http://kamalashila.co.uk/index.htmlKamalashila's bits & piecesen4ks@kamalashila.co.ukCopyright 2008 Anthony Matthews2010-07-22T08:26:44+01:00 hourly 1 2000-01-01T12:00+00:00 Thu, 22 Jul 2010 08:30:51 +01004ks@kamalashila.co.ukNone2010-07-22T08:26:44+01:00http://kamalashila.co.uk/page27/page27.html#unique-entry-id-7http://kamalashila.co.uk/page27/page27.html#unique-entry-id-7



Tuning in to the Buddha Field
Talk for Buddhafield Festival 2010
Buddhaksetra (Sanskrit, Buddha-field). The sphere of influence and activity of a Buddha. In Buddhist cosmology, each world-system (cakravāla) is the domain of a particular Buddha within which he arises and leads beings to liberation through his teachings. The concept came to prominence in the Mahāyāna on the basis of early speculations about the range of a Buddha's knowledge and the extent of his sensory powers. With the concept of a plurality of Buddhas came the notion of an infinite number of ‘Buddha-fields’ extending throughout the reaches of space in many directions or dimensions. These fields vary in their degree of perfection and are divided into two basic categories, pure and impure. The world we inhabit now is an instance of an impure Buddha-field since beings here are still subject to the basic vices of greed, hatred, and delusion. The most famous of the pure Buddha-fields or ‘Pure Lands’ is the paradise of the Buddha Amitābha in the west described in the Sukhāvatī-vyūha Sūtras, into which all may be reborn by calling upon the name of Amitābha. The existence of these pure Buddha-fields became immensely important in the development of popular devotional Buddhism, especially in China and Japan. [Answers.com Buddhist Dictionary]

