Advice Not Given

by Mark Epstein

“When he said that,” she said later, “I realized he was completely right. Everybody is going to die—don’t be too dramatic about it. I had come to the realization, for the first time, that I was going to die, which should have been no surprise but was a huge surprise inside of me. So to honor my friend, I basically threw out everything in my studio and started anew. Instead of being one of those New Yorkers saying, ‘I don’t have enough time,’ I said, ‘Whatever time I have is exactly the time I need!’”

  Arlene did not take umbrage at Joseph’s comment; she understood intuitively what he was getting at. She had been doing something extra with her grief that threatened to become an obstruction rather than a pure expression of her pain. The story was taking over, as stories tend to do, but she did not have to be its vehicle. She realized there was something more important for her to do in the light of her friend’s impending death than just reacting to its horror. In remembering it twenty-five years later, when describing to a museum curator how her work had changed as a result, she put it like this:

  “It shook me and woke me up. ‘Get used to it,’ he was saying. Death is part of life, a reality for me and everybody else. I was gripped by the need to pay attention, to do everything as an embrace of life, and to be alive in every possible way. I was already vulnerable and raw and I saw that celebrating life meant including full-on sadness along with the exhilaration of being alive.”

  Her friend died in 1990 at the age of thirty-seven, and Arlene, feeling she owed it to her, resolved to live and work more fearlessly. She had just given birth to our second child, and she began to work in a different way in her studio. With two small children, she did not have much personal time, but she resolved to use the time she had gratefully. Out of the simplest of materials, wet plaster and skins of paint, she sculpted works that, much to her surprise, began to resemble Buddhas. It was as if her resolve to live more in the moment were taking direct physical form, without her intending it to. She had never made figurative or iconic work before and she was somewhat embarrassed by it, at least at first.

  “I could work with plaster in a short amount of time, and it was riveting. One day I was making something blobby and it looked, I thought amusedly, like a Buddha. In a different state of mind it would have looked like a pile of shit. Despite the fact that I had never had interest in making representational work, suddenly it made sense to use this as a sign of my resolve to embrace aliveness. I became aware that having the physical presence of an icon functioned as a reminder to stay awake, in the broadest way one could use that word. Having the Buddhas in my studio became a source of comfort.”

  Why should Joseph’s comment have affected Arlene so deeply? And what was there in his Buddhist sensibility that led him to make such a blatant intervention? As his reticence all those years later plainly indicated, it is not as if he is in the habit of saying such things to people in the grip of their most intense grief. But there was an opening between them, an opening for a direct communication about Right View. Joseph was not criticizing Arlene for making a big deal out of her friend’s illness. It was a big deal. But my wife saw that, in her attachment to the story, in her dramatization of the unfairness of her friend’s illness, she was resisting a bigger truth. Death is a fact of life. We hide from it, not only by avoiding it, but also by making too big a deal out of it. Right View was the Buddha’s method of describing a realistic way of responding to the truth of impermanence. Arlene’s embrace of life, and the need she felt to pay attention to each moment of it as a result, was her spontaneous response to, and expression of, this wisdom.

  —

  In talking with my three patients about their beginning attempts at meditation, I thought back to this pivotal encounter between Joseph and Arlene. He had managed to show her that there was another way to approach her grief than she had thought. I wanted to do something similar for my patients as they approached meditation. I was struck by how each of my patients wanted to be meditating the “right” way and how each of them considered their own way to be “wrong.” In thinking about how to help them, this notion of “right” and “wrong” rose urgently to the surface. The Eightfold Path advises that certain “right” qualities can be cultivated. When talking about “Right this” and “Right that,” however, Buddhism does not mean to imply that all other approaches to life are mistaken. The word “right” means something to us that the original term (sammā) did not mean. When we hear “right,” we automatically think “wrong.” But the word, as the Buddha used it, had other primary connotations. Some translators use “realistic” to convey its sense; others use “complete.” To my mind, “right” means balanced, attuned, or fitting. When something is twisted, we set it right. If it is crooked, we right it. The Eightfold Path “is not a recipe for a pious Buddhist existence in which you do everything right and get nothing wrong,” says one contemporary Buddhist commentator; it is a means of orienting yourself so that your fears and habits do not tip the balance of your existence.

