Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. In this 47-minute teaching from a 1977 retreat at Camp Cedar Glen in California, Jack Kornfield offers guidance on the non-linear nature of spiritual practice and concrete tools for maintaining a stable path. He begins by reframing common obstacles—the cycles of high and low experience, the intensification of perceived impurities as insight deepens, and the plateaus where progress seems to stall—as natural and necessary parts of development, not signs of failure. He then addresses foundational practices: daily sitting meditation (he emphasizes two hours minimum, split morning and evening), periodic silent retreats, and the power of spiritual friendship and community. Kornfield walks through the five precepts not as commandments but as signals of awareness, exploring how working with truthful speech, restraint, and ethical action naturally calm and clarify the mind. He offers practical guidance on relationships—particularly with parents and intimate partners—emphasizing that presence and embodied transformation teach far more than words, and that viewing relational difficulties as learning opportunities rather than failures fundamentally shifts how one engages with others. He closes with supporting practices: silent meals, mindful walking in daily life, and a final Zen teaching about the balance between letting go and returning to engaged living. Suited to practitioners with some retreat experience or serious interest in meditation.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 15 C CG.mp3
UUID: 66510d34-0917-486b-a966-4a9e5a88b037
Teacher: Jack Cornfield
Collection: Camp Cedar Glen (Jack Cornfield)
Date: 1977 (exact day not recorded)
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Words: ~6,692
The following recording of Jack Kornfield was made on April fifteenth nineteen seventy seven at Camp Cedar Glen near Julian, California. Useful to have some perspective about the path in order to keep yourself from getting too caught up in the stage in which you are working. These pointers may help. Each stage that one can label must pass away. Even the labeling will ultimately pass.
The initial euphoria that comes through the first awakening into even a little consciousness, except in very few cases, will pass away, leaving a sense of loss or a feeling of falling out of grace or despair. The Dark Night of the Soul by Saint John of the Cross deals with that state. Practice is a bit like a roller coaster. Each new height is usually followed by a new low. Understanding this makes it easier to ride with both phases.
As you further purify yourself, your impurities will seem grosser and larger. Understand that it’s not that you are getting more caught in the illusion. It’s just that you’re seeing it more clearly. The lions guarding the gates of the temples get fiercer as you proceed towards each inner temple. But of course, the light is brighter also.
It all becomes more intense because of the additional energy involved at each stage of practice. At first, you will think of your practice as a limited part of your life. In time, you will come to realize that everything you do is part of your practice. One of the traps along the way is the trap of purity. You will be doing everything just as you should and get caught in how pure you are.
In India, it’s called the golden chain. It’s not a chain of iron, but it’s still a chain. In the end, you’ll have to even give up your ideas of purity. Early in the journey, you will wonder how long the journey will take and whether you will make it in this lifetime. Later you will see that where you’re going is here and you will arrive now.
And so stop asking. At first you try. Later you do your practice because what else is there to do? At certain stages, you will take your practice very seriously. Later, you will see the wisdom of the statement of Jesus that to seek the Lord, people need not disfigure their faces.
Cosmic humor, especially about your own predicament, is an important part of your journey. At some stages, you will experience a plateau as if everything has stopped. This is a hard point in the journey. Know that once the process has started, it doesn’t stop. It only appears to stop from where you are looking.
Just keep going. Doesn’t really matter whether you think it’s happening or not. In fact, the thought it’s happening can be just another obstacle. You may have expected that enlightenment would come zapped, instantaneous and permanent. This is very unlikely.
After the first experiences, the unfolding is gradual and almost indiscernible. It can be thought of as the thinning of a layer of clouds until only the most transparent veil remains. There is, in addition to the up and down cycles, an in and out cycle. That is, there are stages at which you feel pulled into inner work, and all you seek is a quiet place to meditate and get on with it. Then there are times when you turn outward and seek to be involved in the marketplace.
Both of these parts of the cycle are part of one’s practice. For what happens to you in the marketplace helps in your meditation. And what happens to you in meditation helps you to part to participate in the marketplace without attachment. What is happening to you is nothing less than death and rebirth. What is dying is the entire way in which you understood who you are and how it all is.
