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Metaphor

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Metaphor
– a poem by Tarchin Hearn

The inner tangle
and the outer tangle,
This generation is entangled in a tangle,
So pray, Gautama,
Who can untangle this tangle?
(The Vissudhimagga)

Metaphor and meaning are slippery subjects, and so too is money.  Money is a currency for exchanging objects.  It is countable, measurable, gross and specific.  Metaphor is a currency for understanding.  It is ephemeral and approximate, subtle and pregnant with nuance and intimation.  Money is a blunt instrument to facilitate living in a fantasized existence of  defined edges and graspable properties.  Metaphor is a language for enabling universes of interpenetrating worlds of lived experience, in all their ungraspable fullness.  It is sometimes said that money is for realists and metaphor for poets and dreamers, but in the end, money itself is a product of metaphor.  Metaphor is a mystery that can lubricate and gather together an immense dance of becoming, an emerging symphony of felt/sense understanding.  In the subject/object market-place-world, anyone can buy stuff with money.  Some believe that given enough of it, they could buy any thing.  It takes, however, deep calm, bright awakeness and a solid base of life affirming relating, to unfold the art of metaphor. 

To indenture ourselves as apprentices of wonderment and awe in the studio of all embracing life, this is how we can begin to untangle the inner and outer tangle.

 

He was a purveyor of metaphors,
buying and selling to all and sundry,
wandering widely, he set up shop,
in village greens, in conference centres,
in living rooms and places of time and knowing
that lacked geographic coordinates.

He dealt in metaphor of all kinds;
the cheaply mass produced fads, and popularizations
and also, an extensive range of useful ones,
for cleaning and removing stains, for unsticking
and lubricating squeaky hinges,
for collating and organizing data.
He had metaphors with hand grips and ergo-metrically
designed straps and quick releases.
Some were big.
Some were massive.
He had light ones and dark ones and ones
that were both light and heavy, dark
and dancing, all at once.
Some allowed you to see all the way to Betelgeuse.

Wherever he went, he was always interested in the old and rare
but also the new and innovative
and he carried an uncanny knack of
sniffing out ones that people packed around with them,
or had stored away in dusty cupboards
forgetting they were even there.

His personal collection was extensive and it
was rumoured that he had some that were
so refined you could place one on the finest balance,
and it’s weight was less than the lightest feather.
A collector and dealer, a connoisseur of connoisseurs,
moving with ease through the lives of countless modes of being.

Yet few know where he came from.
He seemed to just appear,
and then, with a smile,
he’d gather all his wares and stuff them into a tiny bag of blackness.

I say blackness,
but, actually,
I couldn’t really make it out.
It wasn’t like anything else in the world.
It was silky and soft and heavy and encompassing,
and everything went tumbling in to this bag of silence,
this unseen baggage of belonging and vastness.
Looking around, he’d grin and then,
tossing his bundle in the palm of his hand,
he’d pop it into a pocket,
right next to his heart.

Some people said that he lived in a far away place that had no need for metaphor, that his own house was simple and unadorned.  It was even thought by some with wild imaginations, that he lived in the bag of blackness, or the shirt pocket!  Of course, there were always gushy mushy types who thought his home must be his heart.  To me, he was a purveyor of metaphors, a travelling tinker, a mysterious vagabond, who trod the roads and byways of our lives.  He once allowed me to carry his bag.  Truth be said, I think he saved my life.

© Tarchin Hearn www.greendharmatreasury.org


A Buddhist Understanding of Prayer

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A Buddhist Understanding of Prayer
by Tarchin Hearn

This essay was originally written in 2006 at the Wangapeka Study and Retreat Centre.  It has been edited and re-formatted for Green Dharma Treasury.

I often receive requests for prayers.  Please pray for someone.  Please hold someone in your prayers.  To tell you the truth, the more I’m asked this, the more I find myself pondering, what does it actually mean?  With a sense of the ineffable mystery of the universe, what does it mean to pray for someone?  Surely we are not being asked to join in mere petition.  Begging for mercy or for help – pleadings of desperation pouring forth from sadness and fear of imminent loss.  Prayer as bartering, a kind of marketplace exchange.  Prayer as anger or righteous indignation.  It’s not fair.  We want justice.  Prayer as the outflow of desperately needing to DO something when we have run out of other things to try.  Prayer as payment, I’ll do this and you give me, or him, or her, health or success or whatever.  Prayer as control; tweaking the DNA, fine tuning the microtubules, reprogramming the cosmic computer in a preferable way.

All of this trying,
all of this efforting
outflows of pain and sadness and
the messy wreckage of broken connections.

Of course, there is also prayer as celebration, co-mingling and falling together, tumbling through the sharp door of grief into an ocean of love.  We mould each other, teach each other, shape each other; cajoling, pleading – reverberations of feeling and memory.  What a blessing!  Each moment; uniquely fresh, never-to-be again-ness.  Alive to this – suchness resting – you reminding me and me reminding you of all that is precious; a bursting gratitude for having danced with each other in a way that was with no other.

Surely prayer that heals – even in the face of dying – is a mystery of aliveness, an unfathomableness described with four tiny letters;  l, o, v, e.  Linking, coupling, grieving, celebrating, discovering, losing, laughing and lightening; living together, merged and mingled.  A felt need for prayer is life’s invitation to all of us.  It’s the knock on the door, the message on the answer machine.  An enticement to drop the pretence, the falseness and façade.  Drop the procrastination, the game playing, the toeing of the party line, the keeping up with the Jones, the fear of being different, the fear of failure – the fear of being real!  Let us have the courage to ask each other for prayer, for help, for upliftment.  Let’s send out the invitations and then, resting in trust, let us dance abundantly with all that joins us.

In this context, perhaps it does makes sense to pray for someone, especially when they are not capable of praying themselves.  This is a mystery, a place of guardian angels, of sambhogakayas and inexplicable linkages.  It is intimate and personal.  Remembering you, a fellow way-farer on the path of living; an adventuring, struggling, pioneering-through-illness friend.  Appreciating the multi-dimensional vastness of your being: biological, ancestral and historic along with the environmental circumstances of your journey.  Joining these memories to the piercing screech of blackbirds as they distract a morepork from their territory and the evening breeze gently rustling the limbs of the trees.  Breathing with the thought of you while opening to the perfect weaving of lifetimes and lifelines – becomings and unbecomings in countless realms and dimensions.  This is my prayer, your struggle tugging my heart, drawing my mind to what is eye moist and wondrous.  Perhaps even better than praying for someone is to pray with someone.  Isn’t that what we are doing?  We touch each other drawing forth awakeness, amazement and sometimes blessed peace, and sometimes all of these together!  Ah, you are weaving me into the world.  Humming with the birthing/dying mystery of countless beings, immense gratitude explodes in all directions – a profound embracing.

In the last few months, so many people, have reverberated through my being as prayer.  People I know, friends of friends, people I’ve heard about, creatures, species, water sheds and ecosystems.  The years go by.  The list gets longer; this listing of gain and loss, this blessing of mystery, this savouring and celebrating of each vast, boundless, intermingling.  We pray together, we live together, we struggle together, we love together, we feed all beings together.

E, Ma Ho!
May all beings join in the banquet!

But – let’s not get totally carried away.  Sometimes we forget.  Do you know what I mean?  Blessing seems gone.  Loss is all around.  How then can I pray?

At times like this:
Pray with your body.  Feel the tensing and relaxing of your muscles as prayer, the beating of your heart and the tides of your breathing as prayer, the movements of digestion and elimination as prayer.  Enjoy and explore your posture as prayer, sitting as prayer, standing as prayer, walking as prayer, and lying down as prayer.  Pray with all your activities, working as prayer, playing as prayer, exercising as prayer.  Pour the nectar of exquisite attention into whatever you are doing, moment by moment, so that, that too becomes prayer.  Prayer without ceasing.  Life without ceasing.

Pray with your voice.  Sing, chant, call out all the names of all the beings you love.  Speak from your chest, from your belly and feel the resonance of your voice loosening all the fibres of your being.  Let the murmur of poetry and wondrous things ride on your breath, cadences of deep caring, choralling down into the marrow of your bones.  Let your talking stop and surrender into the great silence.  Listen to the whisper of your heart-knowing, a symphony of cells, a dancing of intelligence.  All around, spiders, trees, birds, and landscapes; myriad beings, talking, broadcasting, weaving you into their weaving.  We see each other.  We hear each other.  We respond to each other.  We are not alone.  Communication – the activity of coming into union.  Our languaging together is the prayer of the universe.  Your every whisper – the prayer of ‘as it is-ness’.

Pray with your mind.  Release into stillness and feel the motionless motion of knowing the world, and – being known by the world.  Allow the gates of memory to fall open and enter the mandala of your life.  Thanking where thanks are due.  Forgiving when forgiveness is needed.  Peacemaking when peace is right.  Celebrating all the ordinary miracles that somehow were taken for granted.  Blessing and supporting where blessing and support are needed.  Letting go of regret.  Letting go of ‘yes buts’.  Letting go of ‘shoulds’ and ‘oughts’ and things not accomplished.  Let your mind be a prayer and allow yourself to dwell in the beautiful and the life affirming.

Day by day  – body, speech and mind,
living life abundantly,
generously and humbly.
In this way perhaps our entire life
becomes
prayer.

It’s one of those mornings; five-thirty a.m. and luminous.  The light is rose-ing salmon grey-pink, silhouetting the peaks, a celestial water colour washing the canvas of my mind, transforming a chill metal-blue dawn into a visual symphony of saturated colour.  The air is dense.  Everything is so extraordinarily still, it seems, that by simply opening a space of caring, I can feel pin prick crystals, emerging one by one, billions of them, a gloaming of frost falling silently into our world, clothing the blades of grass, the bracken fronds and marble leaves.

Bellbirds, tuis, blackbirds, grey warblers and south island tomtits are waking, one bird, and then the next; a squeak, a twitter, a stretch of silence, a peep, another silence, then a raucous chatter; arpeggios of liquid clinks and bloonks, until avian breakfast chatter is bouncing up and down our little valley. Everyone’s talking!  Light, colour, stillness, exuberance, fluid breath, feet planted in the earth; it seems the whole world is blessed.  Resting in this pristine wonder, thinking of you, thinking of me, sharing this holiness, savouring the luminosity. Surely the knowing of such a moment, this absolute ordinariness, this perfection of everything – just as it is – surely this is the very heart of prayer.

A single beech leaf;
blushed gold, pastelling incrementally to a viridian hint of summer long gone;
flittering, tumbling,
pausing in a moment of perfect levitation
then changing pace and direction,
zigging and zagging,
falling down the staircase of the sky
and thwapping ever so delicately into a waiting puddle.

Imagine the limpid surface; intimately, effortlessly, echoing a golden leaf
spiraling ever bigger and clearer,
details of veins and ragged edges,
turning in space.
Does the puddle have any kind of aqueous expectation?
A tiny almost imperceptible thwap
pushing the surface tension, liquid drum skin stretching earthward
receiving, gathering,
then springing outward,
a flawless catch and rebound,
concentric rings of mirror-like crystal
a rippling world observed by fantail and the
sparkling of my neurons in breath-holding recognition of something miraculous.
Surely this too is a kind of prayer?

After breakfast,
sitting on the porch of Triple Gem … a bowl of becoming,
petals of knowing opening and closing within and around.
River sound swooshes and hums with the light,
pine auras of blinding whiteness, individual needles,
some neurotransmitter has turned up the magnification!
And suddenly,
as if from nowhere,
a harrier . . . two harriers!
(Everything has become slow motion.)
Hovering, gliding, sliding on the dense thickness of frosted air,
rising in the waves of warming light
while visions of far away friends
and yogis in meditation
and earthworms wrapped in their dark warm beds
and micro-organisms in the stream
and each separate leaf and needle
all of us and all of this
together,
weaving
an elegant tapestry of beauty and meaning.
Surely this is prayer in action.

A medium size fly is buzzing in the sunlight
exploring the wall of my hut,
seeking whatever flies seek on pristine wintery mornings.
His eyes are so big!
Where did he spend his night?

