(upbeat music) This podcast is brought to you by Free Buddhist Audio, the Dharma for Your Life. Our work is funded entirely by donations from our generous listeners. If you would like to help us keep this free, make a contribution at freebuddhistaudio.com/donate. Thank you and happy listening. - So I was ordained in 1976, the long hot summer of 1976. I think some of you might not have been born then, which makes me feel terribly old. But just to give you some orientation, you would be just on the edge of punk rock happening, the sex pistols hadn't yet released. Anarchy in the UK, the West Indies were thrashing England in the test series. Trade Union power was very strong at that time. There was no internet, there were no mobiles. I was living along with a lot of other Buddhist in squats, in the London Borough of Camden under the great red Ken Livingston. Thank goodness that a squat in council property. And we were building the LBC in the old fire station. Again, thanks to the labor council. They, you know, were quite amused that they thought we could do that place up for so little. So thanks to them. So a very different world. And yes, so now little order then, I thought it was quite big. Actually, it was little compared with nowadays. And our Sangha, the friends, friends of the Western Buddhist order. Well, there was a real energy and vitality, I would say, at that time. And we were, it was real alternative living in our communities and living very, very simply. Well, we could be very simply because we were squatting kind of semi-legally. You could work, quite not very much work, not have and live on very little. And we did. And at the heart of our Sangha, and we didn't have many centers then, the main center was in North London, not the now North London center. This was in archway, this center. And there was Glasgow, there was Brighton, there was the LBC being built with great difficulty and very little money. And there was some activity in New Zealand, a bit in Finland, but that was about it. And at the heart of all this, of course, was Sangha Achter, was bounty. There was no ordination process. Yes, you went to your Mitra-Studig group and you went on retreats, but they weren't, they were retreats for anybody. They weren't retreats for many tasks for ordination. There was no private preceptors, there were no public preceptors. There was Sangha Achter, who was our preceptor, but it was just fancy ordaining us. We didn't use the language of a preceptor. There was just Banshee, and us. Banshee and activist, all the members, Buddhist activists, very definitely. And Banshee was very active, seminars, lecture series, retreats, ordinations, writing books, editing seminars, lots of individual correspondence and really getting together with people to work out what the order, what the movement was. What was this thing called the Western Buddhist Order and the Friends of the Western Buddhist Order? And there was an almost daily revision of what we were. Somebody would go up to Banshee's, he was staying in a small house up in North Norfolk in those days, or, yeah, that's right. He didn't even have Pavanoka then. And they'd come back maybe from a small study group or just me seeing Banshee in a chat round dinner and they'd come back and say, hey, guess what, Banshee, this is the way he's talking about the movement now. This is the way he's thinking about it. So you'd have this, wow, you know, that's really cool. That's quite something. So there'd be this sort of daily revision almost. That's only a slight exaggeration of what we were about, very important. As Banshee, as Sanger Achter, I'm just gonna call him Banshee, actually, explored the vision more fully, more deeply and articulated the implications of that vision more fully. Now, I'm not gonna say this was a golden age. I'm not at all nostalgic for the old days at all. I mean, I love the movement as it is now. Those days have gone, they were of their time. They were important and I treasure the memories, but I'm very, very glad that we have things as they are now. But I'm mentioning it because it's a formative and decisive influence for me. Banshee was and is my teacher. Yes, I don't even mind saying my guru, even though he rejects that sort of language, but he's definitely my teacher. And his disciples were my caliarmitras, are my caliarmitras and my teachers. I learned the Dharma from then. I practiced the Dharma with them. I worked for the Dharma with them. In those days at the time of my ordination, I should also say, there was no detailed exploration of spiritual death, spiritual rebirth. There was no articulation of the stages of the spiritual path. Sankarachta's distinctive way of explaining the stages of the spiritual path. It was all there, it was all implied, it was all referred to in the spirit of those things were there, they were in the air, but they weren't fully articulated as they are now. You might be interested to know as well, but even the sort of language of the centrality of going for refuge wasn't as apparent in those days. I'll say something about that in a bit later. And my ordination happened after two years of involvement when I was 19 and it happened on a weekend retreat in an old farmhouse in Thetford Forest. It was midsummer, so the days were long, wonderful, long, light filled days and it was a brilliant, fat, waning moon. And it was, but it was ginormous above the vines in Thetford Forest. And the accompaniment, the background accompaniment to our weekend retreat was the roar of jets like dragons growling in the nearby U.S. air base. And Bancy just gave himself completely fully to us that weekend as well as all-daining Ratnagoona and myself. He led the shrine room activities, he led