When we talk about death happening every moment, we also might have a natural question: “If I’m continuously being born and dying, then who is it that goes through all these experiences?” Once this body is dead, who has the chance to merge with the mother luminosity? If that chance is missed, who goes on to the next bardo, known as “the bardo of dharmata”? When it comes to reincarnation, who gets reborn? A similar question would be “What is it that continues from lifetime to lifetime?” Or “What goes through the bardos?”

The standard answer to all these questions is “consciousness,” or namshe in Tibetan. The word “consciousness” could mean different things to different people, but the Tibetan language is extremely precise when it comes to describing the mind. Namshe implies that this consciousness is dualistic. For instance, if Rosa sees a mountain, Rosa is here and the mountain is there: they are two separate things. Whatever Rosa sees, hears, smells, tastes, or feels seems like an object separate from Rosa.

This is how things appear to all of us, right? There’s a sense of a division between me and everything else. The experiences keep changing, but I always seem to remain the same. There’s something about me that feels like it never changes. But when I look for this unchanging me, I find that I can’t pin anything down.

I was born on July 14, 1936. My name at that time was Deirdre Blomfield-Brown. I can definitely acknowledge there’s a connection between that infant Deirdre and today’s Pema. I have memories of my childhood. The mother and father I had then are still my mother and father to me, even though they’re long gone. A scientist would say that the baby and I have the same DNA. And of course we have the same birthday. But the interesting question remains: Are the newborn baby and the elderly woman I am today actually the same person?

I still have pictures of myself as an infant and a toddler. If I try hard, I can pick out some ways that child looks similar to what I see today in the mirror. But I also know intellectually that not a single cell of my body has stayed the same. Even at present, every cell and every atom of my body is continuously changing.

I’ve tried long and hard to find a real me that stays the same from year to year—or even from moment to moment—but I’ve never had any success. (This is a worthwhile exercise, which I highly recommend to anyone interested in the mysteries of life and death.) So where does this leave us in terms of the bardos?

As I said, the standard answer for what continues across lifetimes is namshe, dualistic consciousness. This is not so easy to understand. A while ago, I called my friend Ken McLeod, a highly learned Buddhist practitioner who’s written some of my favorite books, and I asked him about it. Like other students of the Dharma, he said that namshe is what goes through the bardos. But he made the point that this consciousness isn’t some stable entity that flows through everything. It’s constantly dissolving and reforming. Every moment, we experience something new: the smell of toast, a change of light, a thought about a friend. And every moment we have a sense of a self having that experience—a sense of “I, the smeller of toast.” When this moment passes, it’s immediately followed by another moment with a subject and an object. This flow of dualistic experience continues uninterruptedly through our waking hours and our dreams, through this life and across lifetimes.

But beyond this flow of moments, is there anything underlying them all that we could point to as “consciousness”? We can’t locate or describe any stable element that lives through all our experiences. So from this point of view, Ken said that another answer to “What goes through the bardos?” is “Nothing.” There are just individual moments, happening one after another. What we think of as “consciousness” is fluid, more like a verb than a noun.

Life and death, beginnings and endings, gains and losses are like dreams or magical illusions.

When Ken and I had this conversation, it gave me a better feeling for how I keep clinging to this self as something permanent, when it’s actually much more dynamic than that. It’s not some fixed, frozen thing. We can have this view of ourselves as frozen—and we can have frozen opinions of others as well—but that’s just based on a misunderstanding.

Why do we have this misunderstanding? Who can say? It’s just how we’ve always seen things. The Buddhist term for it is “co-emergent ignorance,” or, as Anam Thubten calls it, “co-emergent unawareness.” We all come into our life with this unawareness. And what are we unaware of? We are unaware that we are not a solid, permanent entity and that we are not separate from what we perceive. This is the big misunderstanding, the illusion of separateness.

Here is how I’ve heard teachers talk about the origin of our unawareness. First, there is open space, fluid and dynamic. There is no sense of duality, no sense of “me” separate from everything else. Then, from that ground, everything becomes manifest. If properly understood, the open space and the manifestation are not two separate things. They are like the sun and its rays. This means that everything we’re experiencing right now is a display of our own mind. Recognizing this union is called “co-emergent wisdom” or “co-emergent awareness.” Remaining caught in the illusion of separateness and solidity is co-emergent unawareness.

And this, of course, is where you and I find ourselves. It’s obvious that co-emergent unawareness is our usual experience. But in reality, no one and no thing in our world is fixed and static. Consciousness is a process that constantly dissolves and reforms, both now and in the bardo. And every time it reforms, it’s completely fresh and new—which means that we have an endless stream of opportunities to have a completely fresh, open take. We always have another chance to see the world anew, a chance to reconnect with basic openness, a chance to realize we’ve never been separate from that basic spaciousness—a chance to realize it’s all just been a big misunderstanding.

If you spend enough time pondering this, you might understand it with your rational mind. But then you may still ask yourself, “Why do I experience myself as separate? Why don’t I experience each moment as fresh? Why do I feel so stuck?” The reason you feel this way is that you—like everyone else—have been under the sway of co-emergent unawareness for a very, very long time. Therefore, it takes a very, very long time to dismantle.

Our misunderstanding of separateness goes deep. Even animals have an innate sense of being a separate entity. But unlike animals, we have the ability to contemplate. We can use our fairly sophisticated brains to realize that our misunderstanding is indeed a misunderstanding—that moment by moment, we have a chance, even if briefly, to merge with that basic ground again.

Even if we’re convinced of this, however, we can’t drop our familiar sense of separateness just by willing it to go away. But what we can do is start to meditate. In one session on our meditation cushion, we can see for ourselves how fluid our consciousness is. We can observe how our thoughts and emotions and perceptions appear and disappear, and how this process just goes on and on without a break.

We can also see how mysterious our thoughts are. Where do all those thoughts come from? And where do they go? And why do we get so serious about what goes on in our mind? Even though our thoughts are as elusive as mist, how can they cause us endless unnecessary problems? How can they make us worry, get jealous, quarrel with others, get euphoric and depressed?