Something feels immense and perfect
life thrumming as the earth turns
and illumination races down the face of Jones’s ridge.
a waking of newness.
a heart glow of breath-catching gratitude,
a perfect eternal moment,
a life worth living,
Surely knowing this is the blessing of prayer.

may all beings be well
may all beings be happy
sarva mangalam
all is blessing

(Please feel free to share this essay with your friends.)
© Tarchin Hearn   www.greendharmatreasury.org

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Remembering Sonia Moriceau, Ad Brugman and All Beings

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Dear Friends

Last night, at midnight NZ time June 11 or noon UK time, a friend, colleague and teacher, Sonia Moriceau, let go into the wider life of the planet.  I will remember her smile and the mindful way she moved.  I will remember that day at Wangapeka during the School of Living Dharma, the way her hand rested on my abdomen as we breathed together, entering a sensitivity I think of as embodied blessing.  A few days ago I visited her web site and saw that in June this year she was scheduled to lead a retreat called  “How to Prepare for Death:  Leaving Fear Behind.”  Sonia, you always did teach by example – and now this – how Zen!

For those who knew her and loved her, please join me in this prayer that many of us learned from Sonia, who herself learned it from her long time teacher, John Garrie Roshi.  As you contemplate it, bring to mind all the wonderful aspects of Sonia’s life, the beauty, and grace and love of truth that she so steadily modeled and so readily shared.

Contemplating the inconceivable number of wholesome moments  birthed
into the world through the life of Sonia Moriceau
May they continue to flower and increase, inspiring, supporting and beautifying
the lives of uncountable beings to come.

May her family and friends and all their families and friends,
find rest and clear seeing, in the heart of Dharma.
May the blessings of immeasurable love and immeasurable light be realized by everyone everywhere.

 

Peace To All Beings

by John Garrie Roshi

 

Peace to all beings
may all beings be well and happy
and free from fear.

Peace to all beings
whether known or unknown
visible or invisible
real or imaginary
born or yet to be born
may all beings be well and happy
and free from fear

Peace to all beings
within and beyond the imagination
in the world of ideas
in the world of memories
and in the world of dreams
may all beings be well and happy
and free from fear

Peace in all the elements
of earth and air and fire and water
fulfilled in space
peace

Peace in all universes
from the smallest cells in the body
to the greatest galaxies in space
peace and light rising

Peace and love and comfort and ease
to all in need
may they be well and happy
and free from fear.
Peace To All Beings

For those who would like to know more I’m including this e-mail we received this morning.

Dear friends,

As you know, Sonia has been in intensive care since Sunday. Her condition became more critical over the past twenty-four hours and it became clear Sonia was going to die.
Sonia was fully aware of what was happening and that she was reaching the end of her life. Today at a few minutes past twelve, Ad and Jane were with her when she passed away. She was very peaceful, and over the past twenty-four hours has told Ad her mind was clear, quiet, with not many thoughts.
Sonia has been brought home to the Orchard where she will rest in the zendo for a few days.
We will send a further e-mail by lunchtime tomorrow with regards visiting Sonia and other arrangements. There will be a cremation either Saturday or Monday and we hope to maintain a constant vigil over Sonia’s body until then.
In the meantime, we would request you do not phone the Orchard until you receive further news.
with much love,
Jane, on behalf of Ad.

Sufficient Love To See

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We are living in extraordinary times.  Our understanding of life as a planet-wide, delicate, yet creatively responsive phenomena, is becoming clearer than ever, while at the same time, we humans seem to marching, robot fashion, into an authoritarian form of money driven governance that makes the novels of Brave New World and 1984 seem almost benign. 

 
In September of 2000, I wrote a poem called “Sufficient Love to See”.  So much has happened since then.  America as an institution, has come out of the closet and revealed itself to be a morally bankrupt, authoritarian, military-industrial golem/bully –  the shadow side of its original aspiration for freedom, justice and respect for all.  The global financial system has shown itself to be the alliance of blind delusion, greed and fear that it really is.  Nature, in all her unimaginable vastness and complexity is increasingly reminding us where we really stand.  All of this could be simply overwhelming or it could be just the spur that each of us needs, not to fuel the fires of anxiety,  desperation and grasping for certainty, but to grow our roots even deeper into the loam of  living sanity.  (The original version of this poem can be found in “A Sheaf of Poems 1991 – 2000”, in the Green Dharma Treasury section on Poetry.)

 

Sufficient Love to See

The path of awakening is all around you.
It is the life you are living.
It is the place where you are.
It is the mind that is experiencing.

Just pause and allow the looking to deepen.
the hearing,
the smelling
the tasting,
the touching,
the thinking.

Do you have sufficient love to see?
That’s a big question!

Feel the fullness of being;
within and around,
awake, responsive, engaging;
It’s everyone.
A living tapestry of infinite depth and dimension.

When the heart is flowering . . .
When curiosity is working its wondrous mystery in the very fabric of one’s body . . .
When interest and question are probing, caressing, fathoming;
teasing out with endless appreciation the richness of ‘other’ . . .
When the doorways of sensing are wide open, allowing lightness;
the joy of discovery . . .

Then . . .
We experience wherever we are to be a treasure,
bursting prison walls of alienation and self absorption,
a flood of joy, cascading forth,
watering the wholesome seeds of everyone.

Two Poems

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We are living is shocking times.  On a personal level, Cecilie, a long time friend, and teacher for many readers of this post, is journeying in unknown territory in an intensive care unit, as she slowly reassembles her body/being after a major car accident.  On a collective level, we are filled with the images of suffering in the Philippines after the strongest cyclone ever to make landfall, tore a path of unimaginable destruction through the lives of millions of beings.  Life is surely mysterious.  None of us know what the morrow will bring. 

Here are two poems from a new collection “A Sheaf of Poems 2010 – Onward” which is now posted on GDT.  They are not about tragedy.  They are about life, and life links us all.  So precious.  So delicate and fragile.  So tenacious and strong.  I’d like to dedicate these two poems with love and caring to Cecilie and to the people of  the Philippines.  May your healing be deep, profound and speedy.  May the rest of us never take life for granted but learn the path of reverence, wonderment and well grounded intelligence for the benefit of everyone.

 

Maps and Terrain
As a child, I wanted to be a map maker.
I gathered pencils and paper and sticks tied
together with strings to sight along

And I began to map our street and neighborhood.

At that time, we subscribed to National Geographic magazine
and I collected the maps and kept them
flat between thin sheets of plywood
and I dreamed of travel and adventure.

I drew a grid on a map of the world and a grid on the wall beside my bed
and I enlarged the world map so that it filled the entire wall and painted
in all the oceans and major rivers,
the hot and cold currents;
sweeping curves of blue and red.

And I lay on my bed, for hours,
dreaming of traveling the world by water;
Sailing here and canoeing there,
with short portages to cross the Andes and other inch long gaps.
For come unknown reason I left the land unpainted – vacant of national boundaries.
They didn’t seem real like the sea and the great rivers.

I moved on from this year of passion, yet later in life
found myself again collecting maps.
Maps of the body and maps of vegetation and weather trends.
Maps of family dynamics and social change,
of historic swings and eons of geologic and life evolving journeyings.

And I thought that by learning these maps, I would know the
terrain and would be able to find my way, and this obsession deepened
until one day, walking in unknown land with steep hills
and tumbling streams and golden autumn leaves and the first hints of winter,
it dawned on me that I was mapping the land with my body,

step by step,
breath by breath,
the tilt of the hip and the slide of the shale,
the smell of flowers and the flush of memory,
the buzzing of bees and pleasure of energy’s song.

And as I mapped the land,
the land was mapping me;
traces of our lives, mingling and flowing,
shaping and being shaped,
mapping each other in flesh and heartbeat and kidney function,
in shifting metabolisms and felt sense respondings.

And as we map
a knowing blossoms clear and fine
that the map IS the terrain
itself
transforming,
through being
the map makers that we are.

 

Deep Ecology
Moving through fields of minds of beings
moving as a being of care-filled minding stillness,
movement as a play of mystery unfolding . . .
This flowering here of nowfulness.

Grassy meadows
rippling with zephyred thought and feeling,
photons of star parents,
touchings of brother,
scentings of sister,
a buzzing inter-pollination in every direction;
and we flow
as one river;
streams of magic
forging paths of openness,
tracks of transient creatureness,
weavings of life-lines lacing the open sky,
Birthing an old forest of worlds.

Walking in Wisdom – a path of view, meditation and action –

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Walking in Wisdom
– a path of view, meditation and action –
by Tarchin Hearn

In Buddhism, wisdom is not a knowledge of ultimate facts or truth but an ever deepening process of understanding, life enhancing connectivity, and communion.

In this sense, wisdom is living.
Not something we have,
but something we do.
It is the fundamental ground that we are.

We radically intermingle; cells and organs, minds and bodies, creatures and communities, beings and environments, the so called animate and the so called inanimate.

Cells live together as organs.  They are affected by the activity of organs while organs are affected by the activities of cells.  Minds are shaping and crafting bodies, while bodies facilitate the manifesting of minds.  Creatures determine communities while communities shape creatures. Beings affect their environments while environments affect the beings that make them up.  Animate is affecting inanimate as, simultaneously, inanimate is shaping animate.  This is a broad and all-encompassing view.

Learning the art of embracing this multi-leveled dynamic of interpenetrating realms and times; learning the art of participating in this;  engaging with this; and being this;  and so unfolding the potentialities inherent in this; – is to master the craft of meditation – the way of inclusive integration.

Maturing this craft, until it perfumes all activities of body, speech and mind, permeating every aspect of relating, so that the hint of wholeness is everywhere revealed, is the fruition of this work.  Collaboration, symbiosis, compassion’s play unceasing – this is the action

Wisdom, meditation/integration, wholesome relating;
view, meditation, action;
ecology, meditation and living dharma;
base, path and fruition;
prajna, samadhi and sila;
different ways of naming a single wondrous path.

A primordially immanent budding,
this living truth,
this community of ever evolving balance and ineffable mystery,
this middle way,
this eight-noble-fold path,
may we see it, learn it and live it
. . . AH!

You might view the above as a description of ‘what is’ with the idea that it is something we are, or should be, working towards.  I suspect this would be a form of conceit.  After all, life’s story is an unfinished work in progress.  I prefer to see my description as simply part of the effort of unfolding this moment, the work that I need to do now, a work that needs to be done at this point in history.  It is not intended as a grand answer or delineation of the ultimate state of affairs.  Rather, it is part of the process of energizing our living today – a step on a journey of deepening understanding, deepening life enhancing connectivity and deepening communion.  This is surely wisdom walking in wisdom.

“True Refuge” a new book by Tarchin

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“True Refuge”, an inspiring new book by Tarchin Hearn, is now available from Wangapeka Books for $20 plus postage. To order copies, contact us at <books [at] greendharmatreasury [dot] org>

Some of you may have heard that Tarchin has been having some health issues. We are pleased to announce that not only has this book, ten years in the gestating, been born, but at the same time, Tarchin ‘gave birth’ to a kidney stone and stent and is now blissfully recovering from what has seemed like a long labour!

Introduction

In the Buddha, the Dharma and the excellent Sangha,
I take my refuge until enlightenment is reached.
By the power of generosity and other good deeds,
May I realize buddhahood for the sake of all living beings.

At this very moment, in Buddhist temples around the world, devotees with palms joined at the heart are reciting verses of refuge to the Buddha, Dharma and Sangha, in a ritual called ‘taking refuge’, or ‘going for refuge’. For many of these people, this act of devotion is a practice they learned from their parents or grandparents and has become something of an ingrained habit; a largely unquestioned part of being the person they are. Christians, Moslems, Jews and Hindus, along with practitioners of other institutionalized forms of religion can be seen performing similar rituals in similar moments of devotion.

For some people, taking refuge is much more than just a religious habit. It can be a powerful moment of emotionally charged poetry that helps them touch a place of deep inspiration and uplifting aspiration. For others, contemplating refuge becomes a doorway into a lifetime of questing and questioning that takes them far beyond the gates of the temple and the religious symbolism of Buddha, Dharma and Sangha. In their quest, they may even find themselves asking, what is refuge? Who goes for refuge? And for that matter, what do we actually mean by Buddha, Dharma and Sangha?

