The architect of the Indian constitution. The drafter of the Hindu Code Bill, which permitted Indians from different castes to marry and extended equal rights to men and women. The man who believed Buddhism was the only way to liberation, leading hundreds of thousands of Dalits (“untouchables”) to convert to Buddhism and escape the oppression of the caste system. What Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar (1891–1956) achieved was in many ways unthinkable given the tremendous discrimination he faced as a young Dalit. But, had Ambedkar not met and married a young doctor named Sharada Kabir, it’s unlikely that he would have been able to accomplish nearly as much as he did during the last decade of his life.

Kabir, who became known as Dr. Savita Ambedkar after their marriage in 1948, published her memoir in the Marathi language in 1990. In 2022, nearly twenty years after her death, Babasaheb: My Life with Dr Ambedkar was published in English for the first time. Translated by Nadeem Khan, Babasaheb gives English speakers an insightful look into Savita’s complicated commitment to serving her husband—whom many consider a bodhisattva—as a companion, caretaker, and trustworthy confidante during watershed moments in modern Indian history. 

Savita was born in 1909 to what she described as a progressive Brahmin family. Graduating with a bachelor of medicine and surgery from Grant Medical College in 1937, Savita worked as a junior doctor for Dr. Madhavrao Malvankar in Mumbai before accepting a position as chief medical officer of a women’s government hospital in Gujarat. But facing some health issues, she returned to Mumbai and resumed her work with Malvankar. 

Enter B. R. Ambedkar. Savita writes that she wasn’t familiar with him before meeting him at a friend’s house. He was “deeply concerned about women’s progress” and congratulated the young doctor on her accomplishments, Savita Ambedkar writes; they also discussed Buddhism in their early meetings, leaving her “literally goggle-eyed with wonder.”

Though Ambedkar had the elegance of a German prince and the stamina of a high-ranking politician, he was suffering from a number of significant health issues (including diabetes, rheumatism, high blood pressure, and neuritis), which were put on the back burner while he worked on the constitution in 18- to 20-hour stretches. He sought the medical advice of Dr. Malvankar, whom Savita Ambedkar worked with as a junior doctor. 

The Ambedkars’ marriage started as more of a medical commitment than a romance: Savita had offered to live with him to oversee his treatment, diet, and rest; Ambedkar instead proposed, in part because “for the sake of millions of my people, I have to live on.”

“His personality, his work, his sacrifice, his scholarship, they were all mightier than the Himalayas. Placed against his lofty personality, I was an utterly shrunken phenomenon. How was one to turn down a great person like Dr. Ambedkar?” Savita writes. “The doctor inside me was prodding me to go and serve him medically. The government had placed upon his shoulders the historic responsibility of drafting the Constitution of free India, and therefore it was utterly imperative that his health should be well looked after, and he should be given appropriate treatment.” 

She accepted, and they were married on April 15, 1948, less than three months after Gandhi was assassinated. “From then on till the last moment I stayed with him ceaselessly like his shadow,” she writes.

“Placed against his lofty personality, I was an utterly shrunken phenomenon.”

Over the past several years, I’ve had a number of conversations with a dharma friend about the faults of applying modern thinking to the lives of ancient Buddhist women. She is working on a book about the Buddha’s birth mother and views Mayadevi as the goddess she is; to compare her to an earthly woman makes no sense, because she was divinely chosen to be the Buddha’s mother. We can take inspiration from her qualities, but to try to think of her as a woman in our world is futile.

In that sense, it was more comfortable for me to think about Savita Ambedkar’s life as a dharma story rather than the biography of a modern woman. When I begin viewing her life through a feminist lens, I see only what she gave up to be the “shadow,” the constant companion and caretaker of one of the most important men of independent India. 

The few glimpses we get of Savita are inspiring and fierce: when Ambedkar was so ill that his constant stream of visitors would not help his condition improve, Savita cut meetings short, or refused to let them start in the first place, so that he could rest. Although they employed a cook, Savita would prepare his food with healing in mind; she taught him yoga asanas and made sure he had oil massages to help with circulation. Savita kept Ambedkar on a strict schedule, helped bathe and dress him; Savita made it possible for him to read and write into the night and work on legislation that affected millions of people at the time (and all the generations to come). Indeed, the ink was still drying on edits and corrections to The Buddha and His Dhamma when Ambedkar died in his sleep on December 6, 1956. 

Yet following Ambedkar’s death, Savita was forced into obscurity. Some of Ambedkar’s followers even alleged that she had murdered him, and a significant amount of the memoir is spent establishing Ambedkar’s health history and how she likely prolonged his life. Though she was effectively blocked from politics, Savita found friends among the younger generation of social reformers in the seventies and eighties, garnering respect from the Dalit Panthers, radical anticaste thinkers who were inspired by Ambedkar, Karl Marx, Buddhism, and groups like the Black Panthers in the US. 

Early on in the book, Savita compares herself to Yashodhara, the Buddha’s wife. Like Yashodhara, about whom we know little from Buddhist literature, Savita’s innermost thoughts and dreams remain a mystery. We are instead left wondering what we might do if a bodhisattva came into our lives. Would we set aside everything to serve them too?

The post The Other Dr. Ambedkar appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

It is hard to know how to even begin to review a book of the beauty, depth, nuance, and complexity of David McMahan’s excellent Rethinking Meditation: Buddhist Meditative Practices in Ancient and Modern Worlds. McMahan’s previous book—his seminal The Making of Buddhist Modernism—is undeniably one of the most important books on contemporary Buddhism ever written, and Rethinking Meditation is destined to take its place alongside it as an indispensable classic. 

Rethinking Meditation is really two books in one. The first half of the book dismantles the myth that the Buddhist meditation we practice today is the timeless practice handed down from the Buddha. McMahan demonstrates how every culture and historical era reinterprets and repurposes Buddhist practice to make it relevant to its place and time. Every culture and era has “filters” and “magnets” that de-emphasize some aspects of the Buddhist tradition while amplifying others. Thus, modern Western meditators filter out classical Buddhist themes that are incongruous with late modern Western culture (e.g., rebirth, the foulness of the body) and emphasize themes that are culture-congruent and relevant to the moment (e.g., interdependence, secular re-enchantment, savoring the moment).

As a result, the ways in which an Indian Buddhist monk in 200 BCE understood meditation, and the purposes to which he put it, and those of an American convert Buddhist in 2023 are remarkably different. For example, the ancient Indian monk contemplated the foulness of the body—how it was filled with phlegm, pus, and bile—and engaged in charnel ground meditations to watch bodies decompose in order to disenchant himself with the body. Modern mindfulness meditators, on the other hand, engage in body scan practices to experience the body more fully, to reinhabit and become more intimate with it, and to live a fully embodied life.

