His Holiness the Dalai Lama graced Tricycle’s first cover and was interviewed by the performance artist Spalding Gray in the same issue. Now, 30 years later, His Holiness speaks to psychologist Daniel Goleman about education, what happens when we die, and the grim reality of climate change.

We also revisit eight contributors from our early years to see how their thoughts on the issues of those days have changed (or not): Charles Johnson, Roshi Joan Halifax, Sallie Tisdale, Christopher Titmuss, Mark Epstein, Donald S. Lopez Jr., Jan Chozen Bays, and Sharon Salzberg reflect on comments they made in the pages of Tricycle in decades past.

Finally, Tricycle’s editor-in-chief, James Shaheen, moderates a conversation between the writers Stephen Batchelor and Ruth Ozeki on Buddhist practice and creativity. Both speak of the struggle to center one’s own creative voice amid the cacophony that pervades modern life.

For 30 years we’ve been engaging the Buddhist community and the culture at large in conversation about the place of Buddhist teachings and values in our world. We’re grateful to all who have joined us in that discussion over the years, and we’re happy to engage with new voices as the Buddhist community continues to grow.

—The Editors

The post Coming Full Circle appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

What were the main concerns of Buddhists in Tricycle’s early days? What were the burning issues at that time? We checked in with some of our contributors from the magazine’s first decade to see what they were thinking back then—and how they felt about those issues now. • Some of our writers responded directly to what they’d written long ago. Others focused on their concerns today. But if the emphasis has changed, it seems the issues have not. Now as then, questions of identity, pharmaceuticals, psychedelics, gender, discrimination, the environment, interconnectedness, and Tibet remain relevant to Buddhists, just as they were when the first issues of Tricycle rolled off the press.

Charles Johnson

Buddhism and Identity

If the teachings of Shakyamuni Buddha are about anything, they are about a profound understanding of identity and the broadest possible meaning of liberty—teachings that sooner or later had to appeal to a people for whom suffering and loss were their daily bread.

. . . Soka Gakkai is but one branch on the Bodhi tree. Yet its success in recruiting black Americans indicates that people of color find in Buddhism the depths of their long-denied humanity; centuries-old methods of meditation—very empirical—for clearing the mind of socially manufactured illusions (as well as personally created ones); an ancient phenomenology of suffering, desire, and the self; and a path (the eightfold path) for a moral and civilized way of life. (“A Sangha by Another Name,” Winter 1999)

These have been difficult years—2020 and 2021—for all of us. We have endured crises thick and threefold: Layers of suffering that include an ongoing coronavirus pandemic that has caused over 500,000 deaths in America alone. We have endured a contentious presidential election that has divided Americans in ways we have not seen since the 1960s and perhaps the Civil War, leading to an assault on the nation’s Capitol on January 6, which resulted in five deaths. And deaths of black Americans at the hands of police officers emerged as the central theme of a Black Lives Matter movement that has drawn attention to centuries of racism.

Yet pandemics, racism, and political corruption are not new. Deaths, plagues, impermanence, and social conflicts have been with us in the past. We can expect such experiences in the future, and practitioners of buddha-dharma, people who embrace the bodhisattva ideal, have traditionally seen it as their role to address these painful but inevitable episodes and to end suffering in a way that allows us to heal, adapt, and gain the courage to live, grow, love, and be of greater service to others and ourselves. So even more than in the 1990s, I believe the words I wrote in “A Sangha by Another Name” can have an urgent appeal today for black (and all) Americans seeking happiness, peace, and liberation.

_{Charles Johnson is a scholar, award-winning novelist, essayist, cartoonist, and martial arts teacher. His latest book is Grand: A Grandparent’s Wisdom for a Happy Life.}

Roshi Joan Halifax

Psychedelics: Help or Hindrance on the Road to Enlightenment?

Psychedelics are an extraordinarily powerful tool for opening the mind field. I look at psychedelics as a kind of phase through which we pass when we’re trying to become more truly who we are, more authentic, and more genuine. I feel like I graduated from psychedelics, but that they were definitely part of the evolution of my own psychological or developmental maturation. But it’s really a different kind of mind that is cultivated in meditation, where the qualities of stability, and lovingkindness, and clarity, and humbleness are the primary qualities. Psychedelics don’t necessarily cultivate those qualities. (“The Roundtable: Help or Hindrance?” Fall 1996)

This is a remarkable time, when the legal use of entheogens/psychedelics is making a resurgence in our society. I am familiar with the benefits of these mind-transforming substances from having worked with terminal cancer patients at the Maryland Psychiatric Research Center in the early 1970s. I was then married to Stanislav Grof and partnered with him in the project as a co-therapist, using LSD-assisted psychotherapy with those dying of cancer. I gained enormous respect for the depth and power of the human unconscious as a result of this work. I also saw the project as a contemporary rite of passage for those who were dying. My view of this approach has remained consistent over the years. The benefits of psychedelic therapy can be great, as can the pitfalls. Stan always emphasized set and setting: this included careful preparation and intensive processes for the integration of these powerful experiences. We have our psychological defenses for a reason. When they are radically lowered and the landscape of the deep psyche is surfaced, it can be overwhelming. Great care and skill are required. Other interesting considerations include the commodification of this approach, the medicalization of the approach, and issues related to cultural appropriation. We have learned much from the past, and I look forward to seeing how the next chapter of this work unfolds.

_{Roshi Joan Halifax, PhD, founder and head teacher of Upaya Institute and Zen Center in Santa Fe, New Mexico, is an author, medical anthropologist, and pioneer in end-of-life care.}

Sallie Tisdale

On Buddhism and Gender

Gender inequities can’t be avoided; they may seem a tiresome topic for conversation at times, but they are real and they cause harm. Male and female as forms are no more important than dark and light, hot and cold. They rise and fall in the cycle of lives like a breath. And gender has been repeatedly used by human society as the palimpsest for a wide variety of ills. When I read Buddhist texts, I try to accept the human limitations in the writers, try to trust my own understanding, try to find the ways that I create division. (“Nothing Special: The Buddhist Sex Quandary,” Winter 1994)

The human body has no self-nature, no separate existence. Its qualities are like vapor. Yet we act as though things like size and age and color are permanent and important. The amount of melanin in one’s skin and which parts of your body stick out can determine the course of your life. From the point of view of the Absolute, such ideas are madness. But we live in the relative world, and madness sometimes rules.

In Buddhist circles, women who speak out against institutional misogyny are told to let go of attachment to the idea of gender. It is mere conditioning, meaningless. Such advice is a point made by those in power to those without. Men say such things to women even as they deny women full authority and access—an anti-dharmic injustice that is still widely practiced thousands of years after the Buddha. Our practice leads us to take responsibility for our pain. But the pain continues. We don’t look like the images of the Buddha on our altars; we don’t look like most of the leaders of Buddhist sects; we don’t look like the images of enlightenment in most of the literature. We are told that in the dharma all are equal. And of course, that’s true; the point is that it’s not at all true in the very human institution of Buddhism.

_{Sallie Tisdale is a lay dharma teacher at Dharma Rain Zen Center in Portland, Oregon, and the author, most recently, of Advice for Future Corpses (and Those Who Love Them): A Practical Perspective on Death and Dying.}

Christopher Titmuss

Buddhism and the Environment

Spiritual teachings of awakening point to ultimate realization so that we don’t go over the top with concern for the fate of the earth. The preservation of life, the so-called sanctity of existence, is not our most important concern, no matter how much we consider ourselves thoughtful human beings. Nobody immerses themselves full-time in the fate of the Earth; it is only one of our daily considerations.

. . . As Greens, we campaign for a nonviolent revolution to change the wretched consumer value system that haunts the Earth and humanity. But an equal revolution must take place in our perceptions to reveal an authentic spiritual awakening. . . . I believe we must (a) put to rest the myth of stewardship; (b) end the notion that resources are worth saving; (c) end the notion that the future matters; (d) dispense with the rhetoric that time is running out. (“On the Green Credo,” Winter 1993)

Tricycle. Three Decades. Three Full Stops. . .

Three decades seem like three full stops of an unfinished sentence. What is unseen and unspoken requires our investigation. Our voices of protest can then continue against the questionable constructions of minds addicted to power. The past three decades stand worthy of reflection to recognize noble endeavors and to remember to engage in a creative use of imagination. The naming of suffering, seeing its causes/conditions, and exploring the resolution still matter. Mindfulness and meditation serve as a preparation, as a path, for clarity of action. These two links have become elevated to a primary talking point rather than supporting a liberated engagement with the dynamics of the field of existence. We sow seeds and nourish life regardless of the opportunity to witness any fruits.

Despite the endless teachings in buddhadharma pointing to the emptiness of self, of ego, far too much of the tradition still finds itself succumbing to the pursuit of self-satisfaction. The belief in an inner world to change first and then an outer world sustains a false perception. Changing of our “self” shows a detail in the web of existence. We are human beings with the potential to awaken to much more than notions of a separate self and experiencing oneness.

