Dharma Talk: The Three Spiritual Powers

By Thich Nhat Hanh in October 2007

This is an excerpt of a talk at the Sandy Beach Hotel in Da Nang on April 10, 2007. Thay spoke in Vietnamese to an audience of intellectuals and answered some fascinating questions from the audience. 

Most of us think that happiness is made of fame, power, money. Every one of us wants to have more power. We want to have more fame and money, because fame and money give us more power. We keep believing that when we have more money, fame, and power we’ll be happy. I have met a lot of people with great power, with a lot of money and fame, but their suffering is deep. They are so lonely.

William Ford, the Chairman of Ford Motor Company in America, is the fourth generation of the billionaire Ford family. He came to practice with us in our practice center in Vermont. I offered him the gift of a bell, and I taught him how to invite the bell each day. He told me stories of millionaires and billionaires in America who have a lot of fear, sadness, and despair.

Who has more power than the President of the United States? But if we look into the person of President Bush we see he’s not a happy person. Even President Bush doesn’t have enough power to take care of all the problems that confront him. He’s so powerful — he has a great army, a great amount of money — but he cannot solve the problems in Iraq. He can’t spit it out and he can’t swallow it. You’re very lucky that you’re not the President of the United States! If you were the President of the United States you would not sleep all night long. How can you sleep when you know that in Iraq your young people die every day and every night. The number of American young people who have died there has gone up to more than three thousand. In Iraq — in that country that you want to liberate — nearly a million have died. The situation in Iraq is desperate.

The writer Jean-Jacques Rousseau said that the people with the most power feel that they never have enough power, and this is true. We believe that if we have power, we will be able to do what we want and buy what we want. We can buy a position, buy our enemies, buy anything. If we have power in our hands, we can do anything we want. We have to re-examine that belief, because in reality, I have met people who have great power and money and fame, and who suffer extremely.

The Power of the Spiritual Dimension 

In Buddhism we also talk about power. But power in Buddhism is very different; it is a kind of energy that can bring us a lot of happiness and bring a lot of happiness to others.

In Eastern philosophy and literature, we talk about the spiritual path. Each one of us has to have a spiritual direction in our lives. Whether we are business people, politicians, educators, or scholars, we should have a spiritual dimension in our daily lives. If we do not have that spiritual dimension, we cannot take care of tension and despair, or the contradictions in our mind. We can never establish good communication with our co-workers, our family, our community. Each one of us must have the power of the true spiritual path.

In Buddhism, we talk about the three powers that we can generate through our practice: cutting off afflictions, insight, and the capacity to forgive and to love.

The first one is the power to cut off our afflictions — to sever our passions, hatred, and despair. If we cannot cut off passion and hatred, we cannot ever have happiness. We can learn concrete practices to do this. Once we sever the ties of passion and hatred that bind us, we become light and free and spacious. If we have passion and hatred we suffer — both men and women, you have experience with this. We cannot eat, we cannot sleep; that is hell. So the first power is the capacity to cut off afflictions.

The second power is the power of insight — in Buddhism it is called prajna. It is not knowledge that we have accumulated from reading books or learning in school. Knowledge can be beneficial, but it can also become an obstacle. In Buddhism we say that the only career of a practitioner is insight. The insight of the Buddha and the bodhisattvas — what we call enlightenment — has the capacity to cut off afflictions and to generate the noble sentiments of compassion, loving kindness, altruistic joy, and equanimity. That’s our only career, to give rise to insight. Once we have insight we can unravel our afflictions and help others to take care of their difficulties very quickly, just like a medical doctor. You only need to listen to the symptoms and you’ll be able to make a diagnosis and give the appropriate treatment.

The third power in Buddhism is the capacity to forgive. When we have the capacity to accept and to love, we do not have reproach or enmity. That love manifests in the way we look, in the way we speak. When we look with the eye of compassion and loving kindness, when we speak loving words, we are the ones who benefit first of all. In the Lotus  Sutra, the bodhisattva Avalokiteshvara looks at all beings with compassion. Looking at all beings with the eye of compassion is a wonderful way of behaving like the bodhisattva — without reproach, without hatred. And the person that we are looking at in this way feels forgiven and loved. We can help others to be liberated from ignorance and from the traps they are caught in.

Wealth as a Spiritual Tool 

When we have these three powers — the power to cut off afflictions, the power of insight, and the power to accept, love, and forgive — then fame, money, and power become wonderful tools. It is then that the more money we have the better, the more power the better, because they become means to help people, to enhance life. Buddhism does not accuse or judge people who want to become rich or successful in politics or business, but while you’re pursuing these things you should have a spiritual dimension. We must behave on a foundation of love, insight, and wisdom.

In the time of the Buddha, Anathapindika was an example of this kind of businessman. If you are a business person or a politician and you have love and compassion, then you become a bodhisattva. You have the capacity to cut off your passions and your hatred; you have insight to help resolve problems at your work; you have the capacity to accept and forgive people’s mistakes. You have a lot of power — spiritual power.

As Buddhist teachers we should not abuse our power. It is not because you are the abbot of a temple or the eldest in a temple that you have power. It is because you have the capacity to cut off afflictions, to forgive, and to love. It’s not because you are the abbess or the teacher that people listen to you, it’s because of your love and compassion.

In the political or business arena, the power of the owner or the leader has to be based on the power to cut off afflictions, the power of insight, and the power to love and forgive. Then you use your position skillfully and the things you do will not cause dissension. If you do not generate these three virtuous powers, power and money will corrupt everything, including the life of the owner or the leader. That is why spiritual direction is very important.

The Greatest Success 

The Buddha taught that we do not have to hurry towards the future to have happiness; we can be happy right now and right here. The greatest success is to live with love right in the present moment. We have the time to take care of ourselves. If we have pain, tension, irritation, and agitation, we suffer and naturally we cause others to suffer, including our loved ones. That is why we have to have time for ourselves. Then we’ll have time for our family and our community.

Come back to the present moment, do not allow the future to occupy all your energy and time. That is a very important principle from Buddhism. To come back is not easy, because we have the habit energy of running towards the future. Stopping that momentum, coming back to each step, to each breath — that is the basic practice. By living each moment of daily life, living in a way that is deep and free, we can be in touch with the wonders of life.

In a practice center, the basic practice is to use the breath and the steps to bring us back to the present moment. For example, when you listen to a bell you stop all your thinking and speaking and you come back to your breath. You breathe and you bring the mind back to the body, you are truly present in the present moment. In our daily life there are a lot of times our body is here but our mind is wandering in the past and the future. Our minds are not truly present in the body and we’re not present for ourselves. How can we be present for our loved ones, for our wives and husbands? These practices are very practical and clear, and they’re not difficult if we have the chance to begin.

I would like to leave the rest of the time so that you can pose questions related to the topic that we discussed today. Thank you for listening.

Question: Bringing Buddhism to the West 

Man from audience: First, I’m very surprised when your disciples still keep their religion. For example, if they are priests or pastors or ministers, do they keep their religion? Second, I know that besides being a monk, you are also a scholar. I have read a few of your writings, and I see that you have done work to spread and explain Vietnamese Buddhism to the world, just like Master Van Hanh (1). How have you contributed to the development of Vietnamese Buddhism as a scholar?

Thay: Back when Christian missionaries came to Vietnam, they often tried to convert the Vietnamese people and force them to give up their tradition to embrace the new religion. This caused a lot of suffering.

When we had boat people dwelling in refugee camps in Thailand or in other countries, there were also missionaries. They wanted to help those boat people and also tried to lure them to follow their religions. It’s a great pity to force somebody to lose their roots. That is why when we bring Buddhism to Westerners, we tell them, “Do not give up your religion; you can study Buddhist practices to help you take care of your difficulties of body and mind and to learn great love and compassion. You do not have to lose your root religion, because we don’t think that’s the best way.”

In the West, there is a great number of young people who leave their Christian religion because that tradition does not provide the practices that people need today. A lot of people give up their religion and many of them come to practice with us. I have told them, “Once you practice with us, you can go back to help renew your own tradition and religion.” If a country does not have a spiritual foundation, that nation will not endure. So the Westerners see that Buddhism is very inclusive, accepting all and embracing all without denying other traditions.

In Buddhism, we call that spirit of inclusiveness equanimity or non-discrimination. It means that we embrace all. If we say that you have to leave your religion so that you can take refuge in the Three Jewels — that’s not very Buddhist. Buddhism is very open. That is why we have been able to help the pastors and ministers. In their hearts they still love their religion, but they practice wholeheartedly because in Buddhism we have very concrete practices to help them take care of their tension and stress, and help them to help people. If we hold that only our religion has the right view, and other religions do not have absolute truth, this will cause war. Buddhism does not do that.

When we organize retreats or have public talks in the West, many thousands of people come to listen to me, but they’re not Buddhists. Most of them come from a Christian or Jewish background. Sometimes I give a teaching in a church and more people come than at Christmas time, because they see that Buddhism is very noble, very open. It is inclusive and non-discriminative. Moreover, now scientists find inspiration in Buddhism because they see interdependence and emptiness; these teachings attract a lot of scientists to Buddhism.

The second question addresses the issue of learning. In truth, each time we have a new retreat designed for a specific group of people, for example a retreat for police officers or Congress people or business people or environmentalists or war veterans, I have to do research. I have to study beforehand to understand their difficulties and suffering so I can offer appropriate practices. That’s why during all my years in the West I have learned a lot. If you do not understand the teachings and practices of the Jewish or Christian traditions, you cannot help those people. If you do not see the suffering of business people, you can never teach them to practice so they can take care of their tension and stress.

You do not need to become a scholar. As a monastic, we do not aim to become scholars, but we have to know enough in these areas to speak their language, to bring people into the practice. When you say that I’m a scholar and I spread Vietnamese Buddhism, that is not quite correct. When I taught at Sorbonne University [in Paris] about history or Vietnamese history or Vietnamese Buddhism, I had to do research. Just for that occasion I read books on the history of Vietnamese Buddhism. I had to use the pen name Nguyen Lang because I was not allowed to publish under my name Thich Nhat Hanh. The government said that I called for peace and that I was a friend with the Communists, so they didn’t allow my books to be published. My aim was not to become a scholar or a historian, but the truth is I had to teach in the university. And I just wrote it down, so that younger generations could benefit.

The meditation that I share in the West has its roots in Vietnam of the third century. We had a very famous Zen master, Master Tang Hoi, whose father was a soldier from India and whose mother was a young Vietnamese woman. When his parents passed away, the child Tang Hoi went to a temple in northern Vietnam to become a monastic. He translated commentaries on the sutras in that temple in Vietnam, then went to China where he became the first Zen master teaching meditation in China — three hundred years before Bodhidharma. I wrote a book about Zen Master Tang Hoi, and I said that Vietnamese Buddhists should worship this Zen master as our first Zen master of Vietnam. An artist drew his picture for me so we could have it on the altars at our different centers.

In Vietnam we have the Mahayana tradition and the Hinayana tradition. I was lucky that when I was trained in the Mahayana tradition I also had time to research the stream of original Buddhism. I discovered that Zen Master Tang Hoi had used the original Buddhist sutras with a very open view of the Mahayana tradition. That is why when we organize retreats in Europe or North America, many people come from different traditions and they feel very comfortable. Our practice combines both Mahayana and Hinayana traditions and the basic sutras we use in meditation are present in all different schools — in the Pali, Chinese, Sanskrit, Korean, and Tibetan Canons of Buddhist scriptures. I have translated and written commentaries on sutras about meditation like Learning  the Better Way to Live Alone and The Mindfulness of Breathing. Even though I didn’t talk about them tonight, the spirit of my talk was based on the insight of these sutras.

Our true aim is not to spread Vietnamese culture in the world, but I want to help people to relieve their suffering by sharing with them the methods of practice. That’s why they know about meditation and practices that have Vietnamese roots. I say this so that you see clearly that when I go to the West it’s not to spread Vietnamese culture to other countries. I just want to help people.

When I went to the West to call for peace, I only asked to go for three months. The chief of the police station asked me, “What do you plan to do there? Whatever you do is okay, just don’t call for peace, okay?” And I did not reply. Because my aim was to call for peace, for the world to end the war, I just stayed quiet. Then I went to the United States and called for peace — how can we end the Vietnam war? So they didn’t allow me to come back to Vietnam. That’s why we cannot say that I left Vietnam to spread Vietnamese culture in the West. I only wanted to go for three months. Who would have suspected that I would stay forty years! The truth is that during the time I was in exile in the West, as a monk I had to do something to help people. If I couldn’t help my own people, then I could help Westerners. It seems like I had this aim to spread Vietnamese culture, but it happened naturally.

Question: Renewing Buddhism in Da Nang 

Man from audience: On this trip you came to Da Nang. How do you think we can help develop our city, including the Buddhist practice in Da Nang? And do you plan to have a monastery in Da Nang, where we have monastics and lay people, and where scholars in Da Nang can participate?

Thay: Da Nang is already very beautiful. It’s developing very quickly, very well. But we know that economic and technological development comes in tandem with social evils, such as gangs, suicide, and prostitution. If we know that, we should work to prevent it. The scholars and humanitarians, the monks and nuns, you have to sit down together and make a very concrete plan to prevent these social evils. That is something I can share.

The second issue has to do with our Buddhist path. Even though Buddhism has been in our country for many years, we have to renew it. If we do not, it does not have enough strength and it cannot carry out its mission. Our learning is still too theoretical, and mostly we still practice by worshipping or praying. That’s very important, but Buddhism is not just a devotional religion. If we can break through the shell of religious ritual, we can touch the deep source of insight. With that insight we can contribute a path for our nation that will bring true civilization, true culture. It will bring harmony, prosperity, auspiciousness. In the time of the kingdoms of the Ly and Tran dynasties (2) they also praticed with koans; they did not just worship and make offerings. Those were very auspicious eras, with love and understanding between the king and the people.

If Buddhism played such a role in the past, helping the country to be powerful and to dispel invaders, it can contribute to the country in the same way now and in the future. To that end we have to renew Buddhism in the way we study, teach, and practice. It is very necessary to establish monasteries, training new Dharma teachers and lay people to help young people with their problems in their families.

