This question is most likely very familiar to Buddhists in the West. This article however, originally comes from Sri Lanka (Daily News). The question is therefore directed towards Sri Lankan Buddhists, but that doesn't make the answer any less interesting for westerners.
Buddhism is listed under the great world religions. That could just mean that it is one of the religions that is still followed and is not yet dead, like so many of the great religions that lightened the life of the Egyptians and Greeks.
But we are ask the question as to whether Buddhism is a living religion in particular as to whether the teachings of the Buddha are not to difficult for modern day Buddhists to apply to their daily life. Do we think that the Buddhist discipline is outdated and irrelevant for modern day situations? Has the philosophy of Buddhism proven not to stand up to modern science and technology?
Is the fact that we are world citizens in conflict with a religion that was taught to people coming from a small part of India 2,500 years ago? Do we find that the absence of an external authority who lays down the discipline taught by the Buddha has gradually led to the disintegration of that discipline?
That Buddhism is written about in books and on the Internet does not make it a living religion. It is about its use by living people.
Keeping Buddhism alive means that the Buddhist values are kept alive, not through public celebrations, but because individuals strive to live up to them. The most noticeable Buddhist characteristic is the deep and lasting understanding of the suffering which is an unavoidable part of existence. If we by our way of thinking, speaking or acting add to human suffering, then we also damage the foundations on which Buddhism stands. If we take our refuge to violence as the only way of bringing about an end to social and political conflict, if we as members of society earn our living by means which damage the hearts and minds of others through alcohol, tobacco and drugs, if people find it easy to life with the human shortcomings of greed and longings, then don't we contribute to bringing the Buddhist religion in danger.
More and more people leave Buddhist values behind them and argue: Buddhism is Buddhism, business is business. What they are doing is divorcing Buddhism from their political, economic, social and cultural life.
This is one of the unavoidable consequences of the modern trend towards the awareness of human rights. Whilst this movement has thrown light onto much of the suffering in the world, there is also a tendency in our society to lay too much emphasis on the individual. Most people are given an misleading sense of what human freedom is. Individuals tend by their nature to stand up for what they believe their rights to be, to strive after pleasure, to give expression to their feelings and to follow their longings. The unhappy result is that they are a part of the wider society. Easy access to weapons, or being members of organised structures often makes them forget their responsibility for the community whose well-being is also their own well-being.
On the other hand: when leaders have let go of Buddhist principles of responsibility for the well-being of those they serve, and when, as a result, the servants of public order revolt both against the leaders and public order, then of course a society degenerates. If the society degenerates, then Buddhist principles no longer have fertile ground.
We Buddhists, especially the so called learned amongst us, become more and more preoccupied with exalted, abstract ideas of Buddhism such as metta, karuna, peace and understanding. Unfortunately there is less preoccupation with their actual practice, with putting them into practice in daily life situations, at work, in society.
We have for example brought nearly everyone up to be a good person, but not to know when hate or jealousy arises in their mind and therefore they give expression to these things. They feel happy in their preoccupation with rituals and celebrations which for them are an unmissable source of pleasure. The true value of their religion is in danger of dying out through non-use.
What is urgently asked of learned Buddhists is to make clear the practical relevance of Buddhist principles in the context of aggressive norms and values which are increasingly make up part of modern society. What we need is a way of celebrating Vesak, etc. with a programme of activities to bring particular Buddhists practices into use.
We should not forget that it is not only reminding people of Buddhist Teachings in daily life situations that will bring about this transformation. Behaviour does not come forth so much out of ideals and ideas, as from our hearts, our inner feelings.
The question is: do we know our own heart? Do we have a feeling of responsibility for our own feelings, our own life? Buddhism requires that we become awake.
When we wake up we begin to have a deep feeling of our human circumstances, of the reality that all beings are essentially the same. Then the barriers between self and another become less important. Then people wake up to their own responsibility.
What does that mean?
Responsibility means to live fully with the movement within ourselves and the ability to recognise those animal tendencies which arise from time to time, and to ensure that they do not live their own life. A Buddhist does not have to be responsible to others, not even to the Buddha. If he only has an example to become awake to live an alert life, be mindful and aware of his own tendencies, then a feeling of natural responsibility will develop for himself and for all the beings with which he comes into contact.
That is the sort of attitude which leads to Buddhism being a living religion.

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The Sage Commander
The Denma Translation Group

We are all leaders in our own way. We all face conflict and chaos in our lives. but the wise leader seeks victory beyond aggression. An essay by The Denma Translation Group, authors of a new translation of The Art of War.
The Sun Tzu, the ancient Chinese text known in the West as The Art of War, shows us how to conquer without aggression. It teaches "taking whole," by which an enemy is overcome without being destroyed. For over two millennia this text has been studied in East Asia. Now its tradition has the possibility of taking authentic root in the West. Anyone seeking to work skillfully with conflict can benefit from its insights.
The Sun Tzu speaks to conflict from a place we call victory. Victory implies the attainment of one's objective. But true victory is much more than that. Taking the view of the whole, it encompasses the views of both its enemies and allies. It looks beyond immediate loss and gain, going to the root of all contention. It is utterly flexible. Victory is more a way of being than a final goal. It is the ground on which we can most effectively participate in conflict.
Victory lies beyond the dichotomy of war and peace. War is sometimes necessary, but it devastates much that is good. Perfect peace is not possible in human society. The issue, therefore, is neither how to avoid conflict nor better arm ourselves, but how to engage it in a way that is sane, kindly and effective. Sometimes this may require the use of force, but the highest skill lies in "subduing the other's military without battle."
These ideas do not belong solely to the Sun Tzu or any other proprietary group. They are basic human knowledge. Yet the Sun Tzu sets them out with unusual directness. It demands that we understand the structures of contention and master all its relevant factors, from organization, supply and the psychology and forms of conflict, to configurations of seasons and terrain. It urges us to penetrate the surface tangle of phenomena so that their truer patterns become visible.
We must also develop a thorough knowledge of ourselves, the habits of our thought, the passions, dislikes or blindnesses that influence our perception and judgment. This discipline means sustaining an openness of mind, leaving a space for our natural intelligence to arise. Through such processes we begin to relinquish the acquisitiveness of small victories and come to take the perspective of the whole.
The epitome of this practice is the general, the central figure of the Sun Tzu. This general is a sage commander, someone who goes beyond the conceptualizing activity that constitutes good planning, effective strategy or even wisdom. Seeing the whole, the sage commander creates endless forms from within it. This ability arises from human capacities to see, hear and know the world that are common to everyone.
The general is the sage commander who wields power in the midst of contention and conflict. He is a remarkable example of human skill and wisdom. He speaks with authority and is effective and resourceful, in tune with larger patterns. He commands the battlefield. The general personifies an idealized wisdom, making what might otherwise seem distant and unreachable relevant to our everyday life. Upon closer examination, we can see some element in each of his qualities and actions that reflects our own experience in situations of conflict. Just like the sayings in the text that change our way of thinking with a few words, the image of the sage commander can reshape our actions during times of great challenge. This shows us taking whole, how to conquer without fighting.
Being
For the Sun Tzu, the key to skillful action is in knowing those things that make up the environment and then arranging them so that their power becomes available. It is not necessary to change the nature of things in order to come to victory.
The sage commander starts with himself. Thus his first question is not what to do but how to be. Simply being oneself brings about a power often lost in the rush to be something else. A rock is just a rock, and a tree just a tree. But the text tells us that:
As for the nature of trees and rocks-
When still, they are at rest.
When agitated, they move.
When square, they stop.
When round, they go.
Thus the shih [force] of one skilled at setting people to battle is like rolling round rocks from a mountain one thousand jen high. (Chapter 5)
The torrent these things become as they roll down the mountain side is unstoppable.
Because the sage commander has settled into being who he is, he is no longer constantly comparing himself to others. He is not embarrassed, and doesn't need to pretend to be more than he is. There is no gap between his words and his action. Thus he acts from his own ground of strength.
The sage commander is genuine because he appreciates himself as he is. This gives rise to gentleness, where he can allow things to be as they are, rather than forcing them to be a certain way. This kindness is not based on the logic of ethics, nor do his actions necessarily conform to conventional standards of behavior.
Knowing how to be means that the sage commander doesn't hover above the ground or perch upon his seat but sits like a mountain, of the nature of the earth. Being who he is, he is a compass point by which others can obtain their bearings, so that they too can relax into who they are. Simply by being who he is, holding his seat, he has already accomplished much of his goal.
Since his activity radiates a quality of completeness, his actions display a deep conviction. This engenders trust, so others believe in what he does and says. Thus he leads the people and ensures the welfare of the state.
When the sage commander leads the troops into battle, they must follow without hesitation. He works hard to earn this loyalty by knowing and caring for his soldiers. With natural inquisitiveness about how people function, the sage commander connects to his troops in an intimate and personal way.
And so one skilled at employing the military takes them by the hand
as if leading a single person.
They cannot hold back. (Chapter 11)
Every circumstance is an opportunity for the sage commander to cultivate this relationship, and every exchange can deepen his connection with his troops.
Loyalty is above all based on appreciation. It develops when people appreciate what they are involved in, and when appreciation is expressed for them. The sage commander earns the loyalty of the troops by first genuinely expressing loyalty to them in even the smallest gestures. He doesn't miss the opportunity to win someone's trust, and never gives up on anyone. In this way, he creates a unified entity where before there were many individuals, and gains a military that follows him through extreme conditions and conflict.
He looks upon the troops as his children.
Thus they can venture into deep river valleys with him.
He looks upon the troops as his beloved sons.
Thus they can die with him. (Chapter 10)
His natural inquisitiveness manifests as respect for the intelligence of his troops. Even negativity is not an obstacle, since he responds to the intelligence expressed within it. Thus mutual respect strengthens the bond between the sage commander and his troops.
The bonds forged by intimate contact and mutual respect provide the ground for hard training and difficult tasks. Constant socialization and reinforcement of values are necessary to build cohesiveness. But it is through this kind of effort that these bonds can develop into fierce loyalty.
Working with Chaos
The ground of battle, and indeed all of life, is unpredictable, full of chaos and uncertainty. From an ordinary perspective, chaos is the disorder between the last discernible order and the future order that has not yet come. It is a dangerous and uncertain time, when things that seem solid and fixed fall apart.
Chaos is indeed a great challenge for the general. If he himself is chaotic, his ability to command the situation is seriously undermined.
He is chaotic and unable to bring order. (Chapter 10)
And the outcome of his own confusion is a confused and ineffective military:
The general is weak and not strict.
His training and leadership are not clear.
The officers and troops are inconstant.
The formations of the military are jumbled.
This is called "chaos." (Chapter 10)
The sage commander, however, always takes the bigger view. While in the midst of confusion, he sees how chaos forms its own particular order. Though the course of a hurricane along the coast is unpredictable, it is part of a weather pattern that is intelligible.
Chaos is born from order.
Cowardice is born from bravery.
Weakness is born from strength. (Chapter 5)
Chaos and order are two aspects of the same thing. Together they constitute the totality of our experience, the good and bad, the confusion and clarity-how it is all interconnected and constantly shifting. From the smaller perspective we experience these as opposed. But in order to take whole, the sage commander must work with this totality. He resides in the fundamental orderliness of the chaos, and thus for him:
The fight is chaotic yet one is not subject to chaos. (Chapter 5)
While chaos is generally a difficult and uncomfortable time, it is also dynamic, a time of great openness and creativity. The sage commander develops an appreciation for its potent quality. Since he holds no fixed position, chaos is not a threat. He is not undermined by uncertainty. Rather than giving in to the impulse to control chaos when it arises, the sage commander rests in the chaos, and allows it to resolve itself.
This trust resembles conventional patience, in that the sage commander refrains from action. Yet rather than an act of forbearance, it is a matter of letting things happen in their own time. It is a withdrawing from the smaller skirmishes to allow a greater victory to ripen.
When it has rained upstream, the stream's flow intensifies.
