What is ‘paying attention’?

Tuesday, July 28, 2009 at 1:17 pm (buddhism, meditation, practice)
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Do you think attention is the same as mindfulness? I don’t. I think attention is something more specific than mindfulness.

What’s more, attention can actually alter the structure of your brain.

This was indicated in a scientific study conducted with monkeys. All the monkeys were subjected to the same two kinds of physical stimuli, which were concurrent — they heard sound through headphones, and their fingers were in an apparatus that caused the fingers to tap. All the monkeys were listening and tapping for 100 minutes each day, for six weeks.

The sound and the tapping were not synchronized, however. Imagine yourself reading a book in a noisy coffee shop. You can hear conversations all around you, and there’s probably music too. If you’re really absorbing what you are reading, then you must be shutting out the sounds, which are unrelated to your text. If not shutting them out completely, at least you have downgraded them. You have relegated them to the background.

Half of the monkeys were rewarded with tasty juice if they made a sign when the rhythm of the sound changed. The other half were rewarded the same way, but only if they made a sign when the rhythm of their tapping motion changed. The two halves of the group kept the same roles for the six-week test, so presumably the listeners got better at recognizing the change in sound rhythm, and the feelers got better at noticing the change in motion rhythm.

In this way, with the yummy reward for doing the right thing, all the monkeys had an incentive to pay attention. But half of them were paying attention to sound, while the other half were paying attention to the motion of the finger apparatus.

The researchers had scanned all the monkeys’ brains before the test. After the test, they scanned the monkeys’ brains again.

The difference between the two groups of monkeys reflected the effect of paying attention: In the group that listened for rhythm changes, the area of the auditory cortex had increased. In the other group (which had heard all the same sounds, at the same volume, for the same length of time), there was no change in the auditory cortex. But in those monkeys, who had been rewarded for catching a change in the rhythm of their fingers’ movement, the area of the somatosensory cortex had increased. In the other monkeys, there was no change in that region of the brain. Wah!

I read about this experiment in Train Your Mind, Change Your Brain, by science journalist Sharon Begley (pages 156 – 160). Begley attended a conference at which a group of neuroscientists presented some of the latest findings about the brain to the Dalai Lama; later she wrote this book, with additional reporting, based on those presentations. It’s highly readable and altogether fascinating!

Breathe.

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How to live moment by moment

Thursday, July 23, 2009 at 8:47 am (buddhism, practice)
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In the first chapter of The Diamond Sutra, the Buddha goes about his normal day. He puts on his traveling robe and picks up his bowl and goes to town, to beg just like any monk would. Then he eats. Back in the forest with the monks, he puts away his robe and his bowl. He washes his feet. Then he sits down in the meditation posture and “[turns] his awareness to what [is] before him.”

The translator, Red Pine, tells us:

In the first chapter, we see what a buddha does, which is not so different from our own daily round of existence, if we could only do what we do unhindered by attachments and see what we do unobstructed by delusions. What this sutra teaches us is how to transform attachments and delusions, how to be a buddha. And it begins with a patched robe, an empty bowl, and the Buddha’s daily practice of his teaching. (pp. 39-40)

A long time ago in a Zen center, I heard someone ask the teacher how she should spread all this wonderful Buddha-dharma to her friends and neighbors. She wanted to share it, but she didn’t know what she should say to them.

The teacher told her not to worry about telling other people about the dharma. He said if she would simply live her practice, then by her example, others would come to know the dharma.

Breathe.

The Diamond Sutra, translated by Red Pine (2001)

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Reading the Diamond Sutra

Tuesday, July 21, 2009 at 8:18 am (buddhism, practice, quotations)

A while back, I began to want to study some sutras. I first chose The Dhammapada because I thought it would be sort of fundamental and basic, like the ground floor of Buddhist teachings. That guess seemed spot-on as I read the Gil Fronsdal translation a couple of times.