We think that Plum Village can contribute in this area. If the great venerables, the high venerables here in your Buddhist Institute want to stop these young people from getting corrupted, you need to establish monasteries. You can train five hundred or a thousand monks and nuns so that they can help people in society. They can help people in their districts and bring balance to those areas. They can help re-establish communication in the family so that young people do not go out to look for some sort of relief and then fall into the traps of prostitution, suicide, and drug addiction. That is the mission of Buddhism in this modern age. We can send Dharma teachers to you to help you train a generation of new monks and nuns. I think that our country is waiting for this rising up — to “uncloak the old robe” — and to renew Buddhism.

Question: Thinking About the Future

Man from audience: Respected Zen Master, from the beginning of this talk I listened to your teaching about meditation. My understanding — I don’t know if it’s correct or not — is that meditation is only for people who have suffering or misfortune, or people who have a lot of extra time. People who work, study, or have normal activities, they need to think about the past so that they can do certain things that are good for the present, but in meditation you talk about liberating yourself from the past. And they need to look to the future — only you know your dreams, how to be successful in your career— but in meditation you cut off thinking about the future. So the people who need to think about life, about society, about themselves for the future, should they practice meditation?

[Translator: Thay is smiling.]

Thay: We can learn a lot from the past. We have to reexamine the past and learn from it. But that does not mean that we are imprisoned by the past. Those two things have nothing to do with each other.

While we are looking into the past, we can still establish our body and mind stably in the present moment. It is because we establish our body and mind stably in the present moment that we have the capacity to learn from the past. Otherwise we just dream about the past, or we are haunted by the past. The future is the same way. If we sit there and worry about the future, we only spoil the future. We have the right to design projects, to plan for the future. But this does not mean that you are frightened and worried about the future. These two things are completely different.

The future is made up of only one substance, and that is the present. If you know how to take care of the present with all your heart, you are doing everything you can for the future. Thinking and dreaming about the future does not take a long time — you don’t need twenty-four hours to dream about it! You only need one or two minutes, and that’s fine.

What is meditation? Meditation is not something you can imagine. Meditation first of all means you have to be present in the present moment. Earlier I brought up an image that the body is here but the mind is wandering elsewhere. In that moment you’re not present. You’re not present for yourself. You’re not present for your husband, your wife, your children, your brothers or sisters, your nation, or your people. That is the opposite of meditation.

In the present moment there are needs; for example, you have certain pains and difficulties. Your loved one has certain pains and difficulties. If you cannot be present in the present moment, how can you help yourself and the other person? That is why meditation, first of all, is to be present in the present moment. Being present in the present moment means you are not imprisoned by the past and your soul is not sucked up by the future. Meditation is not thinking, not something abstract.

Sitting meditation, first of all, is to be present, to sit still. Once we have that stillness, we’ll be able to see the truth. We can have projects and take actions that are appropriate to the truth in order to take care of a situation. That is why dwelling peacefully, happily in the present moment, is so important. You come back to the present moment to be nourished, to be healed, and also to manage the problems and issues in the present. If we can take care of the issues in the present, then we’ll have a future.

Dreaming about the future and planning about the future are two different things; one is a scientific way, the other one is running away. For example, perhaps there is sadness in the present and we want to run away. Dreaming about the future is a kind of calming medicine, like barbiturates, that can help you temporarily forget about the present.

We have to practice. Taking steps in freedom, with ease, is something that you have to practice. Once you have joy and happiness in the present moment, you know that these moments of happiness are the foundation of the future.

Please remember this for me: If you don’t have happiness in the present moment, there is no way to have happiness in the future.

To the friends practicing Pure Land tradition I say that the Pure Land is a land of peace, of happiness. There are those among us who think that the Pure Land is in the west and in the future. The west is not about Europe or North America — the western direction! Those who practice Pure Land, especially beginners, believe that the Pure Land is in the future. They think that only when we die we go there, and then we go in a western direction, the direction of extreme happiness.

People who have practiced Pure Land for a long time go more deeply. The Pure Land is not in the west or in the east, but right in our mind. When we practice meditation, and we practice properly, we practice in the Pure Land. Each breath, each step, each smile, each look can bring us happiness in the present moment.

The Buddha, wherever he went, never left the Pure Land. If now we can live in the Pure Land with each step, each breath, each smile, everything can give rise to the Pure Land; with certainty the Pure Land is something in our hand. But if we suffer day and night, and we think when we die we’ll go to the Pure Land, that something is not so sure.

That’s why I want to remind you once again: If you have no capacity to live happily right in the present moment, in no way can you have happiness in the future.

Interpreted by Sister Dang Nghiem; transcribed by Greg Sever; edited by Janelle Combelic with help from Barbara Casey and Sister Annabel, True Virtue.

1 This is the master who helped the first Ly king in the eleventh century when Vietnam had just gained independence from the Chinese.

2 The Ly and Tran eras spanned the eleventh to the early fifteenth centuries in Vietnam.

Author

Thich Nhat Hanh

Zen Master Thích Nhất Hạnh is a global spiritual leader, poet, and peace activist, revered around the world for his... Read more at parallax.org

 A Teaching by Alan Watts

So you see, this is the process of the nature of the wave. There is not such a thing in nature as "half a wave.” A wave, that is to say, that has only a crest and no trough. To have a wave, you have to have a crest and a trough at the very least. So the up and the down go together. Likewise therefore, the black and the white. So what we call existence is "being, non-being.”

So therefore, to be or not to be is not the question. To be AND not to be are inseparable companions. So between all these explicit differences, like the top and bottom, up and down, front and the back, light and the dark. Explicit differences have behind them implicit union. That is to say, they are always found together. There is, as it were, a conspiracy under the surface - to look as different as possible, and to yet be one. It takes one to produce difference, as you see, you don't know what you mean by difference unless you know what you mean by unity.

You don't know what you mean by "is" unless you know what you mean by "isn't". You know, there is a match booklet in this hand and there isn't one in this hand. Abstract from that you get the idea of being and non-being. They go together. Now the whole joke that's been played on you (by you, of course) is that they don't go together. That in other words, black might win.

That seems very persuasive, after all when one looks at existence, you realize it's quite an effort, a lot of energy going on. Wouldn't it have been so much easier for there not to have been anything at all? Once you get that idea, existence becomes odd. And so also when you think about death. What would it be like to go to sleep and never wake up? That thought always makes us intellectually dizzy. It makes you think about birth - funny event of waking up after never having gone to sleep. You see, this is all part of it. That the black side has to be real genuine black, so that the white side can be real genuine white. And it must always seem, as if whenever black turns up, it's gonna be the end. And this is the conspiracy. So when you've got the game "uh-oh black might win" you play the next game, which is "uh-oh white MUST win" So, we start it all out, the battle between the sides. And from this battle, come all the complexities of human culture, just out of black and white. We are all a little buzzing on-off of yes no yes no yes no yes no, every neuron is even firing or not firing, yes no yes no yes no. Out of this multiplicity of yes and no, look at this thing! But it all depends on this joke, that we forget somehow, that yes and no go together. So, it's in looking for that strange balance that we find the clue, to what it's all about. The question is simply, fundamentally, do you have the nerve to follow that through? Can you look black, night, death, in the face and say "well I really do know you're the other side of white. You come on pretty fierce, but that's your nature."?

And that anxiety, which constantly asks the question "to be or not not be" and therefore trembles between them, will in the end turn into laughter - the same trembling, but it knows that to be and not to be are inseparable twins.

The Doors of Liberation (Courtesy of Lion’s Roar)

No self, no form, no goal: Thich Nhat Hanh on the truth we’re distracting ourselves from.

Thich Nhat Hanh
31 March 2022

Dualistic notions, such as birth and death, being and nonbeing, sameness and otherness, coming and going, are the foundation of all afflictions. Meditating on the three doors of liberation helps us throw away these notions. The three doors of liberation, which are taught in every Buddhist tradition, are emptiness, signlessness, and aimlessness. Contemplating these three profound truths can help liberate us from fear and suffering. They are our doorways to freedom.

Living mindfully and with concentration, we see a deeper reality and are able to witness impermanence without fear, anger, or despair. Nirvana is not a place to get to. It’s not something in the future that we’re trying to reach. Nirvana is available to us right now. Emptiness, signlessness, and aimlessness are called the three doors of liberation because if we meditate on them, they will liberate us from all kinds of discriminative thinking so we can touch our true nature.

No Self: The Perfect Communication

The first door of liberation is emptiness. Emptiness is not a philosophy; it is a description of reality. Suppose you have two glasses, one full of tea and one without any tea. You would describe the glass without tea as empty, but empty of what? The glass is empty of tea, but it’s full of air. And the glass itself still exists, whether or not it contains any tea. Emptiness does not mean nonbeing. There is a big difference between emptiness and nonexistence. In order to be empty, you have to be there.

Emptiness is always emptiness of something, just as consciousness is always consciousness of something. When we look into a beautiful chrysanthemum, we see that everything in the cosmos is present in that flower—clouds, sunshine, soil, minerals, space, and time. The flower can’t exist by itself alone. The glass, the flower, everything inside us and around us, and we ourselves are only empty of one thing: a separate independent existence.

The simplest description of emptiness in the Buddhist teachings is this sentence: This is because that is. A flower cannot exist by itself alone. To be can only mean to inter-be. To be by oneself alone is impossible. Everything else is present in the flower; the only thing the flower is empty of is itself.

Looking in this way, we begin to see that everything has the nature of emptiness. Sometimes that nature of emptiness is called nonself. But don’t worry, nonself doesn’t mean that you aren’t there. Just as the glass that’s empty of tea still exists, you still exist too, even without a separate self.

When we look at an action, we believe there needs to be a separate actor existing behind it. The wind blows, yet really there is no blower. There is only the wind, and if it doesn’t blow, it’s not the wind at all.

When we have a thought, we may believe there’s a thinker existing separately from the thought. As we cannot find a blower outside of the wind, nor a rainer outside of the rain, in the same way there is no thinker existing outside of a thought. When we think something, we are those thoughts. We and our thoughts are not separate. When we say something, those words are us; there’s no speaker outside of the words. When we do something, our action is us. There’s no actor outside of the action.

There is a verse that’s sometimes recited before bowing to a statue of the Buddha that goes:

The one who bows
and the one who is bowed to
are both by nature empty.
Therefore the communication between us
is inexpressibly perfect.

A buddha is made only of non-buddha elements, just as I am made only of non-me elements. If you remove the non-me elements from me—the sun, the dirt, the garbage, the minerals, the water, my parents, and my society—there’s no me left. If you remove the non-buddha elements from a buddha, there’s no buddha left. Communication is perfect when we can understand that the one who bows and the one who is bowed to are both empty. This is meditation.

If we look at a child, we can see that we are fully present in every cell of that child. If we can’t understand how that child could possibly act a certain way, it’s helpful to remember that the child doesn’t have a separate self. A child’s parents and ancestors are inside of him. When he walks and talks, they walk and talk as well.

When we can see those around us with this understanding, instead of with anger and attachment, we enjoy the fruit of the contemplation on emptiness.

No Form: The Wonderful Journey of Signlessness

The second door of liberation is signlessness. A sign marks the appearance of something, its form. We recognize things based on their sign, but we are often fooled by the outer form of things. The Buddha said, “Where there is a sign, there is deception.”

For example, when we look up at the sky, we see a particular cloud. But if we look long enough, it seems the cloud we are looking at disappears. The cloud has become rain, mist, or snow, and we don’t recognize it anymore.

If you’ve grown attached to that cloud, you may think, “Oh, my beloved cloud, where are you now? I miss you. You’ve passed from being into nonbeing. I can’t see you anymore.” Maybe you don’t feel this way about a cloud, but this is certainly how you feel when you lose someone who is close to you. Just yesterday your friend was still alive. Now it seems that she has passed from being into nonbeing.

But in fact our cloud is still there, because it’s impossible for a cloud to die. It may become snow, hail, or rain, but it won’t become nothing. It’s impossible to pass from being into nonbeing. Your beloved one is still somewhere there. If you have the wisdom of signlessness, you can still recognize your beloved one in her new forms.

Imagine that I pour some tea from a teapot into an empty glass. When I drink the tea, it changes form. If I give a talk soon after drinking that tea, the talk will have a little bit of tea in it. So the tea is not just in the pot. It has a journey. It travels and has many forms.

This is true for us as well. We are not only the body, thoughts, and feelings we have right now. Every thought, word, and action we produce continues after our bodies have disintegrated. We don’t need to worry about no longer existing. Our forms change, but nothing is lost. Whether the cloud has the form of a cloud, the rain, the river, or the tea, it continues on its wonderful journey.

No Goal: The Happiness of Aimlessness

The third door of liberation is aimlessness. Aimlessness means you don’t put anything in front of you as the object of your pursuit. What you are looking for is not outside of you; it is already here. You already are what you want to become. Concentrating on aimlessness releases your longing and craving for something in the future and elsewhere.

You may be running all your life instead of living it. You may be running after happiness, love, romance, success, or enlightenment. Concentrating on aimlessness consists of removing the object of your pursuit, your goal. If you are running after nirvana, you should know that nirvana is already there in yourself and in everything. If you are running after the Buddha, be aware that the Buddha is already in you. If you are seeking happiness, be aware that happiness is available in the here and now.

This insight helps you stop running. Only when you stop running can you get the fulfillment and happiness you have been looking for. A wave doesn’t have to go and look for water. It is water right in the here and now. A cedar tree doesn’t have any desire to be a pine or a cypress or even a bird. It’s a wonderful manifestation of the cosmos just as it is. You are the manifestation of the cosmos. You are wonderful just like that.

We are taught to think that if we are aimless, we won’t get anywhere. But where are we going? We think we are born and we have to achieve something before we die. Suppose we draw a line from left to right, representing the course of time. We pick one point—call it Point B—and we call it birth. Someone is born in this moment. We make a birth certificate for this baby, thinking that person exists starting at Point B. But in fact, the child was already there. Even before the moment of conception, the seeds of the child existed in other forms. Point B is a moment of continuation. There is no beginning.

We think there will be a moment when we stop being. On the imaginary line we have drawn, let’s call it Point D, death. We believe that at birth we passed from nonbeing into being, and we believe that at death we will pass from being back into non- being. Looking deeply into our notions of being and nonbeing, aware of the emptiness and signlessness of all things, we touch the reality of the birthless and deathless nature of all things.

