Buddhism 101

by Arnie Kozak

  Bernard Tetsugen Glassman

  Bernard Tetsugen Glassman is one of America’s most provocative Zen teachers and promoters of Engaged Buddhism. In 1982 he founded the Greyston Bakery in New York City. His idea was to start a business that would employ the members of his sangha—allowing them to leave their day jobs—so they could concentrate more fully on their practice and contribute to the practice of Engaged Buddhism. In 1993 the Greyston Foundation, a nonprofit corporation, was created to oversee social improvement programs. Profits from the bakery filter through the foundation, supporting its social development work for the poor and afflicted. Greyston helps the homeless, the jobless, and provides childcare, healthcare, and living assistance for people with HIV/AIDS.

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  “So for me the question became, ‘What are the forms in business, social action, and peacemaking that can help us see the oneness in society, the interdependence in life?’ ”

  —Roshi Bernie Glassman

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  When Greyston was established, Roshi Glassman (with Roshi Sandra Holmes) then went on to create an order of Zen practitioners devoted to the cause of peace. The Zen Peacemaker Order subsequently emerged. The Peacemaker Community is now an international peacemaking group with members of the world’s five major religions. The network includes organizations such as Greyston Mandala, Prison Dharma Network, and Upaya Zen Center in the United States; StadtRaum in Germany; Mexico City Village in Mexico; La Rete d’Indra in Italy; and Shanti Relief Committee in Japan.

  Joan Jiko Halifax

  Roshi Joan Jiko Halifax is a student of Thich Nhat Hanh, a founding member of the Zen Peacemaker Order, and founder and roshi of the Upaya Zen Center in Santa Fe, New Mexico. She is an author and activist and is greatly respected for her work with the dying. Upaya programs include the Project on Being with Dying, the Partners Program, the Prison Outreach Project, and the Kailash Education Fund.

  Working with the Dying

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  Frank Ostaseki is the founder of the Metta Institute and the Zen Hospice project. He says of working with the dying, “The eyes of a dying patient are the clearest mirrors I have ever looked into. They show me myself in a way that nothing else can. They show me my deepest clinging, my aversion, and something else—an undying love.”

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  The Project on Being with Dying is a program aimed at helping caregivers work with dying people, to change their relationship to both the dying and living. A focus of the program is the training of healthcare professionals. These professionals take their work with the dying back to their own institutions where they can teach these practices to other healthcare professionals. The Partners Program matches dying people with caregivers they need, complementing the help of hospice workers and medical professionals. The Prison Outreach Project offers mindfulness training to inmates in the Mexico prison system, aiming to reduce stress in prison. The Kailash Education Fund is aimed at providing educational opportunities to some of the poorest children in Nepal.

  BUDDHA IN JAIL

  The United States imprisons more of its citizens than any other country in the world. Buddhism has ventured into the prison system in the United States. Shugen Sensei is the director of the National Buddhist Prison Sangha (NBPS) that started in 1984 with John Daido Loori. Their aim is to teach inmates meditation.

  Prison can also provide the opportunity for awakening as portrayed in the compelling memoir, Razor-Wire Dharma by Calvin Malone. In it, he describes the mundane experience of eating an apple, an apple that stood out from the usual horrible prison food. “Breathing in I smelled apple, breathing out the universe. Everything there is or ever was was contained in this apple . . . I could see it with the wild exactness of shattered glass. The answer and the question were there in the apple. I was feeling an inexplicable joy, while at the same time, keenly aware. I never before felt better in my life. I realized this moment was as good as it gets.”

  The Buddha’s teachings offer this form of radical freedom: that the happiest moment of your life could occur during a prison sentence, that true happiness could arise from the simple beauty of an apple, a living thing connected to everything else in the entire universe.

