Tag Archives: nembutsu

Listening in the silence

So when you listen to a thought, you are aware not only of the thought but also of yourself as the witness of the thought. A new dimension of consciousness has come in. As you listen to the thought, you feel a conscious presence — your deeper self — behind or underneath the thought, as it were. The thought then loses its power over you and quickly subsides, because you are no longer energizing the mind through identification with it. This is the beginning of the end of involuntary and compulsive thinking.

When a thought subsides, you experience a discontinuity in the mental stream — a gap of “no-mind.” At first, the gaps will be short, a few seconds perhaps, but gradually they will become longer. When these gaps occur, you feel a certain stillness and peace inside you. This is the beginning of your natural state of felt oneness with Being, which is usually obscured by the mind. With practice, the sense of stillness and peace will deepen. In fact, there is no end to its depth. You will also feel a subtle emanation of joy arising from deep within: the joy of Being.

Eckhart Tolle, The Power of Now

This inward listening of which Tolle speaks is truly, as he himself says a few pages later, the preliminary state for becoming aware of the present moment as it happens. In his own words,

Just become intensely conscious of the present moment. This is a deeply satisfying thing to do. In this way, you draw consciousness away from mind activity and create a gap of no-mind in which you are highly alert and aware but not thinking. This is the essence of meditation.

Simply to sit still, listening, is really all we need to do. The arising of thoughts then becomes thinking no longer, but just another appearance in the bright field of open awareness. We can listen to the thoughts bubbling up and falling away, without feeling that we are thinking them, just as we can listen to the cooing of the wood pigeons in the trees across the garden, the rising and falling of traffic sounds, or our own breathing.

Listening is an entirely open attention – undefended, accepting – to what may come. Aside from the strange moments of illumination sometimes hidden within great trauma and shock, there is no other time we are so open to what actually is. It may be the truest state we humans are heir to. And it is important to realise – which is why listening is so powerful a practice – that this is not something we achieve, or do: it is something we allow.

It seems to me that at its heart, all true contemplative practice is a way to this acceptance, as Tara Brach so memorably pointed out; which is why the radically simple ones appear to be the best, whether just sitting (shikantaza), naked intention (Centering Prayer) or some kind of repetitive practice such as hesychasm or the Nembutsu. All of them, when practised faithfully, lead to silence and to listening.

Hopeless? (republished)

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Rereading some of my old posts from the period of the recent pandemic, I was struck by how relevant three of them seemed to our current situations of division and unease. Here is the first of them:

—

In When Things Fall Apart, Pema Chödrön writes,

Turning your mind toward the dharma does not bring security or confirmation. Turning your mind toward the dharma does not bring any ground to stand on. In fact, when your mind turns toward the dharma, you fearlessly acknowledge impermanence and change and begin to get the knack of hopelessness…

It describes an experience of complete hopelessness, of completely giving up hope…

Suffering begins to dissolve when we can question the belief or the hope that there’s anywhere to hide.

This brings us close to what has become for me a key issue in practice and in experience. Chödrön goes on to point out that this sense of hopelessness, of “nowhere to turn” and no one to turn to, lies at the heart of non-theism. There is no cosmic babysitter, she explains: “In a non-theistic state of mind, abandoning hope is an affirmation, the beginning of the beginning.”

Now, there is a decided attraction in such a point of view. For all the relinquishment of the sense of “a solid, separate self” it is fatally easy, down this road, to see oneself as some kind of Raymond Chandler anti-hero, hat pulled low, collar turned to the rainy night, face starkly outlined by the light of a match held in cupped hands. “There’s no hope now, baby. And y’know, that’s okay…” The End.

The Buddhist opposite, I guess, is shinjin. Here the practitioner is giving up not hope, but self-reliance. She abandons her self to the tariki, the “other-power” of Amida Buddha inherent in the nembutsu, the core practice of Pureland Buddhism. As Jeff Wilson points out,

The nembutsu that we say, that others can hear, is only the tip of the shinjin iceberg; the nembutsu we recite is only the most visible sign of the working of Other Power within the shadowy ego-self. That inner working of shinjin may show through as nembutsu, but it can also show through in a hug, a gift, a kind word, laughter.

Nembutsu is a vital avenue for expressing our faith, but it need not be taken for the whole iceberg. There’s really no limit to the possibilities of expression of the trusting heart….

