“Do nothing,” Poonjaji advised from his dais at the front. Recently unearthed Chinese texts provide new inspiration in the search for enlightenment here and now. Sudden Awakening
Found this great post here.
In 1993, I went to Lucknow, India to receive teachings from the
Advaita master H.W. L. Poonjaji, a disciple of Ramana Maharshi. Many of
my friends and colleagues, including several dedicated teachers of
Vipassana meditation, had preceded me to Poonjaji’s door. By the time I
arrived, his fame had blossomed and his small living room bulged with
seekers from around the world who had elbowed their way into his morning
satsang. I found a flat square saffron cushion in the back of the room
and squeezed onto it, my knees bumping my neighbors on both sides.
Ceiling fans spun in a feeble attempt to cool the already rising
temperatures of the still early morning, and stifling a yawn as I wiped
sweat from my brow, I wondered what I was doing in this steamy room at
the foot of a guru. I didn’t believe in gurus. I had discovered
meditation in my early twenties, had wended my way through various
practices for the next decade, and had landed squarely in the Vipassana
Buddhist camp. For years I diligently attended retreats and was grateful
for the outpouring of insights, albeit not entirely flattering, that
occurred during the ten or twenty-one days of silence and requisite slow
motion. No matter how easy or difficult the days of sitting had been, I
consistently cherished the hard-won openness of heart that accompanied
my return to the world, even though I knew that within days my normal
life would overwhelm my senses and dispel all calm from my seemingly
imperturbable mind. Still, my spiritual progress was steady and assured,
and I assumed that if I kept practicing I would gradually become
clearer, calmer, kinder, and wiser.
“Do nothing,” Poonjaji advised from his dais at the front of the
room, his voice raspy with age, his Indian accent thick, his wool-capped
head bobbing in that nod-like motion that characterizes Indians and
perplexes Westerners. Exuding a seductive warmth laced with an icy,
commander-in-chief sternness, Papaji (as we called him to show respect)
insisted we not meditate or do yoga or fast or sit naked in the snow to
awaken the mind. Then he chuckled, flashing his pearly false teeth, and
the whole room burst into laughter.
Any practice one did would create a state of mind that was temporary,
Papaji told us. Meditation, yoga, psychedelics, fire walking,
visualizing deities, bungee jumping, and other techniques might be
effective in inducing temporary states of calm, bliss, or insight, but
he was not interested in fleeting conditions of the mind. What Papaji
demanded we recognize was the beingness that resides at the core of
existence, that is untouched by birth and death, joy or sorrow, and
requires no effort to attain because there is absolutely nothing to
attain. By engaging in any practice, no matter how effective, one gave
substance to obstacles that did not in fact exist by reifying the notion
that awakening required some kind of special activity. All one needed
to do was turn awareness away from objects of perception and onto
awareness itself. “See the one who is seeing,” Papaji said. “Be quiet.
Be still.”
In Papaji’s presence, recognizing one’s already extant awakening was
effortless if one relaxed deeply enough to simply be. Nearly everyone
who visited this teacher tasted true nature—a feeling of boundless
awareness that existed within us and around us regardless of what we did
or did not do, a consciousness that we could see in one another’s eyes.
The one who is seeing was the very same one looking back, consciousness
itself. And in that moment, all of the Buddhist teachings I had been
struggling to understand through the gradual accumulation of insights
became strikingly clear: there is no separate self; all arising
phenomena are impermanent; suffering exists until we identify not with
the changing conditions of our lives but with consciousness itself,
which is boundless and more intimate than our breath.
Inadvertently, Poonjaji created waves in the territory of those who
espoused the theory of gradual awakening, namely, in the land of Western
Buddhism. Many of my Western friends who had studied with the most
famous Thai and Burmese meditation masters and had sequestered
themselves repeatedly in rigorous three-month meditation retreats, began
seeking out teachers who espoused the formless practice of sudden
awakening.
In 1998, not long after my fourth trip to Lucknow to “be with the
master,” as my friends said (words that stuck in my gullet despite my
boundless reverence for Papaji), I met Wendi Adamek in a novel-writing
class at the University of Iowa, and was immediately struck by her wit,
talent, and demure beauty. During a dinner party one evening in her
white clapboard house near campus, Wendi took me on a tour of her home.
