Nov 6 – I ask Nagendra what he thinks about retreats.  The longest ones I’ve done have been a week long.  My mind calmed, it became easier to observe what thoughts arose and see their origin, and that helped the meaning of teachings get through the usual distracting clutter.

I hope to do a one month retreat sometime because that’s the traditional next step, but I shall not take the following step, a three year retreat.

The two week-long classes I just took were a form of retreat.  We were instructed to consider them so.  At one point our teacher said: “People think what it means to be a lama is we give up sex, but it’s so much more than that.  We make more than two hundred commitments about what we will and will not do, and after the third empowerment we must have a consort for the next practices.”

Empowerments authorize you to perform certain practices.  They are given by teachers when you have attained the results of your current practice.  Each of the four empowerments authorizes one to perform a certain class of practices. One is then granted approval for specific practices within that class.

I am at the first level and feel unlikely to get to the second.

The original set of Buddhist practices is known as Nyingma, the Old School.  My teachers are in this tradition.  Three New Schools came later, one of which split into two, and the latest of which is headed by the Dalai Lama.

An important way the Nyingma tradition is different is its practitioners can live an “ordinary” life with an approach that is different from ordinary.

Both my teachers are married with children.  The younger one, who is mid-30s, was told by his chief teacher: “It is time for you to have a wife.”  He was quite surprised but did as he was told and is happy that he did.  His wife alerts him to negative behaviors that he had not noticed.   There was no question of disobeying, anyway.  He is unusual in teaching from his own experience, which makes his teachings more accessible.

I’d been thinking the Nyingma ordinary life approach seems the most effective.  Our experiences in ordinary life trigger our habitual negative concepts and emotions.  That causes us to suffer, which can motivate us to change those habits.  If we hadn’t triggered our suffering, we would not have noticed the existence of our negative concept or emotion.

But doesn’t that mean a three year retreat is counter-productive?  If I sit by myself in a cave for three years I won’t interact with anyone and trigger any new suffering.  “What do you think, Nagendra?”

A long pause, then: “When there is no temptation there is no examination.”

“Is that original?  It must be a quote!”  

“Oh, it’s original…”  He was just articulating his opinion.  Pretty amazing.

In any case, it’s what I always thought.  But then Nagendra went on to say his more considered opinion.  What would happen in long solitude is thoughts would come from one’s past experiences. You might recall a particularly fine meal in a restaurant.  You would think about going for such a meal again but it would be impossible.

Or you might think only about your Buddhist practice.  In that case you might imagine the results you hope your retreat will bring, or fear that it will not.

The lama who taught the classes I just took mentioned the most powerful teaching he ever received .  He asked his teacher what he gained from twelve years of solitary retreat.  He replied: “Oh I wasted all that time in hope and fear about the results I might get.”

So I see how I might benefit from a three year retreat — but I still won’t be doing one

After that our conversation degenerated into more examples of what is wrong in Nepal now and the deep rooted origins.  Every so often, to vary my response, I would say “Bullshit!”

At last Nagendra said: “I like this concept, bullshit.  It gives us the power to ignore what we label that way.”

I was very happy.  I had originated the Bullshit Empowerment.

Oct 28 – A famous saying in the tradition I’m practicing is: “Confusion dawns as wisdom.”  That is truly skillful phrasing!

The practices I’m learning aim to disrupt misunderstandings that we crystallize in words whose meaning we no longer question.  Words that point in more than one direction can shake us up, help us to see multiple truths simultaneously.

“Dawns” directs us to recognize that just as night’s darkness is replaced at dawn by the light of day, the confusion in which we live will be replaced by lucid awareness when the result of our training dawns.

The same word also directs us to recognize that while at first light we can see wisdom, confusion reigns in the full light of day because we bring our perspective and assumptions to everything.

My experience is very much of both meanings.  Sometimes there’s a sudden clearing in the fog.  Other times I suddenly recognize the fogginess of what I thought was clear.

I’m committed to this training because I’ve seen its inspiring results in others.  But it is indeed confusing!  The practices are either so simple that they don’t look like they could have any effect, or so complicated as to seem incomprehensible. And they’re hard to do.

Try creating a highly detailed and colorful movie in your mind while chanting Tibetan sentences over and over again, remembering when to ring your hand bell, what melody to use when, and what gestures to make with your hands at what points while narrating a story.

And try understanding the changes you’re working to make in your mind and its resulting behaviors while you’re doing all that.

This is why the teachers are always telling us: “Slowly, slowly…”  It’s a long and arduous process breaking up the mess our minds have gotten into over the whole of our life to this moment.

I’m thrilled to find it working a little bit.  So thrilled that I must show you this picture I took a few years ago in upper Mustang near the Tibetan border even though it has nothing to do with what I just said!