For some, the journey of refuge can expand in the direction of a vigorous exploration of what we are, and where we are, and how we as human beings fit in with the rest of the world and the cosmos around us. Questioning this way, we may find ourselves asking what we actually mean by ‘going for’ or ‘taking’ refuge. Is refuge to be found in a location, something one can ‘go’ to? Is refuge a thing, something that can be taken or held? If we really look deeply, enquiring with the whole of our being, we may end up feeling our way into a fresh understanding of the very fabric and functioning of life and, in doing so, touching a sense of vast meaning, profound belonging and unfathomable completeness. At this moment we might realize that the contemplation of refuge has brought us back to the fullness of what, where and who we are. We will have recognized and realized our true home.

Years ago, I set out to write a booklet on refuge, one that would be filled with explanations and clarifications of Buddhist tradition. As time passed, my expanding reflections and explorations, coupled with teaching and working with people both in cities and in retreat, took me ever more deeply into a vast and complex weaving of life experience. I began to sense that truly seeking refuge and actually resting in or realizing refuge, were the underlying themes of everyone’s lives whether they had heard of refuge or not. Refuge is the concern of everyone, not just Buddhists.

As I pointed out in the preface, all of us are participating in a turbulent world of climate change, political instability, social upheaval, economic uncertainty and natural disasters. For the millions of people finding themselves engulfed by fire, flood, earthquake, war and rising poverty, the search for meaning and physical and emotional resilience is no longer a mere philosophical diversion. It is central to their survival as well functioning, decent human beings. This search for meaning, in the midst of emotional stress and increasing feelings of disempowerment, is the viscerally real work of refuge in action. I would say that it has been our central human work throughout history. The capacity to wonder about what we are and where we are going and how we are connected with others and what we can contribute to the world, is what makes us humans fully human. Whether we grapple with this as a religious concern or as a secular practicality for survival and success, these questions are profoundly at work in the bones and marrow of beings from all cultures.

Celtic tradition sings of home and belonging. Deep ecologists celebrate their inseparable interweaving with all life. Physicists feel their way towards a beautiful theory that links everything. Devotees of religions of all kinds, yearn for union. Buddhists honor the Buddha, Dharma and Sangha. Sufis embrace the beloved. Christians give themselves over to the Christ Consciousness or to Godhead – “Not my will be done but thy will be done.” Muslims practice surrender. Agnostics let go into the ineffable. Sufferers learn to embrace their life situation. This journey towards refuge, towards safety, belongingness, well being, meaningful being, and a fundamental sense of home, is the underlying dominant theme of all human endeavor. It is the beginning, the middle and the end of all paths of awakening. It is initially felt as a deep emotional yearning. It unfolds through mindful life experience. It culminates in the manifesting of a richly matured human being. Refuge is both the starting point of our explorations and the final realisation.

In these pages, I hope to share with you some glimpses into what could become a life long journey of contemplation and practice. Rather than a traditional presentation with methodically developed themes and arguments, I have opted for a collage of poetry, observations and, hopefully, some fresh avenues for question and enquiry. I’m trusting that your intuition will knit these various offerings together, in ways that are relevant to your own unique situation and circumstance.

For practicing Buddhists, I hope this small book will revitalize your understanding of what, in my life, has become a deep and fertile ground of contemplation. For those of you who are rooted in other traditions of enquiry, I hope you will taste the flavor of refuge or at least have a tantalizing whiff, a possibility for living that seems vast and profoundly universal, yet is arising, at this very moment within you and around you in the dance of living relationship which is our very beingness.

Excerpts from “True Refuge”

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Excerpts from “True Refuge” a new book by Tarchin
147 pages; $20 + postage

Irony will sometimes teach us more than earnest explanations. Too often I meet Buddhists who, in the temple or as part of a session of meditation, chant refuge prayers to the Buddha, Dharma and Sangha, and then, in their day to day living, seek refuge in dramatically different ways. Sometimes, when the opportunity has seemed right, I have suggested to them that if they had the courage, they could try being a bit more honest. Instead of chanting “I take refuge in the Buddha, Dharma and Sangha”, which for many people are little more than pious concepts, they could look at where they actually go for refuge, on a daily basis, and then to name it as it is.

Imagine the following situation. You are standing in the presence of your object of ‘reverence’. Your palms are held together in a gesture of prayer. Perhaps you are in front of the refrigerator. “I take refuge in compulsive snacking.” Or before the TV, “I take refuge in zoning out”. Looked at this way there are an astonishing number of ways people try to find refuge. There is refuge in defensiveness. “I take refuge in irritation, prickliness and self justification.” There is seeking refuge in travel, novelty, money, credit ratings, pensions, and insurance. There is looking for refuge in sex, relationships, romance, or companionship. How about refuge in sleep, withdrawal, or even in passive aggression? Some seek refuge in overt addictions such as drugs, alcohol, coffee, tea, TV, movies, music in the background, texting and social networking. Some seek refuge in routine – in habitual activities. Some take refuge in pausing and breathing. They’re not all negative! There is seeking refuge through hiding from people and situations and seeking refuge through fixing or controlling people or situations. A big one is hoping to find refuge in what others think of me.

Try doing this for a day or two, hands folded, head bowed in prayer, gazing at your current source or object of refuge and at that very moment, recite the words, “I take refuge in _____”(and baldly state it as it is). Notice your response.

At the same time, you are saying this prayer, gently float the following question. Is this particular matrix of body, speech and mind a realistic place of refuge that can give me a sense of safety, well being and belonging in any life circumstance? Will this refuge sustain me in the face of sickness, old age and death? Will it sustain me in the midst of recognizing that life is vast and ultimately unknowable in all its detail, and that everything exists dependent on other things which themselves depend on other things? Will it sustain me when I find myself in new and unfamiliar territory, where my native wit and intelligence are my only guide? Equipped with your wholeness/fragmentation compass, really look into this. Over the course of days and weeks check it out – again and again. These are attempts at refuge, but are they broadly useful or do they just create more trouble? In the process of exploring this way, can you begin to discern the possibility of ‘true refuge’?

Rather than a blunt black or white, yeh or nay, it can sometimes help to think in terms of less functional and more functional places or sources of refuge. Less functional refuge tends towards withdrawal and disengagement – hunkered down behind a rocky outcrop in a storm (which may be necessary in a crisis but not in daily living). More functional refuge tends towards expansion and engagement – lucid, loving, open and accepting.

After you have observed some of your habitual attempts at refuge, take a large sheet of paper and on it, write something like this:

less functional refuge < – – – – – – – > more functional refuge
withdrawal < – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – > expansion

Now jot down the various refuge attempts that you know are familiar patterns in your life. Arrange them along the line between less functional and more functional. What is actually important to you? As a refuge, does it work?! Does it really lead you to an experience of well grounded, thoroughly integrated, wholesome functioning? Can it support a sense of fundamental goodness, wonderment and reverence through all the unavoidable stages of life, including dissolution and death?

I take refuge in wholeness,
    the natural state of complete authenticity and presence.
I take refuge in playful experimentation,
    the great flowing, the universal teachings of awakening.
I take refuge in daily practicalities, this unfolding communion of all life.

To order a copy of “True Refuge”
In New Zealand, e-mail <books [at] greendharmatreasury [dot] org>
or in Auckland, contact Janet at janete1 [at] ihug.co [dot] nz
In Melbourne, Australia, contact Kathryn at kathryn [at] openpathmeditation.com [dot] au
In Hobart, Australia, contact Margaret at msteadman [at] trump.net [dot] au
In Canada, contact Samaya at bgordon [at] magma [dot] ca

 


A Life of Dharma

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A Life of Dharma
by Tarchin Hearn
(first published in Wangapeka Newsphere, Jan. 2015)

‘Dharma’ is a rich and bounteous concept. Common translations give us words or phrases such as truth, teaching (particularly spiritual teaching), natural law, law of nature, phenomena, process and ‘thing’. It’s difficult to grasp in all its dimensions – as is our life. What does it mean to ‘live a life of dharma’? To devote yourself to dharma? Living truth, living teaching, living natural law, living phenomena, living process, living thing. It takes an entire evolving staggeringly alive planet to bring forth just one innocent, vulnerable, freshly born human being. And yet . . . this was how each one of us began.

A mother; a living being, a person, a weaving of relationships happening simultaneously at many levels: water, soil, sun and air; molecules, cells, organs and organism; bacteria, fungi, plants and animals; and all of these mysteries, embedded in the worlds of her mother and father, grandparents, great grandparents and extended communities; oceans of hopes and fears, beliefs and uncertainties, potentialities and possibilities. And joining with your mother is an entanglement of motives and movements, neurons, hormones and matrices of distant families tracing a pattern through time – your father.

Egg nuzzling with sperm, mysteriously revolving in space, chemically morphing to allow in, not any sperm but that particular sperm. Two cells of germination, beings, not even vaguely human looking, coming together and dying to their separate self-ness in the process of becoming a symbiont called you. I once read that we share 50% of our genome with a banana! Chemically, at the stage of fertilization, we are not much different from a chimpanzee. We are a co-creation of lives and species and cultures and mystery, and we need all of this to exist. We are conceived from, in and with, a living world. This is our home. It’s what we are. It is our body and it’s total functioning gives rise to our mind – the field of knowing that we are. We are bigger than most people think! Please pause and breathe and settle into the fullness of being what you are, where you are. Welcome to the mystery of your living.

A human being is so much more than a particular biological form. A human being is also a potential, flowering into the universe – a potential that is different from the potential of bananas and chimpanzees. In a spiritual sense, physical birth doesn’t seem to be enough to make us fully human. We are born as animals with roots in the worlds of plants, micro-organisms and the natural environment. As such, we have an in-built potential for self-oriented awareness and self-interest-driven caring. We share this mode of awareness with dogs and cats, with birds and fish, in fact, with all other animals. With education, either intentional or serendipitous, some of us slowly continue the adventure of becoming human. Lex Hixon, in his beautiful book, “Mother of the Buddhas” states that a human being is not merely an outer physical form but an “inward potential for panoramic awareness and selfless compassion”. Each one of us emerges from the ineffable dance of life-unfolding, through a symbiosis of vast multi-dimensional awareness and selfless compassion. To realize fully what we are is to realize our potential. This is what it means to live a life of dharma, to devote ourselves to truth in all its mystery. The central purpose of all dharma practice is to bring forth this panoramic awareness and selfless compassion, in other words, to cultivate a well balanced, thoroughly integrated, vibrantly alive, humane human becoming.

Respect for nature, love of life,
the blessing of the human birth.
Born from nature, all of us,
I will remember and give thanks.
I am a human being,
endowed with nature’s gifts.
Unique, alive, each one of us,
I will remember this. (by Lama Chime Shore – “Foundation Chorus”)

Many Buddhist texts present a vision of six realms, or modes, of experience. Although some people insist on regarding the six as descriptions of the objective world, a more sophisticated understanding might see them as six common modes of experience that we all encounter, at least to some degree, in the course of our growing into human-ness. A hell state is a way of living that is dominated by anger, hatred and irritation. The hungry ghost or preta state is one dominated by chronic hunger/need/desire. Look at how much of your life is taken up by shopping and acquisition. ‘Globalization’ can look suspiciously like ‘preta’-ization! Animal states reveal a marvelous potential for awareness and certain degrees of caring and co-operation, but it is pretty much self referencing. Titan states are dominated by aggressive competitiveness and jealously, chronically comparing themselves and their achievements with those of others. Think of the huge drive of the upwardly mobile executive class. Deva or radiant states are dominated by complacent satisfaction and the take it for granted-ism of class privilege and material wealth. Finally, as we mentioned earlier, the human state reveals a potential for panoramic awareness and selfless compassion.

Take a good look at your life. We are shape shifters, constantly morphing from one state into another. What kind of creature are you, right now as you read these words? Are you an dancing expanse of panoramic awareness and wide open, all-embracive compassion? Or are you a manifestation of longing and hunger, or a tight ball of reactivity, or a tightly conditioned tunnel of me-centred awareness? Have you actually realized your humanness or are you something else?

I don’t think there is much value in seeing the six realms or states as levels or hierarchies of being, with hell at the bottom, devas at the top and human conveniently, though somehow usefully, situated in the middle. The six describe a range of common modes of being, ways of perception and engagement, and it’s likely you know most of them if not all of them, with considerable intimacy.