the pooges and he also led a really wonderful seminar on a miller-upper story and songs called The Shepherd Search for Mind. Banty talking about not just renunciation but the nature of mind, sort of pointing to the nature of mind. And in those days, as I indicated, yes, going for refuge was important, Banty emphasized it, but going for refuge meant commitment, commitment. That was the language, full commitment. And it means that now, but that was the real, strong language that was used. Going for a fudge meant full, total commitment to the Buddha Dharma and Sangha. It was the total response of our total being to the Buddha Dharma and Sangha. The feeling was a fully giving yourself to it with no doubt, no holding back. That was definitely the mood, the atmosphere of the times. There's even a famous story of a discussion going on between, before this was before I was all down, but a discussion going on between, you know, they're quite senior order members now, but they're having this discussion around the table in the famous community at number five, Balmor Street. And the table collapsed under the weight of the intensity of discussion and presumably the washing up and plates and milk bottles and the discussion, what was it about? Commitment, that was the kind of atmosphere of the times. And Sangha Rachter's presence, Banty's presence, was sort of dangerous, kind of dangerous. You might not feel that now when you go and see Banty these days. But in those days, we're going to have a look at a painting in our community lounge. And it's Banty with long black hair, yellow ropes and beads seated in meditation. That's what he looked like. That's what he looked like on my ordination retreat. So these rather crumpled yellow ropes, long hair and white beads and this kind of slightly dangerous feeling about him, as though kind of anything could happen and nothing could happen when you're in his presence. But also playful and incisive and completely and utterly himself. Precise and yet spontaneous, brilliant, brilliant clarity, incredible depth and range of knowledge, great powers of analysis, great critical mind, critical of concepts, critical of language and yet a sense of something altogether other, very ordinary and yet strange capital S, as if he was in contact with some hidden, vital realm fascinating and yet awe-inspiring. That's what it was like to be around him. That's how I felt. I'm not the only one who felt that. And also incredibly warm at times, intense, intensely positive emotion to be around. And when it came to my ordination, my private ordination, I was very aware of going alone. That's the symbolism of the private ordination. You know, Banti always used to say when he performed a private ordination because she'd start off in the shrine room with everybody else. And he always used to say when you have your private ordination, the symbolism is even if no one else anywhere in the world was going for refuge, you would still go for refuge. You would go alone. You would go as an individual. You'd still do it. And I remember very well after Banti had gone out onto the little private ordination shrine room a bit later on, really going with solemn steps, kind of feeling. This was a really momentous time in my life across this sandy yard up a narrow staircase to a tiny room. And there, something happened. I experienced it. People have different experiences in their private ordination. But I experienced it very definitely as initiation. Initiation in the sense of the activation of tremendous energy, a sort of spiritual energy, a kind of current of energy, a pure, blissful, deep current of energy that runs on even now, a transforming energy. And a sense as well of being truly seen, truly witness, truly known, just in that moment, just in that short time, in that ordination ceremony, of being seen fully and completely, nakedly even. And I don't mean seen psychologically. I mean, being seen as it were, essentially, as seeing, if you like, of my deepest potential, what you really are, if you could only realise it, as he said. Strict, if you like, of all the trips, or the games, or the habits, or the immaturity, seen clearly and seen delightively as well as solemnly by the man I had the deepest reverence for. Well, when you are seen like that by the man you most revere. Something happens, something is unleashed. And of course, it's named. That was the other important experience, being named. No longer was I whatever I was. I was now Padma Vadra, which Banti pointed out, was one of the names of Guru Padma Sambava, who I have some feeling for, had some feeling for. But later, joyously, delightedly, in the public ordination ceremony, where everybody's presence, Banti explained what he said, this is one of the names of Padma Sambava. And everybody burst out laughing for some reason. They thought that was a terrific joke. He then went into the meaning of Padma, the meaning of lotus, pointing out that the lotus evokes the tender, receptive, so-called feminine qualities, compassion, love, receptivity, and the Vadra evokes the hard-cutting qualities, energy, wisdom, the so-called masculine qualities. And he said, you need both to be fused perfectly. So a real precept, a real teaching in my very name. For me, ordination was very definitely a spiritual rebirth. Or rather, looking back, I would say it was the beginning, a very early beginning of a spiritual rebirth. Looking back, I really was just a little chick, a real baby bird, beginning to break out and get my little beak through the shell. Actually, looking back, as well as the my little beak, sort of breaking out, there was a very, very big bird outside that was breaking in. There's a famous kuman, public case, as they're