Michael Imperioli has a knack for playing mobsters and villains. Best known for his roles as Christopher Moltisanti on The Sopranos and Dominic Di Grasso on The White Lotus, the Emmy Award–winning actor has made a career out of exploring addiction and afflictive emotions on-screen.

Off-screen, though, Imperioli is a committed Buddhist practitioner. In 2008, he and his wife took refuge with Garchen Rinpoche, and during the pandemic, they began teaching online meditation classes together, exploring Tibetan Buddhist texts like The Thirty-Seven Practices of a Bodhisattva. Though Buddhism no doubt influences his creative work, Imperioli prefers to focus his practice on his everyday life. For him, Buddhism offers a way to liberate harmful emotions and cultivate patience and compassion on a day-to-day level.

In a recent episode of Tricycle Talks, Imperioli spoke with Tricycle editor-in-chief James Shaheen about the dangers of the instrumentalization of Buddhist practice, what The White Lotus can teach us about craving and dissatisfaction, his relationship to his dharma name, and whether he believes that liberation is possible in this lifetime.

James Shaheen (JS): You’re best known as an actor, most recently in The White Lotus and famously in The Sopranos, but people may not know that you’re also a devoted Buddhist practitioner. How did you first come to Buddhism?

Michael Imperioli (MI): When I was a teenager, I started reading Jack Kerouac, who knew an awful lot about Buddhism. I mean, if you read his poems, like The Scripture of the Golden Eternity, you really see the depth of knowledge he had about dharma. I was very curious about Buddhism through his writing, so I bought a copy of the Diamond Sutra at St. Mark’s Books [in New York City’s East Village], and I really couldn’t penetrate it. Buddhism stayed somewhere in the back of my mind until much later.

In 2007, my wife and I started going to Jewel Heart, which was in Tribeca at the time, and Gelek Rinpoche was teaching there. That was the first time we went to a Buddhist teaching, and he was our first teacher. Shortly after that, we ended up taking refuge with Garchen Rimpoche. It was funny, because when my wife and I first walked into Jewel Heart, we realized we had both been there in the ’80s when it was Madam Rosa’s, which was a very decadent late-night nightclub.

JS: I remember that. You’ve come a long way.

MI: No mud, no lotus, as they say.

JS: Absolutely. I’ve heard you say that you came to Buddhism during the height of your success when you felt that something was missing. So what was missing?

MI: Maybe it’s not so much what was missing but that there was no ultimate satisfaction in the success that came. I spent my late teens only pursuing acting. I didn’t do anything else. I barely traveled, I was in New York, I did every job I could. I really wanted a certain degree of success, and I was driven toward that. And when that success did come, I realized that it wasn’t an end unto itself. I felt intuitively that what was missing was on a spiritual level—that there was a wisdom that was lacking. Just doing another successful TV show or winning an Academy Award wouldn’t be the answer.

I started exploring a lot of different spiritual paths before Buddhism, not really committing to any, reading books and going to different meetings and centers. I would read stuff like Krishnamurti, and when I was reading the book, it made a lot of sense. Then the book would be over, and I just felt like, “OK, now what?” There wasn’t really a practice to implement in your daily life. And then, when we stumbled into Jewel Heart, I saw the potential for a path and a practice.

JS: You mentioned your ambition and your desire to succeed in your career as an actor, and I remember many years ago, you sat on a panel with Gelek Rinpoche and Philip Glass. Philip said that the very qualities that made him a success professionally were the same that he applied to his practice: attention, focus, discipline, and creativity, among others. Has that been the same for you?

MI: Yeah, ambition has a negative connotation in some ways, but to succeed in anything, let alone an art form, you need a lot of tenacity and perseverance and discipline and passion and creativity. A lot of those are positive qualities, admirable qualities even. Practicing Buddhism takes a lot of discipline, and it takes a lot of perseverance, commitment, open-mindedness, and honesty. I agree with Philip on that.

JS: You know, I met you after that panel, and I interviewed you in 2009. I’ve been listening to your recent interviews, and it’s pretty amazing to hear you talk about your practice nearly fifteen years later with such commitment and depth. It made me realize that it helps me to see change in others that I often miss in myself. Do you ever feel that way?

MI: Yeah, especially with my wife, because we got into it together, we practice together, and we talk about it a lot. It’s a big part of our lives. I see it in her. I see it in simple ways, like when somebody annoys you, you have an awareness that somebody’s annoying you.

When you behave in a way that lets the afflictive emotion of anger get the best of you, you see that and make amends and realize that it’s not what you want to do. I mean, I see the discipline she has and the commitment to it [in reading Buddhist texts]. That’s very clear. But in those simple, day-to-day ways, I see the practice at work. And it’s very inspiring to me to see those changes.

JS: What sort of changes do you see in yourself in your own day-to-day?

“Maybe it’s not so much what was missing but that there was no ultimate satisfaction in the success that came.”

MI: You know, I find that more positive people come into my life—kinder people, more generous people, more compassionate people. And that’s amazing. Ultimately, the practice is bringing awareness to your existence, second by second, day by day: What am I doing in this moment? What am I thinking? I went through most of my life justifying my emotions and my reactions: “I did this because they did that. She took too long in the line in front of me at the coffee shop, and now I’m angry.” We can justify those emotions all the time, and that’s fine. But you’ll be stuck there. Those things don’t just go away.

JS: Often I think about Buddhist practice in terms of becoming a kinder, more compassionate person, and I don’t think that’s a modest goal. But I recently interviewed Anne Klein (Rigzin Drolma), and she said she was challenged by her Dzogchen teacher when he asked her, “Do you have confidence that you can achieve liberation in this lifetime?” I’m still focused on not snapping at my partner or the people I work with, and I consider it a victory when I have the intelligence and poise to make a decision not to be that way. And yet, sometimes I go back to Anne Klein’s teacher’s question: Do I believe I can be free? Does that ever come up for you?

MI: First, I agree with you that it’s not a modest aspiration to work with those afflictive emotions and become aware of them. I think liberation is possible in this lifetime, but it takes an awful amount of commitment. I’m confident that it’s possible; I’m not confident that I’m going to get there. But I don’t really think about it that much.

Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche once said to his sangha, “So you become enlightened. Then what?” He likens enlightenment to being present at your own funeral, particularly the idea of “you” with this ego mind becoming enlightened. They’re kind of conflicting because enlightenment is the opposite of that. He’s almost saying you can’t really have your self and your ego and be enlightened.

Enlightenment is not this better version of you. It’s not Clark Kent becoming Superman. It’s something else. One of the mahasiddhas said, “I am not really impressed by someone who can turn the floor into the ceiling or fire into water. A real miracle is if someone can liberate just one negative emotion.”

JS: On the note of negative emotions, you play Dominic Di Grasso on The White Lotus, and he seems like a case study in dissatisfaction, addiction, and regret. Dominic can’t prevent the mistakes he has to make, although he pays for them in cash. I’ve found that practice can offer an opportunity to intervene, yet most people won’t come to the practice. How do you think of this in terms of the bodhisattva vow? Or is that too crazy a question?

MI: No, it’s not a crazy question at all. The bodhisattva vow is a really big commitment. [laughs]

JS: Kind of like enlightenment.

MI: Yeah. Maybe when you first hear about Buddhism, you think that there’s a way to reach nirvana or some place where all the suffering is gone. Then you take a bodhisattva vow, and you realize that whatever that state is, you’re not going to get there until everybody else gets there, and you’re hanging around for everyone else.

I think The White Lotus really shows the habitual tendencies that become so ingrained through your own karmic imprints from past lives, through your DNA, and through the learned behaviors that you saw in your younger years from your parents or the culture you were in. Those things can really stay with a person and stay in a family unless something cataclysmic happens or some kind of light bulb goes off—or both, maybe at the same time.

The White Lotus is interesting to me because you have very, very rich people in the most opulent, luxurious god realms, and they’re all miserable. When you don’t have those things, you might think that it would make you really happy to live like this or travel first class and stay in the best hotels. And here we have a story of these people who actually do that and are not very happy at all. There’s momentary happiness and fleeting pleasures, and yet there’s still dissatisfaction. Something is not being fulfilled.

JS: Right. There’s an interesting experiment I did when I was much, much younger. I found this apartment in New York, which was no mean feat at the time, and I really loved it. I had a view of the Hudson River, and the apartment even had a window in the bathroom, which in New York isn’t guaranteed by any means. I remember thinking, “I wonder how long before I take this for granted.” I wasn’t yet a Buddhist; I didn’t have a practice. But it occurred to me that we fall for it every time. We think, “Just this will make me happy.” And in The White Lotus, it’s really clear that we fall for it every time.

MI: Yeah, how long did it take before you took it for granted?

JS: I think it must have been about six weeks, and all of a sudden, I was in a mood again. I didn’t care about that window. I didn’t care about the Hudson River. But when I see the character you played, it would be easy for me to hate him if I didn’t also identify with him. He wants his wife back, and yet he’s in the throes of addiction—he can’t help himself, and he can’t help his son. It was such an accurate description of the samsara that we all live in, and again, I think that practice can interrupt that. Or it’s a possibility anyway.

MI: It is a possibility. But even with practice, those ingrained behaviors, especially addiction, are very hard. Pema Chödrön talks a lot about how a lot of the path is one step forward, two steps back. Maybe one day you go one step forward and only one step back, and you should rejoice in the fact that today it was only one step back. That’s progress. I think practice can help because to practice Buddhism requires real honesty with yourself. You really have to have a bold, honest view of your own mind. People can uncover this through psychotherapy with psychologists and psychiatrists. But with Buddhist practice, it’s in a different way, sometimes a mundane, day-to-day way. You really have to make a commitment to being honest with yourself, and that’s sometimes very hard.

JS: Yeah, I’ve found that sangha and a teacher are essential in being honest with myself. Sometimes a teacher can say something that cuts right through your fabrications. I remember once I was harping on something, and my teacher looked at me and said, “Why do you care so much?” And all of a sudden it shattered. I was sitting there seeing myself as this repetitive person harping on the same thing, and I had to really consider, why did I care so much? Practice is important in relationship with others and with a teacher, without which I don’t think I’d have made any headway at all.

MI: Oh, same for me. I don’t think it really exists outside of that.

“The goal of Buddhism isn’t to make you a better actor. That’s like taking a Ferrari to drive next door.”

JS: In addition to being an actor, you’re also a musician. Can you tell us a bit about your band, Zopa?

