This podcast is offered by the San Francisco Zen Center on the web at www.sfzc.org. Our public programs are made possible by donations from people like you. Thank you. My wife, who is my harshest critic and is always telling me that I or at least warning me not to come off as pompous and so on. I said, did I come off pompous? And she said, yes. When you made that comment about talking to yourself as a 19-year-old, it made it sound as if I was assuming that you were all as naive as I was when I was 19. I want to assure you that I don't think any of you could possibly have been as naive as I was when I was 19. It was partly a different time, too. It wasn't just that I was naive, but the entire Western sangha was a very, very different world.

[01:00]

And friends of mine who are still very much involved in North American practitioner communities are always going out of the way to tell me that things have changed dramatically from the 70s when I was more involved in Western sanghas. What I want to do today is a little different. I kind of thought about how to go about this, but I have... There are some things that I could talk about that I touch upon in this paper. There's some research I've done recently, although it gets kind of technical, but I may be able to distill it, about what the early Chan community was actually doing when they were practicing. Because one of the questions that scholars have is, did Chan just create a new story about Buddhism, but basically did traditional practices... Or were they actually experimenting with new forms of meditation? This is centuries before Shikantaza, before Gunan practice and so on. So there's kind of a black hole.

[02:01]

But what I thought I would do instead, although you'll see that this touches on it, is read a paper that was actually intended for a somewhat different audience. I was invited to a conference at the Institute of Cross-Cultural Psychiatry. where they were very interested in mindfulness meditation, but they were beginning to have some reservations about the research on mindfulness meditation. Now, I assume that many of you, if not most of you, if not all of you, have heard of mindfulness-based stress reduction and mindfulness-based cognitive therapy. These practices, they're basically, they come out of one particular Burmese tradition, Mahasi Sayadaw, although they've been modified a bit, and I'm going to talk about them in here. They've really like taken the country by storm. And the issue is that many people believe that mindfulness meditation or some variation of it is the heart of Buddhism, that Buddhism is about meditation. And then they kind of run with it and it's become very, you know, people are very interested in the application of mindfulness meditation towards all sorts of contemporary psychological ailments.

[03:13]

So I wrote this intending to be polemical. polemical means stir up debate. In other words, I do not phrase things in a congenial and conciliatory manner. And that's in part why I had some reservations about doing this, but I've had so many enjoyable conversations with you over the last couple of days at lunches and dinners that I get the feeling that people like being stirred up. But the other thing to keep in mind when I go through this, it will only take about half an hour, so there should be lots of time talk but I know that if I actually read it I'll pack in a lot more and just put a lot of things on the table I know you probably don't like to be read to but the other thing to keep in mind is many of the things I'm addressing really don't apply to this community I think some of the things I'm addressing do because it has to do with the way you think of meditation but one of the things that you'll see I'm critical of is stripping meditation out of Buddhist forms of practice

[04:14]

And that clearly is very different. I mean, Tassahara is nothing else but an attempt to create a Buddhist form of practice. Or if it's anything, it's that. So here goes. It's called, Is Mindfulness Buddhist and Why It Matters? So in a chapter in an edited volume on the role of culture in depression, Gandalf Obeseckira, he's an anthropologist, but he's a Buddhist anthropologist. He's from Sri Lanka. He starts by quoting a very influential study that was done in 1978 on the social origins of depression. And this is the definition of depression that he uses. It says, the immediate response to loss of an important source of positive value is likely to be a sense of hopelessness accompanied by a gamut of feelings ranging from distress, depression, and shame to anger. Feelings of hopelessness will not always be restricted to the provoking incident, large or small.

[05:19]

It may lead to thoughts about the hopelessness of one's life in general. It is the generalization of hopelessness that we believe forms the central core of depressive disorders. End of quote. Now, Obesecura then responds. He says... End quote. Now, we might want to quibble with Obay Sekhara. We might want more evidence for the similarities he sees between good Sri Lankan Buddhists and American depressives. Do Sri Lankan Buddhists really aspire to a state that we would associate with depression?

[06:21]

Or is the very idea of depression so culturally and historically constructed as to mitigate its cross-cultural utility? In other words, depression doesn't really work as a cross-cultural category. However one approaches these issues on purely doctrinal grounds, Obayasekara has a point. Early Buddhist sutras in general, and Theravada teachings in particular, those are the teachings that are mainstream in Sri Lanka, they hold that, one, to live is to suffer. Two, the only genuine remedy to suffering is escape from samsata. And three, escape requires, among other things, abandoning hope. that happiness in samsata is possible. Yes, Thetavada tradition. If one has any doubts, consider the advanced stages of insight described in the path of purification. This is the Visuddhimagga. It's an authoritative Pali compendium composed in the 5th century by Buddhaghosa in Sri Lanka.

[07:23]

But maybe you've heard of this text. This is the most important meditation manual used in the Pali or Thetavada world today. So Buddhaghosa goes through all the different practices and meditative states discussed in the scriptures, and then he comes to these stages of insight. These are eight stages that immediately precede your first taste of nirvana, called sottapati. And the eight stages include stages like the knowledge of dissolution, or knowledge of appearance as terror, and knowledge of danger. And Buddhaghosa resorts to vivid similes, to capture the affective tone that accompanies these rarefied states. In other words, he's actually trying to tell you what these states feel like. And one of the most harrowing is found in the description of knowledge of appearance as terror. And this is from the Vasuddhi Magga. This is Buddhaghosa describing what it's supposed to feel like to meditate at this particular stage.

