Buddhism Inside Out

Good, thank you, welcome. There's a very nice energy when I came into the room earlier, which was lovely. So this talk, the idea of this talk came from a conversation that I had with Tenzin Shenyon, who is a guy from Liverpool who's ordained in the Tibetan tradition. Who's going to come and live with us in a few weeks' time, and he described Pure Land Buddhism as "Inside Out Buddhism." So I just wanted to unpack that really, and it fits with some of the other thoughts I've been having recently. I thought, well, it sounds like a good idea for a title as much as anything else, so here we are. So he was contrasting it to styles of Buddhism where you engage with the practice in order to get somewhere, which we all do some of that all the time, of course. And perhaps towards the end of the talk, I'll talk about how the two different styles can come together and work together, but in some traditions of Buddhism, there's a real emphasis on the path, or different stages on the path. They have the Lam Rim meditations in Tibetan Buddhism, which sort of, first of all you complete this practice, then you move on to this one, and you're developing your spiritual maturity as you go through the stages. A few weeks ago we were chatting with friends about the idea of enlightenment in Buddhism, and we said, "Oh, we don't really worry about enlightenment in this tradition." 'Or we don't worry about getting enlightened.' And they said, 'Well, what motivates you? Why do you practice then?' Because for them, the idea of becoming enlightened, becoming something other than they are now, was what drew them along the path. Whereas in Pure Land Buddhism, or in this take on Pure Land Buddhism, we're coming at it from a different angle, or inside out. So I want to think a little bit about gratitude, about grace. And about honesty. Wanting to— gratitude for what we have now undermines this idea of wanting to get somewhere where we're not. Part of the reason we want to get somewhere where we're not is because we can't really experience, we don't really experience fully what we've got. In this moment. And of course, some of what we've got in this moment is suffering, is dissatisfaction. That's part of the picture, but it's not the only part of the picture. And if that's the thing that fills our window, then of course we're going to want to do something to get out of there and to get somewhere else. But as any of you who have ever sat in meditation Well, no, fighting with what's presented to you, trying to change it into something else, invariably produces more drama, more conflict. So using that example of meditation, if you're sitting quietly and a thought comes up and you think, 'Oh, I want to get rid of that,' or 'I don't like that memory,' or 'I'd like to be different in this moment,' that energy to change yourself usually ends up creating more ripples in the water, stirring more things up, and actually keeping you in the state that you don't want to be in. Developing gratitude allows us to stay with what's happening. Moment to moment, in a way that doesn't create more chaos and create more conflicts. It also encourages us to broaden our understanding of what reality is. Particularly in the West, we have this idea of working really hard, doing it for yourself, pulling yourself up by your own bootstraps, making the right choices, putting the work in and then getting good results from it. Now, there's nothing wrong with that, as far as it goes, but when you really start to examine the choices that brought you to where you are now, what you uncover is a whole range of causes and conditions that are nothing to do with you, nothing to do with how much work you put in, nothing to do with whether you chose to go left or to go right. They're instances of things coming from the outside that change you, that gift you with the opportunity to become something different or to to something different. As far as I remember, my first introduction to Buddhism was reading some stories about some Zen Buddhist monks and nuns online. I don't remember exactly what sequence of events took me to that website, but My guess is it wasn't a conscious one, and I know for sure it was actually to do with avoiding work during the day rather than, you know, rather than deliberately choosing what was going to give me the best outcome in terms of what I thought my goals were at the time. So that was a chance encounter, and that website is hosted by a professor of psychology or philosophy, I don't know, somewhere in the States. And of course, if you unpack his life, there'll be a whole load of coincidences and choices and causes and conditions that come together to allow him to present those stories online. Maybe if things had been slightly different, I'd have— that link wouldn't have been there, I wouldn't have been able to click on it, and I wouldn't be sitting here today. So that was a gift. It was grace, if you like. It was something to be grateful for that was nothing to do with anything that I'd planned or intended or