Yesterday, Vishvapani was remembering our sixteenth birthday. I think that was the occasion of Bhante giving the paper on ‘the ten pillars of Buddhism’, with most of the Order sitting in, I think, York Hall in Bethnal Green, listening to the first reading of the text. It was a seminal moment.
A fortieth birthday is more problematic, isn’t it. If the sixteenth birthday is the Indian coming of age, the association I have with fortieth birthdays is mid-life crisis. Assuming that we’re not all going to go out and buy a red sports car at the end of this weekend, what happens at age forty? Traditionally, there’s a taking stock. It’s a time when youthful idealism, even may I say naiveté, meets the complexities of real experience, and we have to figure out what is of real, central value to us.
I wanted to give this talk on our system of training for two reasons, which follow on from that idea of taking stock. Subhuti recently wrote about the cetokhila sutta, One of the points the Buddha makes in that sutta is that to make spiritual progress, you need to have confidence in the spiritual training you’re engaging in. It’s a practical necessity. So first of all, I wanted to engage with this idea of confidence in a system of training. We’ve been through a turbulent time in the last couple of years, and for some of us confidence in our training has been an issue. I want to try to spell out the grounds for confidence.
Secondly, over the last few years we had more inflows from other sources and traditions than ever before. On the whole I’ve found that a stimulating thing, but I think it has also raised questions that need clarification. So I want to come on to the whole issue of ‘lineage’ that was raised yesterday. I think we’re already at a point, as a community where, now that we’re forty, we have the responsibility to hand on to the next generation, what our teacher has handed to us. To do this we need to be clear as a practice community: what is it that we’ve been given, what is it that we’re passing on?
So I want to try to address both of those issues; confidence in our own training as a condition for successful practice; and clarity about what our system of practice is, so we can practice it effectively, and hand it on faithfully.
I was asked to speak about ‘What do we mean by our system of training?’. The first thing I want to say is personal; talking about a ‘system’ at all makes me uneasy. I like my freedom. I was visiting Vassika recently. Vassika makes mosaics, and she was telling me about how they had made mosaics in Ravenna. Ravenna is a town in the North of Italy, with some extraordinary Byzantine mosaics dating from the sixth century. The thing about modern mosaic, if I understood Vassika, is that the tiles are regularly cut, and laid flat in the grouting; the mosaics from Ravenna are cut irregularly, in fact they’re sometimes broken, and are laid into the cement at more irregular angles. And the effect of that is that the way light catches the surface is completely unpredictable, the surface is scintillating, much more interesting than the more uniform, more modern method. In the piece that Vassika showed me, those irregular tiles make up this beautiful, luminous halo of a saint. That image struck me. The whole thing held together, but it was unpredictable, alive. At least when it comes to mosaic, I like a little irregularity, something that’s not too tight.
So I want to reassure myself that when I talk about a system, I want to allow for a bit of irregularity in the pattern. I’m uneasy with a system that ‘s too tight. Luckily, it seems, so is Bhante. As part of the preparation for this talk, I was listening to a series of question and answer sessions that Bhante did recently at madhyamaloka, on a seminar organised by Subhuti on ‘Sangharakshita as teacher’. Some of the things Bhante said on those sessions about our system of meditation really struck me. I’m assuming that most people are familiar with the main categories of what Bhante has called ‘a system of meditation’: the stages of integration; positive emotion; spiritual death, or vision; and spiritual rebirth, or transformation. In the seminar Bhante had this to say about these stages:
The system is not meant to be a rigid system, with carefully defined boundaries. Each stage is meant to cover a vast range of experience and practices… For example in the second stage, the stage of positive emotion, there can be joy, ecstasy, bliss, compassion: everything that’s of an emotionally positive nature, from ordinary positivity to sublime spiritual experience. One shouldn’t think of these stages in too narrow a sense...
So that was the first point I wanted to make: when Bhante talks about the stages of a system, he’s talking about something that covers ‘a vast range of experience and practices’.