The bookshelves in her office supported the weight of a serious
collection of books on Buddhism—in Chinese. This slim and bespectacled
dark-haired woman in her early thirties was not only an aspiring fantasy
novelist, it turned out, but also, and primarily, a scholar of medieval
Chinese Buddhism. (Wendi is now an Assistant Professor of Chinese
Religion at Barnard College.) In a rush of excitement, Wendi told me
that she had recently been awarded a sizeable National Endowment for the
Humanities fellowship to conduct research on materials discovered at a
remote archaeological site in China. Her enthusiasm was contagious—as
her dinner party guests chirped away in the garden munching roasted corn
and barbecued salmon, Wendi and I lingered in her office, and she
unveiled the details of her research.
In 1900, a caretaker at the Magao Caves near the Silk Road oasis of
Dunhuang, in China’s Gansu Province, accidentally broke through a cave
wall. To his surprise, he came upon a pile of dusty, time-worn scrolls
that scholars later informed him had been concealed in the secret
enclave for centuries. Wendi was most elated about a recovered
eighth-century text called the Lidai fabao ji, by a radical Buddhist
sect called the Bao Tang. Up to that point, it had been a “phantom
work,” a work referred to in other texts of the era but never before
seen. The Bao Tang embraced a formless practice known as “sudden
awakening” and claimed that realization was available to everyone,
laypeople and ordained, men and women, royalty and peasants alike. Wu
Zhu, the sect’s founder, also claimed that awakening required no formal
practice: “The dharma is separate from all contemplation practices.
No-thought is precisely no-practice, no-thought is precisely
no-contemplation.” In fact, Wu Zhu attested that by engaging in any
formal practice one gave substance to impediments that did not in fact
exist.
The teachings articulated in the Lidai fabao ji were nearly word for
word what Poonjaji had uttered in his living room in Lucknow twelve
hundred years after the text had been compiled; these were teachings I
hadn’t received from any of my many dharma teachers during two decades
of Buddhist study. Suddenly, this obscure text from eighth-century China
seemed utterly relevant to the crossroads I had encountered on my own
path. Should I continue to practice in the dharma hall, following my
breath and noting sensations, thoughts, and feelings as they arose and
passed away in an attempt to reach enlightenment, or should I give up
all effort and all practices and simply rest in what I had recognized as
innate Buddha-nature? Would the former deliver me where I hoped to
land, and was I capable of the latter? Wendi, who most often engages in
dialogue with other academics, seemed bemused by my sudden interest and
did not hesitate to answer the questions I thrust upon her. Who was this
character Wu Zhu, and what happened to the Bao Tang?
The sect mushroomed partially as a response to the fact that Buddhism
in eighth-century China, while highly popular, had become quite
formalized, thanks in part to the lavish support of the T’ang dynasty.
Grand and ornate monasteries flourished throughout the empire, but
ordination cost a fortune, and monks were required to conduct complex
purifications, recite sutras, chant prayers for the protection of the
empire, and perform daily ceremonies. Buddhism was popular among
laypeople who—like practitioners throughout the world today—attended
retreats and made offerings. But the practice as a whole, Wendi
explained, was oriented toward ritual, purification, and the gaining of
merit rather than attaining direct realization of the innate nature of
mind, or Buddha-nature.
While these descriptions of T’ang-dynasty Buddhism did not precisely
parallel my own experience in the centers where I had practiced, there
were striking resemblances. I had practiced in my neighbor’s zendo for
years, bowing and staring at the walls, reciting lineage prayers and
chanting the Heart Sutra, which, while mysteriously calming, were also
hauntingly opaque. I had sat in retreat after retreat in Vipassana
meditation halls following my breath and noting all sensations, and had
been soothed and inspired each evening as brilliant teachers delivered
moving, insightful, and poetic dharma talks. But no one mentioned
enlightenment. I had attended initiations, transmissions, and
empowerments with highly revered Tibetan rinpoches, reciting prayers in
Tibetan as the great masters wielded bells and drums with impressive
dexterity and wrathful and benign deities seemed to take on a
three-dimensional presence and float out of their colorful brocade
frames on the walls. But no matter where I turned, enlightenment
continued to be a condition that was essentially unattainable by the
likes of me. At best, awakening was a state to be achieved through
untold devotion, dedication, striving, prostrations, prayers, and
endless hours on the zafu that would gradually result, if you were among
the karmically blessed, in perhaps delivering you a bit closer to the
cherished but unutterable outcome.
