Shambhala

Buddhist tradition thrives in Austin

March 29, 2010

Area’s diverse Buddhist scene is home to dozens of temples, meditation groups and centers

One of the most popular ambassadors of Buddhism in the West, the Dalai Lama, met with President Barack Obama in February. The meeting, which riled Chinese leaders, happened right after Tiger Woods mentioned a return to his Buddhist roots in a public apology for his extramarital affairs. Then Fox News analyst Brit Hume sparked even more discussion on Buddhism when he suggested that Woods might be better off converting to Christianity.

The national attention on Buddhism has been echoed in the establishment of new Buddhist groups and temples in the Austin area over the past decade. The faith tradition emerged in the sixth century when the wealthy Siddhartha Gautama, who lived in what is now Nepal, renounced his social status to lead a life pursuing the comprehension of human suffering.

Dozens of types of Buddhism are now practiced all over the world by more than 360 million people. An estimated 1.5 million people identify themselves as Buddhist in America. Americans became more aware of Buddhism and the dharma, the law that orders both the cosmos and individual conduct as well as the teachings of the Buddha, in the 1960s.

Last month, the Interdependence Project, a Buddhist-influenced community group and activist organization whose mission is to foster the intersection of contemplative practices and social change, started a chapter in Austin (it’s also in Portland, Ore., and New York). The project, led by psychologists Michael Uebel and Uva Most, started with an art opening at the Pedernales Lofts on East Sixth Street. That led to interest from dozens of Austinites to start an informal meditation group, Uebel said.

The project adds to Austin’s diverse Buddhist scene, which offers dozens of ethnic temples, mindfulness or meditation groups and centers that follow specific traditions. Local Buddhist teachers, priests and laypeople say there has been a visible Buddhist presence in Austin since at least the 1990s, but there are no reliable estimates of the number of Buddhists in Austin because the U.S. Census Bureau doesn’t track information about religious affiliation.

Mark Adams, 42, a psychotherapist who runs his own private practice and counsels veterans struggling with post-traumatic stress disorder, said that he came to meditation about a year ago when he became interested in mindfulness, or the practice of being more aware in everyday life. While working with his patients, he said he became more interested in his own self-care as an extension of caring for others.

Like others who have participated in the Interdependence Project, Adams said he doesn’t feel as at home in more structured Buddhist communities.

“I visited some other places and nothing seemed to stick,” Adams said.

Adherents of Buddhism, a non-theistic tradition, follow a path of mindfulness and nonviolence toward others. Buddhism emerges out of at least two major lineages: Theravada, which is atheistic and the predominant religion of Southeast Asia, and Mahayana, which translates to “Great Vehicle” and emerged from India. Tibetan and Zen traditions that are also part of the larger Buddhism pantheon each have their own slightly different emphasis on the same general principles.

Nawala Lakkhana and Pandit Eluwapola Gnanaratana Thero, Sri Lankan monks at the 5-acre Austin Buddhist Center in Southeast Austin, say they practice Theravada Buddhism at the 4,500-square-foot space, which was built in 2007. About 50 families go there for meditation, said Dilum Chandrasoma, a philanthropist whose family has been in the Austin area since 1966. It’s one of a handful of temples in Northwest and Central Austin and smaller sanghas — or Buddhist communities — that meet in far Southeast Austin and have a mostly immigrant following.

Although Chandrasoma says the Austin Buddhist Center is open to all who want to meditate there, it caters mainly to Sri Lankan immigrant families. More prevalent in Austin are the more informal groups that practice loosely connected Buddhist principles of mindfulness and contemplation without a specific religious affiliation, like the Interdependence Project.

According to the Pew Forum for Religion in Public Life, a think tank based in Washington, D.C., only one in three American Buddhists lists their ethnicity as Asian; the number of Buddhists in America made up less than 1 percent of 35,000 adults surveyed in the Pew Forum’s 2008 U.S. Religious Landscape Survey.

Chris Lance, director of the Austin Zen Center, said the center’s community of about 70 members — who meditate and attend events at the three-home campus near the University of Texas — are largely Western converts to Buddhism. The center’s main building is a two-story green home with several incense-scented rooms where cushions and chairs line the walls around altars where bronze Buddha statues sit.

The Austin Zen Center was founded in 1995 by psychotherapist and Buddhist priest Flint Sparks. Sparks, who comes from Southern Baptist roots, began the Zen center by starting a meditation group. Around the same time, Peg Syverson had arrived in Austin around 1994 and had started a meditation group as well. Sparks left the Zen Center in a full-time capacity, and he and Syverson now run Appamada, a Buddhist group that meets in Central Austin.

Webber, 63, has been meditating at the center since 2002. She lived down the street in a duplex, but at the beginning of the year moved into the Zen Center. The retired landscape designer started looking for a place to meditate after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. “I became aware of what could come out of the blue on a sunny day,” she said. “I thought I needed to be more prepared.”

Now there are other, smaller Buddhist communities that round out the experience of Buddhism in Austin. They include the Chittamani Buddhist Center, the Shambhala Meditation Center and several other smaller local Buddhist or Buddhist-inspired groups that meet to meditate, discuss the philosophies of nonviolence, the benefits of compassion and mindfulness, and conduct volunteer work.

But not everyone in these communities necessarily defines themselves as a Buddhist. As Most said after a recent informal meditation sit at the Interdependence Project, “Philosophically, Buddhism doesn’t demand that you choose, like other traditions. You don’t have to do anything with Buddhism except let it resonate in your life. It manifests in non-Buddhist ways in the culture, like being vegan or anti-war.”

joshundasanders@statesman.com; 445-3630

Buddhist groups in Austin

The Austin Buddhist Center

5816 Ross Road, Del Valle www.austinbuddhistcenter.org

Appamada (formerly Ordinary Mind Zen)

913 E. 38th St. www.appamada.org

Austin Zen Center

3014 Washington Square www.austinzencenter.org

The Austin Shambhala Meditation Center

1702 S. Fifth St. www.austin.shambhala.org

The Interdependence Project

2401 E. Sixth St., #2017 www.theidproject.org/regions/austin-tx

A project with groups based in New York and Portland, Ore., that allows a space for art, activism and meditation to mix. Founded by writer Ethan Nictern, the son of a well-known Buddhist teacher, the project was founded locally this year.

[via The Statesman]

‘Meditative Gardener’ aims to cultivate good nature

March 22, 2010

Wildmind Meditation News

news

No Comments

Gardens sprout bouquets and salads, but can they also seed inner peace?

Vermonter Cheryl Wilfong remembers a 2005 meditation retreat in which a Buddhist nun sought to weed everyone’s minds of wild, invasive thought.

“Imagine a flower garden growing in your heart …” the instructor urged. “Imagine a lotus streaming forth golden light …”

For Wilfong, something else sprang up: the idea of grafting her three favorite interests — gardening, meditation and writing — into a book.

