Prayer and Meditation

Where does prayer fit in?

Ken: I’m not very good at giving talks. I think I’m better at some kind of interaction, so we’re just going to start off right there. When the White Heron Sangha, through Nancy, invited me to come up here, I was up here once before, last year, and I very much enjoy this area of the country. I think it is astonishingly beautiful, and it’s just a great relief to get out of the big metropolis. So I’m very happy to be here, and my reception with the White Heron Sangha was very warm. So when Nancy said, “Would you come back?” I said, “Yeah, it’d be a pleasure,” even though in many respects, I’ve actually stepped away from teaching activities to write. But I was very glad at this opportunity because I want to explore—and it’s my intention to explore this evening with you— the ideas of prayer and meditation, mainly because in Buddhism prayer is like this practice that is off to the side. In other religions traditions, it’s not quite sure where meditation fits in. There’s one thing that most people associate Buddhism with, rightly or wrongly, it’s with meditation. So to begin with, I’d just like to hear from you what some of your questions or some of your interests [are], what you would like to learn from this evening? Just three or four people. Be brave. You won’t be held accountable for anything.

Student: Hi, I’m under the impression, rightly or wrongly, that prayer has to do with projecting outward from the self, whereas meditation has to do with projecting inward.

Ken: Yeah. I think that is the common impression, and that’s one of the things I want to explore this evening. So, that’s great. Thank you.

Student: Well, I seem to think that when I pray, I ask for something, and when I meditate, I’m not supposed to ask for anything. [Laughter]

Ken: And is that kind of a restriction for you? Okay. Yes.

Student: I’m hesitating with the whole prayer concept, because for me, it seems to be directed to someone you pray to: Jesus or God, or one of the saints, or something. And since my understanding is that Buddha is not a god, that we don’t really pray to him for anything, even a thanksgiving prayer. So I don’t see how Buddhism and prayer can go together.

Ken: Yeah. I think there are quite a few people who wonder that too, yet—and I’m steeped in the Tibetan tradition—there are thousands of prayers. You have no idea how many. Okay. Another one over here.

Wendy: Well, I’ve always been confused about saying metta, because on the one hand, you’re asking, “May somebody be free of suffering, may they be happy,” but then there’s another—I don’t know if it’s a prayer or a saying—where you say, “All beings are the owners of their own karma, and nothing I can do can change that.” So how does that work together?

Ken: Very good. This reminds me of an email that one of my students sent to me the other day about a statement that the Dalai Lama made. And he’d given this talk, it’d been very well received, but one of researchers said that the Dalai Lama has this definition of compassion, which is, not being able to tolerate the pain of others. And the researcher was saying, this is a very unfortunate definition of compassion. Compassion is not being able to tolerate the pain of others. And your question goes right to the heart of the matter, which I think is really, really deep, in that, in Western thinking, we always think in terms of facts. We take things very, very literally. One of the things we don’t really appreciate is that almost all of Buddhist teaching is not in terms of facts at all. It’s in terms of experience. So the definition of compassion as, “I’m not able to tolerate the pain of others,” is a description of an experience. It’s not a fact. You see what I mean? And it’s going to the same thing. “What am I doing here? Am I actually having an effect on these people?” But then all these people, their karma is theirs, and we get very confused by that when we think of it all as facts. So this is, this really goes to the heart of a very important matter.

There’s a couple of others. Oh, one back there. And then two more. Yes. And thank you so much. There’s very few audiences so forthcoming with questions. I just really appreciate this.

Student: George Bernard Shaw was once asked, “Do you pray?” And he said, “Heavens no. Why should I spend all that time talking to myself?” So my question is, is there more to prayer than talking to yourself?

Ken: Okay, there’s one in here. No. Yes. And then we’ll come up to you.

Student: The tradition that I was raised in was Christian, as probably most people in this country. And I was always under the impression that prayer was like, or essentially people’s interest in Christianity is that essentially they make a deal. [Ken laughs] And in that sense, it’s very similar to the ancient religions and whatnot, but the Romans were very practical and they basically appeal to a god because they wanted something. And I tend to think that that’s frequently the case when people are praying.

Ken: Okay. And one more.

Student: To what extent is meditation a private and solitary experience? And to what extent is it a group sharing experience?

Ken: That’s very interesting question. Good. I’ll try and touch on that. One up here. Oh, one more

Student: I wanted to say something about prayer and meditation and Wendy mentioned metta. And I, I think that if you’re using metta, like “May I be happy, may I be healthy, may I live with ease,” what’s the difference between that and something like the prayer of St. Francis of Assisi, “May I be an instrument of thy peace. Were there’s hatred let me sow love,” and so forth? It seems like in both cases, you’re asking—

Christ and Buddha as religious icons

Ken: Well, you’ve certainly provided me with some very, very rich ideas to work with, so, thank you very much. I’m just going to do my best with this, and this is really gonna be my reflections on this. And I’ll talk for a while, and then I’m very happy to engage further questions and discussions. So, you know, so we go back and forth here.