Beginning in 730 C.E., offshoot movements arose in China attacking
the establishment and claiming that institutionalized Buddhism, in the
words of Wendi, “nurtured the illusion that awakening was a condition to
be achieved rather than one’s own inherent reality.” The most famous
movement became known as the Southern School of Ch’an (which later
flourished in Japan as Zen), whose hallmark was the teaching of sudden
awakening, the direct realization of one’s innate awakening independent
of any affiliation with a government-supported monastery or any
particular ritual or practice. The Bao Tang claimed allegiance to the
Southern School, and the Lidai fabao ji, written by anonymous members of
the sect, gained notoriety because of the clarity of its nondual
teachings.
During an era when laywomen occupied the lowest rung of an entrenched
hierarchical spiritual system, the Bao Tang welcomed them into its
fold. Within the Lidai fabao ji are the only full-fledged accounts in
any of the early Ch’an texts of women as disciples of Ch’an. This and
other clues in the literary style have led Wendi to wonder if Wu Zhu’s
female disciples may have had a hand in the actual writing of the Lidai
fabao ji. Their authorship would be one possible explanation for the
text’s anonymous attribution; nearly all other texts of this era were
attributed to specific authors.
One of the most remarkable stories in the Lidai fabao ji is that of
the daughter of a Grand Councillor who came to Wu Zhu for teachings:
She was quick-witted and clever, extensively learned and
knowledgeable, and when asked a question she was never without an
answer. She came to pay obeisance to the Venerable [Wu Zhu]. The
Venerable saw that she was obdurate and determined on chastity and he
preached the Dharma for her.
“This Dharma is not caused and conditioned, is neither false nor not
false… . The Dharma is beyond eye, ear, nose, tongue, body, and mind… .
No-thought is precisely no-body, no-thought is precisely no-mind.
No-thought is precisely no-preciousness, no-thought is precisely
no-worthlessness. No-thought is precisely no-high, no-thought is
precisely no-low. At the time of true no-thought, no-thought itself is
not.”
Upon hearing Wu Zhu’s teaching, the Grand Councillor’s daughter gains
instant awakening, joins her hands together and “weeps grievously, a
rain of tears.” Wu Zhu gives her the dharma name Lian Jian Xing
(Complete Seeing Nature) and she tonsures herself, dons robes, and goes
on to become renowned as “a leader amongst nuns.”
Imagine an eighth-century Chinese woman so empowered by her
experience of awakening that she has the confidence to disregard the
complex and expensive bureaucratic process of ordination and proclaim
herself a nun in flagrant defiance of the prevailing spiritual
institutions. Knowing of this woman in the past who broke away from the
bureaucratized forms of religion to teach from the authority of her own
awakening has had a profound impact on me. If Lian Jian Xing could do
this, might I? My female colleagues are becoming more and more adamant
about parity in contemporary Western Buddhist institutions as, despite
the sincere efforts of some organizations to divest the tradition of
historical patriarchal values, we continue to see more men in leadership
and teaching roles than women. Until this changes, the primary effect
of this nun’s story will be reassurance that true spiritual authority
lies within the heart of my own religious experience and not necessarily
in the institutions that claim such authority.
During long Vipassana retreats, the thought had often crossed my mind
that had women risen to power in historical Buddhist hierarchies, they
would have created a different style of practice—something less harsh
and more nurturing, something that emphasized both ease of being and
relatedness among the practitioners, something more celebratory of
embodied life. I imagined instead of not making eye contact, one would
exchange glances full of lovingkindness with one’s meditation
colleagues. I imagined shoulder rubs, foot massages, refreshing the skin
with petal-infused mists, and sharing jugs of freshly made cucumber
water. Thinking of Lian Xiang Jian, I surmised that there must have been
thousands of courageous and spiritually illuminated women in the past,
women we do not hear about who at particular moments in history emerged
as leaders and who embraced forms of practice that emphasized
peacefulness, relatedness, and ease.
