The Tibetan Book of the Dead or the Bardo Thodol is attributed to the eighth century Indian Buddhist adept Padmasambhava…

who is responsible for bringing Buddhism to Tibet. In this sacred text there is described three stages that occur between death and rebirth called Bardos. Including the stages of life there are a total of six bardo states, as listed below.

The Bardo of Waking Life
The Bardo of Dreaming
The Bardo of Meditating

The Bardo of Dying
The Bardo of Experiencing Reality
The Bardo of Rebirth

The Bardo Thödol’s primary goal is to provide guidance for a person passing through The Bardo of Dying. Giving highly detailed instructions on how one can pass through these mythical afterlife states, the ultimate goal is for one to be reborn in the highest form of rebirth possible.

According to the Tibetan Buddhism, both proficient yogic practitioners as well as ordinary people can be helped to find their way through the confusing and terrifying afterlife states. If one understands and recognizes the bardo state that we reside in we can choose the most enlightened or conscious options available to us. For this reason many regard this not only as a guide for dying, but also living properly.

The teachings urge that in the bardo of the moment of dying, one is to maintain one-pointed concentration on the “clear light” and to pay close attention to releasing one’s attachments to the physical body and world. The verse to aid this state of being that was translated by Ralph Metzner in his essay “A New Look At The Psychedelic Book Of The Dead” is as follows:

Now as the bardo of dying draws upon me,
I will abandon desires and cravings for worldly objects.
Entering without distraction into the clarity of the teachings,
I will merge my awareness into the space of the Uncreated.
The time has come to let go this body of flesh and blood –
It is merely a temporary and illusory shell.

If fear and confusion occurs during this initial transistion into the Bardo of Dying due to insufficient concentration and preparation, one will wander through the “intermediate realms” of the second bardo realm. In this realm, called the Bardo of Experiencing Reality, there are visionary encounters with beings of light, similar to angels, or dark and intimidating beings, likened to demons.

The teachings of the sacred text advice not to be overwhelmed by either of the polar visions, but to remember that they are only projections of one’s own mind. They are “the reflections and projections of your mind and life, as seen in the mirror held up by the death god Yama. If you stay centered in the middle path between the extremes of dualistic judgment, you will still be able to pass through to the pure light realms of the higher dimensions.” Metzner’s translation for this guide of transition from this state is as follows:

Now as I enter into the bardo of visions,
I will abandon all awe and terror that may arise.
Recognizing whatever appears as my own thought-forms,
As apparitions and visions in this intermediate state.
This is a crucial turning point on the path.
I will not fear the peaceful and terrifying visions in my mind.

If there is a lack of training or preperation during this transisiton into the final bardo, one will lapse into unconsciousness and find itself seeking rebirth, in which one wanders about seeking ordinary existence and to find a family to be born into. This bardo ends with the process of selecting another human incarnation.

The remaining instructions in the bardo of rebirth phase consist of how to first delay being born at all, and then on choosing the best kind of human rebirth. At a point during this stage the bardo traveler will have to respond to visions of men and women copulating, but is urged by the teachings not to join the activity, though one may be tempted to do so. It is as if the message is “Do not rush into incarnation. Staying with sonscious intention at the very beginning is more likely to lead to a more conscious human lifetime.”

Ralph Metzner suggests that these visions of couples copulating are the soul’s vision of its own conception. At this choice point, the soul chooses which couple to have as parents. The Bardo Thödol says that if the voyager feels attraction to the female and aversion to the male, he will be reborn as male, and vice versa. To summarize this stage, the delay of return from the light and wisdom filled heaven-worlds should be held as long as possible, until an infinite amount of time has elapsed, and reincarnation feels natural. At the time of that choice Metzner’s translation of the sacred text’s guidance is as follows:

Now, as the bardo of rebirth dawns upon me,
I will hold one-pointedly to a single wish –
Continuously direction intention with a positive outlook.
Delaying the return to Earth-Life as long as possible.
I will concentrate on pure energy and love,
And cast off jealousy while meditating on the Guru Father-Mother.

This rebirth phase ends with the physical birth of the traveler when we start cycling through the three bardos of waking life. We hope this sheds insight into the mystical beliefs of those who practice meditation, yoga and psychedelic voyaging and that it aids in both life and death transitions.

Source: Time Wheel

by Melvin McLeod: Richard Gere talks about his many years of Buddhist practice, his devotion to his teacher the Dalai Lama, and his work for Tibetan freedom….

I suppose it’s a sign of our current cynicism that we find it hard to believe celebrities can also be serious people. The recent prominence of “celebrity Buddhists” has brought some snide comments in the press, and even among Buddhists, but personally I am very appreciative of the actors, directors, musicians and other public figures who have brought greater awareness to the cause of Tibetan freedom and the value of Buddhist practice. These are fine artists and thoughtful people, some Buddhists, some not, among them Martin Scorsese, Leonard Cohen, Adam Yauch, Michael Stipe, Patti Smith, and of course, Richard Gere. I met Gere at his office in New York recently, and we talked about his many years of Buddhist practice, his devotion to his teacher the Dalai Lama, and his work on behalf of the dharma and the cause of the Tibetan people.

—Melvin McLeod

Melvin McLeod: What was your first encounter with Buddhism?

Richard Gere: I have two flashes. One, when I actually encountered the written dharma, and two, when I met a teacher. But before that, I was engaged in philosophical pursuit in school. So I came to it through Western philosophers, basically Bishop Berkeley.

Melvin McLeod: “If a tree falls in the forest and no one hears it, did it really happen?”

Richard Gere: Yes. Subjective idealism was his thesis—reality is a function of mind. It was basically the “mind only” school that he was preaching. Quite radical, especially for a priest. I was quite taken with him. The existentialists were also interesting to me. I remember carrying around a copy of Being and Nothingness, without knowing quite why I was doing it. Later I realized that “nothingness” was not the appropriate word. “Emptiness” was really what they were searching for—not a nihilistic view but a positive one.

My first encounter with Buddhist dharma would be in my early twenties. I think like most young men I was not particularly happy. I don’t know if I was suicidal, but I was pretty unhappy, and I had questions like, “Why anything?” Realizing I was probably pushing the edges of my own sanity, I was exploring late-night bookshops reading everything I could, in many different directions. Evans-Wentz’s books on Tibetan Buddhism had an enormous impact on me. I just devoured them.

Melvin McLeod: So many of us were inspired by those books. What did you find in them that appealed to you?

Richard Gere: They had all the romance of a good novel, so you could really bury yourself in them, but at the same time, they offered the possibility that you could live here and be free at the same time. I hadn’t even considered that as a possibility—I just wanted out—so the idea that you could be here and be out at the same time—emptiness—was revolutionary.

So the Buddhist path, particularly the Tibetan approach, was obviously drawing me, but the first tradition that I became involved in was Zen. My first teacher was Sasaki Roshi. I remember going out to L.A. for a three day sesshin [Zen meditation program]. I prepared myself by stretching my legs for months and months so I could get through it.

I had a kind of magical experience with Sasaki Roshi, a reality experience. I realized, this is work, this is work. It’s not about flying through the air; it’s not about any of the magic or the romance. It’s serious work on your mind. That was an important part of the path for me.

Sasaki Roshi was incredibly tough and very kind at the same time. I was a total neophyte and didn’t know anything. I was cocky and insecure and fucked up. But within that I was serious about wanting to learn. It got to the point at the end of the sesshin where I wouldn’t even go to the dokusan [interview with the Zen master]. I felt I was so ill-equipped to deal with the koans that they had to drag me in. Finally, it got to where I would just sit there, and I remember him smiling at that point. “Now we can start working,” he said. There was nothing to say—no bullshit, nothing.

Melvin McLeod: When someone has such a strong intuitive connection, Buddhism suggests that it’s because of karma, some past connection with the teachings.

Richard Gere: Well, I’ve asked teachers about that—you know, what led me to this? They’d just laugh at me, like I thought there was some decision to it or it was just chance. Well, karma doesn’t work that way. Obviously there’s some very clear and definite connection with the Tibetans or this would not have happened. My life would not have expressed itself this way.

I think I’ve always felt that practice was my real life. I remember when I was just starting to practice meditation—24 years old, trying to come to grips with my life. I was holed up in my shitty little apartment for months at a time, just doing tai chi and doing my best to do sitting practice. I had a very clear feeling that I’d always been in meditation, that I’d never left meditation. That it was a much more substantial reality than what we normally take to be reality. That was very clear to me even then, but it’s taken me this long in my life to bring it out into the world more, through more time practicing, watching my mind, trying to generate bodhicitta.

Melvin McLeod: When did you meet the Dalai Lama for the first time?

Richard Gere: I had been a Zen student for five or six years before I met His Holiness in India. We started out with a little small talk and then he said, “Oh, so you’re an actor?” He thought about that a second, and then he said, “So when you do this acting and you’re angry, are you really angry? When you’re acting sad, are you really sad? When you cry, are you really crying?” I gave him some kind of actor answer, like it was more effective if you really believed in the emotion that you were portraying. He looked very deeply into my eyes and just started laughing. Hysterically. He was laughing at the idea that I would believe emotions are real, that I would work very hard to believe in anger and hatred and sadness and pain and suffering.

That first meeting took place in Dharmsala in a room where I see him quite often now. I can’t say that the feeling has changed drastically. I am still incredibly nervous and project all kinds of things on him, which he’s used to at this point. He cuts through all that stuff very quickly, because his vows are so powerful, so all-encompassing, that he is very effective and skillful at getting to the point. Because the only reason anyone would want to see him is that they want to remove suffering from their consciousness.

It completely changed my life the first time I was in the presence of His Holiness. No question about it. It wasn’t like I felt, “Oh, I’m going to give away all my possessions and go to the monastery now,” but it quite naturally felt that this was what I was supposed to do—work with these teachers, work within this lineage, learn whatever I could, bring myself to it. In spite of varying degrees of seriousness and commitment since then, I haven’t really fallen out of that path.

Melvin McLeod: Does His Holiness work with you personally, cutting your neuroses in the many ways that Buddhist teachers do, or does he teach you more by the example of his being?

Richard Gere: There’s no question that His Holiness is my root guru, and he’s been quite tough with me at times. I’ve had to explain to people who sometimes have quite a romantic vision of His Holiness that at times he’s been cross with me, but it was very skillful. At the moment he did it, I’m not saying it was pleasant for me, but there was no ego attachment from his side. I’m very thankful that he trusts me enough to be the mirror for me and not pull any punches. Mind you, the first meetings were not that way; I think he was aware how fragile I was and was being very careful. Now I think he senses that my seriousness about the teachings has increased and my own strength within the teachings has increased. He can be much tougher on me.

Melvin McLeod: The Gelugpa school of Tibetan Buddhism puts a strong emphasis on analysis. What drew you to the more intellectual approach?

Richard Gere: Yeah, it’s funny. I think what I probably would have been drawn to instinctively was Dzogchen [the Great Perfection teachings of the Nyingma school]. I think the instinct that drew me to Zen is the same one that would have taken me to Dzogchen.

Melvin McLeod: Space.

Richard Gere: The non-conceptual. Just go right to the non-conceptual space. Recently I’ve had some Dzogchen teachers who’ve been kind enough to help me, and I see how Dzogchen empowers much of the other forms of meditation that I practice. Many times Dzogchen has really zapped me into a fresh vision and allowed me to see a kind of limited track that I was falling into through conditioning and basic laziness.

But overall, I think the wiser choice for me is to work with the Gelugpas, although space is space wherever it is. I think the analytical approach—kind of finding the non-boundaries of that space—is important. In a way, one gets stability from being able to order the rational mind. When space is not there for you, the intellectual work will still keep you buoyed up. I still find myself in situations where my emotions are out of control and the anger comes up, and it’s very difficult to enter pure white space at that point. So the analytical approach to working with the mind is enormously helpful. It’s something very clear to fall back on and very stabilizing.

Melvin McLeod: What was the progression of practices for you, to the extent that you can talk about it, after you entered the vajrayana path?

Richard Gere: I’m a little hesitant to talk about this because, one, I don’t claim to know much, and two, being a celebrity these things get quoted out of context and sometimes it’s not beneficial. I can say that whatever forms of meditation I’ve taken on, they still involve the basic forms of refuge, generation of bodhicitta [awakened mind and heart] and dedication of merit to others. Whatever level of the teachings that my teachers allow me to hear, they still involve these basic forms.

Overall, tantra has become less romantic to me. It seems more familiar. That’s an interesting stage in the process, when that particular version of reality becomes more normal. I’m not saying it’s normal, in the sense of ordinary or mundane, but I can sense it being as normal as what I took to be reality before. I can trust that.

Melvin McLeod: What dharma books have meant a lot to you?

Richard Gere: People are always asking me what Buddhist books I would recommend. I always suggest Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind to someone who says, “How can I start?” I’ll always include something by His Holiness. His book Kindness, Clarity and Compassion is extraordinarily good. There’s wonderful stuff in there. Jeffrey Hopkins’ The Tantric Distinction is very helpful. There are so many.

Melvin McLeod: You go to India often. Does that give you the opportunity to practice in a less distracted environment?

Richard Gere: Actually it’s probably more distracting! When I go there, I’m just a simple student like everyone else, but I’m also this guy who can help. When I’m in India there are a lot of people who require help and it’s very difficult to say no. So it’s not the quietest time in my life, but just being in an environment where everyone is focusing on the dharma and where His Holiness is the center of that focus is extraordinary.

Melvin McLeod: When you’re in Dharmsala do you have the opportunity to study with the Dalai Lama or other teachers there?

Richard Gere: I’ll try to catch up with all my teachers. Some of them are hermits up in the hills, but they come down when His Holiness gives teachings. It’s a time to catch up on all of it, and just remember. For me, it means remembering. Life here is an incredible distraction and it’s very easy to get off track. Going there is an opportunity to remember, literally, what the mission is, why we’re here.

Melvin McLeod: Here you’re involved in a world of film-making that people think of as extremely consuming, high-powered, even cut-throat.

Richard Gere: That’s all true. But it’s like everyone else’s life, too. It just gets into the papers, that’s all. It’s the same emotions. The same suffering. The same issues. No difference.

Melvin McLeod: Do you find that you have a slightly split quality to your life, going back and forth between these worlds?

Richard Gere: I find that more and more my involvement in a career, in a normal householder life, is a great challenge for deepening the teachings inside of me. If I weren’t out in the marketplace, there’s no way I would be able to really face the nooks and crannies and darkness inside of me. I just wouldn’t see it. I’m not that tough; I’m not that smart. I need life telling me who I am, showing me my mind constantly. I wouldn’t see it in a cave. The problem with me is I would probably just find some blissful state, if I could, and stay there. That would be death. I don’t want that. As I said, I’m not an extraordinary practitioner. I know pretty much who I am. It’s good for me to be in the world.

Melvin McLeod: Are there any specific ways you try to bring dharma into your work, beyond working with your mind and trying to be a decent human being?

Richard Gere: Well, that’s a lot! That’s serious shit.

Melvin McLeod: That’s true. But those are the challenges we all face. I was just wondering if you try to bring a Buddhist perspective to the specific world of film?

Richard Gere: In film, we’re playing with something that literally fragments reality, and being aware of the fragmentation of time and space I think lends itself to the practice, to loosening the mind. There is nothing real about film. Nothing. Even the light particles that project the film can’t be proven to exist. Nothing is there. We know that when we’re making it; we’re the magicians doing the trick. But even we get caught up in thinking that it is all real—that these emotions are real, that this object really exists, that the camera is picking up some reality.

On the other hand, there is some magical sense that the camera sees more than our eyes do. It sees into people in a way that we don’t normally. So there’s a vulnerability to being in front of the camera that one doesn’t have to endure in normal life. There’s a certain amount of pressure and stress in that. You are being seen, you are really being seen, and there is no place to hide.

Melvin McLeod: But there’s no way you actually work with the product to…?

Richard Gere: You mean teaching through that? Well, I think these things are far too mysterious to ever do that consciously, no. Undoubtedly, as ill-equipped to be a good student as I am, I’ve had a lot of teachings, and some have stuck. Somehow they do communicate-not because of me, but despite me. So I think there is value there. It’s the same as everyone: whatever positive energies have touched them in myriad lifetimes are going to come through somehow. When you look into their eyes, when the camera comes in for a closeup, there’s something there that is mysterious. There’s no way you can write it, there’s no way you can plan it, but a camera will pick it up in a different way than someone does sitting across the table.

Melvin McLeod: How comfortable are you with your role as the spokesman for the dharma?

Richard Gere: For the dharma? I’ve never, ever accepted that, and I never will. I’m not a spokesman for dharma. I lack the necessary qualities.

Melvin McLeod: But you are always being asked in public about being a Buddhist.

Richard Gere: I can talk about that only as a practitioner, from the limited point of view that I have. Although it’s been many years since I started, I can’t say that I know any more now than I did then. I can’t say I have control over my emotions; I don’t know my mind. I’m lost like everyone else. So I’m certainly not a leader. In the actual course of things, I talk about these things, but only in the sense that this is what my teachers have given me. Nothing from me.

Melvin McLeod: When you are asked about Buddhism, are there certain themes you return to that you feel are helpful, such as compassion?

Richard Gere: Absolutely. I will probably discuss wisdom and compassion in some form, that there are two poles we are here to explore—expanding our minds and expanding our hearts. At some point hopefully being able to encompass the entire universe inside mind, and the same thing with heart, with compassion, hopefully both at the same time. Inseparable.

