ALBA Comment

Buddhist social engagement

The following essay was written for display at the - Together in Service: a national celebration of faith-based social action - on the 27th November at Coin Street London.

 

There is a very strong encouragement in Buddhism to practice Dana (generosity).  The Buddha usually put this first for his followers – following the formula, Dana, Sila, Bhavana (generosity, morality and developing the mind (meditation)). 

Generosity should be practiced unconditionally, that is, without discrimination between race, creed, sex etc.  We should give wholeheartedly. 

As an example of this in practice, in Sri Lanka, it is common for Buddhists to celebrate their birthday by first giving a meal to the Buddhist monks, and then feeding needy children or the elderly in their locality. 

Another example of generosity in action was the huge response to the Tsunami in Buddhist countries in SE Asia 7 years ago.  Immediate relief was organised by Buddhist temples.  A lot of money was also raised by Buddhists in the UK, the London Buddhist Vihara alone raising well over £100,000 and sending many gifts-in-kind for relief.

In the UK, a number of charities have been set up to help needy children in Buddhist countries.  The Rahula Trust (www.rahula-trust.org), of which I am a founding Trustee, was the inspiration of Ven Vagiragnana, former Sangha Nayaka of Great Britain and Head of the London Buddhist Vihara, who was Chair of the charity for many years.  We currently provide educational sponsorship to over 400 children in Sri Lanka, who would otherwise be unable to afford the uniforms, shoes, books and transport they need to go to school.  Most of the sponsors are Buddhists living in the UK.  Another organisation called the Anglo-Thai Foundation (www.anglo-thai.org)  sponsors a similar number of children in Thailand.   

I am also Trustee of Hope for Children (www.hope-for-children.org), a charity based in the UK, which has an income approaching £2 million annually.  This charity works in 10 developing countries in Asia and Africa.  We support 27 projects in Sri Lanka, including some small projects originally set up by Buddhist monks to help needy children, but is entirely non-sectarian. 

All these charities work to the principle of helping children irrespective of their religion or beliefs.  This is an important principle in Buddhism, it is not a missionary religion, and as such, it would be totally against Buddhist principles to give preference to children along sectarian lines.  I remember one Buddhist monk who asked whether we should continue to sponsor a child, whose mother no longer attended the temple – he was told in the clearest possible terms that this was not a criterion for sponsorship.

This seems to be a feature which sets Buddhist social work apart.  Having visited many countries in Africa and Asia, it is clear to me that many charities who raise funds in the West, supposedly to provide various kinds of relief to people in developing countries, are primarily focussed on religious conversion.     

Another aspect of social engagement which is important to Buddhist communities in the UK, is to teach their children their cultural roots, including the native language of their parents.  

Perhaps, however, the greatest encouragement to social engagement for Buddhists is the teaching of Right Livelihood, one of the factors of the Buddhist Eightfold Path, the Buddha’s path to enlightenment, which all Buddhists try to practice.  Right Livelihood means to follow a livelihood which is not harmful to oneself or others.   Many Buddhists in the UK work as doctors, teachers, therapists and in other social enterprises, with the aim of being of service to their community.  Many again work in professions and trades and endeavour to bring the Buddhist principles of honesty and harmlessness into their working lives.

 

Martin Evans

Mindful Ageing at Amaravati

Last weekend I attended a mindful ageing seminar at Amaravati Buddhist monastery. I was one of a large group of presenters at this event. Overall there were 10 who spoke including three ordained monastics, two ex-bhikkhus, and five lay Buddhists with varying degrees of teaching experience. The event commenced with an introduction from Nick Carroll, the MC for the weekend and was followed by an excellent opening talk from Ajahn Amaro, the present Abbot of Amaravati. This set the context for the seminar and referred to the fundamental facts of life – the four messengers - namely sickness, ageing, death and the figure of the spiritual seeker. This represents our common mortality and the challenge that we face to understand our human predicament and potential. The remainder of the weekend seminar was divided into four themes each of which was introduced by two speakers and then followed up by small group discussion and large group reflection.