So in that case, if it so open,what is the value of a system at all? In the first lecture that Bhante gave on ‘A System of Meditation’ he spelled out his reasons:
‘I want to take up the different methods of meditation current in the order, and see in what way they link into what I have called (and at this point he puts in the qualifier) a trifle ambitiously, a system.So the first thing Bhante wanted to do was to show the relationship between different practices. He then went on to explain why:
‘it needs to be clear how the practices are related. What we need is an arrangement of practice that takes us forward, step by step, and stage by stage… to make clear the progressive, cumulative nature of spiritual practice.So these are central points that I want to underline in this talk. The ‘system’ covers a wide range of experience and practice: the range of practices hang together and support each other; and they become a progressive, cumulative series, that takes us from the first steps into awareness, to a transformative spiritual experience.
going for refuge
Though the talk is about the system of training, I’ve been talking so far mainly about the system of meditation, because it’s the most structured, most systematic, part of our teaching. It’s important to remember, however, that our system of training is not just limited to meditation. In this talk, I want to focus on meditation, but first of all, I want to broaden out a bit to put meditation in a wider context. I want to take this idea that Bhante has made so much of, the centrality of going for refuge. Going for refuge, and it’s place in Bhante’s thinking and teaching is something that I come back to again and again, and ask myself ‘have I really understood this? Do I understand why Bhante gives this quite the emphasis that he does?’. I’m not at all sure that I’ve grasped all the implications of the ‘centrality of going for refuge, in fact I’m sure I have not.
When I became a preceptor, I went back and read a lot of what Bhante had written about going for refuge. I was very struck by a particular passage in his book, The History of my Going for Refuge. Talking about the first ordinations into the WBO in 1968, he says:
Though I had realized that Going for Refuge was the central act of the Buddhist life, and that it meant organizing one's existence round the Three Jewels, that realization had so far found expression only in my personal life....
But now the situation was entirely changed. The twelve people who made up the Western Buddhist Order had ‘taken' the Three Refuges and Ten Precepts from me… and their understanding of the meaning of Going for Refuge coincided with mine, at least partly. Like one lamp lighting a dozen others, I had been able to share with them my realization of the absolute centrality of the act of Going for Refuge and henceforth that realization would find expression not in my life only but also in theirs.So, in the book, Bhante describes ordination in terms of twelve other people sharing his understanding of going for refuge. In the book, he had given a step by step account of how his own thinking about going for refuge had developed over the last twenty or thirty years. Now there’s almost this ‘Kondanya knows’ moment. Twelve other people have understood, at east to some extent, what he understood as central in spiritual practice. Then he goes on:
Not that the realization in question was something fixed and final. It could continue to grow and develop, and find expression in a hundred ways as yet unthought of …That idea, of a shared realization; something that was not fixed but that was developing in twelve other lives; a realisation that was deepening and being supported by their spiritual friendship with each other: I’ve found that a moving description of what happened at the first ordinations, and of what our spiritual community is in it’s essence. It’s our own realization deepening, and coming into relationship with other people whose experience is also deepening. And out of that communication, something of significance happens, an understanding and an expression of that understanding, that couldn’t have been anticipated or foreseen. The point I want to make is that for Bhante, this shared understanding of going for refuge, and its living, developing character, is definitive of the nature of the order.
I said earlier that I’ve been asking myself why going for refuge is so central in Bhante’s teaching. It’s a question that other people ask me, too. I got a letter recently from someone who has asked for ordination. In effect he was saying that for him his meditation practice was the centrally important, and a way of supporting insight: he wanted to know how this related to going for refuge, why was going for refuge centrally important? This might not have been quite what he intended, but for me he was raising the whole question of how best to think about the spiritual life and what we were trying to do. Wasn’t it sufficient for him to be getting on with an effective meditation practice? Wasn’t it sufficient to think in terms of meditation leading to insight? Why do we put quite the emphasis that we do on going for refuge, and on ordination, in our spiritual training?
