it is and leave it at that. That’s phenomenology. In formal terms, it’s the analysis of how experience is directly experienced as phenomena, without getting involved with the questions of whether there is a world “out there” or a self “in here” lying behind those phenomena. It looks at experience “from the inside,” while making the fewest possible assumptions about what lies outside or behind it.

This sort of analysis would be something of an idle issue–how you experience blue is rarely a problem–if it were not for the fact that pain and suffering are also phenomena, and definitely are a problem. And it’s right here that the Buddha focused his attention. He discovered that if you adopt the phenomenological approach to the problem of suffering, you can bring suffering to an end. This is where his teaching differs from modern phenomenology. He doesn’t adopt this perspective simply for the sake of analyzing or describing the experience of phenomena. He puts this perspective to use, manipulating factors directly present to experience to provide a total cure for the primary problem of direct experience: suffering and stress.

The Buddha had two names for the type of thinking that adopts this non-objectified perspective. One is dependent co-arising (paticca samuppada): a sequence of factors, all of which can be directly experienced, leading to the experience of suffering. The nature of this sequence is that the factors themselves can be used to turn the sequence into the path to the end of suffering, at which point they all disband. The causal principle that underlies both sides of the process–the causation of suffering and the cessation of suffering–the Buddha called, this/that conditionality (idappaccayata). This name focuses on the fact that all the conditions in the process are events that are directly apparent to awareness as “this” or “that.” You don’t have to explain the causal sequence by assuming anything lying behind what can be directly experienced: either a world “out there” or a self “in here.” Everything in the sequence can be explained–and manipulated–by what’s right there in the sequence.

To adopt this sort of perspective, though, the mind needs to be prepared. That’s why the Buddha didn’t teach dependent co-arising to rank beginners on the path. Instead, he first taught them how to use the categories of objectification in a skillful way that would prepare them for stage when they no longer needed to think in those terms.

In other words, objectification is not always a negative thing. Although it inevitably leads to some level of conflict, that conflict is sometimes strategically necessary as you practice for the end of suffering. On the outside level, there are bound to be people who will try to prevent you from following the path. You need a strong sense of yourself to maintain a sense of purpose in the face of whatever obstacles they may place in your way.

Similarly, on the inside level, some forms of objectification are helpful as skillful urges do battle with unskillful urges in the mind. To begin with, healthy objectification can help fight off any emotions that threaten to pull you off the path. If you feel discouraged in your practice, you can use the thought of what you are and what you’re capable of doing to give yourself encouragement: “Other people can gain awakening. Then why not me?” (AN 4:159) If you feel tempted to abandon the path, you can use the thought of what you are–and what you will become if you go back to your old ways, or worse–to remind yourself of the sufferings you’ll face if you give up. You can also use the thought of what you are to remind you of the love and concern for yourself that inspired you to practice in the first place (AN 3:40).

The Buddha also recommends using objectification to become what he calls a person with a sense of yourself (attaññu): the ability to gauge how far you’ve come in developing qualities needed on the path–such as conviction, virtue, learning, generosity, discernment, and quick-wittedness–so that you can build on your strengths and focus your energies on the areas where you’re still lacking (AN 7:64).

However, the type of objectification that the Buddha most frequently advises as a part of the path is derived from the teaching on rebirth. If you adopt rebirth and the power of actions to influence rebirth as a working hypotheses, it gives you a useful perspective on the choices you are always making. As you think about the possibilities of where you may have been as you’ve gone through life after life of stress and suffering, and of how much suffering you’ll face if you don’t take on the path of skillful action leading to release, you’re much more likely to embark on the skillful path and to stick with it (MN 60). Also, reflecting on the universality of long-term suffering helps to induce the level of samvega needed to give intensity to your practice (AN 5:57).

There is even a discourse where the Buddha uses this sort of reflection to bring thirty monks to full awakening, reminding them that–in their many previous births as common animals and human beings caught breaking the law–they have lost more blood from having their heads cut off than there is water in all the oceans (SN 15:13). This was an effective use of objectification to get the monks to see the drawbacks of objectification so that they would abandon the objectification that would lead to further rebirth.

