Martine Batchelor is the author of Women in Korean Zen (2007) and The Spirit of the Buddha (2010). She gives talks and conducts retreats throughout Europe and North America. She gave this interview during a visit to San Francisco, on November 10, 2010.
BOYLE: The first question, concerning your path story, is how you got started. As I recall, you read the Dhammapada at eighteen, and that’s what got you interested in Buddhism.
MARTINE BATCHELOR: Well, yes and no, because what happened was that from a very young age, eleven, I was socially and politically conscious. I was active in politics, along with some other people I knew. Then I met a group of musicians, and one of them was interested in meditation. He had this book, the
Dhammapada, and reading the
Dhammapada made me think differently. What the Buddha was basically saying, as I understood it then, was that before you try to change others, maybe you should try to change yourself. I thought it was a good point because I could see that I was very idealistic. That was 1972 or 1973, toward the end of the hippie movement. I was influenced by the freaks movement where everybody was supposed to love everybody. The beginning of my journey happened when I realized that there were things I couldn’t just think away. I could not think jealousy away or self-centeredness away. I could aspire to the loftiest ideals, but that had no effect at all on changing my behavior or my thought. That’s when what the Buddha said resonated. I thought,
Oh yes, he’s got a point. I am experiencing what he’s talking about, and maybe before going into politics I should practice meditation. Then there might be a possibility of some transformation.
BOYLE: So you were sensitive to those things, and you responded to the message that came along. But it was four years later that you went to Korea?
M. BATCHELOR: Yes, because first I had to find a way to get there. I left home and did not go to university. I went to live in England, and in England I met all kinds of people who all did different things. That was between 1972 and 1975, and things started to happen, one could say, spiritually. The Karmapa, the former Karmapa, passed through with the Black Hat ceremony. The Rajneesh people were doing Rajneesh things. I tried different things, like one evening I would go to a Sufi evening, then for a week I’d try the Rajneesh method. But I could see that these things were not really resonating with me. I don’t know if my experience with the Karmapa resonated very much. So I decided to travel. I decided to go east, and I worked to get a little money. I met Kalu Rinpoche in the south of France, but again that did not appeal to me. There was something that did not grab me, that did not appeal to me. What really appealed to me was China and Zen. So I planned to go to Taiwan.
When I left, I traveled overland and found myself in Nepal. It was a beautiful bus journey, an amazing bus journey from Pokhara to Katmandu, and the whole time I was thinking about money. Then I realized that you can be in the most beautiful place, but if you don’t do anything with your mind, it doesn’t make a difference. This is when I decided to investigate meditation seriously. I went to Thailand and spent a few days in a temple. However, being a feminist, I felt women were treated like second-class citizens there, and that did not appeal to me. I wanted to go to Taiwan but I couldn’t get a visa, so I decided to go to Japan. I was flying on Korean Airlines, and they put “Korea” on my plane ticket by mistake. I met a Korean monk and he said, “Oh yeah, lots of meditation in Korea.” I thought, I can go there for a month. I have just barely enough money to do that. Then I’d go to Japan to find work. So I went to Korea, and I stayed there. It was the best mistake Korean Airlines ever made.
BOYLE: Your book gives an account of what happened from the time you arrived in Korea until Zen Master Kusan died. You say that it took you a while to learn what meditation really was. But as time went on, your meditation deepened and you were better able to keep your mind clear. At one point you talk about something that happened during a retreat:
My domestic responsibility for the duration of the retreat was to clean the communal bathroom. I would do this chore at four o’clock every afternoon. At the same time, though, another nun would appear and proceed to wash herself before performing an afternoon ceremony at which she had to officiate. This went on for several weeks and I began to feel extremely resentful. Then one day I went down at four o’clock, and it suddenly didn’t matter any more that she was there washing herself. It was my time to clean and her time to wash. How wonderful it felt to be free of resentment! Although a small incident, it was somehow very meaningful to me. It showed that meditation worked quietly. Without my intentionally forcing any changes, it dissolved the grasping and attachments that gave rise to the irritation.
1
Remember that experience?