I’d like to start by making clear that what I have to say in the this talk about the Buddhas and their fields of influence isn’t all from my own experience. Or rather, it is from my experience but I interpret that experience in my own particular ways. I read it; I read the signs that come to me, just as I suppose we all do. In modern life we have become accustomed to a very defined account of the world around us. Its is based on the fantasy that we exist as concrete unchanging individuals whose world is just what it seems to be, that can be measured in terms of time and space. But Buddhism takes a very different perspective on it all. The Buddhist vision of reality is that everything is alive. And that each individual can awaken to this, the nature of reality – using this word nature in the sense of ‘characteristic quality’. I think this is the best and most meaningful use of the English word ‘nature’, which can all too easily slip into being used in a highly conceptual, abstract, and romantic way.
I can say ‘I like nature’ or ‘I like being in nature’ and you know what I mean – I like being in woods, I like streams and landscapes and skyscapes and seascapes. But woods and streams are just a part of nature in that sense. Nature is everywhere. It’s in the city just as much – the sun and moon still shine, day still follows night. Skyscape is still there. Streams and landscape are still there, certainly buried under many layers of concrete and asphalt, yet nature is still there, as powerful as ever. Nature is everywhere. It is everything. It is our body. It is our mind. It is dhammaniyamata, the ‘ordered’ or natural aspect of all things. So when I say, ‘I like being in nature’, I really mean ‘I like being out of the city’, or ‘I like it when I’m more or less on my own, surrounded by lots and lots of non human beings’. All words are abstractions, because they are all pointers to experience rather than the experience itself. But some are more abstract than others. “Nature” in this sense, of ‘I like nature’, is a highly abstract and vague idea or concept that can mean many things to different people.
That’s why I like the other way we use the word, as in ‘the nature of’ something. The nature of fire is to be hot. People have their particular natures. It’s in the nature of jeans that after a year or two of use, they wear through at the knees. Grass grows. Rain falls. Grass is green. Rain is wet. Everything has its own particular nature, its particular set of qualities, the way it works, the way its particular conditionings come about. That’s certainly the Buddhist way of looking at it, i.e. in terms of all the conditions that bring things about. The way things emerge from their unique conditionings.
There are all kinds of natures in this sense. You can see many different realms of life with their different natures. Buddhism singles out of the infinite number of possibilities the famous five natures or niyamas. There’s matter in the sense of the elements of earth, water, fire and air – the planets, gravity, physics and chemistry. Nature operating in those particular ways.
There’s the whole biosphere, the realm of organisms – bodies, like ours; bacteria, organs of reproduction and digestion, growth, decay – biological nature. Green nature.
There ‘s the kind of nature that governs mental functioning. Perception. Sensing. Responding. Reacting. All beings sense one another in various ways. They detect the stuff around them. Automatic coordination of hand and eye and ear. The subtle magic of connection, that whole area that conditions how we sense and perceive and create a world.
Then getting more subtle and deeper, Buddhism singles out in particular the nature of deliberate action. All conscious acts have a conditioning effect on the one who acts and this is a very special realm of nature. It is the area of karma or ethics, spiritual direction and of personal growth and development. Ethical sensitivity has its own world of conditionality – the way you naturally feel sorry when you hurt someone so you do your best to be kind, on a good day, and doing that creates trust and friendship. The way also that all that can go wrong when you lose the sensitivity and harden yourself against others’ suffering, become more and more of a monster. That whole area that covers what you do in your head, and the acts you do without anyone knowing, and the acts you make sure people definitely do know about. All that will is all having an effect behind the scenes, like Dorian Gray who had a magic portrait of himself up in his attic, which reflected how he really was. All the time he looked like a beautiful young man but the more horrible things he said and thought, the more monstrous the image up in the attic became. On the other hand the more kindly he was in real life, the more beautiful became the portrait.
So there are all these natures. Everything has its particular nature and works only in accordance with its nature. Raindrops don’t rise up into the sky; they keep falling on our heads. That’s physical conditionality. Wounds fester or heal. Food is digested or rejected: biological conditionality. Open your eyes and you’ll see something. That’s the operation of mental conditionality. Be generous, and that’ll usually have a good effect – according to ethical conditionality. So everything is according to its nature. Even spiritual development, even insight and awakening, has its own way of unfolding, its own particular nature. We call that the Dharma Nature or niyama, the conditioning effect of the real truth of things, the ultimate reality of how things are. When you come under the influence of reality, actual reality, things happen. You come under its influence through your practice, the practice of awakening to reality through shamatha (or calming the mind with helpful behaviour and meditations like the mindfulness of breathing) and the practice of vipashyana (coming closer to the real truth of things through seeing their insubstantial nature).
Doing these things you touch something very deep. Or something very deep touches you. You come into its orbit. Under its influence. Into the world of influences that is the Dharmakaya or the Dharma niyama, the Dharma nature.
I hope you can see that I’m trying to paint a picture here, give a feeling or impression of the conditioned nature of all existence. We live in a world of many influences within which we ourselves are an influence. That’s the way things really are, that’s pratityasamutpada, conditioned arising. We are an important part of the pattern. We inherit the influences, from the deep past of our ancestors: the way our bodies are, our skills and knee jerk responses, the nature of our biology and our perceptual processes, the way those have emerged over deep time into the present that is us. We inherit the very basic natural conditionings that are the great physical elements of earth, water, fire and air, and the way they all interact.
All this we inherit with our birth as human beings. Everyone does. Our birth as human beings also connects us with the influence of our cultural and spiritual ancestors – all the cultural traditions of the English, or the Scots, Irish, European, African – whatever they are – the poetry, myths, science, arts, crafts, design and even fashion. Our spiritual ancestors like the Buddha are all there in the background too, even if we have no idea of all the great practitioners in the many traditions.
We’re born into this great web of connections and the more you reflect on this pratityasamutpada, the more you understand the various natures of all its parts, the more you can make it work for you in your search for Awakening. This is also where you can make yourself receptive to the influence of the Buddhas. This is where you can tune into the Buddha Field, the field of influence of the Awakened Ones.
This was the title of my talk and it’s what I mainly wanted to talk about. It’s taken a while to get here because it’s a very big picture we’re getting into here, the whole picture is relevant.
As you probably know the Buddhist path emerges from the establishment of a ground of awareness. Mindfulness of all that I have been talking about – mindfulness of the great elements, mindfulness of the body and its functions, mindfulness of the mind and its activity, mindfulness of the ethical value of all our actions, attitudes, tendencies and habits. Mindfulness of the insubstantiality, the transparency, of all things including ourselves. All this practice of seeing through the transparency leading to those little deaths of the ego fantasy, our pride and our arrogance and our defensiveness and our concealment. Everything becoming transparent and letting in the light of the Dharmakaya, the real nature of life and existence.
And all this being lived, socially, in community and society and relationship. That’s the Buddhist path that leads out of the establishment of a ground of awareness, and then taking action in the field of behaviour. I wanted to sketch it out in this way to give some sense of the vastness of the field of our experience. Not only its vastness but more importantly its character, its qualities, its nature. How alive it all is.
But as well as being this incredibly dynamic field that is our experience, here and now, as we wake from sleep, as we lose conscious awareness and fall into the sleep state, as we are born into this life, and as we fall, at death, into the after death state – even in addition to all this incredible experience that is the field of our lives, I want to draw attention to its also being a field of awakening: a Buddha Field.
I mentioned a little while ago that we are connected to many kinds of ancestors, and that this ancestry includes Buddhas, Bodhisattvas and other great practitioners. But what does this mean? You can say it simply means there is a link. Buddha gained awakening 2 ½ thousand years ago, more or less; his disciples practised and passed on the fruits of their practice and it’s all been kept alive, more or less, down to the present and we, coming into the orbit of these teachings and practices, participate in them and that’s what it means, this Buddha field. We have a connection, a living connection with the influence of our spiritual ancestor, the Buddha. All that is obviously true and that is an important part of the meaning of the word Buddhaksetra, Buddha field.
But there is a far more lively and direct meaning which goes beyond the rather mechanised, literal, historical, modern and sensible viewpoint that can still be felt hovering in the background in all this talk of influences. That is, that Buddhas are not just dead people who have an influence in the same way that dead poets, activists and other dead visionaries do. That nirvana, awakening, full enlightenment, is a state beyond life and death in which Buddhas continue to act for the benefit of unawakened living beings.
So their Buddha field is not just a cultural memory, however lively and meaningful, but a field of live interaction that includes the living energy of awakening.
This is in fact the meaning of Buddhaksetra and other such terms like Buddha Nature, Dharmakaya, and Dhammaniyama, the nature of awakening. That in some way we do not yet understand, awakened beings exist from their own side. I don’t wish here to suggest an interpretation of how the awakened ones exist. It is beyond my understanding. I only have my own conviction based on my interpretation of my experience that, in some way, the energy of awakening is a tangible force in the universe. But a consideration of some of the principles of physics, for example Newton’s third law of motion that states that ‘To every action there is always an equal and opposite reaction’, seems to suggest that in nature, energy is never simply cut off. There is always some kind of continuation into another state. Newton applies his law to the momentum of material objects but it seems likely that something similar applies to the momentum of awareness, which is an extremely powerful force. So it doesn’t seem unreasonable to me that volitions and consciousness may continue in some way after death, and that this continuation applies as much to enlightened as to unenlightened consciousness.
That doesn’t mean that Manjughosa, Avalokitesvara, Tara, Sakyamuni and all the Buddhas of the great thousand fold Trichiliocosm actually exist out there, maybe on glorious thrones, concrete and real and permanent – any more than it means you and I exist here, concrete and real and permanent. We aren’t, so why should they be? The point is that the reality of being is beyond our understanding. All beings are said to be nondual, insubstantial, indescribable in their nature, so the manner of the Buddhas’ existence is no less and no more mysterious than our own. All we can say about Buddhas is that their nature is perfectly wise and compassionate.
So this field of compassionate energy is something that, in the words of my title, can be tuned in to. How we do this I’ve already explained. It is a consequence of practising the path of mindfulness – of integration, positive emotion and those spiritual deaths that come from insights. All is seen as transparent, and the golden light of Dharma can start to emerge from them. This is the classic eightfold path or threefold way of ethics, meditation and wisdom. We can also see tuning in to the Buddha field in terms of sadhana meditation, in which the initiate visualises her or his own body as it really is – conditioned, transparent and empty with the centres of subtle energy at the crown, throat, heart and elsewhere illuminated by symbolic colours and mantric syllables, and this subtle body being filled by the light of the influence of one of the Buddhas or Bodhisattvas under whose protection they have been placed by a preceptor. We can also see tuning in to the Buddha field in terms of devotional practice, ritual and especially puja. Puja is just a non specialised form of sadhana and it can be a very powerful inspiring medium for connecting and attuning oneself to the field of the Buddha’s influence.
So I hope this will help show in more depth the purpose of some of the less obvious results of our spiritual practices of mindfulness, ethics, meditation and development of wisdom. I feel it’s good to bring in the dimension that is not me or mine, that is not my project, which comes from beyond anything I can know or plan for.
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Lively on a Path of Beauty: the Jewel of Spiritual Community
Talk for Buddhafield Festival and FWBO Centres 2009
The difficulty of creating community is pehaps the most urgent challenge in our disconnected world. Since the 60s Buddhists in the west have experimented with a variety of traditional and innovative approaches to community.  How about we take a fresh look at what we could do together as practitioners?

