Ornoth

Four Buddhisty book reviews. Gotta knock these four out in brief, so I can catch up on other stuff.

“The Karma of Questions”, Thanissaro Bikkhu

This was one of our dhamma book club selections. It was my first time reading Than Geoff, although his books are everywhere. He’s written (∞-1) of them, and he gives them away for free. Unfortunately, quantity doesn’t assure quality, and this book was sporadic in its usefulness. Actually, it reads more like the blog of a rant-prone idealogue than a commercially viable author, probably due to lack of editorial guidance. On the other hand, there were a few interesting nuggets that I’d like to retain.

One is the following admission: “While skillful thinking leads to no harmful actions, long bouts of it can tire the mind.” This confirms my felt sense that devoting all that meta-level thought to how one relates to everything really does consume mental energy. That helps me understand why I often feel utterly exhausted by the end of a retreat.

One of his snarkier bits is when he utterly slams the Mahayana bodhisattva ideal of staying behind in samsara to work for the enlightenment of all, rather than passing into nirvana. Mahayana practitioners often criticize vipassana practitioners as selfish, because they focus on themselves and their own enlightenment. That would make sense, he says, if nirvana was a place or a thing. But it’s not; it’s a process, something you do. “If samsara were a place, it might seem selfish for one person to look for an escape, leaving others behind. But when you realize it’s a process, there’s nothing selfish about stopping at all. It’s like giving up an addiction or an abusive habit.” So staying in samara until all beings are enlightened is kind of like vowing not to go to rehab until everyone else goes.

Another interesting bit is that one can fully understand and embrace the Buddhist concept of non-self and still not be perfected. In his words, even after the question “Who am I?” falls away, “the only question still concerning you is how to dig out the remaining roots of unskillfulness still latent in the mind.”

Perhaps the biggest revelation I took from the book has to do with where intentions come from. Intentions are vitally important in Buddhism, because they’re where karma comes from: someone who knowingly does an unwise act accumulates negative karma, while someone who performs an unwise action with wise intention does not.

According to Buddhism, the chain of conditionality goes like this: one’s intentions determine one’s actions, and one’s actions produce immediate and deferred results. So it’s pivotal to cultivate wise intentions. But what factors influence/condition one’s intentions? Than Geoff mentions two things: one’s state of mind and the results of past intentions and actions. So to produce positive intentions/actions/karma, one must cultivate a positive mind state and observe and learn from one’s previous actions.

There were also numerous interesting pointers on practice. For example, one doesn’t do breath practice in order to observe the breath, but to observe cause and effect, and especially to question your assumptions about breathing and how you relate to your perceptions. Another is thinking of concentration as two separate practices: the first skill is getting the mind settled down, and the second, completely different skill is staying there. See if you can try to keep that degree of stillness going in all situations, and examine the things that get in the way.

“The Compassionate Life”, Dalai Lama

I picked up this little book as part of my karuna practice, interested in seeing what the grand master had to say on the subject. Largely this was a discussion of two important Mahayana texts: Shantideva’s 8th century “Guide to the Bodhisattva’s Way of Life” and Langri Tangpa’s 12th century “Eight Verses for Training the Mind”. I took away three interesting ideas.

The first is that patience is considered to be an antidote to both anger and hatred. This works well for me, because I consider myself a patient person, and someone not especially prone to anger and hatred. However, the times when I feel the most irritation with people are usually instances where I’m being impatient about them doing something.

On the topic of compassion, old man Gyatso asserted that it’s not necessary to actively cultivate compassion for every single person. Instead, he suggested realizing the general case: that all beings seek happiness and avoid pain, and have an equal right to do so.

He also offered this offbeat question: if human hatred exceeded human love, then why has our population grown so hugely? Yes, humanity has suffered immense self-inflicted wars and pogrommes, but that hasn’t stopped us from loving even more, as evinced by world population growth.

“Compassion: The Key to Great Awakening, Thought Training and the Bodhisattva Practices”, Geshe Tsultim Gyeltsen

Ironically, while I was in the library looking for the above Dalai Lama book, I accidentally found this one. Although the title promised to further advance my karuna practice, it was (like the Dalai Lama’s book) mostly a commentary on two Mahayana base texts; in this case, Togmey Zangpo’s “Thirty-Seven Bodhisattva Practices”, as well as the “Eight Verses” that were already cited in the Dala Lama’s book.

I really didn’t gain a lot from this book. The major point I gathered echoed the Dalai Lama: that patience is greater than anger.

Other than that, the whole Tibetan cosmology thing kinda left me feeling that Mahayanans are a little bit more than cuckoo.