  It would have been inappropriate to try to speak to my patients the way Joseph spoke with Arlene—I try to be watchful of my desires to imitate my teachers—but I did think of two vignettes to relate to them. One came from a serendipitous conversation with someone I barely knew twenty-five years into my exploration of Buddhism. The other came from my college days when I was first learning about meditation in the context of two-week silent retreats. They each clarified something for me about the beauty and utility of the concept of Right View and asked me to give up a preconceived notion of what a “good” Buddhist might look like and of how a “real” Buddhist might act. I wanted my patients to have the same freedom in approaching their meditations as these encounters had afforded me.

  The first event happened when I was traveling in the Midwest on a book tour about fifteen years ago. A young woman from a local Buddhist organization met me at the airport. While driving me into town, she told me about something that had been bothering her for a long time, something that had shaken her faith in the dharma. An important teacher of hers had come to stay with her after completing a three-year Buddhist retreat. He was a very accomplished man, a longtime student of Buddhism, and a respected professional in his own right who had made the study of Buddhism his first priority in his later years. While at the retreat, unbeknownst to him, he had come down with colon cancer. He had ignored his mild symptoms until the retreat was over, but by that time the cancer had spread and when he came to live with his former student he was suddenly close to death. She took care of him through his final weeks and was there with him when he died. His last words, on his deathbed, had surprised and frightened her, though.

  “No, no, no. Help, help,” he had cried.

  Wasn’t meditation meant to be preparation for death? Weren’t you supposed to be able to accept change and die peacefully? Wasn’t that the whole point of the Eightfold Path and of his three-year retreat? The young woman took her teacher’s fear to mean that his Buddhist studies had been to no avail.

  “Was the whole thing a waste?” she wanted to know.

  I have thought of this many times in the years that have since passed. The young woman’s expectations were certainly in line with Joseph’s conversation with Arlene. Death need not be a surprise, and one of the main fruits of meditation practice is to familiarize us with the inevitability of change and the uncertainty of the next moment. But this man, familiar as he was with meditation, was still expressing fear. Perhaps he was just being honest as he faced his final moments. Who says death is not scary, even for someone skilled in meditation? I always think the closest thing to death is birth, and having seen several births, I can definitely say that, as amazing as it can be, it is also very frightening. I have come to believe that this man was modeling something for his friend, showing her that there are no rules when it comes to facing death. The Buddha’s agenda for Right View—to face impermanence—extends all the way to the moment of death, and all we can do is to be with it without prete
nse. I find, when I think of this story, that it does not diminish my own faith; in fact, it gives me comfort.

  “No, no, no. Help, help,” is a different mantra from the ones Buddhist teachers usually propose, but it is one I can relate to, one that strikes me as universal. To look death in the face and respond truthfully may be the best we can do.

  One of the things I have always appreciated about the Buddhism I have known is the way it has urged me to circumvent my own expectations about what an “enlightened” response might be in any given situation. This suggestion runs counter to my own ingrained habits of striving. That is probably why I find the above story so satisfying. Do I have to be worrying for my whole life about how I will be at the moment of death? Will someone be grading me on how I do? Or can I take what I have learned about facing change and let myself deal with it as best as I can? Do I have to be putting on a false front even at the moment of death? Or can I trust myself not to? I could feel how my patients, in their initial attempts at meditation, were held back by their own particular versions of this striving. Wanting to do it for the right amount of time, wanting to make the tension disappear, and wanting to have the next meditation be as good as the last one all represented different versions of it. My patients’ wishes to “do it right” reminded me of how I felt after one of the earliest silent retreats I ever did. This was the second vignette I relayed to them.

