"I always think friction and having annoying things around is absolutely essential for good meditation. Otherwise, you become incredibly selfish, controlling, and easily upset."
Ajahn Sumedho
[I find this note encouraging, as friction and having annoying things around is basically the definition of my life and practice.]
(Photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons and a generous photographer.)
As non-Vajrayana Western converts to Buddhism will tell you, we have a slightly awkward relationship with Tibet. Not that we have any real bone to pick with our Tantric brothers and sisters. It's mostly just a difference of style. Practice models in the three other common convert denominations – Zen, Vipassana, Theravada – are pretty stripped-down, with Zen probably being the most "gorgeous" of the very Puritan lot. Tibetan forms, meanwhile, are downright High Church.
More prosaic is the simple fact that the Dalai Lama is the only Buddhist most Westerners can name, and since our media regularly imply that he's the "boss of Buddhism", we're all generally believed to owe him fealty. Thus, non-Buddhists are often surprised to learn that I don't really follow the guy's news – he's fine as far as august spiritual figures go, but carries no greater weight with me than the Pope or other sincere religious celebrities.
Similarly, Tibetan Buddhist stereotypes often pass for Buddhist, full stop. Yet I rarely chant "om"; I don't own a copy of the Tibetan Book of the Dead; my Zen teaching embraces transmigration (which I don't necessarily buy, either) rather than reincarnation; and therefore we don't believe past masters can inhabit children.
All of which to say, non-Tantric Neo-Buddhists tend to know fairly little about that tradition or its teachings.
So I was grateful when a fellow Mastodonian shared a particularly provocative passage from Tilopa, an Indian sage whose wisdom looms large in Tibet. Upon further exploration I learned that the posted lines are actually the heart statement of the great Tantra master's programme.
The interpretation presented can be traced to Alan Watts, and reads as follows:
No thought, no reflection, no analysis,
No cultivation, no intention;
Let it settle itself.
Certainly a Zen-friendly sentiment, in that we-say-these-things-a-lot-but-never-do-them kind of way. And other translations found elsewhere enrich the context:
Don’t recall.
Don’t imagine.
Don’t think.
Don’t examine.
Don’t control.
Rest.
A bit more Soto in flavour than Watts' Rinzai-esque lines, perhaps, consisting of nuts and bolts exhortations ("act this way") rather than a self-absent explication of phenomena. But taken together – as is usually the case with these two schools of Japanese Zen – they bring greater insight.
And finally, this fraternal take:
Let go of what has passed.
Let go of what may come.
Let go of what is happening now.
Don’t try to figure anything out.
Don’t try to make anything happen.
Relax, right now, and rest.
(Both of the non-Watts translations quoted here are the work of Tibetan Buddhism teacher Ken Mcleod.)
So I'm paying this forward, as a particularly valuable meditation for Zenners, regardless of source.
Because it's not just good stuff, it's Zen stuff. And also good Zen stuff.
(Tableau of Tilopa courtesy of Wikimedia Commons and a generous photographer.)
"Zen is not found in the understanding, it's found in the doing of it."
Gil Fronsdal
(Photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons and a generous photographer.)
"A watched mind never boils."
Gil Fronsdal
(Photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons and a generous photographer.)
"All you single people who think you'd be happy if you were married, ask a married person.
"All you married people who think you'd be happy if you were single, ask a single person."
Ajahn Brahm
("Korean thanksgiving day night [Fractal art]" courtesy of Wikimedia Commons and a generous photographer.)
In Meditation in the Wild: Buddhism's Origin in the Heart of Nature, Charles S. Fisher writes:
"Buddhism was born in the forests of India. [...] The Buddha found his original revelation while practicing as a forest monk. [...] He developed an understanding of nature which would become part of the remedy he proposed for the problem of human discontent. [...] He chose wild nature - the evolutionary context in which humans arose - as the place to do this. [...] He went to the place in the human mind where there is understanding without words."
The next 315 pages go on to prove his thesis.
Not that it's easy; as a quotation from Theravada scholar Richard Gombrich points out:
"So much of the material attributed to [the Buddha]… is so obviously inauthentic that we can suspect almost everything. In fact, it seems impossible to establish what the Buddha really taught. We can only know what early Buddhists believed he taught."
