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during my recovery, i sat still by watching episodes of the 1973 TV series
kung fu with david carradine
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i loved watching reruns of that series growing up, well before i had read anything about buddhism. something struck me about it, and my dad would tease me about my interest in the show sometimes calling me ‘grasshopper’ just like the zen masters would call the young kwai chang in the show.
seeing the series now, after i’ve studied so much in retreat, is like discovering a shining gem in my youth. the show is surprisingly accurate philosophically. and even the way carradine portrays the wandering monk lost in the old west is consistent with my experience of buddhist monastics. though i don’t know any ass kicking shaolin monks personally. i mean his demeanor and evenness.
i captured some of the quotes from his teachers, to see how they measured up to my buddhist philosophic studies. Click “more” to see some of them.
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We all long for heaven where God is, but we have it in our power to be in heaven with Him at this very moment. But being happy with Him now means:
Loving as He loves,
Helping as He helps,
Giving as He gives,
Serving as He serves,
Rescuing as He rescues,
Being with Him twenty-four hours,
Touching Him in his distressing disguise.
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karma: all effects are the result of multiple causes and conditions, often beyond our complete comprehension. but often positive actions result in conditions for future positive effects. as exemplified by this eight minute clip titled “spin dj is a god”:
UPDATE: The film is no longer on YouTube, but you can go to this site and click “watch it”.
the buddhist view of karma is often misunderstood by westerners, who i think have a very pop cultural understanding of karma as some sort of brownie point system that cross lifetimes. the rice seedling sutra in the buddhist cannon talks about karma much more in terms of effects from causes, and our lives making sense because the situation we find ourself in is the very reasonable result of causes and conditions. it’s not magic particularly.
but then it goes further or in my lineage we talk alot about how the mind becomes conditioned. when you have a thought and act on it, then you condition your mind. so if you yell out in anger, your mind becomes conditioned that way and the next time you’re angry you will be more likely to act in that way. so there is a particular interest in buddhism of how the mind becomes trained by ordinary action, what effects that has on us individually and in society, and how to work with that effectively and mindfully.
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this is a fantastic talk given by senior shambhala teacher Acharya Judy Lief given at the new york shambhala center. it’s 28 minutes long, but she gives a great overview of the different qualities of mind cultivated by meditation and how that relates to life and to stress. i really hope more talks like this become available on the web for free in the future.
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alex posted an interesting anecdote about teaching meditation to prisoners at terminal island, from his friend Jeanie Kerins:
I asked them to tell me a little bit about prison life so that I could make realistic suggestions for their practice in their situation. I asked them to introduce themselves to me as they spoke. Rusty said, “Noise. It’s constant noise. No matter what time of day, there’s always noise. If you have a free hour and you want to meditate in your bunk, you have to listen to some guy talking or their radio or the TV in the hall. It never stops. Then, there’s always the count.” As Rusty spoke, the other guys would grumble in agreement, or nod their heads in assent. What the hell was I going to say to this? Rusty continued, “Yeah man, when I get out of here, I’m going to Katmandu where you can really get into this stuff. Not like this shit hole.”
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Then I told them a story about a friend who went to Katmandu to practice meditation. He saved for years for the trip and rented a meditation hut through some contact in the sangha. When he finally got there, his dream meditation hut was on a cow road. Villagers would take their cows up and down the road all day long, cow bells ringing. The dirt road was paved with cow dung which would turn to dust and the dung-dust would fill his little hut each day. “That was his Katmandu experience.”
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From today’s rigpa glimpse of the day email. Love how he describes transforming the environment of mind, not of the external world.
“If your mind is able to settle naturally of its own accord, and if you find you are inspired simply to rest in its pure awareness, then you do not need any method of meditation. However, the vast majority of us find it difficult to arrive at that state straight away. We simply do not know how to awaken it, and our minds are so wild and so distracted that we need a skillful means or method to evoke it.