_{Christopher Titmuss, a former Theravada Buddhist monk, is a dharma teacher, social critic, poet, and author whose most recent book is The Spiritual Roots of Mindfulness.}

Mark Epstein

Awakening with Prozac Revisited

There continues to be a widespread suspicion of pharmacological treatments for mental anguish in dharma circles, a prejudice against using drugs to correct mental imbalance. Just as the cancer patient is urged to take responsibility for something that may be beyond her control, the depressed dharma student is all too often given the message that no pain is too great to be confronted on the zafu, that depression is the equivalent of mental weakness or lassitude, that the problem is the quality of one’s practice rather than one’s body.(“Awakening with Prozac: Pharmaceuticals and Practice,” Fall 1993) [But] neither Buddhism nor psychoanalysis nor transpersonal psychology can be expected to hold the key to recovery for all mental illness. (Response in “Letters to the Editor,” Winter 1993)

Mindfulness has infiltrated the mental health system in a big way, such that many would-be psychotherapists now see mindfulness as a first-line treatment for a variety of emotional disturbances. This is a huge shift, and it comes with a price. The same suspicion among dharma practitioners toward pharmaceuticals that I noted 30 years ago can now be found among mindfulness-based therapists (and their clients) toward more traditional psychodynamic approaches. Much of the accumulated knowledge of the century-long psychoanalytic experiment is now in danger of being passed over. There is great pressure on mindfulness in particular, and Buddhism in general, to be the answer for everything. And this kind of expectation can only lead to disappointment.

While many practitioners have been quick to embrace the therapeutic potential of “plant medicines” like psilocybin, cannabis, and ayahuasca, as well as the antidepressant potential of psychoactive drugs like ketamine and MDMA, the prejudice against more traditional pharmaceuticals persists. There is shame around needing any other kind of help beyond what the dharma (or perhaps a guided psychedelic journey) can offer. This is, itself, a shame. There are treatments available (albeit ones that have historically been overprescribed) that can help relieve mental suffering and thereby contribute to the possibility of awakening. I always think of the great blue Medicine Buddha who sits in lotus position surrounded by an array of medicinal substances, all of which are part of their armamentarium. The Medicine Buddha is not judging one treatment over another. Their only agenda is to offer whatever helps.

_{Mark Epstein, MD is a psychiatrist and author who has written widely on Buddhism and psychotherapy. His most recent book is Advice Not Given: A Guide to Getting Over Yourself.}

Donald S. Lopez Jr.

Are We Still Prisoners of Shangri-La?

In the popular imagination of the increasing number of Western adherents of Tibetan Buddhism, “traditional Tibet” has come to . . . [be] an ideal to which we can aspire . . . a land free from strife ruled by a benevolent Dalai Lama, his people devoted to the dharma and . . . the preservation of the environment. . . . The . . . important question is why these myths persist, continuing to circulate unchallenged. These fantasies of Tibet operate as constituents of a Romantic Orientalism in which the Orient is . . . exalted as a surrogate self-endowed with all that the West lacks. It is Tibet that will regenerate the West by showing us, prophetically, what it can be by showing us what it has been. It is Tibet that can save the West, cynical and materialist, from itself. . . . [But] to allow Tibet to circulate as a constituent in a system of fantastic oppositions . . . is to deny Tibet its history, to exclude Tibet from a real world of which it has always been a part, and to deny Tibetans their role as agents participating in the creation of a contested quotidian reality. (“New Age Orientalism: The Case of Tibet,” Spring 1994)

Revisiting work from one’s youth is a strange experience, raising deep Buddhist questions about the nature of the self. Am I still the person who wrote that? In 1993, the phone rang in my office at the University of Michigan, in a building that has since been demolished. It was Helen Tworkov, the founding editor of Tricycle. She said, “Someone needs to say something about Tibet, and I think it should be you.”

The essay that I wrote provoked strong reactions, both negative and positive, as such things were measured in the days before the Internet. As I read it over again (for the first time since I wrote it), two things come to mind. The first is that it contains the seeds of many of the chapters of Prisoners of Shangri-La, published four years later: on the word Lamaism, on om mani padme hum, on how Evans-Wentz’s Tibetan Book of the Dead owes as much to Madame Blavatsky as it does to Guru Rinpoche.

The second thought—and the one more pertinent to the celebration of 30 years of Tricycle—is that not that much has changed. In 2018, the University of Chicago Press published a 20th- anniversary edition of Prisoners “with a new preface [by the author].” Reading the book for the first time since I submitted the page proofs, I was struck by how much the mystification of Tibet persists, despite all the remarkable work of translation and scholarship in the intervening years. All these years later, many of us remain prisoners of Shangri-La. What has changed is the situation in Tibet.

Both the Tricycle essay and the book had a political agenda, arguing that the fixation on the fantasy of Tibet is a dangerous distraction from the reality of Tibet and from the real-world hopes of its people. In 1991, many college campuses had a chapter of Students for a Free Tibet. Today, very few do. The dreams for the real Tibet, and efforts to realize them, have slowly faded. The 1990s were a time of hope in Tibet. The 21st century has been grim. Since 2006, 166 Tibetans have died through self-immolation, their protests going unheeded. Today, the policies against the Uyghurs in neighboring Xinjiang are beginning to be applied in Tibet.

Tibetan Buddhism and Tibetan lamas have been a constant presence in the pages of Tricycle since 1991. Three decades later, it is important that we not forget those still in the Land of Snows. That was the concern of the person who wrote the words in italics above in 1994. Whether that is the same person who writes these words today, the concern remains the same. That’s what I remember.

_{Donald S. Lopez Jr. is the Arthur E. Link Distinguished University Professor of Buddhist and Tibetan Studies in the Department of Asian Languages and Cultures at the University of Michigan.}

Jan Chozen Bays

Awakening to Our Interconnectedness

The true remedy for sexual or any other kind of harassment will never be legal. It has to be spiritual. The solution lies in the vivid experience of the interdependence of all existence. From this arises a dynamic and deep awareness of the reactions of “the other” to what we do, say, and think. [But] until we have the clarity of the Enlightened One, we do need legal and moral definitions of what behaviors are unwholesome—that is, those that will have a bad outcome for us or the Whole. (“What the Buddha Taught About Sexual Harassment,” Fall 1998)

The movements that have been born in the last 13 years, including #MeToo, Black Lives Matter, and the efforts to stop hate crimes against Asian Americans, Pacific Islanders, and Indigenous People, are encouraging signs that we are awakening to our interconnected existence. The ubiquitous existence of cell phones and the requirement for law enforcement to wear body cameras have helped end our collective ignorance about what it is like to be subjected to discrimination and injustice and helped awaken us to the pain we feel when another being is harmed. That we suffer when we witness other beings suffer is beneficial. It compels us first to look more deeply into our own hearts and minds for our own thoughts of separation, our own greed, anger, and ignorance, and then, in humility, to choose an appropriate venue for action in the world. There are a hundred million places in the world needing help. We only have to choose one.

_{Jan Chozen Bays, Roshi is a physician, Zen priest, and co-abbot of Great Vow Zen Monastery in Clatskanie, Oregon. She is the author of Mindful Eating and The Mindful Eating Workbook.}

Sharon Salzberg

Mindfulness and Cultural Change

If we create an “other” out of our projections and associations and ready interpretations, we have made an object of a person—we have taken away their humanity. We have stripped from our consciousness their sensitivity to pain, their likely wish to feel at home in their bodies and minds, their complexity and intricacy and mutability. If we have lost any recognition of the truth of change in someone and have fixed them in our mind as “good,” “bad,” or “indifferent,” we’ve lost touch with the living essence of that person. We are dwelling in a worldview of stylized prototypes and distant caricatures, reified images, and often very great loneliness. (“A More Complete Attention,” Winter 2009)

When I said this, my perspective, as it had been for years, was centered on our individual conditioning, and certainly that is still vitally important, as it is a significant factor in how we look at someone—or look through them instead. These days I’m much more aware of collective conditioning—intergenerationally through family trauma and communally through the stories mainstream culture tends to weave around race, ethnicity, and gender. I’ve learned about things like attribution bias: the tendency we have, when people we identify as members of “our tribe” do something bad, to attribute their behavior to “situational” factors. (They had been under stress at work, or they were pressured into misbehaving.) However, we are likely to believe the behavior of the “other tribe” emanates from their character.

I’ve seen how stories are told about us by those we encounter, by media—by everything, really—and how another aspect of mindfulness is seeing those stories and realizing we don’t have to take them to heart or consider them true. I’ve seen how we can find a path to freedom even with all of this going on. If anything, I’m even more intrigued by the role mindfulness might play in deconstructing the causes of alienation, tribalism, and loneliness. Then personal change can be a direct route to cultural change.

_{Sharon Salzberg is a founding teacher at the Insight Meditation Society in Barre, Massachusetts, and a best-selling author. Her latest book is Real Change: Mindfulness to Heal Ourselves and the World.}

The post Then & Now appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

Thirty years ago, the cover subject of Tricycle’s premiere issue was Tenzin Gyatso, the 14th Dalai Lama, photographed by Herb Ritts (1952-2002). His Holiness had won the Nobel Prize in 1989 and was touring the world in 1991 to launch the Year of Tibet, aimed at garnering international support for nonviolent efforts to counter Chinese occupation. But when he was interviewed for Tricycle by the writer and performer Spalding Gray, their conversation was not political but surprisingly intimate, ranging over meditation practice, dreams, fear, and quotidian life.

