Tim Lyons's Blog

Posted by Tim Lyons

Perception. How does it take place? And what does it have to do with our conceptual frameworks?

We might offer a rather iconoclastic answer to this question: people with different conceptual schemes see the world differently. If we take this view to its logical conclusion, we would say that our perception gets colored by concept and that we don’t really perceive the world at all but only our version of it. Let’s accept this as partly true, agreeing that we don’t register “the world” precisely “as it is” all the time.

Both scientists and meditators alike might have a great interest in these matters. Scientists might try to do objective tests involving the organs of perception; and many of them will acknowledge (as many have already acknowledged) that our concepts influence our reports on what we perceive. Meditators – particularly Buddhist ones – won’t reject the information that comes from these studies, but they have a slightly different set of questions to ask about the matters in question. In particular, they will want to know what these matters have to do with ego-clinging.

So when Buddhists talk about the 3rd skandha, the aggregate of perception, they want to investigate the relationship between perception and ego. They will want to see more clearly the way we cling to our perceptions – the way we cling to our various versions of perceptual information. In analytical meditation, they will ask, quite simply, “Do I find self-nature in these perceptions?”

Buddhist teachings contains some very precise descriptions of what happens at the perceptual level. As we saw in our previous installment, Buddhist teachings distinguish clearly between the sense organ, the sense faculty, the object of perception, and the mind that interprets the perception. Furthermore, they do not equate “mental cognition” with “concept,” holding that not all mental functions have to do with concept. One can know without concept.

However, despite the precision of Buddhist teachings on perception, most Buddhists take an interest in the input of scientists, even though those Buddhists will note that the scientific work doesn’t always speak to their main concerns (those involving ego). But it does seem that Buddhists and scientists agree on one (albeit somewhat general) conclusion: we do not find a simple, one-to-one correspondence between what we perceive and what “is really there.” Both Buddhists, investigating in internal laboratories, and scientists, investigating largely in external ones, wish to know more precisely.

Posted by Tim Lyons

The installment that will appear in a few days deals again with Buddhist theories of mind. In this blog, let’s hearken back to some Taoist ideas, for after all, this section of Suite 101 has “Taoism” in the title.

I said some time ago that Buddhist generally paid more attention to mind and that Taoists generally paid more attention to body. Let’s rephrase just a bit: Buddhists generally take a more detailed look at mind, and Taoists take a more detailed look at the body. Again, I’ve presented generalizations; don’t take them as hard and fast conclusions. And keep in mind that both Buddhists and Taoists concern themselves, in various ways through various practices that adepts have tested for centuries, with the relationship between mind and phenomena.

I have not found in Taoist texts such detailed attention to mind as Buddhist give, and I have not found in Buddhist texts such extensive attention to the body as Taoists give. Not that Buddhists never talk about body, but they often talk about it in connection to their main concerns: ego, the suffering that results from ego, and what to do about that suffering as it arises in self and other. Taoists, on the other hand, have, over many centuries, taken a detailed look at body in itself: How does chi (vital energy) flow through the body? What obstructs it? When enhances it? What exercises can one do to enhance the harmonious movement of chi? How, precisely, should one do those exercises?

In the Taoist-influenced I Ching, we also find an emphasis on the relationship between the mind and phenomena. In a future column, we will look at this rather extraordinary book, but for now, let me just offer a generalization (again, one that may provoke some disagreement, as all generalizations will; and, as I’ve noted before, one generalizes at risk when one generalizes about such a heterogeneous subject as Taoism!): In looking at the relationship between mind and phenomena, this text does not primarily draw one back to meditation, but encourages one to act with care and awareness. Of course, as I say that, I already have my own objections, for much of the I Ching encourages non-action, encourages taking a closer look at the inner world than at the outer world. However, even this encouragement arises from questions about what to do, how to act in harmony with the Tao, so often an emphasis in Taoist teachings. But, as I said, more on the I Ching later.

