|
Equipment for the Journey
by Judith Clark
(volume 76:4 p. 195) February 2002
About 25 years ago I visited friends in Derbyshire. The father
of the family was an experienced fell-walker, well acquainted
with the Peak district. He offered to take us out for a day’s
walk up Kinder Scout, the beginning of the Pennine Way, a long-distance
footpath, which stretches from Derbyshire up to Northumberland
and into Scotland. He was very particular that we began the
walk early so that we could complete it in good time. We were
to wear walking boots and take warm clothes and waterproofs,
and we had to be able to carry all our food and drink ourselves.
We had a great day out, and at about four o’clock were
heading back to the descent and our parked car when we were
stopped by a young couple who asked us to direct them to the
start of the Pennine Way. They were dressed in shorts, T-shirts
and flimsy trainers. It was already four, and they were intending
to set off without either map or compass. My friends’ father
was horrified. He said to them, ‘Surely you don’t
intend to set off now. You are not prepared and you will not
reach a suitable stopping point before dark.’ However,
they were not to be deterred, and continued in the direction
of the start of the route. My friends’ father said, ‘I
suppose they will end up getting into difficulties, and some
poor devil will have to turn out to rescue them!’ Our journey
may not be along the Pennine Way but following the Buddha’s
Great Way to full and perfect enlightenment also requires equipment.
Awareness
This ‘equipment’ is known as the Seven Factors of
the Path to Enlightenment. In this article I would like to look
at some of the equipment needed. The first thing we require
is awareness of the necessity of the journey. I once saw a film
about a Carthusian monastery in which one of the monks described
what had led him to the religious life. He said it was the feeling
of an empty space inside him, which he eventually realized was
a ‘God-shaped’ space. I suspect that we too have come
to the Summer School either because we have an empty space inside
or because there are difficulties we need to overcome. We should
be grateful for this feeling of something lacking or of difficulties,
because without them we would never have become aware of the
need to set out on this path.
Awareness is an attentive presence in the living moment of any
situation. The late Soko Morinaga Roshi in his book Pointers
to Insight describes the young men who came to his training
temple in Japan. They were intelligent young men from first-rate
universities. The first job they were given was to heat the
bath. This was a traditional Japanese bath, shaped like a barrel
with a lid and heated by lighting a fire underneath it. After
several instances of a fire being lit under an empty bath, the
roshi found it necessary to start by asking the students, ‘What’s
the first thing you do when heating a bath?’ They would
inevitably say, ‘Light the fire’, to which he would
reply, ‘Definitely not!’ Then they would say, ‘Fill
the bath with water.’ It never occurred to them to scrub
out the bath before filling it with clean water. Duly instructed,
they would scrub out the bath, fill it with clean water and
try to light a fire under it. On checking their progress a little
later, the roshi would find that the ‘fire’ consisted
of two large logs and lots of burnt newspaper. He would then
explain that they would never manage to make that burn. What
was needed was kindling’, the students would say, ‘There
is no kindling,’ To which he would reply, ‘Then chop
some.’ They would then say, ‘I don’t know where
the hatchet is’. To which he would reply, ‘Well, why
don’t you ask someone?’ He would go away for a while,
and when he next returned to see how things were going, he would
find a smoking mess under the bath. Poking about under the bath
he would find it full of burnt paper. He would ask them, ‘What
makes a fire burn?’ Being bright students they would reply,
‘A combination of fuel and oxygen’. The roshi would
say, ’Where’s the oxygen?’ ‘In the air.’
And he would say, ‘Well then, why don’t you clear
the ashes and let some air in?’ Eventually the students
would learn to perform practical tasks such as heating the bath.
We may laugh at this but we are all becoming increasingly divorced
from practical ‘hands-on’ experience in the present
moment. Such things as TV, computer games and virtual reality
come between us and actual experience. We can even make friends
in chatrooms on the Internet! However, face-to-face experience
is essential for the cultivation of awareness. Practising awareness
is said to be both the beginning and the end of the Buddha’s
Path, and it is set out in great detail in the Satipatth›na
Sutra as the Four Foundations of Awareness these four foundations
are awareness of body, sensations, mental states and contents
of mind.