M. BATCHELOR: Yes, sure. I had gone to the nunnery, and I was meditating on the question, What is this? I was not consciously thinking, I should do this, I should do that. Every day at four o’clock I was upset when she came into the bathroom I was cleaning, but this did not disturb my meditation. When I left the bathroom I went back to doing my meditation and forgot about being upset. What I found interesting was that after two weeks I suddenly did not feel upset when she came into the bathroom. There was no resentment, there was just a kind of warm, how to say it, equanimity. Then I understood what to me is the most important thing about meditation—the de-grasping effect. Cultivating concentration and inquiry dissolves the grasping. But it is a subtle effect. I call it the “phht” effect, the fact that by just doing meditation, something is released. So then when you are again in contact with a certain situation, you don’t grasp at it anymore. That’s why I am not so focused on “big bang” meditation experiences. I think that’s why when people do a retreat, say a seven-day retreat, they generally report that it continues to work for the next three months. Because there has been a kind of releasing, and that releasing stays active until they get very busy and everything comes up again. I encourage them to continue not so much with the sitting, the formal sitting, but to continue with the awareness. I would say the effect can last a little longer that way.
BOYLE: That is an important theme. What I am interested in is how a little insight experience like this feeds into your development, and what you learned from it.
M. BATCHELOR: When I was in Korea I was not thinking much about these things. I was just doing the job, the job being to meditate. That’s what I did. Because, you see, in Korea you are in the Zen tradition, the Rinzai Zen/Linchi Chan/Ganhwa Seon tradition. In this tradition there is a great emphasis on awakening, on the big bang experience. Any of the things that I describe in the book are just ordinary stuff in terms of that Zen tradition, in terms of the criteria that were there around me. My experience really was just with what was happening. I did not reflect on it particularly. It was only after I left the monastery and became a teacher, when I was talking about these experiences that I had had, that they began to make sense. Not in terms of a big bang experience, but in terms of what I call de-grasping. That is why I include them in my talks, because to me they are more important.
Even before the bathroom experience there was another experience, which really showed me how it worked. For the first time, I was sitting in meditation for the full three-month period completely on my own. All the other people had gone to other places, and so I was sitting in meditation by myself. It was a little difficult, because as I was sitting the meditation did not seem to work, and since it did not seem to be working, I thought that maybe I should be doing something more useful. So I got up from my cushion and went to do something that seemed more useful, which was to read a Zen book. I got the book, and I sat down and tried to read it and I couldn’t read it. That’s when I realized that although I had the feeling that the meditation was not working, actually it was working. My mind had gone to a place that was relatively calm, even if it did not look that way. It was a very small insight that showed me that a little de-grasping had occurred. I could not get interested in the book because I was in a different state, a kind of equanimous state. I was not in the doing state, I was more in the being state. That’s when I thought, Ah, although it doesn’t look like it is working, actually it is. That was the first time when I realized, Oh yeah, this works differently from what is emphasized in general.
BOYLE: That’s why I’m doing these interviews. Because that’s what I felt, that things were not happening the way I read about them. It’s so easy to overlook things that actually are very important because they seem so normal and undramatic.
M. BATCHELOR: Yes. To go back to the debate about sudden versus gradual, I think we’ve emphasized the sudden when actually the sudden and gradual together makes more sense. Yes, you have a little experience, but it works at both levels: you have a kind of sudden letting go, a sudden thing that happens, and then you have two things, the gradual drip, drip effect of what you are doing in your daily life but also the effect of doing the meditation.
BOYLE: Have we finished covering your time in Korea?
M. BATCHELOR: When I was in Korea I had, in a way, different insights. But I only realized later that they were insights, not at the time they happened. It was only after I was teaching that I started to look at my experience in Korea in a different way. When I was in Korea I was just doing the job, which was to meditate. It was only after I started teaching that I began to understand what I had been doing.
BOYLE: Can you think of other things that happened in Korea?
M. BATCHELOR: Yes. Many of these small insights convinced me of this de-grasping effect. I think what we experience in meditation is not a way of getting into another reality or something behind the veil of illusion. Everything that we experience, whether it be a mystical experience, insight, meditative experience, whatever, is de-grasping. I don’t think it matters too much what you do, if you do Zen practice, or Tibetan practice, or vipassana practice. Generally de-grasping will happen in some way. It’s like, we feel differently in comparison to how we feel when we are grasping.
De-grasping happens in different ways. One important experience happened after I had been six month or eight months in Korea, while I was sitting in meditation. I was asking my koan, What is this?, and suddenly I saw that I was totally self-centered. That was the first time I saw that, ever. Up to that moment I thought I was the greatest, most compassionate person in the world. And then I saw very clearly that all my thoughts, feelings, and sensations were about me. That was really important to me. But it did not awe me; I just saw it.
BOYLE: Did you have an understanding of that, an insight into that at the intellectual level?
M. BATCHELOR: No. I just saw it so clearly at that moment. It was the clearest thing I’ve ever seen. Then I saw also that the other four people in the meditation room were exactly the same. I thought it was funny. After that, the job was to diminish the self-centeredness. But when you have an insight and you see something you have not seen before, it doesn’t mean that the insight remains the same, because the “bang” effect is not there anymore. The insight becomes part of the way you see things, part of the concentration and inquiry of meditation.
