Great interview with Diane Musho Hamilton over on Buddhist Geeks.

I’ll continue reading.
Will

While I appreciate your points, I’m going to have to argue pretty strongly against them. Nothing personal, I just feel that it’s radically important to champion the perspective that one can make progress, can make it quickly, and that good maps of the territory can be a powerful ally in that process. To address some of your points, in no particular order, I offer these points in return:

1) It could be that before you had a good teacher who knew the maps and the territory well, and could therefore guide your practice, that you were indeed stuck. And this isn’t you alone, but probably many people who search far and wide before finding some traction on the spiritual path. I wouldn’t argue that this is a good thing (though it may be useful in so far as one can develop some type of perseverence), but that providing more information, more maps, and of course more solid teaching would help people immensely. I was fortunate to find good teachers and good maps almost at the same time that I started practicing. I was empowered by knowing that enlightenment was possible, I put the techniques to practice (for thousands of hours and months of retreat over the course of a few years) and attained stream-entry (as confirmed by many teachers since) a few years back. Since then I’ve continued to progress, in sometimes extremely hard-to-predict and sometimes very predictable ways. The maps and what they were describing have become more clear, and words like “emptiness” and “non-duality” have become much more clear in my immediate, present-time understanding. That, I think is a good thing.

2) When one puts their reliance on a teacher, that can be a great thing. But I would argue that combing reliance on a teacher with self-reliance is the ultimate combination. When I got stream-entry, on a month-long retreat, I was there with a couple of teachers but I relied almost exclusively off of what I had learned up to that point and my knowledge of the maps to help guide my practice. The teachers would later confirm what had unfolded and help guide me in the practice, as well as challenge the notions of importance that I attached to the “progress” I was making. That is invaluable, but even more so was the experience of being able to rely on my own intuition, knowledge, and effort. That has continued to payoff tremendously as the path unfolds.

3) Having already made this point to some degree, I contend that progress can indeed be felt, experienced, and can be compared to other’s who have made the same progress. It can especially be done when you know what patterns to look for. How could a Zen master, or any teacher be able to make those assessments had they themselves not gone through similar things? Is spiritual practice so different from every other human endeavor that one can’t see how the path has unfolded, even in retrospect? Only if they have no idea what the path looks like… And that doesn’t mean one can’t walk the path without knowing something about it, it just means that one won’t really be able to help others do so.

To wrap this up with one final point…

4) While I think it’s great that wonder kept you going before you were able to meet a good teacher and really begin to deepen your practice with good guidance (you didn’t quite say it that way, though it seemed implicit), I think even more inspiring is to know what is possible on the path (in enough detail to get started with the practice) and then to, through one’s own effort coupled with as much guidance as one needs, discover for oneself what the ancients were talking about and to step from the ranks of the unenlightened into the ranks of the enlightened (which you may know isn’t all that special, but is important nonetheless). To do that quickly, and to verify and see it for oneself, can be the most empowering way of walking the path. Many of the great masters have done it this way, and it is in there footsteps that I aspire to walk, and encourage others to at least be aware of.

Thanks again for your comment and for the dialogue. I feel like this “dharma debate” is extremely useful. Not only because it challenges me to look at my own beliefs and continue to put them to the test of experience, but also because it helps me formulate and communicate some of this stuff more clearly. Also, while I disagree with many of your points, that doesn’t take away from the fact that you appear to be a sincere practitioner and perhaps a competent one as well. Certainly anyone who is giving themselves over to the rigor of a zen sesshin, and who is practicing well, is.

All the best,

-Vince

How else can one know that they are making progress, and be encouraged to continue?

These are two unrelated questions. Like asking how to get to Chicago and what color is the car? You can’t know if you are making progress. This is my experience. I started in 1979 and wondered here and there thinking I was ‘making progress’. It was only when I got a teacher and a sangha that I even got the vague hint of beginning. What was all this ‘making progress’ I thought I was doing? I would argue that progress is something that can only be confirmed by a teacher. It is not something experientially felt.