chosen. When someone gave me a copy of Caroline Brazeys' book, Buddhist Psychology, again, exactly the same story could apply. I guess the slight difference in that encounter was that I'd said that I was interested in Buddhist psychology, so there was something from my own side. But where does that interest in Buddhist psychology come from? Well, it comes from a whole range of causes and conditions that mostly have their origin outside of me. I read Carl Rogers' book about psychology while I was at university, and who knows what other causes and conditions conspired to encourage me to become interested in how the mind works or in spiritual practice. Some things that I look back on, at the time I understood as disappointments, have brought me to this place. So disappointments in other spiritual traditions, in the Christian Church, you know, when I was disappointed in the Christian church when people let me down, when I perceived people to be letting me down, when I couldn't sort of make sense of the teachings that I've been given, that was a big disappointment to me. But if I hadn't had that disappointment and gone through the process of assimilating that, and through the dead space that came after it where I wasn't really connecting with anything spiritual at all. Again, I wouldn't be here speaking to you, and now there's a lot of things that are obvious for me to be grateful for, but in that moment, at that time, I wouldn't have chosen to be grateful for that disillusionment. Maybe I would have done, but it would have been a very cynical sort of gratitude. "Ah, now I'm hard-boiled, and now I'm, you know, I'm following Richard Dawkins, I'm an atheist, I'll unpick whatever you bring to me, and yes, I'm pleased about that." Um, but it wasn't a sort of light-hearted, warm gratitude. The first time I really met this community, this Buddhist community, and the first time I met my teacher, Dhamma Vijja, again it was a moment of grace. It wasn't anything I created, but it wasn't really anything they created themselves either. There perhaps were one or two choices that they made along the way, but again you can unpick those, and it's hard to hold on to anything solid in the midst of all of that. When I had the experience of coming into the Centre in Leicestershire and being warmly welcomed despite being shy, awkward, occasionally passive-aggressive, not quite knowing what to do with myself, that was a real gift. —so much so that I decided to stay for 2 extra days. And when I saw Dharma Vijja teaching about the Lotus Sutra, and in my memory he's glowing when he's giving the teaching. I mean, he wasn't literally glowing, it wasn't a sort of supernatural experience, but there was something very clear about his teachings and about his presence, and he made contact with me somehow. In a way that cut through the sort of fog that I usually carried with me. So there was a sense of clarity or lightness or light shining through. That was a real gift, that was something to be grateful for, that was a blessing that I received. I was chatting to somebody at the Buddhafield Festival and they were talking about a talk that they'd done years ago that they thought went really Well, they described that they were describing their own journey in the Buddhist path and how they'd got to where they were and the choices they'd made and so on. And someone came up to them at the end and said, well, I don't know exactly what they said, whether it was, "I liked that, but," whether it was, "Oh, I didn't like that at all." And he asked them, "Well, what was it about it that you didn't like?" And they said, "Oh, well, there was nothing about it." 'There were blessings in the way that you told that story.' And he went away and reinvestigated what had brought him to that moment, and he found that there were blessings, there were gifts, there were things to be grateful for that weren't anything to do with what he'd created, with the choices he's made, with the study that he'd done. There's a Korean Buddhist teacher who, if I'd been really clever, I would have checked the name of before coming into the room, but I didn't. I want to say— no, I'm not even going to try and guess the name because I'll get it wrong and that, you know, that would be upsetting to everybody. And if I knew it, I wouldn't get the pronunciation right. But Dharma Vijja, my teacher, was reading some of his teachings, and he read about— he read a few years ago, and he read a little bit out to me, and it said— how did he put it? We often understand practice as a way of getting enlightened. If I do my meditation, I'll become more peaceful, the scales will fall from my eyes, and I'll be liberated, or 'nenbutsu,' or the precepts, whatever it is. Whereas he described his understanding as actually the practice— we practice to the extent that we are already enlightened. So another way of saying this is the practice that we're doing now today is as a result of the gifts that we've received. It's as a result of the wisdom that we've been given. Now both of those are