Stop fording. Wait for it to calm. (Chapter 9)
Chaos then becomes a powerful time for the sage commander to take effective action. He can use it as an ally, particularly against a highly solidified position. Chaos can undermine that situation, unraveling it rather than forcing a confrontation. Trying to overpower solidity by building up greater solidity merely triggers the cycle of escalation.
Since the sage commander appreciates and accommodates chaos, he sees more clearly what is taking place within it. Thus he knows how shih (forces) will develop and can catch the moment when one small gesture will be more decisive than a tremendous effort applied at the wrong time or place.
Being prepared and awaiting the unprepared is victory. (Chapter 3)
Allowing a chaotic situation to develop demands courage, for it often means that in the short term things will get worse rather than better. There is always the chance that something of value will be harmed. But in the interplay of chaos and order, things don't always resolve themselves in a linear manner, so they must be allowed to run their course. Achieving a fundamental, long-term solution is more important than resolving immediate irritation and discomfort. So he allows the situation to develop, and, with patience, finds the right moment to make the critical impact.
Faced with chaos or conflict, the sage commander looks first to the largest reference point. No matter what ground he has been given, he always thinks bigger. Loosening his gaze on the immediate and short term, suspending his habitual view, he looks to the space around things. This allows lesser objectives to change and develop naturally. These smaller goals are often woven closely together and in competition with one another. Yet even as they shift position and change shape, they can still support the larger goal. He is careful not to fixate on a particular way they might manifest and thereby avoids insignificant skirmishes.
The best illustration of this is in how he works with problems. A problem usually arises when one holds to a view that has become too small and inflexible. Addressing a problem as it is presented often reinforces the fixation that initially gave rise to it. The sage commander focuses on the bigger perspective that holds the key to both the problem and the solution. There he can catch the possibilities that are hidden from others and attain the victory they cannot see.
In seeing victory, not going beyond what everyone knows is not skilled.
Victory in battle that all-under-heaven calls skilled is not skilled. (Chapter 4)
Victory
According to the Sun Tzu, victory arises only in the moment.
These are the victories of the military lineage.
They cannot be transmitted in advance. (Chapter 1)
How then does the sage commander find victory? Once again, this comes back to knowing-first himself and then the other-as the source of all skillful action. Relying on his own genuineness, he creates the ground for victory in his actions and environment, but most importantly, in his mind.
The sage commander is beyond the sway and manipulation of others. His preparation, then, is not so much focused on the accumulation of strength as on taking a position outside the reach of attack. His perspective prepares the ground of no defeat. Thus he steps outside the possibility of attack altogether, remaining beyond grasp. If he cannot be found, the enemy has nothing to fight against.
Of old, those skilled at defense hid below the nine earths and moved
above the nine heavens.
Thus they could preserve themselves and be all-victorious. (Chapter 4)
The sage commander moves beyond defeat by being victorious over his own aggression. He neither ignores nor indulges in it. Aggression gives the enemy something to fight against. This mires the general in battle. The sage commander responds to aggression by creating space, which relaxes the situation and, paradoxically, brings it more under his control. It's like controlling a bull by giving him a very large pasture.
Residing in victory, the sage commander creates both the ground for the enemy defeat to arise and the openness to catch it when it does. In this way he is victorious before the battle is fought.
The sage commander forms the ground and brings others around to his victorious perspective. He forms himself as well as the environment, and thus narrows the enemy options. He offers them the choices he wants them to have, and leads them where he wants them to go. The sage commander attains victory when the enemy can see no other alternative and chooses what he has offered. It is all-victorious when they see that option as best for them, and have no idea that they were directed there.
One skilled at moving the enemy
Forms and the enemy must follow,
Offers and the enemy must take.
(Chapter 5)
The text suggests various ways in which the sage commander may shape the ground. The ultimate is creating preponderance or shih, which is simultaneously the configuration of forces and the power inherent within them. The sage commander forms the ground to bring about favorable shih. He doesn't change the nature of things, only their circumstances. Thus he gains their power. As the sage commander shapes the ground to create advantage, he waits for the node to arise and then swiftly acts. This is the critical moment when preponderance can be applied and victory assured.
A victorious military is like weighing a
hundredweight against a grain.
A defeated military is like weighing a grain
against a hundredweight.
One who weighs victory sets the people to
battle like releasing amassed water into a
gorge one thousand jen deep. (Chapter 4)
In this complex and essentially uncontrollable world, the ultimate outcome of present actions is not predictable. The enemy of today may be a friend tomorrow. The sage commander seeks a victory that is ongoing. Taking whole allows him to preserve the possibilities-to keep every option open.
Taking whole means conquering the enemy in a way that keeps as much intact as possible-both your own resources and those of the enemy. Such a victory leaves something available to build upon, for both you and your former foe. Destruction leaves nothing, and its aftermath diverts valuable energy from the larger victory.
Taking whole starts with defeating the enemy's strategy, both large and small. Strategy is the means by which all actions are coordinated and all resources allocated. The enemy's strategy makes their actions coherent and focused. Defeating it unravels their cohesion and dissolves their alliances. Thus the sage commander renders the physical destruction of their forces unnecessary. He accomplishes this through the skillful use of forming and transforming the ground of battle. This is as much a matter of mind as it is of the physical conditions of warfare.
And so the superior military cuts down
strategy.
Its inferior cuts down alliances.
Its inferior cuts down the military.
The worst attacks walled cities. (Chapter 3)
Swiftness rules when it comes to taking whole. It allows the sage commander's military to seize the moment when advantage arises. The sage commander's patience allows him to await that moment. When it comes, he can act with lightning swiftness. All in all, he gets to the heart of the matter as quickly as possible. He is not slowed by relating to what the enemy chooses to show, but sees the purpose behind their actions, making quick work of a conflict that could otherwise be destructive for all.
The most profound method the sage commander employs to attain victory is the extraordinary and the orthodox. He engages the enemy with what they expect. This is the orthodox, that which is familiar and understandable, what the enemy can easily see. It confirms their projections. However, the sage commander conquers the enemy with what they never imagine. This is the extraordinary. It is not any particular action but simply what the enemy does not expect.
To do so, he works with the enemy's perception of the world. If the enemy believes the sage commander's position to be protected, they will not attack; it does not matter if it is undefended in fact. More than anything, the sage commander must understand his enemy's processes of thought. Whatever the nature of someone's thinking, strong or weak, it forms a pattern. As such, it systematically includes and excludes. These are both its strengths and limitations. If the sage commander can discern the enemy's patterns, he knows what is orthodox within it. Then, in response, the extraordinary is apparent to him:
One skilled at giving rise to the extraordi-
nary-
As boundless as heaven and earth,
As inexhaustible as the Yellow River and
the ocean. (Chapter 5)
The patterns of his enemy's thought are obvious to the sage commander, the way a road map indicates where the next highway exit leads or a facial expression reveals so much about someone's intention. Part of this comes from familiarity with the world. However, it is less a matter of specific information than of his understanding of basic human existence. All these are still the orthodox. But he himself always thinks bigger, seeing beyond them into something the enemy cannot conceive. This doesn't require special equipment or techniques. It works with the ordinary things of the world and has a quality of everyday magic.
The all-victorious sage commander doesn't attain victory by bringing the enemy over to his side. Instead he creates the existence of a larger view that includes both sides. It is the ground from which all interests arise. But there is no promise of victory, no formula or guideline that will ultimately ensure that victory comes about. Nor is there is an absolute measure of victory. The sage commander can only refer back to his ground of basic genuineness.
Taking whole is victory over aggression. It arises in the unique moment of each circumstance. It preserves the possibilities. Victory is ongoing, a way of being rather than a final goal. It means embracing all aspects of the world. Trying to reject parts of it perpetuates the struggle, in oneself and in the world. Victory over war is victory over this aggression, a victory that includes the enemy and thus renders further conflict unnecessary.
From The Art of War: A New Translation. ©2001 The Denma Translation Group. Used with permission of Shambhala Publications.
The Denma Translation Group is led by James Gimian and Kidder Smith, director of the Asian Studies Program at Bowdoin College. The members all received training in a contemplative discipline created by Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche called the Dorje Kasung, which draws on the practices of Tibetan Buddhism, the Shambhala vision of enlightened society, and some Western military forms. The primary author of this essay is James Gimian. It is adapted from The Art of War: A New Translation, available in January from Shambhala Publications.

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The Lama in the Lab
by Daniel Goleman

Lama Oser strikes most anyone who meets him as resplendent-not because of his maroon and gold Tibetan monk's robes, but because of his radiant smile. Oser, a European-born convert to Buddhism, has trained as a Tibetan monk in the Himalayas for more than three decades, including many years at the side of one of Tibet's greatest spiritual masters. But today Oser (whose name has been changed here to protect his privacy) is about to take a revolutionary step in the history of the spiritual lineages he has become a part of. He will engage in meditation while having his brain scanned by state-of-the-art brain imaging devices.
To be sure, there have been sporadic attempts to study brain activity in meditators, and decades of tests with monks and yogis in Western labs, some revealing remarkable abilities to control respiration, brain waves or core body temperature. But this-the first experiment with someone at Oser's level of training, using such sophisticated measures-will take that research to an entirely new level. It can take scientists deeper than they have ever been into charting the specific links between highly disciplined mental strategies and their impact on brain function. And this research agenda has a pragmatic focus: to assess meditation as mind training, a practical answer to the perennial human conundrum of how we can better handle our destructive emotions.
This issue had been addressed over the course of a remarkable five-day dialogue held the year before between the Dalai Lama and a small group of scientists at his private quarters in Dharamsala, India. The research with Oser marked one culmination of several lines of scientific inquiry set in motion during the dialogue. There the Dalai Lama had been a prime mover in inspiring this research; he was an active collaborator in turning the lens of science on the practices of his own spiritual tradition.
It was at the invitation of Richard Davidson, one of the scientists who participated in the Dharamsala dialogues, that Oser had come to the E. M. Keck Laboratory for Functional Brain Imaging and Behavior, on the Madison campus of the University of Wisconsin. The laboratory was founded by Davidson, a leading pioneer in the field of affective neuroscience, which studies the interplay of the brain and emotions. Davidson had wanted Oser-a particularly intriguing subject-to be studied intensively with state of-the-art brain measures.
Oser has spent several months at a stretch in intensive, solitary retreat. All told, those retreats add up to about two and a half years. But beyond that, during several years as the personal attendant to a Tibetan master, the reminders to practice even in the midst of his busy daily activities were almost constant. Now, here at the laboratory, the question was what difference any of that training had made.
The collaboration began before Oser even went near the MRI, with a meeting to design the research protocol. As the eight-person research team brief Oser, everyone in the room was acutely aware that they were in a bit of a race against time. The Dalai Lama himself would visit the lab the very next day, and they hoped by then to have harvested at least some preliminary results to share with him.
Tibetan Buddhism may well offer the widest menu of meditation methods of any contemplative tradition, and it was from this rich offering that the team in Madison began to choose what to study. The initial suggestions from the research team were for three meditative states: a visualization, one-pointed concentration and generating compassion. The three methods involved distinct enough mental strategies that the team was fairly sure they would reveal different underlying configurations of brain activity. Indeed, Oser was able to give precise descriptions of each.
One of the methods chosen, one-pointedness-a fully focused concentration on a single object of attention-may be the most basic and universal of all practices, found in one form or another in every spiritual tradition that employs meditation. Focusing on one point requires letting go of the ten thousand other thoughts and desires that flit through the mind as distractions; as the Danish philosopher Kierkegaard put it, "Purity of heart is to want one thing only."
In the Tibetan system (as in many others) cultivating concentration is a beginner's method, a prerequisite for moving on to more intricate approaches. In a sense, concentration is the most generic form of mind training, with many non-spiritual applications as well. Indeed, for this test, Oser simply picked a spot (a small bolt above him on the MRI, it turned out) to focus his gaze on and held it there, bringing his focus back whenever his mind wandered off.