[08:25]

He says, a woman's three sons had offended against the king. The king ordered their heads to be cut off. She went with her sons to the place of their execution. When they had cut off the eldest one's head, they set about cutting off the middle one's head. Seeing the eldest one's head already cut off and the middle one's head being cut off, she gave up hope for the youngest thinking, he too will fare like them. Now the meditator seeing the cessation of past formations is like the woman seeing the eldest son's head cut off. His seeing the cessation of those present is like her seeing the middle one's head cut off. His seeing the cessation of those in the future thinking formations to be generated in the future will cease too is like her giving up for the youngest son thinking he too will fare like them. End of quote. In other words, the emotional valence, the feeling of this advanced state of insight is likened to that of a mother being forced to witness the execution

[09:30]

of all three of her sons. Could one imagine a more disturbing image of human anguish? Yet according to Thedavada teachings, it is necessary to experience this depth of despair to confront the unmitigated horror of sentient existence so as to acquire the resolve necessary to abandon the last vestiges of attachment to this world. So Oba Sekura would seem to have a point. states akin to what we identify as depression would seem to be valorized, if only for the insight that they engender on the Buddhist path. However, today, Buddhist insight is touted as the very antithesis of depression. Rather than cultivating a desire to abandon the world, Buddhism is presented as a science of happiness. Maybe you're familiar with this term? A way of easing the pain Buddhist practice is reduced to meditation, and meditation in turn is reduced to mindfulness, which is touted as a therapeutic practice that leads to an emotionally fulfilling and rewarding life.

[10:38]

Mindfulness is promoted as a cure-all for anxiety and affective disorders, including post-traumatic stress, for alcoholism, for drug dependency, attention deficit disorder, antisocial and criminal behavior, and for the commonplace debilitating stresses of modern urban life. This notion that Buddhism is a rational, empirical, and therapeutically oriented tradition compatible with modern science is one of the characteristic features of what scholars call Buddhist modernism. It's an approach to Buddhism that evolved out of a complex intellectual exchange between Asians and Westerners that took place over the last 150 years or so. The exchange, as I mentioned yesterday, goes both ways. My focus is on the particular practice most characteristic of Buddhist modernism, namely mindfulness. And this is the standard translation of the Pali term sati or the Sanskrit term smirti.

[11:42]

And more specifically, the interpretation of mindfulness as bare attention or present-centered awareness, by which is meant a sort of non-judgmental, non-discursive, non-discursive means there's no thinking involved or conceptualization involved, attending to the here and now. Now, we now know that the widespread understanding of mindfulness as bare attention has its roots in the Theravada meditation revival of the 20th century, a movement that drew its authority, if not its content, from the two versions of the scripture, the Satipatthana Sutta, or the foundations of mindfulness. as well as Buddhaghosa's path of purification. That's the text that I quoted. The specific techniques that came to dominate the Satipatthana or Vipassana or insight movement were developed by a handful of Burmese teachers, primarily Lady Sayada and Mingun Sayada. And it was Mingun's disciple Mahasi Sayada who developed the technique that really has kind of stormed the world today.

[12:46]

in which the practitioner is trained to focus on whatever sensory object arises in the moment to moment flow of consciousness. Mahasi designed this method with lay people in mind, including those with little or no prior exposure to Buddhist doctrine or liturgical practice. And perhaps most radical and most disturbing to traditionalists was Mahasi's claim that the cultivation of liberating insight did not require advanced skill in shamatha, or concentration, or the experience of absorption, or jhana. Instead, Mahasi placed emphasis on the notion of sati, which he presented as the moment-to-moment, lucid, non-reactive, non-judgmental awareness of whatever appears in the mind. One of Mahasi's most influential students, the German-born monk Nyanopanika Tara, coined the term bear attention for this mental faculty. And this rubric really took off through his popular 1954 book, The Heart of Buddhist Meditation.

[13:50]

Does anybody read that anymore? He, by the way, before he went to Sri Lanka to study meditation, he was a student of phenomenology in Germany. It's kind of interesting. Western Buddhist enthusiasts may have a hard time appreciating just how radical this method was. It was designed to be accessible to lay persons and therefore it didn't require any familiarity with Buddhist philosophy or Buddhist literature. And it certainly didn't require familiarity with the scholastic literature known as Abhidhamma. And actually Abhidhamma was just, it was taken for granted. Prior to this kind of revolution, if you did Theravada Buddhist practice... Many of the meditations revolved around the kind of formulations and categories one learned in Abhidhamma. So if he was creating a new technique, you didn't need to know that. It also, and this was really out there, it didn't require renunciation of lay life. And it could be taught in a relatively short period of time in a retreat format.

[14:54]

And all of this made it really easy to export. And it's influential today not only in the Theravada world throughout Southeast Asia, but also among Tibetan, Chinese, Korean, Japanese, and Vietnamese religious reformers. I've heard of people from all these traditions basically teaching a version of Mahasisaita's mindfulness technique. And, of course, by the end of the 20th century, this approach to mindfulness, understood as bear attention or living in the here and now, emerged as the foundation of Buddhist modernism. And it just has gone around the world. Now the meaning of the term mindfulness is presumed by many to be self-evident. And thus modern exponents of mindfulness meditation don't see much need to explore the history of the idea. But I want to give you just a little bit of it. Mindfulness is a translation of the Sanskrit term smirti or the Pali term sati, a term that actually means to remember. Think about that.

[15:54]

the term that everybody is saying is living in the moment, the root of the term action means to remember or to recollect, to bear in mind. And its religious significance actually goes back to a Vedic emphasis on memorizing the teachings of the Vedas, setting them to memory so that you have them, they're always present to you. The Pali term sati retains the sense of remembering in the Pali Nikayas, in the scriptures, in the suttas. For example, the Buddha says, what bhikshus is the faculty of sati? Bhikshus, the noble disciple has sati, he is endowed with perfect sati and intellect is one who remembers and who recollects what was done and said long before. Moreover, the faculties of recollection and reflections were unarguably central to a variety of classical practices associated with smirti, including, there's something called Buddha Anu Smirti, Or Nembutsu, do people know the term Nembutsu?

[16:56]

Nembutsu? Nembutsu? Name of Buddha? Nembutsu, for Pure Land practitioners, Nembutsu is always Amitabha Buddha, but it actually just means to recollect the Buddha. And it's generally the chanting the name of Buddha. It actually doesn't have to be Amitabha. It could be one of many. So that Nembutsu, that Smirti, and it actually means to continue to bring to the mind the names of the Buddha. And typically, Buddha Anusmurti practices involve some combination of recalling the characteristics of the Buddha, visualizing him while you're chanting his name. So even in the Satipatthana Sutta, the term sati has a sense of recollecting or bearing in mind. Specifically, it means bearing in mind the virtuous dharma so as to properly apprehend... from moment to moment, what is actually happening, the true nature of what is happening to you. So one scholar, Rupert Gethin, who has written a lot on this, he notes that sati can't refer to remembering in any simple sense, since memories, as Buddhists know, they're fickle, right?