Meditation gives us a way to see the slipperiness of our mind and of our notion of “me.” When we practice meditation, we gradually accustom ourselves to how experiences constantly flow. We see that this happens even though we can’t pinpoint any subject who experiences them.

From this point of view, there is no fixed being who goes through the bardos. Another way of saying this is there’s no continuous individual who experiences life and death. No one lives and no one dies. Life and death, beginnings and endings, gains and losses are like dreams or magical illusions.

♦

From How We Live Is How We Die by Pema Chödrön © 2022 by the Pema Chödrön Foundation. Reprinted in arrangement with Shambhala Publications, Inc.

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It might have been a different story had there been more than two of them. In the case of an actual infestation, I can’t say I wouldn’t have pulled out one of those fly traps that unspool into a sticky ribbon of death. But I decided I couldn’t get rid of these two even if I tried. They must have come in on a grocery bag from the outdoor market. Or on the back of my shirt. In the five years I have been living on the eleventh floor, I have never had any fruit flies. These two were relentless. I tried opening the apartment door to the hallway, but they flew into the kitchen. After several frustrating hours, I realized they were definitely here to stay. The only question was for how long. I googled the life span of a fruit fly. It was two to three weeks. 

Week 1

Their favorite place to land seemed to be the top of my head, right on my bald spot. They also liked to hang out on both of my arms. I assumed that they were getting some kind of nourishment. From sweat?

When I sat meditating, I had to put my meditation shawl over my head, because the constant coming and going of the two flies began to compete with the thoughts I was already trying to tame. They also liked to explore my face. It was impossible not to instinctively swat at them. They were sentient beings. I didn’t want to kill them, I just wanted them to go away.

If I got out of my chair, they followed me. If I stood cooking dinner, they got excited and dive-bombed me. When I came home, I would spot them immediately because they would just be hanging out on the armrest of my recliner. As soon as I sat down, they’d go walking up and down my arms, and fly up to my head. Every once in a while they did zoomies and went hell-bent for leather in every room. I knew they were tiny little flies, but they were beginning to seem ominous.

During the week, my irritation morphed into all-out rage. One afternoon, right after repeatedly snapping a dish towel at them, I sat down and had a hard talk with myself, while all the while they kept spinning around my head. (By the way, they were never alone and always traveled as a pair.) I told myself to get a grip, and then remembered something I had heard from a therapist on talk radio. He was an anger management coach, and I could recall him yelling at that very moment, “Don’t get furious, get curious!” These five words had the effect of a whole dharma talk.

So, I wondered what they ate. Unsurprisingly, it was rotten fruit. I didn’t have any around the house, nor did I want to conjure up any. They seemed to be getting nourishment from somewhere, and were certainly sparky enough for me to feel they were getting what they needed in the apartment. I continued being curious. I discovered that fruit flies were coveted by geneticists for research because of their short lives, which could create hundreds of generations to track in a short time. When I told this to a friend, they laughingly accused me of becoming a fruit fly apologist.

Week 2

I began to find ways to tolerate them. When I cooked, I covered all the ingredients before they landed on them. I did the same with a simple glass of water. Bedtime required a strategy. I would turn out all the lights in the apartment, except for the bathroom, reasoning that the one light would appeal to them. I would then make a dash for the bedroom and slam the door behind me. This didn’t always work. 

I had no idea, and still don’t know, if fruit flies sleep. What I do know is that I awoke one morning to find them both perched on my pillow, completely still. Were they just waiting for me to start the day? In my drowsiness I found myself in a Looney Toons cartoon, actually imagining that they were both having a conversation with me in teeny screechy voices that I couldn’t decipher.  At that point, I believed we were becoming friends. 

Week 3

I came across Pema Chödrön’s book, Welcoming the Unwelcome. It couldn’t have come at a better time. The book spoke to me; it was the very dilemma I found myself in. What synchronicity! Reflecting on one chapter titled “Welcoming the Unwelcome with Laughter,” I realized that I had been chuckling to myself more often than not about the whole dilemma these days. 

Of course,  this would soon stop in the face of a new anxiety: Fruit flies lay hundreds of eggs at once, a Google search told me. Was I unintentionally promoting a real infestation? Was I going to have to pull out those sticky strips after all? I wondered if they were a breeding couple. As it turns out, one needs a microscope to be able to identify their sex. I essentially wished upon a star that they were either both females, or both males. 

Toward the end of this week, I began to see that both of them were getting darker and smaller. They had gone from their original brown to jet black. And they did seem to be less active. They were indolent. When I’d swoosh them away with my hand, they sometimes didn’t even move out of the way. And then one morning, one of them disappeared. Two days later, the other was gone. They were so small by then, I could never have found their bodies, but clearly they had lived out their life span, right on the dot of three weeks. 

I’ve thought about how they gave me the opportunity to be virtuous, not because I didn’t (or couldn’t) kill them, but because I had found a way to live with them through those three weeks.  I had gone from an entitled human to one who, in spite of himself, was forced to take on the challenge of “welcoming the unwelcome.” At least in some, admittedly, clumsy way. 

I felt sad. I had followed them, in a near blink of an eye, through their entire lives. I was reminded that any sentient being’s life and death is something sacred and cherishable. I know, now, from Pema Chödrön, that there are innumerable paths and ways to experience bodhicitta. I’d gone from nearly blind rage to a tenderness toward “my” two flies. And in that very moment,  in the tiniest of ways, I felt my heart grow larger.

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Pema Chödrön, one of the first Americans to be fully ordained as a Tibetan Buddhist nun, celebrates her 87th birthday today. 

Born Deirdre Blomfield-Brown in 1936 in New York City, Ani Pema—ani is an honorific given to Tibetan Buddhist nuns—was drawn to the Buddhist path in the early 1970s. In 1972, she became a student of the late Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche, and two years later she received the nun’s novice ordination from His Holiness Gyalwa Karmapa. At the request of the Karmapa, she received full bhikshuni ordination in a Chan Buddhist lineage in 1981. 