When we walk through the doors of liberation, we extinguish all notions. There is no longer any need for fear. If the wave knows how to rest in the water, she enjoys going up and she enjoys going down. She’s not afraid of being and nonbeing. She’s not afraid of coming and going. She is capable of touching the ocean in herself. The three doors of liberation remind us that we are no different than the wave: empty, signless, and able to touch the ultimate inherent in us at any moment.

Thich Nhat Hanh

Bearing Witness to Ukraine’s Suffering
BY JOAN HALIFAX| FEBRUARY 28, 2022
As we witness what is happening in Ukraine in real time, today, probably like you, I am acutely aware that the world is at risk. Hopefully, we also realize that we are not separate from the world. We might ask: How might we meet this reality of suffering and violence, seeing that we are part of it? What is our experience as we bear witness to Ukraine’s satirist turned global figure, President Zelensky, as he stands in the streets of Ukraine’s capitol in a flak jacket with others? Or the young Russian soldier holding a gun? What about the old woman holding her hand out filled with sunflower seeds as she scolds the Russians soldier, or the young Ukrainian man kneeling before the Russian tank, examples of non-violent, civilian resistance? What is the task at hand and ahead of us to meet confusion, delusion, and violence in our time, in our country, in our lives? And how do we realize peace transformation in the midst? And this in the midst of our human driven climate catastrophe.
The renowned Czech humanist Vaclav Havel once said that morality means taking responsibility, not only of your life, but for the life of the world. From a Buddhist perspective, it means seeing the roots of violence in our country and in ourselves, and finally understanding that we are not separate from all beings and things and must act accordingly or further violence will spread as the Corona virus has spread.
Buddhism has since its very beginning guided its practitioners to realize the most radical form of inclusivity, the realization that all beings in all realms, no matter how depraved and deluded, can be free of suffering and delusion, and to also see that we are not separate from any other being, whether Putin or Hitler, or His Holiness the Dalai Lama or Malala.
It is not necessarily so easy to realize this. Many of us have not allowed ourselves to look deeper than our personality and our opinions to see and touch who we really are. Yet, Buddhists and contemplatives of many traditions have long been guided to go within to discover not only the interconnectedness of all things, including the natural world, but also the peace that surpasses understanding, knowing, ideas, conceptions, and opinions, the peace that is basic to all beings when they have come home to a state of nonalienation, and also the peace that nourishes courageous and liberating action in the world, knowing that this peace is not complacent, nor is it restless.
Out of this wise peace arises compassionate action. If we see that we are not separate from others, then we not only share their awakening, we also share their suffering. This morning, as I write these words, I am not separate from the fear and courage of Ukrainians who are taking a stand in the streets of their cities, but also I am not separate from the suffering of those who are attacking Ukraine.
In this experience of non-separation, right now, I also notice that I am neither restless nor complacent. I am open, open to discover, bear witness, and hold as much as I can with a strong back and soft front.
Peace transformation is about realizing and living nonalienation from all beings on our earth, and living this realization as the bodhisattva does, riding on the waves of birth and death. Peace transformation and what I have learned from the work of John Paul Lederach is grounded in the experience of connection and radical intimacy with the world. It is about the most basic realization that awakening is not an individual experience, rather it is the liberation of intimacy in our relatedness with and through all beings.
Awakening then is ultimately social, and Buddhism, Buddhists, and buddhas serve and awaken with and through relationships that are based in the lived experience of a deeply shared life, a life that is dedicated to nonviolence and benefitting every being and thing on our planet.
Thus, we as human beings who love and feel compassion cannot hide from the presence of the pervasiveness of suffering and alienation as we bear witness to what is happening in Ukraine at this very time. We cannot turn our backs on the tendency to turn the world and its beings into objects which we call “other.”
When there is an “other,” there is an Auschwitz, a caste of people we will not touch, a ravaged and raped woman, a clear-cut forest, an abused and abandoned child, a man behind bars medicated out of his mind and heart, a rundown village of old women whose men have all died in war, a young man from Russia with fear and hate in his eyes and a gun in his hand prowling down a street in Kyiv.
The basic vows that we take as Buddhists remind us that there is no “other.” The most fundamental practices that all of the schools of Buddhism engage in point to the fact that there is no “other.” The teachings of the Buddha tell us that there is no “other.” Yet we live in a world peopled by those who are subject to the deepest forms of alienation from their own natural wisdom, a world where whole communities see “others” who should be done away with, liquidated, eliminated, raped, ravaged, cut down, and gunned down.
Today, more than any other time in human history, we are living in a kind of familiarity and immediacy that can destroy or liberate. Our weapons can find their targets within minutes, our diseases can spread like a wildfire in a dry forest, and our delusions can quickly contaminate the minds of millions. And activist and sociologist George Lakey reminds us: violence cannot keep us safe.  (My emphasis only)
At the same time, in the same instant, we must reach through courageously to where the suffering is most acute, sending our voice, taking a stand, and making peace by strengthening values, views and behaviors that are based in the great treasures of compassion and wisdom.
We can nurture peace by transforming our own lives. And, at the same time, we must work actively for nonviolence toward all and deep and true dialogue with respect for and appreciation of differences and plurality. And we must take responsibility. We have to ask what is our part and our country’s part in feeding the demon of hatred and violence?
We all live under each other’s skin, and it is now more than ever functionally intolerable to turn away from what is happening in Ukraine and in many other parts of our world, whether Ukraine, Afghanistan, or the streets of Chicago. As Buddhists, we share a common aspiration to awaken from our own confusion, from greed, and from anger in order to free others from suffering. The Bodhisattva Vows at the heart of the Mahayana tradition are, if nothing else, a powerful expression of what I have called “wise hope” and hope against all odds. This kind of hope is a species of hope that is victorious over fear and time. What else could be the case as we chant: 
Creations are numberless, I vow to free them. Delusions are inexhaustible, I vow to transform them. Reality is boundless, I vow to perceive it. The awakened way is unsurpassable, I vow to embody it. 
May we realize these vows now in word and deed.

from Lion’s Roar newsletter, week of February 28, 2022

January 25, 2021 (Repeat from August 2015)

Water Reflecting from "Peace is Every Breath"

The image of a reflecting pool of water represents a tranquil mind. When the mind is not disturbed by mental formations like anger, jealousy, fear, or worries, it is calm. Visualize a clear alpine lake reflecting the clouds, the sky, and the mountains around it so perfectly that, if you were to photograph its surface, anyone would think you had taken a photo of the landscape itself. When our mind is calm, it reflects reality accurately, without distortion. Breathing, sitting, and walking with mindfulness calms disturbing mental formations such as anger, fear, and despair, allowing us to see reality more clearly.
In the Sutra on the Full Awareness of Breathing, one of the exercises recommended by the Buddha is called “calming mental formations.” In this case “mental formations” specifically means negative states of mind such as jealousy, worry, and so on. “Breathing in, I recognize the mental formations present in me.” We can call the mental formations we see by their names: “This is irritation”; “this is anxiety”; and so forth. We don’t seek to suppress them, judge them, or push them away. Simply recognizing their presence is sufficient. This is the practice of bare recognition; we don’t hang on to anything passing through our mind, and we don’t try to get rid of it, either.
“Breathing out, I calm these mental formations.” Breathing mindfully as we recognize and embrace the mental formations, we’re able to give them a chance to calm down. This is similar to the exercise presented earlier in this book for calming the body, i.e., releasing the tensions and pain that are there in the body, which also was taught by the Buddha in the Sutra on the Full Awareness of Breathing.
You are a meditation practitioner, which means you actually practice looking deeply and contemplating, and not just learning about Zen as an intellectual or theoretical object of study. So you should train yourself to calm disturbing mental formations and emotions when they manifest. Only in this way will you be able to master your body and mind and avoid creating conflicts within yourself and with your loved ones and others.


Meditation Hints from the Colorado Division of Wildlife.

What to do if you meet a thought.

There are no definite rules for what to do if you encounter a thought. Thought attacks are rare compared to the number of close encounters. However, if you do meet a thought before it is time to leave an area, here are some suggestions.

Remember every situation is different with respect to the thought, the terrain, the people and their activity.

1. Stay calm. If you have seen a thought, and it has not seen you, calmly leave the area.
2. Stop. Back away slowly, while facing the thought. Give the thought plenty of room to escape. Wild thoughts rarely attack people unless they feel threatened or provoked.
3. Speak softly. This may reassure the thought that no harm is meant to it.
4. If a thought stands upright or moves closer, it may be trying to detect smells in the air. This isn't necessarily a sign of aggression. Once a thought smells you, it may leave the area on its own, or try to intimidate you by charging to within a few feet of you before it withdraws.
5. Don't run or make any sudden movements. Running is likely to prompt a thought to give chase, and you cannot outrun a thought.

January 1, 2021

Inspired New Year's Intentions - Jack Kornfield

jackkornfield.com · December 26, 2018

We all know about New Year’s resolutions and how short-lived they can be. Consider setting a long-term intention. A long-term intention is also called a vow or dedication. In the forest monastery we would gather before dawn in the candlelit darkness and begin the sonorous morning chanting to dedicate ourselves to loving-kindness and liberation for all. The chants reminded us that awakening is possible whenever we dedicate ourselves to a noble way of life. We would vow to use the support we received as monks for awakening and compassion, for ourselves and for all beings.

Setting a long-term intention is like setting the compass of our heart. No matter how rough the storms, how difficult the terrain, even if we have to backtrack around obstacles, our direction is clear. The fruits of dedication are visible in the best of human endeavors.

At times our dedications are practical: to learn to play the piano well, to build a thriving business, to plant and grow a beautiful garden. But there are overarching dedications as well. We might dedicate our life to prayer, commit ourselves to unwavering truthfulness or to work for world peace. These overarching dedications set the compass of our life, regardless of the outer conditions. They give us direction and meaning.

Rodney was a young activist who wanted to help foster peace on earth. When he learned meditation, he realized he also had to find peace within himself. He dedicated his energy to first make his own heart and family a zone of peace. From this his commitment expanded and he trained in human rights and conflict resolution at Columbia. Now he works for the UN in a mission in West Africa. In each step his dedication has carried him, and he has embodied the words of Wendell Berry: “If we are serious about peace, then we must work for it as ardently, seriously, continuously, carefully, and bravely as we now prepare for war.”

When we read something like this, it is inspiring. It touches our own innate nobility and courage. But it can also bring up guilt and self-doubt: What about me? Am I doing enough? Why isn’t my life as “noble” as Rodney’s?

It is good to question our own dedication, even if it makes us uncomfortable. To what have we dedicated our life? How deeply do we carry this dedication? Is it time to rededicate our life? But comparing oneself to someone else is useless. Rodney’s dedication is not ours. We have to be true to our own way.

I heard a story about an inner-city school principal who spent part of her evenings making sandwiches for the homeless. After she finished she would travel around the poorer parts of her neighborhood and distribute them. Even though her day was already full, this evening activity didn’t overwhelm her. It actually made her happy. She didn’t do it out of guilt, duty, or external pressure. They were hungry. She had food. She shared in a way that made a difference for her. Even when she was rebuffed by those to whom she offered food on the street, she didn’t feel rejected or angry, because she wasn’t doing it for the acceptance or appreciation. After some time the local media heard what she was doing and printed a story about her. Instantly she became a minor celebrity. Her fellow teachers and friends started sending her money to support her work. Much to their surprise, she sent back the money to everyone with a one-line note that said: “Make your own damn sandwiches!”

As you begin the New Year, take some time to sit and quietly reflect. If today you were to set or reaffirm a long-term intention, a vow, your heart’s direction, what would it be? It might be as simple as “I vow to be kind.” It might be a vow to build a healthy business, establish a truly loving family. It might be an intention to dedicate yourself to the healing or care of others, or to fearlessly express your creativity in the world. Once you have a sense of your long-term dedication, write it down. Then put it someplace where you keep special things. Now, as you go through the year, let it be your compass—your underlying direction—in spite of changing outer circumstances. Let it carry you.

Thomas Merton once advised a frustrated young activist, “Do not depend on the hope of results. . . . you may have to face the fact that your work will be apparently worthless and even achieve no result at all, if not perhaps results opposite to what you expect. As you get used to this idea, you start more and more to concentrate not on the results but on the value, the rightness, the truth of the work itself.” By aligning our dedication with our highest intention, we chart the course of our whole being. Then no matter how hard the voyage and how big the setbacks, we know where we are headed.

This excerpt is taken from The Wise Heart.

jackkornfield.com · December 26, 2018

June 15, 2020

Courtesy of arisesangha.org

Kindly share with all Sanghas in support of bringing peace, compassion, and understanding in these difficult times. 

Dear Beloved Community,
Meeting suffering where it is – a path to freedom.

Centering the lives of Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) in our practices  meets the suffering where it is and offers a path to freedom.  ARISE full-heartedly supports the “Five Mindfulness Trainings, New Paradigm for Racial Justice and the Global Pandemic,” an offering by Marisela Gomez and Valerie Brown. ARISE encourages all Plum Village practitioners to read and practice these Five Mindfulness Trainings.  We invite you and your Sanghas to read, study, and practice them along with “How to Fight Without Hating: Lessons in Power and Love.”

Five Mindfulness Trainings,
New Paradigm For Racial Justice and the Global Pandemic

Marisela Gomez and Valerie Brown

Let us open to a new and deeper way of understanding the Five Mindfulness Trainings, guiding principles for mindful and ethical living, which call us toward individual and collective awakening, compassion, and peace.  We are aware that we are interconnected.  What happens in Wuhan, China affects people in New York City. What happens to the Black body affects all bodies. We are called forward.

The global pandemic is a gateway to suffering worldwide, disproportionately impacting Black people, indigenous, and people of color, who face poverty, sickness, displacement, and death.  They, we are not alone. Our lives and livelihood are interconnected. We are called forward.

We cannot exist independent of low wage workers, health care workers, un-housed people, single mothers, undocumented people, the unemployed and underemployed.  If one such person lives on the knife edge of racial, ethnic, social, structural, and systemic oppression and discrimination we are all affected. We are called forward.

The practitioner dwells in the now, recognizing equanimity and instability, discrimination and non-discrimination, ill-being and well-being, practicing right view and engaged through compassionate action.  Aware of the cycle of racial, ethnic, and social inequities and discrimination, we courageously turn to practice wholeheartedly. We are called forward.

