Being ready to point out things that students are deeply attached to.

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 Sometimes you’ll see meditation courses or mindfulness programs that do make outrageous promises. ‘Just pay $5,000 for this weekend and your life will be changed forever. You will be happy, liberated, enlightened’ and so on. These are very sweeping statements. I’m not quoting adverts verbatim, but I think we’ve all come across those pieces of literature and their promises.

I do feel that the commercialising of Dharma is an uncomfortable drift. When things have a big price tag on them, they have to be dressed up in a way that makes them interesting, sexy, and attractive. That means that sometimes the challenging aspects of the teaching may be trimmed out. For example, those teachings that point to your opinions, your middle-class value systems, your attachment to your appearance or to your wealth. And teachings like ‘renunciation’ or ‘unattractiveness of the body’ are deleted because they don’t help to fill the seats at your events.

It is an ongoing dialogue, but I feel the degree to which the challenging or less attractive teachings get edited out, or left in the fringes, is a weakness. That can weaken the teaching. In 1979, when our teacher from Thailand, Ajahn Chah, visited the USA, he was invited to teach at a ten-day retreat at the Insight Meditation Society in Massachusetts. He was asked to give advice to the teachers: Jack Kornfield, Sharon Salzberg, Jackie Schwartz (now Jacqueline Mandel) and Joseph Goldstein. They asked Ajahn Chah to give them advice as teachers. He said: ‘You will succeed only if you are prepared to challenge the attachments and obsessions of your students.’ The Thai phrase was literally, ‘If you’re ready to stab their hearts.’ Ajahn Chah had a good way of getting people’s attention. Because that is the kindness of the teacher, in being ready to point out things that students are deeply attached to. Particularly to point out the things that students really don’t want to let go of. That is the job of the teacher. That is the kindness of the teacher.

Probably there are a few doctors and surgeons here. How could a surgeon operate if you didn’t use a knife occasionally? These days there’s a lot of microsurgeries but you need the knife sometimes, to get to where the trouble is. That was pointed advice from Ajahn Chah. The kindness of the teacher sometimes needs to manifest as giving advice that’s painful or challenging. It manifests as giving advice that goes against the preferred version of the student’s reality.

Another story that comes to mind is from a friend of ours, a Tibetan lama, Tsoknyi Rinpoche. He would refer to editing the approach to Dharma practice according to your own preferences, as ‘California Dharma’. ‘Yes, I see, all things are empty, nothing is worth attaching to, but I simply like my comforts. I like to have a few beautiful things around but I’m not attached. I just like to have a beautiful home in Marin County, with a nice view, with a picture window looking out over the Bay. But I’m not attached!’

He was staying in a particularly beautiful house in Marin, and his host was from a very wealthy family, and he was talking in these terms. Rinpoche picked up a coffee pot that was sitting on the table, and he started tilting it towards the hand-made Turkish carpet. He asked, ‘How much did this carpet cost you?’ The host replied, ‘About $35,000.’ Rinpoche said, ‘So, tell me about your non-attachment...’ as he tilted the coffee pot a little bit more and a little bit more. ‘You say you really like this place and you enjoy having beautiful things around, but you’re not attached? So how not attached are you?’ And then he tilted the coffee pot a few more degrees. ‘Alright, alright, alright! I’m attached! I’m attached! Just don’t spoil the carpet.’ That was a very practical teaching. It is also the kind of teaching you get from the Thai Forest Ajahns. Teachings that are very to the point.

One other weakness that is happening in the West – in this trimming and editing of the Dhamma teachings to fit people’s preferences and opinions so that it is not challenging – is particularly with respect to mindfulness teachings and the absence of reference to ethics, the deliberate omission of teachings on ethics. For example, the Five Precepts that the Buddha established as guidance for the lay community. Those Precepts are very deliberately left out of the mindfulness trainings: such as Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR), and Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy (MBCT). I’ve had long discussions and correspondence with Jon Kabat-Zinn, (founder of MBSR) on this and he speaks very strongly for the need to leave ethics as implicit rather than explicit, within those trainings. The same approach has been taken with respect to MBCT.

I’d like to read a piece in relationship to that. There’s a rich ongoing discussion within the field of whether ethics should be articulated or not. My own (probably biased) opinion is that it’s a weakness. It would be much more helpful to be more explicit, to spell things out in terms of what really benefits us as human beings. I would say that ethical guidelines, the Precepts, can be articulated and held, without them being seen as religious dictates or uptight Victorian formalisms. But rather the Precepts can be held as skilful guidelines for living wisely, carefully and compassionately.
As it seems very relevant to the theme, I’d read this extract from a commentary I wrote on an article in the academic journal Mindfulness. It addresses some of the aspects in the relationship between MBSR and the ethical field. The original article was written by Elaine Montero, who is from the University of Toronto, and her partners.

Jon Kabat-Zinn in 2004 defined mindfulness as: ‘Mindfulness means paying attention in a particular way, on purpose, in the present moment, and non-judgmentally.’

My comment is: ‘His definition is somewhat broad and though useful, is open to misinterpretation or misuse.’ On this issue, Montero et al. commented:

‘On the implicit rather than the explicit role of ethics in the teaching and practice of mindfulness. This omission of silā may result in concepts such as ‘non-judgmental awareness’ fostering a range of negative stances from self-indulgence to passivity. And this is where, in the absence of proper teacher-training, a poor grasp of concepts such as bare awareness, non-judgmental awareness, nonduality and so on, are likely to misguide participants into bypassing their experience rather than connecting with it.’

