The Priceless Pearl

By: Rebecca Li

In the Tathagatagarbha Sutra there is a story of a boy whose parents sewed a priceless pearl inside his coat. Yet, the boy forgot all about it and as he grew older looked for wealth everywhere. Finding none, he could barely survive. All the while he was in possession of a priceless pearl that he could use to benefit all beings. The pearl in the story refers to our buddha-nature—our natural capacity for wisdom and compassion. It is our capacity to see clearly and act with an appropriate response according to conditions, to see the interconnectedness of all beings, and to love them unconditionally as we see clearly that loving others is no different from loving ourselves. In other words, we each have an innate capacity for wisdom and compassion. We are already fully endowed with this capacity; we are each in possession of this priceless pearl. However, our untrained mind is often too confused and agitated to see this fact and instead we keep looking outward, grasping for what we already possess.

From Illumination.

On Relaxation and Dealing With Pain

By: Chan Master Sheng Yen

When trying to relax, most people either become too lax, leading them to sink into dullness, or try too hard, resulting in a tense or scattered mind.  Relaxing does not mean that the body becomes slack and the mind becomes lazy; it means that your whole being is in repose, wholeheartedly and single-mindedly aware of itself just sitting.  Without relaxing it would be difficult to gain power from this practice.  A comfortable posture will help you be at ease.  While sitting you may feel discomfort, pain, or soreness.  In this instance, to relax does not mean you should just go slack.  Take this opportunity to become fully aware of your body as a whole.  Do not focus on or localize any parts that give you pain.  Instead, see them in the context of your total-body awareness.  You know that in this whole body there is an area that is painful, but you can be detached from the pain.  Being detached from your pain means that you are aware of but not bothered by it.  But you must know this very clearly while maintaining your correct posture.  If you maintain this attitude, your awareness of the discomfort will recede.  This is how to relax.

If underlying your awareness of your body there is also an understanding of impermanence, you will gain insight into sensations as they rise, abide, and fall away of their own accord.  In fact, feelings of pain are opportunities to regulate and attune your mind.  These phenomena are there for you to develop your mind.  Do not try to escape or give in to them; rather, make full use of them.

From The Method of No-Method: The Chan Practice of Silent Illumination

Silent Illumination -- Serene Clarity

By: Rebecca Li

The Chinese words for Silent Illumination can also be translated as "serene clarity."  It is a helpful choice of words because serene does not immediately imply no sound, which tends to be the automatic association most of us make with the word silence.  The word serene evokes tranquil, calm, unflustered, or unagitated.  Letting be.  For example, seeing thoughts and allowing them rather than pushing them away.  Think of Silent Illumination as this practice of allowing.  We can be serene about what is going on and clearly aware that there are thoughts.  We needn't fall into our compulsion to push them away or act on them; instead, we can allow the thought to be here--fully seen, heard and experienced--and move on.

Silent Illumination (Shikantaza) is an Act of Compassion

By: Rebecca Li

Making the mind anything but just mind as it is, is not Silent Illumination. By just staying continuously with what is going on, with clarity, we are being truly kind to ourselves and cultivating the habit of being unconditionally compassionate to everyone we encounter.

From: Illumination: A Guide to the Buddhist Method of No Method. Li is a Chan teacher and dharma heir of Simon Child, in the lineage of Master Sheng Yen.

Establishing Your Meditation Posture

By: Bhikkhu Analayo

The sitting posture needs to be such that the spine is kept straight.  Here some degree of continuity of attention to the posture is required to avoid and slumping of the body….Keeping the body erect could be achieved by slowly passing our attention through the spine from bottom to top, relaxing each vertebra.  Such relaxing enables a natural alignment of the spine, by just letting gravity pull downwards.  The overall sense is as if the body were suspended from above, at the top of the head, and the rest of it relaxes downwards.  The resulting erectness of the body is not something to be held in a fixed manner.  Instead, the body remains flexible, comparable to a slender tree in the wind.  Such flexibility allows for minor adjustments to occur whenever we notice that the body is not fully in balance.  Needless to say, this does not mean that we keep shifting around all the time, but just that we avoid holding the posture rigidly and with tension, be it when sitting on the ground, a cushion, a bench, or a chair.