Joseph Pabhakaro Kappel gave a fascinating talk on Saturday evening that included reminiscences of his time as an Abbott in the Forest Sangha in Thailand.

The seminar was regarded by some participants, including me, as particularly important in re-establishing a precedent for both ordained and non-ordained Buddhists to teach in partnership. This type of joint event happened during the early days of the Forest Sangha in Britain, and has happened in the US, but for no obvious reason has not happened recently in the UK.

The weekend was organised to a retreat timetable including an early start at 5:30 AM and a single main meal before noon and included periods of silence and meditation practice as well as chanting. Set against the retreat timetable were significant periods of presentations and discussion. The approach we adopted has some similarities with that used for many years by ALBA - the Amaravati Lay Buddhist Association - although ALBA events rarely have more than one or two teachers.

Those who offered feedback immediately following the seminar were very encouraging; although the organising and presenting group have still to share their reflections on the weekend and to read any written feedback from participants.

Ajahn Amaro deserves praise and support for helping to plan this event and for taking such an active role in it. 

Chris Ward

 

Mindfulness and Intuition

Buddhism offers a rich array of terms for describing subjective experience – what it is like to feel as though we inhabit a human body. Although scholars and practitioners have come a long way in translating Pali Buddhist terms – we are still in floundering in some cases. We either don’t fully understand what a term means, or we have an idea but cannot easily translate this into English. When reading Buddhist authors or listening to teachers using Buddhist terms, we must always consider what is said as a possible interpretation for us to consider.   

Mindfulness & Clear Comprehension

Sati-sampajañña is a composite of two Pali words and is usually translated as mindfulness and clear comprehension. This suggests a state of mind where we are fully present, unconfused, bright, sharp. We are not dull, fuzzy, confused and bewildered. However, if we adopt this translation and this understanding, then we are proposing to pursue a specific set of desirable mind-conditions. It is desirable to be sharp, clear and present. But sati-sampajañña is not pointing at a desirable and static set of particular mind-conditions, it is a clear knowing of whatever states are present – so it transcends any particular state. We can clearly know that we are confused and fuzzy, or that we are bright and on-the-ball.

In order to confirm our conceptual understanding of the term sati-sampajañña – through direct experience - we have to look within. We learn to notice what is present in awareness without reacting to it – without buying in to mind contents. This is exercising a skill and requires patient persistence. Just as with any skill, regular practice is required.

Mindfulness is based upon an awareness of context – which is known through the mind-sense – as well as what is perceived through our five senses.  

The Numinous

Rudolph Otto in his 1928 work – ‘The idea of the holy’ - talks about the ‘numinous’ – a sense of the holy. He is pointing to an intuitive feeling that transcends everyday discriminative thought and may range from mild to overpowering and can be characterised by words such as awe, mystery, rapture, epiphany, deep humility, oneness and belonging in the world, profound peace, or feeling overwhelmed and swept away by a powerful force much greater than oneself. For Otto this experience, or felt sense, is what he calls ‘numinous’ - the idea or experience of the holy.

Many people are aware of the numinous – either from the memory of a powerful ineffable experience – or as a quite frequent intuitive sense - which for some may be referred to by the word ‘God’. It is the persistence of this feeling of holiness that thwarts any rational resolution of the somewhat naive question of whether or not God exists. For many believers we are not speaking about a rational construct that has been arrived at by thought and reason and is open to doubt, but a felt intuitive sense.

I suggest that this felt sense - of something always present, but just behind (or transcending)  our normal everyday thinking - is actually a good subjective clue to the way our brain  works – our more recently evolved thinking and language based ability which deconstructs and analyses and is where our thinking self ‘lives’ (sometimes called the ‘ego’), works alongside older parts of our mind that deal in holistic perception, pattern recognition, ‘gut’ feelings, impulses, artistic perception, automatic responses, learned behaviour and strategic direction.