In most cases, though, the Buddha recommended using objectification primarily in the early stages of the path, and to develop types of thinking that avoid the categories of objectification on a higher stage of the practice.

This pattern follows the Buddha’s own practice on the night of his awakening. The first knowledge he gained that night was an answer to questions of objectification: Was he in the past? What was he in the past? Where had he come from? Pursuing these questions in the clarity of his concentrated mind, he gained knowledge of his previous births. The second knowledge he gained that night, dealing in terms of beings dying from and being reborn to various worlds throughout the cosmos, was also a form of objectification. However, the third knowledge he gained that night–the knowledge that led to full awakening–abandoned the terms of objectification. This knowledge came to him after he reflected on the enormous sufferings of continual rebirth and redeath that he had seen in his second knowledge, and saw a need to gain escape from them. In the course of looking for that escape, he began to drop the categories of objectification and looked at birth and death simply as processes, without regard to who they were happening to or where. This enabled him to trace the cause of birth and death to events appearing directly to his awareness in the present (SN 12:10). That’s when he was able to abandon the ignorance underlying those events, and so gain release.

Dependent co-arising is a description of the line of thought and investigation the Buddha followed in going from the second to the third knowledge that night. Although even a rudimentary explanation of dependent co-arising would require at least a book, for our purposes here we can simply look at the list of factors in the sequence. In forward order they are: ignorance, fabrication, consciousness, name-and-form, the six sense media, contact, feeling, craving, clinging, becoming, birth, and then all the sufferings that follow on birth, such as aging, death, and grief. What’s striking about this sequence is that none of the factors, even in their detailed explanations (SN 12:2), deal in terms of “I am,” such as “my birth” or “my craving.” And the term “being” doesn’t appear until the end of the sequence, in the explanation of the factor of birth.

This means that the sequence of dependent co-arising is expressed in terms that sidestep the categories of objectification. However, the sequence can be used to explain how those categories arise. As Sn 4:11 points out, the categories of objectification come from the activity of perception. Extended explanations of dependent co-arising in the Canon show that perceptions play a role at two points in the sequence: prior to sensory contact, in the factor of fabrication (SN 12:2); and after sensory contact, following on feeling (MN 18). If these perceptions are conditioned by ignorance, they can be primed to read a sense of “I am the thinker” into sensory contact even before that contact happens; and they can feed on whatever feeling that contact gives rise to, to engender the views and verbalizations that cause the categories of objectification to ensnare them even further. It’s because of these feedback loops–where one factor conditions a factor that in turn conditions it–that dependent co-arising needs no outside help to keep on going indefinitely. The factors are mutually sustaining.

However, this fact can also be used to end dependent co-arising from within. If the ignorance underlying dependent co-arising is replaced with knowledge of dependent co-arising itself, its factors turn into factors of the path. The acts of attention and intention, which come under name-and-form, can be used to direct perceptions away from objectification, and in this way the sequence that ordinarily leads to becoming and suffering breaks down. The sense of being a being is abandoned, and a sense of the world is no longer needed to provide food.

Ultimately, even the processes of dependent co-arising and this/this conditionality have to be abandoned. After all, they aren’t the goal itself. They simply form a path to a goal. Total freedom from objectification comes only when all processes come to an end (MN 18). But learning how to think in terms of processes is the most effective way to reach that unobjectified freedom.

Because the habits of objectification are deeply ingrained in everyday thinking, learning how to think in terms of processes goes against the grain. We’re so used to taking on the role of beings and looking for food that it’s hard to break out of the pattern. This is why people ever since the time of the Buddha have tried to fit dependent co-arising into the classifications of objectification. To allow this, though, would have made the teaching of dependent co-arising ineffective, so the Buddha consistently fought off any attempts to place dependent co-arising into the context of those classifications while he was alive.

One discourse (SN 12:12) tells of a monk who wanted to read an agent into the sequence, asking for each factor of the sequence, “Who is doing this?” For example, when the Buddha said that feeling leads to craving, the monk asked, “Who craves?” The Buddha responded that he hadn’t said, “craves,” and so the question, “Who craves?” is invalid. The appropriate question is: “From what as a requisite condition comes craving?” The answer is, “feeling.” And so on down the line.

