by Ajahn Brahm
Giving is a great source of joy. It goes deep into the mind and makes it easier to meditate. To be able to become still you have to be able to sustain attention. There are two ways of doing that. You can force yourself to concentrate. This usually makes you tired and stressed. Or you can develop the perception of joy in whatever it is that you’re watching. The beauty in the object holds your attention.
Giving develops a beautiful mind. As you meditate, you’re looking at your beautiful mind. You feel a deep satisfaction. You’re quite happy to watch it, like a young man transfixed by a beautiful girl. You can’t take your eyes off her, and meditating is a breeze!
I had been at Wat Pah Pong with Ajahn Chah for only about two or three weeks and was still learning the routines of a Thai Forest monk’s life. Each day at dawn we would all go into the village for our alms rounds. We walked barefoot, and when we returned to the monastery we had to wash our feet before entering the meditation hall.
When Ajahn Chah returned, a posse of monks swarmed him, jostling each other for the chance to bathe his feet. Coming from the West, I thought this highly ridiculous. Water splashed all over the place. Twenty monks madly washed two feet. It was over the top.
My background in science compelled me to investigate this bizarre phenomenon; I would wash Ajahn Chah’s feet to see what all the fuss was about. I knew you had to be fast and determined. I arrived early from my alms rounds and took a seat in the washing area, coiled like a cat.
When Ajahn Chah returned, I pounced, diving into the scrum for my master’s feet. I got one big toe all to myself. A whole big toe! I was shocked: how happy I felt washing the big toe of an old monk! I realized what all these monks were up to. The pleasure of giving is irrational. But it is real.
I knew a young monk who journeyed from Thailand to see his family in Chicago. Imagine his vertigo. Plucked from the steamy forest of Northeast Thailand and dropped into the brutal Chicago winter.
I suppose the shock was too much for him. He slipped on an icy patch and broke his leg.
Taken by ambulance to the hospital, the leg was soon set. His mother arrived at his bedside. He had never seen her smile as much as she did when she saw him in the hospital bed with his leg in a cast.
He was confounded. “Mom, I’m in pain. Why do you seem delighted?”
“Because now I have you exactly where I want you,” she said. “I can mother you, and you can’t run away back to Thailand!”
Nothing gives a mother more joy than having a forty-year-old son with a cast on his leg who can’t go anywhere and needs to be washed and fed.
For her giving is a privilege — the greatest privilege. The greatest joy. How much happier we would be if we approached life like that mother?
Give, give, and keep giving. And let other people give to you!
Hahayana: A Swift Kick in the Ass of Happiness and Wisdom
BOTH VENERABLE GUOJUN and I became Buddhists when we were quite young, and both of us have continued to evolve in our approach to the Dhamma and how we teach.
I became a Buddhist when I was sixteen years old. I was at the Latymer School in London and had gotten my first school prize for what’s called A Levels. The prize was enough money to buy one hardcover book. I was concentrating in math at the time and an adviser urged me to buy a book on math. I went to Foyles, a famous bookshop, and the math books looked incredibly boring. I was poor, from a poor family, and there was no way I was going to waste my very hard-earned prize money on equations and theorems. I wanted something weird and dodgy. The esoterica at Foyles was located in the annex on the top floor. That’s where I went.
In the annex, I perused books on Buddhism. I looked through Lobsang Rampa’s The Third Eye. He had pawned himself off as the reincarnation of a Tibetan rinpoche. (It turned out that he was actually a plumber, living in Ireland.) The book itself was wonderfully done. Like Carlos Castaneda, he was both a fantasist and a fantastic author.
I settled on a general book on Buddhism. I liked the fact that in Buddhism there was no God and there was an emphasis on kindness and compassion. The idea of reincarnation also appealed to me. Why should a human existence be perceived like a straight line with a beginning and an end? All that I had studied in science was more like a circle. The earth was a sphere without edges. The universe was curved without any boundaries. Even the seasons turned in a cycle. Why should life be different?