true, of course, because doing the practice does keep that process of enlightenment working in you, keeps the wheel turning. But if you, if you emphasize that aspect of it, you can easily fall into— or the ego can sort of trick you into creating an identity of somebody who's wise. Or you can end up falling back into that, creating that sort of conflict with yourself, that split with yourself I talked about at the beginning. Oh, I don't want to be this sort of person. Whereas if you practice with the understanding that, 'Oh, I'm meditating this morning because I've been— because I've received these teachings and I've processed them to a particular extent, and to the extent that they've sunk into me is the extent that I can sit here and practice, is the extent that the depth of my practice today 'will go to.' That tunes you back into reality. It tunes you back into an honest assessment of what is the case. It doesn't ask you to do anything, and actually it can create gratitude because you go, 'Oh, well, isn't it wonderful that I'm able to sit here and do this practice and have this experience of even a little bit of peace this morning, this evening?' And what comes with that sense of gratitude? Being able to relax into what you've received, and also a sort of lightness. If you are suffering, if you're in trouble, if things aren't going so well, If the picture is looking dark, knowing that you have already received something just opens the curtains a little bit wider and allows some light in around the edges. If you're in this room listening to me, or if the recording works and you're listening to it, and you're not in this room, you've already received something that's brought you here. You've already got an enormous amount to be grateful for. You can sink into those blessings. And when I do that personally, I feel in my body and mind relax, and maybe that makes it more likely that I can receive more things in the future. Of course, if you start thinking in that way, you can fall back into the earlier trap of trying to get somewhere different. It's really just about appreciating what we've been given in this moment. And if you can genuinely do that, you will naturally keep the precept that's the most difficult to keep, which is not putting yourself above others. According to Alan Watts, that's the most difficult precept to keep, and it's pretty difficult in my experience. But we do that because we're jealous. Or because we feel insecure about our own position. And we don't need to do that if we feel grateful for what we've received already, if we understand that we're already in possession of something precious. And Pure Land Buddhism takes this a step beyond what I've already talked about, because it has this idea that the Buddha is present always. Amitābha, Amitāyas, the Sanskrit names of Amida Buddha, mean unlimited light and unlimited life. So there's a sense of the presence of enlightenment, the spirit of the Buddha, Nirvana, whatever you want to call it. Life means that it transcends time, it's present from moment to moment, and light refers to space. Wherever you go, you've got access to the Buddha. This is considered a sort of existential reality from the Pure Land point of view. Regardless of what you think the Buddha is, whether he's sitting on another planet somewhere radiating out light, or whether he's in a different dimension, or whether it's a symbolic reality that's just a way of making sense of something in the universe. It doesn't matter too much. What's important is the understanding that there is something that can be received at any moment, at any time. So in the way that I talked about receiving those gifts and receiving those blessings and sort of unpicking our own stories, there are times when we become particularly aware of it. But actually, the possibility of receiving grace, of receiving blessings, of receiving Dharma, is present in every moment, in every place that we find ourselves. What keeps us from receiving that is the stories that we tell ourselves, the greed, the hate, the delusion, the conflict that we have with reality. As we relax into the present moment, as we open the curtains a little bit wider to let those chinks of light in, which allow us to relax, what we discover is that if our heart does open a little bit, there is something that we can receive, that light, that eye. Described Dharma Vichara as glowing with when I encountered him teaching about the Lotus Sutra. That's present all the time, that's present everywhere. Not that we necessarily do experience it because we are full of wayward passions and we are ordinary human beings and we're not at the end of our spiritual journeys yet. But this is the central truth of Pure Land Buddhism, this is what's been passed down from disciple to disciple, from teacher to disciple throughout the ages. And of course, you can do two things with that with that knowledge— without understanding? You can have it subverted by your ego who wants to make something of you because you've heard about it. "Oh I'm special