One of my favorite books on meditative practice has to be Pema Chodron's small but very precious book. Wisdom of No Escape. This book is remarkable not only because it explains the techniques of meditation, but also explores the essential attitudes of the practice. Chodron emphasizes how meditation is not designed to make people 'better themselves', but to discover who they are in entirety. Rather than trying to reject the parts of us that we consider as 'neurotic' or 'ego-clinging', Chodron exhorts her audience to stay with watching these tendencies long enough to realize that they too are part of the true Buddha mind. Using the Buddhist parable of four kinds of horses (p.8), Chodron describes how many meditators want to be the best horse, the kind of horse that moves even without the crack of the whip. But as Chodron later describes, being the 'slowest' or dullest horse has its own unique gift, and can often be a spur to deepen meditative practice itself as well as compassion. Chodron remarks at one point:
We don't have to be harsh with ourselves when we think, sitting here, that our meditation or our oryoki or the way we are in the world is in the category of worst horse. We could be very sympathetic with that and use it as a motivation to keep trying to develop ourselves, to find our own true nature. Not only will we find our own true nature, but we'll learn about other people, because in our heart of hearts almost all of use feel that we are the worst horse. (p.11)
Chodron's argument for learning from our own reactive tendencies is a subtle one, and might (perhaps) easily be misunderstood to mean that we simply identify with our own grasping or clinging tendencies. I think the point of the practice is not to 'celebrate' one's neuroses (or grasping tendencies), but rather to look at them long enough to know that we are not identified with those tendencies. It is a bit like: if I stay with something long enough, I become aware that this 'thing' I am looking at is not an object that is separate from me, but it isn't me either. If it were all 'me', then how could it be possibly observed by me? Most of the time, people will identify with the tendencies by labelling them ("oh, this is who I am") and then not linger on them long enough to see that we are not those tendencies at all! It is as though the mind categorizes before fully experiencing the tendencies as not 'me' or 'the fundamental self'.
The paradox is not easy to grasp, and I think it requires practice to understand it. What I have experienced in my own practice are times when I have felt pain around another person. Rather than giving into that pain or concluding that the pain is a reflection of who I am (my inadequacies), I have at times used huatou in the moment to keep questioning the experience: who is having this painful experience, and is the other person a separate individual? As I do this recitation, there is no longer a conceptual framework in which to rest. The pain gradually dissolves or becomes less substantial because I am not adding anything more to it through a train of thought. But I am also acknowledging that there is a painful experience here....I am not trying to cover up my grasping or rejecting tendencies, but just quietly observing them with a full acceptance of their reality. Soon however, the pain is seen as impermanent.
So I think that in meditation, 'being yourself' becomes more and more elusive, to the point where I can't see a model of self being sustainable in practice. What I do see possible is not giving into the judgments we make about our experiences, about self and others. In doing that, I widen my base of experience and am able to see that I don't need to be identified with one tendency exclusively, or another. Mind is much more vast than I had ever imagined.
Chodron, Pema (2010) Wisdom of No Escape.Boston :Shambhala.
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