These silent parts of the mind – at least in analytical language terms - have a much more grounded sense of being at home in the world and automatically and very rapidly respond at times of threat or when we are exercising a well-practiced routine – like driving. We share this intuitive ‘grounded’ mode with our mammalian cousins.  Our intuitive mind is incredibly good at holding and re-enacting previously stored (learnt) constellations of feelings, thoughts and emotions according to current context. When our survival is at risk, our intuitive mind inhibits our thinking mind incredibly rapidly and will usually control our behaviour. We might also include impulses, habits and instincts as forming categories of intuition, or at least of parts of our brain that are outside of direct conceptual control.

Some intuitive functions of the mind are normally inhibited by thinking - and low moods - and yet can never be entirely or completely silenced – they become more obvious when we are relaxed, off-guard, not thinking, or involved with physical activity, but cannot be controlled or known directly through language based thinking – intuition itself lacks a language based voice – but makes itself known through feelings, sudden insights, creative leaps, ‘aha’ moments – and impulses and emotions.

So we may be aware of a strangeness just beyond thinking awareness – something felt as larger and wiser than ‘us’ – or something big and frightening - that we get in touch with in a variety of ways, but which means that a transcendent belief such as the ‘God’ concept is never going to disappear (although maybe we can encourage a less broad and misleading term)   since the experience that the word ‘god’ refers to is built into our subjective sense of the biological reality of our brain.

Our thinking self has difficulty with intuition. If we are substantially identified with our thinking ego – and this is automatic for most adults - we may try to dissect, model and control our subconscious mind – and we may be quite frightened of it.

For an accomplished, articulate and highly intelligent individual, being asked to let go of thought may seem frighteningly, maddeningly, impossible. And it is impossible to deliberately let go from a thinking perspective – if you keep thinking about letting go of thinking you are still just thinking: but it can be done through trust and ceasing to worry about it – this is letting go as a relaxation of the tension involved in thinking. Thinking is vitally important, but is tiring and rather like using a small torch to know the large darkened room that is reality.

When the thinking mind engages in modelling the numinous it may go wrong in various ways. The thinking mind may reify the numinous into a dogmatic ideology –‘one or more sacred things’ to try to protect – and project a conceptual framework onto the world – and Gods get invented as 'things' and invested with superhuman powers.  The use of deities, other realms and anthropomorphism, is an attempt to use metaphor to model the holy and our subjective experience, and provided it is clearly seen as metaphor, can be useful. However, metaphor may lead to a spiritual materialism and a belief in piety whereby the sacred and holy is linked with things and appearances – what we wear, special behaviours, rituals, beliefs, attitudes, special elite groups of people, and so on.

But we can educate both our intuition and our discriminative consciousness, and we can develop the awareness that knows both intuition and concepts.  Neither discriminative consciousness – thinking – nor intuition - are reliable, however, the suffering – dukkha – that the Buddha pointed to – is a product of the discriminative thinking mind, not the intuitive mind. However, this is not to raise up the intuitive mind as somehow automatically better and wiser, although a trained intuitive mind – trained through careful thinking, learning, behaviour modification and meditation practice – can embody wisdom.

In fact the gradual training of Buddhism is using our discriminative mind to apply a framework (for example the noble eightfold path) to our lives in order to re-condition our automatic learned responses – sometimes called impulses or instincts or habits – our intuitive mind – so that our rapid and spontaneous responses are in accord with what we understand as skilful, wise and virtuous behaviour.

Meditation practice is about gently quieting (or resting) our discriminative thinking mind and when we do this our shy, holistic, creative,  intuitive mind may come out to play. This is always there, hovering behind the scenes, on the edge of awareness. Thinking, especially intensive thinking, inhibits our intuitive mind. But becoming familiar with our intuitive mind and resting our thinking mind does not mean that we believe intuition is always good and thinking bad – it is simply that we are rebalancing and re-grounding our awareness in a spacious mindfulness that knows both thought and intuition and the muddy ground between these.