called, from Chinese Chan Buddhism concerning the great master Qinqin. And Qinqin used to say that the foot-traveling patchdrobe-chan travelers-- that's the name of somebody really pursuing Chan realization-- the foot-traveling patchdrobe-chan travelers needed to have the simultaneous breaking in and breaking out I and the simultaneous breaking in and breaking out function. Only then were they truly on the path. So on one occasion, a monk asked master Qinqin, I am breaking out. I ask the teacher to break in to which master Qinqin said, can you live or not? In committing myself, in going for refuge, I was asking to break out, break out of my state, my life. As it was, I was looking, I was longing to break out into the vast open visionary realm of the Buddhas, the bodhisattvas, the gurus, the darkenates. Banti took me seriously, completely and utterly seriously. And looking back, he took me more seriously than I took myself. He gave me exactly what I asked for and broke in, broke the shell. And looking back, like Ching Ching, he was asking the question, can you live or not? After all the notion, I was ecstatic, completely, completely ecstatic. Everything was ecstatic. I was joyful. Surely, I thought, in just a few years, two years, if I practice fully, totally, especially if I do my mantra and visualization practice every day, surely, then, yes, of course, the bodhicitta will arise, that living force, that energy of wisdom and compassion will surely arise. And I will effortlessly gain enlightenment for all beings. And then they'll just be effortless activity. I mean, I was 19. It's forgivable. And a young 19, I have to say. But can you live or not? Can you be reborn? Can you live the spiritual life fully? Can you not live? Can you die spiritually? And the night after my ordination, my public ordination, went back to London and went to my tiny room in my community. And the Santa, who is one of my Kalyanamitras, was sharing this tiny room with me. We were lying next to each other on the floor. And my little room was like a sort of monastic cell. It was covered. All the walls were covered in reproductions of tankers. And there were shrines and everything. And in the depths of the night, between waking and sleeping, on that night after my ordination, from a tanker of Padma Samava residing on the glorious copper-colored mountain, the magician guru, rothfully, ecstatically smiling, and at the center of a surging dance of dark eyes and darkenies, from that image into my semi-waking and sleeping state, a thunderbolt, a lightning bolt, a lightning bolt to the chest, came to me. A sudden, invisible, unknowable lightning bolt, straight to the chest, to the heart, to the vitals, an utterly destructive lightning bolt, straighted too, too much, utterly overwhelming, hauling me out of dream, or was it waking, and hauling me awake so that I shook my friend, Cassandra Wake, coming to muttering, me muttering. It's the picture, it's the picture. Oh, but what if there were nothing to understand, nothing to learn? What if we had simply to accept in comprehension, accept defeat, accept collapse, disintegration, death, face, dissolution of the mind, abdication of reason, erasure of what can be weighed, numbered, measured, sensed, known, face, dissented to hell without hope of resurrection on the third day. Are we prepared for this? So it felt something like that. That's from Bantis poem on Guster and Bitor, by the way. So yes, ordination, going for refuge, the act of solemn commitment, seen and witnessed by my beloved teacher, released a stream of pure, ecstatic, transforming energy. But there was so much in me, so much, that did not want that transformation, not at all. I didn't, I didn't think, I thought the opposite. I thought I was totally up for transformation, but actually, so much in me, wanted to simply add on something to myself, wanted to add Buddhism onto me, without any real change on my part. What I was shown in that experience, if you like, was that was just not possible. It was just not possible. If I wanted to break out into the unbounded, vital, pulsing expanse of the Buddha's, I would need to do a lot of very ordinary day-to-day work for many, many years. And it took me many years to fully accept that truth, to work that out, actually. The lightning bolt from Padma Samla was a kind of prophecy of what was to come. My spiritual life would not be an easy thing. There wasn't going to be some stream of Bodhi Chitta kind of enabling me to kind of work effortlessly. It would be no easy thing. I wasn't going to just go to a teacher, be given a magic mantra, given a yoga technique, a button to press and presto, I'd be enlightened. No, no, no, no, no. And that's an essentially cowardly attitude, I think, in the end, a cowardly attitude. It would involve much, much more from me. I don't regret what went on at ordination and all those early experiences at all. In fact, I cherish them. And I'm deeply grateful to Banti for all that. And in fact, if Banti had just ordained me, that would have been enough. There was enough spiritual quality and vitality in that, in a sense. You don't need anything else. And all the energy flowing from that. But of course, Banti did give much, much more to me and to others. And he continues, in fact, to do so. Anyway, not long after I was ordained, I think it was a year or so after, there was this order convention, big gathering of the order at the school in Sussex. And Banti led this convention. He led the meditations. In the morning and the evening, he led us through all sorts of different meditation practices. He supervised our collective prostrations in the afternoon to make sure we were doing the prostration practice properly. And in the evenings, he