Joseph Goldstein, with Sharon Salzberg and Jack Kornfield, founded the Insight Meditation Society in 1974. His writings include One Dharma: The Emerging Western Buddhism and Mindfulness: A Practical Guide to Awakening. We talked on April 14, 2010.
BOYLE: The way I have been doing these path interviews is to start with the first little glimmerings that led you to study and practice Buddhism.
GOLDSTEIN: When I was a child I was prone to having temper tantrums. These made me and everyone around me quite miserable. But I didn’t know what to do about it. Then when I was about ten, I had my first insight into the working of my mind, in a childlike but somewhat profound way. Just after one of these big outbursts of anger, I looked into my mind and I realized that there was the possibility of a space between the impulse of the temper outburst and the action. I saw that in that space there was a choice, and in a kind of young and naïve way I realized what we are often told—count to ten before you say anything. That’s what I started doing, and it worked—the impulse for the outburst would pass. It was amazing. It was a real transformation, in that particular context.
Then when I was twelve, my father died suddenly, of leukemia. It took me quite a while to process this emotionally, because in my family background death wasn’t really a topic of conversation. It wasn’t talked about. So I, being a twelve-year-old, was holding these emotions without really understanding them. Even though it took me a long time to process emotionally, it gave me a very immediate understanding of death—now someone is here, and now they’re not here—of what that experience is like, and the realization that it could happen at any time, it’s not just sometime in the future.
I finished high school, went on to college, and started studying philosophy. I was interested in trying to understand life. Studying philosophy with that end in mind was frustrating, because at the university at least, the professors were not particularly interested in applying philosophy to living life wisely. But in one class we were reading the Bhagavad Gita, and one line jumped out at me, even though I didn’t really understand it. The line was, “Act without attachment to the fruit of the action.” This was my introduction to the notion of nonattachment. I didn’t really have any understanding of it or quite know what it meant, but nevertheless it was something that registered very deeply as something I wanted to explore. Years later I heard the Dalai Lama express this same teaching, “Act without attachment to the fruit of the action.” But he expressed it in another way. He said that it’s the motivation behind the action that is the real measure of it, and not whether the action leads to success or failure. Everything rests on the tip of motivation, beginning to see the motivation and to work with it. We can’t control the outcome, because it’s dependent on so many other things. But what we can do is purify our motivations. That’s within our power.
Then in my junior year, in 1964, I met some people who were training for one of the very first Peace Corps groups. They inspired an interest in the Peace Corps, and I applied to go to East Africa. Some karma intervened, though, and I was sent to Thailand instead. It was in Thailand that I had my first introduction to Buddhism. I went to a temple where they had courses for Westerners, but I was so much still in my philosophy mode that I went with a copy of Spinoza in my hand. I went to many groups and asked so many questions that people actually stopped coming because of my persistent questioning. Finally one of the monks, probably out of desperation, asked me why I didn’t start meditating. I was young, twenty-one years old, and it was all very exotic to me. So I got a cushion and mat together and then set the alarm clock for five minutes. I didn’t want to sit too long. But even in those first five minutes, something really important happened. It wasn’t a great enlightenment experience, but I did see very clearly that there is a way to look into our minds as well as a way to look out through them. This was revelatory, really. When you think of how we grow up in our culture, there’s very little guidance about looking inward. It’s all about looking out. So to see that there was a way, a systematic way, for looking in, that was really powerful.
While I was teaching English during my second year in the Peace Corps, I decided to undertake a project I had been wanting to do since college, which was to read Proust’s
Remembrance of Things Past. He had a kind of mystical but transforming experience as he passed a pastry shop and smelled some madeleines fresh from the oven. It called back all his memories of childhood. In the last fifty pages there’s quite an interesting exploration about the nature of time, and his understanding of how the past is contained in the present. This is what his experience was: the aroma brought back the past, into the present moment. I had a sudden insight of how everything that I called the past was really just a thought in the mind. That’s how we experience the past. It’s always now, it’s always present. And then my mind made the leap to the future. It was like,
If the past is really the present, then the future is the same. Thoughts of planning, of anticipating, of imagining, are all actually happening right now. It was such an important and freeing insight, to realize that these huge burdens of past and future that we carry around are just thoughts. Think how much of your thought activity is of past and future—probably a huge amount. Depending on your level of insight at the moment, these thoughts are either very light, if we see them just as thought, or very burdensome, if we give a reality to the past and the future as really existing out there. This was a very freeing understanding to come to.