Consciousness

Buddhist teachings describe consciousness in various ways; but what these seem to be pointing to is discriminative consciousness – the ability we have to recognise and name – and the conceptual thinking that uses recognition of name and form. There are many scriptural texts in the Pali Canon that refer to consciousness. One is:

Where do name and form fade out?

Where do earth, water, fire and wind,

And long and short, and fine and coarse,

Pure and impure no footing find?

Where is it that both name and form fade out,

Leaving no trace behind?

And the answer is:

In the awakened consciousness

This makes it clear that our name and form recognition system that categorises our experiences can be known through another underlying and spacious consciousness – the awakened consciousness. Buddhist practice encourages us to become aware of, and to reside in, this awakened consciousness and to come to know our discriminative and intuitive consciousness as abilities that operate according to conditions. 

Chris Ward

 

Attaching to desire is fine?

At a recent meeting, an intention to help others was described as 'attachment to desire' and hence not something to be pursued.

This appears to be an example of taking Buddhist teachings intended as guidelines for examining our current experience and misinterpreting these as general beliefs. 

The second noble truth is often translated as:

‘craving or attachment to desire is the cause of suffering’.

This translation may have some truth to it, but it can also mislead. For example, it easily leads to the belief that ‘I should stop attaching to, or following, any desire since this makes me suffer’.  And this belief can be reinforced by misapplying additional teachings such as: ‘wanting things to be different from the way they are causes suffering’; and with meditation teachings which usually encourage us not to engage with the contents of our thought.

Belief in these teachings can lead to a belief in passivity and irresponsibility as being Buddhist virtues and to the assumption that being passive and irresponsible leads to freedom from suffering.

Misapplying teachings intended to help us gain insight into our present experience is delusional and far from seeing through suffering, if we adopt these beliefs, we are creating more suffering. We are turning specific and quite subtle training guidelines into our present moment awareness into fixed beliefs.

As beliefs, these teachings obviously do not work. The truth is that some desires are good to attach to; that wanting things to be different from the way they are has motivated humanity to create everything from schools and hospitals to monasteries and forests, and that not engaging with thought contents is a teaching guideline – not the only thought that one should believe in. Put another way, the idea ‘that one should not get attached to thought contents’ applies to this thought as well.

And what about desire? Does this mean any strong feeling of greed towards something? Like a powerful wish to own a sports car? Or a sudden impulse for sexual contact? Does it include the sudden realisation that one is very hungry and needs food? And what about a strong wish to help others – is this a desire which one should avoid like the plague as a good Buddhist? And how about feeling attracted and entranced by the scent of a rose – is this a dangerous desire?  Should we steer well clear of fragrant gardens if we are interested in enlightenment? This is assuming that it is impossible to experience pleasure without getting addicted to it and plays into our puritanical conditioning. 

Should we be deeply suspicious if someone wishes to train as a doctor or go to university, or to become a carpenter, plumber or artist, or get married, or have children – and condemn this as ‘just more desire’?

Even if we agree that all of these are ‘desires’ (a moot point) it would seem that some types might be fine to follow, whilst others are not. But perhaps it is the ‘craving’ or ‘attachment’ that is the problem rather than the desire? So if we feel a powerful lust for sexual contact with someone other than our partner in a committed relationship, perhaps the ability to tolerate this attraction without feeling compelled to act upon it, is what is being pointed to?  - In which case it is the sense of compulsion we might feel, (or even the addiction), to exciting sensory experiences that we have to examine and which might be the primary cause of the suffering that enlightenment alleviates.