What is being reborn is the child of the spirit for whom all things are new. This process of attending the death of our illusions of self at the same time as going through a birth process is awesome. Be gentle and honor that which is dying as well as that which is being born. Well, believe that last night, after our hero left Elizabeth Arden’s, we found him in the throes of drug experience in New Hampshire having a difficult time. Pick up the story from there.
Ram Dass. Your turn to speakers later. There were some things that I learned that were really helpful to me, and I’ll share them with you. Some of them were part of what I just read, which comes from Be Here Now on the course of practice, where that it’s a mistake to have a linear model of growth that you’re going to go and things are going to get better. But rather that growth seems to take place in spurts and in going forward and stepping back and seeing where you were with new perspectives.
Because the growth really takes place in bringing you more and more to be here and to know the fullness of your experience and the parts of your mind. So that the difficult times and the times when practice seems hard are an integral and necessary part of the growth. What I learned after going from very high to very low was that there were ways to help come back to a more balanced way of life. And they started to happen automatically as I began to see more clearly. One of them is that for me and for almost everyone, doing periodic retreats, either of solitary or just taking time away from your life alone, be it going to the mountains, doing some kind of a practice, meditation, makes a space where you can renew yourself and renew your contact with that silence and that awareness.
Then you can bring it back again into your life and into the marketplace and work in and out to see. The periodic retreats are one thing, very helpful. Other thing that’s really important, can’t say it too often, is the power of spiritual friends. One point the Buddha was sitting in the forest, it said, with Ānanda, who was his chief attendant. Ānanda said, you know, Buddha, I’ve been thinking.
And the Buddha said, thinking, thinking. He said he said, yes, Ānanda. He was patient with Ānanda. Ānanda was kind of the fall guy in a lot of the stories. He would always ask the dumb questions that everyone else had, but no one else would dare ask.
He said, it seems to me that half of the holy life, of the the life of the spirit, is having good friends. And the Buddha said, not so, Ānanda, which is what he always said. But Ānanda said, well, how is it then? He said, in fact, the whole of the holy life is having good friends. The word for good friends that he used was a Pali Sanskrit word, kalyāṇa mitra.
And it really means spiritual friend. It has a wide range. It means the people that you hang out with who support your practice. It means your teacher a spiritual friend. What it means is understanding that our practice and our growth doesn’t take place in isolation, but it really takes place in relationship to all the people around us and that we can learn from them.
They can be teachings and teachers for us. Wherever you live or whatever your circumstance is, understand that a great power can come from connecting with people around you on the level of practice. If there are people who sit regularly, great. Sit with them. There are people you can live with that are into the Dharma practice, live with them.
It’s if it’s people who do Vipassana, wonderful. If you happen to be living in Nome, Alaska, and there are maybe no Vipassana yogis, then sit with the people around who do yoga or the people who do TM or the Quakers. Find people around who have a reverence and an understanding for the power of silence and the power of of directed meditation practice. And share some space and time with them. And it brings a lot of energy to you from them, and it gives you a place to share and to re reestablish yourself in faith and helps an awful lot.
That’s one really important thing. Taking retreats periodically, having good friends. A few more things. Restraint. Not such a popular word in this culture.
One of the things that the Buddha taught about often was that you know the things in your life which you get really caught in easily through which sense doors, which kind of things. He said, until you’re ready to really work with those and you feel balanced enough, you can avoid them. It means not creating a life in which you make a lot of difficulties and get yourself in the situation that keeps repeating difficulties for you. It can be in terms of the speed or the peace of your life or certain kinds of people that you hang out with or work or circumstances that don’t feel like right livelihood to you. Pay attention to that and know that it’s all interrelated and work with that.
Balance. Pay attention to your rhythms. You know, sleep, eating. We all have different cycles and rhythms. Keep a beginner’s mind with them.
Know that, too, they will change at times as you become more conscious or as your awareness or concentration are stronger at some points than others. And be open to really playing with that. I guess the message that Joseph uses this phrase, he said, don’t be timid about your practice. A lot of people think, well, if I do it this way and I follow and I put my hour or two in during the day, then everything will be okay. You can really see it as a very great experiment and then it becomes quite interesting and fun to play with and you learn a lot more.