One of my teachers says we are all baby Buddhas. That’s very reassuring.

Recognizing a few days ago that we are simply a locus of cognizance within an energy field has now enabled me to understand, in a foggy way so far, how the ever-changing energy field that manifests as us while we’re alive can survive our body’s death.

The ever changing waves and particles that manifest as “me” will be disrupted when my body dies but they will not cease to exist, just keep changing.

It was the same when my body was born.  The sentient being that I think of as “me” did not come from nothing.  The waves and particles of energy that manifested as “me” already existed.  They just manifested in a new way when my body emerged.

But in the everyday world here in Nepal I see no signs of confusion dawning as wisdom.  Now the big festival is over, violent protests have resumed on the border. Vehicles torched, people beaten up…

Newspaper editorials call for politicians and protesters to talk to each other.  It’s not talking but listening that’s missing.  Nepal will not become a functioning democracy just because its Constitution calls for that.  It could take three or more generations for dawn to manifest in Nepal’s  governance sphere.

Now, back to the monastery for the afternoon class.

Buddhist metaphysics as elucidated by Nagarjuna 1,800 years ago explains the world in a way that is, as Alan comments, amazingly consistent with modern physics.

One of the characters in our cranium, Mr. Intellect, loves to explore such ideas, but he does not drive how we act, and Buddhism’s purpose is not intellectual entertainment but better behavior.

Ritual practice helps Mr. Intellect recognize that while his concepts can be useful, they filter reality, and it also helps his roommate, Mr. Ego, who has so many ideas about things we can do, to abandon his lazy emotional habits.  It works like theater except the experience is of existence as it really is.

Acting on a stage, speaking, gesturing and using props, we can experience life with different pre-programmed responses.  Sitting in the audience, we can feel how preconceptions and emotional habits lead to farce or tragedy.  Maybe we recognize some of those same habits in ourselves.

Theatrical performances require carefully designed sets.  It’s the same for ritual practice.  This is the set for the practice I’m learning:

The bowls in the foreground are offerings of sense pleasures.  They originated in India as a replacement for earlier sacrificial offerings.

Pairs of offerings called torma in metal bowls behind them are specific to Tibetan practice.  The noun form of torma means “offering”, its verb form “discarding”.

Torma are offered to deities that embody the perfect form of qualities we want to develop and to demonic forces in us that impair our progress.  They are made from barley flour and butter, are usually conical and are painted and adorned according to their specific purpose.

Here is the torma we’re learning to make.  Lama says it takes only a few months to get good at it 🙂

Our generosity and other beneficial behaviors are imperfect because we are misled by preconceptions and negative emotions.  In these rituals we practice how it feels to manifest these behaviors perfectly.  We imagine being deities that perfectly embody the behaviors.

We practice how it feels when nothing masks our natural goodness.  We imagine requesting our obstructive demons to leave and giving them offerings.

We might want to keep the statues we work so hard to perfect, but such clinging amplifies our selfishness.  We practice discarding them without regret.

Here is one of my classmates getting feedback:

In the world outside, politicians continue to jockey for positions with good payoffs.  Ours make big money after they leave office, Nepal’s via corruption in office.  There’s almost no cooking gas, many restaurants have closed, those left have limited menus, and people cook outside with scrap wood.

But it’s such a blessing to be alive!

Oct 27 – Violent protests in southern Nepal continue along with the blockade.  The border can only be policed at major road crossings so men are still bringing food in by bicycle the same way they always do, but fuel tankers and trucks with raw materials can and are being blocked.

Only about 10% of the usual gasoline is coming in.  Black market gasoline bought for 100 rupees per liter and brought in small containers from India sells for anywhere up to 1,000 in Kathmandu.

Occasional trucks come in with cooking gas.  People queue for days on rumors of a delivery. [photo: Nepal Mountain News]

But a neighbor of my friend Nagendra showed him how, if you are well connected,  you can drive to the back of the depot and get as many tanks as you want.

A few black market tanks brought in from India by bicycle are selling for 8,000 rupees or more versus the usual 1,450.  Everyone assumes the illustration below shows the source of all the others.

Industrial activity ceased almost three months ago.  Factory workers aren’t getting paid, customs revenue is down 27% this quarter, VAT is down 16% and bank lending has stopped.

Life is growing a lot harder for all but the wealthy or well-connected few.  Doma’s grandmother has no cooking gas left and must pay heavily for wood from the jungle.  Yubhan Tamang in the picture below in the kitchen at Bir Hospital, one of the busiest in Nepal, has been cooking with firewood for around 300 patients daily for a month and a half. [Photo: Gopen Rai]

This is the time of Nepal’s great annual festival.  Visiting friends and family is a big part of the celebration but people are not doing it this year because they would have to be offered food and hot drinks.

