This wonderful talk by Ratnaguna looks at the Pureland tradition of Shinran, comparing some of his approaches to those of the contemporary teacher John Kabat-Zinn, pioneer of Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction. The nature of ‘problems’ versus ‘difficulties’ is explored – notions of ‘acceptance’, ‘development’, and awareness itself are considered from new angles that can shed light on our experience of failure and suffering. A lovely, sympathetic and good-natured look at the foolishness of human beings which can, when held in the heart, begin to approach wisdom itself.
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and I'm here to introduce Ratnaguna a delightful task for a delight person for what I'm sure is going to be a delightful talk. I first met Ratnaguna in I think 1974 it might have been 1975 I was just coming round from having fainted while teaching a class at an adult education institute and he was a rather startled very young man looking at me with something like compassion and curiosity. I hope I'll stay upright tonight. The instructions to people sharing talks are that they just say a little bit about the person just to let you know who they are. I have already introduced Ratnaguna on a convention here at Wyndham some years ago it might have even been eight years ago I can't remember and at my age it feels like yesterday so I'm assuming it pretty feels like yesterday for a lot of you so I'm not going to go on for a long time about all Ratnaguna's wonderful qualities not least because I suspect they'll just show themselves to you very shortly as he speaks. He's a wonderful delightful honest beautiful person there's no other word for it but he's also someone who's played quite a part in our history so for those of you who don't know Ratnaguna I'll just mention that he spent the sort of early years of his career with the F.W.B.O. very much based in London around the building project of Sukhavati and the London Buddhist Center playing his part in that and was a sort of founder worker of friends' foods. I think even in the days when it was just a market store I think Ratnaguna was one of the two or three people who ran the market store which was probably the F.W.B.O's first ever right livelihood project which evolved into friends' foods within a couple of years so Ratnaguna played a kind of key role in one of these major planks pillars of our movement from the LBC he moved to Manchester we're along with Sagramati and I think Kamala Sheila and Ratna Jyoti they established the the other Ratna Jyoti the Maha Ratna Jyoti who I think is here they established the Manchester Buddhist Center where Ratnaguna lived for many many years I can't remember how many but working as chairman as Mitric and Vina as teacher and so on from Manchester he moved to Vadricuta and for some years was many many years was living there teaching study or to study Mitric study and so on where I think everyone who was sort of alive in the movement of in those days you know couldn't couldn't fail to recognize and appreciate Ratnaguna's skill as a teacher and study leader but also his love of study Ratnaguna loves to read and reflect and something I can remember was a talk he gave on a chairman's event and I think that was in tandem with some other talks he was giving around the movement where he tried to infect us with his love and appreciation of studying the Dharma something which in those days at least on the men's side of the order seem to be you know something of a poor relation it seemed to be harder to get men to attend study retreats than it was to attract women to study retreats but I think Ratnaguna did manage to you know convey some of his enthusiasm and she a love of Dharma study to a wide audience more recently though than I probably by that mean over the last four years Ratnaguna's sort of been out on a more personal journey which as most of you will know he's recorded with his customary honesty openness and transparency and authenticity in the pages of Shubder and I believe his talk tonight is in some ways going to spring out of his researches his experiences and his insights reflections and conclusions from that period I've only seen Ratnaguna a few times during that period and I know that it's not always been an easy time by any means but as ever whenever we've met up I've just always been grounded impressed and inspired by the sheer honesty with which Ratnaguna doesn't just talk about his experience but allows himself to go into it he is in my view just an exceptional man and an exceptional friend and to see Ratnaguna sort of back in the current no doubt in his own way participating now actively in the breath works project with Sona and Fijamala and increasingly others and playing his part in the Manchester centre and giving a talk here tonight is just wonderful just to know he's going to be around and visible more and more tonight he's going to talk about Shinran and Cabot Zinn and he has a sort of subtitle which he just mentioned which I might not remember but I think it's strangely strange yet somehow ordinary good enough strangely strange but oddly normal I give you Ratnaguna thank you very much for that thank you want to imagine that you're blindfolded and you're put into a field and you're given a tool bag quite a big tool bag and you're told to run around the field so you run in and around the field blindfolded carrying this tool bag unfortunately for you there are a number of holes in the field so inevitably at some point you fall down a hole the holes are very very steep and deep so you fall down this hole blindfolded where am I can't find where you are you realize you're stuck down a hole you can't get out it's too steep it's like ahh tool bag got a tool bag so blindfolded you open the tool bag up it's only one tool in it it's a shovel so what do you do with shovels you dig so you start digging away with great industry digging digging digging it's okay so that's a metaphor a metaphor for would become clear towards the end of the talk what that metaphor stands for I got the metaphor from a book called acceptance and commitment therapy and I'll say a few words more words about that and I'll be using a couple more of their metaphors towards the end of the talk so in a census talk comes from the experience of my last three or four years and I wrote about that in some detail in my article in February chapter crisis of faith that was very very personal and I'm not going to be so personal this evening because I haven't got any more to tell you really that was it so the talk the influences of cabatsin and chin man have come out of my sense of being stuck really stuck in this spiritual life you might think shin man and cabatsin that's two talks really isn't it on i cheating giving two talks in one in a sense i am and in a sense i'm not although chin man and cabatsin are very very different characters very different teachers in important or significant ways they say the same thing to me and i'll be telling you about that later so what i'm going to do is talk about shin man his influence on me cabatsin his influence on me then i'm going to draw it all together and show how really they're saying the same