Sometimes I ask Buddhist audiences, “When you think of Buddhism, what’s the first thing that comes to mind?”
“Meditation,” they say.
“Life is suffering.”
“Enlightenment.”
“Compassion.”
“Loving kindness.”
When I ask non-Buddhist audiences the same question, they often aren’t sure. And when I ask them, “Do Buddhists believe in God?” only a few hands go up. Since Buddhism is my faith and the primary source of inspiration and practice for this book, I thought it would be a good idea now to review the basics of what Buddhism actually teaches, both for Buddhists and for non-Buddhists. Buddhism has been a dominant faith in Asian countries for centuries, but outside of ethnic communities it is still relatively new in the West, and there are a number of misunderstandings about what Buddhism actually is and what it teaches. Many people who call themselves Buddhists came to it as adults and first learned about it from the more than ten thousand books on Buddhism in English—or increasingly from websites. Some of those books and websites are about meditation, but many are not.
There are about 370 million Buddhists in the world today, and the majority do not meditate—at least not traditional silent, sitting meditation. Most Buddhists chant the name of or pray to Buddha. Buddhists also attend services, recite scriptures and prayers, and follow Buddhist ethical teachings. But even for many monks in Buddhist countries, regular meditation is unusual. This may surprise people in the West, where there is great interest in Buddhist meditation.
I once attended an interfaith wedding led by a rabbi. After the ceremony I introduced myself and said I was a Buddhist priest. “Oh, really?” he said. “Do you know Sylvia Boorstein?”
I said that she was a good friend, and he told me how grateful the local rabbinical community was to Sylvia for teaching them Buddhist meditation.
“Judaism once had its own rich tradition of meditation,” the rabbi said. “It was centered in Eastern Europe and Russia. But its teachers were all killed in World War II. Sylvia helped us rediscover our roots.”
Every religion has its form of contemplative practice. Though Buddhism has many meditation practices, it is first and foremost an ethical teaching and a way of life. I have heard anecdotally that Thich Nhat Hanh, the Vietnamese Zen teacher, was once asked to summarize all of Buddhist teaching in one word. He said, “Ahimsa,” which means “non-harm” or “nonviolence.” This is the first ethical precept of Buddhism. The term is thousands of years old and goes back at least to the Vedic Hinduism of ancient India. Mohandas Gandhi made ahimsa the centerpiece of his doctrine of nonviolence.
When the Dalai Lama says, “My religion is kindness,” he is saying much the same thing. More fundamental even than meditation for Buddhists is the sense that all life is sacred, and all life is one. That is the doctrine that underlies nonviolence. If all life is related, then we avoid harming others as much as we avoid harming ourselves. Thich Nhat Hanh calls this connection “interbeing.” Shunryu Suzuki Roshi said, “When you feel the oneness of everything, you naturally don’t want to harm anything.”
This is the Golden Rule, spoken as a Buddhist. To practice ahimsa is to follow Buddhist values, whether you call yourself a Buddhist or not. Meditation grows out of the ahimsa spirit and is a central expression of it. The application of Buddhist meditation to aging, as we are pursuing in this book, is another application of the ahimsa spirit. Our increasingly fragile and infirm bodies and minds are sacred, and worthy of the greatest kindness and care. To respect our aging at every stage is the greatest kindness we can offer to ourselves and those we love.
Shunryu Suzuki once said, “It is not that satori [enlightenment] is unimportant, but it’s not the part of Zen that needs to be stressed.”13
The Buddha was said to have been enlightened under the Bo tree 2,500 years ago, and ever since then, enlightenment has been a centerpiece of Buddhist teaching. It was certainly the centerpiece of my fascination with Buddhism when I first began my study in 1967.
Yet Suzuki says enlightenment is not the point that needs to be stressed. Why would he say that? Probably because it’s something we want too much. That kind of desire is the opposite of what enlightenment is. Enlightenment is not something to have; it is something to live. An enlightened life means to live in mindful awareness, expressing compassion in each situation.
