given by Nomon Tim Burnett
Red Cedar Dharma Hall
March 25, 2009
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[see also Zoketu Norman Fischer's more extentive teachings at EverydayZen.org]
Welcome to the second of two talk on the Lojong mind training slogans of Indo-Tibetan Buddhism which our guiding teacher Norman Fischer spoke about during our last sesshin with him.
Last week we had a length intro to these slogans and talking in some depth about a selection of slogans in the first 3 of the 7 points of mind training which are the categories the slogans are organized by.
In the first point, Preliminaries, we talked about stabilizing our lives with meditation and spiritual practice as both preliminary and ongoing practice that makes everything else possible. This is important and can't be understated. The spaciousness and possibility of doing the practice is the engine that makes all of this stuff transformational and real instead of weird and tricky. And when some of these slogans activate us and fling us into some kind of reactive and self-focussed state of mind we have to reach down and touch the spaciousness of meditation practice and feel it again from that angle.
In the second point, Formal Practice point, we talked about bodhichitta and how Chogyam Trungpa the Tibetan teacher who popularized these teachings in the west emphasized that very strongly. That this traning and all Buddhist training is a deeply altruistic enterprise and we have to awaken at a very deep level a sense of limitless generosity and joyful acceptance of the infinite responsibilty of bodhisattvas, awakening beings, to help others.
In the second point we talked about the slogan "Regard all dharmas as dreams" which I am really appreciating lately. One quick point about that slogan: it doesn't mean we get all loose and flakey and do whatever we feel like because it's all just a dream anyway. We are even more committed to taking care of the world in very intelligent and accurate ways but we do so without the clinging and suffering that our usual belief in the fixed reality of things leads us too. We do so with more flexibilty and complete letting go. With a feeling of just making offerings. But most wonderfully we really do suffer less because it's all a dream.
And also in the second point we talked a little about the meditation technique of tonglen of giving and receiving which is the practice that supports the spirit of these lojong teachings very directly. But because of time I skated over the instruction about tonglen so let's do that now.
Tonglen is brought up by the slogan in the second point "Sending and taking should be practiced alternately. These two should ride the breath." This point is very specifically talking about a practice we can do and that lojong practicioners have done for a thousand years give or take. This is tonglen - which means sending and taking, or giving and receiving. It's the Indo-Tibetan verison of the Theravadin practice of metta more or less.
After hearing about tonglen for ages but never really being so interested in it myself I've been trying to practice it and it's really great, very powerful practice. What you do is you breathe in all the suffering and evil and bad in the world, you're sort of sucking this poison right out of the world as a service to all beings. Usually they say to visualize this as breathing in horrible sticky smelly black smoke. You breathe that in, somewhere I saw it said you breathe that in with your right nostril but that's getting a little picky, and you allow yourself to be the sort of dumping ground for all of this poison. You are really willing to absorb and hold this so no one else has to. Then you breathe out love. You breathe out kindness and everything that's warm and beneficial and helpful to beings. You can do this is a sort of general way: breathing in a feeling of badness and suffering, breathing out joy; you can do this in a visualizing sort of way breathing in this black evil smoke and breathing out light and love and warmth; or you can even do this in very specific ways that relate to the actual details of your life. You can breathe in the dislike and impatience of someone in your family whom have issues with or maybe breathe in the suffering caused by something that person did, and then breathe out joy and contentment right back to that person. It's kind of like sucking the poison from a snakebite, you do that for your loved one or you enemy, so that they won't have to suffer from it and then you give them everything good that you can. You offer them a respite from suffering so they have room to wake up. Give them your entire hearts, just breathe that right out to them. Give yourself away breath after breath.
And true to the way of the Bodhisattva you notice if you are holding back or sort of reserving a little judgement, "well I'll take some of that suffering but you really deserve some, I mean there should be consquences right?" That kind of ungenerous impulse-thought is seen in the tonglen practice as just another manifestation of ego and suffering, just another little black nugget of evil and so you breathe that right in too. There might be enough distrust and judgement and scorn and impatience leaking out right through your own skin so you will have no lack of supply for the breathing in of evil without even thinking about this vast confused suffering world.
I think it's okay to start with something more conceptual like this, we do need to work directly with our story, but after a while as the mind settles you can let the feeling become more and more subtle and universal. Breathing in just the feeling of darkness, the feeling of tightness and pain, breathing out just the feleing of light and openness and joy. It sounds sort of awful at first - what? I have to be the human filter for all the pollution in the world? - and well yes that is the idea. The way the bodhisattva thinks is, well of course I should do that if I didn't someone else would suffer! But then the good news is that turning towards what is in this way, even turning towards something that we are usually quite averse to, turns out to be quite beautiful and transformational. So tonglen practice I'm learning is very beautiful and the more you open to suffering the more you can breathe joy. There's a kind of balance that happens.
Then we talked about two of the slogans in the third point called "Using Adversity." We talked at some length about one which was hard for us to really embrace: "Drive all blames into one." This is a slogan about being willing to take on responsibilty for trouble to the deepest extent possible. To be the one willing to soften a tough situation by taking the blame. We were easily able to imagine situations where taking the blame for something we think isn't our fault would just confuse the situation and maybe even be dishonest. This slogan "Drive all blames into one" or Norman called it "eat the blame" bugged us a bit.