By coming back again and again to the breath or to the koan, what happens is that you don’t feed your conditioned mental habits so much. You diminish their power by not going on with them, by not identifying so much with them. You come back to the meditation, and it becomes more quiet and spacious. You come back to the functioning of the pattern, you are not going for any eradication of the pattern. For example, planning—you come back to planning, to making a plan, but you don’t obsess about it. That leads you to quietness, openness, and spaciousness. Then you are doing vipassana, which is a matter of looking deeply into impermanence or asking a question. We have a tendency to feel that things are permanent, which can get us into difficulties. By looking deeply, we will experience impermanence. We will become more aware of impermanence, and this will help us to become clearer. You develop a creative awareness, and then through that creative awareness you can see what goes on differently. So that, I would conclude, is the way meditation works.
BOYLE: That’s a wonderful statement. But this was all so gradual.
M. BATCHELOR: When I was in Korea I was just sitting in meditation. But because I was in the Rinzai tradition, I was waiting for something special to happen. The big bang experience.
BOYLE: And it didn’t come.
M. BATCHELOR: Yes, of course, nothing. I was not too interested in it either, but that was the framework, that was what I was supposed to experience. I did not experience the big bang, but I was still doing what mattered to me, which was to develop wisdom and compassion. I was going on my little way while everybody was talking about awakening and so on.
BOYLE: When you had that experience of realizing that you were self-centered, that wasn’t just an intellectual insight. For me, sometimes it’s so subtle. It’s like a soap bubble popping, and everything is a tiny bit clearer. But it’s not gradual—the soap bubble breaks and everything is a little bit different, suddenly just a little bit different.
M. BATCHELOR: It’s sudden because you see something suddenly. It’s always been there, but it’s only now you see it, so the sudden aspect is that you see it, and it lasts two minutes, five minutes, and then it becomes a memory. It becomes a memory, and then what you have to do is a gradual process in order to really organically live it. By seeing that you are so self-centered, you can start to work on being more other-centered, in a conscious way.
BOYLE: But in the Korean tradition you were instructed to always be working on that one koan.
M. BATCHELOR: Yes.
BOYLE: For example, when I interviewed Ajahn Amaro, he talked about things like this. When he realized that something was a problem with him, then in his tradition there was a method to use that applied to that particular problem. Whereas in the Korean tradition . . .
M. BATCHELOR: No, no. You don’t have specific methods. To me, the way it works in the Korean Zen tradition is that you just cultivate insight in the Korean way, and then over time you have a de-grasping. But you are training in ethics, meditation, and wisdom, all three, when you work. This is made very clear in Korea. Every two weeks you recite the bodhisattva precepts, the fifty-eight bodhisattva precepts, and you are supposed to live according to them. You are in a certain environment, a very communal environment. Then you have to apply the methodology in a living environment. That’s what I did for ten years. It was a living environment, which helps for transformation.
BOYLE: That’s good, that’s what I wanted to clarify. Because it is so important, I think, for any student who is working on their practice.
One other thing that I am curious about is that Stephen [see
chapter 8] never comes in here. But you met him in Korea?
M. BATCHELOR: Yes, I met him in Korea. He came when I was six years into my stay in Korea. He arrived and I told him to change his clothes at the airport, because he was not wearing the proper clothes. Then I had to teach him the ropes, how to live in Korea, because he had been a Tibetan monk. We got to know each other just as we were going along. But there was nothing special.
BOYLE: Was Stephen the reason that you left Korea?
M. BATCHELOR: No, the reason I left was because Master Kusan had died. When he died, it was like the sun had gone out. It was only after he died that I realized how important he had been. It was really like a hole, a big hole. Things were not the same. The next master who came along was not the same; that’s when the possibility of leaving arose.
BOYLE: Stephen left at the same time and you both disrobed, got married, and moved to England?
M. BATCHELOR: Yes. BOYLE: What did you do in England?
M. BATCHELOR: I was a house cleaner. I did that for ten years. We
moved to a community, and that was great training. BOYLE: What kind of community was it?
M. BATCHELOR: It was an alternative Buddhist community. It was very consensual. We lived there for six years, and that was where I learned a lot about actually applying the training. It was really good.
BOYLE: Were you teaching?
