Maenllwyd: Moments of Being

To write about a place which has made such a profound impact on my life, and to do so concisely and effectively, feels like quite a challenge; but one which I feel I must take on – both for myself and as an offering to the community of fellow members, with whom I have shared so many precious hours and days: times which contained the broadest possible range of human emotions – some of which I had no idea existed. 

Rather than write a retrospective narrative, I have decided to make extracts from my retreat reports the basis of my account – extracts which have the flavour of my title, ‘moments of being’. The phrase is taken from the title of one of Virginia Woolf's early short stories¹ and as such, needs no improvement by me. 

The four extracts I have chosen each seem to me to distil one of the many qualities, functions or processes which Maenllwyd has represented or embodied for me over the years. In reality, of course, these categories overlap and intertwine in a myriad ways: but at the moments described here, a very specific ‘taste’ (a key word for John Crook) has arisen – and I hope to convey something of each taste to my readers. 

1. Containment 

My first visit took place in March 1999 for a Western Zen Retreat with John Crook and Simon Child. During this, and on subsequent retreats over the next couple of years, the main function Maenllwyd had for me was as an emotional container: a place where a lifetime of deeply buried childhood experiences and memories could finally find their expression: 

Once we started the communication exercises, the retreat process deepened in ways that I find utterly astonishing, and more moving and beautiful than I can begin to describe. Tears fell frequently; and what a relief it was just to let them drop onto the floor, being watched with care and love by so many varied and beautiful faces – letting all self-consciousness fall away, down, out. Our lives fell off our faces, leaving just facing-ness and gazing-ness. 

I returned in September of the same year for a full Chan retreat: 

I think it was on the morning of my birthday, when we rose at 4am to see a crystal-clear sky glittering with stars, and watched the moon and Venus rising together across the valley; it was an unforgettable sight. 

Towards the end of the March retreat, John had suggested that I take the question, ‘How is life fulfilled?’, away with me at the end of the retreat. As we settled for our first sit of the morning on this retreat, I felt confident enough to allow this question to drop into my calming mind: 

I watched and waited, breathing quietly. Within a very short time the phrase 'I belong here' floated to the surface. At that point, it was as if a huge dam had burst; tears poured out of me, my body shook with great waves of emotion, and I was filled with an overwhelming sense of relief and gratitude that I was here, in this hall, on this morning, under these awesome heavens. It was as if I was allowing the universe to wash away all those crabbed, gibbering demons which had been swarming over me earlier in the week. I felt shaken to my very core – cleansed.

After breakfast and the work period, in the bright autumn sunshine, I walked up the steep path which rises sharply from the track outside the gate, and stopped where it flattens into a vantage point: 

It was too much to take in. I felt like a blind man whose sight has been miraculously restored. Here I was: here was the world stretched out before me in all its unfathomable, heart-rending beauty. I felt intense joy and gratitude that I had found Maenllwyd – where else could I be?

The opening stanzas of a poem I wrote a couple of years later, after another retreat, seem to me now to encapsulate my first theme: 

Returning again
The gift of stillness
Opens around me
A warm mantle
Enfolds me.

All that I am
Is here in this hall
I walk back in here
Letting go.

All the hall holds
I carry within me
Allowing its teachings
To grow. 

2. Silence 

rising from sitting – 
breath startled! – plunged into now
blue sky all there is. 

The ‘warm mantle of silence’ I evoke in the opening lines of the poem at the close of my first section is, of course, an external silence, and this silence is a defining condition of all our retreats. But as the retreat proceeds, if we are lucky, an internal silence may gradually arise. We may, as Dainin Katagiri points out, ask ‘”What is this silence? How can I speak of it? Do I just keep my mouth shut?” No, I don't think so. Even if you don’t say anything, there is still a problem. Silence – Buddha-nature – is not something apart from your life. It compels you to speak’² In this section, the quotations from my retreat report may convey the flavour of my attempts to speak from such a place. 

In April 2006 I attended a Silent Illumination retreat. On the final day of the week, I was blessed with a glimpse of a profound silence: an experience of ‘one mind’, confirmed by John and Simon. The haiku above was written a few months later. 

I was sitting in the hall during the first period after lunch, and feeling very stable; I ignored the short break. Near the end of the hour there was a sudden shift in my perception. I described this later as being like the negative of a colour photograph – there was a sort of ‘turning around’ in my body – tears welled up, and I allowed them to flow and subside. Quite suddenly, the tears turned in an instant to delighted laughter, and it became a see-saw between the two.

Everyone had left for the walk. I got up, feeling a bit shaky. I found myself saying ‘What is it?’ over and over again. All seemed both familiar and utterly strange in the same instant. 