now! I got this!" "I know what I am doing." Never gonna trip over myself again or even... Oh I am tripping up for myself but Caspar said this thing's always available so I should be able to get to it why don't I get to it?! And wah-wah-wah-wah-wah-wah-wah-wah-wah. Neither of which is a great place to be in. Or you can take it as liberation, as freedom, as your faith deepens. "Oh, well, actually it's okay to be where I am, it's okay to be in the condition that I'm in, it's okay to have the limited amount of wisdom that I've got, because I know there's a whole sea of it out there surrounding me." surrounding everybody else as well, which takes the pressure off if you're in this job. And the understanding in Pure Land Buddhism is that the more we can tune into this, the more we are able to remind ourselves of this reality, the more we're able to receive of it. Whether we're able to will our hearts to open, or whether that's something that's also a gift, maybe we can talk about some other time. But the more we receive of it, the deeper our faith grows. And of course, the more we receive, the more practice we're able to do. This goes back to what the Korean teacher was talking about. The deeper our faith, the the more we trust the presence of the Buddha, the easier it is to meditate, the more pleasant our encounters with the people around us will be, and the more easily we will keep the precepts. So in this understanding, ethical behavior comes naturally and spontaneously out of the deep personal connection that we develop with the Buddha, because we relax, we're not conflicted, uh, we don't need to be defensive at all, because we understand that there's something to lean into. At the same time, we are given practices and precepts, and we do use those consciously in this tradition. And of course, you can say that, oh, we use those consciously because we've already received something that allows us to use them consciously, but let's just consider that we are given Buddhist teachings, that there are sutras, that there are precepts, that there are things that we can strive to reach for. If you read the Nikayas, the stories about the Buddha that are written in Pali, there's hundreds and hundreds of lists of ideal ways to behave for laypeople, for monastics, lists of virtues. And in the way that I'm talking, you— we understand that as the fruits of this practice of the fruit of tuning into the Buddha. But at the same time, all those lists are there. So what do we do with them? How do we work with them? Can we work with them consciously? Those descriptions of how the Buddha of the virtues, of how somebody who's enlightened behaves, serve as a mirror to our own depth of spiritual maturity. When we see ourselves failing to keep particular precepts, or celebrating when other people don't keep the precepts, or being mean, or small-hearted, or grasping, at things, or lusting after things. We can understand that those behaviors come out of an insecurity. They come out of trying to protect ourselves somehow, keep ourselves safe. That's what selfishness is really, is trying to keep ourselves safe in a situation where we don't feel safe. I don't know whether you've heard of Maslow's hierarchy of needs or not. It's one of those— I can't remember when he was around, in the '50s or something, similar time to Rogers. And essentially what he suggested was that there's a— first of all, you need food, then you need shelter, then you need to develop your psychological states of mind and bring that into balance, and then you can practice spiritually and sort of, uh, become enlightened once you've got the other things sorted. Well, actually, I think it's more helpful to put that pyramid on its head. Um, the grasping after physical things— food, shelter, perfect relationships— trying to sort our psychology out. We don't need to engage with that in such a fraught way, in, in a sort of fight for survival way, if we've got the top, the, the cap of the pyramid sort it out. If we're spiritually secure, if that little triangle on the top is already lit up, actually we can be much more relaxed about the other levels in the pyramid because we're already free. We don't need to worry so much about where our food or our shelter's coming from, whether we've got good relationships with people, because we've got a deep sense of being okay, of being loved. Just as we are, of the sort of okayness of our position. And in that position, when that triangle is perfectly lit, so the position of sainthood or of a bodhisattva or a Buddha, what you see in those people is that they don't worry where those things come from. And some of them even live their lives in a way that make it less likely they'll receive those things, going on hunger strike, for example, because they've got a deep sense of spiritual freedom. So when we see ourselves grasping after things, trying to sort those things out, or often in very dysfunctional ways, breaking the precepts, which usually comes out of a sort of twisted sense of trying to get those things for