In their interviews, the teachers told about the paths they followed during their Buddhist training, the practices they engaged in, and the teachings they studied. In this chapter I try to sort out patterns that run through many or all of the interviews. These are eleven examples of successful paths, so the challenge is to identify the ingredients of success.
We first need to recognize that the eleven teachers are a distinctive group of people who share some unusual personal qualities. All of them except Enkyo O’Hara began serious Buddhist study and training at a very young age—in their teens or early twenties. They were highly motivated, and clearly drawn to Buddhist study as a calling, not a secondary activity. It is also striking, given the dominance of self-help narratives in American Buddhist publications, that there were relatively few mentions of emotional issues that impelled them to explore the Buddhist path. Furthermore, they were gifted with high levels of intelligence—four earned Ph.D.s and five had at least bachelor’s degrees, while two followed a pattern popular at that time and dropped out of the education system without entering university.
Because each of the eleven teachers began training in one of the three traditions of Asian Buddhism that are especially well represented in the West (Tibetan, Zen, and Theravada), there was obviously great variation in the teaching methods, doctrines, and practices they encountered. It seems safe to say, on the basis of this admittedly small sample, that no one approach is superior. During their training, most of the interviewees at one time or another studied in traditions other than the one they had started in, so by the time of the interview they were familiar with most of the ideas, pedagogies, and practices that have been brought to the Western world from Asia. My conclusion is simply that while different people are drawn to different traditions, according to these interviews, teaching tradition does not seem to be a major factor in success along the path. Some of the teachers said the same thing, and none of them makes claims for the superiority of one approach over another.
MARTINE BATCHELOR: I don’t think it matters too much what you do, if you do Zen practice, or Tibetan practice, or vipassana practice.
JOSEPH GOLDSTEIN: 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.
Another way to look for the characteristics of a successful path is to focus on what the teachers said was important for them on their journey. Here again, specific differences between practices don’t seem to be as important as the contribution those practices made toward progress, the function they performed in carrying development forward. Meditation provides a good example here, because as noted, each teacher spent a great amount of time engaged in one or more forms of meditation.
There are many variations in the details of meditation practices (especially if one goes beyond sitting meditation to include all activities that require or encourage attentional control). But in functional terms, the teachers reported in their interviews that meditation helped them develop three main qualities or abilities: a)
quieting the mind so that it can be free of internal conversations; b)
letting go, or arriving at a state of nonattachment with respect to desires, fears, beliefs, or ideas—in fact, all the conditionings we have taken for granted as part of the experience of living in the world; c) cultivating
compassion, or feelings of empathy and kindness.
1While the teachers interviewed here used meditative practices to help develop all of these capacities, they reported using other “skillful means” as well. So I take up each quality and look at what the teachers had to say about its development.
Controlling Attention and Quieting the Mind
Meditators quickly learn that they must find a way to control attention in order to direct it away from the internal chatter that tends to take over when the mind has nothing else to do. This might involve concentrating on the breath as it goes in and out, or practicing a visualization, a koan, or a mantra that is recited silently. All of these ultimately focus attention on some aspect of immediate sensory experience. Lately, neuroscience research has shown that meditation improves attention
2 (this is not exactly a surprise to meditators, but empirical evidence is always nice to have). Some studies have also indicated that areas of the brain associated with discursive thinking show reduced activation during meditation.
3 However, if no one form of meditation is better than others for quieting the mind, then what does make a difference? Not surprisingly, success in developing control of attention seems to correlate with the amount of time one puts in doing it and how hard one works at it. Eventually, the payoff comes when the mind can be quietly attentive to perceptual experience in the moment without requiring any special effort. Consider this quote from Ajahn Amaro’s interview:
My mind had always been very chattery, but after six or seven years of meditation it was getting quieter, and during the winters there [at a small monastery in Northumberland, UK] I noticed that it was getting much easier for my mind to be still. Whereas before I’d always experienced meditation as a wrestling match, where you’re trying to get your mind to quiet down, to be reasonably steady and stable, it became easier to just stop thinking. I would decide, Okay, let’s just stop thinking, and my thoughts would stop.
But effort is also important. Shinzen Young was forced into proving the extreme case here, during a hundred-day winter retreat in Japan. In addition to the usual stresses of Japanese retreats, such as sitting cross-legged for long hours and sleeping very little, he had to pour ice water over his naked body three times a day and dry off with a frozen towel. But he learned from it:
I had noticed during this ordeal that if I stayed in
samadhi, in a concentrated state [of sensory attention], it was not exactly pleasant, but manageable. But if my attention was scattered, if I was in a lot of thought, it was hellacious. On the third day of this hundred-day commitment, looking at ninety-seven more days, I had an epiphany:
Okay, there are three forks in this road. I’m either going to spend ninety-seven days in abject misery, or I’m going to give up and go back to the States in black disgrace, or I’m going to stay in some sort of samadhi
state for the next ninety-seven days. I didn’t like the first two alternatives, so the third is what I tried to do…. By the time the hundred days were over, the
samadhi at some level or other was permanent. I was always aware of being in that state, all the time, 24/7.