How many of you have read The Life of Pi? Okay, a friend of mine who’s a teacher in Portland, recommended that book to me in a way that was totally uncharacteristic of him. He’s a very, very solid teacher. And he said, “You’ve got to read this.” It’s fascinating. So I picked it up and I found it very interesting.

It’s kind of an allegory, I think it’s fair to say. At the end of it, I called him up and said, “So what’s your tiger?” And those of you who have read the book will know what I’m talking about there. But the thing that intrigued me about the book was something that happened at the very beginning. The narrator of the book—it’s in the first person—describes how when he was a young boy in India, he formed relationships with all of the different religious traditions. And he just loved all of them. But he had a little difficulty with Christianity after Buddhism because he couldn’t understand why people would come to Christianity, because the central icon of Christianity is Christ on the cross.

Now, if you consider among the world’s religions, it’s probably true to say that the two most powerful icons are the Buddha sitting in meditation and Christ on the cross. And it’s difficult to imagine two more completely different messages. Now, that question intrigued me. And a few years ago, I ran into a couple of situations, both of which cut me open very, very deeply emotionally. Well, they’re both people that were very close to me who did things which really, really hurt. And it’s fair to say I was devastated. However, unfortunately, I had all this training and Buddhism, so I knew what to do, which was to sit in my experience each morning in my meditation. And it wasn’t much fun because there was a lot of pain there, really a lot.

And I remember very distinctly one morning saying, “I feel like I’m being crucified.” And I went, “Oh.” And then it struck me that the power in the icon of Jesus on the cross appeals to something that all of us know is true, but don’t want to admit. Now, you may recall that, if we start with John, “And the word became flesh,” describing Christ coming into the world. Why is it necessary for the word to become flesh? And this is what I was hitting in my own practice, and I’ve hit it a number of times in my own practice, but it had never come to me this way. And that is, when there are deep seated pieces in us, which are unresolved, they keep us separate from the world and are, in Buddhist language, the basis for the formation of a sense of self. And to be able to let go of those—since they’re not just stored in our heads, nor are they just stored in our hearts, they’re actually stored in our bodies, and we know this from post-traumatic stress disorder and all kinds of things like that—you actually have to experience them in your body. And the pain of those deep hurts and that deep conditioning is—and this is a phrase that I’ve come across in my own practice, but I’ve heard some of my colleagues come up with the same phrase—it is pain so intense, you wouldn’t wish it on your worst enemy. This is a very powerful statement and a direct expression of compassion when you think about it.

So this changed my reading of the Christian myth very, very significantly. And what the icon of Jesus on the cross represents is, what we have to experience in order to become free. And that’s totally in free of our conditioning. And in Christianity it’s called being reborn and so forth. There’s all the whole language that is used around it. Now, that makes it a very powerful icon in a very, very different way.

And then you go to the icon of Buddha sitting in meditation. That is an icon which represents peace at an extraordinarily deep level, a peace which is free from the tyranny of reaction. And that peace has the quality of freedom. In the moment of enlightenment with Buddha touching the ground, the final challenge by Mara, which we can take as being our own negative forces. And what it says in the text, Mara, at this point, says to him, “What gives you the right to be there?”

So, that’s a very interesting question. What gives any of us the right to exist, to be? Buddha doesn’t engage it, he just touches the ground. “The earth is my witness,” is what’s recorded in the texts, but it’s just to say, “I’m here and that’s it.” And there isn’t any reaction to it because it’s our reaction to experience that is the cause of suffering, or is suffering. So, we have these two icons, and they lead us in very, very different directions.

Serious practitioners

Ken: Now this is gonna be a little disconnected possibly, but I want to turn to a series of retreats that I taught in New Mexico at a place called the Mandala Center, but it’s loosely affiliated with the Episcopalian church. And we’ve come there, usually 18 to 20 people, for ten days or three weeks at a time. And everybody would just sit, that’s what Buddhists do. They sit, they’re very good at that. But it was very interesting, because the executive director of the center, who is an Episcopalian minister herself, didn’t see that we were sitting. From her perspective, we were praying. And she had never had any religious group come in that prayed eight hours a day. And so she just said, “You know, these people are serious.”

How many of you practice meditation on a daily basis? Okay, how long do you sit? For half an hour, 45 minutes, an hour, something like that? Now, if you’re practicing prayer, how long would you pray for?

Student: Couple of minutes.

Ken: Yeah. But if you look at your meditation practice as a form of prayer, and that may or may not be valid, and we’ll explore that in a minute. But if you’re practicing half an hour, 45 minutes, an hour a day, you’re putting a lot of time into religious practice. This makes you a very serious religious practitioner. And because we’re always comparing ourselves to these completely insane people who spent like 24 hours a day meditating. We think we’re doing nothing. But in the scheme of things, we’re actually pretty damn serious.