ourselves at the cost of others often. Actually, what that says to me is that there's that little triangle at the top of the pyramid isn't as bright as it could be, because if it was, we wouldn't be engaging in these sorts of behaviors. But we do, so there we are. So we can use that understanding in a couple of different ways. One is, oh, I'm breaking the precepts, I've hurt somebody, I'm grasping after something, I'm feeling upset. I guess that means that there's a pocket of insecurity in me, there's some, some part of me that doesn't— that isn't tuned into the Buddha, that doesn't believe it's possible to relax, into this grace, into these blessings, that isn't aware of what it's possible to receive moment to moment. So what you might do then is do some spiritual practice or try and reset the dial so that you can tune back into that reality a bit more, and that's a good thing to do, but maybe you can do it and maybe you can't. Because, you know, I know when I'm really worked up about something, in that moment it's quite hard for me to connect with the Buddha. Maybe later on I'll be able to, when I've calmed down a bit, or when I've processed what I need to process, but in that moment I'm not making that connection. And someone coming and saying, "Oh, just, you know, say 'nen butsu,' tune into the Buddha a bit more," I don't want to hear that. They're going to get, you know, two fingers if they come and suggest that to me in that moment. The deeper spiritual truth that we can take from that, actually, is that regardless of what state I'm in and whether I'm able to tune in to that reality or not, the light of the Buddha doesn't change. It's not affected by me being upset or not being upset. It's still offering me blessings. The Dharma is still still present, offering me grace, offering me blessings moment to moment, regardless of what state I find myself in. And this really is the, the sort of the center of Pure Land Buddhism, that regardless of what state we find ourselves in moment to moment, it doesn't affect the presence of the Buddha. And if we do break a precept, if we do feel upset, actually what tends to happen is, to the extent that we've taken refuge in the past in the Buddha, often we'll feel contrition, we'll feel sorrow. "Oh, okay, now I've calmed down a bit, I can see that wasn't the wisest course of action. I've hurt somebody, I feel sad about that." And out of that sadness comes a relaxation, an acceptance, you know, because sadness, you only get to sadness if you accept what you've done, if you accept reality. It's the same with the stages of grief, you know, you go through all those different stages and you get to sadness and acceptance at the end, because sadness is what's really at the heart. Of it. And in that acceptance comes a relaxation, and in that moment of relaxation, naturally we're able to connect with the light again. That doesn't come from us trying to do it, it's just how it is to be human. Sadhguru ji, Satya Robyn, Satya Robyn. So, for me, this understanding of receiving blessings, of receiving gratitude, both in the sense of very specific things that I've received, some of which I know about, some of which I probably don't know about, because I haven't worked out the whole story, the concrete things that have led me to this place. And more deeply, that sense of gratitude for the teachings being present at all. It's got the potential to transform spiritual practice into something that allows us just to see sit with, 'Oh, this is what's happening today, and that's okay because I know that I've already received this. I know that the blessings are continuing. I know that I don't need to do anything differently in order to make that happen because it's something that happens outside of my own control, outside of what I can manipulate.' I think this is a very good way of looking at spiritual practice. I think in the end there is a synthesis between the two modes of practice, because not only do we use those teachings that we're given more explicitly to act as a mirror for our own state of being, but we also— the deeper our faith, the deeper our trust in the presence of the Dharma, in the presence of the Buddha, the more likely we are to want to put those teachings into practice the easier it is to put those teachings into practice. And sometimes it's helpful to think of us being the ones who put them into practice. That can take us over a bit of resistance, or it can take us into the next level. But I think, as a Pure Land Buddhist, it's most often helpful to think of— I want to say Chenrezig, but I'm not sure that's right, but Koreans teach anyway his description of enlightenment being something that we're gifted, that we practice to the extent that we're enlightened already. Or we would say in Pure Land Buddhism, practice comes out of faith. In the Summary of Faith and Practice, it says faith and practice cannot be differentiated. How you are in the world is a direct mirror of how deeply you're connected to the Buddha. Nam-myoho-renge-kyo. Thank you very much.