Our bodies and our minds are the Buddha

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As we continue our series on Jack Kornfield’s book, After the Ecstasy, the Laundry, Chapter 12 is entitled, “This Very Body, The Buddha.”  He retells the story of Siddhartha Gautama’s six-year spiritual quest when he tried to deny his body through the practice of fasting and extreme asceticism.  One day, he almost drown from exhaustion, and barely had the strength to pull himself up on the side of the river. All he could do was simply roll over and gaze up at the sky.  It’s said that at that moment, he remembered being a young boy and sitting under a rose apple tree in his father’s garden.  That moment of stillness in nature had created this sense of awe and wonder, and his heart became at rest and at peace with all things.  The story is told that, at that moment of remembering, he realized that his six-year spiritual quest had been about fighting against his body and his mind and the world around him.

The Middle Way is a concept described in many ways in Buddhism.  Within the context of this story Jack Kornfield points out that the middle way of being is somewhere between struggling with whatever arises and becoming lost in the flotsam and jetsam of living.  At that moment, Siddhartha started to awaken, he opened to the suffering and beauty of life as it is, and simply rested in the peace that arises naturally out of an awareness of all that is.

About that time, a young woman, named Sujata, walked by who was the daughter of the land owner where Siddhartha was lying down.  She saw this emaciated being, and decided to offer him a bowl of rice milk that she was carrying. Siddhartha accepted it gratefully—something for which his ascetic friends would later despise and shun him.  Yet, Sid now felt refreshed, with a new perspective, and then went to sit beneath the Peepal tree (later known as the Bodhi Tree because Bodhi means awakening), where he would have this experience of being at rest, at peace, with whatever arose in his mind, in his body or in the world around him.  It was then that he became The Buddha (translated as The Awakened One).

In a teaching by HH Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche, one of the great Tibetan Buddhist teachers of the 20^th century, he describes this everyday practice in the following way:

“Simply to develop a complete acceptance and openness to all situations and emotions, and to all people, experiencing everything totally without mental reservations and blockages, so that one never withdraws or centralizes into oneself.  This produces a tremendous energy which is has been locked up in the process of mental evasion and a general running away from life’s experiences.  Clarity of awareness may, in its initial stages, be unpleasant and fear inspiring.  We can see these uncomfortable responses as part of the process of breaking down our habitual emotional reactions and judgments.

“Don’t mentally split into two when meditating, one part of the mind watching the other like a cat watching a mouse.” In this type of meditation, there is no introspection concentration, instead there is a continual opening of the mind and the body to whatever is.  We can experience the whole universe and “us” fluidly as a part of the whole, as open and unobstructed, everything mutually interpenetrating.   Drop the project and simple experience all things, including our sense of self, as transparent and free from obstructions.  Even the judgments and habits and emotions that arise are transparent and ephemeral.  It is merely our confusion or desire to make all things solid and permanent that cause a false sense of separation.

When we remind ourselves again and again, to practice open up, to see where we are stuck, to stop fighting, and start accepting, it is then when the entire experience can burst open into a Technicolor display of living.  The paradox is that things can only begin to change when we fully accept what is.”