Bodhi Retreat 2015 Day Three - Dharma Talk

Nam-myoho-renge-kyo. Nam-myoho-renge-kyo. So this morning I'd like to tell you something about what we're doing at La Villa aux Bois-Élousès. This is my home in France, my retreat. It's also, in a certain sense, a kind of sister house to this community here. And establishing this community here is such a wonderful kind of step forward. And it's very nice to have the two places functioning in some kind of reciprocal relationship, so people go backwards and forwards between the two. Sometimes some of our number are in this house and sometimes over there, so we have kind of two homes like that. So I thought it might be quite interesting for you, for me to tell you something about our, the way we do things, what we're thinking and so on, because in some ways it's the same and in some ways it's different from here. The Amida Sangha, the Amida community, is diverse. It's not like a sort of cloning operation, or franchise, you know, like you go to Little Chef and you know what's on the menu before you walk in the door, because they're all exactly the same. Some Buddhist groups do kind of propagate in that way. Ameeda's not like that. The different groups, different communities in different countries, we have some things in common, some shared basics, but we develop in different ways. So this is one of the reasons why it's always interesting to come together in a retreat and share experience, share stories. This is the traditional way. Buddhist retreats originated from the habit of the early Buddhist bhikkhus gathering during the rain season. In India you had the monsoon, so you had a rainy season. You couldn't go walking about all over the country during the rains, so they would all gather in one place and they'd share their stories. So in this way, experience is shared, and our community grows very much through the sharing of experience. We come and spend time together, we learn from one another, and then we go back to our different lives and our different places. And we've all learnt something. So having some members of the sangha who are based in one place, basically more or less static, being ministers looking after a congregation and a group, and also complementary to that, having some other members of the sangha as Amitāryas who go about from place to place, place, cross-fertilise like bees going between flowers. This system works very well. This is very much, I think, what the Buddha established in the first place, and we're in a sense imitating that in the modern world. This is our modern version of it. We don't walk, we go in buses and cars and aeroplanes and so on, but it's the same, essentially the same basic idea of growing the culture, but also having cross-fertilization. And this makes, as anybody who grows flowers and propagates flowers and so on, or vegetables, knows, this makes for a good sturdy stock when you have this kind of cross-fertilization. So, la Villa Royale, Élises. Élisis is a house and some land in the centre of France. Some of you have been there, some of you have not. It's— whereas here we're in a town, at Élisis we're deep in the countryside and we're in the middle of 30 acres of our own land with forest and gardens and so on. And we have a sense there of— what do we say? Well, you know, on a sort of long-established principle, we're always moving in the opposite direction to the rest of society and the world. While the world is gradually illuminating all trace of myth and magic and so on, we're busily putting it back in. So the idea of, yes, magic, mystery, mysticism and so on, quite central to the idea, and this is why we added the word 'ellusis.' La Villa Oie is the traditional old French name for the place. The town of the king, or perhaps the villa of the king. Depends how far back in history it goes. We don't know how far back in history it goes. It's one of those sort of timeless places. We've no idea when the first humans settled on this little hill, but probably a very, very long time ago. So it may well go back to Roman times or even before, we don't know. But anyway, it's called La Villa Oie, which is a rather splendid name. Sometimes I can sit there and be like, "What?" The king, which is quite amusing. But anyway, we added the word 'Eloses' with reference to the Greek mysteries, because we are very much open to that sacredness of nature. The old religion, as it were, the old religions of Europe. Of course, the old religions of Europe still gives you a vast panoply. So in order to have some degree of consistency and focus, we've concentrated particularly on the ancient Greek forms, though of course we're also open to many, many other things.