“The Best of Inquiring Mind: 25 Years of Dharma, Drama, and Uncommon Insight”

I was delighted to find a copy of this book in the library, as it was already on my Amazon wish list. Despite being a low-budget, seat of the pants operation, Inquiring Mind has been a key publication in American Buddhism for more than 25 years, as evinced by their list of contributors, which includes Jack Kornfield, Joseph Goldstein, Sharon Salzberg, S.N. Goenka, Ajahn Amaro, Jon Kabat-Zinn, Jack Engler, Ram Dass, Gary Snyder, Allen Ginsberg, and John Cage.

As such, the book was very useful to me in terms of charting the lineage of American Buddhism, especially noting the people involved in the founding of IMS and Spirit Rock.

Although it was very interesting to read, the only meaningful passage for me was in Ayya Khema’s article on jhana practice, which described the first four jhana in terms that sound a lot like my own personal experience. It’s a fascinating article which gives me an idea that it would be useful for me to sit down and have a talk with someone who has done and can teach jhana practice, so that I can confirm form myself where I’m at and where to go from there. As well as seeking out her other publications and dhamma talks, of course.

Now, after all that I can relax and read the newest Pratchett paperback before diving back into some more meaty material after the holiday!

Saturday I attended my second Wise Speech workshop at CIMC with Narayan Liebenson Grady. It was interesting because it was one of the few times when people are encouraged to talk to one another, and I found it refreshing, meeting new people or renewing existing friendships.

One nugget I’d like to share is the following quote, which comes from Maha Ghosananda. While his name might not be familiar to most, he’s earned the nickname “the Gandhi of Cambodia” for his work during the brutal Khmer Rouge years that eradicated Buddhism in Cambodia. Here’s the quote:

The thought manifests as the word.
The word manifests as the deed.
The deed develops into the habit.
The habit hardens into the character.
The character gives birth to the destiny.
So, watch your thoughts with care
And let them spring from love
Born out of respect for all beings.

Narayan shared this as a way to put Wise Speech into context as one of the bases upon which our actions depend. This makes clear the reasons behind the Buddhist emphasis on training oneself to engage in wise thought, speech, and action: they are are what drive our habits, our character, and our destiny.

This runs parallel to my main revelation during the workshop, which is to view speech as “instant karma”. Speech has instant, irrevocable results: speak in an unwise way, and you reap immediate repercussions.

Speech is an ideal part of one’s life to work with, because it is concrete, it’s easy to control, and you can see its results immediately. And, of course, it’s an area where most people act without any thought. There’s no other element of practice that yields such obvious results for such a small investment of effort.

After the workshop, a bunch of people from our ever-growing circle of dharma friends got together for a birthday dinner at the Elephant Walk. It’s a Cambodian restaurant, which was a bit ironic given the Ghosananda quote earlier in the day. After dinner we went for ice cream at Lizzie’s in Harvard Square, where I had my favorite: a frappe with chocolate chip ice cream and vanilla syrup, a personal creation I’ve always called “Corrugated Fun”.

This provided ample amusement, thanks to an event earlier in the day. Since lunch wasn’t provided for the workshop, a couple of us went over to the local Whole Foods to pick something up. I grabbed some fresh berries, but put those down when I discovered that they had Haagen-Dazs Cookies & Cream ice cream. Everyone was amused that I put away a pint of ice cream over lunch. Having more ice cream after supper (which I’d ordered “spicy”) only cemented my reputation as having an iron stomach.

I might have even scared them when I offered to recruit a few of them to come with me when the Jimmy Fund’s annual Scooper Bowl comes takes place in June!

Then I came home to some really surreal news, but that’s a story for another—friends-locked—post.

For some reason, the MBTA is the best place in the world for me to practice Buddhism.

First, it’s where I listen to most of my dharma talks. Sure, there’s talks every Wednesday at CIMC, but I listen to more of them on my iPod, from a number of really great teachers. I listen to talks on grocery runs too, but the MBTA is the place where I digest the majority.

Second, it’s where I run into the most people, and the most diversity. The brevity of subway interactions makes it the perfect place to try out changes in one’s mindset and the behaviors those mindsets produce. Buddhism isn’t very useful unless it’s practiced in engagement with the real world, and the T is about as real as Boston gets!

Finally, I really don’t meditate that often on the cushion, nor get very much out of it. But for me, subway rides seem to evoke a certain philosophical state of mind that lends itself to the kinds of spontaneous insights people crow about having on the cushion.

Ironically, last Wednesday I had a pretty major insight on the subway, on the way home from the dentist, where I’d had an old filling replaced. It worked out great, because two hours later I was on the cushion for the regular weekly sitting at CIMC, which provided me with the opportunity to explore the insights I’d gained.

This posting is my attempt to record and describe those insights. It’s written more for me than for anyone else, so if you read it, bear in mind that these aren’t fully formed and polished for public consumption.