By “skillful” I mean that you bring together your understanding of the essential nature of your mind, your knowledge of your various, shifting moods, and the insight you have developed through your practice [of meditation] into how to work with yourself, from moment to moment. By bringing these together, you learn the art of applying whatever method is appropriate to any particular situation or problem, to transform that environment of your mind.”
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i borrowed a set of talks by adyashanti - who has tremendous momentum as a buddhist teacher in california right now - and appreciated his very simple summary of the path as roughly shifting one’s identification from what makes up ego to something else. I’ve heard that basic tenet in seminary transcripts by my tibetan lama but i just haven’t heard that summary in popular buddhist writing often. what makes up ego then? i need to listen more to his presentation, but to me it’s all thoughts and also all habitual emotional content that arises in the mind and body. identification with that is then thinking those are ‘my’ thoughts, ‘my’ emotions and that together they make up what is my point of view. shifting away from that isn’t denying the thoughts or emotions, nor suppressing them with meditation, but starting to see them as part of one’s experience instead of the core of one’s substance. they will arise naturally, the same way the weather changes and shifts beyond our control, but we don’t have to think that they are ‘us’.
i received this quote today from fellow meditator ilsa, “The ‘I’ is an illusion but that illusion needs to be experienced, and it is only by experience that it can be known as an illusion.” by Shankarachanya, a hindu philosopher who emphasized meditation as path.
that brings in another interesting point on the approach to this. some would recommend at least temporarily ignoring the thoughts and emotions that stir us up, or avoiding those situations entirely. meditation on the breath is a way of practicing this and most meditators start with this. then eventually, once basic stability occurs, contemplations intentionally stir up the mind but in the context of that stability it is easier to see how the mind works, how the thoughts take over.
adyashanti takes a different approach in his meditation, instead just asking students to stop elaborating on their experience, to stop adding onto it. i would expect that to be harder for beginners to understand, or to do without getting lost. that’s a more advanced practice in the zen and tibetan traditions. but more power to him and his students if it’s working. though he does also recommend contemplations just like the more traditional tibetan approach, and those contemplations as shankarachanya recommends are typically about ‘what are we?’ - the nature of self and ego.
yet another approach would be to look very closely that those experiences and thoughts arising. where do you feel the emotion in your body, where -exactly-? can you pinpoint it? can you describe the feeling precisely? the logic there i believe is that to believe something is solid and real, that the emotions are “us”, we have to stay a little bit fuzzy about them; a little bit detached. in that fuzziness, there is room to conceptualize them as ‘my emotion’ or ‘me’ as in ‘i’m pissed off’ or ‘you hurt me’. but when you look very precisely at the felt experience of the emotion, or try to pinpoint where the sound in your head of a thought or image in your head of a thought originated from and goes to, that effort to pinpoint things and experience them intensely actually squeezes out any room for the identification process to occur, for the secondary thoughts about the experience and labeling of the experience as ‘hurt’ or ‘injustice’ or whatever to occur and all your left with is the truth that it’s just a felt experience and no different fundamentally than other experiences, like a upset stomach and sore throat.
i should temper this, however, by saying that thoughts are useful. the thought that ‘you hurt me’ could lead to a very helpful conversation that smoothes relations. but the more we really ‘believe’ the conceptualization that ‘i’ was ‘hurt’ by ‘you’ the more we solidify our ideas of ‘i’ and ‘you’ and live with a narrower and more solidified, conceptualized world view. we take away our own freedom the more we live in that conceptual world, and we experience less freshness and therefore less joy from our experience. and in that specific example the more we feel like we need to defend ourselves and protect ourselves instead of opening more and more and loving more. so the thoughts are useful, but it’s better not to take them so seriously or identify with them if we don’t want to live in a conceptual prison of our own creation.
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gary, one of dzongsar khyentse rinpoche’s students, remixed a pretty catchy version of the heart sutra. it’s the same translation that we use in our sangha. it was extra nice to listen to on september 11th.
sitting monkey is place where