In ancient Buddhist teachings a true human being was synonymous to being what was called a true bodhisattva, a being (sattva) in the process of (bodhi) awakening to their human birthright, that mysterious potential for panoramic awareness – think multi-dimensional responsiveness – and selfless compassion. From this perspective, to live a life of dharma is do all that we can to realize that potential; to bring to sublime perfection the art of opening – lightly, gently, and wondrously into the fullness of all that we are. A profound realization on the path of dharma is when it dawns on us that we are all in and on this journey of life unfolding together. In the real world, relationship is not optional. We live with each other. We need each other, in this case, ‘we’, meaning all participants in this unfolding world.

With this in mind we remember our ‘life practice’ – bringing forth an attitude of friendship and open hearted attentiveness in the midst of all our life engagements. Our dharma practice is to become fully human! May we do it richly and well!

I am a human being.
Endowed with nature’s gifts.
Unique, alive, (and this applies to) each one of us
I will remember this.

This life of dharma doesn’t have a fixed idealized form, not monk or yogi, social worker or recluse, When you are human, this life of dharma looks like your life. When I’m human, it looks like my life. When we live together as a healthy, evolving community, beautiful forests, pristine reefs, healthy soils, bountiful oceans, caring families and tribes, then we will recognize that this living world, this awakening Being is truly our home.

Imagine you hear a knock on your door. You go to answer it and find to your delight a dear friend that you have not seen for some time. You instantly smile. A smile of surprise, of welcome, of inviting in. Life is constantly knocking on our door. We answer and find a feeling, a thought, a memory, a physical sensation. How do we meet them? With suspicion, irritation, a sense of obligation or salivating desire? Or can we sense a smile of welcome.

Soften into your body for a moment and sense your muscles, bones and organs. They are constantly relating with each other. Cells are relating to cells. Molecules are relating to molecules. Might it be possible to soften in a way that allows each one of these ‘beings’ to meet in a stance of welcome – to touch each other in ways that bring forth smiles rather than ‘frowns’. Then, our body/mind/community begins to sing!

This is how we begin, at least, this is how true humans begin. We emerge from the mothering/fathering universe of everything. We grow into the world of oneself with gifts of unique competence and individuality. Then discovering our humanness, we plunge passionately and reverentially back into the universe. Bodhisattvas birthing bodhisattvas for the benefit of all.

Wholesome Activity – Keep It In The Ground

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Dear Friends on the Path of Dharma
If we look deeply around us, we will find ourselves to be living parts of a cresting wave of an ocean of life-unfolding, a world awakening, a mystery embodying. We have been blessed with friendships, and myriad opportunities to cultivate skills in compassion, attentiveness and deepening understanding. We have been empowered with glimpses of an innate deep yearning to live well, to love well, to understand more broadly and profoundly. We have been graced with the capacity to empathize and care. We have been enriched and supported in meeting like-minds on the path of life, and by having the opportunity to share with others. From time to time we have been touched by vision and moments of grace, feeling our kinship with everything and everyone.

Counting my blessings and reading the daily news, I sometimes feel I’ve developed a kind of bi-polar condition that oscillates between breath stopping wonderment and sinking despair. So much potential and at the same time, so many tragic disasters. Climate change driven weather events (Vanuatu is one of the latest), ecological degradation and social disintegration, war and statelessness, and epidemics of fear, clanishness, sectarian blindness and growing apartheid mentalities. The list of suffering is too long.

Most of my life, I have tried to support health and well-being through teaching, writing, exploring, learning and inspiring others to contemplatively question and care. I have often spoken about how what we are, in other words the sum of activity, (atoms, molecules, cells, organs, society, ecosystems in action – the process of life unfolding) is what we offer. What more can I give than my entire being? And yet when news of more war, injustice, blatant dishonesty, rampant selfishness and ecological destruction arrives on my threshold I find myself looking for something more that I can do.

Of course, there are unending petitions, marches and gatherings to stop this and to preserve that. Like the dutch boy and the dyke, it seems as if we were all living at the bottom of an endlessly vast dyke that is quivering and groaning on the edge of breaking. Leaks keep spouting all over and we run from here to there trying to plug up the holes with our fingers and toes, desperately hoping the whole edifice won’t break and crash down. It doesn’t feel right to me to just hunker down in an act of spiritual stoicism, enjoying the last reverberations of my blessed life while the rising cries of grief and loss crescend into a force 5 monster cyclone of unimaginable suffering for billions of humans and the uncountable numbers of other creatures we live together with in this world. Our buddhadharma, our spiritual lives, must be engaged.

I continue to post what I hope will be uplifting articles on GreenDharmaTreasury.org. Daily I cultivate patience and kindness and wonderment and presence and I wait in this maelstrom of crazyness for glimpses of opportunity to join with others in taking steps that might truly nourish the good. In Europe during the 2nd World War there were many resistance movements. Perhaps we are part of one that is invisibly organising. A bodhisattva resistance. Resisting insanity and consumption driven heartless living. The last time I heard the Dalai Lama speak in Auckland, NZ, he finished his talk with a heart felt plea that if we didn’t know how to help each other, then at least try to not harm each other! His voice quivered with emotion as he said this.

Identifying and explaining the problems in this world inevitably involves a process of over simplification. A Buddhist understanding that suffering stems from ignorance is undoubtably true but this is a truth that is so vast in its implications that rolling it out to 7 billion humans in the time frame of decades that we have, before life unfolding in the form of climate change and social upheaval clobbers the world as we know it, is frankly unlikely.

The other day, I felt heartened to see The Guardian newspaper’s decision to place climate change and its repercussions at the forefront of their editorial policy. It is wonderful to see such a highly visible and influential news source publicly deciding to be pro-active in facilitating a focussing of energy on this immense driver of of today’s experience. I urge you all to have a look at their thoughtful campaign, “Keep it in the Ground” http://www.theguardian.com/environment/ng-interactive/2015/mar/16/keep-it-in-the-ground-guardian-climate-change-campaign

Please consider joining me and others in signing their petition urging the Bill and Melinda Gates Trust and the Welcome Trust, two of the biggest philanthropic organizations on the planet to divest their investments in fossil fuels. Fossil fuel driven climate change is leading to more and more social, environmental and epidemiological chaos. Divestment would be an inspiring and very public demonstration of integrity on the part of organizations dedicated to helping others through science and healthcare initiatives. Such action, if taken by these well known members of the financial elite, would inspire and challenge many more people who move in the circles of business management and finance.

By the power of wholesome activities
May our lives be rich with awakening.
Living thus, may we help all beings
realise health, happiness and a way of meaningful living.

with love and good wishes in dharma
Tarchin

The Dharma of Illness and The Medicine of Wonderment

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The Dharma of Illness and The Medicine of Wonderment
by Tarchin Hearn
with thanks to David French for asking me to write something on this topic

Oct 25/15, 5:52 am. I am sitting in my hut at Orgyen Hermitage, our 2 acre block situated in the Bay of Plenty, New Zealand. The sky appears crystalline, washed with the colours of dawn and framed with silhouettes of trees and bushes. All around are the sounds of thousands of birds, chirping and squawking, a fluxing aural tapestry celebrating the rising energies of another day. There is a sense of timeless goodness, an unhurried rightness in this moment of simple daily blessing. An immeasurable expanse of experience and experiences surrounds and suffuses me, a weaving together of uncountable situations and circumstances – a seamless whole in the act of constant transformation – this dancing of my current knowing/experience/beingness.

Beneath my skin, vast realms of micro-activity are doing their part in bringing forth a glorious morning display: muscles, tendons, flowing blood, metabolizing cells, neural dance and hormonal releasings. In this very moment, uncountable cells are being born and uncountable cells are dying. What yesterday were carrots and wheat and beans and animal flesh are now flowing streams of metabolic activity; substances being broken down, new substances being built up and all of this molecular action powered by sunlight and mass/energy transformational mysteries.

My situation is no different from everything else. If you look into anything you will see that it has an ‘interior’ and that that ‘interior’ is a dancing of multi-leveled process that, when considered all together, is indistinguishable from the particular thing itself. A rock is composed of molecules relating to each other in a crystal lattice way. Each molecule is composed of atoms that were once born in stars, which themselves are fields of subatomic activity, ‘moving/transforming’ with the speed and energy of light. A living blade of grass is similarly composed as too, a human being, a bird, and an evolving world. This inner dynamic is inter-responding with outer dynamics. The rock is surrounded by situations and circumstances that affect it’s beingness and so it is compacted, or eroded or carved by wind and sand or by the hand held tools of a focused sculptor. The grass is also is similarly shaped and so are you. Everything and anything you can identify is a dancing flux of inner process and outer process and the mingling together of both in simultaneous, mutual, co-creating response.

A few years ago, I was writing about the Buddhist concept of impermanence. Instead of speaking in a negative way – not permanent – I tried to enquire into what it positively is. If something is not permanent, then what is it? The very concept ‘impermanent’ seems to imply that there should be, or could be, something durable or at least, independently stable. Yet when we look deeply and pervasively into the interbeingness of anything we find both ourselves and the object we are involved with, and our mutual ongoing interactions, to be interpenetrating fields of dynamic multi-leveled process. Out of this mutually probing and responding flux of inner and outer in the act of relating, arises our experience of perception. Each moment of perception is an abstracting of seemingly durable, temporarily unchanging features, from an incomprehensibly ephemeral ‘holomovement’1 – this universe in action. We are constantly shaping and re-conforming to the shaping and conforming of ‘others’. This is the ungraspable mystery of our lives and living. It’s what we are. It’s where we are, and how we are and what we are knowing. In Mahayana Buddhism this dancing of impermanence is sometimes referred to as ‘suchness’.

Life is a boundless matrix of dynamic relationships.
Ultimately, every action reverberates throughout the universe.
I responding to you.
You responding to me.
This responding to that.
That responding to this.

Responsiveness is the living heart of being and becoming.
Atoms, molecules, organs and organisms, families and societies;
entire ecosystems, biospheres, planets and galaxies;
all shifting, responding, constantly changing.
Each birthing of this is a dying of that.
Each dying of that is a birthing of this.
Responsive change is the very nature and fabric of what is.
Permanence is a mental abstraction; a hope, a need,
a convenient but potentially deadening freezing
of the actual creative dynamic of all our lives in action.

Suffering arises through trying to fix or make permanent
what is essentially a seamless fluid process.

May we cease grasping at permanence and
with heartful confidence, love, enthusiasm and wide awake sensitivity,
enter fully the great birthing/dying matrix of responsive relating;
this ineffable, un-pin-down-able, present blessing of now.

Pause for a moment, and open all your doors of sensitivity and discernment – seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, touching, thinking, feeling and empathizing. Sense the world within you and around you. You are a constantly changing ocean of relationships: these words and your brain, your posture and the physical objects around you, your chemical and metabolic well-being and the thoughts and understandings that that are shaping the way you are using your senses. There is much more to life than what we usually assume is going on.

Over the last ten years I have been alternately bothered by, and have been trying to make friends with, the results of a steadily enlarging prostate gland. Benign enlarged prostate happens in many men of my age. It is a common expression or unfoldment of the dancing biology that we have become. Getting up five to ten times per night to pee, I was often suffering from sleep deprivation. Two weeks ago, I had a biopsy and the results came through a couple of days back. Cancer.

It is both strange and wondrous to contemplate my situation. Over the years, I have supported many people as they lived in worlds dominated by cancer or assumed potentially terminal conditions. Now, I find myself going along in what feels like a familiar manner and then something subtly shifts. Suddenly everything is convoluting and I realized that this time, the cancer/diagnosis is about me!

The response from friends and acquaintances has been very revealing. After the biopsy, we received a phone call from the hospital and I was told that the doctor had found “something he was concerned about” and that he’d like to see me in his office. I called my GP and he e-mailed me a copy of the lab report. The Gleason scores and PSA readings along with other parameters were listed in an orderly clinical column. I ‘googled’ the unfamiliar terms and began to make sense of what they were saying. I phoned friends who had had similar procedures and read extensively and had a deepening sense of being part of a vast network of lives, disciplines, studies and technological developments – a wondrous glimpse of a living world, the fruits of 3.5 billion years of intelligence unfolding, growing itself into a capacity for curiosity and caring, now inseparably merged with and arising as my living.

