Experiencing Divinity and the Failure of Language

I want to say something about this photo. But I hardly know where to begin, or where to end. It was our first day in Rome, and both Adrian and I were overwhelmed by the city’s chaos, noise, dust, and busyness. I’m not sure what we expected from Rome, but what it revealed to us on that first day had put us both on edge. We snapped at each other whenever our patience wore thin, which was happening a lot that day. In the afternoon, I had arranged for a guided tour of the Vatican Museum and St. Peter’s Basilica. I think we were both relieved to get off the frenetic streets of Rome and into the storied walls of the Vatican.

We began to relax a bit once we were inside. We enjoyed the many beautiful and ancient paintings, murals, frescos, and statuary on display inside the museum. We began to get a sense of the way Rome’s history had, for almost two millennia, been interwoven with the history of the Church. Italy didn’t exist until more recently, and back then the Church itself was a military power to be reckoned with. When Michelangelo at first refused the Pope’s request to return from his home city of Florence to paint the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel at the Vatican, the Pope threatened to lay military siege to Florence and compel him to return by force.

I liked imagining the stormy relationship between those two mighty men, the world's most powerful religious leader and the world's most powerful artist. Michelangelo yielded to the Pope’s request to paint the Sistine Chapel, but it was a mark of his own status as the world’s most famous and powerful artist that he could get away with painting many nude scenes on the ceiling of the holiest chapel in Christianity, including one panel that shows God’s back side and His uncovered butt cheeks. What other artist would have dared to paint God’s back side, let alone His glutes, and survived with his head still attached to his body?

Perhaps he survived because the Pope still needed more from him: designing and building St. Peter’s Basilica, the largest cathedral in all of Christianity, with its massive dome that dominates the Roman skyline. Because of its placement within the Vatican state and the square projection of the front portion of the cathedral which blocks the view of the dome from the square, Michelangelo’s work is best appreciated either from elsewhere in Rome, at a distance, or from inside the Basilica itself, where one stands directly beneath Michelangelo’s architectural work in all its majesty. (Is there anything this man could not do perfectly? Sculptor, painter, architect, and unrivaled master of every form? How is that humanly possible?)

That brings me to this photo, and to the moment it depicts. The rest of our Vatican tour, including the Sistine Chapel, had been impressive and memorable, but relatively devoid of emotion. Which makes what I am feeling in this photo all the more difficult to explain. The moment our tour group rounded the corner and walked through the doorway into the interior space of St. Peter’s Basilica, a deep emotional current seized control of me, and held me in its grip for the next 20 minutes. My jaw gaped, and I was surprised to find a steady stream of tears rolling down my face. The words of our tour guide coming over the earphones faded into the background, along with the presence of hundreds of other tourists and pilgrims around me. I simply stared up at the dome and the ceiling of the cathedral with dumbstruck awe, overwhelmed by a flood of emotion I could not name or explain. A gravitational force pulled me towards the center of the cathedral, and I wandered away from our tour group, making my way towards the space beneath the dome. I must have looked a sight, this lone man slowly ambling forward, staring up with tears streaming down his face, seemingly lost in a trance. Adrian took this photo of me from behind, as he was watching me and sensed I was “having a moment.”

I am at a loss to explain what it was that I felt in that moment, what prompted my tears to flow for 20 minutes and my mind to go as blank and silent as if I had been struck by a hammer. I am not a Catholic or a Christian, but if I were, perhaps I might call it something like being touched by the Holy Spirit or sensing the presence of God. As someone who looks at things from more of a Buddhist point of view, my thinking mind — when it eventually kicked in again — began to chatter about past lives: I’ve stood here before, I was a priest, yada yada yada. But that’s all just chatter, the mind’s feeble attempts to manufacture explanations for a powerful experience that is perhaps best left unexplained. And that’s just what the thinking mind does: it sullies the purity of experience with all its conceptual elaborations. Any attempt at explanation pales next to the experience, just as any logical explanation of musical technique fails to convey even one iota of the actual experience of listening to music.

Among the hundreds of other tourists and pilgrims inside St. Peter’s Basilica that day, I didn’t see anyone else stumbling forward with tears streaming down their faces. I was the only one. Whatever it was that I experienced, it was uniquely directed to me in those moments. I didn’t expect this experience, or ask for it: dumbstruck, overwhelmed with shock and awe, and crying tears of gratitude. For 20 minutes, I glimpsed a form of sheer majesty that shattered the walls of my ego and left me utterly exposed and raw; and in that empty space, with my heart torn open and my chattering mind silenced, I had a wordless intuition of the presence on earth, expressed within the form of what man hath wrought, of something that I can only characterize, with respect to what I felt, as divine.

