The story of tea


Ken: Let’s see. There Is No Enemy. Friday, October 23rd morning session. I am going to begin this morning with a story from this collection of Tales of the Dervishes. It’s a very good collection of stories. They’re all teaching stories. Some of them are pretty straightforward and some of them are more than a little enigmatic. This one is more in the straightforward category, I think, but you’ll decide about that. It’s one of about three or four stories in here, which has to do with the way traditions form and what happens when they do. And this one’s called The Story of Tea:

In ancient times, tea was not known outside China. Rumors of its existence had reached the wise and the unwise of other countries, and each tried to find out what it was in accordance with what he wanted or what he thought it should be. The king of Inja sent an embassy to China, and they were given tea by the Chinese emperor. But since they saw that the peasants drank it too, they concluded that it was not fit for their royal master. And furthermore, that the Chinese emperor was trying to deceive them, passing off some other substance for the celestial drink.

The greatest philosopher of Anja collected all the information he could about tea, and concluded that it must be a substance which existed but rarely, and was of another order than anything then known. For was it not referred to as being a herb, a water green, black, sometimes bitter, sometimes sweet? In the countries of Koshish and Bebinem, for centuries, the people tested all the herbs they could find. Many were poisoned, all were disappointed for nobody had brought the tea plant to their lands, and thus they could not find it. They also drank all the liquids which they could find, but to no avail.

In the territory of Mazhab, a small bag of tea was carried in procession before the people as they went on their religious observances. Nobody thought of tasting it. Indeed, nobody knew how. All were convinced that the tea itself had a magical quality. When a wise man said, “Pour upon it, boiling water, ye ignorant ones,” they hanged him and nailed him up, because to do this, according to their belief would mean the destruction of their tea. This showed that he was an enemy of their religion.

Before he died, he had told his secret to a few, and they managed to obtain some tea and drink it secretly. When anyone said, “What are you doing?” they answered, “It is but medicine, which we take for a certain disease.”

And so it was throughout the world. Tea had actually been seen growing by some who did not recognize it. It had been given to others to drink, but they thought at the beverage of the common people. It had been in the possession of others and they worshiped it. Outside China, only a few people actually drank it, and those covertly.

Tales of the Dervishes, The Story of Tea, Idries Shah, p. 80


Coming to terms with life


Ken: Now there’s another section to the story, but I want to stop here and go through this in a little more detail. As you’ve heard me say before, all philosophies, all religions begin with one person’s attempt to come to terms with his or her own experience of life. Now, what exactly are they trying to come to terms with? Well, sometimes what they’re trying to come to terms with is an experience of clarity, presence, openness or awe, which seems quite different from ordinary human experience. We find this recounted again and again in the accounts of the prophets in the Bible, the early Jewish prophets. But that’s just one collection. And those experiences have a sense of being so very real or so very meaningful that people embark on a journey in their life, how to understand them, how to return to them, how to assimilate them into their lives.

And that quest has led people to abandon the conventional life, spend long periods of time in seclusion, undertake rigorous disciplines of one form or another. For other people, it’s quite the opposite. They encounter circumstances or situations that are tragic, painful or horrific, that they never, ever considered possible: inhumanity, pain, torture, loss of someone close, utter perplexity about the human condition. And they struggled to come to terms with that. “How is this possible?”

The foundation of Buddhism is actually more the second kind than the first, because, as many of you may recall, Siddhartha Gautama grew up, the stories say, the son of a king, but basically he was the heir of a chief of a minor principality in northern India, which was actually squished between two much larger political entities. And so there was a great deal of political intrigue at the time. But anyway, he had—by the standards of the day—a fairly luxurious upbringing. He had everything that he wanted and access to everything that he needed, but was completely confounded when he was exposed—as a very young man in his late teens, early twenties at the latest—to the presence of suffering, of illness, old age and death. And you can imagine yourself as growing up in a very wealthy household where there was never any sickness and everything was beautiful, wonderful. And then encountering somebody who had leprosy or seeing somebody who’s shrunk and bent over from the years and you’d never seen anything like this before in your life. “What’s that?” And that’s basically what happened.

He said to his chariot driver, “What’s that?”

“That’s is a person who’s grown old.”

“What are you talking about?”

That’s basically what went on. And this so shattered him that he abandoned his wife and child and said, “I’ve got to understand; I can’t live like this.” And his spiritual quest is what culminated in experience, which has been passed down from generation to generation, or passed down or reignited down to the present day.

So, the first point then that I’m trying to make here is that every religion, every philosophy, every tradition begins with one person’s attempt to come to terms with his or her own experience of life. And that is ultimately what each of us is doing here. And it’s very, very important to remember that.

Seeking enlightenment?


Ken: Now, where do we turn? Well, here’s where The Story of Tea comes in. We’ve heard about stuff. How many of you heard about enlightenment? How many of you are here seeking enlightenment? Okay, so you’re exactly like these people who’ve heard about tea. Now, how many of you have tasted enlightenment? So we’ve heard about tea, but we’ve never tasted it.