[18:06]

They're nothing to rely upon. Rather... Sati should be understood as that which allows awareness of the full range and extent of the Dhammas. The Dhammas are the kind of constituent elements of reality that form the world of our perception. Applied to the Satipatthanas, what it means is that Sati is what causes the practitioner of meditation to remember that any feeling he may experience exists in relation to a whole variety or world of feelings that may be skillful or unskillful. with faults or without faults, inferior or refined, and so on. In other words, what's really important is to note the moral valence of what is happening to you in order to respond correctly. In short, there's nothing bare about sati, if you think of bare as non-judgmental, since it entails the proper discrimination of the moral valence of phenomena that arise. There are also philosophical objections to construing sati as bare attention.

[19:10]

The proper understanding of bare attention presumes that it is possible to separate pre-reflective sensations. This is something that philosophers call raw feels, just like the bare feeling of something, from the perceptual experiences that we have. And this is something I talked about yesterday. Most people, in other words, they think, well, before there's a table here, there's some pure just sensations. that later on we construct this table. In other words, there's an assumption that our recognition and response to an object is logically or temporally preceded by an unconstructed or pure experience or impression of that object that can be rendered with mental training available to conscious experience. Mindfulness practice, then in the popular, you know, 21st century understanding of it, is a means to quiet the ongoing chatter of the mind to keep, and now I'm using Nyanopanika's terms, to the bare registering of the facts observed.

[20:17]

Now, specifically, this notion of mindfulness as bare attention is tied to a view of the mind as a kind of tabular rasa, a clear mirror that passively registers raw sensations prior to recognition, judgment, and and response. The notion of a conscious state devoid of conceptualization or discrimination is not unknown to Buddhist exegetes. And it's specifically something we find in the later Pramana tradition. Pramana is logic. Here I'm referring to certain Buddhist logicians in the 6th century, Dignaga and Dharmakirti. Probably nobody here has heard of them. Actually, very important in the Indo-Tibetan tradition, not so much in East Asia. And they have a notion of non-conceptual cognition. And this notion became quite popular. It's sometimes understood as the foundation for the arising of conceptualization. Or sometimes people talk about non-conceptual cognition as an advanced state that is basically tantamount to awakening.

[21:25]

And this is known in later Yogacara systems. It's known in some Zen systems. We can talk about it. It's known in Dzogchen. But the irony of it is it doesn't exist in Theravada Abhidhamma. Theravada Abhidhamma doesn't allow for unconstructed experience. It's very interesting. All experience is invariably constructed by past karma. One cannot escape that past karma. Nirvana is that escape. So that is to say, for the Theravadans, the objects of experience appear not upon a kind of tapida rasa, but within a cognitive field or matrix that includes... and conceptual dispositions that are occasioned by one's past karma. And the elimination of these dispositions doesn't yield non-conceptual awareness, you just get nirodha, which I talked about yesterday. You get a vegetative coma. So, given the ambiguity surrounding sati, it's not surprising that when Mahasi kind of spread this technique,

[22:30]

It came under fire. And this is something, this is really what I wanted to bring to the audience. The fact that they're studying a technique that everyone assumes is the foundation of Buddhism, but actually was very controversial within the Theravada world. In fact, I don't mention it here, but when Mahasi teachers first went to Sri Lanka, the Sri Lankan Sangha tried to have them banned. They wanted to actually preclude the teaching of Mahasi's technique in Sri Lanka. Now, what did they object to? They objected to the devaluation of concentration techniques leading to absorption. They objected to claims that the practitioners of this method are able to obtain advanced stages of the path, including the four stages of enlightenment in remarkably short periods of time, sometimes within years, even months or weeks, Mahasi was claiming. And three, the ethics of it all. The ethics of... approaching mindfulness as bare attention seems to neglect or devalue the importance of ethical judgment.

[23:34]

So in work that I've done on the roots of Zen or Chan in 8th century China, I found that early Chan teachers seem to have turned away from traditional forms of meditation. Traditional forms meaning repentance practices, meditations on corpses, meditations on the impurity of the body. That was actually one of the most common ones for monks to do. And so on in favor of setting aside all distinctions and conceptualizations and allowing the mind to come to the rest in the flow of experience moment to moment in the here and now. And what I suggest is that it may not be a coincidence that Chan teachers in the 8th century and Burmese teachers in the 20th centuries were both coming up with similar techniques. Because they had a similar audience, an audience of lay people who were not monastics and who were not necessarily educated in Buddhist scriptures and philosophy. So these early teachers went, they had a number of rubrics they talked about, which you may be familiar with, viewing mind or discerning mind or reflecting without an object and so on.

[24:44]

They're similar to bear attention and they're presented as direct approaches that circumvented the need for traditional dhyana attainments. for mastery of scripture, for proficiency in monastic ritual, and so on. In brief, these early techniques revolve around a simple figure ground shift where attention is directed away from objects of any kind toward the abiding luminosity or transparency of mind or awareness itself. In other words, don't pay attention to the images in the mirror, just pay attention to the mirror. I don't know if this is how you guys present meditation or not. It's standard, actually. And you can trace it back to developments around the time of the fourth and fifth patriarch. This is the so-called East Mountain School, sometimes known as the Northern School. And what's really interesting is the fourth patriarch, he knows that this is a new technique, and somebody asked him where he got it from, and he says he got it from Lehman Fu.

[25:50]

Lehman Fu is a kind of very... notorious kind of wacky Zen-y figure. But the idea that a monastic would claim to be getting this technique that he was teaching from a layman was really quite radical in its day. Now early Chan was not the only pre-modern Buddhist tradition to develop something like bear attention. You also find it in Tibetan Dzogchen, which I won't go into, but that's not surprising because Dzogchen was actually drawn from Chan at this time. And I don't want to engage in the very complicated philosophical issue of whether all these different, whether the Dzogchen people in the 8th century Chan and the 20th century Burmese and the 21st century Americans are all having the same experience when they do this. But I just want to draw attention to certain institutional and sociological issues, to the fact that the early Chan patriarchs... and the Dzogchen masters, like the contemporary Burmese teachers, were interested in developing a method simple enough to be accessible to those with little background in Buddhist doctrine or Buddhist forms of life.