Let me first read some lines from the old Navaho chant. Many of you will know this.
…All day long may I walk
Through the returning seasons may I walk…
Beautifully joyful birds
On the trail marked with pollen …
With grasshoppers…(and) dew about my feet
may I walk…
With beauty before me … behind me … above me … all around me …
In old age, wandering on a trail of beauty, lively, may I walk…
It is finished in beauty
It is finished in beauty
Life could be a path of beauty, into old age, both in its start and in its finish. For everyone: all of us could be valuing our lives in that way. This person singing is so aware of everything around: the seasons changing, changing into old age; the flowers, birds, grasshoppers and the dewy trail itself. And really all this rich range of experience –  because it is alive and because we are connected to it –  is community. It’s certainly acknowledged as community for indigenous peoples like the Navaho, but the reality of it affects everyone whether or not they know it or want it.
The environment is our community. All beings and all things are in relationship and they always have been. Of course we generally ignore this so we fall into a network of betrayal – of unknown other people, animals and other local beings, vegetation, of the earth itself and of other great elemental realities like water and space. If you multiply that by the total population of the western world over recent centuries you realise how vast the damage to the greater community has been.
We have managed to create a world which is for human beings only, in which other kinds of beings are regarded as second class, expendible, mere commodities. And the human beings benefitting from this – the very few human beings who benefit from this – are, perhaps not surprisingly, getting increasingly disconnected from these less important other beings. Obviously, it’s a two way process! We are also getting more and more disconnected from one another, preferring to live in smaller and smaller units, sometimes just a couple, very often entirely alone. And we are even becoming increasingly disconnected from themselves. Because we have so little time, we tend to identify with a mere surface awareness, with a shifting complex of likes and dislikes, perceptions and prejudices. As a result the deeper inner world of feeling, empathy, ethical sensibility, clear thinking and hearfelt communication is just not available to so many people.
From a Buddhist point of view this is highly undesirable. Of course it’s easy to see Buddhism as a way for individuals only – to develop and grow quite separate and disconnected from others. After all, the Dharma is a path for the individual person struggling with his or her own particular conditioning. Yet that path always refers to others, learns from others, gives to others, collaborates and shares with others. Ultimately the path is for others as well as for oneself. And this implies community. It implies that relationship with others is vital for the path to awakening.
The Buddha himself went forth on his quest for awakening because of other people. It was seeing that sickness, aging, and death are inescapable, and then seeing a spiritual practitioner, that prompted him to so radically change his way of life. Our own reasons for starting to meditate and wanting to gain some kind of insight might have a lot more to do with our own suffering than the suffering of others, but sooner or later we come up against the fact that other people actually do exist and that their sufferings and their perceptions of things are at least as important as ours. This is compassion, or the beginnings of it, and compassion is inseparable from insight. In other words community is an essential part of the process of getting more real, more aware of the context in which we exist.
This is why it’s important to stretch our idea of our community to include all beings. For indigenous peoples, it’s good to be aware of all the non-human beings because it reduces human pride and arrogance. Witnessing their special concerns, troubles and joys brings us down to earth, reminds us of our place in this world. We may be at the top of the tree evolutionarily speaking, well, along with chimpanzees – but there are many other intelligent animals, and there are stronger ones, more sensitive ones, more industrious and persistent ones. If we observe how they live, we learn so much from them – but only if we acknowledge them as our brothers and sisters whom we need to take care of. It is our disdainful view of all other beings, including other humans, that keeps us in so much ignorance of ourselves. Because the essence of community is bearing others in mind. The great value of community is that it provides us with other people who can act as mirrors.
Let’s look at one important way that communities bear their members in mind. One thing we do is to create a shrine of some kind. Shrines help maintain a community’s collective memory. You can imagine a shrine of some kind, maybe set up to the Buddha in a shrine room, but then it could could just as well be up on a kitchen shelf to the local spirits, or again it could be outside under a tree, or even built by the side of the road. Each acts as a kind of focus for the community. And by dedicating a special shrine to these beings, people turn them into special members of the community. The shrine gives us a way to connect to them.
For example we have graves and war memorials. These are community shrines and people make offerings to them. By the roadside sometimes you see these very poignant bunches of flowers tied up, still in their cellophane wrapping, for someone who died right there in an accident. Sad, transient and beautiful. Shrines are beautiful things, even when they are messy and disorganised like that. They are beautiful because they express something beyond this world. We can enhance that beauty with lovely arrangements of flowers, skilful woodwork, silk hangings and golden images. That can be inspiring but we can sometimes overdo the aesthetics and lose the connection with the other world. A shrine can’t just be a decorative feature or an art object. It is a portal to another world: it give us access to the world of the Buddhas, the spirits and the ancestors.
But how do we feel about our ancestors? To us, our ancestors are not just dead people; I mean, they’re certainly dead, but they are still part of our lives. On our last Buddhafield retreat we built quite a large shrine to the ancestors. We were reflecting on all the influences we have received in our lives and we all realised that a huge influence on what has brought us to the Dharma, positive and negative, has been our own family – not to mention all our forebears going back into history. We wanted to acknowledge their influence on us and bring them into our sense of community. In some meditation practices you visualise not only the Buddha in front of you, but all around you you imagine all beings starting with your own mother and father. If we all lived together in some west african village as members of a tribe who’d inhabited that area for millennia, or if we were part of an indigenous Buddhist community in Burma or Tibet, say, we’d all share the same ancestors and the memory of a relatively small number of ancestors would be powerfully evocative for every single person in our village. However for most of us in the west life is inconceivably more complex. Over the centuries billions of us have migrated throughout the world again and again and we generally have little knowledge of our grandparents or great grandparents’ lives. In fact we tend to feel that life began with us. In our mind, the past easily becomes something merely quaint, something irrelevant – like a fading black and white photograph.
This loss of the past that we have is a sign of our disconnection from our community. How lonely it seems we are these days. But I think we needn’t be: the ancestors are still there, even in the complexity of modern life, and they can still be a source of deep inspiration for us. In our culture for example we have a lot of myth and written history. Reading it, we open a channel for the influence of the ancestors. Malidoma Some, a West African shamanic teacher, says that we in the west need to acknowledge as ancestors major cultural figures like Shakespeare and Socrates, and other poets, writers, philosophers, teachers, artists and social activists. That brings it right home for me.
I didn’t grasp how important the ancestors are till I realised that our ancestors shrine was affecting everyone on our retreat. First there was just a bit of mossy tree trunk but soon people added bits of wood with written appreciations of deceased family members, then all kinds of offerings started appearing –  flowers, stones, more bits of wood, drawings, carvings, then a model boat and some paper fish appeared and then someone dug a well and filled it with water, and then people floated things in that and dropped stones in it. Everyone found they wanted to contribute something to the shrine, and sit by it. In just a few days it developed a really evocative, slightly eerie atmosphere.
Maybe it’s strong for us because we badly need to feel proud of our human inheritance, to feel that our life is worthwhile. Honouring the ancestors helps remind us that they, at least, had some kind of faith in us and the lives we might live after them. The ancestors play an important part as mentors, the people who encourage us, encourage us to activate what is good and creative in us. We have been given their blessing.
This is why in spiritual traditions everywhere in the world, it’s considered vital to connect to spiritual ancestry. This is not an easy idea for us in the west. In Buddhism practices like guru yoga, and visualisation of a Refuge Tree containing all the teachers of the past is considered essential, really quite basic to the path. Though we do that in FWBO, I think it’s not so clear to us that its so very essential. We still can’t help asking, ‘what’s the point?’