thing and you'll be astounded amazed and you'll go wow at least that's what happened in my fantasy the other day when i was medicine chin man has been an influence on my thinking i would say rather than my practice i don't actually practice pure lamb Buddhism in fact strictly speaking you can't practice pure lamb Buddhism as taught by shin man because according to him all practice is manifestation of self-power which is the product of the calculating mind which is a manifestation of doubt so you can't really practice as a follower of shin man followers of shin man do actually practice but strictly speaking i can't but i find his thinking fascinating and he has even flew into my practice a great deal cabatsin has been a strong influence more recently but not very directly via the work of william's t'sdale and uh seagull and their book uh man if you said man she's about his sense of depression um what is it it's mindfulness based cognitive therapy for depression but i couldn't call the talk shin ran william's t'sdale in seagull because it would sound too much like um it's list as yeah so cabatsin's influence has been quite indirect in fact i find as a writer i find him rather a boring writer and his book full catastrophe living although it's got some great ideas in it it could be pared down much smaller i find him too verbose and very difficult to read however he has been strong influence i think maha mati wanted us speakers to talk about how these influences might be relevant to the rest of the order and i don't really know but their approaches have helped me to find my way back to practice and the f wio and the wbo so i'm right behind them really it's in a way it's a matter of life or death for me the fact that i've come back a matter of spiritual life or death there was a very strong i think possibility that i might not find my way back and these approaches i'm going to talk about have helped me to come back and judging by the responses i got from my article in shabda i think it may be of some use to quite a few people so first i'm going to look at shin ran's ideas then at cabatsin's and i'm going to look at the common ground so shin ran i became interested in him a few years before my crisis actually i was developing the order study course and i was trying to find texts from our refuge tree the teachers of our refuge tree and i read shin ran and i found him fascinating but perplexing and i wondered what he really abuddiced i wondered that because he kind of turned everything upside down it was very timely for me to come across shin ran because it came at a time during a period when i was feeling intensely humiliated and feeling that my years of practice had actually got me nowhere now you can't really talk about shin ran without at least mentioning honan his teacher and honan was a profound influence on shin ran shin ran never really considered himself to be an independent teacher he always considered himself a disciple firstly of amitaba and sort of more in the down to worth away of honan honan was his teacher both lived in japan during the kamakura period of 12th 13th century so honan first he lived in a ten-dime monastery practicing the dharma and after 20 years he gave up in despair because he felt that he wasn't getting anywhere i'm just going to quote you something from him this is i'm afraid my favorite of all quotes of all teachers from the past having a deep desire to obtain salvation and with faith in the teachings of the various scriptures i practice many forms of self-discipline there are indeed many doctrines in buddhism but they all may be summed up in the three learnings namely the precepts, meditation and knowledge as practiced by the adherents of the lesser and greater vehicles and the exoteric and esoteric sects but the fact is that i do not keep even one of the precepts nor do i attain to any one of the forms of meditation alas what shall i do what shall i do the likes of us are incompetent to practice the three disciplines of a precepts meditation and knowledge so whenever i read that i feel a warm glow kindred spirit so he was in some despair and he ended up sitting in the monastery library which is an extensive library and read the whole contents three times in a way to try to find the way out of his problem on the third time he came across a quote by the japanese pure anti-jigenshin who was in turn quoting the chinese pure land teacher shandau and he was writing about other power and when he read that that was the end of his quest he converted to the pure land path and what that means is he converted from the path of self-power to the path of other power and he started the first ever pure land school pure land buddhism had been around for a long time in china in japan but it had never been a separate school so he was the first founder of the first separate pure land school called judo shin so shin man just a few years younger than honan had a very similar experience he also lived in a ten-dye monastery practice for 20 years gave up in despair heard of honan converted to judo shin pure land school became honan's disciple later on honan was banished by the emperor i won't tell you why i haven't got time and most of his main disciples were banished also two of them were actually sentenced to death shin ram was banished to a far part japan on the coast remote village on the coast and he was stripped of his monk's status lived with fishermen got married had children became quite well known as a teacher in his own time but always claimed that he was not a teacher always claimed that he was merely honan's disciple however he did actually develop honan's teachings and became a very original thinker and teacher but before i say anything about his distinctive ideas just want to go back to his crisis i'm very interested in that crisis after 20 years of practice i think he was in the shrine room most of the time he realized he'd got nowhere or at least he thought he'd got nowhere he experienced failure and this experience of failure i would say had a profound effect on him and shaped his whole attitude to damah practice and teaching i myself find failure a very interesting subject we've all experienced failure i'm sure something we've tried to achieve but were unable to so i think everyone experiences failure i believe there's a move in schools at the moment to uh stop having um failed as a mark the teacher who's putting this forward suggests deferred success so shin man and honan had to be each had 20 years of deferred success i myself have experienced quite a lot of deferred success in my life but when you fail to do something you've dedicated your life to a failure spanning 20 years that's something else isn't it usually when that happens the word failure changes from a verb to a noun and you become a failure and in his teachings shin ran very very open about his failure as he's honan uh shin ran practice what i call radical humility he called himself a bonbu bonbu which means foolish person utterly foolish person and as i say he refused to think of himself as a teacher and therefore he considered he had no disciples later on his disciples called him shin man shown him shin ran the saint but if he'd have heard