— or perhaps the 'of course' doesn't belong in that sentence, but we are open to many other things. And so we have all this land, and one of the things that we have done is to look at the land in terms of these ancient pagan figures. And you might say, "What's a Buddhist doing getting muddled up in ancient Greek religion and pagan ideas?" and so on. There's a strong tendency in the modern world to kind of try and purify everything out into something kind of very singular. It's never been my instinct at all. It just causes trouble, you know. This kind of monolithic— or monolithic is very close to autocratic. And a lot of the troubles between faith groups and religions and so on in the world today, I think, is in many ways traceable to the fact that they each try to be the one. And to assert that there is only one and we're it, and therefore the others aren't. And this is a crazy logic. So it finishes you up in this crazy position of saying, "My version of compassion is better than yours, so I'm going to kill you," which is just, you know, about as nonsensical as you can be, really. So to me, a more pluralistic approach makes a great deal more sense. And what's it got to do with Buddhism? You'll often see presentations of Buddhism that say Buddhism has nothing to do with supernatural ideas or anything of this kind. People who write these things have never read a Buddhist text, never been anywhere near the original scriptures. You can see that. The Buddha's talking to deities and devas and so on on every other page. It's a perfectly normal part and full part of Buddhism. When the Buddha is dying, the devas all gather and come to see him. There's a rather charming little passage where he asks a monk to get out of the way because he's obstructing his view of the devas that he wants to talk to before he departs. From this world. And even more importantly, in a certain sense, words that actually form part of our liturgy that we recite every morning about beings with little dust in their eyes and so on. These words, some of the most beautiful and famous words in the whole Buddhist canon, are not words of the Buddha, they're words of a god. They're the words in which the god Sahaṁpatti persuaded the Buddha to go forth and preach. It's a very, to me, interesting, amusing, reassuring fact, which you will have heard me refer to before, that the first thought the Buddha had after his great illumination, namely that nobody would understand and so therefore there was no point in teaching, was a mistake, was wrong. So the first thing the enlightened Buddha thought was wrong. This may give you a different slant on what enlightenment is from one that you might— stereotypical idea you might hold on to about infallibility and so on. You find plenty of writings about how enlightenment makes you infallible in some sense. It obviously doesn't. You know, there are many occasions in the Buddha's life when he changed his mind about all sorts of things. So I think what we can say is it's much more a matter of it made him open-minded. It made him open to changing his mind. It made him open to considering the evidence and changing and looking at this and looking at that. And the Buddha was very flexible and very willing to look at different approaches, different systems and so on. But anyway, as a matter of fact, if we're being more kind of fundamentalist and doctrinal as Buddhists, it was a god who sent Buddha out to deliver his dharma to the world. And if there hadn't been that divine intervention, he wouldn't have done it, and so there wouldn't have been any Buddhism. So the idea that Buddhism has nothing to do with gods and deities and so on is complete nonsense. What you think the gods are, what their function is, how they relate to us as human beings and so on, that's another matter. That's something we could discuss all day. But simply to rule them out of court is not Buddhism. Quite mistaken, quite mistaken. And you know, we're in Europe, we're not in India. Rather than import a whole load of Indian names for gods and deities, it makes far more sense to us at Lavi Loa Ellucis to use European names and European words and European ideas, because then we tap into a great fount of mythology and wisdom and story and stuff that's known and that's been used, and that's been used by Shakespeare, been used by Chaucer, been used by many great figures, by Freud, especially by Freud, as a deeply intrinsic part of our culture. And I certainly wouldn't want to exclude that dimension of our culture because that's where the richness is. You know, Freud, I just mentioned Freud, Freud believed that it was very important to look into history and into literature, and he was an amateur archaeologist. He studied ancient Greek texts and so on. So in our quest to bring back the magic and the myth and the redolent dimensions of our culture, we can include these things. So, having got over that first hurdle, there are an infinite number of these gods and goddesses and so on, so one has to make some selection. So we have, thinking about it and thinking about the modern world and thinking about the, you might say, the problem of the modern world, the problem of men and women and so on. We've chosen to particularly concentrate on goddesses, and there's a logic to this because it's a diagnosis, if you like, it's a diagnosis of the condition of contemporary humankind that Perhaps, and obviously this is an overgeneralization and an overstatement, stereotype in a way, but I'm willing to stick it out there and argue with you about it. Women need, like, some figures that give them dignity as women, that give them a— restore respect to womanhood. Men need to be in touch with their feminine side. These are two different needs, but they're both served by having some focus on the goddess icons. So