It’s because of our disconnected society. For someone living in a more connected kind of world, it is clearly understood, without even thinking about it, that to connect with everyone else and create community, people need to share their lives with their ancestors, with their elders and mentors. And that doing that brings the blessing of community. Indeed the main role of spiritual community could be said to serve as a channel for blessings to flow from the ancestors. This flow of inspiration is channeled especially through our mentors. In Buddhist terminology it is adhisthana, the blessing or ‘grace-waves’ of the tradition and the culture of dharma. Or you could say it’s the atmosphere or the vibe of awakening. It’s the living influence on us coming from ancestral Buddhas like Sakyamuni, who actually existed in history and whose teachings we have actually received, and the whole mentoring tradition that has flowed from people following his teachings.
A realistic appreciation of this is going to take time to develop in western Buddhism. It’s a big transition for us. Nowadays spiritual groups everywhere are finding themselves having to adapt the customs we inherit from eastern traditions to our very different attitudes and problems regarding how we approach spiritual teachings and spiritual teachers. For example there’s the common expectation that a teacher should be perfect and the outrage people sometimes feel when in fact they turn out to be imperfect. But teachers are always imperfect in one way or another.
Malidoma Some has some amusing stories about his relationship with his own spiritual mentor, his uncle Guisso, and how irritating he found him. ‘I remember more vividly the times when I yearned to kill him than… when I wanted him.. for my own sake. Almost every time I was with him, something he did or said, something he did not do or failed to say, irritated me profoundly and stole …curses out of my mouth. I must confess that though he is still alive, I can’t standseeing him because our conversation is almost always a slippery journey into the sticky mud of disappointment. Yet I love my mentor beyond what I can say’
Mentorship is often deeply challenging. This reminds me so much of Buddhist mentoring, where the teacher is always stretching the students, even embarrassing and pissing them off because everything he or she does challenges their expectations. Bhante can be like that can't he — constantly criticising, no let up. Plenty of encouragement to individuals here and there, but to the general Sangha, mostly swingeing challenge. I’ve been in meetings where after he’s gone out of the room everyone is gobsmacked: ‘oh no, what are we going to do with that?!’ Yet for some reason I can’t help opening up to him when we meet, and I owe him everything of significance in my life. He’s done so much for so many people. So just think of all those who’ve got you on a spiritual path: human beings with very human qualities.
In Tibetan traditions the lama is the root of all blessings. In the ordination ceremony the teacher initiates by pouring a little water on your crown. This flows down and fills you with the water of adhisthana.
As we sit here we are in the presence of the Buddhas and the lineage of teachers above, we are literally surrounded by all beings on this earth, and maybe we can feel the presence of all the ancestors beneath us in the earth. We feel the blessing coming from above, below and in all directions. We feel our practice witnessed by the whole community of beings.
…
In any indigenous community, in any pre-modern community, the knowledge of the elders may be vital for everyone’s survival. No one else may be old enough to remember how to survive a difficult set of conditions that last happened fifty years ago. So in our own far more expanded, globalised society, it is tragic that we tend to think of old people as useless and that so many people will do anything to stave off the appearance of agint because they feel they will increasingly be seen, not only as not sexy, but as an embarrassment. Useless and slow, in the way, disgusting clothes, bad hair and, worst of all, bad glasses. This is part of the great mutual betrayal that has happened in our community.
We really need to get beyond this. Why should this happen? All of us are on our way to becoming elders. And our elders are on their way to becoming ancestors. An elders’ life experience is deeply valuable. Elders are generally good listeners. They get used to hearing about all the problems encountered by younger people. Their words are worth listening to and they do not need to raise their voices to be heard. Their good wishes profoundly change the lives of others, and after death, their memory is kept alive as they become ancestors.
Each of us has our own very different life experience to offer as a resource for others. In fact this in particular is what Buddhist practice does for us. I mean, what essentially do Buddhist practices do? They deepen our life experience. Practising awareness, practising mindfulness, greatly deepens the extent to which we experience the detail of our lives. Truthful communication and the other training precepts put us to a continual test and greatly deepen our life experience. That is what Buddhism is really about. It leads to a deepening understanding, to insight into our existence, into life and into death. And it is a collective practice, for even if sometimes we practice alone in solitude we still take others into account. This shared practice is what creates our community. It is what gives us a sense of belonging. And it connects us directly to our spiritual ancestors on the refuge tree – the human practitioners who struggled just as we do, that we call the teachers of the past and the present. In our fledgeling FWBO tradition we call on Sangharakshita’s spiritual ancestry in particular.
When we call on our family ancestors, our cultural ancestors, and our spiritual ancestors – we can feel a confidence that they are actually there, because it is clear that their influence lives on. I suppose that’s fairly clear, but is there any other sense in which we can say they are present, here and now? Indigenous people such as those in Buddhist countries, believe that their family ancestors and spiritual ancestors like Buddhas and Bodhisattvas – are actually present in some way. Malidoma Some’s tribe would say they exist in the Other World. To be honest I think most of us find it hard really to swallow that. But think more deeply for a moment about what it means for anyone to be present – even when they are alive. What does it mean that I am present here? What is really happening with us, with all these bodies and minds here? It all seems so normal and straightforward – I am me and you are you and there is this grass and sky, the former of which is apparently green and the latter blue. But actually these are perceptions; they are partly just ideas laid over the raw experience of that green and blue. We do not really understand it at all, we’ve just got used to these rather strange experiences that we call our existence. The bare fact that we exist is actually so profound and mysterious that it is not really at all irrational to admit the possibility at least that the so called dead are also present, here, right now, in some way. But even if we can’t do that, it’s clear that the influence of our ancestors lives on in us – indeed we actually continue their living influence into the future.
Thus their influence is, or can be, a source of blessing. The main function of community, whether at this very expanded level I’ve been talking about or in the more immediate nitty gritty sense of the people we live with – is to act as a channel for blessing or empowerment. The word from Buddhist tradition, as I said, is adhisthana which means the blessing or the waves of grace or uplift which flow into us through a particular connection, whether the connection is family, or cultural, or spiritual lineage, or some combination of all three. To call on our family, cultural and spiritual ancestry is to seek their blessing and encouragement, their adhisthana. We may call this down with a mantra, say for example OM MANI PADME HUM, the mantra of Great Compassion.
It seems to me that this more expanded sense of community needs to be included if we are to make intentional communities work well in the west. There have been so many experiments over the years, and we in the FWBO have tried hard to make community living, especially single sex community living, the mainstay of our dharma practice. That approach has taken some knocks recently. There has arisen this far more individualistic and expensive culture which started somewhere in the 90s; a culture which now has most able bodied people using all their quality time raising unprecedented sums of money in order to live in a way that their children will find socially acceptable. This has drawn so many away from community life. Even so, there still remain quite a few FWBO communities.
The single sex approach is certainly in accordance with that of indigenous spiritual traditions like Malidoma Some’s Dagara tribe where initiations and rituals are often for one or the other of the two sexes. If you want to concentrate on pure spiritual practice, by and large, a single sex situation is going to be a good place to do it. Especially, I think, if you are in your teens, twenties or thirties when you have that ability to go very fully into just one thing and put everything else aside for a time. I know many of the women around Buddhafield, for example, really appreciate the opportunity to be in a women-only environment.
So even though in recent years many more people have followed that social trend, and moved out of single sex communities and in with a partner –  indeed as I have done myself – there still survives a fairly thriving FWBO culture of community. I think community is a very radical feature of our movement and we can be proud of it. But there is a lot further to go. We certainly can’t sit on our laurels because there are so many people who don’t feel attracted to the current FWBO community models, yet could benefit hugely from a greater degree of community life. If you live in a community and share resources, the cost goes down. You need to work less and you have time to deepen your life experience in ways that the stress of most people’s working life makes quite impossible. I am generalising here, of course, and I know that some kinds of responsibility, even stressful responsibility, can be helpful spiritually, very formative in a positive sense. However for many people the stress they have to bear is formative in a negative sense and I would suggest that the great majority of people would benefit from a simpler life and especially one dedicated to spiritual awakening.