You really need a sense of investigation. It can be investigation with sleeping and eating, with your life circumstances at work, of how much or how little you you have contact with the spiritual community around you. A really important thing to work with is the precepts. Precepts are like on the most fundamental level, they’re like signals. Okay?
You take the precept of not killing or not stealing or not speaking that which is untrue, and you get to a point where it feels like you’re going to break one of the precepts. If you’ve really taken the resolve to be careful with them, then it’s like a light goes on, a signal that says, hey, what’s going on? What are you caught in to such an extent that you need to break a precept? Not to say that the precepts are absolute, there might be appropriate times to break them. But it’s really an important thing to have a lot of awareness around that.
It can be very, very helpful in your life. Not killing. To really remember to have that awareness and reverence for the life around you. Not taking that which isn’t given. If you really understand that precept fully, it means having a social conscience, too.
Not only not stealing, but being aware of what you use, whether it’s water in California or food or whatever else, that the planet isn’t that big, and we share it with a lot of beings. And to really have some consciousness about your relationship to the society and and to speak that which is true. It’s said that the Buddha spoke both that which is true always, that which was helpful to people. Working with just this one precept can be enough to be the entire path for you. To work with that which is true means not only being aware of it in your speech and your interactions with other people, but ultimately to be truthful with yourself, to be really honest about your experience and your feelings and what you see.
To be truthful doesn’t mean that you have to be brutally honest, because a lot of times we see things, much of which is based on our opinions or our feelings anyway, which may be true in our mind, that opinion or that feeling. We can honor that, but may not at all be helpful to someone else. So you don’t need to need to always go laying what you see as being true on other people. But yet, if you know people in your life who speak the truth always, who really honor that, they have an enormous power. So you can feel it around them.
The space around them is still. People know that when they ask them something, they’ll get a really straight answer. They don’t have to worry about being manipulative or or changed for circumstance. And if you really work with the truth in your speech and your daily life, it makes so much peace of mind. Virtue working with the precepts becomes the foundation for the rest of your practice, Because then you’re not concerned about what people are going to think or or how you’re going to say it to make certain people happy.
Makes the mind really still and open. You don’t have to remember what you said because you said what was true. You work with that. You can experiment with the precepts. Experiment with speech.
It’s an interesting experiment to maybe take a day or a certain period of time each week in silence and see how that affects your life. So experiment, Joseph talks about to take a resolve, to not speak about people that aren’t present, about third parties. Really interesting to try that for a day or a week and see how much of your talk is unnecessary. A huge amount of it. Life becomes really simple if you speak about what’s happening and what’s in direct relationship to the people that you’re with.
Experiment with the precept of sexual misconduct in the sense that you might want to experiment with celibacy. If you’ve never been celibate for a while, try it. See what that what kind of space that creates in your life in relation to the people around you. You can learn a lot. If you’ve been celibate for a long time, you might want to experiment with having relationships again.
The preceptive sexual misconduct really means not to get involved in sexual activities that you know bring suffering to other people. And you usually know, not based on that greed, that desire for that sensation, that connection that’s going to bring suffering to other people, causes pain, and it also brings pain back to you. Working with the precepts is very fundamental and can be really helpful in paying attention to your life and your practice. Few more things. patience.
Remember the story of Sue Yehren, I’ve talked about patience a lot during the retreat. When I was going to come back to this country, I went to see an English monk who’d been a monk for many, many years. He was back and forth teaching in Europe and then training further in the monasteries in Asia. I said, I’m going back to the West. I’m going to be a monk there and perhaps a layperson.
How can I work? Do you have any advice on how to get it together back in the West? He said, I have one piece of advice for you, and you can extrapolate from this. Said, if you’re going up to a bus stop and the bus is about to leave, don’t run. There’ll be another bus.
There’s always another bus. You know? Where are you going? That you need to get there so fast? There’s another bus.
And to allow yourself the time to slow down really makes a space to pay attention, space to work with the material of your daily life to become more aware, more conscious, more loving. That really brings me to the most essential message I have for you this morning, which is to sit two hours a day minimum. Once in the morning, once in the evening. First, when you write, get up in the morning so that you get your hour in before you get caught up in the things of the day. Get at night to let let go of a lot that you accumulate in the day.