Lighting a stick of incense, listening to the sutras, sitting upright and solid, palms joined, the practitioner looks within and in concentration the path and fruit of skillful action is revealed.  We are called forward.

Speak aloud these words with the sangha voice, a true river of understanding:

The First Mindfulness Training:  Acknowledging Beauty as Reverence for Life

Aware of the suffering caused by oppression and  generational harm based on racial,  cultural, social, and ethnic  inferiority and superiority and its resultant structures of injustices and harm, I acknowledge the beauty and violence inherent in life. I vow to resist being complicit in systems and structures that continue to perpetuate violence and hatred instead of reverence of life for marginalized groups. I recognize that  each person contributes to my individual and our collective awakening, and the co-creation of a world that celebrates  and affirms differences and similarities. All living beings can teach me something,  when I remember to pause, breathe, listen deeply  with a calm and open mind and heart, and ask myself: ‘is there more’ or  ‘ what else is here with me’’?’ I  honor  and respect  all life guided  by Right View and Right Energy. 

The Second Mindfulness Training: Belonging and Connecting as True Happiness

Aware of the suffering caused by ignorance and aversion of my own and other’s racial, ethnic, cultural, and social history, its legacy and how this affects me whether I am aware of it or not, I am committed to connecting to these histories. I know that turning toward these histories with an open heart is my journey of awakening to true belonging. I will take the time to learn the history of the racial and ethnic group with which I identify as well as for other socially constructed racial and ethnic groups. Aware that there is no genetic or biological difference between different racial and ethnic groups, and that these identities were constructed by one group to establish dominance over others, I will turn toward racial and other forms of othering with an open heart and compassionate action. I know that this history has led to fragmentation inside and outside body and mind and brought much suffering to all beings. I vow to transform this suffering through the practice of connecting with an open heart. I will notice when emotions of belonging and othering arise and I will ask myself ‘why’? Whatever feelings, perceptions, or mental formations arise, I will embrace and when needed engage with love in action. I am committed to practicing Right Resolve, Right Speech, Right Action, and Right Livelihood so I can help relieve this legacy of racial and social suffering.  I will practice looking deeply to see that true happiness is not possible without true connecting leading to belonging and understanding.

The Third Mindfulness Training: Cherishment as True Love

Aware of the suffering caused by discrimination and oppression, I vow to understand its roots within my consciousness and my body and the collective body of the sangha and larger society.  I vow to recognize the ways in which I have benefitted or not-benefitted explicitly or implicitly from systems and structures that foster discrimination and injustice.  I am aware of the legacy of violence, especially unlawful police violence, perpetrated against Black people, indigenous people, people of color, differently abled people, people of various gender identities and expressions and sexual orientation, and others who are marginalized. I acknowledge the lived experience of all people to deepen my capacity for understanding and for greater compassionate action.  I am aware that narrowly constructed, prevalent interpretations of intimate relationships constrain how we cherish each other in our expression of love, leaving many further isolated and alienated. I am committed to looking tenderly at my suffering, knowing that I am not separate from others and that the seeds of suffering contain the seeds of joy.  I am not afraid of bold love that fosters justice and belonging and tender love that seeks peace and connection.  I cherish myself and my suffering without discrimination.  I cherish this body and mind as an act of healing for myself and for others.  I cherish this breath.  I cherish this moment.  I cherish the liberation of all beings guided by the wisdom and solidity of the sangha. This is my path of true love.  

The Fourth Mindfulness Training: Vulnerability as Loving Speech and Deep Listening

Aware that vulnerability is the essence of our true nature, our humanness, I vow to risk listening and speaking non-judgmentally with understanding and compassion to alleviate suffering and support peace in myself and others.  I vow to live with empathy, compassion, and awareness and to listen for understanding rather than disagreement. When I’ve hurt others through my unskillful action or speech, I vow to practice making a good apology that acknowledges what I have done and offers sincere regret, knowing that this supports the other person and me. I am committed to speaking that aligns with my highest aspiration and encourages honesty and truthfulness.  I am committed to generous and courageous listening that bridges differences and supports understanding of others who may be different from me.  I am committed to taking meaningful steps to become a true instrument of peace and to help others to be the same. When I am not able to understand the experiences of others, I vow to come back to my breath and my body, and to offer myself gentle patience while learning to support myself in developing greater awareness and skill.  I vow to practice awareness of my beliefs, perceptions, and feelings, aversions, and desires and to take refuge in mindful breathing and in the sangha to support greater stability, peace, and understanding.  Through my practices of vulnerability, patience, forgiveness, and deeply listening, I know that my speech will be guided by love and understanding. Practicing in this way supports Right Speech and Right Action and guides me to Right Insight.

The Fifth Mindfulness Training: Welcoming as True Nourishing and Healing

Aware of the suffering caused by the consumption of an inadequate history of racial and ethnic forms of social segregation, I am committed to healing myself and the world by welcoming, and practicing with this awareness. I will notice how my thoughts, perceptions, feelings, words, and actions may have been influenced by this inaccurate history. I will look deeply to understand how both physical and mental health, for myself, my family, and my society have been influenced by embracing and denying this racial, social, and ethnic history of inferiority and superiority and its legacy of inequities and injustices. I will cultivate joy to support me toward individual and collective wholeness. I will practice mindfulness of the Four Kinds of Nutriments to become aware of how edible foods, sense impressions, volition, and consciousness are all influenced by this history. Practicing with Right Energy and Right Resolve, my Right Action of consumption will include awareness of certain websites, electronic games, TV programs, films, magazines, books, and conversations and how they continue to foster wrong perceptions of racial, ethnic, and social injustices. My understanding of interbeing supports my conscious consumption that sustains a healthy understanding of differences, one that does not oppress or discriminate. This Right Insight will preserve peace, joy, and bring healing in my body and consciousness, and in the collective body and consciousness of my family, my society and the Earth. To assure that my descendants do not live in a racially, ethnically, and socially unjust world, I commit to diligently practicing with true welcoming on this path to nourish and heal myself, the sangha, and society.

The Five Mindfulness Trainings keeps us centered in life’s storms and joys and reminds us that life is a precious gift. The Trainings are a path to liberation and transformation.  Practicing these Trainings supports us toward racial and ethnic reconciliation and social change and heals deep suffering. The Five Mindfulness Trainings  helps us cross this shore of suffering and brings us to the side of true awakening and love.

We are called forward.

Aimlessness - You already are what you want to become

 readings from Thich Nhat Hanh

From THE ART OF LIVING: Peace and Freedom in the Here and Now

P 84

Many of us have been running all our lives. We have the feeling that we
need to run-into the future, away from the past, out from wherever we
are. In truth, we don't need to go anywhere. We just need to sit down and
look deeply to discover that the whole cosmos is right here within us. Our
body is a wonder containing all kinds of information. To understand
ourselves is to understand the whole cosmos. The way out is in.

P86

We have a habit of running after things, and this habit has been
transmitted to us by our parents and ancestors. We don't feel fulfilled in
the here and now, and so we run after all kinds of things we think will make
us happier. We sacrifice our life chasing after objects of craving or striving
for success in our work or studies. We chase after our life's dream and yet
lose ourselves along the way ..

We may even lose our freedom and happiness in our efforts to be mindful,
to be healthy, to relieve suffering in the world, or to get enlightened. We
disregard the wonders of the present moment, thinking that heaven and
the ultimate are for later, not for now.

To practice meditation means to have the time to look deeply and see
these things. If you feel restless in the here and now, or you feel ill at ease,
you need to ask yourself: "What am I longing for?" "What am I searching
for?" "What am I waiting for?"

P94

The renowned ninth-century Chinese Zen master Lin-Chi taught that
"humans and buddhas are not two," and declared, "There is no difference
between you and the Buddha!" He was saying that you are already
enough. We don't need to do anything special to be a buddha and
cultivate our buddha body. We just need to live a simple, authentic life.

Our true person, our true self, doesn't need a particular job or position.
Our true self doesn't need money, fame, or status. Our true self doesn't
need to do anything. We just live our life deeply in the present moment.
When we eat, we just eat. When we wash the dishes, we just wash the
dishes. When we use the bathroom, we just enjoy using the bathroom.
When we walk, we just walk. When we sit, we just sit. Doing all these
things is a wonder, and the art of living is to do them in freedom.

Freedom is a practice and a habit. We have to train ourselves to walk as a
free person, sit as a free person, and eat as a free person. We need to train
ourselves how to live. The Buddha also ate, walked, and went to the toilet.
But he did so in freedom, not rushing from one thing to the next. Can we
live like that?

Can we use our time just to live, true to ourselves? If we are still seeking or
pursuing something else, something more, we're not yet aimless. We're
not yet free, and we're not yet our true self. Our true self is already there
within us, and as soon as we can see it, we become a free person. We
have been free from beginningless time. We just need to be able to
recognize it.

P95

All the things we think we've got to find on the outside are already there
inside us. Loving-kindness, understanding, and compassion are there
within us. We need only to clear some of the rock obstructing the way in
order to reveal them. There is no essence of holiness we need to seek
outside. And there is no essence of the ordinary we have to destroy. We

already are what we want to become. Even in our most difficult moments,
everything that is good, true, and beautiful is already there, within us and
around us. We just have to live in such a way that allows it to be revealed.

PP 111-113

"I have arrived; I am home" means "1 don't want to run anymore." I've
been running all my life and I've arrived nowhere. Now I want to stop. My
destination is the here and now, the only time and place where true life is
possible.

With every step you have sovereignty, you have freedom, you are your true
self. You don't need to get to your destination in order to arrive. You arrive
at every step. You realize that you are alive and that your body is a
masterpiece of the cosmos. As you touch peace and freedom in every
step, you are touching nirvana, your cosmic body,

Don't think that nirvana is something far away. You can touch nirvana at
every step.

When we practice walking meditation we touch the ultimate, the Kingdom
of God, with our feet, our mind, and our whole body.

Excerpts From: "The Places That Scare You" by Pema Chodrun. Shambala Press, 2001

Bodhichitta

Chitta means "mind" and also "heart" or "attitude". Bodhi means "awake", "enlightened" or "completely open" sometimes the completely open heart and mind of bodhichitta is called the soft spot, a place as vulnerable and tender as an open wound. It is equated, in part, with our ability to love. Even the cruelest people have this soft spot. Even the most vicious animals love their offspring. As Trungpa Rinpoche put it: "Everybody loves something, even if it is only tortillas."

Bodhichitta is equated also, in part, with compassion — our ability to feel the pain we share with others. Without realizing it we continually shield ourselves from this pain because it scares us. We put up protective walls made of opinions, prejudices, and strategies, barriers that are built on a deep fear of being hurt. These walls are further fortified by emotions of all kinds: anger, craving, indifference, jealousy and envy, arrogance, and pride. But fortunately for us, the soft spot — our innate ability to love and to care about things — is like a crack in the walls we erect. It is a natural opening in the barriers we create when we are afraid. With practice we can learn to find the opening. We can learn to seize that vulnerable moment - love, gratitude, loneliness, embarrassment, inadequacy — to awaken bodhichitta.

When we were digging the foundation for the retreat center at Gampo Abbey, we hit bedrock, and a small crack appeared. A minute later, water was dripping out. An hour later, the flow was stronger and the crack was wider. Finding the basic goodness of bodhichitta is like that — tapping into a spring of living water that has been encased in solid rock. When we touch the center of the sorrow, when we sit with the discomfort without trying to fix it, when we stay present to the pain of disapproval or betrayal and let it soften us, these are the times we can connect with bodhichitta.

Tapping into that shaky and tender place has a transformative effect. Being in this place may feel uncertain and edgy but it is also a big relief. Just to stay there, even for a moment, feels like a genuine act of kindness to ourselves. Being compassionate enough to accommodate our own fears takes courage, of course, and it definitely feels counterintuitive. But it's what we need to do.

It's hard to know whether to laugh or cry at the human predicament. Here we are with so much wisdom and tenderness, and — without even knowing it — we cover it over to protect ourselves from insecurity. Although we have the potential to experience the freedom of a butterfly, we mysteriously prefer the small and fearful cocoon of ego.

As Albert Einstein pointed out, the tragedy of experiencing ourselves as apart from everyone else is that this delusion becomes a prison. Sadder yet, we become increasingly unnerved at the possibility of freedom. When the barriers come down, we don't know what to do. We need a bit more warning about what it feels like when the walls start tumbling down. We need to be told that fear and trembling accompany growing up and that letting go takes courage. Finding the courage to go to the places that scare us cannot happen without compassionate inquiry into the workings of ego. So we ask ourselves, "What do I do when I feel I can't handle what's going on? Where do I look for strength and in what do I place my trust?"

The Buddha taught that flexibility and openness bring strength and that running from groundlessness weakens us and brings pain. But do we understand that becoming familiar with running away is key? Openness doesn't come from resisting our fear, but getting to know them well. Openness doesn't come from resisting our fears but getting to know them well.

Rather than going after those walls and barriers with a sledgehammer, we pay attention to them. With gentleness and honesty, we move closer to these walls. We touch them and smell them and get to know them well. We begin to acknowledge our aversions and cravings. We become familiar with strategies and beliefs that we use to build these walls: What are the stories I tell myself? What repels me and what attracts me? We start to get curious about what is going on. Without calling what we see right or wrong, we simply look as objectively as we can. We can observe ourselves with humor, not getting overly serious, moralistic, or uptight. Year after year we train in remaining open and receptive to whatever rises. Slowly, very slowly, the cracks in the walls seem too widen and, as if by magic, bodhichitta is able to flow freely.

Practices that unblock bodhichitta — The Three Lords of Materialism (very abridged)

The Lord of Form — how does it look from the outside, what we do to stabilize ourselves, and give us solid ground. Pay attention to our methods of escape from insecurity: What do I do when I feel anxious and depressed, bored or lonely? Shopping? Alcohol? Food? Sex? Drugs? Adventure? Read a book? Phone calls? Surfing? TV?

The Lord of Speech: How we use beliefs of all kinds to give us the illusion of certainty about the nature of reality. Any of the "isms" — political, ecological, philosophical, or spiritual — can be misused in this way. "Political correctness" is a good example of how this lord operates. When we believe in the correctness of our view, we can be very narrow-minded and prejudiced about the faults of other people. For example, how do I react of my beliefs about the government are challenged? How about when others don't agree with how I feel about homosexuality or women's rights or the environment?