I think over the years since the seventies we have gathered quite a bit of experience of community issues, not always wisdom but a lot of experience that could be brought into looking at community in new ways. Because I do think we need to take a fresh look at community living. A lot of us feel we have done FWBO communities and we don’t want to do it that way any more. So many communities in the eighties and nineties became institutions, empty, on the whole friendly but still a bit cold and cramped somehow. And over those thirty years one can observe that the single sex thing doesn’t seem to work for most people for the whole of their lives – there are a few monastically inclined exceptions no doubt, but I’ve noticed that even some of them have been known to rush off with an overpowering urge to do something completely different.
Community life can be a challenge. It takes work to make a marriage successful, and it takes work to make a community successful, too. A lot of work, there’s no let up really, and I don’t think we’ve always realised that. Yet community living potentially offers the very best kind of life, something really worth working for, for the sake of our future. We really need to learn how to do this well. We just need to start, and then continue.
Personally I’d like a lifestyle that could contain more difference than our communities have done up to now. What I would like is a community so big, both in vision and in physical size, that people could be born there, grow up there, live love and practice there, and eventually die and become ancestors there. They could live in single sex houses, mixed houses, in family, couples, or alone. They wouldn’t need to live in houses actually. I’d hope that such a community would have plenty of land and trees, though the city is just as important as the country, arguably it’s more important. Community members’ spiritual practice could be very intense, medium intense, not at all intense, occasional, or almost nonexistent. What would unify this community would be a vision which everyone understood and kept evolving further through continual communication. Communication is key to all this.
This is obviously my fantasy, but I think as well as our semi monastic situations, we need something a bit closer to ordinary society, while being a very positive and inspiring alternative to it. The thing is, we could help a lot more people live a better kind of Buddhist life. Children for example, and the parents of children. But also those who for one reason or another don’t find single sex community inspiring. Or for people like me who have done that but now would like to live in a way that connects to a broader range of friends.
Its up to us to choose how we live and I’d really like to encourage you all to think how you could start living more communally than you already do, even if you already live in a community of some kind. It isnt easy but it is worth it. It has taken me quite a few years to get started, but now with Guhyapati, Yashobodhi and some other friends I’m involved now in setting up a land based community near the spanish Pyrenees called EcoDharma. We have a large amount of land, a collection of houses and cottages which are partly still in ruins, a few yurts and a very lively vegetable garden. We’re holding retreats, offering solitary retreat facilities, and have a working retreat in the autumn. Ecodharma is going to be a large, diverse community. For me, its somewhere I can practice meditation deeply and connect with people who want to be on retreat. For others, its an exciting social project where they can make deep friendships and work hard to create a really excellent community and retreat centre. Hopefully, it will put down roots deep enough so that eventually people can be born, grow old, die and become ancestors there. Or at least some of those things. These are hopes and wishes, and things never turn out quite the way you expect. But it is a hope for all of us. I hope each of us will find places that are good for a life of ever deepening experience of our existence in this world and appreciation of its significance and its beauty.
]]>4ks@kamalashila.co.ukNone2009-01-01T15:05:37+00:00http://kamalashila.co.uk/page27/page27.html#unique-entry-id-4http://kamalashila.co.uk/page27/page27.html#unique-entry-id-4Where can I go between the pleasure and the pain of it – between sentiment and horror-shock, indifference and anxiety? When I see you suffer, should I suffer? Would that help? Or would it help if I felt nothing, and just got on with life?
No, and no; but then what would help? If I also vibrate with what you feel, I know it helps, but still it hurts. Can anything be done about pain - beyond having sympathy, or maybe living differently?
I don’t think so, unfortunately. But understanding this does change the space where the great mass of dissatisfaction happens. Suddenly there isn’t anything to stop me giving whatever I have, and that’s all anyone can ever do.
Suffering is in everything. No experience, no deed is ever totally satisfactory. What we all need is a creative response to all this suffering – our own, and others’. We can all be overwhelmed by it. Being overwhelmed by suffering is generally very far from being an insight experience. Yet it could induce transformative insight if we could be overwhelmed in a different way – as was Avalokitesvara who fell apart like Humpty Dumpty when he saw how impossible it is to save all beings from suffering. Yet from the shattered remains arose a thousand arms tooled, equipped with wisdom eyes, and ready to go into action.
Kurukulle is another archetypal image that represents insight springing from great compassion. Like the whole great gang of Bodhisattva forms, like Avalokitesvara, Vajrapani and Manjusri, she is a pop cartoon image, carrying a powerful message about how we could all be if we were enlightened. On a mega scale, Kurukulle embodies positive response to suffering. She is a dancer. She dances wild in a cremation ground, wearing bones. She is young and gorgeous and draws all beings to her irresistible allure. In Tantric Buddhism there are four ritual forms: the yellow prospering or maturing rite, the white pacifying and calming rite, the black destroying rite, and the red rite of fascination. Kurukulle is about the fourth of these. She is red, very red and her beauty hypnotises and magnetises all beings. She holds flowery weapons, especially a flowery bow with which she fires love arrows into all beings’ hearts, causing them to fall in love with Dharma.
Wow.
Yes, this is another Buddhist fantasy. Yet it represents a truth: the life of full awareness is profoundly joyful, and suffering can be overcome! You really can dance in the midst of death and darkness! These fantastic images represent a spirit we can partake of if we take them into our hearts. We can meditate upon them. They represent the innate Buddha nature that can be brought to life in us.
The question for us, of course, is how we can even approach such an extraordinary place. We need to fall apart and be put back together differently.
The two main avenues of practice, roughly covering 'falling apart' and 'total renewal' are that of wisdom and that of compassion. The path of Wisdom explores non-self. You see that ‘self’ is a fantasy based on a fundamental misreading of experience. Our experience of self is there all the time as normal. Even a Buddha has one, but he or she doesn’t think it has some kind of special existence. Non-Buddhas like us take it very seriously indeed – as something fixed, real and so important that our whole life is geared around it. But self is just one frame of the movie of our lives. It is just a snapshot reading, a bundle of ephemeral memories, wants and fears happening at the moment. And the view that it is fixed (as me, mine, myself) is the root condition for all our worst suffering. By that I mean all the suffering we add on to the circumstances we cannot avoid. It is usually the worst suffering by far.
Wisdom practice sees this in meditation and lets it go. Wisdom can be there in action too: try giving up a few preferences and being less me, me, me –  it is liberating. Well, it is liberating if one does it clean and straightforwardly. It is not if one does it out of duty or to please the group. That is just me, me, me in another form.
Compassion practice is demonstrated through the Bodhisattva’s life and the four Immeasurables of Love, Joy, Compassion and Equanimity.
Maitri (metta, Pali), ie love – better expressed as friendliness, kindness and wellwishing – is the basic and very Buddhist quality. Buddhists may sometimes be weird but they are usually very friendly. This is the ritual of attraction. Maitri or metta (the actual terms in Sanskrit and Pali) is not sentimental, or just fancying someone. It is ‘disinterested’ in the sense that it is not for ‘me’, but responds to how the actual person is – however attractive or otherwise they may seem at the time.
Karuna, or Compassion is what happens when this so-well-grounded friendliness meets with suffering. It is not pity, not a kind of frozen anxiety, but just a direct, helpful and friendly response. In other words it is less self referenced.
Mudita or (sympathetic) Joy is that grounded friendliness when it meets happiness and is joyful at it – rather than feeling resentful or wanting to undermine it, which unfortunately is a common response.
Upeksha (upekkha, Pali) comes out of insight into the non-self nature of all things, the understanding that all beings are already free of self, yet they grasp on to an idea of a self, and therefore suffer. The response of upeksha meets that reality, by understanding, through experiential insight, how much of that suffering is self-caused. You may be born into terrible conditions, but self-grasping makes that suffering far worse. So you meditate on that and it gives you more power to help – frees you from more levels of self-grasping – and makes you more like Kurukulle!