Mary and I went to the appointment in the outpatient clinic at Tauranga hospital. A nurse took us to a small room and said the doctor would be with us in a few moments. We could hear snippets of conversation going on in the hallway and some kind of consultation happening in the room directly opposite ours. Then both of us thought we heard the word ‘Tarchin’ at which point someone in the adjacent room got up and closed the door and we could only hear muffled voices. I thought to myself that perhaps they were discussing how to break the ‘bad’ news to us. The door opened. The urologist came in. He saw me holding the lab report and I opened the conversation with “well, I guess we have to get to work. What does it mean by . . .?” His eyes and facial expression expressed great relief as he said, “I see your GP must have told you the results”. I realized then that this moment, of telling a patient that they have cancer or some other potentially terminal condition, must be one of the least liked tasks of any doctor. He mentioned that often people found the news to be such a shock that they would have to re-schedule the consultation to give them time for their emotions to settle. We humans, able to send individuals to the moon, inventors and users of internet and cell phones, capable of landing a space craft on an asteroid, mapping genomes, photographing Pluto, peering into a beating human heart, or into the smallest organelles of a cell, are so often traumatized by opening ourselves to the basic biological reality of our lives.

In the midst of the 21st century, many people, in spite of all their worldly wisdom, are still laden with medieval attitudes to illness. It is not uncommon to talk about the big ‘C’ or about being sick or unwell, as if sickness was some kind of failing. (It is revealing that we use the word sick to indicate something warped or immoral, “God, that’s sick!”) Physical dysfunction, frailty or weakness is often experienced as if it were something to be ashamed of, or guilty about – as if we had failed to meet some target or some kind of socially accepted ideal of good health. We often feel a need to make excuses for our suffering. As if we needed to make excuses for being the vulnerably co-dependent dancings that we are! It’s my genes, or a virus, or a bacterial infection, or something that is going around. We try to identify a concrete cause for our condition, not only to help us find a resolution to it but because the only alternative to identifying a clear ‘outer’ cause seems to be that we ourselves, our behavior or our lifestyles, are the cause. It’s our bad ‘karma’ or perhaps our bad diet or lack of exercise or excessive stress, and the illness is punishment or retribution for our dissolute living! But are these really the only two choices; either something outside my control – or me? We could do with a new word for illness/sickness, one that honored the magnificence of this profoundly inter-dependent holoverse in the act of knowing and experiencing itself in this particular manner. I guess it probably wouldn’t catch on to say, ‘I’m having a deepening of suchness’! Or, ‘I’ve been invited into a period of intensified enquiry, contemplation and spiritual ripening’.

Observing the many different responses of people to my diagnosis, I sense something very deep going on here. In a culture that so values and celebrates autonomy and the imagined freedom of independence; my own car, my own house, a secure job (self employed), private property, and so forth not to mention ‘my’ body or ‘my’ mind, the terror of dependence that illness can bring, is more than many can bear. We feel sorry for this unfortunate victim of stroke or heart disease, or cancer. We can easily feel sorry for ourselves. Its unfair. I haven’t achieved my ‘four score and ten’. Some people avoid this depressing inner groan by treating their experience as a military campaign. So and so is heroically fighting the disease. So and so lost their long drawn out battle with cancer. We’re targeting the infection. We’re part of a war on cancer, HIV, and so on. With this metaphor, chemotherapy can be seen as a form of carpet bombing.

All complex, inter-dependent life dancings, in other words, all living beings, have come about through the collaboration and balancing of uncountable factors. As the relationship between these factors change, the system functions differently. If the relationships change sufficiently, the functioning will change into something else all together and the original functioning will no longer be there. An apple ceases to function as an apple when it is digested into molecules of carbohydrate that have become part of a metabolic process. These constantly changing relationships are a basic nature of all interdependent arisings. There is no shame in this. We call the apparent emergence or beginning of something ‘birth’ and the apparent final disappearing of a thing ‘death’. When a child is growing, the birthing of cells outnumbers the dying of cells. In middle age the birth rates and death rates are approximately equal. Later, the death of cells overtakes the birth rate. Birth without death would not be a life. This continuous streaming of birthing/dying is life in action – all of me present with and for all of you. As Mary Oliver wrote in her beautiful poem “When Death Comes”: When it’s over, I want to say: all my life. I was a bride married to amazement. I was a bridegroom, taking the world into my arms.

A week has passed since I began to write this short piece. During that time I have been scheduled for surgery. It is a new morning, in my hut. The bird choirs are announcing and celebrating, probing their newly dawned situations in the world. The echoes of mooing cows adds to this moment of appreciating you and us and the immeasurable intricacy of everything and everyone. I am taking my medicine. It is not expensive, as it has proved impossible to patent. It has been around since the dawn of human kind. I dearly hope you can find this medicine when you need it. It’s called wonderment!

In the vast expanse of nature unfolding,
In faith and trust and wonderment,
We give ourselves to this suchness,
This seamless mystery of birthing and dying.

Giving, flexing, bending, softening, responding
– this fluid, continuous letting go is my sadhana, my work.

Spacious, loving, with feet solid in the earth,
We nurture the hints at blessedness,
The myriad faces and masks of God.

Nurturing, supporting, feeding the presence of blessedness;
the experiential knowledge of being deeply supported
– embedded –
in a miraculous weaving of lives and living
with no absolute beginning or end.

Moving in this flow of compassion and deepening enquiry,
we engage with all beings in ways that support the integrity,
the stability and the beauty of the entire living world.

Engaging with this pilgrimage/journey/adventure of birthing/dying living.
Embracing it. Surrendering into it. The mystery is tremendously integrated.
It is extraordinarily stable. It has been in action for billions of years.
It is breath-stoppingly beautiful in all its vulnerability and creative possibility.

I’d like to finish this essay by thanking all the people who have sent generous offers of support to Mary and I at this stage of the journey. Smiling, breathing, present appreciating, offering May all beings be blessed with wonderment. May all beings realize their true nature.

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1 Endnote:

A comment on the words holomovement and holoverse. In the Avatamsaka Sutra we find the phrase, “worlds interpenetrating worlds without obstruction” or sometimes, “realms (of experience) interpenetrating realms (of experience) without obstruction”. This phrase is pointing to a staggeringly interdependent universe in which each part is itself an interbeing of all the other parts which in turn are interbeings of all the other parts. Shifts in the small realms trigger responses in the large. Movements on the interior of things are dancing with movements of the exterior of things. Mental processes are shaping physical processes while at the same time those same physical processes are shaping mental process. Individuals are influencing collectives while societies are shaping individuals. This total webworking of causes and conditions is sometimes referred to in the Avatamsakha as “Indra’s Net”.

Borrowing from the idea of a hologram, or holistic or wholistic, I have termed this totality of worlds interpenetrating worlds without obstruction, the ‘holoverse’ and the total activity that makes it, a ‘holomovement’. I was first inspired to use these terms back in 1986 by the physicist, David Bohm. Here is a poem that I wrote then and dedicated to him. For those interested in Bohm’s work, I recommend a new collection of his writings called “The Essential David Bohm” edited by Lee Nichol.

Wangapeka May 13/86
(for David Bohm)

I enter the holoverse through the trapdoor of my body.
Rivers of trembling, lighting the streamings,
Stardusting swirlings of lifetiming motes,
Fields pulsing softly and grossly and fast,
Crisscrossing oceans of endlessly sparkling
Visions of all times,
radiating vast implications,
in simple points of infinite complexity.

I enter the holoverse through the trapdoor of my body.
The holoverse bodily enters through me.

The future is now.
The hall of mirrors as metaphor is shattered in the face of a holoverse
rich and wondrous beyond all imagining.
All and nothing, one and many
Vast and minute, separately and sequentially and simultaneously.

Words fade as eyes open even wider
and even wider still!

Early Morning Pith Instruction

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Early Morning Pith Instruction
by Tarchin Hearn

I wake again
from a seeming series of wakings, sleepings, dreamings, beings,
eyes slowly opening to soft dim dawn.
I breathe,
May all beings be well and happy.

The body aches, patchy sensation, not quite connected thinking and feeling.
The birds begin to sing
and wrapping all around is a blessing beyond words.
And I bring my hands together,
in gratitude,
and . . .
get out of bed.

Should I pee?
I have forgotten how my plumbing works!
Out now on verandah,
the sound of liquid cascading
on the walls of old paint bucket.
Yes, I needed to.
It’s disconcerting to be an infant in the body of an ancient,
having to renegotiate the basic functions of life.
Everything is new,
yet, at the same time, perfumed with lifetimes of attitude.

The discomfort on the left side of the abdomen is still announcing its presence,
– a pink, hot, stiffness
– a passing wish of otherwise.

Dressing
boiling water
the smell of coffee in the pot
and sitting down with Dogen
being reminded of sanity.

The sky is overcast and neighbouring sheep are calling.
Roosters join with denizens of forest and thicket
flooding the aural space with cockadoos, solo peeps and insistent chirping.

I remember once, years ago, Namgyal Rinpoché
called Wangchuck and I to his side and said,
in what at the time, seemed an enigmatic way,
that we should study the Eastern traditions, master them and then walk on.
And then study the Western traditions, master them and walk on.
It felt like profound pith instruction
– ‘walking on’.

And here I find myself,
nearly 40 years later,
constantly not walking on
and then catching the moment
and walking
and feeling the quiet natural joy of it,
remembering
in the bones and marrow of beingness
the freedom of this blessed fresh now.
And writing these words
as if to solidify the moment as a reminder to me in times of forgetting.

Walking on is so much easier without baggage.
The baggage of hope and fear
the baggage of loaded words like cancer and health and better and worse.
This is a new and often frightening territory for a society of dedicated shoppers,
media watchers and personality polishers.

The stark beautiful thusness of a living world/community
– thusness unfolding in newness.
So invisible
And yet so palpably here.

And we walk on
together,
celled ones, leafy ones, leathery ones, feathered ones, hairy ones,
and two-legged bald ones;
all interweaving,
suchness revealing
in blessedness breathing
this ever fresh dawning.
May all beings be well and happy.

Taking Robes: Embracing a Life of Natural Awakening; Reflections on Ordination and Divine Ordinariness

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Taking Robes
Embracing a Life of Natural Awakening;
Reflections on Ordination and Divine Ordinariness
by Tarchin Hearn

Click here to read the fully formatted essay in PDF format.

I’d like to begin by briefly sketching out some personal events that led to the ideas in this essay/poem.

In my early 20s, while at Kalu Rinpoché’s monastery near Sonada, India, I participated in an ancient ceremony in which I and a few other young men, in the presence of a community of monks, yogis and dedicated practitioners, shaved our heads, took vows and exchanged our lay clothes for the buddhist robes of a novice monk (getsul). A few years later, in Canada, in a longer and more elaborate ceremony, I received the full gelong/bhikkhu ordination from H.H. the 16th Karmapa. In 1977, I was invited to Ottawa, and began what was to be a life of teaching and dharma exploration which took me to many countries and led to my meeting and interacting with a great many people. I look back on that time as a monk and am ever grateful for the many ways it shaped my attitudes and way of being in the world.

The twelve years I lived as a monk was personally very beneficial but by time I was 36, I found myself increasingly questioning various dissonances I experienced, particularly in terms of the hierarchic structure of the ordained community and the sometimes not so subtle patriarchal attitudes towards woman, children, relationships and non-monastic life. In order to harmonize the universal approach to dharma that I encouraged wherever I taught – what later I came to think of as a path or way of natural awakening – and to stay true to an inner sense of integrity, after much soul searching, I publicly ‘disrobed’. Far from being a moment of ending something, it felt like a stepping forward, a further deepening into the mystery of life and living. On the day of Vesak, the first full moon in the month of May that marks the awakening of the Buddha, surrounded by friends and students, and feeling the palpable presence of all my mentors and teachers, I announced my intentions and restated my aspirations and vows in words that felt deep and fresh and meaningful. It was a very special day that strengthened us all in a communal endeavor of life unfolding.

Over the years many people have, on different times and occasions, asked me for a lay ordination. When the situation felt right, in the midst of their community, in a ceremonial manner, I would have them repeat verses of refuge, the five training percepts both in universal and tradition forms and the bodhisattva vow. To remind themselves and others of this deepening commitment to a life of dharma they could then, in appropriate situations, wear the maroon upper robe of a lay practitioner.