Melvin McLeod: When you say that, I’m reminded of something that struck me when I saw the Dalai Lama speak. He was teaching about compassion, as he so often does, but I couldn’t help but wonder what would happen if he spoke more to a wider audience about the Buddhist understanding of wisdom, that is, emptiness. I just wondered what would happen if this revered spiritual leader said to the world, well, you know, all of this doesn’t really exist in any substantive way.

Richard Gere: Well, the Buddha had many turnings of the wheel of dharma, and I think His Holiness functions in the same way. If we are so lost in our animal natures, the best way to start to get out of that is to learn to be kind. Someone asked His Holiness, how can you teach a child to care about and respect living things? He said, see if you can get them to love and respect an insect, something we instinctively are repulsed by. If they can see its basic sentience, its potential, the fullness of what it is, with basic kindness, then that’s a huge step.

Melvin McLeod: I was just reading where the Dalai Lama said that he thinks mother’s love is the best symbol for love and compassion, because it is totally disinterested.

Richard Gere: Nectar. Nectar is that! [In vajrayana practice, spiritual blessings are visualized as nectar descending on the meditator.] That’s mother’s milk; that’s coming right from mom. Absolutely.

Melvin McLeod: Although you are cautious in speaking about the dharma, you are a passionate spokesman on the issue of freedom for Tibet.

Richard Gere: I’ve gone through a lot of different phases with that. The anger that I might have felt twenty years ago is quite different now. We’re all in the same boat here, all of us—Hitler, the Chinese, you, me, what we did in Central America. No one is devoid of the ignorance that causes all these problems. If anything, the Chinese are just creating the cause of horrendous future lifetimes for themselves, and one cannot fail to be compassionate towards them for that.

When I talk to Tibetans who were in solitary confinement for twenty or twenty-five years, they say to me, totally from their heart, that the issue is larger than what they suffered at the hands of their torturer, and that they feel pity and compassion for this person who was acting out animal nature. To be in the presence of that kind of wisdom of heart and mind—you can never go back after that.

Melvin McLeod: It is remarkable that an entire people, generally, is imbued with a spirit like that.

Richard Gere: I’m convinced that it is because it was state-oriented. Obviously, problems come with that, with no separation of church and state. But I am convinced that the great dharma kings manifested to actually create a society based on these ideas. Their institutions were designed to create good-hearted people; everything in the society was there to feed it. That became decadent—there were bad periods, there were good periods, whatever. But the gist of the society was to create good-hearted people, bodhisattvas, to create a very strong environment where people could achieve enlightenment. Imagine that in America! I mean, we have no structure for enlightenment. We have a very strong Christian heritage and Jewish heritage, one of compassion, one of altruism. Good people. But we have very little that encourages enlightenment—total liberation.

Melvin McLeod: Looking at how human rights violations have come to the forefront of world consciousness, such as in Tibet and South Africa before that, the work of celebrities such as yourself who have been able to use their fame skillfully has been an important factor.

Richard Gere: I hope that’s true. It’s kind of you to say. It’s an odd situation. Previously I’d worked on Central America and some other political and human rights issues, and got to know the ropes a bit in working with Congress and the State Department. But that didn’t really apply to this situation. Tibet was too far away, and there had been extremely limited American involvement there.

I found also that the question of His Holiness in terms of a political movement was very tricky. It’s a non-violent movement, which is a problem in itself—you don’t get headlines with nonviolence. And His Holiness doesn’t see himself as Gandhi; he doesn’t create dramatic, operatic situations.

So we’ve ended up taking a much steadier kind of approach. It’s not about drama. It’s about, little by little, building truth, and I think it’s probably been deeper because of that. The senators, congressmen, legislators and parliamentarians who have got involved go way beyond what they would normally give to a cause they believed in.

I think the universality of His Holiness’ words and teachings have made this so much bigger than just Tibet. When His Holiness won the Nobel Peace Prize, there was a quantum leap. He is not seen as solely a Tibetan anymore; he belongs to the world. We were talking before about what the camera picks up—just a picture of His Holiness seems to communicate so much. Just to see his face. It’s arresting, and at the same time it’s opening. You can imagine what it would have been like to see the Buddha. Just to see his face would put you so many steps ahead. I think a lot of what we have done is just putting His Holiness in situations where he could touch as many people as possible, which he does every time with impeccable bodhicitta.

I keep saying Tibet will be taken care of in the process, but it’s about saving every sentient being, and as long as we keep our eyes on that prize, Tibet will be all right. Of course there are immediate issues to deal with in Tibet. We work on those all the time. Although we had reason to believe a more open communication with the Chinese was evolving, the optimism generated by Clinton’s visit to China has not panned out. In fact, the Tibetans, as well as the pro-democracy Chinese, are experiencing the most repressive period since the late eighties, since Tienanmen Square.

Melvin McLeod: I’m always impressed with a point the Dalai Lama makes which is very similar to what my own teacher, Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche, presented in the Shambhala teachings. That is the need for a universal spirituality based on simple truths of human nature that transcends any particular religion, or the need for formalized religion at all. This strikes me as an extraordinarily important message.

Richard Gere: Well, I think it’s true. His Holiness says that what we all have in common is an appreciation of kindness and compassion; all the religions have this. Love. We all lean towards love.

Melvin McLeod: But even beyond that, he points out that billions of people don’t practice a religion at all.

Richard Gere: But they have the religion of kindness. They do. Everyone responds to kindness.

Melvin McLeod: It’s fascinating that a major religious leader espouses in effect a religion of no religion.

Richard Gere: Sure, that’s what makes him larger than Tibet.

Melvin McLeod: It makes him larger than Buddhism.

Richard Gere: Much larger. The Buddha was larger than Buddhism.

Melvin McLeod: You are able to sponsor a number of projects in support of the dharma and of Tibetan independence.

Richard Gere: I’m in kind of a unique position in that I do have some cash in my foundation, so I’m able to offer some front money to various groups to help them get projects started. Sponsoring dharma books is important to me—translation, publishing—but I think the most important thing I can do is help sponsor teachings. To work with His Holiness and help sponsor teachings in Mongolia, India, the United States and elsewhere-nothing gives me more joy.

The program we’re doing this summer is four days of teachings by the Dalai Lama in New York. August 12 to 14 will be the formal teaching by His Holiness on Kamalashila’s “Middle-length Stages of Meditation” and “The Thirty-seven Practices of the Bodhisattvas.” That’s at the Beacon Theater and there are about 3,000 tickets available. I’m sure those will sell quickly. If people can’t get into that, there’s going to be a free public teaching in Central Park on the fifteenth. We’re guessing there will be space for twenty-five to forty thousand people, so whoever wants to come will be able to. His Holiness will give a teaching on the Eight Verses of Mind Training, a very powerful lojong teaching, one of my favorites actually. Then His Holiness will give a wang, a long life empowerment of White Tara.

I’ve seen His Holiness give bodhicitta teachings like these, and no one can walk away without crying. He touches so deep into the heart. He gave a teaching in Bodh Gaya last year on Khunu Lama’s “In Praise of Bodhicitta,” which is a long poems Just thinking about it now, I’m starting to crys So beautiful. When he was teaching on Kunu Lama’s “In Praise of Bodhicitta,” who was his own teachers whooosh! We were inside his heart, in the most extraordinary way. A place you can’t be told about, you can’t read about, nothing. You’re in the presence of Buddha. I’ve had a lot of teachers who give wonderful teachings on wisdom, but to see someone who really, really has the big bodhicitta, real expanded bodhicittas.

So those are the teachings that I believe His Holiness is here to give. That’s what touches.

Source: Lions Roar

From the Buddhist perspective, true love is said to consist of four major qualities:

1. Maitri, Loving-Kindness

Maitri comes from the Sanskrit word for friend. The root of love for ourselves and others is friendship. You must learn to befriend yourself before even thinking of loving other people. If you are constantly at war with yourself, how do you think you can live peacefully with another? If you cannot love yourself, you cannot love anyone else.

2. Karuna, Compassion

Compassion, in this case, is the desire to relieve the suffering of others. The notion of the word karuna is that having related to our own suffering we know how scary the darkest parts of our mind can be. We then see others grappling with similar afflictions and our heart goes out to them quite naturally. We have empathy for them. And, thankfully, because we have learned to befriend ourselves, we know how to skillfully help others do the same thing. When we realize that we can help others because suffering is the universal affliction, we can all be there for each other.

3. Mudita, Sympathetic Joy

The flip side of understanding someone else’s suffering and wanting to relieve it is sharing in his or her joy. The term mudita is sometimes translated as sympathetic joy or even altruistic joy. It’s the delight you have in appreciating your own experience, whatever that experience may be, and sharing that with another. You are there with them when they suffer and when they are happy. It’s of course rooted in the fact that you are already comfortable with the times when you suffer and when you are happy. You are able to weather both on your own, so now you can weather them with another person.

4. Upeksha, Equanimity

Sometimes people think equanimity is a feeling of being completely at peace. However, if you turn to the definition in any dictionary, you will discover that it actually means the ability to remain calm in the face of complete uncertainty. When you are free-falling in love, you are able to practice equanimity.

If you take these four qualities to heart, you will be able to love more fully. I have been working with them for some years and they have changed me tremendously. I fall in love all the time. When I am at my best I fall in love a half dozen times a day.

I notice after I have been practicing meditations regularly and in longer periods than normal, I walk into the world and feel like my heart can accommodate anything. When I see a playful puppy I fall in love. When I spy a new couple nuzzling against one another on the train I fall in love. When I walk by a group of friends reconnecting I fall in love. When my heart is open I find I am less concentrated on me and my concerns and more available to the world around me. As a result I am exposed to many things every day that I can love wholeheartedly.

When we learn to love, we create space for more than just loving ourselves and one other being. We manifest a love that exists way beyond what we conceive of as possible. We manifest a love that can embrace the whole world, where everyone-including the people we like and those we don’t and those we don’t even know-can experience our love. That is the power of an open heart.

I want to be remembered as someone who knew how to love. I know that through loving practice I can have an impact on this earth way beyond what I might physically do in this lifetime. Through loving-kindness, compassion, sympathetic joy, and equanimity I believe I can fall in love with everyone. It won’t be scary; it will be liberating. I enjoy falling in love.

I co-wrote How To Love Yourself and Sometimes Other People with my great friend Meggan Watterson. We each bring our unique perspective. 

Source: Heal Your Life

by John Welwood: Living with someone we love, with all the joys and challenges, is one of the best ways to grow spiritually…

But real awakening only happens, says renowned psychologist John Welwood, in the charnel ground where we acknowledge and work with our wounds, fears, and illusions.

While most people would like to have healthy, satisfying relationships in their lives, the truth is that everyone has a hard time with intimate partnerships. The poet Rilke understood just how challenging they could be when he penned his classic statement, “For one person to love another, this is the most difficult of all our tasks.”

Rilke isn’t suggesting it’s hard to love or to have loving-kindness. Rather, he is speaking about how hard it is to keep loving someone we live with, day by day, year after year. After numerous hardships and failures, many people have given up on intimate relationship, regarding the relational terrain as so fraught with romantic illusion and emotional hazards that it is no longer worth the energy.

Although modern relationships are particularly challenging, their very difficulty presents a special arena for personal and spiritual growth. To develop more conscious relationships requires becoming conversant with how three different dimensions of human existence play out within them: ego, person, and being.

Every close relationship involves these three levels of interaction that two partners cycle through—ego to ego, person to person, and being to being. While one moment two people may be connecting being to being in pure openness, the next moment their two egos may fall into deadly combat. When our partners treat us nicely, we open—“Ah, you’re so great.” But when they say or do something threatening, it’s “How did I wind up with you?” Since it can be terribly confusing or devastating when the love of our life suddenly turns into our deadliest enemy, it’s important to hold a larger vision that allows us to understand what is happening here.

Relationship as Alchemy

When we fall in love, this usually ushers in a special period, one with its own distinctive glow and magic. Glimpsing another person’s beauty and feeling, our heart opening in response provides a taste of absolute love, a pure blend of openness and warmth. This being-to-being connection reveals the pure gold at the heart of our nature, qualities like beauty, delight, awe, deep passion and kindness, generosity, tenderness, and joy.

Yet opening to another also flushes to the surface all kinds of conditioned patterns and obstacles that tend to shut this connection down: our deepest wounds, our grasping and desperation, our worst fears, our mistrust, our rawest emotional trigger points. As a relationship develops, we often find that we don’t have full access to the gold of our nature, for it remains embedded in the ore of our conditioned patterns. And so we continually fall from grace.

It’s important to recognize that all the emotional and psychological wounding we carry with us from the past is relational in nature: it has to do with not feeling fully loved. And it happened in our earliest relationships—with our caretakers—when our brain and body were totally soft and impressionable. As a result, the ego’s relational patterns largely developed as protection schemes to insulate us from the vulnerable openness that love entails. In relationship the ego acts as a survival mechanism for getting needs met while fending off the threat of being hurt, manipulated, controlled, rejected, or abandoned in ways we were as a child. This is normal and totally understandable. Yet if it’s the main tenor of a relationship, it keeps us locked in complex strategies of defensiveness and control that undermine the possibility of deeper connection.

Thus to gain greater access to the gold of our nature in relationship, a certain alchemy is required: the refining of our conditioned defensive patterns. The good news is that this alchemy generated betweentwo people also furthers a larger alchemy within them. The opportunity here is to join and integrate the twin poles of human existence: heaven, the vast space of perfect, unconditional openness, and earth, our imperfect, limited human form, shaped by worldly causes and conditions. As the defensive/controlling ego cooks and melts down in the heat of love’s influence, a beautiful evolutionary development starts to emerge—the genuine person, who embodies a quality of very human relational presence that is transparent to open-hearted being, right in the midst of the dense confines of worldly conditioning.

Relationship as Charnel Ground

To clarify the workings of this alchemy, a more gritty metaphor is useful, one that comes from the tantric traditions of Buddhism and Hinduism: relationship as charnel ground. In many traditional Asian societies, the charnel ground was where people would bring dead bodies, to be eaten by vultures and jackals. From the tantric yogi’s perspective, this was an ideal place to practice, because it is right at the crossroads of life, where birth and death, fear and fearlessness, impermanence and awakening unfold right next to each other. Some things are dying and decaying, others are feeding and being fed, while others are being born out of the decay. The charnel ground is an ideal place to practice because it is right at the crossroads of life, where one cannot help but feel the rawness of human existence.

Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche described the charnel ground as “that great graveyard, in which the complexities of samsara and nirvana lie buried.” Samsara is the conditioned mind that clouds our true nature, while nirvana is the direct seeing of this nature. As Trungpa Rinpoche describes this daunting crossroads in one of his early seminars:

It’s a place to die and be born, equally, at the same time, it’s simply our raw and rugged nature, the ground where we constantly puke and fall down, constantly make a mess. We are constantly dying, we are constantly giving birth. We are eating in the charnel ground, sitting in it, sleeping on it, having nightmares on it… Yet it does not try to hide its truth about reality. There are corpses lying all over the place, loose arms, loose hands, loose internal organs, and flowing hairs all over the place, jackals and vultures are roaming about, each one devising its own scheme for getting the best piece of flesh.

Many of us have a cartoon-like notion of relational bliss: that it should provide a steady state of security or solace that will save us from having to face the gritty, painful, difficult areas of life. We imagine that finding or marrying the right person will spare us from having to deal with such things as loneliness, disappointment, despair, terror, or disintegration. Yet anyone who has been married for a long time probably has some knowledge of the charnel ground quality of relationship—corpses all over the place, and jackals and vultures roaming about looking for the best piece of flesh. Trungpa Rinpoche suggests that if we can work with the “raw and rugged situation” of the charnel ground, “then some spark or sympathy or compassion, some giving in or opening can begin to take place. The chaos that takes place in your neurosis is the only home ground that you can build the mandala of awakening on.” This last sentence is a powerful one, for it suggests that awakening happens only through facing the chaos of our neurotic patterns. Yet this is often the last thing we want to deal with in relationships.

Trungpa Rinpoche suggests that our neurosis is built on the fact that:

…large areas of our life have been devoted to trying to avoid discovering our own experience. Now [in the charnel ground, in our relationships] we have a chance to explore that large area which exists in our being, which we’ve been trying to avoid. That seems to be the first message, which may be very grim, but also very exciting. We’re not trying to get away from the charnel ground, we don’t want to build a Hilton hotel in the middle of it. Building the mandala of awakening actually happens on the charnel ground. What is happening on the charnel ground is constant personal exploration, and beyond that, just giving, opening, extending yourself completely to the situation that’s available to you. Being fantastically exposed, and the sense that you could give birth to another world.

This also describes the spiritual potential of intimate involvement with another human being.

Another quote with a similar feeling comes from Swami Rudrananda (known as Rudy, a German teacher who was a student of the Indian saint Swami Nityananda), further describing how to work with neurosis in this way:

Don’t look for perfection in me. I want to acknowledge my own imperfection, I want to understand that that is part of the endlessness of my growth. It’s absolutely useless at this stage in your life, with all of the shit piled up in your closet, to walk around and try to kid yourself about your perfection. Out of the raw material you break down [here he is also speaking of the charnel ground] you grow and absorb the energy. You work yourself from inside out, tearing out, destroying, and finding a sense of nothingness. That nothingness allows God to come in. But this somethingness—ego and prejudices and limitations—is your raw material. If you process and refine it all, you can open consciously. Otherwise, you will never come to anything that represents yourself … The only thing that can create a oneness inside you is the ability to see more of yourself as you work every day to open deeper and say, fine, “I’m short-tempered,” or “Fine, I’m aggressive,” or, “Fine, I love to make money,” or, “I have no feeling for anybody else.” Once you recognize you’re all of these things, you’ll finally be able to take a breath and allow these things to open.