 In order to keep the body erect, we of course need to be aware of it.  Thus…[we] establish awareness of the body as a whole in the sitting posture and to some degree also monitor it throughout the meditation session, at least until such a deep level of concentration is reached that the posture of the body naturally remains firm.

From Mindfulness of Breathing. Bhikkhu Analayo is perhaps the foremost contemporary scholar-monk in the Theravadin tradition. Among the many books that he has published, his works on the four foundations of mindfulness—Satipatthana: The Direct Path to Realization and Satipatthana Meditation: A Practice Guide—are exceptional.

A Fully Permitted Exhalation and an Open House For Your Breathing

By: Charlotte Selver

…Being as busy as we are, with one activity heaped on top of another, our heads have lost their elasticity and freedom. Often this lack of freedom is created through the holding of too much inhalation inside of us, which doesn’t permit the cleaning out, the sweeping out, the renewing that is needed. Only fully permitted exhalation can do this. It would be helpful to give yourself plenty of time to find out whether you allow exahling as needed; that means whatever time exhaling wants to take when you do not do it, but allow it until you have, so to speak, a feeling of satisfaction, of completion.

It is also possible that, having permitted a satisfactory exhalation, nothing further seems to occur immediately in breathing. Don’t be upset by this. At one point breathing will start again. There is no need to worry if inhalation does not come immediately after the exhalation; and please listen to me as I say once more, if it comes, not if you inhale. Who can feel the difference? You know, some people take a breath. Wait until it comes by itself! And allow it to distribute in you as it wants to. In other words, be an open house for your breathing, and don’t manipulate it.

All this is a question of sensitivity, and when you orient yourself, you become a fine disoverer. It is much better when you find out about things for yourself, when you trust your own sensations and learn from them and do not have to be told everything. That is truly “exploring.” And you will be delighted at how clear a language the organism speaks.

Allowing Breathing

By: Charlotte Selver

…breathing comes by itself, spontaneously—if we allow it. Therefore, it is the allowing—the possibility of becoming more permissive—that we want to explore.

When we become more sensitive for what being permissive means, then the whole day is full of opportunities for exercising this possibility of becoming more permissive—or, if I might say it differently, more loving in the way we contact whatever we may contact. As soon as we become more open for something we do, we find that the first thing in which we can recognize this increased openness is our breathing.

…Exploring breathing really needs to be a practice, but a practice which is absolutely new each time—not a repetition of old ways, but a finding out what is going on in the condition and activity in which you happen to be at a particular moment. No moment can be compared with another; in wach there is something new to discover.

Breathing Is Always as the Person Is

By: Charlotte Selver

…Breathing is always as the person is. It is the clearest index of what is happening in the person—unless it is made up. Many people think they should breathe “properly.” Forget it! It is no use, because there is no “proper” breathing. Your breathing indicates very clearly what state you are in. When you are more reactive, your breathing is more reactive; when you are more habitual, your breathing is more habitual; if you are pushy, your breathing gets pushy too, or stops.

Breathing Connects Us With the World

By: Charlotte Selver

We by nature are not isolated from the world around us…and the process of breathing is connected with everything which happens in us and around us, just as plants are connected to everything around them.

All the mysterious interwovenness which is happening in the living organism is coming to expression in every moment in which we are living in our environment.

We are usually not awake enough for it, but sometimes you may have noticed that when something or somebody really interests you, you’re speeded up, even when you were tired a moment ago. Your breathing changes; you are functioning quite differently than before.

From Reclaiming Vitality and Presence: Sensory Awareness as a Practice for Life. Charlotte Selver (1901-2003) was a teacher of the Gindler/Jacoby method of awareness and exercise, a somatic bodywork method she further developed and taught after her arrival in the United States from Germany in 1938 as Sensory Awareness. Her work was highly influential to Wilhelm Reich, Erich Fromm, and Fritz Perls (one of the founders of Gestalt Therapy). Selver frequently taught at the San Francisco Zen Center and its affiliated centers, and Suzuki Roshi was well acquainted with her. Her Sensory Awareness method has a close affinity with Soto Zen.