Or maybe, the ‘craving and attachment to desire’ formula is in fact pointing to our infatuation and automatic immersion in our imaginary thought world that we assume to be true and reliable. And letting go of attachment to desire actually means learning to release our compulsive involuntary grip on a thought and language mediated view of reality.

In this approach, we are cultivating a mind that can hold all types of desires, ideas, views and impulses in a spacious way and without automatic entanglement with them, or feeling compelled to act upon them. (Although this does not mean that we should not act upon them).

So perhaps we can rephrase some of these teachings to encourage a more nuanced understanding. Here are some of my attempts:

‘Not accepting in an honest and clear way the current reality, the current context and our responsibilities, and getting entangled with self-related rumination about a situation, leads to suffering’.

‘Becoming addicted to strong sensory desires, including exciting ideas, views and opinions, limits our freedom of thought and action and can generate remorse and suffering for ourselves and others.’

‘Learning to clearly see and evaluate our desires, wants and needs in an objective, spacious and kind way, enables us to act upon those which are wholesome and life-enhancing in a particular context and according to our life situation’.

' Learning to let go of mind contents, thoughts, feelings, and emotions, is an extremely useful skill, but does not mean that some of these mind contents are not important and wise to act upon'

'When the heart is at rest, where is desire?'

'Where there is discriminatory thinking, there is dukkha'

I find that rephrasing teachings that seem obscure, terse, too general, or just plain wrong, can help to encourage a reflective mind that is able to tolerate diverse positions and can choose the right formulation for a particular situation. It also helps us to realise that our situation - the human situation - is highly complex from a conceptual position, and that turning reflective teachings focused on the present moment into fixed and simple beliefs is misguided.  

This is the practice of 'entertaining many possibilities' that avoids getting stuck in dogmatic attitudes (which are all too common in both spiritual and other enterprises).

And perhaps we can agree that acting generously towards others might arise from desire, but that this could be a wholesome desire?

Chris Ward

 

About this blog...

For about ten years, the Amaravati Lay Buddhist Association (ALBA) published a regular journal called 'Community'. Recognising the greater flexibility of blogs and the ease with which readers can comment, we ceased 'Community' and have set up this site. Please submit articles, essays, poems or material for consideration. And please do not hesitate to comment on published material. We invite all comments written from a right speech perspective.  

There is no one who loves or is loved....

Martin Evans felt inspired to write some reflections after the recent ALBA (Amaravati Lay Buddhist Association) Day of Practice when the following question was raised:

‘There is no one who loves or is loved’ (quote from Amaravati calendar 2011) 

‘What does this mean?’ someone asked me. 

‘Ask Ajahn Sumedho’, I said, ‘he wrote it’.

Not a very satisfactory answer from someone who is sitting at the front leading one of our ALBA day events at Amaravati.  So I went on to explain that he is talking about ultimate reality rather than using conventional truth.  That there is someone who loves and someone who is loved, but that, ultimately, they are not who or what we think they are.  But this is a theoretical answer.  It is correct from a Buddhist point of view – but it is a point of view rather than an experience.  I needed a practical example to explain what this means and the value of seeing things in this way. 

The sense of self, when wrongly understood, is grasped.  And we grasp who we want our ‘selves’ to be, which doesn’t accord with reality.  As a result we are dissatisfied and we suffer, the Buddhist word for this is Dukkha.  If I want to be a great teacher then the person I love, as my ‘self’, is a great teacher.  When I am not what my ideal of what a great teacher is, I suffer.  Why?  Because the self I love is a great teacher, and the person who doesn’t live up to that is not the person I love.  So when someone asks me a question, and the perfect answer doesn’t immediately trip off the tongue, I don’t like myself.  I don’t love the reality of who I am, but the personality I want myself to be.