Oser proposed three more approaches that he thought would usefully expand the data yield: meditations on devotion and on fearlessness, and what he called the "open state." The last refers to a thought-free wakefulness where the mind, as Oser described it, "is open, vast and aware, with no intentional mental activity. The mind is not focused on anything, yet totally present-not in a focused way, just very open and undistracted. Thoughts may start to arise weakly, but they don't chain into longer thoughts-they just fade away."
Perhaps as intriguing was Oser's explanation of the meditation on fearlessness, which involves "bringing to mind a fearless certainty, a deep confidence that nothing can unsettle-decisive and firm, without hesitating, where you're not averse to anything. You enter into a state where you feel, no matter what happens, 'I have nothing to gain, nothing to lose.'"
Focusing on his teachers plays a key role in the meditation on devotion, he said, in which he holds in mind a deep appreciation of and gratitude toward his teachers and, most especially, the spiritual qualities they embody. That strategy also operates in the meditation on compassion, with his teachers' kindness offering a model.
The final meditation technique, visualization, entailed constructing in the mind's eye an image of the elaborately intricate details of a Tibetan Buddhist deity. As Oser described the process, "You start with the details and build the whole picture from top to bottom. Ideally, you should be able to keep in mind a clear and complete picture." As those familiar with Tibetan thangkas (the wall hangings that depict such deities) will know, such images are highly complex patterns.
Oser confidently assumed that each of these six meditation practices should show distinct brain configurations. The scientists have seen clear distinctions in cognitive activity between, say, visualization and one-pointedness. But the meditations on compassion, devotion and fearlessness have not seemed that different in the mental processes involved, though they differ clearly in content. From a scientific point of view, if Oser could demonstrate sharp, consistent brain signatures for any of these meditative states, it would be a first.
Oser's testing started with the "functional MRI," the current gold standard of research on the brain's role in behavior. The standard MRI, in wide use in hospitals, offers a graphically detailed snapshot of the structure of the brain. But the fMRI offers all that in video-an ongoing record of how zones of the brain dynamically change their level of activity from moment to moment. The conventional MRI lays bare the brain's structures, while fMRI reveals how those structures interact as they function.
The fMRI would give Davidson a crystal-clear set of images of Oser's brain, cross-cutting slices at one millimeter-slimmer than a fingernail. These images could then be analyzed in any dimension to track precisely what happens during a mental act, tracing paths of activity through the brain.
Oser, lying peacefully on a hospital gurney with his head constrained in the maw of the fMRI, looked like a human pencil inserted into a huge cubic beige sharpener. Instead of the lone monk in a mountaintop cave, it's the monk in the brain scanner.
Wearing earphones so he could talk to the control room, Oser sounded unperturbed as the technicians led him through a lengthy series of checks to ensure the MRI images were tracking. Finally, as Davidson was about to begin the protocol, he asked, "Oser, how are you doing?" "Just fine," Oser assured him via a small microphone inside the machine.
"Your brain looks beautiful," Davidson said. "Let's start with five repetitions of the open state." A computerized voice then took over, to ensure precise timing for the protocol. The prompt "on" was the signal for Oser to meditate, followed by silence for sixty seconds while Oser complied. Then "neutral," another sixty seconds of silence, and the cycle started once again with "on."
The same routine guided Oser through the other five meditative states, with pauses between as the technicians worked out various glitches. Finally, when the full round was complete, Davidson asked if Oser felt the need to repeat any, and the answer came: "I'd like to repeat the open state, compassion, devotion and one-pointedness"-the ones he felt were the most important to study.
So the whole process started again. As he was about to begin the run on the open state, Oser said he wanted to remain in the state longer. He was able to evoke the state but wanted more time to deepen it. Once the computers have been programmed for the protocol, though, the technology drives the procedure; the timing has been fixed. Still, the technicians went into a huddle, quickly figuring how to reprogram on the spot to increase the "on" period by fifty percent and shorten the neutral period accordingly. The rounds began again.
With all the time taken up by reprogramming and ironing out technical hitches, the whole run took more than three hours. Subjects rarely emerge from the MRI-particularly after having been in there for so long-with anything but an expression of weary relief. But Davidson was pleasantly astonished to see Oser come out from his grueling routine in the MRI beaming broadly and proclaiming, "It's like a mini-retreat!"
Without taking more than a brief break, Oser headed down the hall for the next set of tests, this time using an electroencephalogram, the brain wave measure better known as an EEG. Most EEG studies use only thirty-two sensors on the scalp to pick up electrical activity in the brain-and many use just six.
But Oser's brain would be monitored twice, using two different EEG caps, first one with 128 sensors, the next with a staggering 256. The first cap would capture valuable data while he again went through the same paces in the meditative states. The second, with 256 sensors, would be used synergistically with the earlier MRI data.
This time, instead of lying in the maw of the MRI, he sat on a comfortable chair and wore a Medusa-like helmet-something like a shower cap extruding a spaghetti of thin wires. The EEG sessions took another two hours.
It seemed from the preliminary analysis that Oser's mental strategies were accompanied by strong, demonstrable shifts in the MRI signals. These signals suggested that large networks in the brain changed with each distinct mental state he generated. Ordinarily, such a clear shift in brain activity between states of mind is the exception, except for the grossest shifts in consciousness-from waking to sleep, for instance. But Oser's brain showed clear distinctions among each of the six meditations.
The EEG analysis bore particularly rich fruit in the comparison between Oser at rest and while meditating on compassion. Most striking was a dramatic increase in key electrical activity known as gamma in the left middle frontal gyrus, a zone of the brain Davidson's previous research had pinpointed as a locus for positive emotions. In research with close to two hundred people, Davidson's lab had found that when people have high levels of such brain activity in that specific site of the left prefrontal cortex, they simultaneously report feelings such as happiness, enthusiasm, joy, high energy and alertness.
On the other hand, Davidson's research has also found that high levels of activity in a parallel site on the other side of the brain-in the right prefrontal area-correlate with reports of distressing emotions. People with a higher level of activity in the right prefrontal site and a lower level in the left are more prone to feelings such as sadness, anxiety and worry. Indeed, an extreme rightward tilt in the ratio of the activity in these prefrontal areas predicts a high likelihood that a person will succumb to clinical depression or an anxiety disorder at some point in their life. People in the grip of depression who also report intense anxiety have the highest levels of activation in those right prefrontal areas.
The implications of these findings for our emotional balance are profound: we each have a characteristic ratio of right-to-left activation in the prefrontal areas that offers a barometer of the moods we are likely to feel day to day. That ratio represents what amounts to an emotional set point, the mean around which our daily moods swing.
Each of us has the capacity to shift our moods, at least a bit, and thus change this ratio. The further to the left that ratio tilts, the better our frame of mind tends to be, and experiences that lift our mood cause such a leftward tilt, at least temporarily. For instance, most people show small positive changes in this ratio when they are asked to recall pleasant memories of events from their past, or when they watch amusing or heartwarming film clips.
Usually such changes from the baseline set point are modest. But when Oser was generating a state of compassion during meditation, he showed a remarkable leftward shift in this parameter of prefrontal function, one that was extraordinarily unlikely to occur by chance alone.
In short, Oser's brain shift during compassion seemed to reflect an extremely pleasant mood. The very act of concern for others' well-being, it seems, creates a greater state of well-being within oneself. The finding lends scientific support to an observation often made by the Dalai Lama: that the person doing a meditation on compassion for all beings is the immediate beneficiary.
The data from Oser was remarkable in another way, as these were also most likely the first data ever gathered on brain activity during the systematic generation of compassion-an emotional state for the most part utterly ignored by modern psychological research. Research in psychology over the decades has focused far more on what goes wrong with us-depression, anxiety and the like-than on what goes right with us. The positive side of experience and human goodness have been largely ignored in research; indeed, there is virtually no research anywhere in the annals of psychology on compassion per se.
While Davidson's data on compassion were surprising in themselves, still more remarkable results were about to be reported by Paul Ekman, one of the world's most eminent experts on the science of emotion, who heads the Human Interaction Laboratory at the University of California at San Francisco. Ekman was among the handful of scientists who had attended the Dharamsala meeting, and he had studied Oser a few months earlier in his own laboratory. The net result was four studies, three of which are described here.
The first test used a measure that represents a culmination of Ekman's life's work as the world's leading expert on the facial expression of emotions. The test consists of a videotape in which a series of faces show a variety of expressions very briefly. The challenge is to identify whether you've just seen the facial signs, for instance, of contempt or anger or fear. Each expression stays on the screen for just one-fifth of a second in one version, and for one thirtieth of a second in another-so fast that you would miss it if you blinked. Each time the person must select which of seven emotions he or she has just seen.
The ability to recognize fleeting expressions signals an unusual capacity for accurate empathy. Such expressions of emotion-called micro-expressions-happen outside the awareness of both the person who displays them and the person observing. Because they occur unwittingly, these ultra-rapid displays of emotion are completely uncensored, and so reveal-if only for a short moment-how the person truly feels.
From studies with thousands of people, Ekman knew that people who do better at recognizing these subtle emotions are more open to new experience, more interested and more curious about things in general. They are also conscientious-reliable and efficient. "So I had expected that many years of meditative experience"-which requires both openness and conscientiousness-"might make them do better on this ability," Ekman explains. Thus he had wondered if Oser might be better able to identify these ultra-fast emotions than other people are.
Then Ekman announced his results: both Oser and another advanced Western meditator Ekman had been able to test were two standard deviations above the norm in recognizing these super- quick facial signals of emotion, albeit the two subjects differed in the emotions they were best at perceiving. They both scored far higher than any of the five thousand other people tested. "They do better than policemen, lawyers, psychiatrists, customs officials, judges-even Secret Service agents," the group that had previously distinguished itself as most accurate.
"It appears that one benefit of some part of the life paths these two have followed is becoming more aware of these subtle signs of how other people feel," Ekman notes. Oser had super acuity for the fleeting signs of fear, contempt and anger. The other meditator-a Westerner who, like Oser, had done a total of two to three years in solitary retreats in the Tibetan tradition-was similarly outstanding, though on a different range of emotions: happiness, sadness, disgust and, like Oser, anger.
One of the most primitive responses in the human repertoire, the startle reflex, involves a cascade of very quick muscle spasms in response to a loud, surprising sound or sudden, jarring sight. For everyone, the same five facial muscles instantaneously contract during a startle, particularly around the eyes. The startle reflex starts about two-tenths of a second after hearing the sound and ends around a half second after the sound. From beginning to end, it takes approximately a third of a second. The time course is always the same; that's the way we're wired.
Like all reflexes, the startle reflects activity of the brain stem, the most primitive, reptilian part of the brain. Like other brain stem responses-and unlike those of the autonomic nervous system, such as the rate at which the heart beats-the startle reflex lies beyond the range of voluntary regulation. So far as brain science understands, the mechanisms that control the startle reflex cannot be modified by any intentional act.
Ekman became interested in testing the startle reflex because its intensity predicts the magnitude of the negative emotions a person feels-particularly fear, anger, sadness and disgust. The bigger a person's startle, the more strongly that individual tends to experience negative emotions-though there's no relationship between the startle and positive feelings such as joy.
For a test of the magnitude of Oser's startle reflex, Ekman took him across San Francisco Bay to the psychophysiological laboratory of his colleague Robert Levenson at the University of California at Berkeley. There they wired Oser to capture his heart rate and sweat response and videotaped his facial expressions-all to record his physiological reactions to a startling sound. To eliminate any differences due to the noise level of the sound, they chose the top of the threshold for human tolerance to huge sound, like a pistol being fired or a large firecracker going off near one's ear.
They gave Oser the standard instruction, telling him that they would count down from ten to one, at which point he would hear a loud noise. They asked that he try to suppress the inevitable flinch, so that someone looking at him would not know he felt it. Some people can do better than others, but no one can come remotely close to completely suppressing it. A classic study in the 1940's showed that it's impossible to prevent the startle reflex, despite the most intense, purposeful efforts to suppress the muscle spasms. No one Ekman and Robert Levenson had ever tested could do it. Earlier researchers found that even police marksmen, who fire guns routinely, are unable to keep themselves from startling.