Five years later, the Dummerston resident has published “The Meditative Gardener: Cultivating Mindfulness of Body, Feelings and Mind,” a 256-page paperback blooming with insight, instruction and color photography.

“Just as we cultivate our flower, vegetable and herb gardens, we can bring such intention and effort to nurturing our inner garden,” she writes in the introduction. “The Buddha’s teachings help us understand the similarities between nature and human nature.”

Wilfong laughs when recalling how the nun’s calls to imagine were supposed to plant visions of loving kindness. Instead, they got her looking at her life.

An Indiana native, she had come to Vermont in 1972 and discovered gardening in 1977, just before marking her 30th birthday with her first meditation retreat.

A counselor by training, Wilfong went on to graduate from the University of Vermont Extension’s Master Gardener program in 1999 and enroll in the Community Dharma Leader course at California’s Spirit Rock Meditation Center in 2005. Needing a class project, she began her book.

Having already written “Following the Nez Perce Trail” — a 512-page guide to the historic passage from Montana to Wyoming, Idaho and Oregon — Wilfong knew she needed to start with an outline. For “The Meditative Gardener,” she found her framework in the basic teaching points of the Satipatthana Sutta, a Buddhist text whose title translates into “Discourse on the Foundations of Mindfulness.”

That complex work reflects on the body and its myriad sensations, be they pleasant, unpleasant or neutral, and the mind and its states ranging from love to hate. Through it, Wilfong saw a simple truth: “The mind is the master, and the body is the slave.”

With mental focus, she has moved from her first garden — a small plot of flowers and vegetables — to develop a backyard Eden of almost 30 beds. But other times her thoughts drift and dawdle.

“Our minds are a jungle of exotic greenery that we walk or run through every day without really recognizing what it is that grows there,” she writes. “We may even develop a certain fondness for some plants that we later find out have poisonous roots.”

That’s when the mind, touched by desire, hatred or ignorance, triggers the body to actions of greed, aversion or delusion. Wilfong cites such garden-variety examples as purchasing too many plants or procrastinating from weeding.

She also writes about the rest of the world. The short biography on her book jacket makes her life sound serene: The author wakes daily before dawn to meditate, then gardens, studies Buddhism, naps 20 minutes every afternoon and teaches at Brattleboro’s Vermont Insight Meditation Center before retiring early.

But Wilfong feels the sting of being, and not just from mosquitoes. Having come of age in the 1970s, she recounts on page 120 the camaraderie of sex, drugs and rock and roll — and the consequences upon waking up.

“I was really trying to skate around that,” the author says.

But her editor pushed for personal detail.

“I did it, as briefly as possible,” Wilfong says with a laugh. “It’s just being honest that I’m human.”

Wilfong’s book doesn’t chisel a set of moral commandments. Instead it coaches readers how to contemplate whether attaching to or avoiding something harms more than helps.

Alongside a set of related exercises — consider “Loving-Kindness Meditation Toward Bugs” or “Sprouting Compost Contemplation” — the author also urges everyone to exhale.

“Having goodwill toward the garden is important, but even more important is having goodwill toward the gardener, which is to say, yourself,” she writes. “If we practice mindfulness, we realize we don’t have to improve anything; we need only bring awareness to the time we spend in the garden.”

If only publishers acted accordingly. Wilfong spoke with several who liked her concept but wanted changes. Deciding to print the book herself, she received help from Windham County photographers Gene Parulis and Lynne Weinstein and book designers Dede Cummings and Carolyn Kasper.

The author is advertising the $35 paperback in the Buddhist magazines Shambhala Sun, Buddhadharma and Tricycle, through mailings to fellow members of the national Garden Writers Association, and on her Web site, www.meditativegardener.com (which features downloadable meditations).

With the weekend’s arrival of spring, Wilfong is getting ready for another summer of gardening.

“I went with the break-your-back theory for almost 30 years.”

Then she hired someone to help out.

Isn’t that cheating? Wilfong considers it compassion.

“This was a way to be kind to myself, and I could hire a mother and support her. We’re doing each other a service.”

And sharing their good nature.

[via Rutland Herald]

“This Is Getting Old,” by Susan Moon

March 3, 2010

Bodhipaksa

reviews

Susan Moon is one of Buddhism’s funniest writers. In this new book, Bodhipaksa finds, she’s also one of Buddhism’s most honest, moving, and beautiful writers.

Title: This is Getting Old
Author: Susan Moon
Publisher: Shambhala
ISBN: 978-1-59030-776-2
Available from: Shambhala and Amazon.com.

My first encounter with Susan Moon’s writings was The Life and Letters of Tofu Roshi, which fondly parodied the language, idiom, and culture of the Zen tradition in which Moon practices. It’s the best Buddhist humor writing I’ve come across. That was in 1980, which is 30 years ago, now. That’s a long time. Realizing that makes me feel old, which is appropriate since Moon’s latest book is subtitled “Zen Thoughts of Aging With Humor and Dignity.”

This is a book about aging, but it’s not at all depressing. Susan Moon is a very funny lady. She has a chapter about her family’s history of retinal detachment that includes the following line about contact lenses: “They required at least as much daily care as a small pet–a canary or hamster–without providing any companionship.” I can imagine those words coming from the lips of David Sedaris. Even the title of the book is a lovely, playful double-entendre. This is aging. This is what getting old’s like. And it’s getting old. I especially loved the opening to the final chapter, “This Vast Life”:

“Every morning, I vow to be grateful for the precious gift of human birth. It’s a big gift, and it includes a lot of stuff I never particularly wanted for my birthday. Some of the things in the package I wish I could exchange for a different size or color.”

Moon herself would say she’s a very funny “old lady,” although I don’t tend to think of late-60s as being old these days. Still, she’s 30 years older than when she wrote Tofu Roshi, and she describes in meticulous detail the kinds of changes that have taken place in her body and mind since then — hair graying, bones thinning, memory failing — and that’s a lot to deal with. Moon has almost two decades on me, but I’m already starting to experience my body as aging. From that point of view, This Is Getting Old is a good reminder, to people who aren’t yet old, of what’s in store for them.

The Buddha said that in his youth he was “intoxicated with youth,” and don’t we all, in our younger days, see old age as something that will never happen to us — not because we plan to die young, but because we think of old age as a personality defect, or we think of elderly people as having always been that way. Perhaps Moon’s book will find itself mainly in the hands of “boomers,” but that would be a shame. Anyone interested in Buddhism, whose key teaching is impermanence, would appreciate this up-close portrait of what’s in store.

This Is Getting Old is a collection of essays on different topics more or less related to aging. Mostly the stories focus on Moon herself, but there’s a particularly moving chapter (“The Breathing Tube”) about her mother’s car accident, and her death after three undignified weeks in hospital. There’s a coda to that story in a a later chapter (“Talking to My Dead Mother”) in which we learn that Moon had just finished the final edits to a book her mother had written–only three weeks before the crash. Moon’s mother never got to see her own book in print. That’s painful to hear, but it reminds us that death is like that — it doesn’t wait until you’ve wrapped everything up before it takes you away.