MI: Zopa is an indie rock trio that was formed in 2006. We took a hiatus when I moved in 2013 for about seven years, and then two and a half years ago, we started playing again. I play guitar, and I sing some of the songs. It’s a very collaborative group. We’re influenced by a lot of the New York bands from the ’70s like the Velvet Underground and Lou Reed, as well as a lot of ’80s post-punk and ’90s indie rock.

Over the years, there have been some Buddhist themes in the songs, and we have a new song that includes the Seven Line Prayer of Guru Rinpoche in Tibetan. There’s something cool about playing those songs live—those mantras and prayers have a certain frequency and resonance that I think might touch people in positive ways.

JS: The name of your band is also your dharma name, Zopa. When did you receive the name, and how has your relationship to it changed over time?

MI: When I took refuge with Garchen Rinpoche, I got the name Konchog Zopa Sonam. Zopa means patience in Tibetan, and the day I took refuge, he said, “Patience is the key to your practice because when you lose your patience, you lose your love.” At the time, I was still very new to Buddhism, and I took that as a pithy Hallmark card nugget—I didn’t really take it to heart.

Years later, I said to myself, “The day you took refuge with him, he said this to you. Maybe you should give it a little bit more importance. Maybe you should really look into what it means for patience to be the key to your practice.” Since then, I’ve started to take it more seriously and really focus on it as much as I can or as much as my awareness allows me to.

Trungpa Rinpoche said that if you’re a dharma practitioner, patience is an obligation. It’s not just something you do because you want to be kind. It is an obligation. Not only that, but it’s also an opportunity to practice. When you feel yourself becoming impatient, you can become aware of that and choose to bring some patience into the situation. These little annoyances become opportunities for practice.

JS: We recently had the interdisciplinary artist Meredith Monk on the podcast, and she said that a lot of our artistic practice is waiting and trying to get out of the way. Does this resonate with you, and how do you think about the creative process?

MI: God, yeah. Especially on a movie set, you spend most of the time waiting. But also with writing, if you’re working on a writing project that’s going to take some time—let’s say you set up a schedule to write Monday through Friday from 10 to 3—chances are you’re not going to be literally writing fingers on the keyboard for five hours, and there might be a big chunk of that time where nothing’s happening. You’re not really waiting for inspiration because you can’t wait for inspiration—you’d probably wait forever. But you have to trust that there’s some other process going on subconsciously and that for those hours that you’re there, there is some kind of alignment where you’re in tune with the story or the character. Even if you’re not actively writing or actively imagining it, somehow, your consciousness knows that that period of time is related. You have to trust that, and there’s a lot of waiting involved.

JS: More generally, how does practicing Buddhism shape your artistic work?

MI: Typically, I don’t like talking about this because the goal of Buddhism is not to make you a better actor. That’s like taking a Ferrari to drive next door. But I do think that meditation can help with focus. Art demands a certain intensity of focus and concentration, be it performing onstage as an actor or as a musician, sitting down writing, or acting a scene. The more focused you are in the moment, the better, and I definitely think meditation can help with that.

JS: So in other words, it’s an ancillary and unasked-for benefit. But you pointed out something very important, I think: the instrumentalization of our practice in order to get something. Any of us can fall into that.

MI: Yeah, back to Trungpa Rinpoche: it’s kind of like being present at your own funeral. The fact that this 2,500-year-old tradition is still in the world and there’s still a lineage and a connection to that wisdom is so unbelievably precious that to instrumentalize it for some worldly purpose really runs counter to it. If you’re making a commitment to practice, at some point, there’ll be shifts in everything: in the way you interact with and perceive the world. They may be little shifts, but they’re there.

♦

Listen to the full conversation on Tricycle Talks here. 

The post No Mud, No Lotus appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

¡Bienvenidos a nuestra nueva sección de Dharma en Español! Aquí en Tricycle reconocemos la importancia de seguir ofreciendo el dharma a los practicantes de una amplia gama de comunidades, y dado el creciente interés en el dharma en español, hemos puesto en marcha una nueva iniciativa para ofrecer enseñanzas originales y traducidas. Profesores de habla hispana de Latinoamérica y Europa han contribuido generosamente con charlas de dharma y prácticas que publicaremos en nuestra página web y en la revista, así como con artículos seleccionados de nuestra Sección de Enseñanzas. Esperamos que estos artículos cuidadosamente seleccionados les inspiren, desafíen y apoyen, y que también animen a todos aquellos que buscan la liberación a recorrer el camino de la práctica.  

No dudes en hacernos llegar tus comentarios o sugerencias. Nos encantaría saber de ustedes.

Welcome to our new Dharma in Spanish section! Here at Tricycle we recognize the importance of continuing to make the dharma available to practitioners across a wide range of communities, and given the increased interest in Spanish dharma, we’ve started a new initiative to offer ongoing original and translated teachings. Spanish speaking teachers from both Latin America and Europe have generously contributed dharma talks and practice pieces that we’ll be publishing in our website and print magazine, as well as selected pieces from our Teachings section. It’s our hope that these carefully curated offerings will inspire, challenge, and support you and encourage all those seeking liberation to walk the path of practice.  

Please don’t hesitate to reach out with your comments or suggestions. We’d love to hear from you.

***

El camino espiritual necesita desesperadamente un cambio de imagen. Está plagado de dos grandes problemas. El primero es el uso de la palabra “espiritual”; el segundo es el uso de la palabra “camino”. En tándem, estas dos cosas podrían ser lo peor que le ha pasado al camino espiritual.

Empecemos por la noción de lo “espiritual”. El término se utiliza no sólo en contraste con lo material, sino a menudo en oposición a ello. Entonces, la palabra “espiritual” invita una serie de interpretaciones insidiosas y despectivas. Implica un trascendentalismo peligroso: para ser espiritual, hay que alejarse de lo material. Lo espiritual es bueno, lo material es malo—y por ende, nunca se encontrarán uno con otro. Con esta visión errónea, los que emprendemos el camino espiritual a menudo nos enfocamos en una versión del paraíso. El viaje se convierte entonces en escapismo y nos perdemos.

El psicólogo budista John Welwood se percató de esta falla hace años y creó el término “evasión espiritual” para describir las tendencias de rodeo que todos tenemos como practicantes espirituales. En más de cuarenta años en el camino, me he dado cuenta de que no se trata de si un meditador se verá atrapado por esta patología, sino más bien de cuándo. De cierta manera, es totalmente comprensible. El mundo material apesta; ¡sáquenme de aquí! O más adecuadamente: el mundo real apesta; llévenme a lo irreal. Pero cuando confundimos la renunciación con la evasión, surgen todo tipo de problemas.

Aunque podríamos decir que la renunciación—la cual es un componente integral del camino—es la manera de salir del samsara, ¿a qué es a lo que estamos exactamente renunciando? Si respondemos que es al mundo de la apariencia convencional, nos hemos perdido de nuevo. El samsara no es un lugar; es un estado mental. A lo que realmente queremos renunciar es a nuestra relación inadecuada con la materia, no al mundo material.

Del mismo modo, podríamos decir que el camino espiritual es un viaje hacia el nirvana. Pero, ¿dónde está eso exactamente? El nirvana no es un lugar al que llegaremos en un futuro lejano. El nirvana es también un estado mental. Y está disponible aquí y ahora.

Entonces, ¿qué es lo que realmente apesta? Nuestra relación con el mundo material. ¿De qué queremos salir realmente? De un estado mental samsárico. El maestro budista tibetano Trungpa Rinpoche dijo: “No hay salida alguna. La magia consiste en descubrir la manera de entrar completamente”. Si profundizamos en la materia, encontraremos el espíritu. Si profundizamos en nosotros mismos, encontraremos todo lo que buscamos. Entonces podremos darnos cuenta de que, en última instancia, el samsara es el nirvana. Esta es la verdadera no-dualidad.

***

Recurrimos al camino espiritual porque estamos sufriendo. Cuando la Primera Noble Verdad—que dice que el sufrimiento existe—finalmente nos golpea, emprendemos el camino para aliviar ese sufrimiento (la Tercera Noble Verdad). Pero seguir un camino auténtico no consiste en sentirse bien (a menos que hablemos de un bien básico). Se trata de ser real. Y ser real significa aceptar toda la realidad, incluyendo lo material. Esto requiere aceptar e incluir nuestro maloliente cuerpo, nuestra desordenada vida emocional y todas las cosas pegajosas que hay en medio. Requiere abrazar todo lo que vemos; no sólo lo que consideramos “espiritual”.

“Despertar” es una expresión común en el camino, pero se trata más bien de “aterrizar”. En lugar de mirar al cielo, pon la cara sobre la tierra. Siente realmente la tierra en tus ojos y así mezclarás finalmente el polvo con el oro. La materia y el espíritu no son más que dos extremos del mismo espectro de la realidad: la materia no es más que espíritu burdo (cosificado); el espíritu no es más que materia sutil (descosificada).

La noción de “camino” es un insulto más. ¿Un camino hacia dónde? ¿A la iluminación, el despertar, y la no-dualidad? Pero, ¿dónde está eso exactamente? Fíjate bien y descubrirás que es un camino a ninguna parte, o al ahora-aquí.

Deja esta revista. Respira profundamente. Ahora mira hacia arriba. Ya está. Lo que estás buscando está escondido a plena vista. Eso es, irónicamente, por lo que no lo puedes ver. Es como el intentar ver dentro de tu párpado; está tan cerca, que es invisible. Cuando pensamos en la iluminación, la mayoría de nosotros buscamos una experiencia al nivel de Hollywood: un “acontecimiento espiritual”. Pero es más bien como Oklahoma (me encanta Oklahoma): algo muy ordinario. . . y material.

En el camino espiritual, puedes pasar de largo de lo ordinario en tu camino hacia lo extraordinario, sin ver que la iluminación es realmente extra-ordinaria. Por eso el maestro zen Suzuki Roshi dijo: “La iluminación fue mi mayor decepción”. Para el ego que busca la gloria, el despertar es la última decepción; un verdadero bajón—a la realidad.

Ponte de pie conmigo y despeja el espacio delante de ti. Ahora da el paso más importante de tu vida. Da un paso hacia ti mismo. ¿Hacia dónde te volverás? ¿Hacia dónde irás? Este es el tipo de camino al que me refiero.