I don’t care how hard it is or what what it feels like. You sit and the mind is just thinking and thinking and thinking. Put in your time. Log your hours. You know?
It’s like getting your pilot’s license. You need to have a certain number of hours. Just do it. And even though at times it feels like nothing’s happening, it happens and it works. Just to have that discipline and make that space.
Seems easy a couple hours a day. Been sitting here six, eight, ten, more hours. But as many of you have come and gone from other retreats have discovered, it gets very easy to get so caught up that you have to start squeezing your sittings in between other important things. Eventually, they sort of get squeezed out. There is nothing in your life that you can do that’s more important than sitting.
Nothing. You know, going out and saving people who are dying or or doing some really great work of of compassion for a lot of people, whatever your job or your family needs are. None of that is more important than your meditation. The meditation is the most important thing you do in your life. And I say that not because sitting is really any different than anything else, but because of what it represents.
It’s so easy to get caught up in your life and take what you do seriously as if this building or this help or this thing that you’re doing, this task, was really going to make the world different than what the world needed. Another book or another workshop or another whatever you happen to do. The world doesn’t need more workshops, and it doesn’t need more books, and it doesn’t need more buildings. It needs less greed, and it needs less hatred, and it needs more love. That’s really all.
If there wasn’t a lot of greed and hatred, things would be really fine. And your life is the place to start. If you make the space to sit, to be disciplined in your practice, then when you get up, your mind is somewhat cooled out, more spacious, more aware. And each person you meet and each task that you go about through the day, you touch with that energy, you know, and people are going crazy around you and you’re a little stiller than they are, and they can feel it. It makes a space for them to become still and not to get so caught up.
So it’s like it sets a tone for your life. It’s really essential. It’ll be hard, and sometimes you’ll forget you won’t do it or it’ll be too much. There’s a difficulty in sitting in the world. I sort of see it in terms of layers.
If you put it off for a while, then you kind of build up in your body and in your mind. It’s like a layer of pain and speed. And then when you sit down, it it hurts, and the mind is moving. You’re restless, and it’s difficult. And you have to sit and be with that, let yourself experience it until the mind settles.
But if you sit and you feel that and say, oh, I don’t want to do this, and you get up and you do it more to avoid it, then you put more days in without sitting and it gets harder and the layer gets thicker. And eventually, the you have to come to a retreat and get locked in somewhere in order to let yourself sit through that again and get back to it. So don’t let it build up in that way. Really work as a daily practice. Most important, really helpful.
Talk to communities. A few more things. Relationships. People ask. People ask about how to work in relationships, relationships with your family and your parents, relationships with people you live with, with your wife or husband or lovers.
Few things. First of all, in terms of your parents and other people that you meet when you leave here, in terms of teaching, you teach much more by how you are than anything you say. It’s a beautiful story that Ram Dass tells. He was I think it was at Naropa. He received a letter from this girl who’d been to some retreat or other and undertaken practice.
She’s living in central Canada somewhere like Saskatchewan. Her parents were fundamentalist Christians, and they were very upset at her Buddhist meditation practice. So upset that they called the priest and the people to come over and talk to her and try and deprogram her or exercise her or whatever was necessary. She wrote about all the difficulty around this with her parents and closed the letter by saying, my parents hate me when I’m a Buddhist, but they love me when I’m a Buddha. There’s no need to be a Buddhist or a Hindu or a spiritual person.
To be Buddha means to work to be aware and kind and compassionate, helpful to people, generous. You don’t have to take any any stance of being a certain kind of person, but just to use your life situation to cultivate the qualities of Christ or Buddha or whoever you happen to to admire. Working with parents is really hard. It’s a story I’ve told many times. Perhaps I’ll tell it again.
Śāriputra was the chief disciple of the Buddha in terms of wisdom. Very, very wise. And it came time he was quite sick, and he knew through his powers of mind that he was going to die. He went to the Buddha, and he asked permission to go home to see his old mother before he died. The Buddha said, of course.