about that he would have not liked it at all he was shin man the bonbu but and i think this is very important although he openly admitted that he'd failed to make any progress while practicing in the monastery he attributed this failure only partly to himself in part it wasn't his failure it was partly circumstantial it was partly due to the times he was living in in common with many other japanese Buddhists of the time he believed he was living in the third age of the dharma where it was no longer possible to practice and make progress equivalent i think to the indian idea of kaliyuga the dark age and japanese Buddhists called this age mappo yes he was a completely and utterly foolish being incapable of practicing the dharma but so was everyone else no one had the ability to practice the dharma anymore so his failure in the monastery was not really his failure in the sense that he'd failed to do something that that it was possible to succeed at it was the failure of the system the whole tradition of study practice realized ethics meditation and wisdom was now unworkable it could no longer be done the time of self-power was over he believed and the only thing left to do was give yourself up to amitaba other power and let the force of amitaba's wisdom compassion and merit take you there to the pure land and from there you could gain enlightenment so shinran's ideas his developments of pure land thought his practice his whole life comes from his experience of failure and despair but being unable to make any progress in fact he made failure into a feature so i sometimes say that shin buddhism was born from despair so i'm just going to mention a small cluster of the ideas that i found fascinating inspirational and influential first idea is shin jin and this is probably the most important of shinran's ideas because it describes the most important state or stage in the pure land buddhism's life shin jin is often translated as faith but it's not quite the same as faith straddha i think better translation of shin jin is entrusting or true entrusting and to understand this you have to know something about the context in which he was speaking so in the larger sukhadivuha sutra the bodhisattva damarkara vows to become enlightened and create a pure land in the western direction and he makes a number of vows depending on which recension of the sutra you've got it's usually 48 sometimes it's 47 46 but usually 48 and the 18th vow is considered by pure land buddhism to be the most important because it's here that damarkara promises that if you simply think of him single-mindedly with an aspiration to be reborn in his pure land you will be reborn there this is a fairly common idea i think in mahayana buddhism mahayana sutras that by focusing your mind one pointedly on a buddhah and perhaps his pure land you will be reborn in that pure land but damarkara's vows and this particular vow goes one step further at the end of each vow he says that if it turns out that what he vows does not come about may he not become a buddhah and therefore may he not create that pure land so if it turns out that on thinking off him and saying his name you are not reborn in his pure land he won't actually become a buddhah and therefore won't create a pure land as he did become a buddhah amitava and as he did create that pure land sukhavati then what he vowed must be true it's a cast-iron promise so qingin is a state of believing in this promise in this vow and entrusting oneself to it so as i'm talking about shidman's influence on me i'm going to tell you how i understand this idea i don't actually believe it as literal truth i don't believe that the myth of damarkara and his making of the vows and his later on becoming amitava and creating the pure land is literally true but i do believe it says something very important about the nature of life really the nature of the universe or at least the nature of the mind and i think that's why pure land has pure land buddhism has lasted and i think it's white so popular in the east because i think the myth expresses a very important truth and this is one i think it's saying i think it's telling us that although bad things do happen in the world and that these bad things can happen to any one of us in a spiritual sense we're going to be okay in terms of the five nehemas i'm not going to go into the five nehemas i'm just hoping you know what i'm talking about on the level of the kara niema and dharma nehemas everything is going to turn out fine on the level of the other nehemas it may not but on the level of the kara and dharma nehemas we'll be okay as long as we have faith it's a bit like the famous quote from st during of knowledge all shall be well and all manner of things shall be well so it's very very optimistic you could say born from despair but very optimistic probably most buddhists who know about the five nehemas anyway would agree that on the level of the kara and dharma nehemas as long as you have faith you will be okay but they would add but you've got to make the effort faith and effort with faith you make effort in the spiritual life no matter what happens to you on the physical plane spiritually you'll be fine and pure land buddhists would have agreed with that up until the time of shin man i either effort was involved although pure land buddhism has always seen faith is taking precedence over efforts but when shin ran came along he believed that the time for making an effort was gone all you could now do was give yourself over to amitaba and the vows he made when he was the bodhisattva dharma kara i don't know whether shin man was familiar with the parley canon probably not if so i would guess that he would feel really at home with the suitanipata the fourth and fifth chapters particularly of the suitanipata which are according to many scholars the oldest chapters in the parley canon but there's another sutta that i think he would really like and it's a chetana sutta from the angu to anikaya now here i'm going to mention sargamati told him i would mention him this evening so this is a good this is a good place to mention him sargamati has painstakingly found all the references in the parley canon to all the different formulations of the spiral path that we're familiar with there are lots of different formulations he's found them all and you can get them off him if you want i say this because his last big talker men's can men's order we can when he was talking about tataka tagabra i think he mentioned this and he was a bit annoyed that people don't seem to realize there's all these different paths but anyway there you are sargamati and the chetana sutta is a form of the spiral path that we're familiar with but it begins with virtue leading on to freedom from remorse leading on to joy then rapture and so on the same all the way up the interesting thing about this particular formulation of the spiral path is that at each stage the buddha says for a person endowed with virtue for instance consummate in virtue there is no need for an act of will made freedom from remorse arise in me it is a nature of things that freedom from remorse arises in a person endowed with virtue and this goes on all the way up so twelve