As a global spiritual leader and best-selling author, Ani Pema is revered for her accessible teachings on compassion and facing fear, pain, and uncertainty. In honor of her birthday, here is a selection of her timeless wisdom from Tricycle’s archives. 

***

Advice on Knowing How to Fail 

“Sometimes you experience failed expectations as heartbreak and disappointment, and sometimes you feel rage. But at that time, instead of doing the habitual thing of labeling yourself a ‘failure’ or a ‘loser’ or thinking there is something wrong with you, you could get curious about what is going on… If there is a lot of ‘I am bad. I am terrible,’ simply notice that and soften up a bit. Instead say, ‘What am I feeling here? Maybe what is happening is not that I am failure—maybe I am just hurting.’”

How to Develop Genuine Compassion

“When taking care of ourselves is all about me, it never gets at the unshakable tenderness and confidence that we’ll need when everything falls apart. When we start to develop maitri for ourselves—unconditional acceptance of ourselves—then we’re really taking care of ourselves in a way that pays off. We feel more at home with our own bodies and minds and more at home in the world. As our kindness for ourselves grows, so does our kindness for other people.”

How to Live Beautifully with Uncertainty

“Anxiety makes us feel vulnerable, which we generally don’t like. Vulnerability comes in many guises. We may feel off balance, as if we don’t know what’s going on, don’t have a handle on things. We may feel lonely or depressed or angry. Most of us want to avoid emotions that make us feel vulnerable, so we’ll do almost anything to get away from them. But if instead of thinking of these feelings as bad, we could think of them as road signs or barometers that tell us we’re in touch with groundlessness, then we would see the feelings for what they really are: the gateway to liberation, an open doorway to freedom from suffering, the path to our deepest well-being and joy. We have a choice.”

Allowing Emotions to Move Through You

“Our emotions have a lot of mental conversation—and, in my experience, it is often hard to discern between what is the thought and what is the emotion. In any given sitting period, in any given half hour of our lives, there are a lot of things that come and go. But we don’t need to try so hard to sort it all out. We don’t have to attach so much meaning to what arises, and we also don’t have to identify with our emotions so strongly. All we need to do is allow ourselves to experience the energy—and in time it will move through you. It will. But we need to experience the emotion—not think about the emotion. It’s the same thing that I’ve been talking about with the breath: experiencing the breath going in and out, trying to find a way to breathe in and out without thinking about the breath or conceptualizing the breath or watching the breath.” 

The First Step in Pulling Ourselves Out of Despair

“The reason we often start to go downhill with losing heart is that we allow ourselves to get hooked by our emotions. When we get hooked—when we get really angry, resentful, fearful, or selfish—we start to go a little unconscious. We lose our payu—our awareness of what we’re doing with our body, speech, and mind. In this state, it’s all too easy to let ourselves spiral downward. The first step in pulling yourself up is to notice and acknowledge when you’re going unconscious. Without doing that, nothing can get better for you. How could you change anything if you’re not aware of what’s going on?”

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When we start to meditate or to work with any kind of spiritual discipline, we often think that somehow we’re going to improve, which is a subtle aggression against who we really are. It’s a bit like saying, “If I jog, I’ll be a much better person.” “If I had a nicer house, I’d be a better person.” “If I could meditate and calm down, I’d be a better person.” Or the scenario may be that we find fault with others. We might say, “If it weren’t for my husband, I’d have a perfect marriage.” “If it weren’t for the fact that my boss and I can’t get on, my job would be just great.” And, “If it weren’t for my mind, my meditation would be excellent.”

But lovingkindness—maitri (Pali, metta)—toward ourselves doesn’t mean getting rid of anything. Maitri means that we can still be crazy, we can still be angry. We can still be timid or jealous or full of feelings of unworthiness. Meditation practice isn’t about trying to throw ourselves away and become something better. It’s about befriending who we are already. The ground of practice is you or me or whoever we are right now, just as we are. That’s what we come to know with tremendous curiosity and interest.

Curiosity involves being gentle, precise, and open—actually being able to let go and open. Gentleness is a sense of good-heartedness toward ourselves. Precision is being able to see clearly, not being afraid to see what’s really there. Openness is being able to let go and to open. When you come to have this kind of honesty, gentleness, and good-heartedness, combined with clarity about yourself, there’s no obstacle to feeling lovingkindness for others as well.

Why Meditate?

As a species, we should never underestimate our low tolerance for discomfort. To be encouraged to stay with our vulnerability is news that we can use. Sitting meditation is our support for learning how to do this. Sitting meditation, also known as mindfulness-awareness practice, is the foundation of bodhicitta training. [Bodhicitta is the wish to attain enlightenment and to bring all beings to the same awakened state]. It is the home ground of the warrior bodhisattva.

Sitting meditation gives us a way to move closer to our thoughts and emotions and to get in touch with our bodies. It is a method of cultivating unconditional friendliness toward ourselves and for parting the curtain of indifference that distances us from the suffering of others. It is our vehicle for learning to be a truly loving person.

Gradually, through meditation, we begin to notice that there are gaps in our internal dialogue. In the midst of continually talking to ourselves, we experience a pause, as if awakening from a dream. We recognize our capacity to relax with the clarity, the space, the open-ended awareness that already exists in our minds. We experience moments of being right here that feel simple, direct, and uncluttered.

This coming back to the immediacy of our experience is training in unconditional, or absolute, bodhicitta. By simply staying here, we relax more and more into the open dimension of our being. It feels like stepping out of a fantasy and discovering simple truth.

The Six Points of Posture:

Sitting meditation begins with good posture. Awareness of the six points of posture is a way to be really relaxed and settled in our body. Here are the instructions:

• Seat: Whether you’re sitting on a cushion on the floor or in a chair, the seat should be flat, not tilting to the right or left, or to the back or front.

• Legs: The legs are crossed comfortably in front of you—or, if you’re sitting in a chair, the feet are flat on the floor, with the knees a few inches apart.