Someone who can truly embody the deep meaning of non-harming may be said to be living a life of enlightenment. Someone who can express kindness in each activity, as the Dalai Lama teaches, is truly practicing the Buddha’s way.
My thirty-seven-year-old son, Ivan, sometimes tells his friends that his father is a Zen Buddhist priest. “Oh, that ‘life is suffering’ thing,” they often reply. “I could never get into that.”
Buddhism is not “that life is suffering” thing, although that is how it is often understood. Anyone who visits a Buddhist country like Japan, Burma, or Thailand will be struck with the kindness of the people and their ready smiles. They do not seem to be dwelling on “life is suffering.” Ivan’s friends would be closer to the mark calling Buddhism “that kindness thing.”
However, the Buddha did teach the Four Noble Truths, the first of which says, “Human existence is marked by dukkha.” Dukkha is frequently translated as “suffering,” though “frustration” or “disappointment” might be closer to the actual meaning. This teaching does not mean that life is only suffering; it means that suffering is unavoidable, but that we can work to avoid unnecessary suffering. Unnecessary suffering is the kind caused by selfishness, fear, and greed. The Buddha taught that selfishness just makes our suffering worse, and when we are unselfish and loving, we can accept even the greatest difficulty. This is an important lesson, as it applies to aging. Some aspects of aging are difficult and cannot be avoided, but a positive mental attitude can brush away the cobwebs of much anxiety and fear.
Once, when I was on a live radio show being interviewed by a Christian talk show host, her first question to me was, “Do you Buddhists believe in God?”
I had only a few seconds to think of an answer.
“Yes,” I said.
“Good!” the host said. “And how do you pray?”
I said that we prayed in silence to reach our divine nature.
“I like that!” the host said.
If I had said no to the first question, that would have narrowed the conversation considerably. But I didn’t say yes just because my host was Christian. Given a choice between yes or no, I think yes is truer to the essential spirit of Buddhism. Some Buddhist teachers might not agree with me. But it all depends on what we mean by God or Buddha. Buddhists the world over pray to Amitabha or Tara—forms of Buddha who hear the prayers of anyone who calls their names. When my teacher was becoming ill, and in what became the last year of his life, he said to us, “I ask Buddha to give me ten more years.” That sounded like a prayer to me.
St. Anselm saw God as beyond any thought or idea. Suzuki Roshi said, “We have to believe in something which exists before all forms and colors appear.”14 The Dalai Lama says, “If someone shows genuine love and compassion toward fellow human brothers and sisters, and toward the Earth itself, then I think we can be sure that that person truly demonstrates love for God.”15
This principle of God as expressed by Suzuki and the Dalai Lama is what I meant when I answered the talk show host. And when it comes to aging well, I believe that such a universal spiritual expression is more important than any specific vocabulary or religion. The Dalai Lama seems to agree, saying:
When young…an individual might feel completely self-sufficient, completely in control, and thus conclude that no deeper faith or understanding is necessary. But with time, things inevitably change; people get sick, grow old, die. These inevitabilities, or perhaps some unexpected tragedy that money can’t fix, may clearly point out the limitation of this worldly view. In those cases, a spiritual approach…may be more suitable.16
Even though Buddhism is not just meditation, its contemplative tradition is rich and has been preserved by generations of Buddhists to the present day. This treasure is now unfolding in the West, where different schools, traditions, and practices of Buddhism are coming together for the first time, though this potpourri of languages, teachings, and practices can be confusing, even for dedicated Buddhists.
This book draws on the contemplative practices of various Buddhist schools as practical resources to help with the journey of aging. I have tried to keep them simple, and limited them to four types: mindfulness of body and breath; compassion and gratitude; transforming emotions; and spacious awareness. Each of these types has a particular flavor, purpose, and meaning.
