BUDDHIST WISDOMS

Pema and Alice Walker

2011-11-03T10:03:00.000-07:00

Alice Walker: About four years ago I was having a very difficult time. I had lost someone I loved deeply and nothing seemed to help. Then a friend sent me a tape set by Pema Chödrön called “Awakening Compassion.” I stayed in the country and I listened to you, Pema, every night for the next year. I studied lojong mind training and I practiced tonglen. It was tonglen, the practice of taking in people’s pain and sending out whatever you have that is positive, that helped me through this difficult passage. I want to thank you so much, and to ask you a question. In my experience suffering is perennial; there is always suffering. But does suffering really have a use? I used to think there was no use to it, but now I think that there is.

Pema Chödrön: Is there any use in suffering? I think the reason I am so taken by these teachings is that they are based on using suffering as good medicine, like the Buddhist metaphor of using poison as medicine. It’s as if there’s a moment of suffering that occurs over and over and over again in every human life. What usually happens in that moment is that it hardens us; it hardens the heart because we don’t want any more pain. But the lojong teachings say we can take that very moment and flip it. The very thing that causes us to harden and our suffering to intensify can soften us and make us more decent and kinder people.

That takes a lot of courage. This is a teaching for people who are willing to cultivate their courage. What’s wonderful about it is that you have plenty of material to work with. If you’re waiting for only the high points to work with, you might give up, but there’s an endless succession of suffering.

One of the main teachings of the Buddha was the truth of dukha, which is usually translated as “suffering.” But a better translation might be “dissatisfaction.” Dissatisfaction is inherent in being human; it’s not some mistake that you or I have made as individuals. Therefore, if we can learn to catch that moment, to relax with it, dissatisfaction doesn’t need to keep escalating. In fact it becomes the seed of compassion, the seed of loving kindness.

Alice Walker: I was surprised how the heart literally responds to this practice. You can feel it responding physically. As you breathe in what is difficult to bear, there is initial resistance, which is the fear, the constriction. That’s the time when you really have to be brave. But if you keep going and doing the practice, the heart actually relaxes. That is quite amazing to feel.

Pema Chödrön: When we start out on a spiritual path we often have ideals we think we’re supposed to live up to. We feel we’re supposed to be better than we are in some way. But with this practice you take yourself completely as you are. Then ironically, taking in pain—breathing it in for yourself and all others in the same boat as you are—heightens your awareness of exactly where you’re stuck. Instead of feeling you need some magic makeover so you can suddenly become some great person, there’s much more emotional honesty about where you’re stuck.

Alice Walker: Exactly. You see that the work is right ahead of you all the time.

Pema Chödrön: There is a kind of unstuckness that starts to happen. You develop lovingkindness and compassion for this self that is stuck, which is calledmaitri. And since you have a sense of all the other sentient beings stuck just like you, it also awakens compassion.

Alice Walker: I remember the day I really got it that we’re not connected as human beings because of our perfection, but because of our flaws. That was such a relief.

Pema Chödrön: Rumi wrote a poem called "Night Travelers," It's about how all the darkness of human beings is a shared thing from the beginning of time, and how understanding that opens up your heart and opens up your world. You begin to think bigger. Rather than depressing you, it makes you feel part of the whole.

Alice Walker: I like what you say about understanding that the darkness represents our wealth, because that’s true, There’s so much fixation on the light, as if the darkness can be dispensed with, but of course it cannot. After all, there is night, there is earth; so this is a wonderful acknowledgment of richness.

I think the Jamaicans are right when they call each other “fellow sufferer,” because that’s how it feels. We aren’t angels, we aren’t saints, we’re all down here doing the best we can. We’re trying to be good people, but we do get really mad. You talk in your tapes about when you discovered that your former husband was seeing someone else, and you threw a rock at him. This was very helpful (laughter). It was really good to have a humorous, earthy, real person as a teacher. This was great.

Pema Chödrön: When that marriage broke up, I don’t know why it devastated me so much but it was really a kind of annihilation. It was the beginning of my spiritual path, definitely, because I was looking for answers. I was in the lowest point in my life and I read this article by Trungpa Rinpoche called “Working With Negativity.” I was scared by my anger and looking for answers to it. I kept having all these fantasies of destroying my ex-husband and they were hard to shake. There was an enormous feeling of groundlessness and fear that came from not being able to entertain myself out of the pain. The usual exits, the usual ways of distracting myself—nothing was working.

Alice Walker: Nothing worked.

Pema Chödrön: And Trungpa Rinpoche basically said that there’s nothing wrong with negativity per se. He said there’s a lot you can learn from it, that it’s a very strong creative energy. He said the real problem is what he called negative negativity, which is when you don’t just stay with negativity but spin off into all the endless cycle of things you can say to yourself about it.

Alice Walker: What gets us is the spinoff. If you could just sit with the basic feeling then you could free yourself, but it’s almost impossible if you’re caught up in one mental drama after another. That’s what happens.

Pema Chödrön: This is an essential understanding of vajrayana, or tantric, Buddhism. In vajrayana Buddhism they talk about how what we call negative energies—such as anger, lust, envy, jealousy, these powerful energies—are all actually wisdoms in disguise. But to experience that you have to not spin off; you have to be able to relax with the energy.

So tonglen, which is considered more of a mahayana practice, was my entry into being able to sit with that kind of energy. And it gave me a way to include all the other people, to recognize that so many people were in the same boat as I was.

Alice Walker: You do recognize that everybody is in that boat sooner or later, in one form or other. It’s good to feel that you’re not alone.

Pema Chödrön: I want to ask you about joy. It’s all very well to talk about poison as medicine and breathing in the suffering and sending out relief and so forth, but did you find any joy coming out of this?

Alice Walker: Oh Yes!. Even just not being so miserable.

Part of the joyousness was knowing we have help. It was great to know that this wisdom is so old. That means people have had this pain for a long time, they’ve been dealing with it, and they had the foresight to leave these practices for us to use. I’m always supported by spirits and ancestors and people in my tribe, whoever they’ve been and however long ago they lived. So it was like having another tribe of people, of ancestors, come to the rescue with this wisdom that came through you and your way of teaching.

Pema Chödrön: I think the times are ripe for this kind of teaching.

Alice Walker: Oh, I think it’s just the right medicine for today. You know, the other really joyous thing is that I feel more open, I feel more openness toward people in my world.
It’s what you have said about feeling more at home in your world. I think this is the result of going the distance in your own heart—really being disciplined about opening your heart as much as you can. The thing I find, Pema, is that it closes up again. You know?

Pema Chödrön: Oh no! (laughter) One year of listening to me and your heart still closes up?

Alice Walker: Yeah. It’s like what you have said about how the ego is like a closed room and our whole life’s work is to open the door. You may open the door and then discover that you’re not up to keeping it open for long. The work is to keep opening it. You have an epiphany, you understand something, you feel slightly enlightened about something, but then you lose it. That’s the reality. So it’s not a bad thing.

Pema Chödrön: No

Alice Walker: But it’s frustrating at times, because you think to yourself, I’ve worked on this, why is it still snagging in the same spot?

Pema Chödrön: That’s how life keeps us honest. The inspiration that comes from feeling the openness seems so important, but on the other hand, I’m sure it would eventually turn into some kind of spiritual pride or arrogance. So life has this miraculous ability to smack you in the face with a real humdinger just when you’re going over the edge in terms of thinking you’ve accomplished something. That humbles you; it’s some kind of natural balancing that keeps you human. At the same time the sense of joy does get stronger and stronger.

Alice Walker: Because otherwise you feel you’re just going to be smacked endlessly, and what’s the point? (laughter)

Pema Chödrön: It’s about relaxing with the moment, whether it’s painful or pleasurable. I teach about that a lot because that’s personally how I experience it. The openness brings the smile on my face, the sense of gladness just to be here. And when it gets painful, it’s not like there’s been some big mistake or something. It just comes and goes.

Alice Walker: That brings me to something else I’ve discovered in my practice, because I’ve been doing meditation for many years—not tonglen, but TM and metta practice. There are times when I meditate, really meditate, very on the dot, for a year or so, and then I’ll stop. So what happens? Does that ever happen to you?

Pema Chödrön: Yes. (laughter)

Alice Walker: Good!

Pema Chödrön: And I just don’t worry about it.

Alice Walker: Good! (laughter)

Pema Chödrön: One of the things I’ve discovered as the years go on is that there can’t be any “shoulds.” Even meditation practice can become something you feel you should do, and then it becomes another thing you worry about.

So I just let it ebb and flow, because I feel it’s always with you in some way, whether you’re formally practicing or not. My hunger for meditation ebbs but the hunger always comes back, and not necessarily because things are going badly. It’s like a natural opening and closing, or a natural relaxation and then getting involved in something else, going back and forth.

Alice Walker: I was surprised to discover how easy it was for me to begin meditating many years ago. What I liked was how familiar that state was. The place that I most love is when I disappear. You know, there’s a point where you just disappear. That is so wonderful, because I’m sure that’s how it will be after we die, that you’re just not here, but it’s fine.

Pema Chödrön: What do you mean exactly, you disappear?

Alice Walker: Well, you reach that point where it’s just like space, and you don’t feel yourself. You’re not thinking about what you’re going to cook, and you’re not thinking about what you’re going to wear, and you’re not really aware of your body. I like that because as a writer I spend a lot of time in spaces that I’ve created myself and it’s a relief to have another place that is basically empty.

Pema Chödrön: I don’t think I have the same experience. It's more like being here—fully and completely here. It's true that mediation practice is liberating and timeless and that, definitely, there is no caught-up-ness. But is is also profoundly simple and immediate. In contrast, everything else feels like fantasy, like it is completely made up by mind.

Alice Walker: Well, I feel like I live a lot of my life in a different realm anyway, especially when I’m out in nature. So meditation takes me to that place when I’m not in nature. It is a place of really feeling the oneness, that you’re not kept from it by the fact that you’re wearing a suit. You’re just in it; that’s one of the really good things about meditation for me.

Judy Lief: I assume, Alice, that as an activist your job is to take on situations of extreme suffering and try to alleviate them to some degree. How has this practice affected your approach to activism?

Alice Walker: Well, my activism really is for myself, because I see places in the world where I really feel I should be. If there is something really bad, really evil, happening somewhere, then that is where I should be. I need, for myself, to feel that I have stood there. It feels a lot better than just watching it on television.

Judy Lief: This is where you bring together your private practice and your public action.

Alice Walker: Yes. Before I was sort of feeling my way. I went to places like Mississippi and stood with the people and realized the suffering they were experiencing. I shared the danger they put themselves in by demanding their rights, I felt this incredible opening, a feeling of finally being at home in my world, which was what I needed. I needed to feel I could be at home there, and the only way was to actually go and connect with the people.

Pema Chödrön: And the other extreme is when our primary motivation is avoidance of pain. Then the world becomes scarier and scarier.

Alice Walker: Exactly.

Pema Chödrön: That’s the really sad thing—the world becomes more and more frightening, and you don’t want to go out your door. Sure there’s a lot of danger out there, but the tonglen approach makes you more open to the fear it evokes in you, and your world gets bigger.

Judy Lief: When you are practicing tonglen, taking on pain of others, what causes that to flip into something positive, as opposed to being stuck in a negative space or seeing yourself as a martyr?

Alice Walker: I think it’s knowing that you’re not the only one suffering. That’s just what happens on earth. There may be other places in the galaxy where people don’t suffer, where beings are just fine, where they never get parking tickets even. But what seems to be happening here is just really heavy duty suffering.

I remember years ago, when I was asking myself what was the use of all this suffering. I was reading the Gnostic Gospels, in which Jesus says something that really struck me. He says basically, learn how to suffer and you will not suffer. That dovetails with this teaching, which is a kind of an acceptance that suffering is the human condition.

Pema Chödrön: It is true people fear tonglen practice. Particularly if people have a lot of depression, they fear it is going to be tough to relate with the suffering so directly.

I have found that it’s less overwhelming if you start with your own experience of suffering and then generalize to all the other people who are feeling what you do. That gives you a way to work with your pain: instead of feeling like you’re increasing your suffering, you’re making it meaningful. If you’re taught that you should do tonglen only for other people, that’s too big a leap for most people. But if you start with yourself as the reference point and extend out from that, you find that your compassion becomes much more spontaneous and real. You have less fear of the suffering you perceive in the world—yours and other peoples’. It’s a lot about overcoming the fear of suffering.

My experience of working with this practice is that it has brought me a moment by moment sense of wellbeing. That’s encouraging to people who are afraid to start the practice—to know that relating directly with your suffering is a doorway to wellbeing for yourself and others, rather than some kind of masochism.

Alice Walker: I would say that is also true for me in going to stand where I feel I need to stand. I feel I get to that same place.

I also appreciate the teaching on driving all blame into yourself. We need a teaching on how fruitless it is to always blame the other person. In my life I can see places where I have not wanted to take my part of the blame. That’s a losing proposition. There’s no gain in it because you never learn very much about yourself. You don’t own all your parts. There are places in each of us that are quite scary, but you have to make friends with them. You have to really get to know them, to say, hello, there you are again. It’s very helpful to do that.

Pema Chödrön: One of the things the Buddha pointed out in his early teaching was that everybody wants happiness or freedom from pain, but the methods human beings habitually use are not in sync with the wish. The methods always end up escalating the pain. For example, someone yells at you and then you yell back and then they yell back and it gets worse and worse. You think the reason not to yell back is because, you know, good people don’t yell back. But the truth is that by not yelling back you’re just getting smart about what’s really going to bring you some happiness.

Judy Lief: The lojong slogan says “Drive all blames into one,” that is, yourself. But there are definitely situations where from the conventional viewpoint there are bad guys and good guys, oppressors and oppressed. How do you combine taking the blame yourself with combating oppression or evil that you encounter?

Alice Walker: Maybe it doesn’t work there. (laughter) Pema why don’t you take that one. (laughter)

Pema Chödrön: Well, here would be my question: does it help to have a sense of enemy in trying to end oppression?

Alice Walker: No.

Pema Chödrön: So maybe that’s it.

Alice Walker: I think it’s probably about seeing. As Bob Marley said so beautifully, the biggest bully you ever did see was once a tiny baby. That’s true. I mean, I've tried that on Ronald Reagan. I even tried that on Richard Nixon, but it didn’t really work that well.

But really, when you’re standing face to face with someone who just told you to go to the back of the bus, or someone who has said that women aren’t allowed here, or whatever, what do you do? I don’t know what you do, Pema, but at that moment I always see that they’re really miserable people and they need help. Now, of course, I think I would love to send them a copy of “Awakening Compassion.” (laughter)

Pema Chödrön: It’s seeing that the cause of someone’s aggression is their suffering. And you could also realize that your aggression is not going to help anything.

So you’re standing there, you are being provoked, you are feeling aggression, and what do you do? That’s when tonglen becomes very helpful. You breathe in and connect with your own aggression with a lot of honesty. You have such a strong recognition in that moment of all the oppressed people who are provoked and feeling like you do. If you just keep doing that, something different might come out of your mouth.

Alice Walker: And war will not be what comes out.

Judy Lief: It seems to me that Dr. Martin Luther King had the quality of a tonglen practitioner. Yet he didn’t ask us not to take stands.

Alice Walker: He was from a long line of Baptist preachers, someone who could really get to that place of centeredness through prayer and through love. I think the person who has a great capacity to love, which often flowers when you can see and feel the suffering of other people, can also strategize. I think he was a great strategist. I think he often got very angry and upset, but at the same time he knew what he was up against. Sometimes he was the only really lucid person in a situation, so he knew how much of the load he was carrying and how much depended on him.

As activists, it is really important to have some kind of practice, so that when we go out into the world to confront horrible situations we can do it knowing we’re in the right place ourselves. Knowing we’re not bringing more fuel to the fire, more anger, more despair. It’s difficult but that should not be a deterrent. The more difficult something seems, the more it’s possibile to give up hope. You approach the situation with the feeling of having already given up hope, but that doesn’t stop you. You said we should put that slogan about abandoning hope on our refrigerators.

Pema Chödrön: Give up all hope of fruition.

Alice Walker: Right. Just do it because you’re doing it and it feels like the right thing to do, but without feeling it’s necessarily going to change anything.

Pema Chödrön: Something that I heard Trungpa Rinpoche say has been a big help to me. He said to live your life as an experiment, so that you’re always experimenting. You could experiment with yelling back and see what that happens. You could experiment with tonglen and see how that works. You could see what actually allows some kind of communication to happen. You learn pretty fast what closes down communication, and that’s the strong sense of enemy. If the other person feels your hatred, then everyone closes down.

Alice Walker: I feel that fear is what closes people down more than anything, just being afraid. The times when I have really been afraid to go forward, with a relationship or a problem, is because there is fear. I think practice of being with your feelings, letting them come up and not trying to push them away, is incredibly helpful.

Question from the audience: Thank you both for being here and bringing so much pleasure to so many people tonight. I’m asking a question for a friend who couldn’t come tonight. She was at Pema’s three day seminar and she left on Saturday feeling badly because she had got in touch with her anger and couldn’t stay. Now she feels she’s a bad Buddhist, a bad practitioner. I’ve been trying to tell her it’s okay but I think she needs to hear your words.

Pema Chödrön: Well, tell her we’re used to using everything that we hear against ourselves, so it’s really common to just the dharma teachings and use them against yourself. But the fact is we don’t have to do that anymore. We don’t have to do that. It’s just like Alice saying that the heart opens and then it closes, so she has to realize that’s how it is forever and ever, She’ll get in touch and then she’ll lose touch and get in touch and lose touch. So she has to keep on going with herself and not give up on herself.

Question from the audience: This is really hard on her because you two are her favorite people in the entire world.

Alice Walker: And she didn’t come?

Question from the audience: She’s so broken-hearted.

Pema Chödrön: She didn’t come because she was so ashamed of herself for not being able to stay with it...that’s not true, is it?

Question from the audience: Yes, it is.

Pema Chödrön: Really. Wow. You should tell her that she’s just an ordinary human being. (laughter) What’s a little unusual about her is that she was willing to get in touch with it for even a little bit.

Question from the audience: My name is Margaret, and I have practiced Tibetan Buddhism for a number of years. About eighteen months ago, right around the time that for the first time in my life I fell in love with a woman, the Dalai Lama made a number of comments pointing out where the Tibetan tradition did not regard homosexuality as a positive thing, in fact an obstacle to spiritual growth. It reached the point that I left the sangha I was connected with and found a different part of the spiritual path that’s working for me now. I have gay and bisexual friends who are interested in Buddhism but some of them have been stopped by what the Dalai Lama had to say and by the lack of coherent answers from other people. I think it would be a big service if you could address that.

Pema Chödrön: Well, listen. I have so much respect for the Dalai Lama and I think that’s where people get stuck. I didn’t actually hear those comments, and I heard there were also favorable comments. But aside from all that, as Buddhism comes to the West, Western Buddhist teachers simply don’t buy that. It’s as if Asian teachers said that women were inferior or something. I mean, it’s absurd. That’s all there is to it. (applause) It’s just ridiculous.

Question from the audience: Let me ask you to say that often and loud.

Pema Chödrön: Sure! I go on record. And I’m not alone, it’s not something unique with me. Western teachers, coming from this culture, we see things pretty differently on certain issues and this is one, for sure.

But the Dalai Lama is a wonderful man, and I have a feeling that if he were sitting here he’d have something else to say on the subject.

Alice Walker: You know, when he was here at the peace conference he was confronted by gay men and lesbian women and he readily admitted that he really didn’t know. He didn’t seem rigid on it.

But also, when there is wisdom about, we should have it! Wisdom belongs to the people. We must never be kept from wisdom by anybody telling us you can’t have it because you’re this that or the other.

Question from the audience: I have a question about the connection between tonglen and joy, because I kind of understood the question of the moderator, anyway, Judy’s question when you breathe in so much suffering how do you avoid becoming so burdened or martyred by it, and what I’m understanding about tonglen is that there’s something kind of transformative about it, when you breathe in suffering and then you breathe out relief and healing. I keep thinking about that prayer of St. Francis of Assisi about being an instrument of peace, and where there is hatred, let me sow love, and where there is despair, let me sow hope. I’m wondering if joy has a place in the ability to make that transformation.

Alice Walker: I think the practice of tonglen is really revolutionary, because you’re taking in what you usually push away with everything you’ve got, and then you’re breathe out what you would rather keep. This is just amazing. I mean, it really shakes you up. I’m sure there are many people who can’t believe that you’re being asked to breathe in the dark, breathe in the heavy, breathe in the hard and the hot. They want to breathe in the white light. But the time has come for all of us to breathe in what is the most difficult, to own it, to get to know it, to feel it out. And then to really think about what the world needs, and to try to send that out. I think that’s the transformation.

Question from the audience: So it’s the courage to face the suffering and the darkness?

Alice Walker: To bring it into yourself. Think of all the people who don’t think that there is any darkness in them. There are millions of people who think they don’t have any darkness. But it’s something that we all have, and part of the problem is that we’ve been pushing all this stuff away and denying it, so of course it’s the biggest shadow you can imagine. That’s what’s clobbering us, everything we pushed away.

Pema Chödrön: My feeling is that it’s like taking off something that’s been covering your eyes and hindering your ability to see. It’s overcoming your fear of what’s painful, although actually you’re training in opening to both joy and suffering, You see if it’s just aimed at joy, then suffering always seems like then you blew it, like this poor woman who didn’t come tonight because she felt she wasn’t living up to the instructions. That’s very common. People want it all on the joy side or the success side or the victory side. Then when it’s just naturally is part of life just naturally flips, or the mood changes, or the energy changes, you feel that you’ve made some mistake or you’re a failure. So it has to include all of that.

One of the basic tonglen instructions, sort of like the tonglen outlook, is that when anything is delightful in your life, you wish that other people could have it. That heightens your awareness of even those fleeting moments of appreciate you usually don’t notice. You start catching the moments of delight and pleasure, just the smallest kinds of happiness and contentment.

The other part of the instruction is that when you feel suffering, you also think of all the other people who are suffering. It covers everything: you share what’s good and you also realize we’re in the same boat with the suffering. So it’s all bigger. Some kind of joy comes from that, strangely.