Today, the Dalai Lama is one of the most famous and revered spiritual leaders on the planet. And his conversation with best-selling author and longtime Buddhist practitioner Daniel Goleman reflects quite a different set of interests, notably how Buddhism can contribute to Western neuroscience, psychology, and education.

You often talk about how ancient Indian thought could add to modern education. What do you see as missing? Modern education is very much oriented around external things, material things. So in the West there’s not much concept of training our mind. But in the Indian tradition, the Buddha himself said, “My followers should not accept my teachings out of faith, but rather through investigation.”

All ignorance is based on appearances. In order to reduce ignorance, we must investigate deeper reality—tongpa nyi [Tib., “emptiness”; Skt., shunyata]. The Buddha’s teachings deal with reality. So it’s not just faith—we must utilize our intelligence. Faith and intelligence must combine. In an Arab Muslim country and a European Christian country you mainly see faith in God, whereas in India you are your own master. Ultimately, everything depends on yourself. Buddha cannot save you, cannot protect you, unless you train your own mind. The Buddha made clear the way to do that.

India had almost three thousand years of nonviolence, ahimsa, based on karuna, compassion. India also developed shamatha—“single-pointed mind”—and vipashyana, “investigation.” Then the Buddha came. He taught dharma according to the different mentalities of different people, so that buddha-dharma became very rich, a knowledge institution. The emphasis was on reasoning rather than faith.

Explaining the mind through the brain is not sufficient. Mind is on a different level. The Indian tradition, particularly the knowledge tradition, [offers] a lot of explanation about the mind and destructive emotions. So now a number of scientists are paying attention to Buddhist philosophy and Buddhist psychology. I hope we will take modern science and ancient Indian psychology and combine the two. I think we can serve humanity more effectively and more usefully that way. And we can do it without religion. This is just knowledge about psychology, about emotions. It’s simply how to create peace of mind and a happy life, and ultimately, how to create a peaceful world, a happy world. India’s tradition is secular. We can teach the secular way in schools.

What’s also basic is the altruistic mind, the oneness concept. All eight billion human beings that live on this planet have the same emotions, the same mind. We all have the seed of compassion. Physically, mentally, emotionally, we have the same potential.

About compassion: I’ve heard you appreciate Christians for good works like building clinics and schools. I’ve also heard you say that Buddhists could be doing more to put compassion into action. What do you have in mind? Buddhist literature [has] a lot of explanation about emotions and the mind, and how to tackle anger and fear. That part is quite rich in ancient Indian tradition. From the Christian point of view, we are all created by one God and God is infinite love. We are all children of that kind of father. If you seriously think that, then we should all live harmoniously and compassionately, according to God’s wish.

What about Buddhists? Buddhism is a nontheistic religion. Everything ultimately depends on one’s own action. If you help others, if you serve others, you benefit. So altruism is a source of happiness. And a source of unhappiness is all the disasters due to anger. Anger comes from fear; fear comes from a self-centered attitude.

“When we face some serious problem, then our usual sort of thinking—‘I,’ ‘I’—lessens. Sometimes some difficulty is a way to develop altruism.”

With the pandemic, people became kinder and helped each other more in a spirit of interconnection. How can this time be an opportunity for us to become better people and create a better world? I think we can learn from the nurses and doctors. They are really serving, helping these helpless people, regardless of their own safety. They truly practice altruism by serving other people.

Do you think that their example, or our own experiences, will leave people kinder after the pandemic is over? To some extent, yes. When we face some serious problem, then our usual sort of thinking—“I,” “I”—lessens. For example, if there is a flood or an earthquake, people don’t care what others’ religion is, what others’ race is. They come together and work together. Sometimes some disaster, some difficulty, is a way to develop altruism.

That sense of oneness, sense of helping other people, do you think it lasts? In education, we should emphasize the importance of the oneness of all human beings. We are brothers and sisters, and we should help each other. If we feel that not only on a physical level but also on a mental level, we’re much happier. When you feel “I,” only “I,” then you feel lonely. So altruism is the best way to fulfill your own interest.

There’s another crisis now—global climate change. I’ve heard you say that at some point the rivers in Tibet will be dry, like the rivers in Afghanistan are becoming today. And that, of course, would be a catastrophe for all the people throughout Asia who depend on water from Tibet. How long will it be until that happens? One Chinese expert told me that in the next few decades, there is a real danger that all the water on this planet will dry up. So for the next few decades, it is our responsibility to take special care about ecology. I think the human mind is not thinking long term. We just follow the last few centuries in our way of life and habits. Global warming is a reality. Accordingly, we should pay more attention. Tibet is the ultimate source of water for all the major rivers in India, China, and Vietnam. So we must pay more attention to the ecology of Tibet. We must think about the next two to three generations at least.

If you see the next two or three generations as being able to slow down global warming or reverse it, does that mean that the prediction of rivers drying up would be far in the future? Global warming, nobody can stop that. But we can postpone.

You’ve been very active in the encounter between Buddhism and contemporary culture, particularly science. What are some of the major things each side has learned from the other? Buddhists use reason and analytical mind in meditation. Science is seeking reality. Both analyze reality, but we have differences. Scientists utilize a lot of different machines. The Buddhist tradition, the knowledge tradition, uses only the brain.

Now many scientists are paying more attention to a subtle level of explanation about reality and particularly about the mind. So modern science, [which was mainly] about material [things], now pays more attention to our brain. Then that automatically brings attention to the mind and the emotions.

Looking at it from the science side—I’m a psychologist by training—it seems that Buddhism has a more subtle understanding of the mind. In fact, it talks about subtle levels of mind that Western psychology doesn’t know anything about. Does it seem to you that something is missing in Western psychology? To some extent, yes. Science from the West is mainly oriented around external things. Ancient Indian tradition, including Buddhism, [has] more explanations about mind—for example, why in a waking state we use one level of mind and emotion, and then the dream state is a deeper level of mind and emotion. You can train during dreaming [to reach] a more subtle level of mind and emotion. Then [at the] subtlest level, [there is] no longer emotion but still, pure mind. So a deeper experience of the subtle mind affects the grosser level of mind.

You’re helping Richard Davidson [University of Wisconsin–Madison psychology professor and founder of the Center for Healthy Minds] do research on thukdam, a rare deep meditative state after physical death. This practice seems to depend on a more subtle level of mind. Could you explain why this project is important? Here, in Dharamsala, there have been a number of such cases after death. For example, my own teacher, Ling Rinpoche, remained in thukdam for 13 days. And one scholar, a practitioner in South India, remained in thukdam for almost three weeks. So now some scientists—one is a Russian professor at Moscow State University—are seriously paying attention. Richie Davidson noticed that when a brain monitor is connected to a person in thukdam there is some sort of unusual [activity]. This shows clearly a different level of mind—when the brain is no longer working, but still the subtle mind is there.

Some years ago, you requested a Mind and Life institute meeting on destructive emotions. Given the different levels of consciousness you’re describing, are there differences in when an emotion becomes destructive? The destructive emotions are mainly related to the grosser level of mind. Subtler mind also uses the subtle level of some emotions. But the grosser level of emotion is no longer there.

Anger or fear, jealousy—these destructive emotions are based on too much self-centeredness. Altruism is thinking about the well-being of all sentient beings, and sometimes in thinking about them tears come. So some emotions are very positive and don’t disturb your mental state. As soon as I wake up, I think about altruism. One Shantideva prayer [says], “So long as space remains, I will remain in order to serve sentient beings.” This gives you inner strength, determination. With more inner strength, destructive emotions do not have much effect. At the subtler level, there is no longer any danger of destructive emotions arising.

One reason to meditate [is that a] deeper level of mind reduces the power of those emotions that are related to a grosser level of mind. On a subtle level, the body is like a dream body separate from your [ordinary] body while you meditate. That shows the effect of meditation. People who have disturbed their mind and do too much thinking should just meditate. That is good for mental rest.

One-pointed meditation, not thinking, is useful for strengthening the stability of the mind. Then, in vipashyana, analytical meditation, the mind will not follow [or be attracted by] sounds and seeing but will remain still. There are many different analytical meditations. As a Buddhist practitioner, I always use the analytical meditation about shunyata. Very useful.

The post How to Serve Humanity appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

James Shaheen (JS): Ruth and Stephen, you both talk a lot about voice. Ruth, your novel The Book of Form and Emptiness is full of voices. There’s a cacophony of voices, and objects speak, and the main character is trying to find his voice. And Stephen, you’ve played with the notion of right speech as voice.

Stephen Batchelor (SB): We’re all familiar with the idea of the eightfold path and right speech. And the way it’s normally presented is in terms of what is morally, ethically good speech. It’s about speaking gently, truthfully, and honestly, and that’s important. But the word normally rendered as “speech” in Pali is vaca, which is a cognate of the Latin word vox and the English word voice.