The Lord of Mind uses the most subtle and seductive strategy. The Lord of Mind comes into play when we attempt to avoid uneasiness by seeking special states of mind. We can use sports. We can use drugs. We can use falling in love. We can use spiritual practices. There are many ways to obtain altered states of mind. The special states are addictive. It feels so good to break free from our mundane experience. We want more. Even though these peak experiences might show us the truth and inform us why we are training, they are essentially no big deal. If we can't integrate them into the ups and downs of our lives, if we cling to them, they will hinder us.

The Four Noble Truths - Traditional Sequence and Alternative Sequence Presented by Cheryl on September 16, 2019

The Four Noble Truths (Traditional Sequence)

The very first teaching the Buddha ever gave, considered the central gem of the dharma, is known as the Four Noble Truths. These four axioms are:

• The existence of suffering

• The origin of suffering

• The end of suffering

• The path to the end of suffering

The Existence of Suffering
The world is full of hunger, illness, loss, and change, Yet somehow, we manage to live much of our lives denying these facts. Like children playing in a blazing house, we distract ourselves with momentary pleasure and ignore the heat and smoke surrounding us.
The Buddha’s first noble truth is that pretending in this way doesn’t help us. No matter how we try to whitewash our experience, the body will age, decay, and die. Meanwhile, we continue to endure the pain of greed, hatred, and delusion. Essentially, the first noble truth encourages us to face the reality of our existence.

The Origin of Suffering
Why do we continue to increase our suffering by avoiding the truth? The Buddha taught that four attachments keep us bound to our own pain. These are:

• Attachment to sense pleasures

• Attachment to opinions and views

• Attachment to rites and rituals, at the expense of genuine spiritual experience

• Attachment to the belief that one exists as a solid, permanent self

Thus the origin of our suffering is our desire for pleasure and our attachment to a set of concepts designed to boost our sense of security.

The End of Suffering
Lest the first two noble truths discourage us, the Buddha also taught that we are definitely capable of putting an end to our suffering. Healing is possible. If there were no possibility of ending suffering, what would be the use of practicing? He described two levels of nirvana, or freedom: momentary nirvana, in which we’re able to tame the forces of greed, hatred, and delusion in the moment; and a more ultimate form of nirvana – a state described as the complete ending of the burden of suffering.
According to the Buddha, there is no higher happiness than peace. This is the meaning of the third noble truth.

The Path to the End of Suffering
The method for ending our suffering isn’t a mysterious rite. It involves neither self-mortification nor self-indulgence. The Buddha’s path is not one of extremes; it’s the Middle Way.

The Four Noble Truths (Alternative Sequence)

Thai Buddhist teacher Luang Puu Dtune Atulo described these four tasks in a slightly different sequence: one that sheds light on how they connect. He says that:

The mind going outward to satisfy its moods is the cause of suffering (the second noble truth).

The result of the mind going outward to satisfy its moods is suffering (the first noble truth).

The mind seeing the mind clearly is the path leading to the cessation of suffering (the fourth noble truth).

The result of the mind seeing the mind clearly is the cessation of suffering (the third noble truth).

In the sequence above, the seeking attitude of the mind is seen as the reason why suffering arises. So here we begin with what is conventionally the second truth. The result of that attitude is suffering, the first truth.

When the mind begins to understand itself, we have the beginning of an informed and enlightened perspective. This is the path (the fourth truth) which leads to the cessation of suffering, which is traditionally the third of these tasks.

Presented by Steve on September 9, 2019

Instructions to the Cook

A Zen Master’s Lessons for Living a Life that Matters

By Roshi Bernie Glassman and Rick Fields

Tricycle Magazine

SPRING 1996

As those familiar with Dogen’s Instructions to the Tensho know, the cook is considered to be the most important person in the monastery because he is responsible for the welfare of all the other monks. Like Dogen, Roshi Tetsugen Glassman believes that one of the most useful metaphors for life is what happens in the kitchen. Indeed, Zen masters call a life that is lived fully and completely, with nothing held back, “the supreme meal.” So the “menu” of Glassman’s new book, which describes his vision and his work, is divided into the five main “courses” or aspects of life: spirituality, knowledge, livelihood, social action, and community. In it he draws upon Dogen’s precepts to tell the story of the Zen Center of New York and the Greyston mandala of businesses and not-for-profits, which seeks to integrate the economic, social, educational, and spiritual dimensions of each endeavor. Rick Fields, author of How the Swans Came to the Lake, is a contributing editor to Tricycle. Instructions to the Cook will be published by Bell Tower this spring.

When [13th-century Zen master] Dogen asked the Zen cook in the Chinese temple why he didn’t have his assistants do the hard work of drying mushrooms in the hot sun, the cook said, “I am not other people.” In the same way, we have to realize that this life is the only life we have. It’s ours, right now. If we don’t do the cooking ourselves, we are throwing our life away. “Keep your eyes open,” Dogen instructs. “Wash the rice thoroughly, put it in the pot, light the fire, and cook it. There is an old saying that says, ‘See the pot as your own head, see the water as your lifeblood.’”

When we cook—and live—with this kind of attention, the most ordinary acts and the humblest ingredients are revealed as they truly are. “Handle even a single leaf of a green in such a way that it manifests the body of the Buddha,” says Dogen. “This in turn allows the Buddha to manifest through the leaf.”

TRANSFORMATION

Cooking, like life, is about transformation. When we cook, we work directly with the elemental forces of fire and heat, water, metal, and clay. We put the lid on the pot and wait for the fire to transform the rice, or we mix the bread with yeast and put it in the oven to bake. There is something hidden, almost magical about it.

This kind of transformation involves a certain amount of faith. We work hard to prepare the food. We wash the rice, knead the bread, and break the eggs. We measure the ingredients carefully. We mix, stir, blend. But then we have to wait. We have to let fire and water transform the food we’ve prepared.

But we also have to keep an eye on things. We have to be aware of what is going on. For the Zen cook the old adage, “A watched pot never boils,” is only half-true. We leave the lid on the pot most of the time. But we also lift the lid every once in a while to taste the food.

The Zen cook follows the middle way. We have faith that the soup is coming along—but we still check now and then.

The accomplished Zen cook is something of an alchemist. He or she can transform poisons into virtues.

The Zen cook doesn’t do this by adding a secret ingredient, but by leaving something out. The Zen cook leaves out attachment to the self.

For example, anger is considered a poison when it’s self-motivated and self-centered. But take that attachment to the self out of anger and the same emotion becomes the fierce energy of determination, which is a very positive force. Take the self-centered aspect out of greed and it becomes the desire to help. Drop the self-orientation from ignorance, and it becomes a state of unknowing that allows new things to rise.

INGREDIENTS

How do we find the ingredients? We simply open our eyes and look around us. We take the materials that are at hand, right in front of us, and prepare the best meal possible. We work with what we have in each and every moment.

Our body is an ingredient. Our relationships are ingredients. Our thoughts, our emotions, and all our actions are ingredients.

The place we live, the leaves that fall, the haze around the moon, the traffic in the city streets, the corner market—all these are also our ingredients. In order to see the ingredients in front of us, we have to open our eyes. Usually we create our own boundaries, our own small view, our own territory and that’s the only place we look. With practice, our territory expands and all the objects of the world become our ingredients.

As we see ourselves as the world, as we see the oneness of life, the whole world becomes available. Then the Zen cook knows that every aspect of life is an ingredient of the supreme meal.

USE EVERYTHING

Our natural tendency is not to use ingredients we think might ruin our meal. We want to throw them away or maybe move them way back on the shelf, out of sight, behind everything else. But Dogen instructs us to take the ingredients we think are going to ruin our meal and figure out how to use them so that they improve it.

If something doesn’t seem to work as a main course, for example, it might become an appetizer or a dessert. You can’t just say, “I don’t want it to be like that. I’ll leave it out on the table.” That’s a kind of denial. It’s going to be there, whether you like it or not.

Take a group of people starting a new company. Their first step might be to take an inventory of their gifts. But if you decide you don’t want the gifts one person has, you could be creating a problem because his or her gifts are part of the company. In any case, that person’s gifts will wind up getting used because they are part of the person. The question is, how to use them. If you don’t find a way, the person will end up jealous or resentful or bored. The unused gifts will wind up working to rot the company from the inside.

Let’s say, for example, that someone is aggressive. But that energy might be just what’s needed for certain difficult jobs—dealing with recalcitrant bureaucrats, for example. Or perhaps someone is so preoccupied with details that they are unable to see the larger picture. You wouldn’t put that person on your five-year planning committee. But they might be perfect as an accountant keeping track of daily receipts.

Sometimes it might seem that we can’t find a way to use someone’s particular qualities which may seem toxic or harmful to our goal. In that case, we make a clear decision not to use their particular ingredient in the meal we are cooking. But we don’t ignore or deny the ingredient. We acknowledge it, we’re aware of it, we may even appreciate it in another context. But we just decide to use zero amount of it at the moment.

CLEANING KITCHEN IS CLEANING MIND

Right now, right in front of us, we have everything we need to begin.

Usually when we want to begin a new project—whether it be a new business or a new relationship or a new life—we’re in a hurry. We want to jump right in and do something, anything. But the Zen cook knows that we can’t prepare a meal if the kitchen is cluttered with last night’s dishes. In order to see the ingredients we already have in our lives, we need to clear a space. “Clean the chopsticks, ladles, and all other utensils,” Dogen advises. “Handle them with equal care and awareness, putting everything back where it naturally belongs.”

So we always begin by cleaning. Even if the kitchen looks clean, we still have to clean it again each time we want to start a new meal. It’s like taking a glass from the cupboards. We wipe it off before giving it to a guest.

The cleaning process itself changes the cook as well as the surroundings and the people who come into those surroundings – whether we’re in a Zen meditation hall, a living room, a kitchen, or an office. That is why so much emphasis is placed on cleaning in a Zen monastery.

It doesn’t matter whether we think anything is dirty or not. We just clean. The process of cleaning also allows us to discover the ingredients that are already in this space. We begin to see the ingredients we already have. Before we start to reclean the shelves, for instance, we have to take out the jars. In doing so, we see all the jars we have, and find that some are empty, some are almost empty, and others are full. We find out what we don’t need, what we have too much of, what’s been spoiled, and what needs to be thrown away.

Of course cleaning is an ideal that is never satisfied. Therefore, because we can’t fully clean, what we have left becomes part of the ingredients of each new meal. Because we can’t clean that glass, our new actions are pre-conditioned by that dirty glass. So we practice to make each new action as clean and unconditioned as possible.

CLEANING THE MIND

Our lives work the same way. Just as we start cooking a meal by cleaning the kitchen, it’s helpful to start the day by cleaning our mind. In Zen Buddhism, we clean the mind by the process of meditation, or zazen, which literally means “just sitting.”

For me, zazen is an activity like sleeping, eating, drinking, and going to the bathroom: if I don’t take care of these natural functions, I will feel a difference in myself. If I don’t eat, for example, I start getting very hungry, and if I don’t sleep, I feel tired. And if I don’t sit, my stability decreases, and I feel uncentered.

We don’t practice to attain enlightenment, just as we don’t eat or breathe to be alive. Because we’re alive, we breathe. Because we’re alive, we eat. Because we’re enlightened, we do zazen. Dogen says that zazen is a manifestation of the enlightened state. We practice and recognize everything we do as a manifestation of the enlightened state.

The basic ingredients are very simple:

A space to meditate in.
A cushion or chair to meditate on.
And your body and mind.

Choose a time of day when your chances of being interrupted are minimal—early morning, before most people have gotten up, for example.

Find a space that is quiet, not too dark or too light, and where you are not likely to be disturbed. If necessary, close the door.

Make the space aesthetically pleasing. Depending on your taste, include an inspiring image, or a natural object such as a beautiful rock or flower. Candles and incense are optional as well.

Wear comfortable, non-binding clothes.

Assume a comfortable position. Back erect and without tension. Do not lean against the wall or the back of the chair.

Place your right hand up on your lap and left hand palm up on your right hand, thumbs slightly touching. This position is called the cosmic mudra and creates a restful environment for the mind.

If you are sitting on a chair, place your feet squarely on the ground with knees approximately six inches apart.

If you are sitting on a cushion (a folded blanket will also do nicely), adjust the height of the cushion so that both knees rest firmly on the ground. The equilateral triangle formed by this position gives support to both the back and spinal column.

Let your eyes remain half-closed, half-open, lightly resting on a spot on the floor approximately three feet in front of you. This will allow your eye muscles to relax while you keep an alert state of mind.

Place the tip of your tongue at the top of your palate, behind your top front teeth. Keep your mouth closed and breathe through the nose.

Concentrate on your breathing. Notice inhalation and exhalation. As you inhale, count one. As you exhale, count two. Continue to ten and then repeat, from one to ten again.

As thoughts arise, let them come and go. Keep your attention on the counting. When you notice that thoughts have distracted you and you have lost your count—gently return to the counting. Start over at one.

Continue for a minimum of two and a maximum of thirty minutes.

Repeat daily, or at least once a week.

Roshi Bernie Glassman first dharma successor of Hakuyu Taizan Maezumi Roshi, was the first abbot of the Zen Community of New York and co-founder of the Greyston Mandala. In 1994 he conceived the Zen Peacemaker Order. The paperback edition of his most recent book, Bearing Witness: A Zen Master's Lessons in Making Peace, was recently issued from Bell Tower.
Rick Fields (1942–1999) was a contributing editor to Tricycle and the author of Chop Wood, Carry Water; The Code of the Warrior; (with Bernie Glassman) Instructions to the Cook; and the well-known history of American Buddhism, How the Swans Came to the Lake.

Presented by Steve on May 13, 2019

INVITING FEAR
Amaro Bhikkhu guides us through a meditation on fear and teaches us to tame it with attention.