NEW! The Audiobook Version of You Are Buddha

We are all looking for greater meaning and wisdom in our lives. The problem is that we search for these things outside ourselves. The most profound teachings of the Buddha say that the wisdom we search for does not come from outside. It is already within us; it is our very nature. The spiritual path is simply a way of helping us uncover and manifest the wisdom we already have.

Filled with personal stories, guided meditations, and more, You Are Buddha offers a practical guide to learning meditation, working with thoughts and emotions, becoming more deeply embodied, understanding the nature of mind, developing ethical conduct, and becoming an authentically mature, awakened human being.

Available in paperback, ebook and NEW audiobook format (narrated by the author).  Select a format below for details.

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_______________________

In the NYC area? Join me this Sunday for meditation class at Yoga Agora.

Paper Bags

A birthday poem written by the old bag labeled Dennis Hunter.

This being human is a paper shopping bag.
Inside the bag is a parcel we carry from womb to tomb.
Most of our lives are spent staring at the bag,
identifying with the label it represents: “me.”
We build our lives around a brand, a fiction,
proudly sporting it through the world
and comparing it to other people’s brands.
We all want to have the best brand, to be seen
carrying the shopping bag with the finest label.
We have forgotten the purpose of a shopping bag,
and confused the bag and the brand with what's inside.
Stop for a moment, dissociate yourself from this bag of bones
and all the labels and brands it represents, and look inside.
Try to remember why you picked up a shopping bag
in the first place, and what it contains.
It’s raining now, and your paper bag is wet.
Already its fibers are weakening; soon it will break
and spill its contents into the street.
Don’t wait until then to open the parcel and see what's inside.
Open it now!
You’ve forgotten you ever went shopping in the first place,
and here you are, crying out against the rain,
holding a disintegrating bag from the great Store.

But this is where the metaphor breaks down…

The parcel in your bag is not something you bought,
for you cannot acquire or own what you are.
The parcel is you, and you never left the Store with it.
You only carried it around for a little while
in a shopping bag made of space, time and flesh,
from one part of the Store to another:
this laughable parade of paper bags and colorful logos.
You can neither purchase nor shoplift yourself.
Nothing ever leaves the Store, but everything returns to it.
Remember this, and be free from the illusion
of imprisonment inside a crumbling bag of bones, skin and personality.
Forget your brand, remember this, and embrace the deathless state.
The great Store, and everything in it, is you.

Outside Looking In

There's no barrier or wall to be breached
before you can be set free.
Only a shift of awareness takes place,
and suddenly you are no longer inside looking out,
but outside looking in, and what you see
is that there was really nothing there to see.
Nothing to look at, but the looking itself, looking at looking.
Seeing, seeing seeing. Being, being being.
Knowing, knowing knowing.
Experience is not two things. Not one thing. It's no thing at all.
And then, you're not even on the outside looking in,
because "inside" and "outside" are still duality.
Instead, you see there never was any wall or line
separating the inside from the outside.
That was the grand illusion, the primordial magic trick.
Great magician, you can't make the elephant disappear
if it never was in the room to begin with.

Stop Making Sense

Stop talking to yourself about silence
and talking to yourself about stillness.
You need not talk yourself into these states.
You need only stop talking altogether
and allow the silence and stillness
that are already always present to be undisturbed.
Begin to talk about them, woo them, try to create them,
and watch them move away.
You need not do anything to create silence; rather,
only stop with all the doing, the talking, the wooing
and silence is what's left.
You need not try so very hard to remain still; rather,
only cease with all the movement, the effort, the chatter
and stillness is already present.
Rest within that stillness, that silence,
already here, uncreated, unadulterated,
and you may glimpse Natural Awareness:
not mere consciousness, which is always consciousness of something,
walled in by the reference points of self and other,
but Awareness—vast, undifferentiated, without reference points.
Not self, but Self, beyond all notions of self and other.
Not this, but That, beyond all ideas of this and that.
Yet, again, talk about Awareness, try to describe it
or grab hold of it, and you move away from it.
You crawl back into the safety of the cage
of the little self, with its bowls of food and water,
each bowl labeled neatly with your name and your reference points.
Only ask yourself: is it your destiny to live in this cage forever?
Do you really need these little bowls of kibble
when the vast open field of Awareness is waiting for you
just outside the door of your cage?