Posted by Tim Lyons

Sometimes people who haven't done Buddhist practice hear that Buddhism involves a kind of cool or detached analysis of experience. Though we do find some emphasis on detachment, we also find that Buddhist teachings encourage us to get in direct contact with our experience, not eliminating or ignoring anything, not sugar-coating things, but looking as directly as we can - and using time-tested techniques in our effort to look ever-more directly.

This month's column deals the second skandha, often called "the skandha of feelings." (The Sanskrit term is vedana.) Many people in the West talk about "getting in touch with the feelings," and Buddhists might say the same thing, but they would mean something quite different. They would mean, not "Let's talk about my various feelings about the various elements in my world," but, "Let me see how, at a very basic level, I actually experience the world, automatically, without the intervention of all the conceptual structures I build." A Buddhist would say, "What does my awareness do as it contacts the world?"

And, again, it's not that Buddhists ignore the various conceptual structures that we build. In terms of the skandhas, those conceptual structures and elaborations come under the 4th and 5th. And in every case, the teachings encourage us to examine our experience closely. When we examine the skandhas, we seek the source of our ongoing anxiety in the world. Once we've experienced that source - once we've seen ourselves creating our own anxiety, maybe we can do something to change the pattern.

We should note, here, that the Buddhist vedana does not necessarily mean that we get involved in our emotions. Most of these "emotions" have to do with matters not related to vedana; they seem to involve much more conceptual elaboration. But these feelings - vedana - we could certainly call them "mental contents." We experience them. And we might note, here, that when Buddhists refer to "mental contents," they do not mean "non-emotional contents." Our mental contents include both thoughts and emotions; Buddhist teachings often don't distinguish them. This seems to me a helpful and accurate way to proceed, as I've never had a thought without an emotional content or an emotion that wasn't also a mental content.

A final remark, one which probably gets us ahead of ourselves. The Buddha not only recommended that we examine the skandhas closely, suggesting that we would find such an examination quite helpful; he also said that, from an ultimate point of view, these skandhas don't have solid existence. We could see the skandhas as a conceptual structure, a conceptual elaboration, and thus, as Mahayanists would say, "empty." We'll come to this anon. For now, we can say that, conceptual elaboration or not, the skandhas describe our experience quite accurately.

Posted by Tim Lyons

Many western psychologists attribute many psychological problems to "ego weakness" and do a lot of work with their clients to help them strengthen this ego. Does this work go in the opposite direction of Buddhist practice? Are the two traditions completely at odds?

We might remember, here, some of the work of Chogyam Trungpa, who founded Naropa Institute (now Naropa University), a Buddhist oriented western educational institution, and whose teachings inspired Maitri Psychological Services, an approach to psychology and counseling grounded in Buddhist principles. At one point, Trungpa Rinpoche ran a live-in center for severely disturbed people. In that center, he emphasized simplicity and groundedness. He realized that some people need some settling before they can benefit from meditation, so he emphasized simple activities and grounded routines that would help people relate to their worlds more directly and sanely.

We can see from this kind of work that practitioners in both traditions recognize the need for some preliminary grounding. But what about ego-strengthening? An interesting term, and we don't find it used in the Buddhist tradition. However, we do find an important emphasis on "maitri," or "loving kindness," beginning with oneself. So, first one learns to extend kindness to oneself. This kind of practice helps to undermine the kinds of ego-weakness that western psychologists work with, for such weakness seems to consist of habit patterns in which a person constantly entertains aggressive thoughts about himself, thoughts in which one demands that one act, think, feel, react, or look differently than one already does. This kind of aggression undermines self-acceptance and thus in a sense weakens ego.

Buddhist practice, on the other hand, while not affirming ego (for if we do the practices, we begin to see through the process of ego, the process described by the five skandhas), emphasizes self-acceptance. One does not judge mental events; one simply observes them closely. If we do this, we begin to see ourselves more accurately, without cultural or conceptual overlays. We can cut through self-aggression simply by watching the thought-patterns through which that aggression arises. So though Buddhist practices do not aim at ego-strengthening, they do aim to undermine those processes that lead to the crippling self-assessment we often refer to as "ego weakness."

