by Ajahn Brahm
The abbot listened in calm silence to this account. When it concluded, he said, “Bring the boy.”
“These are your real parents,” he told the boy. “Now it is time for you to return to them and assume your place in the world.” In China, children have no say. He might have wanted to stay with the monks. Who knows? For his part, the abbot was full of compassion. The abbot hugged the boy, and then he turned and went back into the monastery and on with his work.
Cultivating the Mind-Field
CHINESE MONKS wear pants because traditionally we had to work on farms. The monasteries were usually out in the countryside, and the monks grew their own food. We have an expression in Chan, nong chan, which means “farming meditation.” The texts in our tradition that use the language of “cultivation” and “mind-field” reflect the way farming is interwoven in our tradition. Plow to remove stones, loosen up soil, sow seeds, and cover them with earth; water, fertilize, weed, thin, pick! During these tasks monks were taught to be mindful and aware. The rhythmic nature of the work — repetitive actions, done in silence — was the nong chan practice. The monks learned not to ask why they had to farm. They grew food so they could eat. They were farmers in order to survive. Similarly, they meditated both in the fields and on the cushion for their spiritual life to survive and flourish.
I got a taste of this practice when I trained in Taiwan’s Fu Yan Institute in Hsinchu. You could say the institute was a college, except that its students did the cooking and cleaning. About one hundred of us were enrolled when I was there. We farmed a small area of land for food. In winter we chopped firewood to heat water for our showers. We washed our own clothes — a habit I retain to this day — and we handled carpentry, electrical, plumbing, and general maintenance.
We woke at three or four, depending on the schedule for our early morning duties. We slept in bunks, six or eight to a room. We learned basic Buddhist ceremonies and rituals. We read The Way to Buddhahood and studied the Pure Land school, bodhisattva precepts, and Nagarjuna’s commentary on the Mahaprajnaparamita Sutra. We read the Tiantai and Vipassana commentaries and the Agama sutras. We studied the histories of Indian and Chinese Buddhism and their major texts. There were seminars where we delivered papers. It was solid, basic Buddhist education.
I had to work quite hard. I always skipped dinner, keeping a small bun that we had for lunch and eating that. My companion was the Dharma, the teachings. They kept me company. It was a pure life. Very simple. I worked the institute’s small plot of land. We grew sweet potato greens, a hardy crop of nondescript taste that didn’t need much looking after and was quite nutritious. We also grew cabbage, spinach, and bok choy. It was in these first tentative forays into nong chan that I began to develop an awareness of the mindfulness practice that I still teach today: wherever the body is, the mind is there; whatever the body is doing, the mind is doing it too. Mind and body, in harmony together.
Nong chan teaches us to cultivate the plants with a unified mind — we are one with the crops and the elements and our labor or activity, which is the source and sustenance of our lives. The growing process can’t be rushed, and each plant is different. We need to appreciate it on its own terms in order for it to flourish. It is the same when we’re in the Chan hall — we are all different and ripen at our own pace and in our own way.
Chan has been called “a special transmission outside the scriptures, not founded upon words and letters.” Nong chan grounds us in activity that is about an intuitive awareness that has nothing to do with words. It is about losing yourself in the elements: sun, water, wind, earth. Rather than think, I need to water the crops, nong chan tells us to think, The crops need water. Rather than focusing on our own needs and desires, we learn to simply respond to what’s needed. We are not separate from the rest of humanity, from the earth itself.
As I practiced nong chan, I felt as though I were going back to the source, to the beginnings of Chan, to the place where my life began. I saw our practice extending through generations of great teachers who had cultivated cabbages in the mind-field and realized themselves, passing along the teachings to us through the tunnel of time.
Crossing the River, Smelling Fish
ONE DAY my master Sheng Yen and I were walking through the forest at his retreat center in Pine Bush, upstate New York. It was spring and there had been snowmelt and lots of rain. A normally placid stream that was easily crossed had turned into a raging torrent.
“Do you think the river god will open up this stream for us so we can walk across?” Sheng Yen asked.
“Shifu, let’s leap over!” It was a beautiful spring day, and I was a young, impetuous monk who thought I could do anything. I knew Sheng Yen enjoyed this aspect of my character, so I was free with my words. “Keep your impulsive energy and turn it into bodhichitta,” he would tell me. Bodhichitta is the motivation to awaken all sentient beings.
We studied the muddy, rushing stream. “The bodhisattva path is not as easy as you think,” Sheng Yen said. There was a wistfulness about him — a sadness. The retreat center was experiencing a lot of difficulties, and I felt the weight of these problems as he told me the following story, which perhaps was a Buddhist folktale that he had heard when he was a child.
There was once a Brahman arhat who every day went to hear Buddha teach. On his way, he had to cross a river and so he’d call out to the river god, “Babu, open up! I want to walk over.” The river god paid respects to the arhat, and the arhat likewise paid respects to the river god, and the river god opened a way for the arhat to walk through. The arhat went to see the Buddha and then returned home, again exchanging greetings with the river god, who opened a path through the flow.