There’s a chapter about depression called “I Wasn’t My Self,” which initially struck me as being rather tangential to the theme of aging. Depression, after all, can strike at any age, and Moon was far from elderly in the several years she dipped in and out of that experience. But in retrospect it’s an essential chapter. This Is Getting Old is pervaded by the theme not just of aging, but of loneliness. In fact, of the two, loneliness may be the more dominant, since much of the content is about what it’s like to no longer be desirable, to know that you may never have sex again (and, more importantly, not to have someone with whom you can have sex), what it’s like to end a relationship and have the thought “I’ll die alone” taunt you day after day. Moon’s depression seems to have been her strongest experience of the loneliness that still haunts her in her 60s.

This Is Getting Old is an aubiographical book. I say this just to be clear that it’s not a series of reflections on aging treated as an impersonal phenomenon. Moon shows us aging rather than tells us about it, and she shows us in a breathtakingly honest way. She’s very open about the pain she’s experienced at various times in her life. And she never seems nasty, even when she’s talking about people giving her a hard time, like her mother driving her mad with disparaging comments about her hair. And, as I mentioned, she’s very, very funny. I found that I liked her more and more as the book unfolded.

I’ve just finished a book on the six element practice, which teaches us about impermanence and not-self, and I wish I’d had the opportunity to read Moon’s beek earlier. She has some beautiful passages on the elements:

“There’s no empty space. The air is fluid, making room for us, so that each of us inhabits a nook that is exactly our size and shape. The air kindly moves with us when we move … We’re all connected, molecule to molecule. I’m held by everything that’s not me.”

You’ll notice that Moon writes beautifully.

This Is Getting Old is beautiful, funny, warm, honest, and existential — what’s not to love?

“The Mindful Leader” by Michael Carroll

September 28, 2009

Sunada Takagi

reviews

No Comments

In The Mindful Leader, author Michael Carroll’s premise is that the best leaders aren’t those who take charge and make things happen. They’re the ones who are willing to be fully human and inspire the best in others. Sunada reviews this book that shows us how to pursue excellence at work and do so with decency, dignity, and authenticity.

Pick up a typical book on business leadership and what do you get? Advice on how to motivate others to do more, do it faster, and win in a zero-sum game. But on the first page of The Mindful Leader, it’s suggested that we sit quietly and do nothing for a while.

Outrageous? Not at all!

Michael Carroll takes a decidedly unconventional, but thoroughly refreshing perspective on the subject. He explains as follows:

“When we lead a career that is sharply focused on being more successful, more admired, or just more comfortable, we can deceive ourselves into neglecting the world around us. We end up managing our lives like projects rather than actually living them. Consequently, for mindful leaders, cultivating this ability to be at work and throughout our lives is not just a nice idea or an interesting thing to do. Rather, by learning to be at work we discover how to stop kidding ourselves and … to open respectfully and realistically to our workplace as it unfolds in the present moment.”

If this strikes you as too soft and “touchy-feely” for the take-no-prisoners business world, I urge you to read on. He isn’t advocating becoming a nice, well-liked person who gets left behind in the cut-throat race to the finish. Carroll would argue that being a genuine human being and an effective leader are not contradictory. In fact, there’s a synergy between these two realms that’s greater than the sum of their parts.

In the introduction, Carroll talks about the concept of the bodhisattva-warrior. A bodhisattva is a highly advanced spiritual being whose sole purpose in life is to help others. A bodhisattva-warrior is a courageous figure who uses his power and ingenuity to overcome the forces of arrogance, aggression, and greed in the world. This book is in effect a training manual for modern-day bodhisattva-warriors. It’s not a job for sissies.

Michael Carroll has the background to know what he’s talking about. In his 25-year career, he held executive positions in major corporations like Shearson Lehman/American Express, Simon & Schuster, and Walt Disney. During that time, he also studied Tibetan Buddhism in the Shambala lineage, graduated from Buddhist seminary, and is now a senior teacher. Drawing on his training in these two worlds, he now consults to businesses on how to be respectfully in the moment while confidently pursuing one’s work objectives. (Note that I also wrote a review of his related previous book, Awake at Work.)

The heart of the book lays out the Ten Talents of the Mindful Leader: Simplicity, Poise, Respect, Courage, Confidence, Enthusiasm, Patience, Awareness, Skillfulness, and Humility. He discusses each talent by introducing a common business challenge, and then shows how mindfulness naturally expresses a quality perfectly suited to countering the situation. He discusses how to cultivate this quality through meditation or conscious reflection, and how to bring it out into our work world.

Title: The Mindful Leader
Author: Michael Carroll
Publisher: Shambhala Publications
ISBN: 978-1-59030-620-8
Available from: Amazon.com and Shambhala.

One chapter at a time, he shows how we can heal “toxic” workplaces, cultivate courage in the face of risky situations, pursue long-term goals without sacrificing what’s here and now, and lead with wisdom and grace instead of ambition and power. Every chapter is filled with real world anecdotes and parables from the Buddhist tradition that bring his points colorfully to life.

It’s the section that follows, Bringing Our Full Being to Work, that I appreciated the most. Here, Carroll draws out a higher level of integrative skills that I think are the mark of a true leader. It’s where all the previous ten talents meld into a holistic vision of masterful leadership. These skills are Synchronizing, Engaging the Whole, Inspiring Health and Well-being, and Authenticity.

I particularly enjoyed his story of a capsized ferry disaster in ancient China, which is an illustration of Engaging the Whole. I’ll let the story speak for itself.

… all the villagers dropped what they were doing and raced down to the ferry … except for the blacksmith. … He ran in the opposite direction. People stopped and grumbled, ‘Now we know who to depend on when things go wrong. Look at that cowardly blacksmith scurrying away when he is most needed.’
As people rushed to the capsized ferry, they struggled valiantly to save those in the water, but they were too late. Those who had fallen into the river had been pulled downstream by the strong current, and the villagers could see people struggling in the rapids as they were swept out of sight and around the bend. No one could see the blacksmith, however, just past the curve of the river extending a bamboo pole to those in need, pulling them to shore one by one.
Unlike the well-intentioned villagers, the blacksmith ‘engaged the whole’: his behaviors were as much an expression of the circumstances as they were a reaction to them. He knew that ‘results’ – saving the drowning passengers – were inherently defined by the river, terrain, and timing, not by his personal need to help. Going downstream rather than rushing in panic to the scene of the disaster was a choice that followed the contours of his world: because he was synchronized, he was skillfully in tune with the facts, and his presence was, in many respects, an expression of the situation’s intelligence.