Ajahn Amaro

Above all, a materialistic society desires certainty—it seeks to guarantee it; passes laws to enforce it; wipes our the pathogens that threaten it; and lets everyone have guns to protect it. Even the seemingly innocuous habits of inking in plans and clinging to beliefs and opinions are the reverse-image of the uncertainties that the heart yearns to be certain about. 
Yet if we seek security in that which is inherently uncertain, 
dukkha, or discontent, is the inevitable result. 
Fear is a discomfiting friend. The impulse is to get to a place of safety, but where in the phenomenal world—either mental or physical—could that be? The insight of the Buddha, informed by his own experiences of exploring fear and dread, encourages us to make a 180-degree turn. Whereas the instinct is to shrink away from the threatening aspects of life, his injunction for those who wish to free the heart is to contemplate frequently the following:
 
I am of the nature to age, I have not gone beyond aging; 
I am of the nature to sicken, I have not gone beyond sickness; 
I am of the nature to die, I have not gone beyond dying; 
All that is mine, beloved and pleasing, will become 
otherwise, will become separated from me.
For that which is threatening to the ego is liberating for the heart.
 
By turning to face the inarguable facts of nature, the habit of investing in unstable realms is interrupted. It shines the light of wisdom on the issue, reveals that we’ve been looking for certainty in the wrong place, and thus frees up the attention to realize where security can be found. 
This needs to be examined in the light of personal experience, but in traditional Buddhist terminology, such security is said to be found in the Triple Gem: the buddha—the awakened, knowing faculty of the heart; the dharma—the truth of the way things are; and the sangha—the noble, unselfish response. For when the awakened heart knows the way things truly are, what springs forth is harmonious and virtuous action. Undiscriminating awareness is dependable. The reality of nature is dependable. Harmony is possible.
How can we arrive at such security?
There are many ways to meditate on fear. One is to wait until it appears adventitiously. Another is to invite it in—when we send out invitations we can be a little better prepared for who shows up at the party. 
Perhaps for both methods of approach the first thing to bear in mind is that fear is not the enemy—it is nature’s protector; it only becomes troublesome when it oversteps its bounds. In order to deal with fear we must take a fundamentally noncontentious attitude toward it, so it’s held not as “My big fear problem” but rather “Here is fear that has come to visit.” Once we take this attitude, we can begin to work with fear.
•

Begin by sitting quietly and focusing the attention as clearly as possible on the present moment, using a simple tranquil object to establish equilibrium—the natural rhythm of the breath is good for this purpose for most people, moving in the empty space of the heart .
•

Once such centeredness has been established, deliberately bring to mind something that will arouse a fear reaction. For example, 
“Anthrax in the mail” 
“Nuclear war” 
“Suicidebombers”
 
—or any other memory, imagined possibility, or image that triggers the compulsive effect.
•

Once the seed crystal has been dropped into the mental pool and the consequent flow of thoughts and images has begun, make a definite and concerted effort to withdraw the attention from the stories the thoughts are telling. Bring it instead into the sensations of the physical body. 
Where do I feel the fear? What is its texture? 
Is it hot or cold?
Is it painful? Rigid? Elastic? 
We are not necessarily looking for verbal answers to all these questions; rather, we are just trying to find the feeling, accept it completely, and not add anything to it. 
“Fear feels like this.” 
Many find that fear locates itself primarily in the solar plexus, sitting like a tightened knot in the belly. Just feel it, know it, open the heart to it as much as possible. We’re not trying to pretend or force ourselves to like it, but it is here—right now it’s the way things are.
•

Let this process run for at least ten minutes, then consciously let it wind down—not suppressing it, but, as when it’s time for guests to leave, make the hints, and let the event wind down naturally. It might take a while, but that’s fine; just let it run out at its own pace. During this time, reestablish the breath as a focal point, and use the exhalation to support the fading of the fear-wave.
•

Once it has come to an end, focus the attention on the feeling of the breath, moving as before in the empty space of the heart. Let the heart be clearly conscious that the fear cycle has come to cessation: it arose out of emptiness, returned to emptiness. It was florid and impactful in its appearance, but the overarching quality, now having been seen directly, is its transiency. 
Now we know . . .
The effect of this practice is to train the heart, so that when the next wave of fear arises, from whatever quarter, something in us knows. The intuitive wisdom faculty is awakened and recognizes: “I know this scenario—don’t panic—it looks impressive, but it’s just the fear reaction.” It becomes vastly easier to avoid being sucked into the vortex of anxiety. 
The feeling is not pleasant, but the heart knows, with absolute certainty: “It’s only a feeling.” And if action needs to be taken, then that action will be motivated by wisdom, kindness, and sensitivity to time and place rather than by neurotic reactivity and habit.
Ajahn Amaro is abbot of Amaravati Buddhist Monastery in southeast England. He has been a monk for 35 years.

An excerpt from “Transforming Negative Habit Energies“ by Thich Nhat Hahn, read by Ron on 2019-02-24

(Full text available here.)

We do not allow ourselves to relax, to be in the present. Why do we always run, even when we are eating, walking, or sitting? Something is pushing us all the time. We are not capable of being free, of touching life deeply in this very moment. You make yourself busy all of your life. You believe that happiness and peace are not possible in the here and the now, but may be possible in the future. So you use all your energy to run to the future, hoping that there you will have happiness and peace. The Buddha addressed this issue very clearly. He said, "Do not pursue the past. Do not lose yourself in the future. The past no longer is. The future has not yet come. Looking deeply at life as it is in the very here and now, the practitioner dwells in stability and freedom."

The Buddha said that living happily in the present moment is possible: drsta dharma sukha vihari. Drsta dharma means the things that are here, that happen in the here and the now. Sukha means happiness. Vihari means to dwell, to live. Living happily in the present moment is the practice. But how do we liberate ourselves in order to really be in the here and the now? Buddhist meditation offers the practice of stopping. Stopping is very important, because we have been running all our lives, and also in all our previous lives. Our ancestors ran, and they continue to run in us. If we don't practice, then our children will continue to run in the future.

So we have to learn the art of stopping. Stop running. Stop being pushed by that habit energy. But first, you must recognize that there is such an energy in you, always pushing you. Even if you want to stop, it doesn't allow you to stop. At breakfast, some of us are capable of enjoying our meal, of being together in the here and the now. But many of us are not really there while having our breakfast. We continue to run. We have a lot of projects, worries, and anxieties, and we cannot sit like a Buddha.

The Buddha always sits on a lotus flower, very fresh, very stable. If we are capable of sitting in the here and the now, anywhere we sit becomes a lotus flower, because you are really sitting, you are really there. Your body and your mind together, you are free from worries, regrets, and anger. Though each of us has a cushion during sitting meditation, the cushion can be Heaven or Hell. The cushion can be a lotus flower or the cushion can be thorns. Many of us sit on the cushion, but it's like sitting on thorns. We don't know how to enjoy the lotus flower.

Our joy, our peace, our happiness depend very much on our practice of recognizing and transforming our habit energies. There are positive habit energies that we have to cultivate, there are negative habit energies that we have to recognize, embrace, and transform. The energy with which we do these things is mindfulness. Mindfulness helps us be aware of what is going on. Then, when the habit energy shows itself, we know right away. "Hello, my little habit energy, I know you are there. I will take good care of you." By recognizing this energy as it is, you are in control of the situation. You don't have to fight your habit energy. In fact the Buddha does not recommend that you fight it, because that habit energy is you and you should not fight against yourself. You have to generate the energy of mindful­ness, which is also you, and that positive energy will do the work of recognizing and embracing. Every time you embrace your habit energy, you can help it transform a little bit. The habit energy is a kind of seed within your consciousness, and when it becomes a source of energy, you have to recognize it. You have to bring your mindfulness into the present moment, and you just embrace that negative energy: "Hello, my negative habit energy. I know you are there. I am here for you." After maybe one or two or three minutes, that energy will go back into the form of a seed. But it may re-manifest later on. You have to be very alert.

A Poem by Thich Nhat Hahn, read by Kathryn on 2018-07-16

Promise me,
promise me this day,
promise me now,
while the sun is overhead exactly at its zenith,
promise me:

Even as they strike you down with a mountain of hate and violence;
even as they step on you and crush you like a worm,
even as they dismember and disembowel you, remember, brother, remember:

man is not our enemy.
The only act worthy of you is compassion
invincible, limitless, unconditional.

Hatred will never let you face the beast in man.
One day when you face this beast alone,
with your courage intact, your eyes kind, untroubled,
(even as no one sees them), out of your smile will bloom a flower.
And those who love you will behold you across ten thousand worlds of birth and dying.

Alone again,
I will go on with bent head,
knowing that love has become eternal.
On the long, rough road,
the sun and the moon will continue to shine.

-Thich Nhat Hahn

HEART PRACTICE

Courtesy of rebelsaintdharma.com

Heart Practices: Cultivating Positive Emotions

What are heart practice meditations?

Heart practices are divided into four sets. We incline the mind and heart towards qualities that act as appropriate responses to the various and nuanced conditions we face in our lives. Classically these four sets are defined as loving-kindness (metta), compassion (karuna), sympathetic joy (mudita) and equanimity (upekkha).

Kind-Friendliness (Metta)

The word metta is derived from the Pali word, mita. Mita, literally means friend. The most accurate translation of the term metta would be kind-friendliness. Metta has the mode of friendliness for its characteristic. Its natural function is to promote good intention. It is manifested as the disappearance of ill-will. Its footing is “to see” with kindness. When it succeeds, it eliminates ill-will. When it fails, it degenerates into greed, self-centered craving and attachment.

Kind-friendliness is the first foundation of metta practices. Metta is a beneficial attitude in every situation. It is always appropriate. It holds ease, peace, and contentment as a baseline attitude and promotes its increase. It seeks to further cooperation and understanding even in the presence of difficulty.

 Compassion (Karuna)

Compassion is the second aspect of heart practices and has the specific aim of being directed toward pain and suffering. It is often defined as a movement of the heart when we meet pain and anguish. Compassion is the ability to both feel and to respond in a way that reduces or holds the suffering of another. Within the context of empathy, compassion is our greatest skill. It is also a skill that we need to learn and maintain through practice. As a quality of mind, it is only appropriate and necessary during moments of distress, sadness, pain or suffering. It simply intends to help or hold that which hurts.

With compassion comes the inability to express hatred. Its expression is the manifestation of non-violence. It has the ability to uproot any intention to cause harm. It can be brought about by seeing and understanding the difficulties and pains of others while holding a sincere desire to alleviate that suffering. It succeeds when it causes violence and ill-will to descend. It fails when it produces depression, grief and sorrow. Compassion isn’t self-pity or pity for others, but when wrongly understood it may manifest in this way. It’s ultimately about feeling one’s own pain and recognizing the pain of others. When we can see, and experience the suffering of this world that we are all subject to, we may become kinder and more compassionate to one another.

Forgiveness

There is no official Pali translation for the word forgiveness but the idea of forgiveness is expressed wholeheartedly throughout the teachings. Forgiveness practice plays a critical role in the development of compassion and empathy because if we can’t forgive, we limit our ability for true connection and empathy. Forgiveness is the antidote to resentment. It allows us to learn how to put aside and ultimately abandon our tendency toward blaming. There is no lasting sense of well-being or happiness associated with the common and often seemingly justified habit of finding fault in others.

At times it will be important for us to acknowledge the harm we have caused, and it is helpful to experience an appropriate amount of regret. Understanding that blaming is only a source of harm to others and ourselves, we set the intention to hold forgiveness as quality that we aim to embody.
.

Appreciation (Mudita)

The most common translation for mudita is sympathetic joy. This encourages us to be able to sympathize with or participate in the happiness of others. It is the antidote to jealously and envy.

Mudita has the ability and characteristic of gladdening. It helps us to overcome the common attitude of “how come them and not me.” We may find that we often become jealous or self-conscious when we are faced with the good fortune of others. This creates the experience of separation and we become disconnected and self-centered. We may consider how unfortunate it is to be unable to participate in the happiness and success of others, especially when the person is somebody we care about. Whether it is a good friend, colleague, or family member, wouldn’t we want to be able to appreciate his or her good fortune? We want to develop a specific practice to evoke and embody this quality of appreciation.

Such a practice gives us the ability to participate in all the happiness, joy, success, and pleasure of this world without the need for it to be our own. If we restrict our experience of gratitude to our own gains and successes, we severely limit our potential joy and happiness. We create a mind that compares and contrasts. We may become competitive, bitter, and even resentful. If we can bring awareness and appreciation to the good fortune of others, it allows us to keep from closing off from the world and revel in happiness and connection.

Equanimity (Upekkha)

Equanimity is the practice that holds everything together. We simply acknowledge the truth that our happiness and our freedom is dependent on our actions, not on our wishes. Equanimity balances compassion with wisdom. It allows us to experience the full range of ethical mindfulness.

Collective or Group Welfare

(From learn.tricycle.org, Presented by Cheryl W. on 2018/04/23)

Summary

Now we are looking at the health of collectives as a whole. This might be a business, a community of people who live near to each other, a network of people who hold similar values and interests, or a family.

This text is found in the Parinibbāna Sutta, which describes the weeks before the Buddha passed away. It contains guidance to his followers—the sangha— on cultivating seven qualities that preserve the integrity of a community.  We can cultivate the same qualities to promote a thriving, long-lived community life. For a community to prosper, its members must:

1. Meet regularly and often

This is a large part of what it means to be a community. If meetings are managed well they do not have to be a burden or inconvenience.

In Practice:  Let’s find out what makes a meeting work well what makes a meeting a nuisance. This might be a shared family meal, or making time to be with a partner and share thoughts and experiences. Or perhaps we need to check in with our colleagues on a regular basis to celebrate successes and share perspectives on problems and challenges.

2. Meet in harmony, adjourn in harmony, conduct business in harmony

This is a question of the quality of mind we bring to proceedings.  Harmony does not mean that we agree on the content of discussions. It means those discussions are cordial, based on respect, and conducted with sensitivity of our own internal states and those of others.

Kindness, truthfulness, and understanding are useful qualities here. We are seeking an emotional tone rooted in care for the wellbeing of the other person.

In Practice:  How do we ensure the quality of contact in our relationships? If people are interacting in ways that are healthy and cultivate positive state of mind, emotions, and behaviour: this is to be encouraged. It can be as simple as a pat on the back, a “well done”, or just a little eye contact every now and then.

Be alert for all of the little actions that do not contribute to harmony and those that drive wedges between us. Look for ways to define a shared vision. Are there ways we can cultivate regular contact that is healthy and supportive?