times the buddha says this no need for an act of will it is in the nature of things so the next stage arises naturally it's in the nature of things another translator says it's natural the word translates is damatal i think shinman would have really liked this sutta although he would have gone further than the buddha no need for an act of will shinman would have said yeah in fact it's important for there not to be any act of will because any act of will that you apply would prevent the natural flow to the next stage you all just get in the way of the nature of things later shinman said that shin jin this stage that i'm talking about was also genen which is natural so genen is naturalness so entrusting oneself is natural and this brings me onto the second of shinran's ideas hakurai hakurai means calculation it means to deliberate analyze determine a course of action it means to arrange or manage to work out a problem to bring a plan to a conclusion it's often translated as the calculating mind and it refers to the small mind the mind of the ego planning calculating manipulating the world other people for its own ends hakurai is also used as a synonym by shinman for self-power that is all acts of intellects and will aimed at gaining enlightenment and the calculating mind is all pervasive everything we do everything we say is tainted by calculation even our desire to live the spiritual life even our desire to gain enlightenment to be compassionate is tainted by our own calculations for our own benefit the ego thinks i want to gain enlightenment and sometimes shinman uses the term double-mindedness for this which is really good i think you perform a skillful act nothing wrong with that but then what does the mind do it appropriates that skillful act oh look at me i did something really skillful there and chandel the earlier chinese pureland master talks about this he called it good acts mixed with poison and he made the point that while you have that kind of mind a double mind you can't enter the pure land you need a single mind a mind of complete sincerity so shinman agreed with this saying that hakurai calculation was the antithesis of shinjin in trusting shinjin being single-minded and sincere but the problem with hakurai is that it's a closed system you can't get out of it it's a bit like the hole that you've just fallen down and you're shoveling away industriously 20 years shoveling away you just dig in the hole deeper and deeper you can't pull yourself up by your bootstraps so that's why self-power doesn't work according to shinman because it's the self trying to get something for the self and that's why according to shinran we have to have recourse to other power it's only other power that can help us out of this closed system of the self planning for the self but there is another form of hakurai it's amitaba's hakurai amitaba is constantly working for our benefit but we keep getting in the way of his mind his wisdom and compassion with our calculations and there's a phrase that shinran uses over and over again shinjin is no self-working is true working no self-working is true working it's a bit like the zen idea of the small mind and the big mind the small mind is us the big mind is amitaba so there's an equation self-power is our hakurai our calculation other power is amitaba's hakurai amitaba's calculation and shinjin is true in trusting to amitaba's mind letting go of our own calculation so then there's another equation if shinjin is entrusting oneself to amitaba then self-power is doubt doubt in dharmaka as vowel and doubt in the pure land don't know how many of you are following this line of argument or agree with it just telling you shinman's ideas really but i think sangerashta expresses the idea of hakurai and letting go of hakurai in his poem life is king although he there uses the metaphor of ownership won't redo the whole poem but there's a line isn't there we try to anticipate the earned smile the soft reward that's hakurai at work and at the end he says life cannot belong to us we belong to life life is king i think these last two lines express the falling away of hakurai our calculation in the arising of shinjin naturalness or entrusting when we realize that life doesn't actually belong to us and that actually nothing belongs to us that life is not ours to manipulate and that we actually belong to life that life is king at that point there's a giving up or giving away of the self and with that comes a kind of letting go into life no more calculating no more manipulating people and events to get their own way and the kind of entrusting to life and entrusting to the natural dharmic law the laws of karmat and dharma niyamas dhammata or jinen naturalness entrusting oneself to life as king or life as amitava you could say so you've probably guessed now that shinjin is equivalent to the point of no return well chinran equated shinjin to stream entry the arising of the bodhi chitta irreversibility that's the irreversible umi and turning about in the seat of deepest seat of consciousness so you could say it's equivalent to insight or seeing things as they really are although pure land Buddhism being the path of faith or trust doesn't speak in those terms it speaks in emotional rather than cognitive terms so sometimes the rising of shinjin is called a change of heart and i love that change of heart because often when we say someone's had a change of heart we mean that there's been a shift in their attitude in the way they relate to something or someone we don't necessarily mean that they have any more knowledge but there's been kind of an emotional shift to life in fact according to shinran with the arising of shinjin doesn't really come any more knowledge well there is the insight is to realize how foolish you are not how foolish you've been but how foolish you are how deeply irredeemably foolish you are you've been digging away at this hole making it deeper and deeper and deeper so deep you just cannot get out of it but you can only have that kind of insight from another perspective so with this realization of foolishness comes amitaba's mind so it's from amitaba's viewpoint that you see how foolish you are so we're all deeply foolish beings but we haven't got a clue how deeply foolish we are we probably all at times do something a bit daft and we think so we all think we're foolish but you don't know how deeply foolish you are it's a bit like Buddha nature the idea that um you are already Buddha turned on its head you are already foolish you've always been foolish and shinjin is simply realizing how deeply and utterly foolish you are that's great for me anyway because i'm a complete and utter div i think most of you realize that now but so are you we're all equally foolish pure lamb Buddhism is very egalitarian there's no hierarchy except i might say oh i'm much more foolish than you this is fantastic because you know sometimes when you read shadu and someone's sounding off about something very very seriously and sometimes i look and i think that sometimes i do that of course sounding off about things as if it really as if my view is really important i'm just a complete div as most order members are and so