Prayer as mantra

Ken: So what is the difference between prayer and meditation? Now, in the comments that some of you made and the questions you raise, you seem to be praying to something. Now, that in Christian parlance is known as petitionary prayer where you’re asking for something, and it is the first level of prayer.

You can find all kinds of descriptions of the various stages of prayer. St. Theresa of Avila expounds on this as well as Hildegard, I believe, and several others. And there’s a well-established sequence, particularly in the Catholic Church, beginning with petitionary prayer, which is your first way of interacting with God, progressing through up to unity prayer, which is not a verbal form of prayer. It is where you experience union with God. Now, when you start talking about this, this gets very similar to things we might encounter in Buddhism, like mahamudra or dzogchen or something like that. Not exactly the same necessarily, but there’s some ideas. I’m gonna talk about this in terms of what is well known as the Jesus Prayer or the Centering Prayer, which is a very simple prayer. There are two versions of it. “Lord Jesus, have mercy upon me,” or “Lord Jesus, have mercy upon me, a sinner.”

And this is a prayer that’s practiced in the Orthodox tradition. It is being revitalized by Father John Keating as the Centering Prayer. And essentially, if we compare it with Buddhist techniques, it’s a mantra, and it works exactly the same way. And if you read about the stages of how this comes about, this is taken from Greek sources, probably from a monk from Mount Athos. It starts with verbal prayer. And you just repeat this over and over again. As you repeat it over and over again, it becomes a mental habit. So it just forms and you’re saying it to yourself all the time, or you say it to yourself mentally. And the third stage is you begin to form an emotional connection with it. So now your heart becomes involved, and then it becomes just part of you. And finally, it becomes how you connect with a part of you that is divine. And this is very, very similar to the process of mantra recitation. One of the most famous mantras in the Tibetan tradition is the mantra, om mani padme hum. Anybody heard of this one? Okay,

Student: Say it again, please.

Ken: Om mani padme hum. It means the jewel in the lotus, which is an epithet for Avalokiteshvara, a mythical figure in Indian and Tibetan Buddhism who represents awakened compassion. The Dalai Lama is regarded as an incarnation of Avalokiteshvara, as are several other of the high teachers.

But, when you see these people with these little prayer wheels going around, is om mani padme hum. Every time it goes around, hundreds of millions of mantras are said because cause it’s stacked. They’re printed on very small paper, and when the Tibetans came to the West, they would set up electric motors. So they would just spin these things, ’cause they felt it was … [laughter] Well, from our point of view, we say it’s cheating, from their point of view, they’re just getting more mantras said. [Laughter] So, you take your choice, and it’s filled with symbolism, etc. But the way these mantras work is exactly the same way.

How many of you practice meditation and would like to experience a calm mind? Okay, well, see, this is what mantra is meant to do. [For] the word mantra, the etymology of the word is manas and tra. Manas is a word for mind. Tra is a word for protect. So it’s protect the mind. And you say the mantra to protect your mind from distraction and disturbances. And you do this by repeating it all the time until it becomes second nature. And what happens then, is that when you repeat it enough, so it just starts running by itself in you. You know that little subconscious gossip that goes on when you meditate?

Student: Mm-Hmm.

Ken: Okay? The object of mantra recitation is to replace that subconscious gossip with the mantra. And once that has happened, you have a quiet mind. That’s how it protects the mind. And you can see the similarity with the Jesus Prayer.

The purpose of meditation

Ken: Now, one of the points that was raised in the beginning here is that prayer seems to be going out there, and meditation seems to be going in here. Well, I think that’s how many people approach it, and how many people look at it. But it’s fair to say that, if you practice meditation as a form of introspection, you’ve got a problem in your practice. It is not actually a form of introspection. And this may sound very, very strange to say this, but it’s not actually a way of going inwards. It’s a way of going into our experience. And that is the purpose of meditation. It is to build a sufficient capacity of attention so that we can actually experience what arises. It’s not going through some form of internal psychoanalysis or psychotherapy, or trying to figure ourselves out. It’s building the capacity so that we can experience whatever arises.

Now, most of the time, we don’t experience whatever arises. How many of you got angry sometime last week? Oh, be honest. There it is, okay. I get angry every day at something. Now, when we get angry, almost always, and Nancy referred to my consulting practice—it’s something I love to tell CEOs, it just irritates them no end—you only get angry at that which you feel weaker than. You don’t get angry at something you feel stronger than, you just take care of it. Not a problem. You only get angry when you feel weaker than something. And so, anger is a way of getting away from a certain feeling in us. And usually it’s the feeling of being vulnerable, afraid, threatened, unable to cope, etc. That’s when we get angry. In certain sense, it’s just like being a bullfrog. We puff ourselves up, we puff ourselves up with anger and out of anger, we immediately form enemies. Because the basic energy of anger is to oppose and see the world in terms of opposition. Meditation practice is not about figuring out why we get angry, or it had to do with my mother dangling spiders over my crib, and things like that. It’s not about that. It’s about developing the capacity of attention so that when you feel afraid, when you feel threatened, when you feel incapable, you feel incompetent, you can actually experience it, and not get swallowed by it, and not push it away.