Posted by Tim Lyons

Last time we talked about the skandhas - all five of them: form, feeling, perception, concept, and consciousness - the Buddhist description of ego. We said that we can see the skandhas as a description either of the components of ego or of ego's development. This time, we'll take a closer look at the first skandha: body.

But before we look into the skandha itself, let's take a brief detour back to our Buddhist-Taoist discussion, particularly the part about the body. Some will say that Taoists pay more attention to the body and that Buddhists pay more attention to the mind. We can see why people say this. After all, Taoists have developed a myriad of body-related practices ranging from Chi Kung to T'ai Chi to various other martial arts. Furthermore, Taoist ideas related to yin and yang have had a profound effect on Chinese medicine, a tradition of remarkable vastness and subtlety. And Buddhists just seem to sit around.

Actually, Buddhists don't "just sit around," but we can see why people say that they do. As I said in an earlier installment, we can find various Buddhist practices related to the body, ranging from lama dancing in Tibet to Zen remarks about "chopping wood and carrying water" to various body-related disciplines developed by contemporary Buddhist teachers. But we must admit that Buddhist do do a lot of sitting around.

This doesn't mean, however, that they pay no attention to the body. In fact, many Buddhist practices take the body as the prime focus for one's contemplations. For example, we can point to analytical meditation practices in which one looks carefully at the body as a source of ego identification; and in the traditional instructions known as the Four Foundations of Mindfulness, the first one has to do with the body.

However, in most of these practices, one doesn't really do anything with the body. Contrast this with the Taoist practices mentioned above: the practitioner learns a specific set of movements or techniques involving either the muscles or the breath. Though we find some Buddhist practices taking a similar approach, most Buddhist practices don't so much do something with the body as they do take careful notice of how we habitually relate to the body. Initially, the practices involve careful attention to what we find ourselves doing instead of developing a new set of things to do.

Posted by Tim Lyons

Buddhists teachers present various ways of categorizing the teachings. (And note, in passing here, that Taoists generally do not go into categories to the extent that Buddhists do - and some Taoists seem to eschew them altogether.) We have, for example, the Three Yanas (sometimes condensed into two), the Stages of the Path, the Sutras and Shastras, the Three Turnings of the Wheel, and The Tripitika (the Three Baskets).

In this latter categorization, which includes only teachings by the Buddha, we find the Vinaya, the Sutras, and the Abhidharma. The Vinaya presents monastic rules and regulations, but also rules for social living. "Vinaya" translates as "taming." The rules of the Vinaya help us to tame ourselves in our interactions with others.

The Sutra-pitaka includes teachings on spiritual training: teachings on the stages of the path, on compassion, on meditation, and so forth. The term "sutra" means "brief discourse."

The Abhidharma-pitaka presents the psychological background. These teachings help us to increase our prajna, our insight and wisdom - what translator Herbert Guenther used to translate as "discriminating insight born from wisdom." The term abhidharma translates as "the way things are." These teachings help us to see the world accurately; they help us to see, as the Dzogchen Ponlop Rinpoche puts it, that "the root of samsara is the false imputation of a truly existent self."

The Five Skandhas, part of the abhidharma teachings, describe what we might call the component parts of this imputation. Some teachers say that the skandhas also describe the process by which ego develops. We might certainly say that the skandhas describe the way we perpetuate our own suffering and claustrophobia. Hopefully, by seeing more clearly what we do to ourselves and what we use to get that doing done, we can stop doing it and experience a bit more spaciousness.

In this week's column, we will take our first look at the Five Skandhas.

Posted by Tim Lyons

Let's face it: neither Buddhists nor Taoists seem intent on emphasizing the importance of the self or the importance of one's so-called personal accomplishments. However, though Taoists have influenced Buddhist teachings and vice-versa, we distinguish between the two bodies of thought and practice for good reason; and one of those reasons has to do with the approach to ego.