Some years ago, I received an e-mail from a dharma student in England asking how to make herself a robe. I wrote the core of the following essay and called it “How to Stitch a Robe; reflections on ordination and divine ordinariness.” It was posted on Green Dharma Treasury. Recently, I received a similar request and I shared with that person this earlier essay; expanded with a number of edits and additions. I‘m posting it here, hoping it will speak to others who might be at a comparable stage in their journey.

Taking Robes
Embracing a Life of Natural Awakening;
Reflections on Ordination and Divine Ordinariness

Robes are like onion skins.
When you peel off one layer, another is revealed.
Even if you keep peeling off the layers,
you will never arrive at a central core or essence of onion-ness.
All you will have is a pile of old wrappings
. . . and a lot of space.

It’s not so rare for people, at some point in the course of their lives, to feel a stirring, a calling or perhaps a deep pull to join a religious order – in Buddhist parlance, ‘to take robes’. It seems that most manage to ignore this disturbing ‘wobble in normality’, or if unable to do so, they end up rationalizing it away: a medieval nostalgia, an adolescent fantasy, totally impractical, a meaningful thing to do but . . . maybe later, when I’ve finished my current projects and obligations! Yet beyond desires to escape from rat races and lives of stressful trivia; or urges to be part of a respected community that is dedicated to thoughtful study, contemplation and active compassion; there flows a deeper yearning to free one’s self from society’s pervasive addiction to fragmentation and continual conflict and instead, to flower as an integral part of this evolving world/universe – part of a community or sangha of life-unfolding wholeness.

In some traditions, a novice would actually sew their own robe. More than cloth though, in the Tibetan Vajrayana tradition, robes or clothing represent thoughts, concepts, attitudes and mental habit patterns, as if we dressed ourselves in our own, (and society’s) concepts and beliefs. From this perspective, we might think that entering the religious life should involve taking off clothes rather than putting them on! In spite of this, the setting aside of secular clothing and the wearing of robes or some kind or religious garb or insignia can be part of the process of transforming one’s life – an outer visible sign of an inner invisible process. For young monastics, struggling with ego dreams, caught in the ancient and largely unconscious pattern of seeking approval and affirmation from parents or mentors or peers, the physical robe itself can become a focus of concern and it’s not uncommon for a considerable amount of thought and energy to coalesce around it. Robes can be a way of creating and maintaining a more solid identity, a kind of badge of belonging. This is far from maturing into a soft, easeful naturalness; a playful, no big deal, attitude to identity.

The true religious life is not possessed by any school or tradition. It grows from reality itself. It is older than time and wiser than any wisdom teaching. In this spirit, here is a meditation on how to stitch a robe. Perhaps more than that, it is a meditation on natural awakening, ordination and divine ordinariness!

She was born into this extraordinary world;
a living planet,
a dancing of millions of interdependent species,
this mystery that grows us;
flowerings
of wonderment, reverence and awe.

It’s what we are.
It’s
what we’re in.
It’s
who we’re with.
It’s
where we are,
– and . . .
why we are.

It’s what she was, is and will be,

in spite of exponential population growth, leading to masses of people living knee to elbow, cheek by jowl, mingled together in cities, with oceans of anxiety, jungles of fantasy, storms of desire and frustration, and all the while shopping to survive, lost in a global culture of technology and mechanisation, that, driven by market forces, requires ever increasing human intervention, micro-management, and coercive control.


In a heartfelt moment of nostalgia and deep aspiration,
her parents named her Sophie
to remind themselves (and their daughter) of a world of living wisdom,
a world that was,
moment by moment,
bit by bit,
one creature after another,
gradually
slipping
away.

She grew in body and spirit and interrelatedness.
She might have gone to a regular school.
She might have been ‘successful’.
She might have striven to get somewhere, to prove herself, to be someone
but instead,
somehow . . .
She fell into a life of deepening and discovery,
cultivating the ancient arts of kindness and communal being-ness,
and clear-seeing presence,
and unrestricted reverential enquiry.

She explored how bodies and minds of myriad species are weaving together this mystery of nowful presence. She cultivated awareness practices of buddhadharma and meshed them with science, personal healing and social responsibility to enter a way of living that, in an age of anxiety and uncertainty, was awesomely inclusive and joyously life affirming.

One day she decided to take robes; to commit herself
to a life of health and naturalness and service.
This is her story.
I
t could be your story.

As you sew your robe,
do a mantra of loving-kindness with each stitch.
Consider this robe that clothes you:
the robe of your body, the robe of emotions,
the robe of thoughts, and feelings and memories,
the robe of relationships,
of friendships, companionships, and casual meetings through life,
the robe of blessings and teachings and teachers,
the robe of all your ancestors, leading back to the beginnings of earth,
and the robe of your current life activities,
rippling out in myriad ways and directions,
reverberating into unknowable futures through the lives of all you touch.

Consider how you are clothed in stardust,
galaxies and the gravity of celestial bodies.
Consider all the lives that nourish you, support you,
and lend their beingness to your being.
Blue-jay, maple and may-fly,
Tui, flax and cricket.

And every once in a while, consider
what is there when there’s no robe,
when there is totally relaxed, unassuming, nakedness!

Who is it that is stitching?
Who is hosting these threads of your life
– this visible robe of love and clear seeing for the nourishing of everyone?

Life is not a journey,
we are eternally here.
Life is not a learning,
there is no knowledge to accumulate.
Life is not a testing,
there is no authority to judge.

Dwelling in a space of love,
tendrils of curiosity reaching forth in all directions,
we feel our way,
softening and sensitizing into the richness of community,

a living world within us, around us and through us.

Apprentices of wonderment and awe,
probing and questioning,
sampling and savouring
with calm abiding and vivid discernment together exquisitely intermeshed,
we touch our home,
this world,
of you and me and all of us together,

precious
beyond words.

At the time of the Buddha, robes were simple clothes made from discarded fabric, sometimes bits of tattered cloth from funeral shrouds. Sewing these many pieces together symbolised a joining of the many interdependent aspects of our life; aspects that are also parts of other being’s lives. The making and on-going mending of a robe was an opportunity to contemplate wholeness and connectedness; this seamless garment, this cloak of many colours. Wearing such a robe would remind us of the wholeness and inter-beingness of life and provide the opportunity for others to glimpse a possibility of wholeness. To be clothed like this goes along with a willingness to be truly seen, and to see.

Originally, the robes were utterly functional – just as wholeness is utterly functional! They were worn to keep warm or cool, to stave off biting insects, protect from the sun and to preserve a basic modesty. Today, religious traditions have, by and large, lost touch with the simple, straightforward and practical. They have replaced the grace of divine ordinariness with institutionalised ‘ordination’. For many seekers, the robe is bought ready-made off the rack, and we are prided or shamed by the richness or poverty of the colour and weave. We might ask what need have spiritual beings for needles and threads? With our air-conditioned buildings and pesticide protected nature, robes have lost most of their original functions. Today they more often serve to identify the wearer as being a religious ‘someone’ who belongs to a particular cult or tradition. Robes have become uniforms, badges of office, tokens of authority and myriad other segregating and separating functions – far from the original, natural intent.

Imagine being blessed with the recognition of a deepening sense of universal community and communion; an easeful yet powerful confidence/trust/faith in this unfolding life of natural awakening. Imagine making yourself a ‘robe’ and then sitting in the felt sense presence of all living beings, including your mentors and spiritual guides, friends and acquaintances, students, clients and co-journeyers in this awakening world. Imagine expressing to all these beings your deepest, heartfelt aspiration to flower in wisdom, compassion and non-clinging awareness, using words that spontaneously arise from your heart or traditional prayers that inspire and fill you with a sense of vibrant immediacy.

Natural awakening is all around.
It is closer than hands and feet.
It is the luminous presence that graces all appearance.

Natural awakening is freely available.
It cannot be packaged, bought or sold.
It was not invented by individuals or cultures.
It self-reveals in the deep passion – the ever fresh stillness – of immeasurable love.

Natural awakening is Mystery transcending.
Radically imminent yet ever ungraspable,
Natural awakening is the vast expanse of what you are
the dynamic energy of suchness in action.

Natural awakening is all of me present with and for all of you.
I/thou – truth embodied
Resting
Knowing
Ah!!!!!

To glimpse the wholeness and unity of beingness,
To value the vast dancing of diversity,
and the unique one-off-ness of each precious individual,
To marry these two,
– seamlessly –
in the temple of our lives,
This is to enter
the ancient and venerable order of divine ordinariness.

Each day brings opportunities for a fresh ordination.
Each moment of living we don our robes anew.
One morning, in such a moment,
the following verse blossomed in my mind.
Whispering through the cells of my body,
Reminding me of how I might move through the day.
It could be your voice.
It could be our prayer.
May it touch us deeply.

 

Being the fullness of the human animal that I am,
Uniquely clothed in this continuously morphing collage of sentience,
Abiding in the monastery of a world that is utterly and profoundly alive,
I wander in unpretentious openness, wonderment and servic
e.

sarva mangalam

all is blessing

Mind and Mindfulness

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Mind and Mindfulness
by Tarchin Hearn

a fresh approach to mind and mindfulness

Mindfulness has become a popular topic in today’s world of therapy, healing and self-help teachings. I wanted to write something from a less common angle, hopefully stimulating possibilities for fresh understanding and appreciation. I began this article in a prose format but then decided to put it into verse form to allow greater opportunity for you to enter a space of contemplation and deepening experience. Try reading it at a slower pace than you normally would –– as if you were reading it out loud. Allow the gaps and spaces, a comma here and an absence of comma there, to hint at a rhythm in an ever changing current of words, flowing as a stream of intimated meaning. If you find it ‘speaks’ to you, pause and have a ‘sit’. Your reading and understanding has its own current and flow. Then, when you are finished, you might read it again.

 

How to speak about this mystery?
Mind is that which minds.

Do you mind?
Do you care or have concerns?
Please be mindful of the fact that . . . .
In other words,
be careful and responsive with and to this mystery.

To touch something mindfully implies
touching gently and sensitively;
with respect and caring for the integrity of that
particular ‘what’ that you are touching;
a hand, a hip, a thought, a breath of ineffable.

And as you touch, in turn you are touched.
In mindfulness we don’t hurt this object in the act
of touching it. In other words,
we treat this ‘otherness’ with respect,
this otherness touching their otherness,
that is you.

Surely this applies to all our senses.
Each child finds his or her way;
fumbling, stumbling,
growing into sensitivity,
clumsy at first, then gradually becoming
smoother and more integrated and
sometimes even graceful.
Think of a toddler
just learning to walk, and then,
a sixteen year old olympic gymnast poised on the balance beam,
vibrantly alert and focussing.

Mind-full-ness is a fullness of knowing,
and fullness of knowing is both detailed and vast discernment;
and love,
and passion,
and detachment
and surrender
and reverence
and so much more.

Mindfulness/carefulness/caring, sensitive, attentive, respectful/engagement,
is nourished
in the company of parents, then teachers,
then mentors,
then lovers and friends.
We copy each other; imprint on each other;
responding to and with
each other.

It matters how we proceed.

To cultivate mindfulness is
to consciously grow,
maturing in the direction of
a smooth functional integration of
embodied, languaging, experience.
An opposite direction leads towards frustration,
pain, agitation, fragmentation and suspicion.

Mindfulness arises in this inter-dancing.
Body, speech and mind,
the entire field of interbeing,
all events and meanings:
self and other, individual and groups,
universes of intelligence unfolding.

What mystery
this body – physically growing into an increased capacity for
delicacy, harmony, grace, flexibility, and co-ordination.

What mystery
this speech – skillfully growing in the direction of,
kind, uplifting, supportive and inspiring communication.

What mystery
this mind – a field of knowing; growing towards attentive inclusiveness,
translucency and multi-leveled acceptance/understanding.

This minding mindful mind is
the universe in process.
Experience is not a subjective representation.
It is not a personal re-presentation of some mysterious otherness.
It is a presentation, always present,
a mutually transforming
interaction of mingling events.
It takes two to ‘language’.