“Mindfulness” in a Buddhist sense means “concentrated nonjudgmental attention to what is happening.” Mindfulness is a particular way of paying attention. While we can be mindful of any experience—physical, mental, or emotional—mindfulness of body and breath is foundational. Buddhist contemplative practice is rooted in the body.
We usually have no trouble paying attention to the things we like or enjoy; we can be quite focused in the pursuit of love, money, power, and other things that we want. Mindfulness means paying attention whether we like it or not, without judgment or interpretation. Mindfulness trains us to accept our experience just as it is.
The physical body is the most insistent bellweather of our aging, and most people in the second half of life are paying close attention to the body in terms of stamina, vigor, skin care, diet, weight loss, and attractiveness. But how many of us pay attention to our bodies without judgment? How many of us actually experience our bodies just as they are?
Aging Breath by Breath in Chapter 2 and vertical time in Chapter 5 are examples of mindful awareness as applied to the aging body. As far as our bodies are concerned, aging tends to happen faster and cause more trouble for us when we aren’t aware of it. When we fail to notice that our lower back is a little stiff when we get up in the morning, we are more likely to really injure it later in the day. The same applies to mental and emotional injuries; they start small, but if we neglect them, soon they become larger.
Compassion begins as a kind of mindfulness. We train ourselves to notice our own and other people’s feelings and try to sustain that awareness. But compassion as a contemplative practice goes beyond mindfulness. Compassion is proactive. We actively work to generate and strengthen compassionate feelings, both in meditation and in daily life. We need to do this work because we do not start life as fully developed compassionate beings. In fact, as young children, we are self-centered and focused on our own needs. It is only when we begin to understand that other people have needs, too, that compassion dawns.
Even as adults some part of us still expresses that needy, self-centered child, especially when we are fearful, anxious, or depressed. That child can also reemerge when we are feeling overwhelmed by the challenges of growing old. As Buddhists, we cultivate compassion whenever we can. The Loving Kindness Prayer at the conclusion of this chapter, as well as the Sending and Receiving contemplation of Chapter 9, are both examples of traditional compassion practices. The gratitude reflections of Chapter 4 are closely related.
Compassion and gratitude can arise out of mutual connectedness. Compassion and gratitude are like a daily tonic that can lift our spirits. But they are much more than medicine. They are fundamental principles or qualities of all life. When I was young, I attended Sunday school, where we often sang the song “God Is Love.” I liked the song, though as an eight-year-old, I couldn’t say why. Now, as I look back to that feeling, I realize that the truth of it was clear to me. Love is the highest form of connectedness. Even as a child, I understood that.
The natural spiritual intelligence we have as children never leaves us. It is deep inside, waiting to be called forth. Compassion practices are like this. They draw their power from what we already know. Compassion and kindness, when directed back toward ourselves, help us tolerate our own aging and the aging of those around us. Due to the aftereffects of both illness and age, I tend to knock things over—such as glasses of water—more than I used to, and when I do, I tend to be hard on myself. “Stupid!” I scold myself.
“Don’t say that,” my wife gently reminds me. “You’re not stupid. You’re just a little slower than you used to be.”
And then I remember: I must be kind to myself and kind to others as well. There’s nothing wrong with being a little slower.
Contemplative practice is nourished by two essential foods: focus and insight. Without focus we cannot see clearly, and without insight, focus doesn’t really change us. Everyone can be focused when they want something. In Chapter 1, Ikkyu’s wealthy patron was focused on getting a scroll to impress his friends, and Ikkyu was focused on teaching the patron a lesson.
Without focus, meditation devolves into reverie and daydreaming. But meditative focus alone is not transformative. Focus in meditation is like a lens or a magnifying glass. It allows us to see our experience more clearly. That is good, but now that we can see better, what is the wisdom that seeing our experience brings to us?
Behind all Buddhist contemplative practice is the conviction that we can grow, we can change—and not just when we are young, but throughout our lives. Until fairly recently, brain scientists thought that we are born with a fixed number of brain cells and could not grow any more. New imaging techniques and the discovery of “brain plasticity” has corrected that misperception. The brain creates new neurons all the time and in response to injury creates huge numbers of them.