Rudy suggests that we have to acknowledge and embrace our imperfections as spiritual path; therefore grand spiritual pretensions miss the point. In his words, “A man who thinks he has a spiritual life is really an idiot.” The same is true of relationships: beware of thinking you have a “spiritual relationship.” While loving connection provides a glimpse of the gold that lies within, we continually corrupt it by turning it into a commodity, a magical charm to make us feel okay. All the delusions of romantic love follow from there. Focusing on relationship as a spiritual or emotional “fix” actually destroys the possibility of finding deep joy, true ease, or honest connection with another.

Sooner or later relationship brings us to our knees, forcing us to confront the raw and rugged mess of our mental and emotional life. George Orwell points to this devastating quality of human love in a sentence that also has a charnel ground flavor to it: “The essence of being human is that one does not seek perfection, and that one is prepared, in the end, to be defeated, and broken up by life, which is the inevitable price of fastening one’s love upon other human individuals.”

This then is the meaning of the charnel ground: we have to be willing to come apart at the seams, to be dismantled, to let our old ego structures fall apart before we can begin to embody sparks of the essential perfection at the core of our nature. To evolve spiritually, we have to allow these unworked, hidden, messy parts of ourselves to come to the surface. It’s not that the strategic, controlling ego is something bad or some unnecessary, horrible mistake. Rather, it provides the indispensable grist that makes alchemical transformation possible.

This is not a pessimistic view, because some kind of breakdown is usually necessary before any significant breakthrough into new ways of living not so encumbered by past conditioning. Charnel ground, then, is a metaphor for this breakdown/breakthrough process that is an essential part of human growth and evolution, and one of the gifts of a deep, intimate connection is that it naturally sets this process in motion. Yet no one wants to be dismantled. So there are two main ways that people try to abort this process: running away and spiritual bypassing.

The problem with running away when a relationship becomes difficult is that we are also turning away from ourselves and our potential breakthroughs. Fleeing the raw, wounded places in ourselves because we don’t think we can handle them is a form of self-rejection and self-abandonment that turns our feeling body into an abandoned, haunted house. The more we flee our shadowy places, the more they fester in the dark and the more haunted this house becomes. And the more haunted it becomes, the more it terrifies us. This is a vicious circle that keeps us cut off from and afraid of ourselves.

One of the scariest places we encounter in relationship is a deep inner sense of unlove, where we don’t know that we’re truly lovable just for being who we are, where we feel deficient and don’t know our value. This is the raw wound of the heart, where we’re disconnected from our true nature, our inner perfection. Naturally we want to do everything we can to avoid this place, fix it, or neutralize it, so we’ll never have to experience such pain again.

A second way to flee from the challenges of relationship is through spiritual bypassing—using spiritual ideas or practices to avoid or prematurely transcend relative human needs, feelings, personal issues, and developmental tasks. For example, a certain segment of the contemporary spiritual scene has become infected with a facile brand of “advaita-speak,” a one-sided transcendentalism that uses nondual terms and ideas to bypass the challenging work of personal transformation.

Advaita-speak can be very tricky, for it uses absolute truth to disparage relative truth, emptiness to devalue form, and oneness to belittle individuality. The following quotes from two popular contemporary teachers illustrate this tendency: “Know that what appears to be love for another is really love of Self, because other doesn’t exist,” and “The other’s ‘otherness’ stands revealed as an illusion pertaining to the purely human realm, the realm of form.” Notice the devaluation of form and the human realm in the latter statement. By suggesting that only absolute love or being-to-being union is real, these teachers equate the person-to-person element necessary for a transformative love bond with mere ego or illusion.

Yet personal intimacy is a spark flashing out across the divide between self and other. It depends on strong individuals making warm, personal contact, mutually sparking and enriching each other with complementary qualities and energies. This is the meeting of I and Thou, which Martin Buber understood not as an impersonal spiritual union but as a personal communion rooted in deep appreciation of the other’s otherness.

A deep, intimate connection inevitably brings up all our love wounds from the past. This is why many spiritual practitioners try to remain above the fray and impersonal in their relationships—so as not to face and deal with their own unhealed relational wounds. But this keeps the wounding unconscious, causing it to emerge as compulsive shadowy behavior or to dry up passion and juice. Intimate personal connecting cannot evolve unless the old love wounds that block it are faced, acknowledged, and freed up.

As wonderful as moments of being-to-being union can be, the alchemical play of joining heaven and earth in a relationship involves a more subtle and beautiful dance: not losing our twoness in the oneness, while not losing our oneness in the twoness. Personal intimacy evolves out of the dancing-ground of dualities: personal and trans-personal, known and unknown, death and birth, openness and karmic limitation, clarity and chaos, hellish clashes and heavenly bliss. The clash and interplay of these polarities, with all its shocks and surprises, provides a ferment that allows for deep transformation through forcing us to keep waking up, dropping preconceptions, expanding our sense of who we are, and learning to work with all the different elements of our humanity.

When we’re in the midst of this ferment, it may seem like some kind of fiendish plot. We finally find someone we really love and then the most difficult things start emerging: fear, distrust, unlove, disillusion, resentment, blame, confusion. Yet this is a form of love’s grace—that it brings our wounds and defenses forward into the light. For love can only heal what presents itself to be healed. If our woundedness remains hidden, it cannot be healed; the best in us cannot come out unless the worst comes out as well.

So instead of constructing a fancy hotel in the charnel ground, we must be willing to come down and relate to the mess on the ground. We need to regard the wounded heart as a place of spiritual practice. This kind of practice means engaging with our relational fears and vulnerabilities in a deliberate, conscious way, like the yogis of old who faced down the goblins and demons of the charnel grounds.

The only way to be free of our conditioned patterns is through a full, conscious experience of them. This might be called “ripening our karma,” what the Indian teacher Swami Prajnanpad described as bhoga, meaning “deliberate, conscious experience.” He said, “You can only dissolve karma through the bhogaof this karma.” We become free of what we’re stuck in only through meeting and experiencing it directly. Having the bhoga of your karma allows you to digest unresolved, undigested elements of your emotional experience from the past that are still affecting you: how you were hurt or overwhelmed, how you defended yourself against that by shutting down, how you constructed walls to keep people out.

Another term for directly engaging our karma might be “conscious suffering.” This involves saying “yes” to our pain, opening ourselves to it, as it is. This kind of yes doesn’t mean, “I like it, I’m glad it’s like this.” It just means, “Yes, this is what’s happening.” Whatever comes up, you are willing to meet it and have a direct experience of it. For example, if you’re hard-hearted, you have a full experience of that. Then you see how acknowledging this affects you and what comes from doing that.

Bhoga involves learning to ride the waves of our feelings rather than becoming submerged in them. This requires mindfulness of where we are in the cycle of emotional experience. A skilled surfer is aware of exactly where he is on a wave, whereas an unskilled surfer winds up getting creamed. By their very nature, waves are rising fifty percent of the time and falling the other fifty percent. Instead of fighting the down cycles of our emotional life, we need to learn to keep our seat on the surfboard and have a full, conscious experience of going down. Especially in a culture that is addicted to “up,” we especially need our “yes” when the down cycles unfold—to be willing to fall apart, retreat, slow down, be patient, let go. For it’s often at the bottom of a down cycle, when everything looks totally bleak and miserable, that we finally receive a flash of insight that lets us see the hidden contours of some huge ego fixation in which we’ve been stuck all our life. Having a full, conscious experience of the down cycle as it’s occurring, instead of fighting or transcending it, lets us be available for these moments of illumination.

While the highlands of absolute love are most beautiful, few but the saints can spend all their time there. Relative human love is not a peak experience nor a steady state. It wavers, fluctuates, waxes and wanes, changes shape and intensity, soars and crashes. “This is the exalted melancholy of our fate,” writes Buber, describing how moments of I/Thou communion cannot last too very long. Yet though relationships participate fully in the law of impermanence, the good news is that this allows new surprises and revelations to keep arising endlessly.

Relationship as Koan

Relating to the full spectrum of our experience in the relational charnel ground leads to a self-acceptance that expands our capacity to embrace and accept others as well. Usually our view of our partners is colored by what they do for us—how they make us look or feel good, or not—and shaped by our internal movie about what we want them to be. This of course makes it hard to see them for who they are in their own right.

Beyond our movie of the other is a much larger field of personal and spiritual possibilities, what Walt Whitman referred to when he said, “I contain multitudes.” These “multitudes” are what keep a relationship fresh and interesting, but they can only do that if we can accept the ways that those we love are different from us—in their background, values, perspectives, qualities, sensitivities, preferences, ways of doing things, and, finally, their destiny. In the words of Swami Prajnanpad, standing advaita-speak on its head: “To see fully that the other is not you is the way to realizing oneness … Nothing is separate, everything is different … Love is the appreciation of difference.”

Two partners not holding themselves separate, while remaining totally distinct—“not two, not one”—may seem like an impossible challenge in a relationship. Bernard Phillips, an early student of East/West psychology, likens this impossibility of relationship to a Zen koan, a riddle that cannot be solved with the conceptual mind. After continually trying and failing to figure out the answer, Zen students arrive at a genuine solution only in the moment of finally giving up and giving in. In Phillips’ words:

Every human being with whom we seek relatedness is a koan, that is to say, an impossibility. There is no formula for getting along with a human being. No technique will achieve relatedness. I am impossible to get along with; so is each one of you; all our friends are impossible; the members of our families are impossible. How then shall we get along with them? … If you are seeking a real encounter, then you must confront the koan represented by the other person. The koan is an invitation to enter into reality.

In the end, to love another requires dropping all our narcissistic agendas, movies, hopes, and fears, so that we may look freshly and see “the raw other, the sacred other,” just as he or she is. This involves a surrender, or perhaps defeat, as in George Orwell’s words about being “defeated and broken up by life.” What is defeated here, of course, is the ego and its strategies, clearing the way for the genuine person to emerge, the person who is capable of real, full-spectrum contact. The nobility of this kind of defeat is portrayed by Rilke in four powerful lines describing Jacob’s wrestling match with the angel:

Winning does not tempt that man
For this is how he grows:
By being defeated, decisively,
By constantly greater beings.

In relationship, it is two partners’ greater beings, gradually freeing themselves from the prison of conditioned patterns, that bring about this decisive defeat. And as this starts reverberating through their relationship, old expectations finally give way, old movies stop running, and a much larger acceptance than they believed possible can start opening up between them. As they become willing to face and embrace whatever stands between them—old relational wounds from the past, personal pathologies, difficulties hearing and understanding each other, different values and sensitivities—all in the name of loving and letting be, they are invited to “enter into reality.” Then it becomes possible to start encountering each other nakedly, in the open field of nowness, fresh and unfabricated, the field of love forever vibrating with unimagined possibilities.

John Welwood, Ph.D. is a psychotherapist who has been a student of Tibetan Buddhism for more than thirty-five years. His books include Perfect Love, Imperfect Relationships: Healing the Wound of the Heart.

Source: Lions Roar

by Chad Foreman: There is an advanced spiritual practice within the Tibetan Buddhist tradition known as the Rainbow Body practice…

it consists of the practitioner being able to dissolve the course aspects of their body and mind into light at the time of death and even during their lifetime. Thousands of people have witnessed the amazing occurrences including stunned Chinese prison guards who have locked advanced practitioners away in prison cells only to discover they’ve completely vanished.

The rainbow light that is witnessed at the time of death of these advanced practitioners is a manifest symbol of the energies of clear white light which the Meditator has successfully dissolved their physical elements back into. According to the ancient Tibetan spiritual traditions, our planet is alive and sacred; and the five elements of earth, water, fire, air, and space are not just natural resources but can be considered fundamental aspects of a living universe. These five elements also correspond to the five wisdoms of enlightenment which are all aspects of a universal consciousness.  As I mentioned this is an advanced practise but I would like to give an overview here to inspire people to what’s possible within the human condition.

The rainbow body phenomena could be a universal experience not just for Tibetan Meditation Masters. The Christians have become very interested in these cases and a Catholic priest – Father Francis Tiso has studied it in-depth and even went to Tibet in the mid 90’s  to investigate further. He wrote his finding in a Christian publication about the universal potential and implications of the phenomena:

“It suggests that the alleged resurrection of Jesus Christ was not an isolated case, but shines as an example of what may be possible for all human beings.”

Tibetan Buddhist teachings say we are all beings of light and the Rainbow Body training is primarily to remove the blockages and obstacle that prevent this reality to manifest in full view. The Tibetan Buddhist explanation of who we really are consists of  a trinity, as appears in so many other spiritual traditions. The trinity we consist of is:  an omnipresent formless filed of consciousness, a subtle light/sound/bliss energy body and the individual expression of physical appearance. Very similar to what I understand God, the holy spirit and the son to represent. This trinity is a seamless whole that represent different aspects of the one thing.

Greatly realized beings who attain the rainbow body at the time of death leave behind only nails, hair, and occasionally cartilage. They dissolve into the middling level of the trinity; the light/sound/bliss level; represented by the holy spirit in Christianity. The dissolution process may take up to seven days, during which time the body shrinks progressively. There are  incidents of “partial rainbow body attainments” in which the master or yogi halts the dissolution process before it is complete in order to leave behindholy relics for their students. These relics have also been witnessed transforming into crystals or multiplying. I must admit such a thing happened at the Tibetan Buddhist monastery I was living at when the pearl like relics seemingly multiplied over night.

Remarkable and as yet scientifically unexplainable things happen to these great Masters at the time of death.

“The elements of the body shrink as the light aspect of the elements become more apparent and the gross aspect become lessened. The body grows small and takes on a younger and more luminous quality. Sometimes the process is incomplete before the consciousness completely leaves the body. In that case the corpse can be quite small and young looking. Such was the case with H.H. Dudjom Rinpoche, if you go to his stupa (grave) you see he’s quite small looking the size of an 8 years old.”

A further example is found in the research of Friar Francis Tiso of Our Lady of Mount Carmel, who collected eyewitness accounts of the death of Khenpo A-chos in 1998:

“A week before the Khenpo died, a flat rainbow appeared over his house. Those present at his death told Fr. Francis that they saw the wrinkles on his skin disappear and the skin become smooth and shiny like that of a young boy’s…Everyone present noticed a sweet fragrance, like perfume. Outside the hermitage they saw rainbows in the sky…the body was shrinking but [his disciples] saw no signs of decomposition.”

If you hadn’t thought of it already it’s what happened to Obi Wan Kenobi when he allowed himself to be struck down by Darth Vader. His body immediately dissolves into space, however he merged with the force and continues to guide and mentor Luke on his path to Jedi enlightenment. I know Star Wars is just a movie, but it is a pop culture example that millions are familiar with, and yet another idea that George Lucas borrowed from Eastern Mysticism.

There are many tales and legends of the great beings who attain the rainbow body within Tibetan culture. While it is understood that only
highly realized beings reach that state, the many individuals whose storied deaths left the signs and traces that they had attained the body of light are people from peasants and farmers all the way up to the highest lamas and rinpoches. Certain famous historical figures in Tibetan history, including Padmasambhava and Milarepa, are often depicted in paintings in rainbow body form. However, not only do teachers in the modern day recount incidents of the rainbow body from their memories from Tibet, but contemporary masters have attained the rainbow body themselves. It has been unofficially asserted that 13 incidents of the rainbow body have been observed in the last hundred years within just one tradition. Dudjom Rinpoche is one such example, among others, including the 16th Karmapa.

David Wiclock reports that there are over 180,000 documented cases of people transforming into a “light body” after death. He has made a fascinating presentation detailing the events and showing evidence of footprints left behind by numerous Masters who when they achieve a level of realisation in the Rainbody Body practise they can also manipulate matter and leave hand or feet marks in solid rock. This is another widely known phenomena in Tibet and thousands of Buddhists each year go on pilgrimage to the caves where these Masters have literally left their mark:  you can watch Wilcock’s presentation on YouTube here. 

In fact Tibetan Buddhists widely venerate masters and yogis who have achieved this level of realization, for the rainbow body is said to make the enlightened body of the Buddha visible to practitioners who are able to see them. Thus it is a manifestation of the Buddha’s great love and compassion, and gives hope and faith to practitioners. Westerners too, may be reassured by mention of an American who achieved full rainbow body attainment found in Bokar Rinpoche’s book Tara: The Feminine Divine.

by Peter Williams: This dharma essay covers how to work wisely with emotions through mindfulness practice…

Probably more than anything else, emotions are the place of deepest attachment. We define our personalities largely through them – “I am a happy person, a sad person, an eager person” – and we tend to lose meditative awareness anytime emotional states occur. I will focus particularly on difficult emotions, as they tend to be where we get most easily hooked into suffering. The techniques below apply also to easier emotions – such as joy or love – and it is skillful to be aware of them, as this lessens our attachment to them.