I thought I'd read you what Alan Wallace said about this one and maybe just a few more thoughts of my own.
The next verse instructs us to blame everything bad that happens to us, from tragedy to ingrown toenails, on one thing alone: self-centeredness. This is a very powerful antidote to a very natural tendency. When we experience misfortune, we almost invariably look outward and say, "Who did this to me?" If we identify a perpetrator, myriad mental distortions arise in response. Another person may well have acted as a cooperative condition contributing to our unhappiness, but that person is not the real cause.
On the deepest level, taking karma into account, we are ultimately responsible for our present circumstances, and for the future we are creating right now with each action of body, speech, and mind. But we are responsible on another level also which can be helpful to consider. Imagine, for example, that someone drives into my car and puts a dent in it. In this particular instance I am blameless; my car was stationary. I can target the person who did it, and that person seems truly to blame for my suffering - the dent in my nice new car. But remember how our enemies first appeared when we approached them in the practice of taking and sending. I have isolated this person. It's a sure bet that I am looking at the person who dented my car as an intrinsic, autonomous entity, and in this way I feed the fires of my indignation and self-righteousness.
What is the real issue here? Was I at fault in this particular context? Both the law and my insurance company would say that I was not. Someone has damaged a possession of mine and I have no freedom to choose whether or not I experience this particular circumstance. On a deep level I have stacked the cards to experience this through my own previous actions. But here lies the freedom: How do I respond? The dent in the car has no power to cause me any suffering unless I yield to it. The dent is only an external catalyst, a contributing circumstance, but by itself it is not sufficient to cause me suffering. The suffering actually arises from the stuff of my own mind. If I were mindless there would be no suffering, but that is not an option. I cannot decide to reject my mind. Instead I must apply my intelligence: What element of my mind was responsible for my suffering?
The real source of my suffering is self-centeredness: my car, my possession, my well-being. Without the self-centeredness, the suffering would not arise. What would happen instead? It is important to imagine this fully and to focus on examples of your own. Think of some misfortune that makes you want to lash out, that gives rise to anger or misery. Then imagine how you might respond without suffering. Recognize that we need not experience the misery, let alone the anger, resentment, and hostility. The choice is ours.
Let's continue with the previous example. You see that there is a dent in the car. What needs to be done? Get the other driver's license number, notify the police, contact the insurance agency, deal with all the details. Simply do it and accept it. Accept it gladly as a way to strengthen your mind further, to develop patience and the armor of forbearance. There is no way to become a Buddha and remain a vulnerable wimp. Patience does not suddenly appear as a bonus after full enlightenment. Part of the whole process of awakening is to develop greater forbearance and equanimity in adversity. Shantideva, in the sixth chapter of his Guide to the Bodhisattva's Way of Life, eloquently points out that there is no way to develop patience without encountering adversity, and patience is indispensable for our own growth on the path to awakening.
So think of your own example. Recognize that anger or resentment is superfluous mental garbage, and that clutter and distortion serve no useful purpose in our minds. Suffering is not even necessary.
The other thing I have thought about this slogan is that it's a slogan encouraging us to embrace not knowing. We talked last time about the bodhisattvas being more interested in reducing suffering than in being right, and being willing to be dumped on if that's skillful. I think where we got upset is we said, "Well what if it's not skillful, what if what's skillful it to push back? is to be strong? is to call a spade a spade and tell the other person they are really creating trouble here?" So I think this slogan encourages us to think twice about how sure we are that it wasn't our fault. We can be so sure about that, and to practice erring on the other side. "I really don't know what happened, here's what I saw, here's what I felt but I bet I don't understand what happened from your point of view at all, maybe I'm really confused. I'm really sorrry about creating this mess! Please teach me, how did this happen, what can I do better?"
The fourth point is called "Life and Death" and it refers to a four-point practice that's all about making effort. Making the great effor t that we are called upon by this life to full be present from start to finish and beyond. The only slogan is not so easy to remember and explains what it's all about. Trunpa translates it "Practice the Five Strengths, the Condensed Heart Instructions. the mahayana Instruction for Ejection of Consciousness at Death is the Five Strengths; How You Conduct Yourself is Important." And Alan Wallace does a much less literal translation but more helpfully: "To Synthesize the Essence of This Practical Guidance, Apply Yourself to the Five Powers " In other words to make all of these practices and slogans work well, to allow them to function, work with these five powers.
The five powers turn out to be: strong determination, familiarization, seeds of virtue, reproach, and aspiration. Strong determination: we are determined, we are going to work with our hearts and we are going to practice steadily. Familiarization: we are not going to shy away from our actual experience, we are going to become deeply familiar with our neurotic little selves using a variety of tools - meditation, therapy, journal writing, whatever works for us. Seeds of virtue: every good thing you do is a seed, plant more seeds, keep planting seeds, don't worry if they don't appear to sprout and don't get excited if a bean stalk shoots up, just keep planting seeds. Reproach: take yourself in hand, this is a kind of responding to familiarization, one has to be careful about activating lots of guilt this teaching doesn't come from such a guilt oriented culture, but reporach is really reminding yourself that self-centered action and narrow lazy approaches to life just won't do and paying attention to the suffering that arises as good fuel for this study. And lastly aspriation: this is the world of vow, of bodhichitta again, of promising every day to do your best to save all beings. Lately I've been chanting this to myself every morning as an aspiration practice born out of our study of precepts:
Buddhas and Bodhisattvas, please concentrate your hearts on me.