  The retreat was in the countryside north of Mendocino, California, and was taught by Joseph Goldstein and Jack Kornfield, another of my earliest teachers. I had met both of them at Naropa Institute in Boulder, Colorado, during the summer between my junior and senior years of college and was quite enamored of them. I was twenty-one years old and awash in the exhilaration of discovering a discipline, and a community, that made sense to me. Joseph and Jack were probably both just thirty years old. There was enough of an age difference between us at that point to make them seem like real elders, however, although when I look back at it now it is hard to believe how young we all were. The two weeks of silent reflection took place at an old camp in a wooded landscape studded with waterfalls and sun-soaked flat rocks perfect for sunbathing after quick dips in the roaring stream. I was visiting California for the express purpose of the retreat, and when it was over I got a ride back to San Francisco with Joseph and Jack. I did not yet know them well and it felt special to be in their company. We stopped in Mendocino for lunch before making the long drive. The food at the retreat had been fine, all that I expected, vegetarian with an emphasis on inexpensive grains that could feed the hundred participants, but we were hungry. I was ready to embrace a vegetarian diet if that was what was called for and was mostly focused on becoming an accepted part of this new group.

  Much to my surprise, Jack Kornfield ordered a hamburger. I did a double take. A hamburger? After a retreat? A Buddhist teacher? I felt suddenly lighter. I was ready to superimpose a set of expectations on myself that went all the way down to what I could have for lunch. Right View, Right Speech, Right Livelihood, Right Action, and Right Lunch.

  I did not even want a hamburger. But if I did, I could decide for myself. I have always been grateful to Kornfield for this moment—one I am sure he has long forgotten, one that solidified my sense of Right View. The lesson I took from it was that my Buddhist leanings did not mean I had to cloak myself in a false identity. Even as I was pursuing Buddhism, I could be myself. This left me free to investigate more easily. The Eightfold Path was relevant just as I was, no matter what my diet was or how I might act at the time of death. It was offered in a way that encouraged me to figure things out for myself. I did not have to let my expectations rule my experience and I did not have to follow anyone blindly. I might be wandering in open country, but I had a sense of direction. This path, as Right View made clear, was designed to help me be real with myself.

  Two

  RIGHT MOTIVATION

  Right Motivation suggests that we do not have to be at the mercy of our neuroses if we do not want to be. The conscious mind, when properly oriented, can, with practice, rise above the conditioning of its subconscious influences and intentionally direct a person’s activity. More often than not, as therapists know all too well, we are run by impulses we cannot see. Habitual and repetitive patterns of reactivity dominate the untrained mind. Buddhism, practical as always, takes this as a given, but says it is only a starting place. We can shake free of our unconscious influences if we first admit they are there, if we can find and identify them, over and over again, as they appear in our day-to-day lives. Right Motivation encourages us to come out from our hiding places, to use our powers of observation for our own good, and to be real with ourselves. It is the branch of the Eightfold Path that brings conscious intention to the forefront—that asks us to use our intelligence to our advantage, and to not let our fears and habits determine the direction of our behavior.

  A friend of mine, a Buddhist psychotherapist named Jack Engler, has a story about his understanding of Right Motivation that has long stayed with me. Almost forty years ago, Jack traveled to the village in India where the Buddha was enlightened to study with the Bengali teacher who had taught Joseph Goldstein about Buddhism. Joseph had spent seven years in conversation with this man; Jack felt fortunate to be able to be with him for several months. He had gotten a Fulbright fellowship after completing his clinical psychology doctorate to, among other things, assess the psychological health of South Asian masters, but his primary motivation in journeying to Bodh Gaya was to learn meditation from this man. Much to his consternation, however, Munindra, the teacher, talked to him of nothing but the health of his bowels for several weeks. Was he constipated, did he have diarrhea, had he tried the various remedies available in the local market? I have since learned that this is an acceptable way of making preliminary conversation in the culture Munindra was part of—much like our talking of the weather—but for Jack it was incredibly frustrating. After two weeks of it, he finally confronted Munindra during a walk in the fields behind the Chinese temple.