No necesitas tener ninguna experiencia especial para ser libre. No tienes que ir a ninguna parte. Pensar que es así te aleja de lo que realmente buscas. Para emprender un camino, necesitas asumir la ausencia de lo que buscas. Para buscar la verdad, tienes que negar que ya está aquí presente. Pero el camino es cosa de percepción; no es real. Sólo tienes que reconocer lo que está siempre delante de ti mismo. Como dice repetidamente El libro tibetano de los muertos: “El reconocimiento y la liberación son simultáneos”.

Muchos de nosotros en el camino espiritual nos sentimos queremos experimentar algo distinto de lo que estamos viviendo ahora mismo. Eso no es un deseo de iluminación. Es un deseo de escapar. Pema Chödrön escribió La sabiduría de no escapar para contrarrestar esta motivación. Si buscas cualquier cosa fuera de ti, estás en un camino dualista. Sengcan, el Tercer Ancestro Zen, dijo en el Poema de la Mente de Fe: “Incluso apegarse a la idea de la iluminación es extraviarse. Deja que las cosas sean a su manera”.

Trungpa Rinpoche, en una de sus enseñanzas fundamentales, dijo: “Podríamos decir que el mundo real es aquel en el que experimentamos placer y dolor, lo bueno y malo. . . Pero si estamos completamente en contacto con estos sentimientos dualistas, esa experiencia absoluta de la dualidad es en sí misma la experiencia de la no-dualidad”. Déjate estar presente al cien por cien con cualquier cosa que ocurra—lo bueno, lo malo, y lo feo—¡y ya está!

Esto implica que nunca alcanzarás la iluminación; simplemente dejarás el engaño. ¿Cómo puedes alcanzar algo que ya tienes? Intentar acercarse sólo sirve para alejarse. Como dijo el maestro Dzogchen Longchenpa: “Si quieres experimentar la mente natural, sólo puedes hacerlo no queriéndolo”. En lo más alto del camino sin senderos, intentar alcanzar la iluminación, e incluso la meditación misma, son formas sutiles de distracción. Son una dis (“alejarse”) y tracción (“atraer”)—así nos apartamos de la realidad.

Entonces, ¿qué debemos hacer? Nada. Pero hagámoslo muy bien. Este es el arte de la meditación al nivel más refinado de la no meditación “sin distracción”. No te apartes ni te distraigas de nada. No dejes que la sensación de que puedes alcanzar el despertar sólo a través de la práctica, o incluso de la meditación, te distraiga. Y definitivamente no dejes que el camino espiritual te distraiga.

Estas enseñanzas de nivel absoluto trascienden pero incluyen el camino relativo. Nos conducen al final del camino, no como un destino final, sino para llegar a la comprensión de que la iluminación es un destino falso. Y así, aunque necesitemos el camino provisionalmente, también debemos dejarlo ir. El maestro Zen Norman Fischer dijo: “No hay ningún lugar al que ir ni ninguna forma de llegar. Siempre hemos estado donde debemos estar”. Deja de aplazar tu iluminación. Deja de reprogramar tu cita con la realidad.

This article was previously published as The Two Biggest Problems with the Spiritual Path.

The post Los dos mayores problemas del camino espiritual appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

In his conversation with Matthew Abrahams, Venerable Bhikkhu Bodhi argues for “Enlightenment” over “Awakening” as our best English-language translation of bodhi, the Pali word for the Buddha’s transcendence (“In Defense of ‘Enlightenment,’” Summer 2021). With due respect to the eponymous Ven. Bodhi, I find “Enlightenment” to be the less enlightened of the two English terms.

I mean “less enlightened” here in its secular sense: less informed by the liberal values of the historical Enlightenment, the seventeenth-to-nineteenth century European intellectual and social movement. These values include reason, critical thinking and discussion, human equality, individual freedom, naturalism, tolerance, democratic institutions, science, and literacy. Ven. Bodhi devotes significant attention in his conversation with Abrahams to associations between the Buddha and historical-Enlightenment values. He notes in particular the Buddha’s enlightened (in this secular sense) process of inquiry, his use of Socratic dialogue in teaching, and his encouragement of careful reasoning. We might also note the Buddha’s many cautions against blind faith, reflexive adherence to tradition, and unquestioning trust in authority. 

We might furthermore speculate that early translators of Pali intentionally chose “Enlightenment” over “Awakening” in part to associate bodhi (and the Buddha)—approvingly—with such values, which freed Europe from religious authoritarianism, launched the Scientific Revolution, and enabled modern democratic societies. But I suspect early European translators—most prominently Max Müller—intended otherwise. They aimed not to associate the Buddha’s transcendence with the historical Enlightenment, but to appropriate its metaphor of illumination (Descartes’ light of reason) in the service of its great counter-movement, Romanticism. The reactionary German Romantic movement opposed the historical Enlightenment. Romantic values, including intuitionism, supernaturalism, revelation, and subservience to a collective or national spirit (often embodied in a representative hero), align closely with the religious authoritarianism that the historical Enlightenment supplanted. 

The Pali Canon presents us with both enlightened and romantic images of the Buddha. Alongside the reason- and inquiry-encouraging Buddha whom Ven. Bodhi mentions, the Canon also presents romantic images of bodhi issuing in cosmic effulgences and emanations, miraculous revelations, and supernatural omniscience that justifies submissive faith. It is to these romantic canonical images, rather than the enlightened ones, that Ven. Bodhi turns in his defense of the traditional English translation of bodhi as “Enlightenment.” For Venerable Bodhi, the Buddha’s transcendence is a revelation of esoteric light, rather than a realization to which the Buddha awakens. “Beyond the range of intellect and reason,” it is an attainment less to  aspire to or emulate than to worship. 

For early, Orientalist, mystically-inclined translators like Müller—and for succeeding traditionalist monastic translators including Ven. Bodhi—the choice of “Enlightenment” performs a two-fold function. It emphasizes romantic and religious-authoritarian understandings of the Buddha’s transcendence over enlightened ones. And it undermines the association of “Enlightenment” as a metaphor of illumination with liberal values. Indeed, after approving of enlightened aspects of the Buddha’s “method,” Ven. Bodhi dismisses outright the association of “Enlightenment” with “Locke, Kant, and Voltaire” when the discussion turns to transcendence. In this context, the historical sense of “Enlightenment” becomes an unrelated and irrelevant second meaning of the word for the Venerable.

Moreover, although Ven. Bodhi objects to “Awakening” as an inaccurate literal translation of bodhi, he defends “Enlightenment” primarily on figurative grounds. “Enlightenment” is a free translation—certainly freer than “Awakening,” which is a common figure of speech in English for coming to “know” or “realize” (literal translations of bodhi which the Venerable endorses). But I have no objection to free translation, an interpretive style which aims to convey in a target language (in this case, English) the meanings of terms as their speakers understood them, rather than their literal meanings.  

With its contrasting enlightened and romantic images of the Buddha, the Pali canon requires interpretive choices in the course of translation. The interpretations governing our translation choices are unavoidably based on the values we see at the heart of the dharma. We can choose to defer to tradition, relying on the authority of a sacred text or semi-sacred commentary. We can even reason, circularly, that such fundamentalism is not a choice but a requirement of text-based faith (even if our text presents mutually exclusive, incommensurable images). This is the choice of religious authoritarianism, and it is anti-rational. 

Or we can rely on our own capacities of discernment as we weigh our thoughts and intuitions against our values and experience. This is the basic lesson of the historical Enlightenment, and it is the sandiṭṭhiko, ehipassiko, paccattaṃ veditabbo (“visible in this life,” “come see for oneself,” “to be understood for oneself”) aspect of the dharma that draws so many of us to the teachings of the Buddha. 

The Buddha’s own relentless pursuit of truth as a bodhisattva—an uncompromising process of experimentation, observation, and inference that led to his transcendent discoveries—supports the latter approach—both to the dharma and to translating bodhi. So too do canonical texts such as the “Simile of the Snake” discourse and many others. By this approach, “Awakening,” with its connotations of coming from unknowing or delusion to a more lucid, self-aware understanding, represents bodhi better than mystifying, confounding “Enlightenment.” The enlightened choice is ours to make.

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I was in dokusan again with Katagiri Roshi, just half an hour before the end of another sesshin. Tenderized and open, I asked again, “How can I go beyond self-consciousness?” Roshi bolted forward, “Already you are stuck!” he shouted. Everything stopped. Then he said in a commanding tone, “Turn over a new leaf, NOW!” Figure and ground reversed. Katagiri Roshi’s bushy eyebrows obeyed. They were me. The bell ringing to end the interview obeyed—me. The tan shag carpet under my feet obeyed—me. Norm, the tender giant Zen monk sitting next to me when I returned to the zendo obeyed—me. 

—Adapted from Keep Me In Your Heart A While: The Haunting Zen of Dainin Katagiri

This experience, almost forty years ago, was a pivotal moment for me, an initial awakening (kensho or “seeing true nature”). Although it provided the basis for faith to continue the Zen Way, I now see it as an intimation of the Great Way, not the Great Awakening in this very life promised by the most vital streams of buddhadharma, including Zen. That is, to deeply accord with the awakening of Shakyamuni Buddha, and through personal experience, directly verify the truth of buddhadharma. Further, if awakenings are authentic, they give energy to the altruistic vow to liberate all beings.   

More about what I mean by “awakening” in a bit, but first a caution. 

Today, the vital streams, the received traditions, that have kept awakening alive through the eighty-some generations since Shakyamuni Buddha, so that it is still available for us now, are threatened by our (Earth-destroying) consumerist proclivity to settle for the cheap and easy, by our (understandable) cynicism in the possibility of any authentic transformation, and within my root tradition, Soto Zen, by those (nice people) who are hell bent on making the buddhadharma about faith and intellectual understanding, while unintentionally abandoning exactly what could most serve the helpless ones in the future—awakening to their true nature. Following the band Crazy Horse, I call succeeding generations “helpless ones,” because, at least in part, they depend on our awakening today in order to awaken in the midst of a (likely) dystopian future with some unforeseeable degree of ecological and societal collapse.

Therefore, in this article, I will offer a Zen view of what awakening is and a little about what it isn’t, offer awakening stories from contemporary practitioners, share a historical interlude that has distracted Soto Zen from its original purpose, point to some of the shadows that come with emphasizing the light, and pray with you for Great Bodhisattvas to appear in the future to illuminate the Great Way for the benefit of all the many beings on this little blue dumpling planet. 

What Is Awakening?