But Oser did. Ekman explains, "When Oser tries to suppress the startle, it almost disappears. We've never found anyone who can do that. Nor have any other researchers." Oser practiced two types of meditation while having the startle tested: one-pointed concentration and the open state. As Oser experienced it, the biggest effect was from the open state: "When I went into the open state, the explosive sound seemed to me softer, as if I was distanced from the sensations, hearing the sound from afar." Ekman reported that although Oser's physiology showed some slight changes, not a muscle of his face moved, which Oser related to his mind not being shaken by the bang. Indeed, as Oser later elaborated, "If you can remain properly in this state, the bang seems neutral, like a bird crossing the sky."
Although Oser showed not a ripple of movement in any facial muscles while in the open state, his physiological measures, (including heart rate, sweating and blood pressure) showed the increase typical of the startle reflex. From Ekman's perspective, the strongest overall muting came during the intense focus of the one-pointedness meditation. During the one-pointedness meditation, instead of the inevitable jump, there was a decrease in Oser's heart rate, blood pressure and so on. On the other hand, his facial muscles did reflect a bit of the typical startle pattern; the movements "were very small, but they were present," Ekman observed. "And he did one unusual thing. In all others we've tested, the eyebrows go down. In Oser they go up."
In sum, Oser's one-pointed concentration seemed to close him off to external stimuli-even to the startling noise of a gunshot. Given that the larger someone's startle, the more intensely that person tends to experience upsetting emotions, Oser's performance had tantalizing implications, suggesting a remarkable level of emotional equanimity.
Finally, in the last experiment, Ekman and Robert Levenson showed Oser two medical training films that have been used for more than three decades in emotion research simply because they are so upsetting. In one a surgeon seems to amputate a limb with a scalpel and saw-actually preparing an arm stump to be fitted with a prosthesis-and there is lots of gore and blood. But the camera focuses only on the limb, so you never see the person getting the surgery. In the other, you see the pain of a severely burned patient, who stands as doctors strip skin off his body. The main emotion evoked in the scores of research subjects who have viewed both these films during experiments is highly reliable: disgust.
When Oser viewed the amputation film, the emotion he reported feeling most strongly was the usual disgust. He commented that the movie reminded him of Buddhist teachings about impermanence and the unsavory aspects of the human body that lie beneath an attractive exterior. But his reaction to the burn film was quite different. "Where he sees the whole person," Ekman reported, "Oser feels compassion." His thoughts were about human suffering and how to relieve it; his feelings were a sense of caring and concern, mixed with a not unpleasant strong sadness.
The physiology of Oser's disgust reaction during the amputation film was unremarkable, the standard changes indicating the physiological arousal seen during that emotion. But when he spontaneously felt compassion during the burn film, his physiological signs reflected relaxation even more strongly than they had when the signs had been measured during a resting state.
Ekman ended his report of the results by noting that each of the studies with Oser had "produced findings that in thirty-five years of research I have never seen before." In short, Oser's data are extraordinary.
From the perspective of neuroscience, the point of all this research has nothing to do with demonstrating that Oser or any other extraordinary person may be remarkable in him or herself, but rather to stretch the field's assumptions about human possibility.
A decade ago the dogma in neuroscience was that the brain contained all of its neurons at birth and it was unchanged by life's experiences. The only changes that occurred over the course of life were minor alterations in synaptic contacts-the connections among neurons-and cell death with aging. But the new watchword in brain science is neuroplasticity, the notion that the brain continually changes as a result of our experiences-whether through fresh connections between neurons or through the generation of utterly new neurons. Musical training, where a musician practices an instrument every day for years, offers an apt model for neuroplasticity. MRI studies find that in a violinist, for example, the areas of the brain that control finger movements in the hand that does the fingering grow in size. Those who start their training earlier in life and practice longer show bigger changes in the brain. Still, neuroscientists do not know with certainty what accounts for this change-whether the change is in the synaptic weights as added connections bulk out neurons, or whether an uptick in the number of neurons may also be playing a role.
A related issue revolves around the amount of practice that it might take in order for the brain to show such a change, particularly in something as subtle as meditation. There is an undeniable impact on the brain, mind and body from extensive practice. Studies of champion performers in a range of abilities-from chess masters and concert violinists to Olympic athletes-find pronounced changes in the pertinent muscle fibers and cognitive abilities that set those at the top of a skill apart from all others.
The more total hours of practice the champions have done, the stronger the changes. For instance, among violinists at the topmost level, all had practiced a lifetime total of about ten thousand hours by the time they entered a music academy. Those at the next rung had practiced an average of about seventy-five hundred hours. Presumably a similar effect from practice occurs in meditation, which can be seen, from the perspective of cognitive science, as the systematic effort to retrain attention and related mental and emotional skills.
Oser, as it turned out, far exceeded the ten-thousand-hour level in meditation practice. Much of that practice came during the time he spent in intensive meditation retreats, along with the four years living in a hermitage during the early period of his training as a monk, as well as occasional long retreats over the subsequent years.
While Oser may be a virtuoso of meditation, even raw novices start to show some of the same shifts. This was clear from other data Davidson had gathered on similar brain changes in people just beginning to practice a variety of meditation called mindfulness. These studies had given Davidson convincing data that meditation can shift the brain as well as the body. While ÷ser's results suggested just how far that shift could go with years of sustained practice, even beginners displayed evidence of biological shifts in the same direction. So the next question for Davidson to tackle was this: Can specific types of meditation be used to change circuitry in the brain associated with different aspects of emotion?
Davidson may be one of the few neuroscientists anywhere who can dare to ask this, because his lab is using a new imaging technique-diffusion tensor imaging-to help answer this question. The method shows connections among different regions in the nervous system. Until now, diffusion tensor imaging has mostly been used to study patients with neurological diseases. Davidson's lab is among a select group that use the technique for basic neuroscience research, and the only one to be using it for research on how methods that transform emotion may be changing the connectivity of the brain.
Perhaps most exciting, the images created by diffusion tensor imaging can actually track the subtle reshaping of the brain at the heart of neuroplasticity. With the method, scientists can now, for the first time ever, identify the changes in the human brain as repeated experiences remodel specific connections or add new neurons. This marks a brave new frontier for neuroscience: it was only in 1998 that neuroscientists discovered that new neurons are continually being generated in the adult brain.
For Davidson, one immediate application will be searching for new connections in the circuitry crucial for regulating distressing emotions. Davidson hopes to see if there actually are new connections associated with a person's increased ability to manage anxiety, fear or anger more effectively.
From the scientific perspective, what does any of this matter? Davidson sums it up by referring to The Art of Happiness, a book the Dalai Lama wrote with psychiatrist Howard Cutler, in which the Dalai Lama said that happiness is not a fixed characteristic, a biological set point that will never change. Instead, the brain is plastic, and our quota of happiness can be enhanced through mental training.
"It can be trained because the very structure of our brain can be modified," Davidson said. "And the results of modern neuroscience inspire us now to go on and look at other practiced subjects so that we can examine these changes with more detail. We now have the methods to show how the brain changes with these kinds of practices, and how our mental and physical health may improve as a consequence."
Oser, reflecting on the data gathered in Madison, put it this way: "Such results of training point to the possibility that one could continue much further in such a transformation process, and, as some great contemplatives have repeatedly claimed, eventually free one's mind from afflictive emotions."
When I asked the Dalai Lama what he made of the data on ÷ser-such as being able to mute the startle reflex-he replied, "It's very good he managed to show some signs of yogic ability." Here he used the term yogic not in the garden-variety sense of a few hours a week practicing postures in a yoga studio but in its classic sense-referring to one who dedicates his or her life to the cultivation of spiritual qualities.
The Dalai Lama added, "But there is a saying, 'The true mark of being learned is humility and mental discipline; the true mark of a meditator is that he has disciplined his mind by freeing it from negative emotions.' We think along those lines-not in terms of performing some feats or miracles." In other words, the real measure of spiritual development lies in how well a person manages disturbing emotions such as anger and jealousy-not in attaining rarified states during meditation or exhibiting feats of physical self-control such as muting the startle reaction.
One payoff for this scientific agenda would be in inspiring people to better handle their destructive emotions through trying some of the same methods for training the mind. When I asked the Dalai Lama what greater benefit he hoped for from this line of research, he replied: "Through training the mind people can become more calm-especially those who suffer from too many ups and downs. That's the conclusion from these studies of Buddhist mind training. And that's my main end: I'm not thinking how to further Buddhism, but how the Buddhist tradition can make some contribution to the benefit of society. Of course, as Buddhists, we always pray for all sentient beings. But we're only human beings; the main thing you can do is train your own mind."
Daniel Goleman, twice a Pulitzer prize nominee, is the bestselling author of Emotional Intelligence (Bantam) and Healing Emotions (Shambhala).
From Destructive Emotions: How Can We Overcome Them? Narrated by Daniel Goleman. © 2003 by Mind and Life Institute. Published by arrangement with Bantam Books, an imprint of The Bantam Dell Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc.
From Shambhala Sun, March 2003.

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White Plums and Lizard Tails
by Noa Jones

Spring is blossom season in Japan. Drifts of petals like snow decorate the parks and streets. On May 15, 1995, in this season of renewal, venerable Zen master Hakuyu Taizan Maezumi Roshi wrote an inka poem bestowing final approval on his senior disciple, Tetsugen Glassman Sensei, the "eldest son" of the White Plum sangha, placed it in an envelope and gave it to his brothers. Hours later, before dawn broke over the trees of Tokyo, Maezumi Roshi drowned. His death shocked his successors, students, wife and children, and the Zen community at large. At age 64, he was head of one of the most vital lineages of Zen in America; he was seemingly healthy, fresh from retreat, invigorated by his work and focused on practice. Recently elected a Bishop, he was at the zenith of his sometimes rocky relationship with the Japanese Soto sect. But before he'd barely started, he was gone.
Senior students scrambled for tickets and flew from points around the world to attend the cremation in Tokyo. Three months later, at the public ceremony in Los Angeles, Maezumi Roshi's adopted home, Jan Chozen Bays read a poem to an eclectic crowd of mourners-11 of Mazezumi's 12 first generation successors. including Glassman (now also known by his clown name, Bernie the Boobysattva), Dennis Genpo Merzel and John Daido Loori, plus third and fourth generation dharma heirs, rabbi roshis, professor successors, Catholic priest senseis and others. Chozen Roshi wept as she recited:
I knew the watch and glasses
but not the face they said was yours
there cold in drifts of white flower petals.
They said it was your body
we carried in kesa-covered box.
How could I know?
Before you always carried us.
Soon they bring us sharp white bone pieces.
Wait!
Now I know you.
Now I know you.
Losing your teacher. Imagine setting sail in a shark-infested, choppy ocean without a ship, without clothes even. The loss of a spiritual guide has sent populations spiraling into a state of confusion throughout history. All Buddhist schools have known the perilous vacuum left by the death of a guru or a roshi. Shi'ites and Sunnis wasted no time starting wars upon Muhammad's death. Sons and daughters battled in the void that Swami Muktananda left behind. The Mormon Church divided into twelve quorums following the execution of Joseph Smith. Even baboons are prone to quarrel when the dominant dies.
And so there they were, over five hundred students suddenly naked and at sea. Would they sink? Dissolve into other sanghas? Float to other gurus? Or would they learn to swim?
Taizan Maezumi's own journey began at sea in 1956 when he bought a one-way ticket on a freighter to Los Angeles, where he would assume a position as priest under Bishop Togan Sumi at Zenshuji Temple, the Soto headquarters of the United States. "He came with a mission," says Daido Roshi, abbot of Zen Mountain Center in upstate New York, "not just to transmit the dharma to his immediate successors, but to envision the future generations and what they would need."