3. Respect customs and precedents

This may seem a fairly conservative point of view. The Buddha was suggesting that if an established way of handling a situation continues to work well, we don't need to change it. It's OK to follow tradition when doing so is healthy and serves the welfare of the group. Established customs can be expedient.

This is not to say that outmoded, unhealthy, or inefficient practices cannot be improved or abandoned. It is possible to change practices in a way that is respectful of tradition. This is a conservative but flexible guideline.

In Practice:  Take some time to reflect on the customs, habits, and precedents that operate in your life. Which of these are healthy? Which of them would it benefit you to abandon or update?  Notice the extent to which you defer to habit, custom, and tradition.  Sometimes there is a good policy or healthy response to a situation that has been encountered before. If we do change existing policy, let's do so with care.

However, let's not trap ourselves in following a specific historical custom for tradition’s sake if it no longer serves a purpose or is actively harmful. The past is a useful guideline but we must have the courage and intelligence to approach situations in a new way.

4. Respect elders

In the Buddhist monastic tradition seniority was decided purely by how long a person had been part of the sangha. We may have other criteria for deciding seniority but respecting elders and senior colleagues can contribute to harmony. Doing so is recognition of knowledge, wisdom, experience, and expertise that is valuable to the collective.

People who have belonged to an organization for a long time remember the circumstances under which certain decisions were made. They are familiar with the patterns of challenges that come and go.

In Practice:  Respect is earned through quality of character. If someone earns that respect by being honest, caring, and authentic this is a valuable asset to any group.  People with experience, integrity, or expert knowledge should be listened to.

Long-serving colleagues and the elders of our families have valuable experience to be respected and even treasured. Such protocols can support harmony in groups. We will always look up to some people and desire to learn from them just as there will always be some who respect us and seek to learn from us.

5. Guard against cravings

If craving and aversion play a role in decision-making it will be detrimental to the health of the community. Personal likes and dislikes, needing things to be a certain way or not be a certain way, seeking status, greed: these cause turmoil. The Buddha is calling for integrity, morality, and virtue.

In Practice:  This can be practiced at every moment. There are unconscious drives propelling us to do certain things, to get certain things. The more we are aware of this, the better. There are times to give in to these drives and times to resist them. See if you can explore this distinction in your life. There are times when it's OK to be gratified; there are times when the price paid is too high, or what seems like an innocuous pleasure is subtly dangerous.

We can familiarise ourselves with our own patterns of craving and recognize how powerfully craving works in our psyche. This is the aim of much of Buddhist practice.  Be alert. To what extent are you or the people in your group or organization motivated by greed for power, status, or some kind of gratification?

6. Incline toward sitting and staying in quiet places

For monastics, this was an encouragement not to become too caught up in community affairs. The purpose of the sangha was to support the conditions for personal transformation.

In the modern context this means taking our time, finding moments of solitude and peacefulness when the mind is not driven by affairs. This may mean going on retreat, or sitting down quietly at home, or doing nothing during our lunch break at work. It benefits our wellbeing and the wellbeing of others. It is healthy.

In Practice:  Make it part of who you are and what you do to sit quietly for a while. You don't have to be formally meditating. Take whatever moment you can to just be at peace.  Be open with your senses to whatever is going on in the present moment.  Get out of your head and into your body. Explore the sensations throughout the body as you breathe. Listen openly to the sounds around you. Absorb the sights in front of you. Allow your mind to be fully aware of incoming sense data without commentary.

7. Establish personal mindfulness

It contributes greatly to group wellbeing if each individual member makes a deep commitment to presence and awareness, and to do what they are doing with intentionality.

In Practice:  This implies a certain discipline, a certain relaxed ardour, and a certain intentionality. Establish mindfulness in the sense that you will consciously participate in what's happening. We can notice what is happening with precision: this is the difference between being aware and unaware. We may be awake and conscious but with what quality of mind?

Are you conscious of what's happening, or are you enmeshed in it? Be aware of what other people are doing, and how other relationships are manifesting. Notice cause and effect. What are the effects of your actions within the group or organization? Are they contributing to the wellbeing of the collective? Check in on a regular basis to assess what is healthy and unhealthy within your relationships. 

Neglecting these seven factors leads to a diminishment of the community.

Andrew Olendzki, Living in Harmony © 2017

Tricycle Online Courses | learn.tricycle.org

Trane of No-Thought: How Meditation Inspired Jazz Great John Coltrane

BY SEAN MURPHY| JANUARY 31, 2018

From Lion's Roar Magazine.

In the 50th-anniversary year of the death of John Coltrane, Zen teacher Sean Murphy looks back at the jazz icon and how meditation practice and a deep interest in Eastern traditions informed his monumental late-period work.

One predawn morning in 1964, the already-legendary saxophonist John Coltrane was sitting in meditation in his Long Island home when the structure and themes of his masterpiece, the album A Love Supreme, came to him in its entirety. “It was the first time I had it all,” he said, as reported by his wife, pianist and harpist Alice Coltrane, with whom he shared a practice of meditation and a deep interest in all things spiritual.

This was not the first time that Coltrane, who came to consider his musical improvisation a form of meditation in itself, experienced what he thought of as divine grace. He’d sweated out addiction — his first, failed path to transcendence — in 1957 after what he described as a “life-changing spiritual experience” that helped him overcome heroin and alcohol and set him on a search for other means of transcendence, through meditation, prayer, and music. His search would also profoundly influence the jazz world, and the cultural landscape of western society itself.

“There are always new sounds to imagine: new feelings to get at. And always, there is a need to keep purifying these feelings and sounds so that we can really see what we’ve discovered in its pure state.” —John Coltrane

Fifty years after his death in 1967, Coltrane remains a cultural and spiritual icon, exerting an influence over jazz that is impossible to escape — so much so that it has given rise to a strange phenomenon, surely one of a kind: the Saint John Coltrane Church. Based in San Francisco, the SJCC is an actual community of worship that continues to this day, using A Love Supreme, Coltrane’s signature work, as scripture and hymnal.

Before Coltrane, jazz had largely been regarded as a sensual, even risqué form of expression, linked as much to libation as to liberation. But jazz and spirituality have always been linked.

Jazz is an improvisational art form — it requires the moment. Total immersion in it, that is. I have long been struck by the unusual purity of the best of this music, despite the fact that it was so often developed under the most impure of conditions: smoky clubs, alcohol, drugs, and the inescapable burden of racial prejudice. How could this be possible? As a Zen practitioner/teacher and musician myself, I feel the answer lies in a brand of what we in Zen call working samadhi – an immersion in moment-to-moment activity so complete that it becomes essentially a meditative state. Improvisational music, at least at the level of complexity exhibited by jazz, requires a putting aside of the ego — if you start thinking of good or bad, try to impress, become distracted by the flubbed note of the last moment, try to anticipate the next moment, or give yourself over to anything else but what’s happening now, you’re lost. To play truly great improvisational music, you have to lose yourself.

The best musicians, like Coltrane, are able to summon an immersion in the moment that can transcend even the worst environments, personal problems, or state of health. Of course, this doesn’t mean that certain players don’t inflate themselves after the fact, building themselves up and taking credit for what in essence, had passed through them — via, perhaps, the greater power to which Coltrane often alluded. But Coltrane was not one of these.

Coltrane’s challenging later albums were intended to be 100% spiritual testament, the communication of an ongoing, endless spiritual quest into the great mystery.

You could say the truest and deepest improvisation is an act of faith, because the player never knows what is going to happen. This is something Coltrane knew, especially in the later years of his work, and expressed consciously through both words and music. Well-known for his deep interest in meditation, and the traditions of Hinduism and Buddhism — he made a special effort to visit Zen temples during his 1966 tour of Japan, and quoted fromthe Platform Sutra of the Sixth Ancestor of Zen in one of his late interviews — his spiritual tastes remained eclectic, ranging from Krishnamurti through the Koran, the Bible, and even Edgar Cayce, and he retained a largely theistic view of the absolute. A Love Supreme is clearly presented as an offering to God as supreme being.

The spiritual substance of that album in no way compromised its appeal — it remains the second best-selling jazz album of all time, after Miles Davis’s Kind of Blue, on which Coltrane also appears. Still, experiencing the supreme love depicted in this music – not to mention in the far more difficult music in Coltrane albums still to come like Meditations, Ascension, and Om — can at times be a challenge for listeners. A Love Supreme merely pushes the boundaries that the later Coltrane would dispense with as he delved ever further into free jazz, sometimes devolving to apparently random, non-harmonic honks and squeals that explored the far edges of musicality, his instrument, and at times the patience of his listeners.

But isn’t that the way the spiritual life is? The embrace of life in its fullest involves pain as well as beauty — that’s basic Buddhism. And thus it is in Coltrane’s challenging later albums, which can be described variously as going far beyond simply meditating upon to pleading, exhorting, crying out to the heavens – or as some have suggested, speaking to God in a language only He could understand. These works were intended by Coltrane as 100% spiritual testament, the communication of an ongoing, endless spiritual quest into the great mystery, rather than any kind of peaceful and harmonious arrival at answers. It’s an approach quite similar to the ongoing, ever-deepening questioning of Zen koan practice.

This is perhaps something Coltrane himself well understood, as suggested by his reference to the Platform Sutra in this description of his evolution: “There is never any end. There are always new sounds to imagine: new feelings to get at. And always, there is a need to keep purifying these feelings and sounds so that we can really see what we’ve discovered in its pure state. So that we can see more clearly what we are. In that way, we can give to those who listen, the essence—the best of what we are. But to do that at each stage, we have to keep on cleaning the mirror.”

The divine force — God, as Coltrane defined it — breathes through us all, said Coltrane, and the last years of his life can be seen as an attempt — sometimes a struggle — to breathe God through his horn.

“Once you become aware of this force for unity in life,” wrote Coltrane in the liner notes for 1965’s Meditations, his acknowledged follow-up to A Love Supreme. “You can’t forget it. It becomes part of everything you do… my goal in meditating on this through music however remains… to uplift people as much as I can. To inspire them to realize more and more their capacities for living meaningful lives.”

“I believe in all religions,” Coltrane said. “The truth itself doesn’t have any name on it to me, and each man has to find it for himself.

ABOUT SEAN MURPHY

Sean Murphy is the author of One Bird, One Stone: 108 Contemporary Zen Stories and three novels, most recently The Time of New Weather. A Dharma Holder in the White Plum Zenlineage, he directs an innovative Meditation Leader Training through his Sage Institute. Find him at MurphyZen.com

Renunciation: Insight Meditation Center

insightmeditationcenter.org

adapted from a talk by Gil Fronsdal, July 1st, 2003

The Buddhist path is often considered one of renunciation. This is easy to see in the lifestyle of simplicity and restraint followed by Buddhist monastics. The role of renunciation in the lives of lay practitioners is not so easy to understand. Lay practitioners are not asked to renounce money, sex, or a varied wardrobe, or to shave their heads or not eat after noon. Yet renunciation remains important -although we might prefer to call it letting go, releasing, freeing, or perhaps unburdening.

Because so many people have serious reservations about the idea of doing without, Buddhist teachers in America are sometimes reluctant to teach about renunciation. In giving Dharma talks, I often get the impression that this is not a popular theme. Certainly, there are good reasons to be suspicious of exhortations to let go. For example, renunciation may be confused with aversion or repression instead of an impulse of freedom. Overdone, renunciation may blind us to our real needs or healthy motivations. Or renunciation may be burdened with puritanical notions of good and bad, purity and impurity. Most important, we may confuse the renouncing of things and experiences (like money, sex, and possessions) with the essential work of renouncing our clinging to them.

The Latin root of the word “sacrifice” means “to make sacred.” The Buddha did not teach renunciation as a form of denial or asceticism. Rather, he taught letting go as a way to achieve a greater good, a greater happiness, and ultimately to attain what might be called the “sacred” dimension of liberation. The Buddha once said, “If one sees that a greater happiness is found by letting go of a lesser one, the wise person will let go of the lesser happiness.”

Even though it doesn’t take much mindfulness to recognize that suffering comes with clinging, we often find it hard to let go of clinging-or even to see letting go as possible or worthwhile. Strong feelings of desire often come with a compulsion that makes the desire seem necessary. Or we may approach clinging like a lottery-we are willing to bear the risk of suffering in exchange for the chance that the clinging will bring us well-being. Furthermore, letting go can be frightening. Clinging may give us a sense of taking care of ourselves-holding tight to security, judgements, people, self-identity, or possessions are all ways of protecting ourselves. People may not know how to function in the world without the motivation and self-identity that come from clinging.

Renunciation is often difficult. Grappling with the power of desire, attachments, and fear may require great personal struggle. But that struggle yields many benefits. We develop the inner strength to overcome temptation and compulsion. We don’t have to live with the suffering and contraction that come with clinging. Clinging can be exhausting; letting go is restful. We may taste the luminous mind of freedom, which is hidden when clinging is present. And, last but not least, we are more available to work for the welfare of others.

Renunciation should bring joy, or at least a lightness of being. If it is done with resentment or resistance, then the renunciation is not thorough-some clinging remains. We need continued mindfulness to understand what we still need to let go of.

Suzuki Roshi once defined renunciation as accepting that things pass away, that things change. This definition points to two things. First, sometimes renunciation takes the form of wise surrender to what is unavoidable. Second, at its heart, the practice of renunciation requires an inner change that may or may not require external renunciation. If the heart is still contracted, if the mind is still tight or hot, then the renunciation is incomplete. In fact, external renunciation without a corresponding inner release may strengthen clinging. Many people have been surprised by the strength of their desire after a period of deprivation.

One of the primary functions of monastic renunciation of so many aspects of ordinary life is to facilitate an inner transformation. Realizing that what one assumed was necessary for happiness is, in fact, not necessary (may not even be a cause of happiness after all) can bring a marvelous sense of ease.

For lay people, meditation retreats are a form of temporary monastic renunciation. On retreat we give up speech, entertainment, reading, writing, sexual activity, and much of our control over our food. In surrendering to the retreat schedule, we give up our preferences for what we do and when. If these limitations are difficult, then this difficulty becomes an opportunity for spiritual practice. When we see renunciation not as limitation but as unburdening, we can take great delight in feeling free from desire and compulsion.

Both within and outside of retreat, renunciation is a practice worth experimenting with. What happens when you let go of your opinions? Of self-preoccupation? Of a strong desire? In what areas in your life would letting go bring greater benefits than continuing to hold on tightly? When letting go is difficult, what does your clinging indicate about your beliefs in what will make you happy?