Simply put, awakening begins with an abrupt nondual embodiment. What follows, the path of verification in the nitty gritty details of training and in life, is of equal or greater importance. Awakening, then, is both an empty event and an ongoing full-to-the brim process. But rather than more didactic definitions, let’s instead look at four experiences of awakening by contemporary Zen students, all householders.

Then one day, driving as usual to get groceries, listening as usual to a rather slow and unspectacular aria by Mozart, an unusually brilliant note was heard. All became open, vast, and yet more intimate than my very breath. No me and an outside world, no oneness—indescribable. An eternal expression of being. And my days are no longer filled with inquiries, gnawing questions of existence. Instead, there is boundless resolution. Serene intimacy with the unspoken call of “Just this! Just here, NOW!”

“No me,” “no oneness.” “Serene intimacy.” “The unspoken call.” Here’s another student’s experience that occurred while they were working with the koan, “Does even a little dog have the buddhanature?” Chinese master Zhaozhou said, “Mu”:

It happened in the middle of a difficult seven-day sesshin, I didn’t know how I would go on. But somehow I kept asking my bowls, the trees, and the toilet: what is Mu? On the fifth day, I was sitting in the garden after lunch, inexplicably crying again. This time, I just let the crying be, and a huge wave of fear arose. The thought came: if I let go, who will catch me? I rode the fear, and the image of an outstretched hand appeared in my mind. I let go then and began to shake as waves of energy flooded my body. I disappeared and the world became luminous, each thing just exactly itself, impossibly vivid. The whole universe had always been boundless love, and I was overcome with gratitude. After a while, I had to pee, and as I walked down the garden path back to the center, I felt like I was walking on my own face. 

Notice here how difficulty and intense emotions, as well as the student’s courage to go through the fear, bloomed into an initial awakening. Here’s another student’s experience:

There was an abrupt dissolution. Not so much that I was breaking apart but that the entire universe was breaking apart, and then everything just seemed to blink out. Simultaneously, I felt a huge weight suddenly removed. Then everything was back and I was looking at the wind blowing the grass again. Except that now, I wasn’t looking at the wind in the grass, I was the wind in the grass blowing completely weightless and free. My awareness was no longer in my head looking out at the wind in the grass. Rather, awareness seemed to be emanating from everywhere and nowhere. There was no center to it. Looking up at the sky, the trees, and the buildings, everything was an alive being looking back at me. But yet somehow that which was looking back at me was me.

“Abrupt dissolution.” “Breaking apart.” “Weightless and free.” “No center.” “Everything was an alive being looking back at me.” And finally:

Suddenly, looking up, something burst and flipped over and there were huge waves sweeping up to the sky, extending infinitely in all directions. So vast. Torn apart, the world was now inside. What was me was happily insignificant as part of the vastness. Things and people were glowing, more vivid in color and form in just being, than I could ever have believed possible. Rubbish in the street, the smell of car exhaust, worn buildings, passers-by, all were just so! And it didn’t go away. It was irreversible.

“Something flipped.” “Glowing.” “Irreversible.” 

What Does Zen Have to Offer?

First, a nonsectarian qualifier: although these experiences all happened within the context of Zen koan practice, like an appreciation for Mozart or walking on your own face, no tradition has sole access to these vivifying, verifying experiences. They are an expression, and a gift, of our essential nature. 

What the Zen tradition has to offer is a path of practice that makes initial awakening more likely, if taken up with wild abandon. In addition, if, as Meido Moore Roshi says, instead of adjusting the practice to fit our life patterns, we adjust our life to fit the practice offered to us. 

One thing that all these students shared, predominant in the second example, is that they were all working with the keyword from a koan (“mu,” for example). In my teaching practice, I’ve taught the two main methods of Zen—for the first twenty years, just sitting, the last ten with koan. And from this experience, I can report that although students who practice just sitting do sometimes have initial awakening, the likelihood is much greater when working with the keyword from a koan.

Zen offers a couple more things that are uncommon in the world today. First, a path of practice post-awakening to further open the initial experience through application of nonduality in face-to-face meetings with a teacher, and simultaneously within the vertiginous vicissitudes of daily life, eventually freeing us from the awakening. As we say, Zen practice is like taking a shower. First, we wash with soap. Then we wash the soap off. This is enormously important and provides training in how to support others in the path of awakening.

In addition, the Zen way offers clarity about what awakening is and what it isn’t. After all, human beings have all sorts of spiritual experiences. In Zen we focus on the most practical, those that can be put to use in daily life, and those most likely to lead to compassionate action. 

The initial and even the more definitive awakenings that most of us have today are like opening the door and taking a peek into Buddha’s world. 

Hogen Bays Roshi, co-abbot of Oregon’s Great Vow Zen Monastery, for example, distinguishes “insight” from “awakening.” When one has an insight—and these are very common—the sense of subject and object remains. An example of an insight would be, “Oh! I see that everything is impermanent.” In this insight, there is an “I” who is observing and learning from the flow of impermanence. Insights help us to understand life and are important, but they are limited in their power to reduce our suffering, and they don’t give us sufficient skills to help others awaken. 

Another important distinction here is that awakening is not absorption (samadhi). Absorption can open into awakening, and some degree of the deeply settled heart is necessary for awakening, but they are distinct experiences. In absorption, there is often the sense of the self expanding into a god-like consciousness, so someone who has had an experience of absorption might say, “I am one with everything.” When the absorption ends, human-realm suffering returns, sometimes with a hell-realm like vengeance. 

On the other hand, with awakening—that is, an abrupt nondual embodiment—there is a decrease in suffering. “It was irreversible,” said one of the above students. And through dropping the distinction of I and thou, awakenings also uncover the capacity to profoundly benefit others. 

More on that below, but for now one more crucial point: given our propensity for self-deception, it is essential that we don’t self-diagnose whether an experience was an insight, absorption, or awakening. Work with a skilled teacher who can make these vital distinctions.

It is also important to note that awakening experiences vary in depth and breadth. Robert Aitken Roshi has described initial awakenings as poking a hole in the wall that separates the self and the ten thousand things. More definitive awakenings knock the whole wall down. Granted, initial awakenings rarely seem “small” for the one experiencing them. For example, the initial awakening that I described at the beginning of this piece was profound for me at the time. Only through continuing practice-verification, though, did I get an inkling of what’s possible beyond that early intimation. We know from our lineage teachings, as well as the Mahayana sutras and commentaries, that the initial and even the more definitive awakenings that most of us have today are like opening the door and taking a peek into Buddha’s world. 

Henry Shukman Roshi, in his wonderful memoir, One Blade of Grass, tells about one such more definitive awakening that happened during a sesshin with his teacher, John Gaynor:

As my mind struggled to construct an understanding, suddenly that former moment was immediately present. Time vanished. That time and this had never been separate. Then what had I been doing through all these years of “Zen”? As I heard John speak just now, I felt as if I were perched on the edge of a great cliff. Before I had time to think about whether I might step off, a thunderbolt dropped on the crown of my head. FALLING OFF THE CUSHION. LYING on the floor. Weeping. Everything gone. All the hard work of holding together the world as Henry knew it—gone. No more Henry, no more world. Nothing. No more Zen. Truly, nothing. True nothing. 

Later, Shukman Roshi describes this experience by saying, “Everything in between has been erased.” Everything in between past and present, self and other. What remains? Shukman Roshi writes that at the end of the sesshin, “At the celebratory lunch, when we were each asked to speak a few words, all I could say was ‘Thank you, thank you,’ over and over again.”

The Effects of Awakening

However, whether an awakening is initial or more definitive, it isn’t magic. We all still have much work to do. I certainly do. Philip Kapleau Roshi said that awakening doesn’t transform us overnight, but it establishes the basis by which we can go on endlessly transforming ourselves. 

One student expressed the practice of awakening, often referred to as post-kensho training, like this: 

It took me many years, though, and quite a lot of pain, to find someone who could show me how to navigate this, to learn to play with it, to laugh at/with/as it, to throw it away (it never goes away), to see what it is for. Turns out it is completely ordinary and simple, nothing special after all. But I don’t know where I would have been without it, given where I started. It saved me. All I really want to do now is take care of people around me and the world as I meet it, and through this I have a way, a practice.

One point this highlights is the importance of the teacher-student relationship, an essential ingredient in the ongoing work of cultivating verification. Especially after an initial awakening, the teacher not only verifies the experience, but also provides an indispensable mirror. In my own process, Katagiri Roshi was especially tough with me in this stage of practice, and I’m very grateful to him for that. 

Another student writes this about their post-kensho process:

This awakening experience was so overwhelming, that the impulse was to preserve it, to build a new wall around it. After a time, I came to see that holding on to it wouldn’t work, and set about deepening this understanding, continuing to raze and demolish walls rather than build up new ones. And a natural desire that others could see and feel this for themselves grew in me, so the question arose, how can I best do that? The vow to liberate all beings, which had been just words, became an expression of my deepest desire.

Notable with both of these students is the movement to helping others. Here’s another student’s experience:

[Initial awakening] unlocked a kind of gentleness in me that wasn’t functioning very well before. There is also a blooming of faith that resulted from the experience. We are always in the midst of freedom even if we can’t see it. On some level, I no longer feel like Zen practice is a choice that I’m making. Rather it is how one proceeds in this reality. At the same time, there is a much deeper commitment to working to transcend my ego-centric habits and live for others.

But Didn’t Suzuki Roshi Say…

“It’s not that [awakening] is unimportant, but it’s not the part of Zen that needs to be stressed.” 

Yes, he did. And recently one of his fourth generation successors, a teacher at a large Soto center, described the attitude of his institution as “rabidly anti-kensho.” On the other hand, my main koan teacher, James Myoun Ford Roshi, often says, “First and foremost, Zen is about awakening.” So which is it? 

Clearly, it is fair to say that not all Zen folks agree about focusing on awakening. To understand why that is, it might be helpful here to take the short historical interlude I promised above. In 1853, you see, Commodore Perry steamed into Edo Bay with a squadron of US Navy ships, some twenty-five times bigger than anything that the Japanese navy had at the time. This unleashed a stream of cause and effect that eventually took the steam out of the Soto tradition’s focus on training and awakening monks, and shifted it to a model inspired by Western Protestantism that appealed to householders with practices based on faith in Dogen (a convenient substitute for Jesus Christ) and karma teachings. 