We could cite a vast corpus of Buddhist teachings that tell us that you can't find this ego. Those teachings analyze, often in minute detail, the ways that we delude ourselves as regards who and what we think we are. We find these teachings in all Buddhist traditions, ranging from Tibet to Southeast Asia and from Japan to the shores of mighty Maine. We see it when a Zen master gives a student a gentle (or, perhaps, not entirely gentle) thwack with his stick. We see it in the teachings of Nagarjuna and Chandrakirti, two main figures in the Madyamika "school" of Buddhist thought. And we find it in the quiet sitting of monks in one monastery after another in both Southeast Asia and Barre, Massachusetts. Buddhists have, we might say, worked out the details. They have given us very precise road-maps of what we might call our "psychological territory."

What of the Taoists? Certainly they wouldn't say, "Three cheers for ego!" (Actually, some of them might, for some Taoists have a reputation for irony!) But they don't seem to work out the details. They give us poetry. They speak of the empty space in the middle of a wheel or a house; they speak of the Valley Spirit, and they say that "the Way is like an empty vessel" that you can draw upon as much as you want without ever having to refill it. But we seen considerable differences between these Taoist verses and Buddhist teachings on the skandhas, or on emptiness, or on anatman (no atman; no self-identity). And we find that world of difference even if the Buddhists, like the Taoists, write in verse (as they often, but not always, do).

So, Buddhists often give us explicit statements: You think you exist, but you err in the following specific ways. Taoists generally inspire us in non-explicit ways to give up our delusions.

Posted by Tim Lyons

In my experience as a practicing Buddhist, the teacher plays a central role in study and practice and in the hierarchical setup. For example, students in the Kagyu tradition of Tibetan Buddhism all know of the Karmapa; students in the Gelugpa tradition all seem to revere the Dalai Lama; Japanese Zen had its Patriarchs, and each Theravadin monastery has a head monk. And Buddhist students show great honor to their teachers. We see some variation in these matters, of course: the hierarchy seems more evident in the Tibetan tradition than in Zen, for example. In addition, though people proclaim the master as a master, if you watch the master's behavior, you will often see a great deal of modesty and self-effacement.

In the Taoist tradition (and again I use the term loosely, the boundaries of that tradition often having a hazy quality, somewhat like the horizon in many Chinese landscape paintings), the great masters often have no association with any hierarchy at all. One hears about them, it seems, through word of mouth, and that mouth generally doesn't belong to the master. In fact, when one encounters the master, he may say that he knows very little of the art or technique of which you speak. You may have to persist in your inquiries, coming back several times, before he will give even a hint of what he knows. As in the Buddhist tradition, though, students honor their teachers, though perhaps in a less formal way.

Of course, we see some of this same self-effacement in the Buddhist tradition. The master will often not announce himself, even though he often has a position of prominence in the community or monastery. He often proves easy to locate even to the uninitiated. And notice that I say "often." We could cite many exceptions. I know of some Buddhist teachers considered as highly enlightened beings who yet go unnoticed in our society. And Buddhist tradition has many stories of enlightened masters who largely flew below the so-called radar of their respective societies. So, as we see again and again, we shouldn't consider the Buddhist-Taoist differences as set in stone. Rather, we should consider them often as differences in degree. With some exceptions, which we will come to shortly.

Posted by Tim Lyons

In the first two installments of this column, I have dealt exclusively with Buddhism. Yet section of Suite101 is entitled "Buddhism/Taoism, so we might ask about the relationship between the two traditions. It seems to me that though we find many points in common, so that to many people in the West the two seem virtually indistinguishable, we also see important - some would say crucial - differences in both philosophy and practice. We will take our first look at these matters in this week's column.

Some years ago, my T'ai Chi teacher offered a couple of thoughts. He said to consider, as a starting point, these notions: that Taoists often pay more attention to the body and that Buddhists often pay more attention to the mind; that Taoists tended in China to live outside of the cities, off in the mountains, and that Buddhists tended to live closer to the cities; and that whereas Taoists tended toward an iconoclastic view of social forms, Buddhists tended to accommodate themselves to social forms, adapting to the culture rather than standing apart from it. He also said that in China, we might find that different people had spiritual practices combining elements from Buddhist, Taoism, Confucianism, and other traditions.

