Shambhala Sun | January 2013

Not for Happiness

DZONGSAR JAMYANG KHYENTSE is one of the truth-tellers of modern Buddhism. The truth he tells us is that if it feels too good, it’s probably not Buddhism. But if you want real transformation, if you want painful honesty and deep, uncomfortable change, then read on.
 
Buddhist practices are techniques we use to tackle our habitual self-cherishing. Each one is designed to attack individual habits until the compulsion to cling to “self ” is entirely eradicated. So although a practice may look Buddhist, if it rein- forces self-clinging, it is actually far more dangerous than any overtly non-Buddhist practice.

The aim of far too many teachings these days is to make people “feel good,” and even some Buddhist masters are beginning to sound like New Age apostles. Their talks are entirely devoted to validating the manifestation of ego and endorsing the “rightness” of our feelings, neither of which have anything to do with the teachings we find in the pith instructions. So if you are only concerned about feeling good, you are far better off having a full-body massage or listening to some uplifting or life-affirming music than receiving dharma teachings, which were definitely not designed to cheer you up. On the contrary, the dharma was devised specifically to expose your failings and make you feel awful.

Try reading The Words of My Perfect Teacher. If you find it depressing, if Patrul Rinpoche’s disconcerting truths rattle your worldly self-confidence, be happy. It is a sign that at long last you are beginning to understand something about the dharma. And by the way, to feel depressed is not always a bad thing. It is completely understandable for someone to feel depressed and deflated when their most humiliating failing is exposed. Who wouldn’t feel a bit raw in such a situation? But isn’t it better to be painfully aware of a failing rather than utterly oblivious to it? If a flaw in your character remains hidden, how can you do anything about it? So although pith instructions might temporarily depress you, they will also help uproot your shortcomings by dragging them into the open. This is what is meant by the phrase “dharma penetrating your mind,” or, as the great Jamgon Kongtrul Lodro Taye put it, “the practice of dharma bearing fruit,” rather than the so-called good experiences too many of us hope for, such as good dreams, blissful sensations, ecstasy, clairvoyance, or the enhancement of intuition.

Patrul Rinpoche said there is no such thing as a person who has perfected both dharma practice and worldly life, and if we ever meet someone who appears to be good at both, the likelihood is that his or her skills are grounded in worldly values.

It is such a mistake to assume that practicing dharma will help us calm down and lead an untroubled life; nothing could be further from the truth. Dharma is not a therapy. Quite the opposite, in fact; dharma is tailored specifically to turn your life upside down—it’s what you sign up for. So when your life goes pear-shaped, why do you complain? If you practice and your life fails to capsize, it is a sign that what you are doing is not working. This is what distinguishes the dharma from New Age methods involving auras, relationships, communication, well-being, the Inner Child, being one with the universe, and tree hugging. From the point of view of dharma, such interests are the toys of samsaric beings—toys that quickly bore us senseless.

The Heart of Sadness

Kongtrul Rinpoche suggested we pray to the guru, buddhas, and bodhisattvas and ask them to grant their blessings, “So I may give birth to the heart of sadness.” But what is a “heart of sadness”? Imagine one night you have a dream. Although it is a good dream, deep down you know that eventually you will have to wake up and it will be over. In life, too, sooner or later, whatever the state of our relationships, our health, our jobs, and every aspect of our lives, everything, absolutely everything, will change. And the little bell ringing in the back of your head to remind you of this inevitability is what is called the “heart of sadness.” Life, you realize, is a race against time, and you should never put off dharma practice until next year, next month, or tomorrow—because the future may never happen.

This race-against-time kind of attitude is so important, especially when it comes to practice. My own experience has shown me that promising myself I will start to practice next week more or less guarantees that I will never get around to it. And I don’t think I am alone. So once you understand that real dharma practice is not just about formal sitting meditation but a never-ending confrontation with and opposition to pride and ego, as well as a lesson in how to accept change, you will be able to start practicing right away. For example, imagine you are sitting on a beach admiring the sunset. Nothing terrible has happened and you are content, even happy. Then suddenly that little bell starts to ring in your head, reminding you that this could be the last sunset you ever see. You realize that, were you to die, you might not be reborn with the ability to appreciate a sunset, let alone the capacity to understand what a sunset is, and this thought alone helps you focus your mind on practice.
 
Go Beyond Concept

A sincere wish to practice the dharma is not born of a desire for personal happiness or to be perceived as a “good” person, but neither do we practice because we want to be unhappy or become “bad” people. A genuine aspiration to practice dharma arises from the longing to attain enlightenment.

By and large, human beings tend to prefer to fit into society by following accepted rules of etiquette and being gentle, polite, and respectful. The irony is that this is also how most people imagine a spiritual person should behave. When a so-called dharma practitioner is seen to behave badly, we shake our heads over her audacity at presenting herself as a follower of the Buddha. Yet such judgments are better avoided, because to “fit in” is not what a genuine dharma practitioner strives for. Think of the great mahasiddha Tilopa, for example. He looked so outlandish that if he turned up on your doorstep today, odds are you would refuse to let him in. And you would have a point. He would most probably be almost completely naked; if you were lucky, he might be sporting some kind of G-string; his hair would never have been introduced to shampoo; and protruding from his mouth would quiver the tail of a live fish. What would your moral judgment be of such a being? “Him! A Buddhist? But he’s tormenting that poor creature by eating it alive!” This is how our theistic, moralistic, and judgmental minds work. In fact, they work in a very similar way to those of the world’s more puritanical and destructive religions. Of course, there is nothing necessarily wrong with morality, but the point of spiritual practice, according to the Vajrayana teachings, is to go beyond all our concepts, including those of morality.

