I : Two confusions
• The Ecumenical Approach
An important and defining characteristic of Triratna is that we do not adhere to a single historical tradition of Buddhist practice (though it could be argued we are nevertheless heavily weighted towards the Tibetan – but never mind that right now). This characteristic arose out of Sangharakshita’s formative insight into the Historical Perspective as it applied to Buddhist praxis through the Ages. Traditions in the more distant past have been so keen to define themselves uniquely for what were often contemporary reasons, that they could lose sight of what was common between them and their forbears, or their contemporaneous colleagues in other parts of the globe. If you read Hakuin, for example, you can see this all at play – cultural and political concerns mixed in with a somewhat venomous approach to those who dared to pollute the Dharma with other views and practices. Sangharakshita thought that it was important, as much as possible, to see these common elements across traditions – even between those that might have originally been dismissive of each other, or across traditions that were using what were on the face of it incompatible notions. This is a unique aspect of Triratna – but, it seems to me, also something of an Achilles’ heel.
Seeing what is important and common to the traditions is going to be undertaken by an individual who, if they are not fully Enlightened, is liable to introduce their own limitations and bias, by virtue of still being susceptible to ignorance. For example, Sangharakshita’s weakness in the area of meditation is generally apparent; his blind-spot with regard to nirōdha is even more particular and crucial (and this is not to speak of the sexual misbehaviour disaster, and its confusions). So, we have an Order that is weak on meditation’s nature and significance, and tries to do too much with the developmental approach alone (i.e. with bhāvana). Shenpen Hookham and her disciples see ‘us’ in this way, as far as the comments I have pieced together over the years seem to indicate.
All these concerns aside – this approach in principle is NOT the same as your average Order-member taking the views and practices of non-Buddhist and non-mainstream practitioners, and feeling justified in treating them as parallel paths to the same awakening. THAT approach comes out of Religious Universalism, and is not the same as an historically informed comparison between living and effective Buddhist traditions by someone truly qualified. It would be a soft-headed ecumenicalism that was open to non-Buddhist ideas on the grounds of this principle, though it seems to me this is what has in fact happened in Triratna.
• The significance of Lifestyle
Another way in which Religious Universalism has infected our discourse is in the discussion of the Primacy of Going for Refuge. Out of his long-running disagreement with monastic formalism, Sangharakshita coined the phrase ‘commitment is primary, lifestyle secondary’. This was initially meant to accommodate those who had families or care-giver responsibilities and couldn’t go on long ordination retreats, for example. ‘Lifestyle’ was identified with the three C’s of Centre, Community and Co-op, which were the kernel of the New Society, and it was promoted as something of an ideal way to live. Even now, when I mention the word, Order-members can still think that that is what the term ‘lifestyle’ refers to, so it has clearly become quite formalised. When you read Sangharakshita about this principle, he talks in terms of a persistent effort to bring your life’s activities more and more in accord with your commitment, as an ongoing and organic process. Perhaps because we got wrapped up in a divisive debate around the 3 C’s, we never really explored the wider issue of lifestyle in a useful way, and so didn’t develop a granular and progressive notion of how this accord that Sangharakshita recommends might have been brought about. We could, for example, have looked at issues of solitude in our lives; our relationship to Carer’s Disease (the habit of assessing the worth and meaning of your life in terms of your fulfilment of the usually very ordinary self-oriented needs of others); the necessity of daily reflections on mortality and the faults of samsara; issues of guilt-induced and group-driven busy-ness; the centrality of establishing an actual relationship with a mentor; and so on. Many of these things are independent of one’s relationship to the Three C’s, or to family. In the end, lifestyle is no more than practice itself, and without practice there is no effective or even apparent commitment. The nominal separation of lifestyle and commitment in Sangharakshita’s idea is only there to make a point – they are not literally separable.
Here too over time, Religious Universalism has substantially affected how we look at this guiding principle. We have perhaps separated out in our minds a notion of a meaningful Pure Commitment, of Going for Refuge, from what we are doing in and with our lives. Not only is it then difficult to discuss Going for Refuge meaningfully, but it is somewhat taboo to discuss the relative values of lifestyles either. I would generally now feel about as comfortable discussing peoples’ lifestyles as I would their sex-lives (=completely not comfortable and not interested, by the way! ). Perhaps too because of the clumsiness of past attempts, lifestyle issues are now pretty much ignored, and we have returned to a very respectful and democratic distance from each other. This makes it difficult to usefully discuss Going for Refuge, as there is no longer an established practical commonality, leaving discussion of one’s commitment largely neutered in the realm of verbal assertions alone. We used to say that Triratna was Neither Monastic nor Lay. Ironically, we have turned out to be far more Lay and unreconstructed than most other Buddhist organisations.