Judy Lief: Pema, how do you avoid the trap that has come up in these questions—wanting to be the perfect practitioner and feeling worse and worse because you can’t accomplish it?

Pema Chödrön: You could do tonglen with that feeling of failure and include all the other imperfect failure people. So there’s nothing that can happen to you that you can’t use. It takes a while to get the hang of that, but when you start to hear yourself saying “bad dog” or whatever, you stop right there and acknowledge what you’re feeling and the billions of other people feeling the same way. Somehow that shakes up our ways of getting stuck.

When I’m teaching, I’m so aware that most people are hearing with a filter of turning it against themselves. I try very hard, as do most Western teachers, to address that, but it still keeps happening. You just have to keep addressing it. You know, it takes practice. That’s why it’s called practice.

Alice Walker: It’s also important to accept and even embrace the fact of our imperfection. Our imperfection is probably our one perfection. Also I think it’s really good, when you have periods of happiness, to say , I am happy. I think that focuses you in the moment of being happy, and you really know that you’re happy. Otherwise, especially in this culture where you’re always being told to buy something or go somewhere or do something, you lose that moment of being happy because you’re projecting happiness as being somewhere or something else. So when you feel happiness, you just say it, even to yourself, maybe especially to yourself, but aloud, I think it helps to say it aloud, Just say, I’m happy.

Pema Chodron: I hadn’t thought of making it so simple, but that’s right, just say it. Then you could also say, could other people have this, too. Words are powerful in terms of brainwashing ourselves. (laughter)

Pema Chodron is director of Gampo Abbey in Cape Breton, Nova Scotia. She is the author of When Things Fall Apart: Heart Advice for Difficult Times.

Alice Walker won the Pulitzer Prize for The Color Purple. She is the author of By the Light of My Father's Smile.

Good Medicine For This World, from Shambhala Sun, January 1999

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2011-11-01T07:26:00.000-07:00

Anger and Buddhism
What Buddhism Teaches About Anger

Anger. Rage. Fury. Wrath. Whatever you call it, it happens to all of us, including Buddhists. However much we value loving kindness, we Buddhists are still human beings, and sometimes we get angry. What does Buddhism teach about anger?

Anger is one of the three poisons – the other two are greed and ignorance – that are the primary causes of the cycle of samsara and rebirth. Purifying ourselves of anger is essential to Buddhist practice. Further, in Buddhism there is no such thing as "righteous" or "justifiable" anger. All anger is a fetter to realization.

Yet even highly realized masters admit they sometimes get angry. This means that for most of us, not getting angry is not a realistic option. We will get angry. What then do we do with our anger?

First, Admit You Are Angry

This may sound silly, but how many times have you met someone who clearly was angry, but who insisted he was not? For some reason, some people resist admitting to themselves that they are angry. This is not skillful. You can't very well deal with something that you won't admit is there.

Buddhism teaches mindfulness. Being mindful of ourselves is part of that. When an unpleasant emotion or thought arises, do not suppress it, run away from it, or deny it. Instead, observe it and fully acknowledge it. Being deeply honest with yourself about yourself is essential to Buddhism.

What Makes You Angry?

It's important to understand that anger is something created by yourself. It didn't come swooping out of the ether to infect you. We tend to think that anger is caused by something outside ourselves, such as other people or frustrating events. But my first Zen teacher used to say, "No one makes you angry. You make yourself angry."

Buddhism teaches us that anger is created by mind. However, when you are dealing with your own anger, you should be more specific. Anger challenges us to look deeply into ourselves. Most of the time, anger is self-defensive. It arises from unresolved fears or when our ego-buttons are pushed.

As Buddhists we recognize that ego, fear and anger are insubstantial and ephemeral, not "real." They're ghosts, in a sense. Allowing anger to control our actions amounts to being bossed around by ghosts.

Anger Is Self-Indulgent

Anger is unpleasant but seductive. In this interview with Bill Moyer, Pema Chodron says that anger has a hook. "There's something delicious about finding fault with something," she said. Especially when our egos are involved (which is nearly always the case), we may protect our anger. We justify it and even feed it.

Buddhism teaches that anger is never justified, however. Our practice is to cultivate metta, a loving kindness toward all beings that is free of selfish attachment. "All beings" includes the guy who just cut you off at the exit ramp, the co-worker who takes credit for your ideas, and even someone close and trusted who betrays you.

For this reason, when we become angry we must take great care not to act on our anger to hurt others. We must also take care not to hang on to our anger and give it a place to live and grow.

How to Let It Go

You have acknowledged your anger, and you have examined yourself to understand what caused the anger to arise. Yet you are still angry. What's next?

Pema Chodron counsels patience. Patience means waiting to act or speak until you can do so without causing harm. "Patience has a quality of enormous honesty in it," she said. "It also has a quality of not escalating things, allowing a lot of space for the other person to speak, for the other person to express themselves, while you don't react, even though inside you are reacting."

If you have a meditation practice, this is the time to put it to work. Sit still with the heat and tension of anger. Quiet the internal chatter of other-blame and self-blame. Acknowledge the anger and enter into it entirely. Embrace your anger with patience and compassion for all beings, including yourself.

Don't Feed Anger

It's hard not to act, to remain still and silent while our emotions are screaming at us. Anger fills us with edgy energy and makes us want todo something. Pop psychology tells us to pound our fists into pillows or to scream at the walls to "work out" our anger. Thich Nhat Hanhdisagrees.

"When you express your anger you think that you are getting anger out of your system, but that's not true," he said. "When you express your anger, either verbally or with physical violence, you are feeding the seed of anger, and it becomes stronger in you." Only understanding and compassion can neutralize anger.

Compassion Takes Courage

Sometimes we confuse aggression with strength and non-action with weakness. Buddhism teaches that just the opposite is true.

Giving in to the impulses of anger, allowing anger to hook us and jerk us around, isweakness. On the other hand, it takes strength to acknowledge the fear and selfishness in which our anger usually is rooted. It also takes discipline to meditate in the flames of anger.

The Buddha said, "Conquer anger by non-anger. Conquer evil by good. Conquer miserliness by liberality. Conquer a liar by truthfulness." (Dhammapada, v. 233) Working with ourselves and others and our lives in this way is Buddhism. Buddhism is not a belief system, or a ritual, or some label to put on your T-shirt. It's this.

2011-11-01T07:16:00.001-07:00

The source of a true smile is an awakened mind. Smiling helps you approach the day with gentleness and understanding.

Thich Nhat Hanh
Peace Is Every Step

2009-08-21T14:36:00.001-07:00

Instead of the resentment being an obstacle, it's a reminder. Feeling irritated, restless, afraid, and hopeless is a reminder to listen more carefully. It's a reminder to stop talking; watch and listen. It's a reminder to use tonglen practice to allow some space.

For example, you hate this person who is standing in front of you. You just wanted to help a hungry person get food, and then you find yourself talking to the enemy- a bureaucrat, a politician, THEM. All you do is get more and more angry at them, so nothing happens. They grow more stubborn as you grow more furious and polarized and the sense of huge me versus huge THEM increases.

When we feel resentment, the words that we speak, the actions that we perform, and the thoughts that we have aren't going to produce the results that we're hoping for. Beyond that, we're so aggressive that we're not exactly adding any peace and harmony to the world. Resentment becomes a reminder not to feel bad about ourselves but to open further to the pain and to the awkwardness.

If we really want to communicate, we have to give up knowing what to do. When we come in with our agendas, they only block us from seeing the person in front of us. It's best to drop our five-year plans and accept the awkward sinking feeling that we are entering a situation naked. We don't know what will happen next or what we'll do

2008-11-26T05:35:00.001-08:00

Using Adversity

Pema Chodron

Drive All Blames Into One

When we look at the world in this way we see that it all comes down to the fact that no one is ever encouraged to feel the underlying anxiety, the underlying edginess, the underlying soft spot, and therefore we think that blaming others is the only way. Reading just one newspaper, we can see that blaming others doesn't work.

We have to look at our own lives as well. How are we doing with our Juan and Juanitas? Often they're just the people with whom we have the most intimate relationships. They really get to us because we can't just shake them off by moving across town or changing seats on the bus, or whatever we have the luxury of doing with mere acquaintances, whom we also loathe.

It doesn't mean, instead of blaming other people, blame yourself. It means to touch in with what blame feels like altogether. Instead of guarding yourself, instead of pushing things away, begin to get in touch with the fact that there's a very soft spot under all that armor, and blame is probably one of the most-perfected armors that we have. You can take this slogan beyond what we think of as 'blame' and practice applying it simply to the general sense that something is wrong. When you feel that something is wrong, let the story line go and touch in to what's underneath.

Strangely enough, we blame others and put so much energy into the object of anger or whatever it is because we're afraid that this anger or sorrow or loneliness is going to last forever...'Drive all blames into one' is saying, instead of always blaming the other, OWN the feeling of blame, OWN the anger, OWN the loneliness and make friends with it. Use the tonglen practice to see how you can place the anger or the fear or the loneliness in a cradle of loving-kindness; use tonglen to learn how to be gentle to all that stuff. In order to be gentle and create an atmosphere of compassion for yourself, it's necessary to stop talking to yourself about how wrong everything is - or how right everything is, for that matter.

2008-11-24T10:07:00.001-08:00

Don't Expect Applause

The next slogan is "Don't expect applause," which means "Don't expect thanks." This is important. When you open the door and invite all sentient beings as your guests, and not only that, but you also open the windows, and the walls even start falling down, you find yourself in the universe with no protection at all. Now you're in for it. If you think that just by doing that you are going to feel good about yourself, and you are going to be thanked right and left- no, that won't happen. More than to expect thanks, it would be helpful just to expect the unexpected; then you might be curious and inquisitive about what comes in the door. We can begin to open our hearts to others when we have no hope of getting anything back. We just do it for its own sake. On the other hand, it's good to express our gratitude to others. It's helpful to express our appreciation of others. But if we do that with the motivation of wanting them to like us, we can remember this slogan. We can thank others, but we should give up all hope of getting thanked back. Simply keep the door open without expectations.

From Start Where You Are : A Guide to Compassionate Living by Pema Chodron, Copyright 1994, Shambhala Publications.
Published by arrangement with Shambhala Publications, Inc., Boston.

2008-10-07T12:26:00.000-07:00

The first step is to see yourself jealous, see yourself frivolous, see yourself wallowing in self-pity. You think to yourself, "Well, what would Dr. Seuss do in this situation?" Instead of using it as ammunition against yourself, you can lighten up and realize it's the information that you need in order to keep your heart open. If everybody on the planet could experience seeing what they do with gentleness, everything would start to turn around very fast, even if we didn't get to the second difficulty

2008-09-30T05:05:00.001-07:00

Breathe Away Pain
While resisting pain only makes suffering worse, mindfulness meditation can help chronic pain sufferers.

By: Ferris Jabr

Pain is necessary. It alerts us to threats, teaches us to avoid future risks, and makes sure we don't forget to help ourselves heal. Our bodies have evolved instinctive reactions to pain and injury—accidentally brush your hand against a boiling kettle and your arm will retract reflexively before you even realize why. Our minds, too, respond to pain in a characteristic manner: ever notice how even a minor wound can dominate your thoughts?

But what if you could manipulate your natural response to pain in order to control and alleviate suffering? That approach—aided by a technique known as mindfulness meditation—holds great promise for those experiencing chronic pain.

Though pain usually serves a beneficial purpose, chronic pain—which persists far longer than the usual period for an injury or illness—is pathological. Close to 1 in 3 Americans suffers from chronic pain to varying degrees, according to Penny Cowan, founder and executive director of the American Chronic Pain Association. Headaches and pain from the lower back, cancer, and arthritis are among the more common afflictions.

In a June 2008 study published in The Journal of Pain, researchers at the University of Pittsburgh found that elderly individuals who suffer from chronic low back pain benefited from mindfulness meditation, experiencing less pain, better sleep, enhanced well-being, and improved quality of life. And a 2003 review in Clinical Psychology: Science and Practice found significant improvements in pain ratings and other medical and psychological symptoms across a decade of studies.

The basics of mindfulness meditation aren't as complicated as you may think. First, you should simply relax, while maintaining good posture. Then close your eyes and accept all sensations as they filter through you. Don't judge them, but rather focus on your breathing. If you get distracted, gently guide yourself back to the sound and rhythm of your own breathing. The aim is to achieve active and focused moment-by-moment awareness of your present experience.

If you are in chronic pain, you may worry that increasing your awareness could only amp up your suffering. But mindfulness meditation can actually help by redirecting your attention, Cowan says. Our instinct is to resist pain, but resistance only increases suffering. Mindfulness can relinquish your resistance, thereby lessening the experience of your pain.

Meditation can help you find "the spaces in between" all of your experiences, where you can be in the moment and not in the pain—or worries about the pain, or feelings of anxiety or sadness, says Lonnie Zeltzer, professor of pediatrics, anesthesiology, and psychiatry at UCLA's David Geffen School of Medicine, and director of the Pediatric Pain Program. "By sitting each day to meditate, your brain actually begins to quiet down; you begin to feel more equanimity, and the pain begins to lessen and move from foreground to background."

A few suggestions for mindfulness meditation:

Find a Good Spot
Location can influence your ability to meditate properly. Above all, choose a place where you feel comfortable. The less distracting and quieter it is, the better.

Sit Right
You may sit in a chair or on the ground, but sitting with your legs crossed and your back straight is best. Comfort is good; slouching isn't. Buddhists believe that erect posture strengthens the connection between mind and body.

Breathe!
Your primary goal is to maintain a focus on—and solely on—your own natural inhalation and exhalation. Not only does such focus anchor you to successful meditation, it helps relax your body and your mind.

Keep Re-Focusing
Inevitably, your thoughts are going to wander. It will be impossible to think only of your breathing. But that's perfectly fine. Simply return your focus each time you realize you've been distracted.

Psychology Today Online, 16 Jul 2008
Last Reviewed 15 Sep 2008
Article ID: 4621

2008-09-15T05:49:00.000-07:00

Don't Misinterpret

Don't impose the wrong notion of what harmony is, what compassion is, what patience is, what generosity is. Don't misinterpret what these things really are. There is compassion and there is idiot compassion; there is patience and there is idiot patience; there is generosity and there is idiot generosity. For example, trying to smooth everything out to avoid confrontation, not to rock the boat, is not what's meant by compassion or patience. It's what is meant by control. Then you are not trying to step into unknown territory, to find yourself more naked with less protection and therefore more in contact with reality. Instead, you use the idiot forms of compassion and so forth just to get ground. When you open the door and invite in all sentient beings as your guests, you have to drop your agenda. Many different people come in. Just when you think you have a little scheme that is going to work, it doesn't work. It was very beneficial to Juan, but when you tried it on Mortimer, he looked at you as if you were crazy, and when you try it on Juanita, she gets insulted.
Coming up with a formula won't work. If you invite all sentient beings as your guests while just wanting harmony, sooner or later you'll find that one of your guests is behaving badly and that just sitting there cheerfully doing your tonglen and trying to cultivate harmony doesn't work.

So you sit there and you say, "Okay, now I'm going to make friends with the fact that I am hurting and afraid, and this is really awful." But you are just trying to avoid conflict here; you just don't want to make things worse. Then all the guests are misbehaving; you work hard all day and they just sit around, smoking cigarettes, drinking beer, eating your food, and then beating you up. You think you're being a warrior and a Bodhisattva by doing nothing and saying nothing, but what you're being is a coward. You're just afraid of making the situation worse. Finally they kick you out of your house and you're sitting on the sidewalk. Somebody walks by and says, "What are you doing sitting out here?" You answer, "I am practicing patience and compassion." That's missing the point.

Even though you've dropped your agenda, even though you are trying to work WITH situations instead of struggling AGAINST them, nevertheless you may have to say, "You can stay here tonight, but tomorrow you're going, and if you don't get out of here, I am calling the police." You don't really know what's going to benefit somebody, but it doesn't benefit anybody to allow someone to beat you up, eat all your food, and put you out on the street.

So "Don't misinterpret" really gets at the notion of the big squeeze. It's saying that you don't know what's going to help, but you need to speak and act with clarity and decisiveness. Clarity and decisiveness come from the willingness to slow down, to listen to and look at what's happening. They come from opening your heart and not running away. Then the action and the speech are in accord with what needs to be done, for you and for the other person.

We make a lot of mistakes. If you ask people whom you consider to be wise and courageous about their lives, you may find that they have hurt a lot of people and made a lot of mistakes, but that they used those occasions as opportunities to humble themselves and open their hearts. We don't get wise by staying in a room with all the doors and windows closed.

From Start Where You Are : A Guide to Compassionate Living by Pema Chodron, Copyright 1994, Shambhala Publications.
Published by arrangement with Shambhala Publications, Inc., Boston.

2008-08-31T05:44:00.000-07:00

Be Grateful to Everyone

The slogan 'Be grateful to everyone' is about making peace with the aspects of ourselves that we have rejected. Through doing that, we also make peace with the people we dislike. More to the point, being around people we dislike is often a catalyst for making friends with ourselves. Thus, "Be grateful to everyone."
If we were to make a list of people we don't like - people we find obnoxious, threatening, or worthy of contempt - we would find out a lot about those aspects of ourselves that we can't face. If we were to come up with one word about each of the troublemakers in our lives, we would find ourselves with a list of descriptions of our own rejected qualities, which we project onto the outside world. The people who repel us unwittingly show the aspects of ourselves that we find unacceptable, which otherwise we can't see. In traditional teachings on lojong it is put another way: other people trigger the karma that we haven't worked out. They mirror us and give us the chance to befriend all of that ancient stuff that we carry around like a backpack full of boulders.

"Be grateful to everyone" is getting at a complete change of attitude. This slogan is not wishy-washy and naive. It does not mean that if you're mugged on the street you should smile knowingly and say "Oh, I should be grateful for this" before losing consciousness. This slogan actually gets at the guts of how we perfect ignorance through avoidance, not knowing we're eating poison, not knowing that we're putting another layer of protection over our heart, not seeing the whole thing.

"Be grateful to everyone" means that all situations teach you, and often it's the tough ones that teach you the best. There may be a Juan or Juanita in your life, and Juan or Juanita is the one who gets you going. They're the ones who don't go away: your mother, your husband, your wife, your lover, your child, the person that you have to work with every single day, part of the situation you can't escape. There's no way that someone else can tell you exactly what to do, because you're the only one who knows where it's torturing you, where your relationship with Juan or Juanita is getting into your guts.

When the great Buddhist teacher Atisha went to Tibet... he was told the people of Tibet were very good-natured, earthy, flexible, and open; he decided they wouldn't be irritating enough to push his buttons. So he brought along with him a mean-tempered, ornery Bengali tea boy. He felt that was the only way he could stay awake. The Tibetans like to tell the story that, when he got to Tibet, he realized that he need not have brought his tea boy: the people there were not as pleasant as he had been told.

In our own lives, the Bengali tea boys are the people who, when you let them through the front door of your house, go right down to the basement where you store the things you'd rather not deal with, pick out one of them, bring it to you, and say "Is this yours?"

From Start Where You Are : A Guide to Compassionate Living by Pema Chodron, Copyright 1994, Shambhala Publications.
Published by arrangement

2008-08-18T09:20:00.000-07:00

Always Maintain Only a Joyful Mind

You hear a slogan like 'Always maintain only a joyful mind' and for the whole next two weeks you're just hitting yourself over the head for never being joyful. That kind of witness is a bit heavy. So lighten up. Don't make such a big deal. The key to feeling at home with your body, mind and emotions, to feeling worthy to live on this planet, comes from being able to lighten up.
When your aspiration is to lighten up, you begin to have a sense of humor. Things just keep popping your serious state of mind. In addition to a sense of humor, a basic support for a joyful mind is curiosity, paying attention, taking an interest in the world around you. You don't actually have to be happy But being curious without a heavy judgmental attitude helps. If you ARE judgmental, you can even be curious about that.

Notice everything. Appreciate everything, including the ordinary. That's how to click in with joyfulness or cheerfulness. Curiosity encourages cheering up. So does simply remembering to do something different. We are so locked into this sense of burden - Big Deal Joy and Big Deal Unhappiness - that it's sometimes helpful just to change the pattern. Anything out of the ordinary will help, and tonglen is definitely something different. This practice is about repatterning ourselves, changing the basic pattern and unpatterning ourselves altogether. You can also just go to the window and look out at the sky. You can splash cold water on your face, you can sing in the shower, you can go jogging - anything that's against your usual pattern. That's how things start to lighten up.

Sooner or later you will find yourself in a situation where you can't change the outer circumstances at all, and you realize it all comes down to how you relate to things - whether you continue to struggle against everything that's coming at you or you begin to work with things.

You hear a slogan like "Always maintain only a joyful mind" and for the next two weeks you're just hitting yourself over the head for never being joyful. That kind of witness is a bit heavy. So lighten up... in contrast, a joyful mind is very ordinary and relaxed.

From Start Where You Are : A Guide to Compassionate Living by Pema Chodron, Copyright 1994, Shambhala Publications.
Published by arrangement with Shambhala Publications, Inc., Boston.

2008-05-18T10:03:00.000-07:00

Pema Chodron
Train Wholeheartedly

You could say, "Live wholeheartedly." Let everything stop your mind and let everything open your heart. And you could say, "Die wholeheartedly, moment after moment." Moment after moment, let yourself die wholeheartedly.
I have a friend who is extremely ill, in the final stages of cancer. The other night Dzongzar Khyentse Rinpoche telephoned her, and the very first words he said were, "Don't even think for a moment that you're not going to die." That's good advice for all of us; it will help us to live and train wholeheartedly.

These teachings are elusive, even though they seem so concrete: if it hurts, breathe in it; if it's pleasant, send it out. It isn't really something that you finally and completely "get." We can read Trungpa Rinpoche's commentaries on mind training and read the text by Jamgyon Kongtrul. We can read them and try to apply them to our lives, and we can let them continually haunt us, haunt us into understanding what it really means to exchange oneself for others. What does that really mean? And what does it mean to be a child of illusion? What does it mean to drive all blames into oneself or to be grateful to everyone? What is bodhichitta, anyway? Trying to speak these teachings to you is-for me-a chance to digest them further. Now you are going to find yourselves speaking them and living them and digesting them. May you practice these teachings and take them to heart. May you make them your own and spread them to others.