[26:58]

They were also people who were not wedded to Indian cosmology. They didn't necessarily believe in the six realms and rebirth and so on. You don't need all that to do this practice. And they were interested... This is a key one. The people were interested in immediate results as opposed to incremental advancement over countless lifetimes. So it's not surprising that the early Chan and Dzogchen teachers found themselves in the same position of Mahasi. Namely, they were castigated by the people around them for dumbing down the tradition, for devaluing the importance of ethics, for devaluing the role of wisdom, and for crassly instrumentalizing practice. In other words, using practice as a way to kind of a quick fix or quick results. So those interested in the mindfulness traditions today would do well to pay attention to some of these criticisms. The tongue master Matsudao Yi, for example, who is a celebrated representative of the Hongzhou Zen lineage, this is in Dogen's lineage, was noted for his rejection of the more scholastic interests of the monks in his day.

[28:09]

And he's particularly associated with the idea of a sudden, almost spontaneous realization of one's Buddha nature or true mind. But Song Mi, who's another celebrated master of his day, I mentioned him yesterday, he really had problems with this. He believed that the Hongjo method, which he characterizes as, this is his term, simply giving free reign to the mind, fails to distinguish between right and wrong. Indeed, a not uncommon criticism at the time was that the excessive focus in meditation on achieving inner stillness, the Chinese term for this is Ningji, especially when unbalanced by an engagement with the scriptures, leads to a state that they described as falling into emptiness, which is the basis of meditation illness or Zenbyu. The term meditation illness was used by various Buddhist masters as a critique of practices that emphasized inner stillness.

[29:11]

They seem to have been targeting practices that cultivated a sort of non-critical or non-analytic presentness. And today, I like to translate meditation sickness as zoning out, by which I don't mean being lost in thought or daydreaming. Rather, I think what the medieval meditation masters met by terms such as falling into emptiness and meditation sickness, they were targeting techniques that required an intense immersion into the moment, into the now, such that the practitioner loses touch with the socially, culturally, and historically constructed world in which he or she lives. the practitioner becomes estranged from the web of social relations which really form our humanity as well as our sanity. And the key to avoiding this is to learn to see both sides at once, according to Song Li. Song Li says, quote, while awakening from delusion is sudden, the transformation of an unenlightened person into an enlightened person is gradual.

[30:21]

End quote. or from a more traditional Buddhist perspective then, what is missing in the modern mindfulness movement is this gradual transformation which involves active engagement with Buddhist doctrine and Buddhist forms of life. This engagement with Buddhist scripture, doctrine, ritual and institutions is often rejected by modern advocates of mindfulness. And this is where it really doesn't apply to, or I don't think it applies to your community. Maybe it does. Yeah. In other words, they believe that they can garner the rewards of Buddhist practice without having to adopt a Buddhist form of life or a Buddhist worldview. Indeed, some insist that Buddhist practice doesn't entail a worldview at all. Buddhist practice is not a process of reconditioning, but of settling aside our culturally constructed notions of reality. They say it's deconditioning, right? You just want to set aside... our social conditioning and see things as they are.

[31:23]

The object is to put an end to the ceaseless inner chatter of the mind, to stop thinking. And this is what I talked about yesterday. I talked about Judith Bolte-Taylor's video and this notion that if you could just basically take a hammer and kind of knock out that analytic section of the left brain, then the abiding Buddha nature in our right brain would just kind of shine through it. So in short, The rhetoric of bare attention is predicated on an unacknowledged commitment to what scholars of mysticism call perennialism. And perennialism is the notion that there is a singular, transcultural, universal, spiritual experience that is common to mystics around the globe. The perennial experience is unconstructed experience. It's free of local or any cultural or linguistic or social conditioning. more inflections. Although, of course, anything you say about it is going to be conditioned by those, whatever your local conditioning is.

[32:29]

More specifically, the popular understanding of mindfulness seems to be associated with an understanding of perennialism that is sometimes called the filter theory. And this theory holds that our normal sensory and discursive processes, rather than opening us to reality, actually filters reality out. And I pointed out yesterday that Kamalashila, in his critique of the northern Chan master Mohayan, or Mahayana, pointed out that there's a place for yogis of this practice, and that's the realm of the mindless gods, the zombie gods. So just as there is a set of metaphysical commitments that support the modern mindfulness movement, there are also... ethical and political commitments. This is really what I wanted to talk about. The problem is that in America, these ethical and political commitments so resemble those of mainstream consumer culture that they go unnoticed.

[33:35]

Note that in the early period, the Buddhist institution, the Sangha, comprised a renunciate community that embodied quite literally a critique of mainstream social values and cultural norms. For the Sangha, liberation required letting go. And letting go did not mean merely to adopt a particular attitude or psychological frame. Letting go was more than just a state of mind. It meant, it necessitated a radical change in the way one lived. It required one to cut family ties, to cut worldly pursuits, to opt into an alternative, communal, celibate, and highly regulated lifestyle. Modern teachers of mindfulness don't make such demands of their students. The liberating or therapeutic benefits apparently do not require dramatic changes in the way one lives. Rather than enjoining practitioners to renounce carnal and sensual pleasure, mindfulness is tethered away to more fulfilling sensual experiences.

[34:40]

Rather than asking practitioners to renounce mainstream American culture, mindfulness is seen as a way to better cope with mainstream American culture. And there may be no better exemplar of this than Tricycle Magazine, I'm sure this is a cheap shot, with its advertisement for expensive meditation gear, for Dharmic dating services, Dharmic dentists and accountants, and the authorization of the entrepreneurial and commercial activities of countless Dharma centers and Buddhist masters. The packaging of mindfulness in programs such as mindfulness-based stress reduction and mindfulness-based cognitive therapy is arguably a variant on the same theme. Now, could it be that this socially conservative... I had hesitance about talking about this, but I'm going to try it. Could it be that this socially conservative ideology... Socially conservative means that it basically props up the status quo rather than critiques it. Could it be...