McMahan also dismantles the idea that meditation is a “science of mind” that enables practitioners to objectively discover the “way things really are”—some true, unchanging nature of reality. Instead, he describes how the various mental maps from different schools of Buddhism shape and limit the kinds of insights practitioners are likely to discover through meditation. It makes a great deal of difference whether one thinks one becomes a Buddha through developing and embodying certain views, mental states, attitudes, and competencies (e.g., the paramitas and brahma-viharas) or whether one views enlightenment as an uncovering and realization of the Buddha one already is. McMahan is nuanced here, however, and acknowledges the possibility that meditation has the potential to deconstruct categorical thinking—a possibility also suggested by Nagarjuna’s tetralemma and Zen’s admonition to “go beyond words and letters.” Thus, different strands of the Buddhist tradition both constrain and liberate discovery. What meditation will show you depends on how you think about meditation. But even when meditation encourages us to transcend our categories, we are all still limited by our social imaginaries, our conditioning, our mental habits, and the constraining visions of our traditions.

What meditation will show you depends on how you think about meditation.

In the second part of the book, McMahan explores three aspects of late modern culture that strongly affect contemporary understandings of Buddhist practice: the ethics of appreciation, authenticity, and autonomy. We can understand how the ethic of appreciation affects modern Buddhism when we consider mindfulness meditation’s orientation toward embodiment, “stopping to smell the roses,” and finding new satisfaction in mundane repetitive tasks such as doing laundry. We see it also reflected in the title of Maezumi Roshi’s book Appreciate Your Life: The Essence of Zen Practice. This ethic of appreciation that characterizes a good deal of modern Buddhism in East Asia and the West is not something we find in early Indian Buddhism.

The ethic of authenticity is reflected in the idea that we have an authentic self (as opposed to a socially conditioned self) that needs to be uncovered, actualized, and expressed. We see this in the idea that meditation involves “going within” to discover one’s genuine self. Of course, early Indian Buddhism insisted there was no such thing as an essential or unchanging self.

The ethic of autonomy involves what philosopher Charles Taylor calls the “buffered” self—a completely independent, rational observer who is in control of his or her appetites and desires and is able to maintain equanimity in the face of untoward life circumstances. We see this reflected in the idea that meditation builds inner imperturbability and peace regardless of external circumstances, and that we are responsible for our own happiness.

McMahan suggests that we replace the idea of the autonomous self with what he calls “situated autonomy”—an acknowledgment of our embeddedness in social structures, counterbalanced by the simultaneous acknowledgment that practices like meditation can enhance our agency through increasing our awareness of possibilities for mental and physical action. McMahan points out that certain aspects of the Buddhist tradition mitigate against this autonomous self. The inner citadel model of the self is in conflict with late modern perspectives on the plural, contingent, dialogical, and interdependent nature of selves—perspectives that dovetail with traditional Buddhist views on nonself, dependent origination, and emptiness. The interdependent self introduces the possibility of an ethical responsibility toward all beings and the natural environment that mitigates against the individualized buffered self. This leads to an engaged Buddhism that is not just about feeling good but doing good—and doing good in ways that undermine systemic forms of privilege and oppression. But nuanced as always, McMahan points out that this new Buddhist interdependence is a modern secularized variant—it aims at a better world in this life rather than a future life, or through transcending the world completely to arrive at nirvana.

I have not sufficiently commented on the beauty of McMahan’s prose. There are very few academic writers who write as beautifully as he does—at times lyrically and poetically—and yet never losing precision, complexity, and nuance. You will want to read this book all at once, but the ideas are complex enough that you ought to read it slowly.

Rethinking Meditation is a book you will want to have on your shelf. It examines “traditional” Buddhist and secular mindfulness rhetoric and will help readers to think more clearly about how our understanding of meditation is inevitably affected by historical, social, and cultural contexts. 

♦

This article was originally published on existentialbuddhist.com.

The post The Varieties of Meditative Experience appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

Challenging the ideas about the European discovery of Buddhism and its influence in the construction of Protestant Buddhism, Dust on the Throne: The Search for Buddhism in Modern India presents a compelling narrative of the reinvention of modern Indian Buddhism in colonial and postcolonial India.

Drawing from “unarchived histories,” Douglas Ober examines the marginalized, disenfranchised, and forgotten institutions and persons that played an instrumental role in shaping the trajectory of Buddhism in medieval/early modern and, especially, colonial India. He begins by questioning the prevalent idea of the decline of Buddhism in the 13th century. Ober argues for the presence of Buddhism and its memory in the minds of Hindu Brahman elites, who continued to remember a story of struggle, competition, and conquest over the Buddhists in premodern India.

This was evident to a vast network of native scholars/assistants who worked alongside the colonial surveyors and civil servants of the East India company. These assistants often talked to locals to gather information about sites, texts, or images, and their investigations revealed the bias against Buddhism and the appropriation of Buddhist spaces within Hinduism. Ober forcefully argues that the idea of the European discovery of Buddhism resulted from the deliberate silencing of native scholars, reflecting “colonial arrogance, bigotry, and racial prejudice.”This began to change in the second half of the 19th century, when English-educated Indians began to produce new scholarship on Buddhism. In addition to collecting manuscripts and archaeological/art historical data, scholars presented Buddhism as a scientific, rational, and scriptural religion that opposed the evils of Brahmanism, i.e., the caste system and Vedic ritualism. In contrast, scholars such as Sarat Chandra Das traveled to Tibet, studied there, and collected hundreds of manuscripts, and challenged the predominant representation of the Buddha as a social reformer or the sangha as a promoter of gender equality. Later, scholars attempted to identify “crypto-Buddhists” in the early 20th century among the marginal lower castes, tribals, and untouchables. What is evident through the discussion of these examples is the entangling of colonial institutions, European and native scholars, and their dialogues, which resulted in a sustained interest in recovering the Buddhist past.

Ober also covers monk-scholars, who developed their understanding of Buddhism through monastic training in Sri Lanka or Burma, rather than the scholarship of the time. The focus on these agents at the grassroot level highlights their important role in reimagining Buddhist sacred sites such as Sarnath and Kushinagar. Ober also draws our attention to the crucial role of the Theosophical Society in the development of scholarly practitioner global networks. The Theosophical Society’s preference for Buddhism and engagement with Buddhists from different parts of Asia led to the emergence of a number of Buddhist associations, which focused largely on social and religious reforms through scriptural Buddhism, in contrast to Dharmapala’s Mahabodhi Society and its goal of reviving Buddhism’s past glory. All of these associations were part of a broader global Buddhist network in which they exchanged information and resources across national, regional, cultural, and geographical boundaries.

At the end of the 19th century, the anti-Brahmanical representation of Buddhism began to be replaced with a new interpretation that saw Buddhism more as an offspring of Hinduism. This new formulation, Ober writes, was “inextricably tied to the birth of the modern nation and intellectual assimilation of the Indic religions, such as Buddhism and Jainism.” (Growing up in India, I was always taught that both these traditions were heterodox sects of Hinduism and not separate religions.) Ober provides a contextual study of sociopolitics through which this understanding caught the imagination of nationalist leaders and Hindu thinkers in the first half of the 20th century and became the popular understanding. A new conception of inclusive Hinduism that equated “Hindu-ness” with “Indian-ness,” and defined it as “a combination of territorial, racial, religious, and cultural characteristics,” emerged as a result of the works of organizations, including the Hindu Mahasabha. The philanthropist J. K. Birla’s patronage for the construction of a number of Buddhist viharas and temples, modeled on Hindu revivalist architecture, was aimed at asserting India’s claim as the Buddhist homeland and Buddhism being part of a singular Hindu tradition. This claim helped tone down the anti-Brahmanical rhetoric and framed the revival of Buddhism as a recovery of India’s great past.