Now I certainly want to support anyone with a serious meditation practice and a serious commitment to Insight. I was doing some study recently on the Bodhisattvabhumi, a text by Asanga, which threw some more light for me on the connection between meditation and going for refuge, in fact between any spiritual practice and going for refuge. In the Bodhisattvabhumi, in a section on the Essence of Ethics, Asanga describes the factors essential to successful spiritual practice. Asanga is talking about the Bodhisattva’s practice, but what he says, I think, is true of any effective practice. Two of the things you need, two things that are central to any practice, are first of all what Asanga calls ‘purified intention’; and the second is ‘to make correction after failure’.
What Asanga means by ‘purified intention’, as I understand it, is like more and more of the ‘stream’ of our being moving towards awareness and compassion, towards the arising of the bodhicitta. But Asanga recognises that that is not where we are starting. So, his second point is about ‘making correction after failure’. What he’s saying is that a lot of the time we won’t be acting out of purified intention. He takes it for granted that most of us, some of the time, will ‘fail’. When that happens, the important thing is that we make correction: we recognise that we’ve moved away from that pure intention, and intentionally come back. To begin with, the volition towards awareness and kindness is just one strand among many in our minds. As our practice deepens, it becomes the central, defining current of our lives. That’s what going for refuge is. Meditation practice, ethical practice, ritual, all spiritual practice, supports this fundamental shift.
According to Asanga, that ‘purification of purpose’, and that sustained intention to make correction after failure is of the essence of practice. I really liked the pragmatism of recognising that losing touch with our going for refuge is part of practice. At least at times, it’s a given; it’s not that we’ve done something dreadfully wrong. What we have to do is what Subhuti described as ‘committing to re-commit’. Every time you lose connection with that intention to move towards awakening, you notice and make correction. For me it clarifies at least one way in which going for refuge underlies and unifies every other practice.
A third condition for effective practice, according to Asanga is ‘to correctly receive it from someone else’. What does this mean? I wouldn’t usually think about our teaching in terms of lineage, but ‘lineage’ came up in yesterdays discussion, and Vajrasara reminded me that Bhante has recently spoken about the movement in this way. In fact he spoke about their being four lineages: a lineage of practice; a lineage of teaching, and a lineage of inspiration. As something of an afterthought, maybe by way of consolation for those of us who spend most of our time working for the movement, he said there’s an organisational lineage, ‘the structures that need to be carried on’.
I want to say something about these lineages, but I mainly want to concentrate on the lineage of practice, and mainly on meditation practice. So to avoid a misunderstanding, I want to say again that our lineage, our system of training, is more than meditation. For most of us meditation is something we do for an hour, or a couple of hours a day. The other shaping influences in our lives, how we spend the other twenty two or twenty three hours, are not necessarily towards awareness. So if the effect of our practice is going to be transformative, we have to be thinking of each moment of experience within a framework of practice.
Earlier, I listed the four main stages of the system of meditation: what Bhante has called the stages of integration, emotional positivity, spiritual death, and spiritual rebirth. Speaking more generally about our system of training, Bhante has expanded this. In a seminar he gave a little before the ‘system of meditation’ talk. He described what he calls ‘five great stages of the spiritual life’. This is closely related to the system of meditation, but in this he makes more explicit the connection with the five spiritual faculties. What he calls the five great stages are mindfulness, positive emotion; vision; transformation and spontaneous activity for the benefit of others. The link between these stages and the system of meditation is pretty clear, I think, but just in case it is not, i’ve laid it out in the table below.
In the seminar, Bhante goes on to make the connection between these stages and the five spiritual faculties. So the stage of integration in the system of meditation directly connects to the spiritual faculty of mindfulness; the stage of positive emotion connects with the spiritual faculty of faith; the stage of vision connects with the spiritual faculty of wisdom; the stage of spiritual rebirth connects with the spiritual faculty of meditation, in the sense of a transformation of our whole being. The spiritual faculty of virya isn’t linked so directly to the system of meditation, but he does link it to the five great stages, as ‘spontaneous activity for the benefit of others’. Maybe it is not stretching it too much to connect this to the unforced awareness of formless practice, or to see it as an attitude within all the stages of meditation, an attitude of naturalness, of spontaneity, and an other regarding dimension.
