Aus dem Englischen ins Deutsche übersetzt von Lothar Schenk

“Tage und Nächte fliegen vorbei, fliegen vorbei: Was tue ich gerade jetzt?”

Der Buddha bringt einen dazu, tagtäglich diese Frage zu stellen, sowohl um einen davon abzuhalten, selbstzufrieden zu werden, als auch zur Erinnerung daran, dass die Ausübung der Lehre ein Tun ist. Obwohl wir hier sehr ruhig sitzen, geht im Geist immer noch ein Tun vor sich. Da ist die Absicht, sich auf den Atem zu konzentrieren, die Absicht, diesen Fokus aufrecht zu erhalten, und die Absicht, darüber zu wachen, wie der Atem und der Geist sich verhalten. Meditation als Ganzes ist ein Tun. Selbst wenn man Unbewegtheit oder “eins mit dem Wissen sein” übt, ist immer noch ein Anteil Absicht vorhanden. Das ist das Tun dabei.

Das war eine der wichtigsten Einsichten Buddhas: selbst wenn man vollkommen still sitzt und beabsichtigt, nichts zu tun, ist immer noch die Absicht da, und die Absicht ist selbst ein Tun. Es ist ein Sankhara, etwas Gestaltetes. Das ist etwas, womit wir die ganze Zeit leben. Tatsächlich basiert unser ganzes Erleben auf Gestaltenstätigkeit. Die Tatsache, dass man diesen Körper spürt, Gefühle, Eindrücke, Gedankengebilde, Wahrnehmungen — diese ganzen Ansammlungen: um sie im gegenwärtigen Augenblick erleben zu können, muss man ein Potenzial in etwas Tatsächliches umgestalten. Man gestaltet das Potenzial an Formen in das tatsächliche Erleben von Formen um, das Potenzial an Gefühlen in das tatsächliche Erleben von Gefühlen, und so weiter. Dieses Element des Gestaltens befindet sich ständig im Hintergrund. Es ist wie die Hintergrundstrahlung des Big Bang, die überall im ganzen Universum präsent ist und nicht weggeht. Das Element des Gestaltens ist immer vorhanden und formt unser Erleben, und es ist so beständig vorhanden, dass wir es nicht mehr wahrnehmen. Wir bemerken gar nicht, was wir da tun.

Continue reading…

“Days and nights fly past, fly past: What am I doing right now?”

The Buddha has you ask that question every day, both to keep yourself from being complacent and to remind yourself that the practice is one of doing. Even though we’re sitting here very still, there’s still a doing going on in the mind. There’s the intention to focus on the breath, the intention to maintain that focus, and the intention to keep watch over how the breath and the mind are behaving. Meditation as a whole is a doing. Even when you practice non-reactivity or “being the knowing,” there’s a still an element of intention. That’s what the doing is.

That was one of the Buddha’s most important insights: that even when you’re sitting perfectly still with the intention not to do anything, there’s still the intention, and the intention itself is a doing. It’s a sankhara, a fabrication. It’s what we live with all the time. In fact, all of our experience is based on fabrication. The fact that you sense your body, feelings, perceptions, thought-constructs, consciousness — all of these aggregates: To be able to experience them in the present moment you have to fabricate a potential into an actual aggregate. You fabricate the potential for form into an actual experience of form, the potential for feeling into an actual experience of feeling, and so on. This element of fabrication lies in the background all the time. It’s like the background noise of the Big Bang, which hums throughout the whole universe and doesn’t go away. The element of fabrication is always there, shaping our experience, and it’s so consistently present that we lose sight of it. We don’t realize what we’re doing.

Continue reading…

The Buddha was like a doctor, treating the spiritual ills of the human race. The path of practice he taught was like a course of therapy for suffering hearts and minds. This way of understanding the Buddha and his teachings dates back to the earliest texts, and yet is also very current. Buddhist meditation practice is often advertised as a form of healing, and quite a few psychotherapists now recommend that their patients try meditation as part of their treatment.

After several years of teaching and practicing meditation as therapy, however, many of us have found that meditation on its own is not enough. In my own experience, I have found that Western meditators tend to be afflicted more with a certain grimness and lack of self-esteem than any Asians I have ever taught. Their psyches are so wounded by modern civilization that they lack the resilience and persistence needed before concentration and insight practices can be genuinely therapeutic. Other teachers have noted this problem as well and, as a result, many of them have decided that the Buddhist path is insufficient for our particular needs. To make up for this insufficiency they have experimented with ways of supplementing meditation practice, combining it with such things as myth, poetry, psychotherapy, social activism, sweat lodges, mourning rituals, and even drumming. The problem, though, may not be that there is anything lacking in the Buddhist path, but that we simply haven’t been following the Buddha’s full course of therapy.

Continue reading…

One of the first stumbling blocks that Westerners often encounter when they learn about Buddhism is the teaching on anatta, often translated as no-self. This teaching is a stumbling block for two reasons. First, the idea of there being no self doesn’t fit well with other Buddhist teachings, such as the doctrine of kamma and rebirth: If there’s no self, what experiences the results of kamma and takes rebirth? Second, it doesn’t fit well with our own Judeo-Christian background, which assumes the existence of an eternal soul or self as a basic presupposition: If there’s no self, what’s the purpose of a spiritual life? Many books try to answer these questions, but if you look at the Pali canon — the earliest extant record of the Buddha’s teachings — you won’t find them addressed at all. In fact, the one place where the Buddha was asked point-blank whether or not there was a self, he refused to answer. When later asked why, he said that to hold either that there is a self or that there is no self is to fall into extreme forms of wrong view that make the path of Buddhist practice impossible. Thus the question should be put aside. To understand what his silence on this question says about the meaning of anatta, we first have to look at his teachings on how questions should be asked and answered, and how to interpret his answers.

Continue reading…