Get Well Soon, Thầy

Via @thichnhathanh and plumvillage.org, comes news that Thich Nhat Hanh is recovering from a lung infection in the hospital.  All seems OK, but he’ll be in the hospital for a couple of weeks being treated with antibiotics.  For more, please see this .pdf of Thầy’s letter to all retreatants in YMCA of the Rockies, Estes Park, Colorado.

Update:  Via a comment by Kenley Neufeld on Shambhala Sun Space‘s article  “Thich Nhat Hanh in hospital“:

You may also read the latest statement from the sangha regarding the remainder of the tour. Please visit
http://tnhtour.org/2009/2009-08-24-Public-Stateme…

Quotes

Love is the capacity to take care, to protect, to nourish. If you are not capable of generating that kind of energy toward yourself – if you are not capable of taking care of yourself, of nourishing yourself, of protecting yourself – it is very difficult to take care of another person.

Zen Master Thich Nhat Hanh

All my life I have tended to gravitate towards the hardest, most difficult road I can take. I’ve been that way since I was little. When I was 5 or 6, it was decided that I was too forceful a person – too full of myself is how I once had it explained to me by my parents. So in the first grade (I started school a bit young), a concerted effort was undertaken by my parents and teacher to “take me down a peg.” That was a hard year for me. I love my parents and know that they did not mean me real harm, but their efforts with my teacher that year were very successful. I have long since struggled with issued of self-worth and self-confidence. This is part of my Origin.

So I do what I do, and I am what I am. I sit, I practice. I try to practice mindfulness. I dissect, dissolve and attempt to release what I grasp after.

The great practitioners of nonviolence have never turned their heads or shrunk away from their own or others’ suffering. Knowing the downfalls of aggression, they have been able to respond with wisdom and broad-mindedness. This type of wisdom and courage grows from our commitment to understanding our own mind and reactions and the causes and results of our actions. We develop the ability to accurately read and respond to the world around us without rejecting it. This is the practice of nonviolence. Of course this takes some maturity. We really need to cultivate this kind of maturity.

Dzigar Kongtrul

Wonderful Failure

There is a wonderful aspect to the mindfulness trainings: they are actually impossible to keep! To refrain from harming others? What a profound practice! We receive the Five Mindfulness Trainings knowing that by doing so we are opening up to our own failure. We cannot fix the world, we cannot even fix our own life. By accepting failure we express our willingness to begin again, time after time. By recognizing failure, we change, renew, adapt, listen, and grow. It is only by practicing without expectation of success that we can ever truly open to the world, to suffering and to joy. What extraordinary courage there is in risking losing what you know for the sake of the unknown; risking what you think you are capable of for the sake of your true capability! What profound freedom — not having to get it right all the time, not having to live for the sake of appearance! By opening to our own failure, we open to the magnificence of the unknown, participating unconditionally, renewing our life.

— Caitriona Reed
pp. 15-16, For a Future to Be Possible

I read this book (by Venerable Hanh) a while back, and found it to be a concise and useful read. However, it is this passage by Ms. Reed, quoted at the beginning of a discussion of the Second Precept, that I’ve really been thinking about lately. I don’t know about y’all, but I’ve got a huge amount of perfectionist “habit energy.” This quote really spoke to me, and has had such a relevant impact on my practice of mindfulness, but also on the texture of my emotional and intellectual landscape. Reflecting on the great gift of failure, it is easier for me not to dwell when I inevitably break a precept. (Right Listening and Speech, most recently and most notably.) Ms. Reed is totally right – what profound freedom there is in moving beyond the need to always be “correct” in our practice.

Finished

About a week ago, I finally finished Thây Hanh’s The Heart of the Buddha’s Teaching. This is a tremendously useful read – I really think that this is definitely one time that the book lives up to the title.

When I was a kid I taught myself how to speed read – a tremendously useful skill, if you can keep your retention level up (I’m still at about 98%, thank goodness.). However, this is not a book that can be read trivially. I read this one SOOO slowly and carefully, going back over passages frequently.

I don’t know that this is the first book I’d give someone who expresses an interest in Buddhism to me, but it would be the first one I’d recommend to someone I knew to be *seriously* interested.

