Joining With Naturalness Part Three

Picking up with the section entitled “Buddhist Yoga Exercise,” reminding ourselves, as the authors do in their first paragraph, that there are many varied “Buddhist Yogas” and thus many different ‘exercises,’ let’s explore what Goldfield and Taylor have to say regarding the practices taught by Khenpo Tsultrim Gyamtso.

They make the important point, I believe common to all Buddhist Yogas, that movement practices are essential for developing the ‘practice mind’ in and throughout our daily activities. While walking meditation is a common practice (especially in the Theravada tradition) for instance, in Zen ‘work practice’ is strongly emphasized. In fact, it was during my Zen training that I learned to hang sheet-rock, as well as use several different power tools!

Goldfield and Taylor remind us of the three qualities of mind guiding the intention behind practice and specify that while exercise has many physical benefits for the body, our mental attitude must be one of ‘renunciation,’ in that we renounce clinging to body as ‘truly existent.’ I might prefer to phrase it as “renounce clinging to body as self.” This is an important piece often ignored in contemporary yoga (asana) practice. In fact, I find that some approaches to practice actually encourage and strengthen identification with the body as self, which will ultimately prove futile, as the body ages and becomes less able to perform the more challenging asanas. This is not, however, merely a contemporary issue, as texts as old as the hatha-yoga tradition (roughly 1,000 years old) already warn that the practice of asana, outside the context of raja-yoga (here meaning meditation) become ‘obstacles to liberation!’

Remembering the second quality, I encourage students to re-affirm their bodhicitta by reminding themselves that they practice for the benefit of all beings. And finally, that our practice is to cultivate the realization of the true nature of ‘things as it is,’ as Suzuki Roshi would often say.

In the following section, “The Key Points of Yogic Exercise,” the authors say that the most profound way to apply the mind during activity is to focus on the true empty nature of phenomena. Their description of maintaining the ‘nondual awareness, the union of luminosity-emptiness’ recalls the practice I teach of “Big Sky Mind.” 

They suggest focusing attention at the point four fingers width below the navel, which in Zen is the hara. Sometimes I too ask my students to focus here, especially during vinyasa practice, as in going from plank to upward-facing dog to downward-facing dog moving from this point. They all express a distinct difference in the energy and fluidity of movement.

Most of the rest of this section speaks of the body as impermanent, in the fact of its constant changing nature. In “Body of Peace,” I emphasize that in fact, nowhere in the universe is there absolute stillness. There is constant vibration, what Tantra calls spandha. What we call ‘stillness’ in meditation is actually a kind of calm-activity, vibrant, yet easeful, vigorous yet at rest.

I especially like the following phrase: “Experience is much softer than when we are clinging to ourselves, objects, and ideas with heavy conceptuality.” This is the “body of peace,” which is boundless and all-pervasive, not limited to the outline of the ‘skin-bag.’

The section entitled “How To Use Sickness To Enhance The Practice Of Buddhist Yoga” is another aspect of Buddhist Yoga that is both often mis-understood and/or ignored. The second of the Five Remembrances is “I am of the nature to have ill-health; there is no way to avoid having ill-health.” Frequently, when I offer this teaching, it brings up a lot of resistance among many students. They think it is ‘negative thinking’ and would rather ignore such realities. They may even be working under the delusion – encouraged by some ‘new age’ thought – that if they are ill they ‘brought it on themselves’ and that if their practice were ‘good’ they could avoid all illness!

What the authors here remind us of is that illness can be worked with skillfully to attain deeper realization of our true nature. And indeed, isn’t it true that when things go well for us, it is kind of easy to let practice slip away? Then the shit hits the fan and we rush back to the mat or the meditation cushion! Many people come to my “Body of Peace” retreat with the notion that a body of peace never feels pain. One of the first things I tell them is that in fact, a body of peace is beyond pleasure and pain; that in going beyond circumstances, there is a peace that can contain pain, that is undisturbed, as Patanjali puts it, “by the pairs of opposites.”

No Gaps

I have a tee-shirt from Zen Mountain Monastery that features an enso and brush calligraphy saying, “No Gaps.” That’s how we are expected to practice: with no gaps, seamlessly throughout the varied activities of daily life. My teacher, Samu Sunim would often exhort us that “there is no way of the Buddha outside everyday life.” Thinking that practice is one thing, and our life is another is one of the most pernicious beliefs a practitioner can fall victim to.

In this penultimate section, the authors are telling us that our training is to be engaged, to act without attachment, with compassion and the energy of bodhicitta. There is ultimately nothing separate from the naturalness we seek to join with. Thus, ultimately, we come to see that therefore there is nothing that truly needs to be ‘joined.’ We have never really been separate!

As they conclude, at first all this takes effort. Our conditioning keeps pulling back into delusion. But, over time we experience glimmers of emptiness and the relaxed ease of naturalness and as practice and life become not-two, life – including pain, illness, aging and death – becomes more joyous, spacious, natural.