However, I wanted something more substantial. Maybe more challenging. I was thinking about commentaries — so many learned Buddhist scholars have written commentaries over the centuries … shouldn’t I check them out?

So I wound up with The Diamond Sutra, a 2001 edition translated by Red Pine and published by Counterpoint. This text has been kicking my butt for a few months now.

The Buddha said, “Subhuti, if someone should claim, ‘the Tathagata teaches a dharma,’ such a claim would be untrue. Such a view of me, Subhuti, would be a misconception. And how so? In the teaching of a dharma, Subhuti, in the ‘teaching of a dharma,’ there is no such dharma to be found as the ‘teaching of a dharma.’ ” (p. 22)

Whoa! This is a major, stupendous koan! The first time through this text, I had to give up on the commentaries. They were too hard for me. So I contented myself with only reading the sutra (it’s 27 pages). Still too hard. So I read the first five chapters (3 and a half pages) about 10 times. Then I read the commentaries on those five chapters.

I’m still working on this, on days when I feel alert and focused and smart. If I sit down with it for about two hours, I can work through about two chapters and the commentaries. Do I understand it? Heck, no. But I am enjoying it now. And little by little, I think some drops of water are falling on a very hard stone.

Breathe.

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Angkor, the great ruins of Cambodia

Sunday, July 19, 2009 at 10:52 am (buddhism)
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The July 2009 issue of National Geographic magazine has a fantastic story about Angkor, the 400-square-mile site in Cambodia where the Khmer kings ruled an empire circa 1100 C.E. It’s 30 pages of fascinating discoveries about the civilization and, in large part, their engineering achievements with water control (1,000 years ago!). The breathtaking photos cover many two-page spreads, and there’s also a wonderful takeout insert that has a huge map on one side (Cambodia, Thailand, Vietnam, Laos, Burma, and West Malaysia) and a timeline and temple diagrams on the other side.

Check out the slick and informative Angkor graphic feature on the NatGeo Web site.

You can also read the article there.

There’s an incredible one-hour program about this same subject on the National Geographic Channel. I saw it on July 14, and there’s a re-broadcast coming up (in the U.S.) on Tuesday, July 21. I happened to record it in HD on my TiVo, and it is breathtaking! So if you can see this in HD, please don’t miss it!

Admittedly, there’s very little about Buddhism in this package, but from 1181 the Khmer rulers supported Buddhism as the national religion, and it continues to be the dominant religious practice in Cambodia today.

Breathe.

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Karma explained

Thursday, July 16, 2009 at 8:03 am (buddhism)
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A blog post at The Buddha Is My DJ offers some wonderful ideas for considering karma.

I have come to view karma in the context of cause and effect. In popular-culture portrayals of Buddhism, we do not hear a lot about cause and effect — but in the Zen texts I have read, there are many references to this phrase and its connection to the 12 Links of Dependent Origination.

Everything comes from something, from some confluence of events and conditions.

Once I started getting that connection (ahhh …), karma stopped seeming like simple tit-for-tat.

Breathe.

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Living and practice: A road map

Wednesday, July 15, 2009 at 8:37 am (buddhism, practice)
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Yesterday I wrote a little about Buddhist monks, but I didn’t clearly say what I was trying to convey. I’ll give it another try today.

The monk leaves his home and family and goes to live with a group of monks, in a monastery or elsewhere. There’s also a tradition of monks who go off alone, into the forest or into the mountains, becoming hermits with a solitary practice. So the life of a monk is often referred to as “the homeless life.” In contrast, lay people are often called “householders.”

In the Buddha’s time, the monks walked and lived with the Buddha. After he was gone, they lived in groups without him. They built monasteries and other permanent residences. Groups of monks settled in various locations. As time passed, Buddhism spread south through India to Sri Lanka, north to Central Asia, east and south to Southeast Asia, and farther East to China, Korea and Japan. Everywhere Buddhism spread, numbers of people took up the homeless life.