The consequence of that is we all have our own ideas about what enlightenment or awakening or presence or any of the terms we want use. We all have our own ideas about what it is. And this was certainly true of me when I entered the three year retreat. We had very definite idea, we were going to get all of this great teaching. We were all going to get enlightened in three years. Wonderful. Then we found out the fact was a little different from the story.

So the opening paragraph:

In ancient times, tea was not known outside China. Rumors of its existence had reached the wise and the unwise of other countries, and each tried to find out what it was in accordance with what he wanted or what he thought it should be.

Tales of the Dervishes, The Story of Tea, Idries Shah, p. 80


So we’ll translate this to our interest in spiritual practice. We have an idea of what is possible, and our idea of what is possible to a very significant extent determines how we look for it and what we will regard as acceptable or not acceptable. The king of Inja—Inja is a word that means “here”—so people here sent an embassy to China. So, these people thought it was something very, very important. So they sent a high level delegation to the emperor of China.

So this is an analogy for people who think that this enlightenment is something really, really important. And so they bring their very best, they bring their intelligence, and their diligence, and their perfect moral behavior, and they’re prepared to put all of their effort into that very high level stuff.

And so they come to the emperor, and the emperor serves some tea. They came looking for tea. Here it is, and look around and see the peasants are drinking it too. Well, obviously, since what they’re looking for is really high level stuff, it’s not suitable for the peasants. So whatever the emperor is giving them, it can’t be the real thing.

Now, there’s a teacher in Nepal, who died a few years ago. His name was Tulku Urgyen. And almost everybody who came to him, he would in some way elicit in them some experience of nature of mind, experience, whatever. And that’s just what he did. He was very, very effective at it ,and a very profound teacher, but very, very practical. But in conversation, he would just elicit this experience, and we can regard him like the emperor of China. He just showed people what was possible in them, right there. And some people went, “Well, if you’re just giving it out like this, it can’t be very important.” And they forgot about it. And other people thought, “Oh, this is really important,” then they made a big deal out of it, and other people used it as a basis for their practice. So we come to this with all kinds of preconceptions. And those preconceptions to a large extent really influence what we can take in and how we take it in.

So when we come with very high expectations and we’re showed just how ordinary our mind actually is, then we think we’re being deceived because we haven’t got the real goods.

How many of you are familiar with thing called the Theosophical Society? These people fell for this hook line and sinker because they made such a big deal about spiritual awakening, and there was a secret society somewhere in the Himalayas, etc. Several of their centers amassed extraordinary collections of spiritual and occult texts. There’s one in LA which has an amazing library, but they missed the whole point completely.

So then we have the greatest philosopher of Anja. Anja means “there.” So we have here and there. Now, this person collected all the information he could about tea, and notice here, “he collected all the information he could about tea.” So this is studying enlightenment as a subject in university. And a lot of people do. In fact, a lot of people went into religious studies because it was the only place they could think of going to where they could get some kind of knowledge of spiritual practice. And they were so disappointed. And I’ve talked to many of them because it was an academic study of these various teachings, things like that. And there was zero practice involved.

So here we have this person who’s getting all the information he could about tea. And when you have no experience of this, then you necessarily form ideas about it. And his idea is, it must be a substance which existed but rarely. Now, if you just study the sutras, and you take all of the descriptions, things like that, particularly if you study the Mahayana sutras, you would inevitably come to the conclusion that whatever they’re talking about must exist once in every universe because it’s so extraordinary, so extreme, so wonderful, and things like that. It couldn’t possibly be anything that any ordinary human being could ever attain. The language is so flowery, so ornate.

It was of another order than anything then known, For was it not referred to as being a herb, a water green, black, sometimes bitter, sometimes sweet?

Tales of the Dervishes, The Story of Tea, Idries Shah, p. 80


Ken: So when you have no idea of a thing and you’re only relying on other people’s accounts, you’re getting other people’s experience, and it’s very, very difficult to figure out what they’re really talking about because they’re talking about their experience.

And so is tea a plant or a drink? Well, we know of course, because we know what tea is that it’s a plant, the leaves of which are dried and it’s made into a drink, and then you drink it. It has all these different facets. But if you didn’t have any idea of that and you heard people talking about tea, all of the stuff would seem completely contradictory and very, very puzzling. And you’d have to conclude that it was something of an extraordinary nature to have all of these different properties. Now, how many of you have done something similar with enlightenment? Okay.

Honored or workshiped but not touched or engaged

In the territory of Mazhab (Mazhab is the word for sectarianism) a small bag of tea was carried in procession before the people as they went on their religious observances. Nobody thought of tasting it. Indeed, nobody knew how. All were convinced that the tea itself had a magical quality.

p. 80


So in Sri Lanka, there is a relic, which is regarded as the tooth of Buddha. And every year it’s taken in procession. A big to-do is made about it. So we have this idea of enlightenment, and we come across something which symbolizes it or embodies it in some way, and we don’t know what to do with it. So we make it into something very special, that’s what it represents to us, and now we start to worship it. But worshiping it, you can’t taste tea or slake your thirst by worshiping a bag of tea. And yet, this is very, very much the way many, many people approach spiritual awakening: they worship it. They regarded as something other to be honored, but never actually touched or engaged. And so you have this poor wise man who says, “Pour upon it, boiling water, ignorant ones.”