Let me mention a couple things you WON’T find in this book. First, it doesn’t teach you how to meditate. There is a section on meditation and reflection, but it’s clear the intent is to provide just enough guidance to engage with the reflection exercises. It won’t help you start a full-fledged meditation practice, which is really beyond the scope of this book. You’re better off using the chapter as a reference and seeking instruction elsewhere.

Second, you’ve probably figured out by now that this book isn’t about management methods and competencies. You won’t find anything that you can bring to your office on Monday and get cracking on. What it does is invite you to pause and reflect. It gives you lots of food for thought about what it means to be more fully and authentically human. And it encourages us to cultivate the basic attitudes and mental skills that form the ground upon which great leaders naturally emerge.

There’s one other important point from the book I’d like to emphasize. Although the subject is leadership in a business context, I think the principles can apply to anyone. Leadership isn’t something that only CEOs do. Each and every one of us can be a leader in whatever we do – whether we’re teaching children, designing software, or driving taxis.

As Carroll says:

… all human beings instinctively want to offer their best to others and in turn inspire others to do the same, and this can be done by anyone, anywhere, anytime.

In that regard, I hope this book is read by a much wider audience than just business people. If everyone followed these principles and engaged with the world in this way, our planet would be a very different place indeed.

Here’s a YouTube video of Michael Carroll speaking at a “Meet the Author” event at Northeastern University in Boston MA.

“Sitting Practice,” by Caroline Adderson

September 17, 2009

Hazel Colditz

reviews

No Comments

A Canadian author’s sophomore novel deals with the serious subjects of disability and unrequited incestuous love, but brims over with life and laughter as it provokes the reader to reflect.

This is Caroline Adderson’s second novel — and one filled with humor, likable characters and great writing that make for an easy weekend read.

Ross and Iliana are three weeks into their marriage when a car accident and a moving tennis ball change the dynamics of their lives and lead them both into a journey of self-reflection and faith.

Ross Alexander is a funny, charismatic and passionate chef who runs his own business, Reel Food, catering to the film industry. He meets Iliana, a nurse, after he has surgery on his nose because of a history of snoring. She is tall, beautiful, reserved and athletic, and when Ross first sees her he can tell just by watching her walk across the room that she is his opposite.

Title: Sitting Practice
Author: Caroline Adderson
Publisher: Shambhala Publications
ISBN: 978-1-59030-558-4
Available from: Amazon.com and Shambhala.

Iliana comes from a family with rigid religious values. “You were damned if you did not accept Jesus Christ as your savior, yet faith was a gift from God, not something you could go out and acquire on your own.” As an adult she struggled with faith. “Who in their right mind, she wondered now, could endorse so frustrating and cruel a paradox?” Her parents chose not to attend Iliana and Ross’s wedding. They did not trust or believe in the secular world, especially people — even their daughter — who did not share their beliefs.

Their love story also includes Ross’s twin sister, Bonnie, who lives her life searching for “Mr. Right” but finding only betrayal and loss because she constantly compares them unfavorably to Ross, with whom she is in love. Bonnie has a son, Bryce, who is a delight in Ross’s otherwise heavy and darkly comic relationship with his sister.

Throughout much of the story Ross deals with his the guilt he assumes for the accident, which causes Iliana’s once toned and tall body to become wheel chair bound. It was fascinating to read how the more Ross suffered the more Iliana “let go” to what was and accepted her limitations by training her physical body within its new limitations. She seemed more alive and aware of herself after the accident. Perhaps when we lose an ability that we take for granted, our other faculties heighten to fill the loss?

She reveals her suffering in her loss of intimacy with Ross. “Never would she be suspected of an affair because no one suspected her desire. The chair had neutered her.” These two sentences are powerful. It made me think of the countless times I perceived people in wheelchairs to be somehow detached, asexual, or fragile.

Adderson illuminated many thoughts for me that I might never have had the opportunity to think about… What if? … What if this were me? Iliana may have lost the use of her physical body from the waist down but this did not diminish her need or desire to be touched. Ross, like myself, failed to recognize that just because her external vessel had changed, internally she was still a woman, longing and desiring warmth and love.

Although I really liked this book there were many times I lost interest in the story due to the many flashbacks. Caroline Adderson writes wonderful dialogues but at times she seems to try too hard. When I first embarked on this tale I thought the title was going to reveal Ross’s Buddhist beliefs. In the end, however, I realized that true wisdom came by way of the reader, processing, interpreting and evaluating: how would a trauma like this change my life with or without a spiritual practice? The ending was a tad disappointing, because Iliana and Ross never reached a point of closure, but life’s drama is often like that.

While Iliana trained her physical body, Ross was training his mind with his Buddhist practice. Both seem to come to realizations to move forward in their own time and means, but I can’t help but wonder who is the one doing the “Sitting Practice”?

“Embracing Mind: the Common Ground of Science and Spirituality,” by Wallace, B. Alan & Brian Hodel

September 10, 2009

Ratnaprabha

reviews

Are science and spirituality “non-overlapping magisteria” (as the late Stephen J. Gould put it), or can some overlap indeed be found? B. Alan Wallace, lecturer, scholar, and noted Buddhist practitioner, believes that it’s time for scientists and meditators to team up (and indeed for scientists to become meditators) in order to study the mind from within.

Alan Wallace became a Buddhist monk in the early 1970s, ordained by the Dalai Lama in India. After 14 years of training and retreats, he returned to the US to study physics and the history and philosophy of science. Since then he’s been trying to find meeting points for his two enthusiasms — Buddhism and science — and this book (written with the help of journalist Brian Hodel) is the latest of several grappling with some of the very profound issues that Buddhism and science spark off in each other.

Title: “Embracing Mind: the Common Ground of Science and Spirituality”
Author: Wallace, B. Alan & Brian Hodel
Publisher: Shambhala
ISBN: 978-1-59030-482-2
Available from: Amazon.com & Shambhala.

The book is really a plea for science to fully ’embrace’ mind, and so to be prepared to learn from the profound insights of ‘contemplatives’ (which chiefly means Buddhist meditators), people who have rigorously investigated their own minds. “Buddhism”, Wallace writes, “is concerned with understanding the world of experience, which doesn’t exist without consciousness.” Obvious, I suppose, but somehow this phrase really struck me. For Buddhism, actual human experience is primary. Scientists, however, are eager to describe the secrets of the material universe, and human experience is only the rather suspect tool that they are compelled to make use of in their quest.

Yet scientists had been taking a strong interest in the human mind since the pioneering psychology of William James over a hundred years ago. James had high hopes for introspection as a research instrument, but was thwarted by the chaos and instability that he and his subjects found as they tried to make sense of their inner worlds. So Western scientific psychology abandoned introspection, and attempted to study the mind as an object, something observed by dispassionate scientists, in other people, from the outside.

Wallace wishes to revive William James’s project, using the clarity and stability available in meditative experience, an experimental arena that James was unaware of. How can you hope to understand the mind, he asks, without accepting the validity of the subjective world which it really is? Consciousness is real, and subjectivity is valid.

