by Ajahn Brahm
What do you do when everything falls apart?
“In free fall, nothing is solid and there is nothing to hold on to. There is no way to control the experience. You have to surrender, and with that surrender comes the taste of liberation.”
— MASTER GUOJUN
“Instead of trying to discipline your mind with ill will, fault-finding, guilt, punishment, and fear, use something far more powerful: the beautiful kindness, gentleness, and forgiveness of making peace with life.”
— AJAHN BRAHM
Most of us tend to live each day as if it will be just another day — like nothing will change. It always comes as a shock when we lose a job, a loved one, a relationship, our health — even though we’ve seen it happen again and again to those around us. Once we finally realize we’re not immune, then we wonder: what now? How do we continue when the terrain suddenly gets rough?
Meet your companions for this rocky part of the path: Ajahn Brahm and Chan Master Guojun — one a teacher in the Theravada Buddhist tradition, the other in the Chinese Zen tradition. You’ll learn from the honest, generous teachings of these two beloved meditation masters how you can still live fully — even flourish — when the road ahead looks steep and lonely.
Personal, poetic, instructive, and often laugh-out-loud funny, this is inspiring advice for people from all walks of life.
“With unflinching honesty, Ajahn Brahm and Chan Master Guojun share the struggles they’ve faced, even after becoming monks and respected teachers. We see how, instead of turning away in aversion from adversity, they’ve used it as a steppingstone for finding the peace and happiness we all seek. I love this book!”
— TONI BERNHARD, author of How to Be Sick
In free fall, nothing is solid and there is nothing to hold on to. There is no way to control the experience. You have to surrender, and with that surrender comes the taste of liberation.
— MASTER GUOJUN
Instead of trying to discipline your mind with ill will, fault-finding, guilt, punishment, and fear, use something far more powerful: the beautiful kindness, gentleness, and forgiveness of making peace with life.
— AJAHN BRAHM
Contents
Editor’s Note
PART I. CARING NOT CURING
Ajahn Brahm
1.Moving Toward Life — No Matter How Difficult
2.Caring Not Curing
3.The Wind of Wanting
4.Putting Kindness First
5.There Is Nothing
6.Free-Range Frog: Living Simply and Gratefully
7.Giving
8.Hahayana: A Swift Kick in the Ass of Happiness and Wisdom
9.The Unifable: Make It Right
PART II. FLYING WHITE
Master Guojun
10.Agarwood: Poison into Beauty
11.Flying White: Unique and Unrepeatable
12.Heheyana: Going beyond Expectations
13.Nothing Special
14.Let It Come, Let It Go
15.Cultivating the Mind-Field
16.Crossing the River, Smelling Fish
17.Embrace Uncertainty
18.Sky Poem III
19.The Seven Wonders of Chan: Right Here, Right Now
20.Many Dishes Make a Meal
21.Just Let It Be
22.Bonsai: Provoking Growth
23.Just Is Just Just
24.Seeds for Hell: Seeing Under the Surface of Things
25.Waking Up the World
About the Authors
Editor’s Note
IN 2016 Ajahn Brahm and Chan Master Guojun copresented in front of large audiences during Ajahn Brahm’s Indonesian “Happiness Every Day” tour. Falling Is Flying is based on the teachings delivered at those joint appearances and on my subsequent conversations with Ajahn Brahm and Venerable Guojun.
The jumping-off point for the book was the painful controversies that both teachers faced. Ajahn Brahm’s ordination of nuns led to his excommunication from the Thai Forest tradition of his teacher Ajahn Chah. He was essentially banished from Wat Nong Pah Pong, the monastery where he trained, and Ajahn Brahm’s organization in Australia was stripped of its affiliation with Ajahn Chah’s group.
Master Guojun was the target of a smear campaign. His case is complex, and, like Ajahn Brahm’s excommunication, largely has to do with monastic codes, as well as the perception of what constitutes right action in the Buddhist world and the way money and power are exercised within religious communities.