Now I’ve had this experience where coming into a group and they’ve been making a real fuss about something, I’d say, “Well, why don’t we just do it?” And they go, “What?” I said, “Yeah, why don’t we just live this way?” “No, no, no, no, no,” and they get quite upset. They don’t get as upset as they did with the wise men. They hanged him and nailed him up.

Because to actually use this stuff in life feels to many people as a sacrilege, that you’re defiling it, you’re reducing it to something ordinary, or by using it, you’re showing that it’s just like everything else and you’re actually destroying its special status. Thus you must be an enemy of religion. And we all know what happens to enemies of religion. So, “Before he died, he had imparted secret to a few people, saying, ‘This is what you do with tea. You pour water on it and you drink it and you feel better. That’s good.”

Practice is for navigating life properly


Ken: And just a slight digression. There was a Korean teacher who died a few years ago who came to the west and was quite a remarkable person. He didn’t know any English, he just felt he had to come to the west to teach. So he started working in a laundromat, and he started a sitting group and eventually his students managed to persuade him to stop working in the laundromat and they would support him. And he wrote an article that I read at one point in which he said, “Enlightenment, that’s the job for the pros.” And we have three of them here, sitting in the back here. So that’s your job is to get enlightenment. People who are devoting their full life to it, monks and nuns and so forth. That’s the function, the job of the pros, is to get enlightened. We’re laypeople. It’s not our job. Our job is to navigate life properly, whatever that means for us. And that’s how we use our practice, to navigate life properly. But we don’t have the time. We’ve got too many distractions, etc. We’re never going to get enlightened. That’s not our job. That’s for the pros. Our job is to navigate life properly. So the article goes on and on about this. The last paragraph of the article is, “Mind you, the purpose of getting enlightened is to navigate life properly.” [Laughter]

And that’s really the point. We’re all here trying to figure out how to navigate our lives, and you wouldn’t be here otherwise. And so this is like tea. Tea is a drink. It refreshes us, takes care of thirst and so forth. And so we use this practice to navigate our lives. However, given the fate of this poor guy who got strung up and died because he said, “Use this to navigate your lives.” We daren’t tell anybody about that, or this group. So we pretend to be doing something else. “Oh yes, these practices, these are very special practices and I have to do them because basically I’m really, really screwed up. So you don’t pay any attention to what I’m doing.” And there are a lot of spiritual traditions actually, which take that point of view, or put that word out because they’re so used to, they’ve had such a history of people misrepresenting, misusing, misinterpreting traditions that they used it as a kind of screen, and only people who are really, really persistent are actually given instruction and guidance and so forth.

There’s another story. This is also from the Sufi tradition about this … looks like this is a story session this morning. I rather like this one.

A group of villagers approached a local Sufi teacher and said, “We’d like to study with you.

And he looked at them and said, “Are you willing to work and study hard and not indulge in laziness?” They all said yes.

“And are you willing to serve others and practice humility?” They said yes.

“And are you willing to undergo hardship and forsake comfort?”

“Yes.”

He said, “Very well, I’m going to be meeting with a group of people who’ve been studying with me for three years. Why don’t you come and you can meet them?”

So the next evening, this new group came in, they were seated. Then the teacher turned to his older students and said, “How many of you would prefer to be lazy than work and study hard?”

And they all went, “Yes.”

“How many of you would rather be served by others than practice humility and serve others?”

And they said, “Yes.”

“And how many of you would rather indulge comfort and not endure hardship?”

“Yes.”

So he turned to the new group, he said, “So you see, the result of studying with me is that you’ll be worse people than you are now.”

Go and think about this.

Open the tea house of experience

And so it was throughout the world. Tea had actually been seen growing by some, who did not recognize it. It had been given to others to drink, but they thought it the beverage of the common people. It had it been in the possession of others and they worshiped it. Outside China, (which we can take as a kind of symbol here) only a few people actually drank it. And those covertly.

Then came a man of knowledge who said to the merchants of tea and the drinkers of tea and to others, “He who tastes knows. He who taste not knows not. Instead of talking about the celestial beverage, say nothing, but offer it at your banquets. Those who like it will ask for more. Those who do not will show that they’re not fit to be tea-drinkers. Close the shop of argument and mystery. Open the tea house of experience.”

Tales of the Dervishes, The Story of Tea, Idries Shah, p. 81


That sounds very simple, doesn’t it? It’s actually extremely difficult, you have all of these preconceptions to overcome. But you see what he’s pointing to. He says, forget about all of this stuff, studying and learning about it, amassing knowledge and trying to figure out what it is. Give people a chance to taste it. Those for whom it means something, they all make use of it. And those for whom it doesn’t click well, they’ll let it go. But rely on experience, not on theory, not on form, not on ritual, not on all of these other things.