when when the movement and the order is criticized i think well of course what you expect from a bunch of divs and there's this effective foolishness real foolishness an absolute foolishness i'm only on the level of effective foolishness at the moment okay the last idea i'm going to talk about of shin rans is the moment of the arising of shinjin up until honan pure lamb Buddhism was very concerned with death and your future rebirth so it is important to remember amitava to devote oneself to him to give one self up to him to chant his name make offerings and so on so that at the moment of death you'll be in the right state to move on into his pure land and the moment of death became very important and very crucial death proximate karma became very important because according to the sutra of contemplation of amitava no matter what kind of life you have actually led if you can remember amitava at the time of your death and sincerely call his name even just once you will bypass the evil realms and be reborn in his pure land now this is a great idea in a way but it brings about quite a lot of anxiety what if you forgot what if you in such a bad state in so much pain that you just could not bring amitava to mind so honan tried to remove this anxiety but by saying that the time of death is not so important actually what's important is now if you dedicate yourself to amitava say his name etc you will be reborn in a pure land so no to worry you could say that he taught that habitual karma was more important than death proximate karma for shinran the arising of shin jin was a transcendental moment it was the point of no return and once you'd experienced shin jin you were assured of entering the pure land sometimes he called it the assured state and what this meant was that you really did not need to worry about the future in fact worrying about it and making efforts to be reborn in the pure land will manifest stations of self-power therefore calculating mind and therefore doubts and they would get you nowhere so forget about the future forget about the pure land shinran brought pure land buddhist's focus from the future to another place to now and this place then shin jin arises in one moment of time each in one moment of time just going to read you something from a pure land buddhist scholar called denis irata he says this moment of time isn't just another moment in the conventional sense it's the shortest possible instant of time and thus is both time at its threshold and beyond time time that has become rich and full having been permeated by timelessness now i just said that forget about the future forget about the pure land but that isn't really correct shinran i would say never forgot about the pure land the pure land was always his guiding principle but for pure land buddhist this present moment each in him is situated within a context the context of a mythical past Dharmarkaras vows his enlightenment as Amitabha and his creation of the pure land that all happened in the unimaginable past and the mythical future you're being reborn into that pure land and these two mythical dimensions the past and the future imbue the present moment with a mythical significance so shinran ichinen is now so there we are shin jin entrusting hakurai calculation jinen naturalness and ichinen one moment and then of course there's other power which i just referred to but haven't gone into that as a another idea mainly because you're all familiar with that idea and then there is radical humility which he didn't teach the teaching but which he exemplified so that's all i've got time for to tell you about shinran time to move on to kabat zin and kabat zin is a very very different kind of person to shinran living in a very different context shinran lived in a traditional society where buddism was the norm and his teachings assume a prior knowledge of buddism and they're situated very squarely within the buddhist tradition and you could say that his teachings are religious they're mythical based on a story based on having faith in that story kabat zin lives present tense in america where buddism is not the norm and he teaches mainly within a medical context in a secular context and although i believe he is a buddhist he has never openly admitted i don't think to be something to do with labels not wanting to have labels he's probably most well known for his mindfulness based stress reduction course mbsr that he initiated 30 years ago in massachusetts medical school at the university there and this course mbsr courses for people suffering from long-term health conditions including chronic pain so most of you i'm sure know something about john kabat zin already so i'm not going to say as much about kabat zin as i said about shinran the main components of the mbsr program is mindfulness and he defines mindfulness in a particular kind of way define it many times but this is the main definition that most people use mindfulness is paying attention in a particular way on purpose in the present moment and non-judgmentally i'm not going to go into a clause by clause analysis but i just want to pick out two aspects which have been very important to me this is last two aspects in the present moment and non-judgmentally so let's take the last one first this is the one that could be controversial don't know if papa vagus here but he did threaten to heckle during this talk so this will be the place non-judgmental what this means is that whatever you notice in your practice of mindfulness you don't judge to be either good or bad it just is and the reason this may be controversial is this understanding of mindfulness is different i think from mindfulness is taught by the body in the parley cannon and i think as taught by sanguyxta and as understood by most of us at least until recently so in the parley cannon teaching and bantays judgment is present in mindfulness in the practice of mindfulness here as part of the practice of mindfulness is a distinguishing between skillful and unskilled mental states and then having distinguished them making an effort to prevent any unskillful states from arising and to eradicate any that have arisen and to develop any skillful states that have not yet arisen yeah and maintain those skillful states that have arisen this is the four right efforts which you're familiar with so you know all this so judgment is involved in the practice of mindfulness judging some states to be skillful others to be unskillful and then possibly probably making an effort to change whatever is present so in cabot zinn's teaching of mindfulness mindfulness does not include judging mental states in this kind of way and it does not include making an effort to change them the practice is simply to be aware of everything including mental states and not to try to change anything so in cabot zinn's way of understanding it there's no sense of progress away from skill unskillful to skillful no sense of getting rid of hindrances no sense of trying to develop jjana any of that kind of thing there was a conference this time last year at banger university on mindfulness and cabot zinn was there and there was a presentation by one of his colleagues in america Ruth Byer on