]]>4ks@kamalashila.co.ukNone2008-12-19T13:13:52+00:00http://kamalashila.co.uk/page27/page27.html#unique-entry-id-3http://kamalashila.co.uk/page27/page27.html#unique-entry-id-3
The following was produced for the recent 'Buddhism and Nature' seminar held at Dharmapala College, Birmingham, in November.
It is a working document for your interest. It needs some correction so I shall eventually replace it with something better researched. Meantime, your comments are welcome.

Western Buddhists are currently elucidating the concept of ecoDharma which, briefly defined, is the ecological expression of the Buddha’s teaching. They obviously feel that the viewpoint of Buddhism is an especially valuable voice in the gathering response to the ecological crisis. But what is it that makes a difference? Is there a possibility that some of us in our eagerness to interact with similarly minded people may lose sight of essential aspects of traditional teaching and end up distorting its liberating message? At this stage of such a promising enterprise it is important to consider how exactly the Buddhist doctrines we are invoking support our ecological perspective.

It is sometimes assumed that Buddhism has historically been exceptionally ecologically motivated. Its monastic precepts, for example, forbid disturbing the earth; and the ten essential precepts are clearly intended to foster a nonviolent respect for all forms of life. However in practice, as Malcolm David Eckel has shown, Buddhist society down the ages has not been notably free from anthropocentrism, and environmentally considerate values have not been held in a unified way across the various traditions.

Yet the inconsistency results from influences in world culture rather than anything inherent in Buddhism itself. For it may be argued that aspects of EcoDharma have been intrinsic to Buddhism from the very beginning. To give one key example, according to Reginald Ray its traditional practices have actively and consciously counteracted alienation from nature, a universal phenomenon singled out by the ecological movement as a cause for humanity’s most damaging problems.

Alienation from nature is attributed to a diversity of causes including human greed, dualistic religion and scientific ignorance. However it may also be identified with the primary obscuration to awakening pinpointed by Buddhism: avidya or moha. To understand this, we need to see our disconnection from the point of view of the Buddhist way of seeing nature. To do this it seems there is enough overlap between Buddhist and western notions of ‘nature’ to allow us, for now, to set aside detailed examination of the equivalent concepts in ancient Indian and Buddhist discourse such as dhatu, kaya, or prakriti as contrasted with samskrita.

The primary meaning of the English noun ‘nature’ is the collectivity of inhabitants and products of the earth (sometimes as distinct from humanity and its creations), along with the forces causing and regulating them. Thus the word can be used as roughly equivalent to more precise contemporary words like ecosphere or biosphere.

A secondary meaning of ‘nature’ is the inherent quality of a thing or person, as when we say ‘I wouldn’t read a book of that nature’ or ‘she’s generous by nature.’ Drawing on this secondary meaning we commonly use the adjectives ‘natural’ and ‘unnatural’ when we subjectively feel that something is harmonious or disharmonious, normal or abnormal. Some people may consider it unnatural for horses to wear blinkers, men to wear trousers, or people to behave badly; others that it is natural to be somewhat greedy or ignorant.

Both primary and secondary strands of meaning are found in Buddhism. The first, i.e. the phenomena of our world along with all their relations and causal conditions, is equivalent to Dharmadhatu or the entire sphere of phenomena. Buddhism does not make a division, in this context, between human and nonhuman realms or between matter and mind. Mental processes like perception and volition are as much part of nature as trees and physical movement; certain realms of existence (the arupadhatu) are held to be entirely nonmaterial.

In other words whatever happens is natural; nothing can happen against nature. All phenomena in the three dhatus are part of nature by virtue simply of their manifestation according to universal laws such as pratityasamutpada: ‘this being, that becomes.’  So when the Buddha said in the Dhammapada, “hatred never cures hatred, only love can cure it; this is an eternal law,” he was pointing not only to a psychological method but also, more universally, to the way things happen in nature.

Then with reference to the secondary meaning, everything including the diverse processes of spiritual development has its own nature, its particular qualities and limitations, and unfolds only in certain ways. Under certain conditions only does seed give rise to sprout, then to plant, and only then to flower and fruit. Often the nature of these propensities is only partially comprehended; they may not even be known about. The British biologist J.B.S. Haldane is famously credited with the statement that the natural environment is not only more complex than we imagine, but also more complex than we can imagine. Similarly in the Buddhist sunyata view of things, natural processes are ultimately indescribable and cannot, by definition, even be understood. Their apparent identities are actually empty, unfixed and ultimately inconceivable. This difficult truth, too, is natural, is in their nature, is the nature of all reality.