[35:42]

identified or does it have some connection with perennialism? So arguments to this effect have been made by others, including Hannah Ardent and the philosopher Emmanuel Levinas, but perhaps most relevant is the critical Buddhism movement that I talked about briefly yesterday that came out of the Japanese Soto tradition. The leaders of this movement... claimed that the ethical failings of the Japanese Buddhist schools, notably their complicity in the nationalist fever that led up to the Pacific War, could be traced in part to Buddha nature theory. This is this notion of inherent Buddha nature that we're all naturally endowed, we're basically in our true nature already awakened Buddhas. Their argument in short is that the East Asian Buddhist tradition abandoned the more analytic and critical dimensions of Indian Mahayana and aligned itself instead with Buddha-nature doctrine, which they see as un-Buddhist, Hindu, and that this led to a kind of ethical, social, and political passivity.

[36:51]

Now this is not the place to weigh in on this issue, except to note that this critique too emerges not from without, this is not coming from non-Buddhist, this is coming from within the Buddhist tradition. So, just to finish up, it's my impression that many of the psychologists, cognitive scientists, and sociologists doing research on Burmese-style mindfulness practices seem to assume that the psychological benefits of such practice are borne out by centuries of Buddhist experience. This is simply not the case. To the extent that the modern approach to mindfulness can be found in pre-modern Asia, it was a minority position and was often met with criticism from traditionalists. The nature of the criticism at least warrants our attention, as it parallels criticism directed against Mahasi's technique in modern Southeast Asia. Thus we hear the charge that these practices emphasize momentary states rather than long-term transformation, that they do not yield the benefits that are claimed on their behalf, that they're more Hindu than Buddhist,

[38:00]

and that the overriding emphasis on inner stillness in the absence of critical engagement with the teachings can lead to a paralyzing state of narcissism or self-absorption, what East Asian Buddhists have long identified as meditation illness. Now, I'm not suggesting that mindfulness meditation has no therapeutic value. and I'm certainly aware of a body of material that suggests that it does. It's just that my own experience among long-term meditators in Asian monastic settings, as well as in American practice centers, leads me to be somewhat skeptical. And I wonder if the researchers in this area are asking the right questions of the right people. It's not just that advanced meditation practitioners in more traditional Asian settings may not exhibit the kinds of behavior that we associate with mental health, it's that it's not clear that they aspire to our model of mental health in the first place.

[39:01]

And this, I think, is the real challenge for those interested in the causal relationship between traditional forms of Buddhist practice and the behavioral outcomes that meditation is supposed to bring. So now we have lots of time to talk. Yes? It's not really about meditation at all. The term Swami, that's... a creole Haitian term that's not Buddhist at all when and how did this person come up with that term oh what did you hear yesterday so a philosophical zombie is a term that's used in western philosophy it's actually and it does have a technical meaning that's interesting I didn't know that it was a creole term and I don't know whether Haitian yeah I don't know whether the philosophers, they're probably aware of it. Okay, that's all. But they just like, you know, in Descartes' day, he talked about evil demons.

[40:06]

Now we talk about zombies because they're popular in the press and everyone knows what a zombie is. Yeah. Yeah. This part you mentioned, Hannah Horst. Yeah. Can you give a title? Yes, so... You'll have to give me a moment to come up with the title. I'm getting old. But it was actually... She was trying to figure out what made people like Heidegger, this very, very deeply reflective person, so enticed with fascists, that he found fascist ideology attractive. And the argument in a nutshell, it's a complicated argument, is that what he was after is a certain kind of untainted purity of pure being. And the messiness... of a kind of political democracy, the messiness of the social world, it struck him, it somehow offended his aesthetic and moral and philosophical sensibilities. So this attraction to a kind of state of purity that stands apart from the world actually leads to a kind of passivity when it comes to the messiness of the world.

[41:18]

And that leads to a kind of conservatism. I'll just leave it the way it is because we're interested in the transcendental. Levinas was also very, very wary of a certain kind of attraction to the absolute or the transcendent or to a state of purity. That's why I like the early Theravada understanding of the mind is it's messy all the way down. I'm happy to give you a copy. It's actually coming out in the journal of... It's some journal. Do we have something? Yeah, no, it's Transcultural Psychiatry. It's the only article I'll ever publish in the journal of Transcultural Psychiatry. Yeah.

[42:19]

Well, I wanted to say that I think that a lot of people might recognize that that the Chan tradition was like a divergence from the traditional Buddhist tradition. And they may also recognize that Dogen represented a generation of revolutionaries in Japan. And then they may recognize that Shunya Suzuki, Maizumi Roshi, and other people of that generation were coming to the United States or to Europe and teaching another form of revolution and Buddhist teaching. But it's kind of difficult to see that we're in kind of like one more step or move, because now we don't have Stradinia Suzuki, we don't have Dandy Katagiri, Tetsugami, we don't have these... Adrift! And so now we're involved in another kind of revolution where we're trying to figure out what our practice is about. And it's really interesting that a lot of people don't see that we're actually actively changing the tradition. We're actively engaging that like every day, changing what Buddhism means, what Zen means.

[43:27]

Yes, sometimes, you know, I give talks like this and people accuse me of just, you know, me saying, oh, the only real Buddhism was Buddhism back when. And, you know, we should go back. And that's actually, you know, I don't know any historian who believes that because there is no, it's not as if there was a pure Buddhism sometime in the past. It was always... being transformed and often quite wildly. And the situation in American Buddhism is so interesting because there's a great precedent for it. And the precedent was the transformation of what happened when Buddhism went from India to China. It was just, if not much more dramatic. You know, China was a civilization that was even older than Indian civilization. When the Buddhists first arrived, they weren't thought of as... bearers of this great Ori tradition, they were seen, you know, like these kind of quirky Hare Krishnas dancing in the street, right? They're just these kind of wacky folks. And they weren't just wacky, but they were uncouth.

