Book Club: "The Body of Truth" by Ajahn Amaro Bhikkhu (Part 3)

Whew! It's taken me some time to get back to this! There's much in this chapter worth speaking about, but I'm going to be brief, just jot down some notes, and see if there's any takers wishing to comment and dialogue. Otherwise, next post, I'll begin comments on the final chapter, Michael Stone's concluding essay.

First, the section "Responsiveness Rather Than Reactivity" pretty much sums it all up! I often talk about how practice takes us from the conditioned patterns of reactivity to more creative, wholesome, liberated responsiveness. To be able to respond is to also take responsibility. In the Zen ordination ceremony, the "Gatha of Atonement" (or "Repentance") is chanted three times to emphasize that when we take this path up, we are saying we are no longer viewing ourselves as "victims," and that from now on we take responsibility for our actions. Only in doing so can we ever live as free beings.

In "Mother Nature's Valium," Ajahn Amaro points out a basic physiological fact: when the body is tense, the mind will be tense and active; when the body is relaxed, the mind relaxes. Have you ever noticed, for instance, your hands clutching the steering wheel of your car while you are driving? Next time you do, quickly reflect on what's going on in your mind, and I can bet you will have been lost in thought, either planning or ruminating or fretting.....   Conversely, the next time you find yourself lost in thought, do a quick scan of your body, and I can bet you'll find you are holding tension somewhere!  The good news is that with this awareness, you can use either 'active mind' or 'tense body' as "Bells of Mindfulness," awaking you to "suchness," the topic of the last section of this chapter.

Ajahn Amaro, speaking of the word tathaagata) says: "is that Buddha quality completely transcendent -- utterly gone? Or is it immanent in the physical world -- completely here, present now? The term is perfect in that it carries both these meanings and indicates that the two, embodiment and transcendence, do not exclude each other in any way." I go further in saying that "transcendence" itself is a completely immanent, embodied experience and reality. As a "Zen Naturalist," I do not believe that there is some separate "transcendent realm" outside the physical world. What is transcended is our notions about what that physical world is.


I like how he adds: "This attribute of suchness then carries with it the spirit of inclusivity, being the point of intersection of the embodied and the transcendent, of time with timelessness. It directs us toward finding spiritual fulfillment in the suchness of the embodied mind, here and now, rather than in some abstracted, idealized 'me,' some other place and time, or in some special uber-heavenly state we might reach through withdrawal of senses." This is fabulous writing! And it's important to keep in mind just how tenacious the tendency to seek some such "uber-heavenly state" is in our culture! Religions of all types trade on such promise!

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: Brahma Viharas, Emptiness and Ethics by Christopher Key Chapple

“Brahma-Vihara, Emptiness, and Ethics”

by Christopher Key Chapple

Well, the holidays have passed, and I hope those of you who have been reading Michael Stone’s Freeing the Body, Freeing The Mind with me as part of this ‘virtual book club’ are still sticking with me in this new year!

Christopher Key Chapple is a professor of Indic and Comparative Theology and one who has done much wonderful work on Patanjali and other Yogic texts, so again I was looking forward to reading his contribution, especially as just last year I had written over 7,000 words on the Brahma-Viharas for Yoga Journal. As Chapple begins his chapter, he points out that along with the Viharas, emptiness and ethics are “three points of contact between Buddhism and classical Yoga.”

However, I was much surprised – and a bit dismayed – to find that Chapple takes the Classical Yoga approach to the Brahma-Viharas and implies that this is the same understanding in the Buddhist Yoga tradition. The translation from Yoga-Sutra I.33 he uses reads:

Be friendly with the happy, compassionate toward those who suffer. Celebrate the success of the virtuous, be even-minded toward those who lack virtue.

While I was happy to see how he translates upeksha as “even-minded” instead of the (to my mind) awful “disinterest” and “disregard” favored by many other yogis from the (Hindu) Classical Yoga tradition such as B.K.S. Iyengar and Swami Satchidananda, I felt dismay that he takes that tradition’s contextual conditions as crucial and central to the practice of the Four Brahma-Viharas! 

In fact, in the Buddhist Yoga tradition, these four qualities are also often referred to as the Four Immeasurables, and are to be practiced toward all beings, as we see in the translations of people like Georg Feurstein and Chip Hartranft who translate this same sutra thus:

The projection of friendliness, compassion, gladness and equanimity towards all objects -- <be they> joyful, sorrowful, meritorious or demeritorious -- <bring about> the pacification of consciousness.  – Feuerstein

Consciousness settles as one radiates friendliness, compassion, delight, and equanimity toward all things, whether pleasant, or painful, good or bad.  – Hartranft

I hasten to say that I am not saying the classical tradition is ‘wrong.’ For the Classical Yoga emphasis on one’s own ‘inner peace,’ cultivating these states of mind is a way of restraining or reversing what Patanjali calls vikshepa, the tendency of the mind to be distracted and outwardly directed. Patanjali tells us that when we react haphazardly or callously to what people do around us, inner disturbance is the result. These four attitudes combat that disturbance and bring us closer to a state of balanced equilibrium.