When I was in rehabilitation after a brain infection, my doctor told me a story about brain plasticity. She said that when mice were taught to run through a maze to find cheese and were later examined, they had grown many new brain neurons. But when they had to swim through water too deep to stand in to find the cheese, the number of new neurons was enormous.
This kind of result has transformed rehabilitation medicine and is instructive for spiritual practice as well. Through the insight gained in spiritual practice, we can change, and when we are facing great challenges, our change can be even greater. In other words, Buddhist meditation is not just about being relaxed and calm, but about seeing through our problems and difficulties to find a new way. Just as the mice in the maze found a way to the cheese—even under great difficulty—through contemplative reflection we can find our way to new possibilities and solutions to problems.
The relationship between focus and insight in meditation can also be expressed as a balance between effort and surrender.
Jim, a retreat participant, complained after a meditation session that he was having a hard time keeping track of his breath. “I’m too busy thinking about whether I’m going to get the job I just applied for.”
I advised him not to try so hard and just relax.
“If I relax, I fall asleep,” he replied.
I told him that was OK too. Eventually, I told him, you’ll wake up.
The effort to focus can be hard, especially for beginners. In Buddhism, the distracted mind is often likened to a monkey, jumping from here to there, while the focused mind is pictured as an elephant: calm, steady, and deliberate. The balanced state of meditation is sometimes pictured as a monkey riding on top of an elephant.
Beyond the efforts of monkey and elephant, there is another kind of contemplative practice that is more like surrender. It goes by many names. In the Zen tradition we say “just sitting” or “just awareness.” Tibetan Buddhism speaks of “resting in true nature.” When I am speaking in an interfaith context, I might use the term “the prayer of silence” or “divine presence.” This awareness is called “spacious” because it feels like a clear blue sky or a boundless ocean. It is called “awareness” because it is not focused on anything in particular; it is just awake and conscious.
In Buddhism, simply resting in a relaxed, open, spacious state of mind without purpose and without a goal is considered the highest form of spiritual practice, and all of Chapter 10 is devoted to it. If the distracted mind is like a monkey, and the calm mind is like an elephant, “just awareness” practice might be thought of as an all-encompassing radiance that includes monkey, elephant, ourselves, and everything else.
This spacious awareness is considered both an advanced practice and a practice even the merest beginner can do. This seems to be paradoxical, but when a beginner does it, it has the quality and substance of a beginner’s awareness, and when an advanced meditator does it, it has a deeper quality of advanced awareness.
That is why I like to call it a prayer of silence. Prayer is not really something you get “good” at, like other skills—although people who pray regularly have cultivated a prayerful attitude toward life. A prayer is in essence a surrender and a supplication to that which is beyond ourselves. In this sense the Buddhist practice of spacious awareness has a universality that makes it kindred with other religions.
The prayer and contemplation on Loving Kindness has become one of the most popular Buddhist practices being taught in the West. It has its roots in the Loving Kindness or “Metta” Scripture taught by the Buddha. This short hymn to compassion exhorts us to “cherish all living things.”
Even as a mother at the risk of her life watches over and protects her only child, so with a boundless mind should one cherish all living things, suffusing love over the entire world, above, below, and all around without limit; so let one cultivate an infinite goodwill toward the whole world.
In my own spiritual communities, we recite the following verse from the Loving Kindness Scripture after every meditation session:
May I be filled with loving kindness;
May I be free from suffering;
May I be happy and at peace.
We say it three times beginning “May I…,” three times beginning “May we…,” and three times beginning “May all beings…,”—nine times in all. That way it includes everyone, including each person in the room.
This recitation is a kind of aspirational prayer. We know that not all people, including ourselves, are always filled with loving kindness. We know that they are not free from suffering, nor are they always happy and at peace.
