Sangha space

"Buddhist Modernism" wrapped up today - here's the classroom after the students had left. The room gave us nothing but trouble, being by turns too hot and too cold (sometimes both), noisy, and both dim and too bright to see much when using the overhead projector. The chairs were uncomfortable, and stuck to the vinyl floor when you tried to move them into a circle; their little desklets periodically flipped a student's things onto the ground. I commended the class for its success in forming a learning community (a sangha, one said!) despite the room. And I promised we'd find a way to get together in half a year in this very space, where we'd find ourselves nostalgic precisely about its discomforts.

Easy to say on a day of beautiful winter light... Notice all those prime colors peeking in the windows!

I wonder how we'll look back on our experience together. Several students dutifully pledged that the ideas they'd encountered in the class would be with them for the rest of their lives; I said they should wait and see. Beyond encountering the many faces of Buddhist modernism we've done a lot of thinking together about the mysteries of learning ... some of it personalized, liberating, unselfing. It all might mean more to them after they have a few more semesters of college, and of life, under their belts!

Befriending the silent observer

I got goosebumps in "Buddhist Modernism" today, not something I was expecting. As a final example of our topic before they give final research presentations, I'd given the students two chapters from Haemin Sunim's The Things You Can See Only When You Slow Down: How to Be Calm in a Busy World, a book currently climbing Amazon charts in various western language translations, but originally a compilation of tweets. Sunim's observations became the most retweeted tweets in South Korea, and the books that have brought them together have been major bestsellers there.

There are few zingers among the tweets we read, though - that's not what they're about - and our discussion was a little flat. It got a little better when I asked students to read aloud one which spoke to them, so we had a taste of retweeting. Now each appeared as something someone else had cared enough to send on. But the advice and observations still seemed pretty common-sensical: slow down, relax, be yourself, enjoy the little things. There were a few clearly Buddhisty ones, like the one I was surprised it was left to me to read aloud:

I wish you could see my true nature.

Beyond my body and labels,

there is a river of tenderness and vulnerability.

Beyond stereotypes and assumptions,

there is a valley of openness and authenticity.

Beyond memory and ego,

there is an ocean of awareness and compassion.

but in general it seems a pretty ordinary, slightly New Agey, self-help book. If you read to the end, though, you find that all rivers lead to the sea. The goosebumps came when I read the class the book's epilogue:

Your Original Face

When you are so busy that you feel perpetually chased, when worrying thoughts circle your head, when the future seems dark and uncertain, when you are hurt by what someone has said, slow down if only for a moment. Bring all of your awareness into the present and take a deep breath.

What do you hear? What does your body feel? What does the sky look like?

Only when we slow down can we finally see clearly our relationships, our thoughts our pain. As we slow down, we are no longer tangled in them. We can step out and appreciate them for what they are.

The faces of our family and colleagues who always help, the scenery that we pass by every day but fail to notice, our friends' stories that we fail to pay attention to - in the stillness of the pause, the entirety of our being is quietly revealed.

Wisdom is not something we have to strive to acquire. Rather, it arises naturally as we slow down and notice what is already there.

As we notice more and more in the present moment, we come to a deeper realization that a silent observer is within us. In the primordial stillness, the silent observer witnesses everything inside and outside.

Befriend the silent observer. Find out where it is, and what shape it has assumed. Do not try to imagine it as something you already know. Let all your thoughts and images merge back into silence and just sense the observer already there in silence.

If you see the face of the silent observer, then you have found your original face, from before you were born.

Birth of a new religion

I think we turned a corner in "Buddhist Modernism" today. I've been trying, not entirely successfully, to get the students excited about the questions raised in David McMahan's Ris of Buddhist Modernism: how are the Buddhisms we encounter in places like the US related to the traditions of Asian Buddhism of the past (and present)? McMahan argues that much of "Buddhist modernism" is specifically of this time and place, continuing concerns western folks had before ever they encountered Buddhist texts or teachers - though it's being "of this time and place" doesn't automatically delegitimate it: more than most traditions, Buddhism has a history of hybridizing itself with different cultures. The question "Is it Buddhist?" isn't quite the right one, but it's an important one too. Much of what Buddhism has been in other times and places is absent from Buddhist modernism.