Wallace sets the scene with a survey of Western scientific attitudes and how they developed, trying to explain how the world of actual experience could have become so devalued. Surprisingly, prevalent Christian attitudes seem to have set science on a materialist course, distrusting consciousness and human intuition. By the 19th century, scientific materialism was well entrenched, and insisted on five principles (page 11).

Objectivism: the only reality is the material universe outside our minds.
Realism: scientific laws are there to be discovered that fully describe this reality.
Closure: only material influences can affect this reality.
Universalism: the laws we discover are true everywhere.
Reductionism: everything can be understood in terms of interactions between purely physical things.

You can probably see how taking human experience seriously undermines these comforting principles. Yet Wallace insists that it is worth taking a rigorous scientific approach to understanding the mind and its interaction with the material universe. He calls this approach ‘contemplative science’, a term I think that he coined several books ago, which has become quite popular in the US. Really it is his term for Buddhism, though in this book he makes a half-hearted attempt to extend it to other spiritual disciplines that value introspective experience. Every meditation, in Wallace’s view, is an experiment, a piece of independent research which is assessed by one’s meditation supervisor; then one’s reports are ‘peer-reviewed’ by other meditators, as if they were scientific papers. In this way the superficial and subtle properties of the mind have been discovered by generations of contemplatives. Now it is time for them to combine forces with scientists and their MRI scanners. What are the measurable effects of meditation? What’s going on in the brain and the rest of the body when one enters deep states of awareness? Can the reports of meditators and the psychological framework of Buddhism tell us anything about reality as a whole? (I think they can, though I must say that Wallace’s picture of Buddhist meditation as a piece of scientific research does not convince me.)

Wallace proposes a “science of the world of experience” (page 200) to replace our outmoded model of science excluding subjectivity. Respect the results of introspection, but ensure that your inward-looking scientists are properly trained meditators. Then a much fuller understanding of the mind will be possible.

But could this project go even further, and produce a non-dual science, with a vision of the universe (not just the human mind) that has shaken off the five materialist principles? Wallace thinks it could. He believes that crime and selfishness and new forms of ill-health “dominate modern life” (page 105), partly because scientific materialism gives no incentive for ethical behavior. “To be born for no reason and then be extinguished forever is a disheartening and perplexing picture of human life.” (Page 106) Yet we can espouse “the open-minded, exploratory, unbiased ideals of science” without giving up the miraculous and mysterious. This is in part because the most wonderful mysteries have already been emerging for over a hundred years in the new physics.

In trying to present the strangeness of quantum mechanics and relativity, the new physics, I feel that Wallace has taken a few steps backwards. Do you remember The Tao of Physics by Fritjof Capra, back in 1975? Capra was a good physicist, much better in fact than Wallace, who makes quite a few small errors in his scientific explanations. But he became overexcited by noticing parallels in language between the theories of modern physics and some rather imaginative translations of texts from Daoism, Buddhism and Hinduism. For example, the constant appearing and disappearing of virtual particles was like the dance of Shiva, and the fecund space from which these particles emerged was like the fertile emptiness of Mahayana Buddhism. Similarity turned into equality, and Capra convinced himself that Einstein and the Eastern sages were talking about the same reality. But his parallels were rather crude, and didn’t really stand up to examination. I felt rather surprised that Wallace, a good scholar with a wide reading, revisits many of these parallels in this book.

Most crucially, Wallace believes in the participatory mind. This is his clinching evidence that science’s rejection of subjectivity has to be abandoned because of evidence from the very heart of science itself.

When quantum physicists measure, say, exactly how a particle of light is polarized, the polarization ‘collapses’ from a cloud of possibilities into one actual result. And there is evidence that this collapse is not just a change in the experimenter’s knowledge, but is a real change in the state of the system being measured. Some physicists (and many more non-physicists) have concluded that the consciousness of the observer has interacted with the particle of light, causing it to adopt a definite state of polarization. But this is a controversial and quite problematic position. Really nobody knows how the collapse happens, or what the collapse really means. If the survival of a boxed cat depends upon a measured quantum event, is the consciousness of the cat enough to collapse it, or does it need the experimenter to come along later and open the box, until which time the cat is neither alive or dead? (The Schrodinger’s Cat Paradox.) What if an untrained friend notes down the readings on a quantum physicists’ apparatus — does the collapse happen when he takes his notes, or when the trained physicist reads them? (The Wigner’s Friend Paradox.) And in any case, what are our noble consciousnesses doing interfering with such trivial matters?!

Nevertheless, Wallace is quite right to confront science with the primacy of our human experience, and to confront us with the mystery of the apparent boundary between our inner life and outer reality. We seem to peer out from our inner castle. Science blithely annexes our outer world as we watch impotently. Yet here we are, this is valid, and somewhere the boundary must crumble away.

I hope that more and more Buddhists will sally forth from their castles, and offer fresh visions of the universe in a language that scientists can understand and incorporate. I hope that more scientists will be allowed into the castle of the human mind, exploring it hand in hand with Buddhist meditators, and coming up with intriguing questions, fruitful research projects. These questions need, I think, a viewpoint less entrenched in medieval Tibetan Buddhist psychology than Wallace’s, prepared to question Buddhist ready answers. For example, if we don’t accept the materialist assumption that mind is no more than an electro-chemical fizzing in the wet-ware of computer-like brains, then that means it is conceivable that one’s stream of consciousness was conditioned by other streams before the birth of this body, and may in turn condition new ones after death. So, let’s investigate the effect (say) of in vitro fertilization on the later personality of the child — a child who homed in on such a bizarre beginning would surely be a very different being from one who preferred natural conception (or perhaps not — what do you think?). The Tibetan Book of the Dead does not envisage such a possibility, and its authors did not have the tools of experimental science to hand. We have them, let’s go for it.

In Buddhism, it pays to leave assumptions at the door

July 30, 2009

Wildmind Meditation News

news

No Comments

Barbara O’Brien (Guardian): Anxiety about what Buddhism ‘really’ is has followed it around for centuries. It’s a mental habit Buddhist teaching warns us of.

Henry Steel Olcott, TW Rhys Davids, and other 19th century western “Buddhologists” arrived in Asia brimming with Orientalist idealism about the pure wisdom of the ancient east. Then they looked around and concluded that the people of Asia were largely an ignorant lot who didn’t appreciate “authentic” Buddhism as well as them. Olcott in particular made it his mission to explain Buddhism to the Sinhalese, publishing a Buddhist catechism and organising Buddhist Sunday schools.

Both Rhys Davids and Olcott made important contributions to the understanding of Buddhism in the west, and I understand the people of Sri Lanka still honour Olcott’s memory. We might well dismiss 19th-century western attitudes toward “inauthentic” Asian Buddhism as typical Victorian-era white arrogance. However, westerners continue to want to save Buddhism from backward, superstition-ridden Buddhists, who (they believe) have contaminated the Buddha’s authentic philosophy with rituals, altars, bowing, incense and other clutter of religion.