If we think for a moment about this body-mind issue, we will see immediately that Taoists (a term that covers a lot of ground, so that I use it with hesitation), though they may put considerable emphasis on the body, do not neglect the mind, and that Buddhists, though they may put considerable emphasis on the mind, do not neglect the body. I've known people who refer to themselves as Taoists who do sitting meditation practices that seem indistinguishable from some Buddhist meditation practices. And if we look at some basic Buddhist meditation texts, we find the first "foundation of mindfulness" described as "mindfulness of body." And though we could certainly find abundant Taoist body-related practices (T'ai Chi Chuan, chi kung, the internal and external Brocades, and others), we also find various body practices in Buddhism (e.g. lama dancing in Tibet, a strong emphasis on physical postures, and others). And, of course, many Buddhists and Taoists would reject the body-mind dualism that underlies the discussion as a whole.

Posted by Tim Lyons

I remember the time when I first "got into" Buddhism. I had reached the ripe young age of 28 or so. I had the feeling that something "wasn't quite right," though I couldn't put my finger on the problem. I had had a relationship break up, but I didn't feel that I was in a crisis. I didn't feel desperate or that I needn't anything in particular, but I did feel that, as D.H. Lawrence once put it, life had left me 'as it were, slurred over.'

I had read some Buddhist books over the four or five years previous, but I hadn't gone running out to find a teacher. I felt in some vague way that I wanted to study Zen, but didn't do much about it. I had a job in downtown Boston. An MTA trip from there to the Zen center would have taken nearly an hour; a ten-minute walk took me to one of Chogyam Trungpa's Tibetan Buddhist centers. They had daily meditation sessions a half hour after I got off, so I went.

I sat every evening for a couple of weeks. My knees hurt a lot. I couldn't sit full lotus the way my Zen books recommended. I didn't have any experiences that I could categorize as "spiritual" at all. I did the meditation technique as well as I could. Part of me said, "This isn't going anywhere." Maybe that was the point: not to go somewhere but to experience the present. It seemed that I had experienced something - I now call it "authenticity"; at the time, I didn't call it anything. Somehow I kept doing the practice. I sat with myself, without supports or distractions. And when I got done each evening, I felt, in some strange way, better. Not less neurotic, necessarily. Not wiser or "more spiritual." But I kept sitting.

I think now, looking back, that I had perhaps had some glimpses of what Buddha meant by his Noble Truths. Just some glimpses, and short ones at that, even though, on the cushion, I just thought a lot either about women, or about my job, or about how I wanted the hour to end, or about other things that probably seemed important at the time. Spiritual experience? Go figure.

Posted by Tim Lyons

The Dalai Lama, perhaps this planet's most famous spokesperson for Buddhism, seems to smile and laugh a lot. And yet the teachings of Buddhism start with the Buddha's 1st Noble Truth: the Truth of Suffering. What's the connection? How did the Dalai Lama get that joyful smile if he does practices designed to address human suffering as directly as possible?

We perhaps tend to think that walking the so-called "spiritual path" will feel quite blissful. We perhaps think that we will somehow transcend our neurosis, become better people, and attain some higher state of consciousness. However, Buddhist teachers tell us again and again that we must look directly at our experience: at our anxiety, our boredom, our fear of death, our constant effort to maintain our "self identity," and our ongoing passion, aggression, and ignorance - the so-called Three Poisons, found at the center of the Tibetan Wheel of Life, driving what Buddhists call "samsara," the ongoing round of experience of birth, life, and death. Buddhist teachers throughout the centuries have offered to their students various skillful means enabling them to look directly at experience - what some have called "the dualistic fixation" that causes so much suffering of all types. If we want to escape from a prison, first we must understand that prison, to know its layout so that we will know how to get out.

The Buddhist practices that I know about help us to look directly at experience, to experience the present; because if we wish to find this elusive something-or-other called "truth," we will do so only in the present moment. And that means looking at our awareness, moment by moment. I feel pretty certain that the Dalai Lama does that. What happens when we do it? And how do we do it?