From Start Where You Are : A Guide to Compassionate Living by Pema Chodron, Copyright 1994, Shambhala Publications.
Published by arrangement with Shambhala Publications, Inc., Boston.

2008-05-05T08:28:00.000-07:00

In Buddhism, bodhicitta[1] (Ch. 菩提心, pudixin, Jp. bodaishin, Tibetan jang chub sem, Mongolian бодь сэтгэл) is the wish to attain complete enlightenment (that is, Buddhahood) in order to be of benefit to all sentient beings -- beings who are trapped in cyclic existence (samsāra) and have not yet reached Buddhahood. One who has bodhicitta as the primary motivation for all of their activities is called a bodhisattva.

Etymologically, the word is a combination of the Sanskrit words bodhi and citta. Bodhi means 'awakening', or 'enlightenment'. Citta may be translated as 'mind' or 'spirit'. Bodhicitta can therefore be translated as 'mind of enlightenment' or 'spirit of awakening'.

Bodhicitta may also be defined as the 'Union of Compassion and Wisdom'. While the Compassion and Wisdom aspects of Bodhicitta are actually highly dependent on each other, in the Mahāyanā tradition they are often referred to as:

Relative Bodhicitta, in which the practitioner works for the good of all beings as if it were his own.
Absolute, or ultimate, Bodhicitta, which refers to the wisdom of shunyata (śunyatā, a Sanskrit term often translated as 'emptiness', though the alternatives 'openness' or 'spaciousness' probably convey the idea better to Westerners). The concept of "śunyatā" in Buddhist thought does not refer simply to nothingness, but refers, loosely, to freedom from attachments (particularly attachment to the idea of a static "self") and fixed ideas about the world and how it should be. The classic text on śunyatā is the Prajñāpāramitā Hrdaya Sūtra, a discourse of the Buddha commonly referred to as the "Heart Sūtra."
So, the term bodhicitta in its most complete sense would combine both:

the arising of spontaneous and limitless compassion for all sentient beings, and
the falling away of the attachment to the illusion of an inherently existent "self."
Some bodhicitta practices emphasize the absolute (e.g. vipaśyanā); others emphasize the relative (e.g. metta), but both aspects are essential to develop on the path to enlightenment. The Relative without the Absolute can degenerate into pity and sentimentality while the Absolute without the Relative can lead to nihilism and lack of desire to engage other sentient beings for their benefit. The cultivation of both the relative and absolute aspects of Bodhicitta is an important part of all Mahāyāna practices, including in particular the Tibetan Mind Training practices of tonglen and lojong.

Bodhicitta may be viewed as having different levels: one useful classification is that given by Patrul Rinpoche in his Words of My Perfect Teacher. He states that the lowest level is the way of the King, who primarily seeks his own benefit but who recognizes that his benefit depends crucially on that of his kingdom and his subjects. The middle level is the path of the boatman, who ferries his passengers across the river and simultaneously, of course, ferries himself as well. The highest level is that of the shepherd, who makes sure that all his sheep arrive safely ahead of him and places their welfare above his own

2008-05-05T08:19:00.001-07:00

So now the technique. Tonglen has four stages. The first stage is flashing openness, or flashing absolute bodhicitta. The slogan "Rest in the nature of ALAYA, the essence" goes along with this flash of openness, which is done very quickly. there is some sort of natural flash of silence and space. It's a very simple thing.
The second stage is working with the texture. You visualize breathing in dark, heavy and hot and breathing out white, light and cool. The idea is that you are always breathing in the same thing: you are essentially breathing in the cause of suffering, the origin of suffering, which is fixation, the tendency to hold on the ego with a vengeance.

You may have noticed, when you become angry of poverty-stricken or jealous, that you experience that fixation as black, hot, solid, and heavy. That is actually the texture of poison, the texture of neurosis and fixation. You may also have noticed times when you are all caught up in yourself, and then some sort of contrast or gap occurs. It's very spacious. That's the experience of mind that is not fixated on phenomena; it's the experience of openness. The texture of that openness is generally experienced as light, white, fresh, clear, and cool.

So in the second stage of tonglen you work with those textures. You breathe in black, heavy, and hot through all the pores of your body, and you radiate out white, light and cool, also through all the pores of your body, 360 degrees. You work with the texture until you feel that it's synchronized: black is coming in and white is going out on the medium of the breath - in and out, in and out.

The third stage is working with a specific heartfelt object of suffering. You breathe in the pain of a specific person or animal that you wish to help. You breathe out to that person spaciousness or kindness or a good meal or a cup of coffee - whatever you feel would lighten their load. You can do this for anyone: the homeless mother that you pass on the street, your suicidal uncle, or yourself and the pain you are feeling at that very moment. The main point is that the suffering should be real, totally untheoretical. It should be heartfelt, tangible, honest, and vivid.

The fourth stage extends this wish to relieve suffering much further. You start with this homeless person and then extend out to all those who are suffering just as she is, or to all those who are suicidal like your uncle or to all those who are feeling the jealousy or addiction or contempt you are feeling. You use specific instances of misery and pain as a stepping stone for understanding the universal suffering of people and animals everywhere. Simultaneously, you send out spaciousness or cheerfulness or a bunch of flowers, whatever would be healing, to your uncle and all the others. What you feel for one person, you can extend to all people.

You need to work with both the third and fourth stages - with both the immediate suffering of one person and the universal suffering of all. If you were only to extend out to all sentient beings, the practice would be very theoretical. It would never actually touch your heart. On the other hand, if you were to work only with your own or someone else's fixation, it would lack vision. it would be too narrow. Working with both situations together makes the practice real and heartfelt; at the same time, it provides vision and a way for you to work with everyone else in the world.

You can bring all of your unfinished karmic business right into the practice. In fact, you should invite it in. Suppose that you are involved in a horrific relationship: every time you think of a particular person you get furious. That is very useful for tonglen! Or perhaps you feel depressed. It was all you could do to get out of bed today. You're so depressed that you want to stay in bed for the rest of your life: you have considered hiding under the bed. That is very useful for tonglen practice. The specific fixation should be real, just like that.

Let's use another example. You may be formally doing tonglen or just sitting having your coffee, and here comes Mortimer, the object of your passion, aggression or ignorance. You want to hit him or hug him, or maybe you wish that he weren't there at all.

But let's say you're angry. The object is Mortimer and here comes the poison: fury. You breathe that in. The idea is to develop sympathy for your own confusion. The technique is that you do not blame Mortimer: you also do not blame yourself. Instead, there is just liberated fury - hot, black and heavy. Experience it as fully as you can.

You breathe the anger in; you remove the object; you stop thinking about him. In fact, he was just a useful catalyst. Now you own the anger completely. You drive all blames into yourself. It takes a lot of bravery, and it's extremely insulting to the ego. In fact, it destroys the whole mechanism of the ego. So you breathe in.

Then, you breathe out sympathy, relaxation, and spaciousness. Instead of just a small, dark situation, you allow a lot of space for those feelings. Breathing out is like ventilating the whole thing, airing it out. Breathing in is like opening up your arms and just letting go. It's fresh air. Then you breathe the rage in again - the black, heavy hotness of it. Then you breathe out, ventilating the whole thing, allowing a lot of space.

What you are actually doing is cultivating kindness toward yourself. You don't think about it; you don't philosophize; you simply breathe in a very real klesha. You own it completely and then aerate it, allowing a lot of space when you breathe out. This, in itself, is an amazing practice - even it it didn't go any further - because at this level you are still working with yourself. But the real beauty of the practice is that you extend that out.

Without pretending, you can acknowledge that about two billion other sentient beings are feeling the exact same rage you are at that moment. They may have a different object, but the object isn't the point. The point is the rage itself. You breathe it in from all of them, so they no longer have it. It doesn't make your own rage any greater; it is just rage, which causes so much suffering.

Sometimes, at that moment, you get a glimpse of why there is murder and rape, why there is war, why people burn down buildings, why there is so much misery in the world. It all comes from feeling that rage and acting it out instead of taking it in and airing it. It all turn into hatred and misery, which pollutes the world and obviously perpetuates the vicious cycle of suffering and frustration. Because you feel rage, therefore you have the kindling, the connection, for understanding the rage of all sentient beings. First you work with your own klesha; then you quickly extend that and breathe it all in.

At that point, simultaneously, it is no longer your own particular burden; it is just the rage of sentient beings, which includes you...

The things that really drive us nuts have enormous energy in them. That is why we fear them. It could even be your own timidity: you are so timid that you are afraid to walk up and say hello to someone, afraid to look someone in the eye. It takes a lot on energy to maintain that. It's the way you keep yourself together. In tonglen practice, you have the chance to own that completely, not blaming anybody, and to ventilate it with your outbreath. Then you might better understand why some other people in the room look so grim: it isn't because they hate you but because they feel the same kind of timidity and don't want to look anyone in the face. In this way, the tonglen practice is both a practice of making friends with yourself and a practice of compassion.

By practicing in this way, you definitely develop your sympathy for others, and you begin to understand them a lot better. In that way your own pain is a stepping stone. Your heart develops more and more, and even if someone comes up and insults you, you sould genuinely understand the whole situation because you understand so well where everybody's coming from. You also realize that you can help by simply breathing in the pain of others and breathing out that ventilation. So tonglen starts with relating directly to specific suffering - yours or someone else's - which you then use to understand that this suffering is universal, shared by us all.

Almost everybody can begin to do tonglen by thinking of someone he or she loves very dearly. It's sometimes easier to think of your children than yor husband or wife or mother or father, because those relationships may be more complicated. There are some people in your life whom you love very straightforwardly without complication: old people or people who are ill or little children, or people who have been kind to you.

When he was eight years old, Trungpa Rinpoche saw a whimpering puppy being stoned to death by a laughing, jeering crowd. He said that after that, doing tonglen practice was straightforward for him: all he had to do was think of that dog and his heart would start to open instantly. There was nothing complicated about it. He would have done anything to breathe in the suffering of that animal and breathe out relief. So the idea is to start with something like that, something that activates your heart.

So you think of a puppy being stoned and dying in pain, and you breathe that in. Then, it is no longer just a puppy. It is your connection with the realization that there are puppies and people suffering unjustly like that all over the world. You immediately extend the practice out and breathe in the suffering of all the people who are suffering like that animal. It is also possible to start with the puppy or your uncle or yourself and then gradually extend out further and further. Having started with the wish to relieve your sister's depression, you could extend further and breathe in the depression of people who are somewhat "neutral" - the ones to whom you are not that close but who also don't cause you fear or anger. You breathe in the depression and send out relief to all those "neutral" people. Then, gradually, the practice moves to people you actually hate, people you consider to be your enemies or who have actually harmed you. This expansion evolves by doing the practice. You cannot fake these things; therefore, you start with the things that are close to your heart.

It's useful to think of tonglen practice in four stages:

Flashing openness

Working with the texture, breathing in dark, heavy, and hot and breathing out white, light and cool

Working with relieving a specific, heartfelt instance of suffering

Extending that wish to help everyone

The main thing is to really get in touch with fixation and the power of klesha activity in yourself. This makes other people's situations accessible and real to you. Then, when it becomes real and vivid, always remember to extend it out. Let your own experience be a stepping stone for working with the world.

From Start Where You Are : A Guide to Compassionate Living by Pema Chodron, Copyright 1994, Shambhala Publications.
Published by arrangement with Shambhala Publications, Inc., Boston

2008-04-27T06:12:00.001-07:00

Commitments Osho
Abandon Poisoned Food

The body needs physical food: without it, it will start withering away. This is how it survives; it contains nothing but physical food.
Your mind contains memories, thoughts, desires, jealousies, power trips, and a thousand and one subtle things. All that is also food; on a little more subtle plane it is food. Thought is food. The mind is nothing but the inner side of the body; hence what you eat affects your mind. If you eat non-vegetarian food you will have one kind of mind; if you eat vegetarian food you will certainly have a different kind of mind.

And watch what you allow into your mind. People are completely unaware; they go on reading everything and anything, they go on looking at the TV, any silly stupid thing... Avoid situations where you unnecessarily burden yourselves with rubbish. You already have too much as it is. And you go on collecting as if it is something precious.
..
Leave a few gaps in your mind unoccupied. Those moments are the first glimpses of meditation, the first penetrations of the beyond, the first glimpses of no-mind. And then if you can manage to do this, the other thing is to choose physical food which does not help aggression and violence, which is not poisonous. Now even scientists agree on this, that when you kill an animal, out of fear he releases all kinds of poisons... And on the mental plane things are more complicated. If you think you are a Hindu, you are poisoned; if you think you are a Mohammedan, you are poisoned...You have been spoon-fed since the very first day; from your mother's breast, you have been poisoned. To think of oneself as German, as Chinese, is to think of oneself in opposition to humanity; is to think in terms of enmity, not friendship.

Think of yourself only as a human being. And when your intelligence grows a little more you will even drop the adjective "human." You will think of yourself only as a being. And the being includes all - the trees and the rivers and the stars and the birds and the animals. Become bigger, become huge. Why are you living in tunnels? Why are you creeping into small, dark holes?... No idea is great enough to contain a human being; being-hood cannot be contained in any concept. All concepts cripple and paralyze.

Don't be a Catholic and don't be a communist, just be a human being. These are all poisons, these are all prejudices. And down the ages you have been hypnotized by these prejudices. They have become part of your blood, your bones, your very marrow. You will have to be very alert to get rid of all this poisoning.

Let your physiological body be pure of all poisons and toxins, and let your mind be unburdened from all kinds of rubbish and junk. And let your soul be free from the idea of self. When the soul is free from the idea of "I", you have arrived at that inner space called no-self, ANATTA. You have come home. Now there is nowhere to go; now you can settle, rest and relax. now you can enjoy the millions of joys that are being showered upon you by existence.

From The

2008-03-28T20:13:00.001-07:00

Compassion Meditation Changes The Brain
ScienceDaily (Mar. 27, 2008) — Can we train ourselves to be compassionate? A new study suggests the answer is yes. Cultivating compassion and kindness through meditation affects brain regions that can make a person more empathetic to other peoples' mental states, say researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

This study was the first to use functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to indicate that positive emotions such as loving-kindness and compassion can be learned in the same way as playing a musical instrument or being proficient in a sport. The scans revealed that brain circuits used to detect emotions and feelings were dramatically changed in subjects who had extensive experience practicing compassion meditation.

The research suggests that individuals - from children who may engage in bullying to people prone to recurring depression - and society in general could benefit from such meditative practices, says study director Richard Davidson, professor of psychiatry and psychology at UW-Madison and an expert on imaging the effects of meditation. Davidson and UW-Madison associate scientist Antoine Lutz were co-principal investigators on the project.

The study was part of the researchers' ongoing investigations with a group of Tibetan monks and lay practitioners who have practiced meditation for a minimum of 10,000 hours. In this case, Lutz and Davidson worked with 16 monks who have cultivated compassion meditation practices. Sixteen age-matched controls with no previous training were taught the fundamentals of compassion meditation two weeks before the brain scanning took place.

"Many contemplative traditions speak of loving-kindness as the wish for happiness for others and of compassion as the wish to relieve others' suffering. Loving-kindness and compassion are central to the Dalai Lama's philosophy and mission," says Davidson, who has worked extensively with the Tibetan Buddhist leader. "We wanted to see how this voluntary generation of compassion affects the brain systems involved in empathy."

Various techniques are used in compassion meditation, and the training can take years of practice. The controls in this study were asked first to concentrate on loved ones, wishing them well-being and freedom from suffering. After some training, they then were asked to generate such feelings toward all beings without thinking specifically about anyone.

Each of the 32 subjects was placed in the fMRI scanner at the UW-Madison Waisman Center for Brain Imaging, which Davidson directs, and was asked to either begin compassion meditation or refrain from it. During each state, subjects were exposed to negative and positive human vocalizations designed to evoke empathic responses as well as neutral vocalizations: sounds of a distressed woman, a baby laughing and background restaurant noise.

"We used audio instead of visual challenges so that meditators could keep their eyes slightly open but not focused on any visual stimulus, as is typical of this practice," explains Lutz.

The scans revealed significant activity in the insula - a region near the frontal portion of the brain that plays a key role in bodily representations of emotion - when the long-term meditators were generating compassion and were exposed to emotional vocalizations. The strength of insula activation was also associated with the intensity of the meditation as assessed by the participants.

"The insula is extremely important in detecting emotions in general and specifically in mapping bodily responses to emotion - such as heart rate and blood pressure - and making that information available to other parts of the brain," says Davidson, also co-director of the HealthEmotions Research Institute.

Activity also increased in the temporal parietal juncture, particularly the right hemisphere. Studies have implicated this area as important in processing empathy, especially in perceiving the mental and emotional state of others.

"Both of these areas have been linked to emotion sharing and empathy," Davidson says. "The combination of these two effects, which was much more noticeable in the expert meditators as opposed to the novices, was very powerful."

The findings support Davidson and Lutz's working assumption that through training, people can develop skills that promote happiness and compassion. "People are not just stuck at their respective set points," he says. "We can take advantage of our brain's plasticity and train it to enhance these qualities."

The capacity to cultivate compassion, which involves regulating thoughts and emotions, may also be useful for preventing depression in people who are susceptible to it, Lutz adds.

"Thinking about other people's suffering and not just your own helps to put everything in perspective," he says, adding that learning compassion for oneself is a critical first step in compassion meditation.

The researchers are interested in teaching compassion meditation to youngsters, particularly as they approach adolescence, as a way to prevent bullying, aggression and violence. "I think this can be one of the tools we use to teach emotional regulation to kids who are at an age where they're vulnerable to going seriously off track," Davidson says.

Compassion meditation can be beneficial in promoting more harmonious relationships of all kinds, Davidson adds. "The world certainly could use a little more kindness and compassion," he says. "Starting at a local level, the consequences of changing in this way can be directly experienced."

Lutz and Davidson hope to conduct additional studies to evaluate brain changes that may occur in individuals who cultivate positive emotions through the practice of loving-kindness and compassion over time.

This research was published March 26 in the Public Library of Science One.

Adapted from materials provided by University of Wisconsin-Madison.

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2008-03-11T07:02:00.000-07:00

Keep the Three Inseparable

Your actions, your speech, and your thoughts should be inseparable from this yearning to communicate from the heart. Everything you say can further polarize the situation and convince you of how separate you are. On the other hand, everything you say and do and think can support your desire to communicate, to move closer and step out of this myth of isolation and separateness that you're caught in.

From Start Where You Are : A Guide to Compassionate Living by Pema Chodron, Copyright 1994, Shambhala Publications.
Published by arrangement with Shambhala Publications, Inc., Boston.

2008-02-15T06:43:00.001-08:00

Be Grateful to Everyone
The slogan 'Be grateful to everyone' is about making peace with the aspects of ourselves that we have rejected. Through doing that, we also make peace with the people we dislike. More to the point, being around people we dislike is often a catalyst for making friends with ourselves. Thus, "Be grateful to everyone."
If we were to make a list of people we don't like - people we find obnoxious, threatening, or worthy of contempt - we would find out a lot about those aspects of ourselves that we can't face. If we were to come up with one word about each of the troublemakers in our lives, we would find ourselves with a list of descriptions of our own rejected qualities, which we project onto the outside world. The people who repel us unwittingly show the aspects of ourselves that we find unacceptable, which otherwise we can't see. In traditional teachings on lojong it is put another way: other people trigger the karma that we haven't worked out. They mirror us and give us the chance to befriend all of that ancient stuff that we carry around like a backpack full of boulders.
"Be grateful to everyone" is getting at a complete change of attitude. This slogan is not wishy-washy and naive. It does not mean that if you're mugged on the street you should smile knowingly and say "Oh, I should be grateful for this" before losing consciousness. This slogan actually gets at the guts of how we perfect ignorance through avoidance, not knowing we're eating poison, not knowing that we're putting another layer of protection over our heart, not seeing the whole thing.
"Be grateful to everyone" means that all situations teach you, and often it's the tough ones that teach you the best. There may be a Juan or Juanita in your life, and Juan or Juanita is the one who gets you going. They're the ones who don't go away: your mother, your husband, your wife, your lover, your child, the person that you have to work with every single day, part of the situation you can't escape. There's no way that someone else can tell you exactly what to do, because you're the only one who knows where it's torturing you, where your relationship with Juan or Juanita is getting into your guts.
When the great Buddhist teacher Atisha went to Tibet... he was told the people of Tibet were very good-natured, earthy, flexible, and open; he decided they wouldn't be irritating enough to push his buttons. So he brought along with him a mean-tempered, ornery Bengali tea boy. He felt that was the only way he could stay awake. The Tibetans like to tell the story that, when he got to Tibet, he realized that he need not have brought his tea boy: the people there were not as pleasant as he had been told.
In our own lives, the Bengali tea boys are the people who, when you let them through the front door of your house, go right down to the basement where you store the things you'd rather not deal with, pick out one of them, bring it to you, and say "Is this yours?"
From Start Where You Are : A Guide to Compassionate Living by Pema Chodron, Copyright 1994, Shambhala Publications. Published by arrangement with Shambhala Publications, Inc., Boston.

2008-01-27T06:52:00.000-08:00

When All the World is Filled With Evil, Transform All Mishaps Into the Path of Bodhi

This is the precious gift of the lojong teachings, that whatever occurs isn't considered an interruption or an obstacle but a way to wake up. This slogan is very well suited to our busy lives and difficult times. In fact, it's designed for that: if there were no difficulties, there would be no need for lojong or tonglen.
The path includes all experiences, both serene and chaotic. We delight in the beauty of the snow falling outside the windows or the light reflecting off the floor. But when the fire alarm rings and confusion erupts, we feel irritated and upset... we've done something wrong, or more usually someone ELSE has done something to ruin our beautiful meditation. As someone once said about a loud, bossy woman, "What is that woman doing in my sacred world?"

