The last word on learning Buddhism

I was at the Sunday morning service at the Ch'an Meditation Center. The speaker lectured on and on as we all sat cross-legged on cushions on the carpet. Individuals to the left of me and to the right moved now and then, rearranging their legs, making themselves comfortable. Because of my early Zen training, I sat all the while erect and still, without moving a single muscle--deep in a peaceful meditation. I wasn't inattentive to the talk but mainly paid close attention to my own mind. Suddenly, it began to stir.

For that one instant, it was as if I were simultaneously inside and outside time. From the spacious and unperturbed dimension of the meditation, I watched closely as a vast complex came forward to claim me. Because I had been sitting so still for almost an hour already, I was attentive enough to see myself begin to fall into an identification with it. From within the complex, I realized the speaker was really enjoying hearing himself talk and I felt concern he wasn't about to wind down anytime soon and ring the bell. At the same time, I began getting the first unpleasant sensations in my folded legs. From long experience, I knew they were going to start aching unbearably. All this was familiar stuff from my early years meditating and so I recognized the complex was "me." It was me as I existed in time--my conditioned self.

The arising of this "self" and the identification with it happened almost simultaneously--that's the conditioning. Being "me" was a habit I had. Had I not been in such an attentive state, I wouldn't have noticed I could equally well do without it.

But I did notice. That's all I did-nothing else. Immediately, I was free. Like the two wings of a bird, the noticing and the freedom operated in unison. The moment I saw I had begun to fall into an identification with "me," I was immediately free of "me."

I could see with such beautiful clarity that this "me" was not at all central to who or what I was. It was central, though, to the onset of the leg pain. To have let my consciousness be hijacked by it, I perceived in a flash, would have been tantamount to delivering my peaceful meditation into an agonizing bout of endurance. As it was, the pain was stopped dead in its tracks. It had dropped away of its own accord. I sat on for a long time after this, free of pain and immobile in peaceful meditation.

All this happened in the blink of an eye and, in that same blink, I realized it was happening. The realization was like the drop of a pebble in a pond. Ripples spread out in larger and larger circles. They vanished and the surface of the pond was still again. I sat a long time meditating in that stillness. Eventually the speaker did stop. It came as a surprise to me to hear the bell ring. It was as if no time had gone by at all.

I hardly gave the whole thing a second thought. The next morning I almost didn't write it down. It just chanced to spring to mind as I sat at my computer, as I do first thing every morning, and began typing.

Leg pain in sitting meditation is a mental attitude. The feeling "It's impossible. I can't bear it." is an ego feeling. When there is no "I," there is nothing to bear. In contrast, the more self-centered the sitting is, the more painful.

Only as these sentences started pouring down on the page, did it dawn on me: I had experienced the great Buddhist truth: "The source of suffering is the illusion of a separate self." It stunned me to have realized this myself--on my own. It wasn't some big earth-shattering realization of enlightenment; only a plain everyday observation of the obvious.

After that experience I became sensitive to the way the Sunday lectures kept presenting the Buddha's realizations from the outside. Not a single lecture ever gave a view of how it was to experience one of these truths for oneself. In fact, the possibility that this could happen was never entertained. All the lectures presented the Buddha's insights as if they were necessarily foreign to any experience we ourselves could possibly have. The lectures called upon us--not to experience these truths for ourselves, but to believe in them and accept them as truth. In other words, the Buddha's great and timeless realizations had. been turned into dogma and were being passed on to us as a belief system.

It seemed wrong to push the Buddha away from us like this and make him larger than life. If the historical Buddha had thought he was special and unlike anyone else, he wouldn't have gone around trying to share his realizations with others. Rather he must have immediately recognized that what he'd experienced of his own nature held true also for all sentient beings. Surely, he saw Buddhas everywhere. The idea was to touch them and spark it to start happening on the inside of those Buddhas like it had in him.

I began to see the Sunday lectures at the Ch'an Center twisted the kinds of simple and profound clarifications I was beginning to have into something cosmically grandiose and impossible for the ordinary mortal to achieve in this lifetime. I got the feeling I was at the wrong end of a long historical progression that had started out with plain insights that were real and immediate--the kind of realizations that could possibly occur, even if only partially, to some stupid jerk like me in a world like this--and transformed them into a package for the consumption of the masses. Similarly, the big polluted river that snakes its way like a mudflow through the coastal industrial city started out high in the distant mountains as a pristine stream. When things come into the crowded human world, this happens. They get corrupted.