August 2008
Lama Norlha Rinpoche, when he teaches meditation, sometimes illustrates his instructions with a classic example: If we become accustomed to sitting in meditation with a spaced-out, blank mind, it is said that we are sowing seeds for rebirth as a hibernating animal. The raccoon, says Rinpoche (via his ace translator, Lama Jamdron), disappears into its den in the late fall, and when it re-emerges in the spring: same old raccoon!
That, it seems, is not how we want to meditate. When we sit on our cushion or in our chair, our mind should be relaxed, much like the raccoon enjoying its rest after an action-packed summer. But, unlike the raccoon, we should not actually be sleeping—in the midst of our relaxation, our mind should also be very alert, tuned in to our object of meditation and aware of every passing thought. Otherwise, we are wasting our time, and might as well be taking a nap or watching a “Full House” rerun.
I’ve read that Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche instructed students to meditate as if they had a snake on their lap. During my years in New Hampshire, driving on icy roads provided another apt analogy. In either case—at least assuming Trungpa Rinpoche was talking about a poisonous snake—even the slightest lapse in vigilance could be fatal, a situation that naturally inspires the mind to be finely attuned to every new development.
The point is not to make meditation sound impossible, or even difficult. It’s not that we should expect to have a “perfect” meditation session every time we sit down. Or even once! In her book The Wisdom of No Escape Pema Chödron devotes a chapter, called “Precision, Gentleness, and Letting Go,” to how these three qualities or techniques of meditation complement each other and can be used as remedies whenever one of them goes out of balance. When you catch your vigilance developing into tightness, tension, or a cascade of thoughts, then you apply relaxation in the form of gentleness or letting go; when you get too spacey or dull, then you rachet up the precision.
Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche, in The Joy of Living, likewise urges us not to be hard on ourselves as we enter into the process of taming our minds. He says that as long as we maintain “the intention to meditate” during our session, it’s a productive one. We are all going to space out or get caught up in thoughts from time to time; the point is that as soon as we remember what we’re doing, we return to our relaxed vigilance. Doing that patiently again and again over time gradually wears away our strong habitual patterns to reveal mind’s brilliant underlying nature, and is what meditation is all about.
Time is going to pass no matter what we are doing, and we are going to get old one way or another—unless, of course, we die tomorrow. Either way, we will suddenly find ourselves at the door to the next life, prepared or unprepared.
The good news is that we don’t have to be at the mercy of the passage of time. We can put it to work for us—even turn it into an asset! If we meditate every day, even for a few minutes, that all adds up automatically as the days, weeks, months and years inexorably fly by. Lama Norlha Rinpoche has said that however much practice we do during our life, it will be in the bank when we need it, to help us through hard times, the process of dying, and the transition to what comes next. Naturally, we’ll be a lot better off when the crunch comes if we have managed to make regular deposits over time.
We can apply the same advice to our daily lives. If we spend every day completely immersed in one project and one thought after another, or lost in distraction in front of the TV, when we wake up in our next life: same old raccoon!
In three-year retreat, the goal is to be 100% focused on our practice all the time—and since we are engaged in formal practice most of the time, it’s not too hard to remember, even if we don’t always succeed. But even during our short breaks, we are encouraged not to think about what we are eating or how much sleep we are getting or what bizarre thing our neighbor seems to be up to, but to apply the techniques of meditation as much as possible in all situations, so that it eventually becomes our default mode.
In household life, where the ratio of formal practice to activity is reversed, we can still put most or even all of our time to constructive use via three handy devices:
And once we awaken, maybe we’ll be able to do something for that old raccoon.
August 2008
For the past few weeks, we’ve been entertained almost every day by a family of raccoons: a mother and five cubs.
The cubs are SO cute! They climb the chicken wire enclosure where the guinea hens used to live, engage in wrestling matches, and wreak general, adorable havoc on the property, as mom looks on to make sure they stay safe. Early one morning one of the cubs picked a green tomato (our only food crop, aside from a few herbs), and one of the retreatants, who happened to be outdoors just before the 6:00 a.m. chanting, hissed at it to discourage further destruction. It hissed back nonchalantly, and carried on.
The other morning, in pre-dawn twilight, I was out on the front porch enjoying a brief break in the summer heat, when suddenly one of the cedar trees that line the maroon fence waved at me! Astonished, I kept my eyes on the tree…and it waved again! Then I noticed a pair of bright eyes near the top of the tree, and another pair on the waving arm. It was still waving when I had to go back inside.
Observing the raccoon cubs’ antics, it is easy to forget a key downside to the animal realm, but sooner or later, there is always a reminder. One day last week, the birdhouse near the guinea hen coop had its top open, and there were telltale feathers.