Right now the majority of us can only afford to be slightly nonconformist, yet we should aspire to be like Tilopa. We should pray that one day we will have the courage to be just as crazy by daring to go beyond the eight worldly dharmas—happiness and suffering, fame and insignificance, praise and blame, gain and loss—and care not one jot about whether or not we are praised or criticized. In today’s world, such an attitude is the ultimate craziness. More than ever, people expect to be happy when they are admired and praised, and unhappy when derided and criticized. So it is unlikely that those who want the world to perceive them as sane will risk flying from the nest of the eight worldly dharmas. Sublime beings, though, couldn’t care less either way, and that is why, from our mundane point of view, they are considered crazy.
 
Develop Renunciation Mind

If worldly happiness is not the goal of dharma, then what is it that prompts a person to want to practice? Chances are that stepping onto a spiritual path would not even occur to a person who is rich, enjoys their life, and has a strong sense of personal security. Of course all of us, even the rich, experience moments of sadness and hopelessness, and we may even momentarily feel the urge to turn our backs on all this world has to offer. But this is not a genuine experience of renunciation mind, as it has far more to do with weariness and boredom than renunciation; it is often a sign that, like a spoiled child tired of his toys, we are in desperate need of a change.

Jamgon Kongtrul Lodro Taye said that if deep down you continue to believe a tiny corner of samsara could be useful or that it might even offer the ultimate solution to all your worldly problems, it will be extremely difficult to become a genuine spiritual seeker. To believe that life’s problems will somehow work themselves out, that everything bad is fixable, and that something about samsara has to be worth fighting for, makes it virtually impossible to nurture a genuine, all-consuming desire to practice the dharma. The only view that truly works for a dharma practitioner is that there are no solutions to the sufferings of samsara and it cannot be fixed.

It is vital to understand that however positive this worldly life, or even a small part of it, may appear to be, ultimately it will fail because absolutely nothing genuinely works in samsara. This is a very difficult attitude to adopt, but if we can at least accept it on an intellectual level, it will provide us with just the incentive we need to step onto the spiritual path. (Other incentives include making fools of ourselves or becoming entangled in worldly systems by trying to fix them.) The bottom line, though, is that only when a beginner truly appreciates just how hopeless and purposeless samsara really is will a genuine aspiration to follow a spiritual path arise in his or her mind.
 
As Shakyamuni Buddha, compassionately and with great courage, explained to an autocratic king, there are four inescapable realities that eventually destroy all sentient beings:
 
1. We will all become old and frail.
2. It is absolutely certain that everything will constantly change.
3. Everything we achieve or accumulate will eventually fall apart and scatter.
4. We are all bound to die.
 
Yet our emotions and habits are so strong that even when the truth is staring us in the face, we are unable to see it.
 
In addition to recognizing the futility of samsara, the point of dharma practice is that it penetrates our minds and diminishes our affection for our ego and worldly life by pressing us to detach ourselves from the eight worldly dharmas. However beneficial a practice appears to be, however politically correct or exciting, if it does not contradict your habit of grasping at permanence, or looks harmless but insidiously encourages you to forget the truth of impermanence and the illusory nature of phenomena, it will inevitably take you in the opposite direction of dharma.
 
Develop the Willingness to Face the Truth
 
Most of us tend to resent being confronted with the truth, and from resentment springs denial. The most obvious example is that we feel annoyed when we are forced to acknowledge the illusory nature of our lives and the reality of death. We also take exception to contemplating it, even though death is an irrefutable universal truth. Our habitual reaction is to pretend it will never happen—which is how we deal with most of the other inconvenient truths we find difficult to stomach.
 
Instead of becoming resentful, though, it is important for any- one who sincerely wishes to become a dharma practitioner to develop a willingness and openness to embrace the truth, because the dharma is the truth. The Buddha himself made no bones about it. He never once provided his students with rose-tinted glasses to take the edge off the horror of the truth of impermanence, the agonies that are “emotion,” the illusory nature of our world, and, above all, the vast and profound truth of shunyata, emptiness. None of these truths is easy to understand, or even to aspire to understand, particularly for minds programmed by habit to long for emotional satisfaction and aim for ordinary bliss. So if someone is able to hear teachings about emptiness and tolerate them intellectually as well as practically and emotionally, it is an indication that they have a real affinity for the dharma.
 
Overcome Poverty Mentality
 
Many of us feel spiritually impoverished. Kongtrul Rinpoche said this is because we never stop desiring comfort and happiness. Until that kind of poverty mentality is overcome, a large portion of our mind will always be busy trying to secure personal comfort and happiness, making letting go of anything at all extremely difficult. Even those who present themselves as spiritual practitioners will find it impossible to make the superhuman effort necessary.
 
The problem here is that on a superficial, worldly level, everything spiritual, especially the buddhadharma, appears to be utterly useless and a complete waste of time. We are practical beings who like to build houses so we can be comfortable and happy, and to put our resources into erecting a stupa with no bedroom or toilet or anything functional in it strikes us as being wasteful. But as Kongtrul Rinpoche pointed out, clinging to the merest hint of an idea that worldly values and ideals might somehow be useful makes it extremely hard for anyone to tackle something as apparently futile as spiritual practice. And cutting the ties of the habits that bind us to worldly values, especially when it comes to material wealth, is virtually impossible. “Wealth,” from an authentic dharma perspective, is understood entirely differently. For a dharma practitioner, wealth is not gold, silver, or a healthy bank account; wealth is contentment—the feeling that you have enough and need nothing more.
 
Liberation from Illusion and Delusion

As the Buddha said in the Vajracchedika Prajnaparamita Sutra (Diamond Sutra), “Like a star, hallucination, candle, magical illusion, dewdrop, bubble, dream, lightning, or a cloud—know all compounded phenomena to be like this.”
 