Buddhism’s return to the national forefront was not a monolithic but a multipronged phenomenon.

Buddhism’s return to the national forefront was not a monolithic but a multipronged phenomenon. Several leaders such as B. R. Ambedkar (a Dalit) and monk activists such as Bhikkhu Bodhananda (a Bengali Brahman) continued to make strong arguments for the egalitarian, anti-caste, anti-Hindu nature of Buddhism. Despite being aware of the claims of the “Hindu-Buddha,” and a proximate relationship between the Hindu and Buddhist organizations, Ambedkar argued for a clear separation between a Buddhist and a Hindu identity. This separation was also emphasized by Marxist scholars, who found close connections between Buddhist and Marxist doctrines. Rahul Sankrityayan presented Buddhism as “a religion of reason, human pragmatism, and atheistic humanism,” while Damodar Dharmananda Kosambi highlighted the process of collective decision-making and lack of private property in the sangha as features common to Buddhist and Marxist thought. Ober correctly asserts that these articulations were a result of global networks that shaped their scholarship as well as activism in the independence movements in colonial India.

Ober also interrogates how Buddhist symbols, sites, and relics were intricately tied to the nation-building exercise and used as instruments of foreign policy. The adoption of Buddhist Dharmachakra and the Lion seal of Sarnath as national symbols was predicated on Nehru’s understanding of Buddhism as “a modern religion of reason” that did not require any institutional commitment. Even though he participated in multiple relic tours and Buddhist functions, Nehru saw Buddhism as a “cosmopolitan modernizing force with pan-Asian appeal” that could be utilized as an instrument of foreign policy to represent India as the guiding force of the past and present. Nehru consciously chose relic-centered diplomacy as a tool in the Buddhist border regions to present India as a legitimate state and in neighboring Buddhist countries as the homeland of Buddhism.

Ober’s exhaustive survey assembles Buddhism’s disparate histories from different regions of modern India and contextualizes the formation of its multiple stands. He effectively dismantles the idea of European discovery of Buddhism and challenges the overemphasis on the contribution of Dharmapala and Ambedkar’s scholarship. Each of the indigenous curators Ober profiles was linked to the global networks of monks, scholars, intellectuals, political leaders, industrialists, and the colonial state, demonstrating the interplay between East and West, local and global, native and colonial, and national and universal. The ambitious scope of Ober’s work justifies his multisited and multilingual methodology, and reliance on translations and secondary literature. While Ober engages with previous works that focus on the role of colonial actors and selective native scholars, his effort is elevated by engaging with the voices of marginalized people and overlooked associations in the rebirth of Buddhism.

The post The Rebirth of Buddhism appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

In a well-known koan from the Book of Equanimity, an abbot asks a scholar where he is going. The scholar replies that he is going on pilgrimage. The abbot then asks, “What are you going on pilgrimage for?” The scholar confesses he doesn’t know. The abbot simply responds, “Not-knowing is most intimate.”

Chenxing Han takes this last line as the guiding philosophy of her new book, one long listening: a memoir of grief, friendship, and spiritual care. Written in the aftermath of her friend’s death from acute myeloid leukemia, one long listening is an ode to not-knowing, chronicling how grief fundamentally restructures Han’s view of reality. She describes the book as a “mala bracelet of rumination-worn beads” that circles around three autumns: the fall of 2014, when she began a chaplaincy residency at a hospital in California; the fall of 2015, when she moved to Taiwan to study spiritual care at a Buddhist college; and the fall of 2016, when her friend and former roommate passed away. Han’s friend once said to her that autumn is “the most honest season,” as it “does not pretend that life blooms forever.” The autumns that Han chronicles in one long listening are no exception. Filled with reminders of impermanence, these three seasons of Han’s life are times of profound loss and quiet transformation as she learns what it means to grieve—and to care.

The memoir’s fragmentary structure mirrors how Han comes to understand grief: as a cyclical process that ruptures expectations of coherence and instead unfolds in its own time. Over the course of the memoir, we watch Han revisit the same memories, turning questions over again and again as if in prayer, never arriving at a clear answer but rather delving deeper into the intimacy of not-knowing. In eschewing linear narratives and clean resolutions, she aims not just to describe the experience of chaplaincy and grief but also to evoke it in all its opacities and uncertainties.

As she lets go of her expectations, she comes to experience the mutuality of spiritual care, allowing herself to be transformed—and cared for—by the patients she meets.

Han, as a hospital chaplain, interfaces with uncertainty on a daily basis as her patients and their loved ones grapple with new diagnoses, rapid physical decline, and death. Confronted with their many questions—“Why does my father have cancer? Is grandma ever gonna leave the ICU? Where is my daughter now that she’s dead?”—she can only answer honestly, “I don’t know.” For Han, this is the heart of chaplaincy: learning to accompany others through the unknown and unknowable as they come to terms with illness and impermanence. Of course, this is no easy task: “At the threshold of every patient’s room, I can foresee nothing of the visit ahead,” she writes. “This not-knowing is terrifying.” Often she is called in when other medical providers are at a loss and when every possible intervention seems inadequate. There is no easy fix; all she can do is listen and be present. Yet sometimes, impossibly, presence is enough. Her honest and tender vignettes of bedside visits illustrate the intimacy that can emerge from holding space for another without rushing to offer a solution. Her patients trust her with their despair and heartache—and with their hidden joys. (“No one told me this work would be full of love stories,” she muses.) Through listening openheartedly, Han bears witness to the fears, delights, shames, and regrets that make up a life.

This is challenging work, and Han frequently finds herself on the verge of burning out. In her first written assignment as a chaplain resident, she “waxe[s] poetic about the chaplain as bodhisattva,” striving to offer herself fully to her patients, sometimes losing herself in patients’ stories as a means to “forget [her] own hauntings.” Soon, though, she realizes how untenable it is to attempt to accompany every patient through their existential distress without also tending to her own. At a friend’s urging, she begins to give herself “permission to fall short of limitless generosity,” accepting that she, too, is in need of support. As she lets go of her expectations, she comes to experience the mutuality of spiritual care, allowing herself to be transformed—and cared for—by the patients she meets. Sitting at the bedside of a dying elderly Chinese man, she is transported to her own uncle’s deathbed; visiting a Buddhist writer who is undergoing chemotherapy, she receives a blessing not to give up on her own writing. These moments blur the lines of who is caring for whom, and Han comes to recognize that “we are each other’s bodhisattvas.”

This lesson becomes all the more poignant as Han finds herself in the throes of her own grief. As she sits at her dying friend’s bedside, Han notices all the ways that her friend is caring for her and teaching her how to go on after her death. After her friend dies, Han comes to view their friendship as “one long listening.” And though she initially finds herself livid with the “listening-bereft world” after her friend is gone, eventually Han discovers that she is still listening—and her friend is too. Honoring her friend’s memory becomes a way of opening up to the everyday wonder of the world, and Han is often startled by the beauty she encounters—and the care she receives—when she sheds her expectations and follows what she views as signs from her departed friend.