Usually when there is evidence of predation, it is left behind by our resident cat, Dee Dee. But prying open the top of a birdhouse is a bit beyond her capabilities. Darn those cute raccoons.
And that Dee Dee! Her full name is Dun Drup, which in Tibetan means “Goal Accomplisher.” She is an ace hunter, and we frequently stumble upon her victims, dead, mortally wounded, or merely terrified. Occasionally we can intervene in the nick of time, but usually all we can do is dispose of the remains and say a few prayers.
Dee Dee is a poster child for the paradox of cyclic existence. She is absolutely the world’s most lovable cat. She lends herself to almost any sort of contact with humans. You can pick her up, rub her belly, scratch her head, squeeze her, turn her upside down, play her like an accordion, or carry her in your arms as you circumambulate the house. She is a perpetual purr machine. They don’t come any cuter than Dee Dee.
Unless, of course, you are a mouse or chipmunk or vole or sparrow or, the worst case so far in retreat, a pair mourning doves. The Dreaded Dee Dee is a certified mass murderer. She revels in the sheer joy of killing. She is also convinced, despite all our scolding, that her deadly sprees contribute to the household larder. There seems to be no way to discourage her.
Why do we keep a cat? In a word: rodents. Why don’t keep her indoors all the time? Eight residents and four doors, versus a cunning, one-pointed feline brain. But even if we kept our personal hands clean of murderous felines, there are billions more where she came from.
We do our best to make sure she is in at night—not only to protect others, but also to save our sweet kitty from a similar fate at the hands of one of the local coyotes. What goes around comes around: that is the law of karma, cause and effect. Dee Dee is headed for a gruesome fate, whether or not it is the way this particular life ends for her. In fact, her victims are paying off their own karmic debts, according to the Buddha’s teaching. Even in this lifetime, some of them were terrifying predators a little further down the food chain.
If you are expecting me to attempt to tie this up into any perspective that makes sense within the context of life as we know it, forget it. It’s a mess! When things are going well and we’re not confronted with the direct evidence—if our cat hasn’t brought in a bluebird lately, and no one close to us has died or received a devastating diagnosis, and we haven’t lost our job or been hounded to the brink by papparazzi—it’s easy to forget what a whirlpool of confusion and vale of tears we really inhabit. For awhile. And when bad things do happen, we can never ultimately sort out who’s to blame. There’s always another layer to it, if we dare to look, and eventually our analysis just hits a wall.
When the World Trade Center was destroyed in 2001 along with thousands of ordinary citizens going about their daily routines, we were horrified. KTC monastery is within commuting distance of New York City, and some of our members knew victims, or were even there. But when we prayed for the victims, we also prayed for the killers. According to the Buddha, people (and animals) do terrible things out of ignorance, thinking they are doing something else entirely, often quite oblivious to the heinous nature of their acts or the suffering they cause. They are busy focusing, as we all do at least most of the time, on another part of the picture: their own goals and their own immediate happiness. And they will pay dearly for it in the end. Just like lovable Dee Dee, and those adorable raccoons.
But wait—that’s not all! The truth that life as we know it is laced with suffering is just the first of the Buddha’s Four Noble Truths, his nutshell description of the way things look to a fully awakened mind. The other three truths are all good news: the truth of origination (the mayhem has a cause), the truth of cessation (the mayhem can be ended), and the truth of the path (the complete, step-by-step how-to manual). The raccoon story, and everybody else’s, can have a happy ending. All we have to do is get to work.
July 2008
When I was a child, my hero was the cartoon character Mighty Mouse:
“Here I come to save the day!
Mighty Mouse is on the way!”
I used to dream about being a girl superhero. I had a ponytail and flew through the air and rescued people from “bad guys.” That was when I was about six years old. I soon gave up the fantasy and caved in to reality: I was just another powerless kid who had to go to school every day and do my chores and homework, and when I grew up I would be a powerless adult who went to a boring job and paid insurance premiums.
Guess what? Though there is undeniable truth to the “reality” version of things, the fantasy turns out to be no less true. I might not have known this had I not encountered the path of Vajrayana Buddhism, in which imagining ourselves as superheroes is not only allowed, it’s the fast track to enlightenment! And it’s not considered a fantasy; it’s an equally valid—even a more valid—way to see ourselves.
Though the Vajrayana (the type of Buddhism that came to us from Tibet) includes all the types of practice done in the other Buddhist traditions (Hinayana and Mahayana), it is distinguished by what are generally called deity practices, in which we visualize “deities” who have superhuman abilities to help beings in particular ways; in some cases, we even visualize these deities as ourselves.