Face to Face with the Object of Meditation

By: Sayadaw U Pandita

It is as if you are walking along a road and you meet a traveler, face to face, coming from the opposite direction. When you are meditating, the mind should meet the object in just this way.  Only through direct confrontation with an object can true mindfulness arise.

They say that the human face is the index of character.  If you want to size up a person, you look at his or her face very carefully and then you can make a preliminary judgment.  If you do not examine the face carefully and instead become distracted by other parts of his or her body, then your judgment will not be accurate.  

In meditation you must apply a similar, if not sharper, degree of care in looking at the object of observation.  Only if you look meticulously at the object can you understand its true nature.  When. you look at a face for the first time, you get a quick, overall view of it.  If you look more carefully, you will pick up details--say, of the eyebrows, eyes, and lops.  First you must look at the face as a whole, and only later will details become clear.

Similarly, when you are watching the rising and falling of your abdomen, you begin by taking an overall view of these processes.  First you bring your mind face to face with the rising and falling.  After repeated successes you will find yourself able to look closer.  Details will appear to you effortlessly, as if by themselves.  You will notice different sensations in the rise and fall, such as tension, pressure, heat, coolness, or movement.

From In This Very Life: The Liberation Teachings of the Buddha. Sayadaw U Pandita (1921-2016) was a towering figure in the Insight meditation tradition of Burma. He was a successor to Mahasai Sayadaw and taught many prominent American meditation teachers,

Tuning the Breath in Zazen

By: Keizan Jokin

When sitting in meditation, your body may seem hot or cold, uneasy or uncomfortable, sometimes stiff, sometimes loose, sometimes heavy, sometimes light, sometimes startled awake.  This is all because the breath is not in tune and needs to be tuned.  The way of tuning the breath is as follows: open your mouth, letting the breath be long or short, gradually harmonizing it; following it for a while, when a sense of awareness comes, the breath is then in good tune.  After that let the breath pass naturally through the nose.

Keizan Jokin (1268-1325) is considered the “second founder” of Soto Zen. Keizan and his disciples are credited with spreading Soto Zen in Japan, away from monastic practice and toward a popular religion appealing to all levels of Japanese society.

What We Call "I" is Just a Swinging Door

By: Shunryu Suzuki Roshi

When we practice zazen our mind always follows our breathing.  When we inhale, the air comes into the inner world.  When we exhale, the air goes out to the outer world.  The inner world is limitless, and the outer world is limitless.  We say the “inner world” or “outer world,” but actually there is just one whole world.  In this limitless world, our throat is like a swinging door.  The air comes in and goes out like someone passing through a swinging door.  If you think “I breathe,” the “I” is extra.  There is no you to say “I”.  What we call “I” is just a swinging door when we inhale and when we exhale.  It just moves; that is all.  When your mind is pure and calm enough to follow this movement, there is nothing: no “I”, no world, no mind, nor body, just a swinging door.

From Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind

Dogen on Samadhi

By: Eihei Dogen

The Buddha says: 'When you monks unify your minds, the mind is in samadhi. Since the mind is in samadhi, you know the characteristics of the creation and destruction of the various phenomena in the world [...] When you gain samadhi, the mind is not scattered, just as those who protect themselves from floods guard the levee.

From The Eight Awarenesses of the Enlightened Person, in The Hazy Moon of Enlightenment, by Taizan Maezumi and Bernie Glassman. Dogen (1200-1253) was the founder of the Soto Zen school in Japan.

Ways to Consider Samadhi

By: Rob Burbea

…samadhi is usually translated as ‘concentration’, but in many respects that does not convey the fullness, or the beauty, of what it really means.  Therefore we shall keep it in the original language...  For samadhi involves more than just holding the attention fixed on an object with a minimum of wavering.  And it certainly does not necessarily imply a spatially narrowed focus of the mind on a small area.  Instead here we will emphasize that what characterizes states of samadhi is some degree of collectedness and unification of mind and body in a sense of well-being.  Included in any such state will also be some degree of harmonization of the internal energies of the mind and the body.  Steadiness of mind, then, is only one part of that. 