[44:28]

They shaved their heads, right? And in a Confucian environment, that's a big no-no. The hair is given to you, body is given to you by the ancestors. You don't shave your head. And the greatest and most... immoral thing one could do in China was to be celibate. Because it wasn't providing offspring to take care of the ancestors. That goes way, way back. So Buddhists were reading these vile creatures spreading this pernicious barbarian. I mean, right down into Chan, Bodhidharma is the barbarian. They still, they kind of adopt the term barbarian and use it as a badge of honor. But initially, it was really a very, very derogatory term they used for the books. But they just muddled through, and they created something quite interesting. However, in my mind, as a historian, it becomes very interesting when they are actively aware of what it is they're doing.

[45:32]

In other words, and it takes them hundreds of years, when they begin to engage the text, and they say, yeah, well, we like that, we don't like that. And that's what, you know, my place in this discussion is just to say, hey, you know, it's fine to keep on kind of developing in your own way, and that's great, but it might be useful to use as a resource to know something about the history and the doctrine of the tradition because you'll see many of the things that you're doing have been done before. And they've been talked about at length. And also, I think it can be quite dangerous if you don't realize or understand that that you are in part of this active engagement of the change. Because then you can just be kind of let along with the stream, going with what sounds good or what sounds popular and stuff like that, especially if you're ordained in a tradition or you become a teacher in a tradition and you aren't aware that this is a changing tradition. Sociologically, I think the biggest challenge

[46:34]

I don't know if this will sound odd or not, but the biggest challenge is just that there isn't an infrastructure right now to support teachers. And so teachers are forced to be entrepreneurs. And if they become entrepreneurs, it forces them, in a sense, in a situation, again, this may really not affect Zen Zen. I mean, this is one of the more established communities in America. But an awful lot of teachers really have to present themselves, you know, they have to basically present themselves as charismatic, realized masters because, you know, that's the only way we know how... There's no church to support them. There's no institution that will send them a monthly stipend so that they can basically just, you know, do their work. And now we have, you know, the Wisdom Press and Shambhala Press. I mean, you can't be a teacher without publishing a book anymore. And so suddenly it's these publishing houses are determining... who becomes known as a teacher and therefore really who has a viable lifestyle as a teacher.

[47:41]

Yeah? So I just wanted to expand a little bit on your discussion about mindfulness-based stress reduction and mindfulness-based argument therapy. So as a practicing psychologist, I've certainly seen the aspects that you're talking about in terms of adaptation of these traditions as a tool or as a method. or as a symptom relief sort of approach. But I wonder if any of the research that you've been looking at talks about other aspects of mindfulness practice in psychotherapy such as the importance of mindfulness practice of a practitioner of psychotherapy or the notion that, let's say if somebody is dealing with trauma or severe anxiety, that there may be some short-term relief provided by a mindfulness practice, but that that mindfulness practice can grow into something more, can grow into something that offers a person an opportunity to develop an authentic worldview, or to look at their sociocultural context, or to consider their situation in life, or to consider your super existential question.

[48:58]

Yeah, you know, I have no doubt that can't keep up with the literature, no one can keep up with the literature anymore. There are thousands and thousands of articles every year, technical articles, looking, you know, clinical studies, biological studies, people may know the Shamatha Project, which was a massive, like three month, they put people in two different groups, there was a control in another group, they did a retreat for three months, and they have enough data, they said it will take 20 years to get through all the data they have. I mean everything, blood samples, skin grafts I mean it's just amazing what they're doing not skin grafts but what do you call it whatever I'm not a biologist I have no doubt that mindfulness has found real therapeutic uses in all sorts of different that's not for me that's not the issue the issue is when people think that's Buddhism and

[50:00]

that's when it gets a little bit problematic. However, there is an underside to this, which is one psychologist, Willoughby Britton, I don't know if anybody knows her, Willoughby Britton teaches at Brown, but she's the only person I know, and she's gotten a lot of press for this, is starting to study people who have negative experiences from meditation retreats. And it turns out there's a lot of them. serious psychotic breaks, extended hospital treatment, and so on. And she's really interested in what is going on there. I mean, it would be easy to say, well, these people just, you know, it just tripped something internally. But she's really interested in is there a relationship there. And the problem in terms of the press is so much of the work is done by advocates that, you know, they're Buddhists. that it begins to look like the science on... Those of you who are old enough to remember TM in the 70s, when they were... And that was very sincere work they were doing.

[51:07]

They were really convinced that TM practice was scientifically verifiable. And their Fairfax University... I forget what their university is. But they were pumping out hundreds, thousands of articles... on the benefits, all sorts of benefits and power of TM meditation. But it became, it was after one, no one paid attention because it was all being done by TM practitioners. I was curious, like, acknowledging our position in, or our duty and responsibility and the malleability of the Dharma, now like uh as you say like you know taking uh taking that on i'm curious what you think um how effectively does uh mindfulness or how essential is mindfulness to Buddhist practice and what else uh what do you think uh other things looking back through the tradition back through the history things that we kind of you know uh

[52:14]

let go of, or just the way that is coming to America, what things do you personally think are essential to Buddhism that have been and have gone by the wayside? I know it's kind of a big question, but like these other things that we have, you know, that we have not essentialized, like for instance, is the reincarnation really essential to Buddhist practice? reincarnation is a real tough one I mean you could say I can always put on my historian hat and say well obviously it's not essential because look there are American Buddhists self-professed Buddhists who wind up no interest in reincarnation so but maybe this is a response and I think it's a simple one and I think it's one that I believe historically scholars of all forms of Asian Buddhism, whether Southeast Asia, Tibet, China, Japan, India, estimate that at the most, 5% of the monastic sangha was meditating.

[53:24]

You know, that meditation was a fringe practice within Buddhism. It was respected. People knew, you know, I mean, it's not like the They understood, they see pictures of Shakyamuni and images of Shakyamuni that they're worshipping, meditating. They know that it's important, but it was not considered the be-all and end-all of being a Buddhist monastic. It was one vocation within the tradition. Some monks were scholars, some monks were teachers, some monks basically they were administrators, they managed these large estates, some were missionaries. There were lots of different, it was, looked a lot more like, you know, the Catholic tradition, for example, where there were many different vocations. And even though the meditating monks were often respected, they weren't always respected. They were also seen to be a kind of fringe, you know, slightly wacky, often living somewhat apart from the main monastic community.