• Torso: The torso (from the head to the seat) is upright, with a strong back and an open front. If sitting in a chair, it’s best not to lean back. If you start to slouch, simply sit upright again.

• Hands: The hands are open, with palms down, resting on the thighs.

• Eyes: The eyes are open, indicating the attitude of remaining awake and relaxed with all that occurs. The eye gaze is slightly downward and directed about 4 to 6 feet in front of you.

• Mouth: The mouth is very slightly open so that the jaw is relaxed and air can move easily through both the mouth and nose. The tip of the tongue can be placed on the roof of the mouth.

Each time you sit down to meditate, check your posture by running through these six points. Anytime you feel distracted, bring your attention back to your body and these six points of posture.

⧫

From Comfortable with Uncertainty © 2002 by Pema Chödrön and Emily Hilburn Sell. Reprinted in arrangement with Shambhala Publications, Inc. Boulder, CO. www.shambhala.com

This article was originally published on March 21, 2018

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Not knowing how to act during a difficult moment can be frustrating—but there’s a way to get better at it. The following excerpt is from Pema Chödrön’s The Compassion Book: Teachings for Awakening the Heart, which features the 59 Tibetan Buddhist lojong, or “mind-training,” slogans, as well as concise commentaries to guide you toward a compassionate way of living.

Pema Chödrön advises picking a slogan at random each morning and then applying its message to experiences that arise as you go about your day. Over time, this practice will equip you with quick, skillful pointers for how to act (and react) in any given situation.

Related: Making Friends with Oneself 

Here are eight to get you started:

In postmeditation, be a child of illusion
When you finish sitting meditation, if things become heavy and solid, be fully present and realize that everything is actually pliable, open, and workable. This is instruction for meditation in action, realizing that you don’t have to feel claustrophobic because there is always lots of room, lots of space.

Whatever you meet unexpectedly, join with meditation
The unexpected will stop your mind. Rest in that space. When thoughts start again, do tonglen [a meditation on compassion], breathing in whatever pain you may feel, thinking that others also feel like this, and gradually becoming more and more willing to feel this pain with the wish that others won’t have to suffer. If it is a “good” shock, send out any joy you may feel, wishing for others to feel it also. Meeting the unexpected is also an opportunity to practice patience and nonaggression.

Related: Tonglen on the Spot 

All dharma agrees at one point
The entire Buddhist teachings (dharma) are about lessening one’s self-absorption, one’s ego-clinging. This is what brings happiness to you and all beings.

Always maintain only a joyful mind
Constantly apply cheerfulness, if for no other reason than because you are on this spiritual path. Have a sense of gratitude to everything, even difficult emotions, because of their potential to wake you up.

Don’t talk about injured limbs
Don’t try to build yourself up by talking about other people’s defects.

Work with the greatest defilements first
Gain insight into your greatest obstacles—pride, aggression, self-denigration, and so forth—and work with those first. Do this with clarity and compassion.

Don’t transfer the ox’s load to the cow
Don’t transfer your load to someone else. Take responsibility for what is yours.

♦

From The Compassion Book: Teachings for Awakening the Heart by Pema Chödrön © 2006. Reprinted with permission from Shambhala Publications. www.shambhala.com

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The American Buddhist nun and bestselling author Pema Chödrön has stepped down as an acharya (senior teacher) at Shambhala International in response to the group’s handling of the allegations of sexual abuse against Shambhala lineage holder Sakyong Mipham Rinpoche. Pema Chödrön, who had remained a part of the organization after the Sakyong stepped away from teaching and administrative duties, decided to resign after the Sakyong announced that he would resume teaching and a transitional board of directors invited him to lead an upcoming event in France. 

In her letter to the board, released publicly on January 14, 2020, Pema Chödrön wrote, “I have decided to step down as an acharya.  As you know, I haven’t actually served as an acharya for a long time, and I have been considering retiring for a few years.  And now, the time has come.”

She said she was “disheartened” at the Sakyong’s decision to start teaching again:

I experienced this news as such a disconnect from all that’s occurred in the last year and half. It feels unkind, unskillful, and unwise for the Sakyong to just go forward as if nothing had happened without relating compassionately to all of those who have been hurt and without doing some deep inner work on himself.

Then came the letter from the Board informing the Shambhala community that they have invited the Sakyong to give the Rigden Abhisheka [an initiation ceremony] in June, and I was dumbfounded. The seemingly very clear message that we are returning to business as usual distresses me deeply. How can we return to business as usual when there is no path forward for the vast majority of the community who are devoted to the vision of Shambhala and are yearning for accountability, a fresh start, and some guidance on how to proceed?  I find it discouraging that the bravery of those who had the courage to speak out does not seem to be affecting more significant change in the path forward.

On June 28, 2018, the advocacy group Buddhist Project Sunshine released the second in a series of reports detailing sexual abuse and misconduct by Shambhala teachers and staff, including senior leaders and the Sakyong. On July 6, 2018, the Sakyong announced his decision to step away from teaching and administrative duties, and the Shambhala board of directors resigned, putting in place the interim board. The new board hired the law firm Wickwire Holmes to investigate the claims and on February 3, 2019 released to the Shambhala community the full report, which confirmed some of the allegations against him. 

Recently, a group of 125 students in Europe asked the Sakyong to continue teaching, and he and the board said they agreed to the request.

Ani Pema said in her letter, “I understand that the Board’s decision to invite the Sakyong was based on the compassionate intention to benefit the 125 people who wish to take the abhisheka in order to continue on their path. But for me, personally, to have the very first indication of how we are going to manifest be that we are returning to business as usual is shocking and also heartbreaking.

“Hopefully, it’s not too late to reverse this trend.”

Pema Chödrön, born Deirdre Blomfield-Brown, became one of the first Westerners to ordain as a Buddhist nun in 1981 under Shambhala founder and the Sakyong’s father, Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche. In 1984, she established Gampo Abbey, one of the first Tibetan Buddhist monasteries in North America, in Cape Breton, Nova Scotia. Since then, she has become perhaps Shambhala’s most high-profile teacher, writing several bestselling books, including When Things Fall Apart: Heart Advice for Difficult Times (Shambhala Publications, 1996), and recently appearing in an hour-long interview with Oprah Winfrey, where she spoke about the issues at Shambhala. 