It is not a matter of true or false perception,
as if there was a finite fixed being or universe out there
waiting to be correctly or incorrectly perceived;
something one could or should be mindful of.
Rather, the unfolding dynamic of your living
engages with the dynamic unfolding of ‘other’ in
this combined whirl of ever-fresh transformation
which is your knowing now.

So much more than
a focussed action,
a daily discipline,
a Buddhist meditation
to practice or neglect.

Fully flowered mindfulness is a perfume
that flavors everything,
a quality of being
that transforms everything,
even mundane ordinary living;
this setting up of mindfulnesss,
an always available profound way
of blessing
and of peace.

Mindfulness is the flavor of a healthy mind in action.

And so . . .  returning to the question,
“How to speak about this mystery?”
This thusness – look around you!
This is how we speak.

Words are like tools
and a good craftsperson
cares for his or her tools
sharpening,
fashioning a new handle,
a particular tool for a particular job.

Jargon is a blunt chisel.

May these words dance well in our minding.

In Praise of Slow Reading

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In high school, I took a course in ‘speed reading’. We were lured into it with promises that it would improve our grades and our efforts to “get ahead and succeed in life”. They didn’t mention, because no-one at that time could know, that it would help us read inter-net screens, blogs, news reports and e-mails. No-one mentioned that it would also reduce, and hence neglect to further cultivate, our abilities to enjoy the act of contemplative discovery that can come with deliberate slow reading.

We learned to skim through a text, picking out salient features. At times we would fly through an article so fast that consciously we had little idea as to what it was about yet when tested afterward, as they often did in those classes, we discovered that we had retained far more than we thought. This became a model for ideal reading – fast and effective. Today with Google and proliferating hand-held devices, more and more people are developing habits of reading that paralleled our ‘speed reading’. We skim, looking for headlines, summations, and whatever we currently deem to be important information. The whole process is deceptively exhausting. We rarely feel refreshed after a few hours on the net.

To highlight these questionable aspects of speed reading, imagine a new ‘latest technique’ – Speed Listening! Perhaps we could scan a piece of music, eliminating all the spaces between the notes, since they don’t convey any real information. ‘Garage Band’ or some other audio editing software could do this for us. We could then listen to a dominant trumpet, or the first violin, or a keyboard solo or the vocal melody and disregard the rest as not particularly necessary for the message. Imagine Beethoven’s Ninth with all the ‘unnecessary bits’ – the musical equivalent of junk DNA – cut out. What kind of musical experience would that be? Some might call it ‘noise’.

Reading can involve much more than merely accumulating information. We mingle with a well crafted piece of writing in a flow of contemplation in which the formatting and physical presentation accentuates and augments the conceptual message of the words. I call it slow reading because I feel unhurried. I often find myself pausing, releasing my eyes from the page to reconnect with the sky, the plants, the structure of the room and myself in the act of sitting and breathing. And in this enlarged and more inclusive space, there is room for hidden depths of being to respond to the words and ideas in the way of wandering associations and interiorly felt responses of feeling and understanding. I don’t just read with words. I read with feeling, intuition, physicality and intellectual astuteness. I read with eyes of inter-being.

Unlike a conversation with a real person, where I’ve interrupted them, mid-flow, in order for me to enter contemplation, I don’t have to be concerned about the book getting impatient or upset. It waits for me to feel beneath the surface of the words, touching the import and relevance of what the author has written. Then, when I’m ready, as I come back to the sentence, often re- reading it again, it picks up the conversation where we left off.

I am walking with the author in companionship. Savoring the rhythm and timbre of another way of understanding and responding with riffs of my own, sometimes riffs that surprise me in their freshness and leave me wondering about wisdom and sympathetic magic. In a world where time is not so fixed we, writer and reader, are making music together. It is a kind of jazz, played in the medium of body, speech and mind as we grow ourselves into something we might never have grown into on our own.

I’ve had to train myself to slow read on a screen; to let my face and eyes relax and to enjoy the way my breathing moulds itself around the flow of ideas; to not be seduced by hyperlinks; and to take into account the fact that many e-publications are done with standardized formatting that conveys little of the rhythms and pauses that the author might use to hint at the mysterious world of their own lived understanding. For contemplative reading, I confess I much prefer a real book. To feel the texture of the pages and weight and smell of the volume. The spot of coffee, the crease on page 47, and the way the book falls open at the place where I have dawdled for longer periods.

Years ago the computer industry, trumpeting the paperless society, said that we would be ecologically responsible, saving millions of trees. On this point however I’m going to depart from my passion for environmental parsimony and to encourage you to print the articles from Green Dharma Treasury that have inspired your interest. Then take the printed pages away and sit yourself in a comfortable chair, hopefully in a pleasant place. Relax into your breathing body and in an unhurried way join me in a journey of collaborative discovery.

When I write something I often sit with it for some time, coming back again and again, savoring it in different lights, different weathers, temperatures and atmospheric pressures of understanding. I give this effort of written communication sufficient time to find its way into rightness. Is this what I really mean? It’s a kind of slow writing and it seems only appropriate to receive this crafted work in the spirit it was given, to receive it with slow reading. A good piece of writing calls out to be read more than once.

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I have been receiving many e-mails enquiring as to my health. Thank you all for your concern. I’m pleased to say that I seem to be healing well from the surgery. As to the cancer, I have decided to describe my situation as one of “living and watching”. It sounds suspiciously like what I have been teaching for the last 40 years! At this point if you go to the greendharmatreasury/public-schedule you will see that we are gradually scheduling some teaching. In late April, I hope to be giving a 9 day retreat in Shoreham Australia, exploring the themes of prajñāpāramitta, the wisdom teachings of Mahayana Buddhism. If you are able, please consider joining us.

Please feel free to share this with others.


Excerpts from Newly Revised and Extended Satipaṭṭhāna E-book

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I’m happy to post a newly revised E-book – Satipaṭṭhāna: Foundations of Mindfulness; A Manual for Meditators.

This revised edition has been extended from 46 pages to 80. Click here to download the complete text in PDF format. For those of you who are ongoingly working with this teaching, you might consider having it printed and coil bound so that you can take it away from your computer.

Here are two excepts.

The Buddha constantly urged his followers to cultivate sati. Today, sati is most commonly translated into English as ‘mindfulness’. Given the fact that western educated people tend to see mind as something quite different from body, I often wonder if the current popular understanding of mindfulness is broad enough to include everything the Buddha intended when he used the word ‘sati’.

As recently as the 1950s, the idea of psychosomatic was a radical and challenging concept. Bodies were quite separate from minds. If you were physically ill you would go to a medical doctor but if you were mentally ill you would visit a psychiatrist. Today it is increasingly ‘mainstream’ to assume your physical functioning intimately affects your mind and mental processes, while simultaneously your mental functioning is affecting your physiology. Many people are comfortable with the compounded idea of ‘body/mind’ and yet those same people can still make a fundamental distinction between the brain and the body. It’s common to speak of consciousness occurring through brain functioning as if the body serves merely as a support to keep the brain alive and to walk it around. With only a little investigation it becomes obvious that the functioning of the brain is utterly embedded in the functioning of the body and vice-versa. To remedy this artificial split and to remind ourselves of the innate unity of our organism, perhaps it would help to expand ‘body/mind’ to ‘body/brain/mind’. But even this is not inclusive enough because of the tendency to think of ourselves as single autonomous units. I feel like a ‘me’ – not a ‘we’. And yet revelations about the micro-biome are demonstrating that it would be more accurate to think of ourselves as complex evolving ecosystems. Perhaps it is time to expand the concept of body/brain/mind and begin to think of ourselves as body/brain/mind/communities!

So here is the question. What would it imply for a body/brain/mind/community to engage in sati? I’d like to suggest an acronym that might remind us of a richer understanding of sati. The acronym is EMAP. It stands for embodied/mindfulness/awareness/in-placeness.

Sati (mindfulness) always arises in a particular living body. At the same time, the integrated functioning of that body/brain/mind/community determines the arising richness and expression of sati. Mindfulness doesn’t float around in space. It is always an expression of embodiment. To remind us of this we have the first letter ‘E’ – embodied.

Sati involves an aspect of conscious attentiveness. One chooses to be mindful of something. For example, I am being mindful of my breathing. The body/brain/mind/community that is me is actively and consciously engaged in cultivating more and more refined powers of attentiveness and discrimination, using breathing as a support. To remind us of the wilful, choiceful, directed, aspect of sati we now have ‘EM’ – embodied/mindfulness.

Considering the inconceivable sum total range of activities of the trillions of cells that compose a human adult in the act of living, it is obvious that myriad dancings of awareness/responsiveness; atomic, molecular, cellular, synaptic, organ system and so forth, are functions that I, as an ego personality, will never be able to be ‘mindful’ of in all their detail. A matured sense of sati will need to include an appreciation of this ocean of choiceless attentiveness that is singing our ’embodied/mindfulness’ into being. To remind ourselves of this, sati could be rendered ‘EMA’ – embodied/mindfulness/awareness.

Finally, every organism lives in relationship with an ‘outer’ environment. In any given moment, where we are affects who and what we are. Sati also embraces this dimension of living and so we have ‘EMAP’ – embodied/mindfulness/awareness/in-placeness.

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Beyond simply being a collection of meditation instructions on mindfulness, the Satipaṭṭhāna Sutra encourages an active life of ‘sensitive, engaged, experiential, exploration-unfolding’. From an evolutionary perspective, you could say we were born to do this. Our ongoing experience is, and has always been, essentially whole and radically (at the root) inclusive. After all, to make anything from scratch requires the collaboration of an entire evolving universe. To illustrate this further, consider what is happening right now in the midst of your reading these words. You are a mirror-like morphing of physiology and mental processes, each reflecting the other. Your posture, breathing, metabolising and neural functioning along with your thinking, reflecting, evaluating, remembering and even your moments of drifting attentiveness; the sounds of the birds outside and the traffic on the street, in fact everything that makes up the world within you and around you; all these processes are responding with and to each other. Everything is mutually shaping. Your ongoing lived experience, your ongoing ‘beingness’, is a summation of an entire universe of experience in a dance of continual transformation. You’re not composed of fundamentally separate bits with gaps between the bits. There are no ‘gaps’ between these things. The on going living process that makes you up is a dynamic seamless whole with only arbitrary beginnings and endings or inner edges and outer edges. In the Satipaṭṭhāna Sutra, the Buddha invites us to explore this unfolding mystery.

Your Body is an Ocean of Awareness

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“Foundations of Mindfulness; A Manual for Meditators” a newly revised and extended e-book by Tarchin Hearn is now available. Click here to download a free copy of the entire 80 page text.

The following article is taken from Appendix C in “Foundations of Mindfulness”

Your Body is an Ocean of Awareness:
A Different View of Satipaṭṭhāna

The four foundations of mindfulness are often discussed in terms of actively directing mindful awareness towards the body, feelings, states of mind and phenomena. Here is a slightly different approach that you may find enriching.

The phrase “awareness of body” most commonly invokes a sense of intently investigating one’s body or one’s experience of embodiment. We could however understand it in quite a different way. If I were to speak of the ‘activity of Tarchin’ we might take this to mean the activity or activities that compose Tarchin, or the activity that belongs to Tarchin, or the activity that Tarchin does. Now, consider the myriad moments of awareness/responsiveness that collectively weave together, giving rise to a living body/form/shape in action. This multi-levelled matrix of awareness/ responsiveness, in a sense, belongs to the body or even better, is the body – hence the phrase ‘awareness of the body’, or ‘awareness that belongs to and with the body’. From this perspective, kāyānupassanā involves the experiential exploration of all the patterns of reciprocal responsiveness that together are your body in the act of living. How do these continuously interweaving responsive knowings: sub-atomic, atomic, molecular, cellular, metabolic, social, interspecies, ecological and so forth, bring forth the world of your body?