From a Buddhist point of view, each aspect and moment of our lives is an illusion. According to the Buddha, it’s like seeing a black spot in the sky that you are unable to make sense of, then concentrating on it intensely until finally you are able to make out a flock of birds. It is like hearing a perfect echo that sounds exactly like a real person shouting back at you. Life is nothing more than a continuous stream of sensory illusions, from the obvious ones, like fame and power, to those less easy to discern, like death, nosebleeds, and headaches. Tragically, though, most human beings believe in what they see, and so the truth Buddha exposed about the illusory nature of life can be a little hard to swallow.
 
What happens once we know that everything we see and experience is an illusion? And what is left once those illusions have been liberated? To be liberated from illusion is to dispel all the limitations that false perception brings and entirely transform our attitude. So “liberate” means to be released from the delusion of imagining illusions to be real. But crucially, we have to want to be liberated; we have to want to become enlightened. And it is only once we develop a genuine longing for enlightenment that, almost automatically, we start to learn how not to want to be ambitious in a worldly sense. Such a longing is not easy to generate, but without it, to step aimlessly onto the spiritual path would be utterly pointless.
 
Millions of people in this world are interested in some version of meditation, or yoga, or one of the many so-called spiritual activities that are now so widely marketed. A closer look at why people engage in these practices reveals an aim that has little to do with liberation from delusion and has everything do to with their desperation to escape busy, unhappy lives, and heartfelt longing for a healthy, stress-free, happy life. All of which are romantic illusions.

So where do we find the roots of these illusions? Mainly in our habitual patterns and their related actions. Of course, no one of sound mind imagines any of us would willingly live an illusion. But we are contrary beings, and even though we are convinced we would shun a life built on self-deception, we continue to maintain a strong grip on the habits that are the cause of count- less delusions. Small wonder the great masters of the past have said that although everyone longs to be free from suffering, most of us simply won’t let go of it; although no one wants to suffer,
we find it almost impossible not to be attracted to samsara.
 
Mindfulness
 
Most of us know that aggression is a problem, as are pride and jealousy, but the truth is that all emotions cause problems one way or another and each has a distinctive character. “Passion,” for example, is starkly different from “aggression.” Fundamentally, though, all emotions spring from one basic source, distraction.

What is “distraction”? Clearly, it is not merely the sound of a chainsaw firing up or blaring Bollywood music that interrupts our meditation practice. On a more profound level, distraction is any of the emotional responses we are sidetracked by—for example, hope for praise and fear of blame, as well as its more subtle manifestations, like being spaced-out, distracted, lost in thought, or worked up.
 
Since our fundamental problem is distraction, its fundamental solution is to be mindful. There are an infinite number of methods for developing mindfulness that all fall into one of two categories: shamatha or vipashyana. The point of shamatha practice is to make mind malleable. But a pliant mind alone will not uproot samsara completely; we also need to see the truth, which is why vipashyana, or insight, practice is so crucial.
 
Unfortunately, though, mindfulness is difficult, mostly because we lack the enthusiasm to develop it but also because our habit of longing for distraction is both deeply ingrained and extremely tenacious. It is therefore vital for a dharma practitioner to develop renunciation mind and to recognize the defects of samsara, both of which lie at the core of the Buddhist approach to training the mind.
 
The masters of the past suggest we should constantly remind ourselves about: the imminence of death; the futility of our worldly activities; and the worst news of all, that there is no end to samsara’s sufferings. Just look around you and you will see that the world never ceases to churn out more and more of the same thing, and that the result is unremitting pain and unbearable suffering. It’s no surprise, then, as the great masters have pointed out, that to maintain mindfulness for as long as it takes to drink a cup of tea accumulates more merit than years of practicing generosity, discipline, and asceticism.
 
Adapted from Not for Happiness: A Guide to the So-Called Preliminary Practices, by Dzongsar Jamyang Khyentse. © 2012 by Dzongsar Jamyang Khyentse. Published with permission of Shambhala Publications.
 
From a young age, Dzongsar Jamyang Khyentse has been active in preserving Buddhist teachings, establishing centers of learning and practice, publishing books, and teaching all over the world. He’s the founder of Lotus Outreach, a non-profit dedicated to ensuring the education, health, and safety of at-risk and exploited women and children in the developing world. He’s also the director of the films The Cup and Travellers & Magicians.

From the January 2013 Shambhala Sun magazine. Click here to see more from this issue.

To order a copy of this issue, click here.

Shambhala Sun | January 2013

Unconditional Beauty

The dharma art teachings and artworks of CHÖGYAM TRUNGPA RINPOCHE.

1. Dharma and Art

People often start with art and discover dharma out of that. But our approach is different: we begin with dharma, the truth of the teachings, the truth of reality, and then we try to find if there is any art in it. We start right at the beginning, right at the basic point—with the question of who we are, what we are, and what we are trying to do in terms of art. So in discussing dharma art, it is important to have some familiarity with dharma and why it is art.

Dharma means “norm” or “truth.” It is also defined as peace and coolness, because it reduces the heat of neurosis, the heat of aggression, passion, and ignorance. So dharma is very ordinary, very simple. It is the stage before you lay your hand on your brush, your clay, your canvas. It is very basic, peaceful, and cool. It is free from the neurosis that creates obstacles to perceiving the phenomenal world properly and fully, as a true artist should.

The basic obstacle to clear perception is omnipresent anxiety, which does not allow us to relate to ourselves or to the world outside ourselves. There is constant anxiety, and out of that anxiety comes a feeling of heat. It is like entering a hot room—we feel claustrophobic and there is no fresh air. That claustrophobia leads us to contract our sense perceptions.

When there is one hundred percent claustrophobia—the full heat of neurosis—we can’t see, we can’t smell, we can’t taste, we can’t hear, we can’t feel. Our sense perceptions are numbed, which is a great obstacle to creating a work of art.

