The History of the Past
By Michael Erlewine
[Some personal history as to how Tibetan Buddhist sitting meditation came into America.]
Not sure what the immediate goal is for learning Shamata Meditation, commonly called Tranquility Meditation. If you sit on a cushion and focus on a dot on the wall, a pebble or twig on the floor, what you find is how hard that is without being distracted. And that can go on for a long time.
The common understanding may be that by facing the confusion of trying to maintain a focus will eventually lead you to sorting it out and becoming tranquil. IMO, there must be an easier way.
Making effort to learn to focus without effort requires learning to give up that effort. How about learning to focus on something that very much interests us?
Perhaps because of the lack of homogeneity of people undertaking learning meditation, the best that can be done is to kind of throw everyone into the mix, give them something to focus on (pebble, stick, spot of the wall) and let them sort it out.
If that’s the best we can do, for the kindness of all concerned, please show me the door.
It’s not that I didn’t try to do just that, and for 32 years; it’s that it did not work for me, not even a little.
It seemed a harsh treatment for anyone that merits a little loving kindness and care. Yes, there are hundreds of books on meditation and just as many would-be meditation teachers, but as for my learning from any of them, it not only did not happen, it actually was harmful to my learning the dharma.
Mastering the dharma requires so much more for us than that.
I do understand that it takes Buddhism something like 300 years to enter a country, so we have just started here in America. And I’m part of that first group of would-be Tibetan dharma practitioners or close to it. Before that, there was some ‘Ze’n in America. I looked into that as well.
However, in my experience, it was like the blind leading the blind. Authentic dharma teachers were rarer than hen’s teeth, as they say. Everyone was your guru and everyone knew about nothing because they had no real experience… yet.
We were all stirring the pot, yet there was nothing in the pot to stir. As Trungpa Rinpoche used to delight in saying, “Your guess is as good as mine.” In my memory, it was mostly guesswork.
My actual Tibetan dharma teacher was 800 miles away and spoke no English. You needed to find a translator willing to translate if you wanted anything close to a conversation.
And so, in-person teaching meant travelling 800 miles and then listening in a large group (sometimes hundreds of people), with maybe the opportunity to ask your one question at the end of the teaching, standing in line to ask it.
It worked only because it had to work. We ‘worked’ it. We cared that much, but it was anything but ideal. Yet, that’s how it was and for a long time at that. Is it any different today? That’s a question for you.
I can’t fairly say because I’m not seeking instruction at this point, not sampling that marketplace, so to speak.
It does not look so good to me, but by now I’m an old codger, stuck in his past and not monitoring the slipstream of the present state of dharma in America. However, I am finding my own way.
I see the business of dharma going on around me, and from my perspective mostly (no all) about money these days or at least too much so. Are there more qualified dharma teachers? I hope so, but you could not prove it by me. I’m not really a good witness at this point.
Am I worried about the dharma? Not at all, because as they say, the dharma is unborn and has no beginning and no end. Our take on it, yours and mine, are probably not representative, and what is representative is beyond our experience at this point. We can only guess at what passes for it.
What I CAN do is drill down on my own practice, yet the path (and trail) of that is so individual, so personal to my life events, that it is difficult to generalize from my single perspective.
However, I don’t see the signs that might catch my eye the textbooks say indicate realization or even recognition of the mind’s nature, yet as mentioned, why should I? I only know my own yidam, so to speak, and that has been tailored to my particular dharma path, step by step.
Yet I also know that there is nothing but dharma on all sides, no choice but to fashion something of use from what is directly in our path. And we make our path as we walk it. That’s what the phrase ‘turning the wheel of the dharma’ means.
And yet, I am sure that from out of this chaos, in time, will come a map of the path not only that we have travelled, but one that society in general has traveled. History will emerge from the seeming chaos of this present time, precipitate, and be written down.
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The past codifies the present and freezes this present moment into frozen statues in time. The precipitate of ‘now’, like falling rain, will distill from the skies of present experience in the coldness of time and, like Braille, be read by the fingers of feeling that we manage to still have. It’s up to us.
Are things out of control? You can’t ask an old person that question, because everything seems uncontrollable with age. That’s the beauty of change. The fresh lava has not yet cooled into stone, yet it will.
I find the only relief comes from going within my own experience, yet deeper. Reading from the outside-in no longer works if it ever did, which I doubt.
And if the public or recent social ‘drift’ is all about the outside, our deciphering meaning from outside appearances, then I believe we have it just backward. While the past dictates our future to some degree, the future by definition contains more than just the past.
It’s like those ‘black snakes’ we used to light on the sidewalk on the 4th of July. The black ash that the fireworks spewed out due to intumescent reaction is but the history and past of the fire up front that is still burning.
Everything I have learned about life suggests that we read from the inside out and not from the outside in. Don’t judge a book by its cover; read the book.
The past is a direct reflection of the present moment, which itself is a reflection of future input.
When I look around at what passes for dharma-teaching today, most of it has been (and is being) commercialized beyond my imagination. I’m sure those who have never known anything different will see this just as the way it is. I get that and it is sad.
I am old. We never charged for dharma or if there was any fee it was travel expenses, honorarium, and so on. If we had anything, it was respect, although we didn’t know much about what we were respecting. LOL.
Back then, the dharma did not wear the cloak of money, yet that’s in the process of happening now and by great teachers as well. It’s hard for me to see the dharma through the lens of commercialization, yet unfortunately soon most will not know the difference.
This appears to be the way Dharma wants to appear now, and our grandkids will see it as just another form of entertainment for which there is a ticket.
I don’t believe that dharma can have a price. It is way more durable than we are.
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As Bodhicitta is so precious,
May those without it now create it,
May those who have it not destroy it,
And may it ever grow and flourish.