That’s what I, what I mean when I say meditation is about building the ability to experience everything completely. And when we can experience everything completely, then we do not have to react to anything. And that is freedom. And in the Buddhist parlance, that is the end of suffering, when we don’t have to react. Now, this is an ideal. Does that actually happen in practice? To a certain degree, but I’ve been around a number of high teachers, and I’ve seen them react to little things now and then. They do. Now, that I hope is a little bit of clarification about meditation.

Through prayer we forge a relationship with a mystery

Ken: Let’s turn to prayer. Prayer is a little different. And as several of you said, it feels like you’re praying to something out there. And what does this have to do with Buddhism? Because we don’t have anything out there, ideally. Well, I’d like to bring this in a little bit. How many of you have experienced that there’s a part of you that seems to know what to do in situations, but you don’t know how it knows?

Okay? How many of you found that part coming out when someone close to you has experienced a deep loss or a deep tragedy, and you’re with them, you don’t know where the words come from, and you’re just there? And when you look back on those times, how conscious were you of yourself? Not at all. And you look back on those times as something magical and something really that has a spiritual quality, very much what Martin Buber refers to as “I and thou,” because there’s, there’s a sacredness or, something really, holy or something like that to those experiences. Well, we have that part of us, and I may be a little bit heretical here, but I’ve been regarded as a heretic in Buddhism, which is very interesting ’cause it’s non-dogmatic religion. And that aspect of us I’m going to call—just for the sake of the discussion this evening—the divine. That’s how we experience god. And it’s probably fair to say, in a certain sense, that’s what god is. So that when we’re praying, what we’re doing is forming a relationship with that part of ourselves that we ordinarily don’t have much to do with.

And many people put it way out there, as you know, up in the sky, and all kinds of projections onto it. But when I sit with this and feel what it’s like, it’s this part of us that we don’t know what to do with. We don’t know where it comes from, and yet it seems vitally important. I mean, really, really important because however it manifests in the world, it brings good. Even when it manifests very directly and very clearly, it still brings good. And so it’s something we treasure and very, very important to us. And so, if you turn to something like the Lord’s Prayer, that’s exactly what’s going on with it. “Our Father who art in heaven,” it’s referring to something in us which we put on another level. And what we’re doing in that is forming a relationship with it. Now, this is what came home to me because in the Tibetan tradition, we pray a lot. There’s a certain prayer which I have here in front of me, which is part of a set of practices called, known infamously in the West as the foundational practices or ngöndro. How many of you heard of this? And you have to do a hundred thousand of each of them. They’re very simple practices. But a hundred thousand is a lot of anything. And, this prayer is:

Treasured teacher, I pray to you, give me energy to let fixation on self go.

Give me energy to know the pointlessness of life. (I’m still working on a good translation for that line.)

Give me energy to stop ordinary thinking.

Give me energy to know mind has no beginning.

Give me energy to let confusion subside on its own.

Give me energy to know all experiences as pure being

A Shower of Energy

This is deep stuff. But you pray, and prayer is directed in the Tibetan tradition very, very frequently to one’s own teacher who you see as how you experience buddha. That’s what the phrase, “See your teacher as buddha” means. It doesn’t mean you regard the teacher as buddha. It’s how you experience buddha at this point, and how you experience what it means to be awake. And this form of practice has come in for a great deal of criticism in the West, because since this is a devotional aspect, you are abdicating personal responsibility. You’re ceding everything, all responsibility, to the teacher, etc. These are naive understandings of how this actually works. You aren’t ceding your own intelligence, your own moral integrity at all. Those are misrepresentations. But what you are doing is allowing yourself—and this is the really challenging part of these prayers—allowing yourself to form an emotional relationship with this part of you that you don’t understand. You don’t know where it comes from, but is really, really important.

Now, what is it like to form an emotional relationship with a mystery? It’s a challenge. Because you can’t bring anything to the table. You are completely open. And the real practice of prayer, I think, is extraordinarily difficult because you have to be #that# open to the mystery: the mystery in you, and you can call it the mystery in life, because I do not see them as different. When you do this, when you allow yourself to form that emotional relationship, to feel that this is where you want to go in your life, this is what you want your life to be based on, and you can allow yourself to feel that yearning in your heart, then quite extraordinary things actually happen.