These fantasies quickly came undone as Wendi told me about the next
phase of her research, a translation of the inscriptions left on cave
walls by the nuns of Baoshan, in the Yunnan Province of China. In the
twelfth century, these women practiced an extreme form of asceticism,
including severe fasting, or what scholars today call “holy anorexia.”
Clearly, women can be drawn to practices that are characterized by
self-affliction as well as those characterized by ease and noneffort. So
where does this leave me? Am I an adherent of Advaita and the notion of
Sudden Awakening, or am I a Buddhist who practices Vipassana on the
zafu, with the occasional foray into Dzogchen retreats? Must we be
adherents of only one school to be authentic in our practice and our
devotion, or can we straddle however many traditions we find inspiring
and helpful?
Last winter, I attended a ten-day Vipassana retreat at Spirit Rock
Meditation Center in northern California. For the first few days, I
followed the instructions with a quiet and obedient commitment despite
Poonjaji’s gruff voice echoing in my mind, “Do not meditate.” As my mind
calmed and my body became more comfortable with the long hours of
stillness, I abandoned the rigorous noting of sensations, thoughts, and
feelings to the most minute of details; instead I allowed myself to open
into a spacious awareness where all these came and went of their own
accord, in their own rhythm, and I watched, felt, heard, and saw in an
easy, allowing way. When I felt the urge, I did not walk in slow motion
steps noting the lifting, rising, and falling of one foot and then the
other; instead I strode up the hill under the most blazing of
winter-blue skies until, far beyond the earshot of fellow yogis, I sang
out loud and danced in the wind. And when such activities led to a
vagueness of mental acuity and a spaced-out drowsiness accompanied my
return to the zafu, I went back to noting breath, thoughts, and
sensations until my attention became stabilized enough to allow an
openness of mind to flourish once again. I did not keep my antics secret
from my teachers, nor did they discourage me. Different students
respond to different styles of practice, they said. At a certain point
you have a toolbox full of techniques, and you pull out what you need at
any given moment. Awakening is the point, not methodology.
I was happy to be back in the dharma hall, a place I had come to love
beyond measure during all my years of practice. It was here that I felt
most safe, not only from a world that was characterized by rampant
violence, glorified greed, and a global politic severed from
truth-telling—but also from the confusion of my own mind. It was here
that I was able to experience the deepest clarity of heart and mind. It
was here that I dissolved into the grief that had gone ungrieved, here
that my heart broke open enough to let everyone in, even those I had
ousted, here that I found myself most vulnerable and most alive. I have
come to realize that despite the fact that the spiritual teachers whom I
have had the good fortune to encounter in this lifetime can appear to
be in conflict about the methodologies that foster awakening, my own
experiences form an unbroken continuum. Wisdom does accumulate—not in a
linear arithmetic progression but in a complex, dynamic system. Each
understanding sheds light upon the others in an interactive living
process. Insights that seem unassailable may suddenly meet passionate
doubt, all clarity shattered at the very moment it is most needed. Then,
just as suddenly, wisdom will resurface, stronger for having vanished,
wisdom that now knows of its own disintegration.
At the core of Buddhist teaching is the awakened mind—the knowing
that we are not this body but consciousness itself, a boundless,
luminous, loving, peaceful, intelligent presence. I have seen this in
one way or another over and over again. Having tasted and glimpsed and
savored such knowing, now what?
Now, I go on retreat when I am able. Poonjaji did say not to meditate, but he also said, “Be quiet. Be still.”
Here, perhaps, lies the heart of the quest. Here, perhaps, is the
most repeated guidance in all of Buddhist practice. Here, perhaps, is
the place where all traditions come together without conflict. Be quiet,
be still. Let the mind rest. Discover who you really are.
“In the moment of no-thought, no-thought itself is not,” said Wu Zhu.
Be quiet. Be still.
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