And this, as it happens, is very different from what we've been told. For example, some of their records maintain that Gautama encountered his famous Four Sights on the way to the forest, where he sat and pondered what he saw. Others suggest that the pivotal debate between Mara and Gautama on the eve of his Enlightenment was actually about the Devil's contention that the young man had no right to strive to end suffering. All those statues of him touching the earth, they contend, depict him saying, "Check it out, dipstick: I'm home. Go find someone who cares."
But outdoor practice was hard – even harder than it is now – with dangerous wildlife and tribal warriors still ruling the outback, and the impulse to organise was strong. Yet The Kindred Sayings of Kassapa show the Buddha "bemoan[ing] the passing of the forest way of life and criticis[ing] those who depart from it"; he may have gone so far as to advocate a straight-up return to hunter-gathering, according to texts that describe his sangha living off the land, hunting game, and never returning to the Red Dust World. The fact that Buddhism spread to new lands precisely as Indian forests were clearcut leads one to wonder what exactly the motivations of those first "missionaries" were. (It also throws intriguing light on the Bodhidharma story. Canon holds that when asked why he came all the way to China to sit under a tree, he replied: "Because this is the best tree in the world." Perhaps his actual words were something like, "Because you still have trees.")
Conjecture aside, the founding generation of Buddhists exhorted aspirants to imitate Gautama literally. Mahakasyapa, a member of the Buddha's inner circle, died a loud and proud hermit, as did no less than Sariputra, of Heart Sutra fame. Finally, reports of early Western observers – Greek travellers – confirm that the first Buddhists were itinerants, without clergy or temples.
But as the movement grew respectable and sedentary, hermits were increasingly viewed as "unsocial, possibly antisocial, and potentially dangerous to established Buddhism." This last repeated pious tales of the Buddha's forest practice, but openly discouraged others from emulating it. Old-school monks, known as "mahallas", were accused of backsliding and dissolution and reviled by the ordained. (Some verses quoted in Wild are stunningly similar to the rant St. Benedict unleashed on Sarabaites and Gyrovagues at an identical stage in Christian history.)
To be sure, over the past 2500 years Buddhist back-to-the-landers have continued to crop up; modern Zen and Theravada are remnants of two such rebellions. Possibly Wild's greatest gift is the two and half millennia of these forgotten reformers it lifts from obscurity. Along the way its author weighs the relative merit of individual cases. He reviews Issa's suburban eremiticism, which echoes most current hermit practices, with guarded approval, but – interestingly – takes Bashō, Ryokan, and Kamo No Chomei firmly to the woodshed.
And that's where I get off the train. In these passages, Fisher reminds me of Thoreau's critics, calling down suspects for claims they never made. His indictment of Bashō does ring, but he repeatedly spins individual innovation in self-directed practices as weak or duplicitous; in the case of Ikkyu, he indulges in crass bourgeois morality. Somehow, in all of his research on us, he missed our core vow: "I will neither take nor give orders." I may raise an eyebrow at others (OK: I do raise an eyebrow at others) but ultimately I have no right to deplore them. Licence to judge is a delusion of the ordained.
But this mild annoyance in no way diminishes the significance of Fisher's work. His journalism is both intrepid and thorough, penetrating the Thai forest lineage – a modern restoration movement – at length and documenting the gradual deterioration of Zen, from Bodhidharma's boldly-planted hermit flag, to the dismissal of 19th century hermit Ryokan (his own beefs with him aside) as a "lunatic". He finishes with an account of his own brushes with eremitical practice (Fisher is not a practising hermit per se, but is attracted to our forms) and a light survey of four contemporary American hermits. All in all, it's the most comprehensive treatment of the subject I've found anywhere.
And I found it impossible to put down. With any luck, Meditation in the Wild will stand for many years as Eremitical Buddhism 101 for sincere students of the Buddha's way.
This is the mouthpiece of the Insight Meditation lineage maintained by Gil Fronsdal. (I have no idea what titles are in play or how the hierarchy over there works, but Gil delivers most of the teishos, so I'm assigning him authority.)
Insight in general, and Gil in particular, offer a refreshing perspective on Buddhist practice. Gil's gentle, self-effacing delivery inspire trust, and his perspective that existence is more or less an elaborate practical joke suggests to me that he's as near enlightened as anyone in this life. (Also, as a Zenner who jumped ship for Theravada, he's an invaluable resource for Zenners; his subtle criticisms of our approach to the Great Matter are both respectful and incisive.)