Because troublesome states are such big obstacles in our lives, leaning to work with them skillfully offers profound relief from suffering. The essence of this skill is learning to welcome emotions without getting overwhelmed by them, walking a middle path between repression and indulgence. Mindfulness allows one to experience difficult states fully, learn from them, and then watch them disappear all by themselves. In the process, one learns self-compassion, patience, and connection with all humanity, since we are all plagued by emotional turmoil. Over time, one’s relationship with difficulty changes; mindfulness takes what one considers to be emotional “crap” and turns it into manure, fertilizing one’s heart to grow into more openness, tenderness, and joy.

This all leads to the confidence that one’s mind is workable and a newfound sense of freedom that the Tibetan Buddhist tradition likes to call the “lion’s roar.” May it be so for you!

The RAIN Approach

What are emotions? Mindfulness practice shows us that an emotion has three components: thoughts, body sensations, and mood or energy. Thoughts are always involved, body sensations are present frequently, and mood is sometimes part of the experience. How do we work with such energies in our meditation? Vipassana teachers at Insight Meditation Society teach a simple and effective approach encapsulated in the acronym RAIN, which stands for recognize, accept, investigate, and non-identify.

Recognize
This is a big deal. If everyone recognized what they felt, thereby providing the choice to act the emotion out or not, the world would be a completely different place. Imagine if you saw you were angry every time it happened, and could use the pause to decide whether it was skillful to lash out at someone or not? “Being mindful is easy,” says my teacher Joseph Goldstein, “Remembering to be mindful is the hard part.” This is especially true with emotions; it is very hard to remember to be mindful during the intensity of an emotion.

In meditation, when you do recognize an emotion, you can label it with a simple word such as “fear” or “envy.” Brain research shows that “naming is taming,” that labeling an emotion gives one a sense of healthy distance from the experience, allowing it to be more easily observable. Don’t worry too much about getting the label exactly right. The function of the label is just to connect the mind to the present and make the emotion more workable. If you go into too much thinking around which exact emotion you are experiencing, just note, “emotion” or, “feeling.”

Accept
You can’t judge and understand at the same time. If you are judging you are caught in reaction, and you cannot be aware of something if you are reacting to it. In meditation, we stay with our experience, being willing to feel an emotion exactly as it is, without adding layers of interpretation and judgment. This is acceptance. Can we accept so deeply that we can actually be friends with everything that arises? Can we say to anger, or fear, or happiness, “I am your friend, no one can know how you feel but me.” Can we accept so deeply that if we do react, we can notice even that without judgment (which is just more reaction), and come back to the body sensation of the emotion?

We can accept our emotions best by staying grounded in the body sensations associated with them. The body tends to be the place of least charge in the midst of an emotional upheaval. In the midst of fear, it is much easier to stay attentive to the tingling in the belly than it is to stay aware of the fear thoughts. The belly does not say, “Oh my gosh, it’s 6 weeks before the holidays and I have not even begun shopping, and where is all the money going to come from for my 27 cousins and nieces and nephews, not to mention all my siblings.” It just says, “tingle, tingle, tingle.” Which is the easier aspect of anxiety to be with?

We never know our thoughts to be true. Of course, they are sometimes quite relevant and need to be acted upon, but much of the time our thoughts are just so much confused, unclear, anxious and hypothetical background noise. In this acceptance step, we need to accept the storyline of our emotion without judging it, while adopting some ironic distance to the truth of the story. “We’ll see” is my favorite response to a panicked storyline. It encapsulates kindness and wisdom. There is no condemnation of the story, but there’s a lack of reaction to it. This acceptance of the thoughts without believing them is the key to beginning a wise relationship with emotions.

Adopting an attitude of kindness is an especially important part of this acceptance step. As we start to become more mindful, we may begin to notice emotions that conflict with our self-image or that seem inconvenient in certain situations. Because mindfulness gives us such a mirror-like and unflinching take on how we are doing, it forces us to be kind to ourselves.

We must learn to accept our foibles and shortcomings and can be secure in the knowledge that any compassion we give ourselves will be planted in our hearts as a gift that we can then give someone else. As the Dalia Lama says, “My religion is kindness,” and being kind to our rowdy emotional lives is a huge step towards having a full and healthy heart. The phrase “of course” best encapsulates the attitude of kindness one can take towards their emotions. When an emotions arises, no matter what it is, see if you can give it your best grandmotherly (or fatherly) smile, pat in on the head, and say, “Of course.”

Investigate
Something really shifts in our psyche when we start to take interest in what it is like to feel an emotion, rather than being swept away by it. This interest leads us to an experiential, not intellectual, investigation. To investigate emotions, ground your attention in the body, noticing any thoughts that may arise. We don’t ignore the thoughts, but since they can pull us out of the present so easily, we stay with our body sensations, noticing the thoughts in the periphery. It’s as if we were staring at the full moon (our body), and noticing stars in the background (thoughts).

We investigate the emotion in the body. Where is it in the body? Find its boundaries, its center. What is the texture of the sensation? Tingly? Buzzy? Is it hot or cold? Is there pressure? Is it pleasant, unpleasant, or neutral? What happens to it? (Three things can happen to any phenomenon – it can stay the same, increase, or decrease). Answer these questions experientially, by feeling the answer, not by thinking it.

Impermanence. The first lesson of investigation: emotions are impermanent. Meditation shows us that emotions change all the time. They might keep coming back because of a recurring thought. But they dissipate soon after the thoughts dissipate. Impermanence is the great liberator, your true friend. You don’t have to do anything to get rid of an unpleasant emotion but be aware of it.

Impermanence takes care of the rest. Of course, this does not work if you have the agenda to get rid of the emotion by being mindful of it. This is based on aversion, and aversion will be the underground spring that keeps feeding the emotion. However, if we are truly interested in finding out what an emotion feels like, its impermanent nature will reveal itself.
Important advice: rather than “letting go” of your emotions, welcome them. Fully allow them and be mindful of them. If you do truly do this, they will express their energy and eventually go away all by themselves. You don’t have to “let go” of an emotion, you only have to “let it go” on its merry way.

Impersonal.  The second lesson: emotions are impersonal. When we check in with our bodies we see emotions are just sensation. It’s the story that makes them so personal. For example, an occurrence of anxiety might trigger the thought, “There I go again, I’m such an anxious person. When will I ever heal? Therapy’s no good. I’ve spent all this money on it, and I’m still anxious a lot.” Without this painful thought pattern, the experience of anxiety is little more than an unpleasant butterfly feeling in the belly.

On a retreat, a meditation teacher told me that the feeling of fear is no more personal than the sound of a passing car. “Yeah, right!” I thought. Later during this meditation retreat, I realized exactly what she meant. I was doing walking meditation in a hallway and felt fear.

Mindfulness was fairly strong, so the story behind the fear disappeared fairly quickly and I was just noticing the tingling in the belly. With a jolt, I realized that the sensory texture of this buzzy feeling in the belly was exactly the same as the sound of the buzz of a fluorescent light in the hallway. While the experience was the same, since I attached the notion of “I” to the belly sensation, it felt a lot more problematic. When I dispensed with this notion, I could just feel the buzz, and feel no more concerned about it than I would be about the sound of a fluorescent light.

Non-identify

Notice that if you are aware of an emotion you are not it. You are bigger than it. In this last step, we see that we can experience an emotion like fear, or calm, or joy, but we can’t experience the “I” to whom the emotion is supposed to be happening. We see that “I” is always created by a thought or internal image. Thus, our language of emotions needs to shift from “I am happy” to “Happiness is happening.” We can be aware of happiness, but not the “I” that happiness is “happening” to. This is non-identification.

We also have the illusion that “I” is making an emotion happen. In fact, emotions just arise from conditions in the mind. One mind moment conditions another. Once on retreat, there was this twang-like click from a thermostat in the meditation hall, almost like a bass, and instantaneously I heard the bass in a John Coltrane tune called “Africa.” And I went into bliss and thought, “Ah, infant bliss.” And then came the thought, “Infant, oh no!” because I was remembering the time I was babysitting my infant godson when he was sitting in a car seat in the house.

I got this craving for a chocolate chip cookie. I put him a little bit hastily on a laundry basket full of clothes and the thing toppled. And he fell on the carpet and hit his head and started bawling. Eventually he calmed down and began to feel better. But I felt so bad inside because I had the thought, “That happened because of my greed for wanting a cookie.” Then I started feeling all the other times I was thoughtless of others: the times I’ve rushed through a door and didn’t hold it for somebody, or cut people off in traffic, or offended people with an offhand joke. I sat there in that unworthiness for quite a while.

Where did that unworthiness come from? From a click in the meditation hall. I never saw the “I.” Instead, there was just the witnessing of a cascade of mental events spilling out of itself until it all got really stuck in the difficult emotion of unworthiness. The arising of unworthiness was so impersonal!

A huge healing happens when we begin to see our emotions as impersonal and ephemeral. We can really start to allow our emotions, seeing how workable they all are. Not only are they fickle and changing all the time, but they are not happening to us, and “we” don’t make them happen. It’s as if airplanes are constantly passing an airport and never landing. We don’t have to fuss with planes that never land. They just pass on by.

The essence of working with emotions in meditation is summed up by dharma teacher Anna Douglass: “What we are practicing is non-interference. When you get out of the way, everything self-liberates.”

Peter Williams has practiced meditation for 22 years in the Theravada and Tibetan Buddhist traditions, including many months of silent retreat, and has taught meditation since 2003. Peter is trained as a Community Dharma Leader by Spirit Rock Meditation Center. He teaches retreats in the Rocky Mountain West. Peter also practices as a transpersonal psychotherapist in Boulder.

Source: Buddhist Portal

The benefits of meditation are vast, and in many ways unmeasurable or quantifiable. Here are just a few to get your inspiration going…

Reduces Stress

In the past decade, meditation as  a tool for stress reduction has become increasingly popular. There is so much in the in the news about mindfulness, it could be easy to dismiss as a passing fad or cure all. But Scientists and psychologists are increasingly finding that meditation does help people better manage stress. And why wouldn’t it? Stress is all about our reactions to life circumstances. How we respond to the world is a reflection of how we think and feel. While a certain amount of stress is beneficial by alerting us to dangerous situations, a huge amount of stress is added on by our own minds. By creating more space between our thoughts and reactions, it is possible to reduce the unnecessary amount of stress we put ourselves under.

Increases self-awareness

Mindfulness practice develops self-awareness, the capability to observe our own behavior without judgement. Several tests are used by scientists to measure self-awareness among meditators. The “Five facet mindfulness questionnaire” was developed by researchers to determine the effectiveness of mindfulness training describes self awareness as an “enhanced capacity for acting with present-centered awareness rather than on ‘automatic pilot’–lost in the past or future.” Several studies have found that practitioners self-report self-awareness using this method. The ability to slow down and reflect on life is an under-utilized skill in today’s action oriented have self reported . Being able pause and reflect on one’s actions and how they are affecting others, can change your life. Increased self-awareness fosters better relationships with those we live and work with.

Increases self-acceptance

“All suffering, stress, and addiction comes from not realizing you already are what you are looking for,” says John Kabat-zinn, researcher and director of the Center for Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction. Stress and anxiety can be a clever way resist who who we are, out of fear of not being who we wish we were. Meditation lets us find our who we truly are, behind the storylines and thought-chatter. In her book, When things Fall apart, Pema Chodron explains,  “The most fundamental aggression to ourselves, the most fundamental harm we can do to ourselves, is to remain ignorant by not having the courage and the respect to look at ourselves honestly and gently.” Meditation is a radical form of self acceptance that develops integrity and genuineness and reduces anxiety and depression.

Regulates Emotions

Recent studies have shown that mindfulness training can help regulate emotions in the brain. At the University of Toronto, researchers found that after 8 weeks of mindfulness practice, the brains of meditators and a non-meditator appeared quite different. When shown distressing images, Non-medtator’s brains showed significant activations in the left side of their brain, areas that are “self-referencing.” Shown the same pictures, meditators scans displayed a more even spread of activations on both left and right sides of their brain. The study demonstrated that meditators have calmer reactions to troubling stimuli, by not over activating their left brains. The epidemic of PTSD in veterans, a disorder characterized by the inability to regulate emotions, have initatied more research in this area. Distancing our identification with anger, lessens its destructive power.  

Develops Contentment

Although it’s common to find articles claiming meditation makes you happy, from the the perspective of mindfulness based meditation, contentment might be a more accurate term. Meditation develops a basic contentment with things as they are. Happiness usually means chasing something outside of us. Practicing meditation and being in the present moment leads to a sense of contentment towards yourself and others. A basic contentment, stops us from treating others as obstacles or competition to our happiness. Happiness is usually thought of as something it’s possible to have, contentment is more a way of being.

Improves Physical Health

Science is increasingly finding that the mind and body are more connected than previously realized. Research has linked anxiety and depression to heart disease, chronic respiratory problems and other ailments. Our emotions and thoughts affect our physical body in more ways than we realize. A recent study published in Psychosomatic Medicine,  found that participants who practiced a mindfulness regiment developed more anti-bodies to influenza than a non-meditating control group by the end of the study.

Some of the first research conducted around mindfulness training explored how mindfulness training can alleviate chronic pain. John Kabat-Zinn’s research on this subject has led to the development mindfulness pain reduction techniques that are currently being a used in used in clinical settings.

Source: Buddhistportal

by Bill Scheffel: The First 5 Minutes of Meditation…

When we first sit down to meditate, we cross a boundary not unlike the one from dreams to waking in the night. To meditate is to experience a categorical shift in our being, it is to come infinitely closer to being itself.

Yet in the first five minutes of meditating it seldom feels like this. Instead it typically feels like we’ve gone from being in mild traffic to driving a highway in Mumbai. If thoughts were cars, we’re suddenly experiencing a million of them.

Why is this?

It is traditionally said that when we begin to practice, we experience our thoughts as if we were standing behind a raging waterfall (a version of Mumbai traffic). This is not because we are thinking more, we are simply experiencing the amount of thought that is normally occurring in our mind – but it takes the contrast of sitting still and doing nothing to recognize this.

Living Within the Paradox

So, the first thing to do is not to fight against our thoughts, much less judge ourselves for having them.

It is ironic how long it takes to not judge ourselves for having thoughts. As more than one teacher has pointed out, having thoughts means that we are alive! There is nothing wrong with thinking.

Yet to meditate is to live within paradox. On the one hand, it is crucial to accept our thoughts, on the other hand, only as thoughts diminish does clear seeing begin to dawn. Truly, we must embrace this paradox. Doing so means to both accept and exert. Acceptance is the expression of self-love, exertion is the expression of commitment through practicing mindfulness.

The Body vs the “Body-Body”

Back to those first five minutes. One of the first things we can become aware of is the difference between body and what Chogyam Trungpa called “body-body.” Body, as we normally experience it, is a collection of concepts, opinions, ideas, attitudes. In other words, we’re just up in our heads.

We experience this intensely in those first five minutes. Gradually, breath by breath, minute by minute we begin to experience body-body. Gradually we make contact with our actual body: a pain in our sacrum, an anxiety in our belly, a fly on our nose. Recognizing the pain, the anxiety, the fly is experiencing clear seeing!

If we are speedy, tired or both, we might journey through those first five minutes lying on our back. Truly! An actual nap might be just what we need. Then meditation.

On the other hand, we could meditate for five minutes (or longer) in the deeply nourishing somatic posture of lying down (it helps to have the knees up, held together with a yoga strap or scarf). Close the eyes, and with each breath let the body relax, let the nervous system discharge, let the breath enter the lower belly.

In the first five minutes of meditation we experience, at least in glimpses, all the potentials of meditation, all of the journey that we can or will eventually take. Sometimes those “first five minutes” are all the minutes we have. Five minutes of meditation can be in itself a complete, potent and beautiful session.

And remember no matter how long one has been practicing, those first five minutes are usually crazy. 

Bill Scheffel is a writer, creative writing teaching and videographer who has directed Shambhala Training since 1980. Bill was a student of Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche and taught classes in meditation, creative writing and poetry at Naropa University for thirteen years. Currently, Bill teaches online classes in creative writing and the I Ching. For more on Bill see Vertical Time Yoga.

Source: buddhist portal

by Bill Scheffel: I once heard Tsoknyi Rinpoche comment that terms for the unconditional – such as “Buddha nature” or “unborn awareness”…

need to be updated from time to time. Even if we know what they mean (we know only in moments), because of repetition they may cease to move us, become clichés, get stale. There is no need to stick to the same spiritual terms we have always used – not only can they become worn out, they also can back us into narrow or even intolerant corners.

In his recently published book, The Intelligent Heart, Dzigar Kongtrul Rinpoche uses the term “universal mind” to refer to Buddha nature. When I came across universal mind in my reading of his book, I felt strangely liberated. It was a term I could feel affection for, and I loved its sweeping inclusion of everything (which any term for the absolute is meant to do). Certainly this is the spirit Kongtrul Rinpoche intended for the term: that it speak to the heart.

Kongtrul Rinpoche contrasts universal mind to “small mind,” his term for the self-clinging, self-identified part of ourselves; the place we typically inhabit that is unable to truly empathize with others, develop compassion and see the universality of consciousness. The compact simplicity of small mind makes it easily grasped, and blunt. Shunrhu Suzuki-roshi also used small mind, which he contrasted to “big mind,” his term for unborn awareness, and one that to my ear evokes universal mind.