Read the rest of this article…

The imperialist spirit lives on today in best-selling author and atheist Sam Harris, for example. Harris wrote in an essay titled Killing the Buddha that “The wisdom of the Buddha is currently trapped within the religion of Buddhism.” Like the Victorian Buddhologists, Harris seems besotted with his own ideal of an authentic Buddhism that no saffron-robed Asian monk could possibly appreciate.

As a Buddhist who writes about Buddhism, I encounter almost daily enthusiasts who declare with great confidence that Buddhism is a wonderful philosophy, or maybe even a science, but it’s not a religion. And they know this because they’ve read lots of books about it. That most of those books were written by people who spent years immersed in rituals, altars, bowing, and incense tends to be overlooked.

Meanwhile, people debate whether western Buddhism is “authentic”, or even if authentic Buddhism can exist in a western cultural context. I say the issue of “authentic” Buddhism in the west is not about robes versus blue jeans, or about culture at all. The issue is whether we can accept Buddhism on its terms and not ours.

Westerners no sooner realised that there was something of value in Buddhism than they co-opted it for their own agendas, from promoting human understanding to personal self-improvement. But the power of Buddhist practice comes from its ability to confound assumptions and break us out of limited, habitual thinking. If from the beginning we demand that Buddhism conform to our assumptions and habitual thinking, it hardly matters whether we wear jeans or robes. It won’t be authentic.

Our very determination to shoehorn an ancient Asian discipline into 21st-century western definitions of “philosophy” or “religion” is a rejection of “authentic” Buddhism. This sort of conceptual packaging is one of the mental habits Buddhism warns us about. Without realising it we use prefabricated concepts about ourselves and the world around us to organise and interpret what we learn and experience. One of the functions of Buddhist practice is to sweep away all the artificial filing cabinets in our heads so that we see the world as-it-is.

About 2,000 years ago Buddhism hit another cultural speed bump as it made its way into China. The officially sanctioned monk’s robe was wrapped around the body leaving the right shoulder and arm bare. But Chinese cultural sensibilities demanded that arms be covered in public. Eventually, with much grumbling about authenticity, Chinese monks took to wearing long-sleeved robes similar in style to the robes of Taoist scholars. They wrapped the one-shoulder kashaya over the sleeved robe for formal occasions, a practice found in China, Japan and Korea to this day.

Likewise, Buddhism will find ways to express itself authentically in western culture. But to encounter authentic Buddhism in any culture, first empty your cup of assumptions and expectations. And if you meet the Buddha on the road, really kill him – meaning, “kill” all ideas about him. Don’t just replace one idea of Buddha with another idea you like better.

“To Buy Or Not To Buy,” by April Lane Benson, PhD

June 24, 2009

Priyamitra

reviews

No Comments

A new book offers help to those caught up in the painful compulsion to over-shop, from advice on how to untangle the financial mess that results from living beyond one’s means, to exercises for uncovering the unmet needs that drive the addiction to over-consume.

“For every Imelda Marcos — who fled the Philippines leaving behind more than three thousand pairs of shoes — there are countless unknown overshoppers: a businessman whose collection of fountain pens has grown obsessive; a language teacher whose closets are stuffed with unworn, still-tagged garments; a waitress who’s succumbed to the Jewelry Television Network.”

April Lane Benson, PhD has written a self-help book that could quite easily be transposed to other addictions. But, this book is written specifically for the overshopper who is motivated to change their own addictive behavior. To Buy Or Not To Buy is more of a workbook than simply an explanation of overshopping. As such, there are specific exercises to follow, journaling, and a healthy dose of honest self-reflection required for the reader hoping to finish this text. Benson also points out that a significant measure of patience with the effort and with oneself is necessary.

Title: To Buy Or Not To Buy
Author: April Lane Benson, PhD
Publisher: Shambhala/Trumpeter Books
ISBN: 978-1-59030-599-7
Available from: Shambhala and Amazon.com.

Right from the beginning the reader is asked to take on some substantial work; there are questions to consider/answer, there are shopping myths to examine, and there are shopping behaviors to identify — all with the aim of helping the reader identify traits they may be unaware of. This work is intensified in the second chapter by looking at emotional/psychological triggers for overshopping and the fallout that inevitably results. Inventories, matrices, and journaling exercises lead the reader to better understand the mechanisms at work in their own overshopping behavior. The third chapter ties this work together by having the reader sketch a portrait of their overshopping self-image, really asking that a close look be taken so as to see and understand that the behavior is not the person, it is a behavioral profile. With this identity groundwork laid out the text turns to ways of changing.

Right from the beginning the reader is asked to take on some substantial work

Chapter four digs into the often delicate matter of sorting one’s financial tangle, the wreckage that usually accompanies overshopping. In some ways this chapter is the most straight-forward, and for many will provide the first outwardly visible change others close to the overshopper will see. As with prior chapters there are exercises and journaling work to help the overshopper move forward. Putting one’s finances in order can be both liberating and exhilarating, feelings that are generally noticeable by anyone paying attention.

Now we come to the heart of the matter, dealing with unmet needs, the root of the overshopping behavior. For many this will be a delicate subject requiring much sensitivity and kindness, compassion even. But, readers who have come this far and done the work prescribed earlier will have started to develop the understanding and patience that fosters momentum. Chapter six turns the magnifying glass away from the reader for a moment to look at how society is permeated by and buys [sic] into consumerism, how marketing aims specifically at luring us all into spending money. This chapter also draws upon the self-knowledge developed in earlier chapters in order to de-magnetize the places and feelings that repeatedly snare the overshopper. This sets the reader up to consider shopping more mindfully and with greater intentionality.

The heart of the matter [is] dealing with unmet needs

Chapters eight and nine dive back into the space of personal experience, looking in detail at what the body, heart, mind, and soul are doing/not doing when overshopping is occurring, and considering the consequences for living more fully in the present moments that make up our lives. The work here continues with the aim of building a vocabulary for identifying and describing our experience, in itself valuable for everyone not just overshoppers. Lastly, there is a chapter to brace the reader for overshopping lapses and/or relapse. Included are preventative exercises and journaling methods to prepare for the likelihood of resolve slipping or being overwhelmed by unforeseen circumstances.

Weaknesses of the book are few and relatively minor. They include the author, early on, citing a study that men are as likely to be overshoppers as are women, but failing to use a balance of examples to back the assertion. The first chapter lists six gendered examples of overshopper types, five of which are female. As the text progresses this ratio evens out at close to 7:1 making the reading easier for women than for men. The cover also is designed to appeal more to women than men. Another weakness — perhaps glitch is a better term here — is that the author offers the reader seductively easy access to obtaining a shopping journal, buying a ready made journal from the author’s website, ‘if they prefer.’ This seems ill-advised for one trying to help others curb an overshopping habit.