This ritual went on day after day, the same exchange of words over and over, until one day when the river god became upset and went to complain to the Buddha. “He keeps calling me Babu,” said the river god. Babu is how you address a servant, someone low class and insignificant.
The Buddha asked the arhat to meet with the river god. “Have you been respectful to the river spirit? Have you looked down on him?” the Buddha asked the arhat.
“That wasn’t my intention,” said the arhat. “If I made him feel that way, I’m very sorry for it, and I apologize.”
“You see?” the Buddha said to the river god. “He apologized to you and he is sincere. It is just his habit, as he is from the Brahman caste,” the Buddha said.
After he finished telling the story, Sheng Yen said, “I don’t think the river god will help us today.” We returned to the retreat center.
Several days later, Sheng Yen took up this theme of the way our habits shape our behavior during a Dharma talk in the Chan hall. He told a story about Ananda.
One day the Buddha was taking a walk with Ananda in the marketplace. The market was done for the day — the vendors had left and the stalls were empty. The Buddha saw some discarded banana leaves, which the vendors had used to wrap up their goods, on the market floor. The Buddha asked Ananda to pick one up and inspect it.
“Can you see anything inside the leaf?” the Buddha asked.
“No,” Ananda replied.
“What do you smell?”
“Salted fish.” Ananda picked up another leaf. “Jasmine flower,” he said.
“What does this mean?” the Buddha asked.
Ananda, as usual, was perplexed.
“You cannot see the fish or the flowers,” the Buddha explained. “But you can smell the things that are left over, the residual.”
Sheng Yen used the word xi qi in Chinese to refer to these residuals. Xi qi can be translated as “smell habit,” but qi also means energy. Sheng Yen was drawing from the complex matrix of Buddhist philosophical teaching on intention and karma, and he was pushing us as his students to carefully investigate our own habits and suppositions.
Karma is a type of energy. We cannot conceive of karma: it’s too complicated. An analogy might be a seed from a mango. It drops and produces a mango tree. Three years later th
at mango tree produces one hundred mangoes, which all drop and produce trees that also bear fruit and then produce a thousand trees, and so on. One seed or one very small action can produce a vast multiplicity of effects. The Mahayana view is that even though I may not have had the intention to disrespect or harm you, if I do, then I have created karma. With the right view, we can see many of the problems in our relationships and the world from this perspective.
As Sheng Yen told this story, I again sensed the wistfulness in him that I had felt when we were together by the rushing stream.
“We all still have lots of habits; we are imperfect, and we should not take things too hard,” Sheng Yen said. He looked at me. His eyes were sad with a kind of helplessness. I thought he would go on and say more. But he simply said, “That’s all for tonight,” and he rose from the pu tuan (cushion) on which he sat and walked slowly into the dark passage behind the dais.
These stories have recently returned to me as I have been in the midst of my own troubles. Sheng Yen was cautioning us against judging the actions of others. He was saying that very often our habitual tendencies produce unintentional effects, and that we have to be mindful of this in our relationships. The subtle but powerful filter of xi qi is pervasive.
I have often thought of the way Sheng Yen looked at me that night in the Chan hall. The feeling was more than an older man to a younger man, more even than master to disciple. It was the way a father might look at a son. In the midst of his own troubles and challenges, he knew that I would face difficulties too — that they were inevitable, and there was nothing he could do to prevent what was coming.
I want to tell him now, as I write this, that I am okay. The energy for bodhichitta is still there inside me. I feel it moving, welling over. And I will never give it up.
Embrace Uncertainty
I HAVE ALWAYS been drawn to what some people would consider extreme activities. I like to test my limits and have an adventure. I’m not necessarily drawn to activities that are dangerous, but I’ve always been attracted to those things that prompt us to see our real selves, beyond the masks we wear, that put us up against who we really are.
In my younger days as a monk I tried bungee jumping in northern Thailand. I took a slow lift, the kind you see at construction sites that are used on skyscrapers, which was attached to the face of the cliff and ascended to its lip. When I got to the top and looked down, my heart began racing. On the edge of the lift was a metal extension, a catwalk that stretched out. Below was a largish pond.
My legs and lower body were tied with Velcro straps and thick belts. I hopped out on the metal catwalk. My knees were wobbly, and I began to shake. It was like walking the plank or going off a high diving board, except that it was much, much higher. The water glistened below me. I felt weak. Apparently this moment is too much for some people. They start weeping and refuse to jump.
I was fascinated by the moment at the edge, right before you leap. I knew that I wasn’t in any danger. And yet the fear was overwhelming on the first jump. You have that fear even though you know nothing bad is going to happen. It teaches you that there is a deep divide between knowing something with your mind and experiencing it. You might say the moment of jumping, of hurling yourself into space, is a breakthrough. Just do it, you tell yourself. Once you step over the edge there is no going back. You have done something incontrovertible. 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.