This link between the system of meditation and the five spiritual faculties strikes me as very significant. It suggests that the system is not an arbitrary one. What you’re looking at in the system of meditation isn’t a set of practices that have haphazardly come in to the order and movement. What we’re looking at is an attempt to describe the fundamental characteristics of the mind in the process of waking up. That process, according to the teaching on the five spiritual faculties, is characterised by a growing awareness; a tendency towards more joy, less self concern and more concern for others; a tendency towards seeing more clearly the nature of things; and that deepening insight gradually becoming more and more transformative of all aspects of our lives: we start to live in a way that’s a bit less self referential, a bit more inclined to help others.
The reason I think this is so significant is that it shifts the system of meditation from being arbitrary, from being one system among many, to saying that is rooted in the nature of developing spiritual experience. To the extent that spiritual experience means a growing awareness, then mindfulness of course is part of that deepening experience: to say that is just to describe, not prescribe. To say that spiritual experience means a move away from hatred into love, all you’re doing is describing another fundamentals aspect of what happens when we begin to mature spiritually. It seems to me that what the system of meditation is saying is that there is a certain character to our own developing spiritual experience; that it’s possible to be aware of the main strands of that; and it’s possible to intentionally support their development.
I was almost a little bit shocked to come to this conclusion; the system of meditation grows out of the nature of the mind in a process of awakening. It’s that fundamental. It’s descriptive rather than prescriptive. It’s certainly not arbitrary.
In our own teaching, each stage has a characteristic practice. So with mindfulness, for example, the mindfulness of breathing is the obvious, characteristic practice; with positive emotion it would be the metta bhavana. But it is not limited to that particular practice. Again, in Bhante’s recent question and answer sessions, he points out that the positive emotion stage would include the metta bhavana, the brahma viharas, it would include puja, would even include poetry and the arts. So for each of the stages there’s a key practice, but the stage is not limited to that practice.
So first of all, I want to open that space up: each stage is wider than it’s key practice. Now, having opened it up, I want to close it back down again, or at least ask again what the is the practical value of a system of meditation. How does a system help us practice?
One of the fundamental things we’re trying to do with spiritual practice is to go beyond our own self-referential relationship to the world, out of an experience dominated by craving and aversion, or more simply, determined by what we like and what we don’t like. And this applies to spiritual practice. I’d say that for most of us, for quite a long period, there’s an argument for the discipline of just doing the specific practices, the ones we like, and the ones we don’t like.
I have an enormous bias towards mindfulness practice; left to my own devices I’ll tend to do, to only do, the mindfulness of breathing. I’m more temperamentally reluctant to do the other practices. There are certainly good reasons for me to be doing the mindfulness practice (I’m drawn towards mindfulness practice the way a man in a desert is drawn towards water). But there are also more self-centred ones; it temperamentally suits me: I like it’s clarity, it’s simplicity: it’s the protestant end of Buddhist practice. In the last few years, since I’ve started to teach in the ordination process, there’s been a change in my personal practice. I’ve had to more conscientiously do a range of practices. Doing practices like the prostration practice, the bodhicitta practice, and the six element practice, has been enormously beneficial to me, and to my mindfulness practice. I’m grateful that I’ve had a structure that has made me broaden out my practice beyond my temperamental preference. So a lesson I’d draw from that is that there’s a real benefit in just doing the basic practices, practices that help develop all of the great stages. Certainly don’t prematurely drop them because you have a preference for one or other of the practices.
But it is also true that after a while, you know from direct experience what works and what doesn’t in your own practice, and for good reasons. You have to start to be intelligently in dialogue with the tradition, with your practice, and with your kalyana mitras. For me, the mindfulness of breathing can cover quite a wide range of the ‘system’; it covers mindfulness, supports piti and sukkha, it moves in to the whole area of the laksanas, more traditionally covered by the six element practice. But for a good friend of mine, the mindfulness of breathing doesn’t even effectively support the experience of mindfulness; formless practice has been a more effective support for mindfulness for her than the mindfulness of breathing has. So you have to be in intelligent dialogue with your own meditation practice. It’s not mechanical. Be sensitive to what’s effective in your own practice. But not too prematurely; you don’t want your habits and preferences to be the arbiter of what bits of the tradition you’re willing to be open to. As Bhante says, ‘it needs to be clear how the practices are related’. The system is trying to support us in the development of ALL of the spiritual faculties.