Then at the very end of my time in the Peace Corps I was sitting in a friend’s garden. He was reading from a text then called The Tibetan Book of the Great Liberation, and now, in a new and better translation, titled Self-Liberation Through Seeing with Naked Awareness. The refrain in the text, over and over again, was, “Look into your mind, look into your own mind. Look at the nature of your own mind.” I was sitting, quite concentrated at the time, and I was listening to the text, “Look into the nature of your own mind.” Then it said, among other things, “The nature of the mind is unformed, unborn.” My mind opened, in some way, to that experience of what the unborn is, what the unborn means. It can mean different things. We can understand “unborn” from different sides. Sometimes, some traditions talk of unborn awareness, which means that there is no beginning. It is unborn, and in that sense outside of time. It can also mean unarisen. What’s unborn is unarisen, unoriginated, nonoccurrence. Just look into your own mind. When we look into our own mind, the nature of the mind is unformed, unborn. What is the reality that is before occurrence, before arising?
Something really opened at that point. In the moment of recognition after that happened, the phrase kept coming into my mind,
There’s no me, there’s no me, when seen from the perspective of nonarising, nonoccurrence. This was extremely disorienting. I was just sitting in my friend’s garden, listening to this text, and all of a sudden there was this huge seismic shift. I was about to leave Thailand after having been there for two years. It was unsettling; I didn’t have any context for understanding the experience or what had happened, but I knew that in some fundamental way something had shifted. Then for a while, maybe a week before I was actually leaving, I started getting seduced by the thought,
Maybe I’m enlightened. Maybe I’m all done, and there’s no self, there’s no me, there’s no one there. But then I’d be walking down some dark Bangkok street at night and fear would arise. I thought,
Hmm, something’s still here, and that kind of illuminated the issue. I slowly started to realize that this experience was not the end of the spiritual path, it was actually just the beginning. People have different kinds and different levels of intensity and different levels of transformation, but all kinds of openings, like this, are really intimations of possibilities. They are the transforming experience of what’s possible, not some final accomplishment. This is such an important point on our spiritual journeys, because at different times in our practice we may have real transforming moments of understanding, where something radically shifts. It’s important to see it in the correct way.
The great twelfth-century Korean Zen master Chinul had a framework of teaching called sudden awakening/gradual cultivation. I very much appreciate that framework, because it acknowledges the power of those moments of sudden awakening, and also reminds us that it needs a gradual cultivation. It’s not the end of the path. Here’s what he says:
Although coming into this life we may suddenly awaken to the fact that our self nature is originally void, and calm, and no different from that of the Buddha, old habits are difficult to eliminate completely. Consequently, when we come into contact with either favorable or adverse objects, anger and happiness blaze forth. Adventitious defilements are no different from before. Nevertheless, although you must cultivate further, you have already awakened suddenly to the fact that deluded thoughts are originally void and the mind nature is originally pure.
I find that a very good framework for understanding. We can have a transforming experience of the empty nature of phenomena and still appreciate the fact that there is a lot more work to do.
BOYLE: So because the cultivation is gradual, it’s not so easy to pick milestones to talk about, as it is for sudden awakening?
GOLDSTEIN: Exactly. The particular moment of an experience is a big milestone, but then there is the gradual process of integrating that experience into our daily life. That takes years of practice for most people. One’s life experience and meditative experience continually reveal those places where we’re still attached and where we get caught in some identification or other.
BOYLE: You would catch yourself getting caught?
GOLDSTEIN: Yes, but of course, when we are caught, we are usually lost. If we were really awake, we wouldn’t be caught. But in the moment when we begin to be mindful of being caught, the fruit of that initial experience is that even the “caughtness” is seen as not self. We see long-established habit patterns still playing themselves out, but they no longer have the same power because underneath we understand that this habit itself is selfless. So the habit has loosened up a lot. This really helps; an understanding of selflessness has helped me a lot over the years, even in times of being caught in various things, by freeing my mind from a lot of self-judgment about my failings. Because as I said, I now understand that caughtness itself is selfless. That’s really quite a benefit, because self-judgment is a very prevalent pattern in people’s minds.
