Our mind makes our world

The other weekend I was just about to leave the house with my two boys, Sam, aged three, and Charlie, aged 18 months, when Sam started to get agitated and clamour to get in the car. When I asked him what was going on, he told me that he was scared of the noise. The noise in question was some kind of power tool being used in one of the houses in the neighbouring street; it wasn't particularly loud and, I assured him, it wasn't going to hurt him. But he got more and more upset. As we were only going to the playground, all of ten minutes away by buggy, I - not unreasonably I thought - told him not to be so silly: that it was just a power tool and that he would be fine. So I wheeled a protesting Sammy and a completely unfazed little Charlie quickly down the road, away from the offending noise, and he did indeed soon calm down and forget all about it.

But this little episode really made me think. From my point of view, it was unreasonable for Sam to be frightened; yet, in his world where danger lurks in unexpected quarters, fear was a totally natural and reasonable emotion to be feeling. Both of us were right - and both of us were wrong. Just because my experience wasn’t the same as his did not mean that his experience wasn’t real. This underscores one of the primary teachings of the Buddha, which features in the very first verse of the Dhammapada, one of the principal early Buddhist texts:

"Experience is preceded by mind, led by mind and produced by mind"

Buddhism says that our experience isn't objective: it's a product of our minds. In a very real and important way, we create the world in which we live. Some people may see dangers and threats everywhere; others may walk through life seeing only the sunny side. For some people, football is everything; for others, it's unutterably boring; some may hear a power tool and think nothing of it; others may hear the same thing and be frightened half to death. And this isn't just an interesting idea: it has very real implications for how we relate to, and get on with, other people. The reason we fall out with others is because we think, consciously or otherwise, that they are - or should be - like us, with the same ideas, values and perceptions - and, when they do something we don't like, we judge them accordingly. Or, to take another example, we might not see that our tendency to be spontaneous and in the moment drives people of different temperaments round the bend, because, after all, everyone likes to be spontaneous and in the moment, don’t they? Scale this up to the level of national, cultural or religious conflict and you have a real problem on your hands.

So, what’s my point? Well, in a way, it’s really quite simple. Each of us inhabits a different world, a world that we have constructed out of perceptions, values and ideas of how things are. So what we need to do more is to realise that this is the case, to try to empathise with others, to see things from their point of view - as Harper Lee puts it in "To kill a Mockingbird", to get into another person's skin and walk around in it  - before we make judgements. The little episode with Sam was a reminder to me to do this: perhaps there will be an occasion during your day today when you can do the same.

Approaches to suffering

A few days ago a member of my order, the Triratna Buddhist Order, died, and my partner and I decided to mark the event with a little ritual, a kind of send-off. I went up to the office to print out a picture of her and, on my way down, I stopped off in the bathroom to take some rubbish down. We live in a tall house, so it made sense to do both...  so there I was heading down the stairs with a picture of Vijayatara in one hand, and a bag of dirty nappies in the other.

But then I thought - hang on - was this a bit disrespectful to my friend who'd died, to be, as it were, associating her death with something as banal - or as dirty - as bags of used nappies.

But then I decided that in fact - from a Buddhist point of view, - it was both natural and appropriate.

 Buddhism teaches that nothing is permanent. Everything that there is has come into being at some point and will also end at some point. Flowers bloom and wilt, empires grow and decline, stars are born and die billions of years later, people grow old and pass away. This is a natural law which applies to absolutely everything. So death, far from being wrong – something that needs to be hushed up or kept under wraps – is a natural part of the wonderful and mysterious process that we call life which, when you have young children, involves changing their nappies. In the midst of life we are in death - but also, in the midst of death we are in life.

In a similar vein, as my family and I emerge from a long winter - punctuated by a range of minor but annoying illnesses - I realise I feel it's my right to be well... that illness is somehow wrong.

  

Of course, illness should be treated if possible and it is desirable for people to be well. But we shouldn’t expect to be well. Buddhism tells us that, wherever there is life, there will also sometimes be illness: it just goes with the territory. This is not negative – it’s simply realistic. The problem arises through our unwillingness to accept illness and death - when we respond to them with fear, anger, frustration or blame, denying them their place in the natural order of things. According to Buddhism, it is these impure emotional states that really cause us to suffer.

 As the Buddha says in a well-known early text:

Experiences are made up of mind, preceded by mind, led by mind. Suffering follows an impure mind like the wheel of a cart follows the hoof of the ox that draws it

Joy follows a pure mind like a shadow that never leaves.

So what Buddhists try to do is to open up to the true nature of things, using meditation and reflection to open our hearts and minds, and to learn to respond to illness and death with love and compassion, even humour. The Buddha teaches us that this is the true way to joy.

