Ajahn Chah’s teachings also parallel Dzogchen in regard to the nature of the Buddha. When you come right down to it, awareness is not a thing. Nevertheless, it is an attribute of the fundamental nature of mind. Ajahn Chah would refer to that awareness, that knowing nature of mind, as Buddha: “This is the true Buddha, the one who knows (poo roo).” The customary way of talking about awareness for both Ajahn Chah and other masters of the forest tradition was to use the term “Buddha” in this way—the fully aware, awake quality of our own mind. This is the Buddha.
He would say things like, “The Buddha who passed into parinibbāna 2,500 years ago is not the Buddha who is a refuge.” He liked to shock people sometimes, when he felt he needed to bring their attention to the teachings. When he said something like this, they would think they had a heretic in front of them. “How can that Buddha be a refuge? He is gone. Gone, really gone. That’s no refuge. A refuge is a safe place. So how can this great being who lived 2,500 years ago provide safety? Thinking about him can make us feel good, but that feeling is also unstable. It’s an inspiring feeling, but it is easily disturbed.”
When there is resting in the knowing, then nothing can touch the heart. It’s this resting in the knowing that makes that Buddha a refuge. That knowing nature is invulnerable, inviolable. What happens to the body, emotions, and perceptions is secondary, because that knowing is beyond the phenomenal world. So that is the true refuge. Whether we experience pleasure or pain, success or failure, praise or criticism, that knowing nature of the mind is utterly serene. It is undisturbed and incorruptible. Just as a mirror is unembellished and untainted by the images it reflects, the knowing cannot be touched by any sense perception, any thought, any emotion, any mood, any feeling. It’s of a transcendent order. The Dzogchen teachings say this too: “There is not one hair’s tip of involvement of the mind-objects in awareness, in the nature of mind itself.” That is why awareness is a refuge; awareness is the very heart of our nature.
Has Anybody Seen My Eyes?
Another parallel between Dzogchen and Ajahn Chah’s teachings comes in the form of a warning: do not look for the unconditioned, or rigpa, with the conditioned mind. In the verses of the Third Zen Patriarch it says, “To seek Mind with the discriminating mind is the greatest of all mistakes.” Ajahn Chah expressed the futility and absurdity of this tendency by giving the example of riding a horse and looking for it at the same time. We are riding along, asking, “Has anyone seen my horse? Anyone see my horse?” Everyone looks at us like we are crazy. So we ride over to the next village and ask the same thing: “Anyone seen my horse?”
Ajahn Sumedho offers a similar example. Instead of looking for a horse, he uses the image of looking for our eyes. The very organ with which we see is doing the seeing, yet we go out searching: “Has anyone seen my eyes? I can’t see my eyes anywhere. They must be around here somewhere but I can’t find them.”
We can’t see our eyes, but we can see. This means that awareness cannot be an object. But there can be awareness. Ajahn Chah and other forest masters would use the expression “being the knowing.” It is like being rigpa. In that state, there is the mind knowing its own nature, Dharma knowing its own nature. That’s all. As soon as we try to make an object of that, then a dualistic structure has been created, a subject here looking at an object there. There is resolution only when we let go of that duality and relinquish that “looking for.” Then the heart just abides in the knowing. But the habit is to think, “I’m not looking hard enough. I haven’t found them yet. My eyes must be here somewhere. After all, I can see. I need to try harder to find them.” (...)
**
Realising Cessation
Another very important aspect of the view is its resonance with the experience of cessation, nirodha. The experience of rigpa is synonymous with the experience of dukkha-nirodha, the cessation of suffering.
Sounds good, doesn’t it? We practice to end suffering, yet we get so attached to working with things in the mind that when the dukkha stops and the heart becomes spacious and empty, we can find ourselves feeling lost. We don’t know how to leave that experience alone: “Oh!—whoom—everything is open, clear, spacious . . . so now what do I do?” Our conditioning says, “I am supposed to be doing something. This isn’t what it means to be progressing on the path.” We don’t know how to be awake and yet to leave that spaciousness alone.