In fact, the ideas here will probably not jibe with your own. There are elements that will run strongly counter to the beliefs of my more “intuitive” type friends, and there’s a couple points that will equally annoy the logicians. In either case, I’m posting this more to explore and organize my own thoughts than seeking feedback.

Please understand that I’m not saying any of this is “truth”, even for myself. And I’m not looking for debate or argument about what the “truth” is. This is just my attempt to record a series of ideas that I think might aid my understanding of some key Buddhist concepts.

I cited a very pertinent truth in my review of Siddhartha: “Wisdom cannot be communicated. Wisdom that a wise man tries to communicate always sounds foolish.” So bear that in mind, too. What might be insight for me might sound patently obvious to you, or even utterly wrong. Oh well. Arguing about it won’t change anything.

So with all those disclaimers, here’s the stuff.

There are these three concepts in Buddhism, all of which haven’t made much sense to me yet. They’re called dependent origination, no self, and karma.

Dependent origination has always been explained to me thus: nothing that exists or happens occurs independent of some preceding condition. Everything that exists is predicated upon a set of preceding conditions. That is, nothing happens or exists all by itself, without cause.

Okay, that’s nice. Big whoop. In a word, DILLIGAF? What possible philosophical value does something so inane have? I mean, this is one of the most core tenets of Buddhism that gets mentioned repeatedly. I’m pretty sure Buddha himself is quoted as saying that if you know the Four Noble Truths and Dependent Origination, you’ve got everything you need. What’s the big deal?

Well, extend the metaphor to thought. Forget the idea that we control what we think; any fifteen minute meditation session will readily dispel that idea. That’s practically the first thing you learn when you sit. No, most of our thoughts arise in patterns that are in direct response to certain conditions.

What are those conditions? For the most part, they’re sensory input. If I see a particular thing, I’m likely to think certain associated things in response. If I feel a certain tickling, I’ll think there’s a mosquito on my arm. If I hear someone say something, I’ll respond in a way that’s pretty predictable for anyone who knows me.

While you might be able to exert a small degree of control, and there might be a modicum of randomness going on, the overwhelming majority of our thought is comprised of ingrained habitual responses to the sensory input we receive. And, of course, our thoughts are the conditions which drive our actions. We are essentially nothing but reaction machines, bumping into the world and reacting mindlessly to it in an immensely expanded version of Brownian motion.

That’s what I think dependent origination is trying to point at: that our thoughts, like everything else, are just autonomic reactions to the conditions around us. We think we’re the author of our own thoughts, and we’re fascinated by our selves, but if you really look at your own thoughts, you’ll find your mind is full of well-worn ruts that we traverse over and over again. We re-run the same thoughts—and let’s be honest, they’re really not very deep or complex at all—and it’s as difficult for us to veer out of those habitual patterns as it is for a hamster to change the direction of his Habitrail.

That’s also where I think “no self” comes in. If the world—including us, our thoughts, and our actions—is merely one immense chain “reaction”, and we’re all operating on autopilot, then is there really such a thing as a “self”? What am I, if I am just a collection of semi-autonomic learned reactions to external stimuli? We think of our “self” as something definitional, something essential, and something we control, but can we even say that it exists, when even our thoughts—the very things we use to define “me”—are wholly predetermined by our habits and predispositions?

To illustrate: at this point, the ideas I’ve described are sensory input that has been fed to your thinking process. And most people who read this will now be having thoughts that are their habitual—usually negative—reaction to the idea of determinism. So are you not even now playing out some of your tired old habits of mind?

This seems to me to also drive the definition of karma. Contrary to the simplistic interpretation, karma isn’t about being rewarded or punished in a future life for your behavior in this life. Nor is it some puerile idea of cosmic fairness, where we later will reap the results of meritorious or unwise actions.

Karma is exactly this: your habitual reactions and patterns of thought predispose you to certain kinds of experiences, interactions, and outcomes. If you always view the view from a victim’s point of view, you will only see the ways in which you are victimized, and you will continue to be a victim. If your thoughts and habits are those of an unhappy person, you are very likely to continue to be an unhappy person. The way you think, which is largely formed in childhood and became well ingrained in adolescence, makes you what you are. This is karma.

However, Buddhism does include something of an escape pod from complete determinism. We know that we cannot control our reactionary thoughts and habits, but as I asserted earlier, most of those habits have been learned. In theory, it should be possible to indirectly influence our thinking, to un-learn our old habits and train ourselves to react to the world with new patterns which aren’t as inflexible, adolescent, and self-destructive.

If you can, through practice, create ever the slightest space between perception/stimulus and reaction/response, you have a chance to get inside this reaction engine and maybe change your response.