that's what we've done. It's not to say that we ignore the male side of things, but we give particular emphasis that way. And one of the ways we've done this is to dedicate different parts of the land according to their character to each of the 6 primary goddesses of ancient Greek religion. So there's one part of the land devoted to this goddess, another to another, and so on. You see, now To make another Buddhist connection, when the Buddha was enlightened, on the night of his enlightenment, you may have seen statues of the Buddha. I don't know if there's one in this room. No, there isn't one in this posture, but you often see the Buddha with one hand in his lap and the other hand touching the earth. This is the earth witness posture. And this is because, this is said to be because the Buddha, when he had his great illumination, there was nobody there to witness it. No humans there to witness it. So he called Mother Earth to witness. You see, and it's said he touched the earth to call the earth to witness, and the earth shook. In acknowledgement, you see. Well, the Earth Mother, of course, is kind of primary goddess figure, not just from Greece or from India, but from all over the world. And in the ancient language, the earth was called 'Da' and the 'Da Mater,' the Earth Mother. In Greece is Demeter. So one of our goddesses is Demeter, and the area of land, one of the areas of land most proximate to our buildings, is dedicated to Demeter. And in Greek mythology, Demeter symbolizes order and cultivation and everything that's to do with society, as it were, particularly in a kind of rural sort of sense of growing things from the earth, harvest, the seasons, the orderliness of life in the country. And we're living in the country, so having some focus on Demeter is very Feels very apt, feels very nice. And then beyond Demeter, the land gets wilder. We have forest and stuff, and that area of land is dedicated to Artemis. Artemis is a goddess very much associated with the wild. So you have these two. So often when you see— this is one of the advantages of looking at the god-goddesses figures, is that they bring out the polarities within ourselves. When we look at some of the idealised figures, sort of the Buddhas and so on, if you like, are a sort of higher level in a way than the gods and goddesses. They're always kind of perfect in some way, but the The gods, goddesses, they're a bit closer to human. They're mixed figures. And they're very useful for working on our own psychology. Because we have in us always both sides. There's a side that's cultivated and there's a side that's wild. So having areas— and then it's, you know, we talked yesterday about the body. And movement and bowing and so on, and how practice is often with the body. By having areas of land, you can actually go, you can spend time with Demeter, you can spend time with Artemis. You can go and build a shrine to Artemis out in the forest and feel close to your wild nature, or you can stay in the more neatly cut grass, as it sometimes is when we have time, the more civilized part, and you can be in touch with that side of your nature. And I think this is very valuable because it brings out both. It gets you out of this sense that you have to be just one thing and get rid of the other, which is a spiritual disease. Somehow we have to restore wholeness, and I find that these polarities and this use of the archetypal, if you like, figures is a great way of restoring wholeness. Yes, like that. So Demeter and Artemis, next door to each other, different pieces of land, you can walk from one to the other. And then in the area in front of the house, we have an area dedicated to Irene. Irene is the goddess of peace, and that's what we'd like, some peace in our community. So the meditation hall is in this area, so you can be at peace. And of course it has a special meaning for me because my mother's name was Irene. So there's a very close relationship between myself and my mother, so that's very special having an area dedicated in that way. But then beyond the domain of Irene, there's an area again more wild which in the past we used to call Owl's Corner. Because there are always lots of owls there. And again, this is forested. And this is— the association of owls is Athena Minerva, who is a much more warlike character than Irene. So again, you've got another contrast here. Between, like, the peaceful and the martial aspects. Athena, goddess of Athens, you know, Athens with all its great civilization and culture, and so much of our culture derives from Athens, but also a very troubled and warlike place that was often stirred up in strife of one sort or another. So Athens was like the birthplace of philosophy, and we think of Plato and Socrates, but it was also the place that killed Socrates. So it's all these edges. So another pair in a way, going out in the opposite direction from Demeter and Artemis. And then if you go the other way, we have another pairing in a way, because we have a big area devoted to Aphrodite. Aphrodite perhaps in a certain way was the most powerful of all the goddesses in the Greek system. She was the kind of free woman, not at all abashed about her sexuality. And when you look at the Greek