How can we help? The way that we can help is by making friends with our own feelings of hatred, bewilderment, and so forth. Then we can accept them in others. With this practice you begin to realize that you're capable of playing all the parts. It's not just them, it's 'us' AND 'them.' I used to feel outrage when I read about parents abusing their children, particularly physically. I used to get righteously indignant - until I became a mother. I remember very clearly one day, when my six-month-old son was screaming and crying and covered in oatmeal and my two-and-a-half-year-old daughter was pulling on me and knocking things off the table, thinking "I understand why mothers hurt their children... I'm not going to do it. But at this moment, everything in me want to eradicate completely those two sweet little children."

So lest you find yourself condescendingly doing tonglen for the other one who's SO confused, you could remember that this is a practice where compassion begins to arise in you because you yourself have been there. You've been angry, jealous and lonely. You know what it's like and you know how sometimes you do strange things. Because you're lonely, you say cruel words: because you want someone to love you, you insult them. Exchanging yourself for others...doesn't happen because you're better than they are but because human beings share the same stuff. The more you understand your own, the more you're going to understand others.

From Start Where You Are : A Guide to Compassionate Living by Pema Chodron, Copyright 1994, Shambhala Publications.

2008-01-26T06:34:00.001-08:00

Whatever You Meet Unexpectedly, Join With Meditation

This is the slogan about surprises as gifts. These surprises can be pleasant or unpleasant; the main point is that they can stop your minds. You're walking along and a snowball hits you on the side of the head. It stops your mind.
I was being driven in a car one day, when a horn honked loudly from behind. A car comes up by my window and the driver's face is purple and he's shaking his fist at me - my window is rolled down and so is his - and he yells "Get a job!" That one still stops my mind.

The instruction is that when something stops your mind, catch the moment of that gap, that moment of big space, that moment of bewilderment, that moment of total astonishment, and let yourself rest in it a little longer than you ordinarily might.

Interestingly enough, this is also the instruction on how to die. The moment of death is apparently a major surprise.

After the gap, when you've begun to talk to yourself again - "That horrible person" or "Wasn't it wonderful that he allowed me to rest my mind in the nature of alaya?" - you could catch yourself and start to do tonglen practice. Let the story line go and get in touch.

Usually we're so caught up in ourselves, we're hanging on to ourselves so tightly, that it takes a Mack truck knocking us down to wake us up and stop our minds. But really, as you begin to practice, it could just take the wind blowing the curtain.

I had an interesting experience of something surprising me like this on retreat. I had been practicing all day, after which you might think I would be in a calm, saintly frame of mind. But as I saw that someone had left dirty dishes, I started to get really angry.

Now, on this retreat we put our name on our dishes... there was only one woman of our group of eight who would leave such a mess. Who did she think was going to wash these dishes, her mother? Did she think we were all her slaves? I was really getting into this, I was thinking, "I've know her for a long time, but actually she might as well have never meditated for the way she's so inconsiderate of everybody else on this planet."

When I got to the sink, I looked at the plate, and the name on it was "Pema" and the name on the cup was "Pema" and the name on the knife was "Pema". It was all mine! Needless to say, that cut my trip considerably. It also stopped my mind.

From Start Where You Are : A Guide to Compassionate Living by Pema Chodron, Copyright 1994, Shambhala Publications.
Published by arrangement with Shambhala Publications, Inc., Boston.

2008-01-26T00:08:00.000-08:00

Walking Meditation
Walking meditation is a contemplative practice where close attention is paid to the action of walking. It is not thinking or contemplating while walking (which is also delightful), but being mindful of the muscles of the body, the placement of the feet, balance, and motion. Walking meditation has a long tradition in Buddhism and can also be practiced while walking a labyrinth. Steven Smith, the guiding teacher of the Hawai'i Insight Meditation Center, has provided us with this walking meditation instruction.

Walking Meditation Practice
by Steven Smith

In walking meditation, we become aware of the movement of each step. It is a way of using a natural part of life to increase mindfulness. Once you learn the practice, you can do it almost anywhere. It helps us feel fully present on the earth.

Find a place where you can walk back and forth, about ten to twenty steps in length. Keep the hands stationary, either behind the back, at the sides, or in front.

Feel the sensations of standing. Be aware of contact with the ground, of pressure and tension. Feel the entire energy field of the body, how it is all participating in this standing. Feel the hands hanging down...the shoulders weighted...the lower back, the pelvis...each having its own part in keeping the balance of the standing position.

Now bring your attention to the lower part of the body, from the hips downward, the primary foundation of standing. Staying aware, very slowly shift your weight from the left and back of your body to the right, noticing as you do how the sensations change as your balance shifts. Now hold your weight on the left for a moment, aware of the particular sensations in the leg... hips, thighs, legs, knees, calves, feet, toes, not particularly noticing or identifying those parts of the body, but letting the awareness fill the legs. Feel hardness, tension, tightness, heat, vibration, toughness, stiffness, whatever is there.

Now, keeping your weight on the left side, bring your awareness to the right and feel the relative lightness, emptiness, subtler sensations on the right leg. Now, with your awareness still on the right leg, slowly shift your weight to the right side. Let the awareness seep in right down to the bone, sensing the variations of hardness and softness, toughness, and fluidity, pressure, vibration, weight.

Now bring your awareness to the left side again, and move as if you are very slowly pouring water from a full vessel into an empty one. Notice all the changes as you shift your weight to the left side. With your eyes open just enough to hold your balance, very slowly peel your right foot off the ground and move it forward and place it on the ground. With your awareness on the right, shift your weight, bring awareness to the left, feel from the hips and buttocks down the sides, the whole range of sensations. Continue stepping slowly, keeping your awareness on the sensations. When you get to the end of the path, pause briefly and turn around. Center yourself, and be aware of the first step as you begin again.

You can do the walking meditation at different paces: brisk, normal, and very slow and meticulous. The idea is not to walk slowly; the idea is to move mindfully. As your mind begins to quiet, you will see how we notice more when we move slowly. More becomes clear, we get to feel the inter-relationship of mind and body.

If you like labeling, you can say to yourself "walking/walking" or "step/step," or "right/left." Not using the labeling as a cadence that becomes rote, but using it to encourage the awareness of the sensations of walking.

After some time, you can slow down a bit and actually feel more or less two sections of walking, the lift swing and the placing. So the label might be "lift" as you lift and swing, and then "place." It is a little slower, but not so slow that you lose your balance. Lifting , placing, stop. Feel the stopping, feel the turning. Lift and place, it is very simple, you are really just being with walking.

You are being really detailed, you are not assessing, you are not evaluating. It is a bare awareness, feeling the flow of sensations. When you lift, move, place, notice the shift of weight, the heel peeling off the toe, even the ground. Or you might notice the knee bending, the calf tensing, or the thigh being taut...sometimes you may notice the whole leg simultaneously, another time you might focus on tingling in the toe. Lifting, moving, placing.

Holding your visual field to a minimum--6,8,9 feet--is helpful for a period of time. Then, when you feel like you just can't take it anymore, open up your field of vision, look around, and just be aware of seeing and hearing for a while. It is important to keep a lightness of being.

If you feel flooded with thoughts, just stop for a moment and be aware of thoughts. Let the flood of thoughts come and go and then go back to the walking. You begin to see that nothing is a distraction, as long as you recognize what is there.

Think of it like this... you are starting off on a trek, and you just landed in Katmandu, You are going up to Mustang Valley....you are going to trek up one of these mountains, and there is the goal of reaching the top, there's the desire to get there, and then there's the realization that there is a whole process of getting there, and, along the way, more and more, there is the realization that the process is the goal. At first, you don't have your walking body...you have been busy and confined, muscles aren't loose, bones are a bit stiff....it takes a while for there to be a rhythm between mind and body, to get into that rhythm, to be carried by that rhythm, so that the experience becomes being carried by the mountain, and then the second winds come...and the body just feels in flow, it feels in harmony, it feels in sync with the mountain itself and the movements up and down.

It is the same way in meditation--first it's a stretch, and you feel a resistance, the push, the upward climb....but you can just take your time, keep learning how to settle back, lean back, and tune in to the process, until more and more, you feel carried by it itself, and it becomes restful.

2008-01-26T00:01:00.001-08:00

Judith Simmer-Brown: We’ve been working at Naropa University with a Master of Divinity program that is relevant to this discussion. It trains students to be Buddhist chaplains, working with the sick and dying in hospital. That’s the ambition most of them have. Some of them would very much like to work in prison, and it seems that that’s the main direction our students are moving. When our students do internships in the hospital, they work under supervisors who are mostly Christian chaplains. But it’s been a very interesting dialogue for our students, because we train them in Tonglen as Geshe Lobsang taught yesterday, and the students develop a stabilized Tonglen practice that they then take into the hospital.

The students go into rooms where people are sometimes in great suffering or sometimes have very minor things happening. Many times, however, people are dying. Our students work in the emergency rooms and critical care situations. Instead of doing the Jesus prayer or Pure Land practice, they are doing Tonglen. This is an incredibly powerful practice. This is how we are taught to work with our own suffering and directly with the suffering of others at the bedside. There is an atmosphere in the room with someone dying that is an incredible teaching for us as practitioners: to open to suffering, to let it teach us very directly about our own mortality, and to share our presence with those who are dying, who want someone very much to just be there.

It has been such a powerful thing for us to be able to take our own experience of this and teach students to do it. One of the most interesting things for us has been to work with Christian supervisors who tell us that there is something about our students that when they go into the room they seem to be able to be there. That’s true even if students are relatively new, simply because of Tonglen practice. Tonglen is a practice that could be used by any of us as a way to open to an environment in the hospital or the bedside of a dying person.

2008-01-19T17:25:00.000-08:00

2008-01-14T19:53:00.000-08:00

Tonglen is Tibetan for 'taking and giving', and it refers to a meditation practice found in Tibetan Buddhism.

In the practice, one visualizes taking onto oneself the suffering of others, and giving one's own happiness and success to others. As such it is a training in altruism in its most extreme form. The function of the practice is to:

reduce selfish attachment
increase a sense of renunciation
create positive karma by giving and helping
develop loving-kindness and bodhicitta
it refers to all of the Six Perfections of giving, ethics, patience, joyous effort, concentration and wisdom, which are the practices of a Bodhisattva.
This practice is summarized in seven points, which are attributed to the great Indian Buddhist teacher Atisha Dipankara Shrijnana, born in 982 CE. They were first written down by Kadampa master Langri Thangpa (1054–1123). The practice became more widely known when Geshe Chekawa Yeshe Dorje (1101–1175) summarized the points in his Seven Points of Training the Mind. This list of mind training (lojong) proverbs or 'slogans' compiled by Chekawa is often referred to as the Atisha Slogans.

H.H. The Dalai Lama, who is said to practise Tonglen every day, has said of the technique: "Whether this meditation really helps others or not, it gives me peace of mind. Then I can be more effective, and the benefit is immense". [1]

2007-12-19T13:42:00.000-08:00

Alternately Practice Sending and Taking

To understand what this next verse of the root text means, let's simply follow Sechibuwa's commentary. He suggests that we sit comfortably on a cushion and while clearly visualizing our mother, cultivate loving kindness and compassion for her.
It seems crucial, and profoundly beneficial, that he chooses to begin with our own mother. If we do not have a loving relationship with our own parents, something is going to be awry at the very core of our spiritual practice, creating disharmony throughout our lives. I say this not naively, but knowing that some parents abuse their children sexually, physically, and psychologically. Those of us with ill-feeling towards a mother or father may be tempted to say: "This is hard for me because I had a rotten childhood. I'll skip my parents and begin instead on firmer ground, with a close friend, or my wife or husband."

There is, of course, no law against this. But as long as our feelings remain unresolved towards our own parents, we lack a firm foundation for other relationships. Regardless of how our parents have treated us, it is crucial for a balanced and harmonious life that we come to terms with any resentment we feel, and so bring insight to bear on the relationship that loving kindness and compassion can arise from our heart. By beginning with our mother, we establish a root to let this compassion flow out to our father, to other relatives and friends, to people about whom we feel indifferent, and finally to our enemies.

Sechibuwa encourages us first to reflect that our mother has given us this precious, fully endowed human life, which means, in essence, that we have time for spiritual practice if we do no more than shift our priorities. Regardless of how she might have treated us afterwards, it is because she gave us birth that we have a wonderful potential for spiritual growth in this and future lives.

Think too, says Sechibuwa, that while our mother has cared for us so long in this and previous lifetimes, sometimes even sacrificing her life for her children, she has meanwhile suffered grief, anxiety, fear, and physical pain. Not only because of her children, but throughout the course of her life, she has experienced the suffering of mental afflictions, aging, sickness, and death. As we ponder this, a feeling of compassion for our mother arises without much effort. Compassion, in this case, is simply the wish, "May you be free of suffering."

Take the example of a mother who is a drunkard. We can reflect upon the unhappiness, the lack of satisfaction and meaning in life that gave rise to a habit of drinking and made her dependent on alcohol to get through each day. If a mother is an alcoholic, it naturally follows that sometimes she is not a very conscientious mother; and thirty or forty years later the child may still suffer resentment. But as we feel compassion for her, we can empathize with the sorrow and anxiety that gave rise to the affliction of alcohol dependency. And we can wish from our hearts, sincerely and without hypocrisy, "May you be free both from the dependency, and from the unsatisfied need that gave rise to it. May you be free of the suffering as well as its inner source."

Imagine now the suffering that your own mother experiences. For this potent practice to be done correctly, it must become a very personal meditation on your own mother. Bring to mind the suffering you have seen her experience, physical or mental, related to her internal condition or external circumstances. Go right to the source of the suffering, the basic mental afflictions themselves: attachment, hostility, ignorance. Imagine her own experience of the suffering, particularly if you have a mother who is handicapped by a problem such as drinking.

Practice "taking" this suffering. Imagine taking upon yourself your own mother's suffering together with its sources: all the mental distortions and the instincts for their arising. Imagine that you are peeling this off her, removing it from her continuum. As Sechibuwa says, "Slice it off with a knife." Imagine it as dense, black smoke; draw this black smoke from her and bring it into your heart. Visualize a blackness there in your own heart, like a black egg or sphere, symbolizing your own self-centeredness. Draw in the black smoke of suffering and its sources, and dissolve it into this blackness at your own heart. The point here is not to imagine yourself experiencing your mother's anger, pain, or confusion. Instead, imagine that the suffering comes directly into your heart, specifically to the self-centeredness in your heart, and totally annihilates it, leaving not a single trace.

As you draw in the black smoke, see your mother in your mind's eye arising from the suffering and the mental afflictions that are its source. For example, if she suffers from arthritis, imagine her looking at her hands and her joints, moving them freely and delighting in the experience of the full and proper use of her limbs, her back, her neck. Imagine her regaining vibrant health. If strife or anger plague her, imagine the anger quelled, the strife pacified. Imagine her serene, content, at peace with her surroundings. If she is anxious by nature, see her face becoming calm, relaxing as you draw out the black smoke of her worries.

In this way, imagine taking off layer after layer of internal and external unhappiness and misfortune, and dissolving them into your own heart. This is the practice of "taking" as applied to our mother, the first half of the practice for the cultivation of relative bodhicitta.

The second half of the practice is known as "sending" or "giving." Let the aspiration arise: "May I bring about all happiness for my own mother." Imagine that you are giving your body, your possessions, and all your virtue, without any sense of reservation, to your mother. Imagine sending this in the form of a white light that radiates from a precious jewel at your heart, a jewel from which all favorable circumstances for your mother come forth: food, clothing, dwelling, helpers, and spiritual guidance. Imagine her being endowed with everything she needs for the realization of full awakening.

Once again, let the full wealth of your imagination be brought to bear in this practice. Visualize this jewel fulfilling her wishes, so that she can put them aside. If we really long for something worldly, it may well enhance our spiritual practice to satisfy that mundane desire and thus dispense with it. Imagine her desires fulfilled so they no longer nag at her mind. Contented, she recognizes this as insufficient and longs for full awakening. Imagine her meeting with all favorable circumstances for her spiritual growth, the purification of her mind, and cultivation of wholesome qualities. If your mother is a Christian, imagine her meeting with a Christian mentor, her devotion deepening, and her life more and more emulating that of Jesus Christ. Imagine her receiving the fullest possible benefit from this spiritual path and following it more and more deeply. Imagine her attaining full awakening. Imagine the qualities that would arise; how her personality would be transformed. Imagine the loving kindness, the wisdom, the ability for serving others that would arise, and then, finally, imagine her attaining full awakening.

Gain some familiarity with both taking and sending in this practice. As you become familiar with them separately, practice them alternately, first taking and then sending. Let them enhance and enrich one another. At times go back and simply allow the affection for your mother to arise with a heartfelt concern for her well-being. Then once again, on the basis of loving kindness and compassion, practice taking and sending. Sechibuwa writes: "Truly long to be able to give her all happiness, even offering her your body, your own possessions, your own virtues."

Virtue in this context means the wholesome imprints on your mind stream. Keep in mind that this is the very source of your future happiness, what brings you success in mundane as well as in spiritual matters. Imagine offering this up to her as well. The point of the practice is to release the attachment we have to our own body, possessions, and virtues - not only to detach ourselves from them, but also to offer them sincerely for the service of others. So we start with our mother to experience the longing, "If I only could offer you my merit, my body, my possessions."

To some extent of course we can. If our mother is in need and we can in fact help her, then the meditation must manifest in external activity and not remain on the level of imagination. Let the compassion that arises be not simply an armchair compassion, such that we sit here and think these very nice thoughts and then treat her thoughtlessly or repeat old, unwholesome patterns. Rather, let the meditation while we are in solitude arise into our aspirations and, as in the previous meditation on ultimate bodhicitta, let it then be integrated in our actions following meditation so that we really develop the intention to serve our mother.

This practice of sending and sending with regard to our mother can constitute the first session of meditation. We might want to take a break before expanding this practice in a second session to focus on other people: our father, for example, or close friends. Then gradually move on to indifferent people and finally to those whom we really dislike.

In each case, it is very helpful to meditate first on the kindness of these other beings. Meditating on our friends' good qualities is an easy beginning. Then take one friend to mind and think of this person's misfortunes and the specific kinds of suffering to which he or she is subject. Place yourself in this person's shoes and imagine experiencing her anxieties. Then begin the practice of taking: take into your heart as a black smoke the mental and physical suffering of this person, as well as the mental distortions that give rise to such suffering.

Repeat this with one, two, ten, or twenty different people, from session to session, day to day, until the practice becomes very fluent. Gradually include people whom you regard with indifference. Here the practice becomes extremely potent. Focus again and again on such people, recognizing that just like us they wish to experience happiness and be free of suffering. This is the bottom line. Regardless of whatever kindness they may or may not have rendered to us in any observable way, we are kin. We belong to the same family of sentient beings.

The practice is the same in each case: taking suffering, taking the sources of suffering, then offering your body, your possessions, and your merits. just as you did with your mother, send them all causes and favorable circumstances for their spiritual growth, so that they can recognize the inner source of their discontent and not mistake it for some external situation. Send them the circumstances that will enable them to follow the path of their choice, purifying their minds of the sources of misery, confusion, and strife, and bringing them to joy that arises from the essential nature of the mind itself, rather than from some pleasant stimulus.

We are working up to the enemy. Don't postpone this facet of the practice, thinking you are not ready; it is worth entering soon. Plunge in and bring to mind a person you really cannot stand. Perhaps someone has treated you contemptuously, abused you, or taken something that you really cherished. For whatever reason, repugnance may arise toward a certain person. Perhaps they have really done nothing wrong at all, but something about their personality or behavior gives rise to abhorrence.

Because it is a mental distortion, hostility towards another person tends to be fundamentally stupid. As we look at a person with objectionable qualities, hatred invariably grasps onto that person as existing intrinsically. Because hatred itself derives from the ignorance of grasping onto such intrinsic existence, it naturally carries that same characteristic of ignorance with it. Hostility is stupid in the sense that it ignores the manifold causes and conditions that have given rise over years and years, lifetime after lifetime, to the present characteristics of the person in question.

To some extent we may be free of the qualities that we find so abhorrent in another person, especially if we have had the benefit of excellent teachers and a background in dharma. Has the other person been so fortunate? Has that person had close and meaningful contact with authentic spiritual guides who can show them the source of their suffering? Or have they been deprived of this precious guidance?

Anger tends to ignore a person's history, to reify him, and hold him intrinsically, autonomously responsible for every objectionable quality. Anger does something else: it hones in on small instances in which this person seemed especially obnoxious, narrow-minded, or superficial. On the basis of selected vignettes, perhaps even without direct contact, we build a caricature. In the mind of our own anger, we build a conceptual construct of a human being who has only negative qualities, a person with no Buddha nature. We look at this cartoon of our own creation that has no existence at all as a human being, because no human being can exist totally saturated to the core with repugnant qualities, and we feel, "How disgusting you are! " Of course what appears in our mind's eye is disgusting and repulsive; it is also a fabrication of our own distorted mind.

Let's come back to the real person. I am not suggesting that every disagreeable quality we perceive in others is a fallacy and that everyone, with the exception of ourselves, is pristine pure. People are three-dimensional. Every single person is endowed with Buddha nature, and every single person has a history. As we seek to cultivate loving kindness and compassion for people we dislike, and on that basis to practice sending and taking, it is invaluable to keep their personal histories in mind. Even if we know nothing about them, we can infer that there have been causes and conditions that gave rise to the behavior we perceive. When our minds are settling in meditation, with hopefully greater clarity than normal, we can seek out in the mind's eye occasions when these people did not display repugnant qualities. Anger does not care about those times at all; it wants to sift them out and completely forget about them. Balance anger's view with the dharma view, based on intelligent faith, that each of us - enemy, friend, indifferent person, or self - is endowed with Buddha nature. Each of us at our core is utterly pristine and untainted by mental distortions.

Now integrate the with the practice of taking and sending. In the first act of taking, identify the specific disagreeable behavior or personality traits that you find repugnant in this person. More than likely they are mental distortions or direct expressions of them. Here the term "mental afflictions" is very helpful. Anger, attachment, and ignorance are not bad simply because they produce bad results on some future occasion. Even as they arise they hurt, causing some degree of subtle or gross suffering.