Coming full circle to living fully, and without regret

The tea was brought from one stage to another along the Silk Road whenever a merchant carrying jade or gems or silk would pause to rest, he would make tea and offer to such people as were near him, whether they were aware of the repute of tea or not. This is the beginning of the chaikhanas, the tea houses which were established all the way from Pekin to Bukhara and Samarkand. And those who tasted, knew.

At first mark well, it was only the great and the pretended men of wisdom who sought out the celestial drink and who also exclaimed, “But this is only dried leaves.” Or “Why do you boil water, stranger, when all I want is the celestial drink?” Or yet again, “How do I know what this is? Prove it to me. Besides the color of the liquid is not golden, but ochre!”

When the truth was known, and when the tea was brought for all who would taste, the roles were reversed, and the only people who said things like the great and intelligent had said, were the absolute fools. And such is the case to this day.

p. 81


And one of the things through my reading and some conversations: I think we’re at a very interesting point in history—and I hesitate to make comments like that because tends to leave one with the feeling of being special—but we’re in the middle of, let’s say, put it that way, a transition in which the goal or aim of spiritual practice was taken to be transcending the human condition. And you can translate that as “imbibing the celestial drink,” tea, to something which we use to navigate our lives. That is, a way of finding a relationship with life so that we can live fully and completely without regret. And this is a very, very significant shift in how religion, philosophy, all of these disciplines are regarded. Interestingly enough, this is where they started, and then over the last couple of millennia they became something else. And now in a certain sense we’re reverting back to what they were originally. So what I want to do this morning …

Student: You just kind of glossed over by saying something quite, I thought profound. And then you said, “Well over the last millennium,” I just thought, well, okay—

Ken: Couple of millennia.

Student: Could you be a little more specific about that, just briefly?

Worshiping mindfulness and profiting from it


Ken: Well, I think we can provide a modern day analogy. Mindfulness is a quality of attention and something one cultivates in Buddhist practice and in any other contemplative tradition. But mindfulness is the English term used to translate very specific Buddhist terms. I can never remember what the Sanskrit is, but the Tibetan is dran pa (pron. tren pa).

Now, largely because of the work of Jon Kabat-Zinn who set out in the mid-eighties—I guess because he appreciated the value of mindfulness in his own life—he set out with the intention of making mindfulness a household world, and to a significant extent, he succeeded. So what do you have now? Well, at UCLA, you have two research institutes which are studying mindfulness. I was approached by a group which is seeking to use the principle of mindfulness in developing a family coaching clinic. You now have innumerable academic psychologists and therapists developing their careers through their research on mindfulness.

You have people who worship mindfulness in various ways, and also people are looking at how to profit from mindfulness. So as one person said about a recent conference on mindfulness, “Now you have all of these very, very old different forms of therapy, and improv theater, and all kinds of things coming out, and they’re being adorned with a new cloak called mindfulness.” And many of these people have never practiced any meditation whatsoever, and yet they’re now teaching it, and so forth. So this is what happens is that as something becomes useful, then other people study it, make it into an object, into a discipline, and it becomes something other than what it was originally. And so the philosophical, or the spiritual exercises on which much classical Greek philosophy rests, exactly the same kind of thing happened. And through the influence of the scholastic philosophers in Christianity, all of the spiritual exercises in Christianity were eventually eliminated and only a few vestiges remained, and it became something which was studied, not practiced.

It’s interesting, the word dogma, which we usually associate with being very rigid—a rigid body of teaching—was, as far as I know, originally the word for spiritual exercises. And they were very, very clearly defined, “You do this this way,” because when you’re working with internal material, you need to be extremely precise. But it was that association with being very well-defined, which became rigidity and flexibility and so forth. Very useful. And our word theory comes from the Greek word teoria, and it was an exploration of spiritual approaches, not something hypothetical, but a lived engagement with life.

So that’s what’s happened over the last couple of millennia and there’s a global movement here, and it’s not just in western society, the same thing’s going on in Islam and China and everywhere. People are looking to spiritual practice as a way of finding a way to live fully and completely. And if we go to the back to The Story of Tea … I lost the place here.

Student: Ken, while you’re looking. I was just wondering if that’s similar to when there were the different changes in Buddhism, when there was Theravada and then Mahayana, where it was more focused on practicality.

Ken: Possibly. There’s something a little different happening there. A minute. I’m looking for a passage here.

If you look at people struggling to figure out what tea was and how to use it, it’s very analogous to what we were experienced in the seventies and eighties with all the new age stuff. Because people were looking for something, they didn’t know what it was, and they came up with all kinds of strange things and they still do. How many of you have read or watched The Secret? It’s wonderful. Here is this thing which is promising you can get whatever you want if you understand the laws of attraction. It’s completely a corporate ripoff. It was very carefully crafted, and it’s one of the most successful DVDs or whatever to be sold over the web because it gives the promise you’re going to get what you want when it was totally taking advantage of people’s need and greed. And people still take it seriously.