When we see happy people, cultivating a friendly attitude toward them will help forestall feelings of jealousy and envy. When we encounter those who are suffering, we should compassionately do what we can to help—for our own sake as much as for the person who is suffering. "Our goal is to keep the serenity of our minds. Whether our mercy will help that person or not, by our own feeling of mercy, at least we are helped," Satchidananda says.

Appreciating and delighting in the qualities of virtuous people will inspire us to cultivate such virtues ourselves. And finally, when we are faced with those we deem nonvirtuous, the classical yoga tradition teaches that we should strive to have an indifferent attitude toward them. Often, we indulge in judging and criticizing those who we feel are misguided. This hardly helps us maintain a serene state of mind! Commentators in the classical yoga tradition point out that the yogi should not divert attention from his or her own practice in order to try to reform those who are unlikely to heed advice. As Satchidananda points out, "If you try to advise them, you will lose your peace."

However, the broader view is the one emphasized in the Buddhist tradition, where the brahmaviharas, as I mentioned above, are also known as "the Four Limitless Ones" and "the Four Immeasurables," reflecting Buddhist yoga's emphasis on social relationships and the interdependent nature of all beings. Both of these perspectives are valuable; reflecting on the intention and purpose behind each gives greater depth to our own practice. I only wish that in the desire to emphasize the similarities between the two Yoga traditions of Classical Yoga and Buddhist Yoga, we don’t blur, bury or soft-pedal the real differences.

Other than this, I do find Chapple’s emphasis on the significance that the terms for each of these qualities have a feminine ending very interesting! Patanjali is often criticized (most often correctly, in my view) as being male-centric, so it is helpful to see a way in which the importance of the feminine principle can be found in the practices Patanjali offers.

Tomorrow I will post on the section on “emptiness,” but for now, I’d love to hear from those of you who have been reading along any thoughts you have about the Four Brahma-Viharas. For those of you who are interested in reading my articles on them from Yoga Journal, here are the links:

Maitri/Karuna: “Love In Full Bloom”

Mudita: “I’m So Happy For You”

Upeksha: “Calm Within”

Seriously? Some further comments in response to Michael Stone

Michael Stone, yogi, psycho-therapist, activist, writer, and friend, wrote a comment in response to my last post (Why take life so seriously? It’s impermanent.) on FaceBook, prompting me to take this opportunity to delve again into what I was attempting to get at in that post.

Michael wrote: Isn't "peace the path" because our actions matter, not in a future life awaiting us, but in the real social, political, emotional, familial life of ours now? frank the title of your blog makes me uneasy as it comes close to the passivity that a (mis)understanding of non-attachment connotes. yes, the asset of joy means everything. and so does action! mindfulness happens in action, whether joyful or serious or upset and neutral. if we focus too much on not taking life so seriously, we can become indifferent, or worse, we tend not to study our actions and their consequences.

Michael specifically says that it is the title of my blog that made him uneasy. I don’t know (and I should have asked) if he had read the post before commenting. And if he did read the post, I should have asked if the rest of the post left him uneasy as well, or if it indeed were just the title.

After all, the title is simply from a bumper-sticker I found humorous, and yes, a bit provocative. And that was exactly why I chose to use this to title this particular post. As I responded to Michael, it was meant to be both humorous and provocative. I think perhaps the humor may have been lost on Micheal, and it simply 'provoked' his response.

The response I posted to Michael’s comment on Facebook was the following: Michael, I agree that "if we focus too much on not taking life so seriously, we can become indifferent" but my experience with students (and most people I know) is that we don't focus on taking life less seriously at all. The point of this post is that through self-absorbtion, most of us take things too seriously (personally) etc. Thay himself offers the practice of stopping and considering what you (and the person or persons you are caught in drama with) will look like in 100 years.

Our actions DO matter. AND I do believe we'd be better off not taking ourselves so seriously at the same time. Or as Pema Chodron puts it, "Enlighten up!" I've often experienced that when a group of practitioners can feel easeful enough to laugh at themselves and their 'craziness,' a deeper sense of authenticity and intimacy is the result.

I hope by this you’ll see that I am not saying that life is meaningless or that we should adopt a frivolous attitude to it. Everyday, as part of my prostration practice, I chant the following gatha:

Great is the matter of birth and death!