Some people say that if there were no neurosis, they could not become good artists. This view of art is the opposite of a sense of peace and coolness. It undermines the possibility of intrinsic beauty. Fundamentally, art is the expression of unconditional beauty, which transcends the ordinary beauty of good and bad.

From that unconditional beauty, which is peaceful and cool, arises the possibility of relaxing, and thereby perceiving the phenomenal world and one’s own senses properly.

This is not a question of whether you have talent or not. Everybody has the tendency toward intrinsic beauty and intrinsic goodness, and talent comes along with that automatically. When your visual and auditory world is properly synchronized and you have a sense of humor, you are able to perceive the phenomenal world fully and truly. That is talent. Talent comes from the appreciation of basic beauty and basic goodness, which arises from the fundamental peace and coolness of dharma.

When we begin to perceive the phenomenal world with that sense of basic goodness, peace, and beauty, conflict begins to subside and we start to perceive our world clearly and thoroughly. There are no questions, no obstacles. As anxiety sub- sides, sense perceptions become workable because they are no longer distorted by any neurosis. Through the practice of meditation, we can relate with our thoughts, our mind, and our breath and begin to discover the clarity of our sense perceptions and our thinking process. That enables us to become dharmic people and true artists.
 
When we begin to realize that the principle of dharma exists within us, the heat of neurosis is cooled and pure insight takes place. Because restfulness exists beyond the neurosis, we begin to feel good about the whole thing. We could safely say that the principle of art is related with this idea of trust and relaxation. Such trust in ourselves comes from realizing that we do not have to sacrifice ourselves to neurosis. And relaxation can happen because such trust has become a part of our existence. Therefore, we feel we can afford to open our eyes and all our sense perceptions fully.
 
2. Genuineness
 
When relaxation develops in us, through letting go of neurosis and experiencing some sense of space and cool fresh air around us, we begin to feel good about ourselves. We feel that our existence is worthwhile. In turn we feel that our communication with others could also be worthwhile and pure and good. On the whole we begin to feel that we are not cheating anybody; we are not making anything up on the spot. We begin to feel that we are fully genuine. From that point of view, one of the basic principles of a work of art is the absence of lying. Genuine art tells the truth.
 
Dharma art means not creating further pollution in society; dharma art means creating greater vision and greater sanity. Art has to be done with genuineness, as it actually is, in the name of basic beauty and basic goodness. When basic goodness or basic beauty is not being expressed, what you do is neurotic and destructive, and cultivating other people’s sanity becomes difficult. Nonetheless, you cannot take the easy way out for the sake of making lots of money or becoming a big name. There has to be the basic integrity of maintaining our human society in a state of sanity. That is and should be the only way to work with art. The purpose of a work of art is bodhisattva action. This means that your production, manifestation, demonstration, and performance should be geared toward waking people up from their neurosis.
 
The name artist is not a trademark. The problem of the modern age is that everyone has become merchandised, everybody is a mercenary, and everybody has to have a label: either you are a dentist, an artist, a plumber, a dishwasher, or whatever. And the label of “artist” is the biggest problem of all. Even if you regard yourself as an artist, I request you not to write “artist” for your occupation when you fill out a form. From my way of thinking, and from what my training tells me, when you have perfected your art and developed your sensitivities, you cannot call yourself anybody at all.
 
Being an artist is not an occupation: it is your life, your whole being. From the time you wake up in the morning, when the buzzer in your clock rings, until you go to bed, every perception you experience is an expression of vision—the light coming through your window, the hot-water kettle boiling to make tea, the sizzling of the bacon on the stove, the way your children get up with a yawn and your wife comes down in her dressing gown into the kitchen. If you limit that by saying, “I am an artist,” that is terrible. It is showing disrespect for your discipline. We could safely say that there is no such thing as an artist. There is just art—dharma art, hopefully.

3. Heaven, Earth and Humanity

The principle of heaven, earth, and humanity seems to be basic to a work of art. Although this principle has the ring of visual art, it also could be applied to auditory art such as poetry or music, as well as to physical or three-dimensional art. The principle of heaven, earth, and humanity applies to calligraphy, painting, interior decoration, building a city, designing an airplane or an ocean liner, organizing dishwashing by choosing which dish to wash first, or vacuuming the floor. All of those works of art are included completely in the principle of heaven, earth, and humanity.

This principle comes from the Chinese tradition and was developed further in Japan. It has been connected with the tradition of ikebana, Japanese flower arranging, but we should not restrict it to that. If you study the architectural vision of a place like Nalanda University in India, or if you visit Bodhgaya, with its stupa and its compound, or the Buddhist and Hindu temples of Indonesia, you see that they are all founded on the heaven, earth, and humanity principle. In horseback riding, the rider, the horse, and the performance are connected with the heaven, earth, and humanity principle, which can also be applied to the disciplines of archery and swordsmanship. Any discipline, whether Occidental or Oriental, contains the principle of heaven, earth, and humanity.

To begin with, let’s consider this principle from the artist’s point of view. The first aspect is heaven, which is connected with nonthought, or vision. You are being provided with a big canvas, with all the oil paints and a good brush. You have an easel in front of you and you have your smock on, ready to paint. At that point you become frightened, and you do not know what to do. Or you might have blank sheets of paper and a pen sitting on your desk, and you are about to write poetry. You pick up your pen with a big sigh—you have nothing to say. Or you pick up your musical instrument and do not know what note to play.

That first space is heaven, and it is the best one! It is not regarded as regression; it is just basic space in which you have no idea what it is going to do or what you are going to do. This initial fear of inadequacy may be regarded as heaven, basic space, complete space. Such fear of knowledge is not all that big a fear, but a gap in space that allows you to step back. It is one’s first insight, a kind of positive bewilderment.

Then, as you look at your canvas or your notepad, you come up with a first thought of some kind, which you timidly put out. You begin to mix your paints with your brush or to scribble timidly on your notepad. The slogan “First thought is best thought!” is an expression of that principle, which is earth.