BOYLE: Now when you are caught, you just notice it and proceed?
GOLDSTEIN: Yes, just investigate it and ask, How did I get caught here? without all those undertones of self-judgment. I’ll give you an example. At one point I was on retreat and a strong feeling of guilt came up about something I had done. It was just an unskillful act, but it came up in my mind and I was seeing it and not feeling very good about it. I was really caught by it, caught by the guilt. At a certain point I started wondering, What’s going on here, why am I getting so caught in the guilt? So I looked more carefully, more mindfully, and I saw basically that guilt was an ego trip. It was just a lot of “I,” a lot of self-ing in a negative way. “I’m so bad,” but with an emphasis on the “I.” As soon as I saw that guilt was just a trick of the ego, then I used a kind of expression that sometimes you find in texts, where Mara will appear to the Buddha and the Buddha will say, “Mara, I see you.” So that’s what I did with the guilt: Mara, I see you. This is just a trick of the ego, and in that moment the guilt really dissolved. I then began to see the difference between guilt and remorse. There can be a wise remorse about unskillful actions, but guilt is an unskillful, unwholesome mindset because it’s just reinforcing the sense of self. It’s not that the mind never gets caught in things anymore, but it can see things from the perspective of selflessness. And that is very freeing.
BOYLE: Then shortly after this experience you came home?
GOLDSTEIN: Yes. I came back from the Peace Corps to the States profoundly moved by what had happened. And then, of course, I tried to repeat the experience. I would ask people to read the text to me again, but clearly that was not the right approach. So I decided I needed a teacher, that I should go back to Asia to find a meditation practice that both expressed and deepened this understanding. I went to India, and ended up in Bodh Gaya, the place of Buddha’s enlightenment. It’s a very special place, and in 1967 there were only a few Westerners there, studying with a teacher named Munindra. They took me to meet him, and I began practicing with him. When I first met him, and even as I got to know him well over many years, he did not fit my image of a guru at all. He didn’t have what I thought was the gravitas of an enlightened being. Of course, this was a great teaching in itself. It forced me to cut through attachments I had to concepts about how wisdom should manifest.
One time he was in a bazaar in Bodh Gaya, and he was haggling, bargaining, for a little bag of peanuts, which of course is customary in India. But I was there studying, he was my teacher, and I said, “Munindra-ji, what are you doing, why are you bargaining over these peanuts?” He said, “The path of the Dharma is to be simple, not to be a simpleton,” and he went right on bargaining. He was so engaged with the world, he was so interested in everything, he was so open-minded. Over those years, as more Westerners came and wanted to study with him, he would always encourage them to explore whatever they wanted to explore. One of the lines I remember him saying was, “Go. Explore. The Dharma doesn’t suffer in comparison to anything.” His faith in the Dharma, his appreciation of it, was so complete. That was a beautiful teaching, because it inculcated a sense of openness. We don’t have to hold on to our practice with fear, or try to be protective of it. Our practice can be a very openhearted sense of exploration of the world, of our lives. It’s simply to be aware of what’s arising and not cling to it. What could be simpler? Be aware of what’s arising and don’t cling to it. One of the things I most appreciated about that introduction with Munindra was that there was no form, no structure to join. All he said when I came was, “If you want to know your mind, sit down and observe it.” It seemed so simple, and such common sense. How else can we know our mind, except by looking in, by observing it?