In a poem written after her friend’s death, Han quotes the Upaddha Sutta’s refrain that “admirable friendship is not the half but the whole of the holy path.” In this light, one long listening is a testament to the ways that friendship can guide us through grief, cataloging Han’s companionship with patients, friends, strangers, oceans, trees, and the world itself. For its readers, the book serves as a companion, orienting us to the intimacy of not-knowing, the sustaining power of friendship, and the importance of honoring the losses in our lives. Through listening to Han listen, we might learn to listen to the world—to its cries and its silences, its sorrow and its pain, its joy and its despair—and to find beauty in it all.

♦

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Dreaming the Mountain is the first English anthology of Vietnamese Buddhist monk Thich Tue Sy’s poetry. Although he’s a prominent figure in Vietnamese culture, you won’t find much of Tue Sy’s work in the West, but translators Nguyen Ba Chung and Martha Collins have taken a step toward filling the void with their forthcoming bilingual book. An evocative, lyrical, and quietly complex collection, Dreaming the Mountain gives English speakers a taste of a truly extraordinary man’s work.

A professor, Buddhist scholar, translator, and political dissident, Tue Sy writes from a vast breadth of experience. Born in 1943 in Laos, he joined the Linji Buddhist order when he was a child, going on to attend the Institute of Buddhism and become a tenured professor at Van Hanh University in Ho Chi Minh City. He’s translated numerous Chinese and Pali Buddhist works and produced a robust collection of philosophical teachings covering subjects ranging from Theravada and Zen Buddhism to Heidegger and Foucault.

In 1978, due to the continued suppression of Buddhism, Tue Sy was sent to a reeducation camp for three years. A year after his release, he was arrested again and eventually sentenced to death. With the help of human rights organizations, his sentence was reduced to hard labor for fourteen years, but when his scheduled release finally came, the government demanded Tue Sy write a letter asking for leniency. He refused and was only freed after ten days of fasting.

Dreaming the Mountain is a moving depiction of a mind seeking freedom in a chaotic world: the doubts and certainties, the careful, profound observations, and, ultimately, the dedication to liberation. It belongs with the greats of wartime poetry and Buddhist literature, but it’s also a generous companion for any of us seeking to understand this human life.

As with most Zen poetry, nature is omnipresent in Tue Sy’s writing. Wind, sunlight, moss, clouds, and waterfalls appear as characters throughout the poems, their meanings evolving in subtle and unexpected ways like slippery demigods—sometimes angel, sometimes demon. Beyond the universal natural world, there’s the precise landscape Tue Sy inhabits. He wrote most of the poems in this book from Nha Trang, Vietnam (where he previously attended the Institute of Buddhism) or secluded in the neighboring forest, far from his family and friends in what was then still Saigon. It was in Nha Trang that he began to dream of “a desolate peak in the Truong Son Mountain Range, pounded and battered by storms,” which became a symbol of Vietnam for him.

“Dream” is a multivalent term throughout the work, conjuring everything from fantasy to noble aspiration to a lost cause. It’s the gap between real and imagined, and a poignant refrain for someone searching for home in a nation that abandoned him. Tue Sy also uses “dream” as an explicit reference to the illusion caused by ignorance. He writes: “I go to the dream-place / Like early dew, like lightning, like evening clouds,” summoning the Diamond Sutra’s description of conditioned phenomena.

“Why do people die,” he asks, “but love doesn’t die?”

Dreams are also an apt frame for the multiple physical and temporal realities in Tue Sy’s writing. In one breath, we’re on the ground in the Van Gia forest or the reeducation camp where “an army march tramples the setting sun,” and in the next, we’re traveling to paradise. He writes: “Half of me stays in an inn / Half lives in the deva realm with the fairies / Half stays awake in long underworld nights.” Tue Sy’s past and future lives meander beside his poems like shadows, signaling his desire to escape the endless cycle of death and rebirth:

The same life, still listening to troubling stories
Still living and dying with pretense and devastation…
Once, before a gracious old monk, I faltered
Could I, that once, have made a serious error?
Tomorrow I will wait, this time, for you 

It’s a pleasure to witness the way Tue Sy navigates ultimate and conventional reality in every line. In a single sentence of grief, he gestures to both the mass death caused by political violence and that caused by samsara: “For thousands of years, people have said goodbye.” Even when directly dealing with samsara, he shifts between two pairs of eyes. One is disgusted and exhausted by the suffering of human life, and the other sees that nirvana is right here, right now. Renunciation lives alongside the wisdom to know there’s nothing to renounce. From the reeducation camp, he writes,

What magic is behind so much destruction?
And yet a rose just bloomed beside the stream—
Everywhere is the home of the Pure Land

Tue Sy’s poems read like private conversations with himself, turning over sorrow, exile, loneliness, aging, and an enduring sense of the divine like warm stones in the palm of his hand. Even as he wanders through the deepest shadows of human suffering, he comes back again and again to the heart. “Why do people die,” he asks, “but love doesn’t die?”

Are these love poems? Not in the way we might be used to. A current thrums beneath them that sounds like the fourth noble truth: there is a path out of all of this suffering. When Tue Sy speaks of love, I hear a fierce devotion to that path of freedom. “Love, in every moment of my dreams,” he writes. “For love, I’m reaching out to catch stars.”

♦

The post A Fleeting Dream appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

It is not easy for Westerners to practice Tantric Buddhism, or even to come to a genuine understanding of why anyone would want to. We today are separated from the societies that produced the classic Vajrayana texts by vast distances of space, of time, and of fundamental cultural assumptions. The issue is not merely that the details of the rich and complex rituals can be perplexing. The fundamental nature of the practices themselves can be bafflingly obscure.

The Magic of Vajrayana speaks to these challenges in a new and powerful way.  Ken McLeod vividly describes many of his own experiences from a life of Vajrayana practice, interweaving these with translations of practice-oriented texts from that tradition and with helpful comments and instructions on how to approach the practices they describe. This book is not for beginning practitioners and does not seem to be intended for the merely curious. Meant for committed spiritual seekers, the volume presents a searingly honest account of the suffering, challenges, and insights of a life spent engaging with a living mystical tradition.

If you call upon the protectors, be careful what you wish for!

McLeod’s reputation is largely based on his innovative and compelling translations from Tibetan, which often differ in striking ways from how Buddhist texts are more usually rendered into English. Rather than striving for a pedantic, philological form of accuracy or seeking to convey as much information as possible about how the texts fit into the cultural contexts that produced them, McLeod instead aims to evoke in the reader similar experiences and emotions to those that might have been felt by the original audience of the text. His translations strike at the heart, piercing our complacency with sharp words and opening doors to devotion, awe, compassion, and sheer clarity. Here is a taste of what he offers, verses from a traditional text depicting the meeting of Khyungpo Naljor with the mahasiddha Niguma:

Experience arises like magic.
If you practice like magic
You awaken like magic
Through the power of faith …

Don’t think about your teacher or your practice.
Don’t think about what is real or not real.
Don’t think about anything at all.
Don’t control what you experience.
Just rest in how you are right now. 