Humility and trust go hand in hand, forming the second part of the true trusting mind. Shinjin is another name for this development of humility-entrusting.
Jeff Wilson, Buddhism of the Heart: Reflections on Shin Buddhism and Inner Togetherness

The issue of humility is one, of course, with which I had continually to struggle during my long years as a Christian contemplative. My practice was always the Jesus Prayer, “Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner” – a prayer repeated in very much the same manner as the nembutsu, formally for regular periods each day, and spontaneously from time to time for the rest of the day – and night, too, given the way it tends to pop up whenever one turns over in the night, or half-wakes to look at the clock.

The Nembutsu and the Jesus Prayer are both ways of abandonment: not of the abandonment of hope so much as the abandonment of self-will, of giving up not hope but self-reliance, of giving up oneself into the continuum of something not other but utterly interpenetrating. Jean Pierre de Caussade puts it solidly (in Christian terms of course) in his title Abandonment to Divine Providence or The Sacrament of the Present Moment. The fall out of self is the fall into now, into the ground of being, that isness that is always now and in which all beings rest.

The more I go on, the more fundamental this abandonment seems to be for me. However threadbare devotional practice can be, however compromised and compromising the religions we humans build around our moments of clarity and truth, there is no way past the frailty and limitation of the self, its littleness and its bombu imperfection. All its struggles for self-validation will sooner or later have to be given up in death anyway. To let it dissolve in light is no loss, but limitless grace.

All by itself

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The way gives them life; Virtue rears them; Things give them shape; Circumstances bring them to maturity. Therefore the myriad creatures all revere the way and honour virtue. Yet the way is revered and virtue honoured not because this is decreed by any authority but because it is natural for them to be treated so.

Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching (51)

This passage, among others, has given rise to the Taoist concept of ziran, “just-so-ness” (Suzuki). The way goes on; to be truly human is to walk in the way, to “accord with the Tao”: “Therefore there is such a thing as aligning one’s actions with the Tao. If you accord with the Tao you become one with it.” (Tao Te Ching tr. Muller).

It is so simple, but how can it be done? Like Jiddu Krishnamurti’s teaching on choiceless awareness, it can be frustrating to read words like this, with little or no indication of a practice. (There isn’t one in either Krishnamurti or in the Tao Te Ching.) I have often written of shikantaza, the Sōtō Zen practice of “just sitting”, in its simplicity and quiet; but I have also found myself drawing parallels with the Eastern Orthodox practice of hesychasm, and with the Pure Land practice of the Nembutsu. Both of these can of course be seen as a variety of prayer, and many of their practitioners would argue strongly that this is so. But the repetition of a short phrase, either the Jesus Prayer or the Nembutsu, has a quality of practice that is not quite expressed either by the word “prayer” or the word “mantra”, as I understand it.

Let me try and explain. The Nembutsu in particular, often transliterated “Namo Amida Bu”, is usually translated, “I take refuge in Amitābha Buddha”. Amitābha is a compound of the Sanskrit words amita (“without bound, infinite”) and ābhā (“light, splendour”). The recitation of the Nembutsu is seen, in Jōdo Shinshū, as the practitioner’s response to tariki (“other power”) – the power of Amitābha, sometimes expressed as simply “the way things are”. The practitioner does not cause anything by their practice, nor do they plead for anything to be done for them: they merely acknowledge its having been done. They “accord with the way”. As Shinran, the founder of Jōdo Shinshū, wrote:

For myself, I do not have even a single disciple. For if I brought people to say the nembutsu through my own efforts, then they might be my disciples. But it is indeed preposterous to call persons “my disciples” when they say the nembutsu having received the working of Amida.

The beauty, it seems to me, of practices such as hesychasm and Nembutsu is their extreme simplicity, coupled with their explicit renunciation of any sense that it is the practitioner’s hard work that is at stake in the process of awakening.

(It’s important, too, to recognise that, despite all our acceptance of the way, of “other power”, this is not a way of passivity – an accusation often levelled at Christian Quietists from the C12 Beguines right through to William Pollard and Francis Frith among C19 Quakers! To walk in the way may at times be active indeed; the point being to walk in accordance with the way, not to cease walking altogether!)