II : The main issues
• A better relationship with lifestyle
Clearly you cannot draw a straight causative line between someone’s lifestyle and their degree of spiritual development or their speed of progress. We would have almost nothing to talk about if spiritual development was this simple and this linear. The misapplication of simple quasi-scientific notions of causality in relation to the Spiral Path has in fact (I’m rather embarrassed to say) been part of why some Direct Pointing [DP] people are trying to discount Pratitya Samutpada [PS]. Conditionality is obviously more complex than that (as the Buddha said to Ananda). Another reason why PS is being undermined by same is because Sunyata is being treated as a Reality (because it is equated with Pure or Direct Experience) and PS is downgraded relative to it to the status of a merely conceptual fabrication. This is both directly mistaken, and leads to massively mistaken conclusions. It is directly mistaken because they are both conceptual fabrications. Just some of the mistaken conclusions are what are occupying us this in this short series on Religious Universalism.
So – to return to our thread – conditionality is not so complex that essential forms of practice are not however discriminable, clear and recommendable. We had better hope so, if we don’t want to be stuck in Religious Universalism. It is just that in the realm of vipassana, exceptions prove the rules. Those who love and are long-term committed to meditation are some of the genuine leading lights of the Order. Some DP people disown it or minimise its significance. The consequences of one’s choice are major…
Certain lifestyle choices have huge statistical significance for awakening when considered generally, though other less mainstream ones are applicable individually or temporarily. Having a mentor to guide you in making such assessments would to my mind be exactly one of the lifestyle choices that makes a major difference… We need to treat, as the Buddha did, our lifestyle choices as a primary weapon against Mara in our spiritual armoury if we genuinely aspire to awakening in this life.
• The ‘Everything is Practice’ delusion
A common outcome of Religious Universalism is the Advaita-type position, an example or sketch of which follows: one proclaims that one is in a state of continuous Pure Awareness or Direct Experience, and is as it were looking down from one’s lofty height upon everything, ne’er falling off one’s perch. From this giddy height one sees everything as the same (as sunya or ‘empty’, of course), and there is no distinction to be made in the ‘effectiveness’ of one’s practice whatever one is doing. The practice seems to be simply maintaining one’s grip on one’s perch, as far as I can see. You notice that even when people do fall off their perches, they speak as though in principle they haven’t, or cannot or will cease to do so at some time in the hazy future – and as though getting back on one’s perch is relatively mechanical, like getting back on your bike after meeting a hole in the road that someone else put there. There are attempts made to describe this state-of-perchment (which is therefore not nibbana – and this alone should give the game away), but very little discussion of lifestyle issues, other than in a very respectful and subjective way, as in ‘this is what works for me (to get me back on the perch)’. Up on the perch, everything is Practice again, and it doesn’t actually matter what you are doing with your life, as nothing needs to change, and you are going nowhere, and there is no meaning, and meditation is irrelevant (‘though of course it’s perfectly alright if sitting-meditation’s what you choose to do…’).
But this ‘Everything is Practice’ nonsense is quite pervasive in Triratna even when the person isn’t making such lofty claims. I think that a lower-level but correspondent mistake is made when we treat mindfulness as a state from which ‘all is practice, because I am mindful’, when mindfulness is in fact progressive and has a huge range of depth. Mindfulness is going to be weaker and have minimal value when you are preoccupied and busy, or swirling with emotion, or anxious about outcomes, or rubbish at transitions, or dispersed by talking to people, and is likely to go altogether when you are caught up in signs. Knowing you are ‘caught up in signs’ is not much to write home about, and doesn’t count as mindfulness or practice in my book. Treating mindfulness at work as of similar value to meditative development is an example of this confusion which will keep people pretty much at the level they started with, and it would seem to me quite unethical to keep teaching the two as equivalent.
In the same vein of denying that Everything is Practice – states of unmindfulness and states of negative emotion, let alone of unskilful activities like ingesting alcohol, gambling or taking recreational drugs don’t count as practice, and in pretty much all circumstances would never do so. Simply having enough directed attention to be aware that these things are happening is not mindfulness, as there is no effective sampajañña. Notice also how you are feeling about me straying into the taboo area of questioning somebody’s practice and commitment by making reference to their lifestyle issues. May God protect me and my shrivelled unshriven little soul!