I spent a good part of the next seven years at the Burmese
vihar in Bodh Gaya. The
Visuddhimagga, “The Path of Purification,” which is a classical Buddhist commentary, lists all the attributes of a conducive place to meditate. The Burmese
vihar had none of them. It was right on the main road, so buses and trucks would be going by all the time. Directly across from it was a public water tap, so people would be coming there to wash, to do their laundry, to talk. It was surrounded by small Indian villages, which often were playing music over loudspeakers. All of this was going on. In India they have rope beds, which are quite comfortable except that the bed was about five feet long. That was a little problematic for me since I’m 6
ʹ3". And there were a lot of mosquitoes. So I’m sleeping on this five-foot-long rope bed, with no mosquito netting (until I wised up), wrapped up in whatever clothes I had around. The food was really poor. With all of these conditions, however, I felt such immense gratitude for having a place to practice, a place that honored practice. In the midst of the craziness of the world, here was a place where people were honoring the journey of looking inward, of just sitting and walking.
When I first started practicing, concentration did not come easily at all. I’m not one of those people who just sit down and their minds settle into deep meditation. My mind basically wandered the whole time. I would be sitting and thinking. It was kind of fun. I was enjoying my thoughts, and the hour went pretty quickly. It took a long time for the mind to begin to quiet down. I couldn’t sit cross-legged for more than five minutes, the pain was so intense, so I sat in a chair. But because I’m tall, the chair wasn’t that comfortable. So I put the chair on bricks. I put cushions on the chair, and then a mosquito net. It was like sitting on a great throne. It was a little embarrassing when Munindra would come in, but it worked. That reinforced my pragmatic approach. The posture doesn’t really matter, if we find one where we can sit pretty still, observe, look, and do this with commitment.
When I left Bodh Gaya for the first time, Munindra said something whose depth of meaning I have so come to appreciate over the years: “The Dharma protects those who protect the Dharma.” That has such powerful implications for how we live our lives. What it means is that as we protect the Dharma it protects us, from excessive greed, excessive hatred, excessive fear. Then we know to some extent what renunciation means, what letting go means. “The Dharma protects those who protect the Dharma.”
So I spent most of those seven years in India, with some trips back and forth to the States, mostly to work to make some money to go back. The first few times of coming back to the United States were difficult. For me, not only was it a transition from intensive practice to more engagement in the world, it was also a transition from the simplicity of India to being in America. That, in some way, was even harder. So basically what I did that first time or two was just sit around listening to Bob Dylan, doing those things one did in the ’60s, feeling depressed. But then I would go back to India and get all energized by my practice again. What was interesting is that after doing that back-and-forth a few times, I found the transitions much easier. I began to see and understand those times of change as being as much [part] of the practice as being in intensive retreat. It’s just another form. Other things are happening, but the retreat never ends. The Dharma is our life. It doesn’t make sense to be committed to awakening on retreat and somehow to let that go when you leave the retreat. All the forms of transition and activity are as fruitful for Dharma practice as being in retreat, even if the first few times of transition are difficult, as they might well be.
BOYLE: Another theme I wanted to cover involves metta, loving-kindness. This has been a big part of your teaching. When did your interest in metta begin?
GOLDSTEIN: On one trip back I saw the movie Charley, which showed some people being cruel to someone who was mentally challenged. The cruelty of it somehow touched my heart, as well as seeing my own potential for doing unkind things. When I went back to India I told Munindra that I wanted to do some metta practice, because seeing that cruelty was so painful. This was my first intensive period of metta practice. After about a month of doing metta intensively, along with my mind getting quite concentrated, there were tremendous feelings of happiness. It was just wonderful happiness. Of course my first reaction was, Oh great, this is how it’s going to be for the rest of my life. I was quickly disabused of that idea, but it did point to the possibilities of a kind of happiness I hadn’t found before.
There are a couple of things to note about that. One of the first things I saw when I did metta meditation for the first time was that it has two aspects. First, it is a concentration practice rather than an insight practice, because when you are doing metta it’s not for the purpose of seeing the impermanence of things, as in insight practice. It was while doing metta that first time that my mind got really concentrated. Second, it’s also not for the purpose of experiencing selflessness, because you are actually dealing with the concept of self: metta toward oneself, metta toward others. So metta meditation is operating on a different level from insight meditation. It’s operating as a concentration practice.