The third principle is humanity. The humanity principle confirms the original panic of the heaven principle and the “first thought best thought” of the earth principle put together. You begin to realize that you have something concrete to present. There is a sense of joy and a slight smile at the corners of your mouth, a slight sense of humor. You can actually say something about what you are trying to create. That is the third principle, humanity.

So we have heaven, earth, and humanity. First, you have the sky; then you have the earth to complement the sky, and having sky and earth already, you have somebody to occupy that space, which is humanity. It is like creation, or genesis. This is connected with the ideal form of a work of art, although it can include much more than that. It arises from the basis of health, on the ground of coolness and sanity, which we have already discussed.

4. Perception

Having discussed the heaven, earth, and humanity principle in connection with creating a work of art, we could discuss what takes place for the individual who witnesses a work of art. To understand the perceiver of art, it is important to discuss perception in general, the way we perceive things based on the principles of seeing and looking. Whether we are executing a work of art or witnessing one, first we look and then we see.

The notion of looking at things as they are is important here. We cannot even call it a concept; it is an experience. Look! Why do we look at all? Or we could say, listen! Why do we listen at all? Why do we feel at all? Why do we taste? The one and only answer is that there is such a thing as inquisitiveness in our makeup. Inquisitiveness is the seed syllable of the artist. The artist is interested in sight, sound, feeling, and touchable objects. We are interested and inquisitive, and we are willing to explore. We appreciate purple, blue, red, white, yellow, violet. When we see them, we are so interested. Such tremendous inquisitiveness is the key point in the way we look at things, because with inquisitiveness we have a connection. We as human beings have certain sense organs, such as eyes, noses, ears, mouths, and tongues, to experience the different levels of sense perceptions. And our minds, basically speaking, can communicate thoroughly and properly through any one of those sense organs. By training ourselves in the understanding of art as a fundamental and basic discipline, we could learn to synchronize our mind and body completely. In doing so, the first step is learning how to look, how to listen, how to feel. By learning how to look, we begin to discover how to see. By learning how to listen, we learn how to hear. By learning how to feel, we learn how to experience.

When sense objects and sense perceptions and sense organs meet, and they begin to be synchronized, you let yourself go a little further. You open yourself. It is like a camera aperture: your lens is open at that point. Then you see things, and they reflect into your state of mind. That seems to be the basic idea of how a perceiver looks at a work of art. 

5. Unconditional Expression

From our practice of meditation, we no longer regard a work of art as a gimmick or as confirmation. It is simply expression— not even self-expression, just expression. We could safely say that there is such a thing as unconditional expression that does not come from self or other. It manifests out of nowhere like mushrooms in a meadow, like hailstones, like thundershowers.

The basic sense of delight and spontaneity in a person who has opened fully and thoroughly to him or herself and life can provide wonderful rainbows and thundershowers and gusts of wind. We don’t have to be tied down to the greasy-spoon world of well-meaning artists with heavy-handed looks on their faces and over- fed information in their brains. The basic idea of dharma art is the sense of peace and refreshing coolness of the absence of neurosis.

We have to be so genuine and gentle. Otherwise, there is no way to work with the universe at all. You have a tremendous responsibility: the first is to yourself, to become gentle and genuine; the second is to work for others in the same way. It is very important to realize how powerful all of us are. What we are doing may seem insignificant, but this notion of dharma art will be like an atomic bomb you carry in your mind. You could play a tremendous role in developing peace throughout the world.

Adapted by Carolyn Rose Gimian from “Heaven, Earth, and Man,” in The Collected Works of Chögyam Trungpa, volume Seven, based on a seminar entitled “Dharma Art” given in Boulder, Colorado, in July 1979.

From the January 2013 Shambhala Sun magazine. Click here to see more from this issue.

Photo courtesy of Shambhala Archives.

Shambhala Sun | January 2013

Dancing in Foam and Other Adventures

They say that wherever you go, there you are. But as ANNE CUSHMAN discovers in Spain, it’s also true that travel gives you a fresh take on yourself.

I was in my twenties when I first met Shawn. She was a slender, intense yogini from Vermont with a long brown ponytail and Birkenstocks. In a teacher-training program at the Iyengar Yoga Institute in San Francisco, we drilled side by side in our eighties-style leotards on green sticky mats, parsing the muscular grammar of downward dog and revolved triangle. We crayoned nerves and organs in our anatomy coloring books; we identified—blindfolded—the disassembled vertebrae of a plastic skeleton; we visited each other for yoga dates, where we balanced side by side on our heads while discussing our once and future boyfriends.

But then she fell in love with one of our fellow yogis, a handsome, serious Catalan on sabbatical from his engineering job. Shortly after their first baby was born, she wrote me a letter from Barcelona on a flimsy blue aerogram. I meant to write back right away, but I got distracted by a few other things—some long treks through India, a couple of books, a marriage, a child, a divorce. Suddenly more than twenty years had slipped by, and I wanted to take my ten-year-old son, Skye, to study Spanish in Spain.

My Google search found Shawn teaching prenatal yoga and working as a doula in Sitges, a beach town just south of Barcelona. She answered my email right away: “I still have a photo of you in downward dog hanging in my painting studio!” I toured her Facebook wall, where she looked exactly the same as I remembered her, until I realized I was viewing a photo of her daughter. I had a warm but disorienting Skype conversation with a European woman with a chic blonde haircut who answered to Shawn’s name but kept breaking off to chat in Spanish and Catalan with her two teenagers.