Prayers and navigating our lives


Ken: Okay. Now, what I want to discuss this morning, what all of this was a preamble to, was prayers that we use. I want to offer a way of looking at these prayers, which is very much in the spirit of what I’ve been talking about in terms of, “How do we navigate our lives?”

We begin with Gampopa. This is a very free translation of a short verse in the Tibetan tradition, which was composed by Gampopa [The Four Instructions of Gampopa]. Now Gampopa was a doctor in the 11th century, and as a young man, he was a brilliant doctor and married, with a beautiful young wife. His wife fell ill, and he applied all his skills as a doctor and was unable to save her. And she died, and he was absolutely devastated by this. And so his spiritual practice was based on how did he come to terms with this devastating loss? And he studied, for many years as monk In the Gelugpa Kadampa tradition and found it didn’t satisfy his spiritual questions, and eventually headed into the mountains and studied with Milarepa. So:

Let my heart turn to practice.

So here we are, we’re in this dilemma called life, and one of my favorite quotations is from Dilgo Khyentse who’s once asked, “Why do we practice?” He said, “To make the best of a bad situation.” Little glass is half empty point of view.

So, here we are in this experience of life, and we’re trying to find our way through it, and we know that we need some way of proceeding. So we start doing things. That’s practice. And as we learn and develop our practice, that practice in turn, becomes our path in life. [The second line of the prayer is: Let practice become a path]

One of the big shifts in me was … because of my training in the Tibetan tradition, this notion of path is very, very important in Buddhism. In all traditions of Buddhism, and particularly in the Tibetan tradition, there’s a great deal of emphasis on it, but it’s almost always rendered in English as the path. So, I translated a book on taking and sending, Mahayana mind training. And the title of the book in its English translation was The Great Path of Awakening. Now, what if you changed the article from “the” to “a”? Well, everything changes. Now in Tibetan, you don’t have “The”s and “A”s, as you don’t have any articles like that, so you could go either way. But in English—and I’m not quite sure why—we almost always use the article, the which makes it particular, and with the subtle implication that there’s only one. I am the way as opposed to I am a way, as in Christ’s statement there. So that’s why I say, “Let practice become a path”, not the path. And what path is this? It is your path in life. So what we’re doing in spiritual practice is creating our path and finding our path in life. And there isn’t one path. The path is formed by our own feet.

Someone recently sent me a card expressing gratitude for our work together, and the card was a quotation from Ralph Waldo Emerson. Now, I can’t abide Emerson because he’s a salesman through and through, and I don’t understand why he has such a celebrated status in American letters because he’s so hokey. So this quotation was: “Go where there is no path and leave a trail,” and you can hear the salesman in that. And so I called this person said, “Thank you very much for the card, very kind of you; however, the quote is wrong.” Here’s what it should be. “Go where there is no path and leave no trail.” Now it becomes alive, and much more accurate. It’s going to be your path. It’s very possible no one else may follow it. It’s probably better if nobody else follows it because then they’ll be finding their path, and not following your path.

Stephanie: [Unclear]

Ken: Sorry, I can’t hear you, Stephanie.

Stephanie: You really don’t want your teeth worshipped in 2,000 years? [Laughter]

Ken: Okay, so now what do we want to happen on this path? We all want to become clear. We’re just clear about life. So:

Let this path dissolve confusion.

And at a certain point we begin to appreciate that the very confusion that we experience in life is the source of wisdom. So if I may:

Let confusion become wisdom.

So, these four lines describe something quite profound, and there are many other associations I can put in there, but we don’t have time today.

Then the second prayer is refuge. Now refuge is a very, very old metaphor. It’s probably the original metaphor in Buddhism. And it comes from a feudal society in which you’re a poor peasant. Now, when you’re a peasant in a feudal society, life is pretty miserable because there you are toiling in the field, and the local warlord comes along and stomps all over your property, and things like that, on his way to go and conquer the Kathar, the opposing warlord.

And well, maybe he’s victorious and things go fine for a while, or maybe he isn’t. And then things don’t go fine for a while. But sooner or later, the other warlord comes stomping all over your things and ruins all your crops and things like that. So when you’re a peasant, you’re just getting squished by one or the other. And so what you do is you go for refuge and say, “Will you take care of me please?” to the local warlord. He says, fine. And now you’re protected. And what is being sought to be protected are from are the vicissitudes of the human condition. And you can see within this, at this stage of human or a religious evolution, it was very much about finding a way to transcend the human condition.

The whole notion of refuge can be seen as defining a direction in your life that you’re going to explore this mystery. And that’s what I say about refuge. When people take the vow of refuge, I say, “This is defining a direction in your life, an orientation.”

Your teacher represents what you aspire to


Ken: Now the usual sources of refuge are the three jewels: buddha, dharma, and sangha, and I’ll come to those in a minute. In the Tibetan tradition, great emphasis is placed on the teacher. And I’ve come to feel that that’s very, very important for a very unfortunate reason.