At the time, many traditional institutions in Japan were declining into bureaucracies. Monks survived by performing rituals-Yasutani Roshi called them "funeral directors." But in the West, outmoded models of God and religious systems were being tested by the progressive elite, proto-hippie beats and academia. The Zen stirrings of Alan Watts, Gary Snyder and other early students attracted seekers who, though maybe a bit doe-eyed, showed great enthusiasm for authentic study. "Those days I think Zen across the board was a hippie Zen," says Daido Roshi. "It was more romance and fascination with the aesthetic than a religious calling."
Many found the teachings of D.T. Suzuki, which lead East Coast scholars to Eido Tai Shimano Roshi and Phillip Kaplaeu. Shunryu Suzuki Roshi was attracting students in San Francisco, but the Zen Center and Green Gulch were still a twinkle in his eye. Southern California was without a major center and without a teacher.
Maezumi, then only a sensei, was an unknown, but he had qualifications, training and a valuable rebellious streak. He was a product of World War II: during the occupation of Japan, a group of American soldiers used his family temple to house anti-aircraft missiles. He was a curious teenager eager to learn English, and free lessons came in the form of hanging out with the soldiers. They also taught the young monk, ordained at 11 like most boys born into temple families, to smoke cigarettes and drink beer.
Maezumi's father, Baian Hakujun Kuroda Roshi, head of the Soto Sect Supreme Court and one of the leading figures of Japanese Soto Zen, sent the young Taizan Maezumi to live with the famed Rinzai teacher Osaka Koryu Roshi. Departing from his family's tradition, Maezumi studied koans with Koryu Roshi and went on to receive degrees in Oriental Literature and Philosophy from Komazawa University. He then finished his early training at Soji-ji, one of the two main Soto monasteries in Japan. When he received shiho from his father in 1955 (shiho is the dharma lineage transmission that authorizes a person to teach), he became a Soto sensei.
What made Maezumi Roshi so extraordinary was his official recognition by both major schools of Zen. Haku'un Yasutani Roshi of the Rinzai sect approved him as a teacher in 1970, as did Koryu Osaka Roshi in 1972, both bestowing shiho and inka (the Rinzai tradition of final approval). Transmissions by these three masters-his father, Haku'un Yasutani Roshi and Koryu Osaka Roshi-confirmed him as an independent teacher and dharma successor in three separate lineages.
But it was the American soldiers and their English lessons that gave Taizan Maezumi Sensei the edge he needed to be sent across the Pacific. The Japanese Mission in Los Angeles needed an English speaker-but not to teach Zen to Americans. "The Japanese community often suffered under painful racial prejudice and wanted to gather together for comfort in familiar rituals," says Chozen Roshi. "They wanted keep to their culture and language alive for their children."
This meant, for Maezumi, performing funerals and marriages, not formal Zen practice. He dug in nevertheless, enduring long hours at the Soto Mission, completing his own koan studies, performing memorials and services while moonlighting as a translator, writing fortune cookies, working as a gardener and never forgetting his vow to serve the dharma.
By the late 1960s, American students in Los Angeles started sniffing around Little Tokyo for a teacher. People like Bernie Glassman (then an aeronautical engineer at McDonnell-Douglas) and Charlotte Joko Beck had already tasted what Zen practice had to offer, but were seeking direct, ongoing contact with a master. Maezumi Sensei, though still busy serving the Japanese community, answered the call.
He began holding gatherings in a room at the temple. His orientation towards zazen, sitting practice, set him apart from the bishops who ministered to the Japanese congregation. Maezumi Roshi's style was warm, dynamic and direct. He lettered a sign on the zendo reading, "If you want to clarify the Great Matter of life and death you are welcome. Otherwise, better get out!" Buddhanature was "so obvious-" he would say, "right before your eyes."
"He could see through the camouflage of personality and talk straight to the seeker beneath," says Chozen Roshi.
"His task was to introduce Zen to us," says Glassman. "We were to swallow what we could, and then manifest it in our way, and spit up what didn't make sense for us."
Word spread quickly. Maezumi Sensi left the temple and moved to an apartment, then into a house in the heart of Koreatown. He threw himself into teaching. "His life belonged to his students," says Daido Roshi. "He gave himself completely to the teachings."
Under his guidance a sangha came together and matured. The dilettantes left and serious practioners stayed. What developed was White Plum Asanga, one of the most successful lineages of Zen in the West. Through Maezumi's teachings and transmissions, a community of well-trained yet individualistic students took root. "He had a really great vow to spread the dharma and help people realize the nature of life," says Wendy Egyoku Nakao Sensi, a third generation dharma heir who received transmission from Bernie Glassman. "Roshi was so clear about it that it didn't really matter when the obstacles came."
From the start the program was rigorous, with an emphasis on zazen and weeklong practice sesshins. The main course was traditional koan study-memorization of and reflection on hundreds of paradoxical passages whose very impossibility points to the nature of ultimate reality. Each koan requires intense one-on-one time between teacher and student; they will wrestle with the paradox until the master feels the student has grasped its meaning, transcended it and is ready to move on to the next. Such immediate contact with Maezumi helped solidify their trust in him and vice versa.
Egyoku Sensei is now abbot of Zen Center of Los Angeles Buddha Essence Temple, the "mother temple of the lineage" established by Maezumi Roshi in 1967. She says that, around the time Maezumi Roshi started it, ZCLA attracted determined Zen students. Scores of them. The center began swallowing up neighboring properties, eventually occupying an entire city block. Genpo Roshi and Bernie Glassman quit their day jobs and became residents.
As visiting teachers in Boulder in 1976, Glassman and Genpo Roshi observed the naissance of Naropa Institute and Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche's energetic sangha. Genpo Roshi says he parlayed lessons learned from Trungpa Rinpoche (he calls Rinpoche his "dharma uncle") into organized community-building of the White Plum sangha. The LA sangha mushroomed. "From a group of eight resident members in 1972, we had more than 100 people sitting zazen on a daily basis," recalls Genpo Roshi. Though the numbers were high, Maezumi Roshi maintained deeply personal relationships with his students. He began giving mind-to-mind transmission, a tradition that linked his students to the great masters of the past: Yasutani Roshi, Soto sect founder Dogen Zenji Roshi, Bodhidharma and Buddha Shakyamuni himself.
The LA center was the first of six that Maezumi Roshi founded in the United States, South America and Europe. He was meticulous about following the forms of his tradition, and this meant getting the paperwork done correctly. He formally registered each center, each dharma heir and every monk with Soto Headquarters in Japan.
Meanwhile, he was also building his own family. He married Martha Ekyo Maezumi, a cultural anthropology student, in 1975 after two years of courtship. They had three children together, Kirsten Mitsuyo, Yuri Jundo and Shira "Yoshi" Yoshimi. But, Ekyo admits, "his focus was always on his students and their practice. We wanted some time and attention too but it wasn't always there. It was unfortunate, but we all adored him and enjoyed as much time as we could together. It certainly wasn't easy."
Doctors often tell elderly patients that having a small heart attack is a blessing. Seismologists consider little earthquakes good news. These little episodes respectively strengthen the cardiovascular system and release the pressure of the earth. This principle could be applied to the White Plum sanga, which in 1983 suffered a crisis that arrested hearts and shook the ground for many students.
When Maezumi Roshi admitted in public that he was an alcoholic, he did so with deep remorse. But remorse alone could not prevent a mass exodus. Puritanical American idealism with its unrealistic expectations led many to assume the master was above vices. "In fact he was a great teacher with unresolved issues," recalls long-time student John Daishin Buksbazen. "It knocked the idea of the perfect guru into a cocked hat."
Seeing their Japanese master at a human level forced students to re-examine their own motivations. Why had they come here? Some came to work out personal problems, seeking salvation, seeking answers to the great "Who am I?" and "What is reality?" questions. Others came looking for bliss experiences without drugs. And some were merely attracted to the exoticness of Zen aesthetics and form. Whatever the reasons, suddenly they had to assess what practice meant to them and jettison the rest. ZCLA began to sell off its properties. Many made a permanent break from the group, including Maezumi's third heir, Charlotte Joko Beck.
One of those who felt the crisis most keenly was Ekyo Maezumi, Roshi's wife. But she speaks without a trace of bitterness. "It helped the students to see that the teacher wasn't omnipotent and the teacher was human," says Ekyo. "It made each person realize that they were responsible for their practice." Using money sent from Maezumi Roshi's mother, Ekyo moved the children to Idyllwild, a small California mountain community. With time, she gained perspective: "I can take it as a learning experience."
There were others who felt the same. In a revealing documentary shot by Ann Cushman at the time of the crisis, one student expressed heartbroken joy with his fallen guru. "Disillusionment is great," he told the camera crew. "It means I've stopped being illusioned and from that point of view my relationship with the teacher has worked. I am not angry, but free."
Genpo Roshi was not fazed. "Many of us were already quite independent, so I think we were not as hard hit," he says. "So much depended on where you were in your practice. I always felt with Roshi that the deepest connection was to his realization and understanding and that was never shaken by how he manifested in his life."
Egyoku Sensei found the sangha ultimately resilient. "This community has an incredible capacity to regenerate itself." She likens it to a lizard. "Its tail is cut off but it keeps coming back. That event doesn't define us. It was a pruning. Life pruned us. We had to look at it and ask what does the sangha need to grow again?"
Like the abrupt removal of training wheels, the episode was scary and then exhilarating. While Maezumi focused his efforts on the Zen Mountain Center in Idyllwild, senior students began fanning out, setting up their own orders and experimenting with the form. "Through training, all the talents and knowledge we had developed for our own success became tools for the dharma," says Chozen Roshi.
And for the most part, those talents were channeled to serve others. Glassman had already moved east to set up the Zen Community of New York. He began drifting apart from White Plum as an institution but stayed connected to the practice and lineage through his interpretation of Zen as social action. He founded the much-written-about Greyston Bakery and the more recent Peacemaker Order. Daido Roshi, originally a military man and an artist (a student of the legendary photographer Minor White), emphasized monastic Zen meditation and koan study at his center but with the radical change of training men and women together. He also started a publishing company, a prison program and various environmental initiatives.
Genpo Roshi, once a competitive athlete, was one of the most experimental teachers of the second generation. After teaching in Europe and establishing the international Kanzeon sangha, he settled in Salt Lake City, Utah, where he developed the Big Mind technique, a blend of Jungian psychology and Zen. Genpo Roshi discovered that by asking a few Socratic questions, he could "bring about a transcendent experience, opening up the Zen eye or Buddha eye." It's a bold statement.
"I am sure this seems like a quick fix and in a way it is, but Zen has always been known as the sudden school. Zen masters are always seeking ways to create a sudden enlightenment so it is well within our tradition to be non-traditional," says Genpo Roshi with disarming confidence. "Zen teachers have always been a bit bizarre."
"We don't have to all do what Genpo is doing because he is doing that," says Egyoku Sensi, who is busy with her own groundbreaking ideas. "But we can respect and trust that expression and learn from his experiences."
"One of the things about Zen is that it has the ability to take the shape of the container it is in," explains Daido Loorie. "The fundamental teaching is the same-which is basically awakening and realization-but the upaya, the skillful means people use, changes."
It takes considerable skillful means to find trustworthy students. The White Plum sangha is comprised of the 12 direct lineage holders of Maezumi Roshi, and all of four generations of their heirs. Glassman was the first to name his own successor, giving shiho to writer Peter Matthiessen, who founded Sagaponack Zendo. Glassman went on to ordain 16 others, including rabbis, Catholic priests and poets. He sought people who would not emulate him but who could "realize the essence of Zen, strictly realizing and actualizing the oneness of life." How each student interpreted or manifested that was up to the individual. The only constant was an emphasis on daily zazen practice. "But for me that's like emphasizing eating as part of the day," says Glassman.
About fifty successors have since been named in the lineage worldwide but even with White Plum's annual meetings, it's hard to keep track. Daido Roshi likens it to a large extended family. "I know some of the successors," he says, "but they have successors who I wouldn't know if I ran into them on the street. The one thing that connects us is that we came from the same teacher."