There is a saying from the lojong tradition of Tibetan Buddhism: Drive all blames into one. The direction for “blame” is the small mind, our ego, our tendency to be selfish. More than one teacher has commented that this saying is universal to all schools of Buddhism, since overcoming ego is what Buddhism is all about. But it is clear that this universality is common to the essence of all spiritual traditions. Consider this quote from the American Christian mystic Joel Goldsmith:

She who has found her inner self realizes that she is one with all men/women, animals and things. She knows now that what affects one touches all. The universality of this truth is found in all scripture.

In order to avoid our myopic tendencies, besides exposing ourselves to a variety of terms for the unconditional, it is necessary to expose ourselves to other spiritual traditions as well. A close reading of Joel Goldsmith’s little-known classic, The Infinite Way, has shown me how identical his mystic Christian path is to Buddhism; not identical in all methods and certainly not is all words, but in spirit and ultimate destination. Goldsmith speaks of “Christ consciousness.” How different is Christ consciousness from Buddha nature? Goldsmith, needless to say, also uses the word “God.” In reading the book, one might be uncomfortable encountering the word God. But for a Buddhist, if one tries using the word “awareness” instead of God, in many instances the meaning becomes familiar and easily identified with.

In the Buddhist path, the middle way – a name for Buddhism itself – is contrasted to the two extremes that veer from the middle way: nihilism and eternalism/theism. In this regard, Christianity is typically labeled a theistic religion. In the case of contemplative Christianity (the practicing essence of Christianity,) this label is misleading. Buddhism posits that the theistic belief in an external savior is both extreme and false. But in Goldsmith’s view, and other contemplative traditions, there is no notion that we will be saved from outside. The work must be done oneself, and the realization is an inner one.

In these days of division and widespread intolerance, it is crucial that all of us practicing the Buddhist path become spiritually sophisticated: that we become multi-cultural and “multi-spiritual”; not only tolerant but actively interested in other. The words we use and the knowledge we have of other traditions is a key.

Bill Scheffel is a writer, creative writing teacher and videographer who has directed Shambhala Training since 1980. Bill was a student of Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche and taught classes in meditation, creative writing and poetry at Naropa University for thirteen years. Currently, Bill teaches online classes in creative writing and the I Ching. For more on Bill see Vertical Time.

Source: Buddhist Portal

by Lachlan Brown: For years I struggled to find the peace I really wanted…

You know the dream:

Happiness

Not overthinking

No anxiety

Physically fit

And the to live every moment without being distracted by the past or the future.

During that time, I lived with anxiety, insomnia and way too much useless thinking going on in my head. It was never easy.

One of the reasons I was never truly at peace was because of one recurring problem: I couldn’t learn to “accept” where I was without wishing it were different.

Because avoiding and fighting against what is happening inside you only makes it worse.

Unfortunately, acceptance is also really hard to cultivate. We’re practically wired to not accept the moment if it’s not 100% comfortable.

So, what can we do?

What helped me was coming across Japanese Buddhist master Miyamoto Mushashi’s 21 rules of life.

Known as Japan’s greatest ever swordsman, he wrote these 21 rules 2 weeks before his death.

Each rule teaches you to accept your circumstances in life, detach from outside forces you can’t control and be comfortable with who you are.

I find these rules powerful because the only way to cultivate acceptance is through continued practice in your actions and your attitude. The two things we actually have control over.

And these rules give you the necessary guidelines to do just that.

It might take months to rewire your brain, but it’s well worth it.

Check them out:

1) Accept everything just the way it is.

Acceptance is perhaps the most important attitude to overcome mental challenges in life.

It’s a state of mind. There’s no destination or goal with acceptance. It’s simply the process of exercising the mind to be tolerant of anything life throws at us.

Why is it powerful?

Because instead of fighting against negative emotions like anxiety and stress, you’re actually accepting them the way they are. You’re not bitter, and you’re not creating more negativity out of your negativity.

Through acceptance you pave the path for negative emotions like anxiety to become less powerful. You’re not fighting against them and making them worse.

But to be clear: Acceptance is not the following: It’s not indifference or apathy. It does not involve giving up or not trying. It’s simply about accepting things without judging them.

It is what it is. Whatever happens happens. It’s about being patient and allowing the natural flow of things to take place.

2) Do not seek pleasure for its own sake.

As humans, we’re unhappiest when we become dissatisfied with what we have, and decide that we want more.

When we seek pleasure for pleasure’s sake, we put ourselves in an endless loop of desiring that’s only temporarily satisfied when we experience that pleasure.

But feelings don’t last forever. And before you know it, you’ll be back desiring again.

This doesn’t mean you can’t have fun and enjoy pleasure when you experience it. It just means you won’t be constantly seeking pleasure for its own sake. You appreciate what you have in every moment, and sometimes that will be pleasurable emotions.

But you also won’t be unhappy when you aren’t experiencing pleasure.

3) Do not, under any circumstances, depend on a partial feeling.

Same as above, feelings don’t last forever. Emotions are transient. You won’t be happy all the time, and wanting to be so will only make you unhappy.

4) Think lightly of yourself and deeply of the world.

When you think of yourself too much, you amplify your ego and your insecurities.

Happy people are the ones who focus on helping others. There’s a beautiful Chinese Proverb which describes this perfectly:

“If you want happiness for an hour, take a nap. If you want happiness for a day, go fishing. If you want happiness for a year, inherit a fortune. If you want happiness for a lifetime, help somebody.”

In other words: Be humble, don’t take yourself too seriously and focus on helping others.

5) Be detached from desire your whole life long.

Buddhism says that desiring leads to suffering. Why? Because when you’re desiring, you’re dissatisfied with what you have right now.

And when you get what you want, this leads you down an endless loop of desiring.

If you can forget about the idea of wanting, you can learn to be comfortable and grateful for what you have right now, which is key to inner peace.

6) Do not regret what you have done.

Regret is a useless emotion, isn’t it? You can’t change what’s happened. Yes, you can learn from what happened, but that doesn’t involve experiencing regret.

I know that sometimes we can’t help but regret things in life, but it’s important not to dwell on it. It’s useless to do so.

7) Never be jealous.

Another useless emotion. It also means you’re insecure with yourself, because you’re envious of someone else.

Instead, look inside yourself and be grateful for who you are and what you have.

8) Never let yourself be saddened by separation.

It sucks to separate from someone you want to be with. But getting sad over it won’t help you or them.

Sometimes you just need to toughen up and appreciate what you have, not what you lose.

9) Resentment and complaint are appropriate neither for oneself nor others.

Again, complaining without action doesn’t help you achieve anything. It only serves to raise your toxic energy.

And don’t let what other people do affect you as well. You’re not in control of what they do. But you are in control of how you react to what they do.

10) Do not let yourself be guided by the feeling of lust or love.

This one’s probably a controversial one for many. For me, too. I think we can all agree that you don’t want to be guided by lust. It’s similar to chasing emotions that don’t last forever and will only give you temporary fulfilment.

Love, however, is a different story. I don’t know about you, but I think that love is one of the most important emotions to be guided by. Your family is everything, whoever they are, and your life is much more fulfilled when you do whatever you can for them.

11) In all things have no preferences.

Similar to desiring, by having preferences, you’re not happy with what you have right now. You’re dissatisfied and unable to enjoy the present moment.

So if you can, try not to prefer something over something else, especially if you can’t control it.

12) Be indifferent to where you live.

If you can change where you live, then by all means go ahead. And don’t stop looking for opportunities to do so.

But besides doing that, it’s more fulfilling to appreciate where you are right now, rather than wishing it were different.

13) Do not pursue the taste of good food.

Interesting one. Focus on eating to be healthy and for nourishment. Desiring delicious food can lead to addiction and attachment. This goes for alcohol and drugs, too.

14) Do not hold onto possessions you no longer need.

It’s easy to get cluttered with junk that you don’t need. But if it’s not benefiting your life, get rid of it. More space and clear thinking is what’s needed. Not more stuff.

15) Do not act following customary beliefs.

Follow your own common sense. Do what makes sense to your own values, not what other people think. Decide for yourself.

You know what’s right and wrong. You don’t need someone else to tell you.

16) Do not collect weapons or practice with weapons beyond what is useful.

A tribute to his swordsman time, but we can apply this for our lives, too. It’s better to be an expert in one thing, than okay at everything.

17) Do not fear death.

Extremely hard to do. But it’s something none of us will escape. We can either learn to accept that our own and our close one’s time will eventually come, or fight against it causing anxiety and sadness for the rest of our lives.

18) Do not seek to possess either goods or fiefs for your old age.

What good will they do you when you’re gone? Only collect what is useful. Don’t waste your time.

19) Respect Buddha and the Gods without counting on their help.

Take responsibility for yourself. Don’t count on luck or god to pull you through. Tackle the endeavors you know are within your capabilities. Keep doing the right thing and everything else will fall into place.

20) You may abandon your own body but you must preserve your honor.

Don’t do anything that you won’t be able to live with for the rest of your life. Your actions define you, not your beliefs.

21) Never stray from the way.

Stay humble, do the right thing and always keep learning and growing.

Looking to reduce stress and live a calmer, more focused life? Mindfulness is the easy way to gently let go of stress and be in the moment. It has fast become the slow way to manage the modern world – without chanting mantras or finding hours of special time to meditate.

In Hack Spirit’s new eBook, The Art of Mindfulness, we explain how you can use mindfulness practically to help you clear your mind, let go of your worries and live peacefully in the present moment.

By devoting full attention on what we are doing in the moment, we can alleviate suffering, fear and anxiety.

With the power of mindfulness at our fingertips and the beauty of looking deeply, we can find insights to transform and heal any situation.

Source: Hack Spirit

by Lachlan Brown: We’ve all asked the question, “what is happiness?”

Is it a feeling? Having stable circumstances in life? Or is it something that’s deeply personal and can’t be defined?

Well, according to Buddhist master Thich Nhat Hanh, it’s simply a way of being.

In fact, in a simple, but profound quote below, Thich Nhat Hanh says that true happiness is based on inner peace:

“Many people think excitement is happiness…. But when you are excited you are not peaceful. True happiness is based on peace.”

Thich Nhat Hanh says that acceptance is an important part of being peaceful. Yet, in western society, too many people try to change themselves for other people.

However, this is futile to our own inner peace and happiness:

“To be beautiful means to be yourself.You don’t need to be accepted by others. You need to accept yourself. When you are born a lotus flower, be a beautiful lotus flower, don’t try to be a magnolia flower. If you crave acceptance and recognition and try to change yourself to fit what other people want you to be, you will suffer all your life. True happiness and true power lie in understanding yourself, accepting yourself, having confidence in yourself.”

Thich Nhat Hanh says that to achieve acceptance, we need to start embracing the present moment and the beautiful miracles that exist around us:

“When we are mindful, deeply in touch with the present moment, our understanding of what is going on deepens, and we begin to be filled with acceptance, joy, peace and love…Around us, life bursts with miracles–a glass of water, a ray of sunshine, a leaf, a caterpillar, a flower, laughter, raindrops. If you live in awareness, it is easy to see miracles everywhere. Each human being is a multiplicity of miracles. Eyes that see thousands of colors, shapes, and forms; ears that hear a bee flying or a thunderclap; a brain that ponders a speck of dust as easily as the entire cosmos; a heart that beats in rhythm with the heartbeat of all beings. When we are tired and feel discouraged by life’s daily struggles, we may not notice these miracles, but they are always there.”

Thich Nhat Hanh goes onto say that this doesn’t mean we never think about the past or plan for the future, but that we do so in a productive way:

“To dwell in the here and now does not mean you never think about the past or responsibly plan for the future. The idea is simply not to allow yourself to get lost in regrets about the past or worries about the future. If you are firmly grounded in the present moment, the past can be an object of inquiry, the object of your mindfulness and concentration. You can attain many insights by looking into the past. But you are still grounded in the present moment.”

Source: Hack Spirit

Thirteen prominent teachers explain why Buddhists need to be be politically engaged at this crucial time in the country’s history…

in this statement published in Lion’s Roar magazine and co-signed by more than 140 Buddhist leaders.

As long as a society protects the vulnerable among them, they can be expected to prosper and not decline.

—The Buddha, in the Mahaparinirvana Sutta

Buddhism does not align itself with any party or ideology. But when great suffering is at stake, Buddhists must take a stand against it, with loving-kindness, wisdom, calm minds, and courage.

Committed to compassion, we follow the example of the bodhisattva Kwan Yin, “she who hears the cries of the world.” Like her, we listen to the cries of suffering people and do everything in our power to help and protect them.

In this time of crisis, we hear the cries of millions who will suffer from regressive policies of the new U.S. administration targeting our most vulnerable communities. We hear the cries of a nation whose democracy and social fabric are at risk. We join in solidarity with many others who are also hearing these cries, knowing that together we can be a remarkable force for transformation and liberation.

Religious leaders and practitioners have always played a vital role in movements for justice and social progress, contributing their wisdom, love, courage, and commitment to others. People of all faiths are needed on the front lines now, resisting policies that will cause harm and offering a new and positive vision for our country.

We believe that Buddhist teachers and practitioners should be among them, locking arms with all people of goodwill to protect the vulnerable, counter systemic violence and oppression, and work for a more just and caring society. Buddhism is respected around the world as a religion of compassion and peace. We are wanted and needed in this movement, and we have much to contribute.

Buddhism in the United States brings together people of many different backgrounds, interests, and views. Some Buddhists emphasize meditation practice, while others focus on study, community, or faith. Some are politically liberal and others conservative. Some prefer to keep their Buddhist practice separate from political and social issues, while others are deeply engaged.

Facing the reality of this suffering, we remember that peacefulness does not mean passiveness and nonattachment does not mean nonengagement.

Yet one thing binds us together: our commitment to ease the suffering of all beings. The dharma is not an excuse to turn away from the suffering of the world, nor is it a sedative to get us comfortably through painful times. It is a powerful teaching that frees and strengthens us to work diligently for the liberation of beings from suffering.

What is happening now strikes at the heart of this, our central commitment as Buddhists. It transcends our differences and calls us to action. If the policies of the new administration prevail, millions of people in vulnerable and less privileged communities will suffer. Hopes will be dashed. Undoubtedly, lives will be lost. International conflict will intensify and environmental destruction will worsen.

Facing the reality of this suffering, we remember that peacefulness does not mean passiveness and nonattachment does not mean nonengagement.

Today, we ask ourselves: What does it mean to be Kwan Yin in the modern world? What does it mean to be a bodhisattva-citizen, someone who is willing to engage with society to help protect and awaken others? Examining our deepest values as Buddhists, we discern through wisdom the most skillful ways to live and uphold them.

The wisdom teaching of inter-dependence is the bodhisattva-citizen’s guide to the web of causes and conditions that create suffering. While Buddhism has traditionally emphasized the personal causes of suffering, today we also discern how the three poisons of greed, aggression, and indifference operate through political, economic, and social systems to cause suffering on a vast scale.

While continuing to work with ego and the three poisons in our personal practice, the insight of interdependence calls us to address the societal causes of suffering as well. As we resist the heightened threat of many of the new administration’s policies, we also recognize that underrepresented and oppressed communities in the United States have long suffered from systemic greed, aggression, aversion, and indifference.

While some argue that the principle of nonduality suggests that Buddhists should not engage in or take sides on political or social issues, we believe the opposite is true. It is because we and others are not separate that we must act.

The wisdom of interdependence deepens and inspires our compassion. Understanding that none of us is separate, we know that the suffering of others is our suffering. While some argue that the principle of nonduality suggests that Buddhists should not engage in or take sides on political or social issues, we believe the opposite is true. It is because we and others are not separate that we must act.

Whatever our political perspective, now is the season to stand up for what matters. To stand against hate. To stand for respect. To stand for protection of the vulnerable. To care for the earth.

We can see clearly the work ahead of us. It is the work of love and wisdom in the face of racism, gender- and sexual orientation-based violence, xenophobia, economic injustice, war, and environmental degradation. We have to work together to shift the tide toward what will benefit our children, the natural world, and the future.

As Buddhists, we know that real change begins with ourselves. We must explore and expose our own privilege and areas of ignorance, and address racism, misogyny, class prejudice, and more in our communities. We can set an example for the broader society by creating safe, respectful, and inclusive sanghas.

Our Buddhist communities can become centers of protection and vision. This can take many forms. It can mean providing sanctuary for those in danger or skilfully confronting those whose actions would harm the vulnerable among us. It can be standing up for the environment or becoming an active ally for those targeted by hate and prejudice.

It is true that our numbers are small, yet we can join with others who share our convictions and values. For those who are new to this, please remember that there are many people who have dedicated their lives to the work of social change. They have the useful skills of compassionate organizing and building sustainable movements. Find them, get involved, and learn from them.

More than ever, we have to be compassionate, brave, and engaged bodhisattvas.

While we share a common commitment to ease the suffering of sentient beings, that does not mean all Buddhists should or can respond in the same way. Some will march and engage in direct action. Others will support community well-being through clinics, gardens, criminal justice reform, or youth empowerment. Some will work in the next election, some will meditate more, and others will try to be kinder and more civil in their day-to-day interactions. Some manifestations of Kwan Yin have a thousand arms because there are many ways to serve others.

For now, we prepare to face challenging and stressful times. To prevail, we must hold fast to our timeless ideals of wisdom, love, compassion, and justice. We must maintain our faith that, while ignorance and hatred may at times be dominant, through concerted action patiently pursued we can create a society based on justice, love, and human unity.

More than ever, we have to be compassionate, brave, and engaged bodhisattvas. Like Kwan Yin, we hear the cries of a suffering world and, with wisdom and love, we respond.