Another discourse (SN 12:35) tells of a monk who wanted to pursue the question of whether there was someone to whom the factors of sequence were happening. He asked, for example, “Which is the craving, lord, and whose is the craving?” Again, the Buddha said that the question was invalid, but then he went further, saying that this question was another way of asking a question that he consistently put aside: “Is the soul the same as the body, or is the soul one thing and the body another?” In other words, is there something that possesses the body (or the craving, or any other of the factors), or is there not? These sorts of questions, the Buddha said, would make it impossible to practice the holy life. He didn’t explain why, but the reason is fairly clear: By trying to look behind the sequence and to engage in questions using the categories of objectification, you are not looking right at the factors of the sequence. You’re trying to peek around them. Only by looking directly at those factors, and by engaging in them directly, can you put an end to them and bring about the end of suffering.

The attempts to read the categories of objectification into dependent co-arising didn’t stop after the Buddha passed away. In the ensuing centuries, many Buddhist philosophers got into a long-standing debate over the time frame in which the factors happen: Do they all happen in an instant? Are they spread over time in a single lifetime? Or are they spread over more than one lifetime? To ask these questions, though, is to try to place the sequence of dependent co-arising into the framework of the worlds into which beings are born. The sequence itself, however, makes no reference to time frame, and so could be applied to any time frame. In fact, it explains how time frames are created as categories of thought, and how to gain freedom from the constraints of time and other dimensions of the world (Iti 63).

Similarly, when the idea took hold that the Buddha’s teaching on not-self was actually a teaching on no self–that there is no self–dependent co-arising was pressed into service as a way of explaining how experience can happen in the absence of a self. This too, however, was an imposition of the categories of objectification on dependent co-arising. As MN 2 points out, the belief “I have no self” is just as much a fetter as the belief “I have a self.” Both beliefs qualify as forms of objectification because they answer questions that derive from the categories of objectification: “Am I? Am I not?” Only if you abandon these issues entirely, and focus instead directly on the factors of dependent co-arising as they are immediately apparent, can you avoid the inner and outer conflicts that come with objectification.

The tendency to read the categories of objectification into dependent co-arising continues to the present day. Modern-day materialists–who reject the idea that there is a self or soul in the body, and prefer to explain mental events as mere side-effects of biochemical processes–interpret dependent co-arising, with its lack of reference to a self, as compatible with their ideas. This, however, ignores the huge gulf that separates the factors of dependent co-arising from those of a materialist view of the world.

To begin with, the materialist view deals in the categories of objectification. It identifies a person as a being existing in a particular world. It takes the physical world “out there” as real, and regards the processes of the body that can be measured by people or instruments “out there” as the real causes for what is directly experienced to awareness. As for events as they are directly experienced to awareness, the materialist view relegates them to a purely subjective realm, in which the idea of causation from within awareness is regarded as purely illusory. You may think that you’re choosing one course of action over another, for instance, but the choice was actually determined by the chemistry in your body. What you actually are is limited to what people outside, along with their instruments, can measure. In terms of an old debate from the Buddha’s time, materialism maintains that the soul is the same thing as the body. When the body dies, that’s it.

What this means is that–unlike phenomenology, which looks at experience from the inside–materialism looks at it from the outside and holds as real only the aspects of consciousness that can be explained from the outside. This puts materialists in a peculiar position. On the one hand, because they hold that consciousness is simply the by-product of chemical processes, they call into question the idea that consciousness can have an accurate view of the world outside, for–after all–how can the occurrence of a chemical process guarantee that it conveys true knowledge of anything? Yet, on the other hand, they claim that their knowledge of those chemical processes is a proven fact. Where does this knowledge come from, if not from the world outside their consciousness? And when they convey this knowledge to us in their writings, what has it come through if not through their consciousness, whose reality and ability to know they have called into question?