The class discussion has been about a version of that question a student put two weeks ago: 'is it OK to ignore the guidelines?" - to adapt Buddhist practices and ideas to your own purposes? The discussions have oscillated between reflections on respect and appropriation of a foreign tradition on the one hand, and questions about personal commitment to Buddhism on the other. The rather safe consensus seemed to be that if you respect that others (=Asians) have traditions and don't claim to speak for them, and your own engagement is serious and not just trendy, everything is OK.

In vain did I proffer a third question; whether our self-medication with Buddhist medicines is likely to be effective, given that we are unenlightened. (I posted that line from McMahan about how most Asian Buddhists would see the self to which the self-medicator defers as deluded on this blog in partt because the class didn't want to go there.) But today we'd read McMahan's fascinating account of how trends in modern western literature take you to a place very close to mindfulness - to the point where writers in the 1950s described stream of consciousness writers James Joyce and Virginia Woolf as Buddhist!

(McMahan starts his chapter with this epigraph from Mrs. Dalloway:) 

So we had a new question: can one be Buddhist and not know it? The class was excited at the idea. It turned out to be the way into the discussion I've been trying to have - pedigree and intention may be secondary questions compared to the question if something is actually working. I didn't spell out the further implication - that one could think oneself Buddhist and be mistaken - but it's within reach.

Conditioned arising

In "Buddhist Modernism" today, I asked the students to diagram the argument of the central chapter of David L. McMahan's The Making of Buddhist Modernism, "A Brief History of Interdependence." A sort of microcosm of the book, the chapter argues that contemporary Buddhist conceptions of interdependence have as much to do with western romantic ideas and scientific ideas of ecology and systems as with the ancient idea of pratitya samutpada, though they do tap into later Mahayana and especially Chinese ideas about emptiness and nature. I didn't quite get what I was looking for (something like the below) but some enjoyable depictions of a nuanced argument which traces resonances and affinities in the entangled history of modern Buddhism...

Somatic

We had a visitor in "Buddhist Modernism" today, a writer and poet who's visiting Lang this semester. She saw me copying Ambedkar's The Buddha and his Dhamma in the faculty resource room a few weeks ago and we got to talking. Turns out she's been a practitioner for decades, in a Tibetan tantric lineage. And she's a meditation teacher. Come visit my class? I asked, a little concerned she'd find our syllabus too academic, but she obliged. My course is academic, but I was inviting her as a practitioner.

And as a practitioner she came, gently suggesting that Buddhism is about practice - all the texts are pointing to practices - and about embodiment, not the mind. You can't think your way to enlightenment, and "mindfulness" is a McDonald's rip-off of Buddhism. Dukkha is mental anxiety, but it's found in the body - as the Buddha did, on his cushion under the bodhi tree - as is its cause.

She had the last 40 minutes of class and we'd informally planned for a briefish meditation and discussion of the Buddhist challenges of dealing with the particular suffering of inequality and oppression, but we never got there. Or maybe we did. She led us in a "somatic meditation," gauging the mood in the class, for what wound up being 25 minutes - she was more surprised than we were at how long it took! Sitting in our uncomfortable chairs, in our school clothes with shoes on, wasn't ideal but it mattered not. Feel the earth, she said, through the weight of your feet. And amazingly, with some more direction we did. Then we were directed to breathe in energy from the earth through our feet, breathe out relation of tension, and gradually moved our breath's object through ankle and calves. The it was the turn of our sic bones, whatever was in contact with our chair, and from there outward to hips and upward through the collarbone. Then our hands, which had been resting on our thighs - weight also - and from there up to our upper arms, which we were invited to feel were hollow tubes, filled with the breath of the earth. And then our heads - imagining you have no brain, filling your skull cavity with breath turns out to be remarkable satisfying. We moved to the backs of the eyes, and eventually down the neck, and then into the area inside the spine, where we sent breaths up and down, finally letting our torso breathe itself, all while noticing places of tension which miraculously let the tension drain away as she reminded us that meditation doesn't change anything, it just notices, with curiosity.