Both these cases are litmus tests. How do Dharma masters respond when they are besmirched?
That was my primary question when I began building the book. But as I interviewed both monks and began constructing the chapters, the controversies they faced opened into a more free-ranging exploration of life’s challenges and stories about their training — particularly their inimitable relationships with their teachers. I loved hearing their stories of the past, of the student-teacher / master-disciple bond. And my literary proclivities were awakened by their powerful evocations of the isolated and insular Buddhist worlds of their youth. Those unique environments are now being diluted by globalization and the internet, and I wanted to evoke them in their original strangeness and beauty for readers so they will not be completely lost.
The challenges Ajahn Brahm and Venerable Guojun faced in their training and then as accomplished Dharma teachers can help all of us find our way through the problems we inevitably face. We all want life to be other than it is. Yet, inevitably, we can’t control what life throws at us. Both monks show us how to find strength and fortitude and keep an open heart regardless of circumstances. They are both inspirations and fully human examples of how to embrace the beauty of life with all its imperfections and difficulties.
Kenneth Wapner
PART I.
Caring Not Curing
Ajahn Brahm
Moving Toward Life — No Matter How Difficult
IN 2009 a group of four highly qualified bhikkhunis asked me for full ordination. It wasn’t unexpected; discussions about the discriminatory practices in our tradition had been ongoing. Full female ordination in Theravada Buddhism had been missing for about one thousand years, and I had been told that it was impossible to revive it on legal grounds. This may not have been a big issue in Asia, but it certainly was a problem in Western countries such as Australia, where I’m based.
The problem with ordaining bhikkhunis stemmed from their absence. The argument in Thai Theravada is that you need five fully ordained bhikkhunis to give full ordination to other bhikkhunis. If there were no bhikkhunis, as prescribed in the Vinaya (monastic code) to perform the ceremony, then ordination was impossible — a Catch-22. This was an embarrassment to many monks like me. It made me feel like a hypocrite every time that I mentioned that “compassion should be given to all beings.” It was as if I was deliberately excluding women. As if my compassion was selective.
There were white-robed women, living in monasteries, following the additional eight precepts required of their gender, but they were assigned the same duties as white-robed men (anagarika) who were at the entry level to monastic life — duties often regarded by Western Buddhists as inappropriately menial. And whereas the men had the opportunity to proceed to higher ordination, the white-robed women were denied this option only because of their gender.
Attempts had also been made to establish a brown-robed order of ten-precept nuns, called sayalay in Myanmar and siladhara in the West. Because such an order of siladharas had no basis of legitimacy in the Theravada texts, they too became regarded as second-class monastics, not given the same respect and courtesies as the male monastics.
I was informed, for example, that the following five points were abruptly imposed by some senior monks on a community
of siladharas residing within the same monastery, without the courtesy of consulting them first.
1.The most junior bhikkhu is senior to the most senior siladhara. This structural relationship is defined by the Vinaya and cannot change over time.
2.In public situations such as giving a blessing, leading the chanting, or giving a talk, leadership always rests with the most senior bhikkhu present. He may, if he chooses, invite a siladhara to lead, but this in no way establishes a new standard of shared leadership.
3.The bhikkhu sangha will be responsible for the ordination and guidance of the siladharas, rather than the senior ajahn. Candidates should receive approval from the siladhara sangha, and acceptance from the bhikkhu sangha, as represented by the members of the elder’s council.
4.The siladhara sangha should issue the invitation (pavarana) to the bhikkhu sangha at the end of the rains retreat, in accordance with the Vinaya.
5.The siladhara training is considered to be a vehicle respected in our tradition as suitable for the realization of liberation. It is complete as it stands and is not an evolution toward a different form, such as bhikkhuni ordination.
It is to be remembered that siladharas are outside the Vinaya and any rules found in the Theravada monastic code cannot be considered to apply to them.