As Pema Chödrön sent her letter, senior teacher David Schneider also announced that he was stepping away from his acharya role. He wrote in a public statement: “I did not myself see the things initially alleged against the Sakyong; but I did observe, and I was part of, an unhealthy, selectively hierarchical system of privilege and power, one that led to many people getting hurt, women mostly. I personally tried never to cause harm, but I am sure that through the years, I have done so. This will have come from my stupidity, greed, and concupiscence. These qualities, and actions arising from them, are a source of personal shame and of karmic consequence. I can only hope to find forgiveness.”

Pema Chödrön closed her letter by thanking the other acharyas for “the admirable work they have done to stabilize the community’s finances and to establish a new and more efficient code of conduct,” adding, “Nevertheless, I do not feel that I can continue any longer as a representative and senior teacher of Shambhala given the unwise direction in which I feel we are going.”

Update: Ani Pema Chödrön would like to clarify that in her letter to the Shambhala International board of directors, her reference to “retiring” was meant to refer to her role as an acharya in the Shambhala community. She is not retiring from teaching.

The post Pema Chödrön Steps Down as Senior Teacher at Shambhala appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

Nothing is permanent, everything is precious. Here’s a selection of some happenings—fleeting and otherwise—in the Buddhist world this week. 

Pema Chödrön Talks to Oprah About Shambhala Sex Scandal

Buddhist nun Pema Chödrön appeared on Oprah Winfrey’s “SuperSoul Sunday” show this week, and toward the end of their wide-ranging conversation, the topic turned to the allegations of sexual abuse by Shambhala International’s leader Sakyong Mipham Rinpoche and other teachers. In the video, she said, “The situation is just horrendous,” calling it a “rug-pulling out experience” and saying that for many students “they’re life is just blown up in the air and that can’t imagine how they’ll go forward with their spiritual practice.” Chödrön seemed to distance herself from Shambhala, saying that while she is still “officially” a senior teacher at Shambhala, she said that she spends her time “more outside Shambhala than inside.” She also spoke to an incident when she dismissed a woman’s claim of sexual abuse and recounted a phone call they had years later when Chödrön called to apologize. “I was very grateful that she accepted my apology,” she told Oprah. 

Watch the full video:

Buddhist Stupa Collapses After Heavy Rainfall 

Nothing is permanent, not even stupas. After enduring torrential rains, the mahastupa (great stupa) at the Thotlakonda Buddhist Complex in Andhra Pradesh, India, collapsed on Wednesday morning, according to the Times of India. Against the wishes of the Indian National Trust for Art and Cultural Heritage (INTACH) and heritage activists, in 2016 the Indian state archaeology department reconstructed the stupa using modern building materials and rocks on the excavated base of the original structure. Photographs show the crumbling red bricks of more than half the stupa’s rounded edifice. Intach convener Mayank Kumari Deo decried the incident, blaming the government for not taking architectural factors into consideration before moving forward with the renovations. “Thotlakonda stupa collapsed within three years of its construction. We had vehemently protested against reconstruction of the stupa, but the department of tourism took no heed of the protest,” he said. The government also built an interpretation center, which Kumari Deo said has not been used and is already falling apart. “A huge amount of government money has been wasted,” he said. The assistant director of the state archaeology department Venkat Rao didn’t deny that the reconstruction may have contributed to the stupa’s collapse, but he suggested that the primary cause was heavy rain plus the weight of the stupa’s harmika—a fence-like enclosure on top of the stupa, which symbolizes heaven. Stupas played a significant role in early Buddhism, thanks to the efforts of the 3rd-century emperor Ashoka, who solidified Buddhism’s power in the Indian subcontinent by building stupas, which became important sites of pilgrimage. 

Dalai Lama Meets with Engaged Buddhists and Youth Peace Leaders

His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama met with members of the International Network of Engaged Buddhists (INEB) in Dharamsala, India, on Monday, according to a press release posted to his website. Headed by Thai activist Sulak Sivaraksa and based in Bangkok, INEB connects engaged Buddhists around the world working on issues like human rights and environmental devastation. The meeting’s attendees included 35 people from Thailand, 41 from India, 37 from Burma, as well as INEB members from the USA, Japan, South Korea, Bangladesh, Indonesia, Sri Lanka, Nepal, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Switzerland, Hungary, and Sweden. The Dalai Lama stressed a message of unity between religious traditions, pointing out the ideological gaps that exist within the Buddhist tradition. “The Pali tradition included 18 schools of thought, while within the Sanskrit tradition there were four. Different points of view appeal to people of different dispositions, but what is most important to remember is that all religious traditions stress the importance of cultivating loving-kindness,” he said. Two days later, the Dalai Lama met with youth leaders from the United States Institute of Peace (USIP), students who come from conflict-affected countries like Afghanistan, Colombia, Iraq, Libya, Myanmar, Nigeria, Somalia, South Sudan, Syria, Tunisia, and Venezuela. He offered advice about cultivating unity amidst difference: “To emphasise nationality, religion, and colour just creates division. We have to look at things on a deeper level and remember that we are all the same as human beings, physically, mentally and emotionally the same.”

Last month, the Dalai Lama applauded the activism of the youth-led climate strike, tweeting, “It’s quite right that students and today’s younger generation should have serious concerns about the climate crisis and its effect on the environment. They are being very realistic about the future. They see we need to listen to scientists. We should encourage them.”