It seems to me that any practice, like its practitioner, needs simply to disappear in contemplation. How this is to be achieved is indeed a paradox: the falling away of purposive action isn’t an achievement at all. An achievement would be the result of purposive action. Enter a practice of total simplicity and poverty of intent, such as either the shikantaza, “just sitting”, or the Nembutsu – the total “hands-off” (shinjin) entrusting of oneself to the way.

A window on what is

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I find the study of phenomenology in my amateur way endlessly fascinating; it is all too easy to follow it down philosophical rabbit-holes, as I have done in several posts recently. But the contemplative life, related though it is to the practice of philosophy (as seen so clearly in some Buddhist schools like Yogācāra) deals in itself not with discursive thought but with direct experience; which is one of the reasons I have for so long been drawn to the Eastern Orthodox Christian tradition of hesychasm, or to the Pure Land Buddhist practice of the Nembutsu – not primarily because of the nature of these practices themselves (repetitive prayer) but because of their extreme simplicity.

Now, phenomenal experience is sometimes characterised as a tunnel (Metzinger), a “benign user illusion” (Dennett, glossed so brilliantly by Susan Blackmore) or a mindstream (Yogācāra). The idea generally seems to be that what we experience from moment to moment is a transparent, essentially functional but ultimately illusory interface that the mind provides between reality and our (equally illusory) experience of a permanent self. Reality itself is far richer and stranger, and the self is “but one of the countless manifestations of the Tao” (Ho (PDF)). To say these things can of course provoke in the reader a myriad of misunderstandings, and to realise them oneself can cause a temporary existential disruption that is horribly like a classical bad trip. Misleading though many of its Perennialist assumptions may be, one of the best accounts of what is at stake must be Aldous Huxley’s The Doors of Perception. Donald Hoffman finds the same position in Erwin Schrödinger:

[Schrödinger’s] position boils down to this: what we call the physical world is the result of a process that Schrödinger called “objectivation”, i.e. the transformation of the one self-world (Atman=Brahman) into something that can be readily conceptualized and studied objectively, hence something that is fully void of subjective qualities. In the theory of conscious agents this amounts to the creation of “interfaces”. Such interfaces simplify what is going on in order to allow you to act efficiently. Good interfaces hide complexity. They do not let you see reality as it is but only as it is useful to you. What you call the “physical world” is merely a highly-simplified representation of non-dual consciousness.

Donald Hoffman, Schrödinger and the Conscious Universe (IAI News)

Last year I attempted, as I periodically do, to explain to myself how this paradoxical relationship between overthinking and contemplative practice could possibly work. I concluded:

I have written elsewhere of the profound stillness I experienced recovering from childhood meningitis; in many ways, my contemplative practice over the last 40-odd years has been an attempt, scattered as it has at times been, to recover that stillness.

These things are nothing new. The Taoist tradition beginning between the 6th and 4th centuries BCE, and the Chan Buddhist writings in the early centuries of the present era, are full of wanderings “cloud hidden, whereabouts unknown” (Chia Tao). And the central tradition of (at least Zen) Buddhist meditation consists of “just sitting” (shikantaza).

The falling away of purposeful action, in itself the very simplest thing, seems one of the hardest to achieve – perhaps because it isn’t an achievement at all. An achievement would be the result of purposeful action. This appears to me to be the snag with so many programmes of practice involving concentration, visualisation, ritual and so on.

The paradox inherent in practice, any practice, only begins to thin out in sheer pointlessness, either the pointlessness of a repeated phrase such as the Jesus Prayer, or the Nembutsu, or of merely sitting still. The power of shikantaza is simply powerlessness, giving up, complete acceptance of what is without looking for anything. When you cease to try to open the doors, they open by themselves, quite quietly. Not looking, the path opens.

I’ve been thinking…

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(With apologies to Daniel Dennett)

Sitting quietly in what best seems called – in Krishnamurti’s phrase – “choiceless awareness” involves

paying attention to the sensation of the breath (this settles the mind and body), but then the instruction is to let our attention rest on whatever is most prominent in our field of awareness… awakening by engaging the whole of our experience fully, however it presents itself… (Toni Bernhard)

Now of course “whatever is most prominent in our field of awareness” can often not be the sound of traffic on the road at the end of the garden, or the calls of the jackdaws settling down for the evening under the roof of the old water tower, nor even the slight discomfort in one’s left knee, but some thought, profound or (usually) pointless. And then the temptation is to follow the thought: to begin to cogitate, or ruminate, to calculate. What to do about it?