Give Up the Ghost

Don't think that there is some "I" that needs to be moved aside,
seen through, left behind, in order for natural Awareness to be present—
as if you had to get rid of something in order for It to be here.
All your efforts to project-manage the business of awakening—
stop negotiating with a ghost. He has no currency to pay with.
It's already here. This is It. Yes. This. Here. Now.
Nowhere else to look for it. Nowhere to go. Nothing to add.
When you taste the Awareness that is already present
and know that It is you, then a smile
dawns on your face, and you know, too,
why your teachers are smiling in their framed photos.
The joke is on you. There never was any ghost to contend with.
You've only been haunting yourself all this time.

Return to Silence

How can I speak to You, when You are not separate from me?
I want to pray to You, but prayer would be distance,
someone smaller praying to someone bigger,
requesting admission into the vast open arms of the Other.
My mistake was to believe I was somewhere else.
It has felt like that until now.
I know the pain of feeling small and separate from You.
The torment of little "me" and all my tiresome stories,
constricting like a boa around the neck of my own fictional self.
"Let this curse be lifted." That would be my prayer,
but I don't know how to pray to You, or if prayer is even possible.
For just now, when I grow very still, very silent, then prayer
seems beside the point. In this stillness, this silence,
You are already here, and the one who would pray to You
is nothing other than You. Prayers are only words, after all,
and in Your presence words fly away. They dissolve
and lose meaning. Where words were, there is only This.
But even "This" is a word, a mistake, a label
with which "I" try to contain "You," the Limitless.
And so the only form of prayer that seems authentic
is to remain silent, to rest in stillness, not asking for anything.
For only then can my prayer be answered.
Only through silence is the one true Word ever spoken.
Only then can I see that "You" and "I" were never two, never apart.
The small, tragic story of "me" is a dream, and I am a dream figure.
You are the One dreaming. Let me awaken within the dream.
The little, separate "me" is a figment, just the boa of mind's habits
constricting around a non-existent center within empty space.
May the snake let go and relax into freedom and peace at last.
Never let me forget that these dream eyes are Your eyes.
This dream body is Your body. These dream feet are Your feet.
But now I am praying to You again, recreating the illusion of distance,
where there is none. You are here, now. It is This. Only This.
Let me return to silence, and hear what You are already saying.

YOU ARE BUDDHA

We are all looking for greater meaning and wisdom in our lives. The problem is that we search for these things outside ourselves. The most profound teachings of the Buddha say that the wisdom we search for doesn’t come from outside. It is already within us — it is our very nature. You Are Buddha is a practical guide to discovering this innate wisdom and living a happier, more meaningful life.


"Combining insight into the spiritual path with engaging personal anecdotes, You Are Buddha introduces Buddhist practices and philosophy to support whatever path you're on."
— Susan Piver, Founder, The Open Heart Project, New York Times best-selling author of The Wisdom of a Broken Heart

"You Are Buddha speaks about the nature of our mind and the spiritual path in a very fresh and personal way, making profound insights and practices readily accessible. By looking at ancient wisdom teachings through a contemporary lens and sharing his own rich experiences on the path, Dennis Hunter offers an approach to the Buddhist teachings that can be employed by readers of all kinds of backgrounds. There is no need to label oneself a Buddhist to benefit from this book and discover the basic nature that we all share."
— Khenpo Karl Brunnhölzl, author of The Heart Attack Sutra and The Center of the Sunlit Sky

"Starting from the most profound understanding of the Buddha’s teachings, You Are Buddha offers an elegant and practical guide to bringing these insights into your daily life. The presentations of meditation practice, and working with negative thoughts and emotions, are especially valuable. Because this book is grounded in Dennis Hunter’s own deep personal experience and his extensive practice of meditation, it brings a very contemporary perspective to these classical teachings." 
 — Andy Karr, author of Contemplating Reality: A Pracititioner’s Guide to the View in Indo-Tibetan Buddhism and co-author of The Practice of Contemplative Photography: Seeing the World with Fresh Eyes


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All the best to you.
Dennis

Why the Buddha Laughs

Buddhism often gets a bad rap for being pessimistic or taking life too seriously, especially with its famous teachings on suffering, impermanence and emptiness.

But the reality is quite the opposite. Those who have developed any genuine realization of the teachings of Buddhism are often among the most joyful and happy people you could ever meet. Matthieu Ricard, a Buddhist monk who is famous for, among other things, undergoing extensive brain scans and laboratory testing while in meditative states, has been branded by neuroscientists as "the happiest person alive."

There is a particularly baffling slogan in the Lojong teachings in Tibetan Buddhism, which says: "Always maintain only a joyful mind." That sounds like a tall order! Always?!! Only?!! I often feel lucky if I can experience a truly joyful mind for just a few intervals throughout the day.

But that constant, all-pervasive joyful mind is exactly what many realized Buddhist teachers manifest. When I picture the Dalai Lama, the image that comes to mind is one of him smiling and laughing and literally beaming positive energy to everyone around him, which he seems to do 365 days a year.