mindfulness and i asked a question i asked the question about judgment just reiterated what i just said basically and i can't really remember her reply but later i talked to john cabot zinn about it and he said that he takes his understanding of mindfulness from the zinn tradition i know hardly anything about the zinn tradition and i suspect there are zinn traditions but according to him his understanding is there's no judgment involved in mindfulness in that tradition i think we have to remember also the context in which he's teaching he's teaching people with long-term health conditions including chronic pain he's not concerned with ethics he's concerned with helping people to cope with come to terms with live with accept a health condition sometimes a very painful one judging one's condition is not going to help someone like that pain is pain and if it's chronic that is if you're in pain all the time what is the point of judging it to be bad how is that going to help you you can do nothing about it the best you can do with chronic pain is to learn to accept it and acceptance is another way of saying non-judgmental so we don't in this context need to get into a debate about whether one should accept oneself you know there's been a debate lasting probably a year or so now about bainty's teaching of don't accept yourself we don't need to go there because what we're concerned with here is unpleasant experience not unskilled mistakes unpleasant experience that's intractable i said earlier that kambat zinn has had an indirect on effect on me via the work of three psychologists who developed the mbsr program as a preventative to depression relapse program like or nbct might from this base cognitive therapy for depression but in this case in this context the pain that they're concerned with is not physical but mental come emotional more precisely depressive thoughts and moods and the best method to deal with them is to be aware of them without judging them to be good or bad although realizing that they are just thoughts and feelings and thoughts are not necessarily reality again although the context here is mental stroke emotional pain rather than physical pain it's unpleasantness rather than unskilledfulness that they're concerned with well you could say that depressive thoughts are unskilledful they don't talk in those kind of terms so widening this whole context out we could say that we all experience pleasant events and unpleasant events physical emotional social spiritual and the practice of mindfulness consists in simply noticing these events without judging them to be either good or bad in the present moment so this is the other aspect of john kabat zinn's definition i want to look at this evening in the present moment pain only occurs in the present moment you can think about it you can imagine having pain in the future and you can remember pain from the past but you're only actually experience pain in the present moment so the practice is to concern yourself just with that so the question might arise why why would you try to be mindful of your pain in this present moment why wouldn't you try to distract yourself from it with memories visualizations just try to get away from the pain there's a suitor from the polycanum salata suitor often translated as the suitor of the dart or the suitor of the arrow it's in the samyutinika and in it the buddha says that the uninstructed worldling when suffering pain suffers two kinds of pain thus he suffers twice as if struck by two arrows the first kind of suffering is just pain let's say it's a physical pain actual physical pain lower back pain let's say that's one arrow the second side of a pain is your emotional response to that pain it could be resistance to having that pain not wanting it to be there that's another kind of pain on top of the pain and then there's anger about having that pain there's disappointment about having that pain there may be fear that the pain might get worse one scientist who's devoted his whole life to pain that says that pain never comes on its own it always comes with a mass of other human misery every pain has a meaning anxiety depression isolation lots of things when you've got physical pain you've got a lot of other pain as well so the uninstructed worldling suffers twice the arian cycle suffers only once he's only struck by one arrow he suffers the lower back pain and that's it he doesn't also suffer from resistance to that pain and anger about having that pain and depression and anger so the practice of being mindful helps people with chronic pain or chronic health conditions to cope with and accept their present pain because that's all they have to cope with you only have to cope with the pain you're presently experiencing you don't have to cope with the pain that you will experience over the next few years because that's in the future you don't have to worry about all the pain you've had for the past few years because that's gone now only need to concern yourself with this present pain so the question arises can you cope with this present pain and usually the answer is yes the present moment is usually bearable it's usually the thought of past and future suffering that makes the present suffering unbearable or seem unbearable so learning to focus on the present moment in this way brings about an important shift in attitude cabote's in rights about this if you don't want to read the whole of thought catastrophe living read chapter 15 because that's where the main teaching is chapter 15 of his book where he discusses the difference between what he calls healing and curing curing is when you or someone a doctor maybe does something that stops your pain cures it so it's no longer present however cabote's in deals with people who have conditions that have been unable to be cured but healing can still occur and healing doesn't even soften the pain or alleviate it in any way although it might but essentially healing is a profound shift in attitude towards your suffering the way cabote's in rights about this is that through mindfulness you get a glimpse of your wholeness your wholeness the idea is that part of the suffering that you have you still with your fragmented consciousness when you in pain you tend to focus on the pain and identify with it and think that the pain is you and that it's the only thing in your life the glimpse that of wholeness that cabote's in cabote's in rights about is to see experiencing yourself as more than your pain the pain is not you it's just a part of you this is all gone into the salata suta there's more going on in your life than just pain there's also pleasure there's beauty there's love affection meaning purpose or there could be and this glimpse of wholeness is tantamount i would say to insights cabote's in doesn't say that but i think that's what it amounts to it it helps you not to change your condition but to change your relationship to your condition that's all i've got time for this evening on cabote's in so the main ideas i've talked about chin man's idea of shin jin or entrusting and jin in naturalness hacker eye calculating mind the present moment it's in and cabote's in's understanding of mindfulness paying