So when you next lose a loved one, you might want to reflect that the negative emotions that arise – aside from the natural sense of sadness and loss that goes with the death of someone close to you – could actually be making things worse. And the next time you catch a cold or hurt your back, it might help to consider that getting worked up about it – as if it is somehow unfair – is likely to cause you to suffer more than the condition itself.

I wonder what Vijayatara would have made of the nappies. I like to think that she would have approved.

Vajrasattva and confession in Buddhism

The rain has stopped, the clouds have drifted away, and the weather is clear again.
If your heart is pure, then all things in your world are pure.
Abandon this fleeting world, abandon yourself,
Then the moon and flowers will guide you along the Way.

This talk is notionally about Vajrasattva and the practice of purification through confession. Thinking about how to structure it various thoughts went through my mind, one of which was just to talk about this image and describe its symbolism: this means that and this equates to that, so to speak. But the point about symbols is that they do not have direct one-to-one correspondences - symbols in Buddhism point to a reality beyond themselves without attempting to capture or define it. They should be understood as poetry rather than entries in a dictionary. So it's for this reason that I concluded that poetry was the place to start.

These verses are from Ryokan. Ryokan was a Japanese Zen poet and hermit who lived from the 18th to the early 19th century; he was a wonderfully eccentric figure who in some ways made a distinctly shambolic  impression and who delighted in spending time playing with children, being in many was childlike himself: he is also known as Taigu or Great Fool. At the same time, however, his poetry and calligraphy are deeply imbued with wisdom and beauty.  These verses contain a great deal of profound insight. I'm going to go through them and relate them to my understanding of Vajrasattva and draw out the significance of the practice of confession.

The rain has stopped, the clouds have drifted away, and the weather is clear again.

One of the principal qualities associated with Vajrasattva is purity. His colour is white, traditionally described as the whiteness of sunlight on freshly fallen snow or that of curds in a crystal vase. So what you have is an intensity of white, a purity that almost hurts the eyes - a purity that can be evoked by such images but experienced with difficulty. The reason for this is that it is a completely different order of purity from our normal understanding of the word.

Purity is normally opposed to "impurity", forming a pair of opposites which somehow operate on the same kind of level. We probably tend to think of moving along a scale from one to the other, becoming more ethical, more skilful, but essentially remaining a better version of ourselves as we are now, with fewer rough edges, generally that bit nicer, kinder and more considerate. But essentially the same. This is probably how most of us approach the spiritual path, and it is certainly not an approach to be sneered at. But it is inherently limited. The reason why we can't comprehend enlightenment is our inability to project ourselves out of this habitual view of self. But it's essential to realise that the Buddha is not like a nicer, wiser and kinder version of his unenlightened self: he is a being whose love, wisdom and purity is of a completely different order. His is the purity of Vajrasattva.

Let's look at this line. What effect do the rain and the clouds have on the radiant blue sky? They conceal it from view. As anyone knows who has flown, irrespective of how bad the weather is when you take off, at some point you emerge out of the clouds into the blue sky, extending in all directions and limited only by the horizon. The radiant blue sky is also traditionally the medium in which Buddhas and Bodhisattvas emerge. In other words, the blue sky isn't eradicated by the clouds and the rain; it is present all the time but is merely concealed. So what does this mean for us?

The blue sky is a traditional Buddhist image for the mind when free from all hindrances and obscurations - the enlightened mind - and the rain and the clouds can be taken to refer to the hindrances that are so familiar to us from meditation. In fact we can go one or two steps further and see three root poisons - craving, aversion and spiritual ignorance - as those obscurations that prevent the enlightened mind - which itself is eternal, infinite and beyond the reach of change  - from manifesting. If the obscurations are removed, what is left is purity: the purity of a mind that is radiant and unlimited, free of restriction and defilement, and boundless. This is the purity of the enlightened mind, of Vajrasattva. It is a radically different order of purity from anything we can imagine, but, to borrow from the threefold puja, if the Buddha was born as we are born and what the Buddha attained, we too can attain, then it must, so to speak, be our heritage as human beings, the true fulfilment of our nature. But, if we are to realise our true potential, we have to encourage the clouds to part and the rain to stop: we have to work on our obscurations. In the first instance, this means ethical practice.