Dependent co-arising, however, takes a very different approach. Instead of taking a stand on whether the soul is the same as the body or something different, it explains experience in terms of processes “right here.” For instance, it sees the experience of the world “out there”–which the Buddha equates with the processes of the six sense spheres (SN 35:82)–as the result of mental processes such as ignorance and fabrication as they are immediately experienced. And as for the experience of the material body, dependent co-arising shows how that, too, depends on mental processes. Even the birth of this body, it describes in non-objectified form, not as requiring a soul independent of the body, but as the result of acts of craving and clinging, which feed acts of consciousness at the same time they feed off acts of consciousness, as they pass from the experience of one life “right here” in consciousness to the experience of the next life (SN 44:9), also “right here.

In other words, from the point of view of dependent co-arising, consciousness is not merely the result of physical processes. It’s what allows the experience of physical processes to occur. At the same time, the craving and clinging dependent on acts of consciousness are what allow for acts of consciousness to experience those processes in a new body after an old body dies.

What’s more, dependent co-arising focuses primary attention on a problem that cannot be detected by people or instruments “out there”: namely, the problem of suffering. No one outside can detect your mental pain. They may know that certain physical processes are accompanied by pain, but only if you report the pain to them. The actual pain is a phenomenological issue.

At the same time, dependent co-arising treats suffering as a problem that can be cured in a phenomenological way: not through the manipulation of biochemical processes, which can’t be directly experienced–you can’t directly detect which chemicals are combining in your brain–but through mental factors such as intention, attention, and perception, which can be directly detected, or as the Buddha says in MN 18, “delineated” as steps in a process. This is a fact of great consequence. The main problem of experience–the suffering that comes from craving, clinging, becoming, and birth into one confining puddle after another–is caused by factors directly present to experience, and can also be solved by factors directly present to experience, without having to look outside of direct experience to material or other causes hidden behind it.

This is why the best-known anthology of the Buddha’s poetry–the Dhammapada–begins with these lines:

Phenomena are     preceded by the heart,
ruled by the heart,
made of the heart.

It’s right at the heart–right at awareness–where the causes and solutions to the arrow of suffering can be found. An important part of the solution is to recognize that the categories and perceptions of objectification are a major cause of suffering in causing internal and external conflict. While these categories and perceptions may have their uses, they ultimately have to be dropped. And the best way to drop them is to view them from the perspective of a way of thinking that can watch those categories and perceptions in action, as processes, without adopting them. To view them in this way gives rise to dispassion for them, and through dispassion they end. That’s the role played by dependent co-arising. Its perspective forces a radical reorientation of how to look at experience-a lesson that was hard to learn in the Buddha’s day, and is still hard to learn today. But the benefits that can come from learning it–in a way that brings total freedom from suffering–more than repay any difficulties involved.

          — Thanissaro Bhikkhu

If you found this article helpful, please consider
supporting the work of BCBS…

~ ~ ~

August 31, 2011 full moon

A Conversation with Bhikkhu Anālayo

This month we have an interview with Bhikkhu Anālayo, probably best known to students of Dhamma in the West for his 2004 book, Satipatthāna: The Direct Path to Realization, which has since become a touchstone modern interpretation of that key sutta. He paid an informal visit to Barre earlier this summer as part of larger trip to the U.S. (He lives & teaches in Germany.)

Bhikkhu Anālayo graciously answered some questions for Insight Journal. His 2004 book, while very approachable for those with some knowledge of and interest in the Dhamma, was developed from his doctoral thesis. As such, formal practice was not a prime concern of that text. In 2013, however, he hopes to publish a follow-up book that applies much of what he has learned to how it might help us in our practice. (Please see the footnotes and links at the end of this interview for more on his writings.)

Insight Journal: Can you describe for us your path to the Dhamma? Those of us who know about you do so because of your very helpful book on the Satipatthāna Sutta. What else about you might be helpful for us to know about you?

Bhikkhu Anālayo: My main interest throughout has been and still is to change myself through meditation practice. Having meditated for a few years in the late eighties I realized that this is what I want to do with my life. So I went to Asia, where I did a retreat at the monastery of Ajahn Buddhadasa, after which the most logical thing to do was to ordain in order to do intensive practice. I lived as a ‘forest monk’ in a cave in Thailand and practiced, but without having real clarity about the Dharma. Somehow my practice did not really take off.