attention in the present moment and non-judgmentally although coming from very very different contexts sit together very easily for me and this actually shouldn't be very surprising when we consider that john cabote's in got his understanding of mindfulness to the zen tradition and shin man has crossed his pure land and zen and pure land have always been very very connected i suppose in the terms of the developmental imminence or imminental model both shin man and cabote's in's teachings or expressions of the imminence model both of them emphasize not trying to get anywhere not trying to change anything and both have an emphasis on this present moment rather than looking to the future because this present moment is actually the only one you've got and it's only through paying attention to this moment that we can enter into the eternal moment cabote's in says somewhere that meditation happens outside of time shin ran says that shin jin arises in one moment and at that moment is at the limit of time it's both in time and outside of time and both emphasize non-judgmentalism or acceptance cabote's in in the area of chronic pain or ill health shin man in the area of spiritual life i don't think he ever wrote this but many of his followers write in their poems that amitaba takes you into the pure land just as you are there's no need to earn a place in the pure land through spiritual practice this book i mentioned earlier acceptance and commitment therapy at some point there are three authors so i'll refer to the author as a day they talk about acceptance as being the closest you can get outside of a religious context to grace pure grace so what's great grace is opening yourself up to the influence of the higher the transcendental you could say acceptance is opening yourself up to anything to whatever is happening at the moment and in the end i think that shin jin entrusting is very similar to cabote's in's understanding of mindfulness mindfulness is entrusting oneself it's entrusting oneself to life not to amitaba's vow necessarily but to the natural process of transformation that occurs if you just stay with present moment mindfulness is a giving oneself up to the natural law dhammatā of the dhamma mindfulness is faith it's faith it's trusting that there will be that attitudinal shift that profound transformation of view that occurs when you just watch things as they happen without trying to change anything you could say that this attitudinal shift of wholeness that cabote's in wants his patience to have is a shift from the zen idea of small minds to big mind in fact shallot jokobek in one of her books talks about holding difficult emotions within a bigger container she's a great idea i think she says anger for instance you'll never get rid of anger but you can hold it within a bigger a bigger a bigger container so it becomes less important you could also say that it's a shift from one's own calculating mind trying to make things different for yourself to amitaba's calculating mind his sake is a lovely metaphor in the acceptance and commitment therapy book to describe this metaphor of the chess set so you got a chess set there's the board there's the black pieces and there's the white pieces let's say the black pieces represent pleasant things pleasant events the white pieces represent unpleasant events and they're in a battle and the battle goes on for the whole of your life with our small mind our calculation we go inside with the black pieces and we try to beat the white pieces try to get them into checkmates so we have a nice comfortable pleasant life and none none of us have achieved that of course and we won't achieve it just goes on for lifetime after lifetime so that's calculating mind so what what they say in this book is instead of identifying with one side of it why don't you identify with the board so the chessboard holds everything it just holds it and this play of um pleasant and unpleasant just goes on just goes on and on and on but you don't need to get involved in that you don't need to side with one side it just happens so that's the bigger container so yeah bantee says in the latest and the last issue of dama life that buddhism is really all about the developmental model and it can't really be called buddhism if it doesn't use the developmental model that's probably true isn't it when i think of shin man and kabat sin as using the model of imminence of not doing anything more as a tactic rather than the ultimate state of things it's a way of bringing about development by leaving things as they are so basically everything i've said about shin man and kabat zin can be summed up in one word problem shin man had a problem he was unable to practice the dama or at least when he did try to practice he got nowhere and that wasn't supposed to happen that was his problem kabat zin's problem was not his own problem but other people's problems the problem of chronic pain that could not be cured and i'm using the word problem in a very specific even technical sense here i'm using it in the way that bantee does when he distinguishes between a problem and a difficulty a difficulty you will remember is something that can be solved on its own level with intelligence and effort a problem is something that cannot be solved on its own level and at the same time you cannot change the terms of the problem he mentions this distinction twice i think in his take lectures the first one was in the high evolution series in the lecture called is a guru necessary there he says that a problem cannot be solved on its own level in fact he says that by trying to solve it on its own level you actually exacerbate it it's a bit like being in the hole and digging it's what you're doing with a problem making it deeper and deeper and the example he gives in that lecture is of a woman coming to see him complaining of her husband she cannot live with him she says it's impossible so when bantee says to just leaving him she comes up with all sorts of good reasons why she can't leave him so she can't live with him and she can't leave him she has a problem and in that lecture bantee seems to describe problems if they were some kind of negative neurotic mental phenomenon born out of a desire to trick the guru but in a later lecture in the series of the golden lights the birdie's hat for his dream he talks about problems much more positively he says that if you're really living the spiritual life you will have problems spiritual problems many of them conundrums that you cannot solve shinran's problem was that you couldn't make progress he was unable to solve the problem on that level by putting more effort into practice so what did he do he envisaged the dharma in a completely different way not as a series of practices that lead stepwise towards enlightenment but as something that's given to him by amitaba and that gift is freely given not earned there's nothing you can do to earn it now put like that it might sound as if i'm talking about a difficulty rather than the problem because what he did was he changed the terms of the problem but in fact i would say that shinran was only able to make that change only able to change the terms of the problem by by letting