It's worth drawing out a little more what the connection is between ethics and spiritual development. We've all heard about it and we probably have a set of assumptions about the role of ethics on the Buddhist path. But one way of doing this is to bring together two models of the spiral path - that path of development which charts our progression from dukkha, the suffering of the mundane world, to perfect enlightenment. The best known of these starts with a realisation that suffering is intrinsic to human life and that our normal strategies for dealing with it - food, sex, distraction, material wellbeing, career, family - don't work: we need to look elsewhere if we wish to stop suffering. This corresponds to the first two links on the spiral path: dukkha and shraddha, a word which is often mistranslated as "faith" but which actually represents our faculty to respond intellectually, emotionally and volitionally - by acting - to the ultimate in the universe: to the Dharma as represented by the spiritual ideal of the Buddha. Shraddha arises when we have, at least to some extent, seen through the nature of dukkha, recognising that it cannot be beaten on its own level. This is a crucial insight, one that all of us here share at least to some extent: if we didn't we wouldn't be wasting our time sitting here on New Year’s eve when we could be out partying and getting drunk. Once shraddha has arisen, the next link in the spiral path is pamojja - rendered by the English word "joy". The spiritual life should be associated with joy; it should make us happy. But it doesn't always. Sometimes I look around me and I seem to see people around me in the world without any form of spiritual life who just seem to be happier than me. It doesn't seem fair! Here I am working fairly diligently on my mental states but not always experiencing states of joy. So what's going on?
one answer is to be found in another less well-known version of the spiral path that actually has a couple of intermediate links: after shraddha you get sila, or ethics, followed by a term which means something like the satisfaction of knowing that there is nothing for which you can reasonably reproach yourself: the happiness of a clear conscience. If you follow this up with pamojja, you get a clearer picture. If we want to be happy, let alone make progress on the spiritual path, we should practise ethics and develop a clear conscience. Only then will we experience states of joy. Unless we do this - and I speak from my own experience - the spiritual life will always be a struggle and our confidence in our ability to practise the Dharma - our shraddha - will be undermined. The tradition states that shraddha is present in all skilful mental states. Reversing this we will see that it is absent from negative ones. The more unskilful we are, the less shraddha we will have.

Fortunately we have the tools for doing this. We have the precepts, we have our friends to encourage us and - crucially - we have a kind of innate faculty for recognising unskilfulness and responding appropriately to it. One list of positive mental events starts with shraddha and goes on to two crucial states or faculties: hri and apatrapya, together known as the Lokapalas or guardians of the world, because, without them, human life would be impossible. They are both variants of a very skilful mental state: that of shame.
It can be difficult to view shame positively, and it can indeed be quite unpleasant. We are conditioned to regard it as something - well, shameful! We associate it with guilt, with that irrational sense of being bad people, of not being worthy of being loved. But this is not at all what is meant. "hri" is that experience you can have when you realise that you have let yourself down, that you have failed to live up to the best in you or to honour you r true potential. This is incredibly positive because it shows a refined ethical sensitivity - you might be so crude that you wouldn't even recognise some behaviour as being unskilful in the first place. “Hri” acknowledges the existence of a spiritual goal, a set of ideals, the betrayal of which we feel keenly. "Apatrapya" is the same kind of thing, but in relation to our spiritual friends and exemplars: it is the shame we feel when we realise that our behaviour would cause pain to people whom we respect. We aren't afraid that they will withdraw their love from us, but we know that our unskilfulness will distress them because they love us and don't want to see us doing things that will hurt us - as unskilful conduct always does. It’s interesting to note at his point that the verse that one recites in the Vajrasattva sadhana explicitly evokes this kind of shame:

"ignorant and stupid am I - from your samaya I have fallen away"

Vajrasattva can be seen as the ultimate spiritual friend, the ideal object of apatrapya. Because he is the embodiment of the enlightened mind, he will never ever withdraw his love, but his unfailing purity serves all the more starkly to highlight the lack of our own.
So shame - as opposed to irrational guilt and fear of punishment - is a highly positive mental state. Even if it is often unpleasant. It is in the context of this skilful state that confession unfolds its meaning. Unskilfulness undermines shraddha and increases obscurations, distancing us yet further from the purity of Vajrasattva. But happily for us, we feel shame as a result of unskilfulness - and we want to put things right.  Part of that process of putting it right is to follow the prompting of our faculty of hri and apatrapya by acknowledging it to ourselves - but this isn't always enough. It is a recognized psychological insight that a thought or a feeling may not become fully manifest until it is expressed. It may not be enough for us to harbour our sense of shame and keep it to ourselves - there is a definite sense of relief and completion when something that has been troubling us finally comes out. Only then can we really let go of it. But, crucially, how and where and with whom it comes out matters a great deal. For a confession to be effective it must be heard in the spirit in which it is intended. If we try to confess things to people who don't share our aspirations and ethical sensibilities they might completely fail to understand what the big deal is or encourage us to let ourselves off the hook. We might for instance have caused  minor damage to another car with our own and driven off without telling them, to which the response might be to relativise what happened by saying that everyone does it. Or we might want to confess harbouring ill-will toward someone at work, but our other colleagues might just tell us that that person deserves it for being difficult. This is where the aspect of spiritual community comes in. We need to make confessions in the context of spiritual friendship and mutual support, in the knowledge that we will be heard and understood by people who won't withdraw their love or judge us, who won't store up what we have told them and use it against us.