Now as far as being encouraged to continue, I hope ‘making progress’ isn’t required. If so, I’m in big trouble. When I look back to 1979 and see my own lack of ‘making progress’, I wonder what kept me going. THAT’S IT — ‘WONDER’ KEPT ME GOING!

… how else could they realize that they aren’t making progress and figure out a way get unstuck?

Vince, again I feel that this is not my job, this is the job of the teacher. I practice, the teacher watches, confirms progress and tries to prevent stuck-ness. I propose that progress is only a condition see-able from exterior and not a ‘state’ experienced.

Some traditions are big on maps and Zen has some good ones. I’m not a teacher but I feel that the reason I was instructed “not to hold one perspective as higher or more pure than another” was to keep me from getting stuck, becoming nihilistic or fundamentalist. Easy to get a small progress then think AH this is it or think some other stage of progress is not as good. There is a reason the 10 ox herding pictures are presented in a circle.

I’m off to a 7 day sesshin and I’ll check back when I return so I can have my wrong views straightened out by my friends.

Thanks for your comment and perspective.

The one thing I’ll add to your comment is a little bit of wariness when you say that,

I was instructed not to hold one perspective as higher or more pure than another and told this was a trap the conditioned mind would want to snare me in.

I think this is a tricky one, because from the practice-perspective we don’t want to get ensnared in any of the content of our mind and that includes thoughts about higher perspectives and stages as well as thoughts about not getting ensnared in thougts! However, from the relative perspective when we sit down and want to make sense out of our life (using the mind) then I would argue that having thoughts about stages and higher and lower can be ok. Granted it’s not very encouraged in the Zen tradition, and for some reason I see a lot of Zen people adopting a strange anti-thinking bent, it can be useful to hold things in this way. How else can one know that they are making progress, and be encouraged to continue? Or, how else could they realize that they aren’t making progress and figure out a way get unstuck? Without using the conditioned mind skillfully, I would argue, we couldn’t.

That being said I appreciate the tendency in Zen to not get overly concerned with maps, etc. However, there are tons of maps about progess in the Zen tradition. The 10 ox herding pictures and Tozan’s 5 ranks are perfect examples. Also, koan training itself has a developmental trajectory. Development isn’t bad, and we’re constantly creating developmental models for ourself. I’m just suggesting that if we don’t have a good (and accurate) one, then we’ll probably just adopt a poor one (for example: I’m doing well and have developed spiritually if I don’t care about development and don’t make any judgements.). I’m not saying you are doing that, but I’ve seen that model take precedence over others, more useful models before.

Again, thanks for your comment and for your thoughts on this matter.

Sounds as though Bill has really struck a nerve in you. His pontificating about what he thinks about the Heart Sutra has to be held up to our own experience. In that vain, thanks Bill for pissing off Vince and motivating Vince to present this synthesis of his understanding and in turn motivating me to chime in. Funny how the universe is.

This last year I took jukai and while preparing was instructed to study each precept from the Hinayana, Mahayana, and Vajrayana perspective. As an example:

Hinayana
Don’t kill any sentient being, period. No taking of life in any way, under any circumstances.

Mahayana
There is no one to kill and no one to do the killing. Emptiness pervades the universe.

Vajrayana
I take up the way of not killing. I take up the way of being compassionate, nurturing myself, other beings, and other forms of life. Each form of life is a perfect manifestation of Buddha itself.

I found this trivecta treatment of the teachings to be very helpful. It forces one to penetrate a little deeper than comfortable sometimes. It forces me to hold the teaching up to my own experience and see what is true experientially. I have been often surprised what the Vajrayana perspective produces. I was instructed not to hold one perspective as higher or more pure than another and told this was a trap the conditioned mind would want to snare me in. Be vigilant. An old Zen guy used to admonish himself every day with “Be awake!”, and he’d answer himself “Yes I will!”, “Don’t be deceived by others!”, “No, I won’t!”. This treatment of the precepts is much like your “Hegelian dialectic of 1) thesis 2) antithesis & 3) synthesis”.

Fun stuff all around. I hope I have not offended. I am not an academic steeped in the subtleties of the various branches of Buddhism. I am a simple Zen student.

My knowledge is less than perfect and I look forward to being straightened out by my friends.