I didn’t give a damn what kind of Buddhist I became. It was the early 1970s, and in terms of what was available in Britain at the time I didn’t have much of a choice. I attended anything Buddhist. One talk was by a Japanese Zen master. He hardly spoke any English, but I was tremendously impressed by how articulate he was with his limited vocabulary. When somebody asked him his impressions of Buddhism in England, he replied with such eloquence: “Books, books, books! Too many! Dustbin!”
Then came a time when I decided that I wanted to be a monk. It may seem simplistic, but the reason I chose the Thai tradition was because its monks smiled the most. It had nothing to do with philosophy but rather the fact that they were smiling. They were happy. I was drawn to their smiling faces, and that was the beginning of my interest in what I call Hahayana, my vehicle on the Buddhist path.
Not Mahayana, Hinayana, Theravada, Mantrayana.
Hahayana.
When I started in Buddhism, I wasn’t sectarian for the simple reason that in the part of Thailand where Wat Pah Pong was located there were no other sects around! It was very isolated. Later on, when I started traveling, I met monks from other traditions. Now, of course, I travel quite a lot. I stay in other people’s temples. We do events together and build up great friendships. Whenever I go visiting friend’s temples, it’s like my own temple. I don’t even see the difference. We just have different robes. The same cake with different icing.
Hahayana expresses the great joy and happiness of the spiritual path. Too long I was told that the spiritual path is dry and intellectual. That wisdom is cold. But I have seen with my own eyes that in the hands of great masters, wisdom is warm and full of humor. It always recognizes the primacy of relationships. It seeks to create relationships that are warm, uplifting, and funny! It always insists that it is not about me, not about you: it is always, always, always about us.
If religion is the relationship between human beings and the truth, why can’t that relationship be funny? Why can’t it be fun? The reality is that it is joyful. Fun! And not just an empty fun. Something with meaning to it.
People come to our programs to learn wisdom. They leave happier and wiser.
That can be a simple definition of what love is: the coming together of happiness and wisdom.
Investigate for yourself why that sounds right, and you discover the power of Hahayana.
When I first started teaching the four noble truths in the West, I started out, as you might imagine, with number one: the truth that life is suffering. Most people ran for the doors. They had had enough of suffering in their homes, on the job. No more suffering, please, they said. Enough already.
Hm, I thought. Not so effective.
Then, like a good marketer, I thought that I better open by talking about the attractive qualities of the noble truths instead. So I reordered them.
I began with number three, which is usually called “the truth of the end of suffering.” What is the end of suffering? It’s happiness! When I talked about happiness, people perked up and stayed to listen.
The second noble truth about the cause of suffering then became the cause of happiness. I went on to observe that sometimes, undeniably, we are unhappy — the first truth. Why are we unhappy? I explained that we’re unhappy because we’re asking something of life that it can’t give us. I pointed to the way to resolve this dilemma, the fourth noble truth, the Buddhist path.
I maintain that this was a perfectly legitimate reordering of the four noble truths. That reordering, according to my advertising executive friends, was far more attractive. The same product, repackaged.
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In Buddhism it’s important to never be attached to one particular path or way of doing things. My disruptive tendencies were instilled early. On the wall of the Department of Physics’ Cavendish Laboratory at the University of Cambridge where I was a student, someone had written in graffiti, “The eminence of great scientists is measured by the length of time they stop progress in their field.”
When we invest too much in any particular orthodoxy, it stifles our own explorations. Our creativity. Our ability to discover. To play. To have fun!
That was the spirit of Cavendish. I was taught not to be faithful to any particular theory or any school but to always be challenging. Always be changing. Always synthesizing. Moving forward and redefining.
I carried this approach to learning over to Buddhism. I am skeptical of orthodoxies of all kinds.
People say never stand in the shadows of great men. Stand on their shoulders.