According to the Bukkokuji monk Kogen, the tension between this movement and the traditional emphasis of Soto Zen burst into public view in 1928 when Professor Kaiten Nukariya published a front page article titled “True Faith,” taking the position that by using scholarship, studying the doctrine, and having faith it is possible to clarify the principles of Zen. Professor Nukariya’s article was the first of many in what became known as “The Showa Dispute About True Faith.” 

Professor Nukariya’s article prompted a strong response, largely from senior monastic teachers, especially from Daiun Harada Roshi. Harada Roshi’s position was that only through practice and great enlightenment is one able to grasp the truth of Zen, and that scholars without experience of actual practice and actual awakening are simply followers of common sense and science, and have no authority to speak about and define Zen. Harada Roshi’s first article articulating this traditional position was titled, “We Have to Get Rid of Worms Inside the Lion.”

 Unfortunately, at this point in the digestive process, the worms seem to be winning. It is a phenomena way up near the height of irony that a version of Soto Zen, largely the result of desperate efforts to modernize by imitating what some Japanese Soto Zennists thought was Western, was copied by Westerners as traditional Japanese practice. 

Yet, there is hope. Regarding Suzuki Roshi’s “…it’s not the part of Zen that needs to be stressed,” a third generation successor in his lineage, Kokyo Henkel Sensei, says, 

“Maybe this was true for a bunch of acid-soaked hippy seekers looking for total enlightenment on their first day of zazen in 1967. But it might be more appropriate to emphasize awakening in the corporate and society-fixing Zen world of today.”

With Light Come Shadows

Emphasizing awakening is not all luminosity and bliss. As Bodhin Kjolhede Roshi, Co-Director of the Rochester Zen Center recently noted, “There’s a risk that if you talk about awakening, people who haven’t experienced awakening will feel inadequate. It could exacerbate their delusion that they’re not fundamentally awakened already.”

Talking about awakening can also trigger some practitioners to either double-down in their belief that zazen itself is enlightenment, an artifact of the Showa Dispute mentioned above, or respond by reiterating their insistence that awakening is a fantasy, despite all the first-person accounts from Shakyamuni Buddha through the current generation of practitioners.

Another issue is that although it is appropriate for most students to practice with hair ablaze, sitting for a couple hours a day, practicing with continuity in daily life, and engaging in frequent retreats, it isn’t appropriate for everyone. All of us sooner or later will have physical challenges to navigate, but it is primarily our psychological challenges at any given time that might indicate that a less rigorous practice schedule is more fitting. It is always wise and necessary to work with a qualified teacher who can advise us when physical or psychological issues arise, and support us in tapping the brakes, or taking a break, when that is fitting, something that has been appropriate for me in my own practice several times.

Finally, a challenging issue that arises when emphasizing awakening is the troubling truth that not everybody seems inclined to abrupt nondual embodiment, at least of the dramatic variety. Although many students will have an awakening experience during their first five to ten years of intensive work, not everyone will. Even when intention, skill, and application are all present, some people just don’t seem to be prone to pronounced experiences. Still, there are enormous benefits from intensive practice, including experiences of absorption, psychological insights, and the powerful sense of belonging that arises in the teacher-student relationship and with the community of practitioners.

This is another opportunity to pray to the Great Bodhisattvas. 

Rolling Up Our Sleeves… 

Seventeen years after Katagiri Roshi ordered me to “Turn over a new leaf NOW!” I was sitting a solo retreat in a small cabin at a Catholic retreat center and having a wonderful time, moving through the subtle phases of settled zazen and into one-pointed absorption. To my surprise, during the evening of the second day, everything started to shatter, and break into bliss. Energy coursed through my body, sometimes seeming like it might be more than I could handle. The then-recent movie Contact came to mind with Jodi Foster’s character strapped into a wildly vibrating time-space machine and repeatedly telling mission control, “Good to go, good to go!”

I did feel so good and ready to go. 

During a zazen break, I found the workout room in the main building. As I sat down on a machine for the pectoral muscles, everything completely dropped away. There was only complete absorption with no witness. Then a gentle and sparkling returning. As the old Zen song goes, “I was not it, but in fact it was me.” Everything was the same, and yet everything was luminous with no-me apart from it all. 

I slowly walked the grounds of the retreat center and found a bench just opposite a twenty-foot tall crucifix, where I sat for a long time, completely at ease, delighting in a strangely familiar and simultaneously newfound sense of radical intimacy, vast-sky openness, and the luminous beauty of each and everything. 

Then the thought came, time to go back to work. And so I did. 

The post We Are All This Luminous Mind: The Possibility and Importance of Awakening appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

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Dongshan and Sengmi, who were later to become accomplished Zen masters, were walking on pilgrimage, and a white rabbit suddenly darted across their path. Sengmi said, “How swift.”

Dongshan asked him how so.

Sengmi said, “Just like a commoner becoming a high minister.”

Dongshan retorted, “How can such a venerable person as you speak like that?”

When Sengmi asked for Dongshan’s understanding, he said, “After generations of nobility, temporarily fallen into poverty.”

The differing viewpoints about the white rabbit in this story suggest two contrasting approaches to awakening, and to spiritual practice. In Sengmi’s first statement about the rabbit, Thomas Cleary translates the Chinese character as “swift,” William Powell as “elegant,” and it may also be translated as “eminent,” or “refined.” This white rabbit is impressive and grand, not just for his speed. The question is how the rabbit became so eminent. This dialogue about the white rabbit indicates also the issue of how Buddhas or great bodhisattvas become elegant and refined.

Sengmi claimed the rabbit was “Just like a commoner becoming a high minister.” This implies the path of cultivation of a deluded person achieving elevated wisdom through great exertion, often thought of in terms of self-improvement. Many Buddhist sutras and other teachings include various systems of specified stages of development and spiritual growth as guides for practitioners. Wansong, author of several important koan commentaries, says in his commentary in the Book of Serenity, “Usually we awaken by means of cultivation, entering sagehood from ordinariness—a commoner is directly appointed prime minister.” Not only in Buddhism, but in many spiritual and cultural traditions, eminence and achievement are often seen as only the outcome of long, arduous struggle.

On the other hand, Dongshan describes the white rabbit’s situation as “generations of nobility, temporarily fallen into poverty.” This implies that such eminence is a facet of inalienable, inherent buddhanature, not the attainment of some new status or of spiritual social climbing. The upright nobility of a Buddha’s awareness and kindness is a birthright already present, not some new state that needs to be discovered or achieved.

Temporarily falling into poverty is a necessary aspect of the bodhisattva way of life. Bodhisattvas, awakening beings dedicated to universal liberation, join fully with suffering beings and become impoverished, at least spiritually if not also materially, just so they can reenact and exemplify awakening to this innate nobility as an encouragement for others. They practice, sometimes strenuously, not to reach some exalted state but to uncover something already deeply present. Dongshan suggests that the fall into suffering, when bodhisattva practice is engaged, is finally only temporary.

Dongshan’s response refers directly to a parable in the Lotus Sutra, arguably the most important Buddhist scripture in East Asia. In this prodigal son story, a son and father are separated. The son drifts aimlessly and becomes destitute, while the father moves to another city and becomes very wealthy and highly respected. Eventually, the son in his wandering happens upon the estate of the father. The father immediately recognizes his son and sends some assistants to bring him in, but seeing the wealthy, eminent man in front of his mansion, the son is frightened and runs away. The father understands the humble son’s shame and dread and sends his assistants disguised as lowly menial workers to invite the son to come and take a job on the estate shoveling dung in the fields. After a while, when the son feels comfortable with this job, the father has his assistants steadily give the son more responsibilities, until gradually, after a very long period, the son is managing the estate. When the father is finally about to pass away, he calls for all of his friends and the nobles and citizens of the city and announces to them, and to his son, that this really is his son, and that they were separated long before, but that “Now all of my wealth belongs entirely to my son.” The sutra goes on to state explicitly that the very rich old man is the Buddha, and that “we are all like the Buddha’s children.”

Wansong in his commentary to the white rabbit story refers to a saying, “In the metaphor of the destitute son is illustrated the Path; in the verse on presenting the jewel is shown the net of salvation.” The long path of the destitute prodigal son involves realizing a birthright already present. “The verse on presenting the jewel” may refer to either of two other stories in the Lotus Sutra.

In the first story, two friends are up late drinking, and the guest falls asleep. The affluent host is called away but first sews a priceless jewel into the guest’s robe as a gift to provide for him. Later the guest awakens and departs. In his travels he faces hardships and must struggle just to satisfy basic needs. The friends happen to meet later, and the disappointed former host tells his indigent friend about the jewel he still has in his clothing and that he had only suffered want due to ignorance of the jewel. Now he knows and may live at ease. The implications of this story are quite similar to the prodigal son story. The host who provided for his friend is again explicitly compared to the Buddha.

The second Lotus Sutra story suggested by Wansong’s commentary about presenting a jewel is more complex. A bodhisattva and a Buddha visiting from a different world system, what we may consider another solar system or galaxy, or perhaps a different dimension of space and time, inquire of the bodhisattva of wisdom, Manjushri, if there are any beings who could quickly become a Buddha through diligently and devotedly practicing the sutra. Manjushri mentions the dragon king’s eight-year-old daughter, who soon appears. She presents an exceedingly precious jewel to the Buddha as an offering, and he immediately accepts it. She then proclaims that she can become a Buddha even more quickly than the Buddha accepted the jewel, and though she is not human, only eight years of age, and in terms of the prejudices of the time, merely a defiled female, she proceeds instantly to become a Buddha.

The complexities of this story have rightly been much discussed in contemporary Buddhist women’s studies. But in the context of the story about Dongshan and the white rabbit, what is important is that the dragon girl, like the rabbit, is swift and becomes eminent, achieving buddhahood very quickly. In the context of the traditional path requiring ages of effort to achieve excellence, she is quite revolutionary.

The net of salvation demonstrated by these presentations of jewels is immediate, not a product of endeavoring to reach new heights. The path of arhats, the enlightened practitioners of Theravada Buddhism, and even traditionally of bodhisattvas prior to the Lotus Sutra, involves many lifetimes of arduous practice. Dongshan’s statement “After generations of nobility, temporarily fallen into poverty” invokes these stories and the view of awakening as an omnipresent, available capacity, not some product created or achieved through stages of accomplishment.

What of the elegant white rabbit in the original story? Perhaps it is only white in parallelism with the white robe of commoners, as “white-robe” is a widespread Buddhist epithet for laypeople and the phrase used to indicate “commoner” in the original dialogue.