Let’s try to clarify this further. How would we know someone is aware? Actually, we only assume that they are aware based on the way we see them respond to stimulus. An appropriate response usually leads us to assume that there is a certain degree of awareness. If there are no signs of responsiveness, or if the responsiveness seems to be out of sync or disconnected from the stimulus, we might wonder if there is any awareness. Equating awareness and responsiveness, we could identify many dimensions of awareness. Electrons and protons respond to each other’s presence in the process of bringing forth an atom. This might be called a type of ‘sub-atomic’ or ‘quantum’ awareness. Atoms respond to other atoms in the process of forming molecules. We could think of this as a type of ‘atom awareness’. In a similar fashion we could have molecular awareness, cellular awareness, synaptic awareness, organ and organism awareness, colonial awareness, ecosystem awareness and so forth. Living form is a volume of interlinking of multi-levelled awareness/responsiveness in action. Viewed this way, most expressions of awareness that are necessary for our body to exist would be either subconscious or unconscious. What we call conscious awareness or ego awareness, which often seems to appropriate the awareness as something one ‘has’ or ‘possesses’ rather than something one ‘is’, is just one aspect of a rich multi-levelled weaving of responsiveness.

With this in mind, the section on kāyānupassanā could be seen as an invitation to become extraordinarily quiet, relaxed and sensitive, and in this state of vibrant alertness and wide awake curiosity, to listen to, study, and more deeply understand, the process of shaping – this wisdom of embodiment that we are. Not ‘me’ being pointedly aware of an object called ‘my body’ but me softening into a space of stillness and profound sensitivity in order to appreciate the vast ocean of dynamic awareness(es) that together are my body in the process of knowing itself into being.

Through vedanānupassanā we investigate how the dancing awareness/responsiveness that composes our body, gives rise to a biological basis of values vis-a-vis homeostasis, the internal milieux of cells, the autoimmune system, symbiotic functioning and so forth. Living systems exhibit an automatic ‘pull’ towards health and good functioning and an ‘aversion’ to what threatens that. What we call liking, disliking and being neutral, are rooted in our biological functioning and then extended into the realm of concepts, memories, language and other habit patterns of preference and shared experience. Cultivating awareness of feelings, we investigate this matrix of myriad levels of awareness that together make up the realm of experience we call feeling/evaluation.

With cittānupassanā we explore the matrix of awareness that arises as states of mind and with dhammānupassanā we explore the vast field or community of awareness/ responsiveness in action that gives rise to the complex phenomena of living in relation with others.

Kāya: How does this ongoing multi-levelled dance of responsive knowing bring forth a world of embodiment in terms of identifiable forms?

Vedana: How does this dance of responsive knowing bring forth the world of your body in the act of valuing and preferencing?

Citta: How does this dance of responsive knowing bring forth the world of your body, along with the process of valuing, in terms of states of mind or flavours of knowing?

Dharma: How does this dance of responsive knowing bring forth the world of your body and the process of valuing, flavoured with a vast array of subtleties and nuances (states of mind), in terms of identifiable global understandings and involvements?

Putting this all together – this precious teaching of Satipaṭṭhāna – smiling and breathing, we might find ourselves.

Moving through fields of minds of beings
moving as a being of care-filled minding stillness,
movement as a play of mystery unfolding . . .
This flowering here of nowfulness.

Grassy meadows
rippling with zephyred thought and feeling,
photons of star parents,
touchings of brother,
scentings of sister,
a buzzing inter-pollination in every direction;
and we flow
as one river;
streams of magic
forging paths of openness,
tracks of transient creatureness,
weavings of life-lines lacing the open sky,
birthing an old forest of ever fresh worlds.

Capricious Chance and Steady Causality

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These days I find myself reviewing Prajnaparamita/Madhyamaka philosophy (curtesy of wonderful translations by Karl Brunnholzl) along with some of David Bohm’s early writings (particularly his book “Causality and Chance in Modern Physics”). This morning I recalled a poem I wrote in the mid 90s and was amazed at its continuing freshness. I suppose that this shouldn’t be surprising considering the poem was originally entitled “Anew”!

Unknowable dancing vastness,
conceiving spontaneous present
that isn’t a moment.

Capricious Chance and Steady Causality,
Two sides of time, the coin of becoming,
Bursting fresh the universe
With a brand new me appreciating,
Playing music in the boundless hall
With notes a-noting.

Walking down the path,
seeing for the very first time.
Continuously born anew.
Never repeating
Never repeating!
Echoes of infinite difference,
of exquisite subtlety.

Open your eyes and disappear.
The seeing you is different from then.
Walking forth in the morning light,
A new,
A new,
A new!
Tuis tumbling through the sky
Singing with the pure wonder of it all.

All perception is a blur.
Everything moves, movings within movings.
No matter how fast our glimpse
the moment still smears itself across the retina,
Pretending to be discrete moments through photon limitations.

We live in a blur,
moving senses passing changing messages
to a never resting brain.

Discrimination is averaging,
probabilities calculating.
We ‘see’ with our hopes and memories,
frozen encounters
sculpted deftly
to support our stories.

‘AH’ but wait.
Perhaps we are not ‘seeing’,
That is, – seeing something waiting to be seen.

Perhaps the world is birthing
never before beholden.
The seer – the seen, the knower – the known,
mutually shaping infinite cause
makes causality meaningless,
and so everything is both mother and child
and mysterious choice is the father.

Infinite, spacious, awesome creation;
self and dollars, and addresses and business,
all seem so tiny,
so blind to the fullness.

Joy and gratitude pours from my heart.

Sarva Mangalam, Sarva Mangalam, Sarva Mangalam

Vajrasattva’s Hundred Syllable Mantra: a summation of the path

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Portrayed as a radiant buddha figure, Vajrasattva represents the primordial natural state of pure and total presence – the essence of body, speech and mind activity of all Buddhas and Bodhisattvas. As a meditation, the primary purpose of Vajrasattva practice is to remove the obstacles obscuring one’s perception of the true nature of mind, and hence to cleanse unwholesomeness from all levels of being.

The Vajrasattva purification and healing meditation is widely practiced in all Tibetan Buddhist traditions. In general it’s practice involves visualisation and mantra, coupled with clear intent and care filled inquiry. Vajrasattva is usually depicted as a white Buddha figure, seated in meditation, holding a bell and dorje. The bell symbolises wisdom. The dorje symbolises skilful means or compassion.

A distinctive aspect of this meditation is the hundred syllable mantra which can be understood in a variety of ways depending on the maturity of the practitioner. In this short essay I’d like to share with you an approach, or perhaps we should call it an explanation/understanding, that arose in the course of my own contemplations. It is not a fresh a translation but is more a modified rendition with poetic license. I am offering it for the benefit of those people already involved with Vajrasattva practice who may appreciate having their understanding of the meditation stretched a bit. Click here to download the entire 14 page PDF file.

One of the many meanings of the word mantra is ‘teaching’, which can be understood, both in in terms of direct instruction and also, as a form of inspirational intimation. The ‘100 syllable mantra of Vajrasattva’ could be regarded as ‘the 100 syllable teaching’ or, since 100 syllables indicates something quite long, it could indicate ‘the extensive or complete teachings of Vajrasattva’.

In general, vajra means unshakable, firm, indestructible or adamantine and sattva means living being, or becoming. In a literal sense, the word vajrasattva means unshakable being, unshakable becoming, or unshakable suchness. In essence, Vajrasattva is the immeasurable expanse of inter-being. A central aspect of the classical form of this meditation involves visualising a flow of crystal clear nectar washing though one’s body, speech and mind, loosening, dissolving and clearing away defilements. Biologically speaking, the body/brain/mind/community that we are is like a multi-dimensional braided river, a living tapestry of flowing transformation. We are composed of an inconceivable number of flows of different ‘nectars’: water, earth, gasses, energies, foods (rupa), thought and memory (these are cognitive flowings), talents and understandings, that are pouring through, revealing and demonstrating our utterly inter-dependent wholeness, this present ‘body of experience’ which involves everything. The experience of multi-levelled fluidity, rather than a frozen or static state, shows the activity of purifying. All these flowings are modes of connecting; the languaging, the coupling of all phenomena, things and processes, (dharmas). This body/mind is truly community in action. Gradually the practitioner experiences his or her body, speech and mind and all being’s body, speech and mind, and the subsequent timeless inter-being of body, speech and mind, to be the display of Vajrasattva – this dharmadhatu – this total expanse of all events and meanings.

From a deep ecology/buddhadharma perspective, the ideas of unsustainability and impermanence are inseparably linked. Sabbe sankhara annicca’ti. All compounded things are impermanent. Thoughts are impermanent. Feelings are impermanent. Creatures are impermanent. Species are impermanent. Geological features are impermanent. Planets are impermanent. Galaxies are impermanent. All compounded things are impermanent. When we look around us, everything is fleeting and ephemeral and yet we find ourselves constantly grasping for duration and stability. The only dharma to have demonstrated any kind of meaningful sustainability is ‘Life’ which, on earth, has been continuing in an unbroken or unshakable continuum for more than 3.5 billion years. In this sense the Hundred Syllable Mantra of Vajrasattva could be described as the Extensive Teaching on Sustainable Living–Being–Becoming.

For beings experiencing a fairly continuous sense of separation between subject and object, the traditional translation will have most meaning. One is petitioning a higher being or power, outside oneself, for help. Here Vajrasattva represents the unshakably clear state, the embodiment of Buddha Wisdom. The hundred syllables become a prayerful request for Vajrasattva’s blessing which comes in the form of nectar flowing through your being. A traditional rendition of this prayer, along with a partial translation can be found at the end of this article.

In a broader, more embracive sense, Vajrasattva represents the complete realisation of emptiness (śunyatā). In this profound non-dual state, Vajrasattva is understood as the essence, nature and expression of your own mind. Or, put in other words, Vajrasattva is the essence, nature and expression of the immeasurable expanse of knowing that you are. Here contemplating the mantra is not a petition for help, rather it becomes a self empowerment into Mahamudra or the Great Perfection. As an extensive teaching, the mantra serves as a reminder of the entire path from beginning to end. It becomes a song of awakening, a skilful path of wholeness unfolding, resonating with deep understanding and loving presence.

The following explanation/understanding is not a translation. You could think of it as a rendition done with poetic license. By combining this radically inclusive approach with the more traditional translations also outlined at the end of this article, you may glimpse fresh intuitions of how you might engage with this profound practice.

OM
Vajrasattva source of vows
Vajrasattva ever present
Steadying, Gladdening, Enriching, Loving
Treasury of all perfections
Empowering this heart/mind
HUM
HA HA HA HA
HOH
Blessedness,
Unshakable abiding suchness
Beyond all separation
Oh Diamond Jewel of Love
Oh Being of the Great Vow
AH

Click here to download the entire 14 page PDF file.

Native to this Earth

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Native to this Earth

The knowing that I am
is the behaviour of the ocean of being
which is all there is to know
by the knowing that I am.

Like understanding the weather,
there are countless factors,
some large in form, or long in time,
some of micro dimension – transient sparks,
so many factors communing together
making our life and living.

Most of the factors are out of our immediate control.
Yet . . .
with compassion filled understanding and vivid ongoing alertness,
we can learn to ride the waves of our living with integrity and heartfelt respect.

I am born from this earth but I can’t control culture, ancestors, or the unfolding ecology. However, my every gesture and action of body, and thought, contributes to the community of life – this living earth. This is the root Dharma. We are all brothers, sisters, uncles, aunts, cousins, fathers, and mothers of each other. The robustness of Life – adapting and changing over billions of years is due to the immeasurable diversity of our family. The delicacy and fragility of Life is also due to this diversity. What each person does sends ripples throughout the fabric of life. What each of us does, matters! As Chimé Shore once wrote in the ‘Foundation Chorus’, “Respect for nature, love of life, the blessing of the human birth, born from nature all of us, I will remember and give thanks. I am a human being, endowed with nature’s gifts, unique, alive, each one of us, I will remember this.”

“Born from nature, all of us.” Born from the earth. Indigenous to this place. My actions are ultimately inexplicable. They are the results of too many situations and circumstances to accurately predict. A Darwinian might call this random mutation. My actions trigger ripplings of response throughout the web of existence which, in turn, triggers further adjustments in me. This could be called natural selection. Wisdom is to respect the un-pin-downable nature of this unbreakable wholeness of Nature. Compassion is to cultivate skills in sensitive observation and multi-levelled responsiveness, to be able to participate with balance, reverence and wonderment. As this becomes our basic stance of meeting life, we rediscover our true home. We are indigenous peoples. We are born from this earth.

This is Dharma
This is natural law.
This is what is happening.
This is what teaches us.

Through the endless waves of birth, development, wellbeing, old-age and death,
May we reflect to each other,
our true nature.

With love to everyone.

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