  “When are you going to teach me the dharma?” he asked, unable to mask his exasperation any longer.

  Munindra gave Jack an answer that he immediately felt might be profound but which, at the time, he could not really deal with. Only after mulling it over after his return to the States did its wisdom begin to sink in.

  “The dharma?” Munindra replied, feigning surprise at Jack’s sudden impatience. “You want to know about the dharma? The dharma means living the life fully.”

  I am fond of this vignette for several reasons. For two weeks, Munindra was intent on giving Jack no advice whatsoever. Finally, when pressed, he blurted out the counsel he had not been giving, simple words that took on special meaning for Jack because of the relative silence that had preceded them. In his unwillingness to make the practice of meditation the sine qua non of Buddhist wisdom, Munindra echoed the admonishment (to get a life) the Dalai Lama gave to his ascetic follower. And like Joseph’s advice to Arlene to not make such a big deal out of her friend’s illness, Munindra’s message was the kind of general—even simplistic—statement that I have trouble imagining being made by a Western therapist, even though living the life fully is probably the real goal of psychotherapy, too. Jack had made a long and arduous trip to India wanting meditation training, but Munindra did not play directly into his agenda. To my mind, he wanted Jack to have a bigger picture before he started watching his breath. He wanted him to know what the real purpose of meditation was. What did it mean to live the life fully? What stops us? From the Buddhist perspective, what stops us is our ego’s selfish—or we might say neurotic—motivation.

  Munindra was offering Jack a window into Right Motivation, not by telling him to be more altruistic, nor by telling him to meditate with the intention of liberating all sentient beings (as is often the case in Buddhist communities), but by encouraging him, in his offhanded way, to examine how he was not living his life fully. By not cooperating with Jack’
s expectations for meditation training, Munindra was performing a classic Buddhist function. Pulling the rug out from underneath his student, he gave Jack a motivation he has always remembered.

  Right Motivation, which is sometimes rendered as Right Intention, Right Thought, or Right Understanding, at its heart concerns the conscious resolve to shape one’s life based on Right View. Munindra was reminding Jack of this. It can be tempting to use meditation to resist change rather than opening oneself to the ceaseless flow we are made of. It can be tempting to use it to avoid looking at oneself rather than to investigate one’s deepest habits and fears. Many people practice meditation to escape from themselves, to replace a life they are estranged from with a more restricted, contained, and manageable one, lived primarily on the meditation cushion. Munindra did not want Jack to fall into that trap. In psychoanalytic language, he did not want him to be stuck in the anal stage, where control is the big issue and obsessive-compulsive routines originate. Munindra wanted Jack to question the agenda he had for himself, to examine his motivation, even if that meant not getting what he had come for. For there is a risk involved in Right Motivation: the risk of surprise—the risk of consciously reaching for something outside of our comfort zone; the risk of staying present with ourselves but letting go of habit and routine, even if that means coming clean about where we are stuck.

  —

  Right Motivation did not come easily to me either. It was one thing to understand the words and quite another to put them into practice in my life. I saw this most vividly in the early years of my marriage when, despite seven or eight years of regular meditation practice, I found myself vulnerable to intense emotions I could not understand.

  While I was outwardly happier than I had ever been, my psyche was in turmoil in those first years of marriage. I began to have trouble sleeping and became uncharacteristically demanding of my new wife’s affections in the middle of the night. Needing her sleep, Arlene was gentle but firm with her boundaries. She knew she could not fix the problem for me. I tried to use meditation to calm myself but was distraught and confused at what was happening. Buddhist practice, by itself, was not enough to clarify what was going on with me; I needed the help of a therapist. This was important for me to see. It gave me renewed respect for the importance of psychotherapy and added to my caution about presenting Buddhism as a complete treatment for anyone’s psychological ills.