Bring these afflictions to mind, and feel compassion for this person who suffers their disease, recognizing that we ourselves are not immune, although the afflictions may be temporarily attenuated. We are not yet free, and we can imagine future circumstances that might prompt similar behavior from ourselves. This is a brother, a sister, we are dealing with. To be subject to such afflictions, and the actions that derive from them, is indeed to suffer as a victim.

Imagine, in empathy and kinship, taking the black smoke into the blackness of self-centeredness at your own heart. Peel the suffering and its source off that person. As you do so, hold the person as clearly as possible in your mind's eye, and imagine him or her free of repugnant qualities and behavior.

Then, in the practice of sending offer your body, possessions, and merit, so that this person's mind may become clearer and his heart warmer and more open, so that he or she might recognize wholesome behavior and delight in cultivating it. Imagine this person becoming a Bodhisattva and gaining deeper and deeper insight. Imagine your body as a jewel sending out all favorable circumstances for his or her spiritual maturation. Finally, imagine this person becoming a fully awakened being.

Once we have practiced taking and sending in this manner with regards to mother, father, friends, indifferent people, and finally our enemies, we can take a 360-degree approach, and reach out to every sentient being. Saying "every sentient being" avoids the blurry vastness of "all sentient beings," which can become an impersonal "to whom it may concern." Recognize that this includes the animals, human beings of all races, all worlds, and all other types of sentient beings. As before, practice taking and sending on the basis of loving kindness and compassion for each and every sentient being.

Sechibuwa encourages us to practice this not only in purely mental meditation, but also to recite verses verbally to this effect. For example, express in words the aspiration, "May I become a cause of all worldly and transcendent joy for every sentient being. May I become a cause for dispelling the suffering of every sentient being." There are some very beautiful lines to this effect in the third chapter of Shantideva's A Guide to the Bodhisattva's Way of Life. The idea is to saturate our mind, our voice, and our physical activities in the practice of taking and sending.

APPLY THOSE TWO TO THE BREATH.

The next verse of the root text offers a wonderful extension to the practice of taking and sending. It also adds a new dimension to the practice of breath awareness, though it should not replace straight breath awareness as a substitute. This rich but very simple practice has its own fruits.

As you inhale while focusing on your mother or another person, take in the suffering in the form of black smoke. Then, as you exhale, send out white light offering all you have for that person's well-being. With each in-breath, take in and with each out-breath, send out; taking and sending again and again. You can do this in the solitude of meditation, but also very effectively when the suffering of others confronts you directly. When you see someone who is angry or in pain, when you visit someone in the hospital, or watch the news of some calamity, practice right there on the spot. Since you are already breathing, you might as well make it more meaningful.

Excerpted from: The Seven-Point Mind Training(first published as A Passage from Solitude : Training the Mind in a Life Embracing the World), by B. Alan Wallace. Copyright 1992 by Snow Lion Publications, Ithaca, New York 14851.

2007-12-10T10:57:00.000-08:00

2007-11-18T21:13:00.000-08:00

Zen Meditation Instructions
Zazen is a particular kind of meditation, unique to Zen, that functions centrally as the very heart of the practice. In fact, Zen Buddhists are generally known as the "meditation Buddhists." Basically, zazen is the study of the self.

The great Master Dogen said, "To study the Buddha Way is to study the self, to study the self is to forget the self, and to forget the self is to be enlightened by the ten thousand things." To be enlightened by the ten thousand things is to recognize the unity of the self and the ten thousand things. Upon his own enlightenment, Buddha was in seated meditation; Zen practice returns to the same seated meditation again and again. For two thousand five hundred years that meditation has continued, from generation to generation; it's the most important thing that has been passed on. It spread from India to China, to Japan, to other parts of Asia, and then finally to the West. It's a very simple practice. It's very easy to describe and very easy to follow. But like all other practices, it takes doing in order for it to happen.

We tend to see body, breath, and mind separately, but in zazen they come together as one reality. The first thing to pay attention to is the position of the body in zazen. The body has a way of communicating outwardly to the world and inwardly to oneself. How you position your body has a lot to do with what happens with your mind and your breath. Throughout the years of the evolution of Buddhism, the most effective positioning of the body for the practice of zazen has been the pyramid structure of the seated Buddha. Sitting on the floor is recommended because it is very stable. We use a zafu - a small pillow - to raise the behind just a little, so that the knees can touch the ground. With your bottom on the pillow and two knees touching the ground, you form a tripod base that gives three hundred and sixty-degree stability.

Burmese position

There are several different leg positions that are possible while seated this way. The first and simplest is the Burmese position, in which the legs are crossed and both feet rest flat on the floor. The knees should also rest on the floor, though sometimes it takes a bit of exercise to be able to get the legs to drop that far. After awhile the muscles will loosen up and the knees will begin to drop. To help that happen, sit on the front third of the zafu, shifting your body forward a little bit. By imagining the top of your head pushing upward to the ceiling and by stretching your body that way, get your spine straight - then just let the muscles go soft and relax. With the buttocks up on the zafu and your stomach pushing out a little, there will be a slight curve in the lower region of the back. In this position, it takes very little effort to keep the body upright.

Half Lotus position

Another position is the half lotus, where the left foot is placed up onto the right thigh and the right leg is tucked under. This position is slightly asymmetrical and sometimes the upper body needs to compensate in order to keep itself absolutely straight.

Full Lotus position

By far the most stable of all the positions is the full lotus, where each foot is placed up on the opposite thigh. This is perfectly symmetrical and very solid. Stability and efficiency are the important reasons sitting cross-legged on the floor works so well. There is absolutely no esoteric significance to the different positions. What is most important in zazen is what you do with your mind, not what you do with your feet or legs.

Seiza position

There is also the seiza position. You can sit seiza without a pillow, kneeling, with the buttocks resting on the upturned feet which form an anatomical cushion. Or you can use a pillow to keep the weight off your ankles. A third way of sitting seiza is to use the seiza bench. It keeps all the weight off your feet and helps to keep your spine straight.

Chair position

Finally, it's fine to sit in a chair with your feet flat on the floor. You can use the cushion, or zafu, the same way you would use it on the floor - sitting on the forward third of it. Alternatively, you can place the zafu at the small of the back. It's very important to keep the spine straight with the lower part of the back curved. All of the aspects of the posture that are important when seated on the floor are just as important when sitting in a chair.

The importance of keeping the back straight is to allow the diaphragm to move freely. The breathing you will be doing in zazen becomes very, very deep. Your abdomen will rise and fall much the same way an infant's belly rises and falls. In general, as we mature, our breathing becomes restricted, and less and less complete. We tend to take shallow breaths in the upper part of the chest. Usually, we've got our belts on very tight or we wear tight clothing around the waist. As a result, deep, complete breathing rarely occurs. In zazen it is important to loosen up anything that is tight around the waist and to wear clothing that is non-binding. For instance, material should not gather behind the knees when you cross the legs, inhibiting circulation. Allow the diaphragm to move freely so that the breathing can be deep, easy, and natural. You don't have to control it. You don't have to make it happen. It will happen by itself if you assume the right posture and position your body properly.

Once you've positioned yourself, there are a few other things you can check on. The mouth is kept closed. Unless you have some kind of a nasal blockage, breathe through your nose. The tongue is pressed lightly against the upper palate. This reduces the need to salivate and swallow. The eyes are kept lowered, with your gaze resting on the ground about two or three feet in front of you. Your eyes will be mostly covered by your eyelids, which eliminates the necessity to blink repeatedly. The chin is slightly tucked in. Although zazen looks very disciplined, the muscles should be soft. There should be no tension in the body. It doesn't take strength to keep the body straight. The nose is centered in line with the navel, the upper torso leaning neither forward nor back.

The hands are folded in the cosmic mudra. The dominant hand is held palm up holding the other hand, also palm up, so that the knuckles of both hands overlap. If you're right-handed, your right hand is holding the left hand; if you're left-handed, your left hand is holding the right hand. The thumbs are lightly touching, thus the hands form an oval, which can rest on the upturned soles of your feet if you're sitting full lotus. If you're sitting Burmese, the mudra can rest on your thighs. The cosmic mudra tends to turn your attention inward. There are many different ways of focusing the mind. There are visual images called mandalas that are used in some traditions as a point of concentration. There are mantras, or vocal images. There are different kinds of mudras used in various Eastern religions. In zazen, we focus on the breath. The breath is life. The word "spirit" means breath. The words "ki" in Japanese and "chi" in Chinese, meaning power or energy, both derive from breath. Breath is the vital force; it's the central activity of our bodies. Mind and breath are one reality: when your mind is agitated your breath is agitated; when you're nervous you breathe quickly and shallowly; when your mind is at rest the breath is deep, easy, and effortless.

It is important to center your attention in the hara. The hara is a place within the body, located two inches below the navel. It's the physical and spiritual center of the body. Put your attention there; put your mind there. As you develop your zazen, you'll become more aware of the hara as the center of your attentiveness.

Breathing in Zazen

Begin rocking the body back and forth, slowly, in decreasing arcs, until you settle at your center of gravity. The mind is in the hara, hands are folded in the cosmic mudra, mouth is closed, tongue pressed on the upper palate. You're breathing through the nose and you're tasting the breath. Keep your attention on the hara and the breath. Imagine the breath coming down into the hara, the viscera, and returning from there. Make it part of the whole cycle of breathing.

We begin working on ourselves by counting the breath, counting each inhalation and each exhalation, beginning with one and counting up to ten. When you get to ten, come back to one and start all over. The only agreement that you make with yourself in this process is that if your mind begins to wander - if you become aware that what you're doing is chasing thoughts - you will look at the thought, acknowledge it, and then deliberately and consciously let it go and begin the count again at one.

The counting is a feedback to help you know when your mind has drifted off. Each time you return to the breath you are empowering yourself with the ability to put your mind where you want it, when you want it there, for as long as you want it there. That simple fact is extremely important. We call this power of concentration joriki. Joriki manifests itself in many ways. It's the center of the martial and visual arts in Zen. In fact, it's the source of all the activity of our lives.

When you've been practicing this process for a while, your awareness will sharpen. You'll begin to notice things that were always there but escaped your attention. Because of the preoccupation with the internal dialogue, you were too full to be able to see what was happening around you. The process of zazen begins to open that up.

When you're able to stay with the counting and repeatedly get to ten without any effort and without thoughts interfering, it's time to begin counting every cycle of the breath. Inhalation and exhalation will count as one, the next inhalation and exhalation as two. This provides less feedback, but with time you will need less feedback.

Eventually, you'll want to just follow the breath and abandon the counting altogether. Just be with the breath. Just be the breath. Let the breath breathe itself. That's the beginning of the falling away of body and mind. It takes some time and you shouldn't rush it; you shouldn't move too fast from counting every breath to counting every other breath and on to following the breath. If you move ahead prematurely, you'll end up not developing strong joriki. And it's that power of concentration that ultimately leads to what we call samadhi, or single-pointedness of mind.

In the process of working with the breath, the thoughts that come up, for the most part, will be just noise, just random thoughts. Sometimes, however, when you're in a crisis or involved in something important in your life, you'll find that the thought, when you let it go, will recur. You let it go again but it comes back, you let it go and it still comes back. Sometimes that needs to happen. Don't treat that as a failure; treat it as another way of practicing. This is the time to let the thought happen, engage it, let it run its full course. But watch it, be aware of it. Allow it to do what it's got to do, let it exhaust itself. Then release it, let it go. Come back again to the breath. Start at one and continue the process. Don't use zazen to suppress thoughts or issues that need to come up.

Scattered mental activity and energy keeps us separated from each other, from our environment, and from ourselves. In the process of sitting, the surface activity of our minds begins to slow down. The mind is like the surface of a pond - when the wind is blowing, the surface is disturbed and there are ripples. Nothing can be seen clearly because of the ripples; the reflected image of the sun or the moon is broken up into many fragments.

Out of that stillness, our whole life arises. If we don't get in touch with it at some time in our life, we will never get the opportunity to come to a point of rest. In deep zazen, deep samadhi, a person breathes at a rate of only two or three breaths a minute. Normally, at rest, a person will breathe about fifteen breaths a minute - even when we're relaxing, we don't quite relax. The more completely your mind is at rest, the more deeply your body is at rest. Respiration, heart rate, circulation, and metabolism slow down in deep zazen. The whole body comes to a point of stillness that it doesn't reach even in deep sleep. This is a very important and very natural aspect of being human. It is not something particularly unusual. All creatures of the earth have learned this and practice this. It's a very important part of being alive and staying alive: the ability to be completely awake.

Once the counting of the breath has been really learned, and concentration, true one-pointedness of mind, has developed, we usually go on to other practices such as koan study or shikantaza ("just sitting"). This progression should not be thought of in terms of "gain" or "promotion"; that would imply that counting the breath was just a preparation for the "real" thing. Each step is the real thing. Whatever our practice is, the important thing is to put ourselves into it completely. When counting the breath, we just count the breath.

It is also important to be patient and persistent, to not be constantly thinking of a goal, of how the sitting practice may help us. We just put ourselves into it and let go of our thoughts, opinions, positions - everything our minds hold onto. The human mind is basically free, not clinging. In zazen we learn to uncover that mind, to see who we really are.

2007-11-18T21:08:00.000-08:00

Patients Do Better With Psychotherapist Who Practice Zen Meditation, Study Suggests
ScienceDaily (Nov. 18, 2007) — An investigation by German researchers headed by Professor Nickel indicates the practicing Zen meditation by psychotherapists matters. All therapists direct their attention in some manner during psychotherapy. A special form of directing attention, 'mindfulness', is recommended.

Obsessive-compulsive personality disorder
This study aimed to examine whether, and to what extent, promoting mindfulness in psychotherapists in training (PiT) influences the treatment results of their patients. The therapeutic course and treatment results of 124 inpatients, who were treated for 9 weeks by 18 PiTs, were compared.

The PiTs were randomly assigned to 1 of 2 groups: (i) those practicing Zen meditation (MED; n = 9 or (ii) control group, which did not perform meditation (noMED; n = 9). The results of treatment (according to the intent-to-treat principle) were examined using the Session Questionnaire for General and Differen-tial Individual Psychotherapy (STEP), the Questionnaire of Changes in Experience and Behavior (VEV) and the Symptom Checklist (SCL-90-R).Compared to the noMED group (n = 61), the patients of PiTs from the MED group (n = 63) had significantly higher evaluations (according to the intent-to-treat principle) for individual therapy on 2 STEP scales, clarification and problem-solving perspectives.

Their evaluations were also significantly higher for the entire therapeutic result on the VEV. Furthermore, the MED group showed greater symptom reduction than the noMED group on the Global Severity Index and 8 SCL-90-R scales, including Somatization, Insecurity in Social Contact, Obsessiveness, Anxiety, Anger/Hostility, Phobic Anxiety, Paranoid Thinking and Psychoticism.

This study indicates that promoting mindfulness in PiTs could positively influence the therapeutic course and treatment results in their patients.

Journal reference: Grepmair, L. ; Mitterlehner, F. ; Loew, T. ; Bachler, E. ; Rother, W. ; Nickel, M. Promoting Mindfulness in Psychotherapists in Training Influences the Treatment Results of Their Patients: A Randomized, Double-Blind, Controlled Study Psychother Psychosom 2007;76:332-338

Adapted from materials provided by Psychotherapy and Psychosomatics.

2007-11-17T10:41:00.000-08:00

Drive All Blames Into One

When we look at the world in this way we see that it all comes down to the fact that no one is ever encouraged to feel the underlying anxiety, the underlying edginess, the underlying soft spot, and therefore we think that blaming others is the only way. Reading just one newspaper, we can see that blaming others doesn't work.
We have to look at our own lives as well. How are we doing with our Juan and Juanitas? Often they're just the people with whom we have the most intimate relationships. They really get to us because we can't just shake them off by moving across town or changing seats on the bus, or whatever we have the luxury of doing with mere acquaintances, whom we also loathe.

It doesn't mean, instead of blaming other people, blame yourself. It means to touch in with what blame feels like altogether. Instead of guarding yourself, instead of pushing things away, begin to get in touch with the fact that there's a very soft spot under all that armor, and blame is probably one of the most-perfected armors that we have. You can take this slogan beyond what we think of as 'blame' and practice applying it simply to the general sense that something is wrong. When you feel that something is wrong, let the story line go and touch in to what's underneath.

Strangely enough, we blame others and put so much energy into the object of anger or whatever it is because we're afraid that this anger or sorrow or loneliness is going to last forever...'Drive all blames into one' is saying, instead of always blaming the other, OWN the feeling of blame, OWN the anger, OWN the loneliness and make friends with it. Use the tonglen practice to see how you can place the anger or the fear or the loneliness in a cradle of loving-kindness; use tonglen to learn how to be gentle to all that stuff. In order to be gentle and create an atmosphere of compassion for yourself, it's necessary to stop talking to yourself about how wrong everything is - or how right everything is, for that matter.

2007-11-15T06:05:00.000-08:00

Even though the labyrinth is a Western concept, it shares some similarities with Asian monastic and spiritual practices. The patterns of the labyrinth are similar in design and conception to the mandalas of South Asian Buddhism, which are physical representations of the spiritual realm designed to aid in meditation. Labyrinths blend their visual symbolism with the process of walking, which is similar to the Japanese Zen practice of kinhin, literally "walking meditation," where all of the attention is focused on the process of each step, one foot in front of the other, and the breath is controlled and regulated. Both of these techniques are used in Buddhist meditation, which combines the elements of calming and insight into the single goal of samadhi, or "awareness."”

2007-11-12T02:05:00.000-08:00

If we learn to open our hearts, anyone, including the people who drive us crazy, can be our teacher.

• There's a reason you can learn from everything: you have basic wisdom, basic intelligence, and basic goodness.

• Compassionate action starts with seeing yourself when you start to make yourself right and when you start to make yourself wrong. At that point you could just contemplate the fact that there is a larger alternative to either of those, a more tender, shaky kind of place where you could live. - In the Gap Between Right and Wrong

• We habitually erect a barrier called blame that keeps us from communicating genuinely with others, and we fortify it with our concepts of who's right and who's wrong. We do that with the people who are closest to us and we do it with political systems, with all kinds of things that we don't like about our associates or our society. It is a very common, ancient, well-perfected device for trying to feel better. Blame others. Blaming is a way to protect your heart, trying to protect what is soft and open and tender in yourself. Rather than own that pain, we scramble to find some comfortable ground. - In the Gap Between Right and Wrong

• When you begin to touch your heart or let your heart be touched, you begin to discover that it's bottomless, that it doesn't have any resolution, that this heart is huge, vast, and limitless. You begin to discover how much warmth and gentleness is there, as well as how much space.

• A further sign of health is that we don't become undone by fear and trembling, but we take it as a message that it's time to stop struggling and look directly at what's threatening us.

• Gloriousness and wretchedness need each other. One inspires us, the other softens us.

• People get into a heavy-duty sin and guilt trip, feeling that if things are going wrong, that means that they did something bad and they are being punished. That's not the idea at all. The idea of karma is that you continually get the teachings that you need to open your heart. To the degree that you didn't understand in the past how to stop protecting your soft spot, how to stop armoring your heart, you're given this gift of teachings in the form of your life, to give you everything you need to open further.

2007-10-18T21:21:00.000-07:00

Turning Toward Pain
Pema Chödrön discusses her discovery of Buddhism and explains how pain can be a great spiritual teacher.
Interview by James Kullander

This interview is reprinted from The Sun magazine by arrangement with the author.

Pema Chödrön, an American Buddhist nun, is widely known for her down-to-earth teachings on compassion and meditation in the Shambhala lineage of the Tibetan Buddhist tradition. Her books, including the best-selling "When Things Fall Apart" and "The Places That Scare You" are popular among people from many spiritual traditions. Chödrön, whose Buddhist name means "Lotus Torch of the Dharma," was born Deirdre Blomfield-Brown in 1936 in New York City. A graduate of the University of California at Berkeley, Chödrön spent many years as an elementary-school teacher and in the 1970s began to study Buddhism, which she turned to earnestly in the wake of her divorce. She was ordained a Buddhist nun in 1981 and today is the resident teacher of Gampo Abbey, a Buddhist monastic center in Nova Scotia. Now in strict retreat much of the time and suffering from chronic fatigue syndrome, Chödrön occasionally teaches at the abbey and a few other retreat centers, including Omega Institute, in Rhinebeck, New York, where the author, James Kullander, the executive editor at Omega, conducted this rare interview.

Jump to Pema Chödrön talking about:

Discovering Buddhism Judging ourselves The "death feeling" Negative emotions Turning toward pain Meditation Peace in a violent world 9/11

You've been a Buddhist monastic since 1974. That's a long way from being a wife, a mother, and an elementary-school teacher. What attracted you to Buddhism?

The truth is I didn't know it was Buddhism that I was attracted to initially. In 1972, I read an article by Chögyam Trungpa, who would become my principal teacher. The article made terrific sense to me, but I had no idea that he was describing Buddhism. I was living a countercultural life in northern New Mexico. There were a lot of communes around, and I explored them all. One week there'd be a Hindu swami in the neighborhood, the next a Zen roshi, the next a Native American teacher, and the next a Sufi master. I really didn't distinguish between them, and no one encouraged me to do so.

Then my marriage ended and-I've realized since then that this is fairly common-it was one of those crises where everything fell apart. I couldn't feel any ground under my feet. It was devastating.

The word depression was not used much back then, but I think I went into a major depression. At the time, however, I had no words for it. All I knew was that the pain was intense, and there was nothing I could do to get out of it. Any of the usual strategies for entertaining myself or finding comfort only exaggerated the pain. Going to a movie, eating, smoking dope-it all somehow made the pain worse.

I started looking for ways to deal with my anger, which seemed unfamiliar and out of control. The groundlessness I felt had a fearsome and panicky quality to it. I was offered plenty of advice, but it all seemed to boil down to a similar message: "Turn toward the light" or "Chant yourself into a higher consciousness." It was useless to me. If I could have simply turned toward the light, I would've done so happily.

