Preface
Broadly speaking, “dharma” refers to the teachings of the Buddha as well as to those aspects of reality and experience with which his teachings are concerned. “Dharma practice” refers to the way of life undertaken by someone who is inspired by such teachings. (Page 0)
GROUND
Let’s start with the Buddha’s first discourse, delivered to his five former ascetic companions in the Deer Park at Sarnath, near Benares. It was here, several weeks after the awakening and his ensuing ambivalence about saying anything at all, that compassion moved him to embrace the anguish of others. Plunging into the treacherous sea of words, he “set in motion the wheel of the dharma.” This short discourse can be summed up as follows: The Buddha declares how he has found the central path through avoiding indulgence and mortification. He then describes four ennobling truths: those of anguish, its origins, its cessation, and the path leading to its cessation. Anguish, he says, is to be understood, its origins to be let go of, its cessation to be realized, and the path to be cultivated. And this is precisely what he himself has done: he has understood anguish, let go of its origins, realized its cessation, and cultivated the path. Only through knowing these truths, knowing how to act upon them, and knowing that he has acted upon them can he claim to have found “authentic awakening.”
The Buddha was not a mystic. His awakening was not a shattering insight into a transcendent Truth that revealed to him the mysteries of God. He did not claim to have had an experience that granted him privileged, esoteric knowledge of how the universe ticks. Only as Buddhism became more and more of a religion were such grandiose claims imputed to his awakening. (Page 5)
Instead of presenting himself as a savior, the Buddha saw himself as a healer. He presented his truths in the form of a medical diagnosis, prognosis, and treatment. If you have a pain in your chest, you first need to acknowledge it. Then you will go to a doctor for an examination. His diagnosis will both identify the cause of pain and tell you if it is curable. If it is curable, he will advise you to follow a course of treatment. Likewise, the Buddha acknowledged the existential condition of anguish. On examination he found its origins to lie in self-centered craving. He realized that this could cease, and prescribed the cultivation of a path of life embracing all aspects of human experience as an effective treatment. (Page 6)
The first truth challenges our habitual relationship to anguish. In the broadest sense, it challenges how we relate to our existence as such: our birth, sickness, aging, and death. To what extent do we fail to understand these realities and their implications? How much time is spent in distraction or oblivion? When we are gripped by a worry, for example, what do we do? We might struggle to shake it off. Or we try to convince ourselves that things are not the way they seem, failing which we seek to preoccupy ourselves with something else. How often do we embrace that worry, accept our situation, and try to understand it? (Page 7)
Anguish maintains its power only as long as we allow it to intimidate us. (Page 7)
If we try to avoid a powerful wave looming above us on the beach, it will send us crashing into the sand and surf. But if we face it head-on and dive right into it, we discover only water. (Page 7)
Sobre cómo la meditación, al enfrentarse directamente a estados mentales temidos, los disuelve.
cita miedo disposición meditación
WHILE “BUDDHISM” SUGGESTS another belief system, “dharma practice” suggests a course of action. The four ennobling truths are not propositions to believe; they are challenges to act. … To understand a worry is to know it calmly and clearly for what it is: transient, contingent, and devoid of intrinsic identity. Whereas to misunderstand it is to freeze it into something fixed, separate, and independent. Worrying about whether a friend still likes us, for example, becomes an isolated thing rather than part of a process emerging from a stream of contingencies. This perception induces in turn a mood of feeling psychologically blocked, stuck, obsessed. The longer this undignified state persists, the more we become incapable of action. The challenge of the first truth is to act before habitual reactions incapacitate us. (Page 7)
Letting go of a craving is not rejecting it but allowing it to be itself: a contingent state of mind that once arisen will pass away. Instead of forcibly freeing ourselves from it, notice how its very nature is to free itself. To let it go is like releasing a snake that you have been clutching in your hand. By identifying with a craving (“ I want this,” “I don’t want that”), you tighten the clutch and intensify its resistance. Instead of being a state of mind that you have, it becomes a compulsion that has you. (Page 9)
cita craving desapego paradoja
IN THE CESSATION of craving, we touch that dimension of experience that is timeless: the playful, unimpeded contingency of things emerging from conditions only to become conditions for something else. This is emptiness: not a cosmic vacuum but the unborn, undying, infinitely creative dimension of life. (Page 9)
To cultivate these diverse elements of our existence means to nurture them as we would a garden. Just as a garden needs to be protected, tended, and cared for, so do ethical integrity, focused awareness, and understanding. No matter how deep our insight into the empty and contingent nature of things, that alone will do little to cultivate these qualities. Each of these areas in life becomes a challenge, an injunction to act. There is no room for complacency, for they all bear a tag that declares: “Cultivate Me.” (Page 11)
THE ACTIONS THAT accompany the four truths describe the trajectory of dharma practice: understanding anguish leads to letting go of craving, which leads to realizing its cessation, which leads to cultivating the path. These are not four separate activities but four phases within the process of awakening itself. Understanding matures into letting go; letting go culminates in realization; realization impels cultivation. (Page 11)
This trajectory is no linear sequence of “stages” through which we “progress.” We do not leave behind an earlier stage in order to advance to the next rung of some hierarchy. All four activities are part of a single continuum of action. Dharma practice cannot be reduced to any one of them; it is configured from them all. As soon as understanding is isolated from letting go, it degrades into mere intellectuality. As soon as letting go is isolated from understanding, it declines into spiritual posturing. The fabric of dharma practice is woven from the threads of these interrelated activities, each of which is defined through its relation to the others. (Page 11)
The early discourses suggest that awakening was a common occurrence among those who listened to the Buddha and acted upon what he said. A difference in degree was acknowledged between those who had experienced the initial moment of awakening and entered the path, and those who had further cultivated the path and even reached the point where the habit of craving was extinguished. But access to the process of awakening itself was relatively straightforward and did not entail any great fuss.