Huang Yong Ping, Artist Influenced by Chan Buddhism, Dies 

Huang Yong Ping, the artist who provocatively combined techniques stemming from Chinese art and international avant-garde movements, died on Saturday, October 19, at the age of 65. According to ARTnews, Huang, who was born in China but spent much of his life in France, had an interest in mixing the ideas behind the Chan Buddhism and the surrealist tenets of Dadaism. One of his most famous works in The History of Chinese Painting and the History of Modern Western Art Washed in the Washing Machine for Two Minutes (1987), which involved putting copies of Wang Bomin’s book History of Chinese Painting and Herbert Read’s A Concise History of Modern Painting (the first book about modern art history translated into Chinese) into a laundry cycle, then placing the pulped remains on top of a piece of glass perched upon a tea box. The work demonstrated Huang’s penchant for drawing attention to the collision between Western values and non-Western ones in a rapidly modernizing China. 

In a 2014 interview with Post, a website affiliated with the Museum of Modern Art, Huang said: “I applied Chan Buddhism because I believed that the juxtaposition of Chan Buddhism and Dadaism would create new meanings, especially since I placed an Eastern element with a Western one—a term from intellectual history with one from art history. . . This set a foundation for my future artwork, especially in the way I moved from this history to that history; these ideas are all relevant.” 

While Buddhism may have played a key role in Huang’s creative approach, he might have missed the memo about Buddhist ahimsa, or non-harming. In one of the more controversial episodes from his life, Huang exhibited a work that involved live insects, snakes, and lizards encased in a see-through, tortoise shell-shaped container. In Theater of the World (1993), the animals were meant to prey upon each other in a samsaric display. The use of living things reflected Huang’s interest in “comparing humans to beings lower on the food chain,” and was meant to “create a microcosm that paralleled the state of modern affairs.” But animal rights activists protested the work, causing the Guggeheim to exhibit Theater without the animals. Void of the suffering critters, the work was just an empty shell—samsara without the suffering beings. Huang was traveling by plane when the piece was altered, and responded by writing an essay on an air sickness bag that was later exhibited at the Guggenheim: ““[T]his work has repeatedly encountered ‘premature death’ without ever having a chance to ‘live.’ An empty cage is not, by itself, reality. Reality is chaos inside calmness, violence under peace, and vice versa.”

Related: The Buddhist Alternative to Killing Bugs

Ohio Congressman and Mindfulness Enthusiast Tim Ryan Drops Out of Presidential Race 

Representative Tim Ryan (D-Ohio) ended his campaign for the 2020 presidential election on Thursday, according to NBC. Announcing his decision in a video to supporters, the Ohio Democrat affirmed that he would run again for his House seat, but was not ready to endorse any of the other candidates running for president. A longtime fan of contemplative practice, in 2012 Ryan published A Mindful Nation: How a Simple Practice Can Help Us Reduce Stress, Improve Performance, and Recapture the American Spirit. With a forward by Jon Kabat-Zinn, the book is probably one of the first mindful panegyrics that is also patriotic. 

The post Buddha Buzz Weekly: Pema Chödrön Talks to Oprah About Shambhala appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

The Inner Work of Racial Justice: Healing Ourselves and Transforming Our Communities Through Mindfulness by Rhonda V. Magee. TarcherPerigee, September 2019, $27, 368 pp., hardcover

Much has been written on the lack of diversity in Buddhist circles. This book by law professor and mindfulness teacher Rhonda Magee is a nuanced look at the complexities of race, white supremacy, and bias in American society, and offers mindfulness practices to explore our biases and beliefs. Through personal stories Magee shows that race is not only a spectrum of experiences but also something that is done rather than something that is. The work to heal ourselves, and in turn society, must be an ongoing practice. (See p. 40.)

Sculpting the Buddha Within: The Life and Thought of Shinjo Ito by Shuri Kido. Wisdom Publications, September 2019, $19.95, 288 pp., paper

This is the first definitive biography of Shinjo Ito (1906-1989), the Japanese founder of the Shinnyo-en Buddhist community. Shinjo already had an established career as an aeronautical engineer and a family when he ordained as a Shingon monk in his thirties, later rising to the rank of acharya (master). Despite personal hardship and the backdrop of World War II, Shinjo’s growing sangha—today with more than a million members worldwide—centered itself on the Nirvana Sutra’s teaching that we all have a chance at liberation by cultivating our buddhanature.

Welcoming the Unwelcome: Wholehearted Living in a Brokenhearted World by Pema Chödrön. Shambhala Publications, October 2019, $22.95, 192 pp., hardcover

In her first book in six years, Buddhist nun Pema Chödrön reminds us that the act of turning toward our suffering is the first necessary step for

committing to the path of bodhicitta—the desire to awaken for our own sake and all beings. The book includes timely chapters on polarization and not losing heart despite chronic societal challenges, while clear instructions for sitting meditation and tonglen (“sending and receiving”) provide practical steps to get started on, or recommit to, the path to awakening. (See p. 36.)

SCHOLAR’S CORNER

Buddhism and Whiteness: Critical Reflections edited by George Yancy and Emily McRae. Lexington Books, May 2019, $115, 380 pp., hardcover

With essays from more than 15 thinkers, including Tricycle contributing editor Charles Johnson, this book offers new scholarly ideas on Buddhism’s equal access to liberation in the context of the persistent racism experienced in America and beyond. The editors write in the introduction that “racism or white supremacy is like the water in which we all swim”—though only some of us notice that we’re submerged. Contributors from across traditions, who also draw on feminist and cultural studies in addition to race theory, ask whether we can use Buddhist philosophy to put an end to racism and white supremacy just as we apply teachings to cut through our sense of “self.”

WHAT WE’RE REREADING

The Annihilation of Caste

With economic inequality on the rise and systems of inherited advantage and disadvantage dominating global discussions, there is much to learn from Indian statesman and social reformer Dr. B. R. Ambedkar’s landmark 1936 book, The Annihilation of Caste.

Ambedkar, who would later draft India’s constitution, was born a Mahar, one of the “untouchable” castes that grouped together make up the Dalits and constitute 17 percent of India’s population. As a boy, he had to sit on a burlap sack at the back of his class and was beaten if he accidentally touched a higher-caste classmate. Dalits faced widespread oppression and violence while awaiting perhaps their only chance to escape—a higher rebirth (or in Ambedkar’s family’s case, a job with the only “equal opportunity” employer, the Indian government).