It’s easy for a Western person to assume that all those who became monks must have been deeply spiritual and committed to doing good, but that’s a bit naive. Both today and in the distant past, people become monks and nuns for myriad personal reasons. In several countries even today, a boy’s family might send him to the temple to become a monk just because they cannot afford to feed him. He might be as young as eight or nine.

This is not to imply that monks are not sincere. Of course there are, and have been, many thousands of monastics who were devoted to learning the Dharma, teaching others, and so on.

Now, I’m not all that interested in monks and the monastic life — in themselves. But I’ve been thinking about the many various shapes and forms of the teachings we have inherited during 2,500 years, and how the practices of monastic lives have caused those shapes and forms to emerge. It is said we have 84,000 sutras, and that doesn’t even include the other Buddhist texts that have been written, preserved, lost, commented upon, translated, etc.

One approach to Buddhist practice (for monks, at least) is to learn the 84,000 sutras by heart.

Okay, this is totally not practical for a lay person. It’s hard to imagine that even a monk can achieve this, but we are told that some monks have. (Traditionally, there has been a lot of memorization and reciting in Buddhist monastic practice.)

Learning the 84,000 sutras is an example of a goal. If you commit to working toward a goal, you have direction. You know where you’re going, you know what to do every day.

If you read Buddhist texts, you’ll see that a whole lot of goals have been offered and explained.

Your goal might be to get enlightenment. (Many people think that is the whole point of Buddhism.) Your goal might be to save all beings. Your goal might be more humble — to earn a better rebirth for your next life. Your goal might be even more down-to-earth — to acquire merit during this life by doing good deeds or donating money. You might be one of the many people who likes to have a kind of road map, and you’re following a well-defined set of steps — after you master Step 1, you’ll be ready to move on to Step 2. (Maybe you are a Stream Enterer, or a Once Returner.)

All of these things are part of Buddhism. What has led me to pondering the monks and their long history is the idea that so many of these teachings apply very well to giving a monk a goal toward which he can spend his whole life working.

Not every monk is going to have a temperament suited to sitting in silent meditation all day long. Especially not when he is nine years old. Not every monk is going to be good at memorizing or at teaching. But you don’t want to kick him out of the Sangha. So there must be teachings for everyone (and for lay people too), to give everyone the chance to improve and advance.

Then the question: Improve or advance … at what?

What is the ultimate goal? Most people would say it’s enlightenment. Do you believe enlightenment is possible in this lifetime? Well, if you believe in rebirth (which is NOT the same as reincarnation, by the way), maybe you are chugging along in this life with the idea that all good karma earned here will take you closer to enlightenment in a future life. But what if you don’t believe in rebirth? (Many Western people don’t.) Are you working toward a goal, and if so, what is it?

What I’ve been thinking about the monks is this: At the beginning of one’s life as a monk, one needs to hear instructions. The basics: Here are your robes, here is your bowl, here is where you will sleep. There might be a bell or a gong that you must heed. The logistics of the day lived by your body are mapped out. That’s the easy part.

What about the mind? If the mind remains unchanged, nothing changes.

So the monks in each monastery, in each tradition, receive instructions: How to Train Your Mind. The instructions are not a complete road map, with each highway marked in red and each little dirt track marked in gray. No one can make that kind of map until all the roads have been followed. And of course, new roads are built, and old roads are closed and wiped away.

Breathe.

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Monastic life and life experience

Tuesday, July 14, 2009 at 7:37 am (buddhism, practice)
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In the Dharmapada, there are several references to “bad monks.” Those exact words are not used, but the sutras refer to those who wear robes and yet do not tame their mind, or who commit wrong actions.

Many who wear the saffron robe
Have evil traits and lack restraint.
By their evil deeds are these wicked people
Reborn in hell.