Impermanence surrounds us!

Be awake each moment!

Do not waste your life!

This is a pretty 'serious' verse. But to approach our actions and their consequences seriously is still not necessarily the same as taking ourselves seriously, and it was this that I was particularly addressing in my post. This is why I specifically talked about “drama queens” (and we all harbor an inner drama queen to some extent or another).

Sally’s comment directly addressed this when she wrote: Thank you!... this resonates so much with my current family drama that pulls me into thinking and getting so serious. I'd much rather be light, forgiving, loving, and letting go. I will always remember how easily you said there is nothing to forgive when I was so sorry to have forgotton to show up on a class that I was suppose to sub. That response is still with me as a reminder to extend it foward. so much gratitude.

I wrote that post after I had just returned from a Yoga Teacher Training in Costa Rica, where many of the students were oppressed by the suffering of taking themselves and their ‘little dramas’ so terribly seriously. It was this tendency we all share that I was addressing in my post. This is not to minimize the difficulty of life, of family and relationships in general. But again, as Thay reminds us, impermanence should wake us from this daze of taking every 'insult' to our ego so seriously. Many times when I have found myself getting upset and building a Gone With The Wind narrative around a perceived slight, I have used Thay's practice of imagining myself and my loved on in 100 years and the drama completely deflates, as does my anger and self-defensiveness!

Michael responded to my comment saying: thanks frank. sometimes i get charged with being serious (for those who don't know me) and i only mention this because social change that arises from compassion still requires confrontation. we need to confront, with metta, what's in us, but also what is around us. that's serious business!

And I totally agree with Michael that social change is indeed ‘serious business.’ And that compassion sometimes requires we confront injustice. But I still hold that we should work for social change in the same spirit as we work for personal change (or transformation) and that is by not taking ourselves so seriously! I believe this is part of the message we should take from the Diamond Sutra where the Buddha says that the bodhisattva works for the liberation of countless beings, and when countless beings have been liberated does not for one instant believe that any beings have been liberated. Why? Because if we think "I" have saved "others" we are falling into self-cherishment. 

One of the Buddha’s core teachings is the teaching of anatta or not-self. That we take every thought that goes through our head ‘personally’ is part of the problem of duhkha. As Joseph Goldstein says, "thoughts, feelings and emotions are all conditioned by impersonal forces." As hard as it may be to accept, there is nothing ‘personal’ about any of it! That we take things ‘personally’ is what I mean by taking things too seriously. Perhaps I should have been clearer, and so I thank Michael for his comments, prodding me to re-state my intention here.

As Karen Maezen Miller writes in Momma Zen, “Yes, we all have a load on our hands, but the heavy is in our heads. Set the heavy down and sweep aside the useless mental clutter.” As her teacher, Maezumi Roshi told her, “You make everything work.” Don’t we all do so when we take ourselves overly seriously? Life is more fun that we sometimes make it. When a child asked Thich Nhat Hanh what he did for fun, Thay responded with a smile, “Everything I do is for fun.” As I titled an earlier essay, I think of it (life, practice, commitment) as all of it being  “Important Fun.”

In metta

poep sa frank jude

Freeing the Body, Freeing the Mind Book Club: "The Introduction" by Michael Stone

Michael lays out his purpose in conceiving and editing this book in his very first sentence where he says that it is written for those who find themselves “compelled by the teachings and practices of both Yoga and Buddhism” who are “moved to better understand the porous border between them.” He goes on to affirm their “interdependent history,” and their shared goal of “recognizing suffering and bringing it to an end.”

Before going any further, we again need to clarify what it is that we are referring to by the term “Yoga” in this passage. If one is referring to what I call the “ocean” of teachings and practices originating in the sub-continent of India, I’d say to speak of “Yoga and Buddhism” is already inaccurate as Buddhism is a form of Yoga. If, however, one is referring to the so-called “Classical Yoga” of Patanjali, then we can most certainly compare these two Yoga traditions, but for accuracy, I’d write “Classical Yoga and Buddhism” for greater clarity. And, from this perspective, it is certainly true that the Yoga teachings of the Buddha and of Patanjali share both an interdependent history AND are their respective traditions are incredibly porous!

Michael makes a point that I find both important, and personally frustrating at times in its having to be necessary at all: Yoga has been reduced in the contemporary mind to being all about body practice, and Buddhism has been equally restricted to being an exclusively mental practice! Nothing could be further from the truth!

Michael makes an interesting analogy with trees, comparing (Classical) Yoga and Buddhism to an oak and a maple tree. They share many commonalities, and of course have many differences. He takes it through three levels of comparison. I too often make use of the tree analogy, but I have one tree: the Tree of Yoga. And one branch of this tree is Buddhist Yoga, and another is Classical Yoga (and others include Vedanta, Tantra and from that in turn Hatha.