In the decades since we’d last spoken, Shawn and I had each built a thriving life—and along the way, accumulated the usual list of roads-not-taken. I envied her established twenty-year marriage. She envied my fresh new romance with Teja, a musician and qigong teacher. I pined for her trilingual sophistication. She pined for my local community of dharma yoga friends. She told me about the first yoga class she ever taught in Spanish, in which she had instructed a group of pregnant women to “sit on their testicles” (inadvertently confusing the Spanish word for cushions, cojines, with cojones). I told her about the time I led a silent yoga and meditation retreat with my screaming four-month-old son in a front pack, my milk letting down and soaking my camisole as I guided the retreatants into savasana.

A flurry of emails later, Shawn was sitting at my kitchen table in California—along with her husband, her son, her daughter, and her daughter’s best friend. She was handing me the keys to her house and instructing me on how to operate her Persian blinds and put her cat’s bowl in a moat of water so the ants wouldn’t infest it.

Soon I was doing a seated twist on Shawn’s terracotta patio, looking over a valley of rooftops and orange-blos- somed trees to the Mediterranean Sea. Teja, Skye, and I were swapping houses with Shawn and her family for the month.

Travel writer Bill Bryson said that the great gift of travel is that it puts you in situations where you can’t take anything for granted. Like meditation, it cultivates a beginner’s mind in which each experience is fresh.

A house swap, in particular, invites the tantalizing fantasy that you’re leaving behind not just your own familiar routine but also your own familiar and slightly annoying self. You’re swapping it out for a new, improved, more fascinating self, with better outfits and a better shot at enlightenment. Dropped into the middle of another woman’s life—sleeping in her bed with her mosquito coil humming, riding her bicycle to the beach while wearing her (only slightly too small) flip-flops, sautéing zucchini from her garden in her kitchen—I felt, at first, as if I’d been reincarnated.

Our first evening in Sitges, a friend of Shawn’s invited me and Skye to a fiesta de espuma (foam festival) in a nearby village. It was a giant public bubble bath, in which a cannon mounted on top of a truck fired a stream of soapy foam into a plaza next to a seventeenth-century church, while a salsa band played with no shirts on. Children in bathing suits and goggles, wrinkled abuelitas hand in hand with their grandkids, and papas with toddlers seated on their shoulders all frolicked in neck-deep bubbles to a Latin beat. Skye danced through the crowd with a corona of bubbles, shaking his frothy hips and waving his arms.

The next day, Skye, Teja, and I took the train into Barcelona for a bicycle tour through fifteenth-century streets jammed with honking, fuming, twenty-first-century traffic. We pedaled through the medieval courtyard where Ferdinand and Isabella greeted Christopher Columbus on his return from the new World. We cruised past the sandcastle-like splendor of the still-unfinished masterwork cathedral of the architect Antoni Gaudí. We paused for power bars and water at a series of memorials commemorating religious and political martyrs who over the centuries had been shot or burned at the stake or rolled through the streets in barrels full of broken glass.

But it wasn’t just soap bubbles and touristy photo ops that brushed the cobwebs of familiarity from my eyes. In a foreign country, ordinary life—buying groceries, doing laundry, driving Skye to and from his beach camp in Shawn’s old VW van— was a constant mystery. I blundered through my days, bleating the primal phrases from my introductory Spanish CDs— “I want... I need... Do you have... ?”—and misunderstanding the answers. A freeway sign flashed “peligro,” which I knew meant “danger.” But I couldn’t understand the rest of the warning, which, in any case, quickly disappeared behind me. Why was the old woman at the roadside fruit stand so irritated that I’d picked up the melon and set it on the weighing scale? Why were the carts in the Supermarque chain-locked together, and how did I get them apart? For that one, I sent Skye to inquire in Spanish of the white-coated man at the meat counter—who was standing next to an entire pig, skinned and gutted, dangling by its hind ankles from an overhead hook. (We learned that vegetarianism was a rare phenomenon in Spain when we requested our salads sin carne—without meat—and they came with ham instead.) In the U.S., meat came tidily packaged in plastic, its animal origins coyly disguised. In Spain, it stared right at us and said, Hi, I’m Wilbur and I’ll be your tapas for this evening...

Alas, it quickly became clear that I had not been reborn into this new reality as an entirely new person—as, for example, a person who didn’t get snippy when her partner played classical guitar till after midnight, slept in till ten, and then drank strong Spanish coffee from a two-liter measuring cup, even though she had repeatedly told him that the best way to get over jet lag was to get up at dawn and do yoga and meditate with her, and even though she was clearly so right about that! Unfortunately, I had packed my mind along with me—as opinionated and prolific as always.

A few days into our trip, I stayed home all morning to practice yoga on Shawn’s patio. A garbage truck groaned up the street, with a sound like a very large animal in labor, but the breeze smelled of salt water and orange blossoms. As I dropped into the pause at the bottom of a long exhalation, I thought, Now I’m finally here.

But what did I mean by “here”? Shawn’s house was eerily similar to my own: peach-colored walls, a closet full of yoga props, a stack of meditation cushions piled in the corner of the living room. Deep in the heart of my practice, I could have been anywhere in the world. Folding into a forward bend, I met the same familiar body I greet in California—though admittedly more laden with pan al tomate. Seated in meditation, I met the same familiar mind. Sure, the content of my tumbling thoughts was different: What metro stop would get me to the Joan Miró museum on the peak of Montjuïc? Was it really okay for Skye to eat chocolate croissants instead of oatmeal for breakfast and, if so, could I have a bite? But the basic structure was the same: the flickering slide show of planning and judging, the undertow of anxiety laced with longing.

As I hoisted my pelvis onto a foam yoga block for a supported inversion, I reflected on one of the basic teachings of buddhadharma: the solid self that we cling to so tenaciously is actually composed of a limited number of ever-shuffling components. Wherever we go, our experience is created from the same basic elements: seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, touching, thinking. Spain and America, today and twenty years ago—these are just abstract concepts. There’s no coming and no going; we’re always right here, right now.