The 16th Karmapa

My own teacher, the very learned scholar Dzogchen Ponlop Rinpoche, frequently laughs and plays with childlike joy, and constantly seeks ways to make his students drop all of their serious trips and do the same. When you spend time with a realized teacher like Dzogchen Ponlop, you never know how or when he's going to sneak up and pull the rug out from under you—maybe figuratively, or maybe literally. That's part of his job as a teacher. Many of the most direct and personal teachings I've received from him were designed to puncture whatever bubble of excessive seriousness in which I happened to be floating and to make me stop, see the absurdity of my own habitual patterns, drop it all, and just smile, relax, and laugh at myself.

"Since everything is but an illusion, perfect in being what it is, having nothing to do with good or bad, acceptance or rejection, one might as well burst out laughing!"
—Longchenpa, 14th-century Tibetan meditation master

Laughter is medicine for the heart, mind and body. It lowers blood pressure, dispels self-pity and depression, triggers neurochemical reactions that increase feelings of well-being, and strengthens our positive feelings of connection with other beings. It creates a sense of openness and space that wasn't there before, and an open mind leads to new possibilities.

Taking ourselves very seriously, on the other hand, is most often a recipe for unhappiness. The more we invest our attention in all of our personal dramas and our inflated sense of self-importance—the storm that rotates around the illusory center of I, I, I, me, me, me, mine, mine, mine—the more miserable and isolated we become. It's an ancient habit, a dysfunctional skill we've been developing since before we were born. But each time we drop the overly serious trance of selfing and open to a mind of spontaneous joyfulness, we reconnect with our deeper nature and shed a piece of the baggage of the small, tragic self.

"Nothing is worth more than laughter. It is strength to laugh and to abandon oneself, to be light. Tragedy is the most ridiculous thing."
—Frida Kahlo

Enlightenment Is Inevitable

I've been further contemplating the notion of inevitability, which I wrote about here recently. This week in Ani Lodro's class on analytical meditation and the "Uttaratantra" (Maitreya's seminal text on Buddha Nature), we contemplated the assertion that "enlightenment is inevitable." (This view, which didn't sit well with a few students in the class, has been asserted both by Pema Chodron and by my own teacher, Dzogchen Ponlop Rinpoche.)

The view that "enlightenment is inevitable" dovetails nicely with the contemplation I picked up last week from Tara Brach, who defined enlightenment succinctly as "total cooperation with the inevitable."

The notion that enlightenment is inevitable arises naturally from our recognition of the inherent and unshakable Buddha Nature of ourselves and all sentient beings. The question is how long it will take to uncover and fully manifest our true nature. If enlightenment itself is total cooperation with the inevitable, then it is also a total embrace of what already is, because what already is is the ultimate inevitability. Any time we resist and struggle against what is, or get lost in hope and fear about what it might become or regret and nostalgia for what it once was, we are resisting the inevitable. This resistance is a good definition of suffering and indeed of insanity.

One of my favorite Dharma teachers, Ken McLeod, says that the end of suffering is not a state, but a process. We can perpetuate or we can end suffering in each moment, depending on how we act and how we respond to what arises in our experience. In meditation practice, we train ourselves in being open and aware of what arises and in letting go of our habitual patterns of control and resistance. We train in becoming like the sea, which refuses no river.

Ani Lodro reminded me that a famous Korean Zen teacher once said that "wanting enlightenment is a big mistake." The mistake, in this case, is wanting and hoping for enlightenment in some future moment, which is equivalent to denying that the essence of enlightenment -- our own Buddha Nature -- is already here, right now, in this very moment of mind. Always hoping to attain enlightenment in some future moment, we blind ourselves to its existence in the present.

The problem is that we do not *really* believe in Buddha Nature; we don't *really* believe that there is an indestructible, radiant jewel hidden within the slime and muck of our present mind. Looking at the clouds of our obscurations, we don't *really* believe that there is a vast, open, blue sky beyond them. But how could there be clouds at all, without the blue sky to hold them?

Buddha Nature: Jewel in the Mud

Within the Mahayana and Vajrayana schools of Buddhism, it is said that the Buddha "turned the wheel of Dharma" three times -- i.e., that he unveiled his teachings in three major stages over the course of the four decades that he taught, progressively revealing with each turning an ever more refined and profound vision of reality. In the First Turning, he taught the basic, relative truths of suffering and the path to liberation from suffering. In the Second Turning, he taught the profound view of emptiness which is an antidote to our tendency to cling to any notion of the inherent reality of anything. In the Third Turning, he went even one step further than that, teaching on the awakened qualities of mind itself -- the inherent Buddha Nature of all sentient beings.