The largest portion of the book, covering three chapters, describes in detail a deity practice, called “Mastery of the Deathless,” for the goddess White Tara. McLeod’s exposition of this practice is detailed, illuminating, and inspiring; he brings the reader face-to-face with the majesty and wonder of the imagery involved. Many aspects of his discussion relate to fundamental issues about how to approach Tibetan Buddhist practice more generally. McLeod vigorously rejects the use of terms such as “imagination” and “visualization” to explain creation-phase practice. Such terms, he warns, encourage students to think their way through the practice. They carry the implication that it is necessary to control what you experience during the ritual. And then, “Twenty years later, if you are still doing deity practice, you wonder why nothing has changed.  Nothing changed because you never left the conceptual mind. . . . To engage deity practice effectively, stay in the clear empty knowing that is just there when you recite the spell. Rest right there and let the practice unfold.”

As often in his earlier teachings, McLeod emphasizes the importance of balance in a life of spiritual practice. Pushing too hard, going to excess, can lead to serious adverse consequences. McLeod notes that movement practices, such as t’ai chi and qigong, were helpful to him after his own practice led to severe and long-lasting health issues. He also presents instructions for a mountain–offering ritual as a means to maintain or restore balance.

The volume also includes a complete description, with the necessary mantras, of a practice invoking a six-armed form of the protector deity Mahakala. Here the reader encounters the bizarre and unsettling side of Tantric practice. The explanations provided are enormously helpful in making sense of how such texts can fit into a way of life shaped by a commitment to spiritual awakening.

McLeod’s presentation of the protector ritual crackles with intensity, producing a disturbing effect that, for some, may include an edge of actual terror. Some would question the wisdom of the decision to make such a text available to the reading public. However, for anyone who takes such practices seriously enough to want to engage in them, McLeod’s own account of their effects in his life should be a sufficient warning: if you call upon the protectors, be careful what you wish for!

His translations strike at the heart, piercing our complacency with sharp words and opening doors to devotion.

The last chapter of the book, “Living Practice,” distills insights from McLeod’s spiritual journey into clear, direct words of advice. This chapter does much to clarify how McLeod understands how Vajrayana methods relate to the shared aims of Buddhist traditions generally. His advice ranges widely across a broad variety of practices and shows how different methods can enhance and support one another.

Those practitioners who are struggling to make sense of what Vajrayana practice instructions actually mean, and to fit them into the context of Buddhist values and aspirations, may well be grateful for McLeod’s book and for its deeply practical, experiential approach. Other readers will appreciate that the text preserves rare and precious teachings from the Shangpa lineage of the Kagyu tradition, teachings likely to be unfamiliar even to those who are deeply versed in other forms of the Tibetan tradition. And some at least of those who engage with this book may find that new possibilities have opened, and their understanding of how to practice has shifted, through the workings of the ancient Vajrayana teachings manifesting in a fresh, vivid, and unrelenting form. Again and again, McLeod’s words lead us out of concepts, frameworks, and theories and plunge us directly into the majesty of ritual, the darkness of suffering, and the mystery of life.

Listen to an interview with Ken McLeod here. 

Becoming White Tara

You are White Tara. You sit in a crystal palace on a lotus and moon throne. Delicate elegant silks drape your white body. Gold jewelry set with diamonds, sapphires, emeralds, rubies, and topaz highlights your every feature. You have seven eyes. The eye in your forehead looks into the essence of being. The two other eyes that grace your countenance take in the infinities upon infinities of beings that arise, abide, and vanish in the countless world systems that themselves come and go over eons in the vastness of infinite space. Four more eyes, on the palms of your hands and the soles of your feet, take in the pain and confusion of every being in every world. With a combination of understanding and compassion you see how each and every one of them struggles in their life. Your ability and willingness to help them are expressed in your right hand, extended in a gesture of unending giving. Your left holds at your heart the stem of a lotus flower that blooms by your head, a reflection of the utter purity that is present even in the swamp of samsara. You sit relaxed and at ease, the consummate serenity in your bearing devoid of any trace of self-consciousness or self-importance. . . .

Touch now the purpose of your life, the sole reason why you are here: to help beings know in themselves a peace that is inexpressible in words, a peace that transcends understanding, a peace that immediately frees all who touch it from the confusion and reactivity of samsara.

♦

The post Practice Like Magic appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

After years of lockdown, upended lives, and emotional overwhelm, we can finally go outside—now what? It’s hard to pin down a feeling defined by ambivalence, but Katherine May articulates post-COVID numbness in Enchantment: Awakening Wonder in an Anxious Age with precision and forthrightness. Her attention is shallow; her mind is constantly watching for the next threat; her emotions are both overpowering and inaccessible. “Lately I can’t read a whole page of a book,” she says. Sound familiar?

The Maslach Burnout Inventory, a psychological diagnostic tool, says burnout is the result of three factors: emotional exhaustion, depersonalization (also referred to as cynicism), and a diminished sense of accomplishment. This isn’t the first time that May, who was diagnosed with autism late in life, has experienced burnout, but it is the first time she’s seen it in so many others. The “pandemic hangover,” as she calls it, is marked by a sense of being “bored, restless, empty-headed, and bodily resistant to changing it.” She wants to write but flicks between social media channels instead. Time has taken on a disturbing quality. “Every night, when I wash my face,” she says, “I feel as though I have been standing at my sink in one continuous moment across several months.”

May wants the magic back. Childlike wonder and ancient reverence call to her. She wants the dam to break, to let loose a moment of catharsis so powerful it shakes off all the cobwebs. She wants to be enchanted again.

Enchantment is small wonder magnified through meaning, fascination caught in the web of fable and memory. . . . It is the sense that we are joined together in one continuous thread of existence with the elements constituting this earth, and that there is a potency trapped in this interconnection.

The book is divided into the four elements: earth, water, fire, and air. Each part contains reflections on parenting, her childhood, meditation, and places with histories of enchantment. The elements’ evolving meanings illuminate the central themes of embodiment, interconnection, and hierophany, which she defines as divinity revealing itself to us through ordinary experiences. A being who is tapped into hierophany has “a supernatural key to see wonder in the everyday”—in other words, this is a being for whom everything is bliss. The elements remind us of our own physical material, too, and how that material is ever changing and eternal, personal and cosmic. In her section on water, for example, the sea’s unpredictability mirrors her Ménière’s disease, a condition caused by an excess of fluid in the inner ear. The act of taking off her shoes literally “grounds” her amid existential angst.

Turning to the natural world for answers is nothing new, but May catalogs her investigation with refreshing honesty and grace. Not every walk in the woods summons a Whitman-like transmission. Sometimes, like the rest of us, she shows up at a spiritual landmark and putters around, unsure of what to do, until it’s time to get back in the car.