When that space in the mind appears, it can bewilder us or we can easily overlook it. It is as if each of us were a thief who breaks into a house, looks around, and decides, “Well, there is not much to take here so I’ll just keep going, find some other place.” We miss the realisation that when we let go, dukkha ceases. Instead, we ignore that still, open, clear quality and go looking for the next thing, and then the next and the next. We don’t, as the expression goes, “taste the nectar,” the juice of rigpa. We just zoom straight through the juice bar. It looks like there is nothing here. Everything looks kind of boring: no lust or fear or other issues to deal with. So we busy ourselves with attitudes like: “I am being irresponsible; I should have an object to concentrate on; or I should at least be contemplating impermanence; I’m not dealing with my issues. Quick, let me go and find something challenging to work with.” Out of the best of intentions, we fail to taste the juice that’s right here.
When grasping ceases, the ultimate truth appears. It’s that simple. (...)
Fear of Freedom
The Buddha said that the letting go of the sense of “I” is the supreme happiness (e.g., in UD. 2.1, and 4.1). But over the years we have become very fond of this character, haven’t we? As Ajahn Chah once said, “It is like having a dear friend whom you’ve known your whole life. You’ve been inseparable. Then the Buddha comes along and says that you and your friend have got to split up.” It’s heartbreaking. The ego is bereft. There is the feeling of diminution and loss. Then comes the sinking feeling of desperation.
To the sense of self, being is always defined in terms of being some thing. But the practice and teachings clearly emphasise undefined being, an awareness: edgeless, colourless, infinite, omnipresent—you name it. When being is undefined in this way, it seems like death to the ego. And death is the worst thing. The ego-based habits kick in with a vengeance and search for something to fill up the space. Anything will do: “Quick, give me a problem, a meditation practice (that’s legal!). Or how about some kind of memory, a hope, a responsibility I haven’t fulfilled, something to anguish over or feel guilty about, anything!”
I have experienced this many times. In that spaciousness, it is as if there’s a hungry dog at the door desperately trying to get in: “C’mon, lemme in, lemme in.” The hungry dog wants to know: “When is that guy going to pay attention to me? He’s been sitting there for hours like some goddamn Buddha. Doesn’t he know I’m hungry out here? Doesn’t he know it’s cold and wet? Doesn’t he care about me?”
“All saṅkhāras as are impermanent. All dharmas are such and empty. There is no other. . . .” [makes forlorn hungry-dog noises]. These experiences have provided some of the most revealing moments in my own spiritual practice and exploration. They contain such a rabid hungering to be. Anything will do, anything, in order just to be something: a failure, a success, a messiah, a blight upon the world, a mass murderer. “Just let me be something, please, God, Buddha, anybody.”
To which Buddha wisdom responds, “No.”
It takes incredible internal resources and strength to be able to say “no” in this way. The pathetic pleading of the ego becomes phenomenally intense, visceral. The body may shake and our legs start twitching to run. “Get me out of this place!” Perhaps our feet even begin moving to get to the door because that urge is so strong.
At this point, we are shining the light of wisdom right at the root of separate existence. That root is a tough one. It takes a lot of work to get to that root and to cut through it. So we should expect a great deal of friction and difficulty in engaging in this kind of work.
Intense anxiety does arise. Don’t be intimidated by it. Leave the urge alone. It’s normal to experience grief and strong feelings of bereavement. There’s a little being that just died here. The heart feels a wave of loss. Stay with that and let it pass through. The feeling that “something is going to be lost if I don’t follow this urge” is the deceptive message of desire. Whether it’s a subtle little flicker of restlessness or a grand declaration—“I am going to die of heartbreak if I don’t follow this!”—know them all as desire’s deceptive allure.
There is a wonderful line in a poem by Rumi where he says, “When were you ever made any the less by dying?” Let that surge of the ego be born, and let it die. Then, lo and behold, not only is the heart not diminished, it is actually more radiant, vast, and joyful than ever before. There’s spaciousness, contentment, and an infinite ease that cannot be attained through grasping or identifying with any attribute of life whatsoever. No matter how genuine the problems, the responsibilities, the passions, the experiences seem to be, we don’t have to be that. There is no identity that we have to be. Nothing whatsoever should be grasped at.
Small Boat,
Great Mountain
Theravādan Reflections on the Natural Great Perfection
Amaro Bhikkhu
No comments:
Post a Comment