 …although, as the Buddha did, we can certainly delineate a range of discrete states of samadhi (the jhanas), in this present context let us rather view it mostly as a continuum: of depth of meditation, of well-being, of non-entanglement, and of the refinement of consciousness.  [The advantage of this perspective is that there is less chance that] the relationship with practice becomes fraught with wondering too much if one “has it” or “doesn’t have it”, is “succeeding” or “failing”, is “in” or “out”.  Instead of relating to samadhi practice in terms of measurement or achievement of some goal, it is usually much more helpful, more kind, and less self-alienating to conceive of it as a caring, both in the present and in the long term, for the heart and mind.

From Seeing That Frees: Meditations on Emptiness and Dependent Arising. Rob Burbea (1965-2020) was the Resident Teacher at Gaia House in England. He was an exceptionally gifted and innovative Dharma teacher, drawing on the Insight tradition, Tibetan emptiness practice, depth and archetypal psychology and the imaginal. A wealth of his teachings in both text and audio can be found at hermesamara.org

How Samadhi Can Arise With Zazen Practice

By John Daido Loori

Whether we work on the breath, with a koan, or shikantaza, zazen eventually leads to samadhi.  The first indication is usually an off-sensation of the body.  This happens most frequently during sesshin because of the long periods of sitting.  When you sit for a while without moving the body, it stops receiving information about its edges through the senses, such as the friction of your clothing, or an itch on your leg.  So, although you know the body is there, you don’t feel it.  Some people get frightened at this point and involuntarily their body twitches and defines its edges.  Then they slowly move to that place again, and gradually they learn to trust it and they begin to go a little further each time.  Next comes the off-sensation of the mind.  The mind is dependent on thoughts, but when the thoughts disappear, the mind disappears, the self disappears.  That constant reflex action that says, “I’m here, I’m here, I’m here” is the ego manifesting itself.  This is when we realize that we are constantly re-creating ourselves.

From The Art of Just Sitting. John Daido Loori (1931-2009) was the Abbott of Zen Mountain Monastery in Mount Tremper, New York. He received Dharma Transmission from Taizan Maezumi Roshi. He also received Dharma Transmission in the Harada-Yasutani and Inzan lineages of Rinzai Zen as well.

Attributes of the Mind With Samadhi

By: Bhikkhu P.A. Payutto

The mind with samadhi contains the following main attributes:

1.        Strong and vigorous.  It is compared to a stream of water channeled into one direction, which has greater power than water that has been allowed to flow about without direction.

2.        Calm and serene, still and deep.  It is like a pool or lake of still water, the surface untouched by wind and unbroken by waves. 

3.        Clear, lucid, transparent.  It is like still water, without ripples, in which any dust has settled to the bottom.

4. Pliant and malleable, or fit for work, because it is not tense, not willful, not confused, not dull, not agitated.

From: The Essential Buddhadhamma:The Teachings and Practice of Theravada Buddhism. Bhikkhu Payutto is widely acknowledged as one of Thailand’s foremost Buddhist scholars. His Essential Buddhahamma is considered to be one of the most significant scholarly works on the Buddhism of the Pali Canon published in the last century. It was first published in Thailand in 1971 and was recently translated into English.

Melville's Equanimity Teaching

By: Herman Melville

Oh grassy glades! oh, ever vernal endless landscapes in the soul…Would to God these blessed calms would last. But the mingled, mingling threads of life are woven by warp and woof: calms crossed by storms, a storm for every calm.

From Moby Dick

The Sublime Joy Realized Through Dharma Practice

By Nyanaponika Thera

Life, though full of woe, holds also sources of happiness and joy, unknown to most. Let us teach people to seek and to find real joy within themselves and to rejoice with the joy of others! Let us teach them to unfold their joy to ever sublimer heights! Noble and sublime joy is not foreign to the Teaching of the Enlightened One. Wrongly, the Buddha’s Teaching is sometimes considered to be a doctrine diffusing melancholy. Far from it: the Dhamma leads step by step to an ever purer and loftier happiness.

Nyanaponika Thera (1901-1994), born Siegmund Feniger, was a German born Theravada monk and scholar who lived in Sri Lanka. He was a Jewish refugee from Nazi Germany. Nyanaponika Thera was a co-founder of the Buddhist Publication Society and the author of, among other things, The Heart of Buddhist Meditation, an excellent guide to mindfulness meditation and his most famous work. Upon his death, he was given a state funeral in Sri Lanka.