These Buddhist deities are not deities in way we usually understand the word. They really are more like superheroes, whose function is to rescue beings in all the realms of existence from all types of harm. For example, Chenrezi, a four-armed luminous white superhero, relieves suffering with light rays of compassion; Green Tara, a green female superhero, stamps out fear, danger, poverty, and other types of distress. Medicine Buddha, who looks like a blue Buddha, dispels illness. There is a whole class of superhero “protectors,” some of them quite fearsome looking, who make it their business to quash our enemies and demons.
According to the Buddha, everything we experience is in some way a reflection of our own mind: the superhero deities thus correspond to various fully developed aspects of our innate potential, and the “bad guys” they take out are our own familiar disturbing emotions—anger, desire, jealousy, greed, pride, etc.—which they magically restore to their true identities as aspects of our underlying, unrealized wisdom.
In the Mahayana traditions of Buddhism, which include the Vajrayana, all practitioners aspire to be bodhisattvas, or enlightenment warriors. Bodhisattvas can look quite ordinary and show up anywhere—your next-door neighbor could be one. They don’t generally announce themselves, but work quietly to help beings in whatever way is needed. That could be as dramatic as stepping in front of a train to save a child, or, as Tai Situ Rinpoche once explained in a teaching at KTC, it could be as simple as making someone a cup of tea. You might even see one rescuing an insect from certain death—to a bodhisattva, every living being counts.
The most powerful bodhisattvas are those who have attained realization of the true nature of mind, and can therefore see what beings really need and exercise their powers to provide it; Chenrezi and Green Tara are considered realized bodhisattvas. However, anyone can become a beginner bodhisattva simply by making a formal commitment to attain full awakening in order to help others do the same, and then setting out to make it so.
A few years ago, a college student showed up at one of our Dharma center meetings in rural New Hampshire in a log cabin in the woods overlooking a quiet pond, where we met (and my fellow practitioners still meet) one evening a week to do calm abiding meditation and the practice of Chenrezi. This young man had just seen Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, and he wanted to learn to do the magical feats and airborne acrobatics displayed by the characters in the film. We looked at each other for a moment, then welcomed him to our practice: Yep, Chenrezi practice is a perfect place to start!
July 2008
Just a few days into three-year retreat, almost seven months ago, I was helping a fellow retreatant polish some shrine bowls. It was during the lunch break, the only time talking is allowed, and we discovered that we had both come up with the same metaphor to describe our experience so far: down the rabbit hole!
Many aspects of retreat are like being in another world. We hear very little news from outside, even about the monastery whose grounds we inhabit; we are protected as much as possible from anything that might engage our thought processes unnecessarily and interfere with the process of letting them naturally settle so that we can begin to connect directly with our own vast, peaceful, powerful underlying inner nature. A classic Buddhist metaphor is of being caught up in the waves versus experiencing that they are part of the great, calm ocean.
It’s just a temporary escape; when we emerge from retreat we will fully engage once again with whatever waves the world throws our way. But in order to develop the capacity to engage truly effectively, a period of isolation is needed, and that’s what three-year retreat provides.
Well, that’s half of it. It might be isolated, but it’s full of life and activity, even if most of it is internal. Three-year retreat includes a large number of diverse meditation practices, some of them designed to calm down our current, ordinary mental busyness (the waves), and others intended to activate the various aspects of our potential realization (the ocean). These practices can be quite complex, colorful and dynamic: for more on this topic, see “We Are All Superheroes,” also posted this month.
Or, to paraphrase another classic work of Western literature:
Oh, the places you’ll go and the people you’ll meet
When you sit on your seat in a three-year retreat!
Anyway, this is just by way of letting you know that, though I am aiming to send in a post or two about once a month, there are likely to be some lulls in the process. During these first seven months, and probably for several months to come, we are still in the upper reaches of the rabbit hole, pretty much just out of sight of the surface. But my understanding is that some of the practices we will do in the future will serve as express elevators to the depths of our minds…and those periods may not be conducive to the kind of conceptualization required to write a web post.
As I mentioned in the introduction to this web page, Lama Norlha Rinpoche has given me permission to write occasionally from three-year retreat in order to keep in touch with the New Hampshire/Maine community of practitioners affiliated with KTC Monastery. But I can only write what I know (or think I know), and that isn’t much, compared with what is available from the many accomplished teachers in the Kagyu and other Buddhist traditions. There is a wealth of genuine teaching accessible via books, dvds, cds and the internet, and best is to find an authentic teacher to study with if possible. KTC Monastery is open to visitors, and its schedule of teaching and practice, along with contact information for its twenty or so affiliated centers, can be found on its website, www.kagyu.com. If you can’t get to KTC or an affiliated center, start with books or other media by Kalu Rinpoche, Tai Situpa, Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche, Khenchen Thrangu Rinpoche, Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche, Pema Chödron, and others.
Most likely, I’ll be back with another friendly post in August.
From the yellow brick road,
Yeshe Chödron
via Owl