These discriminatory and demeaning rules that relegated bhikkhunis to perpetual second-class status resulted in some female monastics abandoning monastic life altogether. Some moved to a different Western country, and some long-serving lay supporters departed in disgust.
When these four nuns formally asked me for ordination, my heart told me there was really only one response. It was unethical to refuse. That, as they say, is when the shit hit the fan.
Six months after my master Ajahn Chah sent me and my senior, Ajahn Jagaro, to Australia we established Bodhinyana Monastery for monks. The next task was to create a monastery for nuns. In all the monasteries I had ever seen where monks and nuns mixed, the monks dominated. Women were forced into a subservient role. This was why I thought it was important to give the bhikkhunis a place of their own to practice, separate from Bodhinyana.
We searched for land and first found thirty-eight acres of scraggly ground, surrounded by farms, without the solitude and quiet required for contemplative practice. Bodhinyana was lovely, situated on over three hundred acres of wild forest and dramatic hills. It felt deeply disrespectful — and like more of the same — to shunt the women into this second-rate place. Then we learned of 538 acres of hills and beautiful forest with a river running through it in Gidgegannup, about eighty minutes from Bodhinyana. We managed to buy it, and Dhammasara was established.
Our bhikkhunis built it up. Ayya Vayama and nine other novices toughed it out those first years with rough accommodations and lean support. They had gained some independence, but still, they were not fully ordained, and they lived and practiced in a second-rate status to monks — in accordance with the Theravada tradition that dated back a thousand years, when the full ordination of bhikkhunis had, it was said, vanished from the earth.
After I became determined to ordain the bhikkhunis, I wanted to ensure that I was on sound footing according to the Vinaya. I taught myself Pali, which was structured a lot like the Latin that I had learned in school. As I delved into the canon, I became convinced of the conclusions of what’s called “convergent theory,” which assesses the text from various angles — linguistic, archeological, historical, political — and illuminates which parts of it were actually transcribed during the Buddha’s lifetime and reflect the Buddha’s own words and teachings and which parts were later additions. This was significant because it gave authenticity to the claim that teachings in the main books of the Dhamma-Vinaya tradition confirmed that ordaining bhikkhunis could be revived.
Careful research found that bhikkhunis had sailed from Sri Lanka to China in about 1200 CE to establish ordination there. That lineage was unbroken, according to the Vinaya. The Chinese are great record keepers. Clearly, the tradition of ordination the bhikkhunis had established there was authentic.
In Buddhism, we’re monks first and belong to a particular sect of Buddhism second. It’s the same for nuns. Monks and nuns would go from monastery to monastery and everywhere they went, in whichever monastery or temple they stayed, they were considered brothers and sisters.
The legitimacy of an ordination depends on fulfilling four factors:
1.The ceremony is performed within a monastic boundary and all members of the sangha permitted to be in the gathering are present or have given their proxy beforehand.
2.The candidate for ordination is not prohibited from being ordained, for example because they are underage.
3.The formal act of ordination performed by the sangha, by a motion followed by three announcements, follows the standard formula in the Vinaya.
4.There are a minimum of five bhikkhunis, or ten bhikkhunis in the Middle Country of India (the Ganges Valley, approximately), at the ceremony.
It is to be noted that the fourth requirement does not mention that the quorum of bhikkhunis has to be from the same monastery or lineage or sect. As long as they are legitimate bhikkhunis, they fulfill the quorum.
The concept of different sects is called nana-samvasa in the Vinaya. There are only two legitimate grounds for a sangha to split into two sects in Buddhism: either people are excommunicated from a sangha by a formal act called ukkhepaniyakamma or they choose to leave. There are only two grounds for joining together again: either a sangha revokes an act of excommunication, or the people choose to come together. So, according to the Vinaya, five bhikkhunis from any tradition may choose to come together to perform the ceremony that creates a new bhikkhuni. The color of the robes and the rituals performed after the ceremony are all irrelevant to the legality of the ordination.