The economy will be devastated if the blockade and strike continue.  Some private sector leaders are calling for the government to issue a White Paper at least saying what they propose to do.

China has made Nepal a gift of several tanker loads of gasoline, seeking to increase their already growing influence here.  They will stop at the border where Nepal’s political leaders insist the gasoline must be transferred into Nepalese tankers.  Only small tankers can be used because the roads on this side of the border are so poor.

Many Nepalis have fallen for the government’s claim that embracing China’s friendship will propel Nepal rapidly into great prosperity, the end of all problems.  Geography in the form of the Himalayas makes that unlikely.  70% of Nepal’s international trade is with India.  The US is its second biggest trade partner at 7% and China is 6th at 2%.  The explanation?  Transportation costs.

China will not make the investment to supply Nepal with large amounts of gasoline on a regular basis unless the cost of gasoline from India is raised to equal its cost from China.  If India’s gasoline is cheaper, China’s will have no market.

Nepal could equalize the costs by increasing  customs duties on gasoline from India.  That would have the side-effect of benefiting the politicians.  It would also seriously hurt the people.  I’m not betting against it because it’s impossible to overestimate the systemic corruption here.

Oct 20 – The cook is missing. “He come five or ten minutes.”  But in Nepal that’s an aspiration, not something to depend on.  I do need breakfast — I just had to make a new hole in my belt.  Less food, no meat or beer while I’m receiving teachings, it always surprises me how fast the result comes.

But results from classes come much more slowly.  Tibetan Buddhism is an enormous range of training programs among which we search for one that resonates.  Then we must do it, over and over and over again.  They all have the same purpose, to help us grow more kind.

We have so many ideas and habitual responses, and because we misunderstand the basic reality of existence, our ideas are misguided.  That’s why we keep creating suffering.  The only way to stop that is to recognize then discard our delusions and habits.

I can’t say what I’m learning in these classes because I don’t understand it well enough yet, but I will in another post say how ritual practices work, including the role of the dough statues (torma).

For now, I’ll just introduce our teachers, Lama Sherab, whose teaching is so clear, Ani Laura, whose translation makes them that way, and our so skillful and patient torma teacher.

The mental clouds parted for an instant just now.  Such a blessing!  I glimpsed reality not obscured by concepts but as it really is.  So hard to communicate such glimpses though, because no matter how skillfully words try to point toward reality, what they bring to mind is concepts.

I’ll try to show what I recognized.  Nothing we can observe has a fixed intrinsic nature.  Everything is composed of smaller parts that came together and everything we can observe is changing.  Each of us is changing in every instant but because we have what we think of as a personality, a unique face and so on, we imagine we have an unchangeable core that is not made up of parts.

I remember the scary suspicion in my late teens that my personality was fake, that I was fabricating it from no real base.  When suspicion turned to certainty, I told myself it was a good thing because I could choose what to become — a businessman, a good man, maybe both and more!

But, self-centered as I was, it never occurred to me that nobody else had an intrinsic nature either.  I wasn’t ready for Buddhism fifty years ago.  I was for Physics but it was not taught well at my school.  I knew e=mc2 but had no sense of the implications.

Energy and matter are different manifestations of the same thing.  That’s the step I didn’t take to see the true nature of the world.

Our sensory apparatus and brain provide us with the experience of matter.  It’s only if we change focus that we can recognize the other view, that there is nothing other than the flow of energy that manifests to us primarily as matter, things we can see and touch.  What is this galaxy; matter or energy?

Our body, the vehicle for our life journey, is the manifestation of a highly complex and ever changing flow of energy.  It is nothing but energy flowing within a gargantuan ever changing energy field.

What I think of as “me” is a locus of awareness in an energy field like the weather system.  The air is still where I am now but there was a breeze at the monastery.  Further north it’s snowing but it never snows here because the conditions are different.  The weather is changing in every instant everywhere, but within limits created by conditions that change more slowly.  Changes in the world in which the weather changes trigger more changes.  The interplay of flowing forces shapes their flow.

That’s how it is with you, me, with everything that appears to be a thing.  The appearances are real, but they appear as they do only because our mind works that way.  They have no intrinsic nature.  It’s just our concept that they do, and that they are separate from each other.

When we reach that understanding, we feel compassion for all the suffering that results from misunderstanding.  We want to bring it to an end.  That’s not a response from logic, it’s just what happens.   Interacting with people who do a lot of this training, I’ve seen it to be inevitable.  People who train diligently just do grow more happy and kind.  That’s why I know it’s worth persisting.

Look at the energy flowing in that brain!  It is part of the universal energy field and somehow cognizing the flow.  Like the butterfly whose flapping wings spark a tornado, its every action is shaping the future.

Ah, breakfast has arrived. The cook never did, so others took over.  He’s probably celebrating Dashain, the big annual festival.