Ven. Bhikkhu Bodhi, Buddhist Global Relief
Myokei Caine-Barrett, Shonin, Nichiren Order of North America
Zoketsu Norman Fischer, Everyday Zen Foundation
Roshi Joan Halifax, Upaya Zen Center
Mushim Patricia Ikeda, East Bay Meditation Center
Jack Kornfield, Spirit Rock Meditation Center
Ethan Nichtern, Shastri, Shambhala NYC
Roshi Pat Enkyo O’Hara, Village Zendo
Lama Rod Owens, Natural Dharma Fellowship
Gina Sharpe, New York Insight Meditation Center
Rev. Kosen Gregory Snyder, Brooklyn Zen Center
& Union Theological Seminary
Rev. angel Kyodo williams, newDharma Collective
Jan Willis, Agnes Scott College

Additional Signatories

Bhikkhu Analayo, Barre Center for Buddhist Studies
Tenshin Zenki, Reb Anderson, San Francisco Zen Center
Geoffrey Shugen Arnold, Zen Center of NYC & Zen Mountain Monastery
Eiko Joshin Carolyn Atkinson, Everyday Dharma Zen Center
John Bailes, One Heart Zen
Kristin Barker, One Earth Sangha
Rev. Josh Jiun Bartok, Greater Boston Zen Center, Boundless Way Zen
Stephen Batchelor, Bodhi College
Eido Frances Carney, Olympia Zen Center
Jan Chozen Bays, Zen Community of Oregon
Hogen Bays, Zen Community of Oregon
Jenn Biehn, East Bay Meditation Center
Melissa Myozen Blacker, Roshi, Boundless Way Zen
Harrison Blum, Director of Religious and Spiritual Life, Emerson College
Layla Smith Bockhorst, San Francisco Zen Center
Sylvia Boorstein
Tara Brach
Edward Espe Brown, Peaceful Sea Sangha
Karl Brunnholzl
Joshin Brian Byrnes, Sensei, Upaya Zen Center
Sensei Robert Chodo Campbell, New York Zen Center for Contemplative Care
Konin Cardenas, Ekan Zen Study Center
Gyokuko Carlson, Abbot of Dharma Rain Zen Center,  Portland, OR
Shokuchi Deirdre Carrigan, San Francisco Zen Center, Marin Interfaith Council
Kenshin Catherine Cascade, Bird Haven Zendo
Viveka Chen, Triratna Buddhist Order
Rupesh Chhagan, Appamada
Bhikshuni Thubten Chodron, Sravasti Abbey
Jundo Cohen, Treeleaf Sangha
Eijun Linda Cutts, San Francisco Zen Center
Lama Surya Das, Dzogchen Center
Osho Fugan Dineen, Hyannis Zendo
Frank Seisho Diaz (Hoshi), Resident Teacher at Open Mind Zen Bloomington
Rev. Maia Duerr, Upaya Zen Center
Sensei Koshin Paley Ellison, New York Zen Center for Contemplative Care
Linda Galijan, San Francisco Zen Center
Roshi Bernie Glassman, Founder of Zen Peacemakers
Zenshin Greg Fain, Tassajara Zen Mountain Center
Acharya Gaylon Ferguson, Shambhala
Anushka Fernandopulle
Rev. Chris Fortin, Everyday Zen, Dharma Heart Zen
Rev. Bruce Fortin, Occidental Laguna Sangha
Leora Fridman, Buddhist Peace Fellowship
Rev. James Ishmael Ford, Blue Cliff Zen Sangha & Boundless Way Zen
Gil Fronsdal, Insight Meditation Center
Setsuan Gaelyn Godwin, Abbot, Houston Zen Center
Natalie Goldberg, Upaya Zen Center
Joseph Goldstein, Insight Meditation Society
Myocho Tova Green, San Francisco Zen Center
Guo Gu, Tallahassee Chan Center
Robert Kaku Gunn, Village Zendo
Rev. Myo-O Marilyn Habermas-Scher, Hokyoji Zen Practice Community
Brother Phap Hai, Plum Village International
Paul Haller, San Francisco Zen Center
Dawn Haney, Buddhist Peace Fellowship
Peter Harris, Treetop Zen Community Oakland Maine
Sensei Jules Shuzen Harris, Soji Zen Center
Rev. Jerry Hirano, Buddhist Churches of America
Rev. Joan Hogetsu Hoeberichts, Abbot, Heart Circle Sangha
Funie Hsu, Buddhist Peace Fellowship
Myoko Sara Hunsaker, Soto Priest and Teacher, Monterey Bay Zen Center
Kate Johnson
Art Jolly, East Bay Meditation Center
Pema Khandro Rinpoche, Buddhist Yogis Sangha
Rev. Sumi Loundon Kim, Buddhist Chaplain, Duke University & Buddhist Families of Durham
Ruth King, Mindful Members Insight Community of Charlotte
Bodhin Kjolhede
Rev. Ronald Kobata, Buddhist Church of San Francisco
Josh Korda, DharmaPunx NYC
Busshō M. Lahn, Minnesota Zen Meditation Center
Rev. Mark Lancaster, Generous Heart Mountain Sangha
Jack Lawlor, Lakeside Buddha Sangha
Rev. Taigen Dan Leighton, Ancient Dragon Zen Gate
Yo-on Jeremy Levie, San Francisco Zen Center
Noah Levine, Against the Stream Buddhist Meditation Society
Peter Levitt, Salt Spring Zen Circle, British Columbia
Rebecca Li, Dharma Drum Chan Community
Narayan Liebenson, Cambridge Insight Meditation Center
Judy Lief
Kaira Jewel Lingo, Dharmacharya, Order of Interbeing
Acharya Adam Lobel, Shambhala
Katie Loncke, Buddhist Peace Fellowship
David Loy, Rocky Mountain Ecodharma Retreat Center
Arlene Lueck, San Francisco Zen Center
Barry Magid, Ordinary Mind Zendo
Vimalasara (Valerie) Mason-John, Triratna Vancouver Buddhist Center
Acharya Fleet Maull
Myoshin Kate McCandless, Mountain Rain Zen Community
Heiku Jaime McLeod, Treetop Zen Community Oakland Maine
Karen Maezen Miller, Hazy Moon Zen Center
Lama Willa Miller, Natural Dharma Fellowship
Mary Mocine, Abbess, Vallejo Zen Center
Kimi Mojica, East Bay Meditation Center
Roshi Wendy Egyoku Nakao
Shinmon Michael Newton, resident teacher of Mountain Rain Zen Community, Vancouver BC
Zesho Susan O’Connell, San Francisco Zen Center
Barbara Joshin O’Hara, Sensei, Village Zendo
Sarwang Parikh, East Bay Meditation Center
Lila Parrish, Appamada
Deirdre Eisho Peterson, Village Zendo & Red Rocks Zendo
Mitchell Ratner, Still Water Mindfulness Practice Center
Zuiko Redding, Resident Teacher, Cedar Rapids Zen Center
Lodro Rinzler
Betsy Rose, Spirit Rock Meditation Center
Larry Rosenberg, Cambridge Insight Meditation Center
Donald Rothberg, Member, Teachers Council and Guiding Teachers Council, Spirit Rock Meditation Center, Teacher, East Bay Meditation Center
Tenku Ruff
Sensei Steve Aishi Sarian
Ed Sattizahn, San Francisco Zen Center
Grace Schireson, Central Valley Zen
Sebene Selassie
Hozan Alan Senauke
Rev. Keiryu Liên Shutt, Guiding Teacher of Awake-in-Life Sangha
Koshin Flint Sparks, Appamada
Anka Rick Spencer, Puerto Compasivo
Shodo Spring, Sansuiji and Mountains and Waters Alliance
Reverend Myogen Kathryn Stark, Sonoma Valley Zen Group
Peter van der Sterre, 7th Street Zendo, Boise ID
Michael Stone
Kōan Peg Syverson, Appamada
John Tarrant, Pacific Zen Institute
Sensei Myoko Terestman, Village Zendo
Ryushin Andrea Thach, Whatcom and Red Cedar Zen
Thanissara, Sacred Mountain Sangha
Sensei Shinryu Thomson, Village Zendo & Centro Zen Phajjsi Qollut Jalsu
Robert Thurman
Rev. Allan Jo An Tibbett, Provincetown Zen Center
Lama Tsomo, Namchak Foundation
Karma Lekshe Tsomo
Mark Unno
Laura del Valle, Mar de Jade Center at Chacala, Nayarit
LiZhen Wang, Buddhist Peace Fellowship
Steve Weintraub, Green Gulch Farm Zen Center, San Francisco Zen Center
Arinna Weisman
Andrew JiYu Weiss, Abbot, Open Path Sangha
Sojun Mel Weitsman, Berkeley Zen Center
Kate Lila Wheeler, Kilung Foundation & Spirit Rock Meditation Center
Jim Willems, East Bay Meditation Center
Laurie Winnette, Appamada
Doshin Nathan Woods, Sweetwater Zen Center
Larry Yang, Spirit Rock Meditation Center & East Bay Meditation Center
Pamela Ayo Yetunde
Kanzan David Zimmerman, San Francisco Zen Center

Source: Lions Roar

Khandro Thrinlay Chodon:  The feminine principle can be viewed at different levels in accordance with an individual’s understanding or perspective. 

Some of the ways she has been known is as ‘the wise crone’, ‘the nurturing mother’, ‘the powerful shakti’. Within the Vajrayana tradition of Buddhism, the feminine principle has a specific meaning, which unveils to us her presence at the heart of everything. She is revered and respected by practitioners as the spacious quality of mind itself, and through deep practice, her truth unfolds unceasingly. Subtle, mystifying, intriguing, nurturing and pervasive, she is actually beyond gender, and is dynamic.

Today, this feminine aspect of our being needs to be respected and reactivated by both men and women. Science has recently broadened its view from seeing the brain as static to seeing it as having a unique ability to constantly change, grow, and remap itself over a lifetime. Of course, the brain, in addition to our being, has always had this plasticity, something the Buddha mentioned and taught some 2,500 years ago, but modern science has understood only now. It is time to harness our innate ability to go beyond our conditioning, for if we do not, we will continue to remain limited, and suffer as a consequence. At this time, our world needs to focus on the feminine principle so that we can develop the ability to surrender expectation and concepts and move into a realm of ever-flowing wisdom. In this day and age, it is vital to master and fully incorporate the feminine principle into our meditative practices.

Khandro Thrinlay Chodon, who is widely known as a living yogini, will lead us in an afternoon session that illuminates this aspect of her spiritual tradition. She will speak both from the heart of her practice, as well as from her personal experience. The session will begin with a meditation and reflection and end with a short question and answer session.

Khandro Thrinlay Chodon is a lay, female Vajrayana Buddhist teacher, who holds her family’s yogic spiritual lineage, which is the Drukpa tradition revered in Tibet, Bhutan and the Indian Himalayas. She began her spiritual training as a small child and has studied both Eastern and Western approaches to psychology.

Since the death of her husband, His Holiness the IXth Shabdrung of Bhutan, in 2003, Khandro-la has, with the encouragement of many Vajrayana Buddhist Masters, been teaching in the West. She focuses on spirituality in daily life. Her organisation, Khachodling, engages in spiritual and humanitarian projects in the remote Indian Himalayas.

Khandro-la is the embodiment of warmth and humanness. Her contemporary and profound Buddhist teachings inspire and direct practitioners to deepen in their awareness, and courageously expand into the path of wisdom, joy and compassion.

Source: AWAKEN

by Matthew Gindin: Purists discourage mixing traditions, but research reveals that the origins of one of today’s most popular Indian practices aren’t so clear-cut…

Much has already been written about how little those of us folding ourselves into downward dogs or stretching backward into camels understand yoga’s history. Which is to say, not a lot. Dabblers may not even know the basics: that the postural practice of yoga now so popular in the West is descended from a Hindu tantric, or esoteric, tradition called hatha yoga. This confusion may seem compounded by the fact that Western mindfulness and yoga traditions are now deeply intertwined, both often taking part in the same spaces (think yoga warm-ups at meditation retreats) or fusing together (as in mindful movement practices at Chan centers). Purists may object that we are mixing historically different traditions without regard for their separate root systems. While there may be some reason behind that concern—jumbling different practices together with no clear idea of what they are for or how they really work is not a recipe for deep transformation—the idea that we’re mixing two distinct things may be based on yet another misunderstanding of history.

Until recently, I myself thought of a yoga class infused with Buddhist meditation lingo as a mingling of two distinct spiritual traditions. But in significant ways I was wrong. Although I knew that yogic and Buddhist traditions had deep affinities in their views and practices, finding out that the historical lines between them are much more blurred than I had ever realized has made me feel more comfortable including both in my inventory of skillful means and more comfortable with the ways they coexist in the modern age.

I FIRST BECAME INTERESTED IN ZEN AFTER reading about it in Jack Kerouac’s novel The Dharma Bums when I was 14. I devoured several books on the topic, but it wasn’t until I was just out of my teen years, suffering from a bad relationship and the poverty of a merely intellectual approach to things of the spirit, that I began to experiment with daily Zen-style meditation. Around the same time I became interested in hatha yoga, which I understood to be the meditative use of special physical postures for mental and physical health. That is not an uncommon way of understanding it, though it is one, as I would later learn, that jettisons much of what premodern Indian hatha yoga had actually been about—goals like liberation from delusion and suffering, the purification of the subtle energy body, and union with the divine ground of being.

I also worried whether in mixing the two traditions I was not being enough of a purist in either.

After several false starts, when I was in my early 20s and living as an ordained Buddhist monk in the Thai Forest Tradition, I finally began practicing a wider range of traditional Indian hatha yoga techniques such as pranayama (breathing exercises), bodily purification (e.g., pouring salt water through the nasal cavities), and bandhas (muscular contractions that have energetic effects on the body and mind). I saw those practices as useful aids to prepare myself for meditation—as does the seminal 15th-century Hathayoga Pradipika, a text that describes these and other hatha yoga practices as a “ladder to reach the heights of the path of meditation.”

Although I was immersed in Theravada Buddhism, I became more and more fond of the yoga traditions and was pleased to find out that Burmese teachers commonly referred to Buddhist practice as yoga and its practitioners as yogis, as did key Buddhist texts such as Visuddhimagga (The Path of Purification) by Buddhaghosa, composed in Sri Lanka around 500 CE. I enjoyed the little vocabulary overlap between the major practice and the minor practice in my life, though I also worried whether in mixing the two traditions I was not being enough of a purist in either. Some teachers from Buddhist and Hindu lineages alike warn about the dangers of being a dilettante who borrows from different religions instead of going deep with just one. Was it kosher to mix?

That was the beginning of my curiosity about the relationship between Hindu yoga traditions and Buddhism, an exploration that opened up a sea of connections and the realization—backed, as it would turn out, by recent scholarship— that the historical boundaries between the traditions are much more porous than one might think.

THE PALI AND SANSKRIT WORD YOGA goes back to a verbal root meaning “to harness, yoke, bind.” The Buddha himself spoke repeatedly of the goal of his spiritual path as “anuttara yogakkhema,” the “unsurpassable safety from yoga,” referring not to burning one’s yoga studio membership card but to being free from bondage. Not long after, though, the word yoga begins to be used positively. The Katha Upanishad, probably composed by Hindu sages within the first few generations of the early Buddhist community, mentions yoga in connection with discipline—in other words, yoking the body and mind to the will. Later Buddhist sources likewise use the word yoga to refer to spiritual discipline. Later Hindu writings emphasize yoga more as a state of union that is attained rather than as a means, though yoga as practice is a meaning that continues to be used beside this and eventually resurfaces as primary in the premodern and modern periods.

It is the Bhagavadgita, a section of the epic Mahabharata (sometime between 300 BCE and 200 CE), that embodied the full flowering of this classical concept of yoga as spiritual discipline. It outlines several different types of what it calls yoga as paths to spiritual liberation. By the medieval period both Buddhists and Hindus were using the word yoga to refer to their spiritual disciplines.

Premodern Indian hatha yoga was a complex group of bold and sometimes dangerous tantric practices.

Looking for more clarity on this, I spoke to James Mallinson. In 2011 the renowned Oxford-trained Sanskritologist and scholar of classical and medieval Indian texts (with special interest in yoga), who himself looks more sadhu than professor, went on a pilgrimage to Kadri in southwest India, to visit a monastery of the Naths (“Lords”), a centuries-old tribe of sadhus, ascetics living in quasi-monastic groups outside of mainstream society who are known for their nomadic, renunciant lifestyles and complex tantric traditions. (Mallinson’s own resemblance to a sadhu is striking: in fact, he is the only Westerner ever to be recognized as a mahant, or senior sadhu of standing, by one such tribe of yogis.) Mallinson was in Kadri to see two statues on the altar of the monastery temple, having read about them in the work of a French anthropologist named Véronique Bouillier.

The central deity of the altar in Kadri is Manjunatha, a form of Shiva, the Hindu god most closely associated with tantra and yoga. (“Manjunatha” means “snowy lord,” a reference to Shiva’s mythical mountain home.) On either side of the deity, tucked away in the eaves, Mallinson saw what he was looking for: two 3- or 4-foot-high statues that he told me were “among the most beautiful bronzes in India from their time period, in the Chola style.” One of them is identified in an inscription from 1068 as Lokeshvara (Avalokiteshvara, the bodhisattva of compassion); the other is Manjuvara (Manjushri, the bodhisattva of wisdom). But how had two Buddhist bodhisattvas come to flank a Hindu tantric Shiva?