It doesn’t matter what discipline, when you study with somebody, that person represents your aspirations in that discipline, is a symbol for your aspirations. I worked for a very short time with a concert violinist, and he studied with a teacher who was a brilliant, brilliant violinist, and he learned a lot from him, but he learned a few other things too. He learned a poisonous attitude to society and how not to trust people, because that was very much his teacher’s attitude to life. Our teachers, very often, I would say almost always, are not an ideal person, but for better or worse, they represent what we are aspiring to and they’re a symbol for that in our lives.

And there are a few people, a very few people, who are naturally talented spiritually, in the same way that we have people who are naturally talented musically or athletically. And I know people who literally, they just pick up an instrument and they can play it. And when I was a teaching assistant in British Columbia, the teacher that I worked with was a fairly avid golfer and he was describing one student of his, a woman who is such a natural athlete that the first time she played golf, she shot 85. I was like, “What?” And she’d never picked up a golf club before. So there are people who have natural talent like this, and we have people in spiritual circles who are just naturally talented. Tulku Urgyen that I was talking about earlier was one such person. From a very early age, stuff just made sense to him and he could talk about it very clearly and communicate that experience to others and they would get it.

But for the rest of us, we need a teacher. And the same as if you’re studying musical instrument, even if you’re naturally talented, you’re going to do better, in most cases if you study with a good teacher. So the teacher is our way into our aspirations, and that’s why I think it’s quite appropriate as a source of refuge that is a part of this direction that we’re taking in life.

Now, the next two words, “treasured buddha.” This is not describing our teacher, it’s describing how we regard our teacher. And we’ve lost, to a large extent, the ability to use poetic and symbolic language in English. That really died out in English pretty thoroughly about the beginning of the 20th century, end of the 19th, we lost that poetic formal language, and it’s a loss.

And one of the problems is that people, when they read something like this, because of their training in science, the way we approach things, they take everything literally. And I remember having a discussion with a psychologist about this point, and he said, “Well, give me an example.

And I said, well, in the Tibetan tradition, you regard your teacher as Buddha.

He said, “Oh, so he’s infallible.”

I said, “That’s exactly the point. That’s taking it literally. No, he’s not infallible at all. He represents your own spiritual aspirations to you.”

So our teacher is—like it or not—how we experience awakened mind. And I always say it at this point, I’m really sorry for you guys, [laughter] but that’s how we’re connecting with this possibility in our lives. And if you want to put it in terms of the context of tea, this is a person who we’re dependent upon for some kind of knowledge of tea and how to use it, how to work with it. Stephanie.

Stephanie: We’ve talked about this issue in the past of the teacher, and I grew up in a very traditional religion with a great deal of obedience to authority. That is one of the reactive patterns I had to work through. And so I, and think it may be shared by others, profound distrust of placing my path in another’s hands.

Ken: But that’s not what this is about.

Stephanie: Which I know, but if I can take an analogy, maybe I’m still putting spiritual practice up there with the celestial tea instead of just the drinking of tea. So, let me set that aside for the moment and take something more pragmatic. I desperately want to learn to paint, and I studied with several different teachers for three or four years, and some of those teachers were bad. They were abusive, they were just incompetent. But because I had no training in art, at first, I couldn’t distinguish. I knew it felt bad. But finally three years ago, I found a teacher who pushes me, who guides me, who nurtures me. I love her. I will go anywhere with her until I learn what I can from her, and then know the next step. But how do you help the beginning spiritual seeker find an effective teacher?

Ken: Well, I think what you’ve just described in finding an effective art teacher is exactly what they should do. They should go and hang out with one person and see how that is, hang out with another. And I mean, this takes us into the next, actually, it takes us into the next part, the next line here, “buddha, dharma and sangha.”

The potential, the instruction, and the support


Ken: There are three aspects to spiritual practice, always. There’s the potential, which is here represented by buddha. There is the instruction, which is, “How do you do this?” That’s represented by dharma. And there is the sense of support and guidance and encouragement and so forth, and that is represented by sangha. Okay? So, at different stages of one’s practice, one or other of those may be more important.

So, you may look for a person who has actualized, or whatever word you want to use, that potential. There’s something really profound in the quality of that person’s presence. And it’s quite possible that you can have people like that who are really bad at actually teaching you, but you get something just from hanging around them. Or you may find a person who is just really, really good at explaining things, and so you can understand how to do them. Or you may need a person who is very supportive, or some combination of those three things. And so that’s what “I take refuge in the three jewels” refers to: this possibility, this potential in us. That’s one thing that defines the direction. We are also going to need to learn how to do it, which is the instruction. And we should look at the codes for behavior, the meditation instructions, the philosophical outlook, all of these things, as having one and only one purpose, which is to help us figure out a way to navigate our lives. They don’t have any other raison d’etre other than that, even though a lot of give them that.