But it’ll tear apart your conditioned self, which actually is precisely the point of the practice. There’s nothing gentle about it at all. And in the Tibetan tradition, this practice of devotion, as I’m describing it, is really what is regarded as the basis of insight. Now, how many of you have heard about emptiness and the perfection of wisdom and mahamudra and dzogchen and all of this stuff? These are various advanced techniques, supposedly advanced. They’re characterized as experiencing things just as they are, which actually isn’t quite true, experiencing ultimate reality, experiencing what is ultimately true and so forth. I don’t know what is ultimately true. I have no idea what is ultimately true. I don’t even use that phrase anymore.

What I do know is that when you let yourself open emotionally to the mystery of life, you find yourself incredibly naked. You don’t know how to function. And then, as Nietzsche said, when you stare into the abyss, the abyss stares back into you, and you find yourself in a different relationship with your life, which is what I think that a lot of Buddhist practice is really about. Because it’s finding a way to step out of this ordinary way of experiencing things filled with struggles of all kinds of things, with stuff that arises internally and stuff that arises externally. But when you actually step into this mystery, all that struggle ceases. It doesn’t mean that things go right, it doesn’t mean that at all. Bad things still happen. Your house can burn down, your wife can leave you, you lose your job. That can happen. There’s no guarantee here, it, but when good happens, you take that as an experience. When bad things happen, you take it as an experience. And so there’s just the experience of life itself. And this to me, now, has become what the real purpose of religious practice is, at least in Buddhism. And that is, it’s to find a way of experiencing life differently so that you don’t struggle with what you experience.

Freedom from the tyranny of reaction

Ken: Now, many people are currently approaching Buddhism as a way of improving their quality of life. Now they’re going to be more relaxed, more focused, more successful, more this, more that. And then there’s endless books about how the real purpose of practice is to be happy. I have to say this, this is blasphemy to me. I know the Dalai Lama has written a book on the art of happiness, and I’ve heard all things like that. But from my own experience, it is such a trivialization that it really, really bothers me. I would never, ever characterize religious practice or spiritual practice as the quest for happiness. Freedom, peace. Yes, those make sense to me. But it’s the freedom, as I said earlier, from the tyranny of reaction. It is the peace that is possible when you don’t have to react to anything. And those may sound like simple words, but I think if you really take them in, you’ll see that they have quite a significant meaning.

Now, prayer to me, is about forming an emotional relationship with this aspect of our life. And through that emotional relationship, we form a connection. And so we can move into an actual experience like that. And that is why I think prayer is very important. Meditation is about building a capacity. It’s building a capacity so it can experience whatever does arise in us. And the two reinforce each other very, very powerfully.

Huge aspirations

Ken: And before I open up to further discussion, I’d just like to touch on two things. 1974, I was with my teacher in Toronto, and we met with one of the archbishops of the Catholic Church. And he asked my teacher, he said, “Tell me about prayer.” I was very young at that time, and I didn’t really appreciate that what he was actually asking was, “Tell me about meditation.” So I translated it very literally, you know, prayer. We have two words for prayer In Tibetan, one means to make a request. So it’s that petitionary prayer. But the kind of request you make is exactly what I was reading. It’s about deep internal qualities. It’s not good harvests, or a nice car or flowers or something like that. And the other word for prayer is smon lam (pron mönlam), which means aspiration. It’s something you aspire to. And I’ll just give you an example of that kind of prayer. This was a prayer written by my teacher:

By the power of the truth of compassion of all the supreme refuges, (that’s the buddha, dharma and sangha) these seeds of virtue, and this pure noble motivation, may all the suffering of sentient beings who are as extensive as space be cleared away through my own efforts.

By excellent virtue, both ordinary and transcendent, may the hopes and wants of beings be fulfilled.

May the flesh, blood, skin and other parts of my body be useful to any sentient being who has need of them.

May the suffering of all beings, my grandmothers be absorbed by me.
May they all receive my virtue and happiness.

As long as I dwell in the world, may not a single thought of harming others arise in my mind.

May I strive energetically for the welfare of beings, not faltering, even for a moment from discouragement or fatigue.

For all beings who are poor, hungry, or thirsty, may I be able to give them whatever they want effortlessly.

All the great burdens of intolerable suffering, such as the hell realms, may I take on myself. May those beings be free of them.

Aspiration prayer by Kalu Rinpoche

Now, from what I can gather, my teacher wrote this in his early twenties. It’s quite an aspiration, isn’t it? It’s like totally over the top. And the purpose of these aspirations was really the line that we have from Robert Browning: “A man’s reach should exceed his grasp, or what’s a heaven for?” You aspired for the very, very top. And it just moved your whole being in that direction. But I regret to this day that I didn’t translate that question with the word for meditation, ’cause I think my teacher would’ve given him a very, very different response, and it would’ve moved the discussion to a completely different level.

Listening to the mystery of life

Ken: And the last thing I want to, say is, and I can’t remember where I read this. It was relatively recently. It was an interview by a BBC interviewer with a Catholic contemplative. It may have been Mother Teresa, but I’m not a hundred percent certain.