In spite of these two very minor complaints, To Buy Or Not To Buy is well thought out, well written, and contains a great deal of useful, sensible, and wise advice. More than that, it offers an effective and personal method for grappling with the very modern problem overshopping has become. More than thirty years ago Erich Fromm wrote To Have Or To Be, pointing out the alarming trend of materialism in Western culture. Today, April Lane Benson, PhD, provides the very necessary tools each of us can take up to regain our sense of self and worth in the face of this maddening materialism that is overshopping.

“Natural Wakefulness: Discovering the Wisdom We Were Born With” by Gaylon Ferguson

May 13, 2009

Pam Dodd

reviews

No Comments

A new book by Gaylon Ferguson argues that the biggest obstacle to natural wakefulness is the materialism that has us all in its grip, and that meditation and spiritual community are the antidotes. Pam Dodd is our guest reviewer.

Gaylon Ferguson, a Tibetan Buddhist meditation master, has studied and taught meditation for over 30 years. During that time, he has probably met all kinds of people from all walks of life who have actively pursued, or fallen onto, the spiritual path. Ferguson believes that the normal human condition is natural or basic wakefulness. Wakefulness is the fundamental goodness of who we really are, independent of our circumstances, that lies dormant in each of us, waiting to be actualized.

Unfortunately most of us have learned from infancy to be distracted by thoughts and feelings that keep us reacting to life automatically, like robots. We get stuck in the past. We fantasize and daydream. We think incessantly, allowing our monkey mind to jump wherever it pleases. Ferguson calls these habitual patterns reruns. We blindly move through our lives, in prisons of our own making, and we don’t even know it. Looking outside ourselves for our inner well-being, we live with a restlessness that never goes away.

Title: Natural Wakefulness: Discovering the Wisdom We Were Born With
Author: Gaylon Ferguson
Publisher: Shambhala
ISBN: 978-1-59030-657-4
Available from: Shambhala and Amazon.com.

The way to wake up from this “sleepwalking” state is not by trying to force or fix ourselves but by gently befriending ourselves in the practice of lovingkindness that is meditation.

Meditation is a commitment to being here now, no matter what. It’s accepting ourselves exactly where we are, working with what’s available in us, and bringing ourselves back to the present again and again whenever we our minds wander. Ferguson maintains that “sitting quietly in meditation is the best research lab to observe the mind’s behavior when it isn’t being interrupted” (p.98).

Meditation is nothing special. Yet if practiced consistently and regularly, it wakes us up to the basic goodness of our lives, not while we’re squirreled away in some far off, quiet sanctuary, but in the midst of living out the ups and downs of each ordinary, busy day.

Ferguson goes to great lengths to provide useful insights and instructions to the practitioner (for the reader of this book must be an active practitioner if the lessons are truly to be learned). It’s clear he knows the ins and outs of meditation.

Practicing awareness is a stepping stone to radical social change

After the initial chapters on wakefulness and natural training, the middle chapters cover guided exercises, reflections, stories, and student questions on the most important aspects of meditation practice. Central to the book’s approach is the idea of “bare noticing.” This is not “thinking about,” reflection, deliberation, or theorizing, but rather the application of one’s unadorned attention to what currently is. Bare noticing is the basis of mindfulness, the uncluttered appreciation of the fullness of being human.

The book’s meditation lessons start with guided training on mindfulness of the physical body and breathing and move on to mindfulness of mind and mindfulness of feelings.

Along the way we learn how important it is not to be too tight or too loose; how to touch the texture of our emotions; how to lean in to unacceptable thoughts and feelings without being hooked by them; and how respectfully to watch the inner critic or voice of judgment that continuously comments on and criticizes what we think, say, and do.

The last two chapters discuss two central contexts for awakening, the nightmare of materialism and the spirit of community.

Ferguson maintains that the biggest obstacle to natural wakefulness is the world of materialism that has us all in its grips. He traces the roots of our constant sense of inadequacy, anxiety, and feeling like something is missing to our neurotic pursuits and thinking. We “fake it,” putting on masks to compensate for what we think we lack. We constantly chase after physical comfort, security, and pleasure. We rely on belief systems and concepts to filter our perceptions. We become addicted to altered or higher states of consciousness through drugs, prayer, yoga, and even meditation.

One antidote to materialism is genuine community. Communities of sanity, generosity, and celebration help us learn how to overcome a sense of scarcity and fear. In community, we work productively with our attention, care, and concern as we learn how to be present with others’ strong feelings without running away or trying to fix things. We nurture the compassionate heart, strengthening our wishes for the well-being of others. We learn to be skillful, waking up into trust and living courageously with others. In this larger sense, “practicing awareness is a stepping stone to radical social change” (p. 170).

Bare noticing is the basis of mindfulness, the uncluttered appreciation of the fullness of being human.

The hopeful message of Natural Wakefulness is much needed in today’s stressful times. Unfortunately, the book’s structure gets in the way of a full appreciation of its wisdom and lessons.

First, the wording of the chapter titles is too abstract. The clearer descriptive subtitles would have made better titles. Also subheadings throughout the book are uneven; some make sense while others are too vague.

This lack of clarity carries over to the numbering of the guided contemplations and exercises, which doesn’t follow a consistent style from chapter to chapter. Also, the exercises would have stood out more if each had been put in boxes or otherwise highlighted so the practitioner could return to them easily. The same goes for the valuable question-and-answer exchanges; their inconsistent formatting is distracting, making it difficult to follow the insights meant to support the main instruction.

Other issues include the lack of a bibliography, a few muddled metaphors and analogies, and several abrupt or incomplete transitions that leave the reader hanging.

Last, teaching meditation necessarily involves using abstract language. While much of this language may be familiar to the seasoned meditation practitioner, it can be difficult for the neophyte. Add the burden of structural issues like this book has, and despite the great content, it will be a challenge for some to read.

“The Essential Sangharakshita” by Urgyen Sangharakshita, edited by Karen Stout

April 16, 2009

William Harryman

reviews

Buddhism has always adapted its presentation as it has taken root in new cultures, finding new idioms and new forms that resonate with the host culture.

For the last fifty years, Sangharakshita has been one of the teachers most involved in helping Buddhist to find expression in the west. William Harryman takes a look at Wisdom’s new survey of 50 years of teaching.

Discussing the movement of Buddhism to the West seems to be a hot topic in the Buddhist magazines, blogs, and online communities. There seems to be a lot of concern as to how Buddhism will survive the translation from Eastern culture to Western culture. Many traditional Eastern teachers, especially Theravadin, and even some Tibetan, do not want to see Buddhism adapted in any way for its Western audience. From their perspective, Buddhism has survived just fine for more than 2,500 years.