Then, he says, ‘we need is an arrangement of practice that takes us forward, step by step, and stage by stage… to make clear the progressive, cumulative nature of spiritual practice’. I want to come back now to the idea of the system of practice as progressive and cumulative.
I had an interesting conversation with Bhante recently. He said that what he had been trying to do in his book Living with Awareness was to show how the practice of mindfulness went beyond the four stage mindfulness of breathing, and shaded into insight; what he had been trying to do in the Living with Kindness book was to show how the practice of metta bhavana went beyond the five stage practice, and gradually shaded into insight. Then he said something I found so interesting that I asked him to repeat it. He said that he thought that what some order members were starting to do with formless practice was analogous; he said that he had not himself spelled out the implications of just sitting practice, but that some order members in their own practice and teaching, he thought, were now starting to show how formless practice started to shade into insight.
I thought this was a very significant take on the discussion that has been going on around formless practice in the movement. But an even more fundamental point, it seems to me, is that each of the practices that Bhante mentioned, in fact each of the practices in the system of meditation, has the potential to deepen to support the experience of insight.
I want to talk about formless practice first of all. (At the meditation colloquium last August, we decided to try to rebrand ‘pure awareness’ practice. We thought that the term ‘pure awareness’ was so grand, carried so many connotations, that it was simpler and more accurate to call it formless practice, or unstructured practice). Formless practice has been controversial in the movement in last couple of years, and there are a couple of quite different ways that you can tell the story.
One story is that formless practice has been an organisational problem, and there is truth in that. There has been an opposition, even a conflict, in some people’s minds, between formless practice and what has been called ‘bhavana’ practice. In some quarters, we seem to have created quite a muddle around all this, and it certainly has caused some confusion.
But there’s a different story you could tell. On the whole, in my direct experience, I would say that the impact of formless practice has been more helpful than harmful. I say this as something of an outside observer. Formless practice is not a central practice for me: I’ve been on retreats with Viveka, Tejananda and Prakasha, but I couldn’t really see much difference between what was being taught as formless practice, and what I was already doing in mindfulness practice. But in the last couple of years, I notice a growing interest in meditation practice, an excitement, a passion, an ambition about it. It seems to me that meditation practice in the movement has a life in it that I don’t think I’ve seen for a long time. And you’re getting people seriously talking about the experience of insight, without the usual apologies and qualifications; people finding in their practice that if you bring a certain kind of attention to your experience, (like really looking at its impermanent, empty nature) then it supports at least the first glimmers of insight into the nature of our experience, the nature of the mind.
On the whole, I’ve found the whole discussion around formless practice to be enormously stimulating, even the criticisms made for example by David Smith. It’s made me engage with my meditation practice with more intensity and more skill.
So, I think there’s another story we can tell about formless practice, and the constructive stimulating impact it has had on us as a practice a community. Bhante, in the same question and answer session, said that formless practice is important, helpful, useful, as long as it is in a full context of spiritual training. It’s an integral part of our system of meditation, and has been from the start. It’s only a problem if you think that it is the whole path; it’s not. And that brings me back to the system of training, and the five spiritual faculties. If we put formless practice in a wider framework, if we’re clear that what we’re trying to do is set up the conditions for deepening awareness; deepening positive emotion; deepening clarity about the nature of things; and if that clarity is becoming more and more deeply transformative: then there’s no problem.