In sum, across all the interviews, developing an ability to dwell for at least some periods of time with a mind that is quiet, peaceful, and attentive seems to be taken for granted by the teachers as a necessary condition for progressing along the path. Then other things may begin to happen. One of the most common experiences here is an increase in the clarity and brightness of perception, as Stephen Batchelor notes in his book, Confession of a Buddhist Atheist:
The mindfulness sharpened my attention to everything that was going on within and around me. My body became a tingling, pulsing mass of sensations. At times when I sat outside I felt as though the breeze was blowing through me. The sheen of grass was more brilliant; the rustling leaves were like a chorus in an endlessly unfolding symphony. At the same time there was a deep stillness and poise at the core of this vital awareness.
4
Ajahn Amaro says much the same thing:
On one of those nights I remember, I sat up all through the night and was sitting there as the dawn came. What happened was the recognition that the mind was free of any kind of obstruction…. The mind was just clear and bright. There was mindfulness, there was energy; it was tranquil and peaceful and bright. There was a clear sense of how beautiful the mind is, and how utterly simple, how completely ordinary, how beautiful it is when not cluttered with obstructions…. In a sense it was a profound experience of normality, but in that it was incredibly sweet and delightful.
Also evident in these descriptions is an increasing experience of quiet peacefulness and equanimity, as the language-based mind loses some of its grip. Shaila Catherine notes that she began to feel “a stillness so deep that nothing other than a profound sense of peace would pervade my perception of things… along with a decrease in the tendency to become irritated and distracted.”
With this quote from Shaila we move beyond simply quieting the mind to other kinds of subjective phenomena that also come with meditation. Because meditation has multiple effects, a number of secular programs for teaching have been developed and are prospering, most notably Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction and spinoffs from it.
5 And of course, meditation practices are found in all the major religious traditions and in the religious rites and shamanic practices of many Fourth World cultures.
Letting Go
I use the term “letting go” to emphasize that we are talking about a process of letting go rather than achieving a state of detachment. Practices to nourish letting go include gradually learning to live without conditioned desires and habits and to question beliefs and ideas. The teachers used many equivalent terms for this process: “de-grasping,” “nonclinging,” “doubting,” “ceasing to crave,” or simply “relaxing completely.” Joseph Goldstein emphasizes their function, to assist in achieving “nonattachment,” and traces its importance back to Buddhism’s origins: “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.’”
The practical problem is that a true state of nonattachment is extremely difficult to achieve. You can work at letting go, but you can’t just will yourself to be nonattached. You have to work your way toward it patiently and wait for it to happen—and that is where meditation comes in. In the Japanese tradition, koans are used to facilitate the letting go of ideas. But they may take a while. As Enkyo O’Hara remarked: “You drop the koan into this mind and let it sit there. But you don’t do anything to it… because the mind is at ease; it’s not trying to figure the koan out, strategize or anything, it’s just at ease.” With that kind of preparation, degrees of nonattachment may begin to be reached. Ajahn Amaro described how he learned his first lesson in letting go during his first days in a Thai monastery:
There’s no supper in Theravadan monasteries, just one meal a day, in the morning, then nothing until the next day. There we are, sitting meditating in the evening, and I start to get hungry, and I think,
Hmm. I’d really like some pineapple. Now, this is a desire. What was it that [my teacher] was talking about? “When a desire arises you can just watch it.” But I really want some pineapple. But he said, “If you just wait, and watch that desire, then you’ll see that it passes away.” So I stayed there for a while, and then I tried to go back to my breath and was following my breathing, and then my mind got caught up with something else. Then I suddenly realized,
Oh, I’ve forgotten about the pineapple. What hit me was that,
Ah, I didn’t get the pineapple, and nothing is missing. That was a huge “Aha!” experience. That was it. Something clicked.
I didn’t get the pineapple and nothing is missing. He was right. Somehow the implications of that all clicked, almost audibly, saying,
That’s it! All you’ve got to do is stay with this and it will be the way out.
John Tarrant provided another excellent example, from further along on his path of preparation: “I was in a very, very deep place in a retreat once and my mind got incredibly busy. In previous retreats I had found that to be a problem, but this time I just found it funny. That’s when everything stopped… I started just laughing. Then everything seemed filled with light, and all the people seemed wonderful. That went on—the laughter went on for six months or so.”