I say, no: stand in their shadow, kick their ass, and tell them to get out of the way.
A swift kick in the ass. The coming together of happiness and wisdom. That is the spirit of Hahayana.
The Unifable: Make It Right
IT NEVER CEASES to amaze me how much time and energy people spend worrying about decisions. Do I turn left or right? Go here or there? Do this or that?
People come to me all the time and say, “I’m in love, but I can’t decide whether or not I should get married.”
“The decision to get married is no big deal,” I reply. “It’s what you do afterward that matters.”
The bigger the decision, the bigger the worry. So much energy goes into weighing the pros and cons of this possibility or that result. We anticipate the future like fortunetellers with crystal balls. We make decisions as though our happiness hangs in the balance. No wonder that by the time a decision has been made, no energy is left to make whatever it is we have decided on work!
Save your energy for what happens after you’ve made your decision. To make that decision right.
On the question of whether or not to ordain bhikkhunis, I could have chased my tail endlessly around in circles, pondering, “Should I or shouldn’t I?” I knew very well that by ordaining them I was going to cause myself a load of trouble. Yet my heart told me that I really had no choice: it was the right thing to do. If it’s a choice between your head and heart, always choose your heart.
After you make a choice, the real work starts. Part of that work is resisting the very human temptation to look backward. Don’t start thinking “if, if, if”: What if I had made a different decision? Married a different person? Taken a different job?
We can’t know about these ifs. We will never discover what would have happened! Spiritual people like to talk about the ineffable. I prefer the inifable.
The past is always inifable. Don’t if the past. It’s a self-inflicted agony and a total waste of time. We will never make peace with life while we dwell on would-have-beens, could-have-beens, and should-have-beens.
Trust your heart when you make decisions. Then spend your energy making those decisions right.
PART II.
Flying White
Master Guojun
Agarwood: Poison into Beauty
A PRICELESS PIECE of agarwood was my undoing.
Agarwood comes from the infected heartwood of a family of evergreens indigenous to Southeast Asia. The trees produce a dark resin in response to the attack of a certain mold. Agarwood is prized for its fragrance and used in perfume. It also has extraordinary physical properties: the resinous, crystallized heartwood is tremendously hard and dense — so dense, in fact, that it doesn’t float. In Middle Eastern desert cultures, it is ground into powder and applied in an aromatic body rub. In Asia, there is a tradition of carving agarwood into sacred objects.
A piece of prized wild (as opposed to cultivated) agarwood fetched an astounding $1,000 per kilo in 2010. The agarwood’s value is determined by the age of the tree and the quality and mass of its resinous oil. The original wild population of trees is disappearing, and today agarwood is one of the most valuable natural substances on the planet. And as the wild trees are cut and processed, natural agarwood is becoming increasingly rare.
In 2006 I visited Putian, in southern China, with my close friend and fellow monk Dahui, where I commissioned three statues to be built for the Hall of Universal Light on the main floor of Mahabodhi, the monastery in Singapore that I was in the initial stages of rebuilding. These huge statues, each weighing several tons, were carved to my specifications from solid pieces of white camphor trees that were said to be 1,400 and 2,000 years old. White camphor was chosen not only for its size but because of its other properties: its strong odor repels insects, fungus, and mold, and it has a medicinal quality and a purity and integrity that resists defilement.
It was at the carvers in Putian that I encountered the agarwood — an impressive piece, about seven feet long, three feet high, and eighteen inches thick. It must have weighed over a thousand pounds. I bent down to take a closer look at its intricate carving of deities, many of which I realized I use in my own personal practice.