Then a friend made me read The Heart of Buddhist Meditation by Ven. Ñānaponika Thera and that completely changed the situation for me. I felt so grateful that I went to Sri Lanka to meet him, but on arrival I found out that he had just passed away a few days earlier. I stayed in Sri Lanka and practiced, but at the same time studied the Dharma, mainly under the guidance of Ven. Bhikkhu Bodhi. This combination of scriptural study of the early discourses with the practice of intensive meditation is what runs like a red thread through my life.

IJ: Western interpretations of Dhamma have been through many filters, including 19th-century Romantic philosophy, Western psychology, and 5th-century Theravada (Visuddhimagga). What are the key misunderstandings that have been created, based on your understanding of the original Pali texts?

BA: Discussing such misunderstandings is a topic that would perhaps require more space and time, but maybe I just mention some tendencies? Sometimes I feel there is a lack of historical contextualization, so that ideas and doctrines that stem from a later period are not distinguished from early Buddhism. Without in any way wanting to downplay the importance of the explanations and methods that arose within the tradition, I believe it is good to be clear on what is early and what developed later.

Another trend is a kind of anti-intellectualism, according to which progress means leaving behind all knowledge and analytical thought. This is not the model of progress we get in early Buddhism.

IJ: You are clearly someone who has spent time both in serious study of Buddhadhamma texts and in practice as well. How do those two aspects complement each other? Is there a way to more explicitly combine them so that they inform each other?

BA: I try to make sure I always give priority to formal sitting meditation. Thus when I wrote the Satipatthāna book, I would go begging in the early morning and then do my research. In the afternoon I would go up hill to a little hut and just meditate the rest of the day, in this way spending half of my time in practice. Nowadays I work the whole day during half of the week, the other half of the week I am in silent retreat, sitting the whole day. In this way I continue spending half of my time in intensive silent meditation and everything else is nourished by that. I believe if we are able to give priority to the meditation then all else will eventually fall into place on its own accord.

IJ: Has your thinking about the Satipatthāna Sutta, about which you wrote the book, changed since then, as you have encountered those who have read the book?

BA: I have been teaching courses on Satipatthāna and the way students react to and approach various aspects of the discourse and how they implement these in their practice has been very helpful for my own understanding. At present I am preparing a follow up study on Satipatthāna that will be based on the Chinese Agama sources and hopefully come out with Windhorse in late 2013, ten years after the original Satipatthāna book. The new book will be more practice related than my PhD, and it will have more translated text excerpts instead of just references to the sources.

IJ: Are there other classical texts that you focus on? Which others would you recommend for study, in particular?

BA: For me the really central source are the early discourses, which have been preserved in Pali, Sanskrit fragments, a few Tibetan translations and then for the most part in the Chinese Agamas. Since so far only the Pali discourses are extant in translations into Western languages, I am trying to do my best to provide translations and studies of Chinese Agama discourses in articles, many of which can be freely downloaded from the website that has my ‘list of publications’ at the University of Hamburg.* In general I think it is good to be familiar with the early discourses as much as one can, this really helps the practice in many ways.

Besides the Satipatthāna Sutta there are several discourses helpful for insight meditation in the Middle Length Discourse Collection, of which we have the excellent translation by Bhikkhu Bodhi, such as the Smaller Discourse on Emptiness (MN 121, page 965), one of my favourites, which is preceded by the Discourse on Mindfulness of Breathing (MN 118, page 941) and the Discourse on Mindfulness of the Body (MN 119, page 949). Another option would be to go from the Satipatthāna Sutta to the Satipatthāna Samyutta, collected shorter sayings on the same topic of mindfulness meditation, where we are again indebted to Bhikkhu Bodhi for providing us with a reliable translation, Connected Discourses of the Buddha, pages 1627 to 1667. This whole last part of the Samyutta-Nikāya has much that is of relevance to the practitioner, so those willing to read might go through the entire Great Book, the Mahavagga.