[54:24]

Yeah, any self-respecting monastic is not going to be, any meditator wasn't going to be in the monastery because these monasteries were huge institutions particularly in medieval India and China and Japan I think it's fair to say that scholarship was valued much more highly than meditation in terms of rising through the monastic ranks so what it would be nice to see that variety of vocations that you know to use the small c catholic that that kind of variety of different, the understanding that Buddhism is a big tradition, and that there are different vocations, and they all play a role, that, it would be nice to see that. Now, here's another picture that I'd like to just plant in your minds. People here think, you know, when they think practice, they always think this. At one point I was traveling with a Tibetan teacher, Kensei Rinpoche,

[55:28]

And he was really perplexed because when people would constantly talk about practice and it took him a while and you had to keep reminding him that when Westerners talked about practice, they meant this. And so when somebody was talking about practice and he didn't understand it, he would look at me and he'd go this and I'd go, yeah, okay, I get it. They're talking about meditation. In the Tibetan world, practice is not meditation. Meditation is one form of practice. But, for example, in galupa, debate is a form of practice. Now, it's not like they meditate and then they go debating their spare time. Debate, the refining of their really, really, really defining or refining their analytic abilities so that they can parse the world, so that they can parse what is happening to them from moment to moment to moment. That's considered... profoundly and fundamentally transformative.

[56:30]

That's completely gone in the American Sangha, including, I mean, I don't know if, I'm sure there are some, I know of Americans who have learned to debate. I know a number who have become Geshe, but they've all done it in India. I don't know of any Tibetan retreat centers who are training people that way. So it's nothing wrong with meditation. Meditation's great. It's just that the sense that what Americans have, that Buddhism is meditation. That, you know, and maybe they're right. But historically, Asians would have found that a very, very peculiar way of looking at the tradition. Yeah? Is this story of Siddhartha sitting under the booty tree, is that something, is that the narrative, has that changed over time depending on who's telling it to kind of like confirm what they're doing? Like, when, like, I'm thinking about the kind of debate, like, in that story, you know, like, then you debated and became even more lame.

[57:33]

So I'm just wondering, like... No, they're not. It's just that... If you're an American... Here's the biggest... The two responses. In... There's no question that Shakyamuni, that meditation played an absolutely fundamental role... in the narrative of Shakyamuni's enlightenment. That is common throughout all of Buddhism. But did all Buddhist monastics think that they were becoming a monastic to become enlightened? Now this is really the huge gap between the Western Sangha and the Asian Sangha. Western, remember, all think they're going to become enlightened. The Asian Sangha become Buddhist monks because that's their tradition. and it's a great tradition, and there's great wisdom in the tradition, and studying and practicing within that tradition, they will grow as individuals and live fulfilling lives. That's the ideal version. Often they're escaping poverty, there could be all sorts of other things. But the ideal form is, in other words, it's like with Christian priests, we don't necessarily think they all aspire to be Christ.

[58:40]

So one answer is, no, again, I'm not denying the role of meditation iconically, but I'm saying in the actual lived Sangha, it was seen as one of several vocations. But here's another interesting one. There are two stories of Shakyamuni's enlightenment in the Pali Nikayas. And one is what historians call the Dhyana narrative, and one is the Prajna, or the Pasana narrative. In one, go back to the text and look at them. In one, he goes through an ascending sequence of dhyanas. It goes up to the fourth dhyana and down again. It's very interesting because it's triggered by a memory of something that happened to him as a child. Really bizarre. Really bizarre. This is a guy who has just spent six years with the top yogis and has learned all of these dhyanas and then somehow he's sitting on the tree going, what should I do? And then he remembers the spontaneous dhyana he had as a child. But anyway, that's the dhyana narrative. which is tied in with the rose apple tree.

[59:46]

But there's another narrative, which is also there, in which what happens under the tree is he realizes dependent origination. It's a kind of discovery of pratica-samuppada, or codependent origination. So scholars are saying there were actually two different models right from the earliest strata, one of which really emphasized shamatha, or meditative absorption, and one that emphasized some kind of analytic analysis of reality. And they're both there. Again, as a historian, you can see what the Chan tradition, in other words, is struggling with in the 8th century, right down to the present day. You know, what is the relative role of meditation as this kind of absorptive process versus a kind of analytic engagement with the world? This is there right from the very beginning of the tradition.

[60:49]

I'm curious about one of the things that you said was the most controversial about mindfulness being Buddhist was that it's fair attention and it's eradicating thought in a way. And of course, the setup for the talk was is mindfulness Buddhist. But I'm wondering how that fits with mindfulness as it's laid out the Satipatthana where the third foundation is actually all about being mindful of thought and so thought actually is included in the practice and it's not eradicated at all yes so the argument in a nutshell is in I would say in the Pali tradition before the 20th century what you were supposed to be doing when you were recollecting or doing mindfulness practice is whatever arises in the mind, you are aware of what Dharma it is.

[61:54]

And this is the technical sense of Dharma as a kind of these small particles that create our experience. You want to know what they are. In other words, not the narrative. So all that self-narrative, of course, you want to quiet that down. And you want to see, oh, this is a thought arising. And that is very much tied to... And the point isn't to stop thought. The point is to see the thought that is arising and to recognize this is a beneficial or this is a... This particular kind of formation is going to lead to more suffering or less suffering. There's that kind of quality of judgment to it. So, yes, I would say the Satipatthana is not about stopping thought. But it's become interpreted in the 20th century as stopping thought. And so, for example, the simplest example to use is the very opening when it talks about Anupana breathing.