So I started thinking of it not as speech but as voice. The person who enters the eightfold path, as the early texts say, becomes independent of others; then the practice becomes about finding your own voice. Meditation allows us to see how the voices we have internalized from our parents, political leaders, and religious teachers inform the way we speak and think, and thereby it opens up a space in which we’re not just vocalizing what our community believes and says.

And if we have an aspiration to be, let’s say, a writer or someone working in a creative field, then we’re constantly seeking to differentiate our own particular voice. It’s really about finding one’s own truth, one’s own authenticity, and also finding a kind of honesty within life. We have to be able to trust the intuitions and deeper feelings that we don’t really understand or even feel terribly comfortable with.

It’s almost a mantra of the creative writing world, finding your own voice, not deriving it from your favorite authors. It’s an ongoing process. But it’s a journey that is part and parcel of this eightfold path.

Ruth Ozeki (RO): As a novelist who works very often with characters who are autobiographical, I sometimes think of the novel as being a thought experiment and the self as being not just a fixed permanent entity but an array of selves that are constantly changing. That’s what my characters are. For me, the process of writing is a kind of performance art, of listening to all those voices, including the villainous ones who are constantly trying to make me shut up.

We hear a lot of villainous voices these days. We’re so completely overwhelmed by media and social media. And there are many, many voices in the world right now, and it’s very confusing. It is a cacophony. In my fictional worlds I try to inhabit those voices and put them in conversation with each other and see what emerges.

We think of a book as being an object: “This is my book.” But the book that James reads and the book that Stephen reads are two different books, which are both completely different from the book that I wrote. I wrote A Tale for the Time Being in 2012, and that Ruth Ozeki doesn’t exist anymore. You might have just read the book yesterday. It’s a way of speaking across time. The process of reading and writing is a collaborative effort. We’re not making a singular book, we’re making an array of books, and everyone who reads a book is going to be reading something slightly different. So that, too, is a creative act, a generative act. That kind of conversation is why writing is wonderful to me.

JS: I hosted a podcast with Arthur Sze, and he spoke similarly about his poetry, that the person who wrote it back then, and the person who wrote it now, and the person who’s reading it then and the person who’s reading it now, even the same reader, these are different voices and different people experiencing the same text.

SB: I have had the experience more than once of reading a quote in another person’s book and thinking “Well, that’s quite interesting,” and then looking up the source, and it turns out to be my voice. In other words, I didn’t recognize my own voice. There’s a weird sense of dislocation. But I think it makes the point that Ruth is communicating to us. We’re attached to the voice being “mine,” but it’s not really mine, except in a rather loose, conventional sense.

It is bizarre where voices come from. Carl Jung wrote, “People don’t have ideas. Ideas have people.” And as a writer, I often become spookily aware of that. There’s my mind saying “I’ve got to finish this chapter. I’ve got to work out how to say this.” And I get stuck in that place. But when I go off and do something quite different, some sentence forms by itself; something comes to me that I probably wouldn’t have figured out with my intellect.

There’s a source of language bubbling up within me, outside of my ownership and control. What I do as a writer, in many ways, is simply hold that space and create a channel whereby these voices can be heard. It’s a very strange business. I love writing books, because it’s a basically a journey into the unknown. The actual formulation of words, and ideas and things I’ve never thought of, come through by what strikes me as the logic of the text. I follow, I surrender to that logic, and I allow that to come forth, and that, to me, is magical.

I’m very interested at the moment in trying to find a Buddhist equivalent of creativity. I think it’s the iddhis or the iddhipada, what is usually translated as “magical powers,” meaning you can walk through walls and you can fly through the sky, and you can become one or become many, and so forth. Buddhist traditions often take those things literally. Particularly in the early tradition, this is actually a very basic practice. I think that iddhi refers to creativity, and creativity is a magical art. There’s a challenge for us, or at least for me, to re-own creativity as an explicit part of the practice of dharma.

RO: It reminds me, Stephen, of Hee-jin Kim’s book Eihei Dogen, Mystical Realist. Taigen Dan Leighton wrote the foreword, in which he proposed that sitting zazen is performance art. Zazen is a goalless practice, but when we sit, we are manifesting our buddhanature, becoming one with it. That is a type of performance art, and it is inherently creative.

Meditation is a generative, creative act. I’ve always thought that was beautiful. In the sangha, as we move around, make offerings, and do prostrations, we’re collectively performing. We’re inhabiting the Buddha-body as a community, and expressing it endlessly through the rituals and language passed down over time. It’s constantly being changed. It’s constantly being enlivened and reimagined.

“When we sit, we are manifesting our buddhanature, becoming one with it. That is a type of performance art, and it is inherently creative. Meditation is a generative, creative act.”

SB: As you’re speaking, I’m thinking of the philosopher Judith Butler’s conception of performative identity. Self is a performance. It’s how you present yourself in the world, how you communicate: that’s what you are. The Dhammapada, verse 80, says,

Just as a farmer irrigates a field,
as a fletcher fashions an arrow,
as a carpenter shapes a piece of wood,
so the wise person trains the self.

In other words, contrary to the idea that Buddhism is about getting rid of the self, it’s about understanding self as a work in progress, as an ongoing performance that is constantly unfolding, an unfinished project.

And there is something liberating about that, because Dan Leighton gets us out of the idea that all religious activity is somehow repetitive, that it’s keeping a tradition going by doing the same thing. There is room for that; the danger is if that becomes normative, then the tradition is stuck. But we can hold that structure in a way that actually liberates us to perform in our lives more wisely, more compassionately, more creatively.

JS: You’ve both talked about the dark side, places where people are reluctant to go, and Ruth, you certainly take us there in your book. Stephen, you have said that the creative act, giving up control and acting creatively in the moment, entails some degree of risk due to the uncertainty that we face.

SB: We find ourselves confronting life situations, often situations of great suffering, of great difficulty, of great conflict. I might have prepared myself and gotten as much information as I can, but at a certain point I have to say something, to do something, and often it’s very difficult. But once we do, you often find yourself taken over by a flow of words, physical gestures, or whatever it might be. And this is the source of the voice that is outside of us, beyond our ownership. It doesn’t seem to be coming from you but rather seems to have been allowed by your being willing to take a risk rather than just repeating platitudes of the tradition or saying the right Buddhist thing. But we can never be assured of being right, we can never be sure that this is the good thing to do, because we cannot possibly see the consequences and the outcomes of our acts.

RO: I’ve always felt that I write from remorse, that most of my writing happens because I’ve done something or said something that’s potentially harmful, that might have hurt somebody. I have that seed of remorse; then I sit with that and try to figure out: how did that happen? And then I start to perform that, to find the voices, and that performance turns into a novel. That’s certainly how the first novel came, and I think subsequent novels have come in the same way.

The act of doing anything, just living, being alive in the world, is fraught. How do we make sense of that? How do we examine that in ways that allow us to lead a life where we do no harm? Fiction writing looks at these ideas, in the same way that when we meditate, what comes up so often are the terrible things that we’ve said to somebody. The voices of remorse are constantly there. My process of examining these things takes a very long time. I’m glad I have this practice, because it allows me to do it. I don’t know how I would do it without having both the writing and the Buddhist practice together. The two are very helpful and synergistic in that way.

The post Finding the Voice, Performing the Self appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

30 years of Tricycle

• Percentage of Americans who identified as Buddhist in 1990: 0.2%
• Percentage of Americans who identified as Buddhist in 2016: 1%
• Full-time Tricycle employees in 1991: 3
• Full-time Tricycle employees in 2021: 17
• Number of writers published by Tricycle in 1991 who were also published by Tricycle in 2021: 4
• Number of books by the Dalai Lama published as of 1991: 25
• Number of books by the Dalai Lama published as of 2021: 127
• Percentage of Americans who called religion “very important” to their life in 1992: 58%
• Percentage of Americans who called religion “very important” to their life in 2020: 48%

View past installments of Buddhism by the Numbers: Climate Change and Pilgrimage Sites, COVID-19, The Economics of Mindfulness, New York, Armenia, Hawaii, California, Virginia, Kentucky, South Korea, and the African Great Lakes Region.

♦

Data from Gallup poll, Office of His Holiness the Dalai Lama, Barry A. Kosmin, The National Survey of Religious Identification (NSRI) 1990, Pew Research Forum, and Tricycle archives

The post Buddhism by the Numbers: 30 Years appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

Tricycle’s Winter 2018 special section, which focuses on sharing largely unknown practices in the Western Buddhist world, includes:

“Ayya Kema: Recognizing the Four Elements,”
by Ayya Khema

“Listening to Silence,”
by Dharma Master Hsin Tao

“If You Want To Get Enlightened, You’ll Have to Find Your Hara First,”
by Ken Kushner

“Getting Started with the Nembutsu—Pure Land Buddhism’s Chant to Foster Gratitude,”
by Dharmavidya David Brazier

The post Meditations Off the Beaten Path appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

In 1978, I was a new Zen student struggling with zazen, sitting meditation, during my first training intensive in Chicago. I remember watching the jikijitsu [head monk] at the front of the zendo as he put his hands together and bowed. Rising from his cushion, he would pick up a flat wooden stick called a keisaku from the altar, then turn and inspect the trainees. I’d hear him walking slowly, circling the room. He would pause to bow in front of a student, and the student would bow in return, leaning forward to prepare for the keisaku. Whack—whack whack! And again: Whack—whack whack. He would hit the student three times on the muscles on each side of the spine to focus their attention and relieve tension in their shoulders and back, then walk on to the next student. I would sense him getting closer—his footsteps became louder, and I could hear the rustling of his robes. He’d stop in front of me, press his hands together and bow. Whack—whack, whack. And again: Whack—whack, whack. Then, almost inevitably, he’d lean over and say: “Breathe with your hara!” This happened many, many times over the following months.