The correct physical posture for meditation is most important
as it helps us to be aware of mental states arising. However,
there are many other situations in life that require direct
awareness in the body too. At Wimbledon a player waiting to
receive a serve does not just stand casually swinging the racket.
They crouch down, muscles tense, moving their body weight from
side to side ready to play the ball, forehand or backhand. We
need to carry this awareness in the body on the meditation cushion
into all aspects of daily life as a form to be observed. Even
in informal situations, such as shopping in the supermarket,
this awareness in the body can be practiced.
There are experiences we find pleasant and others we find unpleasant.
What causes a pleasant, unpleasant or neutral sensation will
differ in each person. It is human to have preferences, even
animals have preferences. Our problems arise when we feel we
must have what we prefer.
To give a simple example, when I was a student I used to visit
an old lady called Mrs Braid. She was very suspicious and frightened
by official letters because she was unable to read or write.
It took me some time to win her trust but once it had been gained
she loved my visits. In return for dealing with her official
correspondence she would entertain me to tea. At that time I
preferred tea weak and black with no sugar. Mrs Braid’s
idea of tea was rather different. She would begin by putting
two teaspoons of sugar into the cup, she then poured a good
inch of sweet and sticky tinned condensed milk, followed by
tea, a densely brewed black liquid. The first sip of this brew
was truly vile. What is more, to please Mrs Braid at least two
cups of tea had to be drunk, accompanied by a piece of sweet
sticky cake. I would never have chosen to have a cup of Mrs
Braid’s tea then or now. But in that situation, when it
was offered with such kindness and hospitality, there really
was no problem in drinking two cups. It was not my preference,
but in that situation it was possible.
Awareness of mental states is important because it enables us
to catch the passions before they are acted upon. Whichever
passion happens to arise be it desire or anger, unless we are
aware of the arising, it will take off before it can be caught.
Trevor Leggett gave a hint for experimenting with this, when
he discussed the derivation of the words sukha, pleasure and
happiness, and Duhkha, suffering or pain. He said, ‘These
are familiar words in Buddhism, but there is a secret in them.
Sukha comes from su, meaning good, and kha, meaning space. Duhkha
comes from duh or dush meaning bad, and kha, space. The origin
of the words, with their respective meaning of happiness or
pleasure and suffering or distress, comes from their application
to the axle of a chariot wheel. As you know, the axle goes through
the centre of the wheel as it turns. Su-kha , ‘good space’,
is when there is space so that the wheel can turn freely on
the axle. Duh-kha, ‘bad space’, is when there’s
not enough space or when the space is uneven or gritty, so that
wheel and axle grind against each other or stick and won’t
move smoothly. The hint from the make-up of these two words
is that in our actions, in our interchanges with the world,
we need to have a little space. If we can learn to make a little
space, then our actions, and our thoughts, can move easily without
obstruction.’
So if we can get into the habit of taking a deep breath and
creating a pause in what we are doing, this ‘good space’
will allow us to act more smoothly in daily life, without being
carried away by the passions. In fact there was a method for
giving up smoking that used this idea. All it required was an
egg-timer. Every time the craving for a cigarette arose, instead
of smoking a cigarette, you were instructed to turn the egg-timer
over and wait the three minutes which it took for the sand to
run through. If the desire to smoke was still as strong after
the three minutes, you could have one. This was a quite successful
method because people found that after three minutes the craving
had reduced just enough to allow them to choose not to smoke.
Even counting to ten can work if we do it habitually.
Our thoughts seem to switch on instantly when we wake in the
morning and go on throughout the day until we fall asleep again
at night. It seems to be an endless mental film that never stops
unless we become totally absorbed in what we are doing. If we
let it rip it just goes on and on and on. We may tend to indulge
it and deliberately perpetuate it because we are rather afraid
of the silence which would be there without this mental chatter.