myths, she's the one who has by far the greatest number of attendants. The Muses and the Fates and the Seasons and so on, these are all attendants of Aphrodite, who's this great powerful life energy figure. You know, if you think of Freud again, you think of libido. She sort of represents libido, which is life energy completely. So very powerful. And again, for me, a special personal connection because I was brought up in Cyprus, and Cyprus is the island of Aphrodite. Aphrodite is supposed to have come out of the sea just near Paphos in Cyprus. And so all through my childhood, I was used to seeing these, these pictures, sort of iconographic pictures, of Aphrodite rising from the waves. And I have very fond memories of it. And in Cyprus, there has been a certain We're talking here about the connections between different religions, and yesterday we talked about the connection between Heracles and— or the day before— Heracles and Mahastarmaprapta, Vajrapāṇi, a Buddhist figure. In Cyprus, there's been a very strong kind of tendency to merge Aphrodite with the Virgin Mary. Which may at first seem a rather odd connection, but that's what's happened. And because they're— and for the sort of ordinary Cypriot people, they're both very much associated with fertility, motherhood, and all that. And this, of course, does— saying it's seems to us an odd connection is also a very interesting thing, because when you read into these Greek myths, you often find that the things that are lumped together, as you might say, are not the things that we would naturally lump together. So Aphrodite is a kind of patron of marriage and of philandering. It's like both, you know, not one or the other, because she simply represents that sexual energy in all its manifestations and so on. And then beyond that we have another sort of distant area that we haven't really done anything with, but which is at least nominally dedicated to Hera, the last of the six goddesses, who was the wife of Zeus. And she was the jealous woman. She was the woman who was— because Zeus was— she had a lot to be jealous about, you know. Zeus was always philandering. Half the characters in Greek mythology are children of Zeus. All by different females, some of them gods, some of them mortals, and so on. But Hera was always, on the one hand, very cross about it and making trouble for people. Like, earlier we talked about how she made trouble for Heracles, who had the misfortune to carry her name, Hera-klees. But she made trouble for lots of people. But she was also the defender of propriety, which is an important part of society. You know, one wouldn't want to live in a society where propriety was the only ruling principle or virtue, but some idea of what is proper, of what should happen, is essential to the functioning of any society, of any civilization. So Every society has its norms, and Hera is the defender of the norms, as it were, like that. And so, but the— so this is a kind of quick tour of the land, as it were, but also of the metaphysical landscape. And this means that you— that a certain sort of worship or immersion or meditation or reflection is possible just by going from one area of land to another, just by going there and contemplating in a certain place. Just as we might come here and be in front of the ancestor shrine and certain emotions come because we're in that place, or we come and we look at the Buddha and certain emotions come because we're in that place. In terms of Buddhist psychology, this is the matter of the mind being, or the heart being conditioned by its object. And the object is rupa. We call this a buddha rupa. So in the same way, the different mythical figures or archetypes or goddesses, they're rupas. They are figures that are redolent with power. And they're redolent with power because they've been acting in the human psyche for millennia. We talk about ancient Greece, but none of these figures started in Greece. They all go back way, way before Greece. The Earth Mother you'll find is as old as any kind of human civilization. So in a sense, it's kind of connecting yourself with the earth. Connecting yourself with the seasons, connecting yourself with the sky, with the water, with the principles of growth. And these two very important things in Buddhism. The Buddha got his disciples doing the earth, doing the element meditations. And in those days, I'm sure at the time of the Buddha, the elements were thought of everything was thought of as being alive. The whole world was— they didn't have this sharp division that we have between animate and inanimate. Everything had its spirit, everything was alive in some way or other. And as you related to different dimensions, different aspects, you were relating to different aspects of that life. Now of course in modern times with this huge population that we have and urbanization and so on, we're often living in like one environment a lot of the time. We're living amongst concrete. Much of nature has sort of disappeared under paving slabs and so on. So we're a bit cut off, a bit isolated from all this. But this is an impoverishment. So part of what we're trying to do is to bring back some of what we've lost. Now, some of that, of course, you get in the simplest ways. In