Śāriputra went home. He was very, very sick. This story was told to me by the Burmese master, Ajahn Suwat, before I came back to this country, in reference to the fact he said, what am I going to do when I see my parents? I said, oh, I’m going to teach them how to meditate, teach them the Dharma. He said, let me tell you this story.
He said, so Shariputratra has gone home to see his mother and he gets home and his mother sees him and says, Shariputratra, where have you been? I haven’t seen you for years. So you look so sick. You’re wearing these funny robes. What’s happened to you?
Shariputratra explained about the Buddha and and the teachings. And his mother said, listen, I don’t want to hear anything about that, Shariputratra. You just sit down and have a good meal and, you know, you’re not looking well. She fed Shariputratra. And throughout the whole week, Shariputratra’s mother was trying to feed Shariputratra.
And Shariputratra, meanwhile, is trying to explain to her the dharma. She says, listen. I worship Brahma, the great god Brahma, and I don’t want I don’t want to hear any part of this. I knew you when you were this high, And don’t you don’t tell me anything. The wisest disciple of the Buddha.
Comes to the end of the week, Shariputratra is obviously very ill and dying, lying on his deathbed in the house. Night. And all of a sudden, the whole sky lights up in these beautiful colors. And out of these beautiful colors come a whole, like, train of celestial beings from the heaven realms. And Shariputratra’s mother’s eyes are wide.
And he says, Shariputratra, what is this? He said, oh, it’s just the beings from some of the heaven realms come to pay their last respects to Shariputratra. She says, oh, Shariputratra, I didn’t realize what you had been doing. She sits and watches, and all of a sudden the sky turns even more brilliant white, just this luminous white color. And out of the middle of this white comes this figure of the great Brahma god himself vowed to pay his last respects to Shariputratra.
Shariputratra’s mother’s just her jaw drops, and she looks. She says, Shariputratra, the great god, Bhagavad, he who I’ve been worshiping for my life has come to pay respects to my son. What have you been up to, Shariputratra? Shariputratra said, listen. I’ve been trying to tell you, mom, all week.
You haven’t listened to me. You sit down and you watch the breath in and out, rising and falling. And he explained to her and he gave her the rap and she started to meditate and then he died peacefully. Ajahn Suwat said, so if you think that you’re gonna have an easy time with your parents, you know, remember the story of Shariputratra. And if it’s that hard, he said, you can always come back here, and I’ll do my best to train you in psychic powers and things, and maybe you can go back again in ten years and try later.
Be patient. You know? Be patient with your parents and with people like that. It’s not a question of what you say or what you explain, but really how you are more than anything else. Relationships of other kinds.
People often get into relation love relationships for security reasons. The most common thing in the beginning especially is a kind of security pact. It’s pretty scary, isn’t it? Let’s see if we can sort of take care of each other and make it a little better, a little safer. If you base your relationship on some static notion of how a person is going to relate to you, then you set yourself up instantly for dukkha, for suffering, because relationships are alive like your mind is, and they constantly change.
If you base it on a security pact, thinking that somebody can make it okay for you and you can make it okay for them, It’s a very limited notion of relationship and a limited notion of love. It’s a very conditional love. I’ll be this for you. If you’re this for me, and if you’re not, then I won’t love you. I don’t want you.
There can be a whole different basis on which you make your contracts in relationships and a much more fulfilling one. That is to make the contract with someone else that the relationship is based on your two coming together in order to grow, in order to learn, in order to become more conscious, more wise, more compassionate. And then no matter what happens in that relationship is good, because it’s something that you can learn from and grow from. And if you stay together for a long time, you can learn from that. And if you have fights and you you have a lot of lot of pain between you at times, then that’s not a failure.
That’s something that you can learn from and work with to become more aware and more caring and more compassionate. And if you separate, then that’s something that you can learn from and grow from. If you see a relationship as something that will lead to your growth, you’re becoming more conscious, then that it doesn’t get fixed in your mind. It’s how it has to be and how that person has to be. It makes a lot of space to really work with it.