either introduced talks by some of us younger, all the members, and he'd introduce us and then sum us up. Very interesting experience to be introduced and summed up by Banti. And he gave three incredible talks. And those talks, he did script them, but they were quite freely scripted. He did a fair bit of improvisation in them. You could see that. But they were obviously the product of a great deal of thinking, intuiting experience. He gave a talk on going for refuge. And it was the first time he really unfolded his vision of levels of going for refuge and the centrality of going for refuge. Very inspiring the way he evoked that. Evoked the going for refuge of the disciples of the Buddha and evoked the different levels for us now in practice. He gave a really, I think, an extraordinary talk called a vision of history, where he sees history as a battle between the spiritual community and the group. He talked about different spiritual communities down the ages, not just Buddhist spiritual communities, but other spiritual communities and how they arose and passed away. And it was very obvious what he was doing. He's saying, you are a spiritual community and you are part of a long tradition of spiritual communities. But watch out because the group is very, very powerful and the group will not play by your ethical standards and it will destroy you. It will want to destroy you. It didn't say it will, but you need to be aware of its destructive power and also a big message about how you can create groups internally within the Sangha, of course. And then he gave this lecture a system of meditation. And I think it's one of what is most important lectures. Particularly at that time, I think, it clarified so much for us. At that time, in the order, we were all practicing a number of different meditation practices. There was all sorts of things, mindfulness of breathing, metabhavana, contemplation of the six elements, visualization of different Buddhas and Bodhisattvas, super visualization practice, contemplation of the six Bardo verses, recollection of the 24 Nidhanas and so on. That's just a few of them, just sitting. But in this lecture, Bhandi showed us how these practices formed a system, a progressive path or even a mandala of practices. That he showed how they kind of hung together. And he really emphasized particular practices to bring about important stages of the spiritual path. I'm sure most of you are familiar with this, but I'll mention them. So he sees the first stage of the path as being that of integration. And the main practice here is the mindfulness of breathing. Then there's the stage of positive emotion. And the main practice here is metabhavana. Then there's the stage of spiritual death, the main practice here being the contemplation of the six elements. Then spiritual rebirth, the main practice here being the meditation on a Buddha or Bodhisattva. And then there's just sitting, which is the practice of, in a way, non-practice, which is the practice for spiritual receptivity. It's a very important lecture, and it had a big effect on the order. It certainly had a big effect on me. And looking back, my interest was very definitely in spiritual death and spiritual rebirth. I wanted to get away from even obliterate the boring me and be spiritually reborn as soon as possible into a visionary world, preferably with as little effort as possible. And this path that Vanti showed, I showed very clearly that just wasn't going to be possible by the Vatra. I would need to do a lot more basic work. Needs to be a lot more honest with myself. As I said, it took quite a time to sort all that out. For there to be a total, far-agoing transformation, all of these elements need to be present. In fact, if there is to be success on the path, spiritual death and spiritual rebirth need to be operating and present at all stages of the path and for success in all practices. If they're not present in the stages of integration and positive emotion, decisive and complete spiritual death and spiritual rebirth is just not possible. So you've got to be doing your integration and positive emotion practices for there to be a decisive and complete spiritual death and spiritual rebirth, but to do integration and positive emotion fully, you're going to have to start beginning to do spiritual death and spiritual rebirth. And what's left of this talk, I want to sketch out how that's going to happen a bit. So, okay, first stage of the path, integration. And the main practice here is the mindfulness of breathing. In the original lecture, Banji talks about some of us stumbling along to Buddhism, sort of stumbling into meditation classes, our being, our consciousness, divided and disparate. And we're sort of what holds us together. In fact, we're kind of loosely held together with a name and an address. That's about it, you know, he was joking, but there was some treatment for some of this. So the first thing we've got to do is to put ourselves together. We need to learn to concentrate, not through forcing the mind willfully on something, concentrate in the sense of the harmonious integration of all our energies and all our attention, so that we create a coherent self. And of course, in the mindfulness of breathing, we learn how to do this. We learn how to sit still, first of all. We learn how to sit still for a change. We learn how to keep the breath at the center of our attention. We learn how to gather ourselves around that focus, naturally in a relaxed way, but in a persistent way. As well as that, we learn how to practice mindfulness in daily life through awareness, mindfulness of the body and its movements. Very important unto you, it says, following tradition, the body and its