Naming heirs involves traditional, esoteric shiho ceremonies that take place over the course of a week. Details are not for public discussion. But everyone would say that naming an heir is profoundly personal. "What we are talking about is human experience which is a very difficult thing to put to words except poetry," says Daido Roshi. How does a teacher know how his or her heir should be? "It is like asking someone how he knows he is in love. It is an intuitive sense of recognition. Not so rational."
"You know when you know that they know what you know," says Genpo Roshi. "You see that they see through the same eyes."
After things settled down, Maezumi Roshi continued teaching, holding retreats and leading his students to (paraphrasing Dogen Roshi's words) study the self, forget the self and be enlightened by the ten thousand dharmas. "He had the meatiest, juiciest time as a teacher ahead of him, he was reaching a nice ripe old age," says Genpo Roshi. But just when the sangha seemed to be riding smoothly, their teacher let go. On the spring day when Maezumi Roshi died, it was again time to prune.
In his will, Maezumi named Bernie Glassman as president of White Plum. Glassman assumed the role, convening an annual meeting with all the heirs, seeing to appointments and guiding the sangha, but only until the dust settled. The group still meets once a year, usually in the early spring, but Glassman no longer attends. And while he will always be part of the lineage, he does not consider himself part of the organization. Genpo Roshi is the current president of White Plum. "I think I am vice president," says Daido Roshi. "It's not that formal. We hang out, usually for a couple of days. It's celebratory and at the same time business."
Egyoku Sensei was put in charge of ZCLA after several bumpy attempts at reorganization. Maezumi's shoes were not easy to fill. "Our founding teacher had died. We had to strip it down again," she says. "We had to ask, 'What are the ingredients left? What was our legacy? Who is willing to work?'"
It took time and a forceful act of nature for Egyoku to accept her new role. In December 1997, a fire started by a space heater in what used to be Maezumi Roshi's residence at ZCLA, where Egyoku Sensei was trying to make her home. Afterwards, a fireman took her to survey the room, gutted and charred. Suddenly, Maezumi Roshi appeared by her side. "Something is gone now," he said. "That's a good thing, Egyoku. Now do what you have to do here." She finally felt a release that allowed her to completely overhaul the center. "Nothing has been left unturned. But someday it will be cut back again."
The successors all seem to agree that Maezumi's trust in them is the backbone of the strong legacy. It allowed them to own the teachings. "It's not about preserving something, it's about making it grow," says Egoku Sensei. "It was not for him to develop American Zen in the West. His job was plant the seeds. What it would look like, how it would manifest, was up to us. He had tremendous faith in us."
Genpo Roshi recalls that just before his death, Maezumi Roshi said he felt he was a hindrance to the dharma taking root. "In a way, his death was a gift-it freed us. The ball was handed over and we had to develop new ways of approaching the teaching in the West."
And that meant tweaking tradition. Genpo Roshi decided not to make any drastic changes for at least a year. "I knew this would be a rocky time and a time to just grieve," he says. "After that I started making lots of changes."
With Genpo Roshi in charge, Glassman was free to focus on building the Greyston Mandala and his international Zen Peacemaker Order. He renounced his monastic vows and gave up his elegant Zen robes in favor of street clothes and a clown nose. The term "traditional Zen" does not compute with Glassman. "Maezumi Roshi was not carrying out the tradition of the Japanese Soto sect when he came here," he says. "The Soto sect of Japan was not carrying out the traditions of Chinese Zen. You have to be careful with the word 'traditional.' We honor a lot of eccentric people." He likens it to Snow White's seven dwarves, each with his own style. "And I'm Dopey," he says.
But it is unlikely that Dopey could have established a multi-million dollar commercial enterprise that not only provides tasty cakes and bread but also supports a network of community development organizations. Which is what Bernie the Boobysatva and his successors have done in the name of Zen. Greyston Mandala now employs several hundred people in Yonkers at its highly successful bakery, and serves a few thousand more by providing housing, an AIDS clinic, childcare and other services.Construction on a new $10 million complex designed by Maya Lin is under way.
Glassman continues to clown at refugee camps, meet with Israel peace groups, and has developed an "internet of activists and activist groups" he calls Indra's Net. "Each one of us is a jewel in the node of a giant net," he says, "and each jewel reflects every other jewel." By linking up, "we can be a more active force in social change."
The sangha did not sink after Maezumi's death, it did not dissolve. Buoyed like petals strewn on the water, the heirs of Maezumi Roshi are going their own way-from streets of New York to Salt Lake City to Tel Aviv to an island off of the Dutch coast. Egyoku Sensei, a natural born organizer, has masterfully restructured ZCLA, creating a model of healthy center administration based on shared stewardship. She also introduced a lineage of women to the sangha by researching great female masters of the past, like the first Buddhist nun, Mahaprajapati Gotami Mahatheri, and including their names in the chants. Chozen Roshi, a pediatrician and a mother, has focused on what she calls a "family-style" Zen at her center in Oregon "with an eye on abuse of power and boundary crossing issues." Genpo Roshi recently gave shiho to two new successors and teaches Big Mind seminars around the world. Maezumi's children are also blossoming-Yuri is heading off to study French cuisine at the Cordon Bleu, Yoshi is on the dean's list at UCSB and Kirsten is pursuing an acting career in Hollywood.
"To me, Maezumi's genius lay in his ability to see the buddhanature and also teaching potential in many different kinds of people," says Chozen Roshi. "There are some Zen teachers who have no successors or maybe one or two. Maezumi was more the Tibetan style-scatter the seeds widely, some will grow and some will not. We won't know for several generations which of his successors have established lineages that will continue."
What we know for sure, though, is how Maezumi Roshi felt about the dharma. On the evening of his death, in the inka poem he wrote to Bernie Glassman, he said,
Life after life, birth after birth
Never Falter.
Do not let die the Wisdom seed of the Buddhas and Ancestors.
Truly! I implore you!
Noa Jones is a freelance writer for The Los Angeles Times and other publications. Her last story for the Shambhala Sun-An Uncommon Lama-appeared in the November 2003 issue.

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Samsara and Nirvana Are One

The following excerpts from the Hevajra Tantra discuss the tantric idea that there is no fundamental difference between cyclic existence and nirvana. Buddhas perceive them as undifferentiable, but ordinary beings, because of their delusions, think in terms of dichotomies, and so imagine that the path and goal are separate.
Then the essence is declared, pure and consisting in knowledge, where there is not the slightest difference between cyclic existence and nirvana.
Nothing is mentally produced in the highest bliss, and no one produces it,
There is no bodily form, neither object nor subject,
Neither flesh nor blood, neither dung nor urine,
No sickness, no delusion, no purification,
No passion, no wrath, no delusion, no envy,
No malignity, no conceit of self, no visible object,
Nothing mentally produced and no producer,
No friend is there, no enemy,
Calm is the Innate and undifferentiated....
The Enlightened One is neither existence nor non-existence; he has a form with arms and faces and yet in highest bliss is formless.
So the whole world is the Innate, for the Innate is its essence.
Its essence too is nirvana when the mind is in a purified state.

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The reason we practice meditation
By the venerable Thrangu Rinpoche

In the spread of Buddhism in America, the Kagyu lineage was in the forefront of the sending of lamas to America. Of these lamas, the three great progenitors of the dharma in America were His Holiness the Gyalwa Karmapa, His Eminence Kalu Rinpoche, and the Vidyadhara Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche. It was very unfortunate that in the 1980s we lost all of these great beings, but in the aftermath, there were a number of remarkable lamas in the lineage who stepped forward to fill their places and to bring great benefit to sentient beings. Amongst these, in the forefront of them, was The Very Venerable Khenchen Thrangu Rinpoche, abbot by appointment of His Holiness Karmapa of Rumtek Monastery in Sikkim. He is also abbot of his own monasteries in Nepal and Tibet, and by appointment of Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche, of Gampo Abbey in Nova Scotia. In addition he has been very generous and kind to Western students, teaching the dharma extensively in retreats and seminars throughout the world. Rinpoche taught in Seattle for the first time in May 1996. This transcript is from his teachings the evening of May 24.
I'd like to begin by welcoming all of you here tonight. I recognize that you've come here out of your sincere interest in, and wish to practice, genuine dharma, and out of your respect for my teaching. And this is all delightful to me, and I thank you for it. I consider myself fortunate to have such an opportunity to form such a connection with you. To begin, I would like to recite a traditional supplication to the teachers of my lineage, and while doing so, I invite you to join me in an attitude of confidence and devotion. (Chants)
The essence of the buddhadharma, the teachings of the Buddha, is practice. And when we say practice, we mean the practice of meditation, which can consist of either the meditation known as tranquillity or that known as insight. But in either case, it must be implemented in actual practice. The reason we practice meditation is to attain happiness. And this means states of happiness in both the short term and the long term. With regard to short-term happiness, when we speak of happiness, we usually mean either or both of two things, one of which is physical pleasure and the other of which is mental pleasure. But if you look at either of these pleasant experiences, the root of either one has to be a mind that is at peace, a mind that is free of suffering. Because as long as your mind is unhappy and without any kind of tranquillity or peace, then no matter how much physical pleasure you experience, it will not take the form of happiness per se. On the other hand, even if you lack the utmost ideal physical circumstances of wealth and so on, if your mind is at peace, you will be happy anyway.
We practice meditation, therefore, in part in order to obtain the short-term benefit of a state of mental happiness and peace. Now, the reason why meditation helps with this is that, normally, we have a great deal of thought, or many different kinds of thoughts running through our minds. And some of these thoughts are pleasant, even delightful. Some of them however, are unpleasant, agitating, and worrisome. Now, if you examine the thoughts that are present in your mind from time to time, you will see that the pleasant thoughts are comparatively few, and the unpleasant thoughts are many - which means that as long as your mind is ruled or controlled by the thoughts that pass through it, you will be quite unhappy. In order to gain control over this process, therefore, we begin with the meditation practice of tranquillity, which produces a basic state of contentment and peace within the mind of the practitioner.
An example of this is the great Tibetan yogi Jetsun Milarepa, who lived in conditions of the utmost austerity. He lived it utter solitude, in caves and isolated mountains. His clothes were very poor; he had no nice clothes. His food was neither rich nor tasty. In fact, [for a number of years] he lived on nettle soup alone, as a result of which he became physically very thin, almost emaciated. Now, if you consider his external circumstances alone, the isolation and poverty in which he lived, you would think he must have been miserable. And yet, as we can tell from the many songs he composed, because his mind was fundamentally at peace, his experience was one of constant unfolding delight. His songs are songs that express the utmost state of delight or rapture. He saw every place he went to, no matter how isolated and austere an environment it was, as beautiful, and he experienced his life of utmost austerity as extremely pleasant.
In fact, the short-term benefits of meditation are more than merely peace of mind, because our physical health as well depends, to a great extent, upon our state of mind. And therefore, if you cultivate this state of mental contentment and peace, then you will tend not to become ill, and you will as well tend to heal easily if and when you do become ill. The reason for this is that one of the primary conditions which brings about states of illness is mental agitation, which produces a corresponding agitation or disturbance of the channels and the energies within your body. These generate new sicknesses, ones you have not yet experienced, and also prevent the healing of old sicknesses. This agitation of the channels and winds or energies also obstructs the benefit which could be derived from medical treatment. If you practice meditation, then as your mind settles down, the channels and energies moving through the channels return to their rightful functioning, as a result of which you tend not to become ill and you are able to heal any illnesses you already have. And we can see an illustration of this also in the life of Jetsun Milarepa, who engaged in the utmost austerities with regard to where he lived, the clothes he wore, the food he ate, and so on, throughout the early part of his life. And yet this did not harm his health, because he managed to have a very long life, was extremely vigorous and youthful to the end of his life, which indicates the fact that through the proper practice of meditation, the mental peace and contentment that is generated calms down or corrects the functioning of the channels and energies, allowing for the healing of sickness and the prevention of sickness.