In East Asia a white rabbit is commonly seen in the moon, just as people in the Northern Hemisphere in the West see a man in the moon. With the white rabbit representing the moon, a customary Buddhist image of wholeness and full enlightenment, we can see the original story afresh. Thus, Dongshan and Sengmi are talking not just about a small rabbit, but about enlightenment itself, which somehow they had glimpsed passing quickly in front of them. Therefore, their comments reflect approaches and strategies to developing enlightened awareness.

A more familiar white rabbit may be pertinent. In Lewis Carroll’s mid-nineteenth-century fable, a white rabbit leads a young girl named Alice—at “seven and a half exactly,” she is close in age to the dragon princess—to dive down a very deep hole. This white rabbit, too, is quite elegant, wearing a waistcoat with a pocket watch and holding white kid gloves. This white rabbit is also swift, and seeks to be even swifter, as he worries, “Oh dear! Oh dear! I shall be too late!” Such anxiety about the time may be considered more a reflection of Sengmi’s “commoner becoming a high minister,” the practitioner toiling to purify himself with great effort over time to climb to an elevated status, and hoping to get there fairly soon. Perhaps Dongshan’s white rabbit, “after generations of nobility, temporarily fallen into poverty,” may also be nervous about his pace, to the extent that the bodhisattva is fooled in his fallen state before recalling his generations of noble awakened ancestors.

In a more recent invocation, Grace Slick, in her 1967 anthem “White Rabbit” on the Jefferson Airplane’s Surrealistic Pillow album, sings, “One pill makes you larger, and one pill makes you small, and the ones that mother gives you, don’t do anything at all.” Indeed, in the path of cultivation, for commoners working to become eminent, some practices make you larger, providing a lofty perspective that may lead to self-inflation, and some practices make you small, either via a narrow focus of concentration or through the humbling awareness of one’s self-centeredness. Perhaps from Dongshan’s viewpoint of the foundational generations of nobility and the stark immediacy of suchness, the practices that the Buddha gives you also “don’t do anything at all.” Rather than producing dramatic elevation or diminishment, the practices of Dongshan’s Buddha simply remind the practitioner of the inner uprightness, dignity, and nobility of intrinsic awakening.

The implications of his response to Sengmi after encountering the white rabbit include Dongshan’s advocacy of practices to immediately recognize the awakened qualities of kindness and awareness available presently, and recognize the reality of just this suchness. Seeking to escape to some loftier realm is not the point. Practices of cultivation, seeking advanced concentrations, or seeing through and purifying negative karmic qualities may well be engaged, and even necessary, but only from the perspective of awakening from the temporary obstructions to our generations of nobility.

♦

From Just This Is It: Dongshan and the Practice of Suchness by Taigen Dan Leighton © 2015 by Taigen Dan Leighton. Reprinted in arrangement with Shambhala Publications, Inc. Boulder, CO. www.shambhala.com

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Christina Feldman: Waking up is a noble aspiration, but the path is not easy. There are moments of true joy, celebration, and appreciation, and there are moments of doubt and despair. But we welcome the challenge of emerging from a habit-driven, compulsive life into a way of being and inhabiting this life where we flourish, are creative and engaged, and where we feel free. So what allies in this journey support and nourish us, and incline the heart toward awakening? 

This is where we turn to the Pali word bojjhanga. It is a word that describes the seven limbs, factors, or supports of awakening. The “bo” in bojjhanga derives from “bodhi,” wakefulness or liberation, and “anga” from the Pali translation of “limbs.” These limbs or factors describe qualities or capacities we already have. They are present in our consciousness; they are seeds of potential reality that we are invited to nurture, identify, appreciate, and strengthen. In the early texts, these qualities are referred to as an inner wealth or as the seven treasures that protect us against pain and adversity, instead inclining the heart toward awakening. 

The Buddha said that when these seven qualities are cultivated and brought to fruition, they free the mind and heart from all forms of bondage and suffering, and they incline the mind toward liberation or nirvana. If we ask ourselves what the mind of a Buddha looks like, my understanding is that the mind of a Buddha is infused with these seven qualities. 

An Active Practice 

Jaya Rudgard: One of the images the Buddha used [to describe the awakening factors] is of the waters in the high Himalayas that gather in pools and then flow into streams and into rivers and gradually down toward the ocean. In the same way, as we engage these qualities, the mind naturally starts to dissolve the afflictive patterns behind it and incline us toward freedom and understanding. Indeed, the awakening factors are sometimes referred to as the anti-hindrances. There’s a way in which practicing these qualities actually provides antidotes to and a pathway out of the more afflictive qualities of mind. 

When I first was introduced to dharma practice, I had this impression that I had to work to overcome the hindrances before I could settle into anything that was more enjoyable. Actually, we can practice from the beginning by engaging these brightening qualities of the mind. They feel good to cultivate and really speak to the way the Buddha described his path as one that is beautiful in the beginning, middle, and end. It yields fruit immediately. We don’t have to wait for some final epiphany, but can actually start to taste the flavor of awakening as we walk along. 

I very much like Christina’s emphasis on the root meaning of bojjhanga as being limbs for awakening. Limbs are things that you use to walk. This is a practice that we can engage with and do. In some ways, this list of factors is actually a list of practice instructions or tools that we can actually take out of our toolbox and bring into use in our everyday life. 

The Gift of Mindfulness

Christina Feldman: In every moment of our lives, in every moment of experience, we’re always practicing something. Sometimes we are practicing our habits, and sometimes we are practicing in a more intentional way the cultivation of a quality that frees us from habit. As the Buddha put it, whatever we frequently think about and dwell upon, to this does our mind incline. 

One of the greatest gifts of mindfulness is to understand that we have choices about the quality of attention we develop and where we place that attention. We have a choice about what we feed and what we fast. Do we feed the qualities that really enliven us, that bring us to embodiment, and free us, or are we unconsciously choosing to foster and repeat the patterns that create confusion? The hindrances or “veiling patterns” pull us in the direction of ever greater confusion and forgetfulness; of feeling lost, overwhelmed, and dissociated; of being submerged in ill will, craving, doubt, or worry; or simply checking out. The bojjhanga, on the other hand, pull us in the direction of that which we most deeply value and aspire to. They pull us in the direction of freedom. 

Creative Tension 

Here we see that in the process of waking up, there is a certain tension between these two different pulls. It is easy at times to see this as being a very negative tension, and people can become very judgmental of themselves because, “Oh, there I am again, once more lost in craving or lost in aversion or lost in doubt.” But I don’t see this as a negative tension. I see this as being a creative tension. Where would I cultivate joyfulness other than in the midst of the craving for sensual pleasure? Where would I cultivate courage and energy except in the midst of those moments of numbness or dissociation? Where would I cultivate connectedness except in those moments of agitation and scatteredness and fragmentation? 

So what are the factors that really support the treasures in our hearts that lead to awakening?

The first of these, perhaps unsurprisingly, is mindfulness, learning to be here, learning to inhabit this body, mind, and moment fully.  

The second is living in the light of our understanding of change—of insubstantiality or conditionality—our understanding of what leads to distress, and what leads to the end of distress. 

The third set of factors that really support awakening is contentment or ease in our lives and using our “sense stars,” the five traditional sense doors and the sense door of the mind, in the service of sensitivity, respect, and care. It’s being mindful of the kind of footprint we are leaving upon the world in every moment and the kind of footprint we leave in our own hearts. 

The next of these qualities that support awakening is developing skillful or wise attentiveness, and not grasping at the sensory impressions or our associations with them.  

The last of the factors that really support the flourishing of the bojjhanga is trust and confidence in the capacity we have to be awake—to know the fruition of these qualities for ourselves, and trust in our capacity to walk this path with courage, fearlessness, and trust.

♦

Related: Never Turn Away: Opening the Mind of Awakening

The post The Seven Factors of Awakening Explained appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

In recent years, a subtle shift has occurred. The once nearly ubiquitous English word for the Buddha’s realization under the Bodhi tree, “enlightenment,” has fallen out of favor and has increasingly been going by a different name, “awakening.” Perhaps you have noticed this change as well and thought, So what? Trends change, like all conditioned things. Besides, isn’t the dharma beyond words—wouldn’t it, by any other name, smell as sweet?

But according to the scholar, translator, and monk Bhikkhu Bodhi, it’s not that simple.

The rise of “awakening” was not simply an emergent phenomenon but a deliberate decision by prominent scholars and translators whose word choices have since reverberated throughout the wider culture of Buddhist practitioners, as Bhikkhu Bodhi explains in his recent paper “On Translating ‘Buddha’” (published in November 2020 in the Journal of the Oxford Centre for Buddhist Studies). He notes that scholars such as the former president of the Pali Text Society, K. R. Norman, and its current president, Rupert Gethin, as well as prominent Western dharma teachers have adopted “awakening” as a translation of the Pali word bodhi, some contending that this is a more accurate rendering. In contrast, Bhikkhu Bodhi argues that the case for “awakening” is actually inaccurate and misleading and that its widespread use has concealed from the average English speaker a crucial aspect of the Buddha’s supreme attainment.

Tricycle spoke to Bhikkhu Bodhi about his paper and how our choice regarding this one word can change how we think about the Buddha’s teachings.

Why is it important which word we use to translate the Buddha’s awakening? Well, you said his “awakening.”

Oh, sorry. His enlightenment. You see how it’s become an ingrained habit of the mind. When I began to translate Buddhist texts during my early years in Sri Lanka, I took as my models the earlier generation of Western translators of Buddhist texts into English, including the British monk Bhikkhu Ñāṇamoli, the German monks Nyanatiloka and Nyanaponika, the English-educated Sri Lankan monk Walpola Rahula, and others like Piyadassi and Nārada. They all used “enlightenment” for bodhi or sambodhi, and “the enlightened one” to refer to the Buddha. In my own translation work I have adhered to these renderings.

In recent years, I noticed that more and more Western translators were using “awakening” and “awakened one.” I was quite tolerant of translators making their personal choices between the two alternatives, but recently some of my scholar friends challenged my use of “enlightenment” and “enlightened one,” telling me this was incorrect. They maintained that the verbal root budh means “to awaken,” and therefore that I should render bodhi or sambodhi as “awakening” and buddha as “the awakened one.” So I wrote that paper because I decided I had to come to the defense of “enlightenment.”