In some systems of meditation thoughts can be overlaid with a mantra (the nembutsu for instance) to which the attention is transferred, thus allowing the thought to die away naturally. The problem here is not only that the mantra will supplant open awareness itself, but that a mantra has content. It means something. Inevitably it has a religious context, and drags all manner of baggage in its wake. (The nembutsu involves the name of Amida Buddha, and the myths around Amida, and the several Amidist philosophies, and so on and on.)

Another approach is to anchor attention solidly, usually to the breath, not allowing it to stray. But then once more our open awareness has been replaced with focused attention, the quiet engagement of awareness with whatever is, that is central to our practice, replaced with a muscular effort of will.

But of course a thought is only another object of awareness. When we hear the blackbird singing in the hazels at the back of the garden his voice forms the object of our awareness – a response in the auditory cortex in our temporal lobes – and choiceless awareness would leave it at that. So with the thought. If we can leave it as just another object of awareness, rather than as the beginning of a train of thought, and return to the breath, the next object – a sound outside, a breath, a rumble in the tummy, another breath – that is all that is needed. And if we fail? Well, the train of thought we’ve just boarded is only another object of attention, and then we can return to the creak of the trees, the solidity of the floor, the quiet changes that pass, just what is…

The doors of perception

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[Schrödinger’s] position boils down to this: what we call the physical world is the result of a process that Schrödinger called “objectivation”, i.e. the transformation of the one self-world (Atman=Brahman) into something that can be readily conceptualized and studied objectively, hence something that is fully void of subjective qualities. In the theory of conscious agents this amounts to the creation of “interfaces”. Such interfaces simplify what is going on in order to allow you to act efficiently. Good interfaces hide complexity. They do not let you see reality as it is but only as it is useful to you. What you call the “physical world” is merely a highly-simplified representation of non-dual consciousness.
Donald Hoffman, Schrödinger and the Conscious Universe (IAI News)

William Blake wrote, in 1790, “If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is: Infinite. For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things thro’ narrow chinks of his cavern.” The passage has inspired many works and attributions, notably the name of Jim Morrison’s band The Doors, and Aldous Huxley’s 1954 study of the spiritual implications of the use of psychedelics. But there are ways to enter here that do not involve the sudden, often perilous, force of pharmacology.

Our exclusive concern with purposeful action crowds out a vital part of human fulfilment. Some of the most valuable human experiences, observes [Arthur] Machen, come about when we simply look around us without any intention of acting on what we see. When we set aside our practical goals – if only for a moment – we may discover a wealth of meaning in our lives, which is independent of our success or failure in achieving our goals. Matter may not be soft and ductile as Machen’s reclusive mystic [in the short story ‘N’] believes, but our lives are changed when we no longer view the world through the narrow prism of our purposes.
John Gray, A Point of View, BBC website

Setting aside our practical goals, as did Arthur Machen – and the hero of ‘N’ – to wander the streets of London, or the byways of Dorset, for that matter, is one way to avoid the clangour of purposeful action long enough to glimpse the wordless isness beyond the doors of perception. When I lived in London myself, in my early twenties, I spent many hours doing just that. But another way is simply to be still.

I have written elsewhere of the profound stillness I experienced recovering from childhood meningitis; in many ways, my contemplative practice over the last 40-odd years has been an attempt, scattered as it has at times been, to recover that stillness.

These things are nothing new. The Taoist tradition beginning between the 6th and 4th centuries BCE, and the Chan Buddhist writings in the early centuries of the present era, are full of wanderings “cloud hidden, whereabouts unknown” (Chia Tao). And the central tradition of (at least Zen) Buddhist meditation consists of “just sitting” (shikantaza).

The falling away of purposeful action, in itself the very simplest thing, seems one of the hardest to achieve – perhaps because it isn’t an achievement at all. An achievement would be the result of purposeful action. This appears to me to be the snag with so many programmes of practice involving concentration, visualisation, ritual and so on.