I knew that hara was the Japanese word for the lower abdomen, and that it was regarded as the center of ki (chi), or vital energy. There was just one trouble: no one ever explained to me how to breathe with my hara. Try as I might, I couldn’t figure it out.

One evening, while changing clothes in preparation for zazen at our zendo in Ypsilanti, Michigan, I was telling my fellow students about an argument I had had with my boss earlier that day. The more I talked, the angrier I became. Suddenly it felt as if something popped, as the habitual tension I held in my lower abdomen released all at once. My stomach seemed to drop, and my breathing became deeper and more relaxed. I felt grounded; my center of gravity was lower. My body was brimming with energy; I felt supercharged. My mind cleared, and I stopped stewing about the events of the day. As I went to take my cushion in the meditation hall, it hit me: I had finally found my hara.

What Is Hara?

“Hara” is the Japanese pronunciation of the Chinese character fu, meaning abdomen. In Chozen-ji, the line of the Rinzai Zen tradition in which I teach, as well as in Japanese culture more generally, the term hara refers specifically to the lower abdomen. A related Japanese word is tanden, or dantian in Chinese. In Daoist thought there are three dantian; all of them are considered to be critical energy centers. The lowest of the three, the xia dantian, is situated about two inches below the navel and corresponds to the Japanese concept of tanden. While the words hara and tanden are sometimes used interchangeably, tanden is regarded as a single point, unlike hara, which encompasses the entire lower abdomen. Both are associated with the development of vital energy, which explains why I felt my body brimming with energy when I finally found my hara.

Beyond its location in the body, the hara has a dynamic, functional role in breathing. In chest (or thoracic) breathing, there is maximal engagement of chest and rib cage muscles and minimal engagement of the lower abdominal muscles. If you are breathing like this, your rib cage expands and contracts, and your shoulders move up and down. Diaphragmatic, or abdominal, breathing—now well-known in our culture because of its role in yoga—is often referred to as belly breathing. It engages the lower abdomen, which drives the breath like a bellows. When you breathe this way, your lower abdomen expands on inhalation and contracts on exhalation, with minimal motion in your upper body.

An old Zen saying is “You cannot wash off blood with blood,” meaning that it is difficult to control thoughts with just more thoughts.

Hara breathing, which is sometimes referred to as tanden breathing, has similarities to diaphragmatic breathing: in both types, the lower abdomen expands on inhalation. However, in hara breathing the lower abdomen remains expanded on exhalation. Once you are capable of hara breathing, your lower abdomen will expand on inhalation and remain expanded throughout the exhalation and into the next inhalation. It is as though the lower abdomen were a balloon that can remain inflated throughout the process of breathing; the balloon is supported by the engagement of the muscles of your lower back and pelvic floor.

The seminal Western book on hara, Karlfried Graf Dürckheim’s Hara: The Vital Center of Man, reveals the psychological dimensions of hara in the Japanese language. For example, in English we might say that someone has a big heart, meaning they are kind or compassionate. A Japanese equivalent would be to say that person has a “big hara” (hara no oki). In Japanese, saying that a person’s hara “rose” (ga tatsu) implies that they were swept away by anger, as we say in English that someone has lost their head. To say that someone has “accomplished or finished” developing their hara (no dekita hito) conveys that the person is a mature individual. A corollary statement says that one who has not developed their hara is not fit to lead.

When I first heard of these sayings, I assumed that they were metaphoric, much as saying that someone lost their head is metaphoric. However, as I progressed in my Zen training, I realized that they are literal: for example, when someone is swept away by anger, their hara breathing is lost and with that their ability to “settle down.” With one’s development of the physical aspects of hara come profound psychological changes, something I have observed over years of watching my Zen students. As they develop hara physically, they acquire composure, equanimity, and a gravitas that were not there before.

An old Zen saying is “You cannot wash off blood with blood,” meaning that it is difficult to control thoughts with just more thoughts. Another saying that is highly valued in Rinzai Zen in particular is “Enter the mind through body.” These sayings underscore the fact that the keys to the highly valued mental states associated with Zen—particularly the deep concentration of samadhi, in which the delusion of separateness falls away—are physical in nature and physically trainable. As the writer and lay Soto Zen teacher Katsuki Sekida wrote in his guide Zen Training: Methods and Philosophy, “It is the correct manipulation of the lower abdomen, as we sit and breathe, that enables us to control the activity of our mind.” In other words, hara breathing is a gateway to samadhi.

In my tradition, we continually deepen and refine hara breathing through long, slow exhalations, and natural, quick but expansive, inhalations. At first this needs to be done deliberately; over time it becomes second nature. One of my teachers used to say that the depth of samadhi is in direct proportion to the quality of hara breathing. In turn, samadhi enables kensho, the “seeing into one’s true nature” that is fundamental to Zen realization. In this way, the depth of one’s Zen experience is tied to the quality of one’s breathing. Hence the recurrent admonition I received early in my training: “Breathe with your hara!”

Hara Development

Throughout my years as a Zen teacher, I have been struck by how many people experience the same difficulty I once had in finding hara. Even those who have had extensive experience in other traditions of meditation or have trained in yoga or marital arts struggle with this. The only people who seem to find hara quickly are singers and wind instrument players—people who are already well practiced in taking long, deep inhalations.

For everyone else, learning hara breathing can be a surprisingly difficult, complex skill. It involves differentially tensing and relaxing various abdominal muscles at different stages of the respiratory cycle. In addition, you have to learn to regulate the musculature of the pelvic floor and the body’s overall posture in ways that facilitate this type of breathing. It is difficult, in fact, to give specific instructions on how to do hara breathing. That’s because most people start out with poor proprioception, and so they have trouble locating the specific body parts required for hara breathing.

Related: Breathing

There are two ways to acquire hara breathing in the Rinzai Zen tradition. The first is through prolonged zazen practice. By intentionally slowing and deepening one’s breath while engaged in seated meditation, one develops increased proprioception of the lower abdomen. Eventually, you begin to learn the proper balance of tension and relaxation in the abdominal muscles.

The second way to find hara breathing is through intense physical practice, such as that involved in martial arts or while engaged in heavy manual labor. Exhausting the muscles of the upper body through, say, swinging a sword thousands of times or moving hundreds of boulders, eventually helps you develop the differential tension and relaxation of the key abdominal muscles necessary for hara breathing.

Neither of these methods is easy. Though most Zen trainees find their hara more gradually (and less dramatically) than I did, it is in any case a long and frustrating experience for many. For that reason, I have undertaken a quest to make finding hara a more efficient experience for students today, and I have developed a set of exercises to help students begin training in hara breathing. Here I have included two of my favorites. Those already proficient in hara breathing may find that these exercises can help them deepen and refine their breath.

For me, the deepening and refining of hara breathing has come to represent the essence of Zen training itself. Sometimes the changes are sudden, sometimes more gradual, but as my hara breathing has become deeper and more relaxed, I have felt calmer overall and less worried. I am more connected to the world and to other people. My senses are heightened; things look clear and bright. After years of practice, hara breathing has become more and more automatic for me, and today I strive to maintain my hara breathing in all circumstances—not just on the zazen cushion. Those of us who have been at this for a while know that hara development is a lifelong journey, one that makes this life ever richer.

Exercises

In general, 5 to 10 minutes once a day is appropriate for most people at the beginning stages; you can add extra time once you get the hang of the exercises. You can practice anywhere—in a quiet room at home, in an exercise studio, or at a park. You can also do the exercises any time of day, though I like to do them early in the morning because I find them energizing: they clear my mind for the day ahead. (I also practice during breaks at work; if you don’t have private space, however, this might be a challenge.) Some find it helpful to practice the exercises before sitting zazen or engaging in martial arts practice.

Be sure to stop the exercises if you feel lightheaded. Resume them only when you no longer feel lightheaded, and hold your breath for shorter periods of time when you resume. Pregnant women should not attempt this exercise without consulting a physician. If the exercise causes abdominal or other physical distress, consult your physician.

Deep Inhalation Exercise

Remember that in order to be able to keep the expansion in the lower abdomen when exhaling, you first must be able to expand it when taking a deep inhalation. In other words, you must be able to do diaphragmatic breathing before you can do hara breathing. This exercise helps to develop a deep, relaxed diaphragmatic inhalation.