Writing that “political tyranny is nothing compared to social tyranny,” Ambedkar argued that political reforms would fail without a strong foundation of social reform. Time has proven him right; although caste discrimination was legally banned in 1950, the practice continues today.

After decades of demonstrations calling for equal access to clean water and Hindu temples, representation in the courts, and other rights afforded higher-caste Indians, Ambedkar decided to convert to Buddhism to escape the discriminatory system. In 1956, he and nearly 500,000 Dalits from around India took refuge in the three jewels, starting a movement that continues today with the number of converts now in the millions.

In a new era of political turbulence, The Annihilation of Caste reminds us of social reform’s integral role in opposing inequality.

—Eliza Rockefeller, Special Projects Editor

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If there is one skill that is not stressed very much, but is really needed, it is knowing how to fail. There is a Samuel Beckett quote that goes “Try again. Fail again. Fail better.” That quote is what will help you more than anything else in the next year, the next ten years, the next twenty years, for as long as you live, until you drop dead.

There is a lot of emphasis on succeeding. We all want to succeed, especially if we consider success to be things working out the way we want them to. Failing is what we don’t usually get a lot of preparation for.

So how to fail?

We usually think of failure as something that happens to us from the outside: We can’t get in a good relationship or we are in a relationship that ends painfully; we can’t get a job or we are fired from the job we have; or any number of ways in which things are not how we want them to be.

There are usually two ways that we deal with that. The first is that we blame it on some other—our boss, our partner, whoever. The second is that we feel really bad about ourselves and label ourselves a failure.

This is what we need a lot of help with: this feeling that there is something fundamentally wrong with us, that we are the failure because of the relationship or the job or whatever it is that didn’t work out—botched opportunities, doing something that flops, heartbreak of all kinds.

One of the ways to help yourself is to begin to question what is really happening when there is a failure.

Related: Being Natural 

Someone gave me a quote from Ulysses where James Joyce writes about how failure can lead to discovery. He actually doesn’t use the word failure; he uses errors, which he says can be “the portals of discovery.”

It can be hard to tell what’s a failure and what’s just something that is shifting your life in a different direction. In other words, failure can be the portal to creativity, to learning something new, to having a fresh perspective.

I will use me as an example. The worst time in my life was when I felt like the greatest failure, and this had to do with a second failed marriage. I had never experienced such vulnerability and pain than during that particular groundless, rug-pulled-out experience. And I really felt bad about myself.

It took me three years to make the transition from wanting to go back to the solid ground of what I had known before to having the willingness to go forward into a brand-new life. But when I did, it resulted in a profound sense of well-being. It resulted in me becoming a best-selling author!

Related: Making Friends With Oneself 

Sometimes you experience failed expectations as heartbreak and disappointment, and sometimes you feel rage. But at that time, instead of doing the habitual thing of labeling yourself a “failure” or a “loser” or thinking there is something wrong with you, you could get curious about what is going on. Just remember that you never know where something will lead.

Getting curious about outer circumstances and how they are impacting you, noticing what words come out and what your internal discussion is—this is the key.

If there is a lot of “I am bad. I am terrible,” simply notice that and soften up a bit. Instead say, “What am I feeling here? Maybe what is happening is not that I am failure—maybe I am just hurting.”

This is what human beings have felt since the beginning of time. If you want to be a complete human being, if you want to be genuine and hold the fullness of life in your heart, then failure is an opportunity to get curious about what is going on and listen to the storylines. Don’t buy the ones that blame it on everybody else, and don’t buy the storylines that blame it on yourself, either.

This is the thing: I have been in this space of feeling like a failure a lot of times, and I used to be like anybody else when I was in it. I’d just close down, and there was no awareness or curiosity or anything.

Out of that space of failure can come addictions of all kinds—addictions because we do not want to feel it, because we want to escape, because we want to numb ourselves. Out of that space can come aggression, striking out, violence. Out of that space can come a lot of ugly things.

I carried a lot of habitual reactivity of trying to get out of that space. Then as years went by (and meditation had a big part to play in this), I began to get to the place where I really did become curious in that space you can call failing—the kind of raw, visceral feeling of having blown it or failed or gotten something wrong or hurt someone’s feelings.

And so I can tell you that it is out of this same space that come our best human qualities of bravery, kindness, and the ability to really reach out to and care about each other. It’s where real communication with other people starts to happen, because it’s a very unguarded, wide-open space in which you can go beyond the blame and just feel the bleedingness of it, the raw-meat quality of it.

It’s from that space that our best part of ourselves comes out. It’s in that space—when we aren’t masking ourselves or trying to make circumstances go away—that our best qualities begin to shine.

♦

Adapted from Pema Chödrön’s commencement address to the 2014 graduating class of Naropa University in Boulder, Colorado. The full speech is published by Sounds True in Fail, Fail Again, Fail Better.

[This story was first published in 2015]

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For a long time, I was sure I’d never recover from my eating disorder. I’d carried it with me for so long; as a little girl I began overeating as a way to protect myself from the neglect and abuse I experienced from my mom, who raised me by herself. I don’t have many childhood memories, but I do remember the feeling of panic that would overtake me when I heard her keys in the door. The first thing she’d do was check the pantry and refrigerator to take inventory of what I’d eaten. You see, we were poor, and the more I ate, the more food she had to buy. But she was gone so often (I often saw her for the first time every day around 7 p.m.), and all I had to comfort me was food and television. So I ate. And as I ate I became overwhelmed with shame, which peaked when she got home. If I’d eaten too much, she’d send me to my room, where I could smell the popcorn she popped and hear the television. Being alone in my room was a distinct loneliness. I had no siblings. I was on my own.

It was when I became a teenager that I began throwing up. I saw an after-school special about bulimia and decided to try it out. I shoved things down my throat to make myself gag: toothbrushes and q-tips; my fingers. After I’d overeaten at night, I’d run a bath so no one could hear me. By this time my mother was married, and our abusive relationship had evolved to include another party who was sometimes physically violent. They both hounded me about eating and my weight. “Quality, not quantity,” my mom’s husband said, although he would get wasted nightly. They were alcoholics, but our lives had supposedly improved. We had money.

