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Off the Cushion: Theravāda Practice in Daily Life

GIL FRONSDAL

MARCIA ROSE

MICHAEL GRADY

Theravāda Buddhism is renowned for its formal meditation practices, such as mindfulness and insight. What is its’ approach to Buddhist practice in our lives off the meditation cushion?

GIL FRONSDAL: People are looking for how they can bring Buddhist practice into all aspects of their lives. Meditation and mindfulness are elements of that, but there is much more to a Buddhist spiritual life than mindfulness alone. Theravāda Buddhism is a very rich and profound spiritual path with many elements. Meditation and mindfulness are key, but I think they get overemphasized at times. I like to think of the path as a pyramid, and if your pyramid is upside down, it gets wobbly. It’s very important to help people create a strong foundation for their practice, and part of that foundation is the practice of the the transcendent perfections (pāramī). They are intertwined with the mindfulness practice and supported by it.

MARCIA ROSE: At our centers we encourage people to take the foundation of their practice of Buddhadharma—mindfulness—into their daily life. Their life is their practice, and it happens on and off the cushion. Of course, people are able to accomplish that to varying degrees.

MICHAEL GRADY: Even though we talk a lot about practice in daily life, we stress heavily how important it is to keep the basic practices of sitting and walking going. Silent practice is essential. It’s a worthy aspiration to be mindful and wise and compassionate in your daily life, but without a formal practice it’s very hard to genuinely do so.

Can you say more about the perfections and other practices that extend mindfulness into everyday life?

GIL FRONSDAL: There are ten transcendent perfections in the Theravāda tradition: generosity, ethics, renunciation, wisdom, energy, patience, truthfulness, resolve, loving-kindness, and equanimity. They don’t appear very much in the Pali canon, but they are prominent in the Buddhavaṃsa, the story of the Buddha’s previous lives. One of the best later sources is A Treatise on the Paramis (Cāriyapiṭaka Aṭṭhakathā), by Ācariya Dhammapāla. It’s technical in places but very inspiring and profound.

The pāramīs became more and more important in the evolution of Theravāda Buddhism. They’re not so much connected to the early tradition as they are to the mature Theravāda as it developed in Sri Lanka, Thailand, and Burma. The transcendent perfections are not mentioned in many of the popular books on Theravāda Buddhism, but if you go to these countries, you will find that they’re deeply integrated into how people understand their Buddhist practice.

MARCIA ROSE: The perfections are the practice of life; they apply to the situations we encounter every day. If we take the Dharma into our lives, the pāramīs become the practice of our lives unfolding.

MICHAEL GRADY: They’re aspects of insight practice and not separate from it.

MARCIA ROSE: The perfections, the precepts, the brahmavihāras, and other such foundational elements are not meant to be thought of simply in an intellectual way but actually brought into daily life. In every single realm of our life, the perfections show up in the mirror of our relationships.

GIL FRONSDAL: One thing I find beautiful about the perfections, as with the eightfold path and other aspects of the path as described in the early tradition, is that the foundation is our relationship to other people, our interrelational world. We’re not just doing our practice for ourselves. We’re also doing it in a field of other people. We can practice generosity in relation to ourselves, but mostly it’s something we practice in relation to others. Ethics and precepts are also practiced mostly in relation to other people. The foundation of the path is establishing healthy relationships with the people around us, Dharma relationships. Such relationships inform the deep contemplative practice that we do in a more solitary way.

MARCIA ROSE: For example, we can take one of the brahmavihāras, such as loving-kindness (metta), and practice it anytime, in any circumstance. If you’re in a traffic jam, instead of laying on the horn or swearing at somebody or engaging in unkind speech, send metta and see what happens. See what goes on internally.