Based on her own experience, Shaila Catherine gave this description of how meditation can give rise to nonattachment: “The mind was thoroughly disenchanted, and yet utterly free from aversion. This strange combination of equanimity, concentration, and clarity facilitates a breakthrough that releases attachment.”
Notice the word “breakthrough.” When nonattachment occurs during meditation, it tends to come in a moment, as release or insight, like John Tarrant’s opening into laughter quoted earlier. But in addition to or accompanying meditation, other strategies for letting go were reported. Some of the most well known, like Zen koans, are intended to provoke questioning, ambiguity, or skeptical inquiry. Martine Batchelor talked about her experience after meditating on the koan “What is this?” for some while: “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… 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.”
Ajahn Amaro told about a time many years after the pineapple episode when his meditation began to feel stale, like he was stuck in a little gray box. This went on long enough that he started thinking of it as a problem, and wondering what he should do:
Maybe there’s something here that’s getting in the way. There was a plugged-up feeling. I thought,
What’s here that could be getting in the way? I went through the usual list: there was no aversion, no greed, no fear or lust. So what could be here that could be clogging everything up? Then I suddenly realized: I
am…. I remembered a practice Ajahn Sumedho had taught, years before, using the question, Who am I?… What happened was that… there was an immediate transformation.
Amaro’s story is important not only because it illustrates how meditating on a koanlike question can facilitate nonattachment but also because it involves a particularly important kind of letting go—letting go of the self. Here is another version of that kind of detaching, in which one suddenly sees aspects of the self that had been hidden and that one might prefer not to know. Martine Batchelor again: “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.”
As noted earlier, koans are specific questions used to sharpen the letting go edge of meditation, but the questioning needn’t be done only while in formal meditation. The habit of questioning what one has always taken for granted was also reported as a detaching practice, as in John Tarrant’s interview: “I think having a lot of questions . . . allows you to embody what you’ve discovered.” Specifically, questioning undermines beliefs, which is necessary because attachment to beliefs creates obstacles on the path to awakening. Tarrant says, “One way to explain what being in prison is like is believing things.”
Now, letting go of a belief seems clearly different from letting go of a desire or a fear, but actually they both involve breaking out of (or simply escaping from, dissolving) what we have always taken to be reality. Questioning reality is one way to encourage nonattachment, but sometimes everyday life has lessons to teach about letting go. An unusual situation may shake up a reality that was taken for granted, loosening old ties and making possible fresh insights. A former sociology colleague of mine, the late Harold Garfinkel,
6 used this as a research strategy and called it “disrupting normal reality in order to reveal its underlying features.” One year he told his students that when they returned to their residence later that day, they were to pretend that they were total strangers who didn’t know anyone there—roommates, parents, whomever—and then maintain this act as long as they could. Some of his students were also in my classes, and they described the experience as “mind blowing.” Bernie Glassman had a similar idea in mind when he designed his “street retreats,” in which participants lived like homeless people on the streets of New York’s Bowery, with no money, no meals, no bathrooms, and no protected place to sleep:
What I realized is that because we were just living in the now, with no idea of what was going on, there was nothing to hang on to. It was totally out of our experience. About 90 percent of that group came to a much deeper place than people who had been practicing 10 years or so. I recognized that this was the first realization of upaya [skillful means or pedagogy]. I call it a plunge, plunging into unknown situations, which the brain cannot fathom, cannot rationalize. It’s what we try to do with koans, but this was much more real.
All together, the teachers described a comprehensive toolkit of “skillful means” that help facilitate the process of detecting, weakening, and dissolving attachments. Sometimes this is painful, sometimes it is great fun. Freeing oneself from attachments that one very possibly was not even aware existed can allow a shift to a new perspective. When this happens, what might once have provoked anxiety becomes pleasant, freeing, and satisfying. Stephen Batchelor described his experience this way:
One evening at dusk… I was abruptly brought to a halt by the upsurge of an overpowering sense of the sheer strangeness of everything. It was as though I had been lifted onto the crest of a great wave that rose from the ocean of life itself, allowing me for the first time to be struck by how mysterious it was that anything existed at all rather than nothing. “How,” I asked myself, “can a person be unaware of
this? How can one pass their life without responding to
this? Why have I not noticed
this until now?” I remember standing still, trembling and dumb, with tears in my eyes.