The statues are evidence, Mallinson told me, that the monastery once belonged to Buddhist practitioners of tantra. This indication is also supported by a reference to it as a vihara (a word used only for Buddhist monasteries) in the annals of a Shaivite king who made donations to the monastery in the 11th century. The physical integration of a Buddhist tantric monastery into the Nath tradition mirrors a process Mallinson has been interested in for years—the integration of elements of Buddhist tantra into Hindu tantric traditions, including into the tradition we now know as yoga. One of the integrations Mallinson has been researching is quite shocking, and in conversation with him I found it was only the tip of the iceberg.

What inspired me to talk to Mallinson was a text he had included in the anthology The Roots of Yoga, which he edited and translated together with another scholar of yoga, Mark Singleton. The text was an 11th-century tantric Buddhist writing, the Amritasiddhi, which lists the physical practices called bandhas (“locks”).

If the term bandha sounds familiar to you, that may be because you have practiced yoga according to the popular Ashtanga yoga system developed in the 20th century by P. K. Jois. In Ashtanga yoga, throughout the practice one holds three such bandhas: the mula (in the perineum), jalandhara (in the neck), and uddiyana (in the lower abdomen). Those three bandhas, long thought indigenous to the Hindu tantric tradition, have been traced to the Amritasiddhi, which “actually contains the first example of using the physical body like this—to influence the subtle energy body—that we are aware of,” Mallinson says.

Although the term hatha is often translated as “force,” hatha yoga is usually associated in the West with a gentle, traditionalist approach to yoga postures in distinction to more athletic Western varieties. Premodern Indian hatha yoga, however, was a complex group of bold and sometimes dangerous tantric practices that went well beyond asana and aimed to restrain and harness the vital energies of the body for the ultimate purpose of spiritual liberation. That group of practices was thought until recently to originate in Hindu tantra, but Mallinson and others say there is mounting evidence that they actually originated in Indian Buddhist tantra, or Vajrayana.

What’s even more surprising than finding the bandhas in an early Buddhist tantric text—as Jason Birch, a scholar of medieval Indian traditions at the University of London, has pointed out—is that the first known mention in any Indian work of the very term hatha yoga occurs in an important 8th-century Buddhist text, the Guhyasamaja tantra, where it is recommended for practitioners having difficulty attaining tantric visions of their meditation deity. The earliest known explanation of what hatha yoga is, though, has been located in an 11th-century commentary to the Buddhist Kalachakra tantra, which identifies hatha yoga with the forceful retention of bindu (semen) and prana (breath) as well as work with nada (internal sound) as aids to practice. The roughly contemporaneous Amritasiddhi, discussed above, identifies bindu, prana, and nada with mind. So the original hatha yoga aimed at the mastery of vital energies and the mind as one interrelated practice.

THE ORIGINS OF THE BANDHAS AND HATHA yoga in Buddhist texts are dramatic examples of the close relationship between Buddhist and Hindu tantra. They also share similar philosophical concerns and goals—so many, in fact, that their obviously intimate relationship is hidden in plain view, as it were. Key words like “yoga,” “tantra,” “mantra,” “siddhi,” “nirvana,” and “karma” are fundamental to both traditions, and many of their practices, goals, and views of the mind and reality resonate with each other—for example, the dreamlike quality of reality or the already liberated nature of awareness, which are fundamental ideas in both traditions.

Perhaps more surprisingly, they even share teachers. A much-loved 12th-century Tibetan Buddhist tantric text, The Legends of the Eighty-four Mahasiddhas, contains stories of enlightened Buddhist masters, several of whom were also teachers recognized and celebrated in Hindu tantric lineages: for instance, the Buddhist teachers Minapa (Matsyendranath) and Goraksha (Gorakhnath) were also founding figures in the Nath tradition, which is closely associated with the development of hatha yoga in India. Yet research has something even more startling to say.

What is the origin of the physical postures known as asanas that we in the West now identify with yoga? Surprisingly asana practice does not appear to have been part of early hatha yoga and was not integrated with it until centuries later. The earliest known description of the therapeutic use of asanas in fact occurs in a Buddhist tantric text, in the aforementioned Kalachakra tantra:

Holding the feet while in the lotus position gets rid of back pain. Having the feet up and the head down [i.e., a headstand] removes in its entirety a disease of phlegm in the body. (Kalachakra tantra 2.112d–113a)

Mallinson says that this Buddhist teaching, which was written between 1025 and 1040 CE, is “the first mention of therapeutic benefits of asanas in an Indian text that I know of.”

Asana meant “seat” or “seated position” in early yogic texts and could just as easily refer to a stool as a physical posture; it came to mean “seated meditation posture” in the Hindu texts of the first millennium. In the early 12th to 14th centuries the use of the word asana expanded in Indian culture to include postures for wrestling and lovemaking.

Not until the Hatha Yoga Pradipika (Light on Hatha Yoga) are a variety of asanas—15 in total—said to have spiritual and medical benefits and are identified officially as part of “hatha yoga”—an identification that stuck. Yet the Hatha Yoga Pradipika was written four centuries after the Kalachakra tantra, making the Buddhist use of therapeutic asanas much earlier than the Hindu one. If you find this hard to follow, you’re not alone. “Yogic language is fragile and protean,” according to David Gordon White, a renowned scholar of medieval Indian yoga traditions and J. F. Rowny Professor of Comparative Religion at UC Santa Barbara. “Words are embedded in crystalline structures of yogic thought, but then meanings change over time, being reclaimed and repurposed again and again in light of evolving traditions.”

In fact, the connection between Yoga and Buddhism in India goes back much further than the examples from the medieval tradition above. The Yoga Sutras, the popular philosophical treatment of ethics, meditation, and liberation usually ascribed to Patanjali that is commonly used in today’s Western yoga teacher training courses, dates back to before 400 CE; it contains such strong Buddhist elements that one contemporary Indologist, Michel Angot, believes that the text was written by a Buddhist and later overwritten and adopted by Hindu traditions.

The 6th-century Vedanta philosopher Gaudapada is known to have adopted elements of Buddhist philosophy from the Madhyamaka and Yogacara traditions. His work in turn heavily influenced the thought of Adi Shankara, who is considered to be the founder of the Advaita (nondual) school of Vedanta, a tradition whose central ideas have pervaded philosophical strands of Hinduism for several centuries now. Both Gaudapada and Shankara were accused of being “crypto-Buddhists” in their time, though most scholars today assert that they were more likely simply Vedantins influenced by Buddhist thought.

Maybe we could adopt a metaphor of two overlapping gardens whose seeds pollinate each other.

The view that Buddhism and Hinduism were distinct traditions at odds with each other in India may have arisen from polemical texts that never accurately reflected the complex situation on the ground. It was common for sages from different traditions to write texts asserting the value of their own traditions by criticizing other traditions’ shortcomings, and public debates between the intellectuals of different traditions were popular. Yet these rhetorical practices, which tended to draw sharp distinctions between the viewpoints of different groups—and which are still studied in Buddhist circles today—may not represent the lived reality among practitioners. “Eclecticism has been part and parcel of Indian philosophy from the beginning,” says White. “We don’t even really know how hard the lines were drawn between Jain, Hindu, and Buddhist traditions. Sometimes we see pandits from the different traditions dissing each other, but they knew so much about each other, they must have been practicing across the lines.”

White also points out that many tantric practices that became popular with Buddhists, such as identification with a deity, visualization of mandalas and chakras, the pursuit of magical powers, the subversion of normative ethics, and the use of wrathful divinities, likely originated in Hindu contexts. White believes they were adopted by Buddhists during a period when Buddhism was in decline and Hindu tantra was on the ascent.

Maybe this cross-fertilization shouldn’t surprise us—the yogic culture of the 5th century BCE was, after all, the womb in which the Buddha’s awakening was born. Before Buddhism’s center of gravity shifted away from India in the 11th century, the Indian Buddhist tradition largely grew through being either inspired by or in argument with Hindu traditions.

Instead of seeing Hinduism and Buddhism as two different animals staking out neighboring territories, maybe we could adopt a metaphor of two overlapping gardens whose seeds pollinate each other, their worlds meeting at the “fertile edge,” the rich borderland where ecosystems merge. Those who today combine Vajrayana practice with hatha yoga are not so much iconoclasts as returnees to the fluid tantric culture of medieval India.

I HAD WHAT I FEEL WAS A watershed moment in my own understanding of the Buddhist and non-Buddhist traditions of India when I was a Buddhist monk and came across a copy of the revered text of modern Advaita Vedanta, I Am That, a collection of the conversations of Nisargadatta Maharaj, a simple storekeeper and family man who taught out of his apartment in Mumbai and whom many Westerners, including Buddhist teachers such as Jack Kornfield and Joseph Goldstein, went to see in the 1970s. While inspiring, Maharaj’s focus on the realization of the “Self ” can also be unsettling for a Buddhist.

“What self?” a Buddhist may ask. How can you become free of all attachments and suffering if you believe in a self?

This very question is addressed by Maharaj when challenged by a Buddhist monk who visits him. When pressed, Maharaj admits that there is in fact no self and that the state of freedom is impersonal. “The Self is just a hook we use to catch the fish of the ego,” says Maharaj. “Once we have the fish, we throw the hook away.”

I realized when I read this that these two great traditions might not be just intertwined; perhaps they were using different languages and paths to reach the same goals. Perhaps they were like the different “skillful means” Mahayana Buddhists discuss, not two competing, mutually exclusive traditions. If that’s true, and they can be understood as two different languages for talking about the same underlying human journey to freedom, then the yogi should be free to learn from—and judiciously adopt practices from—both.

Maybe we’re more like family, or a conversation, or different parts of one garden, than sectarians throwing barbs at each other in debating halls. If that’s true, maybe a tantric Shiva flanked by two bodhisattvas like that on the altar in Kadri is just right.

Source: Tricycle

by Matthew Gindin: Purists discourage mixing traditions, but research reveals that the origins of one of today’s most popular Indian practices aren’t so clear-cut…

Much has already been written about how little those of us folding ourselves into downward dogs or stretching backward into camels understand yoga’s history. Which is to say, not a lot. Dabblers may not even know the basics: that the postural practice of yoga now so popular in the West is descended from a Hindu tantric, or esoteric, tradition called hatha yoga. This confusion may seem compounded by the fact that Western mindfulness and yoga traditions are now deeply intertwined, both often taking part in the same spaces (think yoga warm-ups at meditation retreats) or fusing together (as in mindful movement practices at Chan centers). Purists may object that we are mixing historically different traditions without regard for their separate root systems. While there may be some reason behind that concern—jumbling different practices together with no clear idea of what they are for or how they really work is not a recipe for deep transformation—the idea that we’re mixing two distinct things may be based on yet another misunderstanding of history.

Until recently, I myself thought of a yoga class infused with Buddhist meditation lingo as a mingling of two distinct spiritual traditions. But in significant ways I was wrong. Although I knew that yogic and Buddhist traditions had deep affinities in their views and practices, finding out that the historical lines between them are much more blurred than I had ever realized has made me feel more comfortable including both in my inventory of skillful means and more comfortable with the ways they coexist in the modern age.

I FIRST BECAME INTERESTED IN ZEN AFTER reading about it in Jack Kerouac’s novel The Dharma Bums when I was 14. I devoured several books on the topic, but it wasn’t until I was just out of my teen years, suffering from a bad relationship and the poverty of a merely intellectual approach to things of the spirit, that I began to experiment with daily Zen-style meditation. Around the same time I became interested in hatha yoga, which I understood to be the meditative use of special physical postures for mental and physical health. That is not an uncommon way of understanding it, though it is one, as I would later learn, that jettisons much of what premodern Indian hatha yoga had actually been about—goals like liberation from delusion and suffering, the purification of the subtle energy body, and union with the divine ground of being.

I also worried whether in mixing the two traditions I was not being enough of a purist in either.

After several false starts, when I was in my early 20s and living as an ordained Buddhist monk in the Thai Forest Tradition, I finally began practicing a wider range of traditional Indian hatha yoga techniques such as pranayama (breathing exercises), bodily purification (e.g., pouring salt water through the nasal cavities), and bandhas (muscular contractions that have energetic effects on the body and mind). I saw those practices as useful aids to prepare myself for meditation—as does the seminal 15th-century Hathayoga Pradipika, a text that describes these and other hatha yoga practices as a “ladder to reach the heights of the path of meditation.”

Although I was immersed in Theravada Buddhism, I became more and more fond of the yoga traditions and was pleased to find out that Burmese teachers commonly referred to Buddhist practice as yoga and its practitioners as yogis, as did key Buddhist texts such as Visuddhimagga (The Path of Purification) by Buddhaghosa, composed in Sri Lanka around 500 CE. I enjoyed the little vocabulary overlap between the major practice and the minor practice in my life, though I also worried whether in mixing the two traditions I was not being enough of a purist in either. Some teachers from Buddhist and Hindu lineages alike warn about the dangers of being a dilettante who borrows from different religions instead of going deep with just one. Was it kosher to mix?

That was the beginning of my curiosity about the relationship between Hindu yoga traditions and Buddhism, an exploration that opened up a sea of connections and the realization—backed, as it would turn out, by recent scholarship— that the historical boundaries between the traditions are much more porous than one might think.

THE PALI AND SANSKRIT WORD YOGA goes back to a verbal root meaning “to harness, yoke, bind.” The Buddha himself spoke repeatedly of the goal of his spiritual path as “anuttara yogakkhema,” the “unsurpassable safety from yoga,” referring not to burning one’s yoga studio membership card but to being free from bondage. Not long after, though, the word yoga begins to be used positively. The Katha Upanishad, probably composed by Hindu sages within the first few generations of the early Buddhist community, mentions yoga in connection with discipline—in other words, yoking the body and mind to the will. Later Buddhist sources likewise use the word yoga to refer to spiritual discipline. Later Hindu writings emphasize yoga more as a state of union that is attained rather than as a means, though yoga as practice is a meaning that continues to be used beside this and eventually resurfaces as primary in the premodern and modern periods.

It is the Bhagavadgita, a section of the epic Mahabharata (sometime between 300 BCE and 200 CE), that embodied the full flowering of this classical concept of yoga as spiritual discipline. It outlines several different types of what it calls yoga as paths to spiritual liberation. By the medieval period both Buddhists and Hindus were using the word yoga to refer to their spiritual disciplines.

Premodern Indian hatha yoga was a complex group of bold and sometimes dangerous tantric practices.

Looking for more clarity on this, I spoke to James Mallinson. In 2011 the renowned Oxford-trained Sanskritologist and scholar of classical and medieval Indian texts (with special interest in yoga), who himself looks more sadhu than professor, went on a pilgrimage to Kadri in southwest India, to visit a monastery of the Naths (“Lords”), a centuries-old tribe of sadhus, ascetics living in quasi-monastic groups outside of mainstream society who are known for their nomadic, renunciant lifestyles and complex tantric traditions. (Mallinson’s own resemblance to a sadhu is striking: in fact, he is the only Westerner ever to be recognized as a mahant, or senior sadhu of standing, by one such tribe of yogis.) Mallinson was in Kadri to see two statues on the altar of the monastery temple, having read about them in the work of a French anthropologist named Véronique Bouillier.

The central deity of the altar in Kadri is Manjunatha, a form of Shiva, the Hindu god most closely associated with tantra and yoga. (“Manjunatha” means “snowy lord,” a reference to Shiva’s mythical mountain home.) On either side of the deity, tucked away in the eaves, Mallinson saw what he was looking for: two 3- or 4-foot-high statues that he told me were “among the most beautiful bronzes in India from their time period, in the Chola style.” One of them is identified in an inscription from 1068 as Lokeshvara (Avalokiteshvara, the bodhisattva of compassion); the other is Manjuvara (Manjushri, the bodhisattva of wisdom). But how had two Buddhist bodhisattvas come to flank a Hindu tantric Shiva?

The statues are evidence, Mallinson told me, that the monastery once belonged to Buddhist practitioners of tantra. This indication is also supported by a reference to it as a vihara (a word used only for Buddhist monasteries) in the annals of a Shaivite king who made donations to the monastery in the 11th century. The physical integration of a Buddhist tantric monastery into the Nath tradition mirrors a process Mallinson has been interested in for years—the integration of elements of Buddhist tantra into Hindu tantric traditions, including into the tradition we now know as yoga. One of the integrations Mallinson has been researching is quite shocking, and in conversation with him I found it was only the tip of the iceberg.

What inspired me to talk to Mallinson was a text he had included in the anthology The Roots of Yoga, which he edited and translated together with another scholar of yoga, Mark Singleton. The text was an 11th-century tantric Buddhist writing, the Amritasiddhi, which lists the physical practices called bandhas (“locks”).

If the term bandha sounds familiar to you, that may be because you have practiced yoga according to the popular Ashtanga yoga system developed in the 20th century by P. K. Jois. In Ashtanga yoga, throughout the practice one holds three such bandhas: the mula (in the perineum), jalandhara (in the neck), and uddiyana (in the lower abdomen). Those three bandhas, long thought indigenous to the Hindu tantric tradition, have been traced to the Amritasiddhi, which “actually contains the first example of using the physical body like this—to influence the subtle energy body—that we are aware of,” Mallinson says.

