by Ben Connelly
This realm is inconceivable by definition: it is nonconception. It is wholesome; within it, all things operate dependently, holistically. There is no I to create separation. It is unstained, for the store consciousness that colors the way we see and drives the things we do that harm ourselves and others is empty. It is constant: time, coming and going, permanence and impermanence are merely conceptions. The universe is not concerned with our ideas of past, present, or future. As it says in the Dhammapada, “If you wish to reach the other shore of existence, give up what is before, behind, and in between. Set your mind free and go beyond birth and death.” Let the mind rest here, for this constant realm is not somewhere else; it is the mind in repose in projection only.
You can allow the mind to rest in this realm through a commitment to meditation practice and kind action, but it is also true that the mind is already resting on the foundation of projection only. You are not in some other realm. Vasubandhu is talking about the realm you are in right now. Have a look around.
In the last line of this work, Vasubandhu refers to the Mahayana concepts of three bodies of Buddha: the manifestation body, the bliss body, and the Dharma body. In Sanskrit, these are known as nirmanakaya, sambhogakaya, and dharmakaya, respectively. In simplest terms the manifestation body refers to the physical, historical body of Siddhartha Gautama Buddha; the bliss body refers to the groundless bliss of liberation; and the Dharma body refers to nondualism, limitlessness. In Mahayana Buddhism we think of Buddha’s enlightenment as being the realization of the emptiness of all phenomena, of the complete nondualism of everything. Since nothing is separate from Buddha, this was his realization: everything is Buddha. When my teacher stunned my young, troubled, and new-to-Buddhism self by saying “you are Buddha” all those years ago, she was using a teaching based on the idea of the dharmakaya. Nothing is other than Buddha; that is what makes it Buddha. It is not something else—it’s just this. The bliss body, sambhogakaya, is the bliss of this realization, which is not attached to any phenomena, outcome, or personal self. I have seen more than one Zen teacher gesturing with their hands as though miming a fountain of joyful energy sweeping through and around their bodies, at a loss for words to describe this blissful body of liberation. Vasubandhu says that realization is this bliss body and this infinite Dharma body.
This work has been laden with complex concepts and models for understanding, and it constantly reminded us that they are only concepts, that they are not the Truth or ultimately real. But now, at the end of this work, Vasubandhu brings us back to the ground of practice—this body, right now. The root of the Buddha’s teachings on meditation is mindfulness of the body, and in the Rohitassa Sutra he declares, “It is just within this fathom-long body, with its perception and intellect, that I declare that there is the cosmos, the origination of the cosmos, the cessation of the cosmos, and the path of practice leading to the cessation of the cosmos.” It is only here in the posture of our spine and the rumblings in our belly that there is a world and an inconceivable, nonself, non-other realm. It is here in the way we walk this path. It is in the way we take care of our body and the way our body takes care of our loved ones and our planet that there is a path to liberation. We can attend to our breathing at any moment to draw ourselves to intimacy with this ground of practice. We can slow down just a bit when we want to rush and strain to get ahead. We can stop and be intimate with how this body is right now, tense and straining, or calm and at rest. We may find that this body is ultimately beyond our understanding, but it is our place to do our best, to manifest our deepest altruistic intentions, to give ourselves. It is the Dharma, the Buddha, the world.
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Epilogue:
MEDITATION AND COMPASSIONATE ACTION, AND THE “THIRTY VERSES”
There are four principal modes of practice suggested by this text: developing awareness of the power of the storehouse, mindfulness of phenomena, developing awareness of the dependent nature of things, and nondual meditation. The first two are associated closely with the material in the first half of the “Thirty Verses,” the second two with the latter half. The first two are designed to help us let go of afflictive emotions, the second to help us let go of delusion: the delusion that there is a world out there that is separate from us, and an I in here that is on its own. They are practices that help us be at peace and realize connection. They operate in close harmony with one another and they can help us to work in close harmony with everything and everyone we encounter.
The power of the store consciousness is vast. This text teaches that we can’t directly know what conditions come together to form this moment of consciousness. As it says early on, what the storehouse holds, what karmic seeds are there, is unknown. Modern psychological processes that allow us to dig into the past and analyze, understand, and be free from habits formed in our earlier life can be powerful and transformative. I highly recommend them. However, this is not the method Vasubandhu gives us with this central Yogacara practice of developing awareness of the power of the storehouse. Instead, this text suggests two methods: first, use the mind to understand and recall the vast and complete unknowability of the degree to which what we experience in each moment is conditioned by our past, and second, simply be aware in the moment of what arises in mind. Reading this book, or many parts of it, has been an example of the first aspect of this practice. In his book Training in Compassion, Norman Fischer says that we should set out on the Buddhist path by developing a sense of the “awesome power of our karma.” In the Nidana Samyutta Buddha says: “This body does not belong to you, nor anyone else. It should be regarded as the results of former action [karma] that has been constructed and intended, and is now to be experienced.” One way to develop this view is to remind yourself now and again that whatever is here in the present moment, life, is not yours or someone else’s. It is conditioning manifesting itself.