But we wish for loving kindness nevertheless. Skeptics may say that wishing won’t help. If we want to improve the world’s happiness, they say, we have to actually do something. This prayer does not exclude doing something in an activist sense. All of Chapter 9, Giving Back, is devoted to that kind of activity.
But reciting this prayer helps in one way: It changes the hearts of those reciting it. And when I change, everyone I know and meet is changed by seeing the change in me. And so it is for those people too; everyone who knows them is changed. It is a little like a spiritual chain letter, or, in the parlance of the online world, like a YouTube video going viral.
I once heard of a church in Russia where a hermit lived fifty feet underground in a cell beneath the altar. No one who visited the church ever saw the hermit or spoke to him; in fact he had taken a vow of silence. But they knew he was there. Because of the hermit, the church became famous for its holiness. People came from far and wide just to be near the hermit and feel his blessing.
This is the power of prayer. When I was in a coma and near death due to my encephalitis, the word went out in many Buddhist communities that I might be dying. These communities included me in their daily chants and recitations. They recited the Loving Kindness prayer for me. My coma was so deep that I had no awareness of the outside world. Even when doctors shined a light into my eyes, my pupils did not react. That was a dire symptom.
Nevertheless, inside my coma I was having many visions. In one I remember sitting with a group of people on bales of hay in a barn. It was late summer, and the smell of the hay was sweet. Some of the people were my Buddhist friends; some I did not know. We were passing around a hot drink, perhaps tea or broth, and engaging in friendly conversation. Every so often the group would chant or sing something. It was a pleasant, friendly sound.
I felt safe there, and knew I would be taken care of. My friends were with me.
Two weeks later I woke up.
There are many forms of the Loving Kindness prayer. Some Buddhist teachers hold retreats where participants repeat the prayer in silence to themselves for hours or days. Profound experiences can occur. This prayer is suitable for every circumstance—for people who are dying as well as those who are healthy, for those young as well as old, for people in pain and suffering and people who feel quite content. Thus it can be a useful resource for us as we age. Whatever our circumstance, whatever our age or state of health, we can wish happiness for ourselves and for others.
This is the version of the Loving Kindness prayer I recommend for aging well:
As I grow older, may I be kind to myself;
As I grow older, may I accept joy and sorrow;
As I grow older, may I be happy and at peace.
Say it a few times to yourself, just to get the feeling of it. When I do it, I feel the same way as I did long ago in that barn of my dream state: friendly, relaxed, taken care of. All compassion practices in Buddhism first begin by being directed at oneself. Until we can generate compassion for the precious person we know best, it is hard to truly share it with others.
Now say it this way:
As each of us grows older, may we be kind to ourselves;
As each of us grows older, may we accept joy and sorrow;
As each of us grows older, may we be happy and at peace.
Now we are sharing this wish not just for ourselves, but for spouses, partners, family, friends—all those who are with us on the aging journey. It is not ever a journey that we take alone. Everyone we know is with us.
Lastly, say it this way:
As all beings grow older, may they be kind to themselves;
As all beings grow older, may they accept joy and sorrow;
As all beings grow older, may they be happy and at peace.
Now we have expanded our prayer to embrace all people everywhere. Whatever joys and sorrows accompany our aging, they belong not just to us or the people we know, but to everyone. All humanity walks together on this journey. The expedition is timeless; we have always been doing it.
You can recite this prayer when you wake up in the morning, anytime during the day, and when you go to bed at night. You can use the traditional version (“May I be filled with loving kindness…”) or the aging version (“As I grow older, may I be kind to myself…”) or both.
Sometimes in my congregations, after we have finished reciting the Loving Kindness prayer for ourselves, for each other, and for all beings, I say, “May it be so.”
You can do this too. After you have finished the prayer, add, “May it be so.”
Whether the wishes of the prayer are true in any worldly, objective sense, it is true that you have said them and mean them.
The prayer is true because you are true.