If we wish to reduce this restless pursuit of thoughts the body
can help us.
Chess training in the Far East, as Trevor Leggett has pointed
out, tries to cultivate inner balance, courage and inspiration.
Mr Leggett watched Kimura, a famous Japanese chess champion,
who was playing a brilliant young player. There was clearly
only one move that Kimura could make but he didn’t make
it; he just sat there. He sat for so long that he seemed to
have fallen asleep. Meanwhile his young opponent became agitated,
fanning himself, drinking tea, going to the toilet, coming back
again and continually fidgeting. After 10 minutes Kimura made
the move he had to make. His opponent responded in a flash.
This process was repeated several times. Eventually Kimura won
because, in his impatience to move the game on, the younger
man made a blunder.
Later, Mr Leggett talked to Kimura and found that he was a fast-talking,
witty man. So he asked him why his chess personality was so
different from his ordinary personality. Kimura explained that
when he was young he was just like his young opponent; but he
played many games against an old master who did exactly what
Leggett has seen him doing. I always lost, he remarked because
of my impatience to move things on. So he practised sitting
in front of an empty chess board for an hour without moving.
He did this for a few days and then increased the time to two
hours a day. At first he found himself seething inwardly, watching
the clock. But suddenly, in the second week, he felt a sort
of calm. After that he could outsit any of them.
It is useful to remember that the body can help us to contain
and calm our agitation. The practice of these Four Foundations
of Awareness comprises the first of the Seven Factors of the
Path to Enlightenment.
Keen Investigation and Energy
The second factor is keen investigation of the Dharma. What
this means is checking and rechecking to make sure that the
map we are following is really the Buddha’s Way and not
one we have devised ourselves. This word ‘keen’ leads
us on to the third factor which is energy. Energy needs to be
invested in the practice at all stages. Generally, we have energy
for those things we want to do but not for those we don’t.
Often our effort is conditional on getting results; we shall
keep going if we seem to be getting there. In the kitchen at
Shobo-an, the Zen Centre in London, there is a cartoon pinned
to the wall which shows a class of children sitting in a circle
on cushions, and a monk is giving the lesson. On the blackboard
is its title, ‘The Journey to Enlightenment’. The
whole class is sitting quietly in meditation except one little
girl who has her hand up and is asking, ‘Are we there yet?’
That is the feeling we all have. We make some effort and then
want to see immediate results. Unfortunately, it is not like
that. Master Hakuin said we need the same intensity of effort
we would put into finding a lost family heirloom.
As contact lens-wearer, I have some small idea of what that
intensity of focus means. Contact lenses are very useful, but
if they get dry they tend to pop out. I have lost lenses in
some strange places, including the shallow end of a swimming
pool, a dark, wind-swept pavement in Tufnell Park and the bottom
of a dusty lift. I am very short-sighted and on all of those
occasions, although I was with people with better eyesight than
me, it was I who found the lenses. Why? Because they are important
to me; without them I am helpless and so I am the one who focuses
most intensely on the search. Applying this to practice would
be really useful.
Happiness
Walking the Buddha’s Way is not intended to be a grim affair,
as the fourth factor, happiness or joyous zest, indicates. We
must remember that happiness is not synonymous with pleasure.
Pleasure comes and goes according to the law of change or impermanence.
This happiness is an abiding state of heart which does not fade,
despite the ups and downs of life. This means that whatever
we experience, good or bad, can be accepted and lived through.
A traditional story told by Venerable Myokyo-ni’s own teacher
illustrates this. It’s called ‘The Horse from the
North’.
An elderly couple with a young son are so poor they cannot even
afford a buffalo to plough their rice paddy. One day, out of
the blue, a horse comes along, attaches itself to the young
boy and follows him home. Nobody knows who owns the horse, and
so the family gratefully accepts it and there is joy and jubilation.