1. From a standing position, start by inhaling deeply. Inflate your abdomen and then your chest as much as possible.

2. Exhale through the nose as much of the air as you can. As you exhale, contract your abdominal muscles as much as you can. Feel your navel move toward your spine.

3. Without inhaling, continue to contract your abdominal muscles (navel to spine) as much as you can. Hold this tension for 5 seconds or until you feel you simply must take a breath in.

4. Release the tension in your abdomen as quickly as possible, and allow a deep inhalation. Focus on the sensation of relaxation in your lower abdomen, and allow yourself to inhale through the nose once again. It should feel as though the relaxation effortlessly drives the inhalation. Feel your lower abdomen expand. You may feel that gravity is helping to expand your lower abdomen.

5. Go back to your normal breathing rhythm. See if you can maintain the sense of relaxation in your lower abdomen as you breathe normally.

6. After a brief period of normal breathing, repeat steps 1 through 5. The amount of time you wait will vary from person to person. In order to avoid getting short of breath, do not attempt this exercise on consecutive breaths.

Relaxed Exhalation Exercise

This exercise helps to develop relaxed expansion in the lower abdomen during exhalation. This is the distinguishing feature of hara breathing. I generally introduce this exercise after someone is able to take a relaxed, expansive inhalation, as taught in the Deep Inhalation Exercise.

Follow steps 1 through 5 of the Deep Inhalation Exercise. This time, before you begin, place one hand right below your navel, the other hand right below your sternum. Both hands will move outward as your abdomen expands on inhalation. Ideally, the lower hand will visibly move more.

For me, the deepening and refining of hara breathing has come to represent the essence of Zen training itself.

Following the inhalation at the end of step 4 of the previous exercise (immediately after you release the tension) and before you start exhaling, begin the next exhalation by very slightly contracting the muscles under your upper hand. Think of it as putting a little pressure on the top of an air-filled balloon (but don’t push with your hand). You will feel a slight “scooping” sensation in the muscles below the sternum. Simultaneously relax the muscles of your lower abdomen while you gently grip the floor with your big toes. This puts tone in your pelvic floor. Sense the weight of gravity pulling your lower abdomen downward.

Use the scooping feeling below your sternum and the weight of the lower abdomen to continue the exhalation. Continue to grip with your big toes. Keep your lower abdomen relaxed and expanded for as long as you can. Ideally, your lower abdomen will remain relaxed and your lower hand will not move. The upper hand will move inward slightly.

It’s OK if at first you can’t maintain the scooping sensation in the upper abdomen or the relaxation in the lower abdomen to the end of your exhalation. Never strain to force the exhalation. The key to this exercise—and hara breathing—is relaxation, even on exhalation.

Inhale when you reach a comfortable end to your exhalation. Once again initiate the inhalation by simply relaxing the muscles of your lower abdomen. Release the grip of your big toes before you inhale.

After a brief period of normal breathing, repeat the exercise. The amount of time you wait will vary from person to person. Again, do not attempt this exercise on consecutive breaths. Once you can maintain the expansion of your lower abdomen when you start the exhalation, work toward maintaining it throughout the entire exhalation.

♦

This article is a part of the special section “Meditations Off the Beaten Path” in Tricycle’s Winter 2018 issue. The other articles in this section are:

“Listening to Silence,”
by Dharma Master Hsin Tao

“The Elemental Self,”
by Ayya Khema

“Pure and Simple Practice,”
by Dharmavidya David Brazier

The post Breathe Deep appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

When I was a young monk, I practiced Chan Buddhism by myself in a graveyard for ten years and later in a mountain cave for an additional two years. I did not have a teacher to guide me, but—propelled by devotion—I followed a method of practice that Bodhisattva Guanyin, also known as Avalokiteshvara, teaches in the Shurangama Sutra. This method, called Perfect Penetration through Hearing, relies not on any words or concepts but on listening to silence.

In the sutra, Guanyin, who was dwelling on an island, listened to the sound of the waves washing up against the rocks on the shore. As Guanyin became fully absorbed in listening to the waves as they rose and splashed against the rocks, then receded into silence, rose and receded again, rose and receded, every sound eventually became silent as it reached Guanyin’s ears. The bodhisattva describes it as follows:

I entered into the stream of the self-nature of hearing, and thereby eliminated the sound of what was heard. When I proceeded from this inner stillness both sounds and silence ceased to arise. Advancing in this way, both hearing and what was heard melted away and disappeared. When hearing and what is heard are both forgotten, the sense of hearing leaves no impression in the mind.

In this practice, you simply listen without attachment to sound, to silence, or to the contrast between the two; there’s no attachment at all. If you are able to listen in this way, you will eventually reach a point when listening still occurs, but it no longer has an object. In other words, there is still awareness, but that which you are aware of is empty.

Related: Hearing: A Door to Liberation

The Shurangama Sutra says, “when both awareness and the objects of awareness become empty, then emptiness and awareness merge and reach a state of absolute perfection.” But even then, you cannot hold on to that experience of unison; you need to let go of it completely by listening even more. This is where the text directs us by saying, “When emptiness and what is being emptied are both extinguished, then birth and death, arising and extinction are naturally extinguished.” In other words, when there is no mental distinction remaining between emptiness or form, when you have experienced complete stillness at the core of everything, then you have returned to “your original face before your parents were born.” It is at this point of return that you fully comprehend samsara—birth and death—and are liberated from it.

This method of listening described by Guanyin is a process of deeply entering into samadhi, a state in which the heart and mind “stop” producing any kind of intentional action and are fully immersed in non-action (wu-wei). There is no longer any difference between “being” and “nothingness.” “Being” is that which is visible, that which we see with our eyes; “nonbeing” is the thought that we hold in our heart, namely the thought of nothingness or emptiness. When you look at anything, it is important not to see it either from the perspective of being or from that of nothingness, but instead to rest in your enlightened nature.

The Chan practice of listening to silence provides a way to refine our hearts and minds, thought after thought, to the point that they become ever more subtle and increasingly attuned to stillness and emptiness. As we progress, we realize how constricted we are by our discriminating mind: our minds, not our hearing organs, make the distinction between sound and silence. But if you practice listening until you no longer make distinctions, you develop a power that is liberating. You’re no longer pushed around by concepts, emotions, or other mental objects. Instead, you decide what to move or transform.

Four Steps for Listening to Silence

While I was practicing listening to silence in the graveyard I developed a four-step method that helped me regulate my breath and settle my body and mind before I started to listen. The first three steps are geared toward the “stopping” (Skt., shamata) of our distracted and dispersed mind by concentrating on one point; the fourth step involves the “seeing” (Skt., vipashyana) of emptiness in the stillness of our heart and mind. One should remember that the guidance of an experienced teacher is important in Chan practice in order to keep you on the right track.

Take seven deep breaths.

Sit up straight with your chin slightly tucked in, eyes partly open (to prevent daydreaming), and your mouth closed. Breathe in deeply from the dantian, the energy center located right under the navel. With each in-breath, be aware of the air passing through your throat and how it passes through the nose with each out-breath. This process helps us to breathe in fresh energy, known as chi, and expel stale energy.

Move the attention from the eyes to the nose, mouth, and heart.

This step is especially geared toward stopping, or reining in, the monkey mind that we find so difficult to control. Start by gently moving your attention from the eyes to the area under the nose where you are breathing in and out. Let it rest there for a while. From there, move the attention to the mouth. Finally, shift your attention from your mouth to your heart. Try not to hold any thoughts, images, or attachments to experience. Our spiritual heart is empty; it has no shape, form, or size. Once this is done, start all over again from the eyes. Repeat this seven times.

Observe the breath.

Breathe in and out naturally while fastening the monkey mind’s attention to the breath. When you reach the state where the monkey no longer feels bound by the breath but instead enjoys staying there, then you have reached the stage of stopping. Your awareness is gentle and clear—it becomes one with the breath.

Listen to silence.

While the previous three steps are intended to stop the wandering mind by letting it rest on the breath, the fourth step of listening has more to do with “seeing.”

In preparation, start by relaxing your ears, head, neck, shoulders, and every cell in your body. Let the entire body quiet down completely. When you hear sounds from outside, like a human voice or the sound of a car passing by, listen to them as the sound of silence. When you tell yourself that distracting sounds are silent, they become that way. However, if you tell yourself that they are noisy and disturbing, that is what they will be. Keep listening to the sound of silence in everything, staying completely relaxed.

Hear the silence in the mountains and rivers, the great wide earth, the sky. Eventually, the whole universe will fall into deep silence. Perceive that same deep silence in yourself.

In this state, there is no sound whatsoever, and when you listen, you listen to the sound of no sound. Every thought returns into silence and becomes still. When practicing this technique, it is important not to force anything when listening but to remain relaxed and listen in a natural way.

Ultimately, it is our awareness unified with emptiness that is really listening to the silence. “Being aware of silence” and “seeing silence” are the same thing. Who is aware of silence? Who sees silence? It is our enlightened nature that is aware and sees. The next step in the practice is to dwell in the clarity of silence, and once you know how to do this, the last step is to enlighten your own mind by seeing your true nature. It might take quite some time to reach these stages, but if you sustain your awareness of silence, then you will eventually reach it. Practicing slowly and steadily is very important. When you feel that your mind starts wandering again while listening to silence, return to step two and focus on the movement from eyes to nose to mouth to heart, with no thoughts or images in your heart.