About half of the teishos here are his; the other half are delivered by a host of other teachers speaking on a range of mostly life and practice topics. (You can always count on Insight to get to the point.) Treatises on sutric or koanic literature are occasionally uploaded as well.
Individual podcasts can be downloaded from the Audio Dharma website, or listeners can subscribe via iTunes or XML. Like the SFZC podcast it's an exhaustive library of teachers and topics, offered entirely free of charge, that could serve as your sole source of spoken-word teaching if you were so inclined.
You gotta love Ajahn Brahmavamso Mahathera. He's a forest monk, albeit not of the hermit lineage. In a West dominated by Zen, Vipassana, and Vajrayana, his dharma is Theravada. He's a working class Englishman with a Cambridge degree in theoretical physics, trained as a monk in Thailand, and teaching in outback Australia. He runs a monastery he built himself. (Seriously. With his own hands.) And he's been excommunicated by his lineage. So he must be doing something right. (Ordaining women, as it happens.)
But the best thing about Ajahn Brahm is his teaching. There's precious little piety about this guru. He'll call out hypocrisy so fast it'll make your incense burner spin. And he starts with his own.
I particularly esteem Brahm's (in)famous Five Types of Religion. (True fact: the original teaching was Five Types of Buddhism, which is how I first heard it. Only when it was pointed out that all religions suffer from these delusions did he rework it for everyone.)
So here they are. Readers who practice a religion, any religion, should copy and paste this list. Then edit out my commentary, and meditate on the rest. Often.
Everybody strapped in?
AJAHN BRAHM'S FIVE TYPES OF RELIGION
1. Conceited Religion: Our religion is better than yours. (And therefore we are better than you.)
This is a Christian stereotype here in the West, but that's only because they're the majority; I run into identical Buddhists all the time. Despite what some would have you believe, triumphalism (the belief that you have a monopoly on truth) is a sin in every religion. In fact, I learned both the term and the condemnation as part of my Christian training.
2. Ritual Religion: Venerating the container above the contents.
Did someone say "guru worship"? Let's face it, Zenners: we do the hell out of this one. Obsession with rank and form, bowing, chanting, posture, oryoki, lighting this, ringing that, bop-she-bop, rama-lama-ding-dong. None of it's worth a crock of warm spit, and if you forget that, it's a giant waste of time.
3. Business Religion: We're best because we're biggest. Biggest church, largest sangha, highest priest, trendiest teacher-author.
This is the "success" model, whereby we declare the biggest seller the best product. Uh, no. Read your scripture, people. God doesn't like "success". Not least because it instantly becomes an altar to Mara. Worldly religion is no religion.
4. Negative Religion: We gotta GET those [insert group here] !!!
As Brahm points out, this is yin to Type 1's yang: where Conceited Religion says "we're the best," Negative Religion says "they're the worst." I call it Varsity Religion: lots of cheerleaders shaking their pompons and urging us to spend our meagre days on earth beating State. Good thing it has nothing to do with enlightenment; State can't be beat.
5. Real Religion: Doing what your prophet told you to do.
Note that the first four types are not this. Try it. Grab any religion. I like Zoroastrianism. And not just because it has the awesomest name of any religion. (It would be worth it to convert just so you could tell people you're Zoroastrian.)
Thus:
1. Did Zoroaster teach his followers that they were a superior race, and all others inferior?
No.
2. Did he teach that temporal gestures were the main point of faith?
No.
3. Did he teach that the biggest temples or most acclaimed priests were the most godly?
No.
4. Did he teach that life is all about opposing some other group?
Almost. He did say that Earth is a battleground between the godly and ungodly, and that salvation is a matter of enlisting in the correct army. But he didn't identify any earthly group as Angra Mainyu's army, nor did he say that just being a Zoroastrian automatically puts you in Ahura Mazda's. So…
No.
So there you have it. Grand Master Z agrees: "Walk the line, chump."
If you'd like to see Ajahn Brahm teach this truth himself (and I heartily recommend it, he's very engaging), you'll find it on YouTube. For links to many more Brahm talks, check out r/thaiforest's Ajahn Brahm Wiki via Reddit.
And yes, they're all that good.
(Photograph of seeker panning out Oz gold courtesy of WikiMedia and the State Library of Victoria.)
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