  The pioneering work that brought Buddha into prison was conducted by S.N. Goenka at the Tihar Jail in New Delhi, India. This prison was considered the most dangerous prison on earth before his work there; torture and murder were commonplace. A visionary warden, Kiran Bedi, embraced Goenka’s aspirations to teach the inmates vipassana meditation. The Vipassana Prison Trust (VPT) teaches vipassana courses to Tihar inmates, a thousand at a time, and teaches in prisons in Israel, New Zealand, Mongolia, Taiwan, Thailand, the United Kingdom, and the United States.

  MINDFULNESS IN HEALTHCARE

  One of the most significant Buddhist influences in the West does not call itself Buddhist at all. This takes the form of mindfulness in healthcare. Every day around the United States and the rest of the Western world medical patients with chronic pain and other debilitating conditions engage in the same meditation that the Buddha did centuries ago.

  The center for this worldwide movement resides in Worcester, Massachusetts, at the Center for Mindfulness in Medicine, Healthcare, and Society, founded by Jon Kabat-Zinn in 1979. Since that time, hundreds of thousands of people have been introduced to Buddha outside the context of formal Buddhism. Almost every major medical center in the United States has a program for Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) and hundreds of professionals worldwide who do this work. These include programs and professionals at prestigious university hospitals such as Harvard and Duke Medical Schools. This is, perhaps, the premiere and most widespread application of Buddhism, albeit in secular form, in the world.

  This practice helps people from all walks of life and from all religious traditions. Since MBSR patients are not being trained in Buddhism, they carry on with whatever beliefs and practices they have. What makes MBSR so special is that it has translated the Buddha’s teaching into an effective, practical, and readily learned, eight-week format. More than thirty years of research has confirmed its effectiveness in reducing stress, improving coping, and helping patients to get on with their lives.

  BUDDHISM IN DAILY LIFE

  Living an Awakened Life

  Meditation and all the Buddha’s wisdom would not be of much value if it stayed on the cushion. Meditation trains you for living an awakened life.

  MINDFULNESS

  In The Greater Discourse on the Foundations of Mindfulness, the Buddha set forth the practice of mindfulness for his students:

  There is, Monks, this one way to the purification of beings, for the overcoming of sorrow and distress, for the disappearance of pain and sadness, for the gaining of the right path, for the realization of Nirvana—that is to say the four foundations of mindfulness.

  What are the four? Here, monks, a monk abides contemplating body as a body, ardent, clearly aware and mindful, having put aside hankering and fretting for the world; he abides contemplating feelings as feelings . . . he abides contemplating mind as mind . . . he abides contemplating mind-objects as mind-objects, ardent, clearly aware and mindful, having put aside hankering and fretting for the world.

  Meditation practice helps you to be mindful in daily life so that you can be awake to what you experience and do. It is easy to get caught up in stories about the future and the past, and sometimes these stories turn to worry and regret. You may find yourself commenting, and more likely complaining, about the present but not actually paying attention to it. To be awake is to be mindful; paying attention to the reality of this moment as it is happening without judgment or storytelling. To be mindful is to break the habit of automatic pilot and following every impulse that arises. To be mindful is to be awake in movement: in eating, eliminating, driving, working, loving, and whatever else you do during your day.

  To be mindful you try to give full attention to your lived experience. As William James said more than one hundred years ago, “The inte
llectual life of man consists almost wholly of his substitution of a conceptual order for the perceptual order in which his experience originally lives.” To be mindful is to reorient the perceptual away from the conceptual, storytelling aspects of the mind. To be mindful you must pay attention to what you see, hear, taste, smell, and most important, the sensations you feel in your body. You must be aware how your mind generates thoughts in the form of stories, images and memories, and emotions (and all the possible combinations of these). The fruit of meditation practice on the cushion and all the techniques described so far is to facilitate this mindful awareness in daily life.

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  “When we see a red light . . . we can thank it, because it is a bodhisattva helping us return to the present moment . . . We may have thought of it as an enemy, preventing us from achieving our goal. But now we know the red light is our friend . . . calling us to return to the present moment where we can meet with life, joy, and peace.”