(From the translation by Gil Fronsdal, 2005, p. 75)

This comes as no surprise to anyone who knows the history of any religion that has ever existed. Clergy, priests, monks and nuns are human beings. Perhaps they all set out on a spiritual path with intentions to do good, but being human, some of them fail.

This idea floated through my mind during meditation one morning recently, right after a thought about reading sutras and trying to learn from them. The theme I was allowing to expand was understanding, or attainment. A teacher once made a nice distinction for me about “knowing” vs. really understanding something: He said I might know a lot about bipolar disorder if I have read a bunch of articles and books about it, but I could never understand what it is like to be a person who lives with that disorder unless I was, in fact, one of those people.

This was a great teaching for me, because I have often appreciated how I can’t really understand what it is like to be this or that person (an African American, a soldier, a gifted musician, a drug addict). So the teacher made his point very skillfully, for me at least, when he said, “That is the difference between knowledge and experience.”

One day, I might experience emptiness, in the sense meant by the Buddhist teachings. One day, I might experience the oneness of the entire universe. But until then, I’m only understanding, or trying to, with my mind.

Back to the monks: They would not need to be evil to be wrong — or simply mistaken. There are 84,000 sutras, we are told. Not a one of them was written down by Shakyamuni Buddha. We can easily discern certain themes and ideas that recur again and again in hundreds of these sutras; we might also encounter some ideas that confuse us or seem contradictory.

I like to remember that humans make mistakes, and all the clerics and monastics were human. So should I torture myself over some discrepancy, some contradiction? Or should I rely on what I, myself, experience?

Breathe.

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Buddhist ideas, American TV: Avatar

Sunday, July 12, 2009 at 10:16 pm (buddhism, zen)
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Sometimes you keep hearing about something again and again, forgetting and remembering, until finally, at long last, you go and check it out. That’s how it was for me and the animated TV series called “Avatar: The Last Airbender,” from Nickelodeon (you can read all about it at Wikipedia). Nick has an excellent Web site devoted to the series. At TV.com, you’ll find a compact episode guide and viewer reviews.

Many different people had asked me whether I had seen this TV series. When I said no, they would always tell me a little bit about it, such as “One of the characters is this boy Buddhist monk.” I would think, yeah, yeah, I’ll look into it. And then, I would forget.

So finally someone mentioned that he had downloaded all 60 episodes of the animated series with BitTorrent, and that led me to watch the first season (20 episodes, about 25 minutes each). Whoa. These are really good!

So first, you need to know I do like animation. The original Disney “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs” (1937) is a lifelong favorite of mine. Recently I discovered the work of the Japanese animation great Hayao Miyazaki, and now I’m on a leisurely mission to see all his films. But I have not seen much of the zillions of anime series from Japan, and I do not run out and watch every Pixar or Disney feature film. So, yes — I like animation, but I’m not a freak for it.

Second, I have a very low tolerance for stupid stories. A lot of U.S. animation (especially on the Cartoon Network) is just junk. It is unwatchable, in my opinion.

So with those two facts in mind, you are about to hear how much I love, love, LOVE “Avatar: The Last Airbender.” I’m up to episode 7 in the second season, and it just keeps getting better and better!

Now, it is true that Aang, the young hero of the series (he is the Avatar, whose task it is to save the world — of course!), is a monk. No one in the series says “Buddhist,” and I have not seen any Buddha images so far. But in episode 4 (season 2), a man with prodigious martial arts skills tells Aang that the whole world is one big living organism, just like the giant banyan tree above them.

“You think you’re any different from me, or your friends, or this tree?” he asks Aang. “If you listen hard enough, you can hear every living thing breathing together. You can feel everything growing. … We all have the same roots, and we are all branches of the same tree.”

Later in that episode, the same man tells Aang and his friends: “Time is an illusion, and so is death.”

Breathe.