movements. You know, so it's not enough to be mindful when you're lying down in seven supine on whatever it is. You also need to be aware of how you're walking, how you're moving, how you're gesturing, all those foods, as well as being mindful of what we feel, what we think, as well as being mindful of others, mindful of our whole environment. And you know, I'm sure you've all noticed this, that after a while of doing that, you notice that some things that we do, maybe a lot of things that we do are just not conducive to that movement to integration. A lot of the things we might be involved with disintegrate us, break us up, even rip us apart. Activities, you know, whether at work or leisure, attitudes, particular emotions that we indulge, views we hold, even perhaps some relationships even. They're actually contributing to our disintegration. They're actually destroying the mindfulness that we're developing in other ways. And if we're serious about progress, those things will have to die. Those things will have to die. They have to be given up. We have to go forth from them. Sometimes we can really feel that tension, that pressure. Well, you need to look at that. You need to be honest about that. So there's a spiritual death here in order to be reborn into the rich and vivid realm of mindfulness. And it really is a rich and vivid realm, this realm of mindfulness. Really very, very rich indeed. Sometimes the way people talk about mindfulness and the way they do it is so unattractive and you can't believe it's the Buddha's teaching. It seems to be something the head does. You kind of note experience and you move very slowly. But there's no real feeling, no real experience. And Banti, of course, has described this as alienated awareness. You're alienated from yourself. You're alienated from your environment. So we need to really practice mindfulness. You need the vision of mindfulness. You need that if you like the vision of enlightened mindfulness, enlightened awareness. Imagine the Buddha's mindfulness. The Buddha's mindfulness would have been like a kind of aura, a kind of field, if you like, in which he moves, through which he acts. Everything for him would be endowed with a brilliant, vivid, awake quality in which self and other self and world are completely transcended. In a sense, everything is mind. But it doesn't mean everything is head. Very hard, I think, for us to really get hold of what a Buddhist tradition means by mind. It's something living, it's a living quality. So as part of mindfulness, we need to, you know, as a way of integration, we need to see what it would mean to be spiritually reborn as mindfulness, as a pure and total presence all the time. So we need to recollect the Buddha very vividly, recollect the Buddha's mindfulness, and go for refuge to the Buddha with the totality of our being. When you ask for ordination, there's a really important practice that opens up for you, that we do on going for refuge retreats, and you can take up at home, if you wish, called the going for refuge and prostration practice. And in this practice, you imagine the Buddha at the center of a great lotus tree. There's an icon of it here of the refuge tree that we use. You're doing that with your mind, and then you do a full length of prostration whilst reciting a verse expressive of going for refuge. So your body speech in mind, your whole being, a fully involved, fully expressive of your overall aim and purpose. And this is a powerfully integrated practice. There's a real integration that goes on in this practice because you're placing at the center of your total being the Buddha and all the refuges. And there's real action and energy flowing into your going for refuge. So that's a bit on mindfulness and integration. And another just a little aside, it occurs to me that sometimes people talk a lot about mindfulness. Mindfulness means self-homesty, means being really honest about where you actually are. And I think that's incredibly important in any spiritual life. Secondly, there's positive emotion. So the main practice here is the meditation practice of metabharthana, the development of universal loving kindness. It's also the practice of meta in all actions throughout life. So what are we doing in metabharthana? Of course, what we're doing is developing, generating, if you like, out of our own friendliness. And everybody has some friendliness to some degree, even it's just at their cat. There is some friendliness, but we're developing a purer friendliness, a purer love, something that grows stronger and stronger and is felt equally to everybody. So in the metabharthana, we're going beyond preferences, beyond particular attachments and diversions in meditation and in our action, in our behavior. A meta says, Banti in that lecture, is the basis of all positive emotion. He thinks it's really basic, this basic, friendly response, loving response to whatever is before you. When you see suffering, that is compassion in the sense of immediately acting positively to relieve that suffering. It's nothing like sentimental condescension or for horror at suffering. It's immediately immediate activity to relieve that suffering. When meta encounters others' happiness, it immediately becomes joy, sympathetic joy, delights in their success. And of course, this is the opposite of cynicism and jealousy. And then there's equanimity, which in that lecture he explains, as a sameness of emotional response to everybody, to whatever state they're in, to whatever's arising, there's this equal love, equal compassion, equal sympathetic joy. He also mentions in that lecture, reverence and faith and devotion. And this is where your meta encounters those who are more developed than you. You