I enjoyed this chapter quite a bit, and hope to hear from you, dear readers, what you have received from this reading. 

Book Club: Zen or Yoga? by Victoria Austin

As this is another fairly long essay, and one I believe to be important for our discussion, I am going to post two or three responses. Today, I’m offering my initial response to Victoria Ausin’s opening and the first few questions she addresses. I look forward to hearing from those of you reading along!

Interestingly enough, the opening of this essay from Victoria Austin sounds similar to something Stephen Cope wrote about several years ago about being on a plane and entering into a similar conversation with someone who asked how he reconciled practicing Yoga and Vipassana. I never seem to have these kind of conversations on planes!

When I read Victoria’s statement: “My seatmate’s very natural questions reflect a common view: that Yoga is practice for the body and Zen, practice for the mind” I was delighted! This is a succinct summary of the common misperception practitioners have in general about Yoga and Buddhism. I was further delighted to see her add: “I see the assumption of a mind-body split, Zen versus Yoga, as a feature of the English language, rather than as any actual separation between the territory of Buddhism and that of Yoga.”

Those of you familiar with my own work know that I think it ludicrous to speak of “Yoga and Buddhism” as two different things. Buddhism is a form of Yoga. However, it is legitimate to speak of “Classical Yoga and Buddhism” or “Classical Yoga and Zen” as two different philosophies of Yoga!

Austin makes a point that I am gladdened to see when she speaks of others’ attempts to “integrate these disciplines” that perpetuates or reinforces this assumption that Yoga is about physical practice (the body) and Buddhism is about meditation (which is thought to be about the mind) and singles out Cyndi Lee’s Yoga Body, Buddha Mind as one example. She also mentions Zen Mind, Yoga Body, a work I am not presently familiar with. While I have gone on record as someone with really respects and enjoys Cyndi’s work, I am not as sure as Austin that “… experiencing the books and workshops would resolve the split” that a mere reading of the titles alone would reify. Ironically, I have a student participating in my Body of Peace program here at Kripalu who has recently taken training with Cyndi, and she said that the split is reinforced by the clear “division of labor” with Cyndi teaching asana and her husband, David Nichtern teaching meditation!

While I agree that “Buddhism” has become a religion, it is not inherently so! The concept of “religion” is one alien to the time of the Buddha. He taught a yogic path of liberation, like many other yogis of his time. And Yoga, while not a religion, is religious in its concerns: the freedom for suffering through awakening from delusion or ignorance of our true nature.

After Austin’s “Introduction,” including a brief biographical overview of her own practice path, she presents several questions she has been asked over the decades about her practice of Zen and Yoga, along with her responses.

The Questions

Her first question provides a simple, bare response of what beginners might expect when taking up the practice of Zen and/or Yoga.

Her second question responds to what the promise of Zen and Yoga practice is. I like that she basically shows that while the Buddha outlined the Four Noble Truths, Patanjali pretty much works from the same base: ignorance is the primary cause of suffering; and each offers an eight-fold path to the elimination of suffering.

Her response to the third question, “How much of Zen is mind training?” I think could have been a bit more succinct, but she eventually gets around to saying that seeing Zen as simply “mind training” is an impoverished view. Primarily, I would add, this impoverished view is based upon the assumption that mind can be fully separated from body, and engaged action in the world. A huge part of my Zen training was work practice, which over the years included weed-pulling, painting, hanging sheet rock, dusting, cooking and assorted other activities. Can this be called “mind training?” Can it not be called “mind training?!”

I would also add that along with “family practice, diversity, and mass media,” important other contributions America (and the west) have brought to Zen is psychological sophistication and understanding, recovery programs, political activism, feminism and ecological activism.

The fourth question is the parallel to the third: “How much of Yoga is body training?” I think Victoria muddies the issue here by bringing in the eight limbs as having been transmitted in diverse traditions and styles, and then referring to Bhakti, Hatha, and Raja. The famous eight limbs of Patanjali are not the only models of Yoga. There are paths with less and paths with more limbs. Bhakti Yoga is itself made up of many individual traditions, many of which never speak of the eight limbs.

Indeed, some scholars assert that the eight limbs found in Patanjali’s Yoga-Sutra are a later interpolation, and that the original Yoga taught by Patanjali is the three-limbed Kriya-Yoga! Iyengar Yoga does indeed offer an integration of the Hatha-Yoga tradition (which famously downplays the yamas and niyamas as evidenced in the Hatha-Yoga Pradipika, its earliest foundational text) and Raja-Yoga as embodied in Patanjali’s Yoga-Sutra. Each alignment instruction given in an Iyengar class is seen to be a dharana, or a point of concentration. Austin’s profound example of B.K.S. Iyengar’s exhortation “to learn to take the muscles evenly inward” is further evidence of the fallacy of thinking we can separate the body and the mind.