In your paper you argue that “waking up” is only one meaning of the root budh and in fact is a secondary or derivative meaning. The verb, you say, primarily signifies “to know.” Do I have that right? Yes, that is correct. The classical Pali text on grammar, Saddanīti, assigns to this root the meanings of “knowing (or understanding),” “blossoming,” and “waking up,” in that order of importance. The Pali-Sanskrit noun buddhi, which designates the intellect or faculty of cognition, is derived from budh, yet entails no sense of “awakening.” Further, when we look at the ordinary use of verbs based on budh in the Pali suttas, we can see that these verbs mean “to know, to understand, to recognize.” My paper cites several passages where rendering the verb as “awakens” would stretch the English word beyond its ordinary limits. In those contexts, “knows,” “understands,” “recognizes,” or “realizes” would fit much better. The verbs derived from budh that do mean “awaken” are generally preceded by a prefix, but they are not used to refer to the Buddha’s attainment of bodhi.

So, you argue, the more important question to ask is whether that type of knowing is better captured by the English word “awakening” and the metaphor of waking up or “enlightenment” and the metaphor of shedding light. And you conclude that “enlightenment” is preferable. Why is that? I rest my case largely on the use of imagery in the texts. The root budh itself has no reference to light, but the imagery used to illustrate the Buddha’s attainment usually involves light, radiance, or luminosity. The texts speak of his attainment of sambodhi as the arising of light. They refer to the Buddha as a “maker of light” and “one who dispels darkness.” That kind of imagery is quite in keeping with the use of “enlightenment” as a rendering of bodhi. On the other hand, we find absolutely no similes, metaphors, or imagery in the canonical texts that illustrate the Buddha’s attainment of complete sambodhi as a waking up from sleep or the Buddha as one who has woken up from the sleep of ignorance or who wakes other people up from sleep.

As you know, the suttas abound in similes, so if “awakening” were intended by bodhi, we would expect to find texts where the Buddha says: “Just as a man might awaken from a deep sleep, so I have awakened from ignorance and attained supreme bodhi.” But we find nothing like that. Rather, we find: “Ignorance was dispelled, and knowledge arose, just as darkness is dispelled when light arises.” And again: “In regard to these four noble truths, there arose in me vision, knowledge, and light.” The Buddha, as teacher, is compared to the sun rising in the sky and lighting up the world, and to a man who brings a bright lamp into a dark room so those in the room can see forms. Thus there is no canonical basis for preferring “awakening” to “enlightenment,” and much against this choice.

“‘Awakening’ fails to convey the depth, thoroughness, and transformative impact of sambodhi, the attainment that makes a person a buddha.”

I’ve noticed a recent trend toward the language of glimpsing: the practitioner has moments of enlightenment and tries to keep that perspective in the time between such moments. Another trend has been a move away from religious imagery, such as casting divine light, toward more psychological analogies, like lucid dreaming. Do you think people tend to favor the term “awakening” over “enlightenment” right now because it sounds more accessible? We might be able to relate more easily to “awakening” than to “enlightenment” because every day we literally wake up from sleep, while “enlightenment” suggests something exalted and remote. And I confess that in introductory talks on Buddhism I sometimes use “the awakened one” for the Buddha, precisely because it is more accessible. But one of the reservations I have about “awakening” is that to my mind it fails to convey the depth, thoroughness, and transformative impact of sambodhi, the attainment that makes a person a buddha or an arhat. The word “awakening” suggests an instantaneous change in one’s level of consciousness. But in the texts the Buddha describes his attainment as a multifaceted, comprehensive understanding, an act of penetrating the nature of reality—the nature of experience—from multiple angles. It involved understanding the four noble truths from twelve angles, the five aggregates from twenty angles, the links of dependent origination from countless angles. In my view, the word “enlightenment” better conveys this vast, profound, stable, and comprehensive level of understanding.

I would say that “awakening” better describes instantaneous insights into the nature of existence, for example, into impermanence or selflessness, than the consummate achievement of buddhahood. One might also use “awakening” to represent the first of the four stages of realization, which is usually translated as “stream-entry”—that is, the first decisive breakthrough, where, just momentarily, one dispels the darkness of ignorance, sees into the truth of the dhamma, and enters the irreversible path to liberation. So even though the texts don’t use a Pali word that corresponds to “waking up from sleep” for “stream-entry,” I would say that this attainment might be described as an awakening.

However, what my paper deals with is the appropriate word to use for the Buddha’s attainment, and for arhatship, the fourth and final stage of realization. Within the canonical texts, that’s where we find the word bodhi or sambodhi [“complete” or “perfect” enlightenment].

Why shouldn’t practitioners think of this enlightenment as easily accessible? Well, the attainment of sambodhi is not at all easily accessible. It takes dedicated practice over many lifetimes to attain that final state, even to attain the liberation of an arhat, much less the all-embracing knowledge of a buddha.The Buddha’s sambodhi is indeed an exalted attainment. It marks the mind’s final liberation from all the fetters that have held it in bondage through beginningless time. It culminates in the knowledge that fully comprehends the nature of all phenomena.

Stressing the exalted nature of those attainments prevents us from overrating our experience and thinking that because I’ve achieved an initial breakthrough or insight, I’ve achieved sambodhi. The translation “enlightenment,” in my view, underscores the elevated nature of this final goal far better than “awakening.”

“If translators want to use ‘awakening’ and ‘awakened one,’ they’re certainly entitled to do so. But this supreme knowledge, this unsurpassed perfect sambodhi, I maintain, is better represented by the English word enlightenment than by awakening.”

It’s interesting how this small difference raises so many questions, and I think it plays into a lot of our tendencies and cultural biases—for instance, that the word enlightenment is so heavily associated with the European Enlightenment. That’s been one of the arguments used against applying “enlightenment” to signify the Buddha’s attainment. But I don’t find that argument compelling. The mind can grasp multiple meanings of a word without confusing them. I doubt that many readers of Buddhist texts today, who come across the word enlightenment to describe the Buddha’s attainment will think of Voltaire, John Locke, and Immanuel Kant. During the period when my interest in Buddhism first arose, I was doing a PhD with a specialization in the philosophers of the Enlightenment, and I never conflated the two meanings of the word.

I think there is also a sense that the Enlightenment thinkers were anti-religious. But most of them were deeply religious. They disagreed with the church’s dogma but did not argue against the existence of God. The view of scientific positivism—that reason doesn’t bring you closer to God but rather supplants God—was an idea that came about in the 20th century and was quickly challenged by postmodernist thinkers. Meanwhile, in the popular culture, we see the New Age movement and a psychological turn, which regard spirituality as belonging to the domain of intuition because it’s concerned with the things that reason can’t explain. But the Buddha’s understanding and reason, as you describe it in your paper, does not seem to be at odds with the type of knowledge celebrated during the European Enlightenment. Certainly, the Buddha’s attainment of sambodhi goes beyond the capacity of reason. He described it as atakkāvacara, “beyond the range of reasoning.” But the Buddha’s method of teaching, as you can see from the canonical texts, is quite in line with the methods of argument used by the Enlightenment thinkers. He appeals to reason; he sets up logical alternatives and asks the person he’s addressing to choose between them. Often, when he’s in a discussion with an antagonist, he will box that antagonist into a corner where the antagonist faces an internal contradiction. The Buddha will analyze problems and principles into a multiplicity of aspects. So in certain respects his methodology is very similar to that of the thinkers of the Enlightenment.

The Buddha, of course, recognizes a dimension of reality that transcends the range of reason and intellect, and that has to be arrived at by a world-transcending inner realization rather than by intellectual understanding. The thinkers of the Enlightenment were opposed not to religion unilaterally, but rather to the idea that the church had the authority to define what is truth and what is falsehood. Perhaps some thinkers were opposed to religion in its entirety, but others, like Locke, Leibniz, and Kant, certainly had affirmative attitudes toward religion.

Toward the end of your paper, you write that when the Buddha claimed to have attained sambodhi, his disciples heard him saying not that he had “woken up” but that he had “attained supreme liberating knowledge.” Why is it important to make this distinction? In my conclusion, I’m trying to determine what the Buddha’s disciples would have heard him saying. I raised the question: Did they hear him say, in effect, “I am an awakened one, one who has attained awakening”? If we correctly understand the use of the word bodhi and the verbs connected with it, I think there’s no evidence that that was what they heard him say.

The objective of the spiritual quest in the Indian ascetic circles of the time was to attain the supreme knowledge that brings liberation from the cycle of repeated birth and death. So when the Buddha said that he had attained sambodhi, that he was a buddha, his first disciples heard him claim that he had attained supreme knowledge, the knowledge that brings the attainment of nirvana—the goal they were all striving for. So it wasn’t that they were asleep, living in a dream world, and now he’s woken up. Rather, they were living in the darkness of ignorance, and now he had attained the supreme knowledge that has dispelled the darkness of ignorance.

If translators want to use “awakening” and “awakened one,” they’re certainly entitled to do so. But what I maintain is that it would be a mistake to assume that the Buddha intended the words bodhi and buddha to convey those meanings. Rather, I argue, he intended to say: “I am one who has known the liberating truth. I have arrived at supreme knowledge.” And this supreme knowledge, this unsurpassed perfect sambodhi, I maintain, is better represented by the English word enlightenment than by awakening.

♦

Read Ven. Bhikkhu Bodhi’s paper “On Translating ‘Buddha’” at no cost online.

The post In Defense of “Enlightenment” appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

In the final segment of Disney-Pixar’s animated film Soul, the character of jazz saxophonist Dorothea Williams (voiced by Angela Bassett) shares a lesson about goals.  When her new and slightly disillusioned star pianist Joe Gardner (voiced by Jamie Foxx) remarks that he thought he would “feel different” after finally getting his big break, she says:

I heard this story about a fish. He swims up to this older fish and says, “I’m trying to find this thing they call the ocean.”

“The ocean?” says the older fish. “That’s what you’re in right now.”

“This?” says the young fish. “This is water. What I want is the ocean.”

Joe’s confusion at his anti-climactic breakthrough follows a bewildering existential odyssey. At the start of Soul, he unexpectedly dies—right after landing a gig with the great Dorothea. As a disembodied soul, he desperately navigates the trippy dimensions of the Great Beyond, the Great Before, and returns to life on earth just in time to perform his set that evening. But after all the drama, and after all the years of dreaming and practicing and waiting, Joe doesn’t experience a euphoric sense of accomplishment. In fact, it all feels pretty normal. As if he had been swimming in the waters of the ocean the entire time.