Then in a different section it says:

‘The response to this central issue concerning mindfulness-based interventions from the founder of mindfulness-based stress reduction is significant. Elaine Montero stated: ‘Reflecting on the choice to keep the teachings of ethics implicit, Jon Kabat-Zinn states that, “Each person carries the responsibility both personally and professionally to attend to the quality of their inner and outer relationships.” At the same time, he indicates that this must be supported “by explicit intentions regarding how we conduct ourselves both inwardly and outwardly.”’

Further, Kabat-Zinn, in 2007, responds to earlier concerns about the exclusion of ethics by indicating that personal and professional ethical guidelines are intrinsic to the delivery of MBI (Mindfulness-Based Intervention Programs.) He also argues that because there is a societal tendency to be incongruent with respect to inner and outer moral stances, an implicit teaching of silā is preferable.

My comments:

‘Jon Kabat-Zinn’s words here seem particularly carefully chosen, as though balanced on a tightrope between his acknowledged respect for the source of MBSR: “I’ve always used mindfulness as a placeholder for the Dharma” [Jon Kabat-Zinn, 2013] and his intention to make MBSR as accessible to as broad a field of people as possible. ‘However, the guidelines he gives are, from the Buddhist perspective, significantly vague, in my opinion. The statements that “each person carries the responsibility both personally and professionally to attend to the quality of their inner and outer relationships” and that one should have “explicit intentions regarding how we conduct ourselves both inwardly and outwardly” could comfortably be assigned to the fictional characters of Tony Soprano (the Mafia boss) or Walter White (methamphetamine cook).’ (That’s my comment.)

‘Of even more concern is the statement that: “because there is a societal tendency to be incongruent with respect to inner and outer moral stances, an implicit teaching of silā (ethics) is preferable.” This seems to state that, because there’s a disparity between the ideals people hold and what they actually do, it’s best not to talk about the subject at all. ‘If this is a correct interpretation of the comment – and again from a traditional Buddhist standpoint – this is a very dubious principle on which to structure a pedagogical approach and a system of would-be beneficial psychological practices.’

I was having a bit of a rant there, and I was wondering what Jon Kabat-Zinn would say about that. But he read it and to his credit, he was quite okay with it. But I felt that sense of things being implicit was so vague. And yes, Walter White (from ‘Breaking Bad’) he was cooking methamphetamine and making millions of dollars for his family. Yes, he was doing it on purpose, it was deliberate. He had an intention in mind. He was surveying his internal concerns. Yes, thousands of people are going to have their lives messed up by this, but it’s worth it because this is what my family needs to survive, because I’m dying of cancer. That is his ethic. That is the story of the whole series. And so, yes: it was deliberate. It was thoughtful. He is paying attention to the standard. And he is a meth cook.

So also in the scenario with Tony Soprano, the mafia boss in 'The Sopranos': what he does is deliberate, it is intentional, and it is for the family. And a few people get rubbed out along the way... Those things are not insignificant. Again, this is my biased viewpoint.

There is a way that our actions and our speech can be guided by concerns that there are results. There are beneficial results and harmful results. The Five Precepts create a very helpful standard of conduct to stop creating trouble for ourselves and for others. The Five Precepts are: to refrain from killing, to refrain from stealing, to refrain from sexual misconduct, to refrain from lying and to refrain from using intoxicants. They are a helpful standard for people so that they can live skilfully and kindly.

It doesn’t have to be a decree from above: ‘Thou shalt not…’, a diktat from outside, held as a Victorian moralism. But rather it is like the way the law requires you to have effective brakes on your car. If you’re going to be on the road, if you get pulled over, and the police want to check your brakes and they don’t work, then you’re off the road. So, similarly, I feel it’s helpful to think of these ethical guidelines in terms of driving safely amongst the other members of the traffic on the road.

Another challenge is the ongoing meshing of ancient traditions and patriarchal Asian societal forms, with an egalitarian Western society. That is an interesting mix. We must bear in mind that the Buddha was teaching 2,500 years ago. It was a very long time ago. The forms that you have in traditional Buddhist societies – such as Thailand, Sri Lanka, Myanmar, China, Japan, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Nepal, Tibet and into Mongolia, Siberia and so forth – are forms which have been the body of Buddhist practice developed over many centuries. There are a lot of challenges in taking those forms and planting them into Western society. Challenges in terms of what to keep, what to delete, how to adapt things, how to change things. It is an ongoing dialogue. In some respects, it is a weakness and a challenge; because some things don’t fit very well in terms of the customs, the traditions, the superstitions, and the forms. They are an uncomfortable fit in Western society.

Other things do fit well, but they are unfamiliar and strange to our perceptions. For myself, in my own community, that’s been a very rich ongoing dialogue. When Ajahn Chah first came to teach in Great Britain, he received an invitation from a group in London to visit their little monastery in Hampstead, in Haverstock Hill in London. He accepted the invitation and told Ajahn Sumedho and a few other monks that they should stay there. He said, ‘You can change the robes if you want to, and you can change the chanting. This is a cold country. You can adapt those if you want to, but you must go out on alms-round every single day.’ They thought that was a bit strange, they thought he would insist on the robes and the ritual forms. But why go on alms-round? 'Who is going to put food in our bowls in London?' But Ajahn Chah was insistent about the alms round. He said, ‘You must go out. Your job is to be the fourth heavenly messenger [the sign of renunciation]. You must go out every day.’ That became a very strong ethic for us that we have adapted a little over time.

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Ajhan Amaro