I see relationships being with people. People ask about sex very much like meditation, in the sense of using it with a beginner’s mind. If you go into a relationship and you see a person fresh the next day and you have some idea of what they owe you and how your relationship is, then it causes a lot of suffering. Just as if you come into the meditation hall with an expectation that this time I’m going to sit and is it going to be like it was yesterday or isn’t it? Am I going to get it to be a certain way?
Great deal of struggle. If you come into the meditation hall and you sit down, say, gee, I wonder what’s going to happen this hour. You’re really open to learning, open to be with it in a fresh way. If you come into a relationship with someone, you say, wonder what will happen today, how it will be, how it will manifest. Even in your sex life, if you come into a sexual experience, say, instead of trying to repeat something or get something from the past, I wonder how it will be.
What can I learn from it? It’s not like eating. You sit down and you have a meal. Not to have expectations it’ll be good or bad or feel a certain way, but how will it be? And in that freshness, you can start to learn from it.
Relationships are close relationships are one of the greatest teachings that we have in our society. We don’t have a lot of people dying on the streets like they do in Calcutta. There isn’t that kind of suffering that’s visible. It’s hidden. Many of us learn more about attachment and suffering and pain and happiness in close relationships with other people than anywhere else in our life.
So it’s beautiful and it’s fertile and you can really learn from it. Use it for that and not for something lesser, that security or that, try to make it okay. Because it won’t be okay. Might as well give up on that. That makes a lot of space for them working with it.
Besides doing a daily sitting practice, a couple of other things that are helpful in a very simple way is to try and take a meal a day in silence, even if it’s just just a tea break or breakfast in the morning, what it does is it reawakens in you the spirit and the the energy from the times of your silent practice, such as this retreat. If you really make a space where you take a meal in silence slowly, mindfully, it kind of re nourishes those seeds that you’ve planted here, that you’ve worked hard to have grow. Similarly with walking, you can do the walking meditation, walking to and from a room or going to your car, walking around your house or your neighborhood. You don’t have to do it specially, but if you can take time in your day when you’re walking, not to use that as a time to plan and think of what you’re going to do when you get there. Because when you get there, what you’ll do is what you’ll do, and it’ll be pretty clear.
You don’t need more thoughts. There are plenty, as you may have noticed. Rather to let yourself use the times that you walk around in your daily life to again come back to your body and back to the present moment. Feel your feelings. Experience how you are in that time.
Come back, feel yourself walking, feel whatever emotions are strong, feel the the speed or tension, if that’s in the body, just come back and pay attention to where you are. And, that reawakens a kind of awareness, makes more space so that when you do get to the next place, you’re not so caught up. You’re a little bit freer. I’ll read you something from Chuang Tzu again, from the Taoist tradition. Since great knowledge is all encompassing, small knowledge is limited.
Great words are inspiring. Small words are chatter. When we are asleep, we are not in touch with the world. We awaken and our senses open. We get involved with our activities and our minds are distracted.
Sometimes we are hesitant, sometimes underhanded, and sometimes secretive. Little fears cause anxiety, and great fears cause panic. Our words fly off like arrows as though we knew what was right and wrong. We cling to our own point of view as though everything depended on it, and yet our opinions have no permanence. Like autumn and winter, they gradually pass away.
We are caught in the current and cannot return. We are tied up in knots like an old clogged drain. We are getting closer to death with no way to regain our youth. Joy and anger, sorrow, happiness, hopes, fears, indecision and strength, humility and willfulness, enthusiasm and insolence, Like music sounding from an empty reed or mushrooms rising from the warm, dark earth, they continually appear before us day and night. No one knows whence they come.
Don’t worry about it. Let them be. How can we understand it all in one day? All these things, like music sounding from an empty reed or mushrooms rising from the warm, dark earth continually appear before us day and night. No one knows whence they come.
Don’t worry about it. Let them be. A few more things. There is they’ll be passed out by Rich Cohen, schedules of retreats that we have planned for the rest of the year, including one this summer in Northern California and also in Seattle. What we do each year, this will be the third year in a row, a three month intensive retreat in the meditation center in Barrie, Massachusetts, which is a really exquisite place to practice.