I kept vomiting and eventually lost around 30 pounds, which at 5’ 6” was a dramatic shift in appearance. By now I was a sophomore in high school, and when the weight came off it seemed as though I had suddenly morphed from an invisible wall-dweller into an actual beautiful girl. I became popular. People saw me.

At 20, I was able to simply bend over any toilet or container and empty the contents of my stomach into it. It became a natural function of my body. Often I’d go to the kitchen again and again, never wanting to, and end up over the toilet crying, wishing I could stop, not knowing why I couldn’t. I had spent two weeks at a recovery center, but that wasn’t long enough.  My parents were the opposite of supportive. I continued to get sicker and sicker.

It wasn’t until my late twenties that I began therapy and found Tara Brach’s book Radical Acceptance. I knew about Buddhism and even considered myself a kind of Buddhist; my grandfather, who was Buddhist, had taken me to temple with him often when I was younger. But Radical Acceptance presented some concepts that opened up a space in which I could breathe. Brach, who has shared about her own struggles with eating disorders, wrote about radically accepting oneself and one’s experience. This wasn’t something I’d been exposed to, even in my grandfather’s Buddhist practice or meditation. I’d been taught to correct myself. When I felt particularly out of control, I’d buy self help books and underline all the passages that told me what I needed to change, even making note cards so I could be reminded.

When I was 29, after a long struggle with her own demons, my mom died by a self-inflicted gunshot wound. She’d gotten divorced a few years earlier, and our relationship had deteriorated even further, although in the months preceding her death she’d told me she had cancer (which turned out to be untrue), and I’d tried to help her, moving from Denver to Seattle, where she lived. When she died, I was working for the Park Service in Alaska. I came home, made the necessary arrangements, and went back to work for the summer. When I returned to Seattle after my season ended, I began to experience severe PTSD. My symptoms were dissociation, hypervigilance, paranoia, and night terrors. I didn’t have any family to support me, and my mom hadn’t left me much money; only her possessions, which she’d hoarded in the basement of her rental. I moved it all into a basement apartment and began going through her things, deciding what to sell and what to keep. It seemed everything she owned was tainted by her choice to take her life.

I’d begun therapy in Denver, but was still actively bulimic. In Seattle, I worked with a Buddhist psychotherapist and delved into several texts, including Pema Chödrön’s When Things Fall Apart, Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche’s The Sacred Path of the Warrior, and Elizabeth Mattis Namgyel’s The Power of an Open Question. I lived near Discovery Park and went on long walks by myself, where I was often shrouded in paranoia (my mother’s favorite birds were crows, and I often thought they were following me, among other things). During the walks I listened to these books, as well as to the Tara Brach and Thich Nhat Hanh podcasts. As I listened, I experienced a physical sensation of unraveling; loosening. I would often cry when the text suggested softness. I had learned, throughout my life, to be hard and rigid. I’d learned that I was bad and that I needed to be fixed.

I registered for a weekend meditation retreat at The Seattle Insight Meditation Center with Howard Cohn. After one of the sittings, I shared with him that I had an easier time with walking meditation. I didn’t tell him what had happened with my mom, but used the word “trauma,” and he suggested that I be gentle with myself, that maybe it wasn’t the time in my life for sitting meditation, and I should listen to my body. I could almost hear the click of revelation: what the books, my therapist, and Howard were telling me was that I innately knew what was good for me, and needed to trust myself. To relax into openness and allow myself to unfold at my own pace. To trust that I would recover.

My therapist began gently urging me to be mindful about my binging and purging cycles. She didn’t ask me to stop, but to pay attention. “What is happening inside you when you begin to binge? What happens when you need to purge?” For so long, my bulimia had served to numb me, and I was terrified to let it go. But simply paying attention was low stakes, and I began to notice how, when I was emotionally overwhelmed (with memories, with meeting new people, with triggering experiences), my first instinct was to come home and eat while watching television. I was trying to erase myself and my experience. This mindful attention—along with the wakeful openness encouraged by Trungpa Rinpoche and the brave compassion and vulnerability suggested by Pema Chödrön—helped me to start accepting my experiences rather than rejecting them. Through my own attentiveness, I could see how bulimia had served an important function in my life. But it was a triangle of destruction, isolating me emotionally, destroying me physically, and stunting me spiritually. I knew I had to stop, but I was also beginning to realize that it may take years to undo it, and more than anything, I needed to be patient.

A few years after my mom died, Tara Brach released a new book, True Refuge, in which she wrote about RAIN, a technique she’d often discussed in her podcasts. I have found this method’s blend of psychotherapy and Buddhist teachings to be the one most important for my recovery. RAIN stands for: Recognize, Allow, Investigate, and Non-Identification. When I came into contact with RAIN I was well versed in the first three concepts, but the Non-Identification piece was essential. Often, when I relapsed, my sense of self would be all wrapped up in my action. I had relapsed; therefore I was weak and bad. I’d be overcome with shame, which would often lead to a continuation of the cycle and sometimes led to day-long relapses where I’d eat and purge until my heart fluttered. It was so scary to feel that out of control. I found that once I began to detach a sense of “good” or “bad” to my relapses, I was able to stop the cycle. I would maybe eat too much, then purge, and that was it. And as time passed, I was able to step into my own process and avert the purging altogether.

At 32, I moved my entire life to the East Coast and returned to school to finish my undergraduate education. I’m 37 now, and just graduated with an MFA. I’m a writer; no longer working a blue collar job, as I had been before my mom died. And I’m still recovering. It’s been a very long and slow process, and I have had uncountable relapses. With each relapse, I forgive myself, and I allow myself to begin again. This is what Buddhist philosophy has taught me; what my teachers have taught me. And now, for the first time in my adult life, I have gone months without a relapse. I celebrate that every day, with the knowledge that, if I do relapse, I can begin again.

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