Our true nature is the emptiness of all things, the “true formless form.” Chan practice is about seeing, hearing, being aware of, and clearly knowing this. It is about realizing that what we habitually see, hear, and are aware of and know is an illusion. We begin this practice of listening to tune into a deeper awareness that leads to the realization of emptiness, which in turn empties out our mistaken views and notions. Most importantly, this Chan practice lets us enter into the true form of enlightened nature.

Such form is eternal; it is unborn and never dies, is neither stained nor pure, neither increases nor diminishes. There is absolutely nothing here to hold on to: no rebirth in samsara; no world of bodily form, sensation, thought, impulse, or consciousness; no pain and no happiness, no gain and no loss. This is what Bodhisattva Guanyin realized through listening to the silence in the sounds of the waves. With our own practice, we, too, can enter the stream of our true nature and see our original face.

♦

Adapted from The Way of the Heart: Teachings of Dharma Master Hsin Tao, edited and translated by Maria Reis Habito © 2016. Reprinted in arrangement with Maria Reis Habito.

This article is a part of the special section “Meditations Off the Beaten Path” in Tricycle’s Winter 2018 issue. The other articles in this section are:

“The Elemental Self,”
by Ayya Khema

“Pure and Simple Practice,”
by Dharmavidya David Brazier

“Breathe Deep,”
by Ken Kushner

The post Listening to Silence appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

Everything consists of the four primary elements: earth, fire, water, and air. Observing the presence of all four of these elements within us, or even just one of them, can be an important way of recognizing how our individual composition is the same as the composition of the rest of the universe. This may be an intellectual understanding at first, but eventually, with practice, it can become a feeling—one of being exactly the same as everything around us.

Anything that we can touch has the earth element: our body—our flesh, bones, and hair; the ground; even water. We humans, reliant as we are upon what we can see and touch, are most concerned with this earth element, particularly as it relates to the body. The body should have the right shape, the right color, the right age, and the right abilities. But really our bodies are nothing more than an assortment of components that are found throughout the universe.

The fire element indicates temperature—warm or cold—and the capacity to digest or to eat. Our margin of comfort for internal temperatures— between 60 and 80 degrees Fahrenheit—is rather small. According to some Buddhist traditions, however, we can expand our comfort level and open ourselves up to the realization that our body contains all temperatures.

The water element implies not only water but also blood, urine, sweat, tears, and so on. It’s also the binding element: it makes things hang together. If you add water to flour, for instance, you get dough. Adult human bodies are composed up to 60 percent of water; if they weren’t, the cells would probably wander around separately, because there would be no binding element.

And last but not least, the air element refers to the body’s breath, wind, and movement. Whenever we move, it’s as though the wind has taken over. Even when we walk, we can see that we are dispersing air and creating movement, however subtle.

When we meditate on these four primary elements in ourselves and in the outer world, we no longer feel threatened by external forces or situations, because we recognize that everything, and everyone, is composed of these same four elements. We see that there are no distinctions between one and the other, and are thereby able to realize the complete oneness of existence and manifestation. Without the feeling of separation from the rest of the world, we also lose the need to strain and stress to be better, more clever, or more accomplished. We can start to just be. That’s all there is to it.

Here’s how to practice meditation on the four elements:

First, put your attention on the breath for just a moment.

Then, feel the solidity—the earth element—of your body. Touch your hands or your knees, or feel your mouth where the lips meet. Feel the bones throughout your body, the skin above them, and notice the subtle pressure of the eyelids on the eyes.

Let that feeling of solidity flow into and merge with the earth element of the cushion that you sit on. Then become aware of the earth element in the soles of your feet and in the floor or mat. Again, let the two earth elements merge.

Now imagine that you are going to walk outside. With each step that you take, the earth element in your feet merges with the earth element of the floor you walk on. You walk to the door, and as you put your hand on the doorknob, the earth element in the palm of your hand merges and flows into the earth element of the door, which you now open.

Imagine walking outside, your feet merging with the literal earth beneath you. You walk over to the nearest tree and lean back against its trunk, allowing your body to merge with its solidity. No separation.

Visualize yourself continuing to walk outside and coming upon a stream. You put your hand into the stream and feel the water’s solidity pressing against your fingers, recognizing that this solidity is what allows boats to float and fish to swim.

You look up at the sky and let your body’s earth element flow into the clouds, which have their own solidity. There’s no division, no separation—only merging. To one side you see a friend, whose body also contains the earth element, and you both observe that shared experience.

Now come back to your immediate surroundings and return to the breath. In this second exercise, focus your awareness on the temperature in your body. Some parts may be warm; other parts may be cold. What is the temperature of the cushion or chair you’re sitting on? In the same way as before, let the two—the warmth or coolness in yourself and in your seat—merge together. Do the same with your feet on the floor. Become aware of the temperature in the soles of your feet and the temperature of the floor. Let them become one.

Go through the same imagination exercise as before—walking to the door, going outside, leaning against the tree, touching the water, looking at the sky, and seeing a friend—but do so with your focus placed on the fire element. Feel the temperature of the earth, the water, and the sunshine in the air. Imagine going into the shade, and how that changes your interaction with fire. The coolness touches your body and generates feeling. The shade and you yourself are not separate.

Now go to the nearest tree and touch it with your hand, feeling its temperature. Merge your own feeling of warmth with the warmth of the tree, and realize that you’re no longer separate from that tree. Imagine leaning back against the tree, absorbing the warmth from the sun’s rays or the coolness of the shade and tuning into the fact that you and the tree share the same fire element in the form of temperature.

For each of the two remaining elements, water and air, repeat the steps outlined above, always first tuning into the breath, then focusing in turn on the element of water and air in the body, then imagining yourself navigating the external world of elements. All the while, recognize that you share the experience of that element with everything you encounter—the wet morning dew; dry, crackly leaves; birds zooming through the air; clouds drifting above. Use your sensory imagination to weave a rich tapestry of connection.

With practice, one day we will recognize that all phenomena are composed of and dependent upon the interaction and merging of these four elements. We will realize that all of it—the entire universe—is just one continuous manifestation. And that we, ourselves, are no different.

♦

This edited version of Ayya Khema’s dharma talk “Contemplation on the Four Great Elements” was reprinted with permission of Buddha-Haus, Germany, © Buddha-haus (buddha-haus.de).

♦

This article is a part of the special section “Meditations Off the Beaten Path” in Tricycle’s Winter 2018 issue. The other articles in this section are:

“Listening to Silence,”
by Dharma Master Hsin Tao, edited by Maria Reis Habito

“Pure and Simple Practice,”
by Dharmavidya David Brazier

“Breathe Deep,”
by Ken Kushner

The post The Elemental Self appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

Pure Land practice is simple. It doesn’t require that the practitioner be learned in Buddhist thought or exceptional in moral virtue, meditation, or spiritual discipline. It is suitable for those with busy lives, and it is as suitable for those who are struggling with self-destructive habits or feelings of despondency, anger, sadness, or confusion as it is for those who are full of joy in living. It connects us with the beauty in the world, is full of art and poetry, fosters gratitude for all we receive, and restores basic faith.

The origins of Pure Land practice lie in Shakyamuni’s teachings to laypeople and the devotion that people felt toward him during and after his lifetime. The great popularizers of this approach—Shan Tao in 7th-century China and Honen Shonin in 12th-century Japan, and their teachers, disciples, and associates—were people who lived exemplary Buddhist lives and knew the whole range of Buddhist teachings, yet chose to emphasize an approach to practice that was accessible to the ordinary person, no matter what their circumstance, personal virtue, gender, status, or history was. These teachers lived in dark times and offered hope.

Honen Shonin saw his father killed in civil war. He worried about the fate of his mother, who was a Korean immigrant. He was shocked by what he saw of human brutality in the Hogen uprising (1156). He understood that many people were trapped in oppressive social conditions they could do little or nothing about. He instituted the nembutsu, the recitation of the Buddha’s name, as a practice of solidarity with and solace for the oppressed.

How can we put ourselves in relationship with unconditional love and live a life that is open, spontaneous, compassionate, and full of trust?

The questions at the heart of Pure Land Buddhism are perennial and universal: How can we put ourselves in relationship with unconditional love and live a life that is open, spontaneous, compassionate, and full of trust, given that we are only ordinary human beings living in a world that is, as Buddha said, on fire with greed, hate, and delusion? We ourselves are not immune: we are part of this world. How can we entrust ourselves to a way that goes beyond the worries and small-minded concerns that clutter ordinary existence and be part of something greater that contributes to the welfare of all sentient beings, when our capacity is so limited and we are already corrupted by beginningless karma?