Some years later the horse kicks the boy and, although the broken
leg heals, it remains bent. Now there is sorrow and lamentation:
the work is going to be harder because the boy is less able.
A few months later an army press gang passes through the village
rounding up all the young men to fight a war. They are not interested
in a cripple with a bent leg, so he is left behind and his family
are better off than their neighbours. Again there is jubilation.
Then, one day the horse rans off. Now the old couple have no
beast to help with the ploughing, and there is sorrow and lamentation.
Then another band of soldiers comes to the village, to requisition
all the animals either for the war effort or for food. As the
horse has gone, the old couple are no worse off. Then the horse
returns out of the blue, and there is joy and jubilation once
more.
This is how life goes: sometimes things are good and sometimes
they are bad. Happiness is being able to recognize that life
is like that and to accept whatever life presents us with and
do our best with it. One translation of priti, happiness, is
rapture which means to be completely absorbed with ‘rapt
attention’. In this state there is no I present, and therefore
happiness can arise. If we are completely given in to the situation,
there is no more stress and agitation.
Calm
This brings us to the the fifth factor which is calm, overcoming
the passions. In modern life we complain a great deal about
stress and anxiety and having too much to do. In fact one of
the most successful recent books is called The Little Book of
Calm. It seems we are all in need of calm. Road rage has progressed
to supermarket trolley rage, and now we have parking rage. If
someone beats you to a parking space, you simply ram them out
of the way with your car! So there is a lot of anger, agitation
and stress out there. All this stems from the fact that we find
it hard to accept the Three Signs of Being: no-‘I,’
change and suffering. If we did, then we would be able to go
with situations in life. Firstly, impermanence: we are anxious
because we might lose the things we have and might not get the
things we want. We suffer because we are frightened that something
might happen to us or our loved ones. And it might. We can’t
change that. Most of all, we are anxious about the idea that
there’s no ‘I’ here anyway. We have spent so
much time and effort in bolstering it up and making it secure
only to be told it doesn’t exist.
Anxiety can lead to obsessive attempts to control life. A friend
told me that she was worried about her parents. They have always
suffered from anxiety, but recently it had increased. The anxiety
takes the form of certain set habits and rituals by which the
day is controlled. Everything has to happen at a fixed time
throughout the day and has to be done in a certain way. Routine
may be a good thing up to point. But in the case of my friend’s
parents, the vegetables must be laid out in a certain order
and peeled in that order, and any deviation from this causes
anxiety. When they brew a pot of tea they set a timer for exactly
three minutes, and only when it rings do they pour the tea.
The whole day is ordered in this way which leaves no room for
spontaneity. My friend will telephone them to say that she will
be passing some time in the afternoon and will call in, only
to be told that the timing of some household event makes that
impossible. She now visits them unannounced because otherwise
they would put her off and she would never see them. The more
they try to control their lives the more anxious they become.
Calm can really be established only when we are fully ‘given
in to what is being done at this moment’, when there is
no room for agitation at all. In one of his books, the Russian
Orthodox priest Metropolitan Anthony talks about his days in
Paris as a doctor in general practice before he became a priest.
He said that at the beginning when he was with a patient, he
was also aware of all the people in his packed waiting room.
Throughout his surgery he was aware of this endless queue of
patients waiting to see him. Because of this, he tried to rush
through the consultations. He found he would have to ask each
question twice. He would have to repeat examinations because
he would forget his findings, and he even forgot the patient’s
name. After some time he decided that he had to address the
problem. He resolved that, regardless of the number of waiting
patients, he would attend fully to the patient before him in
the consulting room. He worked more slowly, behaving as if the
person before him was the only patient he had to see that day.
Whenever he found himself hurrying, he would deliberately exchange
a few pleasantries with the patient in order to return to the
focused, calm state. Interestingly he found that, over all,
he now spent less time with each patient because he no longer
had to repeat questions or examinations.