The ultimate or long-term benefit of the practice of meditation is becoming free of all suffering, which means no longer having to experience the sufferings of birth, aging, sickness and death. Now, this attainment of freedom is called, in the common language of all the Buddhist traditions, buddhahood, and in the particular terminology of the vajrayana, the supreme attainment, or supreme siddhi. In any case, the root or basic cause of this attainment is the practice of meditation. The reason for this is, again, that generally we have a lot of thoughts running through our minds, some of which are beneficial - thoughts of love, compassion, rejoicing in the happiness of others, and so on - and many of which are negative - thoughts of attachment, aversion, jealousy, competitiveness, and so on. Now, there are comparatively few of the former type of thought and comparatively many of the latter type of thought, because we have such strong habits that have been accumulating within us over a period of time without beginning. And it's only by removing these habits of negativity that we can free ourselves from suffering.
You cannot simply remove these mental afflictions, or kleshas, by saying to yourself, "I will not generate any more mental affliction," because you do not have the necessary freedom of mind or control over the kleshas to do so. In order to relinquish these, you need to actually attain this freedom, which begins, according to the common path, with the cultivation of tranquillity. Now, when you begin to meditate, [when] you begin to practice the basic meditation of tranquillity meditation, you may find that your mind won't stay still for a moment. But this is not permanent. This will change as you practice, and you will eventually be able to place your mind at rest at will, at which point you have successfully alleviated the manifest disturbance of these mental afflictions or kleshas. On the basis of that, then you can apply the second technique, which is called insight, which consists of learning to recognize and directly experience the nature of your own mind. This nature is referred to as emptiness. When you recognize this nature and rest in it, then all of the kleshas, all of the mental afflictions that arise, dissolve into this emptiness, and are no longer afflictions. Therefore, the freedom, or result, which is called buddhahood, depends upon the eradication of these mental afflictions, and that depends upon the practice of meditation.
The practice of tranquillity and insight is the general path which is common to both the paths of sutra and tantra. In the specific context which is particular to the vajrayana, the main techniques are called the generation stage and the completion stage. These two techniques are extremely powerful and effective. Generation stage refers to the visualization of, for example, the form of a lineage guru, the form of a deity or yidam, or the form of a dharma protector. Now, initially, when first encountering this technique, it's not uncommon for beginners to think, what is the point of this? Well, the point of this is that we support and confirm our ignorance and suffering and our kleshas through the constant generation of impure projections or impure appearances which make up our experience of samsara. And in order to transcend this process, we need to transcend these impure projections, together with the suffering that they bring about. A very effective way to do this is to replace these gradually, replace these projections of impurity with pure projections based on the iconography of the yidam, the dharmapala, and so on. By starting to experience the world as the mandala of the deity and all beings as the presence of that deity, then you gradually train yourself to let go of mental afflictions, let go of impure projections, and you create the environment for the natural manifestation of your own innate wisdom.
Now, all of this occurs gradually through this practice of the generation stage. The actual deities who are used can vary in appearance. Some of them are peaceful and some of them are wrathful. In general, the iconography of the wrathful deities points out the innate power of wisdom, and that of the peaceful deities the qualities of loving-kindness and compassion. Also, there are male deities and female deities. The male deities embody the method or compassion, and the female deities embody intelligence or wisdom.
For these reasons, it's appropriate to perform these practices of meditation upon deities. And because these practices are so prevalent in our tradition, if you go into a vajrayana practice place or temple, you will probably see lots of images of deities - peaceful deities, wrathful deities, and extraordinarily wrathful deities. And you'll see lots of shrines with some very eccentric offerings on them. Initially, if you're not used to all this, you might think, "What is all this?" And you might feel, "Well, the basic practices of tranquility and insight make a lot of sense, and are very interesting; and all these deities, all these rituals, and all these eccentric musical instruments are really not very interesting at all." However, each and every aspect of the iconography, and each and every implement you find in a shrine room, is there for a very specific reason. The reason in general is that we need to train ourselves to replace our projection of impurity or negativity with a projection or experience of purity. And you can't simply fake this, you can't simply talk yourself into this, because you're trying to replace something that is deeper than a concept. It's more like a feeling. So, therefore, in the technique by which you replace it, a great deal of feeling or experience of the energy of purity has to be actually generated, and in order to generate that, we use physical representations of offerings, we use musical instruments in order to inspire the feeling of purity, and so on. In short, all of these implements are useful in actually generating the experience of purity.
That is the first of the two techniques of vajrayana practice, the generation stage. The second technique is called the completion stage, and it consists of a variety of related techniques, of which perhaps the most important and the best known are mahamudra and dzogchen or "The Great Perfection." Now, sometimes, it seems to be presented that dzogchen is more important, and at other times it seems to be presented that mahamudra is more important, and as a result people become a little bit confused about this and are unsure which tradition or which practice they should pursue. Ultimately, the practices in essence and in their result are the same. In fact, each of them has a variety of techniques within it. For example, within mahamudra practice alone, there are many methods which can be used, such as candali (see footnote) and so forth, and within the practice of dzogchen alone there are as well many methods, such as the cultivation of primordial purity, spontaneous presence, and so on. But ultimately, mahamudra practice is always presented as guidance on or an introduction to your mind, and dzogchen practice is always presented as guidance or introduction to your mind. Which means that the root of these is no different, and the practice of either mahamudra or dzogchen will generate a great benefit. Further, we find in The Aspiration of Mahamudra by the third Gyalwa Karmapa, Lord Rangjung Dorje, the following stanza:
It does not exist, and has not been seen, even by the Victors.
It is not non-existent, it is the basis of all Samsara and Nirvana.
This is not contradictory, but is the great Middle Way.
May I come to see the nature which is beyond elaboration.
And that is from the mahamudra tradition. Then, in The Aspiration for the Realization of the Nature of the Great Perfection by the omniscient Jigme Lingpa, an aspiration liturgy from the dzogchen tradition, we find the following stanza:
It does not exist, it has not been seen, even by the Victors.
It is not non-existent, it is the basis of all Samsara and Nirvana.
It is not contradictory, it is the great Middle Way.
May I come to recognize dzogpa chenpo, the nature of the ground.
In other words, these two traditions are concerned entirely with the recognition of the same nature.
So both short-term and ultimate happiness depend on the cultivation of meditation, which from the common point of view of the sutras (the point of view held in common by all tradition of Buddhism) is tranquillity and insight, and from the uncommon point of view of the vajrayana is the generation and completion stages.
Meditation, however, depends in part upon the generation of loving-kindness and compassion. And this is true of any meditation, but it is especially most true of vajrayana meditation. The reason is that the specific vajrayana practices - the visualization of deities or meditation upon mahamudra and so on - depend upon the presence of a pure motivation on the part of the practitioner from the very start. If this pure motivation or genuine motivation is not present - and, since we're ordinary people, its quite possible that it might not be present - not much benefit will really occur. For that reason, vajrayana practitioners always try to train their motivation, and try to develop the motivation that's known as the awakened mind, or bodhicitta.
Now, as an indication of this, if you look at the liturgies used in vajrayana practice, you'll see that the long and extensive forms of vajrayana liturgies always begin with a clarification of, or meditation upon, bodhicitta, and that even the short and shortest liturgies always begin with a meditation upon bodhicitta, loving-kindness and compassion, the point of this being that this type of motivation is necessary for all meditation, but especially for vajrayana practice.
The only real meaning that we can give to our being born on this planet - and in particular being born as human beings on this planet - and the only really meaningful result that we can show for our lives is to have helped the world: to have helped our friends, to have helped all the beings on this planet as much as we can. And if we devote our lives or any significant part of our lives to destroying others and harming others, then to the extent that we actually do so, our lives have been meaningless. So if you understand that the only real point of a human life is to help others, to benefit others, to improve the world, then you must understand that the basis of not harming others but benefiting others is having the intention not to harm others and the intention to benefit others.
Now, the main cause of having such a stable intention or stable motivation is the actual cultivation of love and compassion for others. Which means, when you find yourself full of spite and viciousness - and it is not abnormal to be so - then you have to recognize it, and be aware of it as what it is, and let go of it. And then, even though you may be free of spite or viciousness, and you may have the wish to improve things, you may be thinking only of yourself; you may be thinking only of helping or benefiting yourself. When that's the case, then you have to recollect that the root of that type of mentality, which is quite petty and limited and tight, is desiring victory for yourself even at the expense of the suffering and loss experienced by others. And, in that case, you have to gradually expand your sympathy for others, and therefore this cultivation of bodhicitta or altruism in general as a motivation is an essential way of making your life meaningful.
The importance of love and compassion is not an idea that is particular to Buddhism. Everyone throughout the world talks about the importance of love and compassion. There's no one who says love and compassion are bad and we should try and get rid of them. However, there is an uncommon element in the method or approach which is taken to these by Buddhism. In general, when we think of compassion, we think of a natural or spontaneous sympathy or empathy which we experience when we perceive the suffering of someone else. And we generally think of compassion as being a state of pain, of sadness, because you see the suffering of someone else and you see what's causing that suffering and you know you can't do anything to remove the cause of that suffering and therefore the suffering itself. So, whereas before you generated compassion, one person was miserable, and after you generate compassion, two people are miserable. And this actually happens.
However, the approach (that the Buddhist tradition takes) to compassion is a little bit different, because it's founded on the recognition that, whether or not you can benefit that being or that person in their immediate situation and circumstances, you can generate the basis for their ultimate benefit. And the confidence in that removes the frustration or the misery which otherwise somehow afflicts ordinary compassion. So, when compassion is cultivated in that way, it is experienced as delightful rather than miserable.
The way that we cultivate compassion is called immeasurable compassion. And, in fact, to be precise, there are four aspects of what we would, in general, call compassion, that are called, therefore, the four immeasurables. Now, normally, when we think of something that's called immeasurable, we mean immeasurably vast. Here, the primary connotation of the term is not vastness but impartiality. And the point of saying immeasurable compassion is compassion that is not going to help one person at the expense of hurting another. It is a compassion that is felt equally for all beings. The basis of the generation of such an impartial compassion is the recognition of the fact that all beings without exception really want and don't want the same things. All beings, without exception, want to be happy and want to avoid suffering. There is no being anywhere who really wants to suffer. And if you understand that, and to the extent that you understand that, you will have the intense wish that all beings be free from suffering. And there is no being anywhere who does not want to be happy; and if you understand that, and to the extent that you understand that, you will have the intense wish that all beings actually achieve the happiness that they wish to achieve. Now, because the experience of happiness and freedom from suffering depend upon the generation of the causes of these, then the actual form your aspiration takes is that all beings possess not only happiness but the causes of happiness, that they not only be free of suffering but of the causes of suffering.
The causes of suffering are fundamentally the presence in our minds of mental afflictions - ignorance, attachment, aversion, jealousy, arrogance, and so on - and it is through the existence of these that we come to suffer. Now, through recognizing that there is a way to transcend these causes of suffering - fundamentally, through the eradication of these causes through practicing meditation, which may or may not happen immediately but is a definite and workable process - through this confidence, then this love - wishing beings to be happy - and the compassion of wishing beings to be free from suffering, is not hopeless or frustrated at all. And, therefore, the boundless love and boundless compassion generate a boundless joy that is based on the confidence that you can actually help beings free themselves.
So boundless love is the aspiration that beings possess happiness and the causes of happiness. Boundless compassion or immeasurable compassion is the aspiration that beings be free of suffering and the causes of suffering. And the actual confidence and the delight you take in the confidence that you can actually bring these about is boundless joy. Now, because all of these are boundless or immeasurable or impartial, then they all have a quality, which is equanimity. Which is to say that if these are cultivated properly, you don't have compassion for one being but none for another , and so on. Now, normally, when we experience these qualities, of course, they are partial; they are anything but impartial. In order to eradicate the fixation that causes us to experience compassion only for some and not for others, then you can actually train yourself in cultivating equanimity for beings through recognizing that they all wish for the same thing and wish to avoid the same thing, and through doing so you can greatly increase or enhance your loving-kindness and compassion.