And then to look for support and guidance where it is appropriate, and I want to make a distinction between support and guidance, and dependence. Sangha is often translated as community. I think it is a bit misleading. I think it has to be qualified because most communities form out of mutual dependence. That is, the farmer grows the wheat and the miller mills it, and the baker bakes it. And so now everybody gets to eat bread because they have this mutual dependence. The sangha doesn’t really work that way. The sangha is much more a community based on shared intention, and there can be a lot of help and support in that, but you aren’t depending on other people in the same way.

The third line about refuge is really the Vajrayana: guru deity, and protector. While guru is very specifically a teacher and is very similar, buddha represents potential, that quality of being awake, and to a large extent that’s where our inspiration, and hence our willingness to undertake this path comes from.

I remember one person, a very bright young man went to a lecture or a talk by Trungpa Rinpoche back in, I think Boulder in 1970s. No, I think it was on the east coast. And he walked in, saw this person, and said to himself, “This person knows about things that I never thought it was possible to know about,” and that was it. And he spent the rest of his life following and developing that. And that kind of thing happens. And that’s essentially what the guru does. It’s the source of inspiration and hence our willingness to engage it, and reveals possibilities to us. It’s not about putting one’s life in another person’s hands, as you put it. That’s very misleading.

Deity—that’s a particular form of practice in the Tibetan tradition—but what it’s really about is building abilities in ourselves, and that’s what one’s doing in that form of meditation. And we need abilities in order to navigate our lives.

Protector. I’m not going to go into all the intricacies of this. I’m just going to deal with it in very general terms. It’s about how those abilities actually take shape in our lives. What does it look like? How do we actually live? How does this intelligence or awakening or understanding actually manifest?

Change, curiosity and creativity


Ken: And then the fourth line, one can say, this is actually what it’s about. We have this experience we call life. That’s a fact. What is it? When we really look at it, we can’t say what it is, and part of the reason we can’t say what it is because we are in it. It’s like trying to ask a fish, “What’s water?” It’s in water. It doesn’t have any concept of water as something else. So, what is this experience? We can’t say. That’s what emptiness refers to. We can’t say what it is, and there’s the possibility of great openness right there. Yet it is very vivid and clear, and there’s nothing we can do about it—that’s the “without restriction.”

One of my favorite phrases is hearing somebody say, “I don’t know how I’m going to handle this,” or “I don’t think I can live with this.” The reason I love that phrase is because it’s so ironic. The question isn’t whether they’re going to handle it or whether they’re going to live with it because they’re going to. The question is: are they going to handle it gracefully or ungracefully, or with difficulty or without difficulty, or things like that. But it doesn’t matter how bad the situation is or how upset you are, you’re going to handle it one way or another. And that’s what “without restriction” is. We can’t do anything about what arises in experience. This is why we’re here. We want to figure out how we can navigate this. No.

When we’re focused on transcending the human condition, we naturally take a look at what is negative in the human condition, and try to move away from it or work out a different relationship with it. And that’s very much how Buddhism has been expressed traditionally. So we have, as we discussed yesterday briefly, the three marks of existence, impermanence, suffering, and non-self. Actually they’re all negatives in Sanskrit, but we find in later Buddhism another perspective being advanced. What does impermanence point to? Well, it points to change, and all of us know that change brings as much new into our lives as it takes away from us. So yes, there is loss and regret associated, or loss and grief associated with change, but there’s also new possibilities and things like that. So we can take the teachings on impermanence and look at them as a way of embracing the principle of change in our lives.

And suffering. Well, what suffering generally does is stimulate curiosity. Why did this happen to me? That’s the beginning of curiosity. And so the presence of suffering in our lives makes us curious about our lives, and that often leads us into finding what we feel passionate about. And curiosity is where creativity comes from.

And non-self, which is regarded as such a downer and a negative. “You mean, I’m not anybody? I want to be somebody.” But when we really appreciate that everything that arises, arises through interdependence or in relationship with other things, and there isn’t any sole agency involved in anything whatsoever, then infinitely more possibilities are opened up for us. We don’t have to, in fact, it’s probably impossible to do anything by ourselves, and we’re much more open to just working with others. And there’s not much more satisfying in human experience than working closely with a group of other people to create something that wasn’t there before. It’s an extremely satisfying thing to do in one’s life. So all of these three marks of existence, impermanence, suffering, and non-self can be viewed as potential sources of meaning and engagement in life, where we engage change, we don’t fear it, we become curious about our life and recognizing that we aren’t islands unto ourselves, engage that whole world of interaction and see what becomes possible of that.

Five step practice: taking attention into closing down


Ken: So, this morning, what I’ve been aiming to do is to step back from immediate concern with our topic, There Is No Enemy, to giving a much broader perspective on what we’re doing with this practice. The next thing I want you to work on in your practice is much more focused on the topic of the weekend. Yesterday we talked about opening attention and then looking at the ways that attention closes down. We talked about various kinds of mind killing and so forth. What I want you to work on today is taking attention deep into where and how you close down. Take attention deep into where and how you close down. Now, some of you both familiar with this because I’ve taught it before. It’s an application of the Anapanasati Sutra that Tich Nhat Hanh put together, and I was taught this by my friend Yvonne Rand. Take something that’s difficult for you in your life and it can be an enemy because they’re usually difficult.