Although the epiphanies May craves don’t happen automatically, she comes to a more useful truth: no place is inherently magical. You can return to the same woods again and again and find them different each time. May refers to this as experiencing “deep terrain.” The beeping toys and gadgets that her son is drawn to are shallow terrain, like most of the territory a burnout-brain seeks safety in. Deep terrain, on the other hand, is rich with multiplicity, symbolic meaning, and mystery and makes you find fresh understanding each time. It isn’t simple.

The Leonid meteor shower of 1833 is a perfect example. One early morning, an estimated 72,000 streaks of light fell across the sky in magnificent arcs. The witnesses, who at the time didn’t have the scientific knowledge to explain it, had to reckon with the mystery in their own ways, each one coming to their own uncertain conclusion about the nature of the universe. That very plurality of meaning is the magic of deep terrain. It doesn’t offer a straightforward answer. Engaging with its layers of history and life isn’t a means to an end but a practice in and of itself, one that requires curiosity, reverence, and ceremony. Most importantly, you create your own meaning. “We are not the passive recipients of the numinous,” May writes, “but the active constructors of a pantheon.” God is found not in the woods but in the woods’ potential to be anything.

“Enchantment is small wonder magnified through meaning, fascination caught in the web of fable and memory.”

Just because something has the potential to be enchanting, though, doesn’t mean we can force it to be so. How do we create the causes for magic? One tool May uses is meditation. In stillness, she learns to open herself to the full spectrum of experience. When we scan the news for the next threat (a symptom of COVID burnout, May says), our minds are looking to control our experience. A headline provides an object for our otherwise vague fear. If we define our discomfort well enough, the idea goes, maybe we can get out of feeling it. In meditation, on the other hand, May realizes there is no narrative to pinpoint. The illusion of a definite reality dissolves along with the protective barrier it provided.

Sometimes that hurts. When it does, we can find strength in compassion. At a Zen Peacemakers retreat, she learns that it’s much easier to face hard truths when you’re buoyed by care—by both the care others have for you and the care you have for them. If you can feel into our interconnection, there will always be hands waiting to catch you. Sometimes that means practicing with a physical sangha; sometimes it just means recognizing how many minds have wrestled with the exact same suffering you’re dealing with now. In the presence of that community of searchers, which stretches endlessly back and endlessly forward, uncertainty can become a beautiful mystery.

May unpacks the predicament we’re all in and refuses to give an easy answer—there is no get-enchanted-quick pill. How do we take joy in not knowing? How do we add texture back to a flattened reality? How do we feel magic again? Her lyrical, often funny, earnest guidance is grounded in basic human nature but leaves room for our own unique paths. In the end, it’s just like the woods: we must make meaning ourselves. The effort may be awkward and uncertain, but on the other side is magic. And if you’re looking for a place to start, going for a walk is always a good idea.

The post An Antidote to Burnout appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

Imagine this: You’re at a party when someone rolls out a multicolored plastic mat and asks everyone to take off their shoes. “Hey, I’ve got an idea,” they say. “Let’s forget about all this conversation, the party, the food. I’m going to start calling out random colors and limbs, which will dictate where you put those parts of your body in increasingly impossible-to-sustain poses. Sound good?” Out of context, the natural response might be to ask, “Why would anyone want to do this?” But, of course, we know that millions of people do exactly this in the game Twister. This raises the question: Why do we play games at all?

In philosopher C. Thi Nguyen’s APA Award–winning book Games: Agency as Art, the University of Utah professor attempts to answer this question with a dissection of what actually constitutes a game in the first place. It’s a famously tricky problem, one that prompted Ludwig Wittgenstein to conclude there is “probably no single characteristic which is common to all the things we call games.” Nguyen begs to differ, framing playing a game as a “voluntary attempt to overcome unnecessary obstacles” for the sake of making possible the experience of struggling against them.

It’s a fascinating argument, one that holds up to most examples we throw at it. For example, a basketball player takes on the obstacles of not carrying the ball and defending one’s own hoop in order to enjoy the experience of passing a ball through the hoop. If the game were simply Pass A Ball Through A Hoop, we could get a stepladder and do it as many times as we’d like. That would be almost unimaginably boring. And yet struggling against basketball’s actual rules adds up to a deeply engaging experience that allows us to bump against the limits of human experience.

But this still seems to be raising the question of why we engage with games at all. Certainly, most of us have more pressing demands: hunger, sickness, death. Family, friends, spouses. Nearly everything seems to be more important than deciding how to put a specific body part on a spot or getting a ball through a hoop. To this, Nguyen offers the concept of “disinterested interestedness,” which he describes as “practical reasoning and practical action engaged in, not for the outcome, but for the sake of the engagement in the practical activity itself.”

The player can enjoy a game only if they give themselves over to its goals and rules entirely.

In other words, the player can enjoy a game only if they give themselves over to its goals and rules entirely, taking seriously the idea that passing a ball through a hoop in a particular way has some real significance. This requires a significant buy-in on our part, which in turn means momentarily forgetting our other everyday concerns in order to have an aesthetic appreciation of the struggle against basketball’s rules. In that situation, food is not so important.

But stealing the ball and going for a layup? That’s life or death.

Many Buddhist thinkers discuss the art of living in similar terms. A particular situation arises—a sense of frustration at work, an unexpected medical setback—and we must take the present moment on its own terms, choosing the most skillful response while remaining unattached to some imagined sense of how the world ought to be. What’s artful about this approach to life is how it flows without judgment with the present condition.

Of course, one might raise the objection that while games give players clear-cut goals and rules, life itself is often far more messy. In this sense, the game framework applied to our day-to-day choices might seem to minimize the art of living into a series of binary choices and point-keeping. Minus one point for a bad response to a coworker’s small talk. Plus three points for holding the door for a stranger.

But taken in the broader sense of Nguyen’s definition of games—the act of putting aside our long-term concerns and taking on the conditions in front of us in order to fully experience a particular moment—it seems there is a useful comparison to make. The moments of our lives are not similar to games in a trivial sense but rather in how they provide us with the conditions we must take on fully in order to experience their deeper meaning.

What this really comes down to is playfulness, or what Nguyen might refer to as an ability to take on different agential modes. In our daily life we can see this in our capacity to move smoothly and willingly between different mental and social states without creating an internal tension that says “This is how it should be.” We work in an office, we ride the bus, we enter a meditation room, we come home to a family. Each of those settings demands a different skillful response. Can we move into them playfully, taking on their demands fully and reacting in an appropriate way with an unencumbered mind? Can we play the game of the moment, see what is expected of us, and thus experience all that life has to give?

It recalls Soto Zen priest Dainin Katagiri’s discussion of time in Each Moment Is the Universe:

. . . accept the fact that whatever you do, wherever you live, under all circumstances, you have a chance to realize the truth. With sincerity, try to realize the ultimate nature of your actions: bowing, studying, talking, or whatever it is that you do. When you bow in gassho, just do gassho through and through. If you really do this, you can touch the ultimate truth.

In a related essay titled “Games and the Art of Agency,” Nguyen calls games “yoga for your agency,” in the sense that they increase our flexibility toward different states of being. In a video game, we jump in and out of, say, what it would be like to be a robot flying around an alien planet or a race car or a medieval thief. “In this way,” he writes, “we can find our way to greater flexibility with our agency, by temporarily submitting ourselves to strictures on that agency.” Isn’t this mindfulness? Not straining against the conditions of our life, but bending with them into a new and broader awareness?