It was a very interesting experience for a lot of reasons. We were still together for a long time, and/but, as the students who spoke in the few remaining minutes recounted, had some quite powerful experiences. One spoke of a feeling of transcendence, one said she felt she'd fallen asleep and realized she hadn't, one said he'd been unable to concentrate until he leaned his back against the wall and then suddenly was in it, another said her head felt light - couldn't say more even when pressed. Our visitor responded to each skilfully - she'd been watching us and had noticed, for instance, the student who'd changed his posture, but also seemed able to discern just the right thing to say to that particular student. Good Buddhist teachers seem to have this gift.

I could have said that, though time ran out, that as the exercise ended I'd found a little ball of tension in the very spot, beneath my right shoulder blade, which a physical therapist a few months ago identified (to my great surprise) as the reason why I was suffering from neck aches. On being noticed, it obligingly subsided.

I haven't mentioned, nor did she mention it in class yesterday (though it's a subject she writes and talks about extensively), that our visitor is a transwoman, and that a Buddhist practice focused on embodiment like this one accompanied her through her transition. Who better to guide one to the body's truth?

Magga (not MAGA)

In "Buddhist Modernism" we're making our way through Walpola Rahula's What the Buddha Taught. As I discovered the last time I used this text, it's great - not just for what it constructs, but for the way it also deconstructs it. And so the book has a conventional enough structure

I The Buddhist Attitude of Mind 
II The First Noble Truth: Dukkha 
III The Second Noble Truth: Samudaya: 'The Arising of Dukkha' 
IV The Third Noble Truth: Nirodha: 'The Cessation of Dukkha' 
V The Fourth Noble Truth: Magga: 'The Path' 
VI The Doctrine of No-Soul: Anatta 
VII Meditation or 'Mental Culture': Bhavana 
VIII What the Buddha Taught and the World Today

The "four noble truths" are where most outsiders starts (even the Buddha is said to have made them the subject of his first sermon), but Rahula knows the tradition better. And so, tucked into his Preface, there's this;

I would ask [the Western reader] ... to take up on his first reading the opening chapter, and then go on to chapters V, VII and VIII, returning to Chapters II, III, IV and VI when the general sense is clearer and more vivid. (xii)

I'd drawn the class' attention to this directive, but nobody had followed up on it. What difference could it really make what order one took things in? Well, all the difference... but none until you try.
So today we tried to make sense of the four noble truths, in sequence. I offered colloquial translations of dukkha, which Rahula insists should stay untranslated (I can't get no satisfaction, everything comes to an end, bummer), and asked annoying questions like "why do we need more than the first noble truth?" "what does the third one add that's not already in the second?" and "Aren't the third and fourth really the same?"

They're not, of course, and that was our segue to Rahula's other sequence, which leapfrogs over the first three noble truths, skips on to meditation and lands in Buddhism's role in modern society, with no urgency to return to the rest of the noble truths, let alone the fearsome doctrine of anatta. Do we perhaps not need to define dukkha then? Or perhaps the point is that we won't be able to grasp its significance until we're on the Noble Eightfold Path - until, that is, we have experienced our own capacity to structure and change our behavior and attitudes, however incrementally?

Blank slate

I'd love to think that everyone in "Buddhist Modernism" got everything on this map - I'd given the class a blank map and asked them to locate a dozen Buddhist countries represented in Figures of Buddhist Modernity in Asia as well as three famous historic sites, Bodhgaya, Bamiyan and Borobodur. Confronted again with the way American education makes geographical ignoramuses of us - although one student knew everything, another pair of students were pretty sure only of where China was, and most others didn't do much better - I'd be happy if some of them got something. At least a sense that Buddhism has tangled with many cultures over a long time? And, once we placed our historic sites (in India, Afghanistan and Indonesia) that it hadn't just spread outward like a melting blob of butter but was no longer a significant presence in places where it had once been important, including the land of its birth.