The paradox inherent in practice, any practice, only begins to thin out in sheer pointlessness, either the pointlessness of a repeated phrase such as the Jesus Prayer, or the Nembutsu, or of merely sitting still. The power of shikantaza is simply powerlessness, giving up, complete acceptance of what is without looking for anything. When you cease to try to open the doors, they open by themselves, quite quietly. Not looking, the path opens.

Bridges

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I continually find myself drawn back to surrender. At times, the desire to relinquish the grasp of the self and fall back into the stream of becoming is almost painful, a sharp longing miles from any greed or physical hunger. It is like the need for solitude, in some ways – and in any case a degree of solitude seems to be necessary even for the inclination to begin.

But surrender to what, or to whom? In theistic terms the answer might be straightforward, but otherwise? A lay neuroscientific way to put it might be to suggest something like the left brain’s analytical, critical faculties giving way, for once, to the intuitive, creative pondering of the right brain – but I’m not sure this tells us much more than the idea of surrendering to God, except without the emotional and metaphysical baggage!

We seem to need a bridge between the human experience of, longing for, surrender, and that surrendered to. For intellectually, conceptually, anything we might surrender to seems lost in a bright mist, invisible to the mind’s eye. it would be fatally easy to take a shortcut, to fall on the one hand into new age woo woo, or on the other into some traditional religious formulation such as the indwelling Christ or the pure land of Amida Buddha.

But, given that these attempts to frame a clearly spiritual experience are trying to get at something beyond mere cultural personification, they may in fact be attempts at bridging the gap, at carrying some kind of message to the courts of reason from out in the coastlands of the spirit.

In an interview, Taitetsu Unno once said,

The way I understand it, the historical Buddha, like you and me, had physical form, was born, and was destined to die. But the content of his being did not die and continues to live. And that is immeasurable life. And not only life. Because it brings us to awakening, it is also immeasurable light. We call it Amida.
Even Dewdrops Fall: An interview with Taitetsu Unno, Tricycle, Summer 1995

If we are happy to let “the content of… being” rest as the underlying, existential ground, rather than ascribing to it some individual essence or soul (which I doubt Taitetsu Unno would have meant in this context) then we do have something a bit more like a bridge, perhaps. The immeasurable, unknowable isness which precedes all things, illuminates and gives life to all beings, is given a name.

Satya Robyn:

As foolish beings, it is easier for us to form a relationship with unlimited light when we give this light a form, a story and a gender. Sometimes we connect with this light through an enlightened human being, as was the case with Jesus or with Shakyamuni Buddha. Sometimes we connect with it through a relationship with a more mystical figure, such as Amitabha Buddha or the bodhisattva Quan Shi Yin. A mystical Buddha has the ability to appear in whatever form is most valuable to the seeker.
Behind our human spiritual teachers and our mystical figures is the light, and the light itself is beyond gender…
Satya Robyn, Coming Home: refuge in Pureland Buddhism

In a way, practice itself, in whatever tradition – given that we who practise are frail, temporary, limited beings anyway – is no more than a bridge over the incoming tide, at the estuary of the spirit. Beyond is the limitless sea that bears us all.

[also published on Silent Assemblies]

Hopeless?

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In When Things Fall Apart, Pema Chödrön writes,

Turning your mind toward the dharma does not bring security or confirmation. Turning your mind toward the dharma does not bring any ground to stand on. In fact, when your mind turns toward the dharma, you fearlessly acknowledge impermanence and change and begin to get the knack of hopelessness…
It describes an experience of complete hopelessness, of completely giving up hope…
Suffering begins to dissolve when we can question the belief or the hope that there’s anywhere to hide.

The nembutsu that we say, that others can hear, is only the tip of the shinjin iceberg; the nembutsu we recite is only the most visible sign of the working of Other Power within the shadowy ego-self. That inner working of shinjin may show through as nembutsu, but it can also show through in a hug, a gift, a kind word, laughter.
Nembutsu is a vital avenue for expressing our faith, but it need not be taken for the whole iceberg. There’s really no limit to the possibilities of expression of the trusting heart….
Humility and trust go hand in hand, forming the second part of the true trusting mind. Shinjin is another name for this development of humility-entrusting.
Jeff Wilson, Buddhism of the Heart: Reflections on Shin Buddhism and Inner Togetherness

An Open Ground

Secular contemplative spirituality and practice