But sometimes when I was doing
metta meditation it would call up its opposite. Once I was sitting in an inside room in the Burmese
vihar, getting very concentrated and blissful. There was a window out into a corridor, and sometimes I would leave pieces of fruit on the windowsill. I’m sitting there feeling expansive, feeling quite a lot of bliss—
May all beings be happy, may all beings be blissful—when I hear this little rustling outside the window. A Nepali man had come to practice, and he had a servant boy with him, so the thought comes into my mind,
That little Nepali kid is stealing my fruit. The contrast was so amazingly blatant. Very often in the midst of all our
metta it touches the other side, and the contrast helps illuminate those times when we’re feeling its opposite.
BOYLE: I know about that instability pretty well, because sustaining metta practice has always been difficult for me. How did your work with metta practice develop from there?
GOLDSTEIN: Well, there are a couple of things. One is, as I said, that doing the metta practice and the happiness that came from it really helped in the development of concentration. Happiness is a foundation for concentration. When I’d go back and do the insight practice, the concentration helped deepen the insight practice, so the two kept feeding on each other in that way. Then as the insight practice develops and matures, one begins to see that one’s awareness itself is imbued with a certain quality of metta. Because there is less defensiveness, there is more openness, so it’s not limited to feelings toward other people but becomes expressed in awareness of whatever is arising, as an openness of the heart and mind. When I was doing insight practice, when thoughts of people came up in the mind, even people I might have had difficulties with, the mind was holding them in a place of greater care, greater love, greater forgiveness. The two practices in some way began to merge.
Many years later I was studying with Tibetan teachers. One, in particular, was Nyoshul Khen Rinpoche. He was talking about bodhichitta. In the Tibetan framework, relative bodhichitta is compassion, ultimate bodhichitta is emptiness. Something happened in me where I really understood that compassion is the expression of emptiness, that compassion is the activity of emptiness. Before that, in some way I had kept the wisdom aspect and the compassion aspect separate. I knew that they both needed to be developed, but I hadn’t seen them as being the same thing. That was a big change for me, because it affected my whole understanding of what the bodhisattva vows meant. Years later I came across this teaching by Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche that expressed the very same understanding. He said that when you recognize the empty nature of phenomena, the wish to bring about the good of others dawns, uncontrived and effortless.
One last story about the Bodh Gaya years. Munindra had the habit of bringing any Western traveler who came to Bodh Gaya to meet me, just to chitchat. Munindra would meet them in the bazaar while he was haggling for peanuts. I would be sitting in the
vihar doing my meditation practice, and he would bring all these people he had met in the bazaar in to see me. I got to where I dreaded his footsteps. I would have the thought,
Please, let it not be Munindra—not a good thought to have about one’s teacher. I would have to get up from these deep states of stillness and chat. At first I was terribly annoyed and irritated, and then of course my practice would be annoyed and irritated. But he kept doing it, he didn’t stop. So at some point I just had to give up, and I realized that it didn’t matter at all. If I stopped resisting it, I could be sitting in a really quiet space, somebody comes, I get up and talk with them. Not a problem. If I’m not making it a problem, they leave and I go back to sitting. So that was a great lesson in how we can hold on so tightly to protecting our space. That can become its own hindrance. Be open to what comes.
BOYLE: Do you still get caught in this?
GOLDSTEIN: Yes, although caught in it less and less. I learned something. In some ways a feeling of impatience is good feedback that we haven’t let go of attachment to whatever state or situation we are in. We get impatient because we think we would rather be doing something else rather than what is right in front of us. Two common experiences can be useful because they provide feedback by showing us that we are out of the present moment in some way, or resisting the present moment. The feeling of impatience is one, so when we are feeling impatient, that could be a good signal to just settle back and relax into what’s happening now. The other feeling that I found really helpful as a signal in that regard is a feeling of rushing. Very often during the day we find ourselves rushing. Well, what’s also interesting is that rushing is not really a function of speed. People can be rushing when they are moving pretty slowly. It’s when our mind is ahead of ourself, our mind is already at some later step and not settled back into the body, not taking the present step. So we can be moving really quickly and either rushing or not rushing—it’s our choice.
BOYLE: Yes, when my mind is spinning around like crazy, I may not be making much progress on the physical plane.
GOLDSTEIN: So it’s helpful to find these ordinary states in our lives but to see them in a different light, to see that they are actually telling us something in terms of our practice.