I walked out into the yard, into the dazzling blue sky and bright sunlight. Everything was bathed in a luminous, intense stillness; all was quietly and intently SO. I sat on the bench, asking ‘What is it? What is it?’ over and over again. 

I saw Simon emerge from the house, and beckoned quickly to him. ‘I need to talk to you!’ I cried, and he came over and we went into the library together. We sat and faced each other, as we had so many times before. There he was. Here I was: we were just SO. I kept leaning forward intently, looking at Simon, and there was nothing in the way. I grasped his hands, leaning forward, and said ‘You’re Simon, aren’t you?’ and he replied ‘Yes – just me – no projections’. ‘What is this? I asked, and he said ‘You’ve got out of the way’. ‘Is there a name for it?’ I asked, and Simon replied, ‘One Mind’. I remained still, gazing into his face, smiling and crying like an idiot; gasps of wonder kept bursting from me in rapt astonishment. Simon said, ‘You’ve got me going now’, and we stood up and hugged each other.

I spent the next hour or two wandering in the fields and valley below. The dazzling clarity and freshness of my perception continued: 

The grass and moss were unutterably grass-y and moss-y: the sheep blinking at me were revealed in all their essential sheep-iness – and I gasped in wonder yet again as I beheld them. (Only ‘I’ was not doing any of this, I guess – hence the sense of unmediated intense clarity, devoid of – or at least, much less coloured by – the normal fog of interpretation, with its attachments and disdains.) 

Later, I returned to the library with Simon and Jake, and tried to talk some more about what had happened: 

As I did so, I was swept up in great gusts of the most intense, gutsy laughter possible; and reached out to feel the solid presence of the small desk beside me, and my chair. That made me laugh even more: it felt as if the universe was laughing. 

3. Flow 

While my experience in 2006 was a key moment in my development as a practitioner, insofar as it seemed strong evidence for the Buddha’s exhortation towards pragmatic, moment by moment, enquiry, it also triggered a period of ruminating intellectual questioning. I wanted answers, corroborating evidence from other sources – it didn't feel enough just to trust my individual experience. So for a few years my practice at home diminished and, although I acted as guestmaster on several retreats, I would define this period as a sort of pause, a treading-the-water phase of my practice. 

However, the sudden shock of John's death in 2011 triggered a re-engagement with practice, and in December 2012 I attended my first Koan retreat; it turned out to be the first of a series, such was the impact of this first retreat. 

It didn’t take me long to select my koan on the first day. It leapt straight off the page: it’s the one that begins: 

Joshu asked Nansen, ‘What is the Way?’
“Ordinary mind is the Way”, Nansen replied.
“Shall I seek after it?” Joshu asked.

The weather was bitingly cold, bright and clear for most of the week; deep frosts and rime coated the trees and the fields. I was soon intimately engaged with my koan – such a different ‘taste’ from Silent Illumination:

The stream at Maenllwyd means a lot to me. Many times during my early visits, I would stand beside it, or in it, during a break; and its bubbling, tumbling flow would allow blocked feelings in me to arise and merge with it. I would stand there crying, becoming one with it as it just continued and continued, an unbreakable presence consoling and melting my heart.

On this retreat, early one morning, I went over to the stream once again. Beside and above it elaborate crystals of frost coated the plants and the grass. Among them, each dark, spikey green leaf of a plant was encased in a thick, clear pendant of ice – like the glass of a chandelier. Beautiful. I began to cry. ‘This is the bit of me that wanted to know, to be certain’, I thought to myself: and the Heart Sutra came into my mind – form and emptiness, emptiness and form: ice-as-form, water-as-emptiness; all the myriad forms of water – the ice, the frost, the mist, the clouds – all of them empty, and returning to the original emptiness of the water. The stream had dissolved ‘me’ once again. 

In my final interview of the retreat with Simon, I said something to the effect that whatever or whoever was sitting in front of him, a name was not really necessary, since what was there was not an object but a process – a flowing, like the stream. Simon said, ‘Is there any need for Nigel to be here?’ Quite easily, and without thinking about it, I said ‘No’.

4. Energy

It was as if I had been digging to find a source of water in a dry, bare landscape, and had suddenly broken through to release a geyser which punched its way high into the air above me.

The stream was to provide a trigger once again when I attended my fourth Koan retreat in the spring of 2015. I had been retired for a year by this time, and was still in the early stages of adjusting to this big transition. During the year, my partner, Richard, had lost his mother and last surviving aunt within a few months, so mortality was very present for me as I travelled to Wales, and, once again, the koan chose me as I read down the list that Simon had prepared for us:

Kansan Egen saw a monk coming and scolded him. The monk said, ‘I came all the way here to meet you concerning the Great Matter of birth-and-death. Why do you scold me?’ ‘There's no birth-and-death at my place!’ answered Kanzan, striking the monk and driving him away.