Could we do this with all of our experiences? Can we take our lives seriously enough to play each of their moments?

The post Playing the Game of the Moment appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

Liberation Day is a fine new short story collection by George Saunders, who has practiced for many years in the Nyingma school of Tibetan Buddhism. Four of the nine stories in the collection are new, the other five having previously appeared in the New Yorker.

Despite his lightness of touch and phantasmagorical humor, Saunders is a precise and learned writer, with a style echoing Chekhov, Vonnegut, Hemingway, and Steinbeck, laced with the flavors of Terry Southern, Monty Python, and Bruce Springsteen. The new book’s title story is a walloping leadoff in the Saunders tradition of heart-stoppingly moving, funny speculative fiction. “Liberation Day” is about a mind-blanked artist, enslaved and shackled to a wall in a rich man’s mansion; it’s about the plight of all artists in the 21st century’s hellscape of grief and disaster; about the mindless, snowballing cruelty of people and their lust and art and beauty and helplessness.

Though there is a lot of humor in it, Liberation Day is less fanciful and playful than Saunders’s earlier work, more deeply anchored in the events of our own dark times; one of the stories, “Love Letter,” dispenses almost entirely with the author’s untamed imagination, speaking with unusual directness of the current political situation in the United States. Taken as a whole, these stories are grappling with the chimeras of self in the modern world, a subject treated with an undeceived openheartedness, intricately connected with the author’s long study of Buddhism.

Saunders is a phenomenal teacher. I was lucky enough to take a writing class from him once, “The Russian Short Story in Translation (for Writers).” Once, in discussing the literary genius of Anton Chekhov, he basically described what has become his own gift:

[…] the whole time you feel this moral presence: “Anton, what should I believe? What do you want me to believe?” “Love is good.” “No, it’s not good.”And he’s constantly guiding you by the shoulders. Every time it gets too simple he goes, “No no no no no…no no…no no no no…no no.” And at the end he just kind of drops you off a cliff.

Whether in the classroom, in conversation or in his work, Saunders constantly provides an example by way of his own generosity and awareness; over the years he has been holding less and less back and offering more and more. The autobiographical piece “My Writing Education: A Timeline,” published in the New Yorker in 2015, provides a brief, clear introduction to his approach as an artist and teacher. He also writes a Substack newsletter—a writing class, really—called Story Club, which I can recommend very highly to any writer or reader interested in the art of fiction.

When I caught up with Saunders to discuss the new book, he was busy packing up the house in the Catskills where he’d lived with his family for many years. His children are grown now, and he and his wife have moved to California. He was in a reflective, maybe nostalgic frame of mind.

I started by asking him about a letter he found while packing up his house, written to himself many years earlier as a sort of eulogy to an abandoned book of stories. He’d posted this letter to Story Club, and it struck me that some of what it expressed seemed very present in his work now.

“I have my sense of beauty,” he’d written. “My work must be the expression of that, in whatever form is needed. Fuck artifice and the imaginary voices of short-story purists, etc. Listen only to your memory. What comes will be beautiful.”

In the letter, you wrote, “I have nothing to offer to the world when I’m careful.” Yes. That was an amazing thing. I was just going through some old files and had totally forgotten ever writing that letter. And there it was: me talking to me, across the years. All the stories in that book were there, and I preserved them, but I knew they weren’t any good. And it was such a thrill to go, Oh, hey, that guy, that 29-year-old me, he’s a little tight-assed, but he makes sense, you know; he cares.

How much do you still agree with him? I think that guy had one more thing to learn. At that time I was still thinking I was going to write about my actual life, and about childhood and all that kind of stuff. But otherwise, yes, that letter still speaks to me.

I have a very controlling mind, which is how I get a lot of work done. I do a lot of revision, but there’s a magical, essential moment when I just veer off the track of control and let something bigger get in there. So he was onto something, you know. But what he hadn’t realized yet was, if you want to tell your deepest truths, you don’t necessarily have to stick with the biography. You don’t have to stick with realism, you don’t have to stick with your actual lived experience. You don’t have to have the story all mapped out in advance. You can approach it another way.

A person might have an idea of who she wants to be as a writer, or as an artist, but her actual tendencies—her actual strengths, the things she’s good at doing, the things she likes to do, the things she can make really leap off the page—might be telling her something different.

“If you want to tell your deepest truths, you don’t necessarily have to stick with the biography. You can approach it another way.”

Writing can have the positive effect of making us realize that we have so many different voices in us, and so many different personalities. Then you choose one, but you don’t really choose one, you just, let’s say “give vent to one,” temporarily.

One person gets on stage for a second. Right, and that’s great, because then, if the person you happen to be at that moment turns out to be not the best, you go, “That’s OK, she’s just passing through.  She’ll be out of here soon.” That is, we can do things—through revision in writing and, I guess, through spiritual practice, in “real life”—to urge better, more interesting versions of ourselves to come forward.

What’s the better self? Well, I don’t know. I guess you know it when you feel it. But for me, there’s a feeling of quiet-mindedness and fondness for everybody and everything, and a little more sense that things are workable, like: OK, whatever happens, it’ll be all right. And certainly there’s a reduction in my anxiety level—because that’s my worst enemy, anxiety.

So I know it when I feel it, but it’s not reliable. I can’t just say, Oh, let’s be our best self today, you know? It depends on how I wake up feeling. Which is a pretty wobbly arrangement.

That’s how I’m understanding Buddhism these days; I’m not meditating a lot right now, but I’m thinking, “Well, I can still be working with my energy, trying to arrange my mind so that if I’m needed, I’ll be more useful.” But that’s a hard thing to do mechanically, just by willpower. Which is why we practice.  But my main “practice” at the moment, seems to be “noticing how wobbly I am when not meditating.”

I remember first talking with somebody who knew a lot about meditation, and I made some joke about, “Absolutely not, I’ll never be able to do it,” and the response was, “Well, no! Nobody can!” Right. It’s like working out, or something: “Oh, I could never lift weights”—Yeah, you can lift weights. You might suck at it, but you can get in there and give it a shot.

You can lift, like, a pound. Yeah. You can lift air, come on!

The post Chimeras of Self appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

Dependent origination, writes Leigh Brasington in Dependent Origination and Emptiness, was the Buddha’s best attempt to describe what happened on the night of his enlightenment. But the great teacher’s list of twelve links, which the British scholar Caroline Rhys Davids called a “mysterious old rune,” can be confounding, to say the least.

Dependent origination is so much richer than a linear list that needs to be memorized, says Brasington, especially when you can grasp the holographic nature of everything in the universe happening based on everything else happening.

Brasington, a retired computer programmer, began meditating in 1985 and was a senior student of the Theravada teacher Ven. Ayya Khema (1923–1997). He regularly teaches retreats on the jhanas, dependent origination, and insight meditation, and is the author of Right Concentration: A Practical Guide to the Jhanas. His latest work, Dependent Origination and Emptiness, was self-published in 2021 and is available free to download from Brasington’s website (with dana accepted). Below, he speaks with Tricycle about some of the book’s main takeaways.