However, there are many more who believe that in order for Buddhism to take root in the West, it must adapt itself to the Western mind. Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche was among the first teachers to really embody this perspective. Many Americans and Europeans went to India, Nepal, Japan, and other Buddhist nations during the sixties and seventies and returned as teachers. Lama Surya Das, Joseph Goldstein, Jack Kornfield, and Sharon Salzberg are among the best known teachers in America. (My comments here are generalizations, so interested readers are invited to check out Western Buddhist Teachers by Andrew Rawlinson for a more in-depth look at Buddhist teachers in the West.) Stephen Batchelor (in Buddhism Without Beliefs) has gone so far as to suggest a Buddhism without karma and rebirth, two seemingly “pre-modern” ideas closely associated with Buddhism.

Title: The Essential Sangharakshita: A Half-Century of Writings from the Founder of the Friends of the Western Buddhist Order
Author: Urgyen Sangharakshita (Edited by Karen Stout).
Publisher: Wisdom Publications, 2009.
ISBN: 0-86171-585-3
Available from: Wisdom and Amazon.com.

Dennis Lingwood went to India (posted there in the British military following WWII) and stayed when his enlistment ended. Having read The Diamond Sutra and the Sutra of Wei Lang as a teenager, he realized he was and had always been a Buddhist. Following his discharge from service, he set off with a friend to find a teacher and was eventually ordained in the Theravada tradition, where he was given the name Sangharakshita (“protected by the spiritual community”). Over the following years he continued to seek the dharma from a variety of Buddhist teachers, including Tibetan refugees, among them Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche. It was one of his other Tibetan teachers, Kachu Rimpoche, who gave Sangharakshita the name “Urgyen,” when Rimpoche was conferring the Padmasambhava initiation. Sangharakshita also read widely in the various Buddhist traditions, seeking an understanding of the universal truths that unite the diverse Buddhist community.

This broad education in Buddhist traditions eventually led Sangharakshita to return to England and found in 1967 the first Western ecumenical Buddhist sangha, The Friends of the Western Buddhist Order (Triratna Buddhist Community). Its goal was to make Buddhism accessible to the West in ways compatible with the modern world. In doing so, Sangharakshita references Western philosophy, psychology, and art, in addition to the central Buddhist teachings. Over the years, Sangharakshita has written extensively on Buddhist practices from the perspective of the Triratna Buddhist Community, and those writings are finally collected in The Essential Sangharakshita (Wisdom Publications), edited by Karen Stout (known in the Triratna Buddhist Community community as Vidyadevi).

Overview

The book is a substantial 792 pages, including material from 38 of Sangharakshita’s books, his poetry, early writings, sutra commentaries, spoken word, and autobiography. The book is organized into sections that help give some coherence to the massive amount of text (Stout has done an amazing job organizing the material). The five broad sections include The Essentials (introductory Buddhist teachings), Buddhism and the Mind (teachings on Buddhist psychology, death, karma, rebirth and other deeper topics), Art, Beauty, and Myth in the Buddhist Tradition (several great sections combining Western psychology, dream study, art, and myth), Buddhism and the Heart (dealing with emotions, meditation, ritual, gurus, and nature), and Buddhism and the World (Bodhisattvas, compassion, ethics, discipline, right livelihood). Within each main section are several smaller sections containing individual articles, poems, excerpts, and assorted writings.

Creating this collection was no small task. Sangharakshita still has more than fifty books in print, so making the selections and organizing them needed an approach that could serve to structure the book. In Stout’s own words:

All my attempts to organize them seemed just to shift the heap into another heap; and the words, taken from their contexts, kept losing their luster. I decided to try organizing the collection according to a symbolic pattern to which Sangharakshita has returned many times in the course of his teaching: the mandala of the five Buddhas, from the Tibetan Buddhist tradition. (Editor’s Preface)

The center Buddha is Vairocana, also known as the Illuminator (The Essentials). To the east is Aksobhya, the Imperturbable (Buddhism and the Mind). To the south, is the realm of Ratnasambhava, the golden Buddha of beauty (Art, Beauty, and Myth in the Buddhist Tradition). In the west, Amitabha is the Buddha of infinite light (Buddhism and the Heart). And in the north, is Amoghasiddhi, whose name means “unobstructed success” (Buddhism and the World). The use of this symbolic structure is quite useful to the reader and adds layers of meaning to the readings.

The Writings

One thing to note at the outset of this section is that those looking to this book for information about the Western Buddhist Order (WBO) or Friends of the Western Buddhist Order (Triratna Buddhist Community) will be disappointed. There is not a single reference (that I noticed) by Sangharakshita to his worldly projects within the text, and only the briefest of mentions in the introduction and in an end matter blurb. As a Buddhist who is not familiar with the Triratna Buddhist Community, I would have liked a chapter or so of explanation about the sangha, especially considering some of the information about controversies (true or otherwise) available on the web. But I can also see not including anything about the Order in order to focus on the material itself.

One thing that, for this reader, highly recommends this text is Sangharakshita’s reliance on the Pali texts when he refers to the Sutras. He is not advocating a purely Theravadin approach either, so the ecumenical nature of the writings with a reliance on the oldest available texts makes a great deal of sense. I also appreciated that he emphasizes mindfulness of breathing and work with developing loving-kindness as the two recommended forms of meditation. This may seem “old school” to some Buddhists, but the reliance on these simple practices for Westerners makes a great deal of sense.

Further, as a Westerner who has sampled from many different traditions, I also appreciate Sangharakshita’s acknowledgment of the Path of Irregular Steps:

We are in the transcendental sweet shop of Buddhism, with all these spiritual goodies around us, and so we grab this and that: Zen, Tantra, Theravada, ethics, meditation of one sort or another. But nonetheless, we do make some progress. The Path of Irregular Steps is a path, and it does give us some experience of Buddhism. (p. 169)

But this only works as a path for a short time. Sooner or later our practice will stagnate or stop altogether. So while he acknowledges that many of us, especially in the West, will attempt this buffet style of Buddhism (a little of this, a little of that), he also knows that a consistent approach is needed, the Path of Regular Steps:

This is the basic principle. If we want to experience the higher stage, or higher level, with any intensity of any permanence, we must first perfect the lower stage, on the basis of which, alone, the higher stage is to be established. This is why, sooner or later, we have to make the transition from the Path of Irregular Steps to the Path of Regular Steps. (p. 174)

Sometimes, in order to make this transition, we need to go backwards–back to the basics we may have skipped over in order to try the more exciting or esoteric practices. Point taken.

This book may be a great introduction to a distinctly Western Buddhist practice for some people, and for others already familiar with Sangharakshita’s work or already a part of the Triratna Buddhist Community, the book is a nice collection of the primary teachings. With a book of this size, there is way more content that a brief review can cover, so pick up a copy and spend a few hours with this uniquely Western approach to Buddhist practice.

William Harryman is a freelance writer, a personal trainer, nutritional coach, and integral life coach living in Tucson, Arizona. He has been a practicing Buddhist since 1998, at first sampling among many traditions before settling into the Shambhala tradition of Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche.

William blogs at Integral Options Café, and you can follow him on Twitter.