So, seen in this light, confession is a means of heeding our innate ethical sensitivity and encouraging it to develop further, acknowledging and disclosing unskilful action that would otherwise serve to distance us yet further from our spiritual ideals. It is also a natural response to spiritual community. The spiritual community, at least in its ideal form, is no place for us to do whatever we feel like doing in the privacy of our own hearts; our love and respect for our fellow practitioners - and ourselves - should preclude that.

If your heart is pure, all things in your world will be pure.

With this line we are moving away from ethical action, including confession, to its result: purity of heart - away from the realm of samsara to that of nirvana, toward Vajrasattva. The First few verses of the Dhammapada tell us that we create our world with our minds, our mental states. This isn't just a figure of speech - it is clearly and observably true in the world around us. People who spend much of their time in states of fear and suspicion of others will experience a frightening world full of danger, whereas sunny optimists will see goodness and kindness everywhere. The world of people experiencing intense craving, such as drug addicts, will be narrow to the point of utter fixation on the object of the craving. People lacking in self-confidence might live in a world in which they are perpetually on the margins and everyone else is having a better time than they are. Some of this I familiar ground, for example in the realms in the wheel of life. So it follows that, for a perfectly pure mind, the world which that person inhabits will be pure, beautiful, light and luminous. I'm reminded of a story from the apocryphal gospels in which Jesus and the disciples encounter the rotting corpse of a dog on the road, and, far from being repelled, Jesus is said to have exclaimed "what beautiful teeth!" We can all have at least a glimmer of an experience of this: I recall some years ago being on a solitary retreat on which I had been practicing lots of metta bhavana meditation - at the end I had to go to a shop, and there were two girls, one customer and one serving. Perfectly ordinary girls but, just for a few instants they were suffused with a kind of glow, a luminous beauty, and their voices had the quality of music. I think that, because I had to a certain extent purified my mind, the reality I was perceiving was a more refined, subtle and beautiful. These things don't tend to last of course, but they can be pointers to the quality of experience of a truly ethical person, someone whose conscience - and with it their consciousness - has been purified.

Abandon this fleeting world, and abandon yourself.

Vajrasattva, like all archetypal Buddha and bodhisattva figures, manifests out of an infinite expanse of radiant blue sky, into which he dissolves at the end of the meditation practice. This is symbolic of sunyata, of the great emptiness: the impermanence and insubstantiality of all things, including this fleeting and insubstantial self which is impossible to pin down, yet which we spend so much time defending and trying to satisfy. Unskilful behaviour, based on greed, hatred and spiritual ignorance, flies in the face of the truth of insubstantiality and impermanence: trying to shore up the self through selfish action is like trying to keep back the waves. The message here is that, if we can just get our petty ego concerns out of the way, drop our unskilful habits, and "abandon" ourselves, then, far from disappearing into some kind of featureless void, a much greater self can emerge. Vajrasattva is sometimes referred to as "Mahasattva" or "great being" - a being who has fully realized emptiness - and whose consciousness partakes of its nature, being radiant, unlimited, pure and blissful and perfectly balanced and harmonious. The attributes of the image reflect this: Vajrasattva holds a vajra, or diamond thunderbolt, to his heart, symbolic of the masculine attribute of great compassion, and a silver bell, expressive of the feminine quality of transcendental wisdom, rests in his lap. The active nature of compassion and the passive nature of wisdom, the masculine and the feminine principle, all in perfect balance, all dualities resolved: The bliss of sunyata and the great compassion - mahakaruna - of the enlightened mind. This is what we can become - but we have to start from where we are, by cultivating our ethical sensibility and confessing our unskilfulness, purifying our minds bit by bit. We can move towards Vajrasattva, open our hearts to his purifying and compassionate influence; we can recite his mantra and dwell on his attributes as a way of contacting a much greater and more beautiful self - a self that is a no-self, beyond all illusion and all limitation.

I have to be honest and say that I don't really have anything much to say about the last line - "the moon and flowers will guide you along the Way." As I said at the beginning, the nature of poetry is to point to things beyond words. Perhaps it just means that we can have faith in the natural order of things - if we fulfil our bit of the bargain by clarifying our conscience and consciousness and cultivating shraddha, the emerging beauty of the phenomena around us in the universe will lead us in the right direction.