When we think of other people we find we create Dukkha for ourselves in the same way.  You love your daughter, but who do you really love?  The daughter you want her to be or the person she really is.  If you love a confident, outgoing daughter, but in reality she is shy and reserved, then when she is shy and reserved, you won’t love her.  And when you try to change her into the person you love, she will feel unloved, and not good enough – become less confident and more reserved.   So we create dukkha for ourselves and others, because we set up an ideal about how people should be and our love is conditional on them meeting that ideal, rather than our love being unconditional, rather than loving the person as they really are.

Thus, unconditional love is dependent on letting go of our attachment to how we want people to be, how we want ourselves to be.  But we have to see through this for ourselves, it is not a view we should hold.  That leads to all sorts of problems.  It would be nonsense to tell my daughter that I don’t love her because I have let go of my attachment to a personality view - and not the least bit helpful.  But if I can recognise the attachment I have for her to be this way or that way to please me, and let it go, I can love her for however she is right now.  This is the basis of a truly loving relationship.  It doesn’t mean condoning what she does all the time, but people don’t change by being criticised, certainly not by their mother or father.  If they do change, it is likely they will be even more determined to go in the opposite direction.

So loving kindness (Metta) is unconditional love which transcends the boundaries of our attachment to a personality or self.  When we can love someone for being just as they are, this is unconditional love.  When we can love ourselves for being just as we are, that is unconditional love.  And seeing through the attachment we have to ourselves or others being this way or that way is an incredible breakthrough, an incredible change in our perception, which frees us from creating Dukkha.

When we can be at ease with how we are, and how others are, loving kindness is completely natural, not something we have to create.  We forgive ourselves for not being good enough.  When someone asks you a question, it is OK not to have the answer spontaneously arise in your mind.  Your sense of ease isn’t disturbed, because your sense of wellbeing is not dependent on you being ‘one who knows’.  And in the same way, when someone says something you would rather they hadn’t, or behaves in a way you don’t think is appropriate or beneficial, you are at ease with that too, because they don’t have to be this way or that way to please you. 

None of this contentment and being at ease with ourselves and other people means that we can’t act to effect change.  In fact, what happens is that we have the opportunity to change, both ourselves and others, because we are coming from a place of loving kindness rather than aversion and criticism.  And we don’t need to be attached to whether what we say or do makes a difference.  Our intention is good, and the outcome is unpredictable, unknowable.  Attaching to the outcomes of what we do is another source of Dukkha.  Which doesn’t mean that we should ignore them – we should learn from them, but not torture ourselves with regrets.

So now we have let go of our attachment to who we are, who somebody else is, and whether the results of our actions are what we want them to be.  All these things are a burden, and laying them down is an amazing relief, even letting go of our attachment a little, or for only a moment. 

It enables us to live with more wisdom.  We can consider what is beneficial and do it, without being bound up by constantly trying to make the world fit into the way we want it to be.  We can be at ease with the way things are rather than and creating Dukkha for ourselves and others.  It is a radical shift in the way we relate to the world and our experience of it. 

To say that no one is loved sounds terrible.  What sort of world is that?  Would you want live in a world where no one is loved?  But the outcome of seeing through our attachment to this illusion of a self transforms our lives into one where unconditional love is a totally natural and ongoing experience.  It is not even something which has to be created by effort; we don’t need to try to love or become someone who is loving.  Why?  It can only be because it is the natural expression of being completely human.  The human condition, when we let go of self attachment, is one of unconditional love.  When the world stops revolving around the self, unconditional love is inevitable. There is no one who loves, but there is love; which is boundless, complete, absolute, and unconditional. 

This is the ultimate, the highest, the enlightenment that the Buddha experienced, and his teaching points to, so that we might realise it for ourselves.  In the meantime ...... we have to do our best.  We can cultivate loving kindness as best we can so that we can bring more kindness into our lives.  And we can investigate how we create Dukkha through our attachment to the way we want things to be, and try to let go of that attachment.  And when we do, when we are able to lay down a little of the burden we are carrying around, the peace that follows is a glimpse of what is possible.

Martin Evans 31/10/11 

 

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