Many of us beginners do not really understand the central theme of the Dharma. This is because most of us come into practice for basically therapeutic reasons, seeking freedom from alienation in life or suffering. In fact, the Buddha supplies us with a total worldview upon which to base a personal understanding of the place of our sentient lives in the Universe. This worldview replaces the need for superstitions interpreting the meaning of life through some external authority such as some God or other. Needless to say, such a view is a challenge to all dogmatists and also to materialist atheists.
What is this worldview? It is based in an intuition that the entire cosmos is one process unified through a common essence or basis. All causation happens within this system, there is no outside or magical power imposing itself from outside. We ourselves are part of this system and both our basic sensations and our knowledge based on inferences from sensation belong within it. Our task therefore is to understand this relationship as clearly as we can and to create ways of being that bring us all ease within it.
The Buddha saw that although the only knowledge we can have of our universal context is through our senses, we get highly confused in understanding this. We fail to realise the nature of ‘being’. His fundamental view is called the Law of Co-dependent Arising, which states that every identifiable cause in a sequence and in all conditions is an aspect of a single process. This process is endlessly moving forward in continuous change so that everything one may see, hear or know is essentially impermanent. This means that everything exists only in the NOW. From this comes the importance of discovering how to be ‘present within the presence of the present’ without confusion.
Our trouble is that we fear the loss of the entity we believe we are, the “me”. This fear leads us to grab onto any illusory idea of permanent security we can think up –indeed the normal basis of religions! We lock on to the past to fix the future, we want security, we want credentials.
The Buddha went on to discover that by allowing impermanence to simply be, he could go beyond dualities and find a oneness within the universal flow itself. While this does not allow us to escape birth and death literally, it can transcend them in direct participation within the universal mystery as it flows along. This mystery he called the Unborn, from which any interpretation may emerge through mental discrimination. Rather than discrimination, the practice of the Dharma is to return to participation in the Unborn. Why is that of personal significance? Well - because it restores self-at-ease, prevents us locking-on to things, gives us a sense of unity with all things and enables us to help others still under delusion.
Yet, our tendency to cling onto self-concern, self-righteousness and basic pride easily distorts our practice through what are called Deviations. The great Tibetan Shakyashri, the teacher of Tipun Padma Chogyal (See Yogins of Ladakh. Crook and Low) gives us some details about what a deviation can be and how avoided.
Fundamentally, a deviation is any preference towards attachments to worldly matters on the one hand or clinging to an idea of ‘emptiness’ on the other. One who may have had an enlightenment experience can never the less become attached to the idea of it, a memory, long for it, and suffer through that clinging. Such a person’s understanding is incomplete.
There are many examples of how we deviate from the unity expressed in the Heart Sutra:
"Form is Emptiness. Emptiness is form.
Form is precisely Emptiness, Emptiness is precisely Form"
Emptiness here means an absence of discriminations in a state of openess to all. There are two movements here, from everyday life of diversified form into the freedom of unification and back again. We often get stuck on one side or the other. The task is to find the third way by which the two imply one another. Shakyashri gives many rather sophisticated examples.
How about us WCF practitioners? To maintain a balance that allows us to move freely in and out of the “brambly forest“ as Hongshi beautifully calls it, we have to avoid many of the subtle and unrecognised clingings our western egotistic minds express. Here are few we do not perhaps usually consider in our busy lives:
- To think that discussion helps insight is a deviation.
- To believe one practices Dharma through institutional management is a deviation.
- To participate in argument and believe that is practice is a deviation.
- To think that the fun of group participation helps towards personal insight is a deviation.
- To believe that going to evening groups a few times a month allows one to avoid intensive retreat while advancing on the path is a deviation.
- To confuse Dharma support ( chanting, visualisation, yoga, tai-chi) with Dharma practice is deviation.
- To think one can find enlightenment through calming the mind without self-confrontation is a deviation.
- To allow reaction to replace reflection is a deviation.
We all need to consider when and how we slip into deviations. It may seem odd at first that Dharma practice takes one entirely out of social and cultural concerns. Why is this? You must work it out for yourselves.
Yet, are deviations totally bad? No - not at all; to discuss, even argue, to administrate, look after accounts, to take a viewpoint, to participate in social issues, may give all us one some insights into ourselves and others, our wants and needs and some sort of ideational comprehension. They may also help us to help others though good administration and considering the Precepts. Yet, these activities cannot move us out of individualism towards that timeless insight that directly contacts the Unborn, the 'essence of mind'. That will emerge ‘from its own side’ when we are ready, when we have let go. How can we become ready? Watch out for those time-born attachments that comprise all deviations.
Over!
Chuan deng Jing di
Tuesday, July 20, 2010
