Book Club: Joining With Naturalness by Ari Goldfield and Rose Taylor

I was looking forward to reading this chapter as it deals with Tibetan Buddhist Yoga, which is one Buddhist tradition I know relatively little about, and I was not disappointed at all! I was glad to see how in their opening paragraphs, Goldfield and Taylor acknowledge that there is indeed a wide variety of “Buddhist Yogas,” and so they take some time to define the terms as they will be using them! This is an important step that I also attempt whenever I teach, but one that many others do not take, and which leads to needless confusion and debate among practitioners.

What Does ‘Buddhist Yoga’ Mean?

I was very much taken by their explication of the Tibetan terms for Buddhist and Yoga. I like the idea of the “insider” as someone who looks and explores ‘inside’ one’s experience. This reminds me of Georg Feuerstein’s referring to yogis as being “psychonauts.” I also found it interesting that sang jeh, the Tibetan term for “Buddha” literally means “awaken” and “expand,” pointing to the fact that the qualities we associate with being a buddha are inherent within us, and that awakening is a kind of expansion of that innate nature. The understanding of nal-jor for “Yoga,” meaning “to join with naturalness” adds an interesting take to the oft-said definition as simply “to join.” It reminds us that ultimately, we are not joining two things that have separated but joining with what is always ‘naturally’ present!

In their discussion of what it means to “join with naturalness,” I like their emphasis on the non-separability of mind and body: the importance of involving mind when working with body and involving body when we work with mind. I think this is an important point, which when forgotten, leads to the mistaken notion that meditation is about the mind and hatha-yogasana is about the body. As I often remind students, when you are sitting in meditation, much of the experience is dealing with bodily issues: tickling, aches, numbness, tightness etc. and how to relate to them. And when practicing hatha, often we are taken up with recognizing the constant commentary the mind produces as we move through our sequence of postures: “I can’t stay here another moment!” “Darn, this side is soooo tight! I can’t get as deep into the posture as the guy next to me and this is his first class!” etc.

I don’t want this to go on too long, so I’ll comment on their main points regarding the Foundations of Buddhist Yoga tomorrow or the next day. Meanwhile, I’d love to hear from any of you who are following along your thoughts about this piece so far.

Book Club: "The Broad Tongue of the Tathagata" by Daniel Odier

I am a fan of Daniel Odier’s book Desire, as well as his work with the tantric text the Spanda-karika, but I found his chapter in Freeing the Body, Freeing the Mind a bit weak, and I honestly have little to say about it! Frankly, I was a bit turned off by what seems to me a bit of the all too typical Zen sectarianism that I find distasteful and less than accurate.

While it is true that the Japanese Zen tradition tends toward a more choreographed ritualistic practice (even in their koan practice which has been formalized into a fairly strict curriculum not found in any of the other Zen cultural traditions), my limited exposure to Chinese Ch’an tells me that such formalism is not completely absent there either!

There is a rhetoric of immediacy or spontaneity that permeates throughout the Zen traditions, along with a kind of iconoclastic propaganda that has led to many mis-perceptions in those outside the tradition. Odier refers to both the Zen master who used the wooden statue for a fire, and to the old Zen exhortation to “Kill the Buddha!” I heard the Chinese Ch’an Master, Sheng-yen, once speak about the western Buddhist scholar who, upon seeing a Zen Master prostrate before a Buddha statue, proclaim, “I spit upon the Buddha.” The Zen Master simply responded, “You spit, I bow.”

In any event, I think it would have been helpful if Odier had defined – and perhaps offered more instruction in – what he calls “Spatial Breathing.” To my mind, what Odier is writing about is the necessity of relaxing the body in order to free the mind. There is no Buddhist tradition that suggests one sit with rigidity; in fact, the Japanese Zen Masters I know refer to such rigid sitting as “Stone-Buddha Syndrome.”

In Patanjali’s Yoga-Sutra, we are told that asana, the seated posture for meditation must be stable and easeful, and that it is done with the relaxation of effort. Then a state of integration or coalescence arises which leads to the over-coming of oppression by the pairs of opposites such as hot and cold; pleasure and pain etc.

Going beyond attachment to concepts and notions about the Path, we enter the limitless space of awareness. What Odier seems to be speaking about, ultimately, we saw already as the subject of Roshi O’Hara’s piece on “dropping the body and mind.”

I would love to hear from any of you reading along with me as to what you make of this chapter. Perhaps some of you got something more from it than I, but overall, I find this the weakest essay of the three we’ve read so far.