Humans are singularly blessed. We are the only species on this planet with the ability to see our own mental and emotional programming. And it is this facility which allows us to—hopefully—influence that programming by examining our knee-jerk reactions and replacing them with more mature, compassionate actions. It’s neither a short nor an easy path, and replacing our mindless habits is very arduous and frustrating work.

And the most frustrating part is this: how many people actually do it? How many of us examine our programming, our mindless patterns of behavior, and then pursue the arduous task of changing? How many are even aware of their programming? Sadly, it’s a bogglingly tiny minority.

But this, I think, is exactly what Buddhism is pointing at when it talks about “the unconditioned”: the ability to bring a freshness of mind to each new situation, in a way that is well-considered and compassionate, rather than based in mindless reactions, adolescent insecurities, and the confusion that comes with acting out of the ego. And the unconditioned is just a synonym for nibbana.

So these are the thoughts that have been circling around my head this week. And yes, these thoughts also are as dependent upon conditions as any others. I’m just fortunate that my life conditions brought me to Buddhism, that I happened to be listening to a somewhat pertinent dharma talk, and that I was in a fertile practice space like an MBTA train, so that these thoughts could occur.

I hope these ideas represent progress in understanding concepts like dependent origination, no self, karma, and the unconditioned. And if they have any value for you, I freely share them. As with everything in Buddhism, realizing something is the first step toward freedom, but it’s also the easiest; putting one’s realizations into practice, especially in daily life, is the real, ongoing challenge.

I always feel some degree of trepidation relating my philosophical revelations. Either they sound like trite, self-evident aphorisms, or they take so much abstract language to relate that they come across completely flat on paper.

Last night I had another interesting revelation. Like the others, it’s going to take some background.

Many Buddhist sects express some form of belief in reincarnation. Throughout his multiple lives, a man must attempt to perform meritorious acts in order to accumulate positive karma and promote one’s future wisdom.

In addition, nearly all schools of Buddhism promote a belief in the unity of all life, some dialect of the concept that we are all truly one in essence.

The point of these tenets is to help adherents overcome the problem of ego. Buddhism stresses compassion above all other values, and modeling compassion requires a certain suppression of the ego’s belief that it is more important than anyone else. It is difficult to express true loving compassion while we’re busy defending our ego’s self-conception of us as somehow special, better, and more important than everyone else.

However, I’ve always had an innate aversion to both of these concepts. I couldn’t explain why, other than indicating a stubborn belief that we are nothing more than bio-mechanical organisms that live briefly and die, and our consciousness, in whatever high esteem we hold it, dies with the meat that houses it. And although we have self-evident dependencies, we are not “one”.

Okay, that’s the background. Now let’s set the scene for the revelation.

I am presently reading “The History of Surrealism”, a horribly dry but authoritative account of the movement, originally written in French by Maurice Nadeau back in 1940. Here is a particular passage where Nadeau speaks about the movement’s primary leader, André Breton.

Life and the dream, he had shown, were two communicating vessels, in which events were homologous, it being impossible for the individual to assert that the latter was more real than the former. This time he went further: he abolished any frontier between the objective and the subjective. There exists, according to Breton, between man and the world, a perpetual and continuous correspondence. There exists, above all, a continuity of events which can be antecedently perceived and whose correspondences remain invisible. Yet self-analysis permits their observation.

Upon reading this, a couple things struck me.

First, the last two lines are a fairly concise statement of a Buddhist approach to life: there is something to life that is beyond its appearance to our mundane senses, and contemplative meditation allows us to access that. Now, the surrealists had a general familiarity with Buddhism, so this isn’t necessarily an independent observation, but it did put me in the mindset of interpreting this passage from a Buddhist perspective. Which led to the following.

It seems to me that Breton, as depicted in this passage, is a bit strident in his insistence upon some existence beyond objective reality. I felt this was an expression of a powerful fear of death, of the very impermanence that Buddhism teaches us to accept.

Or does it?

Breton’s unchecked ego brought him to this conceptual argument in order to bolster the idea that he would somehow live beyond his meat. But in reincarnation and the mystical oneness of all life, Buddhism also seems to provide psychological crutches that allow the overpowering ego to avoid facing death!

In a word, Buddhism’s concepts of karma, reincarnation, and the oneness of all life, while helpful in allowing the individual to suppress ego in order to cultivate a healthy sense of compassion, can also be viewed as the sheerest vanity, providing the ego with ample ways of rationalizing away the blunt, absolutely immutable fact of our impermanence and death.

I find this particularly ironic, because Buddhism is all about mastering one’s ego and accepting the fact that we die. To realize that such an obvious, ego-driven aversion to death can be found within Buddhism’s core tenets was a real revelation.