There is no sense that the Buddhist path is ‘against nature’ except in the secondary sense that its practices transform naturally formed ignorant views and behaviours. The progressive unfolding of factors in the Buddha’s teaching of pratityasamutpada shows how personal progress toward awakening is a natural process taking place only under particular conditions. This potential, latent in all beings, is the Buddha Nature. The Buddhas, who alone realize this nature in the fullness of its wisdom and compassion, are themselves part of its process. They do not stand outside or above nature, for nothing can. Teachers and writers have sometimes called this path of progress ‘transcendental,’ terminology that may sometimes cause confusion with teachings aiming to separate its practitioners from ‘matter’ or ‘the world.’ It is thus important to clarify that what is transcended through wisdom and compassion is not nature itself, but samsara, i.e. that aspect of nature characterized by ignorance of the spiritual path. The Buddha showed that the principle of pratityasamutpada or conditioned co-arising applies also to the generation of the qualities of awakening. Wisdom and compassion too are natural processes taking place only under certain conditions. Their manifestation is expressed in extremely simple, linear formulae e.g. ‘in dependence upon unsatisfactoriness arises faith,’ but just as with samsaric processes the simplicity is only apparent. When the real nature of the various conditions and their interactions is penetrated through sustained reflection on each particularity and generality, they are seen to be ultimately beyond human understanding. This is especially the case when considering the universe as the totality of simultaneously interacting conditions. The implications of Haldane’s statement about nature being more complex than we can even imagine is not far from those of the Buddha’s famous admonishment of his close disciple Ananda, who rashly claimed that pratityasamutpada was easy to understand.

For the extremely deep viewpoint Buddhism has on nature is not far from the present worldview of ecology, the scientific study of the interaction based on need between organisms and their natural environment. Though usually considered as a branch of biology, ecology is also seen as an overarching or ‘holistic’ science since it unites so many other sources of knowledge. Buddhism itself is definable in this context as the science of awakening, its tradition drawing on millennia of observation and encounter, its practices continually measured against experience.

An ecological model works well for describing Buddhist practice: human beings are composed of live and highly malleable conditionings located within a complex environment of influences including that of the Buddhas. One tradition symbolically represents this interacting mandala of influences as a five-pointed vajra or thunderbolt. This dynamic image comprises at one end the five skandhas – principal aspects of the mind-body experience – and at the other the primary principles of awakening, the five Buddhas. It shows our situation in life as one of inescapable openness to changing conditions combined with a latent ability to modify these, though only in certain ways and under certain circumstances. Our being thus unites samsara and the potential for awakening.

The vajra is also an image of our Buddha Nature. The concept of Buddha Nature takes various forms in tradition, some authorities seeing it as an innate reality that can be revealed through awareness, others as a latent potential that can be actualized through effort. Seen in the latter terms Buddha Nature is uncontroversial as a dharma model. As an ever-present awakened reality, however, the teaching of Buddha Nature is easily misunderstood, and so a lively tradition of criticism continues to the present. Nonetheless despite this problematic aspect various aspects of Buddha Nature thought offer a helpful perspective on nature understood as reality or Ultimate Reality.

Some Buddhist teachers believe the idea of Buddha Nature to be implicit in the earliest Buddhist scriptures. Explicitly, it appears in India around CE 200 with the Tathagatagarbha and Srimaladevisimhanada, Mahayana Sutras that are themselves among the earliest. The Tathagatagarbha, which is probably the oldest, communicates the Buddha Nature entirely in images.  It is compared, for example, to a seed covered up by a rough husk. Sentient beings see themselves and others as rough and coarse, when actually they contain seeds of awakening. This is why most people go through life not even noticing that awakening is a possibility for them.

The Srimaladevisimhanadasutra explores all this conceptually and addresses in particular the problem of nihilistic misunderstandings of the doctrine of sunyata, openness or ‘emptiness’. In contrast to the sutras promoting sunyata, which analyse to destruction all conceptual constructions of existence, the Srimala makes daringly positive statements about the nature of things. It points to what reality is not empty of, saying in particular that reality is totally identifiable with the liberated qualities of Buddhahood. This is certainly affirmative, but in what possible sense could it be true? To answer, one needs some practical sense of what it means to negate sunyata, in other words we need to look at what happens in us when we do it. What is nihilism? It is whatever fosters some sense that life is pointless and that there is no objective basis for truth. It may be an extremely subtle attitude and manifest in a diversity of ways. For instance in the current context it might show itself in an unconscious belief that nature (and even reality itself) is evil, dirty, inconvenient, and frightening.

Buddha Nature teaching addresses the heart of such nihilistic attitudes by opening us to the positive nature of reality, that is sunyata. To misunderstand sunyata, in whatever manner, is to lose touch with the spirit of awakening, and that is to lose touch with the fountain of all life. Our present disconnection from nature springs from and is itself a kind of nihilism. It is moha, primordial ignorance of the possibility of awakening. So to the extent that living beings realize the true, positive meaning of sunyata – however they happen to do that, and it is recognized that it need not be through Buddhist means – their lives will become meaningful and freed from nihilism.

The most important point of the Buddha Nature critique of sunyata teaching is that despite the great purity of its deconstruction of our attachment to an illusory conceptual world, we may still end up with a subtly conceptual view. This happens because the Prajnaparamita message is necessarily communicated in language, which, being further commented on, seeds a tradition of debate and commentary. Even though this dialogue is essentially about the fact that concepts only point to reality, and though there are yogic applications of Prajnaparamita that bypass words, the mainstream nonetheless engenders a primacy to words and subtly privileges them. More importantly the style of the language itself, being necessarily negative, easily gives a subtle impression that the reality being referred to, i.e. the poetically termed ‘empty’ nature of all phenomena, has some kind of negative value. The style of the Prajnaparamita texts is constantly to caution the reader from construing anything concrete from any given data. This is of course a practice to be applied in experience rather than understood in any theoretical way. However the human tendency always to abstract from experience leads people to read into this negative instruction a subtly negative concept of what sunyata is – rather than opening, in experience, to the living positive reality that sunyata is. This inevitably stops them short on the path of realization of that living reality. Ironically this difference is precisely what the Prajnaparamita is indicating; yet still the true message is missed.

The response to this of the Buddha Nature style of discourse, in saying that the Buddha qualities are ever present, points directly to the living reality of nature which is already there and always has been, yet which we do not notice. From a nature perspective, this immediacy is true wildness, the natural, unfixed and inconceivable state of things. The seeming provocative assertion that our ‘ordinary’ experience already is an experience of awakening (if experienced it as it really is) accords perfectly well, when seen aright, with familiar Buddhist teachings. Yet one needs to understand those more basic teachings already, and from experience, for this positive approach to make real sense. From a point of view of one who knows they want awakening, it is true to say there are no real obstacles, or that the obstacles are no other than Buddhas – just so long as one addresses them in experience, and has the understanding of emptiness and impermanence, wisdom and compassion. If one aims to experience each apparent obstacle as it really is, dependently arisen and empty, it is seen to be no obstacle at all but a gateway into awakening. This approach is deeply encouraging for the experienced practitioner. The relative newcomer, who as yet does not know themselves and so needs to focus more on what holds them back, will tend to see obstacles not as mutable opportunities but as somewhat fixed entities.

