The Joy of Meditation

There are two important words in the title of this essay: "joy" and "meditation," and I want to talk first about why I chose those words before exploring how we can combine them and find this as a truth in experience.

First joy.

I realized when writing this talk that I've thought and talked about joy a lot recently.  That's something for me to meditate on :-).

The foundation of Buddhism is the Four Noble Truths: the existence of suffering; the cause of suffering; that it is possible to end suffering; and the path to the cessation of suffering.  And the way to end suffering, which I regard as the basic teaching of Buddha and of Buddhism, is to follow the Noble Eightfold Path of right view, right thought, right speech, right action, right livelihood, right mindfulness and right meditation.  So from this it might appear that Buddhism is all about suffering and about the hard work that it takes to end suffering.  What does joy have to do with this.  In my experience of Buddhism in particular, and spiritual practice in general, we are drawn in by our suffering, by  our need,  but we quickly find that it is not so much about dealing with suffering as it is about finding joy.  I find the structural Buddhist tendency to think about suffering is unfortunate, and believe it to be a result both of lack of understanding of the culture in which these teachings arose, and also of the cultural traps in our modern American - or western - society. 

Buddha grew up and taught in northern India 2,500 years ago, and the language and structure of his teachings was tuned to that world.  for example Indian and Hindu culture had a heavy leaning on numerology: 2 squared is 4, 2 cubed is eight, giving us the Four Noble Truths and Eightfold Noble Path; we have the 108 delusions - 2 squared times three cubed; and so it continues.  To be understood we have to adopt the language of those we are talking to.  You still here an English accent in my voice, but I have dropped and softened consonants and changed my vocabulary to be understood, and so I sound American in the UK, not so much by accent but by communication style and structure.  I say "just kidding" when I'm cracking jokes and have a greater tendency to take jokes without this caveat seriously.  You might say I'm becoming a literalist!

Similarly the Hindu tradition in which Buddha was teaching already understood the world in which we live as samsara, a cycle of birth and rebirth caused by ignorance and craving, and had a well developed spiritual path that could lead to moksha or release from this cycle.  So for Buddha's teachings to work, they needed to fit into this framework, they needed to use this language.  They needed to be framed in samsara, suffering, the recurring cycle of birth and death.  But I believe that where Buddha's teaching diverge, and therefore where we should place the emphasis in his teachings, is that release - nirvana - is possible in this lifetime.  He described a set of spiritual practices which, if followed, could lead to one could find liberation here and now in this very life.  Buddha talked of the Brhamaviharas, the four immeasurable minds of loving kindness, compassion, empathetic joy, and equanimity, as a state of being available in this lifetime, and I would suggest that to live in the full embrace of these is on the one hand to attain liberation, but more importantly from my standpoint, to live in joy.  Buddhism for me is not about the suffering, but about liberation, about joy. 

Now let's talk about the spiritual practices suggested by Buddha, the Noble Eightfold Path.

The discipline of following the path is not something we are trained to like by modern society: quite the opposite.  Discipline is work, and in America we work because we have to in order to earn the right to have pleasure later.  I see this is an error of thinking.  There is a wonderful and very popular book written by a Quaker titled "Celebration of Discipline," in which he talks about this, and I recently wrote a blog post, "The Joy of Ramadan" which recognize the truth of this is Islam.  Similarly following the Noble Eightfold Path is itself a source of joy.  To truly practice right speech, right action, right livelihood is to actively participate in making the world a better place, in giving happiness to others, and we all know that great happiness comes from giving.

Our fundamental confusion is to mistake happiness, which can exist independent of our state of pleasure or pain, for the experience of pleasure.  Happiness is a state of mind that arises with the four immeasurable minds.  It resides in full awareness and acceptance of our place in the universe, of our fragile and imperfect human form, and of the wonder and beauty of our individual, personal contingent life which somehow, out of billions of billions of billions of possibilities - not to mention the untold number of non-possibilities - which somehow has come into existence and gives us the gift of this life, of this experience. 

Pleasure, on the other hand, is something we "have" - an experience, a possession - that gratifies the senses.  It cannot by its very nature, last.  If sustained it will get boring then annoying.  It will grow old and dull and insufficient and we will want more.  And yet if it disappears or is replaced by something that gives less pleasure we find ourselves dissatisfied.  Pleasure is as fleeting as our very breath, whereas joy is the foundation of being, just as love is the fabric of the universe.  We know this in our hearts, in our souls, in the core of our being, and yet we have built an entire society based upon our ability to use technology and materialism to generate one pleasurable experience after another, and the illusion that this will bring happiness.  We have build our society on a fundamental misunderstanding of the right enshrined in the Declaration of Independence to "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness," instead pursuing a life of imprisonment by our desires and possessions driven by our reckless pursuit of pleasure.

Joy is possible independent of pleasure and pain; it is our natural state of being, albeit one from which we have drifted.  And it is Buddha's basic teaching that we can follow a set of practices to help us recover this experience in a sustainable manner.

That's a lot about joy, but it's important, both because it hopefully redirects  the way we look at Buddhism, but also because it talks about a fundamental error in the way we as a society direct our lives.

Let's move on to meditation.

Why did I use the word "meditation" when most of us come out of the Zen tradition and we all know that the word for what we do is zazen? 

"Zazen," the Shambhala Dictionary of Buddhism and Zen tells us, "is not meditation in the usual sense, since meditation includes, at least initially, the focusing of the mind on a "meditation object"... Even such aids to zazen practice as koans are not meditation objects in the usual sense...The purest form of zazen is dwelling in a state of thought-free, alertly wakeful attention which ,however, is not directed towards any object and clings to no content."