Absorption
Wholeheartedness means being totally absorbed in the living
situation which brings us to the sixth factor of enlightenment,
absorption. This term is sometimes translated as concentration,
but unfortunately this carries the connotation of an ‘I’
doing it. True absorption comes about quite naturally of itself,
either when we are doing something that really interests us
or when we are in danger. Often it is attributed to the nature
of the activity. However, it is actually a result of the wholeheartedness
with which we are doing it. The belief that absorption resides
in the activity leads us to seek out further absorbing or exciting
things to do. In fact, there is a growing business offering
‘extreme’ holidays which promise to take the client
out of the ‘comfort zone’ of ordinary life. There
is ‘white-water rafting’, being lowered into the sea
in a cage among great white sharks or ‘extreme climbing’
when one climbs the rock face without ropes, clinging on only
by the fingers and toes. The attraction that these activities
all share is that while we are engaged in them, it is impossible
to think of anything but what is being done at that moment.
In complete absorption there is no room for extraneous thoughts,
thus giving us the opportunity to see what is really there.
In this connection Metropolitan Anthony tells the story of an
old woman he met shortly after his ordination as a priest. He
had been sent to an old people’s home just before Christmas
to celebrate Mass. After the service he was approached by an
old woman who wanted advice on prayer. He suggested that she
approach another priest who was reputed to be an expert on prayer.
She said to him that she had talked to experts on prayer all
her life, and it had done her no good at all. She said, ‘I
thought that as you are new to the priesthood and probably know
nothing, you may just blurt out something useful by accident!’
Thus encouraged, he asked what her problem was. She said, ‘For
the past 14 years I have been saying the Jesus prayer almost
constantly, but I have never felt the presence of God.’
The Jesus prayer is a short prayer used in the Orthodox tradition
in which the words ‘Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me’
are repeated over and over again. Metropolitan Anthony replied,
‘If you speak all the time God has no opportunity to show
his presence.’ He suggested that after breakfast she should
go to her room, tidy anything distracting out of sight, set
her armchair in front of the icon and light the lamp in front
of it. He said she should then just look around and take stock
of her room because if she had been practising the prayer like
that for 14 years, she probably hadn’t noticed her room
much. Then, he said, take up your knitting and just knit before
the face of God. The old lady did not feel that this was very
pious advice, but nevertheless decided to do as he said.
Some time later she told him that it had worked. He asked her
to tell him exactly what had happened. She said, ‘I did
as you said. After breakfast I went to my room, tidied it up,
arranged everything and, looking around, I thought, “What
a lovely room this is. I have a view over the garden. I have
all the things that I have collected over my life; what a nice
comfortable place it is to be.”’ She said that she
lit the lamp in front of the icon and sat down and felt the
peace of the room. ‘Then I remembered that I was to knit
before the face of God, so I took up my knitting. I heard the
ticking of the clock, but that did not disturb me. The knitting
needles clicked against the arms of the chair, but if anything,
this just reinforced the silence. Gradually I began to notice
the silence was not an absence but a presence of something.
It had a density and a richness that met the silence inside
me and pervaded me. I realized that at the heart of it there
was an all-silent, all peaceful presence.’ The old lady
was to live another 10 years, until she was over 100; and whenever
she practised this silence, she could sense the quietness and
peace of God.
Serenity
While we still search and hope for spiritual experience, we
remain out there, unfulfilled. It is only through emptying out
completely that absorption can take place. Only in the state
of absorption can serenity the seventh factor of enlightenment
arise. There isn’t a great deal we can say about serenity.
What can be said is that it is not something an ‘I’
can have. Serenity is a quality of the heart that, in the absence
of ‘I’, radiates out to all around it. This is the
essence of the Bodhisattva Path, which is not about practising
for ourselves but for the sake of all beings.
The Middle
Way February 2002 p. 195 (volume 76:4)
|