The BBC interviewer says, “When you pray, what do you ask God?”

And this woman says, “I don’t ask for anything.”

Well, says the interviewer, “What do you say to God?”

“Well, I, I don’t say anything.”

“Well, what do you do when you pray?”

“I listen.”

“What do you listen to?”

“I listen to God.”

“Well, what does God say to you?”

“God doesn’t say anything.”

“What’s God doing?”

“He’s listening too.”

And to me, it captures exactly where prayer and meditation come together, because my own practice of meditation, what I’ve learned through more struggle than I want to remember, is that it’s actually about listening. It’s not just about being quiet. There’s an awake quality in meditation. And one of the words that captures that awake quality is that you’re listening. It’s very active. What are you listening to? You’re listening to the mystery of life, as it is in you, as it is in the world. And prayer is forming a relationship with the mystery of life, which helps you to listen to it.

Now, how this speaks to you, I don’t know. That’s something that you’ll have to explore yourself. So at this point, I’ve covered many of the points I wanted to this evening. Maybe not in a terribly logical order, and please forgive me for that. But I’d very much like to explore some of the questions you’ve raised already and any others you’d like to raise in the time that we have remaining, which is actually quite a bit. Yes.

Student: Believe it or not, in a Presbyterian study group, we were discussing heaven and where where heaven was and where God is. And there were some interesting thoughts passed around, but for some reason, it occurred to me that the kingdom of God may be submicroscopic. In other words, way down around the quark level, the DNA level, way down there somewhere. And that we, people are just monsters compared to the real kingdom of God.

Ken: Do you want me to comment on that?

Student: That’s what occurred to me.

The basis for fundamentalism

Ken: Well, one thing Nancy left out is that my training is in mathematics, at least my university training. So I know a little bit about quarks, the symmetry groups and all of that stuff. One of the challenges we face in today’s world is our vocabulary and our whole way of thinking is permeated by scientific concepts and rational thinking. And this shows up in all kinds of ways. And just what you said is, is one example. Fritjof Capra’s, The Tao of Physics was another example. Very good physics, very, very bad philosophy. But the problems go much, much deeper than that. The language of religion is poetic, and it really needs to be understood as poetry. Now, how does poetry speak to us? It speaks to us by evoking images, evoking states of mind which move us. This is completely different from the way that rational language and the language of science works, because [with] that language, we are explaining how things are, in ways that are reproducible. And you have to take that language absolutely literally. You follow? And this is really important. Now, right in that distinction is where the basis for fundamentalism comes from.

Fundamentalism is not a movement back to fundamentals. It is a reaction to the power of rational thought in the modern age. And what happened in the 19th century, and this is very, very understandable, but also from my point of view, quite tragic, is that people felt their faith was being taken away from them by all of these scientific concepts and so forth. And when they looked at how that was happening, they saw science’s insistence on absolute rational interpretation and literal interpretation of what was written, which is exactly what you want when you’re writing up an experiment or doing a mathematical proof. It’s not something you interpret. There are the instructions. You’ve gotta be able to reproduce that experiment. And if you’re building a machine, you follow those instructions precisely and so forth. And it’s very, very powerful, ’cause it brought in all kinds of inventions and great progress in medicine, and consumer electronics, everything, just fantastically powerful, even weather prediction, etc. So someone had the bright idea, “Oh, we’re approaching scripture the wrong way.” We shouldn’t be interpreting it symbolically or poetically. We should be interpreting it literally. And this is a really tragic mistake, but you can understand why, because they felt their faith was being taken away from them, being robbed.

And so now we have this extraordinarily powerful language, the language of science, and to a very, very significant degree, we’ve lost the capacity to be able to work symbolically, work poetically. And so we seek in our religious practice a literal, rational understanding. This does not work with things of the spirit. We have to be able to learn to listen to the mystery and talk about the mystery. And you cannot talk about the mystery in rational, literal terms.

How we connect with religious practice

Ken: I’m gonna give you one example of a poem, which was very, very important to me. It’s not a happy poem, if any of you know me. I never come up with happy things. [Laughter] It’s by Stephen Crane. And this is a poem which really spoke to me at a certain point in my life. And I have a strong relationship to it to this day, because it spoke to me so powerfully.

In the desert
I saw a creature, naked, bestial,
Who squatting upon the ground,
Held his heart in his hands
And ate of it.
I said, “Is it good, friend?”
“It is bitter—bitter, he answered;

“But I like it,
Because it is bitter,
And because it is my heart.”

In the Desert, Stephen Crane

Now, that’s not something you can understand rationally. I don’t know whether it speaks to you, it speaks to me very powerfully. I think it spoke to you too. Okay. This is how we connect with religious practice.