That sounds great, doesn't it?  It sounds like just the recipe for enlightenment.  Why don't we all just do this for the rest of the day?

I don't know about you, but when I meditate I most certainly do not "dwell in a state of thought-free, alertly wakeful attention which ,however, is not directed towards any object and clings to no content."  The truth of zazen and meditation is more complicated by far.  I'll make three points, though I'm sure there are a lot more, and also other ways of deconstructing this.

First, while it sounds great, for most folk zazen as I described it is not attainable - and it may not even be desirable.  Even those who practice at this seriously for decades cannot sustain this state.  Beyond this the quality, the vibrancy, the feeling of zazen depends enormously and fundamentally on the conditions preceding and surrounding its arising, such as whether the practitioner is approaching his or her practice after a car wreck, an argument with their spouse, watching a sunset, or eating a big meal.  It depends upon whether he or she has chanted before sitting; and if so what was chanted; whether the practitioner is smiling; it depends on the mudra

; and upon the physical posture of the practitioner, which is a big deal for Dogen and others.

Secondly, the truth of zen is that we begin and often continue our practice with concentration on an object - our breathing, counting, or a koan - and I simply don't buy that these are special to zazen in not being objects in the normal sense.  No object under the scrutiny of meditation is an object in the normal sense; rather all objects are reduced to ephemeral contradictions of being, non-being and interbeing. 

Third - and this is well recognized by many, many traditions - there are kinder, gentler paths of meditation that converge on objectless meditation.  Over time if one sits with attention on an object, whether it is a guru or deity, a line of scripture, a scene from the passion, or the loving-kindness practices of meta or tonglen, the object sinks deeper and deeper into the stillness of the mind until the big awareness of our  Big Mind in sense sits on top of our small awareness of the object.  As the object sinks deeper and we settle more into stillness, big mind becomes ever more quiet and our practice converges on the non-thinking of zazen.  At this point we can see the original object of our meditation as become no more than the mantra or chant that the zazen practitioner used to start their period of zazen, it is that which establishes the quality of the stillness.

So I think we've covered our basics of joy and meditation here.  Let's put them together and move on to joy in meditation.  How do we find joy in meditation? 

Actually we really don't "find" joy, but instead if we meditate with the right intention, joy naturally arises in and from the practice.

The Shambhala Dictionary asserts that meditation is the "general term for a multitude of religious practices, often quite different in method, but all having the same goal: to bring the consciousness of the practitioner to a state in which he can come to an experience of "awakening," "liberation," "enlightenment." 

There are a number of practices that popular culture describes as "meditation" whose intention is not to clarify the mind, but rather practices designed for health benefits.  This is a critically important distinction, and it is a distinction Foster, the author of the Celebration of Discipline makes when talking about fasting.  "If our fasting is not unto God, we have failed.  Physical benefits, success in prayer, the enduing with power, spiritual insights - these must never replace God as the center of our fasting."  In the same way, for us meditation has to be first and foremost a spiritual practice.  There is an important and clear distinction between meditation undertaken intentionally for health benefits and meditation undertaken as a spiritual practice, a practice with the intention of leading to awakening - or, in theistic religious traditions, to attain closeness to God, which is analogous.  Meditation, like fasting and spiritual practice in general, is not for the purposes of gaining powers, but rather for gaining insight and waking up to compassion for self and other.  Foster goes on to say, "Once the primary purpose of fasting is firmly fixed in our hearts, we are at liberty to understand that there are also secondary purposes to fasting.  These include revealing the things that control us, reminding us of our interconnection with the world, and helping us restore balance in our lives.  If meditation is undertaken as a spiritual practice, the physical benefits are not even secondary but tertiary.

Returning to the Shambhala Dictionary, "a common mark of all forms of meditation is that the practice of meditation concentrates the mind of the practitioner, calms and clarifies it like the surface of a turbulent body of water, the bottom of which one can see only when the surface is still and the water clear."  I love the metaphor of water settling, a metaphor I've often used in the context of a glass of dirty water which we can stir with our thinking, analytical mind or allow to settle though meditation into clarity, transparency, reflectivity.  I love this metaphor because I find it points so clearly at what actually happens. 

Thich Nhat Hanh, in "The Heart of the Buddha's Teachings," says, "We don't use concentration to run way from our suffering.  We concentrate to make ourselves deeply present.  When we walk, stand, or sit in concentration, people can see our stability and stillness."

The joy of meditation is really as simple as that.  If we adopt meditation as a spiritual practice then we are entering a space in which our concentration heightens, in which we become more present.  As we become more present, we gain greater clarity and insight into what is really going on.  We understand human behaviors better; we connect more deeply with those around us and with the world in which we live; we see our own idiosyncrasies more clearly - often for the first time.

And then a miracle happens.  When we are present, the space from which joy can arise opens up. 

Joy comes into existence when we know we belong, when we know in our heart that we are part of something bigger, when we are so much part of that which is bigger - in our vernacular, we recognize and open to the Buddhanature which underlies existence - that our boundaries blur and we cease to be discrete.  When we are really "here," loss of self is possible, and out of that the joy of meditation arises.  It happens on the cushion, and as the habit grows it happens doing the ironing, driving the car, even sitting and really listening.  It happens in meditation on the cushion, and in the awareness that is being present, the awareness that is living meditation in our daily lives.

May the joy of meditation find you today.