WHEN ASKED WHAT he was doing, the Buddha replied that he taught “anguish and the ending of anguish.” When asked about metaphysics (the origin and end of the universe, the identity or difference of body and mind, his existence or nonexistence after death), he remained silent. He said the dharma was permeated by a single taste: freedom. He made no claims to uniqueness or divinity and did not have recourse to a term we would translate as “God.” (Page 15)
Gautama encouraged a life that steered a middle course between indulgence and mortification. He described himself as an openhanded teacher without an esoteric doctrine reserved for an elite. Before he died he refused to appoint a successor, remarking that people should be responsible for their own freedom. Dharma practice would suffice as their guide. (Page 15)
Even if for five hundred years after his death his followers resisted the temptation to represent him as a quasi-divine figure, they eventually did so. As the dharma was challenged by other systems of thought in its homeland and spread abroad into foreign cultures such as China, ideas that had been part of the worldview of sixth-century-B.C.E. India became hardened into dogmas. It was not long before a self-respecting Buddhist would be expected to hold (and defend) opinions about the origin and the end of the universe, whether body and mind were identical or different, and the fate of the Buddha after death. (Page 15)
as the dharma emigrates westward, it is treated as a religion—albeit an “Eastern” one. The very term “Buddhism” (an invention of Western scholars) reinforces the idea that it is a creed to be lined up alongside other creeds. (Page 16)
First and foremost the Buddha taught a method (“ dharma practice”) rather than another “-ism.” The dharma is not something to believe in but something to do. The Buddha did not reveal an esoteric set of facts about reality, which we can choose to believe in or not. (Page 17)
dharma budismo creencia religión cita favorite
The dharma is not a belief by which you will be miraculously saved. It is a method to be investigated and tried out. (Page 18)
Buddhism could be described as “the culture of awakening.”
TRY THIS EXERCISE. Find a quiet, comfortable place. This may be just the corner of a bedroom or study. Then settle into a chair or, if you prefer, sit cross-legged on a cushion on the floor. Make sure your back is unsupported and upright but not tense. Incline your head downward, so your gaze naturally falls about three feet in front of you. Shut your eyes. Rest your hands in your lap or on your knees. Check to see if there are any points of tension in the body: the shoulders, the neck, around the eyes. Relax them. Become aware of your bodily contact with the ground. Make sure that you are steady and balanced. Notice the subtle polyphony of sounds around you, take note of any sensations in the body, be conscious of your mood of the moment. Don’t judge these things or seek to change them: accept them for what they are. Take three long, slow, deep breaths. Don’t imagine the breath as some invisible stuff entering and leaving your nostrils; notice the bodily sensations (even the trivial ones like the shifting contact of your skin with your undershirt) that make up the act of breathing. Then let the breathing resume its own rhythm, without interfering with or controlling it. Just stay with it, letting the mind settle into the swell of the breath, like a small boat at anchor, gently rising and falling with the sea. Do this for ten minutes. (Page 23)
Normally we are unaware of the extent to which we are distracted, for the simple reason that distraction is a state of unawareness. This kind of exercise can force us to recognize that for much of the time we fail to register what is happening here and now. We are reliving an edited version of the past, planning an uncertain future, or indulging in being elsewhere. Or running on automatic pilot, without being conscious at all. (Page 24)
meditación hábitos distracción mente
Who “I am” appears coherent only because of the monologue we keep repeating, editing, censoring, and embellishing in our heads. (Page 24)
Evasion of the unadorned immediacy of life is as deep-seated as it is relentless. Even with the ardent desire to be aware and alert in the present moment, the mind flings us into tawdry and tiresome elaborations of past and future. This craving to be otherwise, to be elsewhere, permeates the body, feelings, perceptions, will—consciousness itself. It is like the background radiation from the big bang of birth, the aftershock of having erupted into existence. (Page 25)
All of life is in ceaseless mutation: emerging, modifying, disappearing. The relative constancy of still, centered attention is simply a steady adjustment to the flux of what is observed. Nothing can be relied upon for security. As soon as you grasp something, it’s gone. Anguish emerges from craving for life to be other than it is. It is the symptom of flight from birth and death, from the pulse of the present. It is the gnawing mood of unease that haunts the clinging to “me” and “mine.” (Page 25)
Craving can vanish in awakening to the absurdity of the assumptions that underlie it. Without stamping it out or denying it, craving may be renounced the way a child renounces sandcastles: not by repressing the desire to make them but by turning aside from an endeavor that no longer holds any interest. (Page 26)