IJ: It seems that one type of error that is frequent is looking for philosophical nuggets in the teachings, when in fact they seem to be completely pragmatic, practical, and focused on understanding and practice for liberation. Later traditions seem to be especially prone to philosophical systems and views. How can we test ourselves to avoid this kind of mistaken view?

BA: I think if we make meditation our priority, then what is excessive naturally will sooner or later fall away.

IJ: You are doing some work comparing the Pali Canon with related materials in the Chinese Agamas. This is, I believe, a very active and fruitful area of academic research right now. What are the most important findings so far?

BA: The most important finding so far is the close resemblance of the parallel versions as far as essential aspects of the teachings are concerned. This makes core teachings found in the Pali discourses the common heritage of all Buddhist traditions and an important reference point for the follower of any Buddhist school.

Another important finding for me is to see the continuity of certain developments. One example is the bodhisattva ideal. Clearly in early Buddhism the idea to become a Buddha was unknown. Yet, in a book dedicated to the ‘Genesis of the Bodhisattva Ideal‘ I have been able to trace the very beginnings of what eventually became the bodhisattva ideal in the early discourses. Here particularly significant is the Acchariya-abbhuta Sutta (MN 123), as well as its Chinese parallels, but I guess to see what I have in mind you would have to read my book, which is fortunately available for free download.**

IJ: Scholars continue to investigate the origins and structure of the Pali Canon, such as which parts are the oldest, which suttas were possibly created later by combining parts of earlier ones, and so on. What are the most important questions here in your mind? Are there important insights into what the Buddha taught that we can gain? What are the most important issues that we might hope these inquiries could help us understand? Has your work with the Agamas led to any such insights? What are the implications for practice?

BA: In my new book on Satipatthāna** I want to try to explore the way some academic insights can inform our practice. Just to give one example, from a comparative perspective we get the impression that the core practices of contemplation of the body were these three: the examination of its anatomical parts, seeing the body as made up of elements and the cemetery contemplations.

This certainly does not mean that mindfulness of breathing or of the postures of the body is not a form of mindfulness; they certainly are, in fact precisely because they are closely related to mindfulness we now find them in the Sarvastivada and the Theravada versions of the Satipatthāna Sutta. But as far as we are able to tell through comparative study, these may not have been part of the historically earliest formulation of the Satipatthāna Sutta.

So the basic import of ‘contemplation of the body’ is to be found in these three exercises: anatomical parts, elements and cemetery contemplations. This in turn tells us what according to early Buddhism is central when practicing mindfulness of the body. That is, the first Satipatthāna appears to be not so much about using the body to establish mindfulness. Instead, it seem to be about using mindfulness to understand the true nature of the body as a means to developing detachment.

~ ~ ~

If you found this article helpful, please consider
supporting the work of BCBS…

~ ~ ~

*Here is the link to Bhikkhu Anālayo’s published works, several of which are available for free download:

http://www.buddhismuskunde.uni-hamburg.de/fileadmin/pdf/analayo/publications.htm

**The book mentioned by Bhikkhu Anālayo is published in 2010 under the title “The Genesis of the Bodhisattva Ideal”. It is at the same address; see item 4) on the list:

http://www.buddhismuskunde.uni-hamburg.de/fileadmin/pdf/analayo/publications.htm

***This book by Bhikkhu Anālayo is planned for publication at the end of 2013, by Windhorse.

January 9, 2012 full moon

Going Forth: A Buddhist Approach to Retirement & Old Age

Buddhism in the West began its latest emergence in the middle of the twentieth century. Here at the beginning of the twenty-first, those baby-boomer converts find themselves ready for a new phase of life: retirement.

Mu Soeng, the study center’s program director, resident scholar, and a core faculty member, observed this emergence, and the questions it was generating from people who come to Barre. He thought it might be useful to combine the knowledge of the Buddha’s teachings with related ideas from Indian culture on the phases of life. Together with another idea, the combination of a BCBS course with an online community, this will become Going Forth: A Buddhist Approach to Retirement & Old Age, a new course to be offered this April 6-8 at BCBS under his guidance.