Early Buddhist teachings on the subject of karma—and Vasubandhu’s here—bring a message of radical empowerment. What arrives in each moment is the result of the past, but in every single instant you have the capacity to create beneficial intention, which will create more harmonious moments in the future. Countless unfathomable things are out of your control, but you always have the opportunity to give your best intention at this moment and thus plant seeds of happiness, kindness, and well-being for all things. Knowing the awesome power of the store consciousness, and knowing our tiny momentary opportunity to participate in this great unfolding, we can be humbled, ennobled, and inspired to do our best. You may not be able to solve homelessness, but you can smile at a disheveled man on the street. You may not be able to eradicate racial injustice, but you can listen to people of color, you can walk to the voting booth, or you can walk hand in hand with the disenfranchised at a civil rights protest. You can’t make your colicky baby stop crying, but you can do your best to stay present with how she is and how you are right now.
The second way of practice suggested by the “Thirty Verses,” mindfulness of phenomena, is also a way of developing awareness of the power of the store consciousness, but it has countless other merits. If we are aware of what is arising in the present moment without judging, especially if we are aware of the factors Vasubandhu instructs us to attend to, we will begin to see that our thoughts and emotions just seem to appear and disappear. They are not who we are, and they are not so solid and real as we once thought. We can see that the great drama of our lives is actually just a story constructed out of momentary phenomena whose origins we can’t ultimately know, but which are deeply rooted in our unconscious, the store consciousness. Many are the times I’ve been all worked up about some slight I received at work and then found myself seeing the power of the story and the emotions unraveling in the light of mindfulness as I sat cross-legged, quiet, and still in the
meditation hall.
This text recommends various mindfulness practices. I will briefly review them here and then give simple instructions on how to bring these practices into your life without being overwhelmed, for they can seem complex.
It is good to begin by developing awareness of the body and the breath. This is the basis of all mindfulness practice taught by the Buddha, and it has been proven over thousands of years in many cultures and traditions to be very effective at helping to stabilize the mind and emotions. Vasubandhu does not make explicit the importance of the body as the basis of mindfulness, but since mindfulness of body through the breath is so central to mindfulness practice in the Buddhist teachings Vasubandhu studied, it is implied that this is where we begin. When we are mindful of sensation in the body, we are mindful of sense-contact, the first universal factor, and when we are attuned to the tension, ease, and rhythm of our breathing, we become more intimate with ourselves, and awareness of emotional states, the second mindfulness practice, may naturally arise.
Vasubandhu is explicit about the importance of mindfulness of the universal and beneficial factors, and of the afflictions and secondary afflictions. Mindfulness of the universal factors requires some study, as they are subtle, and you may want to review chapters 4, 9, and 10. To be mindful of the beneficial and afflictive factors is extremely powerful and can be done intuitively by directing our attention to how we feel, to the condition of our hearts. This kind of awareness both lets our afflictive karma exhaust itself and allows us to refrain from creating more of the same. When we actually intimately know that there is envy in our mind, we can be free of the need to say something sarcastic, rather than impulsively speaking. When we are mindful of tranquility we may enjoy the peace in our hearts, but still step up and get to work.
I am aware that most of the readers of this book will not memorize all fifty-five elements in Vasubandhu’s list of mental factors. Even fewer will spend hours of meditation practice silently naming them as they arise. The good news is that we can very effectively work with Vasubandhu’s teachings on the power of mindfulness of phenomena anyway. The most important thing is to cultivate a sense of which factors are beneficial and which are harmful and use meditation and simple attentiveness in day-to-day life to develop awareness of which type of body- and mind-states are arising. You may want to compose your own list based on the afflictions you are most likely to experience—fear, helplessness, rage, shame. We all have our individual tendencies. Become intimate with your suffering and your joy. When you are seated on your meditation cushion you don’t need to name or control the emotional state; instead, just notice it. When you are at work, consumed with trying to get things to go your way, stop and notice how you feel. Spend some time noticing: take a break, maybe three breaths long, maybe an hour. At home as you prepare for dinner, pause to take stock of how you feel. You can do this any time. For many people it helps to have a plan for when to check in. When you wake up and before sleep are good. You don’t need to make, fix, judge, or control when you practice mindfulness of afflictive or beneficial mental factors; you can just stop and be intimate with them, be intimate with yourself, your own beating heart. You can plant seeds of presence, peace, and nonviolence in the ground of the store consciousness.