see them, you experience them as more developed than you. And you immediately feel respect or reverence or in the case of the Buddha's faith and devotion. And again, if we want to progress in the development of positive emotion, some things just have to die. There are some things we will have to give up. Again, it will be maybe some, maybe a lot of activities, activities. Maybe some people, even we have to kind of break connection with them because they sort of stimulate negative emotions, which we are not strong enough to resist. And of course, what we have to give up, what we have to go forth from here, is any kind of hatred, any kind of resentment and involvement in any kind of harming of beings. For example, meat eating, things like that. And we need to develop a sensitivity and responsiveness to us and full moral responsibility for our mental states. The Buddha is very, very clear about this. Just go and read the first chapter of the Dhammapada. You know, after the verses on the first two verses about mind being the forerunner of all states of happiness and suffering, skillful states leading to happiness, unskillful states leading to suffering. The next verses are all about giving up blame. All about giving up blaming others, giving up any sense of righteousness and ignition, that sort of thing. And then after that, you get the famous verses on. Hatred never ceases through hatred. It only ceases through life. This is an eternal law. So if we're really serious about the development of positive emotion, those negative responses really do have to die away and all the rationalizations that go with them. We need to be reborn, if you like, into meta. And Bant is, you know, certainly described this. Where meta ends up, where you end, if you like, in meta. Of course, there's no end to meta. It's an immeasurable. There's no end to loving kindness. But he says really what's going on when you get deeply into the practice after you've really worked through those stages, really, you know, develop love, you know, overcome your barriers of hatred and things like that. You enter a sort of state of free floating loving kindness in which there is no self, no other. You're liberated, he says, into a sort of formless spear called the beautiful, something the Buddha said, actually. A completely different, entirely different relationship to the world, a sort of non-relationship to the world in a way. It was a beautiful poem by Cheshwar Muosch. It's a Polish name, so it's very hard to say, called love. Which I think, in a way, it tries to get at this. Love means to learn, to look at yourself. The way one looks at distant things, for you are only one thing among many. And whoever sees that way heals his heart without knowing it from various ills, a bird and a tree say to him, friend. Then he wants to use himself and things so that they stand in the glow of ripeness. It doesn't matter whether he knows what he serves, who serves best, doesn't always understand. So this brings up also the whole area of service, generosity and service. Especially serving the Dharma, working for the Dharma, even being prepared to do very humble work for the Dharma. This is all expression of positive emotion. I must admit, my attitude when I got into the Dharma, I have to say, a definite motive for getting involved in Buddhism was so that I wouldn't have to work. You know, I really didn't want to work. You know, I was incredibly lazy and I thought, you know, brilliant, you know, you can have a sort of path through life where you don't have to work. Fantastic. I'm just going to open the doors to get started. So brilliant, no work if you're a Buddhist. You know, you can just sit on your lotus and, you know, drift off. So, you know, it's been very, very helpful to me that Bunty has really emphasised the importance of right livelihood and working with others for the Dharma. You know, whatever it is, building, cooking, gardening, trading, bookkeeping, I've never done bookkeeping. You know, more relief for everybody else. You know, but I've done a fair few other things and it's very important for me to do those things. It's had a big effect on my energy and certainly my energy to be involved in communicating the Dharma. It's all liberated my energy, if you like. You know, of course, this is very traditional, you know, working for the Dharma, serving the Dharma, serving your teacher, you know, Milarepa, the great Yogi, Milarepa. What happens the first time he meets Marpa? He doesn't know it's Marpa. He's looking for the great Lama Marpa and he goes where he's heard this guy Marpa is staying to his farm, basically. And he sees this man, thick set, stout, fierce looking man who's a bit pissed and he's had a bit too much chan. Plowing his field and he says, and Milarepa says, "Excuse me, you know, "can you tell me where Marpa is?" He says, "Yeah, well, Marpa lives over there." I tell you what, if you plow the field, I'll go and tell him that, you know, you want to see him. This is Marpa, some weird game he was playing. So, Milarepa's first interaction with Marpa was to work, to plow this field fully and completely. And then, of course, after he actually does go and see Marpa, I mean, he just really has to work. He has to build all of these towers and tear them down again. Before there's even a hint of a teaching. You know, every time, you know, he gets near to a teaching, Marpa is just really unpleasant and just gets him to do more work. He was all to purify Milarepa. And there's a wonderful practicality about Marpa as well. Instead of Marpa, that he knew everything from how to mend a pot to how to show you to Buddhahood. And I think this is really important that we shouldn't despise or think that practical