One of the things that Bhante has really been emphasising in the last few years has been the potential for depth in each of the ‘basic’ practices. I’ve had the clearest sense of that in the anapanasati practice, which takes you really simply from awareness of the breath, through the dhyana factors, then just brings our attention how everything that we’re aware of is impermanent. It’s not a conceptual point: it just asks us to look at the breath, to look at each mental state we’ve been so carefully developing, and asks us give it space, to notice the impermanent, empty nature of the whole thing…
It’s obvious how mindfulness of breathing has this insight dimension to it. One of the things I’ve been excited by recently is seeing the same kind of potential in metta practice. Bhante has been explicitly saying that metta, practiced in the right way, is an insight practice. In Living with Kindness, he says:
A common misapprehension is to think of Insight and egolessness in abstract, even metaphysical, terms rather than as comprising concretely-lived attitudes and behaviour. But realizing the truth of egolessness simply means being truly and deeply unselfish. To contemplate the principle of egolessness as some special principle that is somehow separate from our actual behaviour will leave it as far away as ever. If we find it difficult to realize the ultimate emptiness of the self, the solution is to try to be a little less selfish. The understanding comes after the experience, not before.
I’m moved by that idea that you can experience something as a ‘concretely-lived behaviour’ first, and that our conceptual understanding catches up with our ‘actual behaviour later. The metta bhavana practice is an insight practice that moves us beyond the way we split experience into self and other. I had a bit of a sense of this more ‘emotional’ component of insight practice when I was on retreat at guhyaloka last spring, and seeing the way that the six element practice and the bodhicitta practice seemed to support each other.
Bhante has been giving a lot of emphasis to the six element practice in the last few months. Again, in that question and answer session on the Sangharakshita as Teacher seminar, has been saying that if what we’re trying to do is to overcome the illusion of a separate self, then the six element practice was the most important of our meditation practices. At Guhyaloka we did the six element practice regularly, doing it daily for most of the four month retreat, and doing it intensely for a few weeks. If you bring attention, every day for four months, to the fact that the each element comes into our body from the world ‘outside’ and returns to it, it has an effect. The habit of clinging on to our experience, of identifying with it, was softened and loosened in a very simple, straightforward way. And it was a bit of a discovery was going from the six element practice to the bodhicitta practice, and seeing that the loosening up of the six element practice made it easier, in a very natural way, to feel empathic connection with others. At the same time, the bodhicitta practice gave positive, beautiful shape to that slightly scary letting go in the six element practice.
The system is important; each practice supports and deepens the others. The system is trying to nudge our attention towards the main strands in the experience of the mind beginning to wake up.
a threefold path
In the same way that each individual meditation practice happens within a system of meditation, the system of meditation is part of a wider system of spiritual training. I was recently studying a Milarepa song, and milarepa had just sung about the spontaneous, luminous nature of mind, the traditional mahamudra approach. He followed it immediately with a verse that said:
‘your life is full of potential; guard your ethics as you guard your eyes.’
It’s completely traditional that formless practice is put in a context of structured practice. Meditation traditionally is practiced in a context of ethics, whether the context is the pali canon or the mahamudra teaching of Milarepa.
It is also practiced in a context of right view. The fundamental Buddhist view, and the view is paticca-samuppada, conditionality. Again, the is not just conceptual. Milarepa makes the same point using the image of bubbles in a stream, trying to point out that our experience isn’t as heavy, isn’t as fixed as we think it is. The ‘view’ of Paticca-samuppada is trying to make us more sensitive to the fluid, open nature of our experience, the nature of things.
In other words, the ‘view’ at the foundation of our system of training is the nature of reality; the foundation of our system of practice is the five spiritual faculties, a description of the awakening mind. These principles go as deep as the dharma does, but they can be applied at whatever level we are practicing
In the seminar, where Bhante outlines the ‘five great stages’, he concludes:
So what does this mean? It means that everyday one has got five things to practice as best you can.
i
one has too keep up the effort to be mindful and aware and to be as integrated as possible;
ii
one remains in as positive a mental state as one possibly can;
iii
one does not loose sight of one's ultimate goal at any time;
iv
one tries to apply at every level whatever you've realised or discovered on the highest level of your being;
v
and you do your best for other people, you do what you can to help people.
This is your spiritual life and this is your spiritual practice. These are the things with which you are basically concerned... On the practical side, this is all that you really need.
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