I had two children and was teaching school at the time, and one day I came out of work and got into a friend's pickup truck. On the front seat was a magazine that Chögyam Trungpa had published in the 1970s. It lay open to an article titled "Working with Negativity." The first line was something like: "There's nothing wrong with negativity." I took this to mean: "There's nothing wrong with what you're going through. It's very real, and it brings you closer to the truth." The article explained that when you find yourself caught in extreme discomfort or negativity, the negativity itself is not the problem. If you can have a direct experience of that pain, it will be a great teacher for you. The problem is what Chögyam Trungpa called "negative negativity," or reacting against negativity and trying to escape it. It was the first sane advice I had heard for someone in my situation. As I read, I kept nodding and saying to myself: This is true. I didn't even know that Chögyam Trungpa was a Buddhist teacher, or that it was Buddhism I was reading about. Once I connected with it, though, I never looked back. I felt-and I still feel-as if I had connected with an unfinished story, or rediscovered a path that I'd lost long ago.

After I'd read that article, I moved up to the Lama Foundation in northern New Mexico for the summer. (My children were with their father.) I remember seeing Allen Ginsberg drive up in his Volkswagen bug with Tsultrim Allione, who was then a Tibetan nun. When she got out of the car, I was struck by her robes and everything about her. It was almost a physical shock. And I remember thinking to myself: What is this? I hardly remember Allen at all. I started talking with Tsultrim, and I must have mentioned the article, or maybe she mentioned that her teacher was Chögyam Trungpa. She said that if I wanted to meet him I could come with her up to Boulder, Colorado, where he taught.

I would have done it, but a few days later an old boyfriend of mine arrived at the Lama Foundation and told me that he was on his way to a Sufi camp in the French Alps. Because I was still in enormous pain over my divorce, I wanted to go with him. I was jumping blind, looking for some sort of help. All my friends told me I was crazy just to go off like that. But it turned out I wasn't crazy.

A Tibetan Buddhist lama came to the camp. His name was Lama Chime. When I saw him, I had the same experience that I'd had with Tsultrim. His talk didn't make any sense to me, but the minute it was over I went up to him and asked, "Could I study with you?" He didn't have a center or anything like that, but he lived in London and said if I came there, he would give me some instruction. After I'd been with Lama Chime for two weeks, I took refuge, a vow through which one formally enters the Buddhist path. Then I took the bodhisattva vow, a personal vow to seek enlightenment and help others do the same. Two years later I was a nun. I thought I was so worldly-wise. I was only thirty-six years old.

Do you recall having any early spiritual or religious inclinations?

I have no memories of any childhood spiritual aspirations, though I was raised Catholic. But some friends I grew up with say that they always thought of me as a spiritual person. For example, one woman I know from those days once said to me: "When my cousin died, you were the only one who really sat down with me and talked with me about the fact that my very close relative had drowned." We must have been fifteen years old at the time.

So even back then you were drawn toward painful experiences.

I guess so. But what I really remember from the 1950s is everyone always smiling. It wasn't until I studied Freud in college that I had any inkling there was anything below the surface.
Freud observed that we're awfully hard on ourselves, that we judge ourselves and others all the time. Do you think this sort of judging is inherent in human nature, or is it something learned?

Several years ago the Dalai Lama was in a conference with Western Buddhist teachers. At one point, meditation teacher Sharon Salzberg brought up the subject of self-hatred. She said it was a major issue that had to be addressed by anybody teaching Buddhism in the West. The Dalai Lama didn't know what she was talking about. So he went around the room and asked the other Western teachers about it, and every one of them agreed with her. Self-hatred was something that the Dalai Lama literally didn't understand.

The first noble truth of the Buddha is that people experience dukka, a feeling of dissatisfaction or suffering, a feeling that something is wrong. We feel this dissatisfaction because we're not in tune with our true nature, our basic goodness. And we aren't going to be fundamentally, spiritually content until we get in tune. Dzigar Kongtrul, my teacher for the past five years, says that only in the West is this dissatisfaction articulated as "Something is wrong with me." It seems that thinking of oneself as flawed is more a Western phenomenon than a universal one. And if you're teaching Western students, it has to be addressed, because until that self-hatred is at least partially healed, people can't experience absolute truth.

Why not?

Because they will misinterpret the groundlessness of absolute truth. People will think there is something wrong with them.

This self-criticism seems difficult to avoid. You don't just wake up one day and say to yourself, "I'm going to stop being self-critical." If you drop a jar at the grocery store, and it breaks, you automatically think, Oh, what a clumsy fool I am.

I think it's much deeper than thinking you're clumsy. I have my own theory about this, actually, based on personal experience. I was in a close relationship once with somebody who I felt disliked me very much, and I couldn't get out of it. What's more, this person was inaccessible and wouldn't talk to me about the problem. That combination of feeling disliked and having no chance to discuss it made me feel there was something terribly wrong with me, that I was a bad person.

I tried all the meditation techniques that I had been teaching people, but nothing would relieve the pain I was feeling. It was similar to the pain I'd felt when my husband had left me. So I went up to the meditation hall where I was practicing at the time, and I just sat there. I did not do any particular meditation. I just sat there in the middle of this pain, bolt upright, all night long.

And I had an insight. The first thing was that I felt physically like a little child, so small that if I'd sat in a chair my feet wouldn't have touched the floor. And then there was a recognition that I needed to relax into the pain. Until then, I had avoided going to this place where I felt bad or unacceptable or unloved. No language could express how awful that place felt. But I just started breathing into it. I realized that this was a pivotal moment. Somehow, even with the divorce, I had never quite hit the bottom. And that evening, I did. I was seconds away from experiencing the death feeling.

The death feeling?

The deepest level of the dissatisfaction we all feel, and that Westerners misinterpret as something that's wrong with them. But as I relaxed into that feeling, it passed through me. And I didn't die. It passed right through. That was a big moment for me. I realized that resistance to the idea that I was unlovable only made the pain worse.

So you use your own life as the ground for your spiritual practice.

There isn't anything except your own life that can be used as ground for spiritual practice. Spiritual practice is your life, twenty-four hours a day. There's no time off. We do formal practice-meditation-because it brings us closer to those states of mind we experience in our lives during times of crisis. For instance, when I sat there that whole night, I was not running from what was happening to my body and mind. There wasn't any distraction from it, not even to brush my teeth or pee. It was just a moment-by-moment experience of the present.
In Buddhism, there's this idea called the alaya. It's similar to Jung's theory of the universal unconscious. Alaya is a Sanskrit word used to describe a personal storehouse of consciousness. It contains the essence of how we perceive the world and the experiences of our individual lives, and everything that happens to us arises from it. The seeds of everything you think and say and do are buried there. And if the causal conditions come together, certain seeds will ripen. That's what happened to me that night.

Do you keep coming up against painful habits and experiences?

Yes, but there are fewer and fewer of them because those seeds are being burned up.

It must be a tremendous relief.

Yes and no. For a Buddhist, negative emotions are something to work with. There's a joke about bodhisattvas, who are a kind of spiritual warrior in the Mahayana Buddhist tradition: The biggest problem for bodhisattvas is that they don't have much to work with anymore, because fewer and fewer things trigger their negative emotions. It's humorous because this is everyone else's dream come true, but it's a big problem for bodhisattvas. I'm not saying that I'm at that level, but I do know from personal experience that life can become smoother.

I once asked a spiritual teacher what happens as your life gets smoother, and he said you have to up the ante and go into more and more difficult situations. You have the capacity to go into the hell realms of the world and help the people there because you're less triggered by how awful things are. As your own life gets smoother, you can move closer to people who are in severe mental or physical anguish, because you no longer have any fear of it, and therefore you can be of some help.

Have you been doing that?

I'm embarrassed to say I haven't really gone looking for such situations. Any time a painful situation is presented to me, I jump right into it. But I haven't become a political activist or worked in homeless shelters, and I don't know if I will, because I'm getting older and my health isn't so good. All I can say is that whenever pain is presented to me, minor or major, I'm eager to work with it.

Turning toward pain instead of avoiding it is a common theme in your books.

Yes, because I realized what a source of happiness turning toward pain actually is. Our avoidance of pain keeps us locked in a cycle of suffering. The Buddha said that what we take to be solid isn't really solid. It's fluid. It's dynamic energy. And not only do we take our opponents and obstacles to be solid; we also believe ourselves to be solid or permanent. In the West, we add the belief that the self is bad. That night I spent meditating, I discovered that there is no solid, bad me. It's all just ineffable experience.

Is this experience what Buddhists would call "emptiness"?

I don't use Buddhist language very much, but yes, Buddhists would call it "emptiness" or "shunyata" or "egolessness." I would say I experienced the fluidity of what I once thought of as a solid self. And I actually experienced it in a traditional Buddhist way, by staying with the immediacy of my experience and not going off on story lines, as we are always doing. These stories we make up about ourselves distance us from the rawness of our immediate experience.

What we think of as our worst nightmares are what spiritual teacher Eckhart Tolle would call "portals." They are doorways that can take you to a different state of mind. Typically what happens when we experience pain is that our habit of avoiding pain gets stronger, or the pain gives birth to other sorrow-producing habits based on the fiction that there's something wrong. But when you taste experience fully the way I did that night, the doorway opens into what I would call "a timeless now."

There's nothing wrong with our thoughts and emotions except that we identify with them and make them seem solid. But if you don't identify with them, you begin to see life as a sort of movie in which you are the main character. It still has plot and conflict-there's no other way it could be-but you don't have this tight grip on it all. We need to let the story line go and have an immediate experience of what's actually happening, without blaming ourselves or anyone else.

This is an important message for Westerners, because we get hooked on a story about a problem. In Tibetan Buddhism this hooked feeling is called shenpa [Listen to an audio clip about shenpa.] It's an urge, a knee-jerk response that we keep repeating over and over again. We lose our balance and intelligence. But you can notice when it happens. You can acknowledge it. You can catch yourself. You can do something different, choose a fresh alternative. Because if you do what you've always done, you're never going to get unhooked.

advise people to stay with the immediacy of their experience when shenpa arises. One way is just to start breathing in and out. It doesn't have to be a big spiritual act, just something to replace your usual reaction. Eventually, if you don't have the habitual response, then the urge passes. You're on to something else. When you don't have the habitual reaction, you're actually burning up those seeds in the alaya. Then there are two possible outcomes. One is that the urge disappears; you don't have that particular desire to eat chocolate cake anymore, or to make a mean remark. The other outcome is that the urge still arises, but you don't invest it with much meaning.
But you're not going to get anywhere unless you practice.

Yes, meditation practice is the key. But some people can meditate for years and years and years and still burn no seeds. They are stuck on an image of themselves as good meditators, or good Buddhists. To burn up the seeds of shenpa, one must sit in the middle of the fire.

Zen teacher Ezra Bayda does a practice one day a week in which he does not speak or act out of negativity, no matter what happens. You might think that's repressive, but it heightens the awareness of how you otherwise speak and act in ways that strengthen the negativity. If you've taken this vow, you can say: "It's Wednesday. I can't do that." As a result, you discover what it feels like to burn the karmic seeds of negative mind and negative speech and negative action.

We need to break these habits that keep us locked in a cycle of suffering. We have this sense of the self as solidly right and righteous, which would not be such a problem except that it adds up to enormous suffering at the personal level, and at the global level.

We had a national painful experience on September 11, 2001. Where were you, and what was your reaction to the attacks?

I had just entered a hundred-day retreat. I had been there only four days. My first reaction was shock and enormous sorrow, like what I'd felt when my husband left me. I knew that countless people-particularly in New York-were going to find it impossible to get the ground back under their feet. Yet it was an enormous opportunity for people to wake up out of a trance, and many, many people did just that. I also knew that there probably would be a strong conservative backlash, and I felt great sorrow about that too. I didn't have any feeling of there being an enemy, of us-versus-them. Sometimes the seeds of alaya also ripen for nations, and to me that's what happened. I felt sorrow for everybody on all sides.

Buddhism espouses nonviolence. Yet we're living, it seems, in an increasingly violent world. How is it possible to remain peaceful in such a violent world?

You have to want to lose your appetite for violence or aggression. And to do that, you have to lose your self-righteousness. You have to realize that you cannot continue to have your habitual reaction to something, especially if your reaction ends with violence-physical or verbal-against yourself or somebody else, or even against the government of your country or the terrorists or whomever. You have to accept in your gut that the habitual reaction is poisonous not only to you but to the rest of the world.

Some people are waking up to this because they see the repercussions of violence in the world today. But I also see more and more people looking for ways to justify their aggression. I hear them say, "Yes, but this time I'm right." That's our self-righteousness talking. It is the voice of the fundamentalist within us. People need a lot of encouragement before they can silence that voice. Most of them can't get rid of it right away. They keep getting stuck in the story line. But we're not working with right and wrong. We're working with a change at the core of our being. When you make this change, the habitual pattern that causes you to think that something is right or wrong no longer has power over you. You're no longer a slave to it.

Some people find this message powerful, but the next time someone angers them, they start to get self-righteous again. I say to them, "You're sowing those seeds that are going to cause you and others great unhappiness, and you're cutting yourself off from your basic goodness." And they'll pause and say, "You're right." But many of them are still unwilling to give up their story line. They say, "Sometimes you have to be practical. Sometimes there are things that have to be done." The urge to follow that deep groove is very strong.

I think another such deep groove is the idea that we've got to get them before they get us. So it's not only self-righteousness or self-justification; it's self-preservation.

That's what's happening now on an international scale, particularly with the United States and the Middle East. It's a mirror of what's happening at the individual level. What we call "ego," or the sense of a solid self, we could just as well call "self-preservation." It's the same thing at the international level. Self-preservation leads you to think you must have homeland security, which is synonymous with all of those habitual patterns I've been talking about. And you become more and more cut off from your basic heart, your basic wisdom, your basic interconnectedness with other people.

We follow habitual reactions because we don't want to feel the groundlessness of a given situation. But Buddhism teaches us that everything is always groundless. If we can know that, and befriend that, then happiness is possible. Trying to avoid groundlessness only leads to violence.

What would you like to have seen happen after the 9-11 attacks?

I would like to have seen a large number of people realize that the groundlessness they were experiencing was the truth; that it didn't have to be a nightmare; that they could relax into it. In the early days after the attacks, I heard people say that the only thing that made sense was to be kind to each other. That's what happens when we relax into groundlessness: Suddenly the only thing that makes sense is to be kind to each other.

It's beyond my ability to say exactly what we should have done. But the Dalai Lama urged President Bush not to go to war because aggression only breeds aggression. Each of us needs to realize what seeds caused such a tragedy to happen in the first place. And then we can start burning up the seeds of aggression rather than escalating the violence, which will only put us in a worse place in the future.

I would like to have seen an awareness of cause and effect at the global level. September 11 could have been a moment of truth, of ultimate groundlessness. We could have begun to burn up the seeds of aggression rather than sow more; we could have created greater peace and harmony between people instead of more hatred and polarization. We all have to beware of fundamentalism, this self-righteousness that tells us everything is somebody else's fault.

Shamatha-vipashyana Meditation

2007-10-17T16:01:00.001-07:00

Shamatha-vipashyana Meditation
by Pema Chodron
The reason that people harm other people, the reason that the planet is polluted and people and animals are not doing so well these days is that individuals don't know or trust or love themselves enough. The technique of sitting meditation called shamatha-vipashyana ("tranquility-insight") is like a golden key that helps us to know ourselves.

In shamatha-vipashyana meditation, we sit upright with legs crossed and eyes open, hands resting on our thighs. Then we simply become aware of our breath as it goes out. It requires precision to be right there with that breath. On the other hand, it's extremely relaxed and extremely soft. Saying, "Be right there with the breath as it goes out," is the same thing as saying, "Be fully present." Be right here with whatever is going on. Being aware of the breath as it goes out, we may also be aware of other things going on--sounds on the street, the light on the walls. These things may capture our attention slightly, but they don't need to draw us off. We can continue to sit right here, aware of the breath going out.

But being with the breath is only part of the technique. These thoughts that run through our minds continually are the other part. We sit here talking to ourselves. The instruction is that when you realize you've been thinking you label it "thinking." When your mind wanders off, you say to yourself, "Thinking." Whether your thoughts are violent or passionate or full of ignorance and denial; whether your thoughts are worried or fearful, whether your thoughts are spiritual thoughts, pleasing thoughts of how well you're doing, comforting thoughts, uplifting thoughts, whatever they are, without judgment or harshness simply label it all "thinking," and do that with honesty and gentleness.

The touch on the breath is light: only about 25 percent of the awareness is on the breath. You're not grasping or fixating on it. You're opening, letting the breath mix with the space of the room, letting your breath just go out into space. Then there's something like a pause, a gap until the next breath goes out again. While you're breathing in, there could be some sense of just opening and waiting. It is like pushing the doorbell and waiting for someone to answer. Then you push the doorbell again and wait for someone to answer. Then probably your mind wanders off and you realize you're thinking again--at this point, use the labeling technique.

It's important to be faithful to the technique. If you find that your labeling has a harsh, negative tone to it, as if you were saying, "Dammit!," that you're giving yourself a hard time, say it again and lighten up. It's not like trying to down the thoughts as if they were clay pigeons. Instead, be gentle. Use the labeling part of the technique as an opportunity to develop softness and compassion for yourself. Anything that comes up is okay in the arena of meditation. The point is, you can see it honestly and make friends with it.

Although it is embarrassing and painful, it is very healing to stop hiding from yourself. It is healing to know all the ways that you're sneaky, all the ways that you hide out, all the ways that you shut down, deny, close off, criticize people, all your weird little ways. You can know all that with some sense of humor and kindness. By knowing yourself, you're coming to know humanness altogether. We are all up against these things. We are all in this together. So when you realize that you're talking to yourself, label it "thinking" and notice your tone of voice. Let it be compassionate and gentle and humorous. Then you'll be changing old stuck patterns that are shared by the whole human race. Compassion for others begins with kindness to ourselves.

Dalai Lama

2007-10-17T15:50:00.000-07:00

PRESS RELEASE - Washington, D.C., October 17, 2007 - As Tibetan spiritual leader the Dalai Lama received the Congressional Gold Medal today, Voice of America (VOA) broadcast the award ceremony and the Dalai Lama's acceptance speech live to Tibet via radio, television, and the Internet. The same broadcast included videotaped testimonials of the heads of all six sects of Tibetan Buddhism.

The Congressional Medal ceremony will be rebroadcast in several formats to Tibet and elsewhere in China and will be available for viewing at www.voanews.com/tibetan/.

In an interview with VOA yesterday, the Dalai Lama expressed support for the Burmese democracy movement, saying that he admired the recent efforts of Buddhist monks and adding that their cause was just. He urged Buddhist members of Burma's military government to remember the Buddhist teachings of "compassion" and "love" as they confront these situations.

Speaking about the ongoing talks with the Chinese government about the status of Tibet, the Dalai Lama told VOA that progress made during earlier rounds of discussion had eroded. "It is difficult to judge things at the moment," he said. "During the last round, the sixth session, they seemed to have hardened their position and attitude." He reiterated that he is seeking autonomy for Tibet, not independence, a position unpopular with many in the Tibetan community.

The Dalai Lama also revealed that his successor might be chosen by a group of senior monks or appointed by himself personally, rather than through the traditional method of reincarnation. In July 2007, Chinese authorities issued a regulation that requires all reincarnations - including the Dalai Lama - to be approved by the government.

The interview with the Dalai Lama was broadcast yesterday on VOA in Tibetan and Mandarin. VOA broadcasts to China in Tibetan, Mandarin, Cantonese, and English via shortwave radio, medium wave radio, satellite television, and webcasts. Programs and schedule information are available online at www.voanews.com/tibetan/ and www.voanews.com/chinese/ .

The Voice of America, which first went on the air in 1942, is a multimedia international broadcasting service funded by the U.S. government through the Broadcasting Board of Governors. VOA broadcasts more than 1,000 hours of news, information, educational, and cultural programming every week to an estimated worldwide audience of more than 115 million people. Programs are produced in 45 languages.

For more information, call the Office of Public Affairs at (202) 203-4959, or e-mail publicaffairs@voa.gov.

2007-05-31T07:04:00.000-07:00

THE PRACTICE OF TONGLEN Transforming Confusion into WisdomCity Retreat Berkeley Shambhala CenterFall 1999 In order to have compassion for others, we have to have compassion for ourselves. In particular, to care about other people who are fearful, angry, jealous, overpowered by addictions of all kinds, arrogant, proud, miserly, selfish, mean —you name it— to have compassion and to care for these people, means not to run from the pain of finding these things in ourselves. In fact, one's whole attitude toward pain can change. Instead of fending it off and hiding from it, one could open one's heart and allow oneself to feel that pain, feel it as something that will soften and purify us and make us far more loving and kind. The tonglen practice is a method for connecting with suffering —ours and that which is all around us— everywhere we go. It is a method for overcoming fear of suffering and for dissolving the tightness of our heart. Primarily it is a method for awakening the compassion that is inherent in all of us, no matter how cruel or cold we might seem to be. We begin the practice by taking on the suffering of a person we know to be hurting and who we wish to help. For instance, if you know of a child who is being hurt, you breathe in the wish to take away all the pain and fear of that child. Then, as you breathe out, you send the child happiness, joy or whatever would relieve their pain. This is the core of the practice: breathing in other's pain so they can be well and have more space to relax and open, and breathing out, sending them relaxation or whatever you feel would bring them relief and happiness. However, we often cannot do this practice because we come face to face with our own fear, our own resistance, anger, or whatever our personal pain, our personal stuckness happens to be at that moment. At that point you can change the focus and begin to do tonglen for what you are feeling and for millions of others just like you who at that very moment of time are feeling exactly the same stuckness and misery. Maybe you are able to name your pain. You recognize it clearly as terror or revulsion or anger or wanting to get revenge. So you breathe in for all the people who are caught with that same emotion and you send out relief or whatever opens up the space for yourself and all those countless others. Maybe you can't name what you're feeling. But you can feel it —a tightness in the stomach, a heavy darkness or whatever. Just contact what you are feeling and breathe in, take it in —for all of us and send out relief to all of us. People often say that this practice goes against the grain of how we usually hold ourselves together. Truthfully, this practice does go against the grain of wanting things on our own terms, of wanting it to work out for ourselves no matter what happens to the others. The practice dissolves the armor of self-protection we've tried so hard to create around ourselves. In Buddhist language one would say that it dissolves the fixation and clinging of ego. Tonglen reverses the usual logic of avoiding suffering and seeking pleasure and, in the process, we become liberated from a very ancient prison of selfishness. We begin to feel love both for ourselves and others and also we being to take care of ourselves and others. It awakens our compassion and it also introduces us to a far larger view of reality. It introduces us to the unlimited spaciousness that Buddhists call shunyata. By doing the practice, we begin to connect with the open dimension of our being. At first we experience this as things not being such a big deal or so solid as they seemed before. Tonglen can be done for those who are ill, those who are dying or have just died, or for those that are in pain of any kind. It can be done either as a formal meditation practice or right on the spot at any time. For example, if you are out walking and you see someone in pain —right on the spot you can begin to breathe in their pain and send some out some relief. Or, more likely, you might see someone in pain and look away because it brings up your fear or anger; it brings up your resistance and confusion. So on the spot you can do tonglen for all the people who are just like you, for everyone who wishes to be compassionate but instead is afraid, for everyone who wishes to be brave but instead is a coward. Rather than beating yourself up, use your own stuckness as a stepping stone to understanding what people are up against all over the world. Breathe in for all of us and breathe out for all of us. Use what seems like poison as medicine. Use your personal suffering as the path to compassion for all beings.