It was an old monastery by a Catholic group, beautiful land out in the country, and very large and quite comfortable. That schedule of retreats and things will be available. As well, I think Richard has some copies of Joseph’s book for people that want them, which are basically the the retreat talks and some other talks that weren’t given here. Put together in a book form. We will also post somewhere, I think Jackie will take care of it, both the aggregates of a teacher in San Francisco who teaches the posture of meditation, a woman who’s a healer and teacher for those who are in the Bay Area, from Jackie’s address, people around who need to have questions about practice and want to get in touch with her and schedule or name of several other people who are teaching similar type of treats that you can contact.
Also, are some group cities in San Francisco I know, in Berkeley I believe, once a week, certain people’s houses, people get together who’ve done retreats and just sit for an hour or two for a walk perhaps, and just share that space and that energy together. If you’re interested, those will be posted, and I recommend going just as a way of getting support in your practice. Also, if you live somewhere with other people and want to start doing that together, it’s a really beautiful thing. I’m reminded. In London.
When I left Ajahn Chah to come back to his country, he asked me if I was gonna teach. And I said initially that I didn’t think so. In fact, didn’t teach for several years after I was back. He said, well, if you do, he said, why don’t you call it meditation? He said, don’t call it Buddhism.
You know? So it’ll probably be easier to teach it that way. She wasn’t at all concerned with the name or the form around the practice, but rather what the essence of the practice was, which was waking up and being mindful, wisdom, and compassion. Aldous Huxley said when he died, he he he said, all the different spiritual teachers and things that I’ve come across and learned in my life, he said, I come to understand that really what they have all been telling me is simply to learn to be kinder, Kinder to myself and kinder to all other people. Tell you one last story.
A traditional Chinese story training. There was a Chinese monk in a in a Chan or Zen temple, practicing many years. He was quite a good monk. Meditation had gotten fairly deep and some good insights and understanding. But he hadn’t yet come to that center of understanding.
He hadn’t really tasted in the most full way that which was talked about in the grand tradition, many traditions. And so he went to his master and he said, master, for twenty years I’ve been practicing and working and practice is good. I’m very happy, he said, that there’s really nothing else I want except to come to that understanding, that central understanding. And so I’d like your permission to go to the mountains alone. I want to sit on top of one of the mountains and either get enlightened or die.
He said, that’s all that matters to me. The master, knowing that he was in fact a good student, liked, gave his permission. So he left. Went walking western China to the Kunlun Shan, the high mountains there. And he just left the last village behind and was walking up this path through the woods, crossed another path coming down from the mountain back toward the village, and already saw this old old man coming down the mountain carrying a great big bundle.
The old man actually was the Bodhisattva Mañjuśrī who was said to appear to people at times when their mind is just right for understanding. He’s depicted carrying the sword of discriminating wisdom in a lot of the iconography. Anyway, where he talked to Mañjuśrī appeared as a guy, he was an old man with a big bundle, coming down the mountain. And he said to the man, the monk going up, Ho, where are you going? The man told a story.
I’ve been a monk practicing, and now I’m going to go to the top of the mountain to get enlightened or die. He waited for a second. He looked. The old man looked pretty wise. And so he said, say, old man, do you know anything of this enlightenment?
At which point, the old man let go of his bundle and just dropped to the ground. And in that moment, the man, Monk’s mind was so still, he saw that and he became enlightened. He said, ah, all it is is just to let go. That’s all. So simple.
And then he stood there for another few seconds and he said, now what? And the old man reached out and picked up the bundle again and walked off to his house. It’s a beautiful story because it illustrates in a simple way the totality of the path of practice. It’s, on one hand, learning to let go, to be free of attachment and fears, because it’s all going to change anyway. It’s coming to that freedom that comes from from non attachment.
The, the story illustrates that then, with that understanding and with that freedom, to come back to the world, because here you are, there’s people, there’s there’s freedom, there’s jobs, and there’s life. And to bring that understanding back with compassion back to the marketplace, but with joy, with that kind of freedom. Okay. Please sit up and let us do a few minutes of metta to end the retreat. Once you get yourself comfortable, a really skillful way to begin metta for many people is to first begin with a short exercise in forgiveness.
First of all, just thinking in your own mind, may I forgive all those people who have done things that have caused me pain? For the most part, they do them just out of ignorance and out of their own pain.