[62:56]

It doesn't say, pay attention to the sensation of the breath. It says, pay attention to the breath and know this is a long breath or this is a short breath. So right away, in other words, that's a beginning training, but right away it's saying, let's use the mind skillfully, to use the mind to reflect on what is happening and understand what is happening, rather than have it drift off somewhere else. I mean, you know, yes, it's about the present moment, it's about coming back into the moment, but there's a certain kind of, for the Theravadans, prior to the 20th century, there's a certain kind of analytic engagement that comes out of their study of Abhidham. And that's what disappears in the 20th century because no one knows Abhidham. Yeah? I was just curious about your opinion about the practical implications of if mindfulness is Buddhist or not. So if you say, if everybody agrees that mindfulness is secular, then it could be taught in public schools, for example.

[63:59]

So do you think that that is something that is appropriate or not? That's a really, really, really thorny issue. Mind and Life has a new initiative. There's already different groups that are pushing mindfulness practice in elementary school because they believe it's going to be good for particularly kids with behavioral problems and so on. But now Mind and Life, under a directive from the Dalai Lama, is getting involved in the same thing. But they want to hide the fact that it's Mind and Life doing it. because they know that in many communities, if it's associated with Buddhism, it's out. It's really complicated. My own view is that this is a form of proselytizing, even though it's absolutely, sincerely well-intentioned. They really believe that mindfulness is... Actually, I take it back. It is not mindfulness practice that the Dalila wants to bring to school. It's compassion practice.

[65:00]

the problem, you know, I mean, there's evangelical Christians who want to bring prayer back to the school, and they don't want to do it because they're evil, kind of conniving, proselytizing people. They're people who really, really, sincerely believe that if there was more prayer in the school, we would live in a more humane and loving and civilized society. We're a little bit wary of that. I think that there are grounds to be wary of when the Buddhists do it, too. I was just wondering, just from the conclusion of your topic, it seems like you think that there are really big distinctions between mindfulness and Buddhism. Well, again, I don't have any problem with therapists or psychologists using mindfulness if it works. But sometimes they use it and they say, we know this works because there's 2,000 years of Buddhist history that demonstrates, that attests to it.

[66:02]

This is this ancient technique. And the fact that it... And so that's just as data. I don't think... I'm not... I think there's a confusion there. So that's one side. The flip side is people who say, I'm really interested in Buddhism. All I need to do is just practice mindfulness and it will bring whatever insight the Buddhist tradition is supposed to bring. And that... It's not that I... I mean, I'd like to hide under my scholar's hat and say, it's not for me to say they're wrong. But there were a lot of voices throughout Buddhist history who were saying there's something a little bit problematic. Thank you for sharing your work with us. You know, could I just interrupt for a second? I realize it's 437. Yeah, so... Would you, Mike, should we just wrap it up and do the chant, and then I'm happy to sit outside? A few more minutes. Oh, okay. Well, he's the boss, so go ahead. What struck me as I was listening and trying to take it all in was that the main place I've heard criticisms of MBSR from is this online community of self-described hardcore meditation practitioners who mainly ascribe to the Malasa Sayada approach.

[67:21]

and they see themselves as the far end of the spectrum from MBSR and their critiques are mainly that kind of broadly taught mindfulness doesn't teach people to aspire to awakening and that it also doesn't include kind of a warning that they may encounter difficult spots along the way and not never may actually be a direct result of practice. And I kept thinking about this reflection and trying to turn into a question for you that I think I just wanted to express. I appreciate that. I don't know those sites, but I'm not surprised at all. The Burmese Mahasi practitioners, they're a real, they're very, very serious law, and it is very goal-directed. They really want, there's, I don't know if you know this, but there are in The Theravada tradition and the early tradition, there's four stages along the way to enlightenment.

[68:25]

And the first, Sottapatti, or stream entry, means that you will have a maximum of seven more lifetimes being reborn. Whereas if you don't hit that in this lifetime, all bets are off. You could go around for another gazillions of eons. So they really, really, really want to hit that target. To hit that target, you have to go through the stages that I mentioned. These very, very difficult stages. So on the one hand, these people are doing this practice, they believe, without proper supervision. They don't know these states that are going to arise. And secondly, they're not doing it with the proper intention. The proper intention is to get off the path. So that's very interesting. I wasn't aware of it, but it makes perfect sense. And I guess it makes me curious about the origins of mindfulness as it's broadly taught, and the specific people who brought it forward, like what's John Kabat-Zinn's training, and, you know, all directly Mahasi Saida, those disciples who found a way to appeal.

[69:35]

Very, very, very few Westerners studied with Mahasi. They... There were a number of Mahasis teachers in India in the 70s. There was Deepama in Calcutta, Menindra in Bodhgaya. There may have been one or two more, but the key person was Menindra. And around Menindra, there were a number of people. Joseph Goldstein was with him for a long time, Sharon Salzberg. Jack Kornfield was a... He was in Peace Corps. He was in Thailand. He ended up with Ajahn Chah. and a number of people who were in Thai Sanghas, before they went back to the States, they were told to go and do retreats with Goenka, not Menindra, with Goenka, because Goenka perfected the short retreat format. He had this kind of 10-day lay retreat format. Mahasi, even though he had a lot of lay people, he had a center where people came and went.

[70:37]

He didn't travel around and give retreats. So what you had is Joseph Goldstein and some others, Jack and Sharon and Jackie Schwartz, I don't know if people know these people, but they were studying with Manindra for technique and Goenka for a framework. And this was all in the early 70s. And then around 74, Joseph went back and gave a course at Naropa. And this was, I think, the first... I may be wrong, but I think this was the first time that the Mahasi technique was taught in America. But interestingly, it was taught in a Shambhala group. And so already, some of the kind of Theravada trappings were being kind of stripped out. And it was becoming a technique. But I think you can trace it back to a number of individuals. And Kabat-Zinn... I'm not too sure if Cavinson studied with Meninder, but he was definitely buddies with Joseph and Sharon and Jack and that crew. So the technique they were basically doing was Mahasi through this guy Meninder.

[71:40]

Meninder was brought to the States, but he didn't work out in the States. They sent him back, rather. Thank you for listening to this podcast offered by the San Francisco Zen Center. Our Dharma talks are offered free of charge, and this is made possible by the donations we receive. Your financial support helps us to continue to offer the Dharma. For more information, visit sfzc.org and click Giving.

[72:15]

@Transcribed_UNK
@Text_v005
@Score_93.1