Let’s move on to the third practice suggested by the “Thirty Verses”: developing awareness of the dependent nature of phenomena. We sometimes say that complete realization is to see the dependent nature of things without conception, but thinking about, conceptualizing, the dependent nature of things is actually very helpful. When your spouse is standing before you with flushed cheeks and a tense, defensive stance, and your words are coming fast and unwilled, or aggressive silence is thickening in the room, stop to recall that infinite conditions come together to bring him or her to this point of suffering. It’s not about you. When you stop to look out across a patch of flowers in a neighbor’s yard, think of all the gentle effort made by your neighbor to make this tiny patch of beauty, think of all the ants and worms who lived and died therein, think of the vast, incomprehensible power of the sun that feeds it all, and the fact that each individual raindrop had its place in bringing this moment of you and flowers into being. Let your mind help you to step into a life that sees all things as an infinite web of connection.
The fourth method suggested by this text, nondual meditation practice, is a gateway into intimately realizing that we are always already an expression of the vast web of connection that is the world. The language of nondual meditation can help us soften our minds as we sit and attend to posture and breath. There is no way to sum up what it means to do nondual meditation practice, but various texts provide pointers. Attending to the sensations of the breath in the body is often given as a basic instruction; letting go of all judgment, analysis, and goals gets us on the right track; but ultimately the practice is ungraspable. Nondualism is, by definition, inconceivable. The Samdhinirmocana Sutra says, “concentrate on a nonconceptual object.” Just rest in just this. Sit without trying to do something or make something happen. Just sit. No need to add anything extra. Give up the operations of mind. Let go of letting go. There is nothing to attain. You do not need to make some special state of mind. Practice is always already realization.
These practices and all the teachings in this book are intended to serve one central purpose, to promote the well-being of everything. Early Buddhist teachings point toward the cessation of suffering, Mahayana toward the liberation of all beings. If we let the focus of the discriminating mind soften, and let semantics aside, we can see a deep and common theme. It may seem that the teachings in the “Thirty Verses” put a great deal of focus on working with the way our consciousness functions, but this is only because our capacity to contribute to the wellness of all things can most truly be realized and liberated, if we know, see through, and shed the unconscious habits that hold us back.
Acknowledgments
Innumerable labors by people I will never know have brought me the opportunity to write this book; infinite conditions arrive to create my desire to say thank you. Many thanks to Weijen Teng, a wonderful partner, buoyant and insightful, in translating the “Thirty Verses.” I owe a great debt to many scholars of Yogacara: Stefan Anacker, Jonathan Gold, Thomas Kochumuttom, Dan Lusthaus, Reb Anderson, Thomas Cleary, Thich Nhat Hanh, Tagawa Shun’ei, Charles Muller, Lati Rinbochay, and Red Pine are foremost in my mind. To Taigen Dan Leighton for helping me set my feet on the writing path. The inspiration and support of my teacher Tim Burkett has been constant; little did he know when he decided to host a study group on Yogacara a dozen years ago that a book would emerge. To all my friends on the path at MZMC—in particular Kimberly Johnson, Ted O’Toole, Guy Gibbon, Rosemary Taylor, Susan Nelson, Wanda Isle, and Stacy Lee King—a bow. To all the many dear friends around the world who are so supportive as I wander down the paths the muse inspires, thanks! To Laura Cunningham and all the other great folks at Wisdom Publications: I love working with you guys, thank you! To Bussho Martin Lahn, a true friend on the path, I offer a question: Is there gratitude when there is no other?
To all the teachers of yoga, all the therapists and psychologists, the chemical dependency counselors, the friends of Bill W., who have helped this stream of consciousness run more and more clear and free, thanks so much! To David and Christine at the Colfax Abbey. To the many great figures of the Buddhist tradition; to Buddha, Dharma, and Sangha; to those who have touched my own heart the most across vast space, time, and culture: Gotama Buddha, Mahapajapati, Patacara, Vasubandhu, Shitou, Xinggang, Dogen; to zazen, just this, just this—great gratitude!
To my mom, my dad, my brother: there is no me without you. For my dear Colleen, much love. For Finn, Daisy, and Delaney, thanks for letting me in! For my boys Rocky and Max, you are my greatest inspiration.
To you, dear reader, thank you, with all my heart, for your practice.
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