this room, you feel certain things. You walk out into the garden, you feel something else. When I worked with people who had psychiatric disorders many years ago, taking them out into nature, you saw a completely different manifestation, often very healing to take somebody out. Into nature, if you could persuade them, which wasn't always easy because their delusional structure was tied to certain rupas, and they didn't want to be taken away from them. Ourselves, we go on holiday, we experience something different. Very often people have personal transformations when they're on holiday. They may have difficulty reintegrating them when they come back. Why? Because they're surrounded by the rupas. So part of what we're trying to do at Lavi Lua Illusis is to enrich that environment of rupas, to provide, you know, like a very complicated Rorschach blot that you can come— a 3-dimensional Rorschach blot that you can come into, 4-dimensional maybe, and experience something, yes, something that touches your soul, touches your spirit, provides you with an enrichment of experience in that way. So one of the things we're going to be doing is running some programs, some courses, some retreats around some of— loosely around some of these themes, and we'll see how that develops. And we'll try and also develop the site, perhaps with meditation huts in the different zones, perhaps with shrines in the different zones, and also with places of contemplation at the crossover points between the zones. Because often it's not so much just immersing yourself in one spirit It's being on the cusp between two of them that is very interesting, that illuminates dimensions of our life, aspects of our life, shows us things that are happening. And also, of course, opens up new possibilities for us. Earlier I talked about— in one of the earlier talks I talked about the phenomenal world and the a priori world. The a priori world being like the, the world of possibilities. One of the things that we need when we live in such a homogenized society is something that opens up new possibilities to us. Now, of course, it'd be nice if we could open up totally new possibilities, but at least we can mine the possibilities that our culture already provides us with, rather than discarding them. To integrate this great wealth of history and ancient religion, the ancient religious sense. You know, I got into trouble with some people by writing this book called Buddhism Is a Religion. The religious sense is very important. Because it's what's most fundamental in us. And the effort of modern people to try and exclude it does seem to me to be like trying to live on the surface, trying to skim along on the surface and not look at the deeper aspects of the psyche, not look at the things that Jung called the collective unconscious and so on, not look at what happens in dreams, not look at the and deeper transformations that are the reintegration of the shadow and so on. And so what I'm interested in is producing a landscape, a land, not terribly pure land, but one that at least has possibilities. Yes, a land of many possibilities in which we can celebrate the Buddhist truth, but not just in that highly rarefied pure principle level, but also at a level that's closer to what it is to be a real human being with all sorts of different passions, all sorts of different energies. All jostling with each other as they do, which does find expression in all this mythology and these notions of great powers that are at work in us, around us, in nature, in the natural world that we encounter. Because one of the really magical things about La Vie Loi et le Lui, Lewis's, is that you— Many people, certainly I, within minutes of being there, you feel this great tranquillity. You feel like you've entered some magic place. There is a sense of almost Midsummer Night's Dream about it. You feel you can get lost in this forest, and you never know puck's just around the corner. And, you know, if you fall asleep in the forest, you don't know who you're going to fall in love with when you wake up. But it very much has that sort of quality. Magic, magic. There is a certain sort of truth in that. Nature, magic, and you feel it. You feel it in your body, you feel it in your being, and you're able to live a very natural life, digging the earth and working with the forest and working with the plants and gathering flowers and so on. Something very wonderful, very wonderful about it. So rather than take that and modernize it and regularize it and cover half of it with concrete. Our idea is to bring out, tease out those deep possibilities from the natural world using what resources we can find in the culture that we've inherited and thereby produce a place where people naturally grow just by being there and find the fullness of their being, the wholeness, rather than some sort of narrowing. Very much my, my, the whole of my teaching really is about expansion, filling out, yes, be the whole of what you can be. This is the Grail. Okay, so a little bit about what we're doing out there. We'll be publishing material about this. We have a little website that we've developed, so I hope you'll join us there if you're not already on it. Namo Amida Butsu. Namo Amida Butsu.