Book Club: "The Body of Truth" by Ajahn Amaro Bhikkhu

It’s with the sequencing of this essay, following mine and Jill Satterfield’s, that I believe Michael Stone’s editorial expertise shines. With Jill, we read a personal account of mindfulness practice directed to the body. With my chapter, there’s the explicit tying in of the Buddha’s teachings to the larger Yoga Tradition and the explication of the Four Foundations of Mindfulness. Here, in Chapter 12, Ajahn Amaro emphasizes the body as the path of truth – Dharma itself.

First, the Ajahn emphasizes how the body and mind in the Buddha’s teachings are not seen as two radically different phenomena. While they are not generally seen as “identical,” they are seen as completely interdependent (for the most part; traditional Buddhism posits a form of consciousness that can indeed exist independently of the body, and which links one life to another).

In the section “Dimensions of Nature,” Ajahn Amaor explains the concept of namarupa, and its five component khandhas (also known in Sanskrit at skandhas). He then goes on to introduce the other “patterns” or “models” that are used in the Buddhist tradition to describe the human condition: the six senses (ayatana) and the elements (dhatu).

His second section, “Mindfulness of the Body” for the most part, reiterates some of the salient points I make in my essay. What I especially appreciate in Ajahn Amaro’s section is his distinction of the Buddhist emphasis on the body and the ‘mundane’ aspects of life for liberation, in contradistinction to the typically ‘transcendent’ and ‘withdrawal’ understandings of ‘enlightenment.’

In “The Present – Full of Useful Possibilities,” Ajahn Amaro points out how the body is always experienced as ‘present’ while the mind can appear to be caught up in the past and future. It is this very ‘present-oriented’ nature of the body that Buddhist meditation takes as it’s opening to limitless potential for freedom. As he writes, “…since the body is always in the present, the simple recollection of its presence is a surefire method to key the attention into the reality of the way things actually are.” And it is too often forgotten by students seeking some ‘other-worldly’ experience that seeing things as they really are is the door to the wisdom of liberation!

His section on “Walking Meditation,” though short, explains the importance of this practice for the cultivation of mindfulness. By extension, other forms of conscious movement – such as hatha-yoga, Tai Chi and various forms of martial arts and even weight-lifting -- can be developed as forms of mindfulness meditation. This is still something I find many students not fully grasping! They seem to fixate on sitting meditation as the be-all and end-all of meditation practice! Apparently, as the Buddha himself aged, and suffered from various physical ailments, walking meditation became his preferred method of practice.

Finally, for this post, I’ll end with a few words about sila, the ethical teachings of the Buddhist tradition. Ajahn Amaro says about sila that it is the “basis of practice.” I would go as far as saying that sila is the whole of the Dharma. Currently, a group of students I am working with are going through intensive sila study and practice with the ‘goal’ of taking refuge. They are beginning to see sila as real, on-the-ground mindfulness training. They are also seeing sila as more guidelines to freedom than restrictions or prohibitions. As one student said, “When I practice sila, I find myself free of many anxieties, concerns and sufferings I thought were simply part and parcel of life!” Ajahn Amaro refers to the precepts as “rules,” but I think that term misses the living spirit of sila.

I’ll post a concluding post on this chapter later this week, but for now, I’d be happy to hear any comments from those of you who have been reading along. OR, even from those of you who have not read the book, but have been following this blog ‘book club.’

Book Club: "Mindfulness Yoga" by Frank Jude Boccio

Well, it had to happen sooner or later! We’re up to Chapter 11 in Freeing the Body, Freeing the Mind and that means we’re up to my contribution to the anthology. Rather than any comment I make now being merely a reiteration of what I’ve written in the essay, I thought I’d fill in a bit  of the ‘back-story’ here and leave it to you, my dear readers (there are some of you, yes?) to respond with any comments or questions. I’d be especially interested in hearing from any of you who have practiced the Four Foundations of Mindfulness through your asana practice. How has it been for you? Do you feel it has made a difference in your practice? Have you had any insights you’d like to share?

Opening Introduction:

It should be obvious that I take the position of Georg Feuerstein, that Buddhism sits firmly within the wider Yoga Tradition he speaks of in his tome entitled, simply enough, The Yoga Tradition. To my mind, it is obvious. But what you may want to know is that I came to this understanding through my own ‘self-study’ of both texts (practice-oriented, history and philosophy texts as well as my own practice and experience) before I had come across Georg’s work. In fact, it was reading his work and finding a wonderfully clear enunciation of my understanding that drew me to study with him at the first and only YREC (Yoga Research and Education Center) Yoga Teacher Training.

It should also be obvious that perhaps it’s a bit of a bête noir of mine, but it really irks me when people talk about “yoga and meditation” as if they were two things, or even “Buddhism and yoga” as if they were two completely different things! To my mind, it only makes sense to differentiate between “Buddhism and Classical Yoga” which is to say, the specific darshana or philosophical viewpoint espoused by Patanjali in the Yoga-Sutra. But buddhadharma, the teachings and practiced taught by the Buddha is nothing if not a fully realized, comprehensive, coherent model of yoga. His Nobel Eightfold Path is as much a yogic path as the Eightfold Path or the Kriya Yoga model found in the Yoga-Sutra.

This is essentially the jist of my opening paragraphs. The other main point I make there is that one of the fundamental principles of all forms of yoga shared by all is the concept of duhkha. Sadly, this concept is badly mis-understood by many in the hatha-yoga camp and has led to much confusion and straw-man parrying. All yoga arises as a response to the existential human situation – impermanence and the mortality that implies. And, all yoga postulates that we – and all phenomena – are not what we, or they, appear to be. Through this mis-perception of how things really are, we fall into duhkha.

I’ve even had a bit of a discussion with John Friend over this, as he has a tendency to put-down Buddhism’s emphasis on duhkha, saying how his path celebrates life and is about sri and “bliss.” To me, he has admitted to over-stating this, and in fact distorting the truth, because he does understand that duhkha is the First Noble Truth. If you stop at that, you are NOT talking buddhadharma, which is nirodha, the cessation of duhkha (the Third Noble Truth).

One other point I express in the essay, I wish to emphasize here, is that “yoga” means “yoking” as much as it does “union.” Those yogis who only talk about yoga as “union,” I believe both distort and miss an essential aspect of yoga as practice, for much of actual practice is the yoking, the restraining or containing of our conditioned reactivity. It is this restraint (a form of tapas) that allows for the freedom to choose a more skillful way to respond to life’s challenging situations.

In fact, neuro-science shows us that the impulse to act precedes our consciousness of the impulse to act by around 0.3 seconds! That means, action is conditioned, and we are unaware of our first beginnings of the impulse to act. There is no absolute, acausal free-will! However, with mindfulness, we create a bit more ‘temporal space,’ about a half second, and in that ‘gap,’ we can inhibit our action. Thus, our free-will is the ability to restrain our conditioned reactivity. This is the yoking of yoga.

I look forward to hearing from you!

Metta

Poep sa frank jude