THREE CORE ELEMENTS

In Pure Land Buddhism, the great unconditional love that we intuit is embodied in Amida, the Buddha of Infinite Life and Light. In Mahayana Buddhism, of which Pure Land is a part, there is a strong sense that the being of Buddha is not something limited to a single place and time but is universally present and available, inspiring and benefitting us. This is known as the Buddha’s sambhoghakaya aspect. In Pure Land, enlightenment is not so much something to be achieved by personal attainment but rather something that constantly bathes us, a light for the world already given by the boundless presence of buddhas and their teachings.

Then, in contradistinction to this inspiring intuition, Pure Land practice also begins with a recognition that in oneself, one does not perfectly embody such wisdom and compassion; that as a matter of fact and daily evidence, we are deluded beings, emotionally vulnerable and prone to all kinds of errors. This is the state that ordinary people recognize when they say, “I’m only human.” In Japanese it is our bombu nature. In this sense we are literally “foolish beings,” and it is this humble self-recognition that is the second foundation of Pure Land practice.

Putting these two things together—recognition of universal love on the one hand and of our own limited nature on the other—we may suddenly experience a shift, or even a shock. Here we are, prone to greed, hate, and delusion in all their many forms, often acting selfishly and making mistakes, sometimes with dire consequences, yet from the perspective of universal compassion, loved and accepted just as we are. In the language of Pure Land Buddhism, we are accepted by the love of the buddhas, Amida Buddha in particular. In Pure Land practice we recite the Buddha’s name to express our feeling about this, especially our gratitude and wonderment.

These, then, are the three foundations of Pure Land practice. First, to recognize the universal presence. Second, to face our own limited nature. Third, to express wonderment through calling out the name of the Buddha. As we continue with such practice, the calling, as it were, turns around and turns us around. We start to experience it not so much as me calling to the Buddha, but more and more as Buddha calling me. Pure Land Buddhism is, therefore, a “calling” in both senses of the word. It is a practice of calling out, and it is also a sense of being called—a practice that shapes one’s life and provides a spiritual security that transcends even birth and death.

PRACTICING THE NEMBUTSU WAY

There are many ways to call the Buddha’s name, and throughout the Buddhist world devotees do so in one way or another. It may be “Namo Buddhaya,” “Namo Tassa,” or “Buddham saranam gacchami.” In China it may be “Omito Fo” and in Japan “Namo Amida Butsu.” In the West this last tends to be Anglicized as “Namo Amida Bu” in order to preserve the six-syllable form of many Japanese chants. This method of calling the Buddha’s name is known as nembutsu.

The term nembutsu means “mindfulness of Buddha.” Namo Amida Bu means “I call upon measureless Buddha.” However, in reality this practice is not an intellectual or cognitive assertion; it is an expression of sentiment and a way of opening one’s heart to receive. When one recites the nembutsu it is an expression of gratitude and wonderment but also an expression of whatever spiritual feeling is arising at that time. In this sense it is an offering of oneself and a reception of grace. Reciting nembutsu is a two-way street connecting you with Buddha. It is not a straitjacket, not an attempt to squeeze oneself into a prescribed form or arrive at a prespecified state of mind. Each time one says the nembutsu, something different may arise. Whatever one is, one offers, and one receives what one needs. The hallmark of Pure Land is great acceptance, and one of the most difficult things may be to accept that one is already accepted.

Nembutsu can be said, called, chanted, or expressed in any of a great many different ways, rhythms, forms, melodies, and formats, in groups, in big, beautiful formal ceremonies, or while out on one’s own having a walk. Something good happens, “Namo Amida Bu.” Something bad happens, “Namo Amida Bu.” Stuck at traffic lights, “Namo Amida Bu.” Meeting another practitioner, “Namo Amida Bu.” As one gets into it, other practices also start to become forms of nembutsu. Bowing is nembutsu with the body. Acts of generosity are nembutsu for others. Visiting a shrine is nembutsu, because it brings us into mindfulness of Buddha.

What we are talking about is not really a technique but more an approach or orientation. It involves a positive use of imagination and a mobilization of emotion. The whole person is accepted. Pure Land is expressive and poetic. It encompasses the fullness and the pathos of life. It is sometimes said that Pure Land is for those of us who have already failed at more disciplined, ascetic, or demanding approaches, who are perhaps too sensitive, or too artistic, or too ordinary for the more heroic paths. Just say the nembutsu, and keep on saying it, and see.

One thing that we may well see is that insofar as we do take on board the sense that we are accepted even as we are, we tend to become more accepting of others. After all, they are flawed and fallible human beings just as we are, and they are up against the same samsaric difficulties burdened with their own karma, just as we are. We become more sympathetic to the failings of others. We feel loved and more able to love others in return. This is the foundation of true compassion and fellow feeling, which is the universal flavor of the dharma. When we take up the Pure Land orientation, the failures and tragedies that occur confirm rather than shake our faith.

Time to fall
is time to float
for a lotus blossom
–Zuigen Inagaki

In order to start the practice, you don’t need a clear idea of exactly what Amida is or how nembutsu works. Don’t inhibit your imagination, intuition, or emotion. This is not a creed or a dogma; it is a style. You can generate a sense of Amida as an unfolding wholesome energy, as the spirit that moved the Buddha to live a good life, or as unconditional love, but don’t worry about precision or accuracy. If you just have the sense that nembutsu might be a good thing and do it trusting that it will do its work, that is fine. In fact, it is more than fine, and for a special reason. Where many spiritual practices are about becoming more and more conscious, alert, and sharply aware and precise, Pure Land is more a matter of letting the spiritual sense sink down into one’s unconscious. It is not really that we do the practice so much as that the practice works on us, and it does so quietly, in the background, little by little transforming one’s life. Try it. If it works for you, keep going!

A good way to start practicing nembutsu may be to chant “Namo Amida Bu” for five minutes, once or twice a day. That’s it. You can either say the words or listen to a recording of the chant, which you can find online. Feel free to chant along with audio, or chant alone and vary the speed or pitch to suit your own voice. Some people feel self-conscious when they first start chanting, or worry about whether they’re getting it “right.” These feelings will likely fade after a few days [see “Getting Started” for more tips on beginning your practice].

If it helps, you can also simply incorporate nembutsu into daily life. The founders were aware that many ordinary Chinese or Japanese people would have to do their practice while planting rice seedlings or sailing a boat. In our case it might be mowing the lawn or driving the car.

One can’t say exactly how this wholesome energy will affect you—it will depend upon what you need.

Then again, as in any practice, it is good, if possible, to associate with other practitioners. In East Asia this is easy enough, but in the West one might have to reach out through the Internet. It is excellent when we can meet in person and chant together. Chanting is a practice that brings people closer, even if it is via a video link. A nembutsu meeting with some time for chanting and some time for personal sharing can be a great support to practice even when only two or three people are present, although this is even more helpful in a larger group.

In all of these ways we can express thanks for what we receive. A core element of the dharma is the teaching of dependent origination. Everything arises from causes and conditions, which means that everything that we are and everything we have depends upon other things to which we can express gratitude. Nembutsu is the way to do that—a way that not only gives thanks for the specific circumstance but also simultaneously, in a mere six syllables, invokes and connects all involved to the infinite wisdom and compassion of the buddhas. When you get your cup of coffee, “Namo Amida Bu.”

One can’t say exactly how this wholesome energy will affect you—it will depend upon what you need. Sometimes we don’t even know what’s best for ourselves, so we must trust that something good will begin to unfold. As the days go by, you may begin to feel more peaceful or gain more perspective on your problems. Some people notice that they are dealing with their emotions differently and having more patience with themselves and those around them. Most people feel more settled and more secure, less anxious and more natural.

Shinran, the most famous disciple of Honen Shonin, says in one of his songs that the Pure Land is jinen, which is sometimes translated as “naturalness,” or “things in their natural state.” Or as the Pure Land teacher Zuigen Inagaki writes:

Just as you are,
really,
just as you are!

I hope that you enjoy your explorations with nembutsu, and that it brings you the inspiration, peace, courage, and comfort that it has brought me.

Namo Amida Bu!

Getting Started

• You may want to practice at the same time every day to help form a habit. If you’re a morning person, set your alarm ten minutes early. Some people chant during their lunch break or in the evening before they go to bed.
• Choose a quiet space to practice. If you enjoy being outside, try chanting in the garden or while walking.
• Some people like to light a candle or light an incense stick before they begin.
• Chant along with recordings (URLs below), chant alone, or find a friend who’s interested in joining you and chant together.
• If finding privacy for chanting is difficult, just move your lips without making a noise or say the words silently in your head.
• Sometimes you may want to chant for a longer period of time. Some days you won’t find the time, or you’ll forget. That’s OK—just say “Namo Amida Bu” and carry on the next day.

Accompanying Audio:

• amidashu.org/dailynembutsu/prostrations_5mins.mp3
• amidashu.org/dailynembutsu/namoamidabu_5mins.mp3

♦

This article is a part of the special section “Meditations Off the Beaten Path” in Tricycle’s Winter 2018 issue. The other articles in this section are:

“Listening to Silence,”
by Dharma Master Hsin Tao, edited by Maria Reis Habito

“The Elemental Self,”
by Ayya Khema

“Breathe Deep,”
by Ken Kushner

The post Pure and Simple Practice appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.