go of the problem and allowing this transformation to come about he could only do that from the point of shinjim ah just to say a few more words about shinran's problem he had a problem if you want to be a follower of shinran he presents you with another problem the problem is you have to entrust so what if you don't entrust yourself or if you can't entrust yourself you can't develop entrusting because if you develop it itself that goes against it so to try and develop faith is doubt so what can you do what can you do you can do absolutely nothing so what if you do nothing and nothing happens it's quite a problem isn't it to cabbage in the problem was pain chronic pain in practical pain or ill health all the medical experts and all the knowledge in the world cannot make a difference so what can people do they can change and through that change they can change the way they see their problem they can change their relationship to it and again you might think well wait a minute no mindfulness you're practicing mindfulness you're doing something to solve the problem in that by practicing mindfulness you'll have this profound summation of you and you'll see the problem differently but they're still left with the problem they've still got the pain that hasn't changed at all all that's changed is their mind their way relating to the problem now i think that we've all got quite a lot of problems but that we often mistake our problems for difficulties and therefore we treat the problems as difficulties and we dig ourselves deeper and deeper into that hole going back to the suit of the two arrows the first arrow pain is the problem can't do anything about it the second arrow comes about because we treat the first arrow as a difficulty rather than as a problem i we try with effort and intelligence not to have pain but there's a i think fairly well-known psychological truth what one resists persists so if we just accepted the inevitable pain that we experience as physical beings we wouldn't need to suffer twice and i wonder if we would get on better if we made the decision not actually to do anything about our problems a problem is painful if it wasn't painful it wouldn't be a problem so we don't want it that's natural and we often see our problems as obstacles on the path they're in the way of going for refuge oh if only that problem wasn't there i'd be able to go for refuge much more effectively they're in the way of our spiritual progress but the problem isn't in the way the problem is the way it's not actually preventing your progress the problem is the path it's a sign of progress so instead of seeing it as a nuisance in the way to be got rid of what if we welcome it what if we change our relationship to it what if we approached our problems in the same way that we in breathworks and job very very brave people who come along to breathworks courses unimaginable chronic pain forever for the rest of their life anyway what if we were inspired by them to treat our problems in a way that they treat their pain what if we move towards the problem not try to analyze it or think about it or work it out but accept it it's a lovely idea in the acceptance and commitment therapy book about acceptance they say acceptance is good but it's a bit passive so they encourage you in an idea called willingness it's a willingness to experience unpleasantness moving towards it welcoming it I remember when I was at faducuter or dumb of aster as we called it later and doing all those study leaders courses for all the members teachers training courses as well many order members suffered from a lack of confidence when it came to teaching happen time and time again in the end I realized it wasn't a difficulty for them but it was a problem that no amount of achievement and success made any difference to the lack of confidence so when people used to say oh I suffer from lack of confidence I say oh that's good you've got a problem and I meant it as being isn't it good that we've got these problems intractable unsortable painful problems when I come on conventions I have a good time and I have a bad time the good time is seeing all my friends the bad time is seeing all my friends in that they remind me of all my problems I see a couple of people getting on really really well I happen to be sitting next to a room with mock spear in Suvadrin they're with each other all their time they're obviously having a good time and I'm thinking here I am on my own I haven't really got any friends and who and it happened the other day they came in and they were really having a good time together and all my demons came out and said oh you're no good you can't develop friendships you know how you do and I caught myself and I thought wow this is a problem this is a real problem and I thought instead of going oh don't have that thought go away go away I thought that it in welcome it just be willing to have that and see what happens just curious about it what's happening you know why am I doing this okay I'm going to leave you with an image many years ago when we used to have um teachers training things and all that there were different ways to end a talk and one of them was to leave with an image and very often all the members would say I'm going to leave you with an image so I'm going to do that I'm going to leave you with an image I very nearly got a couple of people to enact it in front of you but it would have meant going to knowledge and getting a monster's uniform monster's outfit and I I couldn't be bothered in the end so anyway imagine that you're in a tug of war with a monster you're there the monsters over there pulling you pulling and between you is a huge abyss and he's trying to pull you into that abyss and you're going then you're trying to pull him into the abyss get rid of him you know getting out of this and it goes on for a long time this tug of war goes on for days weeks months years tug of war sometimes you get the upper hand and you pull the monster really near to the abyss you think I've really done it really done it and then it gets by it pulls you back and then you'll need the abyss and you're feeling horrible but you don't fall in either so um you've been how many people have got a problem that's been going on for a long time isn't it? Einstein once said that insanity was doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result so why don't you just drop the rope what would happen then if you drop the rope you probably fall over and stuff your elbows then you get up and then the monster's still there but you're still there as well but you're no longer engaging that struggle and who knows once you've stopped pulling on the rope maybe the monster will get bored with you and go away but maybe you won't the trouble is that the monster seems to be a mind reader and if you drop the rope if you stop struggling thinking oh if I ignore him you'll go away it's just another method to get rid of the monster and accepting really is accepting so it's best not to expect an outcome but to drop the rope and let the monster be there and maybe it will go away eventually maybe it won't maybe you've got the monster for life but at least you won't have to struggle with him
