Mastering the Core Teachings of Buddha - An Unusually Hardcore Dharma Book

They tend to mention things like impermanence, suffering, and no-self, and tend to advocate trying to understand these qualities of all experience directly without the elaboration of thought. They mention time and time again that one should not be lost in the stories and tape loops of the mind. They may have traveled thousands of miles at great expense to help people understand these teachings that they themselves may have spent many years learning. For the hundreds of dollars in retreat fees, donations, and spent vacation time, the students will perhaps get three meetings with the teacher during a 10-day retreat and Content and Ultimate Reality

perhaps get fifteen to twenty precious minutes of time to talk to a real meditation master, assuming they are lucky enough to actually be sitting with one.

However, when some eight to ten students finally get a chance to meet with the teacher in a small group meeting, a brief chance to really learn what this teacher has to teach, what happens? Do they talk about their whole-hearted attempts at following the careful and skillful instructions of the teacher? Strangely, this only seems to happen on rare occasions.

I was at one of these small group meetings where everyone was talking about their neurotic stuff. In a moment of feeling like I might be able to actually add something useful, I said in a loud and exasperated voice, “The breath! Is anyone trying to notice the breath?” They just looked at me like I was out of my mind and went back to whining about their psychological crap. Here was a roomful of otherwise accomplished adults who somehow had been transformed into needy and pathetic children without any obvious ability to deal with their lives or follow very basic instructions. Beware of meditation cultures that consistently encourage this in people. It is a mark of something gone horribly wrong.

Stranger even than this, when students actually do talk about trying to follow the careful instructions of their meditation teachers, it can occasionally seem to be such a shock to teachers, such a violation of the unwritten taboos, and perhaps even such a threat to the hierarchy that they sometimes hardly seem to know how to handle it. In my more cynical moments, I have sometimes suspected that the quickest way to get worried looks from many modern Western meditation teachers is to talk about practice in a way that implies the attempt to actually master anything.

Most of the time students tend to whine about their relationships, their childhood, their neurotic thoughts, their screwed up lives, in short, content. I must say that I have great sympathy for these people. I really do. God knows we all have this sort of stuff to whine about; and, in the right context, whining about our stuff might be a very good idea. But two things are fairly clear: these people have spent too little time in therapy (or perhaps too much time in bad therapy), and somehow have not 98

Content and Ultimate Reality

heard one word of what the teacher has been talking about as regards insight practice.

Now, it is absolutely true that we all have our issues, pains, traumas, scars and quirks. We have to learn to deal with these somehow if we want to be happy and live the good life we all want to live. We have to find ways to deal with the content, to heal, to grow, to mature, and all of that, but we must also learn when to shift to seeing things on a completely different level. There is a time and a place for everything.

Imagine if you were an algebra teacher and you told your students to solve the homework in the back of chapter one. Instead, your students turn in long, rambling essays about the traumas of their childhood. How would you feel? Unfortunately, you would feel like many meditation teachers. Now, it is true that many dharma teachers have a great time helping people deal with their stuff, and some of these are even quite good at it. There are others that put up with having to play this role, but they would prefer to be teaching insight practices. Some teachers just can’t stand it when they spend lots of time giving careful instructions only to have very few people follow them, particularly when they know what an amazing opportunity for even deeper healing, increased wellbeing and clarity is being squandered by their students when they fail to really practice.

Sometimes people have actually heard just a bit of the teachings on impermanence, suffering and emptiness, but then proceed to talk about this in highly content-centered terms. They may say things like, “Oh, yes, I am impermanent and will die one day. This is awful and this thought causes me suffering. Truly, I feel empty inside.”