Thus, around eight hundred years ago, Theravada bhikkhunis from Sri Lanka gave ordination to women in China, thereby starting the lineage of bhikkhunis in that land. The Sri Lankan bhikkhunis presumably returned to their homeland eventually, while their protégés in China evolved gradually, developing over the centuries the distinctive rituals and garments and interpretations that are now recognized as Mahayana. Importantly, they maintained the integrity of the ordination ceremony to fulfill the four factors unbroken to the present day.
A main point against ordination was the passage in the Pali canon where Ananda asks Buddha to ordain his stepmother, Mahapajapati Gotami. “If we ordain nuns, Buddhism will only last five hundred years instead of a thousand,” Buddha is said to have replied, only acceding to Ananda’s request after Ananda asks him if it is not true that women are just as capable of attaining enlightenment as men. This story does not appear in the Chinese and Sanskrit versions of the text, and I and others are quite sure that this is a later insertion into the canon and not something the Buddha, who famously never made predictions, said. And even if he did say it, he was obviously wrong!
Elsewhere in the scriptures, a strong argument was made for ordination. Soon after his enlightenment, Mara visited Buddha.
“Okay, I can see you’re enlightened,” said Mara. “But why teach? All it’s going to do is give you headaches.”
“I will not pass away until I have established the four pillars of Buddhism,” Buddha replied. “The sangha of monks, the sangha of nuns, the sanghas of strong laymen and strong laywomen.”
Forty-five years later, Mara came to see the Buddha again, reminding him of his promise.
“You have succeeded,” Mara observed. “There are thousands of monks and nuns and hundreds of thousands of lay followers. Now you can pass away.” And three months later that is what Buddha did.
The Buddha’s mission after enlightenment specifically mentions a sangha for women equal to the sangha of men. It was the whole purpose of his teaching.
My sangha and I were convinced that the full ordination of women did not break any laws. We brought five bhikkhunis from San Francisco to do the ordination, and they performed a bea
utiful, moving ceremony.
“At last! At last!” cried people in our sangha. “We liked Theravada Buddhism, but we hated the way you treated women.”
People in our tradition had waited their whole lives for this. And now they were seeing it happen before their eyes.
For me, personally, now having fully ordained bhikkhunis was tremendously exciting. I felt Buddhism would be immeasurably enriched.
We have a tradition of great teachers who are women. One particularly dear to me is Patacara, also known as “Cloaked Walker.” She ran off against her aristocratic parents’ wishes with a good man from a lower class. When she was pregnant with their second child, she asked her husband to take her back to her parents’ village so they could assist with the birth.
The baby came early and she delivered midway through the journey. During the labor, a great storm struck. A snake bit Patacara’s husband while he was cutting sticks for a makeshift shelter and he died. She delivered her baby and continued her journey. She came to a river crossing, swollen with rain. She didn’t have the strength to ford it with both children in her arms. She carried her newborn across and was returning for her son when she saw a hawk circling overhead. She waved her arms, calling out, to shoo the hawk away. Her elder child thought she was signaling to him and moved toward her. He was swept away in the stream as the hawk plunged down and carried the newborn skyward.
Patacara continued toward her parents’ village. They, too, had died in the storm after their house collapsed. News of her parents’ death pushed her into madness. She tore at her clothes and her skirt fell off her. She became a cloaked walker — a madwoman in rags wandering through the countryside.
Patacara came upon the Buddha, teaching in the Jeta Grove. The congregation wanted to send her away, thinking, perhaps, that her partial nakedness would entice the monks. But Buddha commanded Patacara to recover her presence of mind. Her madness left her, and she worshipped at Buddha’s feet. “Death of people we love is inevitable,” said the Buddha. “It is a waste of life to brood or become bitter. No one can shelter us from the fate that awaits us. It is therefore incumbent that we set off on the path to nibbana.”