BOYLE: You returned to the United States in 1974, when you were thirty years old. A year later, you, Sharon Salzberg, and Jack Kornfield decided that, given the growing interest in vipassana meditation, you should create a center. This led to founding the Insight Meditation Society in Barre, Massachusetts, on a shoestring, and for the next ten years you worked hard at IMS while traveling and teaching around the world. Then came the 1984 Winter Olympics.
GOLDSTEIN: Yes. I was feeling that something was missing, although I didn’t know what. I realized that I had this unfulfilled aspiration to really do more practice. I had been so busy teaching. I had been sitting every year, usually for a month, but didn’t feel it was enough. Then watching the Olympics and the ice-skating team of Torvill and Dean win the gold medal with a perfect score inspired me with thoughts of what is needed to bring something to that level of mastery. This was the background to my meeting with Sayadaw U Pandita.
We had invited Sayadaw to come to the Insight Meditation Society in the spring and summer of 1984 to teach a three-month course. It was really intense. He’s a very demanding teacher, and at one point I told him that going to interviews with him was like going to a dentist. He challenged us to practice with a new level of ardency. Over the next eight or nine years I did a lot of retreats with Sayadaw, and the relationship became a lot easier. I remember going into one interview and he was in a bit of a fierce mode. I reported what was going on, and he proceeded to point out all the defilements in my mind that were contained in my report. I started to laugh, and that laugh was an important moment, because until then I would have taken it as a judgment and judged myself. But somehow, I had practiced long enough with him so at that point I just gave a laugh of acknowledgment. It was so interesting. As soon as I got lighter with what was in my mind, Sayadaw also seemed to get much lighter in our relationship. It was like he was just waiting for me to lighten up. So it’s really useful to see how we are the ones who are holding the self-judgment.
BOYLE: Was that laugh part of an experience that was almost a milestone?
GOLDSTEIN: Yes. In some styles of teaching the teacher will continually be looking to press your buttons, until you stop reacting. That was an example. It made things much easier. Sitting with Sayadaw taught me a lot about finding the right balance, between not coasting on past experience and also not getting caught up in expectations, not getting caught in that striving mind. I came to understand that learning the art of right effort is really a lifetime endeavor.
Sayadaw also suggested at this point that we practice more intensively the
brahma viharas—what in Buddhism are called the “divine abodes.” These are the practices of loving-kindness, compassion, sympathetic joy, and equanimity. That’s when we immersed ourselves in
metta and the other
brahma viharas. For me it took quite a while to feel connected with them. At first I would be doing
metta meditation without really feeling much. Then as the feeling of loving-kindness started coming, I would fall into another trap. I would be looking to see how I was doing—
Oh, the metta
feeling is getting stronger—being more concerned with how I was doing than with the well-being of the other person. All of this was an interesting time of learning. I also began to see the interconnectedness among vipassana, mindfulness practice, and the
brahma viharas. I saw how they really supported and fed and nurtured one another.
This took me to the early 1990s. Then I began to feel again that there was something missing, that there was some piece that didn’t yet feel fulfilled. These cycles are so interesting to me. They point to the vastness of the Dharma, and how we’re always just at the edge of what’s unknown. It’s always [about] finding new aspects to practice and understand.
At this time there was a really wonderful moment in my practice. I was on a two-month dzogchen retreat in a Zen center in upstate New York, and in the course of a talk by Nyoshul Khen Rinpoche, something clicked in my mind. I understood that compassion and emptiness (of self) are not two different things, that compassion is the activity of emptiness. As I mentioned earlier, this was a big realization for me, because I somehow had been keeping them separate. This brought things together in the most beautiful way, and led me to a whole new understanding of the bodhisattva vows. I had been reading them for many years: “Beings are numberless, I vow to save them; Delusions are inexhaustible, I vow to end them,” etc. I had been reading and reflecting on these vows for a long time. They seemed beautiful, but also impossible to actualize, so I just put them aside. But with this understanding of the interrelatedness of compassion and emptiness, suddenly the vows made more sense to me. If we have these aspirations, and they are resting on the shoulders of the self, they’re too big. How could a self ever fulfill them? But if we see that compassionate activity is the working of selflessness, or emptiness, then it’s not resting on a notion of self, it’s the activity of Dharma, it’s the activity of empty phenomena, it’s the activity of wisdom. Then it becomes a way of life, unfolding. It’s not self-centered.