  —Thich Nhat Hanh

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  You should take your practice with you into everything you do. Vietnamese Zen master Thich Nhat Hanh provides mindfulness exercises in his wonderful book, The Miracle of Mindfulness. Here are a few of his suggestions that you can use during the day:

  • Measure your breath by your footsteps.

  • Count your breaths.

  • Set aside a day of mindfulness.

  • Half-smile.

  • Follow your breath while having a conversation.

  Strive to become mindful in every part of your life. When you are eating, eat. When you are walking, walk. When you are making love, make love. When you are cooking, cook. Be there in the moment, each and every moment. The moment is all you have. This moment.

  The art of meditation is a way to wake up to the world. You can learn new ways to see your troubles and your pain, and bring true wisdom to our life. As American vipassana teacher Jack Kornfield relates in A Path with Heart, attention is like training a puppy. You sit the puppy down and tell him to stay, but the puppy immediately gets up and runs away. So you sit the puppy back down again and tell him to stay. And the puppy runs away. Sometimes he runs away and poops in the corner.

  It is the same with your mind. You tell your mind to sit still and it is off to the corner to make a mess, and so you must start over and over again. With mindfulness, you can come back to the present moment in a matter-of-fact way, just picking up where you left off. You wouldn’t yell at the puppy, so try not to yell at yourself. All minds wander.

  Anything worthwhile requires effort, and meditation practice is a worthwhile endeavor. Sometimes practice will flow fluently and at other times it will be a struggle. It is at those times when a community and a teacher are helpful, because they can provide you with support and keep you on track. Once you have been practicing for a while you will start to taste the fruits of your labor and have glimpses of something beyond the stories about yourself. You might even taste that sense of no self the Buddha talked about as you experience yourself as a moment-to-moment process rather than as a “thing” that needs to be protected and constantly convinced of its worth. Enjoy your practice and keep at it!

  CONTEMPLATIVE EDUCATION

  Mindfulness is not just beneficial for adults. Why not start with children when they are young? Why not bring mindfulness into the schools? The increasing popularity of mindfulness from healthcare is filtering into the education system. Linda Lantieri, founder of The Inner Resilience Program in New York City, finds that “students who engage in mindfulness practice seem to experience reduced stress and acting-out behaviors and increased coping skills, as well as enhanced concentration and an increased sense that the classroom is a community.” Other voices in contemplative education include David Forbes, author of Boyz 2 Buddhas, and Deborah Schoeberlein, author of Mindful Teaching and Teaching Mindfulness: A Guide for Anyone Who Teaches Anything.

  GARDENING

  Gardening itself can be an act of meditation. This is portrayed in the book The Meditative Gardener by Cheryl Wilfong. Dropping your preoccupation with the future and the past seems more possible with hands immersed in earth and your smile exposed to the sun.

  When you garden you connect with your environment in a powerful way. You become intimate with the cycle of life. You can notice the change in the seasons and how each season blends into the next. Spring starts in winter with buds showing through the snow, and leaves start to fall in late summer. The insects have their own life cycles and agendas, and in watching the earthworms and the ants, you can see a larger pattern to life. You can see the interconnection of the roots and the soil, and the creatures and rain. You can eat that which you have grown yourself and feel connected to the earth in a way you may have never known before. Gardening is a meditative act and an affirmation of life.

  Try sitting in a garden and practicing breathing meditation. Moments of wakefulness may come as you drop your stories and notice the life around you. Lose yourself in the sound of the birds, the delicate tapping of the rain on leaves. Hear the movement of water and the flow of a gentle breeze. Anyone who spends time outdoors knows the connection between every living thing on earth.