During Simon’s morning talk on the day after we had chosen our koans, and begun to familiarise ourselves with our choices, he spoke about the point in meditation when the intellect has exhausted itself, and we can begin to look into the koan with a clearer, brighter mind. His precise words eluded me by the time I sat down to write my report at home, but they had dived straight inside me:

As we went out into the spring sunshine for the break I knew that I had to go over to the stream. It embodies my deepest feelings about the journey I began 16 years ago. I leant on the fence post and looked down at the bubbling, chattering water. As if mirroring the flowing water, tears poured out of me in a sudden torrent; an emphatic, unconditional letting-go engulfed me. From that point onwards, for the entire retreat, my experience of myself shifted decisively away from my small, self-concerned identity towards a much larger and energised ‘self/mind’: I found myself able to engage in practice with an utterly committed, intensely enquiring focus. 

On the second or third day whilst looking into the koan, I realised that I had been substituting the word ‘here’ for Kanzan’s ‘my place’. I thought ‘Well, his place could just as easily be Maenllwyd, couldn’t it?’ This thought then morphed easily into ‘here, inside me’. 

At this point there was a surge of energy in my body; it felt as if the koan had come to rest just behind my breast-bone – a palpable presence. Body/mind/koan was one thing – and from that point onwards, nothing mattered but practice. A feeling of intense, open enquiry drove me forward, with nothing at all to fear. Nothing. 

I sat as if (in the phrase from the afternoon liturgy) ‘my head was aflame’. I sat through the morning service the next day; on another day, I sat through the full morning and lunch as well, without moving. The koan occupied my whole being, and I was gazing into a process over which I had relinquished all control: a steady brightness opened in front of me, seeming to become thinner and more transparent. It felt as if the ‘Gateless gate’ might be on the verge of revealing itself. 

When I talked to Simon about this on the last morning of the retreat, he twinkled and said, ‘Well, there you are – swinging back and forth on that gate!’ (Back at home later that day, I recalled an exchange we had had a couple of years before, also at the end of a retreat. I closed my report of that week like this: 

As we drove away from the house after everyone had gone, I got out of the car to open the first gate so Simon could drive through. As I closed it again, I realised that I was on the wrong side. I grinned to myself as I climbed back into the car, saying ‘I nearly left myself behind!’ ‘Good’, said Simon.) 

Whilst digesting a retreat, and putting it into words on paper, I often look back into the great, challenging texts of the teachers of the past, to see if there is something there which has the ‘taste’, the feel, of what I have experienced in Wales. The following two short extracts from Dogen³ spoke powerfully to me after this retreat: 

from shoji: (birth and death) 

Only when you don’t dislike birth and death or long for them, do you enter buddha’s mind. Just set aside your body and mind, forget about them, and throw them into the house of buddha; then all is done by buddha. When you follow this, you are free from birth and death and become a buddha without calculation. Who then can continue to think? 

from genjokoan: (manifesting suchness) 

To carry yourself forward and experience myriad things is delusion. That myriad things come forth and experience themselves is awakening. 

I would like to conclude by offering my heartfelt gratitude to Master Sheng Yen, to John Crook, and to Simon Child for creating the conditions which allowed these moments to arise. When I am at Maenllwyd, I feel complete and that I cover the ground.

Notes

1. Virginia Woolf also uses the phrase ‘moments of being’ in her autobiographical memoir A Sketch of the Past which was written in 1939, but remained unpublished until 1976 (Jean Schulkind, Sussex University Press.) There, she distinguishes ‘being’ from ‘non-being’: she characterises non-being as the ‘cotton wool’ of our daily lives, which she sees as being lived largely unconsciously – whereas her own ‘moments of being’ she describes as ‘shocks’, which she intuits as ‘a token of some real thing behind appearances – which I make real by putting it into words’. From this, she reaches ‘what I might call a philosophy; at any rate it is a constant idea of mine: that behind the cotton wool is a pattern; that we - I mean all human beings – are connected with this; that the whole world is a work of art. ‘Hamlet’ or a Beethoven quartet is a truth about this vast mass that we call the world. But there is no Shakespeare, there is no Beethoven; certainly and emphatically there is no God: we are the words; we are the music; we are the thing itself.’
2. Dainin Katagiri: You Have to Say Something, Shambhala, 1998.
3. Dogen: Moon in a Dewdrop Edited by Kazukai Tanahashi, North Point Press, 1995.