M. BATCHELOR: No, I only started to teach after I had been in England for four years. But to live in the community, to live with other Western people in a nonhierarchical model, was a great training. Not easy every day, but I practiced a lot there, I really worked. What I had done for ten years in Korea, I really applied for the next six years. I had several insights, experiences, when I was there. Community life is a very tough environment for a Westerner; it was like a pressure cooker for us. When it’s hierarchical it’s difficult, but easier; but when it’s democratic and alternative, it’s more intense. It is really an intensive training. It’s much more intensive than sitting in meditation. So it was really good, I learned a lot there. Then I started to teach, and then through the teaching too I learned a lot and had more experiences.
BOYLE: Can you think of one or two or three examples of things that happened during that time?
M. BATCHELOR: The first thing was for me to see. I had been a nun for ten years, and then I got married to Stephen and we went back and for six months I felt I was eighteen years old. I had the emotional life of an eighteen-year-old, and that was sobering. I saw that when you are a monk or a nun you don’t have to deal with any of that stuff. That was really eye-opening, and then after six months I decided, You’ve been training for ten years, now you need to start to use it, really apply it. Then things began to change in my practice. One thing I realized was that I was grasping at Korea geographically. A year and a half in, or two years in, I was in this beautiful Devon manor house, a huge estate by a river. It was one of the most beautiful landscapes in England, and suddenly I was walking one afternoon, it was sunny, and I was walking back from town toward the house and I stopped and I looked about, and I thought, This is beautiful, this is beautiful for what it is. Because up to that moment I had been thinking, It ain’t bad, but it’s not like Korea. That’s when I realized I had been grasping at Korea, and because I was grasping at Korea I could not see the beauty of Devon. That moment I thought, Ah, now I am in Devon. I just saw it at that moment.
I had one of my major insights there. From way, way back I had the habit that if somebody hurt me, I would sulk, and I would do it for a long time. I was very bad about that. I would not look at the person, I would not talk to the person, I just cut off. Then one day this happened. Somebody had said something hurtful to me the night before, and in the morning when I arrived in the kitchen she was there. I could see the pattern arise, the pattern of shutting her off. I could see myself going toward it, but the creative awareness said, “Do something else.” Then there was this incredible fear, and that’s when I realized why change is hard, because it’s easier to live with the pain of the known than the threat of the unknown. It was the power of the creative awareness, which made me think,
Let’s try something different this one time. So I turned to her, I smiled, and it was so easy. I thought,
Why did I not do this before? Then I never sulked and cut people off again, because I realized that it was painful, not only for myself but for the other person. In that moment there was compassion as I realized,
You can’t behave that way, your cutting off and ignoring is so painful for the other person. It is so painful for yourself too. From that time on I did not do it.
BOYLE: That was quite a long time ago, soon after you went to England.
M. BATCHELOR: This experience was maybe, I would say three years in.
Once I had what I would call a mystical experience in Korea, but it was in the oddest of situations. It happened when I was visiting a Catholic nun. It was amazing. She was in a hermitage—you know, they don’t go out into the world. She was the one in charge of visitors. We talked for two or three hours, and the whole time we were talking there was an amazing light in the room. I thought, This is weird, but why not, I need not do anything with it. I thought, Ah, this is interesting. Anything can happen.
I had another experience that was kind of mystical. It happened while I was in London, about fifteen years ago. I was teaching Zen to a group in London, and as I was teaching them and also sitting with them at the time, suddenly I had this very, very strong experience of everybody having buddha nature. Very strong, and it was not just an idea. It was kind of an amazing feeling. After it was over I could see that I had a choice of going into the experience more or leaving it alone. Being the pragmatic person I am, I thought, No, no it would not be a good idea to go down that way.
BOYLE: This happened while you were in the retreat?
M. BATCHELOR: No, during a daylong sitting. It happened while I was teaching and sitting, and I thought, If I want to continue to teach, it might not be a good idea to go into this kind of exciting and exhilarating experience. I don’t want to talk about the experience, because it did not make any difference to me. So I let it disappear. The only thing that was interesting was more on a scientific level—how did it feel to experience something like that? That’s what I got out of it. I thought, Hmm, that is interesting, I can see why people could get excited about this. But I thought it was a bit too exciting, so I did not push it through. It was interesting to have it, just in terms of seeing what people experience. That’s generally not what I experience; I am more interested in the de-grasping aspect.
BOYLE: But you could see buddha nature in these people at that moment?
M. BATCHELOR: Yes, sure. It was like any sudden moment, you can interpret it in many different ways. That’s the way I interpreted it. It could have been interpreted differently by somebody else. What was interesting was the joy, the warmth, and the exhilaration. I could see how people could be enthusiastic about these experiences, because it is very elating. You feel something very different. But personally I thought,
Umm, that’s a bit over the top.
BOYLE: Oh really? How do you feel about it now?