I, Nomon Doan, Buddha's Disciple, greet the new day with humility and joy.
May I today in all actions of body, speech and mind:
Affirm life; give generously; keep the mind clear;
treasure the body; be gentle and kind in speech;
open to and heal through strong emotions;
and return always to Buddha, Dharma and Sangha on every breath.
You could use this little saying or write your own. The important thing about aspiration practice is it is a practice it is not the same as inspiration where we sort of wait around for conditions to be right and we feel inspired and excited about practice. Aspiration practice we do even when we are really in the dumps.
So these five powers are essentially the fourth point of Mind Training.
Now I had the plan to cover all seven points in two talks but I think for once I will exercise a little restraint in my dharma talk and we'll do just one more and take the last two for two weeks from now on my next regularly scheduled dharma talk. That would be on April 8th, the second Wednesday of the month. And by the way on the last Wednesday of April, the 29th, Edie Norton has agreed to give a wayseeking mind talk which will be great.
The fifth point of the lojong mind training slogans is called "Yardsticks" - how do we evaluate our practice. This is a big issue for us, we want to know how well we're doing? Am I doing a good job?
I want to talk about three slogans here. The first is "Of the two witnesses, hold the principal one." The two witnesses are you and others. And the principal one is yourself. This is encouragement to trust your own wisdom. To stop showing off, to radically stopping doing your life and your practice so that you will look good to others and consider deeply what is really right and true for you. This seems at first to contradict the strong encouragement in these slogans to put others first, to let go of our own point of view. To eat the blame and praise others before ourselves. So I think this is a kind of counterweight to those teachings, we still need to know ourselves deeply and learn to trust our deepest sense of who we are beyond all of our craziness.
Trunpa Rinpoche said:
In any situation there are two witnesses: other people's view of you and your own view of yourself. Of those, the principal witness is your own insight. You should not go along with other people's opinion of you. The practice of this slogan is always be true to yourself.
...
You know best about yourself, so you should work with yourself constantly. This is based on trusting your intelligence rather than trusting yourself, which could be very selfish. It is trusting your intelligence by knowing who you are and what you are. You know yourself so well, therefore any deception could be cut through. If someone congratulates or compliments you, they may not know your entire existence. So you should come back to your own judgment, to your own sense of your expression and the tricks you play on others and on yourself. This is not self-centered, it is self-inspired from the point of view of the nonexistence of the ego. You just witness what you are. You are simply witnessing and evaluating the merit, rather than going back over it in a Jungian or Freudian way.
The next slogan I want to mention in this fifth point about yardsticks for practice is "Always maintain a joyful mind." Even when there's suffering or upset, bring up joyfulness. What a gift it is to be alive, to have such wonderful things to practice with. To be engaged in this life of beauty and disaster. I've been reading Jon Kabbat-Zinn lately who is a popularizer of meditation in the medical world, he quotes Zorba the Greek. Someone asked Zorba if he had kids and a house and all that and he said something like oh yes, I had all of the that, The Full Catastrophe. So this joyful mind is the mind of the wonderful catastrophe of life. To bring up joy in what we do, always. Dour American Zen students need a dose of this.
And the last slogan I want to talk about tonight is "If you can practice when distracted, you are well trained" this is a wonderful slogan and we will fail in it all the time and keep learning. It's one thing to sit down here and do our little ritual and be full of love and support and engage the practice. It's another thing to practice when you get a phone call at an unexpected time and someone you barely know is on the line being pushy and you think not very respectful and wants things of you. How do you practice then? There's another slogan that I skipped over from the Using Adversity point called "Whatever you meet unexpectedly, join with meditation" that works with this slogan. The unexpected is our teacher. We want things controlled and organized but life is not that way. It is full of the unexpected so instead of reacting in our usual way to that can we be reminded of practice. Ah, wonderful something unexpected I am reminded to practice even more deeply. And when you can do that you are well trained. Maybe one day!
Thank you very much, let us discuss.
Resident Priest Nomon Tim Burnett has been a student of Zoketsu Norman Fischer since 1987 when he was a resident at San Francisco Zen Center's Green Gulch Farm. After sitting practice periods at Green Gulch and Tassajara Zen Monastery, Tim helped found the Bellingham Zen Practice Group in 1991. Tim was ordained as a Zen Priest by Norman in June, 2000. Like his teacher, Tim is interested in the possibility of deep and complete practice by lay people.
A person of wide-ranging professional interests, Tim has been a botanist, elementary schoolteacher, writer, and computer programmer. In addition to his work at the Resident Priest of Red Cedar Zen Community, Tim works as a software developer.