But I'm afraid for some of the students the particulars of this story won't have stuck, because there was nothing for it to stick to - not just a map of Asia means nothing but maps tout court. Kant was right about this at least: without a knowledge of geography how could you have an understanding of the world and history and your place in it?

Empty promises

Time for another tangerine dream, this one part of the opener of "Buddhist modernism." As in earlier iterations, tangerines were distributed for mindful consumption, with prompts from Thich Nhat Hanh. A sweet moment of shared silence and concentration led to a gentle discussion of awareness, interdependence, self-care, diet and even commensality. How nice to discover that simply attending to things we already do can show us our connectedness, our reality. How delicious to find the whole interconnected world in the tangerine in the palm of our hand...

But of course I couldn't leave it at that. We turned next to Bertolt Brecht's poem "The Buddha's parable of the burning house" (you can find it, in German and English, here), an expression of dejection at the impotence of political art to get people to join the revolution. It's presented as an analogy with the Buddha who wasn't able to get people to flee a burning house,

... Lately I saw a house. It was burning. The flame
Licked at its roof. I went up close and observed
That there were people still inside. I opened the door and called
Out to them that the roof was ablaze, so exhorting them
To leave at once. But those people
Seemed in no hurry. One of them
When the heat was already scorching his eyebrows
Asked me what it was like outside, whether it wasn’t raining
Whether the wind wasn’t blowing perhaps, whether there was
Another house for them, and more of this kind. Without answering
I went out again. These people here, I thought
Need to burn to death before they stop asking questions.
Truly, friends 
Unless a man feels the ground so hot underfoot that he’d gladly 
Exchange it for any other, sooner than stay, to him 
I have nothing to say. Thus Gautama the Buddha. 

But we too, no longer concerned with the art of submission 
Rather with that of not submitting, and putting forward 
Various proposals of an earthly nature, and beseeching men to shake off 
Their human tormentors, we too believe that to those 
Who in face of the approaching bomber squadrons of Capital 
Go on asking too long 
How we propose to do this, and how we envisage that 
And what will become of their savings and Sunday trousers 
After the revolution 
We have nothing much to say.

Only one student was familiar with Brecht, so we had a quick summary of his critique of most art as simply helping people dull their sense of the pain and unfairness of the world with periodic, safely quarantined catharses. I didn't have to spell out that safely quarantined catharsis pretty neatly describes the promise of many a lay Buddhist retreat. What I said was: what if that tangerine in your hand is a lit hand grenade?

But rather than drive the point home, I told them about the Buddha's actual parable of the burning house in the Lotus Sutra, presumably Brecht's source (though how he found it is hard to trace). As you may recall, the Buddha doesn't throw up his hands at the children's refusal to heed his warnings. (Brecht has elided this with the "questions inconducive to edification" from the Milindipañha.) Rather, he lures them from the house with elaborate promises of amazing chariots for their pleasure. As they emerge, the house explodes behind them. Belatedly - but just in time - they realize what danger they had been in, and even as they find only one chariot (the "great vehicle" of the Mahayana) they appreciate the sagacity of the Buddha in tempting them out with the promise of an array of different vehicles, the only thing that will have got them out.

Will the real Buddhism please stand up?

Buddhism for the times

My other Fall semester class, a first year seminar, covers some familiar territory and some new. It's called "Buddhist Modernism" and promises to explore the ways in which our time may be one of significant innovation among Buddhists - and not just "western Buddhists." One of our key texts will be the wonderful anthology Figures of Buddhist Modernity in Asia, which explodes the idea - not too far beneath the surface of many a western Buddhist innovator - that Asian Buddhism is hidebound and out of date. The "figures" profiled have revived, repositioned and reimagined local and transnational Buddhisms in fascinating ways within the contexts of Asian societies working out their own modernities.

The figure rather cheesily depicted above (pic from here) isn't in the book but he might be in my class: an old friend, who even once taught a course at Lang, now director of a path-breaking center marrying Buddhism and group therapy in Seoul, and the author of best-selling books in Korea and, increasingly, internationally. I hope he can Skype in!