While Soul doesn’t explicitly mention (or endorse) Buddhist ideas of rebirth or pure lands, this pivotal scene about the fish in the ocean illustrates the paradox of Buddhist awakening.

The (unenlightened) young fish is like a new practitioner who seeks an ideal peak experience and thus clings to a self-constructed fantasy of what that experience might be. The wise old fish, however, has realized that such figments exist only in one’s own mind, and that enlightenment refers to nothing other than what is right here, right now, in the very quotidian waters of our lives—for as Dorothea says, “We come back tomorrow night and do it all again.” The wise fish has let go of even the desire for spiritual accomplishment and has therefore ironically attained it.

In the next scene, Joe realizes this insight for himself as he improvises a piece inspired by the concrete particulars of the day: a spool of thread, a lollipop, a pizza crust, and a maple tree’s helicopter-seed pod. His emotional connection to the simple suchness of these things generates gratitude for all the interconnected people and places in his life. It also compels him to the ultimate act of compassion in order to help save his friend, Lost Soul No. 22 (voiced by Tina Fey), from the dry ocean expanse of negative self-talk and low self-esteem. 

The basic lessons of Buddhism are all here: pre-enlightened striving, post-enlightened realization that the path itself was the destination all along, a profound grasp of suchness, gratitude, compassion, and bodhisattva-like selflessness. For a children’s movie, these waters run pretty deep.

Don’t let the colorful animation fool you—venturing out into these deep waters is not for the faint of heart. Pixar’s latest may be different in tone and intent, but its oceanic allegory is not unlike other great fishermen’s tales such as The Old Man and the Sea. In Hemingway’s 1952 novella, Santiago dreams of capturing a prize marlin, but once he gets it, his accomplishment is utterly emptied out by a feeding frenzy of sharks. He returns to the other shore with only the skeletal traces of his great struggle, so there is nothing triumphant in his return from the deep waters. His only real ability is to help Manolin, the young apprentice-fisherman, along in his training.

Hemingway’s narrative mirrors the message that, from a post-enlightenment perspective, there is nothing particularly special about awakening, yet one must begin by intentionally setting out and setting sail for it anyway. Fishing for enlightenment ultimately means letting go of the prize, and this in turn means intimately and joyfully reengaging with the everyday as a result. As Zen master Dogen expressed it, “To study the self is to forget the self; to forget the self is to be confirmed by all dharmas.”  

This is the same paradox of “Catching a Catfish with a Gourd,” a visual koan by the famous 15th-century Japanese Zen artist Josetsu. (That’s right, it’s another story about fish.) In the lower register of this hanging scroll, a catfish swims in the waters of a meandering river while a wizened old sage stands by the riverbank holding out a gourd, which symbolizes emptiness. Like all koans, the message here at first appears hazy but gradually comes into focus: by definition, one cannot obtain any one thing (like a catfish) when realizing the absolute emptiness of everything (symbolized by the gourd). How could you hold onto the utter essence-lessness of all compounded transients? This slippery paradox does not stop 31 Zen masters from inscribing their capping verse commentaries in the upper register of the scroll, joking that the slippery fish could be caught by greasing the gourd too, or venturing that it would make a delicious meal of catfish soup and rice. This latter comment riffs on the familiar Zen maxim that cautions against reifying even the image of enlightenment itself: “When you see the buddha, kill him! When you see the patriarch, kill him!” These Zen masters are essentially suggesting, by extension, that “When you see the catfish, cook him!”   

All of this reminds me too of an old educational film called Buddhism: The Land of the Disappearing Buddha, which was part of The Long Search, a 1977 BBC documentary television series about world religions. British director Ronald Eyre’s cheesy ties and long sideburns have not aged well, but his interview with the abbot of a temple at the Daitokuji Zen temple complex in Kyoto is timeless. Rev. Kobori Nanrei says, “There is Buddha for those who do not know what he is really. There is no Buddha for those who know what he is really.” That is, Buddha exists for those who still need an ideal image to aspire to in order to get enlightened, but he doesn’t exist for those who no longer need such a mental prop. This is why in the famous Ten Ox-herding pictures of Zen, the bull initially represents the enlightened mind that the boy-novice must discipline in meditation, but eventually the buddha-bull-mind disappears entirely from view, for the boy realizes that he and the bull were always already non-distinct from the start, and that he was searching for something that was never lost to begin with. 

The ox, the marlin, the catfish, the boy—they all ultimately disappear when the adept realizes that they were helpful but now obsolete tools to awakening. Sometimes, “the one that got away” is the one that truly makes the master.

But it is the post-experiential engagement with the everyday suchness of things that I find most compelling in all these fishermen’s tales. What do you do when you’re back on land? How do you act after you’ve been in the belly of the whale? What do you do with the prajnaparamita wisdom that you’ve obtained in the sea dragon’s palace at the bottom of the sea? For me, the litmus tests of any enlightened being in any religious tradition is humor and help: the ability to laugh at oneself and the world, and to seek out new ways to help generate joy in all the improbable and miraculous permutations that make up the mundane. Giving (dana) is key, but so too is teaching. As the saying goes, if you give a man a fish, you feed him for a day. But teach a man to fish, and you feed him for a lifetime.

The post Fishing for Enlightenment  appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

The monastic community’s commitment to spiritual practice provides a model of the awakening life. For this reason, it’s natural that lay practitioners often feel reverence for them. Out of this admiration, however, can arise a misunderstanding—that only nuns and monks are capable of real progress on the path. But the Karmashataka Sutra, also known as The Hundred Deeds Sutra, paints a very different picture. It shows us that spiritual realization is not solely the province of monastics. In the stories of this sutra, monastics and lay practitioners advance toward awakening together.

Many of these narratives, called avadanas, depict ordinary people welcoming the Buddha or his disciples to their homes for the midday meal. Afterward, the most senior sangha member offers a teaching. Hearing the dharma from an ordained person provides a great spiritual inspiration for the characters in the sutra, just as it can today.

One of the stories of the Karmashataka particularly demonstrates the deep connection between the monastic and lay communities. “The Story of Purana” tells of a young person who enters monastic life but whose realization, when it happens, takes place not in the monastery but back at home. Moreover, when he does awaken, every member of the household shares the benefits.

The story opens during the Buddha’s stay in the ancient Indian city of Shravasti. It features Venerable Aniruddha, one of the Buddha’s foremost disciples. Among his many students was a householder who was very receptive to the teachings.

[Ven. Aniruddha] led the householder to remain steadfast in perfect faith, to take refuge, and to maintain the fundamental precepts. He inspired him to give gifts and to share what he had, and in no time at all his home became like an open well for those in need.

At the time, the householder and his wife were eagerly awaiting the birth of their son. The couple hoped that the child would eventually carry on the father’s work, provide care when the parents grew old, and make offerings after their death to help create the conditions for their favorable rebirth. The parents did not know that Ven. Aniruddha had clairvoyant vision: he knew that the baby had been a highly realized being in his previous life and was now taking final rebirth before attaining enlightenment.

Purana’s realization takes place not in the monastery but back at home. When he does awaken, every member of the household shares the benefits.

One day, the monk arrived at their home unattended by any other monastics. “Noble one,” the householder asked him, “why have you come here alone, without companions or attendants? Noble one, is there no one at all who could attend you?”

“Where shall we find attendants,” Ven. Aniruddha replied, “if one such as yourself does not grant them to us?” The householder resolved then and there that the child they awaited would be placed under Ven. Aniruddha’s care to be trained as a monk.

The child was born, and they named him Purana. In due time, Purana happily became Aniruddha’s attendant and achieved full ordination. At the monastery he practiced “earnestly, forgoing sleep from dusk till dawn.” But despite his efforts Purana was unable to achieve realization before he fell gravely ill and had to cut short his studies. Though he remained ordained, he returned home to be cared for by his parents.

Purana’s commitment to spiritual practice turned what could have been viewed as a cruel twist of fate into a kind of blessing. He used his illness as the basis for a spiritual breakthrough. Working with his painful disillusionment, Purana achieved true renunciation of samsara. He became an arhat, free from afflictive emotions.

Purana did not keep his understanding of the dharma to himself. He shared what he knew with his parents and the members of their household, tailoring the teaching to suit each of them perfectly. This led them to realizations of their own. What happened is described in a vivid passage that recurs throughout the Sanskrit canon—more than fifty times in the Karmashataka alone—whenever householders or others truly enter the process of awakening:

The householders and their retinue destroyed with the thunderbolt of wisdom the twenty high peaks of the mountain of views concerning the transitory collection and manifested the resultant state of stream entry right where they sat.

In other words, the force of their new understanding shattered their towering misconceptions of how life is supposed to be, and thus their son’s teaching launched them irrevocably toward awakening.

As it turned out, Purana’s teaching of the dharma was his parting gift, for the illness took his life. At his memorial service, the Karmashataka tells us, the Buddha gave “a discourse on impermanence to all the four retinues”—that is, to the monks, the nuns, and male and female lay practitioners. He did not single out a particular group among them but demonstrated equal concern for the entire community by offering a teaching appropriate to all. Together, they mourned the loss of the young monk and felt the Buddha’s words guide them along the path.

In the “Story of Purana” we see that lay support is essential to the continuation of the monastic tradition. The sangha depends on a robust community of householders for its very membership. They also depend on the generosity of lay students in the traditional forms of food, clothing, medicines, and other needs. While most of us are not likely to have the experience of offering up a child to be our dharma teacher’s personal attendant as Purana’s parents did, these material gifts may be within reach.

Of course, this support goes both ways. Householders in their pursuit of enlightenment depend on the monastic learning of their teachers. In pursuing merit, the laity also relies on the sanctity of those teachers’ vows, which makes them worthy of reverence.

In the end, the monastic and lay communities are not just mutually dependent but mutually sustaining.

This truth runs far deeper than the material level—a point that was made directly to one of the authors of this article. Kaia once remarked to their teacher, Gen Lozang Jamspal, that they appreciated his skill and value. The teacher did not hesitate to offer a correction.

With just four words, he cut to the heart of the matter.

“No student? No teacher.”

♦

This is the third installment in a four-part series on the Karmashataka (“The Hundred Deeds”) Sutra, a collection of ancient teaching stories on karma that has recently been translated from Tibetan into English. Read the first installation here and the second installation here.

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