7
Compassion and Empathy
Compassion plays a deep and complicated role in the awakening process, according to the interviewees. Because compassion has many shades, it is well to clarify things by turning again to some words from Stephen Batchelor’s interview: “One’s emotional relationship to the world becomes richer. I feel that this practice of the Dharma makes one more sensitive, more sensitized. . . . It’s easy to throw out words like ‘compassion,’ but surely compassion is only real if it is founded on empathy, on a deepening ability to feel what the other feels.”
I like this because the word “compassion” has always been a little rich for my cool scientific mind to feel comfortable with. Grounding compassion on “empathy” makes it more solid. Other words are also used, such as “love,” “kindness,” “sympathy,” “caring.” Those are all just words, however, and it is the feelings that go with them that are important. So I will assume that whatever the words, it is the quality of feeling that the interviewees were talking about as they described aspects of their own experience with compassion.
First, how did they go about developing compassion? Certain kinds of meditation are specifically designed for this. Usually the meditator is instructed to focus on or visualize themes involving love or feelings of loving-kindness (metta), such as picturing a mother holding her baby. Such meditation practices are often discussed and prescribed in the vipassana literature. I know of no equivalent training in the Zen tradition, although it may exist. Joseph Goldstein said this about his experience with metta meditation:
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. . . . 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.
Goldstein found that metta practice brought a more open, less defensive attitude, which suggests less need to protect oneself from what is happening in the moment. That would allow for developing feelings of trust, closeness, and hence empathy with the people present in that moment.
Meditation practices with no special compassion-nurturing component (for example, mindfulness meditation) sometimes had similar results. For example, Shaila Catherine said, “I usually noticed the benefits of meditation in how I engaged with my activities at school, at work, and with family. There was a distinct increase in equanimity, generosity, kindness, and patience.”
Gil Fronsdal described the unfolding of compassion as an almost unconscious process:
I wasn’t interested in becoming compassionate, and the change was so gradual I didn’t recognize it as it was happening. Much of this change I attributed to becoming familiar with my own suffering. During the long hours of meditation, the presence of my inner pain opened something within. Rather than becoming enlightened, I was becoming “compassioned.” “Compassionment” instead of enlightenment.
John Tarrant also talked about compassion as an unexpected side benefit that emerged during the koan practice he had been following for some years:
The big thing . . . that I should say, is I actually wanted clarity, but I found there was a warmth and a heart quality in the koan tradition…. The thing I found was just the warmth and the loving quality of my experience of the universe. We’re not here for very long, and it’s beautiful. And maybe we can look after each other…. There’s a fundamental vastness and eternity about that experience of the kindness of the universe. It’s not just a personal feeling.
From the interviews, therefore, it seems that compassion may be both a contributor to and a consequence of progress toward awakening. For Bernie Glassman, the opening of compassion was not something he had been working on directly. After sixteen years of meditation and koan study, he had a profound awakening experience, and the feelings of compassion that came with this were so strong that they changed the direction of his life:
I felt the suffering, or the unsatisfaction, of all creations. I call them the hungry ghosts, those seeking for being satisfied. At the same time that I had that experience, I realized that these were all aspects of myself. All this seeking was various aspects of myself. At the same time I made a vow to try to feed, to try to help satisfy those thirsts, those hungers. I say that changed my direction. Before that, my whole goal was to be a monk at the zendo and work with the people coming to the zendo and try to lead them toward these experiences. After that I changed the venue of my work from the zendo to society. I wanted to work with everybody, wanted to figure out what are the ways, upayas, of working with people in business and social action and all aspects of life.
Two conclusions are suggested. First, compassion can be nurtured intentionally, through special practices, but it can also just appear along the path, unintentionally, as a by-product of other practices. Second, as Joseph Goldstein noted, the practices used to develop compassion can themselves have beneficial by-products like improved concentration, greater openness, and feelings of happiness. I think the last is especially important, because it shows that feeling compassion is more than a moral obligation—it is also a huge, perhaps supreme, positive reward in itself.
The final topic for discussion concerns the relation of compassion to awakening. I use Fronsdal’s term “becoming compassioned” to emphasize that, like “becoming awakened,” it is a process rather than a state. There are four possible relationships:
1. Becoming compassioned is a necessary condition for becoming awakened.
2. Awakening can be experienced without any special prior development of compassion, but becoming compassioned then occurs as a necessary part of becoming awakened.
3. Becoming compassioned can take place without becoming awakened.
4. Awakening can occur without becoming compassioned.
The interviews provide examples of the first two possibilities. That does not rule out the third and fourth, but we will have to go outside of the present group of teachers to explore them.