And yet... A pill bug crawled toward my head; when I blew on it, it curled into a ball and tumbled away. A fiesta firecracker banged exuberantly somewhere down the street. My sacrum released with a pop as I dropped my feet to the floor. My practice invited me into a living intimacy with this specific unfolding moment.

Again and again, my practice of yoga and meditation helps me navigate this dance between the universal and the personal, the absolute and the relative. It teaches me to honor my own quirky, specific human body and mind and story—while at the same time seeing their ever-changing, impermanent nature, inseparable from the interconnected web of pill bugs and chocolate, garbage trucks and stars. It reminds me that I don’t have to do a house exchange in order to have the opportunity to be reborn in each new moment.

I ground myself in my daily practice whenever I travel, so that travel itself can become a meditation. My practice reminds me that in travel, as in yoga, the point is not just to get from one peak experience to the next—the poses and destinations are part of an ongoing vinyasa, or flow. As Skye and Teja and I took the metro through Barcelona to a flamenco-guitar concert at the Palau de la Música Catalana, I reminded Skye that our day’s adventure wasn’t just the hour and a half we would sit in the concert hall, a stained-glass ceiling arcing above us, listening to Pedro Javier Gonzáles play “Recuerdos de la Alhambra.” The adventure was also our sweaty confusion as we puzzled over the metro map by the train tracks, and our rescue by a young architecture student named Maria, who listened patiently to our halting Spanish and led us through the maze of the station to the right line. If we couldn’t be present for Maria and the metro, chances were we wouldn’t tune in to the concert completely either.

My daily meditations helped me stay centered as we took a cable-car up a jagged mountain to the eighth-century monastery Montserrat, which now attracts a million tourists a year. “That sounds like a monk’s worst nightmare,” I said to Teja, but perhaps it wasn’t; outside the bar by the monastery museum we spotted a group of portly, black-robed monks drinking red wine and passing around trays of hors d’oeuvres. Skye took off his sun hat and set it on a wall to pose for a photo with a statue of a saint. Then by the time we had snapped a few shots, the hat had been stolen by one of our fellow pilgrims. I suggested to Skye that per- haps in a few hundred years, the Buddhist retreat center where I teach in California might look like this: a cable car to the hill above the meditation hall, with a café and a bar on top, and a viewing platform where one could watch through binoculars as the Vipassana students did walking meditation in the courtyard.

My practice also reminded me to stay relaxed as we celebrated Skye’s eleventh birthday with a few of his new Spanish friends and a chocolate-cream cake with Felicidades written in white icing. En route to a business trip, Skye’s dad flew in for the party with his beautiful new girlfriend. The kids played a Barcelona version of Monopoly and argued about the rules in Spanish, while the grown-ups drank sparkling water and made conversation that was not as awkward as I’d feared.

The trip, in its turn, reminded me to be free-spirited in my yoga and meditation practice—to enter it, every time, with the spirit of adventure, open to the surprises that might unfurl in even the most familiar posture, the most ordinary breath. It reminded me to celebrate my body and my life with the unselfconscious exuberance of the women on the crowded Sitges beach, where virtually everyone—grandmother or teenager, slender or with billowing flesh—frolicked in the waves wearing the kind of tiny bikini that back in California you had to be a twenty-something supermodel to flaunt.

At the end of my month in Spain, I flew back home to my own collection of yoga mats and meditation cushions, and Shawn flew home to hers. Since then, when I practice on my deck overlooking Mount Tamalpais, I often think of my longtime yoga friend, practicing on her patio overlooking the Mediterranean Sea. As I practice, I feel connected to her, despite the miles and years between us.

And sometimes, in the space between one breath and the next, I remember the families dancing together in a plaza full of foam. I remember the guitar player at the Palau de la Música: the way he held his guitar like a lover in his arms. The way his fingers released a torrent of song as they traveled over the strings.


Anne Cushman is the co-director of the Mindfulness Yoga program at Spirit Rock Meditation Center and a founder of the online practice community Awakening as Women. For more than twenty-five years she has studied multiple schools of yoga and practiced Buddhist meditation in the Zen and Vipassana traditions. Her work includes the documentary Zen Center: Portrait of an American Zen Community, the guidebook From Here to Nirvana, and the novel Enlightenment for Idiots.

From the January 2013 Shambhala Sun magazine. Click here to see more from this issue.

To order a copy of this issue, click here.

Photo: Anne Cushman

Shambhala Sun | January 2013

Please Come Back

That was MELODY ERMACHILD CHAVIS’ prayer, until finally she accepted that her father would never return. Then, in a London chapel devoted to American war dead, she realized that maybe he’d been there for her all along.

When I was a little girl, I often wondered if my father could hear my voice. My grandmother, his mother, told me that he was in heaven. She said he was always watching over me, and I believed her. When my grandmother taught me the Lord’s Prayer, I thought it was about him. “My Father, who art in Heaven.” When I prayed, I thought I was talking to my father.

My father was a navigator and bombardier in the U.S. Army Air Corps in the Second World War. He died on October 12, 1944, when his B-24 was shot down on a bombing run over Germany.

I learned this when I was older. When I was a child, all I was told was that my father was “missing in action.” So I always had trouble believing he was dead. In thousands of lonely reveries, I imagined his return. These dreams would always end with him taking me into his arms.

My disbelief has gone through many stages over the course of my life. As I grew older, I realized that he was probably dead, but I still hoped he could be among the missing but alive. As far as I knew, there was no body, no grave, no tombstone, no place to visit. Without some concrete proof of his death, I could let myself think that perhaps he had amnesia, perhaps he was only lost, perhaps one day he would come and find me. Until I was in my twenties, I continued my childhood prayer to him: “Please come back. Please come back.”

I was in my forties when I finally learned what had happened. I visited my father’s sister, who brought out a metal box in which my grandmother had stored old papers. They said my father’s remains had been recovered and were first buried at a prisoner- of-war camp in Germany. Later, I read, the remains were returned to his home state, to Rock Island National Cemetery in Illinois. I was nearly fifty when I found his tombstone there among those of other airmen.