MICHAEL GRADY: If you were in a meeting and someone intimidated you and made you fearful, you could use a calming practice, like working with the breath or being aware of touch points in the body, as a way of settling the energy. You could also do metta practice toward yourself or toward the person you’re afraid of. You could be mindful of how fear expresses itself in the body, noticing the different sensations that arise, and their impermanent nature. That leads to the insight that fear is an energy that arises in certain situations beyond our control, expresses itself in certain ways, and passes away. This is the basic methodology we use in vipassanā meditation, but we’re taking it off the cushion and bringing it into a situation where we are actually experiencing fear on the spot. When you can apply the methods you’ve been practicing to real-life situations, you develop confidence in yourself and confidence in the practice.

GIL FRONSDAL: One of the most useful practices is mindfulness of speech—paying attention to what we’re doing when we speak. There’s also an ethical aspect to paying attention to speech. It helps us learn how not to cause harm and to take care of our relationships in a healthier way.

When we bring mindfulness to speech, what we speak tends to become a window into what makes us tick, our deep motivation. Often we don’t see our own motivation clearly. By paying attention to why we say what we’re going to say, a phenomenal amount of self-understanding and self-purification can come about.

MARCIA ROSE: The teaching of no self (anattā) can be liberating and powerful off the cushion. It’s a misunderstanding that this fundamental teaching can only come to be understood during formal practice. We can always be mindful of ways that we create, or recreate, a separate self. We can begin to notice that “self-ing” taking place in our daily life. We can notice how we exaggerate our speech and make our self up in the way we speak. We tell tales, exaggerating what we’ve done, what we’ve said, who we think we are, who we think we aren’t.

The bottom line is looking at our motivation for speaking, and for acting in general. We can look at whether in a relationship we are creating another self, or not. We can see whether we are connecting directly or reacting to life by having to make our self again. We do a nonresidential weekend retreat on that subject alone, because people want to take a deeper look at the process of creating the self in a more concentrated setting. Then they can take what they learn into their lives.

Can you say something about the precepts?

MICHAEL GRADY: The precepts are crucial in the Theravāda tradition. How one holds them varies from teacher to teacher, but holding them is the foundation of the practice. It is also an awareness practice. Laypeople are encouraged to follow the five basic precepts, and we talk a lot about why we think it’s important to follow them and take them up as a practice.

The idea is not to hold the precepts as commandments but to treat them as guidelines. The core principle of the precepts is the practice of nonharm, which is based on the recognition that we’re all interconnected. Ethics provide a very wise guide for living in relationship with others. Whether it’s refraining from harming somebody, practicing generosity and kindness, not taking things that don’t belong to you, or exercising wise action in sexual relationships, the precept are a guide for how to relate to others.

How is that different from the commandment approach?

MICHAEL GRADY: Everybody needs to cultivate their own relationship to the precepts. It’s important not to see them as something imposed on you. A good example is taking intoxicants. Some people define that as never having a glass of wine at a meal, and other people would say that’s fine. What we say is, “Don’t take things that cloud your mind.” If drinking a glass of wine clouds your mind, affects your behavior, or affects your thoughts, then consider restraining that impulse. But you take it as a practice—you use the precepts as a framework for evaluating the consequences of what you’re doing in your life.

Sometimes our own wisdom is limited, and the precepts give additional support and guidance. If you’re moving into a relationship and you’re getting close to having a sexual relationship with somebody, the precepts ask you to step back and see if it’s a wise thing. If you’re pursuing self-interest at the cost of somebody else’s well-being, that’s not a good thing. That would not be living that particular precept. It’s a process of investigation, using wisdom and compassion. Mindfulness is involved in all the precept practices, which ask us to recognize that if we engage in harmful activities it inhibits liberation and causes suffering.

MARCIA ROSE: When we use the precepts to take an investigatory approach to our life, we discover that harm goes in both directions. It’s never just harming the other person and it’s never just harming oneself. Using the precepts as practice requires one to be very honest, and it develops a lot of humility. With humility and honesty come learning. It’s about learning, not about obeying a commandment.

GIL FRONSDAL: I find that the cutting edge of people’s practice is not always on the cushion. It could be in parenting, at work, or in relationships. I see people growing a lot when they begin applying Dharma principles of mindfulness and practice in all these areas. The spiritual growth that’s available in parenting, for example, is just phenomenal.