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Desire is very hard to let go of

Thursday, July 2, 2009 at 9:19 am (buddhism, practice, quotations)
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Lately I have been thinking a lot about desire. I found this in a text about the Four Noble Truths posted at Zen Mirror:

However how does this desire vanish, and how might it be extinguished? Wherever in the world there are delightful and pleasurable things, there this desire can vanish, and there it may be extinguished. Whether in the past, present, or future, whoever perceives delightful and pleasurable things in the world as impermanent, miserable, and without substance, overcomes desire.

The paradox is that to live is to desire. I’m tired, I want sleep. I’m hungry, I want food. I’m lonely, I want a friend. I’m sick, I want to be well.

I have some understanding of impermanence. Often in the course of a normal day, as I catch myself living in the past or planning for the future, I call myself back to the present moment. I chide myself: Be here now. This is the only thing that is real — this moment, now.

I am practicing with being as I am in that moment and not desiring it to be more than it is. Not appreciating it because it will end, but merely being present for it, that experience, whether it is pleasurable or the opposite.

One object of this effort, for me, is a person, my friend. My friend is someone I love, very much. I wish I could spend more time with him, but both of us have busy schedules. In this relationship, I’m working on just being there when we do have a chance to be together. Along with this, I don’t want to wallow in the past, remembering how nice it was to be together yesterday or last week. That wallowing is a way of NOT being in the present moment, and it also generates desire — I wish I were still there, in the past. The same is true of looking forward to a future meeting: If I’m imagining that (desiring that), then I am not here, now.

Also, anything in the past or in the future is not real. It is a chimera, a shadow, an illusion, a dew drop. The past was real, at the time. Now it’s gone. And the future — the future is never real.

Desire has three effects related to time (the very essence of impermanence): Looking at the past, I desire to be there, or to change it, or to have it again. Looking at the future, I desire for it to come now (instead of what is now), to be a particular way, to hold or to bring forth certain things. And looking at the present, I desire to extend it or prolong it when it is pleasurable, or to speed it up or escape it when it is not.

Breathe.

(Related: Desire is one of the three poisons.)

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The long road … this is the practice

Wednesday, July 1, 2009 at 9:42 am (buddhism, practice, zen)
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In the Zen tradition, our practice has few rituals. Meditation techniques that are taught in Vipassana or the Tibetan schools of Buddhism seem exotic and detailed to us. When people who are used to Tibetan practices ask me what we do, I find it a little bit difficult to explain. (I hope I’m getting better at it, because I’ve found myself in that situation a few times!) I try to practice skillful means in choosing my words and my examples.

Sometimes when I have read about the techniques that are taught in other traditions, I felt kind of envious. Look, they have a plan, I thought. They have a road map. They know what they’re supposed to do.

I would feel dissatisfied for a little while — maybe a few weeks. I would read some Zen texts, talk to a teacher, grumble in my own head about how slow my progress is. But after some time, I’d ask myself what I was grumbling about. If I wanted to switch to some other school of Buddhism, I was free to do so. If I wanted to try some other techniques, who was stopping me? No one.

As soon as I realize that I have that freedom, I begin to settle down. I let go. I relax.

I accept and respect others’ practices. If they prefer to chant or to repeat a mantra, it is their practice. My practice is simply to sit. From time to time, this leads me into feelings of frustration and impatience. I’m not doing anything! Or, I’m not getting any better at it!

This is just human nature. People go through periods of deep frustration with their marriages, their jobs, their children. Sometimes I feel like I’ve been in the same job too long now. I want to go out and find a new job, a different kind of job. I want to move to a new city. I want to travel somewhere I’ve never been before.

If I sit with these frustrations and urges, I eventually come to see that they are only the result of desires. My mind has made these desires, and they have made me grumpy and dissatisfied. Desires are impermanent, just like everything else in this world.

This understanding has come to me through the action of practice.

It has not come because I read about it in books. It has not come because I went to the dharma talks and listened with great attention. It certainly has not come because I used logic or reasoning. It has not come because I wanted it (how can you want what you have never imagined?).

Breathe.

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