The essence of the teaching on Buddha Nature is that all beings possess the same potential for full awakening -- that the very nature of all beings is, in fact, enlightened mind itself, and that this enlightened mind which is common to all beings has simply been covered over and buried beneath lifetimes of bad habits, neuroses, and mental obscurations. Though hidden from view, our Buddha Nature is always there because it is what we most fundamentally are; no matter how thick or ugly the obscurations may be that cover it, like a radiant jewel caked in the blackest mud, Buddha Nature itself cannot be destroyed or changed by our obscurations.

We typically think of the spiritual path as being a process of acquiring and developing positive spiritual qualities that we don't yet possess -- yet, viewed from the perspective of the teachings on Buddha Nature, it is actually nothing more than the process of clearing away obscurations (the causes of our suffering) and revealing the radiant, awakened mind, full of positive qualities, that is already our essence. As Karl Brunnholzl puts it, "As long as there is suffering, that's called a sentient being. When there is no suffering, that's called a Buddha."

Just as ice does not function like water, Brunnholzl points out, but at the same time is not made of something different from water, in the same way sentient beings (which is to say, deluded beings) do not function like Buddhas but are not made of something different from Buddha nature.

One of the core obstacles to realizing and uncovering our Buddha Nature is that we believe so strongly in the solid reality of our obscurations. From our perspective on the ground looking up at a cloudy sky, the clouds obscure our view of the blue, open sky, and they seem so solid and real. Yet the blue, open sky itself is not affected in the slightest by the presence of those clouds, and the clouds themselves have no solid core. In the same way, the neuroses and obscurations of sentient beings are temporary and removable, while their Buddha Nature is beyond change.

Brunnholzl gives a very practical analogy for this. When we wash our clothes, we are not really purifying the clothes, we are purifying the dirt, which is adventitious. The natural state of the clothes is already pure.

In the Uttaratantra, Maitreya's seminal text on Buddha Nature, it is said that the Buddha gave the teachings on Buddha Nature to counteract five key obstacles that prevent us from recognizing our true nature: faintheartedness, arrogance, exaggeration, denial, and self-cherishing. (Ani Lodro, one of the nuns here at the Abbey, is currently teaching a class on the Uttaratantra. I'm grateful to her for clearly explaining these five obstacles and their antidotes.)

• Faintheartedness is our habitual poverty mentality, our self-doubt, our depression, our laziness, our sense of lack, our conviction that we don't have what it takes to wake up. The antidote is to remind ourselves, constantly, that we have Buddha Nature already. This opens the door to a sense of joy and contentment.
• Arrogance is our habitual contempt for what we perceive as inferior beings -- our tendency to look at others' faults and judge them, forgetting about their positive qualities and potential. The antidote is to remind ourselves, constantly, that *all* beings have Buddha Nature. This opens the door to developing Sacred Outlook, seeing one's entire world as sacred and regarding all beings as Buddhas, as teachers.
• Exaggeration is putting too much emphasis on the relative, believing too much in the reality of our obscurations and neurosis and obstacles. The antidote is to remind ourselves, constantly, that our obscurations are like clouds, temporary and without any solid existence. This opens the door to relating to ourselves and our world with greater discernment and intelligence.
• Denial is forgetting that our true nature is already here and now, and getting caught up in the search for fulfillment in dreams of the future or in external things -- the thought that maybe we'll be able to connect with Buddha Nature once we get such-and-such. The antidote is to remind ourselves, constantly, that there is nothing that could possibly be added to Buddha Nature to improve it, and nothing that needs to be done with it. This opens the door to develop strong motivation and enthusiastic effort.
• Self-cherishing is clinging to personal comfort and sense pleasures as a substitute for relating to our true nature -- it's a basic sense of being stuck in materialism, and is rooted in a feeling of lack or need. The antidote is to remind ourselves, constantly, that we do not need anything. This opens the door to experiencing and radiating our inherent benevolence, generosity and warmth.

In our culture, which so heavily emphasizes the doctrine of Original Sin and the inherent neurosis and meaninglessness of human life (unless we believe we will be saved from damnation by an external being, a Creator God), the teachings on Buddha Nature are shocking in their positive vision of the potential of all sentient beings for awakening and enlightenment and sanity. The danger in hearing these teachings is that we might misinterpret them as an excuse for doing nothing -- after all, if our fundamental nature is already perfect, why bother meditating or exerting ourselves on the spiritual path?

Suzuki Roshi once looked out at a large audience of students and said: "You are all completely perfect...and you could use a little work."