Although the term hatha is often translated as “force,” hatha yoga is usually associated in the West with a gentle, traditionalist approach to yoga postures in distinction to more athletic Western varieties. Premodern Indian hatha yoga, however, was a complex group of bold and sometimes dangerous tantric practices that went well beyond asana and aimed to restrain and harness the vital energies of the body for the ultimate purpose of spiritual liberation. That group of practices was thought until recently to originate in Hindu tantra, but Mallinson and others say there is mounting evidence that they actually originated in Indian Buddhist tantra, or Vajrayana.

What’s even more surprising than finding the bandhas in an early Buddhist tantric text—as Jason Birch, a scholar of medieval Indian traditions at the University of London, has pointed out—is that the first known mention in any Indian work of the very term hatha yoga occurs in an important 8th-century Buddhist text, the Guhyasamaja tantra, where it is recommended for practitioners having difficulty attaining tantric visions of their meditation deity. The earliest known explanation of what hatha yoga is, though, has been located in an 11th-century commentary to the Buddhist Kalachakra tantra, which identifies hatha yoga with the forceful retention of bindu (semen) and prana (breath) as well as work with nada (internal sound) as aids to practice. The roughly contemporaneous Amritasiddhi, discussed above, identifies bindu, prana, and nada with mind. So the original hatha yoga aimed at the mastery of vital energies and the mind as one interrelated practice.

THE ORIGINS OF THE BANDHAS AND HATHA yoga in Buddhist texts are dramatic examples of the close relationship between Buddhist and Hindu tantra. They also share similar philosophical concerns and goals—so many, in fact, that their obviously intimate relationship is hidden in plain view, as it were. Key words like “yoga,” “tantra,” “mantra,” “siddhi,” “nirvana,” and “karma” are fundamental to both traditions, and many of their practices, goals, and views of the mind and reality resonate with each other—for example, the dreamlike quality of reality or the already liberated nature of awareness, which are fundamental ideas in both traditions.

Perhaps more surprisingly, they even share teachers. A much-loved 12th-century Tibetan Buddhist tantric text, The Legends of the Eighty-four Mahasiddhas, contains stories of enlightened Buddhist masters, several of whom were also teachers recognized and celebrated in Hindu tantric lineages: for instance, the Buddhist teachers Minapa (Matsyendranath) and Goraksha (Gorakhnath) were also founding figures in the Nath tradition, which is closely associated with the development of hatha yoga in India. Yet research has something even more startling to say.

What is the origin of the physical postures known as asanas that we in the West now identify with yoga? Surprisingly asana practice does not appear to have been part of early hatha yoga and was not integrated with it until centuries later. The earliest known description of the therapeutic use of asanas in fact occurs in a Buddhist tantric text, in the aforementioned Kalachakra tantra:

Holding the feet while in the lotus position gets rid of back pain. Having the feet up and the head down [i.e., a headstand] removes in its entirety a disease of phlegm in the body. (Kalachakra tantra 2.112d–113a)

Mallinson says that this Buddhist teaching, which was written between 1025 and 1040 CE, is “the first mention of therapeutic benefits of asanas in an Indian text that I know of.”

Asana meant “seat” or “seated position” in early yogic texts and could just as easily refer to a stool as a physical posture; it came to mean “seated meditation posture” in the Hindu texts of the first millennium. In the early 12th to 14th centuries the use of the word asana expanded in Indian culture to include postures for wrestling and lovemaking.

Not until the Hatha Yoga Pradipika (Light on Hatha Yoga) are a variety of asanas—15 in total—said to have spiritual and medical benefits and are identified officially as part of “hatha yoga”—an identification that stuck. Yet the Hatha Yoga Pradipika was written four centuries after the Kalachakra tantra, making the Buddhist use of therapeutic asanas much earlier than the Hindu one. If you find this hard to follow, you’re not alone. “Yogic language is fragile and protean,” according to David Gordon White, a renowned scholar of medieval Indian yoga traditions and J. F. Rowny Professor of Comparative Religion at UC Santa Barbara. “Words are embedded in crystalline structures of yogic thought, but then meanings change over time, being reclaimed and repurposed again and again in light of evolving traditions.”

In fact, the connection between Yoga and Buddhism in India goes back much further than the examples from the medieval tradition above. The Yoga Sutras, the popular philosophical treatment of ethics, meditation, and liberation usually ascribed to Patanjali that is commonly used in today’s Western yoga teacher training courses, dates back to before 400 CE; it contains such strong Buddhist elements that one contemporary Indologist, Michel Angot, believes that the text was written by a Buddhist and later overwritten and adopted by Hindu traditions.

The 6th-century Vedanta philosopher Gaudapada is known to have adopted elements of Buddhist philosophy from the Madhyamaka and Yogacara traditions. His work in turn heavily influenced the thought of Adi Shankara, who is considered to be the founder of the Advaita (nondual) school of Vedanta, a tradition whose central ideas have pervaded philosophical strands of Hinduism for several centuries now. Both Gaudapada and Shankara were accused of being “crypto-Buddhists” in their time, though most scholars today assert that they were more likely simply Vedantins influenced by Buddhist thought.

Maybe we could adopt a metaphor of two overlapping gardens whose seeds pollinate each other.

The view that Buddhism and Hinduism were distinct traditions at odds with each other in India may have arisen from polemical texts that never accurately reflected the complex situation on the ground. It was common for sages from different traditions to write texts asserting the value of their own traditions by criticizing other traditions’ shortcomings, and public debates between the intellectuals of different traditions were popular. Yet these rhetorical practices, which tended to draw sharp distinctions between the viewpoints of different groups—and which are still studied in Buddhist circles today—may not represent the lived reality among practitioners. “Eclecticism has been part and parcel of Indian philosophy from the beginning,” says White. “We don’t even really know how hard the lines were drawn between Jain, Hindu, and Buddhist traditions. Sometimes we see pandits from the different traditions dissing each other, but they knew so much about each other, they must have been practicing across the lines.”

White also points out that many tantric practices that became popular with Buddhists, such as identification with a deity, visualization of mandalas and chakras, the pursuit of magical powers, the subversion of normative ethics, and the use of wrathful divinities, likely originated in Hindu contexts. White believes they were adopted by Buddhists during a period when Buddhism was in decline and Hindu tantra was on the ascent.

Maybe this cross-fertilization shouldn’t surprise us—the yogic culture of the 5th century BCE was, after all, the womb in which the Buddha’s awakening was born. Before Buddhism’s center of gravity shifted away from India in the 11th century, the Indian Buddhist tradition largely grew through being either inspired by or in argument with Hindu traditions.

Instead of seeing Hinduism and Buddhism as two different animals staking out neighboring territories, maybe we could adopt a metaphor of two overlapping gardens whose seeds pollinate each other, their worlds meeting at the “fertile edge,” the rich borderland where ecosystems merge. Those who today combine Vajrayana practice with hatha yoga are not so much iconoclasts as returnees to the fluid tantric culture of medieval India.

I HAD WHAT I FEEL WAS A watershed moment in my own understanding of the Buddhist and non-Buddhist traditions of India when I was a Buddhist monk and came across a copy of the revered text of modern Advaita Vedanta, I Am That, a collection of the conversations of Nisargadatta Maharaj, a simple storekeeper and family man who taught out of his apartment in Mumbai and whom many Westerners, including Buddhist teachers such as Jack Kornfield and Joseph Goldstein, went to see in the 1970s. While inspiring, Maharaj’s focus on the realization of the “Self ” can also be unsettling for a Buddhist.

“What self?” a Buddhist may ask. How can you become free of all attachments and suffering if you believe in a self?

This very question is addressed by Maharaj when challenged by a Buddhist monk who visits him. When pressed, Maharaj admits that there is in fact no self and that the state of freedom is impersonal. “The Self is just a hook we use to catch the fish of the ego,” says Maharaj. “Once we have the fish, we throw the hook away.”

I realized when I read this that these two great traditions might not be just intertwined; perhaps they were using different languages and paths to reach the same goals. Perhaps they were like the different “skillful means” Mahayana Buddhists discuss, not two competing, mutually exclusive traditions. If that’s true, and they can be understood as two different languages for talking about the same underlying human journey to freedom, then the yogi should be free to learn from—and judiciously adopt practices from—both.

Maybe we’re more like family, or a conversation, or different parts of one garden, than sectarians throwing barbs at each other in debating halls. If that’s true, maybe a tantric Shiva flanked by two bodhisattvas like that on the altar in Kadri is just right.

Source: Tricycle

Mikao Usui was a renowned Tendai Buddhist and the founder of what we know today as “Reiki”…

He was born on August 15, 1865, in the Yamagata region in Japan. His family was of Buddhist traditions and lived there for 11 generations.

Mikao Usui was sent to a Buddhist monastery to start his education from a very young age (around 4 years old). There he took quite a lot of interest in psychology, medicine and various religions from around the world.

Before Japan’s rough period of isolation from the western world, Mikao Usui managed to travel to Europe, America, and China and learned about western cultures and civilizations.

After spending his years in the turmoil of Japanese society, Mikao Usui went for higher education. It is believed he became fluent in English, Chinese and Sanskrit, took an interest in philosophy, western medicine, and theology. He also became a doctor in Japanese literature.

During his life, he had many professions such as Private Secretary, Postmaster General, missionary, reporter, office worker, and others.

Mikao Usui married Sadako Suzuki and had two children: Fuji and Toshiko.

Usui had 3 siblings: two brothers, Sanya who became a doctor, and Kuniji who became a policeman, and a sister, Tsuru.

The whole family’s ashes are buried at the Saihoji Temple in Kyoto.

The Spiritual Path

The story goes that around the year 1900, Mikao Usui had a near-death experience becoming very ill during an epidemic. This had a life-changing effect and made him reflect upon his life.

He started studying esoteric Buddhist holistic healing and he became interested in the teachings of spiritual healers.

Later on, he became a Shingon Buddhist at the advice of a priest, who saw in him the immense potential and accepted him as a student.

Unfortunately, this led to his expulsion from his family as they would not agree with this new path.

But this didn’t stop Mikao Usui from pursuing his dream in finding a higher spiritual path.

Contrary to some beliefs that Mrs. Hawayo Takata constructed a story that Mikao Usui desired to find the Christic healing ways and that he was inspired by the Bible, Dr. Usui wanted to find and understand the higher stage of consciousness that we are all able to achieve.

Therefore, at the advice of his teacher and fellow monks he went on a spiritual quest on Mount Kurama, a place of significant spiritual past, for the Japanese people.

The 21 Days on Kurama Mountain

His purpose was to achieve ”Satori” – which translates as “enlightenment”. Usui was aware that such a quest is not going to be easy, so he started a long ritual of fasting, meditation, and prayer.

After a long and tiring 21 days, he fell into a deep meditative state. It was then when he received a strong beam of bright, white light, shining directly on his head. He also had a vision of the Reiki symbols and how to channel the light through them.

He started having a sudden feeling of awakening and excitement and went down the mountain. He was eager to share his experience with his teacher and fellow priests.

The story goes that while ascending from the mountain, he stubbed his toe on a rock and fell. He placed his hand over his toe and the healing energy began flowing from his hands.

The pain went away and he was healed.

Usui was amazed by this and he realized that apart from the strong “enlightenment” feeling, he gained the ability to heal.

That is when he had an epiphany: his life purpose was achieved; he now had to heal others and teach them what he has learned.

Spreading The Word

And so he did …

He went to help people in need from the nearby villages, all the way up to Tokyo. There he eventually started a healing society named: Usui Reiki Rhoyo Gakkai (Usui Reiki Healing Method Society).

In 1923 there was a great earthquake that struck Tokyo and Yokohama with a 7.9 on the Richter Scale. Unfortunately, over 140.000 people died. Many were killed in the fires that started due to the massive earthquake.

Mikao Usui and his students gave as much healing as possible during that time. Usui Sensei received an honorary award from the Emperor for his great help.

Because of the consequences of this disaster, Usui opened at one point an even larger clinic in Nakano, Tokyo. Having amazing results, his reputation spread all over the country. This led to initiating more than 2000 students in his lifetime.

Out of these, 20 were considered “Shihan” – Masters/Teachers of Reiki. Cujiro Hayashi was one of them. He would later become Grand Master.

The 5 Reiki Principles Developed by Usui Sensei

During this time Mikao Usui developed the Reiki levels (Shoden, Okuden, and Shinpiden) and helping techniques such as “Byosen” – Scanning, “Gassho” – praying position and others.

These provided the student with a gradual, secure and linear progress, without overflowing one’s mind and life.

For Reiki Masters to pass on initiations (attunements) easier, Usui Sensei developed a formal practice called “Reiju Kai” through which the student receives a full Reiki level.

He cultivated the five admonitions recommended by Emperor Meiji, which later became known as the Reiki principles:

• Just for today, I will be grateful.
• Just for today, I will not anger.
• Just for today, I will not worry.
• Just for today, I will do my work honestly.
• Just for today, I will respect all life.

The 3 Things You Have To Remember About Mikao Usui

Even if Reiki has its history before Usui, he still remains the most important figure and is considered the father of Reiki as we know it today.

There are many things to say about him and so much has been given to us through his legacy.

But if there were 3 things to remember about Mikao Usui, I believe these are the ones:

• He is the father of Reiki;
• Usui Sensei initiated Chujiro Hayashi, who in turn trained Hawayo Takata who eventually brought Reiki to the West;
• The most important of them all: Mikao Usui dedicated his life to spirituality and found Reiki because of his near-death experience. So did Mrs. Takata. This shows that he was no that different from us. The moral of the story is that you shouldn’t wait for an unfortunate event to decide to take care of yourself, with or without Reiki. Start today and enjoy living healthy and happy.

About Mikao Usui’s Death, Where He Is Buried And The Inscription On His Memorial Stone

On March 9, 1926, Mikao Usui was in Fukuyama and suffered a stroke which led to his death at 62 years old. His body was burnt and his ashes placed next to where his family is buried, in Saihoji Temple, Tokyo.

Photo Credit: Dorna Revie energycentre.ch

His students placed a memorial stone in 1927 with the title “Memorial of Usui Sensei’s Virtue.” This follows with Usui Sensei’s story from their perspective engraved on the stone.

The first paragraph from the text on Mikao Usui’s gravestone:

What you can naturally realize through cultivation and training is called “VIRTUE” and it is called “MERIT” to spread a method of leadership and relief and practice it. It is people of many merits and a good deal of virtue that can be eventually called a great founder. People who started a new learning and founded a fresh sect among sages, philosophers, geniuses etc., named from the ancient times, were all those as mentioned above. We can say that Usui-Sensei is also one of those people. 

Read the rest on reiki.org

As a side note, you should know that there are many versions of Mikao Usui’s story out there. The one in this post has the generally known data as well as information I have gathered from Reiki Teachers who studied under Hiroshi Doi, one of Reiki’s iconic names.

But the numerous versions are not important…

What is important is his legacy and what he left behind after his passing. 

Mikao Usui’s teachings and the fact that we have access to such an amazing and beautiful way of making our lives better is what we should remember.

Reiki teaches us how to place our body in a state of healing, a way of life and also a form of spiritual evolution.

Mikao Usui Pronunciation

This is how you pronounce Miako Usui: me ka o u shu e [mi kɑ oʊ ju ʃu i]

The “u” from “Usui” should be pronounces as a double-“o” (Google) and not “You”.

A Few Of Mikao Usui’s Quotes That Inspired Me

Mikao Usui’s quotes are very inspirational and full of wisdom. Like any other person who has lived a century ago, we should not take everything word by word.

Obviously, that’s not important.

What matters is the message behind Usui Sensei’s Quotes, and how they can help you find peace when you are down, and become wiser when you lack inspiration.

“Reiki is wisdom combined with energy; it connects us to the universal source of light, it stimulates growth, it balances us from a physical, mental and spiritual point of view, it can heal the deepest wounds and it can bring to the surface the unknown potentials of our being.”

“Reiki is optimum health support. It is like a vehicle to our interior truth, which guides us to happiness. Happiness is the path to healing ourselves.”

“Reiki does not belong to one person or one community, but it is the spiritual heritage of all humanity.”

“Each and every being has an innate ability to heal as a gift from the gods.”

“Reiki is love. Love is wholeness. Wholeness is balance. Balance is well-being. Well-being is freedom from disease.”

Be kind to yourself and every living thing.

Conclusion

I can’t stress enough that the important thing to take from all of this is Mikao Usui’s legacy.

Reiki is not only a gift for us who practice it but a gift to the world.

Let’s embrace the spiritual meaning of his journey through life, and worry less about exact facts.

About Vlad and ReikiScoop

Vlad is a Usui, Karuna, Shamballa, and Gendai Reiki Grand Master with 15+ years of experience. He went through ups and downs like all of us, but what sets him apart is his ability to experiment new and unconventional things in order to grow as an individual and evolve as a Reiki Master. Vlad loves to explore new cultures, talk to people and exchange ideas. Time has come though, to make that next step: “It’s never good to isolate knowledge therefore it’s now time to share my learnings with others”. You can always read more about Vlad and ReikiScoop in the about section.

MORE ReikiScoop? – Here’s what you can do next:

• Free How to do Reiki Guide – Whether you’re a beginner or someone looking to refresh their Reiki knowledge, Click Here to learn How to Practice Reiki from Principles to Techniques!
• Reading List – If you love reading and want to learn as much as you can about Reiki, here’s a segmented guide with my selection of Reiki Books in 2020.

Source: Reiki Coop