What do you think? Does either of these models seem more relevant to your own understanding?

What may come as a surprise to many readers is just how little we know of the Buddha and Patanjali as individuals. Do you think this makes any difference as to how we should receive their teachings?

Finally, I would love to hear from any of you regarding what may be the most pertinent issue raised in the Introduction: Michael asserts a “fundamental affinity between mind practices and body practices.” What do you think of this statement? How does it relate to your own experience of meditation and/or sitting meditation? Is it accurate to conceive of meditation as being about the mind and hatha-yoga-asana to be about the body? Or do you agree that this is a simplistic reduction at best, and perhaps a broad misperception?

Mindfulness Yoga Book Club: "Freeing the Body, Freeing the Mind"

The "Foreward" by Robert Tenzin Thurman 

I’d like to ‘ease’ into our reading and discussion of this anthology, edited by Michael Stone, first so that we can enter into the spirit of the book and to encourage (hopefully) thoughtful dialogue. Second, I’d like to give people a few days to get the book – if they haven’t already – and to begin reading. Third, it’s good to access where we are before beginning and to orient how we’d like to proceed.

Robert Thurman’s “Foreward,” sets out the topic of the book as being “Yoga and Buddhism.” We might want to take a moment and ask ourselves just what we are referring to by these two terms. From my side, Yoga (with the capital “Y” and which I sometimes refer to as ‘the Yoga tradition’ is the large body of teachings and practices – with an emphasis on practices – coming from the various cultures of the  Indian sub-continent. The practices are what Georg Feurstein calls “psycho-physical technologies’ designed to transform one’s bodymind in a radical way such that one transcends the ‘typical’ human existential situation, from one of duhkha to one of freedom (moksha).

This leads to the further inquiry as to how does this definition differ from what we may say of Buddhism? I would argue, ‘not at all!’ Where things get interesting is when we speak of the various ‘yogas’ and then there are many differences to be uncovered. But, as I hope we shall see, there can be larger differences between two Hindu yogas then between some Hindu and Buddhist yogas!

Thurman has often insisted that Buddhism must cease to function as “Buddhism” for its various methods to have the biggest impact on modern (western) culture, and in many respects I agree with him. As Thich Nhat Hanh has said, the west is not in need of another religion! Thay has said that Buddhism can have its biggest influence on modern culture through psychology, ecology, and feminism. I would simply add that it is as a form of yoga, that Buddhist practice can perhaps influence and permeate all the other areas.

An important point Thurman makes is the necessity for one’s “taking responsibility for one’s own health, cultivating a stronger sense of meaning in one’s life, finding the inner strength to express joyful altruism, and developing artful connoisseurship toward enjoying every minute as if it is the ultimate in every sense.”

Our culture tends to support a rampant sense of ‘victimization,’ whereby we seek to blame others for our situation. This is most absurdly evidenced by a case I’ve read about where a burglar sued a homeowner for an injury the burglar sustained while attempting to break into the man’s home!

But the Dharma teaches us that we create our life’s meaning; that our response in the world determines our happiness; and that each moment is indeed ‘absolute.’ Right here and now, we can choose the actions that will determine whether we live as free people or as victims. In Zen, we chant the Gatha of Atonement (at-one-ment) as a practice of remembering (mindfulness) of this fact:

All unwholesome karma ever committed by me since of old,

Because of my beginningless greed, anger, and ignorance,

Born of my body, mouth, and thought,

Now I atone for it all.

With this expression, we take back any power we have given over to others to determine our happiness and freedom. With this expression of strength, we assert that we will not be victims; that we acknowledge that no one can, for instance, ‘make’ us angry.

Thurman ends his “Foreward” by speaking a bit about how during the fifty years of his teaching and practice of the Dharma, “it seemed that Americans were intently preoccupied with the pursuit of money, status, possessions, and experiences of pleasure, and unrelentingly unconscious of the impact of their lifestyle on the world around them.” He speaks of how little training in ethical consideration, and in the mind’s higher faculties of concentration, mindfulness and wisdom’s critical insight we are given. This truth points again how truly 'counter-cultural' authentic yoga is -- or 'should' be!

Thus, he says, books such as this are essential to the curriculum of ‘hopefully ever greater numbers of students’ in order for them (us) to be prepared to live meaningful, productive, self-less, satisfying lives, and in so doing, to enter fully into a positive, contributive relationship to our globalizing society.

It is my hope that this blog, and our joint investigation and discussion (of this book, specifically, and of our Daily Practice, generally) can help us all to cultivate such meaning, joy, compassion and wisdom!

Svaha!

Poep Sa