This was really a big turning point, but at the same time a big spiritual crisis was looming on the horizon. I realized that my Burmese teachers and my Tibetan teachers were saying quite different things about the nature of reality, the nature of freedom, the nature of awakening. In the Burmese teachings, ultimate freedom transcends even awareness. Awareness itself is seen as a conditioned phenomenon, and
nibbana, ultimate truth, transcends even awareness. In the Tibetan dzogchen teachings, and also in the Thai Forest tradition, pure awareness
is freedom. Freedom transcends awareness, freedom is awareness. Great teachers, people I had tremendous respect for, people who I felt were realized persons, people who I felt had really experienced the truth, were saying opposite things about what I felt to be most important in my life. This was a crisis—what to do? I became plagued by the question, Who’s right? Somehow I felt that if I could just think it through, then I would know. I was on a two-month retreat, and the first month my mind was completely engaged with this dilemma. I felt like my whole spiritual path depended on a resolution of this. The resolution finally came when I realized that I was asking the wrong question. I reframed the question so that instead of asking who was right, I asked, Is there one Dharma of liberation that includes them both, that embraces them both?
This led me to two understandings. The first was that with respect to the fully awakened mind, I didn’t know. And that not knowing was tremendously freeing. It was a mantra for me: “Who knows?” I just settled back, did the practice, let it go. The second enabled me to settle back into a variety of practices. That was the realization that all of the teachings, from all the different sides and all the different traditions, really are skillful means for liberating the mind and not statements of ultimate truth. I had been taking both of the teachings as stating the ultimate truth, so obviously if they were opposites, there was going to be a problem. But if we take all teachings as skillful means for liberating the mind, then we have to ask the pragmatic question: Do they work? Each of several quite opposing teachings can serve to liberate the mind. So I framed my understanding in the little phrase, “metaphysics as skillful means.” All the metaphysical systems can be seen as skillful means.
All these systems converge in the understanding that the heart is liberated in nonclinging, that that is the nature of the free mind. Buddha said very clearly that nothing whatsoever is to be clung to, as “I” or “mine.” So now when people ask me what I practice—vipassana, Tibetan, etc.—I answer, I practice nonclinging. Everything else is simply a skillful means to support us in that practice.
A few years ago I was on sabbatical and did a long retreat, and in the middle of the retreat all these teachings fell into a beautiful whole. It all began with the Buddha’s enlightenment song:
House builder of self, you have now been seen.
You will build no house again.
The rafters are broken, the ridge beam shattered.
My mind has attained the unconditioned.
Achieved is the end of craving.
I saw that this was really a practice in the moment. Moment to moment, we can be noticing: is the mind craving, is it reaching out, is it grasping, or not? So the mind can begin to experience at least a taste of the freedom that the Buddha was talking about. In the moment we can really have that taste. I think the reason I like that framework of Chinul’s, sudden awakening/gradual cultivation, is because it acknowledges that there can be radically transforming insights but still more work to do. It can happen, but it is very rare that somebody gets fully and completely enlightened all at once. The danger is that people can have a real awakening experience and, because it’s so powerful, think that it’s all done. For me, it’s been a matter of continual deepening.
BOYLE: This covers your path story pretty well. Is there anything else you can think of that you would want to add?
GOLDSTEIN: Well, I will just say this. There is one teaching of the Buddha’s that I think sums up in many ways the whole path, when he says, “Nothing whatsoever is to be clung to as ‘I’ or ‘mine.’ Whoever hears this has heard all of the teachings. Whoever practices this practices all of the teachings; whoever realizes this has realized all of the teachings.” I think this points to the real heart of what practice is all about. “Nothing is to be clung to as ‘I’ or ‘mine.’” To me that’s a very clear expression to refer to when people want to know, What I am doing? What is the practice about?. This kind of re-clarifies what it is we are actually doing. I like it as a very simple expression of the core.