In 1952, when I was nine, Elizabeth, the newly crowned Queen of England, sent a book to all American children who had lost parents fighting for Britain in the war. My book reached me at the desert housing project near the Arizona army base where my soldier stepfather was stationed. I didn’t like the book, with its black-and-white photos of war planes. Many of them had crashed.

In the book was a letter addressed to me and signed by the Queen. She told me that President Eisenhower had dedicated a chapel in St Paul’s Cathedral in London to the sacrifice of Americans who had fought with Britain against the Nazis. In that chapel, my father’s name was inscribed in a special book.

I was sixty-nine when I went to see his name in St Paul’s. This late-life pilgrimage was unfinished business. I was about to retire from my stressful job of more than thirty years helping defend people facing the death penalty. My work was to investigate the lives and family stories of my clients. I’d had little time to look into my own history. Now I would.

Packing for the trip, I decided to take a dress made in the 1940s that I had found years before in a secondhand store. It was made of dark-blue rayon and fell below the knee in the graceful lines dresses had back then. That generation went to war with such flair. Their clothes and hairstyles were so attractive, their dances so sexy, their music so heartfelt and sentimental. So much was lost when those young people, filled with such energy, died. I took the dress along in honor of them.

I had made arrangements with the cathedral ahead of time, because the book of war dead is kept locked away and brought out only for family members. When I arrived at St Paul’s, the enormous dark-red book, bound in faded velvet, had been placed on a table for me to read. Its title was Roll of Honour. A man wearing white gloves opened it, and there, in old-fashioned hand script, on a page of names that all began with “Ch,” I saw my father’s name: Lt. Thomas Patrick Chavis. I wanted to touch it but kept my hand pressed to my waist. I believed, for the first time so deeply, that my father was dead.

My father was one the 28,000 who took off from England in airplanes that never came back. I raised my eyes to read the inscriptions carved in marble around the curved chapel:

They knew not the hour, the day
Nor the manner of their passing.
When far from home
They were called to join that heroic band of airmen
Who had gone before.
May they rest in peace...
The Americans, whose names appear here,
Were part of the price that free men Have been forced to pay to defend
Human liberty and rights.
All who shall hereafter live in freedom
Will be here reminded that to these men and their comrades
We owe a debt to be paid
With grateful remembrance of their sacrifice.

My father’s sacrifice was to lose his life. Mine was to lose a father.

Contemplating these words, I realized that I had not felt gratitude for my father. Instead, I had felt loss, for all that I did not receive from him. I knew that Buddhism has a centuries-old practice of gratitude—grateful remembrance—to ancestors, but I had not applied it in my own life. Now I thought of all that my father had given to me. He was athletic; so am I. He was a writer; so am I. Following in his footsteps, I had dedicated my life’s most productive years to “human liberty and rights.” His gifts to me are many.

I had obtained the official report on the crash of my father’s plane, and with it the names of the ten crewmen who had died with him that day. I knelt there in the chapel at St Paul’s, and suddenly I decided to speak aloud to each of them. Holding the list, I softly spoke the name of each man, his rank and position on the crew, and then the words, “Our boy, our hero, rest in peace.”

I said “boy” because in that war, the soldiers were always called “our boys over there.” Now I am old enough to be the grandmother of these men, and I could talk to them as if they really were my boys.

I said “hero” because I was always told that my father was a hero. I had never accepted that the only father I would ever have was a dead hero. I had wanted simply to have my father. But now, kneeling below the words inscribed for these men, I felt my dead father’s heroism. I felt the continuity of my life. I was at once a little girl and an elder woman. And I was always the same per- son—my father’s daughter.

I have never been in an airplane without thinking of my father. Countless times I have pressed my forehead to an airplane window, watched the surface of the Earth passing below, and thought of his fall through the air. What did he feel? What did he think of?

Now, kneeling in St Paul’s, I opened myself to his consciousness, and I was suddenly certain that my father thought of me, his baby daughter, as he fell to earth. For he had left a lot of evidence behind of his attachment, writing often in letters to his mother of how much he loved me and of his hopes for me.

I spoke to him in the chapel as though he could hear me. What I wanted to tell him was that I, his little daughter, was all right.

Although I often spoke to my father when I was young, this was the first I had spoken to him since I was twenty-seven years old. I was a lonely single mother of two young children then, sharing a cheap, dark, two-bedroom apartment with another young mother and her baby. We were both poor, without protection in the world, and terribly sad. I was folding laundry and imagining my father watching over me. Suddenly I thought, as if awakened from a dream, “No one is here. I am alone.”

With a newfound kind of grown-up toughness, I decided then and there that my father-seeking reveries were unhealthy. I needed to live in the reality of my life, hard though it was. After that, whenever I caught myself pretending he was there, I stopped myself, and gradually, the habit broke.

But that day in St Paul’s, wearing my blue dress with my father’s Purple Heart pinned to it, I felt that whether he could hear me or not, it was good to talk to my father sometimes. That I never needed to stop believing that he in some way protects me. What a wonderful relief it was to re-imagine my father as a benign presence looking over my shoulder. There, I feel, he will remain peacefully for the rest of my life.


For thirty-two years, Melody Ermachild Chavis worked as an investigator for the defense of people facing the death penalty in the United States. Her search for the roots of violence led to the writing of two books: a memoir, Altars in the Street, and a biography, Meena, Heroine of Afghanistan, as well as many essays. Chavis’ work is sustained by her Buddhist practice. She lives in Berkeley, California, and Wiesbaden, Germany.

From the January 2013 Shambhala Sun magazine. Click here to see more from this issue.

To order a copy of this issue, click here.

Illustration: Tara Hardy