Enkyo O’Hara exemplifies the first case, where becoming compassioned precedes awakening. Her process began with many years of traditional Zen study and meditation in the Japanese tradition, which did not explicitly include components designed to cultivate compassion. Then the AIDS epidemic hit Greenwich Village, where she lived and taught, and without thinking of this as any kind of special Buddhist practice, she plunged into working with the victims:
The quality of the feelings that I had, the depth of understanding, the sudden commitment to work with people who were very ill and to do it a lot… I worked myself very hard during that period of time because the need was so great. I had not been that kind of caregiver before. I had done good things, but I had always held back a little, felt a little resentful when overworked. This was a kind of opening of compassion.
The opening of compassion that Enkyo experienced from this work had a huge impact on her life, deepened her Buddhist practice, and was very much a part of her awakening.
Second, the interviews also showed that the experience of awakening is usually accompanied by a strong opening of compassion. The quote from Bernie Glassman’s interview cited above provides an example of how awakening can occur without any prior attention to compassion, but with compassion emerging as an integral part of the experience. Joseph Goldstein makes this a bit more complicated when he says that based on his own experience and on classic Buddhist texts, the relation between awakening and compassion depends on how far one has advanced in terms of an aspect of the path known as bodhichitta:
In the Tibetan framework, relative bodhichitta is compassion, ultimate bodhichitta is emptiness [awakened consciousness]. 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.
Goldstein is saying that compassion is the activity of emptiness (which is what one experiences during awakening). This is a profound statement, and it will be explored more fully in
chapter 15. If human beings cannot experience awakening without also experiencing compassion, then this has interesting implications for an ongoing controversy about the origins of morality. Some contend that humans can’t be expected to behave virtuously unless they adhere to a religious belief system that defines good behavior and requires it of members. Others argue that a predisposition toward what most humans agree is good behavior has, in effect, been built into our DNA through millennia of evolution. In Goldstein’s Buddhist version, the potentials for both awakening and compassion are present genetically, and each must be nurtured. But when fully experienced they are two aspects of the same thing—you can’t have one without the other.
The problem, though, is that “awakening” and “compassion” have only vague meaning. The next chapter will try to fill this out somewhat, but for now the conclusion is simply that meditation practices designed to strengthen feelings of compassion work. There is some scientific support for this: meditators perform better on psychological instruments measuring emotional awareness and sensitivity,
8 and brain scans of these people show increased activity in brain areas linked with empathy and ability to infer what other people are thinking.
9 Meditation is not the only way to develop compassion, of course. Life presents many opportunities, as with Enkyo’s plunge into helping AIDS victims, or anyone doing things that naturally bring out feelings of loving-kindness. So there is abundant evidence both that developing compassion can help bring about awakening and that awakening can bring with it a strong opening of compassion. The unresolved remaining question is whether or not these two relationships have exceptions. In particular, is it possible to experience awakening without developing compassion, either prior to or as part of the experience? Is compassion a necessary condition for awakening? That question will be examined carefully in the next chapter.
Whatever Buddhist tradition they started in, when relating their path stories all eleven teachers recalled progressing along three lines of development: quieting the mind, letting go of conditionings, and opening up to compassion and empathy. Many different practices were employed, but the specific techniques didn’t seem to be particularly important, so long as the practitioner becomes able to control attention and make progress toward detaching. Overall, two of the qualities Buddhist practice seeks to develop—quieting the mind and letting go of conditionings—seem to be necessary conditions in order for awakening to occur.
The third quality, compassion, seems to have a more complex relationship with awakening. Although it is probably true that the ability to quiet the mind improves with the amount of time spent meditating and the effort given to it, “feeling increased compassion” did not follow a prescribed path. Furthermore, while for some of the teachers interviewed here, developing compassion preceded awakening, all of them reported that by the time awakening occurred, compassion was also present. However, possible exceptions to this optimistic rule have popped up elsewhere and will be examined in the next chapter.
A final note: there is a kind of mythic Buddhist model that if one works hard for a long time, then one will experience sudden total enlightenment. The interviews show more a pattern of small or medium-size insight experiences that occur along the path, sometimes almost unnoticed. These experiences then inform practice, whether or not one is aware of it at the time. One insight experience often leads to another, and at some point we might begin to call them awakening experiences. The point is that rather than a period of training and practice leading directly to awakening, what we actually find in the interviews is continued interaction between practice and experience, with practice improving along the path as one gains a little more insight into what is going on. These moments of insight often serve as signs along the way—the teachers refer to them as milestones, or watersheds—to which one can return if one strays from the path. But eventually, as Stephen Batchelor especially pointed out, one becomes concerned not so much with learning about awakening but with understanding life from the perspective of awakening and finding ways to live that life authentically, while being faithful to what one has learned.