• The making of Claims (about mindfulness)
As I have already implied, this flat mono-value often given to mindfulness implicitly assumes much more wisdom than is in fact often possessed. We can think and speak as though there is a single reality of which we can be mindful, and use language like ‘I am mindful of X’. However, it takes a muchness of many things to appreciate the clingings and confusions of the human heart, or the roiling resistances of defensive and self-protective ignorance. To state that you know what is going on definitively in your experience is generally an exorbitant claim, especially in the immediate present. It’s not as though the correct knowledge is even to be had, sitting there waiting for you ‘externally’, if you were just clever enough, or squinted harder. The number of propositions with which I could describe what I see visually just right now are infinite, and I could express many layered points of view about what I see (‘I’? ‘see’? ‘it’?), some of which are wiser than others. Similarly, mindfulness is a growth-process and a depth-process, not a light-switch one; being mindful does not mean arriving at a single and ultimate flat Direct Experience. And then, the amazing corollary to all this is, that not being willing or able to be conclusive about what your experience is is not necessarily failing to be mindful. Hoorah!
• Using your mindfulness skilfully
Deep mindfulness gives you the wherewithal to explore experience non-karmically i.e. with less identification and interference, in an intimate and useful way. Someone who is or who grasps at being definitive about even deep meditation experience needs to become more provisional, because they will not know how they are limited by their ignorance ‘beyond’ the fuzz of their leading edge yet. They will therefore limit their own growth quite unnecessarily by deciding how things ‘finally’ are. Mindfulness brings a level of relaxation around the apparent content of experience, so that you have a better chance of seeing what is going on there. The Dharma guides you in seeing better. Meditation particularly is an opportunity to drop many layers of entanglement, which for almost everyone is going to be impossible to do during everyday functioning, as they will be volitionally active and environmentally triggered into self-hood in a multiplicity of ways. The general rule is that you aren’t going to awaken by being mindful of everyday functioning alone, as experience is going to be too compromised and too superficial – you need to meditate to awaken.
A way of summarising many of these points about the nature of mindfulness quite simply, is to ask someone who says they are mindful, ‘Mindful of what?’ Don’t put up with the assertion of mindfulness as a state, and question yourself in the same way whilst meditating. This inquiry can show the nature of what is going on quite quickly. As there is never a fixed or limited number of propositions describing what is happening, ever, you are then challenged about what and how you are experiencing – you can’t go fuzzy and passive. Anything that can be described is coloured by and expressive of your views about ordinary things and about Reality. If directed by the Dharma, if explored with a mentor, this appreciation, this mindfulness, can be progressive and useful for awakening.
• Practice Hard and Soft
The ‘Everything is Practice’ mantra may not be so distinctly DP or Advaita inspired, but instead be one or other variety of the soft intuitive sorts that thrive in Triratna like mould in a warm climate. Someone might say ‘if it tastes of freedom, it’s the Dharma’. This for example refers to Sangharakshita’s lecture ‘The Taste of Freedom’, which itself refers to the Uposatha Sutta in the Udana in which the Buddha compares the Dharma in eight ways to the Great Ocean. The sixth way is that the Buddha’s teaching tastes of freedom in the same way that the ocean tastes of salt, wherever it is met. As Sangharakshita says at some length, ‘freedom’ is a translation of vimutti, which is well beyond stream-entry on the Spiral Path. So it is not meant to be equivalent to any blithe or joyful optimism that a puthujjana might feel.
Similarly, the Kalama Sutta is often mis-used in such contexts. Setting aside whether one is really willing to consider one’s behaviour in terms of the three poisons, which is anyways a progressive appreciation within mindfulness – do we also take seriously that we are to bear in mind the advice of the wise? Do we even have in Triratna a clear sense of who is wise, or someone in our lives to whom we are relating in that way? We have something of a democratic clamour in Triratna that comes about from Ecumenicalism without Verticality, and I am not sure that we are doing too well with it. To my mind, Pure Experience and ‘Everything is Practice’ views have obscured a correct valuation of and relationship to the vital core of the Buddha’s guidance; which is quite concerning given how pervasive these views are. ‘Everything is Practice’ amounts in the end to ‘Nothing is Practice’, because the vital link to effective and individualised lifestyle changes is lost in the golden haze of trusting that one is practising all of the time already.