The book can be very in-depth at times, especially when you’re talking about specific suttas. Can you tell me who your audience is? My target audience was my students while I was writing it, but I think anyone who wants to know more about dependent origination other than “It’s a confusing list of twelve items” will find helpful information in this book.

Examining dependent origination is the richest vein I’ve mined in all of Buddhism. I mean, there are lots of other wonderful topics. But within the first five years of my practice, dependent origination seemed to be the most interesting, the one that had the most depth to it, and the more I explored it, the more interesting I found it to be.

The book was also written to get my thoughts organized in a better way, because every residential or long-term Zoom retreat I’ve taught has had at least one talk on dependent origination—sometimes in the course of the retreat period maybe two or three talks. And if I’m teaching, that’s something I want to share. So it’s also written for people who are interested in a more advanced approach to Buddhism than just the basics, for people who have a little bit of background and want to take it to a deeper level.

“The dukkha arises because you want the world to be different than it is.”

Can you give me your elevator pitch for dependent origination? Dependent origination is the primary teaching that the Buddha gave on how the world works, and in particular how it works in relationship to the arising of dukkha, suffering. In general terms: This arises dependent on that. If that doesn’t happen, this doesn’t happen. It’s this-that conditionality. Dependent origination doctrine gets elaborated quite a bit beyond that, with the most famous elaboration being the twelve links of dependent origination. But the twelve links are an example, not the doctrine: the doctrine is about how things arise dependent on other things.

The Buddha’s quest was: How can I deal with dukkha? He very brilliantly didn’t try to figure out why there is dukkha; what he looked for was the necessary condition for the arising of dukkha. And he found one: craving. And so if it’s a necessary condition, and you can turn it off, then the downstream thing doesn’t happen. So if you don’t want dukkha to happen, turn off the craving.

But I want to emphasize that it’s not so much about cause as conditions—craving doesn’t cause dukkha, even though it’s a necessary condition for the arising of dukkha. If someone you love is dying, it’s not your craving that they do not die that causes the dukkha. The dukkha arises because you want the world to be different than it is. And craving causes your mind to be in a state that’s not in harmony with the way reality is.

You write that the order of the links can be reversed. Can you clarify? The most important thing to do for any decent understanding of dependent origination is to read the twelve links in the reverse order. Dukkha arising is dependent on being born. If you don’t get born, you don’t experience dukkha. If you work that way, you don’t fall into the mistake of trying to see causality, and by working in the reverse you’re more likely to look at conditionality.

You caution readers a few times throughout the book against confusing Buddhism with metaphysics, which makes me think people must do this a lot. Most spiritual traditions are very metaphysically based, explaining how the world is: In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. There’s all sorts of stuff like that. And when people come to a spiritual tradition, they’re expecting metaphysical explanations. But the Buddha wasn’t doing metaphysics; he was a phenomenologist. And basically, what he was saying was, Pay attention to the phenomena you’re experiencing, and in particular how you’re reacting to the phenomena that you’re experiencing. It’s a different orientation.

I think a lot of people come in looking for metaphysical answers rather than for the end of dukkha. I mean, they definitely like the end of dukkha!

From a practitioner’s standpoint, that sounds like a big relief. You don’t have to figure out why things are the way they are. It takes a little bit of the pressure off.  Yes. It narrows the scope of what we need to focus on if we really want to deal with dukkha. What we need to focus on are our reactions to our sensory input, as opposed to understanding why the universe is like it is.

Old age, sickness, and death. Those are big problems. If you ask somebody for a short definition of what dukkha is they might point to the five daily recollections [old age, sickness, death, being separated from everything one holds dear, and responsibility for one’s actions]. But a lot of what drives our lives as well is the minor irritations. And we need to realize, “Oh, yeah, that’s also dukkha.” Everything that goes wrong in life has the same necessary conditions that we can work with, and it’s probably much easier to work with the simple things than the really big things. If someone you love is dying, it’s going to be really hard to jump in and start working with your craving that they not die. But if you practice with the twelve links along the way, you can have acceptance of the fact that this person has died and not experience mental anguish to the same degree. If you can manage to get the day-to-day irritations to be less irritating, you’ll be left with much better bandwidth for dealing with them and dealing with the bigger ones when they come along.

So we are sweating the small stuff, but we can work on it. You don’t have to sweat it; you just have to deal with it. The Buddha says when there’s dukkha, name it: it’s arising dependent on craving. Now, can you find the craving? Usually we can: we don’t want it to be like it is. Then comes a really tricky one: Can we drop the craving? And sometimes you can, but sometimes you absolutely can’t because it’s too big.

You write in the book about having an insight about dependent origination while eating lettuce. Buddhist teacher Elizabeth Mattis Namgyel has a teaching on dependent origination that quotes the astronomer Carl Sagan, who said, “If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the entire universe.” Is there something particularly about the food environment that lends itself to explaining dependent origination, or is this just a coincidence? I think eating is a rich environment for learning a lot of things. The lettuce actually comes from an insight I had on a retreat with Tsoknyi Rinpoche, I think in 1994. It was a gorgeous day in Northern California, and I went outside to eat my lunch. In my mind—not visually—I could see that I’m eating this lettuce because some poor guy was sweating in the heat to pick it. And the lettuce got put on a truck and eventually got to the store, and somebody bought it and somebody chopped it up. And there it was for me to put in my salad. So I saw the dependently originated nature of the lettuce right there. And I saw the interdependent nature of me and the farmworkers; that was the most profound part. When you can examine what you’re eating and realize all that it took to get that food in front of you, whether it’s an apple pie or a salad or anything else, you start seeing that we’re not independent; we’re vastly dependent on hundreds of millions of other people—unless you’re living off the grid and growing all your own food.

And how does a realization like this chip away at the idea of ourselves? There’s a quote from Nagarjuna:

You are not the same as or different from
Conditions on which you depend;
You are neither severed from
Nor forever fused with them—
This is the deathless teaching
Of buddhas who care for the world.

—Verses from the Center: A Buddhist Vision of the Sublime, trans. Stephen Batchelor

I am not the same as all these conditions that I depend on: the lettuce, electricity, a house. But I’m not different from any of that either; it’s all this stuff coming together that makes me who I am. This leads to the subtitle of the book, Stream of Dependently Arising Processes Interacting. And at this point where the interacting takes place, I use the name “me,” “myself”—it’s just a designation for a bunch of streams that are interacting at this point. This point of interaction has produced what we could call an entity. And it’s being mistaken for something more than it is, because we’re aware of the locus of all these interactions, because we have a sensing mechanism that senses itself.

I don’t mean to diminish the importance of every living creature. But our own self-view is perhaps a little bit out of whack, especially in Western culture, and especially in the United States. The other thing to remember about the intersection is that it’s not the end, because every action I do, whether it’s writing a book or buying lettuce in the store, is made up of more streams of dependently arising processes going out there to interact with others to make themselves whatever they become.

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