This is the entrance way to so called ‘nondual’ experience, one of unfolding-towards-compassion, or what we could call it true wildness, the ‘natural state’. It is simply the practice of mindfulness, but fully applied. As certainty in wildness becomes deeply established and one begins to open out to and incorporate it, meditation – and eventually all experience – becomes ‘elemental,’ i.e. consisting of a pure spectrum of sensation beyond the usual ego based reactions to sensations to be clung to if liked, or repelled if disliked.

The process of awakening is one of acknowledging the truth of the nature of things beyond hopes and fears that ones experience will be like this or that, and growing confidence in the consummate value of this. One is learning to trust the truth of nature, of wildness in the sense of unobstructed novelty and creativity. In this sense nature is the ultimate dharma teacher. This teacher is not nature in any romantic sense, or in the cyclic eternally recurrent sense, but nature in relation to Buddha Nature – as shown in the model of the vajra, the ecological web of dynamic influence led by that of the Buddhas. In many Buddhist scriptures, nature is portrayed as protecting, maintaining or offering the dharma and is personified by the earth goddess, naga king, naga princess and many other nonhuman and animistic figures. Nature is a medium for Dharma teaching and realization, since one cannot practice using concepts alone: they must become embodied, natural, living realities. So to realise wisdom and compassion one needs to reflect on nature and apply it in nature, in actual lived experience. To reflect in a transformative way on impermanence, insubstantiality, pleasure and pain (sukkha-dukkha) is not merely to think, but to go more deeply into, accept and embody, the reality of wildness, the truly natural state.

Merely being around more trees will not necessarily conduce to awakening. Most of us need for our development periods of intensive contact with other practitioners, and for real world applications of the dharma it is hard to beat our reactions to others around us. Nonetheless, going into wildness does offer unique benefits for dharma practice. At least for a while, most people relax and look more deeply at their existence in a greener environment where non-human life predominates. Wildness shows the larger context; one senses ones place in the web of relatedness. There are also deeper, more challenging benefits. Modern towns are designed to segregate us from the elements, to protect us from danger, provide maximum convenience, to be economical and provide for our many desires. So it is not easy to leave behind the physical convenience of our artificial world of straight lines, flat planes and standard shapes. The bewildering diversity of unique forms and influences that is nature challenges the fixity of our ego’s dependence on convenience. Yet there is nothing more rewarding than opening to these teachings, and the relaxing influence of naturalness can make it relatively easy to let go the more usual resistance and see: there is life beyond clean and dirty, wet and dry, convenient and inconvenient; beyond all the ego issues we are normally stuck in. Learning from nature like this leads us naturally into simpler ways of living. The very simple lives lived by many awakened people illustrates the value, in the special context of practice, of renunciation and abandonment of unnecessary possessions. A simple life naturally brings emotional clarity, freedom of heart and undistracted attention. This is difficult to maintain in artificial surroundings.

The material and technological progress we have inherited is led largely by the selfish demands of ego, a build-up that imposes difficult spiritual tasks on our generation. The surge of modern life has washed us up on a very dry and featureless shore, alienated from the richness of life and the spirit of spiritual fulfillment. Yet just as over time a polluted sea mends and purifies itself once pollutants cease being added, the human mind always possesses the potential to purify itself completely.

]]>4ks@kamalashila.co.ukNone2008-10-17T20:18:16+01:00http://kamalashila.co.uk/page27/page27.html#unique-entry-id-1http://kamalashila.co.uk/page27/page27.html#unique-entry-id-1Right now I'm very absorbed in Reggie Ray's recent book Touching Enlightenment - Finding Realization in the Body (Sounds True, Boulder, 2008). I find it a bit long winded — I'm not sure it needed to be another thick hardback like Buddhist Saints in India - but what he's saying is quite brilliant. RR manages to express in detail some of the experiences I've been exploring in my own practice over the last decade — material which I'm only now finding ways to communicate about. It relates strongly to the Elements meditation and, even more, to formless approaches to meditation.

He's exploring the nature of embodiment. The body comes as part of the "deal" of birth into a world. Everyone has some kind of bodily form, but what is a body? We tend to think of it as a thing external to 'us' — a bunch of physical tools we can use to further our personal ends. It's a means for getting what we want. Even Buddhist practitioners might interpret the 'precious human body' in that kind of way. But from a real perspective of dharma, embodiment is something very different. Our body is more like the world itself, rather than what we use to get around in it. It is our existence- embodied. It is the main thing. The truth of this can come only on the basis of meditation experience, but Ray articulates it well and with considerable passion. (I think his huge enthusiasm accounts for and probably excuses the book's verbosity.)

Main points- to me, anyway:
1. The body is the container of all experience. It receives every single experience nakedly, truly and completely, without any intervention from the conscious ego, despite what our conscious mind might want or assume - despite the fact that the vast majority of information received is screened out by the ego so that it can continue to maintain its little world. In terms of the Yogacara, the body is the Alayavijnana. Everything that has ever happened - more, the truth of everything that has ever happened - is enfolded in the experience of body, and is found when the body is experienced (as in Buddhist mindfulness training) as it really is, without the veiling of ego.
2. Then the body is the container of all vipaka, all karma-results whatsoever — all unfinished business going back into beginningless time is somehow stored in the body - in the whole of it, according to the 'Tibetan yoga' RR frequently cites - in our bones, cells and blood. Often this takes the form of physical unawareness — frozen, unacknowledged yet highly potent experience which can be reawakened through awareness practice (as in Buddhist mindfulness training — i.e., satipatthana, mahamudra, dzogchen, etc.)
I would have liked some expansion of the frequent referrals to 'Tibetan yoga', which he cites as a cloudy authority throughout the book. I understand that he's no doubt talking about teaching that is only accessible to practice, but just a little more explicitness would have helped.

Ray makes interesting points about our disembodied culture. He maintains that the current spiritual/environmental crisis is essentially one of our being disconnected from nature, and says that, historically, this tendency began with the rise of agriculture. Perhaps this explains why Buddhism is historically not particularly eco-minded (as I think various scholars have now shown, though no doubt Buddhism is in some ways better than some others in its connectedness with nature). The Buddha turned up in an era where agriculture had long started taking over from hunter-gathering, and spiritual teachers were already teaching methods of overcoming and controlling 'nature' and the body. (Christianity and the European 'Crusaders' who conquered, colonised and plundered the world up to and including post modern times were really just another product of this era.)

According to RR, the Buddha , to counter this 'transcendentalist' tendency, taught ways to directly and deeply experience the body and the world it serves as a way of liberation (eg the 4 satipatthanas, the central dharma practice). And for us the body remains as the only real place of wildness, the mysterious place we cannot control, while being the repository both of all our actions and for our liberation from them. 'This very place the lotus paradise'... The body is the forest. Buddhist practice is what re-embeds us in the body, and the body is our primary medium for gaining enlightenment.]]>