  MINDFULNESS IN SPORT AND EXERCISE

  All athletes have experienced a meditative state worthy of a Buddha. Sometimes athletic activities pull you into a natural state of mindfulness. Sport becomes a form of meditation when you engage it with your full attention. Understanding mindfulness and mindfulness meditation can help to bring you closer to the experience of sport. This phenomenon can be called sport-samadhi (recall that samadhi is the Sanskrit term for meditative concentration). This type of focused and absorbed concentration is likely familiar to anyone who has slid down a snow-covered mountain at high speed, pushed the pain barrier on a long-distance run, felt at one with their kayak as it shot a set of rapids, or ripped a phat wave on a surfboard. The talking mind becomes quiet and is fully absorbed in the action of the moment. You are not lost in thoughts about the past and worries or planning for the future. You are not telling stories about the activity or anything else. You are present. There is a steady living presence in the fullness of the moment. This is the state of mindfulness. Mindfulness can be thrilling even if the activity is rather ordinary.

  Surfing for Enlightenment

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  Get on a surfboard to attain enlightenment! Jaimal Yogis suggests surfing as a spiritual path in his poignant and deep memoir, Saltwater Buddha: A Surfer’s Quest to Find Zen on the Sea. He quotes Suzuki Roshi, “Waves are the practice of water. To speak of waves apart from water and water apart from waves is a delusion.”

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  Nongravity sports such as road running, road biking, and swimming offer a ready opportunity to full body awareness. Instead of a gravity-induced absorption, the immersion in the present moment includes the entire body. Take running, for instance, where you can experience a moment-to-moment connection with your total body experience, even when this experience includes pain and discomfort. The challenge is to stay with the experience at the level of sensation. That is, experiencing it as a pattern of gross and pointed sensations instead of labeling it as “pain.” However, the mind has a tendency to move you out of the moment of experiencing sensation and perception and into evaluating and judging the experience. Ultimately, you start to tell stories about the experience: “I can’t take this anymore.” When you can be mindful of the present, the artificial distinctions between mind and body disappear and yield to an awareness of being.

  Mindfulness and sport-samadhi can also impact how you deal with exertion and the limits of your body. If you are running uphill and are engaged in a future-oriented conversation, you will be more apt to give up and not push through the pain and discomfort of that exertion. This future-oriented story may be mindless chatter, or it can also be focused on the activity itself. For instance, you might look up the hill and think, “My god, that’s a long way up; I’ll never be able to stomach that.” This self-talk is very different
than staying with the experience of embodiment at that moment. The truth is that running, when it becomes an experience lived in the moment, is a succession of moments; and as intense as those moments may be when attention is focused on now instead of moments from now, the crush of the future is relieved.

  You will get a lot more out of yourself by staying in the moment and feeling the sensations rather than thinking about them. This is not the same as gutting through the experience of what might be called pain. While exercising, you should listen to your body so as to extract any vital information out of the sensations and perceptions you are having. Pay attention so that you can know the difference between sensations that can be pushed through and those that should be respected.

  Sport, like life, can be joyful. And some of this joy comes from the quality of attention you bring to the sport, in addition to the activity being fun.

  SPIRITUAL MATERIALISM

  Avoiding the Trap

  Being in such a consumer culture you may be at risk for consumerizing your spirituality. Is Buddhism immune from such consumption? Buddhist nun, author, and teacher Thubten Chodron warns that “when we turn to spirituality, we may think that we’re leaving behind the corruption of the world for higher purposes. But our old ways of thinking do not disappear; they follow us, coloring the way we approach spiritual practice.”

  Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche says in his classic work Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism, “We have come here to learn about spirituality. I trust the genuine quality of this search but we must question its nature. The problem is that ego can convert anything to its own use, even spirituality. Ego is constantly attempting to acquire and apply the teachings of spirituality for its own benefit. We become skillful actors, and while playing deaf and dumb to the real meaning of the teachings, we find some comfort in pretending to follow the path. This rationalization of the spiritual path and one’s actions must be cut through if true spirituality is to be realized.”