2007-05-31T06:58:00.000-07:00

If you have heard or been taught that tonglen meditation is dangerous, know that that teacher is misinformed and unfamiliar with the practice. That teacher obviously has not practiced tonglen himself/herself. Only good comes from tonglen practice, to yourself & all beings.
— Laura S.
• • • • • • • • • • • • • • •
Tonglen is the Tibetan practice of “sending and receiving.” Tong means “sending out” or “letting go,” len means “receiving” or “accepting.” Tonglen is ordinarily practiced in sitting meditation, using the breath. Put simply, the practitioner breathes in the bad and breathes out the good, taking on the suffering of other sentient beings. At first the practice may appear self-defeating, but as the late Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche said, “The more negativity we take in with a sense of openness and compassion, the more goodness there is to breathe out. So there is nothing to lose.”
Shambhala.orgThe Practice of Tonglenby Pema Chodron, starts as follows:
“In order to have compassion for others, we have to have compassion for ourselves.In particular, to care about other people who are fearful, angry, jealous, overpowered by addictions of all kinds, arrogant, proud, miserly, selfish, mean — you name it — to have compassion and to care for these people, means not to run from the pain of finding these things in ourselves. In fact, one’s whole attitude toward pain can change. Instead of fending it off and hiding from it, one could open one’s heart and allow oneself to feel that pain, feel it as something that will soften and purify us and make us far more loving and kind. …”
Shambhala Sun magazineGood Medicine for This WorldPema Chodron in conversation with Alice Walker & Judy Lief
Pema Chodrontranscript & 5-minute audio clip on belief.net, excerpted from the tape, “Good Medicine,” and used with permission of Sounds True:Tonglen Meditation: Changing Pain into Compassion
Ane Pema Chodron
Andrew Harvey
Venerable Thubten Chodron
Search Shambhala Sun magazine for tonglen meditation.
Search Tricycle magazine for tonglen meditation.
Rigpa’s Spiritual Care ProgramTraining in the Compassion Practices of Tonglenby Christine Longakeremail Sanctuary webpage Rigpa
Articles
dharma grandma sangha: tonglen
dharmamandala.orglojong & tonglen meditation
theflow.org“The Seven Points of Mind Training: Exchanging Self for Others”some teachers of tonglen meditation
non-duality.comTonglen: Taking & Giving Meditation
Books, audio courses, audiobooks & videos
Facing Death & Finding Hope: A Guide to the Emotional and Spiritual Care of the Dyingby Christine Longaker
video & audioGood Medicine: How to Turn Pain Into Compassion with Tonglen Meditationby Pema Chodron
video, I think also audioPema Chodron & Alice Walker in Conversation
book & audioThe Tibetan Book of Living and Dyingby Sogyal Rinpoche, Andrew Harvey, et al

PEMA CHODRON AND TONGLEN MEDITATION

2007-05-31T06:53:00.000-07:00

Click Here to listen to Pema Chodron speak on Tonglen Meditation.

2007-05-31T06:41:00.000-07:00

Excerpted from the tape, "Good Medicine," and used with permission of Sounds True. (Click here to return to the audio page)During this session I'm going to teach tonglen practice. First, I'd like to talk about the different styles of tonglen. The very simplest style, which I think would be helpful for every single one of us--and something well worth cultivating in one's life--is taking a tonglen attitude towards pleasure and pain--whenever it arises in your life.I've gotten into the habit of doing this meditation, although I don't always remember to do it. But more and more, it's becoming spontaneous and natural. When things are painful, when things are difficult, usually that in and of itself will remind me to do tonglen meditation. The quality of difficulty, struggle, pain, dissatisfaction, or unpleasantness will remind me to have the simple thought: "Other people feel this."Now that may sound simplistic--maybe not all that important. But, believe me, it makes a big difference because the isolation, personal burden, loneliness, and desperation of pain gets very strong. And you think you're the only one. I've had people actually say to me, "I think no one else in the world feels this kind of pain." And then I can say to them with tremendous confidence: "You're wrong."But what is not wrong is that we do have that feeling often, that I am the only one that has this particular pain. So maybe it will be a challenge to you to say this, and it might not feel genuine. But even the effort to say this begins to shake up your complacency about pain being just your burden. It shakes it up to contemplate the fact that other people feel this pain too.So this is a basic tonglen logic: When you feel the discomfort, have the thought: "Other people feel this." And then if you want to take it a rather dramatic step further, you can say, "May we all be free of this." But it's enough just to acknowledge that other people feel this pain. And the most dramatic and probably most difficult step is to say: "Since I'm feeling this anyway, may I be feeling it so all others could be free of it."So tonglen meditation has three levels of courage. The first is to say, "Other people feel this." And that is enough. But if, in that particular moment of time, it feels genuine to say, "May this become a path for awakening the hearts of all of us," do so. And the one that takes you to the deepest level of courage is: "Since I'm feeling this anyway, may I feel it so that others could be free of it."This is the tonglen attitude towards pain. It doesn't involve focusing on breathing in and breathing out; it's the spirit of tonglen.

2007-03-18T11:42:00.000-07:00

Buddhist Theology

2007-03-18T11:41:00.000-07:00

Theology of Buddhism and of Anti-Buddhism

Gautama Buddha left us a good psychological method to overcome suffering and the problems of life on earth, and to get away of the Caste System in India... he did not tried to start a new religion, he purposely never even mentioned the words religion, god, soul, the after-death...
Gautama preached not a religion, but a system devoid of "authority", without gods and rituals, devoid of the "supernatural"... "by this you shall know that a man is not my disciple, that he tries to work a miracle", said Buddha... he preached a psychological system of "intense self-effort", "whatever your caste, he told his followers, you can make it in this life-time"... no fatalism like in Hinduism!... man does not have to believe in any god, but in himself.
In fact, Gautama was "a rebel" against the complicated way and rituals of Hinduism, he took away the gods, priests, rituals, candles, incense, the caste system... and this is why today in India there is practically no Buddhism...
Gautama always evaded the task to define the blessed state of Nirvana, always avoided discussing either God or life after death...
So, in the Buddhism of Buddha there is actually not "theology", no treatment of God. Professor Kraemer describes the Buddhist system as "a non-theistic ethical discipline, a system of self training, anthropocentric, stressing ethics and mind-culture to the exclusion of theology."
However Buddhism is not atheistic in the sense that modern secularism, rationalism, humanism, etc. could be regarded to be atheistic (although it has much in common with them). Buddhism is not concerned primarily with refuting the notion of God (as some atheistic writers have done). It is principally concerned with developing a method of escape from the worldly ills. This involves undertaking a method of mental discipline and a code of conduct, which is sufficient to satisfy the most demanding of spiritual requirements. Indeed only very little of the Buddha's voluminous discourses deal directly with the question of God. He was more interested in expounding a way to personal salvation, and to improve the weal of mankind both in this world and in the worlds to come. It is this task that informs most of the discourses of the Buddha which later came to be compiled into the various Canons of Buddhism.
The Buddha did not take an ambiguous or agnostic position on the question of God as he is sometimes represented as having taken by theistically inclined writers. The Buddha has stated his position on God in clear and unequivocal terms.
Devas-gods: Some Buddhists speaks of the existence of category of beings called devas.... in Buddhist texts the supreme god is referred to as Mahâ-Brahmâ (or simply Brahmâ) who was the chief of a class of gods called the Brahmâs. Brahmâ of the Buddhist texts may be considered to be the equivalent of the God of the three monotheistic religions that was to emerge in the Middle East. The first of these was Judaism, with Yahweh or Jehovah as the one God. Next Christianity adopted the same God under the name of Yahweh or Jehovah who is represented as the "Father" of Jesus in the Trinity. Finally Islam adopted the name of Allah for their only God. Some Buddhist recognize three kinds of devas: gods: 1- Sammuthi Deva, god by convention, like the deification of natural phenomena and even of human beings. 2- Uppatti Deva, god by birth, are those celestial beings who are born non-biologically in the celestial spheres called devaloka. 3- Visuddhi Deva, god by purity of mind, are those evolved beings human or divine whose minds are pure, free from evil intentions. Arahats or Buddhas are examples of Visuddhi Devas.
Reincarnation: Buddhists believe in reincarnation and that one must go through cycles of birth, life, and death. After many such cycles, if a person releases their attachment to desire and the self, they can attain Nirvana. In general, Buddhists do not believe in any type of God, prayer, or eternal life after death... no need for a savior, because all salvation is personal work, yoga and meditation, to obtain enlightenment and Nirvana. Buddhism teaches that humans are trapped in a repetitive cycle of birth, life, death and rebirth. One's goal is to escape from this cycle and reach Nirvana. The mind experiences complete freedom, liberation and non-attachment. Suffering ends because desire and craving -- the causes of suffering -- are no more.
Buddhism after Buddha... the Anti-Buddhism:
However, since the time of the Buddha, Buddhism has integrated many regional religious rituals, beliefs and customs into it as it has spread throughout Asia, so that this generalization is no longer true for all Buddhists. This has occurred with little conflict due to the philosophical nature of Buddhism.
Yes, men can't live without religion, without God, and many Buddhists have made a religion out of the beautiful and practical teachings of Gautama... the Buddha was converted into a Divinity comparable to the God of the monotheistic religions.
Since Buddha never emphasized his concept of the divine, Buddhism is left with some life's deepest questions unanswered, questions such as the origin of the universe and the purpose of man's existence.
So, after Gautama's death, many sects have developed within Buddhism. Many of these sects differ in many fundamental ways and comparing them to one another is like comparing two separate religions. Many sects have developed their own unique concept of God. Some are pantheistic in their view of God. Others are atheistic. Still others have developed a polytheistic system of gods. Some have combined pantheism and polytheism. Several sects have elevated Gautama (or Buddha) to the level of a savior or divine being although it is clear he never claimed to be a deity. Other sects have combined some of the doctrines of God from other religions with Buddhism.
Hinayana, Lesser Vehicle, (Theravada): Emphasizes the writings of the Buddha, the closest to Buddha's original teachings, in southern Asia, Sri Lanka, Burma, Thailand, Cambodia. Theravada Buddhist doctrine takes the story of Siddhartha literally, and places him in a series with several earlier Buddhas and one Buddha, Mettayya (or Maitreya), yet to come. From this view, Buddhahood endures only as long as life itself.
Mahayana, Greater Vehicle: emphasizes the spirit of Buddha, by far the largest branch of Buddhism, in China, Japan, Tibet, Korea, Nepal, Indonesia, Vietnam, Sri Lanka, Thailand. Mahayana introduced the doctrine of "bodhisattva", "helpers": Enlightened perfect beings, who choose to help others reincarnating, instead of entering Nirvana (i.e. the Dalai Lama or Amitabha). With this doctrine, Mahayana makes a god out of the Buddha and out of anyone who is enlightened, in open rebellion against the teachings of Gautama Buddha.
Vajrayana, Diamond Vehicle, the third Vehicle, Tantrism. It borrows the Hindu belief in the goddess Shakti sexual power and developed a cult devoted to idols, magic and sex. It has been condemned as a degeneration of Buddhism, and indeed it is an anti-Buddhism.
Tibetan Buddhism: In Tibet and Japan, added to Tantrism the primitive animistic religions of the Tibet, the magic "bon", and some "Mahayana" doctrines to create the most openly occultist of all Eastern religions. On top of it created the super-authority of the "Dalai Lama", a god-on-earth, heading a hierarchy of priests, destroying the "religion without authority" that Gautama the Buddha proposed.
Nicheren Buddhism: In the 13th century a Japanese, Nichiren, founded a school whose aims are the opposite of Gautama Buddha: To satisfy all desires, because "happy individuals can build a happy world"; with emphasis on acquiring wealth, power, personal happiness, pleasures, political power...
Pure Land (Sukhavati, Jodo, Ching-tu): One enters the Pure Land through faith in the god Amitabha, or Amida or Buddha, by repeating the "membutsu", "Namu-Amida-Butsu", "Have faith in Amida, and you will be saved", they proclaim, imitating Jesus Christ... in a total contradiction of the teachings of the Buddha.
Zen Buddhism, from Japan had become in the mid-20th century perhaps the best known of the Buddhists schools in the Western world... "Zen" means "be nothing, think nothing", and "Zazen" "seated meditation"; its adherents claim Zen to be the quintessential of Buddhism... there is actually no theology here.
"Folk" Buddhism: Besides the "official" Buddhism, there is the "Folk" Buddhism, very popular. It is "animistic", with magic to spell spirits and devils, with many gods, divination, witchcraft... and it is usually lived with Taoism, Confucianism, Shintoism...
Finally, Hinduism: The Buddha, for the Hindus, is the 9th incarnation of Vishnu... of course, openly against the will and teachings of Gautama Buddha himself... The 7th and 8th incarnations of Vishnu for the Hindus are Rama and Krishna... and the 10th incarnation and the last one, will be "Kalkin", still to come.
Scriptures and Rules of BuddhismSome Schools of Buddhism: http://www.free-definition.com/Schools-of-Buddhism.html 1 Nikaya schools 2 Mahāyāna schools 3 Tantric schoolsSome Buddhism Teachers: http://www.macalester.edu/~omafray/ccc.htm
http://www.buddhistinformation.com/buddhist_attitude_to_god.htm http://www.island-of-freedom.com/siddhartha.htm http://www.leaderu.com/orgs/probe/docs/buddhism.html

2007-03-18T11:39:00.000-07:00

Amazon.com: Buddhist Theology: Critical Reflections by Contemporary Buddhist Scholars: Books: John Makransky

2007-03-18T11:37:00.000-07:00

Western Buddhist Review - Volume 3

Can there be such a thing as Buddhist Theology? Before reading this book, I would have thought this notion a contradiction in terms. Surely, if one can assert anything about Buddhism, one can confidently state that it is non-theistic? I ordered this book out of sheer perversity. ‘Another attempt to Christianise Buddhism, to sneak God in,’ I scoffed. I was wrong. On reading the introduction, a collaborative effort by the two editors, it quickly became apparent that this was a deeply serious work. It proposes an important and much needed new approach to the scholarly study of Buddhism that should be of benefit not only to academics but also to practitioners. Indeed, its principal strength is that it seeks to revise this peculiarly modern distinction, a distinction that would have seemed incomprehensible to Buddhists of the past.
Buddhist Theology comprises a series of essays by scholars of Buddhism (Buddhologists) working within American academia. However, what distinguishes this collection from many others is that all the contributors are professed Buddhists, and they make no attempt to disguise or apologise for this fact; quite the reverse. The strength of the book derives from its synthesis of scholarly, critical methods and personally committed spiritual investigation. Rather than try to examine Buddhism as though from the ‘outside’, the contributors position themselves within specific Buddhist traditions, albeit with a critical perspective. In other words, their scholarship rests upon a foundation of personal spiritual commitment rather than upon a paradigm of sociological-cum-historical analysis. The tradition of personal commitment varies from case to case but there is a strong bias towards Tibetan schools.
Since Buddhist Theology covers a wide range of topics and themes it is not possible to review them all here. Instead, I will focus on its central thesis. Essentially, it proposes a new intellectual-cum-spiritual discipline that the contributors choose to call ‘Buddhist Theology.’ It argues that an appropriate environment for developing this discipline is the ‘academy’ (‘university’ in British English). Actually, this activity is not altogether new, but it has, so far, been conducted only in a rather peripheral manner. In naming and identifying the leading characteristics of this activity, the authors aim to demonstrate its legitimacy and so encourage its further development.
In particular, Buddhist Theology challenges the institutionalised legitimacy of ‘Buddhist studies’ by arguing that its claim to dispassionate, ‘non-committed’, scholarly examination of the Buddhist tradition is somewhat disingenuous. It also challenges the widespread academic prejudice that committed Buddhists cannot approach their own traditions with a critical intelligence and the consequent belief that their scholarship should not be relied upon. According to José Cabezón, [1] the scholarship of ‘believers’ has been widely dismissed as ‘contaminated’ by their personal religious convictions and accordingly replaced by a pseudo-scientific ‘objectivity’ that seeks to treat religious traditions as ‘cultural artefacts’ rather than repositories of truth and meaning. But, he argues, religious commitment no more precludes a critical perspective than lack of commitment guarantees it, thus challenging a fundamental assumption of Buddhist studies.
General Overview of the Book
Buddhist Theology is divided into three main parts and this review will focus on the first, more theoretical part. It begins with an editors’ introduction by Jackson and Makransky comprising two sections: first, ‘Buddhist Theology: its Historical Context’ and second, ‘Contemporary Academic Buddhist Theology: its Emergence and Rationale.’ Part One of the book is subtitled ‘Buddhist Theology: What, Why, and How?’ Together with the introduction this establishes the theoretical framework for the book. This includes a piece by José Ignacio Cabezón entitled ‘Buddhist Theology in the Academy,’ which might legitimately claim to be the defining essay.
Part Two comprises thirteen essays that approach various themes and topics as examples of experiments in Buddhist Theology. For example, there is an essay by Makranksy entitled ‘Historical Consciousness as an Offering to the Trans-historical Buddha’ which explores the impact of contemporary historical consciousness on how modern Buddhists will need to revise their approach to the Buddhist tradition. An essay by Cabezón explores the issue of truth in Buddhist Theology and proposes a pragmatic approach that follows William James. The other essays included in this section are of varying interest, some rather over-burdened with jargon while others radiate the spiritual enthusiasm of their authors. The final part of the book comprises two critical responses to the previous essays (by Luis Gomez and Taitetsu Unno respectively).
The Editors’ Introduction
This focuses on broadening and clarifying the meaning of ‘Theology’ so as to encompass Buddhist activity and the editors are at pains to extricate the term from its more popular connotations. ‘Theology’ is usually understood to mean ‘discourse about (the Christian) God’ but the term is of Greek origin and, as Jackson points out, [2] it is found in Plato’s Republic, where it refers to poetical narratives about the gods. Originally, then, it seems that theology meant discourse about the divine. Tracy, a contemporary commentator on theology, has identified it as ‘intellectual reflection within a religious tradition.’ [3] Later in the book, John Dunne writes:
Buddhist Theology is the self-conscious attempt to present reasoned arguments from within the tradition on issues of importance to Buddhists in order to correct, critique, clarify or expand the tradition. [4]
The definitions so far offered emphasise the primacy of intellectual factors in the practice of theology. However, the approach of Buddhist theologians cannot be confined to intellectual reflection if this is to admit abstract and theoretical considerations only. Their reflection will be guided by volitional and emotional factors too, most fundamentally a desire for personal spiritual transformation, and is likely to be framed in an altruistic context. Buddhist Theology will then become a spiritually therapeutic activity, a spiritual exercise.
Jackson then tackles a potential objection to the project of Buddhist Theology. Some Buddhists will say, he admits, that since the aim of Buddhism is an experience that is beyond reason (attakavacara) theology is surely beside the point. Notwithstanding, he maintains, there remains a vast legacy of Buddhist intellectual reflection that can be examined. But why examine it? Jackson suggests that ‘we may use the term “theology” to describe conceptual activity within and about a particular religious tradition without thereby implying that such activity is an avenue to the ultimate.’ [5] Jackson’s comment may be overcautious here. The anonymous critic seems to confuse means with ends; even if the Buddhist goal is ultimately beyond reason it does not follow that reason is dispensable as a means of moving towards it, simply that its limitations will eventually become apparent in the course of spiritual evolution.
Somewhat disappointingly, this discussion of the raison d’être of the Buddhist theological enterprise lacks any detailed consideration of its potentially transformative impact upon the individual theologian. This seems a significant and regrettable omission. Nowhere in the book is theology discussed as a spiritual practice; rather it is evaluated in terms of what results it produces, predominantly for others. This would seem to imply that theological activity is an adjunct to ‘practice’ and aims to yield perspectives, decisions and beliefs of value to the practitioner but that the theological activity itself is not practice. However, a bolder approach might propose that the spiritual transformation of the theologian is likely to be the first – even principal – fruit of theological work. Its further fruits will be discoveries, reflections, and insights that may prove spiritually useful to others. Indeed, without the first of these fruits it seems doubtful that the second is possible.
This relationship between the theological exercise and the spiritual life of the theologian is extremely important. A contemporary Buddhist teacher and theologian has suggested that
The only possible Right Motive with which the study of Buddhism can be undertaken is the hope that through such study Enlightenment may ultimately be attained. [6]
This may seem a rather uncompromisingly grand and somewhat idealised statement. However, in more immediate terms we can propose that: The primary purpose for practising Buddhist Theology is that through such practice one will be spiritually transformed and, secondarily, that by engaging with one’s theological work others too may be transformed.
Inevitably, this raises all sorts of questions. What is meant by spiritual transformation? How does one measure whether spiritual transformation has taken place? Does this invalidate the work of historians or archaeologists of religion and other non-committed scholarly investigators? These questions deserve rigorous spiritual investigation, perhaps even theological work.
The definition of Buddhist Theology just proposed does not aim to exclude non-Buddhist scholars from examining Buddhism altogether but it does exclude them from practising Buddhist Theology. In addition, they are, by definition, excluded from approaching Buddhism as the Dharma, that is, from approaching Buddhism as a means to spiritual liberation. The potential limitations and pitfalls of this approach were identified fairly early in the Buddhist tradition by, for example, the redactors of the Alagadduupama Sutta.
Here, bhikkhus, some misguided men learn the Dhamma ... but having learned the Dhamma, they do not examine the meaning of those teachings with wisdom …they do not gain a reflective acceptance of them. Instead, they learn the Dhamma only for the sake of criticising others and for winning in debates, and they do not experience the good for the sake of which they learned the Dhamma. Those teachings, being wrongly grasped by them, conduce to their harm and suffering for a long time. [7]
Following this warning, the Buddha is reported as introducing the simile of the poisonous snake which, if grasped wrongly, may turn back and bite the grasper causing fatal injury. The following passage of the same sutta describes the highly important simile of the raft.
Bhikkhus, I shall show you how the Dhamma is similar to a raft, being for the purpose of crossing over, not for the purpose of grasping. [8]
The Dharma is for the purpose of ‘crossing over’ to the other shore of spiritual awakening. It does not aim at propositional truth but is better described as a method, a soteriology. The true test of the Dharma’s value is in its efficacy, the extent to which it enables spiritual liberation. The purpose of Buddhist Theology, then, will be to inspire transformation not only in oneself but in others too, and the critical methods, tools and approaches of the academy will be utilised under the gaze of this over-arching vision.
Through investigating traditional Buddhist doctrines one is likely to unearth one’s own unexamined intellectual convictions and even prejudices, allowing one to evaluate their usefulness and veracity in the light of one’s spiritual purpose. One may become aware that there are aspects of traditional Buddhism that one cannot accept as true; perhaps one will become aware of degeneration within a certain tradition and thus be able to point it out to the unwary. These are just a few examples of how the theological enterprise may impinge upon an individual’s spiritual unfoldment.