skills are unspiritual and somehow not part of the Dharma, not part of Dharma work, not part of transformation. I think that's very important. And I have to say, as well, working with others for the Dharma, I've really developed real close friendships, intimate friendships that have been really tested. You know, if you want spiritual friends, you know, if you want Kalingonamitras, preceptors, close and close peer friends in the Sangha, work with them, find a way of working with them, find a way of serving with them, serving them. There's so much, actually, we can do with mindfulness, with meta, with spiritual death and spiritual rebirth. You know, we can bring about a lot of transformation with mindfulness and meta if we live practicing them fully. So what about spiritual death and spiritual rebirth as distinct stages? Not far to go now, hold on. So Bantu's vision of spiritual death is really profound. It's very pure, actually. He says, through mindfulness, through meta, you become a together, positive, happy, healthy, functioning individual, going along quite nicely, even very nicely. But that together person, good though they are, has to die. It's not enough. That together person has to die. And I think there's a really important point here. Spiritually die, not literally. A very important point here. You sort of see it. You know, people come along to our centers in a bit of a state. They're unhappy, disappointed by their life. Buddhism and meditation get them together. They may even commit themselves to things. Become a Mitra, ask for ordination, get ordained. They feel even more sort of sorted. So what happens, you know, when they get themselves together? Well, it can happen that they think that they can now make it in the world. And they plunge back in to Korea, to family or a new family because they might have already left one. This happens, and it happens because people are content with a kind of limited attainment, if you like. It happens because there's no wisdom. There's no insight. There's no real lasting definitive spiritual death. There's no experience of shunya-tah, of emptiness. They haven't seen through their fixed and unchanging self. Maybe there's been some beginnings of it, but it's not far agoing. They're nice people. They're nice Buddhists, but that's not enough. That's not what we're about as an order. As he said in the original lecture, shunya-tah can be translated in many ways. It's emptiness, nothingness, the open dimension of being. He said, but it's best translated as death. Because shunya-tah, the experience of shunya-tah is the death of the conditioned you. Even the positively conditioned you. It's the death of belief in a fixed, unchanging self and other, self and world. And the practice here that comes into its own, in particular, is the contemplation of the six elements, which you take up not long before you're ordained, depending on the individual, and certainly after ordination. I'm not gonna go into that practice here. And it can be unhingy when you start to approach these kinds of practices. Sangarachta talks about, you can sometimes experience in meditation a deep, nameless fear. And he describes it as the breath of shunya-tah. Shunya-tah, spiritual death is sort of breathing on you. And that's precisely why integration and positive emotion are so important. The stages of integration and positive emotion represent the ethical, existential, and behavioral homologue of shunya-tah. We need to live unselfishly, mindfully, generously, with full love in order to see, to fully experience emptiness, spiritual death, to experience what the bowels of Bengal, those great wandering minstrels of Bengal call, being dead while alive. Dead in the sense of being dead to all conditioned, conventional, worldly ways, and living entirely for what they call the man of the heart. So that brings us to spiritual rebirth. So death, spiritual death, is not the last word. After any death, after every death, there's always a rebirth. After genuine spiritual death, there's a spiritual rebirth. And the meditation practice here is the Buddha or Bodhisattva that you're initiated into an ordination. This Buddha or Bodhisattva that you contemplate is the new you, you reborn if you're prepared to die, if you're prepared to spiritually die. And this isn't just a meditation practice. There's a crucial point here. It's not a technique. What this practice really means, what it really represents, is that you've discovered, you've found your living vital connection with Buddhahood. Not as an idea, not as a concept, but as a living vital being, a living vital myth, a living form or archetype. There's nothing abstract here. One of the meanings of effective going for refuge is moving, if you like, from the universal to the concrete. You know, to the embodied. So there's nothing abstract here. What we have here is the response in us to the enlightened person that directly resonates with us. The enlightened person, the form that embodies all our aspirations, that in fact embodies all aspects of the goal and all aspects of the path. In a way, that is a kind of represents a kind of unfolding of our entire life. Indian tantric Buddhism calls this the Ishta Devata. An Ishta Devata means the desired, the long for deity. We need to find this. We need to find it quite simply because we are creatures of desire. It's desire that makes us go round and round the wheel of life. You can't just get rid of that desire. You have to transform it onto the path and the utterly beautiful, fascinating, beguiling, compelling Buddha or Bodhisattva that speaks to you will do that. It could be the Buddha himself. Sometimes people say all this stuff about, you know, having a visualizing