Live Session Summary, Sunday, July 30, 2023: It was good to be with you for our Live session exploring the Buddha’s teachings of awakening. The talk highlighted a number of themes, including:
• At the heart of the Buddha’s teachings is the potential for ending suffering in this lifetime and cultivating skills, practices, and insights to help us achieve that goal. All of the Buddha’s teachings revolve around suffering and its end. • All of us, no matter our backgrounds, histories, or characteristics, have the potential to realize the deepest peace, happiness, and freedom attainable in this human existence. All of us have ‘Buddha nature’—the potential to awaken to our true nature and possibilities. • Realizing freedom from suffering does not require us to take on any particular views or beliefs. Rather, it calls for openness, curiosity, and a willingness to observe our experience with acceptance and kindness, and without judgment. The Buddha invited his followers to ‘see for yourself’ (‘ehipassiko,’ in the Pali language). In this way, the teachings are eminently practical, pragmatic, and experiential. • The four noble truths encapsulate the Buddha’s central teaching on suffering and the end of suffering, which can be simply stated: When we cling to anything, we suffer. When we let go of clinging, we end suffering. As the Thai forest meditation teacher Ajahn Chah said: “Do everything with a mind that lets go. Don’t accept praise or gain or anything else. If you let go a little, you will have a little peace; if you let go a lot, you will have a lot of peace; if you let go completely, you will have complete peace.” • The path to freedom is not an all-or-nothing one—the idea that you realize full awakening or are condemned to live in abject misery. As Ajahn Chah’s quote implies, the path can be seen as a gradual one of increasing letting go and moving towards greater freedom. Each one of us can choose what our goal is on the path. For the Buddha, the most important thing we can do in this human existence is to free ourselves from suffering. When we do, we are able to live with peace, joy, and well-being, and bring compassion and loving-kindness into our lives and relationships, and into the world. • At the heart of the Buddha’s training is cultivating present-moment awareness—meeting this moment without judgment. The power of awareness of our experience here and now—the ‘power of now,’ in Eckhart Tolle’s phrase—is to move us from entanglement to freedom of the heart. When we bring awareness to our anger (or fear, or craving), we move from that state into consciousness of it. We are no longer swept up in suffering, we are now aware of our experience. The difference between being swept up in anger and being aware of our anger is the difference between suffering and freedom • Given the strength of our habits and conditioning, and the gravitational pull of the messages that come to us from the world—"buy this, it will bring you to true happiness”—we need to cultivate a path of training, of practice, to keep inclining our mind towards freedom, rather than towards suffering. As the Buddha said, ‘whatever you frequently think about and ponder on will become the inclination of your mind.’ So, we need to develop a path of practice—both through formal meditation and in daily life practices—to help us ‘abandon the unskillful… and cultivate the good’ (Buddha). I shared Wendell Berry’s poem, ‘The Peace of Wild Things.’ In the Comments today, Jana asked the reason ‘behind waiting 49 days to celebrate someone’s life in the Buddhist tradition’ and I said I would respond in the summary: In Tibetan Buddhism, the period between physical death and rebirth is understood to last for 49 days. This period is known as the Bardo, or in-between stage, between the ending of life and rebirth. (See, the Bardo Thödol, translated into English as ‘The Tibetan Book of the Dead.’) During this period, depending on one’s consciousness and practice, it is possible to attain enlightenment or a rebirth with a more auspicious chance of awakening. Prayers are said, typically by a lama, during this 49-day period. Few other schools of Buddhism have as developed a set of teachings on the bardo and the post-life journey—and outside of Tibetan Buddhism, these understandings, while respected, are not generally seen as fundamental teachings of the Buddha, in the way the four noble truths are. I hope this is useful. Have a fruitful and peaceful week ahead. I look forward to seeing you for our next Live session in two weeks, on August 13 at 9am eastern. Warmly, Hugh 🙏🏻 💜 🌻