Now, the kind of difficulty, that’s up to you. It can be something painful, something that you can’t face, something that’s frightening, but some area of difficulty and hold it tenderly in attention. And the key word here is tenderly. You’re not working on it. You’re not going to do something to it. You’re just going to hold it tenderly in attention. In the same way that you would hold a young child, tenderly. You may find that in itself difficult to do because the issue is so hot. And if that’s the case, then open to it to the extent that you can, and still hold it tenderly.

That’s the first step. When you hold it tenderly, you are going to find that there are various reactions that take place in you. Note first the reactions that take place in your body. So if it’s something that’s very frightening, you’ll notice your body contracting. There will be tension in some muscle somewhere in your body. So with the first step, you can say to yourself, “Breathing in, I experience this difficulty breathing out. I experience difficulty.” And you just do that for however long you want. Then gradually, as you become aware of the reactions, you can say, “Breathing in, I experienced the reactions to this difficulty.” The reactions are going to be three. I’ve already talked about the physical reactions or how those reactions manifest in the body. There are also going to be emotions, and usually the emotions are multifaceted and complex.

You may think there’s just one emotional reaction, but as you stay with it, “Breathing in, I experience this emotional reaction. Breathing out, I experience this emotional reaction,” you’ll see that there are others. Where there’s sadness, there’s anger where there’s joy, there’s shame, etc. It goes on and on. Where there’s greed, there’s a sense of deficiency, etc. There are many, many facets here, and you just open to them progressively, not really digging at them, but just by holding them in attention, you gradually become aware of this.

And in addition, you’re going to find all kinds of stories running about this: memories, associations, what you should or shouldn’t be doing, etc., strategies, things, all stuff, just chatter, chatter, chatter, chatter, chatter. So you start in the body, include the emotions, and then you’ll find it possible perhaps to be able to include the stories as stories and not be completely swept away by them.

Little by little you’ll be able to lower yourself into this whole mess, and that’s what it is. It’s a mess. That’s why it’s difficult, because when you open to your own experience, it’s just a mass of messy confusion and reaction and pain and hurt and fear and anger and all kinds of stuff. Anybody know what I’m talking about? Sometimes I think I’m the only one who experiences any of this stuff.

Kerry: I didn’t think you experienced these.

Ken: Sorry to disillusion you there, Kerry. Something very interesting begins to happen as you lower yourself in the stuff. You begin to either develop or discover the capacity to experience it and be relatively calm. Like, “Oh, I can actually just be here. Don’t particularly like being here, but I can actually be here.”

And as you’re able to rest in that calm, step three is being calm in the mess. That is, you’re not as disturbed by it. So “Breathing in, I experience calm, breathing out, I experience calm.” And the fourth step or the fourth phase, what it evolves to is you actually begin to relax in the mess. This is very frightening because you think, I can’t possibly relax here, but you’re fine. “Oh, I can just be in this experience and actually rest here.” Now as soon as you start to rest and relax here, you’re going to feel everything much more intensely. That’s what happens when we relax, that we feel things more fully. So this is going to flip you straight back to step one again, but you’re going to work through it at another level. So if you find yourself cycling back to earlier stages in this, it doesn’t mean anything’s gone wrong with your practice at all. In fact, it probably means something is going right because now you’re experiencing it at a progressively deeper level.

And at a certain point, when you are able to rest completely in the experience and you’re awake and aware and not fighting it at all, you may find that something shifts. Some kind of understanding or perspective comes up and you find yourself in a completely different relationship with it. That’s the fifth step. These steps aren’t really something you do, they are ways that the practice evolves just from holding it tenderly in attention.

So this is what I want you to work on, and this will be the main practice from now on in the retreat for today and a good part of tomorrow. And I’m happy to take any questions now, but we’ve gone over a bit in time, and I’ll also take up any questions you may have this afternoon. Is everybody clear about how to do this right now? That’s the most important thing. Any questions on practicalities? Peter?

Peter: Yeah, I wasn’t sure, I got different numbers of steps. I wonder if you could just kind of summarize.

Ken: Step one is hold tenderly in attention. “Breathing in, I experience this difficulty, breathing out, I experience this difficulty.” Step two is, “Breathing in, I experience my reactions to this,” and as I said, there are three different levels of reactions, so there’s a lot of work to do there. Step three is, “Breathing in, I feel calm in this difficulty. Breathing out, I feel calm this difficulty.” Step four is, “Breathing in, I feel at ease in this difficulty, breathing out, I feel at ease in this difficulty.” Step five is, “Breathing in. I understand this difficulty, Breathing out. I understand.” Does that clarify?

Peter: Yes. Thank you.

Ken: You’re welcome. Okay.