The taste is like the shadow of a bird. It has similarities to, although it is not the same as, an enlightenment experience that Sheng Yen has described. As a young monk he shared a room one night by chance with Grandmaster Ling Yuan, a famous Chan monk. They sat on a large raised platform that is traditionally where Chinese people sleep. Sheng Yen was excited to be in the company of such a renowned monk, and he began asking him many questions. Sheng Yen said these were questions that had been plaguing him about Buddhadharma, and that at this point in his development he was full of doubt. Ling Yuan didn’t respond except to say, “Any more? Any more? Any more?”
It grew later and later and Sheng Yen said he felt a sense of desperation verging on panic. Would his questions never be answered? Was he doomed to a life of gnawing doubt? He asked the next question, and out of nowhere the monk slapped his hand to the platform and shouted, “Put it down!” At that moment, Sheng Yen said, he had an awakening.
Put it down! When you’re in free fall, that’s all you can do. Unfortunately, it’s extremely unlikely that we’ll become enlightened bouncing around on the bungee cord.
Skydiving, another activity I tried, has many of the same qualities as bungee jumping. When you’re in free fall, hurtling toward the earth, the only thing you can control is your mind. You have to be free of resistance to what’s happening. You have to be totally open. You need to go with the flow, a lesson we have to relearn over and over.
Another extreme activity I did had opposite qualities. In bungee jumping and skydiving you want to slow down your experience, but when you’re scuba diving, you often want to get back to the surface as fast as possible!
I went diving to attain great depths off the Great Barrier Reef in Australia. You have to descend slowly and come up slowly, being careful to give your body time to adjust to the change in pressure. The bends can kill you, and there is a strict protocol that must be followed. You can’t rush it.
As you descend, you feel a building intensity of fear. The sun is overhead, growing ever more faint. The sky becomes a distant memory. The darkness envelops you, and the water grows cold. You must relax. As you go farther and farther into the dark, your imagination runs wild. Are there monsters lurking beyond your ever-decreasing field of vision, horrible things with fangs waiting to devour you? There is less and less life in the gloomy depths, but the fish increase in size. And they’re not the colorful fish of the reefs anymore; they’re big fish in drab shades of black and brown. It’s important to regulate your breath — you have to conserve your air. You must remain calm, descending at a measured rate and stopping often to adjust to the increasing pressure.
During the dives, I learned how we fear the unknown, and how even in the face of this fear we need to have a relaxed awareness. When we do this we are able to discover ourselves. The deeper that I went into the ocean, the deeper I felt I was going into myself. At the dive’s nadir the only illumination was from a small headlamp I wore. No matter how spooked I was, I had to make sure my ascent was done slowly and deliberately.
The experiences of free fall and diving to great depths teach us to not grasp at the way we want things to be. We must accept the pace of the experience. Difficulties will end when they end. Not knowing makes us fearful, but life is filled with uncertainty. It is far better to embrace this fluidity than to resist it or pretend that our lives and the lives of those we love won’t pass away.
Our recourse is to keep coming back to the present moment. As you jump, there is no feeling of “why me?” and no sense of right and wrong. In the depths, we begin to see where our fears of the unknown originate. We emerge from the void, and it is to the void we return. There is no point in resisting. Falling through space and gently breathing in the abyss — these experiences are great teachers.
Sky Poem III
We want forever
but we are not
Carried for eons
on our shoulders
nobody else did this to us
we to ourselves
Nothing extraordinary
nothing exceptional
nothing supernatural
it’s okay
no big deal
Eyes looking for eyes
head looking for head
all of it
always with you
simple
direct
beautiful
Untainted
like the sky
without plus or
minus
completely
zero
Grateful grateful grateful
Buddha raga
for everything that is
Put it down
a thousand tons
Hit bash kick kill
doesn’t matter
Each moment alive
that is
our true nature
The Seven Wonders of Chan: Right Here, Right Now
WE USUALLY DON’T realize the preciousness of the breath. We breathe in; we breathe out. Nothing special. It is always helpful to remind ourselves that the breath is precious. Try this experiment: Cover your mouth with one hand and plug up your nose with the thumb and index finger of your other hand. Stop your breath for as long as you can. When you feel as though you’re suffocating, release your hands and breathe. How do you feel?
It is so good to be breathing. Why don’t we feel that way most of the time? The breath is so precious. We generally walk around disconnected from the breath because we lack awareness. How much richer our lives would be if we really felt our breath and appreciated it. When we feel the breath, we feel our lives. We feel the goodness of life. We feel that this life is precious and wonderful.
We could think of this appreciation of the breath as the first of the seven great wonders of Chan. What were the seven wonders of the ancient world? The Great Pyramid of Giza in Egypt. The Colossus of Rhodes. The Hanging Gardens of Babylon. The Lighthouse of Alexandria. The Mausoleum at Halicarnassus. The Statue of Zeus at Olympia. The Temple of Artemis at Ephesus.
Our Chan wonders are infinitely grander! The first wonder of Chan is the breath — to be able to breathe. The second is our sight — we are able to see. The third is our hearing. The fourth is to be able to taste. The fifth is to be able to talk, communicate, and sing. The sixth is our ability to use our bodies: to move, act, walk, dance, run, hug, touch! And the seventh wonder is that we can think, we have a mental functioning. These are the great wonders of Chan.