practice. They didn't do that in the Buddha's day. Well, of course not, because they're the Buddha. You know, if you've got the Buddha sitting with you, you don't need that. I mean, what about an arthropindicist story? You know, when he sees his friend, he's not a Buddhist. There's no anything about Buddhism. And he sees his friend preparing this big meal for somebody. So there's too busy to have a chat. And his friend says, oh, I'm preparing this for the Buddha. And an arthropindicist says, just a minute. Did you say Buddha? Buddha, I did say, an arthropindica. But did you say Buddha? Buddha, I did say, an arthropindica. But did you say Buddha? Yes, I did say Buddha, an arthropindica. Buddha, Buddha, even this sound is hard to come by in this world. When can I see him? When can I meet him? Just the name. That was enough to electrify, to awaken that desire, that longing, that devotion he couldn't sleep all night, placing up and down so that he could get to mourning quicker in order to see the Buddha. And of course, he became a great disciple. And then Shari Putra, the great general of the doctrine, the great Arahant Shari Putra, the great analyzer Shari Putra. What happens when Shari Putra is about to enter Para Nivana? The end of Para Nivana before the Buddha. He goes to the Buddha. He bows down to the Buddha. He praises him with the most loving versus rubbing the Buddha's legs. Rubbing the Buddha's legs with love, with devotion. The Buddha was the longed-for deity to use. They wouldn't have used that word for those early disciples. He was the embodiment of all their deepest longings and aspirations. So find the Buddha. Find the Bodhisattva. Find the myth of enlightenment that speaks to you, that wants to break into you. And live from that. Allow yourself to be completely transformed by that, blessed by that even. You can taste. You can know what the meaning of spiritual rebirth really is. This leads us to spiritual receptivity. Spiritual receptivity is particularly summed up by the just sitting practice. And Banti says, you know, in our meditation practices, there needs to be an interplay, a dialogue, a dialectic, even between activity and receptivity, activity and receptivity. So mindfulness, matter, six elements, visualization, they're sort of active practices, although also require receptivity. But between these kinds of practices, at the end of them, at the beginning of them, there needs to be periods of just sitting, being in a truly receptive, which isn't a blank state. It's not passivity. Look, this is what happens when you're spiritually receptive. Listen to this. This is Sanga Rachta in retreat, and he kept a little meditation diary. And at that time, he was sort of exploring the whole area of, well, spiritual receptivity. It's sort of opening up to what might be being taught from a higher dimension with just a few little diary entries concentrated, feeling of total dissociation between past and present life, doubt, awareness of the answer, whatever leads to growth is my dharma. Decided to ask more questions as follows, what should be my attitude towards surroundings after returning to Kalimpong? Answer, absolute detachment. This detachment is positive, must be detached even from the Buddha. Detachment is taught by the Buddha transcends both attachment and detachment in the ordinary sense. How to behave towards people. Buddha first, and everyone else second, awareness of shortcomings in this respect. Question, what about acquiring land, etc., answer? This will be settled after your return. You must be ready to be anywhere and nowhere. Awareness of the Buddha's presence, though rather faintly, reflected whether these awareness is with genuine guidance, concluded that since they were in agreement with the scriptures and were not unreasonable, they could be accepted. Another entry, good concentration, sensation of positive peace descending, asked, what should I do? Awareness of answer came at once, nothing, experience of emptiness and stillness, self-reduce to an absolute pinpoint. This date lasted for some time. Awareness, whatever works you may have to do later on, in the midst of them, you will have to maintain this state of mind. And the last entry, fairly good concentration, feeling of devotion. Awareness of the universe as it appears in the eyes of Ava Mukiteshara. Again, feeling of devotion, consciousness of peace descending from a great height. So perhaps a little glimpse into what happens when you start to open up in meditation. There is another stage of the spiritual path, there is a sort of end of the spiritual life, it's an endless end, spontaneity. This is what Sankarashita says, it is in the spontaneity, in the sense of spontaneous compassionate activity. He describes it very simply and I think this is incredibly profound, then when I first heard it, but I really do think this is profound. Spontaneous compassionate activity is doing what needs to be done, doing what needs to be done. There's nothing between you and the activity of liberating others. There's no attachment to comfort, to position, there's no aversion, there's no conceit, there's no fear, there's no uncertainty, there's no confusion. Seeing clearly without any filters directly, what is needed in that man there and that woman here and those people there and acting, happily, joyfully, playfully, dancing and singing the dharma in all that you do for all beings, living in continuous transformation, continuous spiritual death, continuous spiritual rebirth for the benefit of all living beings. We hope you enjoyed this week's podcast. Please help us keep this free. Make a contribution at FreeBuddhaSt audio dot com forward slash donate. And thank you. [MUSIC] [BLANK_AUDIO] [BLANK_AUDIO]