I’m working with this wonderful woman, she’s a brilliant research psychologist. We are reading the Diamond Sutra together. Now, the Diamond Sutra is one of the toughest sutras in the Buddhist canon. And there are 28 chapters. We’ve been working for a year, and the chapters are all about this long. Okay? We’ve been at this for, oh, a year and a half at least. No, probably more like two. I think we’re at chapter nine.

Student: What, what do you mean by “this long”?

Ken: That’s the text of one chapter.

Student: Maybe that many pages?

Ken: Oh, no, sorry. Thank you. There’s not that much text. Yeah. Like a little more than half a page to a chapter. Okay? We’re up to chapter nine so far. Why? Because this dear woman takes everything literally. [Laughter] And she’s so good at it. And I have to explain to her time and time again, and I’m just using her as an example, but there are many, many other people I’ve worked with. They read this stuff, and we’re so used to reading things absolutely literally, that we don’t notice the effects that are taking place in us as we’re reading them. We’re so caught up with the meaning, we don’t notice what we are experiencing. Pardon?

Student: How could we?

Ken: Well, because we aren’t trained for it at all. And yet you cannot possibly understand the sutra because it doesn’t make any literal sense. And it just goes on and on with this absolutely mind blowing hyperbole. Just to give you one example, the sutra opens with Buddha coming back from his round of begging, and he comes back to the retreat center, sits down, arranges his robes. And then the next thing that happens is Subhuti—that’s the main interlocutor in the sutra—kneels before the Buddha and says, “Lord, please tell us how a monk should walk, how a monk should stand, how a monk should control his thoughts.”

Now, what’s going on here? Buddha’s just come back. He sat down and Subhuti’s asking him this completely inane question. This is meant to be a deep sutra? Well, here’s my view of what’s happening there.

Have you ever watched a person who moves with such naturalness that your jaw drops and you go, like, [Ken gestures]. I remember once I was at a small, conference up at Esalen. And there’s just 12 of us. We were meant to be talking about mysticism revisited. It was hopeless discussion. One woman at this conference who was an internationally known therapist in connection with cancer, said something that was absolutely outrageous, just way over the top. And I was just sitting there feeling outraged. A psychologist in the group turned to her and communicated his outrage without attacking her at all. And I just watched that one, “How did you do that?” It was unbelievably masterful. And I think my jaw did hit the ground, ’cause I had never seen that kind of skill in communication before. That’s what I’m talking about.

So Buddha comes in, comes back from his rounds, and there is such naturalness, such presence in his movements that Subhuti’s watching him and goes, “How does he do that?” And so, he kneels before him and says, “How does a monk stand? How does a monk walk?” This is the very basics of life. “How does a monk control his thoughts?”

Questions that connect you with the mystery

Ken: Well, the reply is even more astonishing. Buddha says, “Here is how a monk controls his thoughts.” And I want you all to do this right now. Imagine we have this universe, we have 10 to the 17th stars in the Milky Way galaxy, which is the approximate number of stars in any galaxy. And there’s something like 10 to the 19th galaxies in the universe. These are very, very big numbers. If anybody’s a mathematician it comes out 10 to the 17th times 10 to the 19th, that’s a very, very big number. And there’s planets around a lot of those stars. And there’s probably life forms on a lot of those planets. So, just for the sake of argument for this evening, imagine that all of those have sentient beings, like eight or 10 billion people like our planet, okay? Eight billion I think now. So that’s what, 10 to the eighth. So that’s a really big number of people. And then we’ll count all the insects, which makes it much larger. Now, I want you to form the intention to free every one of those beings from any suffering that they should ever experience. Okay? It’s a kind of a big thought. All right? So just take that in and feel that, for a moment. [Pause] And know that at the same time, that as long as you’re thinking of saving a sentient being not a single sentient being will ever be saved. What happens? What happens when you put those two together?

Student: It stops.

Ken: Pardon?

Student: It all stops.

Ken: It all stops. That’s exactly it. That’s how you control your thoughts. They just stopped. So I’m reading this with this research psychologist and she says, “I can’t understand this,” because she’s not paying attention to what actually happens when you read it. And when you read Buddhist sutras, you gotta pay attention to what’s happening in you when you read it ’cause that’s where the understanding is. So when you talk about the mystery of life and where God is, forget about trying to figure out where God literally, anything like that. When you engage the question, if I ask you right now, “Where is God?” What happens in you? No, tell me. Ah, but something happens. Something happens in every one of us. So anybody, when you consider the question, “Where is God?” what happens in you?

Student: It goes silent.

Ken: It goes silent?

Student: You open up.

Ken: You open up. Okay. That’s where God is. That’s how you connect with the mystery. You can use the question, “Where is God?” [In] Buddhism, you’ve got thousands of questions which do the same thing. That’s how you connect with the mystery. It’s right there. But as soon as you start thinking about it, taking it literally, you’re gone. You’re lost. So I’ve been up on my soapbox on that one. Please forgive me, but I it’s a really important point, I think. Okay. Other questions? Now, nobody’s going to dare ask me one. Yes.