As the course description notes, retirement confronts us with existential issues in altogether new ways. While there are many ways this idea could unfold, the initial weekend course is meant to be an exploratory workshop for establishing an ongoing discourse on these vital issues. Can the Buddha’s insights into the human condition be articulated and contextualized in ways that can help guide and support a new kind of community? It will also be the first step in creating an online retirement community that will inspire the daily practice of a far-flung network of Buddhist practitioners.

Building upon the ancient Indian paradigm of retirement being a precious opportunity for personal growth, the course will use the classical teachings from the Pali texts as the primary source material for reflections and conversations, with input from later Buddhist traditions as well.

Insight Journal asked Mu Soeng to say a bit more about the origins of this idea.

Insight Journal: What inspired you to offer this idea?

Mu Soeng: I have been thinking for some time along the lines of a Council of Wise Elders. To some extent, it is a Native American model but it also has echoes in thekalyana-mitta model of Theravada monastic community which is structurally quite horizontal.

So my thinking has been to start a discourse among Buddhist practitioners who are nearing the retirement age or have retired to see if a horizontally structured community can be created that could serve two functions: one, to find resources for greater depth of personal practice; and, two, if these “Wise Elders” could find skillful ways to interact with their own family and friends through a core sensibility of restraint and renunciation, and thus be an inspiration to next generations.

IJ: The image of the Indian model for the later life phase has the feeling of increasing detachment from worldly affairs, a kind of renunciation. Is that accurate? Does involvement with family continue, for example?

MS: The Indian model, which is at heart of my own exploration in modeling an intentional community, is indeed nestled in a culture of restraint and renunciation. To that extent, the teachings of the Buddha are embedded in that cultural container. But this model–the four stages of life: childhood and education; married householder; retirement; and walking alone into the yonder–fits in very well with how the lives of Buddhist householders in various countries of Asia have been modeled.

This is not so much a matter of details as a vantage point of reflecting on the human life. If that vantage point is the explicit Buddhist teaching of letting go of craving and clinging, then it becomes a matter of embodiment which I am hoping will be part of discourse among this envisioned Council of Wise Elders.

So, yes, this letting go of craving and clinging is a kind of renunciation and the nature of this renunciation among lay Buddhist practitioners in twenty-first century America is at the heart of the discourse. It is not so much a matter of involvement with family as it is a matter of embodying the letting go of greed, hatred, and delusion in your own life that your family can see and be inspired by.

IJ: The course description is somewhat open-ended. It seems that you are making the minimum number of assumptions about what this idea could become. Is that intentional? Why did you decide to do it that way?

MS: This open-endedness is largely an issue of cultural translation. I don’t have any answers as to how this translation will take place any more than the next person; that’s why I place my trust in the unfolding of the discourse. If the horizontal community is able to stay focused on the issues of craving and clinging, then I think it will be a skillful for everyone to work with. If we get sidetracked by peripheral issues then it could be chaotic.

IJ: How do you see your own attitude toward practice changing as you enter a new phase in life? What about your own life has had the greatest impact on this?

MS: In recent years I have started making a distinction between training and practice. “Training” is the word I use for retreats that people do in structured and disciplined ways under the guidance of a teacher or a mentor. By “practice” I mean a keen and constant mindfulness of one’s view and intention in the engagements of everyday life. You will notice that view and intention are the wisdom factors of the eightfold path; hence an acute sensitivity to view and intention in everyday life is the expression of wisdom and practice. Training refines one’s view and intention and practice modifies its expressions.

I have been fortunate in my conditioning that ever since I was a teenager I had a deep intuition about the unsatisfying nature of samsara. By samsara, here, I mean the seductions and temptations of the things of the world. But I don’t hold this in any militant nihilistic posture. It is more a matter of sadness that the shape of greed, hatred, and delusion has not changed much since the time of the Buddha. I like to think that there are people out there who have the same intuitions and who would like to join hands in creating a community that can be an inspiration for future generations.

~ ~ ~

For more about the Going Forth online program, please see our Special Programs page.

If you found this article helpful, please consider
supporting the work of BCBS