The Context for Buddhist Theology
Jackson points out that until relatively recently (the nineteenth century, say) Buddhist theological work had been carried out by Buddhist monks in monastic contexts: Naagasena, Naagaarjuna and Vasubandhu to name but a few. The notion that one might want to study Buddhism and yet not be interested in practising it would no doubt have struck such great theologians as incomprehensible, perhaps perverse. At least initially, however, Western interest in Buddhism grew from a colonial desire to understand the beliefs and forms of life of the subjugated populations. Consequently, most of those doing scholarly work on Buddhism in Western academic contexts have not themselves been practising Buddhism until very recently (the 1980s and 1990s).
A new generation of Buddhist scholars – the ‘baby-boom Buddhologists’ – is now working in the academy: scholars who began their careers with a practical interest in, even a commitment to, a particular Buddhist tradition. They turned to academia as a means of finding out more about their chosen tradition. Since until now no Western equivalent of the Buddhist monastic university has existed, the secular university was the only context where critical investigation of Buddhism was possible. As a result, the baby-boomers found tenure in faculties of Religious Studies which insisted ‘that their members be committed, both in research and pedagogy, to description rather than prescription.’ [9] This approach prevented them from pursuing Buddhist theological work systematically, at least until their academic standing was sufficiently secure for them to risk it.
Cabezón points out that the Religious Studies approach leaves many – including the most – important issues untouched. [10] After the work of philology is complete there remains the question of the truth of any given doctrine. Moreover, there is the question of relevance and application to contemporary circumstances. All these lines of inquiry fall outside the orbit of Religious Studies. Buddhist Theology, however, embraces such questions as academically legitimate and it does this by challenging the assumptions that underlie the Religious Studies discipline.
Initially, the ‘scientific’ study of religions arose in contradistinction to Christian Theology as a means of establishing a legitimate context for the academic study of non-Christian religions (at a time when Christianity was considerably more dominant than it is now). This approach employed the method of epoché, the suspension of prescriptive judgements so as to open up space for the in-depth study of non-Christian religions, free from the assumption of their inferiority to Christianity. While providing an opportunity for many people to learn about a range of religious traditions – and even their own where they were not themselves Christian – the rationale of Religious Studies precluded the application of this academic work to the theological concerns of the religions themselves. But at least some people studying their own religion in a critical, academic context will not be content merely to describe their own tradition at a distance, as it were, but will wish to ‘clarify the truth and value of their tradition from a critical perspective located within it.’ [11] Ironically, then, the discipline of religious studies has produced a generation of non-Christian scholars who aim to develop a constructive, critical theology that fits neither within the ‘value-neutral’ confines of Religious Studies nor the prescriptive boundaries of Christian theology.
Makransky points out that the ‘value-neutral’ stance of Religious Studies has, in fact, never been properly value-neutral. Rather, it implicitly established a value in religions divorced from the normative interests of their own religious communities: ‘a value found exclusively in their capacity to fulfil the intellectual, social and economic interests of the Western academy.’ [12] In other words, religious traditions became fodder to feed the academic machine – to nourish research programmes, conferences, publications and – of course – to build scholarly reputations.
According to Makranksy, however, the domains of Religious Studies and Theology now appear to be much less mutually exclusive than they once did. Previous assumptions about the nature of disciplinary knowledge have been challenged and the a priori hegemony of Christian belief has disintegrated, allowing the academy to approach Buddhism ‘as a source of truth and value for persons’ lives.’ [13] He points out that the growing interest in Buddhism among Western people is driven by practical concerns – the ecological crisis, the death of God, the breakdown of traditional forms of authority and hierarchy. If academic discourse about Buddhism does not address pressing issues such as these it will become increasingly irrelevant to the wider culture that funds it.
Makransky points out that Buddhist traditions are in need of critical self-reflection. In order to communicate what they have to offer to the contemporary Western world, they will need a critical perspective on how the traditional patterns of Buddhist thought and practice have been shaped by socio-cultural and historical forces that may not be applicable to contemporary settings. If they fail to do this they may, unwittingly, cause harm to the spiritual lives of sincere Western converts – a particularly sad irony given that the principal aim of the Dharma is to release humanity from suffering.
Thus far, the contemporary critical tools developed within the academy have not been very thoroughly applied in a Buddhist theological context. This has meant that a gap has opened up between those who transmit the living spirit of the Dharma – who are, by and large, not trained in critical methods – and those who critically analyse it in order to understand how it arose. The bringing together of personal commitment and critical scholarship may lead to a renewal of Buddhism, even a new turning of the wheel of the Dharma, that will enable practising Buddhists to diagnose the influence and effects of cultural conditions on the development of their tradition and so cut away the rot in order to reveal the vital heartwood underneath. Until very recently, Buddhists have tended to take their own traditions somewhat uncritically and literally, perhaps alienating those trained in critical thinking and scholarly methods.
Makransky defines Buddhist Theology in the following way:
It includes critical reflection upon Buddhist experience in the light of contemporary understanding and critical reflection upon contemporary understanding in light of Buddhist experience. Like that of Christian theologians, it is the work of scholars who stand normatively within their tradition, who look to traditional sources of authority (in sacred text[s] and previous forms of social practice and experience), who re-evaluate prior Buddhist understandings in light of contemporary findings and who seek thereby to contribute to the continuing development of their tradition in its relevance to new times and places. [14]
It is worth pausing to examine this definition. Makransky identifies five principal features of a Buddhist Theology:
(1) It is done by scholars
(2) These scholars stand normatively within their tradition
(3) They look to traditional sources of authority
(4) They seek to re-evaluate Buddhist teachings in the light of
contemporary concerns,
(5) They seek to contribute to the development of their tradition.
(1) Buddhist Theology is done by Scholars
Nowhere does Makransky define what he means by the term ‘scholar’. However, later in the book, [15] Cabezón supplies us with a few characteristics of scholarship. First, it is based on a commitment to breadth of analysis – to the examination of all relevant sources – which would include grappling with the most anachronistic and problematic aspects of a tradition.
Second, scholarship is critical. It should seek to make familiar the unfamiliar but also defamiliarise the commonplace. It should force us to examine our own presuppositions about our religion, to scrutinise our beliefs and thus reconsider their appropriateness. The critical approach is thus anti-dogmatic and will evaluate Buddhist ideas and practices in relation to whether they help the individual to move towards Enlightenment.
Third, scholarship requires a commitment to the use of formal apparatus. This includes things like the systematic exposition of one’s subject, admissions of limitations or omissions in one’s arguments and sources, as well as more formally stylistic matters such as appropriate annotation and citation, bibliographical information, and so on.
Cabezón argues that such an approach is valuable for two reasons. First, such methods have proved worthwhile so far, and second, ‘There is arguably no greater form of social legitimation than acceptance in the academy, and this requires the emergence of a mode of theological discourse that subscribes to its norms.’ [16] This is a rather large claim and its examination goes beyond the scope of this article.
(2) Normative commitment to tradition
Buddhist theologians are personally committed to the tradition that they investigate, appreciating that tradition as a source of personal spiritual nourishment. They are interested in its transformational value, in how it may enhance their lives, not simply in examining it as a sociological or historical phenomenon. In other words, it matters to them. Clearly, such personal conviction will entail a different sort of critical examination than the one conducted by the historian or sociologist. It will be driven by a personal spiritual search (sammannesanaa), [17] a desire for meaning, coherence, and direction.
(3) Reliance upon traditional sources of authority
Buddhist theologians will conduct their inquiry in the light of what their chosen tradition upholds. They will have a basic trust that the tradition has useful things to say and will aim to clarify what these are, as well as to strip away what is no longer useful or even limiting. However, this touches on a fundamental problem in discerning the spiritual value of Buddhist teachings. Any approach will be limited by one’s degree of spiritual development. This may mean that one will be tempted to dismiss certain teachings through prejudice or simply ignorance when, in fact, that teaching is of fundamental importance. In consequence, a healthy spiritual inquiry is most likely to take place in a context of dialogue with a personal spiritual teacher who may embody the spirit of the Dharma more adequately than the theologian. This also implies that the value of the theologian’s work will be influenced by the degree of his or her own spiritual realisation.
(4) Re-evaluation of Buddhist teachings
Buddhist theologians will not accept their traditions on the basis of blind faith (amuulikaa saddhaa), nor assume that everything in the tradition must be true, but will have an awareness of how teachings are forms of practice that have been shaped by a multiplicity of forces, not all of them rooted in spiritual inspiration. The traditional teachings will be re-evaluated in the light of their liberative value, not in terms of likes and dislikes, fashionable views or personal prejudices. But theologians must surely be cautious here. How are they to know whether some teaching is spiritually beneficial or not? The fact that something may, at first glance, appear to be spiritual chaff may, upon developing deeper insight, reveal itself to be indispensable. The problem of evaluation underscores the need for caution and scrupulous care in the examination of one’s tradition in order that one may step firmly upon the raft of Dharma instead of dismantling it prematurely.
(5) Contribute to the development of the tradition
This draws out the practical, other-regarding aim of theological investigation – the bodhisattva element. It illustrates that such work may express a compassionate responsiveness to the spiritual needs of others and hence be conducted in a spirit of humility and service. Buddhist theologians will be servants of their spiritual communities and of the Buddhist tradition as a whole. They will not place themselves above others – or above the tradition even – in some privileged position but will recognise that their skills and knowledge represent only part of the rounded spiritual individual. They will recognise that the Buddhist tradition, like everything else, is characterised by impermanence (anitya) and lack of fixed identity (anaatman) and needs, therefore, to be continually revitalised and re-appraised. They will understand the urgent need for reassessment and re-presentation of Buddhist principles given the novel circumstances of contemporary Western life.
A further point to notice about Makransky’s definition is that it not only requires theologians to examine the Buddhist tradition in the light of contemporary scholarly findings but also demands that they examine the issues of the contemporary world in the light of Buddhist principles and insights. To this end, they may develop Buddhist critiques of prevailing socio-cultural practices. This kind of work is still in its infancy but includes, for example, the ecological work of Joanna Macy and the work on sexuality of José Cabezón. This Buddhist critique is essential if the pervasive view that ‘West is best’ is to be critically examined.
Does Makranksy’s definition leave anything out? Well, as has already been suggested, the book as a whole seems to omit any reference to the personal transformative impact of theological work on the theologian. In addition, there seems to be very little emphasis on the communal context of Buddhist Theology. The picture created so far is of an individual pursuing his or her research in an isolated way. Presumably, each of the contributors to the volume does participate in a spiritual community of some description. Unfortunately, this aspect of their enterprise is not explicitly articulated. Given the emphasis in Buddhism on the importance of Sangha (spiritual community), it would seem appropriate to stress the interpersonal dimension of theological work.
Ideally, the theologian will be working within a theological community that will provide a framework of support, encouragement and critical dialogue. In fact, it is likely that valuable insights will be gained in the course of theological dialogue as much as in the context of personal research and inquiry. This underlines the importance of spiritual friendship (kalyaana mitrataa) as the social context of Buddhist theological activity, an important safeguard against dangers such as personal aggrandisement (maana) and spiritual bewilderment (moha), as well as a cluster of other defilements (kle.saa). Of course, this ideal can be realised only if there are a number of Buddhists participating together in a theological community who are all motivated by a desire to help each other develop spiritually, as well as benefit the wider Buddhist community. They would need to be motivated and bound together by a shared spiritual impulse.
There is, though, a difficulty here. The Buddhist tradition is vast and disparate. Theologians may be committed to Buddhist traditions that are so different from one another that dialogue seems impossible. This limitation is unwittingly reinforced by Cabezón’s suggestion that the Buddhist theologian is most likely to be committed to a particular Buddhist tradition, for example, Tibetan. He speculates that the theologian who relies on more than one Asian Buddhist tradition will be rare. Western Buddhist academic theology will, he says, be necessarily sectarian. [18] This seems a rather disappointing and pessimistic view. The astonishing – and unprecedented – characteristic of the post-modern Western world is that we have access to the entire Buddhist tradition. We are able to trace how certain doctrines and practices developed as Buddhism was transmitted from culture to culture. We are in a position to ‘prune the Bodhi tree’ and so enable it to blossom anew. Is it not possible that we can take our stand on the Buddhist tradition as a whole without having to commit ourselves to a sectarian standpoint? Could not a valid approach to Buddhist Theology be to discern the underlying unity that binds all traditions that we call Buddhist? In using such an approach, the function of the Buddhist theologian would be to extract the ‘essence’ of the Buddhist message so that it may be sprinkled over – and thus perfume – the forms of Western life. This seems to be the most exciting – and daunting – challenge facing the Western Buddhist theologian.
The Sources for Buddhist Theology
What is the raw material for Buddhist theological inquiry? According to Cabezón, the theologian ‘must take tradition – and especially the textual sources of the tradition – seriously’ [19] (my italics). This would seem to imply – perhaps unwittingly – that the tradition is, primarily, transmitted through texts. However, many integral features of Buddhist life are not well documented, including meditation, ritual and devotional practices. Presumably they should not be excluded from consideration. A textually biased ‘protestant’ approach to the examination of the Buddhist tradition has been consistently and persuasively criticised by Gregory Schopen, who argues that a fuller picture of the nature of Buddhism as it has actually been practised emerges from the examination of archaeological remains and it is worth recalling some of his reflections here. Schopen argues that the study of Buddhism has been inappropriately focused on textual evidence and, moreover, that this focus owes more to Western intellectual and theological conditioning than it does to the nature of the Dharma.
It is possible that the curious history of the study of Indian Buddhism is neither curious nor unique. It begins to appear as only one instance in which a particular assumption concerning the location of religion [i.e. in texts] has dictated and determined the value assigned to various sources. It is possible that what originated as a sixteenth-century Protestant polemic of where “true” religion is located has been so thoroughly absorbed into the Western intellectual tradition that its polemical and theological origins have been forgotten and now it is taken too often entirely as a given. [20]
Buddhist theologians will be alive to this prevailing approach and examine it critically. They will also be receptive to additional ways of characterising and examining Buddhist traditions. This would include the kinds of evidence that Schopen has highlighted.
It is hardly revolutionary to suggest that, had the academic study of religions started quite literally on the ground, it would have been confronted with very different problems. It would have had to ask very different questions, and it would have produced very different solutions. It would, in short, have become not the History of Religions – which was and is essentially text-bound – but the Archaeology of Religions. It would have used texts, of course, but only those that could be shown to have been actually known or read at a given place at a given time, or to have governed or shaped the kind of religious behaviour that had left traces on the ground …This Archaeology of Religions would have been primarily occupied with three broad subjects of study then: religious constructions and architectures, inscriptions, and art historical remains. In a more general sense, though, it would have been preoccupied not with what small, literate, and exclusively male and certainly atypical professionalized subgroups wrote, but rather, with what religious people of all segments of a given community actually did and how they lived. [21]
The Buddhist theologian will not only be interested in texts and archaeology but will examine Buddhist experience too. This will mean that non-textual topics like meditation, ritual, devotion and ethical behaviour will be included in his or her inquiry. Importantly, he or she will be concerned to identify and understand the spiritual significance and transformative value of such activities rather than merely to describe their outward forms from a ‘disinterested’ perspective.
In addition, the Western Buddhist theologian will need to be sensitive to a further possible assumption: that of doctrinal fundamentalism. This approach discriminates what is to be regarded as ‘authentically Buddhist’ from what is to be dismissed as heretical in the light of certain doctrines that are believed fundamental. While there is much value in this approach, it may lead to the dismissal of valuable soteriological methods that appear – at least superficially – to be doctrinally at odds with established Buddhist dogmas (of course, the question of which are the fundamental doctrines is itself problematic). This issue has been highlighted by the debate over ‘critical Buddhism’, stimulated by the work of its principal protagonists Hakamaya Noriaki and Matsumoto Shiro. [22] Among other things, Matsumoto argues that the doctrine of Tathaagatagarbha (Buddha-nature) is not Buddhist because it contradicts the fundamental Buddhist insight of anaatman (no fixed self). [23] Sallie King counters this metaphysical critique with a soteriological defence. She argues that the doctrine is in fact impeccably Buddhist because it helps Buddhists to gain Enlightenment. She proposes that it should be seen ‘as a soteriological device, not as an ontological entity or principle.’ [24]
The Institutional Focus for Buddhist Theology
Jackson concludes his article by commenting that ‘Buddhist Theology emerged almost exclusively from the monasteries; today, it still has a home there, but just as commonly arises from lay-oriented meditation centers and academic departments.’ [25] It is now transmitted through many media, including books, magazines and the Internet. The contributors to this book, being themselves academics, are understandably keen to show that there is room in the academy for the activity they call Buddhist Theology. They make a strong and reasonable case for this. Perhaps, though, there may be other institutional contexts where Buddhist Theology will flourish. It is possible, for example, that Buddhist equivalents of Christian theological seminaries may develop in the West, institutions committed to encouraging systematic and critical inquiry within a context of religious commitment and personal spiritual development. Such an institution may have advantages, particularly that of shared aims and beliefs that would better facilitate theological dialogue in a context of mettaa (loving-kindness). It is even possible that such an institution may develop a fruitful relationship with the orthodox academy leading to the mutual enhancement of both.
Conclusion
The Buddhist theological enterprise as outlined in Buddhist Theology and explored in this article is a demanding one. Cabezón comments,
If we take all of these demands literally, it puts a tremendous burden on academic Buddhist theologians, for over and above religious commitment, an intellectual mastery of the tradition, and a mastery of the norms of traditional and contemporary scholarly discourse that are required to explicate it, it requires of them its (at least partial) internalisation. [26]
The Buddhist spiritual life is – in any case – a demanding one and its goal sublime. Given that their aim will be to function as interpreters and communicators of the Buddha-Dharma, it is not surprising that the theologians’ task is a difficult one. Notwithstanding, the potential value of this kind of inquiry is inestimable. Potentially, Buddhist Theology could lead to a thorough sifting of all aspects of Western life and all aspects of the Buddhist tradition with a view to identifying which forms of belief and practice are most likely to foster personal and even social liberation within the context of our historically unique cultural situation. Indeed, ambitious though it is, this kind of inquiry would seem essential if the Buddhist tradition is to survive with spiritual integrity in the twenty-first century.
Bibliography
Hubbard, J., and Swanson, P.L., Pruning the Bodhi Tree: The Storm over Critical Buddhism, University of Hawai’i Press, Hawai’i 1997.
Jackson, R., and Makransky, R., Buddhist Theology: Critical Reflections by Contemporary Buddhist Scholars, Curzon Press 2000.
Ñaa.namoli, Bhikkhu and Bodhi, Bhikkhu, The Middle Length Discourses of the Buddha, Wisdom, Boston 1995.
Sangharakshita, A Survey of Buddhism, Windhorse, Glasgow 1993.
Schopen, Gregory, Bones, Stones, and Buddhist Monks, University of Hawai’i Press, Hawai’i 1997.
[1] Jackson and Makransky pp.26–8.
[2] ibid., p.1.
[3] ibid., p.2.
[4] ibid., p.276.
[5] ibid., p.3.
[6] Sangharakshita, p.33.
[7] Majjhimanik1ya 22, translated in Ñ17amoli and Bodhi, p.227.
[8] ibid., p.228.
[9] Jackson and Makransky, p.11.
[10] ibid., p.28.
[11] ibid., p.14.
[12] ibid., p.15
[13] ibid., p.15.
[14] ibid., p.19.
[15] ibid., pp.35–8.
[16] ibid., pp.37–8.
[17] . ibid., p.37.
[18] ibid., pp.32–4
[19] ibid., p.40.
[20] Schopen, p.14.
[21] ibid., p.114.
[22] Hubbard
[23] ibid., pp.165–73.
[24] ibid., p.190.
[25] Jackson and Makransky, p.13
[26] ibid., p.41.

2007-03-18T11:35:00.000-07:00

Buddhism, Buddhist Theology and Teachings