M. BATCHELOR: The same as I felt then. It was interesting insofar as it made me possibly experience what somebody else might experience in that way and get very excited about. It was just what it was.
BOYLE: Well, that’s true. I find it fascinating, so I am exploring it a bit. Could you say that you were better able to see these people the way they really were?
M. BATCHELOR: No, I am not saying that. I don’t use this kind of language. No, it was the way it appeared. It was a perception. What you were saying right then is not my kind of language. No, it was more a feeling. I felt a total certitude in that moment, like what I call an organic certitude, that everybody had buddha nature from my point of view. But so what? You know, this could just be my interpretation, because if you are a Christian with the same experience, you might say God is everywhere, or somebody else would see something else. I had a feeling that then, in that moment, got interpreted through my Buddhist framework.
Personally what I am interested in, though I think it would be difficult to do, is to see how much what you experience and what you perceive is influenced by your framework. If you have a Christian framework, do you have a Christian experience? If you have a Zen framework, do you have a Zen experience? If you have a Theravada framework, do you have a Theravada experience, necessarily? Also, does the kind of meditation you do impact on what you experience?
BOYLE: That is what I was going to ask. Does meditation in general help you get past the framework that is conditioning the experience, whether you are Buddhist or Sufi or Catholic?
M. BATCHELOR: Personally, I don’t think so. I would be surprised if it did, because you always see through your senses. You are asking if there is an experience that is beyond the senses. But if you have an experience that is beyond the senses, your senses are not going to get it.
BOYLE: But most of the time what we perceive or what we see—I am talking psychology now—is filtered through and rearranged by the existing structures of the mind, so that what you think you are seeing may be quite different.
M. BATCHELOR: I think when you do meditation you can dissolve what I would call the negative aspect of that. It is the exaggeration and proliferation that goes. I don’t think the functioning of perception goes away, so that you have a tabula rasa experience before any functioning is operating.
BOYLE: Could you continue looking at your life during those times? If you think of something that stands out, I would love to hear about it.
M. BATCHELOR: To me the point of meditation is that we develop the power of the creative awareness. The more we meditate, the more power the creative awareness will develop, in many different ways, alongside the three trainings of ethics, meditation, and wisdom. In a way you develop more and more ethics, you develop more and more meditation, you develop more and more wisdom. They all feed each other. So yes, you can have small insights or big insights in terms of your relationship to others and in terms of the way you are. But I think also what you develop more and more is what I call stability and openness. You develop a strength within yourself that allows you to be with your feelings in a different way. You can experience your feelings, but within you there is a place that is stronger than that, and so you can have upsetting feelings and not be necessarily taken over by them.
I try to practice all the time, not just on the cushion but in daily life. I see things in this way, then in that way, and there is de-grasping in this way and that way. You may realize that there are some conditions that make it easy to be a good Buddhist, a good meditator, and other conditions that will make it more difficult. After I was in the community for a while, I realized that if I was tired I would become irritable, so then instead of going ahead and being irritated with somebody, I went to rest. Just different things like this; you start to see more clearly, not only your condition but also in the conditions of others. So again I would say it’s not just, like, insight into yourself. I think it’s more about how you are present to others, how you listen to them, how you respond to others, respond to situations. I think one has to be careful not to focus too much on insight, because this is very inner stuff. Personally I would say if you really develop meditation, then it makes a difference not only to your inner landscape but also to the way you are with other people.
One last learning experience, then, again having to do with seeing something differently and acting differently. This was when I was still a nun and I went back home because my father was very ill. I saw him dying, I saw his last breath. What was interesting is that up to that point I had believed in impermanence, but as in, “Oh, it’s impermanent, the vase is broken, who cares, it’s not mine, it’s impermanent.” If you want you can use the idea of impermanence in a fatalistic, easy way. But when I saw my father die, when I saw his last breath, then I experienced impermanence. What was interesting is that at that moment there was this incredible compassion for everything that was alive. It made me look at people in a very different way, instead of saying, “Oh, that person did this or that person is like that.” It made me really see the fragility of each human being, whose life rests upon a single breath. That was one of Master Kusan’s teachings, that our life rests upon a single breath. Then I really saw it, and to me what was interesting in that experience was that compassion arose, and from that compassion arose a different way to look at the self and others. A different attitude arose, which I cultivated, and this made me look at people in a more compassionate way.
BOYLE: That’s beautiful. I am glad you added that.
M. BATCHELOR: The way I teach is not very formal; I always talk about different things from my own experience. If you look at my other book, Let Go: A Buddhist Guide to Breaking Habits, in there you have quite a few descriptions of this kind of thing. You have many more experiences there.