One such deity, prominently featured, was Mahamayuri Vidyarajni, a bodhisattva who sits on a white peacock. In China, the peacock represents transformation. It eats poisonous insects and worms, and the more poison it ingests, the more lustrous and radiant its plumage becomes. This symbolizes the way we seek to convert the negativity inside us — the three poisons of anger, ignorance, and greed — into something beautiful, beneficial, and pure. The peacock’s tail, with its multiple halos, signifies the eyes of the bodhisattva who can see in all directions. The thousand-eyed living embodiment of compassion sees everywhere, even into the darkest and most hidden places, wherever there are sentient beings, in order to help relieve their suffering. Legend has it that Mahamayuri was pursued by hunters who captured him in a net. I recite the mantra that he used to free himself. The net, of course, is the net of suffering in which we are entrapped when we are not mindful.
Also carved into the agarwood was Acala, a wrathful deity with a fierce visage. One of the five wisdom kings, he is another of my personal deities. Acala’s wisdom is immovable and unwavering. In one hand he holds a sword that cuts through all defilements; in his other, he wields a rope like a cowboy with a lariat. Our minds are wild horses that need to be lassoed, pacified, and corralled.
A third personal deity featured in the agarwood was Ucchusma, which translates from the Chinese as “unafraid of dirt.” He is a manifestation of Shakyamuni Buddha. After Buddha attained enlightenment, the celestials came to pay respects and rejoice — all except one: the Spiral Hair-Knot Brahma King was cavorting with his consorts in his heavenly palace. (A hair knot is twisted, not straight, and represents entanglements.) Outraged that he failed to show Buddha proper respect, the celestials sought to drag the Brahma King out of his heavenly abode. But he made his palace so smelly and foul that no one dared go in. Then, from the Buddha’s heart, Ucchusma appeared. Undaunted by the foul odors and filth, he seized the Brahma King and dragged him down to earth to bow at the Buddha’s feet.
Dahui could tell I was drawn to the agarwood.
“If you like it, get it for yourself,” he said.
“Don’t joke! It’s much too expensive.”
“I know a way,” Dahui said. He asked one of his devotees, a businessman who invested in hotels and textiles, and who also knew me and had heard my teachings, to buy it for me to install at Mahabodhi. The businessman was happy to oblige and accumulate the merit that would accrue from such a generous gift. He purchased the piece for about $60,000 Singapore dollars ($30,000–$40,000 US) and donated it to me.
Two years passed, and then in 2008 the work was finally completed in Putian on the camphor Buddhas that would sit in Mahabodhi’s main hall. I went to China on a pilgrimage tour with my sangha and asked the manufacturer to send the agarwood to one of my students for safekeeping until the work on the monastery was completed and we could find a suitabl
e place for it. Yet when the monastery was finally finished and the carving was ready to be installed, the ownership of the agarwood was called into question, leading to lawsuits, accusations of financial impropriety, and bogus but nonetheless damaging innuendos of sexual misconduct — which were all widely covered in Singapore’s newspapers.
My name and reputation were dragged through the mud, and I have spent countless hours preparing documents and large sums of money on legal fees to defend myself in the courts. In the midst of all this, I left Singapore and traveled through China. I gave serious thought to giving up the abbot’s position of Mahabodhi. I even considered disrobing. Members of my sangha persuaded me to come back to Mahabodhi, and, strangely, the whole incident has caused me to renew my bodhisattva vows.
In the beginning of Buddhism, the Buddha established the sangha of monks, nuns, laymen, and laywomen in response to Mara, who acknowledged the Buddha’s enlightenment and urged him to depart this world and leave the cycle of birth and death. Mara insisted that the Buddha’s work was done. Some sources add that Mara, witnessing the Buddha’s enlightenment, admitted that he had been defeated but said he would send his children and grandchildren, disguised as Buddhists, into the sangha to destroy it. The Buddha became quiet and sad — so sad, in fact, that he shed tears. But then he brightened.
“Your descendants will have karmic connections to the Dharma,” he told Mara. “You will have sown those seeds into their consciousness. In their future lives, they too will become Buddhist and eventually attain buddhahood!”
Upon hearing this ultimate truth — that our innate goodness and wisdom will eventually triumph — Mara was hopping mad.