Chapter 25

So I’ve been taking my time with Chapter 25 of Thich Nhat Hanh’s The Heart of the Buddha’s Teaching, “The Twelve Links of Interdependent Co-Arising.” Dense stuff. I absolutely savour this book – it’s definitely one to read with great care and love. Undoubtedly it’s one to repeatedly reread, as opportunity arrives. But for right now, it’s slow, slow going. Lots to think about. For the most part I find Venerable Hanh’s writing very accessible. Of course, some of the topics he broaches in this book are incredibly deep, serious philosophical discussions, and the writing becomes appropriately dense at these points. Very humbling.

Thây says …

“Enlightenment is growing all the time.”

Best Mindfulness Book by Hanh?

In keeping with my current explorations of mindfulness in the everyday, does anyone have a favorite book on mindfulness by Thich Nhat Hanh? Or another book/source of Dharma that springs to mind as a favorite/something really useful? If anyone has a suggestion, I’m all (very grateful) ears!

(Oh – I should add – two I’ve contemplated are The Miracle of Mindfulness and Peace Is Every Step: The Path of Mindfulness in Everyday Life.)

Mindful Joyfulness/Joyful Mindfulness

So this is a bit of a slippery fish for me right now. An important part of my practice right now is increasing my awareness of every moment, which I am making some headway on. However, lately I’ve been struggling to be joyful when I am practicing mindfulness. Thich Nhat Hanh frequently speaks of recognizing our difficulties and smiling at them, but sometimes this is oh-so-hard for me. Doing this – greeting my experiences and feelings with joyful, mindful acceptance – can sometimes require a tremendous act of faith on my part. In An Introduction to the Four Foundations of Mindfulness, Lama Lhundrup says:

Then, through contemplating the nature of samsara, we should relinquish all desire, all wanting, all clinging to the cycle of existence and dissolve all sadness and evil-mindedness. With “sadness” the Buddha meant the sadness which arises in the beginning when we take the resolution to leave samsara behind, an uneasiness due to leaving our beloved attachments. There should be no such sadness in our mind when we are letting go of the causes of suffering (!), but rather the great joy of a firm resolve to go towards liberation and to become able to make it accessible to all others as well. In order to practice mindfulness it is very helpful to have the support of a joyful aspiration.

Mindfulness is the practice of those who are happy to get out of samsara. Our basic attitude of mind should be free of clinging to this world. Having this as our basis we can develop the four foundations of mindfulness. For this we have to practice with diligence and with a clear, precise knowing of what we are doing, with clearly understood instructions on our meditation. Mindfulness means not to be forgetful, not forgetting the object of one’s intention. Mindfulness needs to be accompanied by equanimity, a stable mind, not impressed by whatever might appear in mind, and it should be continuous, without interruption; not sometimes mindful and sometimes not. A continuous mindfulness is actually based on a deep letting go, just as Gendun Rinpoche always instructed us. Mindfulness establishes itself naturally when we have no interest for the world and let go of our worldly preoccupation.

It is this joyful aspiration that I am trying for right now.

Pain, Experience, Growth, Compassion

In Coming to Our Senses, Jon Kabat-Zinn points out to us that the part of us that experiences pain is itself *not* in pain. This is true for both emotional and physical pain. Trying to find an awareness of this – if even for a moment – has been tremendously useful to me. I think this speaks into the topic of tinythinker’s recent posts. Liberation and enlightenment (to my thinking) are not ceasing to experience, not becoming numb, but letting pain or other experiences in our lives simply happen – not becoming a burden in our hearts and minds, but allowing us to grow instead.

What is the nature of liberation from suffering? For myself it didn’t take long for me to realize that freedom from suffering didn’t mean freedom from pain.

I’ve had plenty of unhappy things happen to me, frankly, running the gamut from (fairly “minor”) molestation (at 4), to emotional and verbal abuse. And I’ve certainly experienced a variety of other difficulties in terms of situation and circumstance. But that hardly makes me unusual, and my struggles and pains are nothing compared to, say, those in Darfur struggling for their lives, or the many children in sexual slavery around the world, struggling with captivity and abuse. My “sufferings” are meager, I know that. Nonetheless, some days they have a deep impact on my heart and mind. Mindfulness and loving-compassion help me refocus, though I’m sure that some of the stuff stuck in my head will take years to sort out. Gives me something to do on sleepless nights, I guess.