When religion becomes ideology

Student: I get all tangled up with the notion of God as I see him or her out in the world today, responsible for millions of horrible deaths. And so I have a difficult time even connecting with something inside of me that I can call God. So I’m, struggling with this.

Ken: You see God as responsible for the deaths in the world?

Student: No, no.

Ken: Okay.

Student: But the term is used as a justification for all kinds of horrors. I don’t know what the thing itself is. I don’t know what idea is out there about what that thing is that causes people to do the things they do in that name. So I have no idea what I should do with that. And I think that’s one of the things that brought me to Buddhism is because I’m so repelled by hearing that word in our culture that I can’t find my way around it or under it to get to anything that might be in any way relating to me personally.

Ken: Okay? Thank you for that clarification. Now I think I understand your question.

Student: I don’t think there’s a “there” there, basically.

Ken: Pardon?

Student: I don’t think there’s a “there” there.

Ken: Thank you Gertrude Stein. But she did say that about Oakland, not God.

Student: Right. That [unclear] anyway.

Ken: There’s no “there” there. [Laughs]. I don’t think Oakland has ever recovered. [Pause]

People—and I say this somewhat sadly—people will use anything to justify actions that they do not want to take responsibility for. And historically, frequently the gods or God or some divine power has been used to justify horrific actions. Buddhism is not free of that. In the Second World War, sadly, the Japanese military corrupted the bushido code so significantly that they actually regarded themselves as the instruments of karma, and justified their domination of Asia and the atrocities that they perpetrated as the workings of karma. And that is equally as deluded as people who invoke God to make war or to justify the slaughter of innocent people, or people that they’re at war with. This is not, to my mind, a valid conception of God or a valid relationship with God. This is a utilization, as has been done time and time again historically, to justify political, economic, social initiatives or objectives. I think it is detrimental on so many levels. I think it’s really quite tragic, totally corrupt. And I can understand why it causes confusion in people, because often—and I’m speaking here of Japan again—it did cause confusion because there were a lot of very highly regarded Zen teachers who completely supported the Japanese war effort. And that led me to engage the question, because you had the same thing happening in the crusades in Europe, where you had bishops riding into battle with the knights. And it took an Islamic leader to say, “Enough’s enough.” That was Saladin, who just said, “No, I’m not retaking Jerusalem. Too many people have died.” And they worked out a peace, but he was the one who stopped it.

People look for justification, or a way to draw people’s energy into their activities. So kings, rulers have invoked religion in the past. But from my point of view, and I’ve just lost my train of thought, I wanna get back to it.

Student: The chapter was driving …

Ken: Yeah. What the question that led me to is, “What is the quality that allows you to see through your own culture?” Now, the best way, the easiest way to see, through your own culture is to get out of your culture and live in another country for a while. And then you see, “Oh, people really do see things differently and do things differently, and it works.” And then you come back and you see your own culture in a different light. But historically, there have been people who have never left their culture and yet could see through it. And it’s not insight. The quality that allows you to see through your own culture is compassion. Because compassion puts you in touch with suffering. Even when your culture says, “This is completely natural.” No, you just see, “Oh, that person’s hurting, and you dispense with the notions of natural law or divine right, or whatever and things like that. You really see suffering for what it is when you’re in touch with compassion. And that’s how you stay out of that particular trap.

And when any form of religion loses its connection with compassion, it becomes an ideology and it loses its status as a religion. And so anytime a religion kills in the name of something, you know that it’s lost its connection with compassion. And now it’s a belief system, an ideology, and that functions very, very differently. Does that help? Okay. Yes.

Compassion as an idea, an action and quality of being

Student: Does Buddhism see compassion as an idea or as an action?

Ken: I’m going to add one more to that: idea, action, and a quality of being, all three. I’m gonna start with the quality of being. As a quality of being, it is how awareness takes expression in the world. What’s your profession?

Student: I’m a lawyer.

Ken: You’re a lawyer, okay. So you practice law for 30, 40, 50 years, a long time. At the end of your legal career, what do you want to do with your expertise?

Student: Probably what I’ve done all along, which is help people.

Ken: Why?

Student: Mmm.

Ken: You don’t have to answer that, but that’s my experience is that whenever we develop an expertise or something like that, we want to pass it on. We want to help people. That I see as a fundamental expression of compassion, something that’s very, very deeply seated in all of us. That’s why I say it is a quality of being. But it’s also an idea because you can actually spend time with that idea and it’ll move you in the direction of that. And there’s also an action, because if you’re going to pass that knowledge on and expertise on, then you’ll have to do something. So I think it’s all three.

Other questions? I’ve exhausted you? I can’t believe that. [Laughter] Okay. Gave you something to think about. Well, that’s very good. Thank you very much for your attention. It’s been a pleasure to be with you this evening, and I wish you the best.