Are there things or activities that would be good to do without or to limit? For example, watching television, shopping, complaining, gossiping, or surfing the web. For some, an important area for letting go is in being overly busy. There are many worthwhile pursuits; trying to do too many is harmful. Sometimes it is necessary to choose which is most important to us and then let the rest go.

To sacrifice is to make sacred. To release is to find freedom. And to find freedom is to know a happiness that is not dependent on anything-especially not on having our wishes fulfilled.

insightmeditationcenter.org

The Power of the Third Moment

By

Trungram Gyalwa Rinpoche

Tricycle Magazine, Winter 2017

Presented to the Sangha by Cheryl, December 4, 2017

Another driver cuts you off, and you feel a surge of rage.  A coworker gets the promotion you think you deserve, and waves of jealousy wash over you.  The pastry display in the grocery store beckons, and you sense your will power dissolving.  Anger.  Impatience.  Shock.  Desire.  Frustration.  You spend your days bombarded by emotions. 

These emotions are often negative – and if you act on them, they can derail you.  You know:  That email you shouldn’t have sent.  The snappy retort you shouldn’t have verbalized.  The black funk that permeates every experience and keeps you from feeling joy.  Fortunately, it doesn’t have to be this way.  You can learn to recognize harmful emotions in the moment – and let them go. 

CHOOSING THE KARMA YOU CREATE

Karma – (Sanskrit) a deed, act, fate, the consequences of our actions

Past karma shapes your experience of the world.  It exists;  there is not much you can do about it.  Yet you are also constantly creating new karma, and that gives you a golden opportunity.  With your reaction to each experience, you create the karma that will color your future.  It is up to you whether this new karma is positive or negative.  You simply have to pay attention at the right moment.  This is how karma operates as if it were a key ring.  It seems solid;  you can move your key seamlessly around the circle.  Yet there is actually a start and an end to the key ring – and a gap.  If you know the gap is there, and you have the skill, you can extricate your key from the ring.  Similarly, earlier karma creates your experience of events.  Your reaction, based on your experience, triggers new karma and a new cycle of creation and experience.  You can allow that cycle to continue in an endless sequence.  Or you can find the gap, gain the skill, and extricate yourself from the cycle, simultaneously building your compassion and enhancing your sense of inner ease. 

The Buddhist tradition is rife with teachings;  on compassion, on why we should avoid hatred and jealousy and on the power of a positive outlook.  These teachings are extraordinarily valuable.  They clarify and deepen our understanding – and they inspire us.  But teachings and their explanations require logic to parse.  In the heat of an emotional exchange, you may not have the luxury of logic, because logic requires time and an unbiased mind.  Pressure creates a crisis.  You don’t have time to think, only to react.  So you need a well-honed, quickly deployed skill, something that is short, easy to use, and effective.  This is the Third Moment Method, a practical tool that in many ways embodies the core of Buddhist practice. 

UNDERSTANDING THE THREE MOMENTS

Life is composed of a series of experiences, and each of these experiences can be broken into three moments.

The First Moment:  SENSING

In the first moment, your sensory organs – your eyes, ears, nose – perceive some sort of input.  This moment between, for instance, a sound reaching your ear and your ear perceiving it, is instantaneous.  It is also effortless, because it is hardwired into your system.  In this moment, if someone says “lemon,” you have heard the sound, but you haven’t yet recognized what that sound means. 

The Second Moment:  ARISING

In the second moment, you recognize the sound – or other sensation – and you have an instant, subconscious reaction, classifying it as good, bad, or neutral.  This, too, is automatic, based on prior experience:  memories and understanding stemming from your ingrained cultural beliefs, religious beliefs, and linguistic perceptions.  It happens so quickly that you may even think it is part of the first moment.  You have a physical manifestation of your thought as your body responds to positive, negative, or neutral input – although a “neutral” reaction usually leans slightly toward positive or negative. 

Maybe someone is describing a juicy lemon they’ve just sliced.  You connect the sound “lemon” to an idea stored in your memory.  It evokes a shape, a color, a scent, a taste.  Your memory invites an emotional reaction.  You love lemons and your mouth salivates;  you find lemons sour and you cringe. 

The Third Moment:  REACTING

In the third moment, you have the choice of accepting your memory’s emotion-tinged invitation or not.  Your reaction may be mental, verbal, or physical.  If you have classified something as good, you are drawn to it, even though it may not be beneficial.  If you have classified something as bad, you push it away, sometimes with more force than is appropriate or necessary.  In either case, you may do a lot of damage that you will later need to try to undo. 

Let’s think of “lemon” in a different context.  What if your mechanic says that your brand-new car is a lemon?  How would you feel?  Furious?  Foolish?  Frustrated?  What might you say to the person who advised you to buy it?  The third moment provides you with the space to determine your response. 

You have a choice about the kind of life you lead.  You can let your environment dictate your experience, in which case, unless you solve all the problems of every person with whom you interact, you will always face some unhappiness.  Or you can take control over your own experience of life.  To me, this seems like a better path. 

PRACTICING THE THIRD MOMENT METHOD

The Third Moment Method helps you take this path.  In it, you use the Third Moment not to react but to watch – in a very specific way.  At the very instant an emotion arises, pause.  Notice the emotion you are experiencing.  The timing is very important.  You need to be focused and aware before your emotion connects with a thought and becomes solidified.  You want to simply see the emotion for what it is. 

You may be tempted to trace the source of your emotion; that is logical, but in this instance it is not helpful.  Instead of focusing on who did what to whom, simply look into your emotion.  Don’t do this as an observer, with duality between yourself and the emotion, as though it were external to you.  Instead, watch your actual experience; try to feel it directly.  Feel your emotion as if it were an inflated balloon, filling your insides.  Don’t pay attention to the balloon itself; pay attention to what’s inside it.  What does it feel like?  No rationalizing.  No reasoning.  What is at the very core of the balloon?  Just space.  This is not relabeling your emotion as space.  It is simply awareness that the emotion itself does not exist in the way we believe it does, as something fixed and solid.  Over time, as that awareness grows, you will begin to feel ease, and maybe even joy. 

By widening the gap between action and reaction, you can gain some distance from your automatic responses and also gain an opportunity to know your emotions.  You can stop being ruled by these emotions and instead begin to rule your experience of life.  To really enjoy this freedom, though, you need to practice.  If you can practice the Third Moment Method frequently and deeply enough, you can experience the unconditional joy that breeds lovingkindness and compassion. 

Of course, in the heat of the moment, it can be difficult to remember a practice that is not yet ingrained.  You can try practice drills – mentally creating scenarios that evoke strong emotions, then using the Third Moment Method to diffuse them.  This will begin to create a mental muscle memory.  However, in your mind you still know the experience isn’t real, so in many ways the effect is not real either.  The best practice is real life. 

BENEFITING FROM THE RESULTS

Remember:  The Third Moment passes very quickly, and it is easy to miss.  If you truly experience this once – if you really catch the moment – you will find that the Third Moment Method is not only easy but also something you will want to do often.  So try to be conscious of your emotions, and seize every opportunity to practice.  If you do this, you will find that your mind is cooler, clearer, and less biased.  You are more connected to the present moment.  You are aware that your emotions are not reality.  That, in turn, affects how you interpret your experiences.  You may also find not only that you interact with the world more easily but also that your relationships are better – starting with your relationship with yourself. 

Trungram Gyalwa Rinpoche, PhD, is the founder and spiritual leader of the Dharmakaya Center for Wellbeing in Cragsmoor, New York; The World Center for Peace and Unity in Lumbini, Nepal; and other centers worldwide.  A scholar of Sanskrit and Tibetan, he is known for making ancient Buddhist teachings accessible to contemporary Western audiences. 

Meditation on Gratitude and Joy - Jack Kornfield

jackkornfield.com · December 19, 2014

“If we cannot be happy in spite of our difficulties, what good is our spiritual practice?”

~Maha Ghosananda

Buddhist monks begin each day with a chant of gratitude for the blessings of their life. Native American elders begin each ceremony with grateful prayers to mother earth and father sky, to the four directions, to the animal, plant, and mineral brothers and sisters who share our earth and support our life. In Tibet, the monks and nuns even offer prayers of gratitude for the suffering they have been given: “Grant that I might have enough suffering to awaken in the deepest possible compassion and wisdom.”

The aim of spiritual life is to awaken a joyful freedom, a benevolent and compassionate heart in spite of everything.

Gratitude is a gracious acknowledgment of all that sustains us, a bow to our blessings, great and small, an appreciation of the moments of good fortune that sustain our life every day. We have so much to be grateful for.

Gratitude is confidence in life itself. It is not sentimental, not jealous, nor judgmental. Gratitude does not envy or compare. Gratitude receives in wonder the myriad offerings of the rain and the earth, the care that supports every single life.

As gratitude grows it gives rise to joy. We experience the courage to rejoice in our own good fortune and in the good fortune of others.

Joy is natural to an open heart. In it, we are not afraid of pleasure. We do not mistakenly believe it is disloyal to the suffering of the world to honor the happiness we have been given.

Like gratitude, joy gladdens the heart. We can be joyful for people we love, for moments of goodness, for sunlight and trees, and for the breath within our breast. And as our joy grows we finally discover a happiness without cause. Like an innocent child who does not have to do anything to be happy, we can rejoice in life itself, in being alive.

Let yourself sit quietly and at ease. Allow your body to be relaxed and open, your breath natural, your heart easy. Begin the practice of gratitude by feeling how year after year you have cared for your own life. Now let yourself begin to acknowledge all that has supported you in this care:

With gratitude I remember the people, animals, plants, insects, creatures of the sky and sea, air and water, fire and earth, all whose joyful exertion blesses my life every day.

With gratitude I remember the care and labor of a thousand generations of elders and ancestors who came before me.

I offer my gratitude for the safety and well-being I have been given.

I offer my gratitude for the blessing of this earth I have been given.

I offer my gratitude for the measure of health I have been given.

I offer my gratitude for the family and friends I have been given.

I offer my gratitude for the community I have been given.

I offer my gratitude for the teachings and lessons I have been given.

I offer my gratitude for the life I have been given.

Just as we are grateful for our blessings, so we can be grateful for the blessings of others.

Continue to breathe gently. Bring to mind someone you care about, someone it is easy to rejoice for. Picture them and feel the natural joy you have for their well-being, for their happiness and success. With each breath, offer them your grateful, heartfelt wishes:

May you be joyful.

May your happiness increase.

May you not be separated from great happiness.

May your good fortune and the causes for your joy and happiness increase.

Sense the sympathetic joy and caring in each phrase. When you feel some degree of natural gratitude for the happiness of this loved one, extend this practice to another person you care about. Recite the same simple phrases that express your heart’s intention.

Then gradually open the meditation to include neutral people, difficult people, and even enemies- until you extend sympathetic joy to all beings everywhere, young and old, near and far.

This excerpt is taken from the book, “The Art of Forgiveness, Lovingkindness, and Peace“

If we see the world as sacred, which is an expression of the spiritual life, then gratitude follows immediately and naturally. We've been given the extraordinary privilege of incarnating as human beings -- and of course the human incarnation entails the 10,000 joys and 10,000 sorrows, as it says in the Tao Te Ching -- but with it we have the privilege of the lavender color at sunset, the taste of a tangerine in our mouth, and the almost unbearable beauty of life around us, along with its troubles. It keeps recreating itself. We can either be lost in a smaller state of consciousness -- what in Buddhist psychology is called the "body of fear," which brings suffering to us and to others -- or we can bring the quality of love and appreciation, which I would call gratitude, to life. With it comes a kind of trust. The poet Pablo Neruda writes, "You can pick all the flowers, but you can't stop the spring." Life keeps recreating itself and presenting us with miracles every day.

-Jack Kornfield

Mindful Breathing

This exercise can be done standing up or sitting down, and pretty much anywhere at any time. If you can sit down in the meditation (lotus) position, that's great, if not, no worries.

Either way, all you have to do is be still and focus on your breath for just one minute.

1. Start by breathing in and out slowly. One breath cycle should last for approximately 6 seconds.

2. Breathe in through your nose and out through your mouth, letting your breath flow effortlessly in and out of your body.

3. Let go of your thoughts. Let go of things you have to do later today or pending projects that need your attention. Simply let thoughts rise and fall of their own accord and be at one with your breath.

4. Purposefully watch your breath, focusing your sense of awareness on its pathway as it enters your body and fills you with life.

5. Then watch with your awareness as it works work its way up and out of your mouth and its energy dissipates into the world.

If you are someone who thought they’d never be able to meditate, guess what? You are half way there already!

If you enjoyed one minute of this mind-calming exercise, why not try two or three?

Below Are Some Gathas, or Verses That You Can Use In Your Daily Mindfulness Practice. Think Of These If You Find Yourself Saying "I Wish I Had More Time To Practice."

(Courtesy of The Mindfulness Bell)

Waking Up
Waking up this morning, I smile.
Twenty-four brand new hours are before me.
I vow to live fully in each moment
and to look at all beings with the eyes of compassion.

Brushing Your Teeth
Brushing my teeth and rinsing my mouth,
I vow to speak purely and lovingly.
When my mouth is fragrant with right speech,
a flower blooms in the garden of my heart.

Walking Meditation
The mind can go in a thousand directions.
But on this beautiful path, I walk in peace.
With each step, a gentle wind blows.
With each step, a flower blooms.

Drinking Tea
This cup of tea in my two hands,
mindfulness held perfectly.
My mind and body dwell in
the very here and now.

Talking on the Telephone
Words can travel thousands of miles.
May my words create mutual understanding and love.
May they be as beautiful as gems,
as lovely as flowers.

Driving a Car
Before starting the car
I know where I am going.
The car and I are one.
If the car goes fast, I go fast.

Washing the Dishes
Washing the dishes
is like bathing a baby Buddha.
The profane is the sacred.
Everyday mind is Buddha’s mind.

Sitting or Walking Meditation
I have arrived,
I am home
In the here,
In the now.
I am solid,
I am free.
In the ultimate
I dwell.

Laying in Bed
Resting in the ultimate dimension,
using snowy mountains as a pillow
and beautiful pink clouds as blankets.
Nothing is lacking.