In any case, while I struggle with the aftereffects of some of these experiences, I’m not sorry I had a single one of them. Each experience I’ve had has been an opportunity for growth. I’ve done my best – at least since I became an adult and started my own life – to never shirk from an opportunity to grow. Everything I’ve experienced has added to who I am, and what I understand.

Every painful experience I have allows me the opportunity to understand another viewpoint. For instance, it is very easy for me to extend my compassion to people struggling with abuse, past or presence. What I have been struggling with lately (and this partially relates to my lack of serious posts, recently) is learning how to extend that mindful compassion beyond where that compassion is comfortable or easy. Tengu House had a post on this recently, wherein he (?) ponders how to extend that compassion to the folks that kidnap, harm and abuse. This is a difficult but essential question, I think.

Whether or not reincarnation is a reality, I think that there is no question that Wrong Action a person undertakes will lead their future suffering. Reincarnation makes this easier – a person’s wrongful act will be something they suffer with in the future. To my thinking, reincarnation means there’s no escape.

On the other hand, if you don’t believe in reincarnation the answers can be less straightforward, and extending compassion to a violent, “monstrous” person becomes a greater leap of faith. In this case it may be that you simply have to start by letting your “hands lead your heart.” Making a deliberate, conscious decision to always extend compassion moves us all towards the emptying of samsara, towards world peace, towards the end of suffering.

In The Heart of the Buddha’s Teaching, Thich Nhat Hanh speaks of the Five Powers (see chapter 24, pp. 184-191): faith, energy, mindfulness, concentration and insight. With these wonderful tools we can grow both our own Buddha nature, and also begin to see that we all have Buddha nature – villains and victims alike. When we choose to feel compassion for someone who has committed great harm we are mindfully applying what we have learned about compassion and loving-kindness, Buddha nature and co-arising. Compassion without hesitation frees our own mind from suffering and waters the seeds of our own Buddha nature.

The first of the four noble truths is that suffering exists. Unenlightened beings can cause suffering and frequently do. Shantideva made a really good point when he said: “It is natural for the immature to harm others. Getting angry with them is like resenting a fire for burning.” Perhaps one can view the Wrong Actions of human predators the same way one views the actions of a rabid grizzly bear. There is no point in being angry at the bear, and it isn’t very hard to have compassion for her/him. However, the bear must be dealt with for everyone’s safety and be at least imprisoned, if not put down. (Note – I am strongly opposed to the death penalty and do not mean to imply that killing is the best way to deal with human predators. In addition, I am a vegan, so of course I am highly interested in fair and compassionate treatment for all of our fellow creatures.)

Anger can be understood as a strong aversion to someone or something. Aversion is the opposite of attachment and is no more useful. Acting from anger is not acting in wisdom. By deliberately choosing compassion we do not poison ourselves, and we also help to break the cycles of violence and hatred that keep us from achieving the end of suffering for all beings. There is no point in me not forgiving former abusers. It may be hard, but forgiving them allows me to not identify myself with the past’s painful events. As Master Cheng Yen said: “To be angry is to let others’ mistakes punish yourself. To forgive others is to be good to yourself.”

Flower (Lapsana apogonoides) image courtesy of jam34.

Hurrah!

Last night I went for my first Dharma Study, though it was a bit of a drive – I had to haul my cookies all the way to Gulf Breeze (just outside of Pensacola) to visit Palyul Changchub Choling. They’re “… a sangha or group who study and practice Tibetan Buddhism in the Nyingma tradition according to the Palyul nam-cho practices.[Links are mine]“

I doubt I can go every week right now (2 hrs in a car with $3 gas), but they’re such a great group, and I can do preliminary practices (Ngondro) with them and take refuge the next time the lama comes. I’ve thought about it, and I think Tibetan Buddhism is the best place for me to start right now, although I have a great deal of respect for the teachings of Thich Nhat Hanh. Going to the study group last night felt so right – I was comfortable with the meditation session and the dharma discussion – I felt at home in the material and even felt like I had something to contribute to the discussion. (For what it’s worth, they were discussing What Makes You Not a Buddhist by Dzongsar Jamyang Khyentse. I don’t have it, but it seems like an interesting read, if slim. Maybe once I’ve caught up on my other Dharma reading….Apparently, this is a much lighter/easier work than their last selection, which was a book on Dzogchen.)

Perhaps soon I can go back, and maybe I’ll even remember to bring my camera. ^_^