This has been a brief introduction to the practice of meditation, and how to train in and generate compassion. If you have any questions, please ask them.
Question: Rinpoche, can you speak a little bit about the difference between pure projection and impure projection, and in particular, where do pure projections actually come from?
Rinpoche: First of all, impure projections are how we experience because of the presence in our minds of kleshas or mental afflictions. Because we have kleshas, then we experience friend and enemy - that to which we are attached and that towards which we have aversion - we experience delight and disgust and so on. And all of these ways we experience the world - all these ways we experience are fundamentally tinged with, at least tinged with unpleasantness.
Now, what is called pure appearance or pure projection is based on the experience of the true nature or essential purity of what, in confusion, we experience to be five types of mental affliction, or the five kleshas. The true nature of these five kleshas is what are called the five wisdoms. For example, when you let go of fixation or obsession on a self, or with yourself, then the fundamental nature of the way you experience is a sameness, a lack of preference or partiality, which is called the wisdom of sameness. And, when you recognize the nature of all things, then that recognition which pervades or fills all of your experience is called the wisdom of the dharmadhatu. And so on.
Now, when you experience the five wisdoms rather than the five kleshas or five mental afflictions, then instead of projecting all of the impurity which you project on the basis of experiencing the kleshas, you project purity, or you experience purity, which is the actual manifestation of these five wisdoms as realms, as forms of buddhas, and these are what are called the pure appearances which are experienced by bodhisattvas and so forth. Now, in order to approach this, in order to cultivate the experience of these wisdoms and the external experiences which go along with the experience of these wisdoms, we meditate upon the bodies of these buddhas, the realms, palaces and so on. By generating clarity of these visualized appearances and stabilizing that, then gradually we transform how we experience the world.
Question: In practicing compassion, there's the practice of tonglen, which is the sending and receiving, taking the suffering from all sentient beings and giving them the happiness and merit that we have. And, in this practice, I've practiced it before, and it seems to go well for a while, but then there's a subtle sense of "I" that creeps in that says, "I don't really want to take the suffering," or its, "I can't deal with too many people having cancer, I just can't take it all on myself," and so one kind of loses a little courage in the practice. So, could you illuminate us on this practice, and how to overcome these obstacles and really develop heroic mind?
Rinpoche: What you say is very true, especially in the beginning of undertaking this practice. And, in fact, its okay that it be experienced that way. Even though there is a quality of faking it about the degree to which you actually really are ready to take on the suffering of others in the beginning, there's still benefit in doing the practice, because up until you begin this practice, you've probably been entirely selfish. And, to even attempt to fake altruism is a tremendous improvement. But it doesn't remain insincere like that, because eventually the habit starts to deepen and starts to counteract the habit of selfishness.
Now if, when you began practicing tonglen, you already had one hundred per cent concern with the welfare of others and no concern for your own welfare, then you wouldn't need to practice tonglen in the first place. So, it is designed to work for a practitioner who's starting from a place of selfishness and to lead them into this place of concern for others. And, gradually, by using the practice, you will actually cultivate the sincere desire to take suffering away from others and experience it yourself; you will cultivate real love and compassion for others. But on the other hand, you don't really do the practice in order to be able to, at that moment, take on the suffering of others and experience it yourself; you're really doing it in order to train the mind. And by training your mind and developing the motivation and the actual wish to free others from suffering, then the long-term result is that you have the ability to directly dispel the suffering of others.
Question: Rinpoche, you said that we may not be able to - one person may not be able to directly affect or remove short-term unhappiness or suffering of another person, but that we can learn to generate the basis of another's happiness, ultimate happiness. So could you say more, please, about how one person can generate the basis of ultimate happiness for another person?
Rinpoche: Well, the direct basis of establishing another being in a state of freedom or happiness, long-term or ultimate happiness, is being able to show them how to get rid of their mental afflictions and to teach them how to recognize and therefore abandon causes of suffering. And, through doing so in that way, then you can establish them gradually in ultimate happiness. But even in cases where you can't, for whatever reason, do that, by having the intention to benefit that being, then when you yourself become fully free, then you will be able to actually help them and gradually free and protect them as well.
Question: Rinpoche, can you say a little more about the practice of letting go when the mind is agitated, as you described, as used in mahamudra and dzogchen? I experience my mind when I sit as being agitated. And there's the practice of letting go. And I'm wondering if you can just say more about that in a practical way?
Rinpoche: In general, the main approach that is taken in the mahamudra and dzogchen traditions is applied when you are looking at the nature of your mind. Now, kleshas or mental afflictions are thoughts, and thoughts are the natural display of the mind. Thoughts may be pleasant, neutral, or unpleasant, they may be positive or negative, but in any case, whatever type of thought arises, you deal with it in exactly the same way. You simply look directly at it.
Now, looking at the thought, or looking into the thought, or looking at the nature of the thought, is quite different from analyzing it. You don't attempt to analyze the contents of the thought, nor do you attempt to think about the thought. You just simply look directly at it. And when you look directly at a thought, you don't find anything. Now, you may think that you don't find anything because you don't know how to look or you don't know where to look, but in fact, that's not the reason. The reason, according to Buddha, is that thoughts are empty. And this is the basic meaning of all the various teachings on emptiness he gave, such as the sixteen emptinesses and so on.
Now, to use anger as an example of this, if you become angry, and then you look directly at the anger - which doesn't mean analyze the contents of the thoughts of anger, but you look directly at that specific thought of anger - then you won't find anything. And, in that moment of not finding anything, the poisonous quality of the anger will somehow vanish or dissolve. Your mind will relax, and you will, at least to some extent, be free of anger.
Now, you may or may not, at this point, understand this, but in any case, you'll have opportunity to work with this approach tomorrow and the next day, and over the next couple of days you may come to have some experience of this.
So, we're going to conclude now with a brief dedication. But I would also like to thank you for demonstrating your great interest in dharma, and listening and asking questions.

footnote: gtum-mo in Tibetan, meaning fierce or wrathful and referring to a kind of psychic heat generated and experienced through certain meditative practices of the vajrayana. This heat serves to burn up all types of obstacles and confusion. Included in the Six Doctrines of Naropa, the Six Doctrines of Niguma, and the Six Doctrines of Sukhasiddhi.

Note:
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Ten Doubts about Pure Land
By Tien Tai Patriarch Chih I
Translated by Master Thich Thien Tam

Question 1
Great Compassion is the life calling of Buddhas and Bodhisattvas. Thus, those who have
developed the Bodhi Mind, wishing to rescue and ferry other sentient beings across, should
simply vow to be reborn in the Triple Realm, among the five turbidities and the three evil paths.
Why should we abandon sentient beings to lead a selfish life of tranquillity? Is this not a lack
of compassion, a preoccupation with egoistic needs, contrary to the path of enlightenment?
Answer
There are two types of Bodhisattvas. The first type are those who have followed the
Bodhisattva path for a long time and attained the Tolerance of Non-Birth (insight into
the non-origination of phenomena). This reproach applies to them.
The second type are Bodhisattvas who have not attained the Tolerance of Non-Birth, as
well as ordinary beings who have just developed the Bodhi Mind. If they aspire to perfect
that Tolerance and enter the evil life of the Triple Realm to save sentient beings, they should
remain in constant proximity to the Buddhas. As stated in the Perfection of Wisdom Treatise:
"It is unwise for human beings who are still bound by all kinds of afflictions, even if they
possess a great compassionate mind, to seek a premature rebirth in this evil realm to
rescue sentient beings.
"Why is this so? It is because in this evil, defiled world, afflictions are powerful and
widespread. Those who lack the power of Tolerance (of Non-Birth) are bound to be
swayed by the external circumstances. They then become slaves to form and sound,
fame and fortune, with the resulting karma of greed, anger and delusion. Once this
occurs, they cannot even save themselves, much less others!
"If, for example, they are born in the human realm, in this evil environment full of
non-believers and externalists, it is difficult to encounter genuine teachers. Therefore, it
is not easy to hear the Buddhadharma nor to achieve the goals of the sages.
"Of those who planted the seeds of generosity, morality and blessings in previous lives
and are thus now enjoying power and fame, how many are not infaturated with a life of
wealth and honor, wallowing in endless greed and lust?
"Therefore, even when they are counselled by enlightened teachers, they do not believe
them nor act accordingly. Moreover, to satisfy their passions, they take adavantage of
their existing power and influence, creating a great deal of bad karma. Thus, when their
present life comes to an end, they descend upon the three evil paths for countless eons.
After that, they are reborn as humans of low social and economic status. If they do not
then meet good spiritual advisors, they will continue to be deluded, creating more bad
karma and descending once again into the lower realms. From time immemorial, sentient
beings caught in the cycle of Birth and Death have been in this predicament. This is called
the 'Difficult Path of Practice'."
The Vimalakirti Sutra also states,
"If you cannot even cure your own illness, how can you cure the illness of others?"
The Perfection of Wisdom Treatise further states:
"Take the case of two persons, each of whom watches a relative drowning in the river.
The first person, acting on impulse, hastily jumps into the water. However, because he
lacks the necessary skills, in the end, both of them drown. The second person, more
intelligent and resourceful, hurries off to fetch a boat and sails to the rescue. Thus, both
persons escape drowning.
"Newly aspiring Bodhisattvas are like the first individual who still lacks the power of
Tolerance (of Non-Rebirth) and cannot save sentient beings. Only those Bodhisatttvas
who remain close to the Buddhas and attain that Tolerance can substitute for the Buddhas
and ferry countless sentient beings across, just like the person who has the boat."
The Perfection of Wisdom Treatise goes on to state:
"This is not unlike a young child who should not leave his mother, lest he fall into a well, drown
in the river or die of starvation; or a young bird whose wings are not fully developed. It must bide
its time, hopping from branch to branch, until it can fly afar, leisurely and unimpeded.
"Ordinary persons who lack the Tolerence of Non-Birth should limit themselves to Buddha
Recitation, to achieve one-pointedness of Mind. Once that goal is reached, at the time of death,
they will certainly be reborn in the Pure Land. Having seen Amitabha Buddha and reached the
Tolerance of Non-Birth, they can steer the boat of that Tolerance into the sea of Birth and Death,
to ferry sentient beings across and accomplish countless Buddha deeds at will."
For these reasons, compassionate practitioners who wish to teach and convert sentient
beings in hell, or enter the sea of Birth and Death, should bear in mind the causes and
conditions for rebirth in the Pure Land. This is referred to as the 'Easy Path of Practice' in
the Commentary on the Ten Stages of the Bodhisattvas.
Question 2
All phenomena are by nature empty, always unborn (Non-Birth), equal and still. Are we not
going against this truth when we abandon this world, seeking rebirth in the Land of Ultimate
Bliss? The (Vimalakirti) Sutra teaches that "to be reborn in the Pure Land, you should first
purify your own Mind; only when the Mind is pure, will the Buddha lands be pure." Are not
Pure Land followers going against this truth?
Answer
This question involves two principles and can be answered on two levels.
A) On the level of generality, if you think that seeking rebirth in the Pure Land means
"leaving here and seeking there", and is therefore incompatible with the Truth of Equal
Thusness, are you not committing the same mistake by grasping at this Saha World and
not seeking rebirth in the Pure Land, i.e., "leaving there and grasping here"? If, on the
other hand, you say, "I am neither seeking rebirth there, nor do I wish to remain here,"
you fall into the error of nihilism.
The Diamond Sutra states in this connection:
"Subhuti, ... do not have such a thought. Why? Because one who develops the Supreme
Enlightened Mind does not advocate the (total) annihilation (of the marks of the dharmas.)"
(Bilingual Buddhist Series, Vol. 1. Taipei: Buddhist Cultural Service, 1962, p. 130.)
B) On the level of Specifics, since you have brought up the truth of Non-Birth and the
Pure Mind, I would like to give the following explanation.
Non-Birth is precisely the truth of No-Birth and No-Death. No-Birth means that all dharm