Saddhatissa – A Year to Live

13th-century Zen master Dogen said: “A Buddhist should neither argue superiority or inferiority of doctrines, nor settle disputes over depth or shallowness of teachings, but only be mindful of authenticity or inauthenticity of practice.”

Sitting meditation is to place your body in an authentic relation to being. You obviously can’t fake sitting, you are it. To practise unelaborated meditation, we can take to heart this simple instruction by the Buddha, in Sutta Nipata verse 1055, where he says to a spiritual seeker:

‘In every direction there are things you know and recognize, above, below, around and within. Leave them: do not look to them for rest or relief, do not let consciousness dwell on the products of existence, on things that come and go.” (Translator: Hammalawa Saddhatissa)

This is excellent training for death. That’s the heart of it: Do not look to things that come and go for rest or relief. Don’t land on anything. Or, as another master, centuries later, counselled: ‘Don’t perch.’ From the point of view of turning to the deathless, it’s not worth landing on anything.

If we take ritual as placing our body in a gesture that invites Being; that is, as a way of putting our body in the most intimate relationship with Being – while simultaneously being that very gesture of Being – then meditation is a living ritual.

Simply establish and maintain the ritual sitting in one place, and there’s nothing more to do, except relax all experience. Relax ‘body and mind,’ and sit resolutely in favour of simply being here, one hundred percent for whatever condition you are in. We needn’t be disturbed about disturbance (for discomfort is bound to come).

And, a note for any beginner who might find this way of sitting hard: give yourself the gift of five minutes a day, meditating this way, familiarizing yourself slowly.

Whenever our meditation is unelaborated, straight-forward, there we invite death and the deathless; because by simply being, we dissolve identification with whatever occurs. By relaxing our usual here-there orientation, and our self-other images, we get to calmly see into the heart of dying. What a blessing is that!

Dry up the remains of your past and have nothing for your future. If you do not cling to the present then you can go from place to place in peace. Verse 1099, The Sutta-Nipata: A New Translation from the Pali Canon; translated by Saddhatissa.

The speaker is the Budddha of the Sutta-Nipata. The Sutta-Nipata is a text which has been considered for a long time the oldest stratum of the Buddhist teachings.

I was with some friends today, and while with them I experienced several moments in my practice which, it seems to me, relate to this verse. I would like to tease out the meaning of the experiences; especially because, at first glance, the verse seems impractical. What can it mean, to let your past wither? To not go to a future?

I am with my friends. I have said something in the group. I can feel an ego-momentum, a thrusting onward build up in me, especially if I am clinging to what I said. Maybe I want someone to admire me. Maybe I want life to accord to my ideas, as I am representing them to my friends? Maybe it would frighten me, if life weren’t like I think it is? Right there, can my next moment not be carried forward by the clinging in/to the last event? By my concepts, including my self-images?

If there is a next moment, can it just be itself, free of my management? If there is a carrying-forward, can it be the implicit momentum of a level of ‘time’ which, while it personally experienceable, carries us all forward – that doesn’t belong to any of us?

I pause, come home to this breathing body, and someone else takes up the flow, and goes on in what I have said, just as I went on in what was occurring before I spoke. I didn’t have to explicitly remember what came before, to go on in it. If I am willing to go on in someone else’s offering, the flow emerges, and we are, all of us together, versioning a poetry sharing. It’s a dance, now. Dancers go on in each other’s going on in.

O chestnut-tree, great-rooted blossomer,
Are you the leaf, the blossom or the bole?
O body swayed to music, O brightening glance,
How can we know the dancer from the dance?

– William Butler Yeats, Among School Children

The memory of the last moment needn’t determine the present; that moment dissolves so that I can say this thing that I’m saying now, in the group. And the past is in this present; it is saying. (And, that goes for this writing. Try Nathalie Goldberg’s writing exercises, as a demonstration of this principle.)

If don’t drag a contrived version of the past forward with me. It’s not the poet, the fighter, the father, the teacher who is speaking. It’s oneself as and in an interdependent process. They are just concepts, those roles. If I am not identified with those roles, I can let the last thing said wither and dissolve, like writing on water. The ripples belong to the water, now. (There’ more to it, of course – for instance, I have to be willing to let the old concepts of serial time dissolve, also.)

At one point, I got a little attached to an interpretation, and I could feel myself leaning in. You know, we even lean forward, don’t we? It started to be a ‘pushing a barrow’ thing. That’s a great sign. I’m contriving a future for myself, right here in the flow of a community versioning. Right in that moment of clinging is where my contemplative practice can help, if I find a way to remind myself of the big life process. (Re-minding is mindfulness.) I pause. I breathe. For me, today, it was a moment to remember to rest into Suchness.

‘Such’ is a great word. If I’m not dragging a self-image forward, and if I’m not contriving an imagined future, then in the middle, what is there? Suchness, including one who is such. With suchness comes calm. It’s a peaceful space. That very freedom from being imagineable is peace. It doesn’t sound promising, but the peace is exactly because there is no contriving a past, a present, or a future – no contriving an image to possess a craved continuity.

‘Such’ is a word that has various uses, but the Buddhists use it to indicate an experiential quality of being intrinsically ‘just so’; that one ‘just is.’ There’s no comparison when there is suchness. One is oneself, without any clue as to what that is ultimately.

It brings to mind a Marina Tsvetaeva poem, which I read to a meditation group close to ANZAC Day, this year. It was written in 1915. The poem is full of suchness, among its other wonderful qualities. She says, I know the truth.

I know the truth – forget all other truths!
No need for anyone on earth to struggle.
Look – it is evening, look, it is nearly night:
what will you say, poets, lovers, generals?
The wind is level now, the earth is wet with dew,
the storm of stars in the sky will turn to quiet.
And soon all of us will sleep beneath the earth, we
who never let each other sleep above it.

– Marina Tsvetaeva (1915). Translation by Elaine Feinstein.

Throw away your images, poets, lovers, generals. We all of us die, here. Appreciate the wheeling of the Milky Way tonight. It and you are such. This such exceeds life and death.

Does this mean that there is no personal quality to one’s being? Not at all. This courageous woman says, “I know the truth.” The Buddha of the Kalakarama Sutta says, “I know many things.” But you won’t mistake an image for what you are – pure process. Then, then you can go from place to place in peace. There, as my friends enjoyed each other’s company, there was no need to struggle. How happy – what good hap – is that?

Everfresh in the Changing

Tag: Saddhatissa

Just Sitting

Dying to Contrived Personal Continuity